The Forum of Trajan in Rome

This chapter discusses how Trajan after his accession in 98 reconsolidated the imperial house. Trajan was from the Spanish province Baetica, his wife, Plotina, likely from Narbones...

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 ...

Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize, this chapter argues, uses a classicizing allusive technique to set different models of Rome against each other, so that each corrects the flaws or...

Despite the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire lived an agricultural existence and thus resided outside of urban centers, there is no denying the fact th...

The Liber Pontificalis’s account of the four-day Synod of Rome in April 769 convened by Pope Stephen III is a remarkable scene of histrionic recrimination and the condemnation of S...