Details of the lecture

Rome, as we all know, was not built in a day. It took centuries to construct the eternal city, and Rome’s glorious monuments and those who created them are the focus of this talk. It is sometimes hard to see beyond the ruins of today, so using masterpieces of Roman art and reconstructions and with the Emperors as our guides, we’ll go on a journey through Rome in its golden prime: from the splendid civic hubs of the great Imperial Forums to the beautiful, soaring temples of the gods, the dazzling gleam of marble and mosaic in the great public baths and the roar of the crowds at the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum.

Lecturer: Dr. Paul Roberts

Dr. Paul Roberts, ©Richard Eaton, thearssociety.org

Dr Paul Roberts OBE is Research Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. Paul has been a lecturer with the Arts Society/NADFAS for over twenty years, has travelled extensively to societies across the UK, and has also lectured on numerous cruises in and around the Mediterranean. Like all of us, he enjoys the immediate contact of face to face meetings, but is happy to provide online lectures if desired.

He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. He then lived in Italy for several years, teaching and researching. He has travelled throughout the former lands of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, and has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he is currently working on a Roman Villa in the Molise region of the Central Apennines.

His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds, and he has written books and articles on Greek and Roman daily life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sicily, Roman Emperors, mummy portraits, and Greek and Roman ceramics and glass. In 2024 his book „Ancient Rome in Fifty Monuments“, looking at the history of Rome through its monuments and the Emperors who built them, was published by Thames and Hudson.

From 1994 to 2015 he was Senior Roman Curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). Arriving in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2015, in 2019/20 he curated Last Supper in Pompeii, a tribute to the Roman love affair with food and wine.

He was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List 2025 for services to Archaeology and Heritage.