Insight Development Grant (Established Scholar category)

The Flavian Palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome, inaugurated in 92 CE, served as the primary residence of Roman emperors in the city for centuries. It has therefore been the topic of substantial modern research: ancient textual references to the complex have been collected, and its extensive archaeological remains have been investigated. Despite such scholarly interest, our knowledge of how courtiers perceived the palace’s spaces, how they moved through them, and how these spaces shaped social interactions is relatively underdeveloped.

This project will make progress on these issues by creating 3D digital visualisations of the interior spaces of the palace and modelling the movement of people through them. The ultimate historical objective of the project is to understand the connection between space and power in the Flavian Palace. This will include consideration of how space related to hierarchies amongst courtiers, and (especially) of how the emperor used palace spaces to present his preeminent power to such regime insiders, thereby augmenting his personality cult. Such an understanding will deepen our understanding of the essence of power in the Roman empire, and particularly of the fundamental techniques employed by the emperor to ensure regime survival.

To achieve our objectives, we shall firstly use 3D visualisation techniques to reconstruct interior palace spaces, both surviving spaces and those for which only a floor plan survives archaeologically. With such ‘lost spaces’ we shall extrapolate from what has survived using a process of architectonic reasoning, made possible by by the substantial geometric regularity of classical architecture. In view of the time and budget constraints of an Insight Development Grant, we shall focus on the sector known to archaeologists as the Domus Flavia, the western wing of the palace, and especially the northern part of that wing.

Secondly, we shall model the movement of people of different social levels – emperors and their relatives, senators, administrators, imperial slaves, and others – through the Domus Flavia sector. Thirdly, we shall use our models to create digital ‘photographic’ stills and ‘cinematographic’ walk-throughs that will convey the spatial impression that ancient static and moving viewers would have had.

As well as advancing historical knowledge, our project will offer theoretical gains. The use of 3D visualisation of heritage buildings is still in its infancy, and is mostly used either to record remains that still exist, or to excite interest amongst nonspecialists. In contrast, we seek to use digital visualisations to generate and test research hypotheses. In the process of doing this, we shall offer theoretical insights on using digital visualisations to communicate and deal with uncertainty, and to represent and test multiple hypotheses.

Month: Jun   Year: 2025

Month: May   Year: 2027

Insight Grant

Although it concerns a rather grisly topic, this project is necessary for advancing our understanding of ancient Roman politics. It is a study of the dark arts of authoritarian government as exercised from the late Republic to the Severan Age (133 BCE–235 CE). I investigate how authoritarian leaders, especially emperors, clung to power, often despite their unpopularity and inept governance. And, specifically, I focus on the most sinister of authoritarian survival tactics: political repression.

That many Roman emperors murdered or exiled their opponents is not news. Modern narrative histories, drawing on the abundant ancient literary sources, have lovingly catalogued the crimes of the Caesars. But repression is generally imagined as a kind of crude lever pulled when opposition grew too rowdy – a grim punctuation mark at the end of a story, of no interest in itself. At best, repression is approached from the perspective of the legal and institutional framework that enabled it – unsurprisingly, given the outsized influence of legal approaches in the field of Roman history.

The purpose of this five-year project is to foreground repression as a complex political calculation that varied depending on the period, the context, and the status of those repressed. The project will draw on political science research, both theoretical and empirical, concerning modern authoritarian practices. This will be used as a heuristic tool for reading the Roman evidence, providing analytical categories, raising questions, and suggesting relationships between phenomena.

The objectives will be to identify and explain what was present in and absent from the Roman repressive 'toolbox'; how the regime and its supporters 'framed' acts of opposition in a way that justified repression; and how repressive tactics were critiqued in Roman political culture, thereby limiting the regime's repressive options. I shall examine the fates of elite Roman men and women opposed to the regime, but also those of more ordinary dissidents, including protesters and rioters in urban crowds, and indigenous rebels in the provinces.

Month: Apr   Year: 2025

Month: Mar   Year: 2030

This project was funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Its major outputs were two edited volumes, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022: The Roman Emperor and his Court, ca. 30 BC - ca. AD 300. Volume 1: Historical Essays and The Roman Emperor and his Court, ca. 30 BC - ca. AD 300. Volume 2: A Sourcebook.