In the Introduction, I referenced a coin minted under the emperor Titus (Fig. E.1). On one side appeared the figure of the emperor sitting amid a heap of weapons, a reference to his roles in the Jewish War, the capture of Jerusalem, and the construction of the building depicted on the coin’s opposite side, the Flavian Amphitheater. The coin adopts an unusual perspective, showing the Colosseum’s façade while also permitting a glimpse into the building. We spy the columns tracing the uppermost reaches of the interior and a few heads peeping out between them. Lower down two more rings of spectators are visible, the lower one pierced by an entrance and split into wedges by staircases. When we last examined the coin, we remarked about how only one individual appeared – the emperor – while everyone else was merely an undifferentiated head.

This chapter imagines Flavia’s experience of visiting Rome’s principal sanctuary of Isis, the Iseum Campense. It weighs the impact of the space’s architecture, artwork, and rituals and the community that Flavia found there.

This chapter traces the travels of Flavius’ sculpture from Rome, via Paris and New York, to Indianapolis. The artwork’s movements reflect changing historical tides, and also took on different meanings as it passed through each context and historical moment.

As part of an “object biography” of Flavius’ sculpture, this chapter traces reactions to its discovery and subsequent exhibition in the Palazzo Barberini, which raises issues related to the collecting of ancient art in Early Modern Rome and the sculpture’s role in presenting the Barberini family and its history to visitors to the palace.

This chapter takes stock of Flavius’ worldview as presented by his funerary ensemble, noting especially the close nexus of dining, death, and philosophy. Since Flavius’ outlook contrasts with Flavia’s potential beliefs as an adherent of Isis, the chapter assesses the phenomenon of “mixed marriages” in the Roman world.

This chapter reconstructs Flavius Agricola’s life and analyzes his self-presentation across a variety of different lines: the poetic form and references within his verse epitaph, his representation as a reclining diner, the apparent disjuncture between his youthful physique and older face, and the vessel he cradles in his hand.

This chapter considers the experience of visitors to Flavius’ tomb after his death, particularly as they drank alongside Flavius while he was portrayed doing the same.

Of the fifteen lines of Flavius Agricola’s epitaph, seven grant a subbiography of his wife of thirty years, Flavia Primitiva, and her son, Aurelius Primitivus. This chapter considers Flavia’s characterization, particularly as a chaste worshipper of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and weighs the potential appeal of this cult.

Imperial gardens in ancient Rome and China were as much a physical arrangement of place as they were discursive realms, evoking imagination and invective alike. Starting from semantic observations on ancient Latin and Chinese terminologies, Wentian Fu explores the divergent contexts and concepts of imperial gardens in each culture. The first section traces the respective origins: while inextricably intertwined with ideas of visibility, citizenship, and republican traditions in Rome, the chapter argues for a conspicuous absence of those vectors in China prior to Western Han traditions. The analysis of odes from the Book of Songs reveals, on the contrary, close connections with the power-invested charge of palatial structures. In the second section, the author showcases how Roman aristocratic gardens evolved over time from aristocratic domains into imperial properties, dynamically growing in size and scope. The gardens in Nero’s Golden House, which are given exemplary consideration, both resembled and reversed the order of human spheres and nature. In doing so, they paralleled Shanglin Park and the Jianzhang Palace outside of Chang’an: the chapter explains how those sites were critical to the emperor’s pursuit of immortality. In the concluding section, Fu fully capitalizes on his findings, immersing the argument in the ambiguities of imperial gardens both as seductive spaces of transgression, indulgence, and debauchery, and as role model instantiations of good governance.

At some point in the first century BCE, Yang Yun, one of nine ministers at the Western Han court, fell from the emperor’s grace. His uprightness, incorruptibility, and administrative skills were appreciated far and wide, but Yang Yun’s tendency to brag about these abilities, combined with a personality that appeared somewhat aloof, was destined to create friction. In 56 BCE, a series of charges led to his denouncement and his being stripped of his official position and noble title. Yang Yun was spared the death penalty, at least for the time being, to live a commoner’s life beyond the imperial palace. In his own words, ‘I lead my wife and children, and they join my efforts in plowing fields and planting mulberries, in watering orchards and kitchen gardens, in managing money-making ventures from which we pay taxes to the state thereby’.

The chapters assembled in this part turn to the key question of how the exercise of power was subject to a broad array of performative practices, in places as diverse as the administration of the state, public spectacles, agricultural production, and literature. Taco Terpstra kicks off with the performative dimension of statecraft. Due to their substantiated degree of structured hierarchies, standardized procedures, and the ability to employ officials with specific assignments, the imperial administrations of Rome and Han China capture, in exemplary fashion, the design of premodern statehood. Yet both governments looked rather different. While the Chinese relied on a large apparatus of officials who were appointed and paid by the state, Rome governed via a notoriously narrow pool of magistrates whose bureaucratic powers quintessentially built on the support of countless unsalaried local elites. Terpstra’s discussion of these differences departs from an analysis of how administrative rank and agency were expressed through clothing and other symbols of power. Prima facie minor aspects of the grand scheme of empire, the study of Sima Biao’s (third century CE) Treatise on Carriages and Robes, and On the Magistracies of the Roman State by John the Lydian (sixth century CE) offer exciting insight into the ways in which state power was conceived of and articulated throughout the empire. The chapter then segues into the question of state formation and the emergence of bureaucratic structures. Terpstra discloses how, in China, the thrust toward performance-based appointments and promotions preconditioned the rise of a professional bureaucratic corps, whereas the Romans, he argues, actively discouraged such a development. Both dispositions had eminent consequences for the longue durée of state power.