Doctoral candidate Jaymie Orchard has been researching how Romans used plunder in their storytelling of battles and victories.
Who gets to create knowledge? And whose knowledge is, or is not, respected? These questions form the basis of PhD candidate Jaymie Orchard’s research into the stories ancient Romans told about the battles they fought, and how their victories were remembered.
Rather than focusing on the written narratives Romans recorded, Jaymie has looked at the visual media they used to tell their stories, because the visual media would have been more accessible to the general public; “more of the population would have come in contact with these displays and been able to understand them”.
Jaymie is particularly interested in ‘plunder’ – the materials stolen during war and brought back to Rome before being paraded through the city and erected as monuments.
“I am hoping to understand how plunder was displayed to create narratives of victory and how these narratives may have been intentionally manipulated.
“I am most interested in looking at examples of when these visual narratives do not align with written ones. Throughout my thesis I interrogate how this may have impacted the Roman public’s understanding of war and victory.”
Jaymie says the display of plunder has been recognised as a form of propaganda, but not many people have thought about how it might contribute to the manipulation of the memory of victory and conquest.
“I am really interested in who gets to create knowledge, whose knowledge is – or is not – treated with respect and passed on, and how the process of creating knowledge is neither neutral nor objective.”
Jaymie says there are parallels between ancient Rome and modern day.
“The imperial powers of today benefit from the denial of historic and ongoing violence and oppression through rewriting the past and manipulating the understanding of modern history.
“So I think that by studying how the Roman public’s understanding of conquest and victory and empire were manipulated I can also explore how that is being done in our modern day.”
They say they hope their research will help give people new tools and language to unpack and unlearn the propagandistic narratives that we are surrounded by today, and to question the colonial status quo.
They hope to encourage the public to be critical of crafted narratives and the motivations behind them.
“Everything we read has been written from a certain perspective, for a specific purpose, and with an intended audience in mind, so considering those aspects should always be a part of reading history, or, really anything else.
“Whether you are reading a history of ancient Rome or a history of Aotearoa, considering who is writing and why they are writing it, is crucial to understanding how you should weigh what they are saying.”
They encourage anyone seeking a deeper understanding of any topic to “read widely and read from a variety of perspectives, especially those not deemed dominant, normative, or privileged”.
The most surprising thing Jaymie has come across during their research so far is the lack of previous research which interrogates how visual narratives might have been manipulated.
“Classicists are trained to consider the biases in written sources, but I have been surprised how often they haven’t considered how visual media might be manipulated in similar ways.”
Jaymie says their PhD research is “fairly unique” because it focuses on the manipulation of memory through visual narratives rather than written sources, and they are also applying queer theory.
Queer theory has not been widely used in Classics in Australasia before, and when it has been, it’s been applied to myths or literature, they say.
A highlight of Jaymie’s PhD journey so far has been organising what is believed to be the first queer theory panel at the Australasian Society for Classical Studies conference earlier this year.
While the conference has seen an increase in papers which critically consider gender, and this year there were a few papers which used queer methodologies, Jaymie along with their colleagues were “so excited to have had the opportunity to present a cohesive panel which centred queer theories and showcased different queer approaches for the first time in the history of the conference”.
Jaymie is in their final year of their PhD, and they plan on submitting their thesis in early 2026.
-Kōrero by Koren Allpress, internal communications adviser
Classics at Otago
Classics at Otago is a single major subject which combines Classical Studies, Greek, and Latin. You can do any combination of papers from these three subjects which suits you. No previous knowledge of Classics is required. We teach both Greek and Latin as beginners' courses, and encourage our students to include some language papers in their Classics major.
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