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There is an extensive feminist tradition of reading Sophocles’ Antigone within a framework of political theory in response to Hegel’s influential comprehension of the play in the 19^th century. More than thirty articles have been published in recent years, and several significant books, in which Antigone, the heroine, has been made an icon and battleground of feminist theory.

Umberto Eco’s seminal essay Hyperreality (1986) used the Getty Museum in Malibu, a replica of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, as a paradigmatic example of his thesis that America inherently needed to create sites of historical ‘Disneyfication’ to offset an ingrained cultural alienation. The term ‘hyperreal’ is now generally associated with sites that take anachronistic decorative styles and eclectically recombine into environments that claim to surpass mimicry by creating a fully immersive experience.

Grant’s Tomb, the public memorial to and tomb of the great Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States, reused many elements of classical architecture. Located in Riverside Park, the tomb’s impressive architecture and its debt to the classical world has been subject of scholarly work (Kahn 1982); however, the tombs of private individuals in New York City, whose architecture also alluded to the classical world, have been virtually ignored.

The extensive and rich reception history of classical architecture poses an interpretive challenge to the study of neo-antique place-making by complicating the identification of visual allusion or intertext. My paper addresses this issue through examination of a case study: the phenomenon of “Pompeian” (or “Pompeian Revival”) interior decoration in elite U.S. houses and hotels from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. I argue that the “Pompeian Room” functioned in the popular press and wider discourse of that era as a metonym for an increasingly inaccessible pseudo-aristocracy.

Charles Garnier’s exhibition L’Histoire de l’habitation humaine, designed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, included several reconstructions of ancient houses. Most famous for the new Paris Opera House, the architect created 44 ‘reconstructions’ of past house-types arranged along a street to allow visitors literally to walk the world.

I consider here the famous House Museum in Lincoln Fields, London, of the Neo-Classical British architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837) as a singular domus. The House displayed in orderly fashion an enormous number of pictures, works on paper, and a vast library. But the Museum was a sprawling collection of antiquities and casts, supplemented by modern Neo-Classical works, in heterodox assemblage of no discernable governing order within a labyrinth of fantasy architectural spaces.

Ovid’s interest in the topography of urban Rome appears as early as the Amores (e.g. 2.2, 3.2), but the first overview of the Augustan city occurs in Ars 1, where Ovid reformulates many of Augustus’ recently built or sponsored monuments as spaces suitable for finding women (Ars 1.1.49-50, Boyle 2003: 19-20). The speaker of the Ars catalogues porticos, theatres, the temple of Isis, Fora, the Arena, the Circus Maximus, and the temple of Palatine Apollo (1.67-88) as places that make their visitor an erotic masculine subject in urban space.

In poem 1.7, Tibullus celebrates the accomplishments of Messalla as an incarnation of Osiris. The occasion of the poem is the birthday of the triumphant general (1.7.1-2), and the mythic evocation of the god that occupies its center, as in a Pindaric ode, is meant to reflect the glory of the laudandus.

The Latin elegiac poets, from Gallus to Ovid, represent themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of Rome and her empire, with wide-ranging experience of travel around the Mediterranean (e.g., Gallus apud Verg. Buc. 6 and 10, Tib. 1.3, Ov. Am. 3.2), though based by preference in Rome (e.g., Gallus fr. 145.2-5 Hollis, Prop. 1.8, Ov. Ars 1.55-56). There, at the imperial center, they transact love affairs with their mistresses (e.g., Prop. 1.7-9, Tib. 1.2, Ov.

Propertius and Tibullus typically represent their poetic personae avoiding travel in favor of pursuing the life of the elegiac amator at Rome or in the Italian countryside (e.g., Prop. 1.6, Tib. 1.1). Moreover, they discourage their beloveds from attempting journeys, expressing concern on the occasions when they do travel (e.g., Prop. 1.8, 1.11, 1.12, 2.19, 2.32, Tib. 1.9).