Introduction

In his description of a recently unearthed sarcophagus, the great sixteenth-century antiquarian Pirro Ligorio speculated about the significance of its imagery. The sculpted relief represented the death of Adonis, and Ligorio reasoned that it commemorated one who not only had shown undaunted courage in the face of dangers but had indeed done so in the prime of youth, only to be struck down by a sudden, violent death:

The examples for our life are found in contemplation of the dangers that befall others. Whoever it was who exhibited the death of Adonis on his sarcophagus—which was found in the Via Latina, and on which was depicted that young man who, having thrown aside his quiver and bow, was killed by the boar—clearly advises us that a man who would be young and bold in the face of dangers could die as Adonis, the son of King Cinyras, died. Perhaps whoever was buried here died in this fashion. Whatever befell him on account of his great spirit is thus excused, as is his unexpected death, by the example of the loss of that hero who did not know how to take advice from Venus, who loved him so much and who desired that he not set himself to so dangerous a deed for the sake of so brief a pleasure.^[1]

Ligorio’s brief account touches on the narrative power such images hold, the very human desire for exempla, and the ancient penchant for evoking them by way of mythological analogy. Yet Ligorio wavered between a realistic and an allegorical reading of the sarcophagus’s imagery, and when confronted by that of other monuments, he was no less equivocal:

Several others have put chariots on their monuments with undoubted significance, to demonstrate that they died unfortunately, having been thrown headlong when driving: having trusted they would win the palm, they had instead broken their necks. Whence they compared their death with that of the ancient heroes…who, although they were considered like gods because of their virtue, nevertheless had inadvertently lost their lives. Those to whom such events occurred distinguish their tombs by similar examples, thus demonstrating the certainty of death and the variety of its occurrence, as well as both the vices and the virtues of those of long ago, by a certain kind of parallel.^[2]

Whether he read the imagery of the sculpted reliefs realistically or allegorically, for Ligorio it was the narrative force of the imagery that drove their implicit analogies.

The correspondence between the dead and the imagery with which they were celebrated was seldom neat, and the analogy between the two rarely simple. In the absence of an explanatory inscription or portrait, there is nothing to inform the beholder that the deceased, identified with the heroic Adonis by Pirro Ligorio, had died young. And indeed, Ligorio’s analogy, which assumes that within the casket lay another impetuous youth struck down by an early death, is unwarranted—as an examination of the full corpus of surviving sarcophagi reveals.

These brief passages from Ligorio’s antiquarian treatise suggest the scope of this study, which addresses the character and structure of mythological narratives as they appear on Roman sarcophagi. This book is about the meaning of these monuments and, in particular, about the significance of their visualization of narrative. The chapters that follow, which attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the mythological sarcophagi—for, as we shall see, this is a historical problem requiring reconstruction—measure the strengths and weaknesses of such an exemplary response as Pirro Ligorio’s.^[3]

A series of themes will be developed throughout. First, that mythology is to be regarded, not merely as a repertory of stories, but as an evocative force in ancient life and ancient imagery. The appeal to myth was fundamental to an ongoing process of cultural self-identity, a process in which the myths evolved along with the people who had recourse to them. As ancient heroes were regarded as exempla for the present, their exemplary character was subject to continuing elaboration in light of present needs. The mythological tradition was, in fact, a powerful means by which the complicity between the past and the present was manifest—a complicity fundamental to the very notion of tradition.^[4]

Second, essential to the mythological imagination was an ancient penchant to see things in relationship on the basis of distinctive, specific affinities; the technical term elaborated by the Greeks for the apprehension of such resemblances, and for arguments made on the basis of such inferences, was analogy.^[5] As it likened one thing to another, analogy was a fundamental trope for the ancient discovery of order, and one of its primary characteristics was that it signaled the ascendance of similarity over difference.^[6]

In the visualization of the ancient mythological narratives, artists, no doubt together with their patrons, evolved a powerful phenomenon of abstraction, which allowed for a looser association of ideas and images on the basis of resemblances. The third of this book’s themes concerns this concomitant to analogy, one more supple and subtle, here termed typology. This representational mode was rooted in the use of conventionalized visual forms, or motifs, for the depiction of particular stories. For example, a reclining man is a motif, whereas a man who reclines in the pose devised specifically for Endymion is a type.^[7] Yet as we shall see, the characteristics of a type might be employed, with minor variations, in the representation of a series of related tales.^[8] Thus the recognizability of the basic type might serve to suggest further relationships between these stories on the basis of their visual similarities. In this manner, typology provided ancient artists with the visual correlative to verbal analogy and thus greatly expanded their powers of allusion.^[9]

Finally, a full understanding of the mythological sarcophagi and their imagery requires attention to the role of memory and its part in the larger cultural framework in which these objects found their place. Remembrance was an important factor in ancient social life and fueled the need for such monuments and memorials. It was central as well to the visual structures employed in the creation of these monuments; the representational modes of analogy and typology depended on it. Since, as we shall see, Roman religious practices did not demand such caskets for the inhumation of the dead, the perpetuation of memory not only played a role in the creation of the mythological sarcophagi but was ultimately the most significant of their functions. And when the ideas that gave rise to the imagery of such memorials eventually faded, the most crucial and compelling aspect of that imagery vanished as well.

The first two of these themes, those concerning mythology and analogy, have had a long life and still play a fundamental role in the visual arts. The position of typology in the history of visual narration has been less secure. A more complex mode of allusion, typology made larger demands of its audience, as shall become clear, and it would seem that the greater requirements for its success diminished the possibilities of its employment.

These are the topics, then, that are examined in the pages that follow. This study concludes with some brief observations on the disappearance of the typological mode so central to the visualization of the myths on Roman sarcophagi and, by so doing, suggests the historical boundaries of this particular aspect of ancient aesthetics.

The problem of analogy

The penchant for comparison, whether to stress similarity or difference, found no greater advocate in the ancient world than Plutarch. His Parallel Lives provides not only abundant evidence of this propensity, but a vivid account of the purpose of such a comparative mode of thought. In the proem to his Pericles, he sets out the function of his undertaking—as was only fitting—by a broad comparison:

Our outward sense cannot avoid apprehending the various objects it encounters, merely by virtue of their impact and regardless of whether they are useful or not: but a man’s conscious intellect is something which he may bring to bear or avert as he chooses, and he can very easily transfer it to another object if he sees fit. For this reason we ought to seek out virtue not merely to contemplate it, but to derive benefit from doing so. A colour, for example, is well suited to the eye if its bright and agreeable tones stimulate and refresh the vision, and in the same way we ought to apply our intellectual vision to those models which can inspire it to attain its own proper virtue through the sense of delight they arouse. We find these examples in the actions of good men, which implant an eager rivalry and a keen desire to imitate them in the minds of those who have sought them out.^[10]

For Plutarch, the representation of virtus could itself engender virtue, and comparison could breed comparison. The mind was by nature an organ of discrimination predisposed to imitation. Plutarch continued: “Virtue in action immediately takes such hold of a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he sets out to follow in the steps of the doer.”^[11]

The presentation of exempla thus appealed to men and women at the most fundamental level. On the mythological sarcophagi, such exempla were intended to evoke, by “the sense of delight they arouse,” comparisons between the dead and the ancient heroes.

They were heroes of many different kinds. For example, many died young in the Roman world, and interpretations—such as Pirro Ligorio’s—that identify the deceased with the mythical protagonist that graces his or her tomb certainly correspond with Roman ideas concerning a mors immatura.^[12] A wide variety of sarcophagus representations demonstrates the readiness with which these ideas were given visual form. These conceptions appear perhaps most clearly on sarcophagi of the vita humana type that were adapted to the life of those who died young. On these reliefs, scenes of childbirth and education necessarily replaced those symbols of adult accomplishment that death had denied, such as marriage, the cultivation of the Muses, or the performance of religious rites and sacrifices.^[13]

The mythological repertory was also adapted specifically for the sarcophagi of the young dead. This is apparent in the case of a child's sarcophagus in Rome that represents the myth of Prometheus, where the dead child is celebrated by analogy to the miniature “first man” molded by the hero and endowed with the stolen fire of life.^[14] In this instance as in others, the analogy between the individual buried within the sarcophagus and the mythological protagonist depicted on its front is underscored by the small scale of the casket, large enough solely for the body of a child. Similarly clear visual references are made to a mors immatura on other reliefs, where putti enact the roles of mythological heroes—Meleager or Cupid and Psyche, for example. In such instances the young dead are endowed, as if by proxy, with the virtus that death has refused them the opportunity to acquire in life.^[15]

Just as the virtus of the ancient heroes could be appropriated for the young, so too could they be for the old. While old age, with the infelicities of physical appearance it brings, might seem to render identification with a youthful hero less apt, a youthful theme might nevertheless be chosen even in later years, as can be seen on certain sarcophagi whose mythological protagonists bear portraits (Figs. 1 and 2). Indeed, one might complain that death at any age is immatura.^[16]

The monuments themselves demonstrate that facile comparisons between the real life of the deceased and the mythic life of the heroes represented on the sculpted caskets have little to recommend them. For as Ligorio himself realized, the myths functioned on the sarcophagi as conventional symbols of virtus—and as conventional symbols they were available to be appropriated by one and all. An old man might portray himself as the young Dionysos (Fig. 3), or a woman could be buried in a sarcophagus that prominently displayed the sleeping figure of Endymion (see Fig. 29).

The problem of interpretation becomes more complex in the case of myths that present no obvious basis for analogy. The tragic figures of Medea and Phaedra (at times bearing the portrait features of the deceased or a spouse) scarcely suggest a sympathetic parallel between the plots of their stories and the lives of those Romans who appropriated these myths to commemorate themselves.^[17] The use of these stories was more than an appeal to the classical;^[18] nor is it likely that the patrons of these intensely personal works of art failed to comprehend the stories depicted.^[19] The appearance of such stories demands a more nuanced account of all the myths employed on the sarcophagi and a more perceptive response to the complex nature of this funerary imagery.

For the sarcophagi present analogies, not identifications: they do not merely equate the lives of those commemorated with the ancient stories but compel us to contemplate those lives in terms of the fundamental truths the myths reveal. Following Euripides, one sees in Medea a woman torn by conflicting claims—of jealousy, desire for revenge, and love of her children—who acts, despite her judgment, compelled by passion (thumos).^[20] This myth demonstrated, in extreme form, what the ancients held to be the essential aspect of women’s nature; so too, the tale of Phaedra and Hippolytus.^[21] In the dramatic clash of its protagonists, this myth displayed the basic dichotomy between men and women so central to the ancient view of the human condition: that between amor and virtus. For the heroines of both myths, the realization of their nature and the fulfillment of its claims on their character is inextricably bound to the omnipotence of Fate.^[22]

Text and image

The interpretation and historical study of the sarcophagus reliefs and their imagery are guided by established criteria—concerning the nature of these objects, their function, and their context—seldom so focused in the case of other works of art. Neither our knowledge about these objects nor the establishment of these criteria is derived, however, from ancient commentaries devoted to these monuments. There is no surviving ancient text that provides a “key” to the visual language with which the myths are related on the sarcophagi. The study of the sarcophagi has been forced to proceed in a different fashion.^[23]

To begin with, the subject matter of the sarcophagus reliefs was well known to their audience. The myths were once basic to the fabric of life itself, linked to ancient religion and its vision of the cosmos. For Romans of the Imperial era, these myths were given a highly accessible form by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, whose wide dissemination, at least among the upper classes, may be assumed.^[24] The continuity of mythological knowledge among the literate is also attested by the evidence of the role that knowledge played in grammatical education, whose fundamental texts appear to have changed little over the centuries from the Hellenistic age until as late as the sixth century.^[25] The role of mythological allusion in the poetry of the first and second centuries, and the continuing importance of this literature, provide both a parallel and a proof of the receptivity to myth in the age when the sarcophagus reliefs were produced.^[26]

Second, the consistent formalization of the mythological images cemented the bond between the verbal and the visual: readily recognizable forms facilitated the myths' identification. In the visual arts the myths were codified in standardized designs, and repertories for each myth were established. The practice could function at the level of details, such as attributes, as a passage from Cicero makes clear: “From youth we have known the remaining gods—Jove, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo—by the features that the painters and sculptors have wished to employ; not only for their faces, but also their attributes, their age, and their garments.” ^[27] The same practice also functioned, as shall become clear, at the level of plot. The similarity of the surviving representations of the myths in a wide variety of media demonstrates a consistent selection and depiction of story elements, and the repetition of these images led to their familiarity throughout the ancient world. This long-standing practice, along with the striking quality of immediacy it conveyed, was acknowledged in late antiquity by St. Augustine. He recalled the story of the sacrifice of Abraham and acknowledged the powerful effect of its representation's formalization and ubiquitous repetition: “such a famous deed comes strongly to mind, and it comes to mind as something neither studied nor sought, since it is everywhere recounted by so many tongues and depicted in so many places.” ^[28] Continual exposure to such standardized representations fused image and story firmly together in the mind.^[29] Classical literature, the Poetics of Aristotle in particular, suggests the essential role played in the storytelling of the ancient world by such acts of recognition (anagnorisis). As a plot device, anagnorisis served not only as a fundamental structure for narration but as a reminder of the power inherent in the dramatic apprehension of identity and ethos. To aid in the beholders' recognitions, each myth's salient episodes, as well as the identifying attributes of its main characters, were treated with remarkable consistency.^[30]

There is considerable debate about the origin of these standardized images. They may have derived from monumental works of painting or sculpture whose fame led to their replication, or from early illustrated codices and papyri that presented the great narrative cycles and the most prominent myths in epitomizing form.^[31] The employment of models is recorded, however, by Pliny. In his Historia Naturalis, he writes about Parrhasius, most gifted among the ancients in the drawing of outlines, and speaks of the many graphidis vestigia among the artist’s panels and parchments, from whose use other artists had profited.^[32]

While the regularized visual repertories established for the myths were often modified by different workshops, sculptors generally remained true to the fundamental formulae.^[33] At times more profound changes were made in addition to these minor variations. Yet in every instance, artists and patrons made choices, whether they employed standard designs or completely reworked them. Discrimination and judgment were always involved, whether the goal was conformity with established traditions or their rejection for the sake of innovation.

Some decisions led to more striking visible results than others. For as artists and patrons exploited certain visual characteristics that resulted from the standardization of mythological imagery, they transfigured the manner in which the fables were told with images. The significance of such variants—as those among both the Adonis and Endymion sarcophagi reveal—is not only that they altered the appearance of a myth’s imagery, but that they particularized and personalized its sepulchral message.^[34]

In these innovative representations of the myths, text and image complemented one another in a profoundly new fashion. The standardized iconographies encouraged viewers to regard the sculpted images as illustrations to be recognized and thus accorded an implicit primacy to those specific redactions of the myths from which the images were generated. By contrast, those sarcophagus reliefs that deviated from both the established models and the canonical texts asserted the primacy of their images, as they impelled their beholders to decipher the language and meaning of their sculptural forms.

Audience, context, interpretation

Another factor guiding the interpretation of these monuments is that the sarcophagus reliefs, by definition, were intended for a specific context. These were works of art to be viewed under circumstances always the same: first at the funeral and later on visits to the tomb. Their imagery was to be understood in connection with two distinct sets of practices whose relationship remains something of a mystery: religious ritual devoted to the dead and their afterlife, and social practices dedicated to their commemoration. The precise religious significance of the sarcophagi and their imagery has remained elusive on account of the tremendous variation in beliefs held by the Romans, variation that increased during the Imperial period.^[35] In the absence of definitive evidence linking the “survival of death” theme to known religious beliefs, the role of the sarcophagi as commemorative monuments accrues added significance.^[36]

Awareness of the social classes that could afford to commission these monuments, and to display them in suitably sumptuous tombs, allows a degree of certainty about the primary audience for their imagery. It has long been held that sarcophagi, which were transported to Italy quite possibly from workshops in Asia Minor, were purchases of considerable expense in the Roman world.^[37] Recent research has shown the situation to have been somewhat more complex. The purchase of elaborate sarcophagi was also a conspicuous expression of middle-class striving to emulate the cultivated taste and material signs of affluence associated with the Roman aristocracy.^[38] Yet monuments of high-quality sculpture and sophisticated iconography, which only the well-to-do could afford and only the cultivated would appreciate, were not the only ones produced by the Roman workshops. Less expensive forms, with decidedly inferior carving that featured less elevated and complex iconography, were manufactured for the popular tastes of the middle class. At times, expense was limited and high quality maintained by the employment of an overall pattern, as in the “strigilated” type, where a repetitive design—whose carving could be relegated to the less-skilled hands of workshop apprentices—might fill the majority of the relief.^[39]

They were at least moderately well-to-do people, therefore, who came to honor the dead and to remember their ancestors buried in the elaborate mythological sarcophagi. The power of tradition and the strictures of religious practice required their presence on days prescribed for feasts in celebration of the deceased. Funds for such ceremonies had often been provided in bequests by the dead themselves. The family and close friends came on the ninth day after burial for the cena novendialis, and every year for the dies natalis as well as for the Parentalia, celebrated during the latter part of February.^[40] Their attendance on the dead not only provided these works of art with an audience but fulfilled their purpose. For as these visitors came and contemplated the imagery of the sarcophagus reliefs, the legacy that the dead wished for—to be remembered in the guise of the protagonists of myth—was brought finally to fruition.

From MUTHOS HELLENIKOS to mythologia romana

Classicizing taste for Greek imagery flourished under Hadrian and became widespread during the second and third centuries.^[41] This provided the overall context for the adaptation of Greek mythology to meet the new Roman need for imagery suited to the form of sarcophagi. But it was a change in social practice, from a preference for cremation to one for inhumation, that gave rise to the production of these monuments on a large scale. Inhumation was not a new phenomenon but the re-emergence of a long standing practice among both the Etruscans and the peoples of Asia Minor.^[42]

The Greek myths depicted on these sarcophagus reliefs underwent a process of Romanization, which resulted in the refashioning of artistic models, and at times of the stories themselves.^[43] The chapters that follow demonstrate that as the myths were visualized in the formal language of Roman art, and as they were inserted into their new sepulchral context, they assumed specific significance. In this way they were transformed to express new Roman ideas in the fulfillment of new Roman needs.

An understanding of the characteristic process by which the Greek myths were adapted for representation on the funerary reliefs is crucial to a full comprehension of these monuments. The choice of myths, the selection and combination of scenes, their composition, alteration, deliberate omission, and even replacement are among the decisive artistic considerations that distinguished these reliefs as mythological representations of a most singular kind. All of these aspects have been the subject of scholarly research.^[44] The purpose of the present study is to broaden the scope of such investigations and to elucidate certain other characteristics of the Romanization of Greek mythology on the sarcophagi.

The pairing of the Adonis and Endymion sarcophagi that is the focus of these chapters presents many, if not all, of the interpretive issues raised by study of the entire range of mythological sarcophagi. The analysis of these two myths and their visual representations should be considered an attempt to provide a foundation for further study, and the method of investigation proposed here regarded as germane to the examination of other monuments as well. This investigation, based on principles that can profitably be applied in the analysis of other myths and their imagery, is thus offered as a model for the study of mythological sarcophagi in general. The following paragraphs suggest this broader scope of inquiry and establish the interpretive parameters of the chapters that ensue.

The appearance of “stock” types that resulted from the standardization of the myths’ imagery must be investigated, together with the visual conventions they established. It is only by contrast with such conventions that the full force of the variant compositions emerges. The employment on the sarcophagi of stock types and the invention of variants, must be recognized, and analyzed, as complementary forms of decision making that reflect a relationship between visual and verbal thinking. On the sarcophagi, the myths have been refashioned as visual images, and the interpretation of their force and clarity depends on the pictorial and sculptural qualities of their medium as well as on the texts from which their stories derive.

Analysis of the individual motifs with which these stories are visualized may be pursued in new directions. The study of these motifs, so elaborately charted in many publications of sarcophagi of diverse iconographies, may be augmented and amplified by an examination of the typological relationships established in the representation of different myths. The use of visually related motifs, whose significances complement and fulfill one another, provided the artists with one means to expand the connotations of their images.^[45]

The significance of individual motifs in the private context of funerary mythology may be informed by their function in other modes of presentation. Thus a motif’s function within the narrative framework of the sarcophagi may be compared and contrasted with its role in the hieratic forms of the public art of the Empire.

The use of motifs in the frozen tableaux of the sarcophagus reliefs may also be compared with their role in other genres, such as contemporary theatrical productions.

The exemplary nature of the visual imagery for the myths may be linked to corresponding literary traditions, and the appearance and function of common topoi elucidated. The role of the mythological themes appropriated and personalized on the sarcophagi should be compared to the part played by these same themes in the purportedly autobiographical poetry of such first-century authors as Propertius or Tibullus.

Finally, it is necessary to inquire further into the purpose of portraiture on the mythological sarcophagi. Investigation must not only elaborate this phenomenon from a conventional archaeological perspective, collecting and cataloguing examples, but attempt to reconstruct that cultural imagination of which the reliefs form a most poignant expression. The initial stage of such a project has been accomplished admirably by Wrede.^[46] Yet the importance of portraits in Wrede’s work lends his study of the mythological sarcophagi an unwarranted emphasis on the relationship of their imagery to real, historical, life. Nevertheless, as the following chapters demonstrate, all mythological sarcophagi assert analogies; the presence of the portrait features of the deceased merely intensifies and particularizes the monument’s message. For as the myths depicted on the sarcophagus reliefs are conflated with the lives they are meant to recall, we are confronted by more than the “private deification” of those individuals who present themselves in the guise of the gods. We witness not only the power of images to preserve something essential of the dead, but the role of myth in both the formulation of those memories and the creation of a significant and enduring monument.

Notes