This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

In a famous passage of his Metamorphoses Ovid describes the via Lactea, leading from Earth to Heaven and to the Gods of Olympus, by comparing it to the city of Rome (1.173–6). But if Heaven is like Rome, Rome too is like Heaven: in his exile poetry Ovid represents the emperor as ‘Jupiter on earth’, and it is an obvious consequence that the places inhabited by him may appear as a sort of Olympus on earth. Augustus’ house is thus described as Jupiter’s royal palace (Tr. 3.1.33–8 uideo fulgentibus armis | conspicuos postes tectaque digna deo, | et ‘Iouis haec’ dixi ‘domus est?’ quod ut esse putarem, | augurium menti querna corona dabat. | cuius ut accepi dominum, ‘non fallimur’, inquam, | ‘et magni uerum est hanc Iouis esse domum’), and this reversal of the normal spatial hierarchy becomes a standard encomiastic/panegyric trait of the Imperial age (cf. Statius’ description of Domitian’s house at Silv. 4.2.18–21, and many of Martial’s references to Domitian’s courtly world). Rome, being the seat of imperial power, thus looks like a heavenly city: a paradoxical anticipation of (or maybe a hint of?) the Christian idea that will be elaborated by Augustine.

This introductory chapter reflects on the importance of monuments, topography and symbolic space in the production of Augustan ideology, both reviewing the manifold ways in which the princeps sought to impose himself on the urban and Italian landscape, and seeking to contextualise these within wider patterns in the literary and cultural construction of space in the first century BC. After a brief review of the ‘spatial turn’ in Classical Studies, it goes on to identify six broad categories within which the construction and representation of space in ancient literary texts has typically been considered in recent scholarship: the relation between written and physical cities; the relation between space and hegemonic power; the contrasting paradigms of hodological and cartographic space; the relation between centre and periphery; space as a site of cultural memory; and the conceptualisation of poetics in spatial terms. A final section traces some key themes that emerge from the volume’s remaining chapters and relates them to these wider trends in Classical Studies.

This chapter looks at potential allusions in Horace’s Odes to the religious buildings in Rome known to have been constructed or substantially repaired by Augustus. These major construction projects in Rome in the Augustan period are naturally a topic of interest to contemporary poets; in the case of the Odes, it can be argued that there are many points of contact between poetic and architectural artefacts, and even that the Roman literary achievement of the Augustan poet as proclaimed in Odes 3.30 can be paralleled with a Roman architectural project of Augustus himself. It is also interesting to note that though Horace’s Odes contain a number of potential allusions to a range of projects in the considerable programme of temple construction and renovation later carefully recorded by Augustus in the Res gestae, there are no allusions to the Temple of Diuus Iulius, perhaps because the memory of Julius Caesar was felt to be too problematic.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

The inclination to withdraw himself from the public as far as possible is regarded as one of Virgil’s most salient characteristics: this at least is the impression given by the few testimonia and numerous anecdotes of his life. The guiding principle of Virgil’s life as a poet of the res publica Romana could be described as an ‘art of disappearing’, which becomes evident in different ways. By means of this Virgil sometimes succeeds in withdrawing himself spatially even from Augustus, the mightiest designer of space, and in establishing certain limits to his ‘topotactic’ power. To present the ‘withdrawing technique’ practised by Virgil, this chapter draws on information gathered from biographical texts on Virgil as well as on relevant passages of Virgil’s work, naturally without ignoring the documentary fragility of the texts considered. Nevertheless there are conspicuous correspondences between the texts about Virgil and the poetological messages within his literary works, which give an impression at least of his effective seclusion. His reception by his contemporaries and immediate successors proves his greatest success in this respect.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the surviving passage of Isidoros of Charax’s Parthian Stations (written around AD 1–14), together with testimonia and fragments (mostly from Pliny the Elder) arranged as 21 extracts. The chapter introduction shows that Isidoros’ geographical work on the far east of the Roman world, commissioned by Augustus, was far more wide-ranging that the short text we have, which lists stathmoi (stations, stopping-points) within Parthia alone. Partly based upon Artemidoros, it is ‘the only surviving example in Greek of a type of record commonly found in Latin’. New maps show the western and eastern halves of this part of Isidoros’ itinerary, spanning from Mesopotamia to eastern Afghanistan.

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.

The Alexander most visible to us today is one who was created and recreated in the Roman period. While Alexander’s presence in literature is strong enough that we can reasonably describe the trajectory of intellectual interest in Alexander during the Roman period, more difficult to pin down is the degree to which powerful Romans engaged in conscious imitatio or aemulatio Alexandri, which generally involves squaring literary hints with material evidence that does not always speak to us as directly as we would like it to. Without dismissing the world of ways in which various aspects of Alexander-myth may have been subtly exploited by powerful Romans, this paper charts a path between overly credulous and overly sceptical conclusions concerning individual Romans by taking an overview approach of imperial interest and tightening our definitions of ‘imitation’ or ‘emulation’ in the context of Romans and Alexander. I conclude that both imitatio and aemulatio look quite different at Rome than they do in the provincial east.

The project’s results indicate that a landscape once dominated by small, family-run, farms, each cultivating small plots of land, gradually transformed through the three phases of the Roman imperial period (Early, 30 BC-AD 120: 205 sites; Mid, AD 120-260: 174 sites; Late, AD 260-440: 146 sites) into one featuring large agricultural estates involved in extensive farming practices. In light of historical records it seems likely that affluent investors bought up much of the land of failing smallholders, expanding the capacity of their own agricultural enterprises and leasing out properties to poorer farmers. Local wealth, power, and influence became concentrated in the hands of a limited number of elite landowners. Yet despite this process, small low-status sites remained the most abundant class of rural habitation even in the Late Imperial period and many middle-ranking sites endured without a break in occupation even into Late Antique times (AD 440-700: 77 sites in total). The resilience of wide sections of the rural community, even in the face of external threats from Longobards and others, should not be underestimated, but significantly a considerable proportion of Tuscania’s hinterland of cultivated fields had reverted to scrub and woodland by the Late Antique period.

The Conclusions explore the consequences of our arguments for the study of late antiquity more generally and the patterns of Roman military organization. The Roman military was among the most important institutions in the ancient world, and revising its history has ramifications for such perennial questions as imperial decision-making and Roman identity. Moreover, our reconstruction creates new questions, in particular about the economy of the fifth-century east Roman empire and its ability to mobilize and sustain the armies described by the Notitia. This chapter concludes by situating our revised narrative within the longe durée of Roman military history from Augustus to Byzantium and identifying the major considerations, including many non-military considerations, that motivated the empire’s various military configurations.

At the beginning of the second book of Cicero’s De re publica (54–51 BC) we find a remarkable passage: Scipio Aemilianus, one of the dialogue’s interlocutors, cites Cato the Elder’s statement on the superiority of the res publica. Cato attributes the success of the Roman Republic to its gradual evolution thanks to the combined wisdom of many Romans through many generations. Cato rates the Roman constitution much more highly than the ones of Crete, Sparta and Athens because the laws and institutions of these Greek polities have been crafted by only a few, albeit ingenious, persons.

Ovid reinvented Roman cultural memory by re-constructing the memories of Servius Tullius, the sixth mythical king of Rome. In so doing, he joined historians, antiquarians, poets, and even the emperor Augustus in their efforts to rebuild and recover the Roman past.1 Furthermore, Ovid commemorated their collective endeavours in the Fasti, a didactic poem which discusses the aetiologies of Roman festivals (fasti) and highlights how Augustus appropriated Rome’s calendar by filling it with festivals dedicated both to his own achievements and those of his family, the domus Augusta.

In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

In the early first century AD, the democratic institutions of Athens dedicated an honorary statue to the Roman senator Lucius Cassius Longinus.1 In the process, they re-used a monument consisting of a bronze statue and a marble base from the Classical period.2 Elsewhere, I have investigated why Athenians rededicated such old statues to Roman senators in this period. I have shown that old statues, that is statues from the Classical (and Hellenistic) period, were particularly suitable honours for Roman benefactors because of their shape and the cultural memory attached to them. I have detailed the manner in which they were employed as a political strategy both to engage powerful Romans and to manoeuvre them into a position of patronage and support for the city.