Gregor Kalas. The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity

This is one of a number of new books that have forced historians to reassess the vitality of the city of Rome even after Diocletian and the Tetrarchs had ensured that Rome would no longer be the sole imperial capital in the empire. Gregor Kalas’s book benefits from the use of digital mapping techniques and from an earlier research project through the UCLA Digital Humanities Center called “Visualizing Statues in the Late Roman Forum” (xiii). As Kalas unpacks how the physical environment of the Forum—its buildings, statues, and inscriptions—represented political authority and patronage, he not only demonstrates how Rome remained central to imperial rule and to the senatorial aristocracy, but also offers reasons for why aristocrats, in tandem with the emperor, maintained (or rather, restored) the Forum down through 476 and the fall of the last emperor in the West. After a devastating fire in the Forum in 284, Diocletian and the Tetrarchs were freed—or forced—to rebuild large sections of the Roman Forum, including, most importantly, the western area and the Senate House. In part, their “restoration” of this area was so important because it reflected new conceptualizations of imperial power. According to Kalas, “Diocletian and Maximian used new representational strategies for emperors that caused audiences to remember specific pre-Tetrarchic emperors as having been updated by the new ideologies put in place around 300” (18). The sites in the Forum became important loci for emperors and senatorial officeholders to be “memorialized.” Subsequent emperors followed suit, and this contributed to the ongoing importance of the city, even if emperors no longer lived there for extended periods of time, with a few noteworthy exceptions (Maxentius and Valentinian III, especially).

Ancient history · Aristocracy (class) · Art · Emperor · Empire · Ideology · Late Antiquity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Roman Empire · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies