The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity: Transforming Public Space by Gregor Kalas (review)

Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA’s three Book Review Editors: Michael Kulikowski (mek31@psu.edu); Hagith Sivan (helenasivan@yahoo.com); and Dennis Trout (troutd@missouri.edu).

Gregor Kalas’ monograph on the physical and ideological transformations of the Forum Romanum in Rome during Late Antiquity (focusing on the late third through mid-fifth centuries ce) is a welcome addition to a growing bibliography on aspects of Rome during this critical period of transition. While the city’s physical transformation has very much been a part of this recent scholarship, most publications on the topic are limited in length and/or theme, or they often constitute only part—usually the final one—of a longer diachronic overview of a site or area. Kalas’ extended focus on one space during Late Antiquity per se is therefore distinct at the moment, but hopefully the start of a trend. Kalas’s central argument is that imperial and senatorial acts of building construction and preservation, as well as the addition and manipulation of statuary, within the Forum during this time evoked and revived the city’s past to convey power and stability during the late antique present, a time that was recognized already in antiquity as one of dramatic change.

The first two chapters focus largely on architectural changes during the Tetrarchy and the Constantinian period. In Chapter 1, Kalas argues that through his reconfiguration of the Forum and its rostrae, Diocletian attempted to convey a permanence of imperial rule. New imperial optics signalled a shift away from the cult of imperial personality towards a more abstract concept of joint rule and a regular and stable calendar of imperial succession mediated and sanctioned by the gods, thus bypassing the Senate. Chapter 2 focuses on Maxentius’ continuation, as Kalas sees it, of the Tetrachy’s attitudes towards the Senate and Constantine’s subsequent “liberation” of the city from them and return to a pre-Tetrarchic past. As is well-known, Constantine focused on altering (“editing,” according to Kalas) Maxentius’ building projects along the upper Via Sacra in order to establish a contrast between himself and his rival and to convey his role as a restorer of proper political, religious, and judicial order. While Kalas’s assessment of Constantine’s building and renovation program is hardly novel, it is probably more certain and one-sided than either the archaeological or textual evidence permits. His portrayal of Constantine in such sharp contrast to Maxentius, particularly with respect to Christianity, could be more nuanced, as it closely follows the polemics of Constantine’s apologists.

In Chapters 3 and 4, the focus largely shifts from architectural and archaeological evidence to art historical evidence to examine how senators negotiated increasingly restricted outlets of euergetism in their efforts to gain political and social prestige. Kalas’s approach remains nonetheless spatial, as both chapters draw on a long-standing project that Kalas has directed to document and reconstruct the position, appearance, and history of the statuary—much of it imperial portraiture—and extant inscribed statue bases in the Late Antique forum (Visualizing Statues in the Late Antique Forum of Rome, http://inscriptions.etc.ucla.edu). In Chapter 3, Kalas demonstrates that the most visible and important areas of the Forum were restricted to statuary depicting imperial subjects. Since, however, these were almost all senatorial dedications, they reflect a mutually beneficial relationship between senators and the emperor. The accrual of these images conveyed not only the emperors’ constant connection to and improvement on the city’s past, but also the active role that senators (still) had in curating it.

More interesting is the argument of Chapter 4, where Kalas shows that senators created spaces of leisure within the porticos of the Basilicas Julia and Aemilia by transferring famous artwork there from other parts of the city on their...