Recentering the Roman Empire: Local Agency and Interactions with Rome

On the Water’s Edge: Continuity and Change in Provincial River Communities

By Christy Schirmer (The University of Texas at Austin)

River systems were critical for transport and connectivity throughout the Roman world. Although there have been several important studies of riverine landscapes in recent years (see Campbell 2012; Franconi 2017; Arnaud and Keay 2020), we know little about how they were fished in the diverse regions of the Roman Empire, or precisely what role freshwater fish played in local cultures.

Images of “Modest Venus” and multi-scalar identity politics on Roman provincial coins

By Dillon Gisch (Stanford University)

Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite was one of the most famous statues in the ancient Roman world. It was so famous that, even more than 1500 years after its destruction, more than 500 images that replicate its distinctive vulva-covering gesture—the “modest Venus” replica series—have survived to the present day. Among these are 51 Roman provincial coin series struck in bronze from ca. 161 to 268 CE (Bernhart 1936; Jurukova 1973, 1981, 1987; Hristova & Žekov 2007).

Greek Heroes in the Roman Provinces: Contextualizing Three Colossal Copies of the ‘Pasquino Group’

By Rebecca Levitan (University of California, Berkeley)

This paper examines trends of display and collecting in the provinces of the Roman Empire from the 2nd century C.E. onward by mobilizing a particular Hellenistic sculpture’s unique history of copying and transmission. The “Pasquino Group,” was a popular ancient image, depicting an older bearded Homeric warrior carrying the body of a dead younger comrade. Although the bronze original no longer survives, its composition can be inferred through fourteen fragmentary Roman copies in marble, dispersed across the Mediterranean (Andreae and Conticello 1962).