Today we look at the rich art, architecture and history of Sicily – the largest island of the ancient Mediterranean and, in the ancient world, the wealthiest. First we see the Carthaginians, the first major invaders of Sicily and their distinctive, enigmatic culture, still visible on the small island of Motya. Afterwards come the Greeks, with beautiful cities such as Agrigento, and Syracuse and Segesta, filled with theatres and temples to the gods. Then we see Roman Sicily, peaceful and prosperous, with cities such as Syracuse and Taormina, and the sumptuous ‘mosaic villa’ of Piazza Armerina.
Biography
Dr Paul Roberts OBE is Research Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. Paul has been a lecturer with the Arts Society/NADFAS for over twenty years, has travelled extensively to societies across the UK, and has also lectured on numerous cruises in and around the Mediterranean. Like all of us, he enjoys the immediate contact of face to face meetings, but is happy to provide online lectures if desired.
He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. He then lived in Italy for several years, teaching and researching. He has travelled throughout the former lands of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, and has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he is currently working on a Roman Villa in the Molise region of the Central Apennines.
His research focuses on the daily life of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds, and he has written books and articles on Greek and Roman daily life, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sicily, Roman Emperors, mummy portraits, and Greek and Roman ceramics and glass. In 2024 his book “Ancient Rome in Fifty Monuments”, looking at the history of Rome through its monuments and the Emperors who built them, was published by Thames and Hudson.
From 1994 to 2015 he was Senior Roman Curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). Arriving in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2015, in 2019/20 he curated Last Supper in Pompeii, a tribute to the Roman love affair with food and wine.
He was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List 2025 for services to Archaeology and Heritage.
