The first book in this review refers back to a theme we have considered repeatedly in previous reviews: cities, in this case those of Roman Italy and the new modes of investigation that are bringing them alive.Footnote 1 The volume is particularly interested in looking at the diversity of these centres, laying to rest that early twentieth century faith in the regularity of the Roman town plan. Instead, the case studies in the volume show how towns in different areas of Italy fared and failed to meet the demands of their immediate surroundings as well as responding to wider political and economic changes. This changing understanding comes from two directions: our willingness to ask new questions of the cities and the use of new technology. In all the case studies, different kinds of remote sensing technology (clearly laid out by Martin Millett in the first chapter as a preamble to his case study of Falerii Novi) and drone photography allow the city to be mapped and explored in new ways. The book shows how these have allowed new evidence and questions, affecting traditional interpretations. The whole thing is finished by an epilogue by John Patterson, who pulls together some of these themes and points to new questions.
In many chapters, the use of these technologies alongside more traditional techniques, such as digging trenches and revisiting the material culture retrieved from the sites, allows new interpretations. Many of the sites discussed, such as Falerii Novi, Septempeda, or Interamna Lirenas, have few visible physical remains, yet new technologies can conjure up traces of their civic spaces, main routes, and land allotments for domestic units.
More importantly, these finds offer data with which to reappraise these settlements. Interamna Lirenas (explored here by Alessandro Laurano) was presumed to have lost its importance when the Via Latina was rerouted to bypass it during the republic, severing links with Rome. The lack of imported finewares across the site was taken to reinforce this view (180). However, new remote sensing surveys show it to have been flourishing in the second-century ce, with a theatre, bath houses, and large horrea (granaries), maybe not interacting with Rome and empire but acting as a trade hub within the valley and the larger cities in the region. At the same time, a reevaluation of excavated material emphasizing the commonware pottery offers corroborative evidence of these local regional networks (186). Other case studies reflect new emphases: Andrea U. De Giorgi's chapter on Cosa and its neighbouring port, Orbetello, explores how the inhabitants worked with their environment, quarrying for limestone, chopping trees, and, most importantly in an area with no natural water sources, guaranteeing water supplies with the creation of huge cisterns, so successfully that by the Augustan period the supply could even sustain a bath house. Francesca Dionoso's chapter on Fregellae, among other things, relooks at the material evidence of different cooking and eating preferences in the excavated houses to consider the variety of peoples living in the colony, not only the settled veterans but local Italic people attracted by the opportunities of the new urban centre. That population also included Punic hostages following the Battle of Zama, whose presence is reflected in many Punic amphorae found in the city (92–3).
On the other hand, Ian Hayes, Paolo Liverani, Thea Ravasi, and Stephen Kay, working as they do on the Caelian Hill in Rome, have to negotiate a built-up site in order to explore how this hill on the eastern side of Rome developed through the imperial period. Anyone reading the list of obstacles in their way (26) would certainly feel for them! Nevertheless they are able to map changes through the imperial period and into late antiquity, noting how the provisions made for one set of functions affected what might follow. For example, the provision of a water supply and building of sturdy terracing that made possible the gigantic castra of the praetorian guard and fed its baths provided the perfect amenities for building the Lateran church and feeding its baptistery.
The later chapters of the volume similarly focus on transformations into late antiquity. At Lunae, which was struck by an earthquake at the end of the fourth century ce, wealthy home owners took the opportunity to take over space from civic buildings, accelerating urban change before the city reoriented itself around the bishop's chair (167). After an earthquake struck Aeclanum in 346 ce, some buildings were never rebuilt, others taken over by domestic use. However, the north baths were renovated with new marble floors and the city's ongoing importance seems to have been assured by the ecclesiastical centre being located within the city rather than on its edges. Another city, Aquileia, was only just coming into its own, acquiring a circus, huge baths, a market, and horreum in the fourth century ce. Its prosperity and importance related to its location at the very north east of Italy and its subsequent focus as a trade and military hub. The material evidence shows that it was still receiving imports from Africa and the Aegean in the later fifth century ce (227). Reading this volume offers exciting possibilities for new avenues of investigation as well as an appreciation for the sheer variety of urban experience in the peninsula.
In his contribution to Roman Urbanism, Martin Millett writes how the new approach to urbanism might zoom in on smaller areas within cities, giving examples of the work on Porta Stabia in Pompeii (9), and this focus is followed in our next edited volume, which zooms in to explore urban neighbourhoods and how the physical environment affects and shapes senses of community, including at Porta Stabia itself.Footnote 2 Apart from Petric-Alexander Kreuz's chapter on a district of classical Athens excavated by Dörpfeld in the nineteenth century, all the chapters focus on Italy, with an unsurprising emphasis on Pompeii. A lot depends on the interaction of top-down (organization of cityscape into defined areas with magisterial infrastructure) and bottom-up (residents’ own interactions and actions). Christopher Bruun's chapter on Ostia is a great example of this: the first half mostly looks at the epigraphic evidence for vici (city quarters), largely inscriptions related to magistri vici (magistrates) and the gifts they bestowed on the community, fascinating for the insight it gives to the extent to which ambitious individuals could make themselves present in this hyper-local context: one Gaius Cartilius Heracleo, a freedman, is known from at least two inscriptions, the first about establishing a compital shrine and second the gift of a horologium (24). The second half is more speculative – for example, whether neighbourhoods grew around particular shrines. Whilst it seems natural that most people would gravitate towards their local Mithraeum, as to their local bath houses and taverns, it is perhaps harder to suggest that the presence of other sorts of shrines, like that of Serapis, indicate a local community of Serapic followers. The conclusion, rather belatedly, offers exciting opportunities for more nuanced understandings: considering how intersectionality and gender, age, and status may have affected a person's sense of their neighbourhood (for instance, women could not join the Mithraeum).
This chapter highlights one of the issues with this volume. The focus on neighbourhoods and sociability provokes some great questions that help us rethink urban experience. However, a focus on architecture and infrastructures cannot always get to human behaviour, and here it felt like this project could do with more interdisciplinary perspectives that could better probe human responses. After all, neighbourhood is essentially about sociability and depends, as the editors note, on ‘imagined communities’ (5). This is recognized by Steven Ellis, who explicitly addresses the limits of archaeological data and the need to consider it in juxtaposition with people, people whom we cannot access or count but can imagine, a problem that Simon Malmberg also notes from the outset of his own chapter. To that end, a project like this could do with more multi-disciplinary approaches. Drawing on literary and other sources, such as curse tablets from classical Athens, allows Kreuz more opportunity to think about the sorts of human behaviour and attitudes that shaped these neighbourhoods (47).
Steven Ellis writes about the neighbourhood on Porta Stabia, which you can see more of in the recent publication of volume 1 of the University of Cincinnati's excavations of the area.Footnote 3 The area is made up of workshops with living and storage space. Ellis demonstrates how the neighbourhood develops to respond to economic opportunity: the evidence of fish-salting vats in a number of properties under investigation shows the original production focus of the area, but then these spaces are clearly altered to become retail spaces with the building of permanent counters and provision of cooking and storage spaces. Even though this was a quiet neighbourhood, presumably there was enough traffic coming through the Stabian Gate to warrant this wholesale change of emphasis. Simon Malmberg focuses on harbour life in Rome, using the archaeological evidence as a springboard to imagine the seasonal, transient population who inhabited it, particularly at the southernmost of the two harbours under consideration here. The harbours pushed people into close proximity, not only in terms of hours spent together in hard manual labour, but in more leisurely time in the bath houses. Some provocative questions are asked about how this population of outsiders mingled or not with more sedentary locals and how, within this mix, people forged associations and on what basis (ethnicity? cultic affiliation?).
Tobias Busen shows how neighbours in single insulae negotiated amongst themselves as they developed their homes. In Insula 1.4 in Pompeii, several homeowners simultaneously take the opportunity to expand (though not to the same extent) at the expense of another house in the block, but clearly use some of the bought out space as communal construction space, indicated by the now bricked-up doorways that led to different properties. This enabled workers and materials direct access to peristyles under construction that otherwise would have had to traipse or be dragged through smart atria (an inconvenience with which any occupant of a typical Victorian terrace home in the UK will empathize!). As Ellis shows, too, such communal spaces are not always temporary. In the less glamorous Porta Stabia neighbourhood, buildings entered through discreet shop fronts turn out to be connected to others at the rear, allowing neighbours to share facilities such as cesspits (73).
Another problem that the authors all have to tackle is how do you recognize or delimit something as nebulous as a neighbourhood? All of the papers also deal with the impossibility of drawing up neighbourhoods – they can be artificially decided by the range of building chosen for sample (as in Porta Stabia) or drawn around recurrent features (such as fountains or shrines), but these all presume a centre and edge that must have been blurred and experienced differently for different people.
Nevertheless, experiences of inhabiting and communicating in different locales must certainly have given distinct atmospheres to each one. For example, Kreuz notes the lack of communal spaces in his neighbourhood of classical Athens and Eric Pehler uses all kinds of data (numbers of doorways and crossings, depth of ruts in the road) as well as considering the viewscapes offered (i.e. the difference between orthogonal grids that allow long views and the dog-leg and cul-de-sac roads in the western part of Pompeii that enclose the viewer within their immediate location).
The final chapter of the book considers how insula blocks morph over time as inequality emerges from more egalitarian beginnings. Miko Flohr traces this phenomenon in a series of case studies across Italy and the different outcomes observed here, as in the previous volume, emphasize how the regional and local peculiarities shape the development and success of a town. For example, the greater inequality in Pompeii is attributed to the city's elite's wealth coming from ownership of exceptionally fertile land, whereas the prosperity that came to Ostian families was dependent on trade.
Our next edited volume similarly aims to consider human interaction with material culture and the built environment by looking at the benefits of cognitive approaches in understanding religious ritual in the Roman world from Rome to the northern provinces and to Jerusalem.Footnote 4 The cognitive approach highlights how rituals are not just scripted repetitions but interactive sensory experiences that shift with each performance. These experiences determine both the immediate understanding of what worshippers experience and their future memory of what they have witnessed/participated in.
Blanka Misic looks at the worshippers of the Nutrices Augustae in Pannonia Superior and considers how they would build memories through interaction with objects and environment. The cult appears to have revolved around the protection of young children, suggesting that families and communities would return there repeatedly as new children were born. Misic uses the Religious Learning Network, which focuses on how participants ‘learn’ through environment, interaction with objects, and observing actions of other worshippers. As with many theories, its value lies more in the focus its adoption confers than its revelatory content. The small cult buildings shape experience by bringing worshippers in close proximity with each other and ensuring they are all having a view of the proceedings, presuming they took place inside them. Meanwhile, the images on reliefs dedicated there act as memory holders for those who dedicated them and also inspiration for newcomers who encountered them.
Emma-Jayne Graham focuses on Vestal Virgins and the haptic experiences shaped by their interaction with the ritual objects with which they were associated. The starting point is the small procession frieze of the Ara Pacis, focusing on the implements the women carry (objects repeated on the frieze of the Temple of Vesta itself). In considering how the priestesses experienced these objects, Graham distinguishes between proximal knowledge, which is attained through immediate experience, and distal knowledge, which is that learned by observation or instruction. These forms of knowledge shape a Vestal's career, which starts with instruction, then progresses to the responsibility of handling the objects and finishes with the role of instructing the next generation, with the benefit of that experience informing her skill as a teacher.
Vicky Jewell considers the role of colour in defining the experience of worshippers in Mithraea, maintaining that colours have particular associations for their viewers (for example, the red usually used for Mithras's cloak would be easily recognizable to Romans, and, more importantly, to Mithras's many army followers, as a colour associated with Mars and the military). Jewell then proceeds to ancient theories of seeing (extramission and intromission), which have dominated recent accounts of viewing, particularly in terms of religious experience. The imagination of a direct physical interaction between the eye and the objects as they become temporarily connected by rays travelling between each other renders vision a haptic experience. Jewell sees this as particularly pertinent in the shape of gilding, which might be imagined as rays shooting from the image.
Abigail Graham turns attention to one specific ritual of which we know from a long inscription dated to around 140 ce outside the theatre in Ephesus: the procession of Salutaris in which thirty-two gold and silver images of gods were paraded through the streets from the Temple of Artemis to the theatre. It considers the extensive written instructions, but also explores the likely practicalities the text obscures: what time did people assemble? How did carrying the images affect the bearers (a nod back to Emma-Jayne Graham's paper here)? What are the opportunities for mistakes (which must have happened regularly and which the great example, given in the epilogue, of one of the editors’ own children getting the rules of Communion wrong demonstrates) or of inclement weather? Whilst the inscription tries to shape behaviour into the future, Xenophon of Ephesus's account of the procession in action rather focuses on the crowd's appreciation of the beauty of the processing youths, showing that the importance of ritual to viewers and participants does not always lie in its original intent or meaning.
Steven Muir finishes the volume by taking us to late antique Jerusalem via Egeria's account of Good Friday celebrations, which included pilgrims meeting various key symbols of faith, from fragments of the true cross to the ring of Solomon. Muir analyses the different ways in which pilgrims interact with the objects and the distinctions between different kinds of contact from touching and kissing to viewing (whilst showing some of the problems of giving people such proximity to sacred objects – like the over-enthusiasts who bit off splinters of the cross). The haptic experience of viewing also comes into play here as viewing becomes a touching with the eyes. There is some unnecessary speculation here about the room in which these things happened, but the idea of the anticipation of lining up and the proximity of other eager pilgrims is well handled. In the previous chapter, Salutaris's inscription was an attempt to proscribe activity into the future, but in this chapter we get to see just how much the Good Friday experience at Golgotha changed over time. A later account by a sixth-century pilgrim shows that some elements have been jettisoned (no mention of Solomon's ring, let alone veneration of it) and certain objects have been moved to the basilica.
Our last two books, both monographs, take us into the realm of art history. Michael Koortbojian's latest book tackles the representation of space in Greek and Roman relief sculpture.Footnote 5 All relief sculptors face the difficult problem of implying space around the figures they fashion within the limitations of the stone surfaces with which they work. In a world before the mathematical perspectives of the Renaissance, craftspeople reverted to various work-arounds to infer space.
The book is primarily arranged around tracing the historiography of understanding ancient relief, with some of the justification to this approach being to elucidate the chain of ideas because alongside familiar names like Bianchi-Bandinelli are writers who have been largely occluded from memory but whose ideas were germane to later interpretations. This approach also allows opportunity to think about why those writers were so interested in the issue of space and how they were informed by contemporary interests in physiology and psychology.
The complex engineering of the book also allows it to travel chronologically from archaic Greek stelai to late antique relief. Nevertheless, the main lesson is that, despite the insistence of some of the scholars studied and the generally chronological trajectory of the material in each chapter, the need to trace a formal development is unnecessary. Instead, multiple attempts to deal with space were in operation at any one time (and on any one monument).
The variety of solutions was wide: the relief background as neutral space against which the emphasis is on the human body, the crowding of space with bodies so that that backdrop is obscured, the attempt to create the backdrop as an enclosed space, and others to infer cityscapes and landscapes behind the figures. These exist alongside the tendency of the scenes to spread across the plane to fill its space and make itself most legible to the viewer and the opportunity for figures to burst forward out of frames.
The focus of the book on historiography will inevitably constrain its interest and usefulness to a wider audience, which would have been enhanced by placing the structural emphasis on the different possibilities of presenting space. That is such a shame because the book is so great in making us relook at reliefs. Kootbojian leads us to see the inconsistencies that we so willingly overlook. He shows us how the grave stele of Lykeas and Chairedemos, most often dragged into undergraduate lectures to show off the adoption of the classical doryphoros (spear bearer) body, gives an impression of depth through the overlapping of the two figures as they walk side by side, which seems well-done unless you actually look more closely at the their feet and realize that, unlike their bodies, their feet are side by side on the same plane (83). A similar contradiction is seen in a much later relief from the monument of Publius Nonius Zethus, who died in Ostia, in which the donkey plodding around the mill seems to have its back and front legs on the same plane as the mill, which on first sight it appears to walking around. The spatial incoherence is further complicated by an image of a whip stranded high in the relief, which only really makes sense if imagined as hanging from a wall. But if the background is to be seen as an actual wall rather than neutral space, then it is impossible for the donkey's body to exist (141–2). This can be dismissed as an incompetency or as an example of the ways in which different concepts of space were used together in order to convey information and create context.
Throughout, the book considers the relation between relief sculpture and other media. It starts by contrasting the emphasis of archaic freestanding sculpture on frontality in order to impose its subjects onto real world and the tendency of archaic reliefs to present figures in profile, excluding the viewer (though of course several archaic metopes, such as the Europa metope from Selinunte, combine the two as Europa maintains her part in the narrative world of the relief but the Zeus bull looks straight out at us). The backgrounds of vases, sometimes neutral and other times intimating interiors, are also drawn in as, later, are the shared techniques between Roman relief and contemporary painting and mosaic, particularly in terms of the treatment of different themes from the heroic to the pastoral and every day.
There are some great reliefs here, too. Alongside all the famous ones from the Greek and Roman repertoire – the Parthenon frieze, the Pergamon reliefs, and those from monuments of the emperors, such as the column base of Antonius Pius – are many unfamiliar, such as that of Publius Nonius Zethus or another funerary relief, from Sens, that features two scenes of a fuller at work (152). The makers of all these reliefs, of different subjects and made for patrons and viewers of different places and statuses, contributed to the techniques for representing space in their chosen medium.
Finally, Caroline van Eck's new book examines three candelabra created by Piranesi towards the end of his career around 1800, two of which are now in the Ashmolean in Oxford and one in the Louvre.Footnote 6 The candelabra were created from fragments, mostly recovered from Tivoli and incorporated into works of Piranesi's own fashion. Van Eck asks why were they so eagerly appreciated as examples of classical antique taste and form in their own time when today they are demoted, if not quite as ‘fakes’ but as confections of ancient and modern that better illustrate the history of taste and collecting, a fact literally shown by their contemporary physical locations? The book's originality comes in its approach to tackling these questions. Van Eck has purposefully turned away from formal art history and the usual narratives of the birth of neoclassicism in favour of adopting the concepts of human–thing entanglements and the agency of objects, which are now so popular in archaeology (and which we saw in the last review, for example, with Sanne Hoffmann's assessment of terracotta figurines in Greek sanctuaries).Footnote 7 Van Eck looks at the context in which Piranesi's candelabra came into being at a time when expectations of classical antiquity were shaped by a material turn (that, as she says, prefigures the material turn that we are wont to speak of in the Humanities today). An abundance of excavation activity and the new accessibility of private collections brought antiquity's material remains to the fore and offered a more immediate connection with the classical past than offered by texts. These remains were physically present, making the distant past imminent in people's contemporary space, literally bring the past back to life. That vivacity was further exaggerated by the appeal of vivid descriptions of statues that increasingly superceded from dry formalistic exposition, and the fashion for torchlight visits to collections in which flickering flames brought statues to life, a feat made literal by Emma Hamilton's attitudes. With this instinct, restorers like Piranesi (who was increasingly finding this a lucrative line of work) could be understood as providing that animating spark, taking dead fragments and restoring them to their original state, or, as van Eck much more aptly phrases it, helping them to reach their ‘full potential’ (92). This seems an excellent formula that could help us rethink our now rather dismissive attitude to eighteenth-century interventions with ancient material culture.
Another strand of the book concentrates on the very contemporary nature of the candelabra. By comparison with actual Roman examples, the candelabra are revealed to be not very Roman-looking at all; they are busier, incorporating elements from all sorts of Roman bric a brac and with a pronounced emphasis of animals, natural and mythical, some of which appear to be hybrids of his own imagination. And why pick on candelabra at all? Van Eck suggests that it is the association with the funerary that drew Piranesi's interest (after all the Louvre example was intended for his own grave). What they also show is not only his own originality but a fusion of styles, not just Roman but animals that hark back to Etruscan and Assyrian traditions, revealing a much broader concept of antiquity that was about to lose out to Winckelmann's insistence on Greek purity. Animals are a particular concern in the second half of the book and van Eck notes that they are integral to the Empire Style objects that took inspiration from Piranesi. In that style, van Eck understands the zoomorphic elements to imbue the piece with a feeling of life and to show subservience to their masters. A lion-legged table might wander off were it not obeying the wished of its owner to stand still.
This leads to perhaps the trickiest part of the book in which van Eck notes the similarity of these candelabra, with their heaped up animal forms, to totem poles. She does not wish to project an anachronistic understanding onto Piranesi, who had neither seen new world totem poles nor read anthropological works that shaped early understanding of such phenomena. Rather, the comparison addresses what might have been the power of these candelabra both to inspire Piranesi and to be popular with the craftsmen who adopted these approaches in their own work. The final chapter looks at the psychological explanations for the uncanny effect of animation, which might help again explain why humans are disposed to bring the inanimate to life.
The book offers a much-appreciated injection of vivacity to studies of the role of antiquity in neoclassicism. It may be the case that the candelabra themselves rather get lost as the bigger themes are explored, but the final sentences drive home the importance of the approach, as van Eck redefines restoration as ‘a vehicle for the material expression of emotional involvement with objects’ and for using them as a replacement for the dead and absent (179). We might wonder whether the material turn of our own time and the technologies we use to restore traces of lost cities, where we started the review, might not be answering a similar need.
