This article explores literary records of the fourth-century senatorial dedications that illustrate the perception of inscribed monuments in variegated spatial contexts. It offers considerations about literary reflections of material conditions in which late antique statues were set, staged, and perceived, their interaction with urban and domestic contexts, accessibility, and ways in which their mise-en-scène had an impact on an onlooker. Late antique and middle Byzantine patrographic attestations highlight the pleasure experienced by viewing inscribed monuments in city fora. I argue that literary accounts of statue and epigraphic representations of the senatorial aristocracy mediate the phenomenon of the expansion of new, spatially mobile elites. I examine literary descriptions of (1) statuary set up for senatorial office-holders; (2) dedications for emperors and other recipients awarded by senatorial officials; (3) statue monuments erected by senates. I conclude with an elaboration on what different media genres, as mediating structures by which aristocracy and rulers articulated their interaction, reveal about members of the senatorial order fashioning their relationship with the imperial court and the broader public. The elusive traces in late antique and medieval literary reports furnish fragments of historical evidence of how the memory of individual senators was constructed, reshaped, and perceived.

In recent decades, the Turkish government has adopted a proactive policy of pursuing the restitution of cultural objects it believes were illegally removed from its territory. Utilising open-access sale data, the following article examines the impact of this formal restitution policy upon antiquity market sales in Anatolian figurines between 1999 and 2022 across three major international auction houses and the internet market. By casting a forensic gaze upon seemingly decreasing sale rates and ostensibly improving standards of provenance, this study suggests that apparent improvements in the market for Anatolian figurines should not be attributed to the Turkish government restitution policy. Instead, it argues that salient commercial dynamics and the profit-oriented business strategies of individual auction houses are the operative factors in shaping antiquity market data. In doing so, it provides the first quantitative market analysis of auction house sales in Anatolian figurines, widens the applicability of existing methodologies for navigating the duplicitous nature of antiquity market data, and offers much needed empirical insights into the illicit antiquities trade.

From Ovid to Chaucer, the ‘go, book’ refrain is a recognisable motif in the poetry of the classical tradition. This article collects evidence for the emergence and formalisation of the vade, liber formula from its antecedents in Catullus 35 and Horace Epistles 1.20 to its development in the exile works of Ovid and Martial and beyond. We see that the poetic envoi has its very origins in Latin poetry of the first centuries BCE and CE, without direct Hellenophone precedents. Attending to the dynamics of presence and absence, nearness and farness, fixedness and mobility that are highlighted in the poetic address to the book, the article argues that the personification of the book as an authorial messenger develops in response to the changing sense of spatiality of writers vis-à-vis their real and imagined audiences during the period of Rome’s imperial expansion. In the hands of these authors, the book becomes a moving object.

The intense use of scientific dating over the last three decades makes it possible for the first time reasonably to connect the topographically diverse parts of the Hittite capital Ḫattuša. Not only was the decision to found a city at this site based on pre-Hittite parameters, but at the same time, it also becomes clear that the settlement is one of the very few in Anatolia which was continuously used from the end of the third millennium BC through the second millennium until the beginning of the Iron Age. Furthermore, the accumulation of radiocarbon dates in individual, archaeologically intensively studied areas of the site makes it now possible to understand the development as a dynamic and fluent process. Based on the results outlined here, permanent moves back and forth of the settled areas within a geographically defined space can be reconstructed. The Hittite city of Ḫattuša was always a construction site. Next to densely built-up districts there existed at all times large expanses of either ruins of buildings or of open spaces, which could have been used as pasture or arable land. The settlement’s map, regularly reproduced as its overall plan, thus represents a status reconstructed or idealised by modern research. Most probably the settlement was at no time occupied to this extent, and accordingly never looked like this in its history.

This article revisits ‘the problem of Classical Ionia’, the long-persisting idea put forward by John Manuel Cook in 1961 that Ionia experienced regional economic impoverishment in the fifth century BCE. By looking comprehensively at the dataset of coinage available from fifth-century Ionia, this article argues that there is actually significant evidence for regional networking in Classical Ionia, and that various communities, even if not continually emitting new coinages at all points in the fifth century, adopted various strategies for maintaining their economic reach and extending their network of trading partners. Formal network analysis is applied to the coinage dataset, taking the shared weight standards to which communities minted their coins as indicative of participation in common economic networks. The network patterns are tested against two other patterns, specifically the distribution of fifth-century Chian and Samian amphoras, and the pattern of Ionian-coin-containing hoards from within and beyond Ionia. Together, these patterns strengthen the case for a high-level Ionian economic resilience, offering a radically different position to Cook and reaffirming that continuing economic networking was crucial to the activities of fifth-century Ionian states.

The fabric of the Roman empire was held together by a dense web of communications. Letters, often concerned with themes of connection and separation, played a significant role in the cultural construction of Roman imperial space. As material texts composed in one place and read in another perhaps far distant one, letters contributed to an understanding of imperial space articulated in terms of points on an itinerary, whose separation might be grasped in terms of time, as much as spatial distance. Strikingly ancient Roman letters almost never disclose an interest in the quality of places beyond Italy. Often letters work to efface the distance separating writer and addressee. In more formal letters little reference is made to distance, while letters between intimates frequently reflect on the capacity of this form of communication to transcend separation. What are the implications of this for conceptions of the empire’s space? Cicero’s letters are the primary focus of this discussion, which also touches on the letters of Seneca and Pliny and on Ovid’s exile poetry.

The last decades have seen great scholarly interest in the fate of Roman temples and cult statues during the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. The surge of studies on spatiality and lived religion in Roman studies have demonstrated that ancient religious practice was not confined to sanctuaries but rather infused into all spheres of everyday life. Informed by these studies, I argue that the Christianisation effort was not confined to temples and cult statues in sanctuaries, despite the narrow focus on these monuments in legal and patristic sources. The spaces where people most frequently moved, lived, and practised religion in their everyday lives were equally important religious arenas. In this article I venture out of the temples and into the streets of late antique Ephesus to the Triodos intersection to highlight an array of subtle transformations that are unassuming in isolation, but together effectively Christianised the streetscape. I demonstrate that streetscapes were arenas of material Christianisation alongside monumental sanctuaries. The Triodos is used as a point of departure to show how the Roman streetscapes functioned as more-than-material religious assemblages. Human–material interaction in ritual and everyday movement and practices made the streetscapes active participants in the Christianisation process.

The wayfinding theory of Kevin Lynch, this article proposes, lays bare an underappreciated spatial modality deployed by inhabitants and visitors to the Roman city based on street-view navigation of the city’s legible topographical elements, ranging from natural to built features of the environment. In particular, wayfinding is positioned as a primarily non-elite and sub-elite – or subaltern – spatial modality that elites may have been aware of, but rarely had to make use of in their movement through the city. A survey of a diverse set of epigraphic corpora – graffiti, enslaving collars, dipinti, curse tablets, brick stamps, tesserae, and epitaphs – instead demonstrates the pervasive role of wayfinding across many aspects of subaltern Roman life, especially in connection to the practical conduct of business, and how this spatial modality was entangled in several matrices of domination. Ultimately, the theoretical lens of wayfinding should encourage us to reorient our approaches to the topography of Rome away from elite productions of cartography and towards subaltern, street-level conceptions of the space of the urbs.

This article reassesses the so-called Nereid Monument (ca 380 BCE) at Xanthos in Lycia by focusing on the narrative and symbolic role of female figures within its sculptural programme. Constructed as the tomb for the Lycian dynast Erbbina, the monument has been noted for its over-human-size sculpture of Nereids, its historicising city-siege reliefs, as well as its spectacular fusion of visual and architectural styles, motifs and themes from various contexts throughout the Aegean and Anatolia. Building on this scholarship, I turn specifically to the monument’s innovative representations of non-mythological women in prominent areas of its visual programme: Erbbina’s dynastic consort and a distressed woman who is caught in the throes of military violence. By focusing on the role of female bodies in Erbbina’s funerary qua triumphal monument, I argue for the important narrative function of female bodies in articulating dynastic legitimacy and continuity. Finally, this article comments on the importance of femininity in addition to masculinity in dynastic expressions in the fourth century, thus anticipating major art-historical changes in the art of power at the beginning of the Hellenistic period.

This paper discusses the hitherto virtually unknown Byzantine cave monastery in the Ilgarini mağarası in the district of Pınarbaşı/Kastamonu based on its building remains, graffiti (mostly crosses), burials and notable finds. The remains were recorded during two brief surveys in 2012 and 2022. To shed light on the history of the site, an attempt is made to contex- tualise it within the mountainous regions of Middle Byzantine Paphlagonia, as well as with Middle Byzantine texts that relate to monasticism and might refer to the site. Research produces tentative evidence that the Ilgarini mağarası may be identified with the Chryse Petra known from several Byzantine texts, most prominently the Life of St Nikon Metanoite.

This article offers an intersectional and temporospatial analysis of female visibility during religious activity in urban spaces in Republican Rome. The focus is on the regular religious activity of prominent female religious officials – Vestals, flaminica Dialis, and regina sacrorum – and collectives of women – married and enslaved women – as religious activity and roles could empower some women, and provide regular opportunities for visibility in the city. I argue that such an approach and focus reshape our understanding of the visibility of women in urban spaces, challenging traditional scholarly views of female domesticity and invisibility. A temporospatial lens reveals that women of various roles and statuses were regularly visible in a wide array of urban spaces, seemingly irrespective of their public, private, or sacred nature. There appears to have been limited spatial segregation by gender. Instead, a woman’s intersectional statuses and temporality were key dimensions differentiating female visibility. There was no singular gendered rhythm, but plural rhythms in interaction and conflict, and female religious officials played key roles in directing these rhythms and bringing harmony to the religious calendar. Futurity and the preservation of the community lay at the core of this female religious activity. Ultimately, time’s place was pivotal.

The relationship between Rome’s built environment and the spatial practices of its inhabitants was always inherently political. Performative political protest was an integral part of the Roman psyche, and it was embedded in the dynamic interactions between actors and the spaces in which they protested. Multiple spatialities are co-implicated in contentious politics, and the Roman populace engaged with their civic spaces strategically to both legitimise and challenge existing power relations. The boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces and discourses was a permeable one, and when the hitherto unobserved collective strands of identity and informal communication were realised in the open, it was the tip of an iceberg of formed resistance. This article will explore the connectivity between neighbourhood spaces and discourses, with the discourses of the spectacle spaces and protest repertoires. This complex relationship between spatial practice, collective identity, and political action will be explored by integrating the sociological theory of contentious politics with Henri Lefebvre’s triad of socially produced space, with James C. Scott’s concept of ‘hidden transcripts’, which provides insight into the invisible discourses that underpinned popular resistance and participation in Roman contentious politics.