Art and Archaeology

Mit Mythen Leben, the 2004 study of Roman sarcophagi by Paul Zanker and Björn Ewald, has appeared (with updated references) in English. 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 som