Text and image in Roman culture remains an exciting and productive area of scholarly inquiry, and a volume benefiting from the co-editorship of E., who has been central to the development of the field, naturally promises to make an important contribution. A stated goal of this interesting collection, as E. explains in his introduction, is to use the Graeco-Roman system of rhetoric as an ‘emic’ theoretical model to the benefit of Roman art history. Characterising the theoretical models applied to archaeology ‘over the last couple of centuries’ as for the most part ‘etic’, that is, as ‘modern constructs’ that ‘come from outside the ancient world, to which they are then applied’ (p. 1), E. proposes that rhetoric, by being ‘directly located in the culture we are studying’ (p. 5) will offer new insights. As exemplified by the volume's eleven essays (framed by a brief preface and a rather rambling though thought-provoking coda by M.), this approach offers much of value, but nevertheless leaves some pressing questions unanswered.

The book's four sections cover ‘Architecture and Public Space’, ‘The Domestic Realm’, ‘The Funerary’ and ‘Rhetoric and the Visual’. Within E.'s introduction, the dichotomy between ancient and modern has perhaps been somewhat overdrawn, since the editors' project, as stated, depends on an abstraction and generalisation of ancient rhetorical terms – especially the key triad of ethos, pathos and logos as articulated by Aristotle – that bears the hallmarks of modern theoretical models, i.e. models like the ones that E. would seem to wish to replace. Thus we read, for example, that within ‘the problems and the questions at the core’ of rhetoric, ‘[e]thos provides the answers, pathos raises the questions, and logos is the locus of the play of their difference and similarity, difference and commonality between individuals, between opinions, between the questions and the answers that reflect them, on both the subjective and objective levels’ (p. 7; echoed by M., p. 442). The obscurity of this formulation aside, E. seems at pains to advance the emphases of ‘problematology’, the modern philosophical system developed by M. (cf. M. Meyer, Rhetoric, Language, and Reason [1994]). Further, as one is increasingly reminded over the course of the collection, ancient rhetorical concepts have indeed been applied before to Graeco-Roman art (see the works cited at the following places: p. 129 n. 28, p. 183 n. 2, p. 185 n. 5, p. 259 n. 15, p. 318 n. 8). The book's true ambitions seem to come through better in E.'s claim that ‘Roman art is no different from any other area of Roman culture in its ubiquitous rhetorical inflections and functions, themselves not only theorized within the culture but also regularly compared to and applied to visual examples in our rhetorical texts and handbooks’ (p. 22).

How far does this claim hold up? E. himself concedes the importance of noting that ‘the kinds of propositions made by images, and the means by which they are structured in formal terms, are inevitably different from those of language or writing – both in the ways that connections are made and in the ways that the audience's mind grasps them’ (p. 2). One such difference that nagged at me as I read is the much clearer sense in which rhetorical language, as opposed to buildings or images posited as ‘rhetorical’, attempts to persuade its addressees of something specific. In some cases, the persuasive function of an image may be rather straightforward, at least in part: few would dispute the idea that, for example, most public statues of emperors are attempts to persuade their viewers of the emperors' power and authority. Things get much more tricky, in my opinion, when one is dealing with an artistic phenomenon as complex as the interrelating wall paintings within a richly decorated Pompeian house (cf. K. Lorenz's contribution in Chapter 5), or the changing portrayal of mythological characters on Roman sarcophagi (cf. Chapters 7, 8 and 10, by B.E. Borg, Z. Newby and E., respectively). Often, in fact, the images that various contributors insist on as ‘rhetorical’ seem to me to be at least as strongly ‘poetical’ in their subtle semantic play, to which the contributors themselves call attention. And the dangers and drawbacks of interpreting, say, Roman imperial poetry as straightforwardly rhetorical have for some time been evident to scholars of Latin literature (seminal here is, e.g., S. Hinds, ‘Generalizing About Ovid’, Ramus 16 [1987], 4–31). Similarly, the view that the main purpose of ekphrasis of art objects in Graeco-Roman literature is always to function rhetorically in connection with enargeia because ekphrasis is defined thus in the imperial rhetorical handbooks (an opinion voiced more than once in the volume under review) has met with scepticism in some quarters (as in S. Goldhill, review of R. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice [2009], BMCR 2009.10.03), while much evidence can be adduced to show that such ekphrasis in Latin literature is often at least as involved in expressing, for example, a richly ambivalent cultural poetics surrounding the competition between Greek and Roman culture (B. Dufallo, The Captor's Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis [2013]).

The volume's overall success depends on the extent to which one finds that conceptual tensions and problems such as the ones that I have outlined have been overcome. On the one hand, some of the essays advance a clearly delimited persuasive goal for art that seems convincingly rhetorical. J. Trimble presents an illuminating comparison of Suetonius’ diverse rhetorical aims in his physical descriptions of emperors with those of actual portrait sculptures, which ‘made claims not about how an emperor actually looked but about how this particular emperor … fulfilled the role of emperor’ (p. 149). So, too, E. D'Ambra interprets the similarities across representations of elite women, including the affecting evidence of surviving children's dolls, as an implicit argument for ‘a corporate identity governed by a uniform and homogenous look’ and expressing ‘the dignity of women of honor’ (p. 174). On the other hand, the exact persuasive goal of the monument or art object is often in question. Thus, while E. Thomas provides an eloquent account of the ‘homology of language between architecture and rhetoric’ (p. 51) in ‘Longinus’, note his caveat, derived from Vitruvius: ‘buildings demonstrate, but they do not argue. Because of their lack of semantic precision buildings cannot be representational structures like other communicative arts’ (p. 44, italics mine). A not-unrelated ambiguity undergirds F. de Angelis's compelling interpretation of the notoriously low legibility of the upper images on the Column of Trajan. For me, one of the finest essays in the collection is C. Vout's, on the funerary altar of Pedana, but here the author's main purpose is a deconstructive laying bare of such monuments' ‘very failure to persuade their audience’ (p. 315). V. Platt's excellent treatment of ‘the limits of expression’ in Roman art and rhetorical treatises aims primarily at showing how familiarity with one medium might ‘prompt reflection on the potential and limitations of another’ (p. 212), while persuasion itself is simply not a central issue in M. Squire's nevertheless stimulating discussion of the Tabulae Iliacae in relation to the mnemonic systems of rhetorical training.

For its interest in Roman art's ‘discursive function as a mediating tool between a series of addressers’ – among them ‘commissioners, patrons, artists’ – and ‘an audience of viewers’ (p. 4), this book will likely be welcome. More effort to define how the ambiguities and uncertainties of signification should influence our view of whether or not such art is indeed ‘rhetorical’ would have made for a more coherent presentation overall.