In 1830 a hoard of Roman silver weighing some 25 kilograms was recovered from farmland near Berthouville, between Rouen and Caen. The silver was mostly worked into drinking vessels and associated items such as jugs, ladles, and bowls. Two statuettes of the god Mercury confirmed this as a votive deposit, as indicated by various dedications from Romano-Gallic pilgrims, notably on nine pieces left by Quintus Domitius Tutus (‘Mr Safe’) in the mid-first century ad. Restored by conservation experts at the Getty Museum, the cache – along with several other treasures from Gaul – has served as witness to ‘Roman luxury’ in an exhibition on tour in the USA. The exhibition's catalogue is a volume that earns its place in any classical library. The Berthouville Silver Treasure and Roman Luxury Footnote ¹ may not add very much to our understanding of luxuria in Roman discourse: it is left unclear what happens when a ‘luxury object’ is put out of circulation, or at least transferred into the enclosed economy of a sanctuary; and if Mercury was a deity of fortune favoured particularly by freed slaves, perhaps a set of silver spoons was not such an ‘elite’ attribute as supposed? Beyond such factors of value, however, the figurative elaboration on display is striking. At the centre of a libation bowl we find the Lydian queen Omphale in a drunken slumber, exposing her derrière – as if to say ‘Beware how you imbibe’. One wine pitcher shows Achilles leaping aboard his chariot, with the body of Hector trussed in tow; turn the jug round, and there is Achilles again, now himself stricken in battle. On another pitcher, Achilles is among Greeks mourning the death of Patroclus; and there is Hector's corpse in a pair of scales, as the price of his ransom is assessed. We would be impressed to find such ‘sophisticated’ iconography upon objects in use at some stately villa at Rome or around the Bay of Naples. What does its appearance in the moist pastures of Normandy signify – at least for our preconceptions of ‘provincial taste’?

The challenge of gauging repertoires in the provinces is made a little easier when all available material is collected. Roman Sculpture from London and the South-East Footnote ² has been some while in preparation – groundwork was done by Tom Blagg, who died prematurely in 2000 – but it is worth the wait. Over two hundred pieces from London, the Greater London area, and the counties of Kent, Surrey, and Hertfordshire are catalogued. Close petrographic analysis has been conducted throughout, showing that certain works ‘made in Britain’ were produced using stone quarried from northern France. There is also a useful technical discussion of the colossal bronze head of Hadrian recovered from the Thames, hypothesizing that this is an early likeness of the emperor, created locally to mark the imperial visit to Britannia in ad 122. One advantage of a corpus such as this is that some problems of provenance are implicitly resolved. For example, it might be assumed that the togate figure of boy holding a ball, probably from a second-century-ad tomb, was a dislocated object, when found on the premises of Westminster School. However, presented in company with other funerary monuments excavated in the Westminster area – notably the sarcophagus of Valerius Amandinus – the piece may be claimed as more or less in situ originally (though here, again, the stone can be sourced across the Channel).

Hominibus bagis bitam (‘[give] life to wandering men’): the inscription below a marble group of Bacchus and his entourage, from the Walbrook Mithraeum, sounds rustic when enunciated – though by the late third century ad it was not uncommon for the letter ‘V’ to be carved as ‘B’. There is nothing strange about the imagery, however: a central Bacchus relaxed in youthful contrapposto, flanked by satyr, maenad, panther, and old Silenus upon a donkey. The shameless nudity of Bacchus and the accompanying satyr signals Londinium as a classical city – and such sculpted nudity would not again be on display in the capital until the seventeenth century, when the first collections of antique statuary were made. The cultural peculiarity of the classical nude body is noted in the catalogue of the 2015 British Museum exhibition Defining Beauty.Footnote ³ As Neil MacGregor points out in his Introduction, Napoleon Bonaparte needed to know that nudity was once ‘the uniform of the righteous’ (10) – if he were ever to feel happy about Canova's representation of him, ‘Mars the Peacemaker’, the statue kept by the Duke of Wellington at Apsley House since 1816. But how exactly did this culture of the unclothed body arise, in socio-historical terms – and how did it acquire such aesthetic and symbolic potency? The exhibition was successful, letting the objects more or less explain themselves. The catalogue, however, seems over-wary of indulging academic discourse – with the result that it remains distinctly a ‘coffee-table’ production, pleasing to regard but superficial in its commentary. A Platonic attitude may satisfy some readers – beauty is the beautiful: what else needs to be said? – but those studying Greek and Roman art from sixth form upwards will want more thorough exploration of the ways in which art, life, and ideas connect as components of ‘the body beautiful’. By coincidence, another 2015 exhibition, at the Regional Archaeological Museum near Madrid, addressed a similar theme: its catalogue, for readers of Spanish, provides the sort of intellectual substance that one might have wished for in the British Museum production.Footnote ⁴

It is a fact that each of us makes statements before we open our mouths: by our gait, our expressions, our gestures, and even the way we sit ourselves down. Decades ago, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss showed how ‘techniques of the body’ were culturally and socially conditioned: so it seems entirely legitimate to present a study entitled Body Language in Hellenistic Art and Society.Footnote ⁵ Jane Masséglia's monograph has the broad human interest of ‘people-watching’ as popularized by Desmond Morris et al., and it is easy enough to summon modern examples of the sort of analysis that she attempts in antiquity: I will not be the only person who, if he ever walks along with hands clasped behind his back, senses an assimilation to Prince Charles. Pace Mauss, certain postures seem readily decoded because their significance has not changed much over centuries: the jutting elbow and hand on hip, for example, is a classic alpha-male marker of personal space and self-importance. Sceptics may feel that deconstructing the body language of a statue such as the Terme Ruler – ‘arm akimbo, pelvic and hip tilt, and raised grip’ (31) – does not take us any further in giving a precise identification to the piece; and how helpful is it to distinguish ‘mourning’ from ‘thinking’ when viewing a particular articulation of the arms? But we need not fear that we are looking for visual cues that were never intended. From Theophrastus onwards, there is plenty of literary evidence to assist in associating particular postures and gestures with traits of personality, states of mind, and philosophical affiliations – as well as with civic status. And for the Hellenistic period, of course, there is no shortage of small-scale, even ‘mass-produced’, objects to treat as stereotypical. Masséglia's use of such Kleinkunst, and her careful analysis of those figures categorized as ‘burlesque’ or ‘grotesque’, sheds fresh light upon some well-known works, such as the Drunken Old Hag – and generally the range and intelligence of this study make it a highly readable and valuable addition to any bibliography of Graeco-Roman art.