The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann once met, in London, the poet Alfred Tennyson – who, though he saluted Mount Ida tenderly, never travelled much south of the Dolomites. In the course of conversation, Schliemann remarked: ‘Hissarlik, the ancient Troy, is no bigger than the courtyard of Burlington House’. ‘I can never believe that’, Tennyson replied.Footnote ¹ Most of us, I dare say, would understand Tennyson's disbelief – and agree, accordingly, with the sentiment that Troy the site is not a marvellous ‘visitor experience’. The location may be broadly evocative – for those imaginatively predisposed to survey a landscape of epic combat. Yet the excavated remains are rather underwhelming, and difficult to comprehend. The huge trench cut through the Bronze Age settlement by Schliemann, and the resultant spoil heap left on the northern edge of the citadel, certainly contribute to a sense of confusion. But that aside, the multiple layers of habitation, from c.3000 bc until Byzantine times, customarily represented like a pile of pancakes in archaeological diagrams, will test even those pilgrims arriving with some expertise in ancient construction methods. Choice finds from the city are lodged in remote museums; and the substantial extent of Troy in Hellenistic, Roman, and possibly earlier times, indicated mainly by geophysical prospection, is hardly discernible. So archaeologists, post-Schliemann, have to work hard to make the ‘Trojan stones speak’ – at least if they also wish to avoid the charge of being obsessed (as Schliemann notoriously was) with establishing some kind of historical reality for Homer's epic. The late Manfred Korfmann, director of the international excavations at Troy since 1988, produced an enthusiastic guidebook. Now his colleague C. B. Rose has made a one-volume synthesis of the results so far, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy.Footnote ² This will be particularly welcome for students unable or unwilling to access the annual excavation journal, Studia Troica. But novices, I fear, may soon despair of grasping the phases of stratification and ceramic assemblage more often cited by the author than explained (e.g. ‘LH III2a/VIh’). And any reader seeking new answers for old questions about the site's relationship to ‘the Trojan War’ should prepare for disappointment. Much of the evidence for Troy in the late Bronze Age – the period of c.1250 bc, generally reckoned to correlate with events transformed into epic – remains elusive: where, for example, are graves comparable to those of Mycenae? On the other hand, the lesson of the multi-period approach is that Troy the historical city largely constructs its identity upon Troy the mythical citadel – as does the Troad region. So Rose does well to devote an entire chapter to the remarkable archaic sarcophagus recovered in 1994 from a tumulus in the Granicus valley, with scenes of the sacrifice of Polyxena, Hecuba's attendant distress, and some kind of celebration. The iconography here may not be easy to relate to the gender of the deceased (a middle-aged man, according to osteological analysis). Yet it makes a visual statement about the sort of mythical bloodline to be claimed in the region: and, in due time (for Rose's survey is chronological), we will see the epigraphic and monumental evidence for similar ancestral claims by members of the Julio-Claudian clan.

Julius Caesar reportedly found Troy in ruins when (according to Lucan 9.964 ff.) he visited in 48 bc. However, the evidence for benefactions and rebuilding is not manifest until the time of Augustus and his successors. Their ideological motives are, of course, well known. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering a basic problem embedded in the literary tradition. Aeneas, the founder of Rome's greatness, was indisputably of Trojan origin, and indisputably a hero; all the same, he was a minor hero in Homer's poetic compass. Apart from commissioning a Latin epic to ‘big up’ Aeneas, what could these Roman would-be descendants do? One answer lies with the ‘Iliac Tablets’ – a series of miniaturist marble reliefs produced in the early Imperial period. These were recently reappraised by Michael Squire (see G&R 59.2 [2012], 277), but interest in their significance, first registered in the seventeenth century, is not exhausted, to judge from David Petrain's Homer in Stone.Footnote ³ Like Squire, Petrain objects to the view (associated principally with Nicholas Horsfall) that the tablets are ‘monuments of sham erudition’ (11) produced for the likes of Trimalchio – cultural imposters content with a smattering of epic recitation, and a muddled smattering at that. He prefers to speak of ‘creative reading and productive misreading’ (48) of the Homeric and epic cycle narratives that require ‘visual gymnastics’ (71) from the viewers of the tablets. So, on the best-known of the series, the Tabula Capitolina, the restricted field of decoration in no way seems to inhibit the iconographic ambition of not only reminding Roman viewers of ‘canonical’ events associated with the Fall of Troy (including the sacrifice of Polyxena), but at the same time magnifying the importance of Aeneas. The ‘tangle of overlapping sequences’ (134) was pitched not at some wealthy ignoramus but at a patron ‘sophisticated’ (in the best sense of that word) and attuned to the various powers of image and text. Petrain devotes some effort to considering where, typically, the tablets were displayed; more specifically, it suits his argument very well to pursue the implications of the provenance of the Tabula Capitolina – from ancient Bovillae, near the Alban hills, with its carefully attested status as ancestral home of the Julian gens.

How the Romans perceived objects, and their environment, and supernatural phenomena, is broadly the theme of Richard Jenkyns’ God, Space, and City in the Roman Imagination.Footnote ⁴ The monotheistic implication of the title sounds odd, perhaps, and the theoretical baggage of the term ‘space’ is largely ignored, or dismissed to a footnote; illustrations are sparse (seventeen in number) and hardly used as auxiliaries. Can anything so collective as ‘the Roman imagination’ even be defined? Yet readers are rewarded with a master class in how to scrutinize Latin literature with a view to extracting certain kinds of information. ‘Historians…have not sufficiently recognized the uses of imaginative literature’ (ix). Decades of teaching and engaging with his sources – mostly late Republican and early to mid-Imperial – give Jenkyns the graceful, if occasionally waspish, authority to collect a sort of sourcebook on ancient visual experience at Rome. I use the term ‘sourcebook’ cautiously: this is to read, rather than consult.

Were Romans generally attentive to the images and legends stamped upon their pocket money? Presumably most Britons today go about daily business happily ignorant of the Latin motto borne on every pound coin. However, the frequently demonstrable connections that existed between Roman (especially imperial) coin issues and public monuments, or the overt patronage of particular cults, give licence to a study such as Clare Rowan's Under Divine Auspices,Footnote ⁵ which traces the numismatic ‘propaganda’ of the Severans. We learn that Severus, whose stereotype is that of the soldier reliant primarily upon army support for his rule, was careful to invoke divine sanction, and to modulate the divinity according to geopolitical circumstances. So, for his final campaign, in Britain (ad 209–11), he introduced Neptune as spiritual sponsor. (The god did not preserve Severus.) His son Caracalla, again usually considered as a thug, was even more assiduous in showing himself acting with heavenly favour – from Aesculapius, Sarapis, Apollo, and other deities – as if to offset senatorial suspicions about his fratricidal succession. Perhaps these precedents gave Elagabalus the idea that with the right ‘feel-good’ coins in circulation, anything was possible. But Romans, clearly, were not prepared for the Syrian sun cult of which this young emperor declared himself extravagant high priest. Coming after, Severus Alexander wisely opted for the tried and traditional: Jupiter, Mars Ultor, Romulus.

Rowan's monograph provides a nice example of objects and images in the service of history. The coin issues of Elagabalus, for instance, go some way to supporting the literary tradition of outrage regarding ‘Heliogabalus’: that is, their iconography can be described as ‘far removed from the expected and established notion of a princeps’ (246). But the coincidence of written sources and archaeology is rarely neat – a lesson for which we now have a textbook, in the form of Jonathan Hall's Artifact and Artifice.Footnote ⁶ Attractively designed and elegantly written, this has its origins in a regular lecture course at Chicago. An epilogue essay on ‘Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian’ betrays the author's formation in early 1990s Cambridge, with references to a ‘Great Divide’ between classical archaeology and ‘new’ archaeology – an academic chasm that now seems more a feature of vain intellectual postures than marking any radical difference of method and approach. But the substance of the book, based on nine case studies, leads students directly into enduring problems of historical knowledge. The case studies begin with the Delphic Oracle and recent attempts to account for hieratic utterance by tracing emanations of hallucinogenic gases at the site; further chapters discuss, for example, the various identities proposed for the Macedonian ‘Tomb No. 1’ at Vergina, the location of the House of Augustus on the Palatine, and (finally) the evidence for the claim that the bones of St Peter lie beneath the high altar of his eponymous basilica in the Vatican. For each case, Hall provides an appendix of translated documents; and he maintains throughout a tone of what might be termed ‘healthy scepticism’: endeavouring to stay impartial, and never mocking or crushing, as if aware that all certainties are fragile – or that, whatever the source of our history, it is always best understood, in F. M. Cornford's phrase, as ‘myth-history’.

The spirit of Socrates might nod with approval at this educational mode. Indeed, one of Hall's cases concerns the material evidence supposedly attesting Socrates – the claims that a certain house excavated in a south-west angle of the Agora belonged to his friend Simon the cobbler, and that we can identify the ‘State Prison’ where the philosopher spent his poignant last hours. To search for places associated with great minds is always alluring, as if it might explain how those great thoughts were nursed. Add to this the natural interest for practising academics to know about the origins of their vocation, and we have the archaeological quest examined by Ada Caruso in her monograph Akademia.Footnote ⁷ It could well serve as another of Hall's case studies: when the reports of archaeological excavations (sporadic between 1929 and 1966) in the Hekadêm[e]ia suburb of Athens are put to scrutiny, they can be shown to be imprecise and tendentious; as for the ancient literary sources, these are conflicting and misleading. Do we know where Plato taught, or do we only think we know? Caruso divides her analysis of the evidence (both archaeological and literary) into three periods: the fourth to first centuries bc, the first to fourth centuries ad, and then the final phase up to Justinian's order of closure in 529. It is no disparagement of her efforts to say that much of the book is concerned with denying or qualifying the claims made by previous scholars. But, again, the importance here lies in establishing not so much what happened when Plato set up his school as what interested Romans – Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, et al. – and committed Neo-Platonists, such as Proclus, believed to have happened. A useful excursus on portraits of Plato indicates the need, especially during the second century ad, to have an image of the master. As likely as not, there may have been little by way of formal architectural grandeur to his institution of a ‘thinking-workshop’ in or near the Akademos gymnasium. But let us indulge the fond sentiment at least that somewhere just beyond the city walls of Athens an eccentric coterie had its regular meeting place – a model for the somewhat removed and ‘aloof’ status of higher education ever since.