Download PDF | (Greek Culture in the Roman World) Mont Allen - The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi_ Allegory and Visual Narrative in the Late Empire-Cambridge University Press (2023).
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THE DEATH OF MYTH ON ROMAN SARCOPHAGI
A strange thing happened to Roman sarcophagi in the third century: Their Greek mythic imagery vanished. Since the beginning of their production a century earlier, these beautifully carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes. How, then, do we make sense of this imagery’s own death on later sarcophagi, as mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever came to the fore? What does such a profound tectonic shift in the Roman funerary imagination mean for our understanding of Roman history and culture, for the development of its arts, for the passage from the High to the Late Empire and the coming of Christianity, but above all, for the individual Roman women and men who chose this imagery, and who took it with them to the grave? In this book, Mont Allen offers the clues that aid in resolving this mystery.
Mont Allen is Associate Professor of Classics and Art History at Southern Illinois University. A National Lecturer for the Archeological Institute of America, he is a recipient of the University’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award as well as a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interdisciplinary program on Ancient Practices.
INTRODUCTION
The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi OPENING A Pair of Sarcophagi: Moonstruck Lovers A strange thing happens to Roman sarcophagi in the middle of the third century: their mythic imagery vanishes. These beautifully carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes since the very beginning of their mainstream production early in the second century CE, when burial had replaced cremation as the favored means for disposing of the dead. Evocative testament to Rome’s ongoing love affair with classical Greek culture, they had derived emotional force from their resonance with an artistic tradition centuries old while providing catharsis and consolation to those still living.
How then to make sense of this imagery’s own death on later sarcophagi, as mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever – such as the late third century’s endless procession of sarcophagi featuring bucolic shepherds and studious philosophers – came to the fore? What could such a profound tectonic shift in the Roman funerary imagination mean, for our understanding of Roman history and culture, for the development of its arts, for the passage from the High to the Late Empire and the coming of Christianity, but above all, for the individual Roman women and men who chose this imagery as the lens through which they wanted to be remembered, and who took it with them to the grave?
A concrete example or two will help to throw the matter into relief. Sometime around 230 or 240 CE, a couple, anticipating their eventual demise, commissioned a pair of lavish sarcophagi to receive their remains.1 Now, ordering a pair of them – one for each corpse – was indeed unusual. It was far more common for a couple to purchase a single sarcophagus for their joint use. But in this case, our couple clearly had money to spare, and so opted for separate coffins – coffins that, nonetheless, were commissioned to serve as pendants to each other, with dimensions that were almost identical, and carved with scenes that complemented each other, representing female and male variations on a theme. Both (Figs. 1 and 2) are now in the Louvre. And for those unfamiliar with the conventions of sarcophagus imagery, their sculpted scenes may seem bewilderingly busy: as is typical of pieces carved near the end of the Severan period, they display a “horror vacui,” or fear of empty space. Every inch of the surface is crammed with figures and objects – bodies intertwining, drapery fluttering, tiny heads peering out – leaving no passage empty.
Once one’s eye settles, however, individual figures quickly resolve. On the first2 of the two sarcophagi (Fig. 1) we make out the riotous members of the Dionysiac retinue: frisky Satyrs cavort with enraptured Maenads/Bacchants while musically inclined Centaurs pluck their strings and embrace their young. Eventually, one recognizes the protagonists: just to right of center is Dionysus himself, lord of wine and altered consciousness. He daintily approaches the sleeping form of Ariadne, his bride to be, shown reclining on the right. She, marooned by Theseus on the isle of Naxos midway between Crete and Athens, has found temporary relief from her abandonment in the comforting arms of sleep. In a moment, however, her relief will be permanent: Dionysus, stepping down from his Centaur-drawn chariot, advances to embrace her and make her his immortal queen.3
The other sarcophagus4 of the pair (Fig. 2) depicts the story of Selene, goddess of the moon, and Endymion, the handsome young shepherd who caught the goddess’s eye and whom she continues to visit nightly, in love, for eternity.5 No other mythological story could rival it for popularity on Roman sarcophagi. Our eyes are now primed to recognize the general composition – it is essentially the same as that we just saw used for Dionysus and Ariadne (matching pieces indeed) – and so we have no trouble identifying the protagonists. In the center, Selene gracefully alights from her sky-tracing chariot and advances toward the reclining form of her lover at the right. A torch-bearing Cupid at her feet helpfully tugs her forward (“Yes, thank you, but I know where I’m going!” we can imagine her replying gently), while another, further forward, holds his torch aloft to illuminate Endymion’s features for the approaching goddess. We know that he already slumbers, not only from his pose – fully reclining, one hand curled as a pillow to support his slumped head – but from the youthful figure of Hypnos (“Sleep”) himself, recognizable through the diminutive wings sprouting from his forehead, who bends over Endymion to pour out his potent narcotic – essence of poppies – into the youth’s eyes.
A variety of subsidiary figures, many evoking a pastoral context, help to round out the scene. These include, at left, a seated shepherd whose flock of fluffy goats peek out placidly here and there across the entire frieze; Aura, cloak fluttering, who holds Selene’s rearing horses in check; the reclining form of Tellus, personification of the fertile Earth; Cupids and more Cupids; and, finally, four figures who personify the local landscape and thus ground the story in a particular geographic context: behind Aura’s outstretched arm, a small bearded divinity, yet unidentified; standing at the far right, two nymphs of a local spring; and seated high up in the background just to the right of Selene, holding reeds, the personification of Mount Latmos itself, the mountain in Caria on whose slopes the story of Selene and Endymion unfolds.
The viewer will also notice that the pastoral elements woven into the main frieze are picked up and continued on the lid. On the lid’s right half, we confront a small garland-weaving workshop: one man carries a basket of flowers, while a boy and an older woman, facing each other, string the fragrant blooms together. The scene is eminently idyllic – a shepherd at right leans languidly on his staff, bookending the scene – and note how cleverly it plays with the imagery directly below it on the chest, where another flower-bearing figure (Hypnos with his poppies) similarly approaches another shepherd (the reclining Endymion). But the vignette would also, in this context, have resonated directly with Roman funerary ritual and the viewer-visitor’s own actions: Roman families typically brought garlands of flowers such as these into the family tomb, draping them directly over the sarcophagi of their honored dead.
The scene of garland production on this sarcophagus thus served as a concrete reminder of the honors that this family paid to the deceased buried within – a permanent promise, in stone, of the real, transient, yet endlessly repeated floral gifts that the family brought to their dearly departed whose corpse lay just on the other side of this carved stone slab.
The left half of the lid, meanwhile, offers another mythological image with bucolic overtones: Paris, the princely shepherd, charged by Zeus with judging the beauty of Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. He is shown seated, as every judge should be – although here not on a curule chair but on the only thing available in the wilds of Mount Ida, a handy rock. Playfully marking him out as a rustic too is what he holds in his left hand: not the scepter expected of a magistrate but the short, curved, knob-topped throwing stick of a shepherd or hunter (pedum in Latin, lagobolon in Greek, bunny-bopper in colloquial English). Before him the three goddesses display themselves, while Hermes waits in the background to bring the trio, and Paris’s verdict, back to Olympus. What, we may ask, is Paris doing here on the lid of this sarcophagus?
He is included not for any direct narrative connection with Endymion – their stories never intersect, after all – but for thematic reasons. Both are mountain-dwelling herders – mortal shepherds who, moreover, both have the good fortune to be approached by goddesses with beauty and love on their mind. What was the allure of this imagery? Did commissioning a sarcophagus covered with gods and heroes from Greek mythology merely serve to broadcast one’s cultivated classicism, one’s education and refinement, and thus proclaim the deceased’s rank while lending him dignity, as Arthur Nock first proposed decades ago?6 Surely, the mythological imagery must have done this – among many other things. But to think that it did solely this and nothing more, as if making a generalized claim to elite status exhausted its significance, would be myopic.
It would give no insight into why some mythic tales appear far more frequently than others on these coffins (it so happens that Selene and Endymion were a very popular choice7 ), nor why the repertoire of mythological scenes preferred by Romans for their sarcophagi should have differed so starkly from the repertoire of mythological scenes that they commissioned to decorate the walls of their houses, their floors, and their tableware. Nor can it be that Romans simply chose certain mythological tales over others according to random personal preference – that is, that these were scenes that individuals “just happened to like” – as modern teenagers might choose posters of favorite movies, or whatever band was popular that month, to decorate their bedroom walls.
Body Divine, Head All Too Human: Mythological Portraiture In this case, as in most, we can be sure that our Roman couple selected the mythic figures that they did for a pointed purpose. These figures were meant to serve metaphorically as stand-ins for the couple themselves, a lens through which the viewer was to apprehend the deceased and reimagine them in mythic terms. Our couple wanted to be read as Selene and Endymion, and as Ariadne and Dionysus – not only wanted it, but demanded it, as a closer look at the relief carving makes clear: note that while the heads of every other figure are completely sculpted, the faces of Selene and Endymion (and Ariadne on the matching piece) – that is, the main mythic protagonists – remain strikingly blank. They were never completed. This is because they were intended to be customized with the specific portrait features of the deceased couple themselves (an intention that, in this particular case, was not finally realized).
The general phenomenon, typically termed “mythological portraiture,”8 is well known. While it may strike our modern sensibilities as an odd habit, equipping the idealized bodies of mythological protagonists with the portrait heads of real people – often grizzled and craggy with age – was, it turns out, a relatively common practice on Roman sarcophagi. It served a crucial representational function: it made clear to the viewer who was to be identified with whom. Sarcophagi served, after all, as central loci for self-representation, for both the individual dead and the familial group.
Sometimes their imagery was calculated to express the hopes and vision, the ideal self-image, of the deceasedto-be. At other times it was composed to speak instead to the emotional needs of those left behind. Often it did both. But whatever the particular content, if its message was to reach its intended audience, the audience had to be drawn into the scene. This was especially the case with mythological imagery, whose power to move the viewer always depended on metaphorical or symbolic connections rather than any claims to literal depiction. Relationships between various figures within the scenes thus had to be clarified, and links between those figures and the audience had to be forged, if viewers were to read life – the life of the deceased, their own life, the life here – through the images in front of them. Precisely how these links were forged and relationships clarified depended on the genre of imagery.
Roman carvers had at their disposal numerous “tricks of the trade,” all designed to bridge the gap between the real world and the image world.9 Scenes of groups banqueting on the lids of sarcophagi,10 for example, served to evoke the refrigerium, that honorary meal brought by the family to the tomb, whether during the feast of the parentalia11 or on the birthdays of the deceased, and consumed in the presence of those same sarcophagi.12 The chiseled garlands festooning many coffins served as permanent stone reminders of the real garlands of fresh flowers that the family draped over coffins in the tomb.13 Onlookers whose only “job” within the scene is to view the main action were injected to serve as internal surrogates for the viewers themselves, modeling and directing their own gaze.
And ancillary figures inserted to mourn the passing of other mythological heroes and victims (Persephone, Creusa, Patroclus, the Niobids, Hector, Meleager – the list goes on) gave mythological visage to the lamenting family itself, channeling their grief and crystallizing their loss, just as figures shown reclining with their eyes closed – whether in death (Meleager, Patroclus) or in death-like sleep (as with our Endymion and Ariadne) – mimicked in mythic guise the real corpse reclining within the coffin. But of all the ways to link real human subjects with mythological subject matter, none was more direct than the strategy of mythological portraiture: the outfitting of mythological characters with portrait heads bearing the facial features of real individuals (whether the already-deceased or the soon-to-be-so). It was a peculiarly Roman practice, one that would have struck Greeks as strange and a bit brazen. Yet studies of mythological portraiture on Roman sarcophagi seldom emphasize the peculiarly Roman conceptions of personhood that underlay this practice.
This is a shame. If Romans found it easy to equip mythological figures with portrait features of real individuals – or to reverse terms, found it natural to mount portrait heads on idealized mythic bodies – this was because Roman culture, in contrast to Greek, had long held the head by itself sufficient to constitute personhood and able, thus, to represent the total individual.14 Hence that characteristically (and, in ancient comparative terms, bizarrely peculiar) Roman form of portraiture, the bust.15
The crucial corollary: it meant that the depiction of the rest of the body needed bear no literal resemblance to the real woman or man. The body type and its costume – and here we should imagine nudity as just another type of costume – was thus free for choosing according to other interests, to serve desires other than the mimetic. To put it baldly, we should think “body as symbolic prop.” Did a husband commissioning a statue of his wife wish to proclaim her matronly virtue? Her portrait head could be mounted on a statue body wreathed modestly in stola and palla. Did he prefer rather to proclaim her beauty? Her head could be placed atop the nubile body of Venus instead.16 The repertoire of well-known and endlessly copied Greek statue figure types, supplemented by the system of attributes, offered any number of gods and heroes who, recognizable through their bodies alone, could serve Romans as props for mythological portraiture. Sarcophagi, with their mythological friezes featuring dozens of different character bodies, offered all the same options and many more. The modern response to this Roman habit is not usually kind. Students often greet it with befuddled chuckles. It can be hard, even for professional Romanists long used to studying this material, to fight off a reflexive aesthetic aversion to its perceived incongruities. Hence, for example, writing of such mythological portraiture on our sarcophagi, one scholar calls attention to “the change of style from the rest of the reliefs’ elements that is displayed so often by these portraits,” and goes on to deduce, with a hint of surprise, “that both artists and patrons had little concern about the clash of appearances that results from the portraits’ imposition.”17
But to term it a “clash of appearances” is already a modern response, one that betrays our continuing difficulties in (the reader will forgive me here) entering the Roman head. Our cultural conditioning may lead us to giggle at seeing the craggy and battered face of an elderly magistrate crowning the body of an Achilles (Fig. 3) 18 or a Hercules (Fig. 4),19 because we expect the depiction of a body and its head to be governed by the same aesthetic conventions, a single, unifying logic. To the Roman mind, however, each had a logic of its own.
Mythological portraiture thus presented no incongruity.20 But why deploy it on sarcophagi? It went some way toward solving one of the issues inherent to using myth as metaphor: the problem of knowing who was to be identified with whom. Within the open-ended framework of mythological allusion, mythological portraiture provided an anchor. After all, the mere presence of mythological imagery on a sarcophagus did not by itself ensure that viewers would actively identify the coffin’s occupant with one of the mythic protagonists shown and proceed to read the deceased’s life – or death21 – through the lens of that myth, any more than guests reclining in, say, one of the House of the Vettii’s dining rooms would have assumed that they were meant to identify the house’s owner with the gored Dirce, ever-spinning Ixion, or dismembered Pentheus that they saw painted on the walls.22 Grafting the deceased’s portrait features directly onto the body of a goddess or hero was thus a way to channel myth’s rich yet allusive semantic potential. It put into motion, made explicit and emphatic, a comparison that would otherwise have remained merely a vague possibility.23
It demanded that the myth be applied to the person. The Roman couple who commissioned this pair of sarcophagi thus wanted us to imagine them – wanted to imagine themselves, wanted to imagine each other – as Selene and Endymion, and as Ariadne and Dionysus. They could hardly have chosen a richer pair of myths for a funerary context. Above all, these stories served as images of consolation, inviting the surviving family, whether bereaved spouse or later generations, to envision that the dearly departed who was reclining inside the coffin,24 body laid out in the same pose as our mythic sleepers, was not really dead, but, like them, merely sleeping – whether temporarily, like Ariadne, or eternally, like Endymion. Applied to the dead, these scenes presented a comforting fantasy (to call it a “fiction” would be too harsh): they reimagine death as peaceful slumbering, an endless and blissful sleep in the arms of love.25
Nor would any viewer have thought this a stretch: in likening death to sleep, these reliefs presented the visual equivalent of a comparison that Romans often made, in textual form, through their epitaphs.26 Extending the analogy, mourners would easily draw parallels between Selene’s torch-lit visits to Endymion, asleep like a corpse, and their own regular torch-lit visits to the tomb to honor their own endlessly sleeping deceased – “a compelling correspondence between the action depicted on the relief and the activities of the sarcophagus’s viewers,” as Verity Platt has put it.27 But such readings hardly exhausted their appeal.
They served also as visions of love that not even death could sunder, proclaiming that the wife would continue to visit her husband nightly – meeting in their dreams, whether his or hers – even though one had fallen eternally asleep, just as Selene continued every night to visit Endymion. This sentiment too is known from ancient literature28 as well as a handful of inscriptions on Roman tombstones, in which a still-living spouse plaintively hopes to be reunited with her or his (we find both represented) departed beloved – not in the afterlife, but at night, in the surviving spouse’s dreams.29
A bereaved husband could thus hope to see himself in Endymion, finding respite from his grief in sleep, when a vision of his departed wife might, like Selene, appear before him in his dreams, just as a bereaved wife similarly could hope to experience what Ariadne did, approached by the image of her lover while she slept. And if these images provided consolation to a bereaved wife or husband, they also spoke to the emotional needs and desires of later generations.30 Other family members, whether the couple’s children, grandchildren, or descendants to come, would similarly find solace in envisioning that death held no pain, but only eternal slumber, for their ancestors; that all were, and would continue to be, reunited in dreams; and that their own life, in the most literal physical sense – their very own genetic conception – had its source in the passionate romance enjoyed by their forebears.31 Romans of the third century could be romantic sentimentalists, and nowhere is this more evident than in the scenes that they chose for their coffins, through which they wanted forever to be remembered. And in addition to these messages of comfort, there was yet another one activated by this imagery, this one carrying a divine jolt: it figured the epiphanic appearance of a god to a mortal. This must have reverberated powerfully with the religious convictions of Roman viewers, giving these scenes a potent numinal charge.
Gods and Barnyard Animals: Shepherds Take the Stage But what about the bucolic imagery? Paris judging a beauty contest in idyllic surrounds, a rustic garland-weaving workshop, and, above all, the shepherds, the herding dogs, and the fluffy sheep and goats that cascade over the front of this sarcophagus and peek out from every nook and cranny – what was the point of inserting these motifs? Yes, they were mythologically appropriate to the main narrative: Endymion was a shepherd, so the other pastoral motifs help set the stage or, in the case of Paris, echo it thematically. But they were included for other reasons as well. Bucolic scenes carried very particular associations in the Roman mind. For the well-off urban dweller who felt beleaguered by the city’s noise, its hectic bustle, its crushing mass of bodies, its endless stench and dreck, pastoral motifs provided escape.33 They conjured up fantasies of a rustic paradise, a world without cares, a simpler, happier place where flowers grew free for the plucking, frisky lambs gamboled for the sheer joy of being alive, and shepherds could while away their days in placid contemplation.
Peace, tranquility, and bliss were thus the contours of the emotional landscape evoked by bucolic scenes. And as we have seen, the mythological sleepers that adorn these coffins – Ariadne finding respite in dreams as her savior approaches, Endymion slumbering effortlessly and eternally as his lover nears – were similarly chosen for the comfort they provided. They served as invitations to imagine the deceased, whose body lay stretched out just behind these sculpted forms, on the other side of the coffin’s wall,34 in like terms, with death itself thus reimagined as something idyllic: as sleep – peaceful, tranquil, and blissful.
If the sculptors of these sarcophagi thus piled on goats and garlands, sheep and shepherds, it was because these pastoral motifs, deployed here as supporting elements, spoke the same idyllic language as did the mythological sleepers who were the main subject.35 But let us now fast-forward some half a century, from 230–240 CE, when our anonymous Roman couple commissioned this pair of sarcophagi, to the years around 280 or 290 CE, when another Roman, a high-ranking equestrian by the name of Iulius Achilleus, commissioned an imposing sarcophagus36 (Fig. 5) now in the Epigraphic Collection of the National Roman Museum (housed in the Baths of Diocletian). As the inscription on his sarcophagus proudly proclaims, Iulius Achilleus had been Procurator in charge of the Ludus Magnus, Rome’s most important gladiatorial barracks, where men were trained for death in the nearby Colosseum. The position carried great power and status – and also wealth, if the size of his coffin is any guide.
It is the largest and most elaborate pastoral/bucolic sarcophagus yet discovered. Horses prance beside bulls while goats nibble on leaves, rams butt heads, and ewes rest placidly: a multiregister marvel, with some of the lushest effects of surface texture to be found in the third century. (The contrast between sleekly polished horses and bulls and shaggily drilled sheep and goats is especially delightful.) Bucolic scenes never present the gritty realities of ancient pastoral life, of course – ceaseless tending of the flocks, baking in ferocious summer heat, freezing in winter, at the mercy of the elements and uncertain food supplies, miserable accommodations, a life of wretched poverty – but instead serve up a sanitized fantasy of rustic life designed to indulge the pampered yearnings of elite city-dwellers eager for scenes of tranquility.
Of course we know this, just as the coffins’ carvers knew it, and doubtless those who commissioned and bought them knew too. Yet how effectively the imagery still works. Here we are given three shepherds hard at work, as Rome’s well-off liked to imagine them. One sits before his straw hut (it arches up behind him, following the curve of his own back), gently milking one of his ewes. A second shepherd, higher up/further back, uses a curved knife to whittle a throwing stick; listen closely and you can almost hear him whistling while he works. And a third is busily doing nothing at all: seated on a rock, he rests his elbow on his stick, hand held up to his chin in a classic gesture of languid contemplation. He is lost in placid thought, his eyes softly focused, if we could see them but a little closer, on his own quiet musings.
These are the faces of pastoral tranquility, of idyllic bliss. And not just those of the shepherds, but the animals as well. Sheep turn to smile at each other while nimble goats nibble on green leaves and cattle happily chew away. As on the pair of sarcophagi in the Louvre, then, bucolic motifs have been pressed into service here as “landscapes for the soul,” evoking a world of peace and tranquility. And yet, notice what is conspicuously absent from these scenes on Iulius Achilleus’s sarcophagus: there are no mythological characters. This coffin’s cavorting herds and their gentle herders are emphatically not subsidiary figures, not mere secondary cast playing supporting roles to the likes of Selene and Endymion, or to Cupids and Auras, or to Tellus and Hypnos. They are, rather, the main cast in their own right. Deities and mythic heroes here have been ejected from the stage, their positions assumed by barnyard animals and their humble tenders. I hope the reader will pause here for a moment to savor the sheer strangeness of this coup – how unexpected it is – while also wondering what on earth such a transformation could mean.
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