When Pablo Neruda’s El libro de las preguntas was published in 1973, it was the result not of a single, temporally bound project, but of questions that had accumulated in the poet’s mind over decades. “Where is the center of the sea?/Why do waves never go there?” “Is what I see from afar/what I have not yet lived?” “Who shouted with glee/when the color blue was born?”Footnote ¹ Neruda’s pointedly unanswerable questions invited readers to pause, to look again at their world and to see it expanded and enriched by their own posture of uncertainty.

One has the sense, reading John North Hopkins’s new Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, ca. 650–250 BCE, that it represents a sort of Book of Questions for this scholar. As Hopkins notes from the outset, the volume responds in part to the discipline’s age-old anxiety regarding the identity and even the existence of its subject matter. Otto Brendel articulated the problem most famously in his 1953 “Prolegomena to a book on Roman art,” writing that it boiled down to “what, precisely, is Roman in Roman art.”Footnote ² Brendel’s own grappling with this issue had a major impact on the development of Roman art history over the following decades, as new generations of scholars reacted to and expanded on the ideas synthesized in his essay. The utility of continuing to ask “what is Roman in Roman art” formed a core theme of Natalie Boymel Kampen’s “On writing histories of Roman art,” published 50 years after Brendel’s “Prolegomena” in The Art Bulletin.Footnote ³ Kampen concluded that “essentialist questions” such as this one had now “fallen by the wayside, to be replaced by a growing interest in reception and patronage, in the social organization of art production, in ideology, in gender and ethnicity, in performance and movement.”Footnote ⁴ The question has, however, remained a concern, and continues to be interrogated alongside the categories Kampen mentions – to which we might now add that of “identity.”Footnote ⁵ Certainly, Hopkins’s new volume richly illustrates the vitality of all these lines of inquiry two decades later.

Another major line of scholarship implicit in the background to Hopkins’s questions is the extensive debate over “Romanization.” Heated interest in this topic, beginning especially in the 1990s, in some sense overtook “what is Roman in Roman art,” but without providing an answer.Footnote ⁶ Here too, scholars faced a terminological quandary, and after years of discussion there remains little agreement as to what “Romanization” is, how it operates, or what we should call it. As with the problem of defining “Roman” art, most of us would offer the unsatisfying but probably more credible response that “Romanization” – whatever it means – functioned in multiple, distinct ways for different people in different places at different times. The Romanization debate has, over the years, added important nuance to the study of Roman art and history, but has ultimately done so by generating new questions rather than tidily answering old ones. Perhaps the real scholarly project of the last century of Roman studies, then, has been to resign ourselves to the un-answerability of so many of our questions.

This would certainly seem to be the view adopted by Hopkins. It is significant that the word “Romanization” appears only once in their volume, and in specific reference to prior scholarship. Likewise, Brendel and “what is Roman in Roman art” are mentioned almost in passing. Hopkins’s book is not a review of earlier work but a complete recalibration. Perhaps even repeating the word “Romanization” would impose the types of categorizations that Hopkins has explicitly set out to dissolve.

Instead, a series of key terms reappear throughout the study, chief among them: embodied, distributed, fragmented, multidirectional, bound and unbound (as in the title); entanglement, engagement, multivalence; heterarchy, entropy, coexistence, comingling, and copresence. Hopkins’s project is not to clarify but to complicate – to add presences, meanings, and indeed people to a kinetic past that defies modern disciplinary divisions and terminologies.

In terms of content, the volume is concerned broadly with art and architecture produced in and near Rome from roughly 650 to 250 BCE. Each of the five core chapters centers on a theme that is in turn framed and expounded through discussion of a specific building, object, or group of objects. Hopkins asks readers to consider “what might be recovered by looking around (but not overlooking) the Roman threads that are entangled” with these objects, and to “explore what has been lost through centuries of blinding attention, how it has been lost, and what might be regained if a discipline were to try and see beyond its own frames and formworks and to permit the landscape to be unbound from Rome” (10).

The book opens with a description of the sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus which is used as an entry point to one of Hopkins’s overarching themes: that even the most apparently “Roman” objects are the products of craft traditions and knowledge, of people, belonging to a much wider world than Rome itself. Here we begin the “unbinding” of these objects, “dim[ming] the light on those Roman qualities and associations momentarily in the hopes of seeing other worlds that have been overlooked or purposefully diminished in the project of history” (6). As Hopkins repeats throughout the volume, the goal is not to deny the Roman elements of the material past, but to view them alongside the many other cultural worlds that informed their creation and use. The sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus is effective in orienting the reader to this approach: though often cited as an example of early Roman art, the sarcophagus evinces stylistic traditions from across the Mediterranean. As Hopkins notes, its particular combination of triglyphs and rosettes may suggest artistic practices in Sicily and southern Italy, but these elements are themselves widespread and certainly not unprecedented in 3rd c. BCE Rome. The sarcophagus’s clear interest in individual heroization may relate more to Macedonian than to Roman or Italic tradition, but it is carved entirely of undisguised Alban stone, suggesting a deliberately local choice in terms not only of material but also of craftspeople who would have needed to be familiar with its properties. This last point proves particularly salient for the discussions that follow, as Hopkins works to center craftspeople – their physical presences, their experiences, and their contributions – in the broader narratives of building and object creation.

Indeed, it is makers that constitute the focal theme of Chapter 1, which is structured around the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Hopkins has published widely on this temple in the past, but the chapter pursues a fresh line of inquiry.Footnote ⁷ “Who first saw the building in its finished form in their mind’s eye?”, Hopkins wonders (22). “To what extent could the temple’s commissioner – or, for that matter, any other single individual, such as a building expert or artist – really imagine all of the necessary elements on first contemplation or even upon formally proposing or beginning work on such a structure? Who might truly comprehend…how such a space would feel, what its presence would do, and how to make all of that possible?” (22–23). Such questions are not often asked, perhaps because they are fundamentally unanswerable. But, as Hopkins shows, it is the process of thinking through questions like these that proves so enriching.

Part of this process involves examining our own use of language, and the assumptions and unwitting imperialisms that standard scholarly speech often contains. Hopkins probes the use of action words in ancient and modern texts that describe building construction. What does an ancient author actually mean by a word like fecit or epoiesen in relation to patrons who presumably played little part in the mental work of designing a structure or in the physical work of hauling and stacking stones to build it? Hopkins points out that the modern tendency to repeat attributions to elite patrons not only replicates the silencing of makers’ contributions but also seriously skews our own understanding of the structures and their cultural impact. Once we recognize the real diversity of the workers who created something like the Temple of Jupiter and how they “worked together, affecting each other’s efforts on the hilltop and across the landscape” (29), the problems of categorizing the building in terms of a specific culture or group are evident. It is more than the fact that workers came from areas that were not all under Rome’s direct political control, although this is important.Footnote ⁸ Rather, it is that the range of difference in their backgrounds and experiences means that any singular cultural definition of a structure made by so many hands is flawed from the outset.

Chapter 2 takes us deeper into the mobile world of objects, materials, and makers. The first half focuses on architectural terracottas, and Hopkins’s expertise in this area is on full display. Recent interest in the logistics of architectural terracotta production and distribution has significantly advanced earlier debates regarding itinerant versus fixed workshops, and a multiplicity of practices is increasingly recognized. It now seems clear that we cannot think of one or the other situation as being “standard,” since our evidence points to local production as well as to the shipping of finished products and to coroplasts traveling with any range of materials. Hopkins is right to stress that even the importation of finished terracottas to a site would nonetheless involve the movement of roofers or builders. The emphasis on human mobility in relation to construction forefronts the social and cultural realities that underlay a shared material culture in central Italy from at least the 7th c. At the same time, as Hopkins shows, the degree of variation on single roofs, even when their component elements are similar or indeed identical to examples from other sites, is striking. A building like the Regia, so physically and symbolically significant for Rome, contained numerous architectural terracottas known from sites outside of Rome – and this remained true in multiple construction phases. At the same time, the combination and arrangement of these familiar elements was specific to this structure. While this fact “mitigat[es] its uniqueness, its special iconographical meaningfulness to Rome,” it also illustrates how the same terracottas could and must have carried site-specific meanings on the various central Italic temples they adorned (46). As Hopkins notes, all this “begins to present a fundamentally destabilizing element to any study that seeks to bind architecture, sculpture, and its manufacture to site, state, culture, or territory” (49).

Although early stone construction is more obviously bound to place than are architectural terracottas, Hopkins emphasizes here, too, the clear evidence for shared knowledge amongst stone workers and the almost shocking degree of variation in the resulting structures. While it is true, as scholars have pointed out, that the concurrent adoption of certain stone technologies at different sites reveals a high level of interconnectivity, Hopkins asks us to consider how the particular uses of these technologies actually vary as much as they share. Block size is a good example, as it tends to be squeezed uncomfortably into known measurement units – at least in modern narratives. Not only do many blocks defy such standard units, but there is often considerable variation in block size even within single buildings. Hopkins contextualizes this diversity in relation to workers, whose site-specific knowledge of their materials would inform how materials were employed: “material dictated measure, not institutions” (57). Once again, the historical labels to which we instinctively cling are wholly inadequate.

Chapter 3 turns to the theme of temporality, to how time “adjusted and multiplied the way objects and spaces appeared to be bound to Rome, to constitute its quintessence, even” and to “how this process erased or obscured past worlds in ways that have distorted the material record and its invocation in history telling” (69). Hopkins discusses at length an often-cited passage of Livy, in which Cato the Elder laments that there are “too many people praising and admiring the artifacts of Corinth and Athens and ridiculing the terracotta antefixa of Roman gods.”Footnote ⁹ Reading this phrase in relation to temporality opens up new lines of interpretation. As Hopkins discusses, these terracottas were not objects of the distant past for Livy/Cato – Rome was still full of terracotta-clad buildings in the 1st c. BCE. Their “Romanness” was instead bound up with a particular (and rather teleological) way of constructing the past. They are “Roman” because they are a feature of Rome that stretches back centuries. The Rome of Livy/Cato bore witness to the temporal accretion of architectural terracottas, which linked past and present. At the same time, if one examines any individual example of these objects, it is immediately clear that any Roman identity cannot be exclusive. In other words: even if they were Roman, they were not only Roman.

The concept of temporal accretion, which proves particularly rich for thinking through the lived experience of standing within a space and viewing its form and contents, recurs throughout the remainder of the chapter. The rostra in the Comitium, for instance, would have been new and unusual at the moment of their initial installation, and strongly imbued with the living memory of violent conquest. But these meanings would have shifted over time as memory faded and as new rostra were added to their number. So too with the accumulated votives in sanctuaries. As objects became the sole survivors of their era, the meanings originally connected to them would necessarily have been altered – inscriptions becoming unclear, figures becoming unrecognizable, whole centuries being collapsed and whole histories being invented in viewers’ minds. In this way, “what had once been unbound from Rome, only partially of Rome, could now be claimed as Roman” (110). Romanness, then, “was made afterward, through erasure” (110). As Hopkins reminds us at the close of the chapter, it is all too easy to repeat and perpetuate this type of erasure through the uncritical adoption of handed-down terminology and narratives.

Though focused broadly on the idea of objecthood, Chapter 4 is in some sense a case study for thinking with the ideas presented thus far. It revolves around the Ficoroni cista – an object as famous as it is confounding, and quite suited to asking what is and isn’t “bound” to Rome. The cista’s inscription, NOVIOS PLAUTIOS MED ROMAI FECID, would of course seem as good a link to Rome as one could hope for. But the object was given by a prominent member of Praeneste’s Dindii clan to her daughter, as another inscription states, and was ultimately found at Praeneste. Hopkins leads us skillfully through the cista’s seemingly contradictory features, describing the ways in which particular elements (the choice of scene, the types of garments and footwear, the style of engraving, and so on) all reflect different geographies. The author states explicitly that while they will “explore some ways to see these elements together,” they “will not suggest a comprehensive explanation of [the cista’s] function, presence, or meaning” (147). Hopkins proves true to their promise, and it is this direct statement that perhaps best articulates the approach to ancient objects that they are advocating. Once again, they reject any terminology that might serve to define or classify an object like the Ficoroni cista. It is not only Roman just as it is not only Praenestine. Viewing it in terms of Hellenicity or in terms of its Etruscan elements ignores its other features. Even calling it something expansive like Italic or Mediterranean is, in Hopkins’s view, misleading, as it “focuses attention on certain intellectually privileged elements over others” (137).

Copresence – its functioning and how it can be approached and understood in the telling of history – constitutes the thematic core of Chapter 5. Hopkins is concerned primarily with religious practice and sacred material culture, using examples of specific objects to address the underlying issue of what might be bound to or unbound from Rome. As they rightly point out, even when an object is made in Rome or at Roman behest it does not follow perforce that its makers are themselves “Roman” or employing distinctly “Roman” practices in its creation. The concept of entanglement recurs frequently here, and Hopkins reaches from the rich anthropological theory on this topic to show just how oversimplified the Roman narrative tends to be.Footnote ¹⁰ They reintroduce the evidence for mixed groups of artisans in relation to the production of sacred objects, asking us to consider how accepting the entangled reality begins “to unsettle expectations about politically or polity-rooted sacred imaginaries, practices, and, specifically, temple sculpture” (166). Hopkins further considers the problematic category of “Roman religion” and the ways in which it has been artificially isolated from equally troubling categories like “Etruscan religion.” Not only is it unfair to compare a polity with an entire region, but our evidence shows that religious practices in central Italy were inextricably intertwined. Furthermore, the material record from Rome itself is highly varied, “fragmenting the sense of a unified sacred world to hold against an Etruscan or other Italic one” (180). Hopkins then launches into a detailed discussion of anatomical votives in Rome and central Italy. This is among the book’s most exciting sections, as it vividly illustrates the ways in which objects can be simultaneously site-specific and linked across a wide geographic (and temporal) expanse. It also demonstrates the dangers of privileging a retrospective political narrative over the archaeological evidence. The chapter’s conclusion brings back the theme of temporality – specifically, how the passage of time can shape or alter meaning:

The brief Chapter 6 synthesizes and expands the book’s core arguments. Hopkins preempts the potential criticism that their approach might seem “antithetical to the attempt to understand the past” due to its “formlessness” (195) – what I would call its interest in unanswerable questions. But, as Hopkins asserts, and as the volume itself has richly demonstrated, this approach in fact opens up new and wider planes of investigation. I will address a few of these now.

Unbound from Rome is chiefly concerned with the years between 650 and 250 BCE, but the book’s approach and broader arguments are certainly applicable beyond this chronological range. Hopkins notes this in the final chapter, with special reference to the period that follows. Indeed, assumptions of a pervasive “Romanization” have dominated interpretations of Italic art from the 2nd c. BCE onwards, even as Romanization as a construct has been called into question. And yet what “Roman” or “Romanness” means becomes no clearer over time, particularly when we shed the teleological narratives offered by some of our written sources and look directly to the archaeological evidence. A central argument of Hopkins’s book is that “equat[ing] craft worlds with political worlds” (51) can distort our understanding of the past. In the case of architectural terracottas, for instance, the widespread mobility of makers, materials, and products means that no terracotta can really be defined as “Roman,” nor can Rome be identified as the primary center of their production. Hopkins deftly illustrates this for the 7th to 3rd c., but it is equally true for the period that follows, despite Rome’s increased political hegemony. A commonly repeated claim is that earlier architectural terracotta production centers like Orvieto and Falerii Veteres were replaced by Rome in the 2nd c. BCE.Footnote ¹¹ There is no actual evidence to support this idea, and local production of terracottas across Italy appears to have persisted energetically through Roman conquest and beyond. Scholarly assumptions regarding Rome’s role in the dissemination of later architectural terracottas exemplify the dangers of extrapolating military domination to craft production and show the relevance of Hopkins’s approach to periods in which Roman authority was assured.

Another key theme of Hopkins’s study with implications beyond its chronological and geographic bounds relates to terminology – in particular, to the word “Roman.” While the ambiguities of the term have of course been frequently discussed, Hopkins puts the debate in a new light. It is not just about what Roman art is (though that is certainly part of it), but why we are so insistent on calling things “Roman.” Why, in other words, do we require our material to be in some way “bound up with the powerful conglomerate” (196)? Hopkins stresses in the introduction the Orientalist tendencies that underlie our structuring of categories as Roman, non-Roman, pre-Roman, etc., as all this “keeps Rome epistemologically in a central temporal and conceptual space (everything is still framed around its presence or absence)” (9).

As Hopkins shows, however, these issues are about more than terminology. The book is largely a reflection on how scholarship is done: how we get to certain widely held notions, how disciplinary perspective impacts interpretation, how disciplinary categories shape the telling of history. While Etruscologists, for instance, have tended to emphasize craft connectivity in the Tiber region, particularly from the 5th c. (though the phenomenon begins well before), the same period – the same material – has often been viewed through “a distinctly antagonistic and imperialistic lens” (172) by Romanists and ancient historians. Rome and Falerii offer an interesting example. Despite the fact that the two were frequently at odds politically and militarily in the 4th and 3rd c., their sacred imagery is intimately linked. Hopkins has addressed this incongruence in earlier work, but the phenomenon receives deeper attention here in the context of craft networks within the broader region.Footnote ¹² The two polities were simultaneously connected (in terms of material culture and the people producing it) and opposed (in terms of politics). Any cultural label we might assign to Falerii’s sacred sculptures, then, turns out to be highly inadequate – even misleading.

Falerii is one example, but this type of “unbinding” is at the core of the book’s message. Through a careful unraveling of assumptions and cultural labels for the objects and structures under examination, Hopkins exposes the distorting effect of disciplinary categories. They ask us to consider how moving beyond such labels and the academic divisions that rely on them (i.e., what material “belongs” to a given discipline) might bring us to a fuller understanding of the past.Footnote ¹³ This is particularly relevant today, as many academic institutions reexamine how degree programs are structured and whether traditional departmental divisions still make sense.

The book itself is beautifully produced with high quality color images and a pleasing cover. The text is largely free of typos, and the index and bibliography are thorough. Hopkins makes frequent use of evocative language, referring for instance to the physical experience of encountering materials: “harvesting immense amounts of clay, hauling its loose, wet matter, selecting and refining its fabric, and kneading it to the necessary quality of use” (15) or to the “smell of working regularly at wood-fired kilns, or the body aches of the clay-presser” (52). Such passages offer a welcome vividness in academic writing and align with Hopkins’s aim to bring a human element into the consideration of the past. The text overall veers towards the theoretical which might render the volume intimidating to undergraduates, but scholars and graduate students will find much of interest both in terms of big-picture concepts and in the discussions of individual objects and structures. Unbound from Rome ultimately leaves us with more questions than it answers. Its destabilizing effect speaks to the weight of its questions, which should prompt all of its readers to think again about how we approach “Roman” art – whatever that may be.