Rome's visual culture was fundamentally based in the urge to make a permanent memory of persons and (hi)stories, in order to establish the worth of individual and clan, city and empire within a universe divinely ordained to Romanitas. To tame their multi-ethnic Empire, Romans deliberately exported these art practices and appropriated their subjects' 'political" art traditions; as they embraced these Roman art habits to earn their masters' benevolence, the Empire's peoples in turn enriched the "mother language" of Roman art with distinctive regional accents. In rome and in the great provincial cities of Europe, Africa, and Asia, we will explore the socio-political iconographies of portrait, history and myth in many media, from monumental painting and sculpture to coinage and mass-produced pottery; and we will look at the operation of patronage and audience response in the major Roman(ized) contexts for assembling images, from country villas, gardens and tombs, to the urban spectacle spaces of forum, processional way, sanctuary and theatrical architecture.