This chapter unveils the author’s view of what was at stake in demythologization: the viewer’s attitude to chronology, to temporality, to characters defined by their residence in earlier time. For confirmation of this claim, the chapter studies archaeological evidence from Rome’s suburbium, examining the altered spatial relationships between house and tomb that came to dominate in the Late Empire. This reveals what was at stake in the third-century disappearance of mythic figures from sarcophagi: new demands among the living, manifested in multiple domains of Roman life, for greater proximity to their dead.

This chapter turns from religious and political explanations to those that frame demythologization in terms of other social and cultural shifts. Some have proposed that it reflects a rising populism, a widespread decline in education levels, or a diminution in the value Romans assigned to mythological culture. Others have seen in the rise of mythless genres a growing desire for imagery that more clearly projected social status. All are examined.

The Introduction first sets the stage by inviting the reader to consider a few Roman sarcophagi in depth. Serving as an introduction to these compelling objects, this also reveals just how odd it was that deities and mythic heroes came to be expelled from their surface decoration in the third century. It then contextualizes that oddity through an overview of main developments within Roman sarcophagus production from the second through the fourth centuries. The book’s scope and terms are then addressed, and its structure laid out.

This chapter addresses the question of whether we have drawn too strong a distinction between the mythic and the non-mythic. What happens if we consider not iconographic criteria, but modal ones? Taken from the viewpoint of function rather than subject matter, the distinction between mythic and mythless imagery becomes shaky indeed. This chapter first revisits the relationship between the mythological and the so-called biographical sarcophagi, then shows how close attention to Roman sculptural technique – what we might call “material iconography” – provides traction for understanding how Roman viewers imagined the relationship between these genres.

An artist painted the scene of a painter and a workshop assistant adding colors to a statue of Herakles on the outer surface of a large terracotta bowl used for mixing wine and water.1 Found in Apulia (in southern Italy) in the fourth century bce, the scene included an image of the living Herakles approaching the painter and his assistant in the middle of painting his statue. (Figures 15 and 16).2 In the scene, the statue stands on a plinth and the painter works on the statue’s body in situ, while his assistant warms several implements on a brazier for applying pigments blended with beeswax known as the encaustic technique. This depiction is regularly cited as evidence that ancient Greek sculptures were painted.3

For the opening ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, thousands of volunteers painted their faces and costumed their bodies into embodiments of iconic ancient Greek art objects, capturing their vivid colors and patterns (Figures 1 and 2).1 Staged by director Dimitris Papaioannou, Hourglass (Klepsydra) performed a story of ancient Greek art in vividly polychrome living pictures (tableaux vivants). 2 Unlike the bright colors of those portraying objects from earlier and later epochs, however, volunteers portraying the idealized nude male statues and richly clothed female counterparts produced as dedications in the sixth to fifth centuries bce as well as those playing the figures on the reliefs of the Parthenon wore thick white face and body paint, white muscle suits, or white dresses (Figures 3 and 4).3 The construction of these monochrome white sculptural bodies required significant preparation and stood out dramatically on stage in contrast with the colors of earlier and later art bodies.4 This costume of monochrome whiteness thus visually bracketed the living statues portraying the art of the late sixth, fifth century, and early fourth centuries bce from the actors portraying the rest of ancient Greek art.

On Sunday, September 2, 1934, the New York Times announced the discovery of a stack of wooden panels painted with vibrant colors (Figures 44 and 45). Anastassios Orlandos had found these small panel paintings deep inside a cavern lined with stalactites, at Ano Pitsa, near Corinth, in the Peloponnese. The headline read “Plaques Found at Pitsa: Blue, Yellow and Green Shown on Painted Wood.”1 Its emphasis on the colors painted onto the wooden panels positioned the discovery within ongoing debates about the presence or absence of colors in ancient Mediterranean art and language. Orlandos’s discovery of material colors on partly intact paintings merited column inches in a newspaper across the Atlantic for several reasons. First, antiquarian debates as well as academic research about colors in ancient Mediterranean art had continued unabated into the early decades of the twentieth century.2 Second, despite the celebration of ancient Greek painting by ancient authors writing in Greek and Latin, comparatively little material painting survives in the archaeological record. In 1934, that corpus was even smaller than it is today.3 Third, Euro-American nation-states had long claimed and constructed an intellectual, structural, and material genealogy back to ancient Greece, and this faraway discovery of ancient Greek colors – blues, yellows, and greens – undermined the dominant impression of monochrome edifices.4

Approaching the bronze statue of a naked male figure from the left, a beholder encounters the uncanny sight of an eye looking out from a socket cast into its head (Figure 104). Anatomical parts of the eye have been pieced together from polychrome materials: white bone for the white, a pink vitreous paste for the tear duct at the inner corner, a ring of black surrounding a thicker brown ring for the iris, and at the center a void where a pupil would once have been inlaid.1 Only the tear duct alters the symmetry of these concentric circles, decreasing in diameter to the pupil point – white, black, brown, black again – like a target. A sheet of bronze enfolds the back of the eye to hold its parts together; at the front, this bronze sheeting has been sliced into lashes that curl away from the eye and frame it.2 The eye does not move or contract as a beholder approaches; however, brilliance, hues, and variegation form and animate it.

A massive mosaic of black, white, orange, and tan uncut pebbles covered the floor of a banquet room in a private house at Pella (Figure 141).1 The pebbles depict Theseus, the mythical founder-king of Athens, abducting the child Helen of Sparta, years before her marriage to the Mycenaean king Menelaus and subsequent trafficking by Aphrodite and Paris to Troy. Phorbas drives Theseus’s getaway chariot, pulled by four white horses, each with contrasting golden-orange manes and tails. Although this portion of the mosaic has sustained heavy damage and partial erasure, we can still see that the chariot driver looks over his shoulder at Theseus, who drags Helen towards the chariot.2 Helen’s companion, Deianeira, reaches for the girl, as Theseus pulls her out of reach. The scene captures a critical moment in Theseus’s abduction in which Deianeira fails to recover Helen.