Description: This two-day seminar goes beyond the usual review of Rome’s ancient monuments to explore the question, “What was everyday life in Ancient Rome really like?” The method of the course will be to access the values and experience of ancient Roman imperial culture through close study of specific sculptures, paintings, mosaics and architectural structures; that is, we will understand Rome through its art.

Study of daily life will be directed to the two social classes that comprised the population of Rome in the Imperial Age: High and Low. The High were the ruling few, the patricians and the equestrian classes; the Low, the vast multitudes, including the roman plebs. Though we are examining the Roman social system by looking at art, along the way we will review the patronage system that was the social glue between classes; the nature of the economic and tax systems; the organization of labor and commerce; the social customs of marriage and family based on pietas; the behaviors that made a man a real man and the proper comportment for a woman; and the systems of cultural expression ranging from Roman “salons,” where the host’s poetry and writings were read aloud to guests in his home auditorium, to the mass entertainments of the Circus and gladiatorial arena. We will examine all of this against the background of a conquering, military power at the height of its dominance over a expanding, multi-cultural empire.

Participants will walk through specific ancient structures, such as the Baths of Diocletian and Trajan’s Forum, with the idea of reenacting the spatial realities of moving, living and working in Imperial Rome. Rather than brief descriptions of architectural fragments, we will imaginatively reconstruct individual structures from the ground up, speculating on the specific collective values that led to the adoption of one system of spatial organization over another, and identifying what cultural values Roman buildings were designed to convey.

This interactive approach will carry over to sustained observation and analysis of specific Roman sculptures. For example, rather than simply accepting the Romans’ imitation of the visual appearance of the human form, known as mimesis, students will be encouraged to induce the societal and human values that lay behind the elevation of such practices, including the fact that they were borrowed wholesale from the Greeks. Though Roman standards for representation of “reality” influence us very much today, students will be encouraged to look with new eyes in order to reconsider the ways that such highly representational art works work. Through this active kind of looking, participants will generate their own definitions of the Roman sense of beauty, memory and history.

Examination of architectural ornament in wall paintings and mosaics will bring us to a further organizing theme of the seminar: public versus private. Through an assessment of the building programs of emperors on the Palatine Hill, we will learn something about the Roman separation of public and domestic experience as well as the Roman sense of the interpenetration and representation of nature in the built home environment. A visit to the port city of Ostia will provide a different example of private life through its striking contrast to the imposing architectural presence of the forum’s public face of Rome’s religious, political, financial and legal identity.

Ostia will present us, instead, with an intact window onto the working life of Rome’s slaves, citizens, businessmen, freedmen, women and children.  Despite archeologists’ laments at the methods used by the Fascist regime to excavate and restore Ostia, the resulting coherent environment, with its grassy spaces and breezy umbrella pines, conveys the ambience of a city integral to getting the food supply to Rome. Telling distinctions will be drawn between Imperial architecture on the Palatine hill and the apartment complexes, businesses, baths, gymnasia, mithrae and latrines of this working-class town.

These two focused days will create a vivid awareness of the Roman sense of daily life. Beyond the preconceived notions and tired generalizations that can characterize the common, hurried, tourist experience, the seminar offers an opportunity to stand where the Romans stood and stretch our powers of perception to perceive more as they may have perceived. It will provide a fresh perspective from which to make contact with the actual physical and aesthetic properties of objects and monuments from a distant past, which have been preserved through the efforts of countless hearts and minds, and which through thoughtful attention, can become vitally present for us today.

Sites visited: Palatine Hill and Museum, Capitoline Museum, Trajan’s Forum and Museum, Baths of Diocletian, Palazzo Massimo, Ostia