Chapter 4 explores the case-studies of Cosa and Minturnae in detail and assesses the ways in which 3rd–1st century Italic towns sought to emphasize a specifically local identity through their temple roofs. Each site is examined within its regional context to show how colonists and other inhabitants made use of local networks in order to create a distinctive visual identity that was nevertheless readable for a broad spectrum of viewers.

Chapter 2 addresses one of the primary impediments to the study of 3rd–1st century Italic architectural terracottas: questions regarding their chronology and the problematic ways in which they have traditionally been bound up in assumptions regarding so-called “Romanization.” Terracottas from Cosa and Rome are discussed in particular, in order to argue that there is no evidence for a “Roman” point of origin for most terracotta types and that the field must shed the lingering baggage derived from “Romanization” theory.

The immorality of the ancient Romans is a commonplace in modern representations of Roman antiquity. In nineteenth-century history painting, twentieth-century sword and sandal movies and twenty-first-century TV shows alike, inebriated Roman voluptuaries lounge on their couches surrounded by gleaming marble, while they savour exotic foods and grope scantily dressed women and boys.Romans behaving badly certainly have box-office appeal but the details of their excesses in the modern imaginary are deeply rooted in the preoccupations of cultural commentators in Roman antiquity. The speeches of Cicero, the histories of Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, the philosophical works of Seneca, the Elder Pliny’s observations about the natural world – all these texts (and more) return obsessively to the vices of their authors’ fellow Romans, charting their sexual misbehaviour, their insatiable desire for luxury, their inability to subordinate their own pleasure to the public good.

Chapter 6 examines the legacy of architectural terracottas during the period of the Augustan Principate and the rise of the so-called “Campana” reliefs. While architectural terracottas had long been used to define and assert specific local identities, they were now employed to express an idealized Augustan vision of a unified, pious Italic past.

Chapter 1 introduces the scope and organization of the study. It traces the history of scholarship on Italic architectural terracottas and highlights a number of lingering problems and uncertainties that will be taken up in the subsequent chapters.

The ancient Romans have been so domesticated that many modern western men (fewer women, perhaps) have been able to imagine themselves, their rusty Latin refreshed, easily adapting to life in the time of Cicero or the younger Pliny. But language is not the only barrier which separates us from the Romans. Entire vocabularies of gesture differ from one culture to another. For Romans, a particular physical movement could have a meaning quite at variance with one a modern Briton might attribute to it – even indicating a category of behaviour for which we have no close equivalent.

Chapter 5 asks why new colonies turned so invariably to old-fashioned motifs and to the visual culture of their conquered enemies. This phenomenon is discussed in terms of the heterogenous makeup of colonial populations, which had no single visual culture to import, and is then related to broader issues of collective memory, identity formation, and the invention of tradition.

In 62 BCE, a young and politically ambitious Roman aristocrat, Publius Clodius, is said to have disguised himself as a women in order to infiltrate the rites of the Bona Dea, which it was sacrilege for men to observe. His purpose, according to his detractors, was to seduce the wife of Julius Caesar, the Pontifex Maximus, in whose house the ceremony was taking place. A man dressed as a woman, the profanation of religious rites, adultery with the wife of one of the leading men in Rome and the adulterer already notorious for his pernicious and disruptive political dealings – this incident, related or alluded to by numerous Roman authors, summed up the disorder of the final years of the republic. For Roman writers, adultery among the elite was a telling symptom of disease in the body politic.

Chapter 3 examines the five most widespread decorative roofing elements in 3rd–1st century central Italy, which are referred to collectively as the “standard temple kit.” Each type is shown to derive from earlier models, suggesting a conscious act of archaizing in their use which likely relates to notions of antiquity and deeply rooted religious authority.