This book is the product of two conferences on ‘Memory and Mourning: Death in Ancient Rome’ in 2007 and 2008. As with many such volumes, the whole does not amount to much more than the sum of its parts. Each paper pursues its own agenda within what is obviously a broad remit and there is little contact or sense of dialogue between them. Nevertheless, the range and quality of the contributions does testify to the vibrancy of current work on Roman death.

Following a short introduction, the first three papers focus on the immediate aftermath of death. D. Noy highlights the advantages of dying at home as opposed to abroad, discussing final requests transmitted to family and friends from the deathbed, the creation of death-masks (and their relation to imagines and other portraiture) and the challenges involved in returning the remains of those who died away from home. D. Šterbenc Erker maps the division between men's work and women's work in Roman funerary ritual from the deathbed through to festivals of commemoration. E.-J. Graham calls for a new approach to funerary ritual which gives due importance to the materiality of the dead body – the fleshed and decaying cadaver – and the embodied nature of interaction with it. Following some general remarks on the importance of embodied experience and especially embodied memory, she offers a reading of the very different ways in which female kin and funerary professionals will have experienced their encounter with the body of the deceased.

A further four papers present a set of close readings of literary texts with a connection to death, mourning or memory. L. Houghton offers a particularly rich discussion of funerary tableaux in Latin elegy. He demonstrates the danger of taking these descriptions as representative of normal Roman practice given that subversion or inversion of the norm is central to the elegiac poetics. Indeed he argues that the subversion of funerary practice needs to be set alongside the subversion of marriage, slavery and warfare as one of the key tropes through which Latin elegy defines itself. C. Schultze turns to the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, noting the paradox that Dionysius praises the Roman funerary laudatio as a particularly noble and distinctively Roman institution and yet – though he is otherwise very liberal in the inclusion of direct speech – does not include a single laudatio in his text. She explains the paradox by arguing that Dionysius saw it as the duty of the historian to reserve final judgement for himself. E. Brooke takes as her subject the treason trial of Gaius Rabirius in 63 b.c.e. in which the elderly senator was prosecuted for his role in the killing of the populist tribune Saturninus 37 years earlier. She shows that both the prosecution and the defence sought to mobilise the symbolism of funerary ritual during the trial, with the prosecutor Labienus producing an imago of Saturninus during his speech and Cicero turning his defence speech into a laudatio of Rabirius as if he were already dead and invoking Rabirius’ fellow senators of 100 b.c. as his quasi-ancestors. J.-M. Hulls offers a provocative close reading of Statius, Silvae 3.3, a consolatio addressed to Claudius Etruscus on the death of his father, which brings out some of the complexities of this far from straightforward text.

The remaining papers take their point of departure from funerary monuments. J. Huskinson draws on Philippe Ariès's description of ‘the tame death’ and ‘the death of the self’ – two of the five successive cultures of death which he delineated in his seminal history of changes in Western responses to death from the Middle Ages to modernity (L'Homme devant la mort [1977]) – to highlight differences in the way two funerary monuments from the second century c.e. came to terms with sudden death (the two monuments being those of Julia Secunda and Cornelia Tyche, and Titus Statilius Aper and Orcilia Anthis respectively). M. Carroll discusses the role of freedmen in the funerary sphere, covering inter alia testamentary manumission as a form of competitive display (and its commemoration on some tombs), the provision of burial by patrons to freedmen and the role of freedmen in maintaining their patron's tomb and otherwise perpetuating his/her memory. V. Hope reviews the evidence for the commemoration of the dead in the private sphere, using the epitaph of Allia Potestas to spark a discussion of portraits, mourning jewellery and other personal mementoes of the dead.