Ancient Rome - Art and architecture of the classical world

When the Aurelian walls were built around Rome in the third century AD, the area enclosed was about 50 times that of Londinium and the present-day City of London. Rome’s population at that time was around a million, a figure not surpassed by any city in the world until the nineteenth century (by which time the world’s population had increased tenfold).

Such was the scale of ancient Rome – formidable to any modern city-dweller with a little historical imagination; awesome, incredible even, to most citizens and subjects of the Empire. The size was appropriate for the capital of an empire which stretched from Upper Egypt to the Cairngorms, and from Atlantic Africa to Babylon, but the impedimenta of imperial administration were not the sole determinants of its size and status. As a kernel from which the Empire grew, and protagonist in myth and history, it was a spiritual home for every Roman citizen, and the fount of civilisation.

Of course, decline and fall ensued. Rome was relieved of responsibility for half the Empire when Constantinople was founded; it lost its capitular status first to Milan and then to Ravenna; it was sacked by the Goths in AD 410. At one point during the Middle Ages the population shrunk to a hundredth of its ancient peak. As late as the nineteenth century the Forum was known as the Campo Vacchino because cows grazed among the ruins.

After more than a millennium of destruction it is surprising that so much remains. Again, the sheer scale impresses the observer, but so also does the extraordinarily high level of skill in art, craft and construction, and the sophistication of a society which produced such accomplishments. This tour will look at the visible remains of ancient Rome and bring them alive by placing them in the context of the tumultuous history and of everyday life, which reached peaks of refinement and ease while never banishing the lewd, violent and squalid.