Roman metropolitan sarcophagi are often adorned with reliefs representing the lives of the heroes and heroines of Greek myth. Why were particular Greek myths so popular? How easy – or difficult – was it to identify and interpret the mythical stories represented? What emotions were the stories meant to evoke in the mourner at the tomb? And what might be the value of all these intricately carved marble sarcophagi for the writing of Roman social and cultural history?
In this volume a number of Classicists, Classical Archaeologists, and Ancient Historians – most of them not sarcophagus specialists – all attempt to ask some of the most fundamental questions about Roman mythological sarcophagi. Why was Greek myth such a popular choice for the decoration of these monumental marble coffins? How should we interpret the particular myths that were chosen? How easy – or difficult – was it to identify and interpret the mythical stories represented? What emotions were these often violent and tragic stories meant to evoke in the mourner at the tomb? What does it mean when portrait figures are inserted into scenes of myth? How does it affect our interpretation of the mythical imagery that some sarcophagi were completely buried, and their carved reliefs completely concealed? And what might be the value of all these intricately carved marble sarcophagi for Roman social and cultural history? Unsurprisingly, there is a great deal of disagreement on these important questions among the various authors, and on what a cultural history written from the point of view of Roman funerary commemoration might look like. What all contributors to the volume seem to agree on, however, is that the great corpus of carved sarcophagus-reliefs holds out extraordinary – as yet unrealized – promise for the cultural historian. And this selection of essays, all starting from very different premises and assumptions, allows the reader a series of brilliant glimpses of what that promise might yet deliver: a more nuanced and more inclusive understanding of the strange and distinctive society that flourished under the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries AD.
Christopher Hallett is Professor of Roman Art at the University of California at Berkeley. He is probably best known for his publications on Roman portraiture, but he is also a field archaeologist, who has worked for many years at New York University’s Excavations at Aphrodisias in Turkey.
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