Fear and Loathing in the Family Tomb: Roman Sarcophagi as Antidotes (20 min)

Presenters

Mont Allen, Southern Illinois University

Abstract

Emotions have been the explicit subject of little scholarship on Roman funerary iconography, although several important works have addressed them implicitly. Understanding how the images on Roman sarcophagi aroused particular affects—such as love and desire, or peace and bliss—is a concern of Zanker and Ewald’s magisterial Mit Mythen leben, while others, such as Elsner and Platt, have emphasized these coffins’ power to awaken religious awe.

Thoroughly missing, however, has been any consideration of potently negative emotions: above all, the closely allied emotions of fear and loathing. Yet the Roman tomb of the high and late empire was uniquely primed to produce these. Sarcophagi were not airtight containers, and the stench of decay as the corpse moldered and putrefied in its coffin must have produced visceral revulsion among visitors. As for fear: the Roman conviction that the manes of the departed were fearsome and always potentially vengeful beings who needed to be placated through rituals of appeasement (the Parentalia, the Rosaria/Rosalia, etc.) conducted at the tomb was a real one—a fear which the dark, damp conditions of most tombs, and the loathsome stench, would only have fed.

This paper contends that certain genres of sarcophagus form and imagery were directly intended to combat these potent negative emotions. The many sarcophagi shaped like lenoi (wine vats) invited the visitor to reimagine the deceased’s nausea-inducing decomposition in Dionysiac terms instead, as a form of fermentation like that which transformed grapes into wine: something intoxicating, elevated, even divine. And those many showing the tragic deaths of mythic characters were designed to rouse as much grief as possible—precisely to mollify the manes, whose fearsome anger at those still living was appeased by such grief. In this way, I show, sarcophagi served as powerful antidotes to fear and loathing in the tomb.

  AIA-3B