On the first page of his introduction to this anthology, Jaś Elsner offers a striking observation about the rhetorical mode of viewing ancient art: unlike many of the scholarly habits of classical archaeologists — among them stylistic dating, artistic attribution and attention to provenance — rhetoric is ‘a lens that the ancients themselves would have understood’ because it was arguably the foundation of ancient education. The fact that an ancient Roman would have been at home with rhetorical modes of interpreting many artes does not negate the value of other methodologies, but it does suggest that there is an essential validity to thinking about ancient art rhetorically.

Three terms recur in this anthology and serve to tie all of the essays together. These are Aristotle's modes of persuasion, ethos, pathos and logos. In rhetoric, ethos involves establishing the credibility (the authority or good character) of the speaker; pathos involves putting the audience into a particular frame of mind or emotional state; and logos is the stuff of the speech itself — its content, as well as the speaker's choice and arrangement of words. Readers must tolerate some degree of translation across media: E. asks, for example, that we ‘allow logos to be not only words but any medium by which an audience is addressed’ (4). If we permit this sort of leap, though, the fundamental notion of the anthology is sound: Roman art, like Roman rhetoric, existed to negotiate a distance between artist (or patron) and audience, and so Roman art can be understood rhetorically.

All of the essays in this anthology are worth reading, because all of them lead us to look more closely at Roman art and architecture and to think about them as to some degree rhetorically determined. Some essays stand out, though, because they demonstrate that this approach can suggest profitable answers to long-standing questions. Francesco de Angelis takes up the familiar question of why the artists of the frieze on Trajan's Column rendered their subjects in such detail when few viewers could have made out scenes above the lowest spirals. De Angelis marshals Ps.-Longinus’ On the Sublime and other sources to suggest that grandeur (μέγεθος) and attention to detail (ἀκρίβεια) were complementary critical concepts, but that attention to detail was ‘supplemental and ultimately … subordinate to’ grandeur (100). This, he argues, is how we are meant to understand the details of Pheidias’ sublime Zeus at Olympia. It also explains why the frieze of Trajan's Column, which receives so much attention from modern scholars, is never even mentioned in any ancient source.

Jennifer Trimble takes on the perplexing question of why Suetonius’ physical descriptions of the early emperors can differ so dramatically from their sculpted portraits. Faced with this conflicting evidence, many scholars have either ignored the divergent details entirely or accepted Suetonius as the more trustworthy source, on the grounds that the portraits were clearly honorific in intention. Trimble argues instead that both Suetonius and the portraits have rhetorical aims, but that those aims differ. Suetonius is not necessarily more trustworthy, since his descriptions ‘primarily communicated an ethical assessment of the ruler in question, framed in rhetorical terms of praise or blame’ (128). The sculpted portraits of the emperor, on the other hand, needed to meet the expectations of inhabitants around the Empire as to what constituted an appropriate imperial look.

A couple of the essays about sarcophagi also take up long-standing discussions with interesting results. Barbara Borg rejects the old chestnut about third-century art representing a decline driven by loss of skills or lack of funds. She argues that sarcophagi in this period move away from mythological narrative because patrons had different rhetorical goals from their second-century predecessors. Earlier sarcophagi, she argues, offered general messages of loss and consolation — so general that, for example, the gender of the deceased often had no bearing on the gender of the mythical protagonists depicted on the sarcophagus. (Zahra Newby makes the same point in the next essay.) Over time, however, the link between sarcophagus imagery and the identity of the deceased became increasingly specific: what was depicted on a sarcophagus was taken to represent something essential about the deceased. Under these circumstances, patrons must have come to consider many myths too problematic for sarcophagus decoration: ‘Surely the Achilles and Penthesilea sarcophagi were not all created for wives who fell victim to their husbands or lovers’ (251). E.'s essay takes the story of sarcophagus decoration into the next century, arguing that early Christian sarcophagi departed from earlier themes (panegyric of the deceased and the consolation of mourners) to embrace narratives that emphasized the profession of faith.

My one reservation is directed not at the authors but at the press: a number of the images in this volume are difficult to make out. Some of the paintings need to be reproduced in colour if the reader is to see what is being described; other images are just too small. Sarcophagus decoration can be complex: a single long side might contain several scenes and many figures; and so it does the authors’ arguments a disservice to confine illustrations of some sarcophagi to a tiny quarter-page. Proper illustration is costly, but it is the better part of pathos (and perhaps also of ethos) to assume that readers who pick up a book about ancient art might want to look closely at ancient art.