This book demonstrates that objects purchased and then transported home created not just memories of travel, but also articulated the meaning of those places, people or spectacles. The topic of souvenirs is something of a lacuna both in historical thought and in artefact studies. However, 2021 saw the publication of K. Cassibry's Destinations of the Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire's Souvenirs (for a review see AJA 126 [2022], E138–40). P. notes that her book was submitted prior to the publication of Cassibry's. Not surprisingly, there are some areas of overlap, notably around the representation of cities on glass vessels, most famously of Baiae and Puteoli, and of the forts of the western part of Hadrian's Wall on enamelled vessels. Both authors come from the discipline of Art History and seek to demonstrate that ordinary objects of material culture can sustain as much debate as ‘canonical artworks and monuments’ (p. xvi). This is a beautiful book with 132 illustrations, almost all in colour. It would seem that the reluctance to include colour images may be waning in the third decade of the twenty-first century. The book is also a great read and thought-provoking, and it allows readers to run further with the ideas presented.
The book opens with a consideration of what is a souvenir. The personal is at the heart of this discussion, with the example of a San Gimignano snow globe that, like other souvenirs, has a story around it that is humorous, sentimental, private and performative (p. 3). This is a neat device because it causes readers to recall their own snow globe experiences. P. argues that these performative qualities were also present in ancient souvenirs and that souvenirs articulate a viewpoint of place as well as a means for the ancients to imagine a Roman empire.
Chapter 2 shifts the attention onto cult statues as souvenirs. These souvenirs are known to have been produced in antiquity, for example at Ephesus with a focus on Artemis, and P. notes the locations of various finds of these figurines. It is suggested that they might be incorporated into Lararia (pp. 29, 46, 48), but P. notes that no figurines produced as souvenirs (e.g. Artemis Ephesia) have been found in Lararia. This is somewhat surprising, given the range of gods found in Lararia in Pompeii: Jupiter, Venus, Neptune, Hercules and Persephone; some houses even added Egyptian gods such as Anubis or Isis. This raises some methodological questions: how do we define a figurine as a souvenir in the context of the current state of our knowledge of Lararia? Equally, should we see the Lararia of houses in Pompeii of the first century ce as disconnected from the production of souvenirs? Should the figurines of Egyptian deities found in Pompeian Lararia be viewed as souvenirs regardless of their place of production because, wherever made, these figurines perform the role of a souvenir?
The next chapter (3) draws souvenirs together under the theme of cities and sites. The chapter opens with Alexandria in glass, which is followed by Puteoli and Baiae in glass, and then moves onto Hadrian's Wall in enamelled metal. The case studies are well situated, but there is some variation in dating, and it would have been useful for readers to have here, and elsewhere in the book, clearer signposting of the variation in dating.
Chapter 4 shifts the attention away from case studies to the role of souvenirs ‘as critical technologies of memory and knowledge’ that provided people with a means to imagine or conceptualise empire via objects at home, held in the hand or worn on a finger (p. 93). Souvenirs are involved in place-making and are seen to ‘transcend space-time’, and they could reach a mass-market through miniaturisation or schematisation. The argument is persuasive, but I was left wondering whether coins with images of buildings in Rome, events such as congiaria or locally minted coins representing, for example, Artemis Ephesia issued under Claudius (RRC 12 118 & 119) might perform a similar role to souvenirs, if retained rather than spent. The appearance of souvenirs in burials is briefly discussed, but there is a sense that more might have been said about the life cycle of souvenirs as objects with some further discussion on the agency of souvenirs as objects (see E. Swift, Roman Artefacts and Society [2020]).
Chapter 5, on souvenirs of the Circus and the Arena, and Chapter 6, on souvenirs of the theatre, deal with spectacles that were associated with religious worship, but through the lens of ‘sports memorabilia’ in discussing the circus and gladiatorial souvenirs. The range of forms of representation is vast when compared to souvenirs of place: lamps, handles of knives, glass cups, clay figurines and silver cups. Like other souvenirs, these objects found their way into graves. What is less clear from the book is their place of production and life cycle prior to becoming a souvenir. Equally, the moment of becoming a souvenir, in which a lamp with a sports motif was chosen over a lamp with the image of a goddess, needs to be thought of in terms of how these choices were negotiated. There are other contextual questions, such as how the souvenir fitted in with the rest of the grave goods, which are open to further investigation.
Following on from these two chapters, there is a discussion of ‘Imagining the Roman Empire’ in Chapter 7 through spectacles. Case studies of Colchester, Calahora and Athens ‘offer insight into the push and pull between local, regional and imperial exigencies’ (pp. 208–9). At Calahora, unusually, the souvenirs of chariot racing include a date in the local festival calendar, which does not correlate to festivals held at Rome. Colchester, by contrast, features a full range of ‘spectacle memorabilia’, which in the first century ce was unlikely to have been experienced directly in all cases by the local population. Thus, the production of these artefacts drew on a wider knowledge of spectacles. Even though Colchester had a theatre, no theatrical souvenirs were produced – perhaps we should associate gladiatorial performances with the theatre on this basis? By contrast, theatrical imagery dominated the finds of souvenirs in Athens. P. argues (pp. 231–6) that souvenirs engage with ‘an imagined affinity’ (p. 231) of individuals; thus, she rejects the concept of an imagined community, which allowed for a greater range of engagements with people at a distance or those defined as culturally other. This would suggest a power to objects that have traits in common, such as gladiatorial combat, which implies that the glue loosely holding the Roman empire together resided in an affinity with items from a range of shared material culture.
The final chapter, a conclusion entitled ‘Rethinking Rome’, rightly rejects Rome-centric concepts of cultural change for a plurality of centres around which physical experience and/or imagination drew meaning. If we were to replace the word souvenir, though, with that of artefact, I wonder if we gained the same answer. I had a nagging feeling reading the book: is that object a souvenir and what shifts an artefact into the category of a souvenir? In the book, souvenirs tend to be visual representations: figurines or images placed onto an object, such as a lamp. This does not contest the central arguments of the book (summarised on p. 249) that ‘(1) souvenirs shaped how the various Romans remembered, developed knowledge about and conceived of various people, places, events and pastimes, and (2) that they sustained imagined affinities that allowed diverse and far-flung people to feel at once connected to and distant from others in the Roman empire’. Thus, the souvenir, or we might say the artefact, had agency to create and sustain the Roman empire, more so than, say, the canonical artworks and monuments so central to some discussions of Roman power and imperialism.
