This finely wrought volume offers a selection of the papers originally presented at a 2003 conference entitled ‘Role Models: Identity and Assimilation in the Roman World and Early Modern Italy’; selection has given the collection a tighter focus on antiquity. The sixteen papers are preceded by an introduction in which Sinclair Bell sets ‘role models’ (the volume's preferred translation for exempla) in their ancient context, discusses the papers' various approaches to exemplarity, surveys the surviving cultural evidence for Roman exempla, and introduces the papers. With its wide embrace of times and types of evidence, the volume offers an exemplary demonstration of the appeal of exemplarity as an approach to antiquity.

The arguments of the individual papers can only be sketched here. Tonio Hölscher, in ‘The concept of roles and the malaise of “identity”: ancient Rome and the modern world’, contrasts the familiar ancient concept of exemplum or ‘role’ with the modern concept of ‘identity’, illustrating the former with scenes from Trajan's Column. He also considers the way an emperor's statues both communicate ideals that his subjects can adopt themselves (e.g., concordia), and embody roles reserved for wearers of the purple (e.g., Jupiter). Suzanne Dixon, in ‘Gracious patrons and vulgar success stories in Roman public media’, discusses the exemplary value of four individuals commemorated in stone: the Ostian shoemaker Septimia Stratonice, Rome's baker Eurysaces, Pompeii's benefactress Eumachia, and Pliny the Younger (as represented by his career inscription, but with reference to the Letters), asking whether their monuments gave observers ‘something to live up to’ (60) and, if so, what it was. The next paper, Roberta Stewart's ‘Who's tricked: models of slave behavior in Plautus's Pseudolus’, shifts the focus to Republican Rome and to literature, situating Pseudolus and his like in the ‘developing slave society’ of the third and second centuries b.c.e. and viewing him as both role model (for slaves trying to survive enslavement) and anti-model (of élite values). We go further back with Brian Rose's paper ‘Forging identity in the Roman Republic: Trojan ancestry and veristic portraiture’. Rose presents two complementary arguments about the development of Roman self-representation under the pressure of competing iconographies, considering first the changing significance of an ‘eastern’ iconography (Trojan/Parthian) and second the veristic portrait type. For the latter he proposes a new origin (imagines) and a new date (c. 200 b.c.e.), to be tested, he hopes, by analysis of the portraits' marble.

The papers on exempla in imperial literature (Efrossini Spentzou, ‘Eluding Romanitas: heroes and antiheroes in Silius Italicus's Roman history’; Richard Alston, ‘History and memory in the construction of identity in early second-century Rome’; and Margaret Imber, ‘Life without father: declamation and the construction of paternity in the Roman Empire’) are also linked by a focus on élite male concerns. The first two suggest that Republican exempla no longer suffice in this period, Spentzou arguing that Silius shows his readers a world with ‘the boundaries between good Romans and bad barbarians eroded’ (136), Alston that Tacitus addresses the concerns of an audience for whom ‘narratives of elite identity were in flux’ (156). Imber, by contrast, illustrates the ongoing utility of declamatory exempla concerned with the sometimes incompatible roles of pater and civis in an era in which real élite fathers were frequently absent on state business.

Gender roles more broadly construed dominate the next five studies, with three papers on female exempla (Eve D'Ambra, ‘Daughters as Diana: mythological models in Roman portraiture’; Glenys Davies, ‘Portrait statues as models for gender roles in Roman society’; and Sarah B. Pomeroy, ‘Spartan women among the Romans: adapting models, forging identities’) interrupted by Eric Varner's challenging ‘Transcending gender: assimilation, identity, and Roman Imperial portraits’ and followed by Shelley Hales's ‘Aphrodite and Dionysus: Greek role models for Roman homes?’ D'Ambra considers the function of Diana in the commemoration of Roman girls, focusing on the attribution to them of ‘notably masculine virtues’ (172). Davies offers a useful overview of female gender roles in the private and public spheres as reflected in the literary and material evidence, and highlights a tension growing in the Imperial period between an ideal of domesticity and a reality of political influence, following this with an analysis of how the ‘body language’ of various female statue types reflects long-standing ancient ideals. Pomeroy collects Imperial-era literary depictions of Spartan women — Plutarch looms large — and discusses how Sparta's cultural traditions were maintained, revived, and adapted under changing political circumstances. Varner examines ‘striking, perhaps even shocking’ (192) portraits such as a Diana with Augustus' physiognomy, or an Agrippina assimilated to a Claudius (to list just two of the many types introduced here, more of which would have benefited from illustration). He also brings the literary evidence for imperial transvestism to bear on his argument that the blending of male and female in Imperial iconography ‘unequivocally asserts the transcendence of imperial authority over prescribed social roles’ (185). Hales asks why Dionysus and Aphrodite dominate the iconography of Roman domestic space. The association of these gods with masks and mirrors respectively, she argues, makes them useful for the ongoing process of identity construction ‘in a society where … (re)presentation is identity’ (249; emphasis original).

A focus on funerary iconography links the papers by von Hesberg (‘The image of the family on sepulchral monuments in the northwest provinces’), Hansen (‘Muses as models: learning and the complicity of authority’), and Huskinson (‘Degrees of differentiation: role models on early Christian sarcophagi’). Von Hesberg looks at how social roles, particularly those of women and children, are constructed in provinces newly Roman, considering attributes as various as emotionality, regional costume, and domestic paraphernalia; changes between the first and third centuries c.e. are also discussed. Hansen analyses the function of the Muses represented on numerous sarcophagi from the third and fourth centuries c.e., including a number in which a Muse appears with or near the deceased. Particular attention is given to the significance of ‘internal audience’ scenes, which facilitate the communication of values (e.g., learning, concordia, auctoritas) inherent in the scene to an external viewer. Huskinson examines ‘secular’ and Biblical iconography on Christian sarcophagi from third-century Rome, showing how this ‘emergent subgroup’ used imagery to express both integration into and alienation from contemporary society.

The final paper, John Clarke's ‘The philological, the folkloric, and the site-specific: three models for decoding Classical visual representation’, is an enjoyable lagniappe, applying the concept of ‘role model’ to scholarly methodologies and tracing the interpretations of the obscene ‘ass-and-lion’ shop sign from Pompeii that have emerged from three different models, including Clarke's own, which trumps the others by allowing for a meaning that is ‘anything but fixed and eternal’ (314).