Lecture-Dr. Hendrik Day (Middlebury ’99) Professor of Art History, Hunter College, CUNY

“Colonnaded Streets and Urban Theater in the Later Roman Empire”

Grand, colonnaded avenues proliferated as never before in leading cities of the later Roman Empire. These new urban thoroughfares were costly and complex investments that transformed the appearance and the experience of the cityscapes they adorned. Usually willed into existence by the ruling regime, they lent themselves to new forms of political theater intended to project and promote the more autocratic style of rule adopted by emperors from the third century CE.

Colonnaded streets also reshaped the everyday realities of the places where they appeared, channeling movement and patterns of activity along itineraries that privileged some features and experiences over others, thus offering a curated and highly selective vision of the late-Roman city.