So the city of Rome again we'll be concentrating on at the beginning of this
semester, as well as the city of Pompeii. An aerial view of Pompeii as it looks today.
You can see many of the buildings of the city.
Including the houses and the shops and also the entertainment district.
This is the theatre and
the big music hall of ancient Pompeii, the amphitheater is over here.
And you can see, of course, looming up in the background the Mount Vesuvius.
The mountain that caused all that trouble in 79 AD.
So that's the first half of this semester.
The second half of this semester, we are going to be going out into the provinces,
into the Roman provinces.
And that is going to take us, and we're going to look at the provinces both in
the eastern and the western part of the empire, and
that will take us to Roman Greece, it will take us to, Asia Minor.
Asia Minor, which, of course, is modern Turkey, it will take us to North Africa,
it will take us to the Middle East.
In what's now Jordan and Syria and it will also take us to Europe, to western Europe.
To cities like, to cities in France and to cities in Spain.
And let me just show you an example of some of the buildings that we'll look at
as we travel to the provinces.
This is the library of Celsus.
In Ephesus, on the western coast of Turkey.
This, the theater, a spectacularly well preserved theater at
Sabratha you see in the upper right hand side.
And down here a restored view of the masterful Palace of Diocletian,
one of the late Roman Emperors, in a place called Split.
Which is in Croatia along the fabulously gorgeous Dalmatian coast today.
So those are just a sampling of the kinds of buildings that we'll
look at in the provinces.
We're going to be seeing we'll be concentrating on the ways in
which the Romans planned, and built their cities.
And its important to note from the very outset that Rome itself
grew in a very ad hoc way.
And we can tell that.
Here's a Google Earth image showing that core of
Rome with the Colosseum with the famous modern Victor Emmanuel Monument that