K.'s study of Roman idols makes an invaluable contribution to the field of Roman culture and religion. The book explores how idols from the Roman West functioned on temples from the Iron Age to late antiquity. K. demonstrates that, amongst the many votive images populating the sanctuary (i.e. figurines, reliefs, statues and decorative sculpture), the idol was the most important object of ritual worship because it possessed divine agency. The study provides, moreover, a comprehensive examination of the idol's life cycle, exploring not only how people interacted with idols, but also how idols were created, housed in sacred architectural spaces and ultimately destroyed and buried.
K.'s argument is primarily based on archaeological evidence, supplemented by secondary literary sources that describe the use of idols in antiquity. Because temples in the city of Rome were heavily plundered in the fourth and fifth centuries ad, leaving almost no traces of their internal arrangements, most of the material evidence used by K. comes from the Romano-Celtic temples of Western provinces, whose architectural model (a tower-like cellar surrounded by a gallery) enabled evidence to survive intact once the temple fell into ruins.
K.'s book provides an important contribution to the underexplored religious and archaeological aspect of idols and cult images in Roman temples, by examining them in their original context and assessing them as objects endowed with social agency. In this sense K. breaks from a long tradition, revolving around J.J. Winckelmann's study of cult images, which primarily considers the style, iconography and semantics of these ancient works of art. Indeed, despite the central role of idols and cultic images in the study of ancient religion, the topic has been mostly absent from scholarship about the ancient Graeco-Roman world. A decade ago J. Mylonopoulos (‘Introduction: Divine Images versus cult Images’, in Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome [2010]) presented an important discussion about the divinity of cult images. And a few scholars (P. Stewart, Statues in Roman Society [2003]; J. Rüpke, ARG 12 [2010]) have touched on the function of idols in Roman religion. But a book entirely dedicated to the use of idols in Roman culture, with a complete bibliography of cultic images, was missing until K.'s book filled in the gaps.
The book is well illustrated and intuitively structured, covering the birth, life and death of cult images in a sequence of seven chapters. K. opens the volume by distinguishing between idols and other cult images in Roman temples. He recognises that the word ‘idol’ has carried the same ideological baggage since nineteenth-century Christian missionaries used it to condemn native religious practices in colonial settings, and he justifies his choice of the word, extolling its potential to describe unambiguously the image at the centre of cult worship inside the temple. K.'s choice seems particularly appropriate, not only because the word ‘idol’ captures the essential function of the principal statue worshipped, but also because it qualifies the Romans as idolaters, a characterisation that scholars often prefer to disregard. To explore this topic in greater depth, K. discusses the origins of the designation ‘pagan idol’ in the work of ancient Christian writers who attacked Roman idolatry.
In Chapter 2 K. considers the birth of cult images in early Rome. Based on archaeological evidence obtained in the last 30 years, he shows that images of the gods had a long history in both northern Europe and Rome, thus predating the imperial period. He demonstrates, moreover, that the idea that barbarian worship was entirely aniconic was promoted by ancient Roman authors to serve a political agenda. By stressing that Roman idols had been introduced by the Etruscans, ancient authors attempted to legitimise their ancient lineage, diverting attention from the idols’ apolitical status as man-made objects imbued with divine agency.
Chapter 3 challenges the preconceptions about the late birth of native iconography amongst Celtic and Germanic peoples. K. departs from the established notion that wood cult images existed prior to the Roman conquest, to analyse the profound consequences of the figural representations of gods created by Celtic and Germanic peoples after the arrival of the Romans. K. shows that these tribes continued to venerate their idols (most of which were made of wood) after the Roman conquest. Slowly, however, wood was replaced by stone (a Roman medium) and Roman stylistic conventions were adopted while they continued to rely on Iron Age art for their basic forms of iconography. Contact with the Romans also produced new idols and cult images, some quite distant from their Iron Age roots. These cultural interactions introduced to ordinary people the tradition of dedicating votive statues and reliefs, as well as the use of stone temples for housing idols.
In Chapter 4 K. discusses the special arrangements of Roman-Celtic sanctuary sites made to house the idol. By analysing several examples of temples, K. concludes that idols were placed at temple hearths. The foundations of the idols, which were occasionally made below the level of the floor, often indicated that their position and size were known before the construction of the temple. He shows that the foundation below the idols’ base marked the spot where the divinity presided. K. also demonstrates that, though the permeance of the idol was an important aspect, the status of the images was not immutable and that changes to the physical setting of cult images often reflected shifts in their popularity.
In Chapter 5 K. proposes an anthropological comparison with other cultures, in order to understand better the use of idols in Roman rituals. These comparisons, he argues, help make up for insufficient data from Roman archaeological, epigraphical and literary sources. Within this line of reasoning, K. compares idol worship in Hindu India and the cult activity of the Romans, which share many substantial similarities. While the use of cross-cultural comparisons is routinely used in European prehistoric studies, it is still underexplored in Greek and Roman studies. Thus, K.'s methodology brings a fresh approach to the investigation of classical cultures.
In Chapter 6 K. analyses the end of idol-use. He notes that the end of an image's use may occur during different time periods and is related to the idols’ change of function. There are many reasons that an idol may cease to be worshipped: accidental damage, pollution, perceived failure or usurpation by another cult image. K.'s studies show that in the Roman West cult image destruction and deposition began in the late third century ad and continued until the early medieval period. Idols were destroyed by Germanic invaders, Christians and the pagans themselves. Whatever their identity and motivation, the iconoclasts all believed that the objects that they were deposing held real power.
Finally, in Chapter 7, K. presents the general conclusions of his book.
K.'s book is a work of great value to anyone interested in the study of ancient religions and archaeology. The volume will be of particular value to academics working on Roman history, at multiple levels of scholarship (from graduate students to more advanced scholars). Given its new methodological approaches, its depth and its openness to dialogue with anthropological studies, the book will inspire scholars working in ancient studies to revisit established source material and to consider ancient idols and images with a fresh perspective.
