Mit Mythen Leben, the 2004 study of Roman sarcophagi by Paul Zanker and Björn Ewald, has appeared (with updated references) in English.Footnote ¹ This is a cause for gladness among all Anglophones engaged in the teaching of ancient art, because for non-German readers there was frankly nothing to match the intellectual scope and illustrative quality of Zanker–Ewald. Our only regret may be that students will find this explanation of the imagery on the sarcophagi so convincing that further debate seems futile. It is well known that Roman sarcophagi, of which thousands survive from the second and third centuries ad, have had a ‘presence’ or ‘afterlife’ in Western art history for many centuries: some were even re-used for Christian burials (the tale of one such case in Viterbo, the so-called ‘Bella Galiana’ sarcophagus, might be one addendum to the bibliography here). But what did they once signify? Many were produced in marble workshops of the eastern Mediterranean, from which the suspicion arises that Roman customers may not have exercised much discrimination when it came to selecting a subject or decorative scheme. (Our authors rather sidestep the question of how much was carved at sites of origin, such as Aphrodisias, then completed – with portrait features added? – in Rome.) Accepting, however, that an elaborate sarcophagus was a considerable investment – the cost calculated as about six months’ or even a year's salary for a captain in the Praetorian Guard – and supposing that the imagery were more than a status symbol, we are left with essentially two options. One is to follow the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont and others in analysing the iconography in terms of its clues to Roman beliefs about the afterlife. For certain images of myth this seems to work very well – the story of Alcestis, for example; for others, rather abstruse allegories must be sought: what eschatology is lodged in Medea's tragedy, or a scene of Achilles on Skyros? The alternative is to follow Zanker and Ewald in supposing that the sarcophagi do not so much represent the belief systems of the deceased as offer a sort of visual counselling to the bereaved. Hence the title – living with myths, not dying with them: for the regular occasions on which Romans were obliged to remember and honour the dead (parentalia, rosaria, etc.), sarcophagi on display in family burial enclosures provided ‘encouragement to free association’ (31) in various therapeutic and consolatory ways. These of course encompass some of Cumont's reconstructions of Stoic comfort and so on – but with its emphasis upon the response of viewers, the Zanker–Ewald approach clearly allows more flexibility of significance. To say that the message often reduces to ‘it could be worse’ is a brutal summary of the sympathetic and subtle readings expounded in this book. Yet occasionally one could wish for more sophistry. For example, in discussing the consolatory potential of images of Niobe and her unfortunate offspring – a ‘massacre of the innocents’ with obvious pertinence to mors immatura – the authors allude (74) to the curious persuasive strategy deployed by Achilles when he, at last in a mood to yield up the mangled body of Hector, invites the grief-stricken Priam to supper (Il. 24.603 ff.). As Malcolm Willcock long ago showed (CQ 14 [1964], 141 ff.), Achilles resorts to a formulaic paradeigma: ‘You must do this, because X, who was in more or less the same situation as you, and a more significant person, did it.’ Only in this the case the a fortiori argument relies upon a rather implausible twist to the usual story, namely that Niobe, having witnessed the deaths of her twelve children – and with their corpses still unburied, since everyone in the vicinity has been turned to stone – adjourns to dinner. No other telling of the myth mentions this detail: indeed, Niobe herself is usually the one turned to stone. Of course this version suits Achilles well enough: if Niobe lost all her children but not her appetite, why should Priam, who has lost merely one of his many sons and daughters, hesitate to share a meal? But did Homer expect his audience to be disconcerted by such mythical manipulation, or was it typical of what happened when myth served as consolation? And if Achilles/Homer may resort to such embroidery, did educated Romans feel inclined to do likewise? Was this part of the presence of myth in ‘everyday life’?

A collective book review allows one to make the sort of juxtapositions that occur in everyday life – the plummet from the sublime to the earthy. Here is one such: let us imagine that a Roman family emerges from a mournful veneration of ancestors to find themselves downwind of a local cloth-processing workshop. Relics of premises reckoned to be where a fuller had his establishment (fullo or fullonica) are known from Pompeii, Ostia, and other Roman cities. However, defining exactly what went on in such premises is not always easy. Fulling is broadly understood as the process of cleansing and thickening cloth by treading, rubbing, and washing it. But was this part of textile manufacture, or the making of garments? Did it include dyeing? Was only wool treated in this way? The final result appears to have been a denser, smoother material, purged not only of dirt but also of lanolin and natural fats. A possible purging agent leads some historians to relish the nose-wrinkling thought of Pompeians condemned not only to spend whole days up to their knees in stale urine but also to live in the vicinity of such an ammoniacal stench. Revision of the archaeological evidence, and its socio-economic implications, is called for by Miko Flohr's study of The World of the Fullo.Footnote ² As he points out, alternative detergents may have been used (‘Fuller's earth’ is a naturally occurring clay). So perhaps the shock to the nostrils was not so great as we suppose. And it seems that treading in the liquid all day is misinformation arising from an incomplete literary source. In any case, the results of the cleansing and smoothing process carried a good deal of social and political significance: it gave a tunic or toga that ‘whiter-than-white’ appearance distinguished in Latin as candor, and of course this was practically and symbolically how anyone must appear who was standing for political office – ‘whitened’ (candidatus).

Further use of images, structures, and monuments to illuminate Roman society and economics is apparent in the collection of essays entitled Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture.Footnote ³ It was a contention of G. E. M. de Ste Croix that ‘the working class’ in general were wholly invisible in classical art – so as a frontispiece to his ideologically impassioned The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981) he resorted to Van Gogh's Potato-eaters. The iconographical absence remains, I think, remarkable. But we have become more ingenious about looking for traces of slave presence in the archaeological record, and this collection of essays is testament to that ingenuity. In the epigraphic record, for instance, slaves are rarely mentioned as such (e.g. servus). So how might servile status be otherwise indicated? One theory is that a Greek cognomen in a Latin inscription, if unaccompanied by the letter ‘L’ for libertus, gives a clue. Another line of enquiry is shown by analysis of graffiti from the so-called ‘school for [imperial] slaves’ or paedogogium on the Palatine – a rare instance of ‘direct voice’ from slaves (including the well-known cartoon comment on Christian belief). Then there is the scrutiny of Roman domestic architecture with a view to its ‘geography of containment’ – building on the work (again, ideologically impassioned) of Andrea Carandini et al. at Settefinestre c.1980 – and, alongside this, the study of certain household utensils and artefacts reflective of slave roles (candelabra, tray-stands, and so on). The late Natalie Kampen leaves a paper on several military stelae from the North-west Provinces showing freedmen as valued assistants to the deceased. The most oblique angle to material evidence is taken by the editor herself: reflecting upon scenes of ‘Cupid Punished’ in various media, she argues that the apparent frivolity of this visual trope is deceptive. Little Cupid shackled and wielding a hoe, or bound and put in a cage, does more than mark amorous mischief: he is part of ‘the Roman habituation to physical brutality’ (173), a society in which the torture and degradation of slaves was routine.