This chapter examines the early development of Constantine’s religious imagery following his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 ce. It argues that Constantine’s administration swiftly began portraying the civil war against Maxentius as a religious conflict, with Constantine defeating Satan through the aid of the archangel Michael. The chapter highlights the apocalyptic nature of this imagery, emphasizing Michael’s role not only as a heavenly warrior but also as a herald of the end times and Christ’s millennial reign. Scholars have overlooked both the early emergence of this imagery and Michael’s significance within it. While the imperial court may have believed in this narrative, its promotion in the aftermath of civil war suggests that not all Christians in Constantine’s new territories necessarily welcomed their new emperor.

Synesius of Cyrene (b. ca. 373–d. ca. 410) was trained in the classical literature that depicted war as an event with armies opposing one another in battle, but he experienced a different kind of conflict in his own life – namely, the periodic and unpredictable raiding that troubled late ancient Libya. Synesius’ letters and his treatise On Kingship show that these conflicts brought sentiment to the surface as a kind of evidence about people that could be implicitly trusted; Synesius’ sentiment was palpably xenophobic, aligned against both “barbarians” and “Scythians,” and so strong as to circumvent rational examinations of the evidence around him. This essay examines the scaffolded construction of stereotype, built in Synesius’ advice to a hypothetical ruler, and demonstrates how knowledge, even knowledge that seems intimate and trustworthy, can be bent through engagements with violence.

While the evidence of inscriptions speaks to the range of female patronage in the public spaces of Roman cities, the frequency of such attestations corresponds in the main with the period marking the efflorescence of the epigraphic tradition in the Graeco-Roman world (the first three centuries CE). Honorary inscriptions which attribute to elite female patrons the funding of public buildings, games, banquets and other amenities in the city of Rome and Italy appear at first glance to follow a similar pattern of frequency. This is not to say that our sources of information about women of wealth during the later Roman Republic are restricted to the literary record and a minimal residue of pertinent honorary inscriptions. A particular category of epigraphic designation – examined to date in relation to its philological or relational application – offers a useful lens on the phenomenon of wealthy female patronage: inscriptions dating to the Republican period that include the term patrona or the name of the patrona. These inscriptions identify a cohort of women who exercised their prerogative as financially independent benefactors in service to the social fabric of towns and cities across first-century-BCE Roman Italy. By tracking the involvement of wealthy women recorded in the exercise of household or civic patronage, this corpus of inscriptions provides evidence of female participation in those social and cultural processes associated with elite households which speak to the exercise of categories of formal and informal power during the Roman Republic.

This chapter argues that Augustine structured book 1 of the City of God according to the urbs capta motives. Urbs capta narratives (such as Livy’s), offer consolation for civilian populations that had suffered the sack of their city. They address captivity, looting, starvation, mass burials, but also sexual violence. In book 1, Augustine calls these afflictions (that is, the urbs capta motives) “law of war” (ius belli). Once recognized as the structuring device of book 1, it becomes evident that Augustine addresses sexual violence against women through the well-known case of Lucretian, but also against (elite) men. Augustine then uses the laws of war, and in particular sexual violence against men, to reframe traditional Roman virtues, especially pudicitia (modesty) and patientia (edurance) as Christian. As a result, patientia and humilitas (humility) become essential responses to war’s devastation, and Rome’s sack a sign of divine correction, while the urbs capta motives are Christianized.

This chapter calls attention to the violence of everyday life in the Roman world as the backdrop to the more extraordinary violence of war. Drawing specifically on archaeology, which is poorly equipped, it is argued, to reveal war violence but well situated to reveal the unusual volatility of living in the Roman world, it describes the ordinary upheavals of daily life. In particular, it examines the archaeological evidence for volatility in domestic circumstances, in how one made a living, and the physical trauma experienced by working bodies.

This chapter examines the role of elite women as property owners and financial managers in the Late Roman Republic. It highlights how women, often perceived as temporary custodians of wealth, actively engaged in economic transactions, from land-ownership to commercial investments. While matrons such as Cornelia and ‖Turia’ were praised for their responsible management of wealth, others like Clodia and Fulvia were criticized, often as a tool for political delegitimization. Legal and social transformations, including increased autonomy in property management, enabled women to exert financial influence, sometimes even in political spheres. However, ancient sources frequently downplay or stigmatize their economic agency, portraying wealth as a destabilizing factor in gender and social hierarchies. By reassessing historical and literary evidence, this study sheds light on the complex relationship between Roman women, wealth and power, revealing their significant yet contested role in the economic framework of the Republic.

“War,” writes military historian Alexander Sarantis, “is largely a niche area rather than a mainstream concern of late antique and Byzantine studies, which tend to be dominated by theological, literary, artistic, and socio-economic themes.” The fact that war and warfare now occupy a “relatively marginal position in modern scholarship” reflects a number of shifts in the academic landscape, from the reframing of Late Antiquity as a period of change and continuity (rather than an epoch of decline) to the entrenchment of cultural history as the dominant approach in history departments across North America and Europe. And yet, even as military historians have dismantled stale theses about “military decay” as the root cause of the empire’s geopolitical fragmentation and show the late Roman army to have been a source of Rome’s extraordinary resilience, “their” topics of war, warfare, and the army nonetheless fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity. As Bryan Ward-Perkins wryly notes in his controversial 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, “banishing catastrophe” has become a mainstream response to late antique narrative history. Where has war gone?

This chapter examines the evidence for the economic situation and legal rights of Licinnia, daughter of Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus and wife of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. It is argued that she owned (probably as part of her dowry) the house on the Palatine where the couple lived together until Gaius Gracchus moved near the Forum in the last year of his life. The wealth Licinnia brought with her supported her married life and her husband’s prominent career. After her husband’s violent death and the confiscation of his property by the state, Licinnia retained her dowry and subsequently sued successfully for damages to her dotal property that had resulted from rioting. Licinnia’s experiences illustrate the economic and social independence of Roman women in the late second century BCE.

This chapter considers the role of elite women in the auctions of confiscated property during the Late Republic, particularly Sulla’s proscriptions of 81 BCE, and argues that elite women could benefit economically from civil war. While participating in these confiscations harmed the reputations of men close to the dictator, association with the proscriptions was even more damning for the women involved. Several of Sulla’s female relatives were said to have participated in the proscription auctions, with his Caecilia Metella branded as a sectrix proscriptionum or ‘auctioness of the proscriptions’. This label transformed elite women into distasteful, lower-class brokers of proscribed property, showing how the issues of inheritance and wealth raised by the proscriptions could influence female reputations. A comparison with the Servilia and Fulvia, later alleged female profiteers, reveals a continued discourse about the economic and political power of women who profited from confiscated property.

The volume introduction sets out the current debate on the role of women in Roman politics and the significance of wealth and draws attention to the understudied intersection between these topics, which is the justification for this volume. A summary of the volume sections then follows.

As in many pre-modern societies, in ancient Rome the use of and protection from violence acted as a blunt display of an individual’s power. When a person did violence to another, they manifestly had the power to do so. Violence not only creates social hierarchies, but it also protects them, and power, status and wealth, and the resources they commanded, played an important role in protecting high-status individuals from the threat of everyday violence and physical coercion, treatment more readily associated with those of lower status. But while we know this to be the case for the powerful men of ancient Rome, can the same thing be said to apply to powerful women? Through an analysis of the physicality of Roman power as it applied to wealthy women, both as agents and targets of physical coercion, at home and in public, this chapter argues that it can.