Space in Roman studies

Space and place were important in Roman culture. From the speech of Camillus in Livy insisting that the Romans cannot abandon their city to the imperially inflected wanderings of Virgil’s Aeneas, space is a constant theme of Latin literature; meanwhile, Roman augurs defined sacred space, Roman soldiers pushed the spatial boundaries of their imperium ever outwards, and ordinary Romans – and plenty of non-Romans – navigated ever-more-complex cityscapes.

Commentators on Latin literature and Roman history and culture have long been aware of the importance of space in the Roman-period Mediterranean. More recently, however, the so-called spatial turn has brought new awareness of the importance of space and spatial methodologies to disciplines across the humanities and beyond, and opened up new possibilities for the study of space in the Roman world. This volume seeks to demonstrate spatial theory in action at the cutting edge of research in Roman studies. Each contribution makes advances that will be relevant to specialists in various subfields, but it is our hope that the whole will also be accessible and thought-provoking to readers new to the spatial turn. In this introduction, the editors outline some of the main tenets of the spatial turn and the specific theories applied in many of the articles that follow.

From the 1960s onwards, researchers and theorists in disciplines from philosophy to archaeology began to understand space and society as co-created. We discuss some individual theoretical approaches in the following section, but the central claim is always that space is neither a given nor an inert container. Humans affect space when they manipulate the material world via architecture, agriculture, and more; but they also create the idea of space itself, whether by inventing conceptual models like cartography or mathematical geometry or by evolving lived notions of what ‘near’ and ‘far’ might mean, how meaning or memory are attached to any particular place, where the mountain ends and the valley begins. At the same time, space affects human behaviour, and is an active participant in our lives. Both built and non-built space can shape our movement and our moods, can push us into proximity with each other or keep us apart, can express and define everything from ideologies of gender in a bathroom to the nature of time in an agricultural landscape. Now and in the ancient world, space is more than a stage set upon which human lives play out.

The most focused attention to space in the Roman world has come from archaeology. On an excavation, an ancient space itself becomes the primary object of study. As a result, archaeologists and anthropologists, including those working on Roman material, have often been at the forefront of the broader spatial turn, and archaeologically preserved spaces served as the inspiration for many of the original spatial theorists.Footnote ¹ Scholarship in Roman archaeology provides some of the clearest guides to spatial theory and its applicability to the Roman world.Footnote ² Importantly, however, we (the editors) are not ourselves archaeologists, and neither this introduction nor the volume as a whole attempts to cover all the rich ways in which archaeological practice and theory engages with space. Instead, we explore on the one hand how historians and literary scholars can work with archaeologically-preserved spaces, and on the other how the materiality of space, the prime concern of many archaeologists, affects texts and contexts even at a distant or abstracted remove from any particular geographical place.

The spatial turn – or, as we shall see, turns – has already had a significant impact on the study of the ancient Mediterranean.Footnote ³ Undergraduate reading lists may now include literature on how Augustus’ building projects changed the face of the Urbs, how Pompeian houses construct status by controlling access and visibility, how Catullus draws on his audience’s knowledge of distant place-names to create atmospheres of imperialised exoticism, or how pan-Mediterranean trade connections shaped the development of Rome’s growing empire.Footnote ⁴ Historical and cultural subfields have seen agenda-setting publications like Claude Nicolet’s work on how Romans created new modes of measurement, representations, and even epistemologies to understand the world they had conquered;Footnote ⁵ Fergus Millar’s insight that the spaces in which Roman politics took place fundamentally shaped how the people interacted with the elite;Footnote ⁶ Diane Favro’s exploration of the meanings embedded in the city of Rome;Footnote ⁷ Ray Laurence’s contrasting approach to the cityscape of Pompeii, seeking meaning in structures and patterns;Footnote ⁸ and Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s paradigm shift away from doing history in the Mediterranean to history of the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁹ In the world of literature, we think of Catharine Edwards’s demonstration that literary texts about the urban fabric of Rome have impacted how people saw, felt, and interacted with the urbs on the ground;Footnote ¹⁰ Katherine Clarke’s seminal work on the many interconnections between Graeco-Roman concepts of ‘space’ and ‘time’ and therefore, by extension, between ancient geography and historiography;Footnote ¹¹ and Diana Spencer’s exploration of literary representations of landscapes.Footnote ¹² Plenty of genres, periods, and individual authors have received individual treatment.Footnote ¹³ Some of the most recent work explores space on the largest scale, using spatial methods to consider migration and belonging as one route towards questioning the nature of Romanness itself and exploring the spatiality of race and ethnicity in the ancient world.Footnote ¹⁴

It would be impossible to do justice in a short summary to even the most significant work on space across our discipline (and our lists above are limited to those works that have been most influential in the anglosphere);Footnote ¹⁵ meanwhile, a flurry of monographs, edited volumes, and articles have explored space in every context, from enslavement to epic to law and administration.Footnote ¹⁶ It is important to note, however, that seeing the word ‘space’ in a book or article’s title does not necessarily imply that it engages with the spatial turn as we define it. Research that uses space as its field of action, exploring or mapping the location of things or people in space, has always been an important part of our discipline and continues to be productive. For this project, however, we have sought out research that explores space as more than a backdrop, and engages productively with the theoretical foundations of the spatial turn.

The spatial turn: an overview of some theoretical tools

Readers new to the spatial turn might assume that our focus would produce a relatively homogeneous volume, trimming a wide range of ancient evidence to the same theoretical template. However, the spatial turn is far less singular than the name ‘turn’ might suggest: it is more a garden of forking paths than a highway. The plurality of ideas about space encountered in the literature of spatial theory directly reflects the inter- and transdisciplinary history of the turn, and two different works with similar titles might propose very different genealogies.Footnote ¹⁷ Thinkers who are now recognised as founding figures in the discipline come from a wide range of intellectual traditions, including urban planning and architecture (Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson; Kevin Lynch; Amos Rapoport), geography (David Harvey; Doreen Massey; Yi-Fu Tuan), literature (Edward Said), and philosophy (Walter Benjamin; Michel de Certeau; Michel Foucault; Henri Lefebvre), to name a few.Footnote ¹⁸ In the following section, we outline some of the most influential tools they developed, but readers should bear in mind that scholars working in the spatial turn often feel free to employ an eclectic selection of theories as they build their toolkit.

Many of the founding figures of the spatial turn devoted themselves to the study of space itself, rather than any particular place.Footnote ¹⁹ Marxist philosophers Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau delved into the history of ideas to show how space is both material and conceptual. Lefebvre’s ‘spatial triad’, despite its complexity and confusing double nomenclature, has been foundational for later work in many disciplines. He identifies three different ways in which we can analyse space: as perceived, conceived, and lived. It is important to note that these are not three different kinds of space that can be colour-coded or mapped: all space can be analysed in all three ways. Perceived space, which he also calls spatial practice, relates to not just the material reality of space but also to our culturally and socially mediated perceptions of it. For example, do we see a curtained door as a pathway or a barrier? Do we think of that outcrop as a small hill or a towering mountain? It is impossible to hold apart material reality, or the sensory inputs through which we perceive it, from these questions of interpretation. Conceived space, also known as representations of space, is the space of maps and plans, graphs and diagrams. It thinks of the hill as a certain number of metres – or feet, for this too is culturally specific – high. Finally, lived space, or representational space, concerns space as it is imagined and understood by the individual, rich in symbolism but also fundamentally shaped by the reality of daily life – for example, by ritualised movements to or from work, or the way one nestles in a cosy reading nook. Crucially, the third type is not the sum of the first two; each operates alongside the others in a trialectic.Footnote ²⁰

As scholars of the ancient world, we might ask which Lefebvrian mode of thinking about space is predominant in any given text, or attempt to unpick Roman notions of space by examining how each of the three functioned in Roman society. In application, however, the merit of Lefebvre’s triad is often to remind us that each of these three ways of seeing space is co-created with society, and each affects the others. Scholars of the ancient world might be tempted to think, for example, that maps and plans (representations of space or conceived space) offer some kind of objective, ahistoric truth to which the activities of daily life and thought (representational space or lived space) add historically contingent meaning: yes, but the maps and plans themselves are also affected by the spatial activities and imaginations of the societies that create and use them. Or perhaps we might want to propose an analysis in which the architectural form of a painter’s workshop (or, rather, how the painter perceives it; both are aspects of perceived space) affects how they represent three dimensions in two (representations of space), or the symbolism attached to their choice to place certain elements of the composition on the left and others on the right (representational space). But we must not forget that techniques of perspective and spatial symbolism in their own turn affect both the material and the conceptual elements of the workshop as perceived space, via the choices made when it was built, and how the artist now experiences and perceives it.

In the same decade as Lefebvre, Foucault was drawing attention to the constructed (not neutral) nature of space with his (at the time, radical) theory that centuries of Western intellectual history had privileged time over space: history and historical ways of viewing the world and the people in it over geography.Footnote ²¹ From this early point, what would later become the spatial turn incorporated a postmodern willingness to question paradigms that underpinned two centuries of post-Kantian thought.Footnote ²² Perhaps the most radical reinterpretation of both space and the paradigms that allow us to interrogate it as constructed and contested have come from US geographer-Marxist-urban planner Edward Soja, who drew extensively on both Foucault and Lefebvre. He developed his own, post-Lefevbrian trialectic, in which we are invited to transcend the distinction between things in space (Firstspace, the material world) and thoughts about space (Secondspace, representations) to reach Thirdspace, a way of understanding space as fully lived. Soja’s multi-decade investigation of urban spaces showed how a historical, temporal view of the world was severely limited, forestalling people from accurately seeing how inextricably capital and capitalism were bound up in the construction of urban space: space, rather than just time (as capitalist concepts of ‘progress’ would propose), separates people from justice.Footnote ²³

A distinct set of approaches to the construction of space developed within postcolonial theory, a body of thought that was not always self-consciously situated within a spatial turn but that is predicated on how power is mapped onto space across the globe. Coming from a background of literature, Edward Said took well-known literary texts as his subject, using familiar forms of close textual analysis but asking new questions to see how texts construct and are constructed by spatial relationships between East and West, city and countryside, conqueror and colony.Footnote ²⁴ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identified the Western philosophical tradition with Eurocentrism, a doubly spatial metaphor that brings out how both global geography and conceptual models of centrality are at work in the construction of Europe as Subject.Footnote ²⁵ Other theorists working in the postcolonial (and later decolonial) tradition have explored how Western notions of territory – geographically delimited and mappable space, as well as legal concepts of ownership – are among the tools of empire: these spatial epistemologies were developed amid the violence of conquest and in turn imposed by the conquerors to the exclusion of indigenous ways of relating to the land.Footnote ²⁶ Territorialisation and mappability also allowed for the reification of geographically defined cultures, as well as contributing to the construction of ethnicity and race.

These Marxist and postcolonial ways of understanding the world are highly situated, grounded in the specific power relations of their own space and time. We should be very cautious when imposing them on the distant past – and conscious of their importance for our present, and the role our disciplines continue to play in reproducing white supremacy, imperialism, and other forms of oppression, spatialized and otherwise.Footnote ²⁷ At the very least postcolonialism can offer inspiration for ways in which we can ask similar questions of the Roman world. How does space contribute to and conceal ancient power relations? How did the Roman empire develop notions of territory through violence? What indigenous ways of experiencing and constructing space existed prior to Roman conquest or cultural contact, and how did they change, evolve, and affect the new post-conquest reality? Exactly how we are to apply the insights of postcolonial theory, on the other hand, continues to provoke debate.Footnote ²⁸ In the contemporary world, space has shaped how both colonisers and colonised were able or permitted to exercise their agency in the processes of cultural contact, which postcolonial theorists of multiple generations have approached using themes of acculturation, hybridity, creolisation and more.Footnote ²⁹ A generation’s worth of work on ‘Romanisation’ has applied terms such as these, often explicitly taken from postcolonial theory, to the processes of cultural contact and cultural change in areas conquered by Rome.Footnote ³⁰ This body of scholarship, however, later attracted critique for perpetuating reductive concepts of conquered and conqueror, and there is still research to be done to approach the study of Rome’s imperial power and violence in conquered territories through a truly postcolonial and decolonial lens.Footnote ³¹ Most recently, Dan-el Padilla Peralta and others have applied concepts such as cultural appropriation and epistemicide to the Roman empire.Footnote ³²

Some of the most accessible and interesting texts of the spatial turn offer not just concepts of space, but methods for analysing individual places. Theorists from an architectural background have developed approaches with a closer relationship to specific types of space, and particularly cities. Based on the analysis of (real or possible) spatial experience, these approaches are often phenomenological, owing a debt to the work of Heidegger.Footnote ³³ The urban planner Kevin Lynch’s landmark study of how people move through cities combined detailed plans of urban areas with direct observations of how people interact with streetscapes and interviews of human research subjects to explore how humans mentally map the world around them.Footnote ³⁴ His work is often mobilised today in attempts to make cities easier to navigate, but it can also be repurposed to help us think about how people in the past imagined and understood their built environment. The architect Amos Rapoport proposed, in line with the main thrust of the spatial turn, that people’s interactions with their environment are shaped by culture. As a result we can analyse how a given space creates meaning in any given cultural context, through culturally specific cues from colour to the control of movement. Those cues help shape the behaviour of humans in the space, which in turn is a form of communication, interpreted by other observers in the context of the same spatial cues.Footnote ³⁵ The larger-scale ‘meanings’ of architecture as explored by Rapoport flow into the cosmic and even sacred nature of space proposed by fellow architect Joseph Rykwert and even theorists from other fields like Mircea Eliade and Pierre Bourdieu: a building or a city, or even a natural space, can be understood as aligned with the stars, or as divided into north and south, masculine and feminine, or sacred and profane.Footnote ³⁶ Such cosmological approaches to space have flourished in Roman studies.Footnote ³⁷

Another practical approach is the ‘spatial syntax’ of Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, a defined method for analysing how built (and potentially also non-built) space conditions and constrains human movement and interaction.Footnote ³⁸ A room with two exits, for example, is qualitatively different from a room with only one; by adding together many such observations we can provide a formal explanation for how one house may force its inhabitants into regular interaction while another allows them to stay separated as they go about their lives, or how a visitor is likely to access some areas of a city rather than others. Spatial syntax and other methods like it drew on technological advances in GIS and other technologies, capable of analysing large amounts of spatial data. These technologies are not new to archaeologists, and indeed much of Hillier and Hanson’s original work benefited from archaeological data. Scholars of Roman archaeology, in particular, have made significant use of spatial syntax as an analytic method.Footnote ³⁹

Like many parallel intellectual movements, the spatial turn was both radical and blinkered. The early Marxist geographers were primarily interested in the spatial experience of white men. Subsequent decades saw critique, as new approaches arose and attention turned to earlier voices that had been silenced; that process continues today and will continue in the future. Although the early theorists such as Foucault and Lefebvre carefully unpacked how class relations were both shaped by space and played a role in shaping space (in concrete terms, we might think of the exclusion of working-class people from elite dining establishments, or the creation of physical places like working-men’s clubs to service a particular community), they did not attend deeply (or sometimes, at all) to the role that other socio-political factors such as ethnicity, gender, or sexuality played in people’s experiences of built space and the environment. Attention to how gender is spatialised and space is gendered came via critiques by geographers such as Doreen Massey and the Women and Geography Student Group.Footnote ⁴⁰ Their work has explored the interactions between space and gender on multiple scales, from the quotidian to the cosmic. The experiences of those breastfeeding outside the home, dealing with ‘manspreading’ on public transport, or conducting what is now called ‘safety work’ to try to avoid sexual assault are all spatial dilemmas grounded in gendered hierarchies, as are the material implications of how landscape on the largest scale or even Gaia herself is often thought of as feminine. Massey and her colleagues’ insistence on examining the relationships between gender and space created a new sub-field, feminist geography, and new interventions also emerged in geography that foregrounded ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and more as co-created with space.Footnote ⁴¹ Each of the disciplines involved in the spatial turn has experienced, and continued to experience, such ruptures and evolutions. Geographers, architects, and archaeologists, to name just three, have started to integrate the initially separate insights of postcolonial theory into their notions of space; and the canonical founders of postcolonial theory themselves have had their work critiqued and extended by contemporary postcolonial feminists.Footnote ⁴²

With these origins and later developments in mind, it is easier to conceptualise the spatial turn as inherently pluralistic and interdisciplinary. One of the exciting things about how increasing numbers of scholars of the Roman world are working more with interdisciplinary insights and methods from the spatial turn is that they can employ a vast toolkit, with kaleidoscopic results, while theories arising elsewhere can be modified and enriched by incorporating space.Footnote ⁴³ In this volume, we see multiple examples of researchers combining multiple theories – some spatial, others not – to suit the needs of their particular case study. Which theories can usefully be applied depends on the material itself and the questions being asked.

Approaches taken in the articles

Alongside a variety of theories from the spatial turn, our first three contributors – Selsvold, Thomas, and Bodnaruk – explore the spatial potential of assemblage theory. Assemblage theory was never fully articulated as a theory by its originators Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Nevertheless, a core set of ideas articulated in their works, such as A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, generated a new understanding of how the world operates: as a set of ever-shifting aggregates of organic and material things and beings that both exist within space and constitute space.Footnote ⁴⁴ ‘Assemblage’ serves as the English gloss on the French agencement, which means ‘a construction, an arrangement, a layout’.Footnote ⁴⁵ An assemblage is not a unified or unitary whole composed of integrated and co-depending parts. Rather, an assemblage is a collage or kaleidoscope of things – often unrelated and unconnected – coming into a state of relationship with each other.Footnote ⁴⁶ These ‘arrangements’ – of objects, spaces, buildings, people, and animals – shift and change often, as component parts change in themselves and change in relation to the other component parts within the assemblage. To study an arrangement qua arrangement, rather than giving priority to the humans in the assemblage as actors, allows for the study of ‘the ephemeral, the emergent, the evanescent, the decentered and the heterogeneous’ while also acknowledging structures and systems.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such assemblages can exist in space; but space itself also operates as an element in any assemblage, and assemblage theory offers one way to articulate how space can be an actor rather than merely a backdrop.

Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages occur at almost any scale and in any context, from the microscopic assemblages that coalesce within organisms to global arrangements.Footnote ⁴⁸ As such, assemblage theory is part of the spatial turn but also stretches beyond it. For historians and archaeologists, it offers particularly useful tools to think with when we focus on aggregates of objects (including human-made ones), in physical space (constructed by humans and then constructing them in turn), impacting on and being impacted (and observed) by human actors. Thinking of a street corner in Ephesus or Constantinople as an assemblage, as Selsvold and Bodnaruk invite us to do, allows the scholar to examine a multiplicity of elements interacting without privileging any single one: the organic and inorganic elements, human-made objects, trees, shadows, human actors and humans being acted upon, buildings and the spaces between them, are all equally implicated in the assemblage of everything there and everything that happens there. Space itself is not the container in which the people and things assemble, but is equally acting on and acted upon by the other elements of the assemblage.

For Selsvold, understanding a street in Ephesus as an assemblage can help us see how our interpretation of its changes over time do not have to be confined by a single monolithic lens like ‘Christianisation’ or ‘iconoclasm’. We are not dealing with a passive landscape on which humans enacted their will, but a space whose monuments interacted with each other and the people who moved among them to create ever-changing spectra of meaning. Thomas sees not just space but spatiality itself as part of an assemblage of people, things, ideas, and texts which combine to create the dizzying world we know as the baroque. Poetic texts describing almost inconceivably extravagant palaces interact with the human experience of visiting real mansions, as both literary and architectural space play with the very edges of possibility and the imagination. Bodnaruk zooms outwards to show how late antique elites moving in space created and interacted with a network of statues across the Mediterranean, and how later viewers in turn had their experiences and understandings of these same monuments moulded by the ever-changing urban assemblages of which they were a part. The empire-wide assemblage formed by elite travel is itself entangled with the local assemblage on each street corner.

The work of Johnston, Frampton, and Edwards approaches space on a larger scale, drawing in theories of imperial space and globalisation already adumbrated by the movements of Bodnaruk’s pan-Mediterranean elite. Theories of the global are often traced back to the historian Immanuel Wallerstein, who built on the large-scale approaches of the Annales school to argue that the world must be understood as an interlocking global system: no local analysis can be complete.Footnote ⁴⁹ His world-systems analysis explicated how modern capitalism depends on the division of labour between a core of rich nations and a periphery, as raw materials are extracted in the periphery and shipped to the core for higher-value industrial processing and manufacture. But these approaches are not just new ways to map capitalist extraction in space: the Marxist geographer David Harvey has explored how globalisation transforms space itself. For him, new technologies of movement and information transfer have brought the postmodern world to a state of what he called ‘time-space compression’, in which everything is everywhere all at once.Footnote ⁵⁰ The insights of postcolonial scholars such as Said and Spivak can be used to enrich and complicate these basic understandings of how capitalism both links and divides the world, bringing in literature and cultural analysis to show the ways in which colonialism proposes a basic spatial and racial distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and imposes violent hierarchies on a global scale.Footnote ⁵¹ Meanwhile, ever-developing digital modes of interaction are redrawing the interlocking networks Wallerstein saw. Manuel Castells argues that we are living in a network society, in which power is located in and negotiated through information and communication technologies. The ‘space of places’ is eclipsed by the ‘space of flows’, a dynamic network in which connection is more important than geography.Footnote ⁵² But Castells’s network does not mean the end of space; rather, it allows us to see space as a network in which Harvey’s time-space compression operates flexibly and dynamically. Some places have become closer, others further apart; some more central, others more peripheral.

These approaches to the global are explicitly situated in a modern, or even postmodern, world, and cannot be simplistically applied to antiquity. Yet the prompt to think globally, and specifically to think about how empires and technologies affect the construction of space on a large scale, has proved fruitful for the study of the Roman empire.Footnote ⁵³ Empires of all periods depend on a centre–periphery distinction, and the Roman empire in particular was made possible by, and in turn prompted the development of, new concepts and technologies of movement and knowledge.Footnote ⁵⁴ Johnston, Frampton, and Edwards all explore how imperial spatiality was constructed and experienced by elites, whose thoughts do not often turn to those most affected by the violence of empire. Still, the authors they study can help us explore several different angles on the changing spatialities of imperial Rome. Ovid was keenly aware of the empire’s centre–periphery distinction when he found himself on the wrong end of it. In Johnston’s work, Juvenal’s rants against immigrants to the Urbs, as darkly reminiscent as they may be of contemporary anti-immigration discourse, are similarly clear analogies for how geographical and urban space can be pressed into service for the construction of racial and cultural hierarchies. And Aelius Aristides, who as a member of the Greek literary elite was both highly privileged and an ‘outsider’ to Rome, demonstrates clearly how the slippages between inclusion and exclusion allow the orator to manipulate the hierarchies of imperial space to situate himself in the world.

Long-distance movement, which ancient texts already construct as a new reality made possible by the pax Romana, is key to the experience and political economy of imperial, global space, but also calls its strict spatial distinctions (and the hierarchies embedded in them) into question. Frampton explores how early imperial poets think of their poetry as travelling, part of a network of words that criss-crossed the empire both conceptually and, crucially, literally. For Frampton, books, words, authors, readers, and space are fundamentally entangled, a term derived from archaeologist Ian Hodder’s work and often discussed in the same breath as assemblage theory as a way to frame the relationships between the human and the non-human: rather than focusing entirely on human agency, entanglement emphasises how things affect people and people affect things.Footnote ⁵⁵ Its archaeological, rather than philosophical, lineage means that entanglement theory places extra weight on the materiality of things and the processes of human–thing interaction, all of which occur in and co-create space. Frampton also brings to bear other ways of analysing how language communicates over space, including the spatial metaphors inherent in ideas of ‘translation’ and the ways contemporary concepts like the ‘meme’ allow us to think about information in movement. Imperial spatiality forms a key context for the development of new ideas of the book as object-in-space.

Frampton’s work lays some of the groundwork for Edwards’s chapter, in which elite readers and writers participate in the network of literary movement through letters. Epistolarity, she shows, explicitly constructs both time and space, incorporating both Harvey-style erasure of distance via communication (though for Romans the speed of communication fundamental to Harvey had to remain imaginary) and the disappointing slowness of real ancient travel. For Cicero and his correspondents, one response to their increasing consciousness of the vastness of empire was to de-emphasise the geographical particularity of distant places in favour of a virtual, shared literary space akin to Castells’s ‘space of flows’. It has a centre – Rome – but no periphery, other than an indistinguishable mass of ‘non-places’, the anthropologist Marc Augé’s term for the bland spaces of anonymity frequently encountered in the modern world, such as airports and shopping malls.Footnote ⁵⁶ In epistolary space, particularity, identity, and hierarchy are defined not by geographical location but by relationships with other elite men. The empire was swiftly and violently defining new concepts of territory (quite literally, as the term provincia cemented its meaning as a chunk of land, rather than a military campaign), but this group of elite men understood the space they moved in as a network, one with a clear spatiality but little use for the geography one might see on a map. The literary discourses Frampton, Johnston, and Edwards discuss each reflect and reproduce a sense of global, imperial space that can bring the ‘here’ to ‘there’ in an instant, but that simultaneously entrenches spatial and social distinctions.

In the final three articles, Macauley, Webb, and Jewell each combine theories and methods well known from the spatial turn with other, non-spatial theories. To gain a new view of how certain locations in Rome played specific roles in popular expressions of dissent, Macauley combines contentious politics, a political-process theory developed in sociology, with Lefebvre’s spatial triad – a core theory from the philosophical side of the spatial turn.Footnote ⁵⁷ Contentious politics, a theory of social resistance to hegemonic power based on ample empirical data from modern history, provides Macauley with a model for mass resistance and revolt in Rome, at a period when our data are less fulsome.Footnote ⁵⁸ Tilly’s theory of contentious politics, however, does not closely examine the interrelationship between protest and the physical spaces that enable – or constrain – it. The data for popular rebellion, resistance, and revolt in Rome relate closely to physical spaces, be they buildings such as the Circus Maximus or Colosseum, open spaces such as fora, or local neighbourhood haunts. As such, using Lefebvre’s theory of how spaces themselves take shape through social relations, and in turn shape social relations, allows Macauley to bridge the gap. Combining Lefebvre’s framework with a sociological perspective on dissent enables Macauley to make new observations of how popular resistance in Rome both grew from and required specific spatialised social practices. This opens up a path for future research on social resistance in other ancient times and places, perhaps letting us reconstruct voices from the lower social orders which have so often been silent.

Like Macauley, Webb draws on both Lefebvre’s thinking and a theory of social relations from outside the spatial turn. In Webb’s case, intersectionality – a theory of power relations originally growing from Black Feminism and critical race theory – provides a way of addressing a core research question about Roman woman, namely: how did women experience urban space? In what contexts could they move through the city and participate in life outside the domus? Intersectional theories of power dynamics exhort us to pay attention to the way in which multiple vectors of identity shape people’s lives within any given society: how class intersects with gender, how race impacts on experiences of disability, and so on.Footnote ⁵⁹ As such, intersectionality leads Webb to pay close attention to the way in which Roman women’s status qua women intersects with other aspects of their social position, such as class and enslavement. However, while intersectional studies – be they of legal cases, social changes, cultural artefacts, or other phenomenon – locate subjects’ experiences of oppression or domination firmly in their socio-political and historical context, intersectional work has not always focused on or theorised how the ‘matrix of power’ or ‘matrix of domination’ is located in space.Footnote ⁶⁰ To examine Roman women’s movement through, presences in, and absences from the physical spaces of the urbs, Webb applies one of Lefebvre’s last contributions to the spatial turn: the notion of rhythmanalysis.

While Lefebvre remains one of the best known figures of the spatial turn and his insights in The Production of Space underpin some recent work on space in the Roman world, his concept of rhythmanalysis has made comparatively little impact. In his final work, Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre investigated and theorised the interrelationships between time and space as those relationships played out in human life.Footnote ⁶¹ This project developed his earlier insights in The Production of Space on ways in which humans produce space through social usage, by considering how that usage is both governed by the natural rhythms of time itself, and produces rhythms of time. Like (say) our concept of space as cartographic, our concepts of time (as regulated by the clock or the calendar; as an unbroken stream; as inexorably moving at a consistent pace from past to future) are co-created with society and historically contingent. Rhythmanalysis shows that time works like space, in that both ‘time’ and ‘space’ each exist in some sense in nature and in other ways are produced and reified by humans. Lefebvre’s method looks at moments of time-space, remaining open to all the ways in which they might relate to other such moments and refusing to privilege time over space or vice versa: a rhythm can unfold across time, across space, or most likely both. His observations are twofold: that there are different types of rhythms, some cyclical and some linear, some built in to the natural world, others generated by the working of individual societies or even individual human agents, and that these rhythms coexist simultaneously, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes discordantly, in what he calls ‘polyrhythmia’.

The conceptual framework of rhythmanalysis has much to offer scholars of the Roman world, and Webb’s approach shows the value of engaging more with this part of Lefebvre’s oeuvre. At the simplest level, the framework brings ‘time’ back into the equation of how people in the Roman Mediterranean experienced space, a core element of life that impacts everything about it, and which the spatial turn can overlook. More complexly, the concept articulates ways in which ancient spatial experiences and movement patterns also governed and created time. The specific rhythms that Lefebvre observed and analysed in urban Europe do not all translate to evidence of temporal rhythms in ancient Rome. However, if we look for ways in which natural temporal rhythms, such as seasons, impacted Romans, we find them in abundance. We can just as easily see culturally specific ways in which they parcelled out and reified temporal rhythms that they had created: morning baths and evening cena, the Kalends and Ides, festival days, and a 120-minute hora.Footnote ⁶² As Webb shows, core Lefebvrian concepts of ‘cyclical’ and ‘linear’ rhythms can be used to analyse human acts in ancient Rome close up at a highly granulated level, while observing evidence of ‘polyrhythmia’ allows one to understand how those rhythms determined the overall orchestration of urban life. Webb’s work requires both theoretical frameworks: Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis to capture the complex interplays of time and space, and intersectionality to ensure that his new picture of women’s movements reflects the diversity of women from different social statuses.

Our final contributor, Jewell, also demonstrates how spatial turn methods underpinned by intersectional approaches can shed new light on old evidence. Whereas Webb used Lefebvre’s theory of how time and place impact on one another, a somewhat abstract philosophy often untethered from specific analysis of any one location, Jewell turns to perhaps the most empirical of all the canonical spatial theorists: Kevin Lynch.Footnote ⁶³ The focus of Lynch’s work is the heart of the spatial turn: how physical space and human imagination intersect. In the 1960 book The Image of the City, he asked how people envisage the spaces in which they live and move, often in terms of ‘mental maps’. His method involved actually asking them, in a five-year study of how passers-by found their ways through Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles. The results of his research have developed into a subfield known as ‘wayfinding’. Lynch observed five core elements that contemporary city-dwellers use to make mental maps: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Roman archaeologists and urban historians have drawn on Lynch’s framework to make sense of Roman urban spaces.Footnote ⁶⁴ Jewell goes further in applying Lynch’s framework to a large archive of real documents of wayfinding, in which people who lived in and visited the city of Rome directed others. But he goes beyond that: his investigation of passers-by in Rome reflects the intersections between space and class. As Jewell shows, it was largely the non-elite who were required to find their way through Rome’s winding streets: elites were guided or driven. The result is a new avenue for the study of spatial experience and social class.