ABSTRACT
The overriding impression the material arts of Rome offer is of opulence, solid permanence, and the application of practical skills which were largely inherited but which were adapted to the economic and expansionist tendencies that resulted in the growth of the empire. Roman sculpture, learned from the Greeks and Etruscans, reached a peak in the first and second centuries AD which has hardly been matched since. It was, however, the development of the arch, the vault, and the dome, and the use of concrete, which gave distinction, serviceability, and grandeur to Roman domestic and public architecture and civil engineering.
