Event

Often attention in the Augustan period has focused on the city of Rome itself, largely because of the richness of the evidence, both literary, epigraphic, and archaeological. But this is only one part of the story, and given that the population of Italy was many times greater than that of Rome itself, we miss an important aspect of the Augustan transformation of the Roman state if we focus exclusively on the city of Rome. The building projects that took place all over Italy during the early years of the Principate give us a window into questions about whether references to tota Italia held any real meaning. Using a lens derived from memory studies, this paper provides new insights on on the relationship between Rome and the rest of Italy in the early Principate and the development of identity in the Italian peninsula.