Dr. Maggie Popkin, Associate Professor of Art and Art History at CWRU, will be giving a lecture on civil wars and the architecture of victory in ancient Rome on Wednesday, March 12th, 7:30pm at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Murch Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. It is sponsored by the Cleveland Archaeological Society.

“The Roman triumph was an elaborate ritual that celebrated Rome’s military victories over foreign peoples. From the republican period onward, the triumphal route was built up with monuments commemorating victories over foreigners and barbarians. Yet in the imperial period, the Roman emperors who lavished the most monuments on the triumphal route were those who had come to power as a result of civil wars: Augustus, the Flavians, and Septimius Severus. In this talk Dr. Popkin will explore how these Roman emperors exploited the triumphal route’s connotations of foreign victory to obfuscate their bloody and controversial wars against fellow Romans.”