Images of Power in the Roman Empire: Mass Media and the Cult of Emperors

This project will make accessible and build upon important recent finds of inscriptions and coins, statues and larger monuments, bodies of documentary evidence for ancient Roman media which have long been recognised for their value to the study of popular culture and imperial power in the first to fifth centuries. Such sources suggest that, contrary to popular and scholarly opinion, the rise of the Constantinian dynasty did not mark an abandonment of traditional Roman ways of thinking about cult, communications and imperial power. Rather, they provide evidence of a gradual process of remodelling, repurposing and reusing such media for the manipulation of popular opinion.