Introduction: ‘Palatial' centres as creative hubs from the c. C2nd to C7th CE

This paper both introduces the session and presents work by the ERC-funded Rome Transformed (ROMETRANS) Team and collaborating colleagues.

Although the role of monastic centres in generating and disseminating knowledge is well known and understood, there has been comparatively less discussion on the significance of 'palatial' centres as creative hubs. Yet, representing as they did power, places of encounter and the product of extensive investment, ‘palatial' centres embody some of the most important loci for the study of innovation, emulation, and knowledge transfer in antiquity.

The evolution of ‘palatial' centres in the Roman world from c. C2nd to C7th CE raises important questions about the way such centres functioned as creative hubs, and the degree to which they reflect fundamentally new ideas about power, landscape, community, and court cultures. Over a period of five years the ROMETRANS Project team worked together on the detailed study of a 68-hectare area of south-east Rome, focussing on the eastern Caelian. Using a wide array of predominantly non-intrusive methods the team evaluated all the surviving evidence for the area's development from the first to eighth centuries CE. Two zones of particular importance for the study of such centres emerged in this area, the Sessorian Palace, evolving from a suburban villa into a palace from the Severan period to Late Antiquity, and the Patriarchium, serving as Rome's episcopal residence and papal palace, adjacent to the Lateran Basilica.

Following an outline of the methods used by members of the ROMETRANS team and its members, this paper summarises some of the important new insights that have emerged about the development of these complexes. It goes on to show how their evolution shaped and was shaped by the evolving political, social and physical landscape of south-east Rome, and how it in turn contributed not only to the transformation of the city, but also to broader articulations of imperial power, and developments in court culture that resonated far beyond.