Overview

Rome's Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire's holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome's most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This is the first book that follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early middle ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill's tonnage of marble and gold bedecked monuments, but rather an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh centuries CE. During this time, the imperial triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill's different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill's role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state's disintegration in the fifth century were the hill's associations with the raw power of Rome's empire.

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9780197540718

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Reviews

Sweeping in its diachronic breadth but tightly focused on a particular locale, Moralee's study of the Capitoline hill offers illuminating historical insights on both the micro and the macro level. The narrative weaves together a delightfully varied array of evidence and agents, encompassing saints, sinners, rulers, travelers, artists, archaeologists, historians, and treasure-seekers, and exposing how each constructed his own Capitoline. A brilliant demonstration of the value of the 'lieu de memoire' approach, tracing shifts in meaning and memory over time. * Elizabeth Marlowe, Colgate University * This sophisticated and elegant study of the palimpsest that is the Capitoline Hill exploits a rich trove of archaeological, mythological, and historical sources to bring specific moments in its postclassical reception to life. Jason Moralee has succeeded in producing a work that is instructive, enduring in value, and a sheer delight to read. * Richard Lim, Smith College * This is a highly stimulating book, offering fascinating new insights into the history of Rome from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Moralee gives an innovative interdisciplinary account of the Capitoline Hill, fully exploring its richness as a cultural symbol. * Lucy Grig, University of Edinburgh * Moralee's book expertly and surprisingly charts the history of the hill through transformations of imperial ceremony, state religion, and strategies of social memory between the fourth and seventh centuries to show how the history of a place and the memories of its ancient functions carried forward into the early middle ages. This is an excellent, stimulating read about the history of ideas and how ideas attach to places... Moralee is to be congratulated on an exciting, insightful, and learned contribution to our understanding of how Rome's past gave rise to its future. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review * [A] fine book... The historical and archaeological dimensions of this book seem sound to me but I am especially impressed by the author's reading of a wide array of both familiar and obscure texts. Before reading this book I simply had no idea that the Capitoline figured so prominently in the late antique and early medieval history of Rome and of Rome's place in the European imagination. * Thomas F. X. Noble, The Medieval Review * This notable work tackles one of Rome's most symbolically charged places during a period that is usually overlooked. Its examination of the shifting valences of the symbolic significance of the Capitoline hill is an admirable contribution to scholarship. * Church History * The combination of a wide chronological and narrow geographical focus allows its readers to see change on both the micro and the macro scale. Its methodological insistence that the literary memories of a place are as significant as its historical life is both important and welcome. And it serves to demonstrate how much important work is left to be done on those Christian authors - the apologists in particular - of whom unsophisticated readings abound. * James Corke-Webster, Kings College London *

Author Information

Jason Moralee is Associate Professor of History at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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