The Eagle in Winter: Seasonality and Power in the Roman World

Join Professor of Ancient History Greg Woolf (UCLA) for this free public talk.

The Roman Empire was a summer empire. It was in the spring and summer that emperors and messengers travelled, that armies campaigned, that the great monument through which we remember Roman cities were constructed. The populations of cities swelled in the summer months and the world became smaller. In this lecture, I shall be exploring that other empire, the season of disconnectedness, when movement slowed and the emperors’ reach shortened. Each winter the empire went into something like a hibernation, a period of forced inactivity, and its agents and supporters scattered across the provinces, were left to fend for themselves.

Greg Woolf has a long-standing interest in the culture of empire in the ancient world. He has worked on the formation of provincial cultures, often using archaeological material, and also on the cosmopolitan cultures of the metropolis. Much of his work considers the Roman world in a global perspective. He has written on literacy, on knowledge cultures and libraries, on ethnography, on the Roman economy, on gendered Roman history and on the emergence of religions. Currently he is working on a book on migration and mobility, and also on urban resilience as one aspect of the environmental history of antiquity.

This is a FREE public talk, but seats are limited, so please register to attend.

Where: UC Teece Museum, 3 Hereford St, Christchurch
When: Tues 20 June 2023, 6pm. Museum doors will open at 5.30pm