Rome the Cosmopolis

by Edited by Catharine Edwards , Greg Woolf

• ISBN13: 9780521030113
• ISBN10: 0521030110
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Rome stands today for an empire and for a city. The essays gathered in this volume explore some of the many ways in which the two were interwoven. Rome was fed, beautified and enriched by empire just as it was swollen, polluted, infected and occupied by it. Empire was paraded in the streets of Rome, and exhibited in the city's buildings. Empire also made the city ineradicably foreign, polyglot, an alien capital, and a focus for un-Roman activities. The city was where the Roman cosmos was most concentrated, and so was most contested. Deploying a range of methodologies on materials ranging from Egyptian obelisks to human skeletal remains, via Christian art and Latin poetry, the contributors to this volume weave a series of pathways through the world-city, exploring the different kinds of centrality Rome had in the empire. The result is a startlingly original picture of both empire and city.

Table of Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Preface

List of abbreviations

Cosmopolis: Rome as World City

The triumph of the absurd: Roman street theatre

Incorporating the alien: the art of conquest

Inventing Christian Rome: the role of early Christian art

Slavery and the growth of Rome: the transformation of Italy in the second and first centuries BCE

Rivalling Rome

Migration and the metropolis

Germs for Rome

Embracing Egypt

The City of Letters

Bibliography

Index

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