The Ruler's House
The Ruler's House

Author: Harriet Fertik

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1421432900

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How Romans used the world of the house to interpret and interrogate the role of the emperor. The Julio-Claudian dynasty, beginning with the rise of Augustus in the late first century BCE and ending with the death of Nero in 68 CE, was the first ruling family of the Roman Empire. Elite Romans had always used domestic space to assert and promote their authority, but what was different about the emperor's house? In The Ruler's House, Harriet Fertik considers how the emperor's household and the space he called home shaped Roman conceptions of power and one-man rule. While previous studies of power and privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome have emphasized the emperor's intrusions into the private lives of his fellow elites, this book focuses on Roman ideas of the ruler's lack of privacy. Fertik argues that houses were spaces that Romans used to contest power and to confront the contingency of their own and others' claims to rule. Describing how the Julio-Claudian period provoked anxieties not only about the ruler's power but also about his vulnerability, she reveals that the ruler's house offered a point of entry for reflecting on the interdependence and intimacy of ruler and ruled. Fertik explores the world of the Roman house, from family bonds and elite self-display to bodily functions and relations between masters and slaves. She draws on a wide range of sources, including epic and tragedy, historiography and philosophy, and art and architecture, and she investigates shared conceptions of power in elite literature and everyday life in Roman Pompeii. Examining political culture and thought in early imperial Rome, The Ruler's House confronts the fragility of one-man rule.

Domesticating Empire
Domesticating Empire

Author: Caitlín Eilís Barrett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-29

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 0190641371

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Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.

A Cultural History of Shopping in Antiquity
A Cultural History of Shopping in Antiquity

Author: Mary Harlow

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-06-02

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1350278424

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A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. Covering the period from 500 BCE to 500 CE, this is the first book to address the cultural history of shoppers and shopping in antiquity. Evidence for the existence of shops has been found across many archaeological sites in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East but the study of shops and retailing in antiquity is a relatively new subject. From Classical Greece through to the Late Roman Empire, shopping shifted from being a means to an end – a method of supplementing the family diet or providing material goods the household could not manufacture itself – to a form of experience where the processes of browsing and not purchasing became as important as buying. This dramatic transformation is a reflection of the changing material desires of these societies and their perspectives on the ways in which the fulfilment of those desires could be achieved. Recurring themes in this interdisciplinary volume include the lives of 'ordinary' people; the relationship between gender and shopping; the contrast between Greece and Rome; the attitudes towards shopkeepers; the placing of shops in the cityscape; and the zoning of particular crafts and products. A Cultural History of Shopping in Antiquity presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

Supports in Roman Marble Sculpture
Supports in Roman Marble Sculpture

Author: Anna Anguissola

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1108418430

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The first study of a crucial aspect of Roman stone sculpture, exploring the functions and aesthetics of non-figural supports.

A Social Archaeology of Roman and Late Antique Egypt
A Social Archaeology of Roman and Late Antique Egypt

Author: Ellen Swift

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0198867344

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Artefact evidence has the unique power to illuminate many aspects of life that are rarely explored in written sources, yet this potential has been underexploited in research on Roman and Late Antique Egypt. This book presents the first in-depth study that uses everyday artefacts as its principal source of evidence to transform our understanding of the society and culture of Egypt during these periods. It represents a fundamental reference work for scholars, with much new and essential information on a wide range of artefacts, many of which are found not only in Egypt but also in the wider Roman and late antique world. By taking a social archaeology approach, it sets out a new interpretation of daily life and aspects of social relations in Roman and Late Antique Egypt, contributing substantial insights into everyday practices and their social meanings in the past. Artefacts from University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology are the principal source of evidence; most of these objects have not been the subject of any previous research. The book integrates the close study of artefact features with other sources of evidence, including papyri and visual material. Part one explores the social functions of dress objects, while part two explores the domestic realm and everyday experience. An important theme is the life course, and how both dress-related artefacts and ordinary functional objects construct age and gender-related status and facilitate appropriate social relations and activities. There is also a particular focus on wider social experience in the domestic context, as well as broader consideration of economic and social changes across the period.

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius
Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius

Author: Pedar W. Foss

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1000557189

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Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius is a forensic examination of two of the most famous letters from the ancient Mediterranean world: Pliny the Younger’s Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20, which offer a contemporary account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. These letters, sent to the historian Tacitus, provide accounts by Pliny the Younger about what happened when Mt Vesuvius exploded, destroying the surrounding towns and countryside, including Pompeii and Herculaneum, and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This volume provides the first comprehensive full-length treatment of these documents, contextualized by evidence-rich biographies for both Plinys, and a synthesis of the latest archaeological and volcanological research which answers questions about the eruption date. A new collation of sources results in a detailed manuscript tradition and an authoritative Latin text, while commentaries on each letter offer copiously referenced insights on their structure, style, and meaning. Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius offers a thorough companion to these letters, and to the eruption, which will be of interest not only to those working on Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and the works of Pliny but also to general readers, Latin students, and scholars of the Roman world more broadly.

Roman Gardens
Roman Gardens

Author: Anthony Beeson

Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1445690314

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A fascinating look at the history and legacy of Roman gardens, focusing on Great Britain. The author is a board member of the Association for Roman Archaeology and a prolific writer of papers on Roman art and architecture and has lectured on the subject of Roman gardens.

Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction
Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction

Author: Lieve Donnellan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-03

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1351003046

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Archaeological Networks and Social Interaction focuses on conceptualisations of human interaction, human-thing entanglement, material affordances and agency. Network concepts in the archaeological discipline are ubiquitous these days. They range from loose concepts, used as metaphors to address a notion of connectivity, to highly formal and mathematically complex predictions of human behaviour. These different networked worlds sometimes clash and rarely converge. Archaeologists interested in network analysis, however, have achieved a much better understanding of the implications of adopting formal methods for studying social interaction and there have been theoretical advancements realising a better synergy between different theoretical perspectives. These nascent concerns are explored further in this volume with regional specialists exploring case studies from Prehistory to the Middle Ages throughout the Ancient and New Worlds, outlining how formal network approaches contribute to studying social interaction archaeologically. This book will be of interest to archaeologists wishing to access the latest research on networks and interconnectivity and how these approaches have been productively modified to archaeological research.

Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden
Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden

Author: Victoria Austen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-02-09

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1350265209

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This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane, art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playing with concepts of boundedness and separation. Transculturally, the garden is understood as a marked-off and cultivated space. Distinct from their surroundings, gardens are material and symbolic spaces that constitute both universal and culturally specific ways of accommodating the natural world and expressing human attitudes and values. Although we define these spaces explicitly through the notions of separation and division, in many cases we are unable to make sense of the most basic distinction between 'garden' and 'not-garden'. In response to this ambiguity, Austen interrogates the notion of the 'boundary' as an essential characteristic of the Roman garden.

Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption
Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption

Author: Brenda Longfellow

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2018-01-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0472123491

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In recent decades, the study of Roman art has shifted focus dramatically from issues of connoisseurship, typology, and chronology to analyses of objects within their contemporary contexts and local environments. Scholars challenge the notion, formerly taken for granted, that extant historical texts—the writings of Vitruvius, for example—can directly inform the study of architectural remains. Roman-era statues, paintings, and mosaics are no longer dismissed as perfunctory replicas of lost Greek or Hellenistic originals; they are worthy of study in their own right. Further, the scope of what constitutes Roman art has expanded to include the vast spectrum of objects used in civic, religious, funerary, and domestic contexts and from communities across the Roman Empire. The work gathered in Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption displays the breadth and depth of scholarship in the field made possible by these fundamental changes. The first five essays approach individual objects and artistic tropes, as well as their cultural contexts and functions, from fresh and dynamic angles. The latter essays focus on case studies in Pompeii, demonstrating how close visual analysis firmly rooted in local and temporal contexts not only strengthens understanding of ancient interactions with monuments but also sparks a reconsideration of long-held assumptions reinforced by earlier scholarship. These rigorous essays reflect and honor the groundbreaking scholarship of Elaine K. Gazda. In addition to volume editors Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry, contributors include Bettina Bergmann, Elise Friedland, Barbara Kellum, Diana Y. Ng, Jessica Powers, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, Lea M. Stirling, Molly Swetnam-Burland, Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, and Jennifer Trimble.