Considering the sources and material evidence available from Rome, this chapter focuses on the evidence of women’s associations with these soldiers of the different units stationed in the capital. These women were often labeled as “wives” in written documentation. By analyzing the available evidence, predominantly on funerary monuments, the authors expand the discussion of the social expectations and realities of women associated with the military in the context of the Empire’s center. The evidence gives us a rich image of an aspect of society that has not yet been explored, while at the same time providing a new perspective on the life of Roman soldiers. The origin of the women and their social background is treated as a relevant factor for their integration in the military community and – as inhabitants of Rome – in the community of the city. In this context it is interesting to consider the origin of personal relationships. In some cases, it seems that women accompanied soldiers to Rome from a provincial location and other cases suggest the relationship began in the capital itself.

It is clear from the sources that under some emperors, the Roman imperial court could be a social space characterized by violence. This chapter offers a general framework for understanding the key dimensions of court violence – its aetiology, its impact on the court’s image, and the institutions and ideologies restraining it. Drawing on insights into human violence offered by evolutionary psychology, the chapter argues that the latent human capacity for violence was triggered by a court environment with high levels of physical danger, status consciousness, and competition for resources. But in almost all societies, culture and institutions serve to restrain interpersonal violence, to a greater or lesser degree. The second part of the chapter therefore examines the limits placed on court violence by the emperor’s guard forces (the praetorians, the Germani corporis custodes, and the equites singulares), by Roman legal culture, and by Graeco-Roman political theory and ideology.

This chapter presents a selection of images of the emperor in the presence of members of his court, as depicted in reliefs, statue groups, coins, medallions, and frescos. It also includes a number of texts that discuss now-lost depictions of the emperor and his court. It is suggested that such images were important to constituting and reinforcing public perceptions of who was part of the imperial court, and of the hierarchy of the court at a particular moment. The destruction or defacement of images of courtiers who had fallen from grace – known today as damnatio memoriae – illustrated to contemporaries (and illustrates to us) specific changes in court hierarchy, and the general instability of that hierarchy. A number of the sources in the chapter come from provincial contexts, which also illustrates that the image of the imperial court had an impact on the peripheries of the Roman empire.

This chapter examines the role that the Roman imperial court played in the genesis of imperial imagery intended for public display. It argues that the realities of court society have implications for hypothetical reconstructions of who commissioned, designed, and approved such images: ostensibly independent sites of decision-making – ‘senate’, ‘inner circle’, ‘moneyers’, ‘emperor’ – were deeply interconnected. Furthermore, the influence and power of different individuals and groups at court ebbed and flowed, and although such changes never guaranteed particular images, they set new limits on what was possible. With controversial images, artists and their patrons could also exploit the fact that viewing is always conditioned by the viewer’s background knowledge and assumptions, so different audiences could be encouraged to see different things in the same image. A detailed case study of public images of the emperor in the presence of members of his guard units is used to illustrate how some images became more (and then less) possible over time, and how different types of viewers were invited to see varying things in the same image.