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Every day Roman urbanites took to the street for myriad tasks, from hawking vegetables and worshipping local deities to simply loitering and socializing. Hartnett takes readers into this thicket of activity as he repopulates Roman streets with their full range of sensations, participants, and events that stretched far beyond simple movement. As everyone from slave to senator met in this communal space, city dwellers found unparalleled opportunities for self-aggrandizing display and the negotiation of social and political tensions. Hartnett charts how Romans preened and paraded in the street, and how they exploited the street's collective space to lob insults and respond to personal rebukes. Combining textual evidence, comparative historical material, and contemporary urban theory with architectural and art historical analysis, The Roman Street offers a social and cultural history of urban spaces that restores them to their rightful place as primary venues for social performance in the ancient world.
When we think of Romans, Julius Caesar or Constantine might spring to mind. But what was life like for everyday folk, those who gazed up at the palace rather than looking out from within its walls? In this book, Jeremy Hartnett offers a detailed view of an average Roman, an individual named Flavius Agricola. Though Flavius was only a generation or two removed from slavery, his successful life emerges from his careful commemoration in death: a poetic epitaph and life-sized marble portrait showing him reclining at table. This ensemble not only enables Hartnett to reconstruct Flavius' biography, as well as his wife's, but also permits a nuanced exploration of many aspects of Roman life, such as dining, sex, worship of foreign deities, gender, bodily display, cultural literacy, religious experience, blended families, and visiting the dead at their tombs. Teasing provocative questions from this ensemble, Hartnett also recounts the monument's scandalous discovery and extraordinary afterlife over the centuries.
In this book, Jeremy Hartnett explores the role of the ancient Roman street as the primary venue for social performance and political negotiations.
The Material Life of Roman Slaves is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the archaeology of Roman slavery. Rather than regarding slaves as irretrievable in archaeological remains, the book takes the archaeological record as a key form of evidence for reconstructing slaves' lives and experiences. Interweaving literature, law, and material evidence, the book searches for ways to see slaves in the various contexts - to make them visible where evidence tells us they were in fact present. Part of this project involves understanding how slaves seem irretrievable in the archaeological record and how they are often actively, if unwittingly, left out of guidebooks and scholarly literature. Individual chapters explore the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility and between appearance and disappearance in four physical and social locations - urban houses, city streets and neighborhoods, workshops, and villas.
This book explores the social, political, and cultural importance of Thrace to prominent Athenian individuals from the mid-sixth to the mid-fourth century BCE. It examines the unique opportunities that ties with Thrace afforded these important men, and the resulting significance of Thrace to the political, cultural, and social history of Athens.
A larger than usual selection of papers from the annual TRAC conference. Sessions included Supplying the Army, Imperial communication, The role of the deceased in Roman society, Military identities and Experiencing space and place in the Roman world.
The twenty-second Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) was held at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main in spring 2012. During the three-day conference fifty papers were delivered, discussing issues from a wide range of geographical regions of the Roman Empire, and applying various theoretical and methodological approaches. An equally wide selection of subjects was presented: sessions looked at Greek art and philhellenism in the Roman world, the validity of the concept of ‘Romanisation’, change and continuity in Roman religion, urban neighbourhood relations in Pompeii and Ostia, the transformation of objects in and from the Roman world, frontier markets and Roman archaeology in the Provinces. In addition, two general sessions covered single topics such as the ‘transvestite of Catterick’, metal recycling or Egyptian funeral practice in the Roman period. This volume contains a selection of papers from all these sessions.
The pompa circensis was a political pageant and a religious ritual that produced a republican, imperial, and even Christian image of the city. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.
"Demonstrates how studies of the Roman city are shifting focus from static architecture to activities and motion within urban spaces. This volume provides detailed case studies from the three best-known cities from Roman Italy, revealing how movement contributes to our understanding of the ways different elements of society interacted in space, and how the movement of people and materials shaped urban development."--Book jacket.
The Traffic Systems of Pompeii is the first sustained examination of the development of road infrastructure in Pompeii-from the archaic age to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE-and its implications for urbanism in the Roman empire. Eric E. Poehler, an authority on Pompeii's uniquely preserved urban structure, distills over five hundred instances of street-level "wear and tear" to reveal for the first time the rules of the ancient road. Through a thorough, yet lively, investigation of every facet of the infrastructure, from the city's urban grid and the shape of the streets to the treatment of their surfaces and the individual elements of construction, the intricacies of the Pompeian traf...