Roman History: Origins, Conquest, and Imperial Power

Posted on Oct 22, 2026 in Protocol and Event Organization

Livy and the Foundation of Rome

1. Livy
   Livy was a Roman historian writing during Augustus’s lifetime whose History of Rome described Rome’s development from its legendary beginnings. He preserved competing versions of early stories and compared ancestral virtues with the violence and moral problems of his own time. His work shows how history writing could construct Roman identity and provide examples of behavior for readers to imitate or avoid.

2. Aeneas
   Aeneas was a legendary Trojan survivor, son of Venus, who escaped Troy and eventually reached Italy. His descendants connected the Trojan past with the later foundation of Rome, while the Julian family claimed ancestry through his line. He gave Rome connections to divine favor, migration, and the Greek heroic world; he did not personally found Rome.

3. Romulus
   Romulus was Rome’s legendary founder and first king, traditionally associated with its foundation in 753 BCE. He competed with his twin Remus, established his position on the Palatine Hill, and was credited with creating important Roman institutions. His story connects state formation and divine approval with violence, particularly the death of his brother.

4. Remus
   Remus was Romulus’s twin brother and rival in the foundation story, associated with the Aventine Hill. Livy preserves different accounts of his death, including one in which Romulus kills him after he jumps over the new city’s walls. His death exposes the internal conflict beneath Rome’s celebrated foundation and raises questions about political authority and the protection of boundaries.

5. Lupa
   Lupa means “she-wolf,” referring to the animal said to have nursed the abandoned Romulus and Remus. The wolf became a powerful symbol of Rome’s extraordinary origins and the survival of its founders. The famous Capitoline Wolf’s infant figures were added in the fifteenth century, showing how later societies continued reshaping the visual presentation of Roman identity.

6. Palatine and Aventine Hills
   These Roman hills are associated respectively with Romulus and Remus during their competition over founding the city. Each brother occupied a different position while seeking divine approval through augury. The story gives actual geography political and religious meaning, making Rome’s landscape a reminder of its legendary origins and foundational conflicts.

7. Tiber
   The Tiber is the river running through Rome and an important setting in its foundation stories, including the abandonment and rescue of the twins. Livy explains its name through Tiberinus, a legendary king who drowned in the river. This explanation connects a familiar geographical feature with ancestral history and illustrates how Romans used stories to give their surroundings meaning.

8. Vesta / Vestal Virgins
   Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, and the Vestal Virgins were priestesses responsible for maintaining the state’s sacred fire in the Roman Forum. Their work connected the continuity of Rome with the careful maintenance of a shared hearth. Rhea Silvia, the twins’ mother, was also a Vestal, linking the foundation story with questions of religious obligation, family, and political power.

9. Roman Forum
   The Roman Forum was a central space for political, religious, legal, and commemorative activity. It contained temples and important civic structures, including the rostra, where public speeches were delivered. Its overlapping functions show that government, religion, and public memory were closely connected and that control of prominent civic space helped shape Roman political life.

10. Capitoline Temple
    The Capitoline Temple honored Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Juno, and Minerva, the Capitoline triad. Traditionally completed at the end of the monarchy, it stood on the Capitoline Hill and served as a major focus of state religion. Its association with civic identity and military victory expressed the belief that Rome’s success depended on proper relations with the gods.

11. Etiology
    An etiology is an explanation of the origin of a name, place, institution, or practice. Roman examples include the connection between Rome and Romulus, Lavinium and Lavinia, or the Tiber and Tiberinus. Such explanations connect the present with an authoritative past, making familiar landscapes and institutions seem meaningful and deeply rooted in Roman history.

12. Augury
    Augury was the interpretation of divine signs, especially birds, to determine the gods’ approval. In the foundation story, Remus sees six vultures first, while Romulus later sees twelve, producing disagreement over whether timing or number matters more. The episode shows that religious signs required human interpretation and could become part of a struggle over political legitimacy.

Republican Institutions, Conquest, and Cultural Change

13. Fasces
    Fasces were bundles of rods, often containing an axe, carried by lictors accompanying senior Roman magistrates. They symbolized the official’s authority to punish, making governmental power physically visible. The traditional removal of the axe within Rome’s sacred boundary also expressed limits on coercive authority, connecting the symbol with both power and the protections associated with civic space.

14. Romulus’s Asylum
    Romulus’s asylum was a refuge that welcomed outsiders and helped populate the new city. Its inhabitants came from different backgrounds, making incorporation central to Rome’s legendary formation. The story complicates ideas of an exclusively native or uniform Roman people by presenting the community’s growth as dependent on accepting newcomers.

15. SPQR
    SPQR stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, meaning “the Senate and the Roman People.” The formula appeared on public monuments and other official objects, presenting authority as belonging to Rome’s civic institutions and community. Its continued use under emperors shows how traditional Republican language could support political legitimacy even when effective power had become concentrated around one ruler.

16. Senate
    The Senate was a council composed, over time, largely of former magistrates who served for life. It exercised major influence over public finances, religious affairs, and military assignments. Compared with annually changing magistrates, it provided institutional continuity and concentrated experience and prestige among elites; it also continued under emperors, although within a changed balance of power.

17. Consul
    Consuls were the two highest regular Republican magistrates, elected annually. They commanded armies and performed important civic and religious duties, including presiding over Senate meetings. The combination of two officeholders and limited terms expressed the Republican preference for shared, temporary authority, making later sole consulships and prolonged concentrations of power especially significant.

18. Dictator
    A dictator was an exceptional Republican magistrate appointed to exercise extraordinary authority during an emergency, traditionally for a limited period. The office was therefore part of Rome’s institutions rather than automatically an unlawful seizure of government. Caesar’s appointment as dictator for life in 44 BCE transformed the implications of the office by making exceptional personal authority permanent.

19. Pontifex Maximus
    The Pontifex Maximus was the chief of Rome’s pontiffs, with responsibilities involving religious rites and the calendar. The office demonstrates that religious authority was an important part of public leadership. Augustus’s assumption of the position in 12 BCE added religious prominence to his military and political authority and helped present him as a guardian of Roman tradition.

20. Etruscans
    The Etruscans were peoples of central Italy with wealthy urban communities, skilled craftspeople, strong trading connections, and distinctive religious and funerary traditions. Their contact with Greece and influence on early Rome demonstrate that Rome developed within an already sophisticated, interconnected Italian world. Etruscan temples, objects, and tombs challenge the idea that Roman culture emerged in isolation.

21. Alexander the Great
    Alexander was a Macedonian king whose conquests defeated the Persian Empire and transformed the eastern Mediterranean before his death in 323 BCE. His successors established Hellenistic kingdoms, while his military reputation and divine associations remained influential. Roman leaders admired and adapted his image, making him a model for extraordinary conquest, personal prestige, and connections between rulership and the gods.

22. Manubial Temple
    A manubial temple was financed through war booty or the proceeds from its sale, often fulfilling a general’s vow to a deity. It repaid divine assistance while making victory and the patron’s generosity permanently visible in the city. Such temples therefore connect warfare, religion, public benefaction, and competition among elites, who could convert military resources into lasting civic recognition.

23. Roman Triumph
    A triumph was a public procession celebrating a victorious commander and displaying troops, captives, and spoils. It honored divine assistance while allowing spectators to experience Roman victory as a shared civic event. Although the procession was temporary, monuments and buildings preserved its memory, helping generals turn success abroad into prestige and influence at home.

24. Hellenization
    Hellenization was the adoption and adaptation of Greek cultural forms, including art, literature, philosophy, and architecture. Roman expansion increased access to Greek objects and ideas, although cultural exchange had begun earlier through trade and contact. Greek culture could represent education and sophistication, but Roman critics could also associate it with excessive luxury, making cultural borrowing a subject of moral debate.

25. Roman Empire
    The Roman Empire can mean the territories and peoples under Roman domination, rather than only the period of government by emperors. Rome acquired extensive territories while it was still a Republic, using varied arrangements of citizenship, tribute, military obligations, and local government. Imperial control therefore created an unequal political system across culturally diverse communities rather than making every place identical to Rome.

The Late Republic and Civil Wars

26. Cicero
    Cicero was a Roman orator, politician, and philosopher who served as consul during the Catiline conspiracy in 63 BCE. His On Obligations emphasizes duty and justice, while his execution of conspirators without trial exposes tensions between those ideals and emergency political action. His assassination during the proscriptions of 43 BCE illustrates the increasing danger of public opposition during Rome’s civil conflicts.

27. Catiline Conspiracy
    The Catiline conspiracy was a plot exposed by Cicero during his consulship in 63 BCE, involving alleged plans for political violence and the overthrow of established authority. Cicero secured the execution of captured citizen conspirators without trial, an action that later contributed to his exile. The episode raises questions about whether defending the state justifies violating citizens’ legal protections.

28. Proscription List
    A proscription list publicly identified people who could be killed with impunity and whose property could be confiscated. Proscriptions eliminated political enemies while offering opportunities for financial gain through confiscation and rewards. Their use by the Second Triumvirate, including against Cicero, demonstrates how extraordinary authority could turn political rivalry into officially sanctioned violence.

29. Julius Caesar
    Julius Caesar was a Roman general and politician whose conquests in Gaul, wealth, and civil-war victories greatly increased his personal power. He promoted his ancestry through Venus, sponsored major building projects, and became dictator for life in 44 BCE. His assassination reveals fears about permanent personal domination, while the wars that followed show that killing him did not restore stable Republican government.

30. Venus
    Venus was a Roman goddess associated with love and the mother of Aeneas, through whom the Julian family claimed divine ancestry. Caesar honored her as Venus Genetrix, the Ancestress, while Pompey’s complex included Venus Victrix, the Victorious. These different associations show how political rivals could use the same deity to support competing claims to ancestry, military success, and legitimacy.

31. Pompey the Great
    Pompey was a highly successful Roman general who gained extraordinary political influence through military victories, honors, and public patronage. He initially cooperated with Caesar and Crassus but later fought Caesar in civil war and was killed in Egypt after his defeat in 48 BCE. His theater-temple complex illustrates how military wealth and generosity could build a powerful personal presence within Republican Rome.

32. Parthia
    Parthia was a major eastern power centered broadly in the region of modern Iran and a significant rival to Rome. Roman defeats, especially the loss of military standards associated with Crassus’s campaign, made it a symbol of damaged Roman prestige. Augustus celebrated recovering the standards through negotiation in 20 BCE, presenting their return as a major achievement of restored military honor.

33. Lucretius
    Lucretius was a first-century-BCE Roman poet who explained Epicurean philosophy in On the Nature of Things. He presented understanding nature as a remedy for fear, including fear of divine punishment and death, and appealed for peace amid political instability. His depiction of Epicurus as a conqueror of superstition redirects the language of military victory toward intellectual liberation.

34. Rostra
    The rostra was the speakers’ platform in the Roman Forum, a prominent setting for public political communication. Antony delivered Caesar’s funeral speech there, and Cicero’s severed head and hand were later displayed there after his assassination. These uses connect public speech with political authority and show how a familiar civic location could become a stage for intimidation and violence.

35. Cleopatra VII
    Cleopatra VII was a Ptolemaic queen of Egypt who formed political and personal alliances first with Caesar and later with Antony. Her alliance with Antony placed Egypt at the center of the struggle against Octavian, whose forces defeated them at Actium in 31 BCE. She connects Rome’s internal conflicts with the wider Hellenistic world and the political importance of foreign monarchy.

36. Ides of March, 44 BCE
    The Ides of March means March 15, the date Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE by senators led by figures including Brutus and Cassius. The Senate was meeting in Pompey’s complex, and Caesar had recently become dictator for life. Although the assassins opposed personal domination, their action produced further conflict over Caesar’s legacy rather than a lasting Republican restoration.

37. Octavian / Augustus
    Octavian was Caesar’s adopted heir and the same person later known as Augustus. After defeating Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE, he consolidated his position and received the title Augustus in 27 BCE. His rule established the Principate, combining continued Republican institutions with concentrated personal authority presented as service, religious duty, and restoration of order.

38. Mark Antony
    Mark Antony was Caesar’s close associate and co-consul in 44 BCE, later becoming a member of the Second Triumvirate. He delivered Caesar’s funeral speech and eventually allied with Cleopatra against Octavian. His defeat at Actium in 31 BCE helped end the struggle among Caesar’s successors and cleared the way for Octavian’s dominance.

39. Second Triumvirate
    The Second Triumvirate was the official alliance of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, formed in 43 BCE with extraordinary powers. Its members pursued Caesar’s assassins and used proscriptions to eliminate enemies and confiscate property. Unlike the earlier informal alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, it possessed formal authority, but rivalry among its members eventually produced further civil war.

40. Republic to Empire
    The transition from Republic to imperial rule was a gradual concentration of military, financial, and political authority during the late first century BCE. Exceptional commands, civil wars, Caesar’s dictatorship, and Octavian’s victories weakened the independence of traditional institutions. Augustus retained Republican offices and language while making government increasingly dependent on one ruler, allowing major political change to be presented as restoration.

    LegacyRome_wk3-Repub,AugustanTransformations_Brtspc.pdf

Augustus, Literature, and Monuments

41. Campus Martius
    The Campus Martius, or “Field of Mars,” was an area of Rome associated with military activity and later extensive public building. Augustus’s mausoleum, the Ara Pacis, and the obelisk/horologium transformed it into a landscape strongly connected with imperial achievement and memory. Their placement shows how a ruler could shape public experience by coordinating monuments across a shared urban setting.

42. Ara Pacis
    The Ara Pacis was the Altar of Augustan Peace, commissioned in 13 BCE and dedicated in 9 BCE in the Campus Martius. Its imagery includes the imperial family, religious procession, ancestral sacrifice, and flourishing nature. These features associate Augustus’s rule with piety, family continuity, peace, and prosperity, while recurring ritual activity keeps that political message present in civic life.

43. Pax Romana
    Pax Romana means “Roman peace,” referring to the order and relative stability associated with Roman imperial rule. Augustus emphasized the end of civil conflict, connecting peace with his military achievements and leadership. This peace remained dependent on Roman dominance and coexisted with conquest and violence, making it a political claim whose meaning could differ for rulers, citizens, and conquered communities.

44. Mars Ultor
    Mars Ultor means “Mars the Avenger,” the form of Mars honored in Augustus’s forum. The cult connected Augustus with avenging Caesar and restoring military honor, including the recovery of standards from Parthia. Its monumental temple turned achievements associated with Augustus’s family and leadership into public religious memory, joining personal legitimacy with the protection and greatness of Rome.

45. Augustus, Res Gestae
    The Res Gestae was Augustus’s public account of his achievements, honors, expenditures, and services, circulated after his death in 14 CE. It presents him as a generous leader whose authority was legitimately granted and whose actions benefited Rome. Its selective perspective and monumental display, including the Greek and Latin versions at Ancyra, make it evidence for imperial self-presentation rather than an impartial biography.

46. Principate
    The Principate was the political system associated with Augustus’s position as princeps, or “first citizen.” The Senate, magistracies, and Republican political language continued, but Augustus’s military command and accumulated influence made him dominant. The system’s importance lies in its ability to preserve visible institutional continuity while establishing durable government centered on a single ruler.

47. Virgil, Aeneid
    Virgil’s Aeneid was an Augustan epic describing Aeneas’s escape from Troy and journey toward Italy and Rome’s future origins. It connects Roman destiny and the Julian line with divine ancestry, fate, and pietas. Episodes such as Aeneas’s departure from Dido also expose the suffering required by that destiny, allowing the poem to explore the human costs of Rome’s greatness.

48. Dido
    Dido was the queen of Carthage who fell in love with Aeneas and died after he left to continue his divinely directed journey. Her story creates a conflict between personal attachment and obligations to the gods and Rome’s future. It also invites comparisons involving Rome and Carthage or Antony and Cleopatra, making a tragic relationship relevant to questions of empire, loyalty, and sacrifice.

49. Pietas / Piety
    Pietas was the fulfillment of obligations toward the gods, family and ancestors, and the civic community. Aeneas carrying his father from Troy illustrates filial duty, while his departure from Dido shows obedience to divine commands and the future Roman mission. The concept involves relationships and responsibilities beyond religious belief and can place different attachments in painful conflict.

50. Forum of Augustus
    The Forum of Augustus was a monumental complex dedicated in 2 BCE, centered on the Temple of Mars Ultor. Its statues of Aeneas and Rome’s great historical figures, together with Greek-derived architectural forms, placed Augustus within an authoritative history of ancestry and achievement. The complex used space and imagery to present his leadership as the continuation and fulfillment of Rome’s past.

    LegacyRome_wk3-Repub,AugustanTransformations_Brtspc.pdf

Portraits, Imperial Communication, and Outsiders

51. Portrait
    A portrait identifies a person through recognizable features while also constructing a public identity. Imperial portraits combined standardized heads with bodies, clothing, and gestures that expressed roles such as priest, citizen, or commander. Their significance depends on material, patronage, inscription, and location, since portraits could make an absent emperor present and connect local communities with imperial authority.

52. Cuirassed Statue
    A cuirassed statue portrays its subject wearing a military breastplate, presenting the figure as a commander. The Prima Porta Augustus combines this military role with imagery of the recovered Parthian standards, divine connections, and abundant nature. Its symbolism turns a particular political achievement into a broader claim that Augustus’s leadership supports legitimate power and a flourishing world.

53. Equestrian Statue
    An equestrian statue depicts a rider on horseback, as in the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The elevated rider, controlled horse, and commanding gesture communicate prestige, authority, and mastery. The form’s repeated use in later monuments demonstrates the reception of Roman visual models by leaders seeking to present similar claims about military leadership and public importance.

54. Polychromy
    Polychromy means the use of multiple colors on sculpture or architecture. Ancient works could incorporate paint, gilding, colored materials, and inlaid eyes, producing effects quite different from surviving bare marble. Recognizing these features changes how we understand ancient visual experience, especially the lifelike presence and authority projected by portraits; modern color reconstructions remain interpretations of surviving evidence.

55. Tacitus, Germania
    Tacitus’s Germania, written in 98 CE, was an ethnographic account of Germanic peoples by a Roman senator and historian. Its descriptions of their customs and supposed simplicity or morality create comparisons with Roman luxury and behavior. The work therefore reveals Roman concerns alongside information about outsiders, while its later nationalist reception shows how ancient texts can acquire new political meanings.

56. Ethnography
    Ethnography is writing that describes peoples, their customs, and ways of life. Ancient authors such as Tacitus organized unfamiliar communities through categories shaped by their own cultural assumptions, including comparisons between civilization, barbarism, virtue, and luxury. Such works should be read for what they reveal about the observer’s concerns as well as about the people being described.

Religion and Christianity

57. Polytheism
    Polytheism is the worship of multiple gods, including civic, household, local, imported, and personified divinities. Roman religious practice was woven into political leadership, warfare, agriculture, and domestic life, with correct rituals central to maintaining divine-human relations. Its flexible range of gods allowed incorporation of new traditions, although authorities could still restrict practices they considered threatening to public order.

58. Syncretism
    Syncretism involves the association, combination, or accommodation of religious traditions and divinities. Under Roman rule, local gods could continue alongside Roman forms of worship, while foreign gods and practices could also enter Rome. This exchange demonstrates that imperial culture developed through adaptation in multiple directions, although religious incorporation remained connected with unequal power and official regulation.

59. Do ut des
    Do ut des means “I give so that you may give,” expressing a reciprocal relationship between humans and gods. People offered gifts, sacrifices, or vows in expectation of divine assistance, and successful assistance created an obligation to fulfill promises. A general building a vowed temple after victory illustrates how this relationship connected religious duty with military success and public patronage.

60. Roman Sacrifice
    Roman sacrifice was a ritual offering to the gods, often conducted publicly outdoors before a temple or shrine. Officials, attendants, sensory effects, and communal participation made it a visible performance of proper relations between the community and divine powers. Sacrifice could also display social hierarchy and civic membership, helping explain why refusal to participate could appear to endanger more than an individual’s religious standing.

61. Evocatio
    Evocatio was a ritual invitation asking an enemy city’s protective deity to leave that city and accept worship at Rome. The promise of an appropriate temple and continuing honors presented conquest as a transfer of divine support; Juno’s association with the capture of Veii in 396 BCE is a key example. The practice connects religious incorporation directly with military domination.

62. Apotheosis
    Apotheosis is deification, especially the transformation of a deceased emperor into a divine figure through official recognition. Images of rulers ascending to heaven and the divine status of ancestors could strengthen an imperial family’s legitimacy, as Caesar’s deification benefited Augustus. Posthumous deification should be distinguished from the worship of living emperors, which varied between Rome and provincial settings.

63. Pliny the Younger
    Pliny the Younger was governor of Bithynia-Pontus whose correspondence with Trajan around 112 CE discussed how to handle Christians. His tests involved participation in traditional religious acts, including offerings before the emperor’s image, and he expressed concern about stubborn refusal and independent associations. His letters reveal how religious commitment became entangled with administration, civic loyalty, and anxiety about public order.

64. Jesus
    Jesus was a Jewish teacher whose ministry and execution occurred under Roman rule; he was crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate around 30–33 CE. His followers believed that his death had redemptive significance and that he rose from the dead. These beliefs became central to Christian identity and supplied a model through which later Christians interpreted their own suffering and martyrdom.

65. Passio / Passion
    Passio means “suffering” and is used for accounts of Jesus’s suffering and execution and for narratives of Christian martyrdom. A passion interprets punishment through a religious framework, connecting the sufferer’s experience with Christ. These narratives preserve witnesses, encourage believers, and recast an apparently humiliating death as evidence of faith and spiritual victory.

66. Perpetua and Felicity
    Perpetua and Felicity were Christian women martyred at Carthage in 203 CE; Perpetua was an elite mother, while Felicity was enslaved and gave birth shortly before execution. Their Passion combines first-person accounts and visions with an editor’s narrative, placing religious commitment in conflict with family expectations and Roman authority. Its presentation of punishment as victory makes it important for studying gender, status, community, and Christian identity. sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu

67. Martyrdom
    Martyrdom means bearing witness to faith through suffering and death. Christian narratives interpreted execution as steadfast loyalty to God and imitation of Christ, reversing the degrading meaning intended by punishment. Martyrs became role models whose stories, death anniversaries, graves, and bodily remains helped create shared religious memory and new practices of veneration.

Households, Wealth, and Status

68. Petronius, Satyricon
    Petronius’s Satyricon was a Roman novel, probably dating to the 60s CE, that survives in fragments and includes the Dinner of Trimalchio. Its satire mocks extravagant display, cultural mistakes, and struggles over status. Because it is constructed fiction, its value lies partly in exposing social judgments and elite expectations rather than providing an unfiltered record of ordinary Roman life.

69. Trimalchio
    Trimalchio was the enormously wealthy freedman who hosted an extravagant dinner in the Satyricon. His luxurious possessions, elaborate food, mistakes involving classical culture, and ambitious funeral plans reveal his desire for recognition. The satire emphasizes that economic success did not automatically produce inherited elite status, showing how taste, education, ancestry, and behavior helped maintain social boundaries.

70. Freedman / Freedwoman
    A freedman or freedwoman was a formerly enslaved person released through manumission. Freedom could create opportunities for economic success, but continuing relationships with former owners and memories of enslaved origins remained socially significant. Trimalchio illustrates the distinction between legal freedom, wealth, and elite acceptance, demonstrating that upward mobility did not erase every form of hierarchy.

71. Domus
    Domus means both a house and a household, including dependents and enslaved people rather than only a nuclear family. Elite houses received clients and visitors, using decoration, sightlines, and controlled access to distinguish outsiders from intimates and people of different standing. Their layouts therefore helped organize social relationships and publicly communicate the household’s resources, education, and authority.

72. Cena / Convivium
    Cena refers to dinner, while convivium emphasizes the shared dining gathering or banquet. Food, seating, service, entertainment, and conversation allowed hosts and guests to display generosity, cultural competence, and differences of rank. Trimalchio’s feast exaggerates these possibilities, making dining a setting in which wealth is displayed and claims to status are evaluated or mocked.

Funerals, Tombs, and Memory

73. Funeral Procession
    A Roman funeral procession publicly accompanied the dead and, for prominent elites, could lead to an oration at the rostra celebrating achievements and ancestry. Polybius describes the display of ancestral images and the repeated praise of family accomplishments. Such rituals turned private grief into public memory, preserved lineage, and encouraged younger generations to seek the civic honors being celebrated.

74. “Streets of Tombs”
    “Streets of tombs” were roads outside city gates lined with funerary monuments that addressed passing travelers. Families used inscriptions, portraits, unusual forms, and features encouraging people to stop to attract attention and preserve identity. Monuments such as Eurysaces’s occupational tomb or Mamia’s bench tomb show how burial spaces advertised achievement and social recognition in a competitive public setting.

75. Collegia
    Collegia were private associations whose members could share social, religious, occupational, or funerary activities. Some helped arrange burial and remembrance through collective resources, providing forms of affiliation beyond an individual elite household. They are important for understanding how people of different means could establish community and preserve their identities, including through shared tombs and collective commemorative practices.

76. Sarcophagus / Sarcophagi
    A sarcophagus was a coffin, often stone and richly carved, for an intact body; sarcophagi is the plural. Their increased prominence accompanied a gradual shift toward inhumation during the second century CE, and their imagery could express military achievement, affection, or ideals through myth. Scenes such as Luna and Endymion function as visual poetry rather than necessarily illustrating literal events in the deceased’s life.

Map Answers

Meroë is in modern Sudan; the lecture caption placing it in Egypt is misleading. museum.classics.cam.ac.uk

Your professor has not supplied the actual essay questions. These are model arguments with evidence that you can adapt to the wording of a prompt.

Model Essay Arguments

1. What do Roman origin stories accomplish?

Roman origin stories create shared identity by connecting the community with divine ancestry, meaningful places, and remembered institutions. Aeneas makes migration and divine favor central to Rome’s ancestry, while Romulus’s asylum presents incorporation of outsiders as foundational. However, the conflict between Romulus and Remus places violence within the same tradition. Livy therefore preserves a past that both celebrates Rome’s exceptional destiny and invites reflection on its internal conflicts. The stories also make the landscape meaningful by attaching explanations to hills, rivers, and civic institutions.

2. How does conquest transform Rome?

Conquest changes Rome by bringing resources, cultural contact, and new opportunities for elite competition. Victorious generals display captives and booty in triumphs and convert military wealth into temples and public amenities. These projects honor the gods and benefit the community while advertising the patron’s achievements. At the same time, Hellenization introduces admired forms of art, education, and philosophy that critics can also associate with luxury. Roman expansion therefore generates both narratives of greatness and moralizing explanations of decline, particularly when private ambition appears to overwhelm collective interests.

3. How does Augustus legitimize his authority?

Augustus legitimizes concentrated personal authority by presenting it as restoration, service, piety, and continuity. The Res Gestae emphasizes achievements, public spending, and legitimately granted honors, while the Ara Pacis associates his leadership with religious ritual, family, and abundance. The Forum of Augustus places him within a celebrated history of ancestors and Roman leaders. These media reinforce one another, making his dominance appear rooted in established values. The central tension is that traditional institutions and Republican language remain visible while effective political and military power becomes concentrated around the emperor.

4. Why could religion threaten Roman authority?

Roman religious practice supported the community’s relationship with the gods, so participation could become a matter of public responsibility. Although new divinities could be incorporated through syncretism or evocatio, authorities restricted activities they considered socially or politically dangerous. Pliny’s handling of Christians shows how refusal of traditional rites could appear as troubling noncompliance. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity presents a contrasting perspective: fidelity to God outweighs demands from officials and family. The resulting punishment becomes spiritual victory in Christian memory, challenging the state’s intended interpretation of execution.

5. How do Romans display status and preserve identity?

Roman status depends on public recognition as well as resources. Elite houses organize access and display cultural competence, while banquets allow hosts and guests to perform hierarchy through food, service, and conversation. Trimalchio’s wealth fails to guarantee acceptance because the satire judges him through ancestry, education, and taste. Funerals and roadside tombs extend these processes after death: speeches, ancestral images, portraits, and inscriptions preserve selected achievements. Together, these examples show that status must be communicated to audiences and that memory is deliberately constructed rather than passively preserved.

6. What do images and accounts of outsiders reveal about imperial power?

Imperial power depends partly on representations that make authority visible and define its relationship with other peoples. Portraits present emperors as commanders or religious leaders, while local dedications and architectural references connect distant communities with Rome. Yet audiences can reshape these meanings, as the treatment of Augustus’s head at Meroë illustrates. Tacitus’s Germania similarly describes outsiders through Roman concerns, making their supposed virtues a way to evaluate Roman behavior. Images and texts therefore reveal both claims to dominance and the limits of controlling how that dominance is understood.