When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.

This chapter examines the two Chicago-set graphic novels of Chris Ware entitled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) and Building Stories (2012), as well as Lost Buildings (2004), Ware’s “on-stage radio & picture collaboration” with Ira Glass for National Public Radio. The chapter argues that Ware’s body of work explores how various human networks engage with the storied history and urban geography of his adopted city, and that it does so in endlessly experimental ways that have continued to redefine the expressive potential of the comics form. In these works, Ware creates complex visual narratives in which the city and its ever-changing urban landscape is often as much of a character as the people inhabiting it, and his meticulously drawn pages are thus an attempt not only to depict and make sense of Chicago but also to create a visual index of the relationship between its spatial and emotional lives. Despite his untraditional choice of form, this approach places him in a lineage of Chicago writers that reaches all the way back to the earliest recorders of life in the city.

Around 50 BCE a certain P. Vedius disembarked ship in Ephesos. He was Italian and a Roman citizen of free or freed status, and like many others, he came to Asia to make his fortune. He found success and stayed, setting down firm roots in its fertile soil. He married and had children and grandchildren, and he prospered. By the late first century CE,1 his descendants were among the wealthiest and most prominent citizens in Ephesos. Members of the family achieved the highest magistracies in the city, serving as grammateis and prytaneis, as priests and priestesses, and festival presidents. By the mid-second century, the Vedii became senators of Rome. However, this success did not cause them to cut ties with their adopted patris, Ephesos, where they had landed wealth, houses, business interests, and an affection for their new homeland. They continued to contribute their fortunes to Ephesos as euergetai (benefactors) in a series of building projects and in more ephemeral activities, such as sponsoring festivals. By the late second century this prolific family, having intermarried with another distinguished family of Ephesos, the Flavii, had Roman consuls in its ranks, and at least one house in one of Rome’s wealthiest districts. At the end of the Severan age they disappear from the historical record, like so many other individuals and families.2 Natural disasters and the political instability of the third century affected Ephesos deeply. An earthquake shook the city in 262. The following year, a band of Goths raided the city and burned the temple of Artemis to the ground. But even before this cataclysm, the epigraphic habit dropped off, a sign of political and economic malaise, and of social change. Civic authorities and individuals were no longer interested in raising honorific monuments to honor and commemorate benefactors, possibly because benefactors were no longer interested in demonstrating their philotimia (generosity, munificence) through office-holding, the sponsorship of festivals, and the financing of buildings. Thus by the mid-third century, we lose sight of the Vedii, although we know that some of their buildings and statues stood until the fifth century.

The defining verbal representation of Justinian’s bronze horseman was created by Prokopios. His Buildings (I.ii, I.x.5) is a multivalent text, which deserves both a greater consideration and a historiographic rehabilitation. While on the surface Buildings appears to flatter the emperor, I argue that the deeper narrative reveals strong elements of figured speech and safe criticism. Buildings is ekphrastic in certain aspects of form, but not in overall substance. Formal conformity with the genre constitutes a veil for criticism. Focusing on a close analysis of his representation of Justinian’s equestrian monument, I argue that Prokopios indicts Justinian on the charges of gigantomania and obliteration of the past. The bronze horseman features twice in Buildings – within the otherwise coherent cluster of Justinian’s church-building, and as the headlining sculpture in the section dedicated to Constantinople’s non-ecclesiastical monuments. This exceptional return to the bronze horseman is thus both notable and deliberate. The equestrian monument is the only sculptural monument of Buildings that merited a substantive description beyond a list-like entry.

Justinian turned the greatest domestic challenge of his reign (the Nika riots) into a spectacular opportunity for promoting his gloria. He constructed the last imperial forum in Constantinople on the ruins and foundations of the old Augoustaion. Hagia Sophia was the first major element of the new vision to be constructed (532–37 CE), while the triumphal column was the last (ca. 543 CE). No ruler in the premodern era would surpass Justinian’s spectacular accomplishments of either Hagia Sophia or the triumphal column. Justinian deliberately appropriated a colossal equestrian sculpture from the forum of Theodosios. While rulers before him commissioned great equestrian monuments, only he chose to place an equestrian monument at the top of a triumphal column. Like the colossal statues of his predecessors, Constantine and Theodosios, the equestrian Justinian also faced east. The bronze horseman came to command the city’s skyline and define the image of Constantinople. This awesome statement of power became a towering reminder of Justinian and his seemingly boundless might.

The chapter explores the styles of self-promotion available to elite Romans, ranging from frugal self-restraint and material sobriety to prodigial acts of civic generosity, and analyses the debates over and constraints on luxury and encouragement of frugality with respect to building projects and expensive heirlooms, not least those made of silver, from the late republic to the early imperial period. The chronologically and thematically wide-ranging investigation foregrounds in particular the enhanced social mobility that civil war and autocracy introduced into Roman society, including a discussion of why provincial newcomers such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger affected particular enthusiasm for frugality and disapproved of luxury, as a way of positioning themselves as new arrivals within the ruling class of Rome.

Chapter 3 explores the material world of the nuns as part of the intense rebuilding and architectural remodelling programmes embarked upon in mainland Europe after the Council of Trent. Again, the English convents sought to engage with the wider secular world, in this instance using the decoration of their public churches, as well as the vessels and fabrics used in the celebration of the liturgy, to convey how they wished to be viewed by the surrounding populace. Though they used their outward liturgical faces to support their national identity, far more stress was placed on their strong identification with their Order, emphasising their role as part of the universal Church. Material culture in each institution was aimed at developing the nuns’ spiritual lives in adherence with Tridentine rules on behaviour and management. The second half of the chapter focuses on the more private spaces in which the enclosed inhabitants lived their daily lives, yet, as was the case in other early modern European convents, the secular permeated enclosure through various material reminders. It is argued that exile did not mean poverty of material culture.