Exemplum bucolicum

On the sarcophagi, where sleep functions so clearly as a symbol of the afterlife, the designers have taken pains to give a sense of what Endymion’s “deathlike sleep” would be like. The various qualities of this tale of mythical sleep have been translated into visual forms: its eroticism appears in the seduction scene and the characters’ nudity; its endlessness is figured by the symbols of the nightly and annual cycles; its role as a precondition for the youth’s divine “marriage” is signaled by the attendance of Hypnos; and the characterization of the entire episode as a form of deification is heralded by the presence at the scene of Cupid and Psyche.

Another element was appended to the myth’s visual repertory that continued to refine and develop these ideas about the afterlife, although in a different pictorial guise and along different metaphorical lines. This is the pastoral vignette that appears on many of the sarcophagi. Its central motif is a seated shepherd, often sleeping and accompanied by his dog and his flock, all set within a summary landscape (Fig. 39). The traditional identification of Endymion as a shepherd provided the rationale for including this image.^[67] The figure of the shepherd, who appears sometimes young, sometimes old, cannot have been intended to represent an additional episode in the narrative.^[68] In almost every instance, the shepherd is not part of the central scene but appears adjacent to the main action, either asleep or lost in thought.^[69] Yet shepherd and flock are not merely part of the setting and its staffage. They endow the sarcophagus imagery with another topos, the bucolic idyll, which serves to connect this myth to others that similarly invoke a beneficent image of the afterlife.^[70]

This vignette exudes the quiet charm of the Theocritan pastoral. It is the descendant of those Hellenistic images that served as the visual counterparts to Theocritus’s Idylls, which praised the good life amid pastoral quiet as an antidote to civic turmoil.^[71] In early imperial times the Romans had adopted similar images that evoked the serenity of pastoral life. Such bucolic imagery, one aspect of the revival of rural values, was celebrated not only in the verse of the great Augustan poets but in the appearance of sacral-idyllic landscape painting as well.^[72] Moreover, this bucolic imagery held a privileged place in Roman tradition, as Varro had pointed out: “Is there anyone who doesn’t know that the Roman people issued from shepherds? who does not know that Faustulus, the guardian who raised Romulus and Remus, was a shepherd?”^[73]

This visual topos took its rightful place amid the repertory of bucolic imagery. As Vergil tells of “joyous places, the green pleasances, and the blessed abode of the fortunate groves,”^[74] thus the image of the shepherd in reverie could serve as a dreamlike metaphor of the tranquillity waiting after death.^[75] In the visual arts, particularly in sepulchral contexts, it flourished far longer than the literary genre whence it came. On these monuments bucolic scenes remained a classicizing allusion to the past in a mode that was no longer vital to the poetic repertory. Indeed, literary taste for the pastoral appears to have waned, if not almost to have disappeared, by the late second century.^[76]

Resonant with the values and virtues of the pastoral life, this bucolic image could function separately as a symbol. The shepherd’s independent appearance on other sarcophagi testifies to the vignette’s role as a discrete and significant element in the repertory of funerary images (Fig. 41).^[77] The vignette and its constituent motifs could also be reused in new contexts.^[78] This appears to have been the genesis of a unique sarcophagus, now in Naples (Fig. 42).^[79] On this relief the pastoral topos is juxtaposed with an image of the hunt, which was appropriated from the Meleager repertory. As the two images carried to their new context their customary significance, they thus served as symbolic expressions of the active and contemplative life.^[80] On another sarcophagus, now in Pisa (Fig. 43), the bucolic idyll was similarly represented side by side with an image of the Muses, and thus, following Vergil, these images served to symbolize two possibilities for happiness in human life.^[81] A related mode of invention seems to have been responsible for the so-called Rinuccini sarcophagus, where again a recognizable motif from another mythological repertory—the “death of Adonis”—was extracted from its narrative context and re-employed (Fig. 44) in conjunction with elements of the vita humana type. Set alongside the biographical scenes alluding to concordia and pietas, the mythological image of virtus completes the conventional sequence of virtues as it manifestly fulfills the allegorical implications of the series as a whole.^[82]

In each of the preceding examples, motifs were reused independent of the narrative context in which their visual forms were customarily employed. In their new settings these motifs (the shepherd or the entire bucolic vignette, the hunt, or the dying hero) function in the generic sense fundamental to the very idea of topoi. A greater generality is reflected by the Naples and Pisa sarcophagi, where their conventional symbolism does not demand the recognition of their visual affinities with, or sources in, the standardized mythological repertories. Yet in the case of the Rinuccini sarcophagus, something of both the literal and metaphorical significance of the motif’s origin would have been evoked by the sculptural forms. For the “death of Adonis” would need to be recognized, and its significance as an exemplum virtutis recalled, if it were to play a meaningful role amid this complex composition dedicated to scenes of the vita humana.^[83]

The compositional principle that determines the overall mode of presentation on these sarcophagi is parataxis, the deliberate abandonment of the formal conventions of syntax and the organizing structures of subordination that syntax entails. Paratactic compositions involve the stringing together of discrete elements without connectives. In the absence of integrated structures of subordination, the independence of these elements is emphasized by the form itself, and their precise relationship to one another must be forged by the viewer from the interpretation of each in the context of the whole.^[84]

Divorced from the central event, spatially, thematically, and narratively, the bucolic vignette was placed beside the image of Selene and Endymion as both a counterpart and a complement. As a peaceful addition to the tumult of Selene’s arrival and Endymion’s seduction, the pastoral scene has its parallel on the famous sarcophagus of Iulius Achilleus now in the Museo Nazionale Romano (Fig. 45), where similar imagery serves as an emblem of Elysium and symbolizes “the unavoidability as well as the consoling repose of death.”^[85]

The bucolic idyll, as a topos, augmented the repertory for the representation of the afterlife found on the Endymion sarcophagi and offered another symbol for the favor of the gods. To the image of erotic encounter with the divinity amid the quiet of slumber, the bucolic scene adds that of a pastoral oasis of peaceful meditation. In the absence of a narrative relationship, the paratactic presentation of the motifs—and the scrutiny that presentation provokes—prompts the recognition of a special mode of correspondence.^[86] Juxtaposed, the motifs present a form of iconographic symmetry. The erotic motif literalizes the gaining of the gods’ favor, while the bucolic topos metaphorizes the paradise of the afterlife by likening it to a recognizable scene of pastoral simplicity and charm.

Both of these images provide answers to the question of what it is like to be loved by the gods. They were in turn augmented by the evocation of Selene and Endymion’s celestial marriage—literally on the San Paolo and Sassari sarcophagi (Figs. 36 and 37), and metaphorically in the figures of Cupid and Psyche on other reliefs (Fig. 35). The conjunction of these ideas on the sarcophagi would have been familiar, for in antiquity all three conceptions were connected, as Plutarch’s Life of Numa suggests:

Numa, forsaking the ways of city folk, determined to live for the most part in country places, and to wander there alone, passing his days in groves of the gods, sacred meadows, and solitudes. This, more than anything else, gave rise to the story about his goddess. It was not, so the story ran, from any distress or aberration of spirit that he forsook the ways of men, but he had tasted the joy of more august companionship and had been honored with a celestial marriage; the goddess Egeria loved him and bestowed herself upon him, and it was his communion with her that gave him a life of blessedness and a wisdom more than human. However, that this story resembles many of the very ancient tales which the Phrygians have received and cherished concerning Attis, the Bithynians concerning Herodotus, the Arcadians concerning Endymion, and other peoples concerning other mortals who were thought to have achieved a life of blessedness in the love of the gods, is quite evident.^[87]