Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter investigates the relationship between wealth and officeholding in Pompeii. It presents a new reconstruction of the wealth distribution among the Pompeian elite, combining an economic model with archaeological evidence from the local housing stock. The findings suggest that there were significantly more households in Pompeii with curial and senatorial wealth than there were Pompeian decurions and senators.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

This paper reexamines the intertextual connection between Lucretius and Ennius from a multi-medial angle. Ennius’ tragedies were regularly revived in the late Republic, and selections from his epic Annals appear to have been recited in public contexts as well. These performances seem to have stood in a relationship of reciprocal influence with wall paintings, as stagings inspired painters, and their artwork influenced actors in turn. Accordingly, Lucretius treats Ennius’ works as particularly influential expressions of a harmful philosophy that threatens Epicurean ataraxia in a variety of contexts. Analyzing familiar points of contact between the two authors in Book One of On the Nature of Things and highlighting a number of as-yet undiscussed allusions, I argue that Lucretius equips his readers with the tools to challenge Ennius in all three of the relevant media, be it on the page, on the stage, or in images.

This chapter argues that wealth was probably not the primary barrier for Pompeiians to enter the Roman senate. One oddity about the historical record of Pompeii is that it reveals not a single certain senator in the imperial period. A previous reconstruction of the local distribution of income offers a possible explanation: it predicts that there were no Pompeian households with a senatorial income, suggesting that a lack of wealth kept the Pompeiians outside the senate. However, a new reconstruction of the top part of the Pompeian wealth distribution suggests the opposite. This reconstruction is based on combining the archaeological remains of the intramural housing stock with an econometric model which assumes that the distribution of elite wealth follows a distinct mathematical function – a power law. Even though this type of cliometric modelling is pervaded by uncertainties, with the help of probabilistic calculations it is possible to conclude that at least several Pompeian households held enough wealth to satisfy the senatorial census qualification, implying that wealth may not have been the primary barrier preventing Pompeiians from embarking on a senatorial career.

In this chapter, the literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence pertaining to horticulture and arboriculture in eastern Gallia Cisalpina and in Campania is investigated. The chapter argues that these two regions of Roman Italy played an important role for horticultural developments in the late Republic and early imperial era, both as producers of fruit and vegetables and possibly also as developers of new cultivars. The archaeobotanical record of Gallia Cisalpina also clearly shows that, from the Augustan era throughout the whole of the first century AD, the frequency and diversity of recovered remains of fruit greatly increased. These two regions had very important ports, Puteoli and Aquileia, which handled a large amount of trade coming from the rest of the Mediterranean and it is possible that these ports were entry routes into the wider region first, and the rest of Italy later, for new fruit trees coming from the eastern Mediterranean regions such as the peach, the apricot, and the citron/lemon.

Philosophical studies of the interpretation of sensory information have emphasized the central role of senses in the body’s experience of the world as well as highlighting the plurality and overlap in one’s sensory responses to it. This chapter investigates how far such concepts of experiencing space through a multisensory lens are valid for the ancient Roman villa residences of mainland Italy. Sensory responses to the Roman house have previously been restricted to examining sightlines within and outside the house, as well as movement and access within it. When we consider Pliny’s descriptions of his villas, Vitruvius’ guidance on developing a villa, or Seneca’s description of Scipio’s villa, however, it becomes clear that these residences could affect numerous sensorial responses. As such, foregrounding vision and movement above other senses experienced in the Roman domestic realm risks providing only a partial understanding of life in these residences. This chapter proposes the application of further theoretical frameworks, such as soundscapes and smellscapes, for studying the villa.

The archetypical elite Roman house (domus) was entered through the vestibulum. In what is the locus classicus, Aulus Gellius defines the vestibulum as a ‘vacant place before the entrance, midway between the door of the house and the street’ (Gellius 16.5). More than a hundred classical texts inform us about the characteristics of vestibula, but for all this textual evidence, ‘real’ vestibula have been remarkably hard to find in the archaeological record. This chapter offers a study of Roman domestic vestibula on the basis of both literary and archaeological sources. In the first part, it is argued that most architectural rooms or spaces that have been labelled as vestibula do not correspond to vestibula as described in the textual evidence. In the second part, a number of reasons for this mismatch are reviewed, after which new ways of dealing with both kinds of evidence are offered, to overcome the discrepancies between the sources.

This paper reexamines the intertextual connection between Lucretius and Ennius from a multi-medial angle. Ennius’ tragedies were regularly revived in the late Republic, and selections from his epic Annals appear to have been recited in public contexts as well. These performances seem to have stood in a relationship of reciprocal influence with wall paintings, as stagings inspired painters, and their artwork influenced actors in turn. Accordingly, Lucretius treats Ennius’ works as particularly influential expressions of a harmful philosophy that threatens Epicurean ataraxia in a variety of contexts. Analyzing familiar points of contact between the two authors in Book One of On the Nature of Things and highlighting a number of as-yet undiscussed allusions, I argue that Lucretius equips his readers with the tools to challenge Ennius in all three of the relevant media, be it on the page, on the stage, or in images.