Representations of War in Ancient Rome

This is the first book to examine how Romans represented war, in visual imagery and literary accounts. Spanning a broad chronological range the essays consider audience reception, the reconstruction of display contexts, and the language of images, which could be either explicit or allusive in representations of war.

War suffused Roman life to a degree unparalleled in other ancient societies. Through a combination of obsessive discipline and frenzied (though carefully orchestrated) brutality, Rome''s armies conquered most of the lands stretching from Scotland to Syria, and the Black Sea to Gibraltar. The place of war in Roman culture has been studied in historical terms, but this is the first book to examine the ways in which Romans represented war, in both visual imagery and in literary accounts. Audience reception and the reconstruction of display contexts are recurrent themes here, as is the language of images: a language that is sometimes explicit and at other times allusive in its representation of war. The chapters encompass a wide variety of art media (architecture, painting, sculpture, building, relief, coin), and they focus on the towering period of Roman power and international influence: the 3rd century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D.