Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

Rome’s was a politics of all five senses. It was a city of noise, of refuse and bodies in the street, of massive crowds, of massive construction, and a size and opulence not equaled in Europe again for more than a millennium. In maps and inscriptions, Rome was the center of the world. How did Rome become this way? This chapter looks to intercity relations to resolve this puzzle. The Roman Empire was in effect a network of cities in the core–periphery mode – the ultimate “consumer city” supplied by vast hinterlands. Lacking the perfect local environment, Rome imported the commodities – and people – needed to construct an alpha city. The city grew as haphazardly and violently as the Empire itself. The greater the resources of the Empire, the larger the foundation for Rome’s growth. This hit crisis point in the Late Republic, as an increasingly dispossessed agrarian peasantry migrated en-masse to cities alongside inhabitants from across the world. In short, the context for Rome’s growth was a hitherto unparalleled age of globalization in the first and second centuries CE.

The last two chapters of this volume, appropriately, deal with endpoints in the form of tombs in ancient China and ancient Rome. Both chapters, however, make it abundantly clear that tombs should also be studied as points of beginning, namely, as sites where, through the performance of funerals and other rituals, the living renegotiated their own social relationships after a death in their community. Tian Tian’s contribution has a laser-sharp focus on burial money. Starting in Western Han, burial money featured prominently among other grave goods: huge quantities of money were hauled to the burial site – she speaks of two cartloads full in case of one elite tomb – to be subsequently, after a public reading of the funerary-objects lists, buried in the tomb. In Rome, burial coins spread together with the Roman empire, but never in quantities as large as in the case of Han tombs. Moreover, interpreting Roman burial coins remains difficult given that the explanation provided in literary sources (that the deceased needed one coin to successfully cross the River Styx to the underworld) is unsatisfactory to account for the richness of the archaeological record. (For Han China, the funerary-objects lists that were placed in the tomb really help when it comes to categorizing and interpreting the burial coins.) In the Roman case there is little evidence that money played a role in the way families sought to display their wealth and status as they publicly remembered their dead; in contrast, in Han China (and beyond) gifts of money by individuals or other families to the family of the deceased in order to defray funeral expenses were a prominent way to create and confirm communities; as Tian Tian reveals, local villagers even formed private associations (dan) especially for that purpose.

Considering the sources and material evidence available from Rome, this chapter focuses on the evidence of women’s associations with these soldiers of the different units stationed in the capital. These women were often labeled as “wives” in written documentation. By analyzing the available evidence, predominantly on funerary monuments, the authors expand the discussion of the social expectations and realities of women associated with the military in the context of the Empire’s center. The evidence gives us a rich image of an aspect of society that has not yet been explored, while at the same time providing a new perspective on the life of Roman soldiers. The origin of the women and their social background is treated as a relevant factor for their integration in the military community and – as inhabitants of Rome – in the community of the city. In this context it is interesting to consider the origin of personal relationships. In some cases, it seems that women accompanied soldiers to Rome from a provincial location and other cases suggest the relationship began in the capital itself.

This chapter explores the topic of Roman military families’ mobility in the late first through third centuries CE by discussing a case study of British families abroad. It surveys the evidence for families that came from Roman Britain and settled on the continent. In doing so, the author assesses and compares various types of evidence (literary, epigraphic, and archaeological) to discuss the case of British military families on the move, families that had been present in the Roman Empire but not accounted for in the modern scholarly literature. The sources analyzed include literary texts, inscriptions, military diplomas and personal dress accessories that the members of such families took with them as part of personal possessions during their travels. Since most sources available to trace such families come from the Roman military context, the focus lies on emigrant soldiers’ families. The first section relies heavily on the historical texts and epigraphic material while the second part is devoted to the discussion of the potential and limitations of material culture in our search for migrant communities. The chapter provides a case to support the view that British military families traveled far and wide in the empire.

After Cannae, Hannibal needed a maritime base to allow reinforcements and supplies to reach him. But he failed to win over or capture Naples, an old Roman naval ally, and had mixed results elsewhere in Campania: he was successful at proud Capua. He was under-supported from Carthage for all his time in Italy, whether because they could not or would not help him. In 215, he signed a treaty of alliance with Philip V of Macedon. This brought few benefits to either party and would long be remembered by the Romans. Syracuse in Sicily went over to Hannibal in 214 but was recaptured by Claudius Marcellus (late 212). Similarly most of coastal Tarentum in south Italy was in his hands, but only between 212 and 209. In 211, when Capua was under Roman pressure, Hannibal marched on Rome as a diversionary tactic but soon withdrew. Capua fell and was harshly treated.

‘Hannibal’s legacy’ is an influential 1965 book by a controversial historian, Arnold Toynbee. It set the agenda for the next half-century and more of scholarship by arguing that the ‘legacy’ consisted of lasting damage to the agricultural economy of Italy and the political stability of Rome. Its contemporary reception is presented and analysed. The (disputed) extent of Italy’s devastation, as divinely promised to Hannibal in an alleged dream while still in Iberia, is assessed, and manpower difficulties discussed. Hannibal’s legacy at defeated Carthage was more obviously damaging, though the city did not fall until 146. Hannibal’s literary legacy in Latin and Greek literature was systematically ambiguous: fear, horror, fascination, and even admiration. Scipio’s literary afterlife and perceived qualities are explored initially through the medium of the ‘Dream of Scipio’, a fictional work by Cicero in imitation of Plato: Scipio Africanus appears to his adoptive grandson Aemilianus in his sleep.

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 charts the rise and fall of Virgil’s Carthage to explore some of the ways in which the paradoxical resonances of this city are productive of a sublimity that expresses its ambivalent status in the Aeneid. Under construction in Book 1, Carthage surges up before us offering a glimpse of the city’s glorious Augustan refoundation, but also a vision of the nascent Punic menace that would become Rome’s greatest enemy. In Book 4, Carthage has lapsed into an almost ruinous state threatening imminent collapse, a threat partly realised in the image of the city’s destruction that is a fantasy of its Roman conquest (4.669–70). From the start of the poem, though, it is clear that this city is not just Carthage, it is also Troy and Rome, so the vision of its destruction is not only a reassuring affirmation of Rome’s eventual triumph but a disturbing reminder of vulnerability. Virgil’s paradoxical Carthage encapsulates the Burkean sensation of the sublime ‘delight’ that ‘turns on pain’, its Augustan space sublime and thrillingly unstable.

For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

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.

Chapter 4 deals with Nicene–Homoian conversions in Italy under Ostrogothic rule. First it discusses the religious history of the Goths from the fall of the Hunnic empire to their triumph in the war with Odoacer, allowing us to better understand the nature of Gothic Homoianism in Italy and its relationship with the Nicene church. Then it examines conversions under Amal rule and the role of tolerance in their politics and ideology, and finally conversions between the Nicene and Homoian faith in the period of the Gothic War (535–54) and its aftermath.

This chapter explores the superimposition of Roman law and order on provincial and municipal politics.

In contrast with the emphasis put on pietas and providentia by Flavian discourse, the Thebaid is the only Flavian poem that begins and ends without gods, much like Lucan’s Bellum Civile. However, Statius’ gods are described in Ovidian terms and use thought-provoking allusions to the Metamorphoses to challenge the readers’ poetic memory with distorted versions of their literary past. The ways in which Statius and his gods allude to and manipulate the Metamorphoses’ divine narratives, reworking Ovid’s coded use of celestial geographies, both mark a significant distance from Lucan’s epic universe and highlight the Roman significance of the Thebaid’s divine world. The gods’ attempts to legitimise their morally dubious actions by manipulating the readers’ understanding of the Metamorphoses not only shows the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the former literary tradition but also exploits the traditional analogy between heavenly and Roman power to reflect on the Flavian emperors’ progressive sacralisation of the imperial institution and selective renegotiation of Augustan legacy in the tense religious atmosphere of post–civil-war Rome.

In this chapter we treat law as inextricably connected to a text. We examine the ways in which laws and other elements of the legal process, including documents, procedural records, and judicial opinions and commentaries, are produced, preserved, transmitted and communicated to various audiences in ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Near East and Egypt, ancient India and ancient China. We include discussions of when and how texts first emerged in these societies, the materials on which they were written and preserved, and other special features of their written texts, such as language, syntax, degree of precision, and organization and codification. We also examine these aspects of secondary legal texts, including historical accounts and reports, literature, philosophical, religious and other intellectual works, non-legal documents, instructional materials and visual ‘texts’, to see how these contributed to the understanding of law as text.