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This chapter examines Roman attitudes towards the commemoration of those killed on campaign. In general, there is a lack in Roman public monuments recording the names of those who died in action, but two notable exceptions are explored here: Cicero’s proposal to commemorate the dead of the Civil War, and the monuments at Adamclissi in Dacia. The chapter goes on to discuss other ways in which war, and the casualties of war, were commemorated in Rome, in particular through the incorporation of the anniversaries of significant military events into the city’s religious calendar.

This chapter analyzes the social and economic effects of the single largest construction project of pre-Imperial Rome, the circuit of walls built in the first half of the fourth century BCE. I employ an “energetics” approach (Abrams 1994), quantifying the labor-cost of the walls’ construction by means of comparative data and close study of the monument’s remains. The resulting model provides a better idea not only of the walls’ total cost, but of the workforce’s composition, the balance of skilled and unskilled labor, and the schedule of construction. The costs are then input into a general model of the Roman economy in order to assess the broader impact of the walls’ costs. Archaeological and textual evidence indicate the walls were built with compulsory labor. This further underscores the likelihood that the project widened economic inequality and worsened existing socioeconomic tensions.

This chapter explores the act of “crossing the pomerium” and how the distinction the pomerium created did not always correspond with lived realities. Although Republican Rome distinguished the urbs both legally and religiously from what lay beyond the pomerium, its fundamental boundary, the disintegration of this essential division was merely one of the many Republican traditions whose demise would gradually define the advent of empire. Here, the chapter provides three examples that have long been regarded as representations of the imperator, as all Roman imagery demands to be set in the context of those legal, political, and religious institutions that not merely shaped but defined it. What ensues is a sketch of the broader institutional background within which this chapter establishes what it meant to be represented in this fashion at Rome. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates what was, for the Romans of the dawning imperial age, the very real significance of “crossing the pomerium” and entering the city under arms.

This chapter examines the relationship between religiously motivated mobility and the exchange of knowledge and information, using quantitative models and social network analysis. It argues that pilgrimage to participate in cult at Rome was yet another lever by which the mid-Republican res publica bootstrapped itself into statehood. The burnishing of Rome's credentials as a destination for pilgrimage followed closely on the heels of the cresting popularity of a specific brand of religious observance in mid-Republican central Italy, the healing cults that “formed a religious infrastructure that transcended political boundaries.” Although the interaction between premodern state formation and intercultural pilgrimage has surfaced on the radar of scholars working in other periods and regions, few studies of the middle Republic grant much space or recognition to this cultural process. However, mid-Republican Rome was not unlike other imperial cities in its reliance on monumentality to elicit and sustain waves of pilgrimage. The chapter then identifies where in the material record these waves can be detected and their impact gauged.