Dissertation

Moving statues

The agency and impact of Greek statuary in the city of Rome

Author

S.M. van de Velde

Date

19 December 2023

Links

The publication in Open Access

From the second half of the third century BCE onwards, Rome was inundated with ‘non-local’ objects. The great Roman conquests of the period, like the sack of Syracuse in 211 BCE, brought objects from all the conquered regions to the city of Rome. Among these objects was a vast number of ‘non-local’ statues that moved from the Greek world to Rome. In the city, they were put on display in public locations and became an integrated part of the Roman cultural environment and daily life. Such statues changed Rome on multiple levels – and this was also perceived as such by the Romans themselves.This dissertation investigates the introduction and impact of Greek statues in Republican Rome through an archaeological perspective. It attempts to study the appropriation of such ‘non-local’ statues, and the shock of the new that society experienced, from an object perspective, by analysing the biographies of some specifically selected individual statues. As such, this research explores how Greek statues became integrated into the city of Rome and how their appropriation was connected to change and innovation in Roman society.