Decoration and Display in Rome's Imperial Thermae

Across the Roman Empire, ubiquitous archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence attests to the significance of bathing for Romans’ daily routines. Given the importance of...

Roman political leaders used distance from Rome as a key political tool to assert pre-eminence. Through the case studies of Caesar’s hegemony, Augustus’s autocracy, and Tiberi...

Romans held that the Republican city was built almost instantly following the earlier city’s catastrophic destruction by Gauls in 390 BCE. Furthermore, the huge costs of rebuilding...

This chapter examines the development of the city commune in Rome during the period 1050–1150. Rome does not occupy a central place in accounts of early Italian city communes. The ...

This chapter emphasizes that for Rome, the title “empress” is a term of convenience. The closest Latin equivalent to “empress” is ‘Augusta,’ which by the later first century CE bec...

This chapter explores Tacitus’ reading of the question of the relationship of the individual to empire in the Agricola. Tacitus constructed an understanding of Rome’s empire as a t...

Chapter 5 addresses questions of topography and urban design in order to analyze the “power of place”—that is, the Baths’ deliberate associations with preexisting monuments as part...

This work aims to synthesize the textual and (massive) material evidence on the empress Sabina (born ca. 85–died ca. 137). The book traces the development of Sabina’s partnership w...