Stephen L. Dyson has spent a lifetime studying and teaching the history of ancient Rome. That unparalleled knowledge is reflected in his magisterial overview of the Eternal City.

Rather than look only at the physical development of the city--its buildings, monuments, and urban spaces--Dyson also explores its social, economic, and cultural histories. This unique approach situates Rome against a background of comparative urban history and theory, allowing Dyson to examine the dynamic society that once thrived there. In his personal effort to reconstruct the city, Dyson populates its streets with the hurried politicians, hawking vendors, and animated students that once lived, worked, and studied there, bringing the ancient city to life for a new generation of students and tourists.

Dyson follows Rome as it developed between the third century BC and the fourth century AD, dividing the great megalopolis into distinct neighborhoods and locales. He shows how these communities, each with its own unique customs and colorful inhabitants, eventually grew into the great imperial capital of the Italian Empire.

Dyson integrates the full range of sources available--literary, artistic, epigraphic, and archaeological--to create a comprehensive history of the monumental city. In doing so, he offers a dramatic picture of a complex and changing urban center that, despite its flaws, flourished for centuries.

In "Ancient Marbles to American Shores," Stephen L. Dyson uncovers the history of classical archaeology in the United States by exploring the people and programs that gave birth to archaeology as a discipline in this country. He puts aside the common formula of chronicling great digs, great discoveries, and great men in favor of a cultural, ideological, and institutional history of the subject.
The book explores the ways American contact with the monuments of Greece and Rome affected the national consciousness. It discusses how the spread of classical style laid the groundwork for the development of the discipline after the Civil War and examines the period before World War I, when most of the institutions that led to the establishment of the discipline, as well as the first generation of American classical archaeologists, were created. It looks at the role classical archaeology played in the development of the American art museum since the later nineteenth century and considers changes in American classical archaeology from World War II to the mid-1970s.
Filling the void of information on the history of classical archaeology in the United States, this lively book is a valuable contribution to literature on a subject which is enjoying ever-increasing interest and attention.

Rome is one of the world's greatest archaeological sites, preserving many major monuments of the classical past. It is also a city with an important post-Roman history and home to both the papacy and the modern Italian state. Archaeologists have studied the ruins, and popes and politicians have used them for propaganda programs. Developers and preservationists have fought over what should and should not be preserved. This book tells the story of those complex, interacting developments over the past three centuries, from the days of the Grand Tour through the arrival of the fascists, which saw more destruction but also an unprecedented use of the remains for political propaganda. In post-war Rome, urban development predominated over archaeological preservation and much was lost. However, starting in the 1970s, preservationists have fought back, saving much and making the city into Europe's most important case study in historical preservation and historical loss.

Stephen L. Dyson finds in the experience of the Republic the origins of Roman frontier policy and methods of border control as practiced under the Empire. Focusing on the western provinces during the Republic, he demonstrates the ways in which Roman society, like that of the United States, was shaped by its own frontier.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Stephen L. Dyson finds in the experience of the Republic the origins of Roman frontier policy and methods of border control as practiced under the Empire. Focusing on the western provinces during the Republic, he demonstrates the ways in which Roman society, like that of the United States, was shaped by its own frontier. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Stephen L. Dyson examines rural communities as functioning, largely autonomous societies. Dyson traces the major outlines of community development from the end of the war with Hannibal to the early Middle Ages. He shows how local communities responded to changes in the greater Roman society while still retaining their distinctive identity. He examines the "typical" Roman community during the High Empire and explores the life cycle of rural inhabitants, showing how individuals- the aristocrats, the free poor, and the slaves- developed in relation to society as a whole.

The stories behind the acquisition of ancient antiquities are often as important as those that tell of their creation. This fascinating book provides a comprehensive account of the history and development of classical archaeology, explaining how and why artifacts have moved from foreign soil to collections around the world. As archaeologist Stephen Dyson shows, Greek and Roman archaeological study was closely intertwined with ideas about class and social structure; the rise of nationalism and later political ideologies such as fascism; and the physical and cultural development of most of the important art museums in Europe and the United States, whose prestige depended on their creation of collections of classical art. Accompanied by a discussion of the history of each of the major national traditions and their significant figures, this lively book shows how classical archaeology has influenced attitudes about areas as wide-ranging as tourism, nationalism, the role of the museum, and historicism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art.

In this book Stephen Dyson provides a new synthesis, describing current research on the Roman countryside within a topological rather than a geographical or historical framework. He first examines the Roman villa, looking at changing interpretations of the villa and the ways they have been shaped both by new information and evolving interpretative models, relating the survey-settlement evidence to larger questions of landscape use and landscape transformation during the Roman period. Focussing on areas where some of the most innovative rural research has been conducted - Italy, North Africa, Spain, and France - he discusses what happened in rural areas in the period of transition between the end of Antiquity and the emergence of medieval society. He shows that the period of transition was much longer than previously thought, and that there was tremendous variation not only between one part of the Empire and another, but also between micro-regions within a single province.