"'Memorials to the Ability of Them All': Tetrarchic Displays in the Roman Forum's Central Area (original) (raw)
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This paper explores the ways in which the relationship between emperor and senators was visualized in the urban space of late-antique Rome. I argue that the fourth century did not witness a private take-over of public space by the aristocracy, but on the contrary the establishment of a new topography of control. The placement of statuary in the Forum of Trajan and the Forum Romanum both celebrated the supremacy of the monarch over the imperial aristocracy and contributed to maintain that supremacy.
Running Rome and its Empire: The Places of Roman Governance
Routledge, 2024
This volume explores the transformation of public space and administrative activities in republican and imperial Rome through an interdisciplinary examination of the topography of power. Throughout the Roman world building projects created spaces for different civic purposes, such as hosting assemblies, holding senate meetings, the administration of justice, housing the public treasury, and the management of the city through different magistracies, offices, and even archives. These administrative spaces – both open and closed – characterised Roman life throughout the Republic and High Empire until the administrative and judicial transformations of the fourth century CE. This volume explores urban development and the dynamics of administrative expansion, linking them with some of the most recent archaeological discoveries. In doing so, it examines several facets of the transformation of Roman administration over this period, considering new approaches to and theories on the uses of public space and incorporating new work in Roman studies that focuses on the spatial needs of human users, rather than architectural style and design. This fascinating collection of essays is of interest to students and scholars working on Roman space and urbanism, Roman governance, and the running of the Roman Empire more broadly.
https://www.routledge.com/Urban-Space-and-Urban-History-in-the-Roman-World/Flohr/p/book/9780367406226 Built space structures everyday life in the city, and people build spaces that suit their conceptions of what their society is, or should be. The connection is both material and symbolic. In this chapter I aim to tackle the question of how Romans related two of the city’s most important political spaces at two different historical moments: the Forum Romanum during the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire. By drawing on the French theorist Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and a more recent set of concepts devised by organisational theorists Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, I propose a vocabulary that might allow us to discuss the relationship between an individual and an urban space in their societal context. Once we have a consistent mechanism for putting that relationship into words, we can begin to compare it with other relationships at other times and in other places described in the same terms. The Forum Romanum of the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire both have a claim to be their city’s primary political space. There is so much more to be said about each example: these are rich and multivalent spaces, which allow for many different interpretations, and Althusser’s critics must be right that alternative interpretations, misrecognitions, resistance, and more were possible even for their original Roman visitors. But it should be no surprise to find that, on the whole, their architecture reflected the power relations that structured society at these two different historical moments.
The Politics of Space in Early Modern Rome
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 1997
A s absolute as the pope in Rome" was a simile that seventeenth-century Italians invoked when they wished to express the notion that a ruler could do exactly as he pleased. Spatially the popes of the Counter-Reformation lived up to this image by carving out and clearing grand ceremonial vistas that invited the admiration of Rome and the world. Their patronage contributed to two of the most famous monumental public spaces in early modern Europe, Michelangelo's Capitoline plaza in the sixteenth century and Bernini's St. Peter's square in the seventeenth. As the patrons intended, these rhetorical gestures of absolutist urbanism-the great "stage sets" of the Counter-Reformation papacy-have long succeeded in dazzling visitors and scholars with the magnificently articulated authority of the popes. But what was the reality behind this image from the point of view of the urban population who were the popes' subjects? There was more than one actor on the city stage, and authority in Rome was not as easily monopolized as the pontiffs tried to suggest. In this study I analyze the political character of papal absolutism from the perspective of the Roman population, focusing on the rhetorical uses of space that this population articulated. The rhetoric of absolutism turned all eyes toward the prince. But this rhetoric veils the fact that the eyes and attention of the prince's devoted and obedient subjects were often turned elsewhere. Rome was a city of diverse and independent centers of influence. Despite the relative success of the papacy's efforts to deny subjects any formal public authority, patrician families, religious orders, and foreign embassies were just some of the groups that rivaled the popes as foci of private, less formal, attention and power. Lacking political institutions that gave them an active role in decision making, these and other urban groups found other ways to advance or protect their interests. The city landscape itself became a substitute for participatory institutions; it was a flexible and accessible rhetorical resource. When we see how these city dwellers utilized and gave meaning to urban space in their private battles for social prestige or for control of particular neighborhoods, we understand more clearly why the popes themselves resorted to such grandiose public gestures. Space in Rome was a vehicle for political expression. Here I explore how papal subjects used urban space as a means of expression and what their use of space reveals about the tensions within this particular absolutist regime, an elected monarchy ruling an Italian state and an international church. In probing the political meanings of "private," that is, nongovernmental, space in Rome, we shall see that the city had a great diversity of types of space. Our protagonists are a wide range of Roman residents: people of varied gender, class, culture, and nationality. If "space I am grateful for the suggestions of Nicholas Adams,
Portraits, power, and patronage in the late Roman Republic
The Journal of Roman Studies, 2000
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