Between the death of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire, an invisible revolution took place — not of politics, but of form.
Echoes of Empire reconstructs the lost aesthetic culture of this threshold period: the secret arts, counterfeit objects, and acoustic experiments that flourished in the cracks of collapsing order.Drawing upon forged manuscripts, speculative archaeology, and recovered fragments, the book proposes that echo — rather than marble or might — was the defining aesthetic principle of late Republican Rome. Orators transformed rhetoric into sound sculpture; sculptors redefined imitation as transcendence; architects designed chambers tuned to the voice of power. As the Republic faltered, beauty turned recursive, haunted by its own repetition.
The book follows these lost lineages through eight reconstructed studies: from the Copyists’ Guild, who perfected forgeries more beautiful than their originals, to the Gardens of Dissolution, where senators staged vanishing landscapes as rituals of decline; from the counterfeit triumphs of failed generals to the perfumed politics of Cleopatra’s Rome. Each chapter uncovers a civilization in the act of aesthetic self-erasure — building ruins in advance of history.
Visually, Echoes of Empire is presented as a recovered monograph: marginal annotations, faded diagrams, and speculative catalogues accompany the text. Together, they reveal a civilization obsessed with the persistence of its own voice — a world that knew its end was near, and chose to make that ending beautiful.
In the tradition of Church Music and Vanishing Point, Echoes of Empire continues Undercurrent Press’s investigation into the hidden architectures of cultural transformation. It asks not how empires are born, but how they sound as they die.
Empire of Echoes: Lost Aesthetics at the end of the Roman Republic
Thomasina Salles