Social Science Research Council

"Honor and Expectation: Negotiating Empire on Triumphal Arches of the Severan Dynasty (c. 193-217 CE)"

My dissertation redefines the Roman Empire's signature monument, the triumphal arch. Typically considered markers of triumphal processions within Rome and tools of Romanization abroad, all arches have been deemed transparent to the wishes of the Roman emperor. Yet arch inscriptions clearly indicate that Roman emperors did not decree arches, they only received them as honorific gifts. In my dissertation, I re-evaluate the inscriptions and images surviving on arches, and I argue that they offer evidence for local agency in a community's diplomatic negotiations with the emperor.

The Severan Dynasty (193-217 C.E.), founded by a family from the provinces, offers the most promising place to begin this reappraisal because of the quantity, quality and location of the monuments it received. Sixteen Severan arches survive in North Africa, while two survive in the city of Rome. This unique coincidence of a large corpus of arches surviving both in the empire's capital (Rome) and in the emperor's homeland (North Africa) offers an unprecedented opportunity for a trans-regional study of imperial negotiation. Because of scholarly biases against material from North Africa and from the later empire, Severan arches have never been studied as a group, despite their consistently flamboyant design, innovative sculpture and verbose inscriptions.

My analysis draws on recent post-colonial scholarship that counters the centralizing emphasis of traditional "Romanization" studies. Richard Hingley, in Globalizing Roman Culture (2005), foregrounds a number of new approaches that focus on the cultural agency of elite citizens throughout the empire, rather than on the emperor and the citizens of Rome. In Empire of Honor (1997), J.E. Lendon argues that the day-to-day functioning of the Roman Empire depended on the exchange of public honors between the emperor and the empire's leading communities. Both of these perspectives offer insight into the local decree, design and dedication of arch monuments.