Building Memories and Identities in Republican Rome
Date of Lecture: April 20, 2015
About the Speaker: Maggie Popkin is assistant professor of Roman art at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Classics. She’s participated in excavations in Samothrace, Greece and Selinunte, Sicily, and is preparing a number of related scholarly articles on Roman art and architecture. Her dissertation was on “The Triumphal Route in Republican and Imperial Rome: Architecture, Experience, and Memory,” and a book on the same is forthcoming in 2016.
About the Talk: The triumph—an elaborate procession celebrating Rome’s military victories over foreign peoples—was one of ancient Rome’s most important institutions, a ritual at once religious and political, military and spectacular. This talk explores the architectural elaboration of the triumphal route during the third and second centuries B.C.E. The temples, porticoes, arches, and column monuments in front of which triumphs passed powerfully shaped how Romans experienced and remembered triumphs and, consequently, how they conceived of an urban identity for their city.
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