The central preoccupation of my book project is to ask how a young elite man could “act his age” in his specific historical context—and how his performance of age was often contingent on the known performances of others, such as the enslaved boy. Inspired by the overlapping fields of age, performance, and gender studies, I suggest that we can view age as a performance, informed by historically determined “age scripts.” Deliberately drawing on diverse textual and visual evidence—from graffiti to bearded portraits—my book tracks changes in these “age scripts” to demonstrate how the history of age groups can bring intersectional complexity to our understanding of power relations at ancient Rome. In closing, the dark legacy of these scripts, as appropriated in Fascist era Italy, is examined to contend that the project of ancient history can and must speak to the growing field of reception studies in classics.

The photograph of Evan Jewell was taken by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar.