Getting There: Improving Attendance in the Buffalo Public Schools

High rates of absenteeism in the Buffalo Public Schools (“BPS”) are strongly linked to low academic performance and graduation rates. Several difficult issues contribute to the low attendance in Buffalo, including poverty, segregation, mental and physical health challenges, access to transportation, and problems with school climate and student engagement. Many effective programs to improve attendance are already in place, but more work needs to be done. Recent data provides some insights into the attendance situation in BPS. For example, recent BPS data shows a direct correlation between high school students’ attendance rates and their success on Regents exams. In spring 2014, there was a difference of 35% between the passage rates of students with satisfactory attendance and those with severe absenteeism

Review of, Faces of Power: Imperial Portraiture on Roman Coins

The book under review, Faces of Power: Imperial Portraiture on Roman Coins, is a slim catalogue designed to accompany an exhibit of the same name held at the Nicholson Museum in Sydney, Australia between April and September 2007. Overall the catalogue is enjoyable to read and would be an asset to anyone wishing to gain a quick overview of the Roman Empire through its coinage. It could also be adopted as a supplementary text or resource for a survey course of Roman history as a way of integrating material and literary evidence

Roman Monuments

This truly monumental book stems from the author’s doctoral thesis completed in 1993 at Oxford, and the intervening years have certainly allowed for the development and reμnement of his thoughts. The signiμcance of architecture for people living in the second century is the central focus of the book. By using a combination of written and visual evidence, T. tries to understand how the ancient viewer perceived the architectural forms around him. His μrst task, undertaken in the Introduction and picked up throughout the book, is to explain the term ‘monumentality’ and to trace its usage from antiquity up to modern times. The term ‘monumental’ should not be assigned only to a building of great size or one that serves as a commemoration, for ‘monumental buildings transcended natural grandeur because of their practical value’ (p. 239). Those structures that were used daily by many people were considered to have the greatest monumentality by contemporaries

Review of Eve D\u27Ambra\u27s, Roman Women

A compact and practical introductory volume to Roman women is a welcome addition to the study of women in Classical antiquity. Part of a new Cambridge Introduction to Roman Civilization series, Eve D\u27Ambra\u27s Roman Women aims to introduce the daily lives of Roman women to students with no previous knowledge of the topic. D\u27Ambra demonstrates how a range of sources, written and material, are valuable not just for reconstructing how women lived but also for examining the positions of and attitudes towards women in Roman society

The Economic and Cognitive Impacts of Personal Benefaction in Hispania Tarraconensis

This chapter addresses the economic and cognitive roles of personal benefaction in Hispania Tarraconensis, a province of the Roman Empire encompassing a northeast region of modern Spain. During the Imperial period, in particular, individuals and families financed public works, buildings, statues, foundations, and various forms of entertainment such as games, banquets, and performances. As a way of assessing both the financial and cognitive impact of these benefactions over time, this paper analyzes a corpus of inscriptions from Hispania Tarraconensis dating from the Augustan period through the late second century. Assessing the financial impact of benefaction involves charting the cost outlays and whether the donation was a single or continuing occurrence, while analyzing the cognitive impact considers such factors as the function of the monument or activity funded and whether the benefaction might have encouraged competition among the wealthy to make even greater contributions. [Testa]mento Cornelia[e P]roc[ulae ex rel]ictis HS(sestertium) N(ummis) XL et ad[iectis] HS(sestertium) [N(ummis) V(milia)[C]CCCXCV [de suo aedem] consum[mavit - - - l]ib(ertus). (IRC III, 36)1 This text informs us that in Emporiae in the first century, Cornelia Procula allocated 40,000 sesterces in her will for the construction of a temple, to which her freedman added 5,495 sesterces to complete the project. This inscription is an apt example to begin this chapter on civic munificence for it has several features shared with numerous other inscriptions. The text has been reconstructed from six disjointed fragments found through excavations carried out in the twentieth century, just as most inscriptions are fragmentary. It records the construction of a temple; architectural projects were one of the most common undertakings by benefactors. The benefaction was completed with funds bequeathed by the donor; posthumous donations are a small but significant number of the whole corpus of benefactions, which necessitate another individual—sometimes a family member or, as in this case, a freed person—to bring the project to fruition. Finally, the plaque would have been mounted on the temple proclaiming in large letters the donor’s name and her donation. The advertisement of one’s generosity is paramount to the discussion of civic munificence in the Roman Empir

Reconsidering Opportunities for Female Benefactors in the Roman Empire: Julia Antonia Eurydice and the Gerontikon at Nysa

A small, yet significant body of archaeological and epigraphical evidence demonstrates that women in the Roman Empire undertook a variety of public roles. Recent research has centered on wealthy, elite females, who made benefactions in Rome and around the empire in the form of building projects, alimenta, and entertainment. These endeavors required a great deal of money and placed the benefactress in the eye of the public. One of the better known examples of such a woman is Plancia Magna from Perge, who in the early second century held the positions of demiourgos, gymnasiarch, and priestess of Artemis and renovated her city\u27s gateway and built a triple archway to include statues of the imperial family, city founders, and her own family. 2 Although our only information about Plancia Magna comes from epigraphic evidence, it seems as though she was able to control her own wealth and had attained a position of prominence within her city. Some scholars, including Riet van Bremen,3 have claimed that women made such donations according to a family precedent for giving. That is, elite women sponsored building projects or donated funds for the public good because their own families were known for such philanthropic work and they were simply continuing this tradition. The women were acting, not as individuals, but as members of their families

A New Analysis of Antonine Statuary Groups in Roman Spain

This article bridges two fields often kept separate: the study of portrait statues and the study of the statue bases and their texts. However, the statues and their inscribed bases are complementary and necessarily must be studied together. The bases provide information about the titulature of the emperors and the dedicants. Portrait heads have been used in the creation of typologies and identification of regional variations. Too often the portrait statues of one imperial family member are studied in isolation from those of other family members and even from their original context. In this paper, I gather for the first time evidence for 11 statuary assemblages representing the Antonine family in Roman Spain. The inscribed bases and portraits are considered along with their display locations and the dedicants. I combine an investigation of visual representations with the study of imperial ideology to learn more about the life of provincial towns in Spain. Although many of these objects were uncovered without scientific excavation, patterns of dedication can, nevertheless, be assessed. This study paves the way for future inquiries into imperial portraiture in Spain and the practices of benefaction beyond dedications to the imperial famil