It's taken me a long, long time, but I finally finished this encyclopedic set of lectures on the visual aspects of the Roman Empire. I have to admit I didn't realize that's what this was - I thought it was a survey of the historical layers of the city of Rome, but I ended up enjoying it nonetheless. It goes into sometimes excruciating detail (some lectures I napped through and had to replay) but I did learn a lot about why things looked the way that they did. The best lectures were near the end, where the professor took you a fictional visitor on a trip through Pompeii and Rome, pointing out all the things they'd see and experience (and want to see) on such a trip. Since Jamie and I have been to Pompeii and spent several days in Rome a few years back, the locations were familiar to us. Especially in Rome, where we understood where things were in relation to the Capitoline Hill and had seen the foundations of the ancient Temple of Jupiter that was the centerpiece of the city. One surprise was that the main street of ancient Rome, the Via Flaminia (Via Lata once it entered the city gates) - is the main shopping drag now, the Via del Corso, so we had a sort of armature of streets we knew that made the locations make sense.
Good set of lectures, but they could have been condensed substantially -there were six lectures on arena combat, executions and games. It's nice to understand how prisoners were executed and gladiators were trained and fought, that that's a little overkill (pun intended).
