The Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures Series is among the most prestigious international platforms for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture. They are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2018, the forty-fifth year of the lecture series, Robin Lane Fox, a noted scholar of ancient history, will discuss the natural world in pagan and Christian Rome.

The lectures will explore the differing approaches to the natural world by pagans and the early Christians, from Paul and the Gospels to circa 500 CE. They will bring out differing emphases in their respective writings and art and will ask what practical effects such different ways of seeing had on contemporary life.

The first lecture, “Cosmos and Landscape,” will delve into pagan and Christian views of creation. It will also investigate the dominance of humankind over the beasts and the vegetal world, as well as modern theories of a shift from a horizontal view to a vertical perspective of the relation between the natural world and the divine, which Christianity endorsed. In the second lecture, “Animal and Vegetable,” Lane Fox will address the hierarchy and symbolism of animals and plants in pagan and Christian art. The impact of these views on both groups’ experience, including martyrs and Christian holy men in isolated settings, will be considered. (Please note that the second lecture will be held at the British School at Rome.) The final lecture, “Signs and Catastrophes,” will reflect upon the previous two and compare omens and signs, prodigies and miracles, in pagan and Christian worldviews. A particular focus will be explanations of natural catastrophes, including volcanic and seismic disasters, which are still part of our world today. The lecture will conclude with reflections on the end of the world and the perverted natural symbols used to address it.

Robin Lane Fox is an ancient historian and gardening writer best known for his works on Alexander the Great. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and a reader in ancient history at the University of Oxford. A fellow and tutor in ancient history at New College from 1977 to 2014, Fox now serves as garden master and as extraordinary lecturer in ancient history for both New and Exeter Colleges. His major publications, for which he has won literary prizes, include studies of Alexander the Great and ancient Macedon, Christianity and Paganism, and the Greek Dark Ages. His most recent book, published in 2015, concerns the patristic author Augustine of Hippo. Lane Fox is also the gardening correspondent of the Financial Times.

Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864–1914) was an American lawyer and a lover of Roman history who lived on Capri from 1899 until his death. In his will he endowed a series of lectures to be jointly administered by the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome, to be delivered at both institutions. The revised lectures are typically published by the University of Michigan Press.

All lectures will be given in English.