This is an ambitious book that touches on a controversial theme. Advocating against ‘traditional’ views of Roman society, Emanuel Mayer argues that the ‘middle class’, although a modern concept, provides a useful heuristic tool for making sense of urban society in the Roman world, and that it is precisely the emergence of a wealthy, self-conscious middle class that must be seen as the motor behind the consumption and development of certain forms of Roman art. M. notes that the Roman ‘middle class’ used the same iconographical repertoire as the élite, but in a different way, which in turn supports the idea that it is not too modernizing to use the term ‘middle class’ in a Roman context.
The book consists of four core chapters preceded by an introductory chapter, in which M. explains why he believes the term ‘middle class’ is applicable to the Roman world and useful in making sense of it, and followed by a concluding chapter. Ch. 2 uses the contrasting urban landscapes of Pompeii and Olynthos to argue that urban economies changed radically between the fourth century b.c.e. and the first century c.e., and then goes on to sketch the vast economic opportunities for urban populations in the cities of the Roman world. The third chapter takes this argument one step further, and argues how in Roman cities small-scale artisanal production, as a rule, was oriented towards outside markets. The ubiquity of tabernae, M. emphasizes, meant that the commercial middle classes were prominent in social life.
The discussion of chs 2 and 3 serves as a basis for the more art-historical emphasis that dominates the rest of the book. Ch. 4 focuses on middle-class funerary culture, particularly zooming in on mythological sarcophagi from the city of Rome. M. shows how middle classes adapted episodes from myths for their own purposes, and emphasized different aspects of these myths than authors of élite literature did. The fifth chapter continues along the same lines, focusing on the decoration of Pompeian houses. It discusses how middle-class consumers had a preference for certain mythological frames because of their visual appearance rather than their ideological message; they were not aping the lifestyle of the élite, but chose their own way. M. thus opposes the idea of a ‘trickle-down’ effect in which élite models set the standards for those lower down the social scale.
M. is very much in command in the art-historical parts of the narrative. His descriptions of individual monuments and their iconography are clear, meaningful and generally convincing. He rightly emphasizes the distance between domestic and funerary mythological iconography and literary mythological narrative. The book also incorporates a wide range of evidence that goes beyond the canon, and tries to integrate marginal data into the debate — particularly using recent literature from German-speaking countries.
Yet there are some problems with the overall argument. First, there is a sharp contrast between the totalizing ambition of the book — which claims to cover ancient middle classes — and the actual focus of the argument, which is, essentially, on Roman Italy, and mostly on Pompeii and the city of Rome — both exceptional cities that are implicitly taken as representative of the trends and developments. The exceptionality of these cities is hardly discussed. This leaves us with a very incomplete and, probably, biased picture of ‘middle-class’ culture.
Secondly, while it may be true that primitivist scholars like Finley underestimated the dynamics of Roman urban economies, M. seems at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, overstating the commercial boom of the last centuries b.c.e. There are indications that urban economies changed in this period, but the change is very unequal in time and space, and interpretation of the evidence is much less straightforward than M. suggests. By developing his argument around a comparison of the two extreme cases of Olynthos, in the northern margins of fourth-century b.c.e. Greece, and Pompeii, in the densely populated and immensely wealthy first-century c.e. Bay of Naples, M. oversimplifies the complexity of the economic history of the ancient Mediterranean.
Finally, there remains considerable vagueness — methodological and conceptual — around the term ‘middle class’. What is Mayer's ‘middle class’, and how are we to identify it in the archaeological record? It remains unclear. In chs 2–3, it seems as if M.'s ‘middle class’ was strictly commercial, but in the following chapters, he seems to use a much broader definition. In his discussion of the supposedly ‘middle-class’ sarcophagi in ch. 4, M. quietly admits that there is no élite dataset with which they can be compared, except for one single tomb. How do we know that these sarcophagi are all ‘middle class’? The House of Octavius Quartio, which serves as a key example of ‘middle-class’ taste in ch. 5, in size belongs to the top 5 per cent of Pompeian houses. Is that ‘middle class’? If so, where, then, are the houses of Pompeii's élite? M.'s emphasis on the difference between the literary depiction of myths and their depiction on sarcophagi and in houses suggests he would rank most people outside the senatorial and equestrian orders as ‘middle class’. This would deprive the Roman world of most of its local urban élites, and reduce most cities to, essentially, middle-class communities. Ultimately, this means that the book fails to make a convincing case that the controversial concept ‘middle class’ is very useful in discussing Roman urban communities.
