Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome

Description

In this book, Maggie Popkin offers an in-depth investigation of souvenirs, a type of ancient Roman object that has been understudied and that is unfamiliar to many people. Souvenirs commemorated places, people, and spectacles in the Roman Empire. Straddling the spheres of religion, spectacle, leisure, and politics, they serve as a unique resource for exploring the experiences, interests, imaginations, and aspirations of a broad range of people - beyond elite, metropolitan men - who lived in the Roman world. Popkin shows how souvenirs generated and shaped memory and knowledge, as well as constructed imagined cultural affinities across the empire's heterogeneous population. At the same time, souvenirs strengthened local identities, but excluded certain groups from the social participation that souvenirs made available to so many others. Featuring a full illustration program of 137 color and black and white images, Popkin's book demonstrates the critical role that souvenirs played in shaping how Romans perceived and conceptualized their world, and their relationships to the empire that shaped it.

Maggie Popkin is Robson Junior Professor and Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (Cambridge, 2016) and numerous articles on Greek and Roman art and architecture. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Organization and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

'... showcase(s) a truly unexpected range of ancient memorabilia, many of which are usually kept within museum stores ...' Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement