Glocalizing the Pantheon. Empire and innovation in Roman construction technology (2025)
This chapter examines the transformation of Roman construction practices within the framework of imperial hegemony, exploring the intersection of globalization and imperialism. Traditional views on Romanization and Hellenization have evolved, with recent scholarship shifting towards globalization and glocalization to account for cultural interactions in the Roman world. While globalization offers a nuanced view of increased connectivity and its effects on cultural and material practices, it often overlooks the power dynamics inherent in imperialism. This chapter introduces “imperialization” as a concept that bridges the gap between globalization’s focus on connectivity and imperialism’s attention to power structures.
By focusing on key innovations in Roman building technology—such as opus caementicium, opus reticulatum, brick-faced concrete and the concrete dome—the chapter highlights how these developments were deeply rooted in the wealth and power inequalities fostered by Roman imperialism. Moreover, the spread of these technologies illustrates the glocal nature of imperialization, where local practices and materials shaped the adoption and adaptation of imperial innovations. Ultimately, this chapter offers a more precise analytical framework for understanding the impact of Roman imperial hegemony on technological practices, emphasizing both the imperial and local dimensions of change.
Bibliographical details
Type
Chapter in an edited volume, 2025. Publication of a February 2023 conference on Glocalization in the Roman World at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome, where I gave an invited talk.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2025). ‘Glocalizing the Pantheon. Empire and innovation in Roman construction technology’, in R. Montoya González and E. Dodd (eds), Between Global and Local. Glocal Refractions in Roman Material Culture and Society. Rome: Quasar, 65–85. [publisher's website]
Open Access
This chapter will be published in Open Access later in 2025.
Anchoring Science and Technology in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2025)
This collection of essays explores processes of innovation in Greco-Roman technology and science. It uses the concept of ‘anchoring’ to investigate the microhistories of technological and scientific practices and ideas. The volume combines broad, theoretical essays with more targeted case studies of individual inventions and innovations. In doing so, it moves beyond the emphasis on achievement that has traditionally characterized modern scholarship on ancient technology and science. Instead, the chapters of this volume analyse the manifold ways in which new technologies and ideas were anchored in what was already known and familiar, and highlight how, once familiar, technologies and ideas could themselves become anchoring points for inventions and innovations.
Table of Contents
Anchoring, Science and Technology in Greco-Roman Antiquity—an Introduction (Miko Flohr, Teun Tieleman, and Stephan Mols)
Part 1 Anchoring
How the Romans Conceived Their Roads: Inner Experience in the Anchoring of Technological Innovation (James W. McAllister)
Anchoring Innovation as a Form of Social Construction of Technology (Wiebe E. Bijker)
Beyond Innovation: Early Modern European Technological Values (Lorraine Daston)
Ancient Greek Doors and Their Humans (Ineke Sluiter)
Part 2 Innovation
The Reinforcement System of the Theban Treasury in Delphi (Jean Vanden Broeck-Parant)
From Ashlar to Brick: Anchoring and Innovation in Roman Building Practice (Miko Flohr)
Tiberius and the Threat of Innovation (Serena Connolly)
Functional Innovation in Bookcraft in Roman Egypt (Mark de Kreij)
Part 3 Technology
Anchoring, Innovation, and Ancient Near Eastern Technology (Jill L. Baker)
From Hand-Bow to Torsion Artillery Devices: Technological Innovation and the Human Factor (Maria Gerolemou)
Risky Business: Anchoring Blown Glass and terra sigillata Production in the Face of Risk (Anna Soifer)
Models and Modeling in Roman Technology (Rabun Taylor)
Of Myths and Machines: Anchoring Technology in Mythology in Imperial Rome (Michiel Meeusen)
Part 4 Science
Authorizing Prognosis in Prometheus Bound (Marianne Govers Hopman)
Anchoring in tekhnê. Weaving and Plato’s Distinction of Pure and Applied Knowledge (Giovanni Fanfani, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, and Annapurna Mamidipudi)
Cultural and Cognitive Anchoring in Hero of Alexandria’s Metrica (Courtney Roby)
Galen’s Use of Hippocrates as an Anchor for Medical Innovation (Teun Tieleman)
Bibliographical details
Type
Edited volume. Publication of a 2020 virtual conference on Anchoring Technology, held in the context of the 'Anchoring Innovation' project.
Reference
Flohr, M., S. Mols and T. Tieleman (2025). Anchoring Science and Technology in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Euhormos. Greco-Roman Studies in Anchoring Innovation 7. Leiden: Brill.
Open Access
The book is published in open access and accessible through the Brill website.
A Companion to Cities in the Greco‐Roman World (2025)
A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World offers in-depth coverage of the most important topics in the study of Greek and Roman urbanism. Bringing together contributions by an international panel of experts, this comprehensive resource addresses traditional topics in the study of ancient cities, including civic society, politics, and the ancient urban landscape, as well as less-frequently explored themes such as ecology, war, and representations of cities in literature, art, and political philosophy.
Detailed chapters present critical discussions of research on Greco-Roman urban societies, city economies, key political events, significant cultural developments, and more. Throughout the Companion, the authors provide insights into major developments, debates, and approaches in the field. An unrivalled reference work on the subject, the volume focusses on both the archaeological (spatial, architectural) as well as the historical (institutions, social structures) aspects of ancient cities, and makes Greco-Roman urbanism accessible to scholars and students of urbanism in other historical periods, up to the present day.
Part of the authoritative Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series, A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World is an excellent resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and lecturers in Classics, Ancient History, and Classical/Mediterranean Archaeology, as well as historians and archaeologists looking to update their knowledge of Greek or Roman urbanism.
Table of contents
Studying ancient (Greek and Roman) urbanism: research context, commonalities, and specificities (Arjan Zuiderhoek)
Part I : Urbanism and urbanization
Early Greek urbanism (John Bintliff)
Early Roman urbanism in its Italian context (Marleen K. Termeer)
City foundations and urbanism in the Hellenistic world (Gary Reger)
Urban patterns in the Early Roman Empire, 27 BCE–250 CE (Luuk de Ligt)
Part II : The urban landscape
Urban planning and development (Miko Flohr)
Agoras and forums (Christopher P. Dickenson)
Spectacle buildings and baths (Sadi Maréchal)
Urban housing in the ancient Mediterranean (Miko Flohr)
Traffic, movement, and the urban streetscape (Eric Poehler)
Greco-Roman urban water infrastructure (Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow)
Urban margins in Greco-Roman cities (Saskia Stevens)
Part III : The city as a political community
Politics and political institutions in Archaic and Classical Greek cities (Matthew Simonton)
Political institutions in Hellenistic and Roman-era Greek cities (Arjan Zuiderhoek)
Politics and political institutions in Roman cities in Italy and the West (Christopher J. Dart)
Kings, governors, and emperors: Greek cities’ interactions with powerful outsiders during the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Sviatoslav Dmitriev)
Part IV : Economy and society
Cities and socioecological systems in the ancient world (Stef Boogers, Bas Beaujean, Jeroen Poblome)
City and country in the Greek world (Edward M. Harris, David M. Lewis)
City and country in the Roman world (Tymon de Haas)
Greek urban social structures (Kostas Vlassopoulos)
Urban social structures in the Roman world (Emily Hemelrijk, Miko Flohr)
Part V : Civic ritual and civic identity
Civic cults in Classical Athens (J.Z. van Rookhuijzen)
Urban religion in Roman cities (Jörg Rüpke)
Part VI : Cities and war
Fighting poleis: Greek cities at war (Roel Konijnendijk)
War and the city in the Roman world (Paul Erdkamp)
Part VII : Imagined cities
The (utopian) city in Greek political thought (Robert Ballingall)
Cicero's ideal city (Dean Hammer)
Representations of the city in Greek and Roman literature (Christiaan Caspers)
The visual imagination and representation of the ancient city (Annette Haug)
Part VIII : Late Antiquity and beyond
Late Roman cities in the West (Douglas Underwood)
Greco-Roman cities in the Late Antique East (Ine Jacobs)
The afterlife of the ancient city (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill)
Bibliographical details
Type
Handbook with 32 chapters, co-edited with Arjan Zuiderhoek (Ghent), with contributions by an international crowd of specialists.
Reference
Flohr, M. and A. Zuiderhoek (2025). A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. [publisher's website]
Open Access
The volume has not been published in open access, but it is available online through the publishers website DOI: 10.1002/9781119399940.
Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2024)
How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work? It has long been assumed that elite thinkers disparaged physical work, and that working people rarely commented on their own labors. The papers in this volume challenge these notions by investigating philosophical, literary and working people’s own ideas about what it meant to work. From Plato’s terminology of labor to Roman prostitutes’ self-proclaimed pride in their work, these chapters find ancient people assigning value to multiple different kinds of work, and many different concepts of labor.
Table of contents
- Introduction: Value at Work (Miko Flohr and Kim Bowes)
- Plato’s Exemplary Craftsman (Ineke Sluiter)
- Πόνος and πονέω in Aristotle (J.J. Mulhern)
- Galen on Hands and the Teleology of Work (Ralph M. Rosen)
- On Valuing Roman Art and the Labour of Art Making (Lauren Hackworth Petersen)
- Emotional Labour in Antiquity: The Case of Roman Prostitution (Sarah Levin-Richardson)
- Meaning in the Making: Representing Glass Production in Imperial Rome (Bettina Reitz-Joosse)
- Who’s Afraid of Wage Labour? Analysing Some Texts of the Second Sophistic (Christel Freu)
- The Value of Work: Work and Labour within the Roman Upper-class Household (Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga)
- The Labour of Listening: Internal Audiences in Theocritus (Amelia Bensch-Schaus)
- Labor in the locus amoenus: Agricultural Industry as Premise of Pastoral Leisure (Riemer A. Faber)
- Work Underfoot: The Rustic ‘Calendar’ Mosaic of Saint-Romain-en-Gal (Nicole G. Brown)
- Rural Labour and Identity at Vagnari in Southern Italy (Liana Brent and Tracy Prowse)
- Foreign Labour, Common Ground: The Value of Craftspeople in Early Democratic Athens (Helle Hochscheid)
- The Craftsman’s View: Labour and (Self-)Appreciation as Reflected in Signatures (Natacha Massar)
- Professionals as paradeigmata of aretê in Hellenistic Honorific Decrees (Antiopi Argyriou-Casmeridis)
- Images of Craft: Activity and Presentation of Work on Gallo-Roman Tombstones (Fanny Opdenhoff)
Bibliographical details
Type
Edited volume resulting from the June 2021 Penn-Leiden colloquium on ancient values, co-organized by Kim Bowes and myself, which focused on Valuing Labour.
Reference
Flohr, M. and K. Bowes (2024). Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Mnemosyne Supplements 481. Leiden: Brill.
Open Access
This volume is not available in open access, but it is available digitally through the website of Brill.
Urban Heterogeneity and Technological Innovation in the Roman Empire (2023)
How are we to understand technological innovation in the Roman Empire? In which way did the Roman Empire transform or even enhance (ongoing) processes of technological innovation in the ancient Mediterranean? This article explores the relation between imperial hegemony, social heterogeneity, and technological change. The abundance of archaeological and epigraphic evidence makes it possible to both reconstruct a historical geography of urban heterogeneity on the global scale, and to explore its impact at the level of individual regions and cities. This article argues that urban heterogeneity became unequally distributed over the Roman Empire, peaking in the core of the empire in central Italy. Emerging heterogeneity created ideal circumstances for technological innovation, and several key innovations from the Roman period can not only be associated with these extremely heterogeneous micro-regions, but also seem to be facilitated by their very heterogeneity. This perspective adds a new dimension to debates about technological innovation in the Roman Empire that moves beyond the opposition between optimists and pessimists that has long dominated scholarship.
Bibliographical details
Type
Article in peer-reviewed journal, 2023. Publication of a June 2022 conference on Urban Heterogeneity in Copenhagen, where I gave an invited talk.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2023). ‘Urban Heterogeneity and Technological Innovation in the Roman Empire’. Journal of Urban Archaeology 8: 127–145.
Open Access
The chapter was published in open access (doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1484/J.JUA.5.135662).
"En wij dan?" Het dekolonisatieonderzoek en de postkoloniale ontheemden (2023)
Ruim twee maanden na de presentatie van het samenvattende rapport van het NIOD-onderzoek naar de dekolonisatieoorlog in Indonesië organiseerde de Tweede Kamer op 30 mei 2022 een rondetafelgesprek waarin aan organisaties van belangengroepen gevraagd werd te reageren op het rapport en daarover met Kamerleden in gesprek te gaan. De vertegenwoordigers van Indische en Molukse organisaties waren die dag eensgezind in hun boodschap: deze postkoloniale migrantengroepen, wier families zonder uitzondering hard geraakt waren door het dekolonisatieproces, voelden zich in het rapport nogal over het hoofd gezien. Namens de stichting Pelita, die opkomt voor de belangen van Nederlanders met een (familie)verleden in Indië, verwoordde Rocky Tuhuteru het als volgt: ‘er is een groot gevoel van miskenning, niet alleen in de Molukse gemeenschap maar zeker ook, als ik dat zo namens hen mag zeggen, in de Nederlands-Indische gemeenschap en in de totokgemeenschap’.
Wat gebeurde hier? Waarom waren vertegenwoordigers van een aantal groepen die in het dekolonisatieproces een centrale rol hadden gespeeld collectief zo ontevreden over dit enorme onderzoek, waar kosten noch moeite gespaard waren om de dekolonisatieoorlog van zoveel mogelijk zijden te belichten? In dit artikel wil ik proberen deze tegengeluiden inzichtelijk te maken, en betoog ik dat meer gedaan had kunnen worden om te anticiperen op de noden van deze groepen postkoloniale ontheemden, die door deze periode in sterke mate persoonlijk gevormd zijn. In dat kader is het allereerst belangrijk goed te begrijpen hoe de dekolonisatieoorlog en de jaren hierna eruitzagen vanuit het perspectief van de mensen die in Nederlands-Indië waren geboren, getogen en geworteld, maar uiteindelijk geen deel zouden worden van Indonesië. De jaren die volgden op de Indonesische onafhankelijkheidsverklaring van 17 augustus 1945 waren voor al deze mensen onoverzichtelijk, chaotisch, en soms erg angstig, en voor velen stond de uiteindelijke uitkomst – een definitief vertrek uit de Indonesische archipel – volstrekt niet op voorhand vast. Dit maakt dat deze jaren voor de nakomelingen van deze mensen van existentiële betekenis zijn: antwoorden op vragen over waarom zij bestaan, waarom zij Nederlander zijn, en hoe zij zichzelf verhouden tot het Nederlandse koloniale verleden, hangen deels af van hun interpretatie van de gebeurtenissen in deze periode. Lees verder.
Bibliographical details
Type
Article in journal, 2023. Written at the request of the editors. Part of 'discussiedossier 'dekolonisatie'.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2023). ‘"En wij dan?" Het dekolonisatieonderzoek en de postkoloniale ontheemden’. Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 136.3: 263–270.
Open Access
The article was published in open access (DOI: 10.5117/TvG2023.3.007.FLOH).
Prosperity and Inequality: Imperial Hegemony and Neighbourhood Formation in the Cities of Roman Italy (2023)
What did emerging imperial hegemony do to urban communities in Roman Italy, and how does it shape the Roman cities we know so well? Urban landscapes in Late Republican Roman Italy came to accommodate increasing levels of socioeconomic inequality, and this profoundly changed the ways in which urban communities functioned. This chapter explores what that meant for processes of neighbourhood formation. Starting from the idea that inequality can be physically expressed through urban housing stocks, the paper analyses the impact of the increasing wealth inequality brought about by Roman hegemonic prosperity at the micro-level. It starts by identifying the mechanisms of urban development through which inequality could accumulate in urban space, and then proceeds to analyse the actual developments in Roman Italy, contrasting the nature of neighbourhood formation in mid-Republican Italy with that in Late Republican Italy.
The chapter argues that, in the decades that followed the Roman conquest of large parts of the Mediterranean, cities at the heart of Rome’s imperial network increasingly developed urban landscapes defined by inequality, and that this had immediate consequences for the ways in which these quarters could function in everyday practice, entrenching socioeconomic distinction and hierarchy permanently in the urban landscape. However, it is also clear that this did not work out in the same way in every city: in some places, such as Pompeii, inequality became much more strongly pronounced in an earlier period than in other cities (e.g. Norba, Ostia, Paestum, Herculaneum).
Bibliographical details
Type
Chapter in edited volume, 2023. Publication of a November 2021 conference on Neighbourhoods in Kiel, where I gave an invited talk.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2023). ‘Prosperity and inequality: imperial hegemony and neighbourhood formation in the cities of Roman Italy’, in A. Haug, A. Hielscher and A.-L. Krüger (eds), Neighbourhoods and City Quarters in Antiquity. Design and Experience. Berlin: De Gruyter, 157–173.
Open Access
The chapter was published in open access through De Gruyter (doi: 10.1515/9783111248097-010).
An institutional revolution? The early tabernae of Roman Italy (2022)
How can we understand economic innovation in antiquity, and what does it mean for our understanding of ancient economic history? This paper studies the appearance of a very common urban feature in the cities of Roman Italy - the taberna. The paper develops around three arguments. At a very general level, it argues that commercial facilities as architectural concepts should be seen as historical phenomena, meaning that their emergence in some form or another represents a development in the history of markets, and that architectural change constitutes a logical focal point for discussions about the history of markets. Second, more specifically, this paper will argue that this is particularly true for the Roman taberna, which becomes visible in our archaeological and textual record only at a relatively late point in Roman urban history, suggesting there may have been a preceding period in which this phenomenon did not play a role in everyday economic practice; indeed, it will be suggested that this period ended more recently than has commonly been assumed. Thirdly, this paper will argue that the taberna did not have any direct predecessors in the Greek world, as has sometimes been suggested, but was an innovation of Middle Republican Central Italy that at some point was picked up and further spread by both the Roman authorities and private investors. This innovation, it is argued, was so fundamental for the history of retail in Roman Italy that it should count as an ‘institutional revolution’: it profoundly transformed the rules of the game in everyday economic practice.
Together, these arguments serve to make the point that, when discussing the economies of the market in the Greco-Roman World, ‘innovation’ should be a leading historical concept. That is to say, the subliminal message of this chapter is that debates about Greco-Roman economic history should not so much be primarily interested in how markets worked, and how this fits – or does not fit – with our conceptualizations about pre-modern or modern economies; rather, they should aim to explore how market institutions and market practices developed over time and adapted to changing economic realities. This position should be taken as opposing itself to approaches to the Roman economy that unduly privilege structural analysis over historical development, often in terms strongly opposing the Roman past to the modern world. As this paper will highlight, this obliterates many changes and developments within the Roman world.
Bibliographical details
Type
Chapter in edited volume, 2022. Publication of a February 2019 conference organized in Kassel, where I gave an invited talk.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2022). ‘An institutional revolution? The early tabernae of Roman Italy’, in K. Ruffing and K. Droß-Krüpe (eds), Markt, Märkte und Marktgebäude in der antiken Welt. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 425–439.
Open Access
A PDF of this publication is available in Open Access via Leiden University (https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3561535).
Between Aesthetics and Investment. Close-Reading the Tuff Façades of Pompeii (2022)
Why did Pompeians suddenly - in the mid second century BCE - start building houses with façades of finely polished tufa ashlar? This chapter was published in a volume on architecture and the ancient economy edited by Monika Trümper and Dominik Maschek. It offers a qualitative assessment of the economic rationale underlying the transformation of building practice in mid-second century BCE Pompeii. In this period, local traditional building practice based on carefully stacked blocks of travertine was replaced by a much more varied building practice that combined mortar with a number of regional building materials, including tuff ashlar.
The chapter observes that the new practice partially started from aesthetic considerations, but emerged with a clear economic rationale that both minimized costs and anticipated upon return on investment. Putting these developments in a broader Italic context suggests that the emerging building practice was facilitated by the unique local material circumstances at Pompeii: the developments in building technology were to a large extent local in nature, and should be seen as independent of architectural change. This, in turn, suggests that understanding the building practices and construction economies of the Roman world depends to a significant level on qualitative, but contextualized analyses of developments at the local level.
Bibliographical details
Type
Chapter in edited volume, 2022. Publication of a 2019 conference organized at the Freie Universität Berlin, where I gave an invited talk.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2022). ‘Between aesthetics and investment. Close-reading the tuff façades of Pompeii’, in M. Trümper and D. Maschek (eds), Architecture and the Ancient Economy. Analysis archaeologica, monograph series 5. Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 155–172. ISBN: 9788854912922.
Open Access
This publication is not currently (2023) available in open access. You can buy the volume here. For availability in libraries see worldcat.
Information Landscapes and Economic Practice in the Roman World (2021)
How did the Roman Empire transform the way in which people involved in longer-distance trade could get their information about local markets? How did economic information circulate within and between cities? What did the 'information landscapes' look like with which traders would have to familiarize themselves? This chapter was published in a 2021 volume on Managing Information in the Roman Economy, edited by Cristina Rosillo-López and Marta García Morcillo. It explores the reality of asymmetric information in Roman economic practice by analyzing the historical development of 'information landscapes' in the Roman world, and by assessing what these imply for the contexts in which asymmetric information could play a role in everyday transactions.
I started from the idea that space remains an underexplored issue in approaches to economic practice in the ancient world, even though it is clear that, particularly in the Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire, the nature and the dynamics of space change drastically, within regions, they change as a consequence of political unification, economic integration, and urbanization and, within cities, they change because of developments in architectural practice and increasing monumentalization. The chapter discusses the nature and impact of these developments both at the regional level and the urban level.
On the regional level, it observes the emergence, within the Roman Empire, of a limited number of clusters with a rather dense pattern of urbanization, implying strongly integrated regional information networks, and large areas were cities were fewer and further in between, suggesting more dispersed information networks, and a less natural circulation of information. These differences matter for economic actors operating at a supra-local level, and they have implications for the information strategies they can and cannot develop.
Within cities, there is an increasing development toward the construction of permanently accessible public facilities in and around the urban center which suggests a more predictable communication landscape, and therefore a more stable circulation of information, while the increasing amounts of shops along urban thoroughfares particularly in Roman Italy increased the density of urban information landscapes. This means that more, and better information was available to more people. The final section of the chapter explores what this means for information asymmetries, contending that this transformed the role that information assymetries played in everyday economic praxis.
Bibliographical details
Type
Chapter in edited volume, 2021. Peer reviewed. Publication of a 2018 conference organized in Sevilla, where I gave an invited talk.
Reference
Flohr, M. (2021). ‘Information landscapes and economic practice in the Roman World’, in C. Rosillo López and M. Garcia Morcillo (eds), Managing Information in the Roman Economy. Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. London: Palgrave, 205–228. ISBN: 9783030540999
Open Access
A PDF of this publication is available in Open Access via Leiden University (https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3216895).
Pictures
Featured Image
This map of the Roman world shows the spread of evidence for urban culture in the Roman world. It combines epigraphic evidence - inscriptions referring to key urban processes - with architectural remains of public buildings such as baths, theatres and amphitheatres, and it is color-coded to highlight the regional density of this evidence.
