Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome

Book excerpt: "This book offers the first in-depth investigation of souvenirs from the Roman Empire commemorating places, people, and spectacles. Straddling spheres of religion, spectacle, leisure, and politics, souvenirs offer a unique resource for exploring the experiences, interests, imaginations, and aspirations of people living in the Roman world beyond elite, metropolitan men. Popkin shows how souvenirs generated and shaped memory and knowledge and constructed imagined cultural affinities across the empire's heterogeneous population. At the same time, souvenirs strengthened local and regional identities and excluded certain groups from the social participation they afforded so many others. Adopting a fundamentally multidisciplinary approach, this book demonstrates how souvenirs-affordable, portable, and widely accessible-were critical to shaping how Romans perceived and conceptualized their world and their relationships to the empire that shaped it"--