Ida Ostenberg – författare

Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as spectacle and performance. Ida Ostenberg analyses how Rome presented and perceived the defeated on parade. Spoils, captives, and representations are the objects, and the basic questions to be asked concern both contents and context: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? The triumph was a crowded civic celebration, when spectators met with coins from Spain and Asia, Jewish temple treasures, silver plate and furniture from opulent royal feasts, trees from eastern gardens, Punic elephants appearing as in battle, kings, long known by name only, and ferocious barbarians dressed in outlandish costumes. Ostenberg aims to show what stories the Roman triumph told about the defeated and what ideas it transmitted about Rome itself.

The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome focusses on movements in the ancient city of Rome, exploring the interaction between people and monuments. Representing a novel approach to the Roman cityscape and culture, and reflecting the shift away from the traditional study of single monuments into broader analyses of context and space, the volume reveals both how movement adds to our understanding of ancient society, and how the movement of people and goods shaped urban development.Covering a wide range of people, places, sources, and times, the volume includes a survey of Republican, imperial, and late antique movement, triumphal processions of conquering generals, seditious, violent movement of riots and rebellion, religious processions and rituals and the everyday movements of individual strolls or household errands. By way of its longue durée, dense location and the variety of available sources, the city of ancient Rome offers a unique possibility to study movements as expressions of power, ritual, writing, communication, mentalities, trade, and – also as a result of a massed populace – violent outbreaks and attempts to keep order. The emerging picture is of a bustling, lively society, where cityscape and movements are closely interactive and entwined.