The first focus is Rome and Italy, in the Republic and under the first emperors, 5th-1st c. BCE. As the empire expanded, so will we, around the 1st-4th-c. CE Mediterranean world, first to see what Romans put there and then how local peoples came to make Roman art. Public commemorative for grand communal buildings, spaces and tombs illuminates Romans constructing a shared visual language, for religion, politics, enterainment; individuals’ possessions - for houses, gardens, villas and palaces - document collecting, art markets and industries, and ordinary people’s attachment to sculptural arts. So we’ll look at little possessions, like sculpture to wear as jewelry or drink from as banquet cups, as well as at state arts from mass-produced coins to big triumphal arches. Roman art first arose among older and broader traditions, especially, of Greeks; so we study seminal interaction with the Hellenistic world, the replicating of Greek images and hiring of Greek artists, as well as distinctive Roman art practices like the passions for showing history in the round and in relief, for private portraiture, for story-sarcophagi, and for statuary gardens. For the evolution and range of Roman sculpural styles, we’ll explore how stylistic choice could serve Roman social and political needs. And we’ll read ancient texts in translation, from novels to encyclopedias : besides documenting lost monuments, theyspecially help us see how and why Romans wanted to be in a world full of sculpture.