The second chapter focuses on the residential boom in and around the Subura and the building campaigns of Augustus, which betray the emperor’s consternation with the bustling commercial and residential district. A reputation for prostitution began to emerge, so close to the monumental center, and this is considered in the context of Augustus’ building program in the neighborhood, namely the Basilica Aemilia and the Porticus Liviae, which together bookended the lower Subura valley.

Chapter IX argues that ekphrasis originated in the ancient Near East rather than in Classical anituityh discussing examples from a royal building hymn, royal inscriptions and Late Babylonian propagandistic literature.

From the Republic through the early medieval period, the local residents and Rome’s institutional power-holders together shaped both the physical and the ideological landscape of the Subura. Defined by the sloping, narrow valleys that fed into the Forum – the functional and symbolic heart of the city – the Subura and Argiletum thrived on the movement compelled by the thoroughfares that lined these valleys and the connection to the Forum that they provided. The valley was understood and perceived in antiquity as an integral topographical unit in Rome’s natural landscape stretching from the Forum to the Campus Esquilinus outside the Porta Esquilina, and it is only by considering the valley as a whole that both the physical and the ideological development of the area can be fully understood. Similar to a landscape archaeology exploring issues of connectivity between different nodes or settlements within a broader terrain, this work has attempted to show how the development of the Subura valley and Cispian hill was very much a function of its nature as a path connecting center and periphery. Its development was directly affected by the ways in which connections with major nodes were manipulated and altered within various historical and cultural circumstances.

The third chapter examines the interventions of Domitian in the lower Subura. Domitian, who was even more socially conservative than Augustus, took a more aggressive approach to the Subura’s intensifying activity with the construction of his own imperial forum, severing the Subura’s connection with the city center. The complex highlighted Minerva and allowed Domitian to insert himself into the earlier discourse on female morality that had already been established in the Subura.

Chapter II discusses former approaches to Mesopotamian mythology in Assyriology that conceived of myth as either ‘primitive’ and ‘mythopoeic’; as an explanation of natural phenomena and political realities; as a reflection of historical events; and as a negotiation of gender roles, as well as attempts towards outlining the intertextuality of mythical narratives.

Armed conflict and the proximity of soldiers and other combatants shaped late ancient monastic communities in diverse ways that reflected not only the vulnerability of victims but also the resourcefulness of innovators. Monks were wounded, captured, and killed, and some became the objects of veneration as martyrs; monastic communities built walls and towers for protection and offered help to victims of violence; monks interacted with barbarians peacefully and violently and integrated their fears of barbarians into their spiritual lives; monks formed new and often beneficial relationships with military men, some of whom chose to become monks themselves; and the military may have provided one of the models for the organization of monastic communities. Monks saw themselves as soldiers of the heavenly king, not entirely different from the nearby soldiers of the earthly king.

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.