ABSTRACT
Let us begin with a vision of late antique Rome as seen through the eyes of an outsider, albeit an outsider with a difference: the emperor Constantius II, visiting Rome for the first time in 357, as reported by that artful observer Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus tells us that when Constantius arrived in Rome he headed, in considerable pomp, to the Forum Romanum. His (and our) vista of the city is given from the Rostra:
So then he entered Rome, the home of empire and of every virtue, and when he had come to the Rostra, and saw the most renowned Forum of ancient dominion, he stood amazed, and on every side on which his eyes rested he was dazzled by the concentration of marvellous sights.1
