Stone Sarcophagi of the Roman Empire

By Barry Ferst Ph.D.

Over fourteen expeditions I drove a hundred thousand miles across four continents searching out churches, cathedrals, baptistries, catacombs, archeological sites, art galleries, antiquities museums, necropoleis, classical gardens, castles, fortresses, palaces, and private homes--any place that had a Roman Empire era stone sarcophagus. Beside the work of locating and cataloguing sarcophagi, the project I set for myself twenty years ago, I composed explanatory material to say how I did my work, noted what was to be found sculpted on sarcophagi, and developed a schema for organizing the various visual characteristics found on sarcophagi.
On the model of outsider art, my work is outsider scholarshipyet here is documentation of 1,932 presently existing Roman Empire sarcophagi.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984544971

Barry Ferst Ph.D.

Prof. Barry Ferst, Ph.D. is a philosophy professor at Carroll College, a liberal arts Catholic college in Helena, Montana. Over the past thirty-eight years he has developed philosophy courses which use readings, digital images, artifact copies, and other pedagogical devices to present to students philosophical ideas in the intellectual and historical context in which they originated. He has directed numerous humanities symposia that focus on contemporary issues and has brought to campus and the civic community scholars of national reputation. His research specialization focuses on the impact Greco-Roman philosophical speculation had on the three Abrahamic faiths.

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Copyright © 2018 by Barry Ferst, Ph.D.

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Rev. date: 09/10/2018

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1   Introduction

Chapter 2   Locating Sarcophagi

Chapter 3   Housing The Departed

Chapter 4   Stories, Characters, And Themes

Chapter 5   Architectural, Cultural, And Symbol Glossaries

Chapter 6   Classifying Sarcophagi

Chapter 7   Sarcophagus Sites

Chapter 8   Text Files (Tf)

Chapter 9   Concluding Remarks

Works Cited

Bibliography

Index

Photo Files

All photos are viewable at https://scholars.carroll.edu/ roman sarcophagus/

Internet search: roman sarcophagus, roman sarcophagi, stone sarcophagi of the roman empire, early Christian sarcophagi

I have used Christmas breaks, springs, and summers to travel throughout Europe, the Levant, North Africa, Canada, and the U.S. in search of Roman sarcophagi. I thank my wife Louise for reading hundreds of maps, counting streets in places where maps were useless, or where street signs were in Arabic, or where there were no signs at all. I thank my child Sophia Ruah for her patience when European days that were consumed by interminable museums, churches, and archeological sites might have been spent walking about a zoo or play park.

Dis Manibus Dei Manus

I have lived with these sarcophagi so long that their contents have become alive for me. I read the epitaph on Frontius’ coffin, and Frontius is speaking to me. Here is another sarcophagus, a child’s, decorated with a cortege of sea creatures, and in it are the bones of a little girl, dead at fourteen, probably in child birth, innocent and lovely, and so dear to her parents. As these people come alive again, alive to an imperfect stranger, they have gained in some small measure the immortality for which so many of them had wished.

Cover photo: Copied with permission—Image from the film The sarcophagus of the traditio Legis by Pascal Magontier, Axyz - © Marseille Museum of History, City of Marseille.

All photos by Barry Ferst.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

From the Acts of Peter:

When Marcellus saw that the blessed Peter had given up the ghost, without communicating with anyone, since it was not allowed, he took him down from the cross with his own hands and bathed him in milk and wine. And he ground seven pounds of mastic and also fifty pounds of myrrh and aloes and spice and anointed his body, and filled a very costly marble coffin with Attic honey and buried him in his own tomb.¹

From 125 to 450 C.E., many Romans thought it fashionable to buy costly marble coffins in which to inter their dead. The coffin was an oblong stone box approximately six feet by three feet and three feet in height with an interior cavity for the deceased. Scholars refer to these coffins as lithos sarcophagi (Gk. lithos = stone, sarx = flesh, phagein = to eat), for as time passed, all that would remain of the deceased were teeth and bones. Pliny the Elder in The Natural History:

At Assos in Troas [Turkey], there is found a stone of a laminated texture, called sarcophagus. It is a well-known fact, that dead bodies, when buried in this stone, are consumed in the course of forty days, with the sole exception of the teeth, According to Mucianus, too, mirrors, body-scrappers, garments, and shoes, that have been buried with the dead, become transformed into stone.²

Over time sarcophagus became the general term for bodies placed in caskets, something like how every paper hanky became Kleenex and every gelatin dish became Jell-O. Many of these flesh-eaters were without decoration, and many others displayed simple, standardized motifs. Richly carved marble boxes were purchased by the wealthy. Fixing the era of the Roman Empire with Augustus Caesar’s assumption of imperial power in 27 B.C.E. and ending it with the textbook date of 476 C.E. when the barbarian Odoacer sat in the emperor’s chair, the sarcophagus fashionable era spans the years between Emperor Hadrian’s enthusiasm for things Greek,125 C.E., and the twilight that signaled the approaching European Dark Ages, approximately 450.

I first noticed Roman sarcophagi in 1984 during a tour of Europe. After more travels, I decided to inventory the sarcophagi I came across, focusing on whole sarcophagi or entire front panels (at least three-quarters complete) and not bothering with fragments. To date I have driven a hundred thousand miles across four continents visiting museums, churches, city parks, archeological sites, catacombs, castles, palaces, and villas—any place that might have what I was after. I found sarcophagi re-used as flower boxes, water troughs, cisterns, altar tables, wall décor, and once, as corner blocks on an Ottoman fortress. Sometimes, completely by chance, I found a sarcophagus in a parking lot or under a clutter of bushes. In a leased Peugeot, my wife and I, and on a few excursions, my daughter, have circled from Constantine, Algeria, to Palmyra, Syria, to Istanbul, Rome, Berlin, and London, searching out sarcophagi. But more of this in Chapter II.

After eighteen tours of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the United States, and Canada, cataloging remains my primary interest, though given my academic training in philosophy and my interest in Greco-Roman culture, I sometimes try to determine what the carvings on sarcophagi reveal about the social or religious beliefs of the purchasers of these caskets. The imagery, symbols, and signs are an unparalleled source for understanding the sentiments of upper- and professional- class Romans, and those in the lower classes who had secured some degree of financial success. In other words, though not the focus of this book, I have tried to understand what the iconography reveals about the beliefs operative in the Roman Empire, whether those be various cultic creeds, religions, superstitions, social perspectives, or metaphysical philosophies—the Roman pantheon, Greek gods, Oriental divinities, or the Christian Trinity; patrician, eques, plebian, or slave social perspective; Platonism, Epicureanism, Pythagoreanism, or Stoicism. Better noted, the imagery worked into these stone boxes provides an access point for understanding how the general populace understood social, philosophical and theological dogmas and how they were then refashioned as part of the popular culture.³ Nevertheless, I understand Franz Cumont’s warning: It is especially difficult to ascertain up to what point ideas adopted by intellectual circles succeeded in penetrating the deep masses of the people.⁴

Today, approximately two thousand (at most twenty-five hundred) complete sarcophagi, meaning complete trough (the section that holds the body), or front panel frieze (at least three-quarters), exist. How many sarcophagi were made during the period covered in this book is unknown, for production and purchase records don’t exist. From certain stylistic features of imagery and motifs, researchers conclude that there were ateliers in Rome, Arles, Athens, and Alexandria, and a few other small regional workshops, yet this knowledge still does not support an accurate calculation of the number of sarcophagi produced. Moreover, it is unknown who were and how many unskilled workers roughed-out the coffins from raw rock at Marmara, Mount Pentelicus, and other quarries; the number of master craftsmen employed in sculpting; the number of assistants and apprentices who did the simple short-side shield or griffin motifs; and, those who actually ran the business of the funerary monument shops. Nor are there records for the rate of production for either coffins with highly complex friezes or boxes decorated with only looped garlands or an inscribed plaque though it is probable that the latter only took a few days.⁵ However, there are two sources of information that maybe of some limited use. By surveying the layout and size of the Tarraco necropolis in Tarragona, Spain, the Assos and the Hierapolis necropoleis in Turkey, Isola Sacra at Ostia Antica, or Rome’s and Naples’ catacombs, researchers can guess at possible numbers. Moreover, about twenty thousand fragments are in museum collections, and this information, too, would aid in rough estimates.

When I began reviewing literature giving the number of existing sarcophagi, I soon realized that I needed to determine if the author is referring to complete sarcophagi or fragments, given that my focus was on complete sarcophagi or front panels. For example, Anna Marguerite McCann writes, Over five thousand of them are to be found in museums and collections today…,⁶ but there is no indication if this means complete sarcophagi or complete sarcophagi and fragments. Similarly, Susan Walker notes that the British Museum owns seventy-eight stone sarcophagi, but this number includes complete sarcophagi, front panels, and fragments.⁷ In many books 12,000 to 20,000 is given for existing sarcophagi, and so one might conclude that this is the number for existing whole sarcophagi. Such numbers are likely derived from a too rapid reading of two pages in Guntram Koch’s seminal Early Christian Art and Architecture. On page 107, Koch writes:

The early Christian sarcophagi form the largest group. However, there are considerably fewer of them than pagan sarcophagi: around 2,500 Christian examples from the third to sixth centuries compared with more than 15,000 pagan examples.

This looks like there might be a rough total of 20,000 sarcophagi, but on the next page the reader learns:

Sarcophagi with Christian themes have been preserved above all from Rome. More than 1,000 examples have survived from the third century to shortly after 400 C.E., but many of them are only fragments.⁸

And so, in numbering sarcophagi, Koch was referring not only to complete caskets, but also to extensively carved and aesthetically pleasing sarcophagi fragments.

If I were to assume with humble hesitancy and simply for the sake of discussion that five hundred thousand sarcophagi were produced, then obviously most have met with destruction from one source or another. Since they were not buried, but were placed above ground in vast cemeteries, or on the sides of major roads just outside of cities⁹, or in mausoleums, or catacombs, they were in easy reach of destructive forces. Many were smashed open by grave robbers. Many were put in lime kilns, so that building mortar could be made. Others were broken apart so that small decorative elements could be hung like pictures on walls. Some were used as water basins or flower troughs until nature taking it course, wore them into ruin. Uncarved sections might be used as beams, lintels or mullions. Toward the end of the Roman era with threatening attacks by Goth, Ostrogoth, and Vandals, some were employed to reinforce city walls which the successful attackers destroyed. In the Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translator Robert Bly notes that Rilke’s poem Roman Sarcophagi was inspired by what he saw in Italian farm fields. In the middle ages, Italian farmers would knock the ends out [of the sarcophagi] and line them up so that they became irrigation canals, carrying water from field to field.¹⁰

Though the sarcophagi that exist today survived due to no single circumstance, Janet Huskinson points out that the medieval Church brought many sarcophagi from Roman catacombs and funerary basilicas into the center of Rome and onto church grounds to save them and their contents from marauding barbarian armies. Because the Church claimed ownership of archeological sites, sarcophagi became its property. Some caskets were re-used to entomb royalty, saints, and martyrs, and placed in cathedral apses or crypts, sacred places generally beyond the reach of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Charlemagne’s casket is in Aachen Cathedral (TF 2, MYTHOS, Proserpina 17, 1212)¹¹ and several popes lie in the grottos under St. Peter’s in Rome. Troughs survived by being re-used as the base for church altars (TF 5, SUPPORT, Support Imagery 46, 3555). Complete friezes might decorate church walls or garden walls. At St. Felien Church in Gerona, Spain, eight complete friezes are cemented into the stonework of the apse; in Rome twenty or so decorate the courtyard walls of Palazzo Mattei di Giove (TF 5, SUPPORT, Support Imagery 43, 3552), and a similar number were used as an architectural banding on the Medici villa. Other sarcophagi, simply lying about at roadside or under the jumble of an ancient ruins, were recovered in the Renaissance and re-carved with the coats of arms of the rising bourgeoisie. These caskets found homes in castles and fortified palaces, and at some later date were transferred to the Camposanto of Pisa.¹² Some caskets were buried in mud when rivers overran their banks. In 1873 a farmer walking along a river that had just receded from its flood stage near Portogruaro, Italy, came across the sarcophagus of a Roman soldier. The news soon reached archeologist, Dario Bertolini, who went on to excavate 260 sarcophagi. Most of these were subsequently cut up, but a few found a home in the National Museum Concordiense in Portogruaro. Some caskets have simply become the unfortunate victim-survivors of human detritus. There have been times when a foundation for a new skyscraper was being excavated, a sewer system being run, or a subway extended, that by chance a sarcophagus was unearthed. I suppose some buried under centuries of trash or lost to the Mediterranean Sea when being shipped, are yet to be discovered.

Traditionally, scholars, for example Zanker and Ewald in Living With Myths, have only reviewed extensively carved sarcophagi, and those in such locations as Rome (Vatican and Capitoline Museums, and palaces such as Palazzo Mattei di Giove), Paris (Louvre Museum), Arles (Musee departmental Arles antique), Berlin (Pergamon Museum), London (British Museum), and Istanbul (Istanbul Archeological Museum). Moreover, scholars often will focus on just a subset of existing sarcophagi and fragments; for instance, Janet Huskinson has worked on children’s sarcophagi and strigillated sarcophagi, and J.B. Ward Perkins on bower sarcophagi. Other scholars have focused on a specific theme or story scene. At the beginning of my research, I decided to focus on both carved and uncarved boxes, and not only at the sites just listed, but anywhere I had information that a sarcophagus might be located. Therefore, I have not only visited the Vatican and the Louvre taking my tourist photos, but have traveled through Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and so on, confirming or rejecting the information I had suggesting the location of a sarcophagus. From my years of research and travels, I do not believe that there are more than twenty-five hundred complete sarcophagi and front panels in existence.

The book has four Text Files that contain entries for approximately two thousand individual sarcophagi, either complete caskets or front panels, and a fifth Text File that contains support imagery such as necropoleis that display large groupings of sarcophagi, lead caskets, ossuaries, and so on. Text files present approximately thirty-six hundred entries that coordinate with an identical number of Photo File images. For those scholars interested in seeing the photos, they are found at https://scholars.carroll.edu/romansarcophagus/.¹³

Did the peoples of the Roman Empire believe that the body needed an honorable entombment? The answer lies no farther than our present beliefs and practices.

Chapter Notes

¹. Verse 40, The Acts of Peter. Translated by J.K. Elliot, in Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), cited in Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, Bart D. Ehrman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 154. The Acts of Peter are dated to 150-200.

². Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Bk XXXVI, Chap XXVII. Trans. John Bostock and Henry T. Riley. Cited at http://romeartlover.tripod.com/Assos html.

³. A parallel might be women’s rights movement in the United States. The philosophy behind the movement is gender equality. This has played out at the level of popular culture as not only the demand for equal wages but also the right to enjoy male strip shows.

⁴. Franz Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 2.

⁵. Russell, Ben. The Roman Sarcophagus ‘Industry’: A Reconsideration. (author’s copy). In spite of Russell’s valiant attempt, the questions remain.

⁶. Anna Marguerite McCann Roman Sarcophagi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978), 20.

⁷. Susan Walker, Memorials to the Roman Dead. (London: British Museum Press, 1985), 9.

⁸. Koch, Guntram. Early Christian Art and Architecture: An Introduction. London: SCM Ltd, 1996. pp.107-108. In an email (2/23/2006), Koch noted that his number included fragments. At that time [1982] I had about 15,000 sarcophagi (mostly fragments) in my files. This then appears to clarify a later sentence, Therefore I can say, that we know in this moment [2/23/2006] about (approximately!) 16.000 pagan and about 2.500 Early Christian sarcophagi.

Jas Elsner, in an email (11/25/2012) noted that Koch was likely the source for an estimate of 20,000. The figure of 20,000 is an extrapolation of Koch’s 12-15 000 estimate for surviving pagan sarx (my guess is he is not including uncarved examples in this) plus about 3000 for surviving Christian sara [sic] plus a bit extra for fragments: crucially it is for fragment as well as whole pieces. But it is no more than a very rough sketch.

⁹. The Coen brothers were aware of this. See the trailer for the comedy Hail Caesar.

¹⁰. Roman Sarcophagi the Poem, last modified 2017, https://www.enotes.com/topics/roman-sarcophagi/in-depth.

¹¹. At various places, I exemplify the point being made by reference to a specific Text File (TF) listed in Chapter Eight. For example, reference to a Text File in Chapter Eight is written as (TF 2, MYTHOS, Proserpina 17, 1212) or (TF 5, SUPPORT, Support Imagery 46, 3555). See the Photos note at the end of the book for the connection between Text Files and Photo Files.

¹². Greenhalgh, Michael. Marble Past, Monumental Present. Boston: Brill, 2009. p. 514. Greenhalgh cites Guide du Pelerin de Saint Jacques (12th century) which notes: "In no other cemetery [Arles Alyscamps] elsewhere could one find so many tombs of marble, nor such large ones aligned on the ground. They are worked in different ways (d’un travail varie), and carry ancient inscriptions sculpted in Latin letters; but in an unintelligible language. The further away one stands, the longer the files of sarcophagi appear to be. According to Greenhalgh, sarcophagi were being harvested" and re-used from the Alyscamps as late as the nineteenth century.

¹³. I can supply a thumb drive of pictures that correspond to the Text Files. Thumb drive photos are free (though there is a fee for the actual thumb drive, transfer work, and shipping) and is only for private use (research and classroom) as are the website pictures. See the Photo Files note at the end of this book for more information.

CAELATORIS (Sculptor)

image%201.jpgimage%202.jpg

A stele showing a sculptor and his assistant working on the motif of a sarcophagus. The frieze has opposed strigils overlaid at right and left with a lion’s head. The sculptor is operating a drilling with the help of the assistant. Civic Museum. Urbino, Italy.

CHAPTER TWO

LOCATING SARCOPHAGI

The Project

This book is a product of twenty-five years of research and fourteen expeditions across four continents. On wintry evenings before the fireplace in my Montana home with my Springer Spaniels, Niner, Tilly, and Nelo, and my fellow bacchante, Jack Daniels, I sat fashioning my next trip from the information files I had assembled on the alleged locations of sarcophagi. In summertime, it was the same, except it was gin and tonic out under the apple tree in our garden. Then, to personally confirm the information I had gathered, my wife and I drove a hundred thousand miles, ferried across the Straits of Gibraltar, and from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa, from Livorno to Corsica, to Marmara Island or the British Isles, searching out churches, cathedrals, baptistries, catacombs, archeological sites, art galleries, antiquities museums, necropoleis, classical gardens, castles, fortresses, and palaces—any place, according to my information, that was supposed to have a Roman Empire era stone sarcophagus. And of course, entirely by chance, and on more than one occasion, I came across a sarcophagus in a crop field, a parking lot, wine cellar, and under a clutter of bushes. One sarcophagus functioned as a room-divider in a restaurant, another as a planter in a hotel lobby. When I was younger I could travel during the Christmas break, but as I aged and could not see as well at twilight which comes early in Europe, the travels were confined to summer.

It is difficult to say when the thought of such a project first arose. In 1984 with a position in the Carroll College philosophy department secure, my wife and I embarked on what we saw as the culturally required capstone Grand Tour of Europe. We landed at Charles de Gaulle and for the next thirteen weeks we drove our Peugeot from Paris to Berlin to Prague, Budapest, Athens, Istanbul, Rome, and Madrid. On this first adventure, I photographed a few carved sarcophagi, not really understanding what they were, to serve in a picture collection I use in my teaching. We found traveling so exciting, and yes, broadening, that I decided to go and go again and to focus future travels on wherever the Greeks and Romans had their empires because I taught Greco-Roman philosophy. Soon we were scheduling trips for every two to three years. Then, about 1992, while researching what I would see on a drive which would circle through the Mediterranean coast of France, southern Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, up the Italian boot and back to France, I realized that not only Roman era mosaics, but also the sculpting on sarcophagi provided access into the aesthetic sensibilities and religious beliefs of the peoples of the empire. Nevertheless, I suppose it was in 1995 during a Christmas in Paris, when I chose to spend two afternoons in the Louvre Museum taking tourist snapshots of sarcophagi that I should mark out as the official beginning of my sarcophagus search.

Study and Research

On the model of outsider art, I should call my research outsider scholarship. I am not trained in archeology, nor a specialist in the art of the Roman Empire. Yet the love of travel, and my interest in popular culture, especially how abstract, academic philosophy is transformed by the man/woman on the street, kept me on the track of sarcophagi with their billboard presentation of the deceased’s cultic adherence or social perspective. I learned that Classical archeologist Carl Robert published the first attempt at a corpus of Roman sarcophagi, the Antike Sarkophagreliefs (1880-1919). I learned that in the early twentieth century, Classical Art historian Gerhardt Rodenwalt also was cataloguing sarcophagi because of his fascination with the Roman popular style of art. I soon came across other early twentieth century European scholars such as Franz Cumont, Andre Grabar, Edmond-Frederic Le Blant, J.M.C. Toynbee, and Joseph Wilpert. But my stumbling block was not being fluent in foreign languages, and having no German at all, I could appreciate the pictures but not the text.

I soon added a list of contemporary scholars who wrote in English or had had some of their work translated into English. Here were not catalogues, but books that focused on a kind of sarcophagus such as life sarcophagi, mythological sarcophagi, or bust sarcophagi. Just to name a select few, here was Princeton University’s Micheal Koortbojian and his book Myth, Meaning, and Metaphor on Roman Sarcophagi; Jas Elsner’s (Oxford University) Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph; Nancy (Ithaca College) and Andrew Ramage (Cornell University) with Roman Art; Diana E.E. Kleiner (Yale University), Roman Sculpture; and, Richard Brilliant (Columbia University), Visual Narratives. One of the finest books I came across was by Paul Zanker and Bjorn C. Ewald, Living With Myths: The Imagery on Roman Sarcophagi (published in German in 2004, translated in 2012). But in many of these excellent books the discussion of sarcophagi is often limited to a sub-section, or chapter or two, and none had the entire corpus of existing sarcophagi or friezes.¹

So for better than twenty-five years, I have tried to discover the present location of sarcophagi. The information offered here has been harvested from academic texts, journal articles, pdf monographs, travel books such as the Blue Guide and Michelin Tourist Guide (Germany, France, Italy, etc.), museum brochures, museum curatorial notes, newspaper and magazine reviews, and internet academic and tourist sites. Among other things, I learned that there were locations that are repositories for a great number of sarcophagi, and I would need to spend several hours to several days recording what was on display. These museums are the Vatican Museum, Rome’s Capitoline and Terme Museums, the Louvre, the Arles Archeological Museum, the Aphrodisias Museum at the Aphrodisias Archeological Site, the Istanbul Archeological Museum, and Pisa’s Camposanto. I also concluded that a few museums had a not-to-be-missed sarcophagus such as the Rijksmuseum in Leiden and the Velletri Archeological Museum.

Technique and Technology

As useful as these books and articles were, I wanted to go and see for myself these stone sarcophagi. Of course, I wanted to walk the galleries of the Louvre and the Vatican museums, but I also wanted the experience of trudging into the semi-arid Syrian landscape of Palmyra to see where people found it fit to live and entomb their dead. Maybe I would even find unrecorded sarcophagi. I wanted to see if the caskets were actually where the books and articles said they were, because I could tell that some of the pictures were quite old, and I wanted to see if I could locate other caskets that hadn’t been recorded. Though I planned my travels around taking my tourist snapshots of sarcophagi, from my sources of information I frequently had no idea what I was going to find. Was it sculpted with Greco-Roman mythology? Was it a billboard for the deceased’s cult? Would it have only figural elements like bowers or Medusa heads? Would it be inscribed? Have a tablet for an inscription, but lacking one? Would the box be completely bare? A good-size fragment or a fake?² Simply non-existent? And finally, I decided to photograph every sarcophagus or frieze (at least three-quarters of either) that existed.

Now is the time to admit to a few character flaws. First, I have a strange need to be there: I’ve rowed the Nile, walked the edges of the Sahara, banged my head in ancient tunnels, drove through Algeria during social unrest, eaten from unapproved eateries (and gotten retchingly sick). Admittedly, I talk too much, though to spin that in a more positive fashion, I have the gift of gab, the ability to dish the dirt, and cast about a great deal of malarkey. I have a way of getting people, or at least museum curators, site custodians, and janitorial staff, to tell their stories, tell me things they shouldn’t, and show me things normally kept under lock and key. Third, I like completeness. Once I start something, I need to finish and finish with everything that is out there. This is not the limit of my eccentricities, but certainly enough for now.

I started photographing my travels before digital cameras, and so have approximately seven thousand, 35mm transparencies (slides), about three hundred of which are photos of sarcophagi. If these photos were shot in museums—No flash! No flash!—they were taken without supplemental lighting, and so do record the object but not with the best of clarity. Moreover, I never fully understood how to use the various settings on 35mm cameras where one had to master film speed and distance—What am I supposed to do with the range finder parallax? And, film was expensive, so I often did not photograph trough sides or backs. With the advent of digital, point-and-shoot cameras, things got easier and photos better, though I still had to contend with the light problem, because many museums will not allow flash photography—so I did my best with the Nikon Coolpix museum setting. Finally, CMOS came along, and I could shoot under just about any light conditions. Then of course digitizing 35mm for the computer is a laborious and inexact process, but it had to be done. With digital, you simply take out the SD card and slip it into the computer slot.

I need to emphasize that my photos are not art shots; they are tourist photos that simply record the sarcophagus and its placement. No set-up, and the second iron law of museums, No tripod! No tripod! So, as I hustled from museum to museum, down the stairs to some dank crypt or catacomb, on a stop-watch tour of a palace or villa, I would snap the best picture I could. I have purposely not photoshopped out any elements, such as museum barriers, a tourist’s arm or leg, a bush or obstructing chair. I wanted reality, because these sarcophagi meant something real to the people who purchased them (something like my need to be there). This inventory is meant to show almost every existing sarcophagus or front frieze panel, and alert scholars to their present location. I hope that researchers themselves will travel to the places where sarcophagi they are interested in are located so they may fully study the living original.

With the arrival of the public internet in the mid-1990s my searches became easier, but since there is an overload of information on the World Wide Web, the searches became significantly more extensive, and I had to expend a lot more time as I delved into every nook and cranny of some web site. I typed roman stone sarcophagus and then depth-searched such terms and phrases as early Christian sarcophagus, Dionysus, Attis, Endymion, or Jesus sarcophagus. It is also good to know (French) "sarcophage romain", (German) "sarkofag romisch", (Italian) "sarcofago romano", (Turkic) "Lahit roma", and (Hebrew) 63706.png . For example, old Roman sarcophagus elicited a website which featured Poem From An Old Roman Sarcophagus in Olympos, Agean Coast, Turkey with the added information:

This sarcophagus sits under a canopy near the spectacular beach cove of Olympos. It eulogizes Captain Eudemos, evidently working at the time when the Roman Empire used this cove as a shipping center (for among other things the export of sarcophagi).³

I could visit websites of European, Middle Eastern, and North African archeological museums, searching for anything about sarcophagi. One of my great disappointments was the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, Egypt. I knew the museum had sarcophagi, but sadly the website did not bother to mention that the museum was closed for restoration. Disheartened by my too late discovery, I asked a Bibliotheca Alexandrina librarian, For how long? The answer in French was standard Egyptian: "Vous savez, c’est l’Egypte, peut-etre, dix ans. Inshalah."

So, after the hard copy and cyberspace desk-search, came the Jack Kerouac on the road blundering. Augmenting the Alexandrian misadventure, in a rental car with a rght front tire that would go flat, I would drive from Cairo across the desert to Alexandria without the aid of anything that resembled informative road signs, and a not entirely useful Michelin map. From Jamie Lendino’s The History of Car GPS Navigation in PC Magazine:

Twenty years ago, a road trip meant a bunch of fold-out maps stuffed into your glove box or your car door panel pockets. Pulling over, unfolding one like a giant newspaper, and then figuring out where you were and how it corresponded to what you were seeing through the windshield was the norm.

Add to the fold-out maps, pulling into Reims and trying to find the cathedral by looking for the towering spires, hoping that the Abbey of St. Remy was nearby. Or following Centre Ville signs to locate the little brown tin sign that would signal the path to the city museum. But after such searches and around and around in every small town came the wonders of Google Maps and then GPS.

Along the way, those maps gave way to MapQuest or Yahoo Maps print-outs, and now, fortunately, we’ve got portable navigation devices (PNDs), in-dash GPS systems, and GPS-enabled smartphones.⁴

Okay, how to use the Peugeot’s GPS—there must be a manual somewhere—and get that woman in my dash to speak in English.

On the road

Though I like to have two sources identifying the location of a sarcophagus, I do sometimes act on one, though seldom if the information is sketchy and old like from a Baedeker mid-nineteenth century tour book. However, that was the case with the information that at Ajaccio on Corsica there was a third century seasons sarcophagus, but was there really, and better yet, just where? Reading about Ajaccio, I was left with three choices: the Fesch Museum, the Prefecture, and the Hotel de Ville. So, once a parking space was located—in Europe almost as difficult as locating a sarcophagus—it was off to the Fesch Museum where it soon became obvious that this was a fine arts museum, having nothing to do with Roman material. Next it was to the Prefecture, which saving me a bit of walking, is in the Hotel de Ville, but the soldiers at the front gate barred the way. In time, I learned from the soldiers of a side entrance for visitors with papers. I have no papers, but whether front or side, every entrance has to be tried. I locate the entrance which opened onto a small room with two functionaries behind a glass partition. I ask, Is there a sarcophage romain here? and receive a "oui", followed by "non!" Okay, that is actually progress. I explain who I am and what I am doing and what I need. So again, a "non" only sterner this time from someone rapidly transmongrifying into the Medea of Corsica. With my third attempt, hostility fills the room, and given that this is a government building I figure that I am about to get arrested. However, I see Medea saying something to an acolyte, so I sit down with a glimmer of hope, though still concerned about an impending arrest. Five minutes, maybe six, seven, and a smiling, jovial woman emerges from a doorway and says, Please let me show you this wonderful sarcophagus we have. (TF 1, THEME, seasons 29, 0543) One never knows.

At Narbonne I met a helpful construction foreman at Our Lady of Mourguie Church Lapidary Museum that was officially Ferme pour Restauration. Scaffolding, brick and wood, tools and machinery lay about, and everywhere warning signs and yellow caution tape. And yet after a few minutes of explaining my quest, the man stopped all work and said okay, and so hard hat on, I took my photos amid the dust and dangling electric wires. (TF 5, CHRISTIAN, Christian casket 26, 3715 and others)

The Uffizi Museum in Florence has a strict policy forbidding photography, so when I went ahead with my little point-and-shoot, I was suddenly surrounded by guards shouting Niente foto. With Italian limited to "dove" and "voglio", I wanted to believe "Niente foto" sounded like go ahead, but as I raised my camera for a second photo, I was swiftly corrected of this miss-translation. Later that afternoon I faxed a letter from my San Gimignano hotel to the director of antiquities, regarding who I was and what I needed, and by what I am sure constitutes miraculous intervention by some local patron saint for this was Italy and "autorizzazione" could take months if not centuries, by return fax I was told to come the next Monday when the Uffizi was closed and I would be allowed to photograph the six sarcophagi on display. I spent two hours with a museum doyen and had just finished when an ancient curator tottered out with an even older key and opened a door behind which was a dusky closet-size room with four intricately carved sarcophagi. (TF 1, THEME, sea 17, 0478, and others)

The Istanbul Archeological Museum and Palmyra epitomize the meaning of "baksheesh." I had been at the Istanbul museum twice before, and the room that held a great catch of sarcophagi was closed, but on a third visit, a guard sensing my frustration said he could get me in for U.S. $10. After the deal was struck, to my amazement he began ushering museum visitors out of the hall in which we were standing and when that was done, he opened the forbidden door to the hall of sarcophagi. I had ten minutes and I shot without focusing, and then a second guard came in demanding more baksheesh. Palmyra was a similar story. The Orient, forgive the truth Edward Said, is at times very like Naipaul’s and Bernard Lewis’ Orient.

At Thessaloniki, a young guard said no, so I insisted he take me to a museum official. Up a back stairway we went, and in a distant corner office sat the museum’s chief curator. After a short, but pleasant conversation which resulted in several no’s, I resorted to pleading. I’ve come all the way from America…just for this museum. However, it took, and I paraphrase, My grandmother was forced from Smyrna by the Turks to accomplish the task at hand.

In Hama, Syria, just passing time at the Azam Palace Ethnographic Museum, I got into a conversation with a young man regarding the horsepower of the 1969 Mustang Boss 302. We next compared notes on the Camaro small block V-8 and agreed that the Mustang was a better car. After thirty minutes of this, he said that he had something to show me that was "incroyable." We wound through backrooms to a garage of sorts, and he threw back the PVC to uncover a wooden sarcophagus undated, unpublished, unknown except to one or two archeologists, and un-photographed. He said photograph it. When I emailed my photo to a German archeologist hoping for identification, I received back (a paraphrase), How the hell did you get that picture? (TF 5, VARIETY, variety casket 5, 3593)

I knew that Farfa Abbey just east of Rome had a sarcophagus. I had known that for several years, but had always passed it by on a rush to Pompeii. So, at 1:10 on July 3, 2007, I walked into the Abbey church looking for the sarcophagus and was informed that I could come back at 4:00 to photograph, but not now because afternoon prayers had begun. But coming back at 4:00 meant hanging about for three hours, losing three hours. I needed to say something, and I explained that I had to photograph now because John Paul (the one in the Vatican) asked me to meet with him at 2:00. Yes, that’s a dangerous lot of chutzpah, but I got my picture.

How about this for directions for finding a sarcophagus. South of Mirande, isolated in a field between Berdoues and Belloc, is the tiny rustic chapel of St. Clemens—the key is kept at the farmhouse opposite. And upon locating this field with its padlocked chapel, I then went on a search for the right farmhouse which is not exactly opposite and after thirty minutes find a tea-stained octogenarian who has the key if only I can remember where I put it.

On one trip, my wife and three-year-old daughter tracked a path through Turkey that began at Greece’s Kipi Border Crossing Point, then swung south through Cannakale, to Ephesus, Pergamon, Aphrodisias, Heliopolis, then along the Mediterranean coast through Assos, Antakya, and Antioch. Being innocents abroad, we taxied into Syria across the Turkish border, and in a rented 1980 Volkswagen Fox that I kept alive with a vise-grips pliers securing a loose carburetor screw, drove out to Palmyra and finally down to Damascus. On the roadway from the Turkish border with Syria to Aleppo, small groupings of soldiers, signaling with their machine guns that we ought to give them a few dinar, provided my family with enough sense of a great adventure to fill their travel days forever.

A few miles outside of the Algerian mountain town of Cirta, driving became a matter of dodging potholes on one lane roads or less. Suddenly, what didn’t even look like a road disappeared though the Michelin map gave no indication of this. A fellow at path-side waved me on in something resembling French that the two-track would take us where we wanted to go. So, I drove on only to be rescued a few minutes later by a second fellow in a battered Toyota, saying if I keep going in this direction I will end up dead by Bedouin hands in a Bedouin tent no matter that a TV antenna poking through its camel hair fabric seemed to indicate some form of civility. That same savior then led my wife and I back to the right road where the Michelin map kicked back into reality.

Once in a while, no matter what—beg, plead, or ruse—I failed. I did what I had to do, even if a bit of larceny was involved, because I firmly believe this material should not be hidden, and that interested parties of all sorts should have access to these items and not be in debt to the tremendous time and cost it is to visit these museums, churches, and archeological sites. Still, sometimes I came up empty-handed.

At the Narbonne Archeological Museum, no photos, and no photos so strictly enforced that not only did each room have its guard, but visitors were followed by doddering oldsters who scolded if you tried to go back to a previous room. This was the only one-way museum I have ever visited. Ciceronian reasoning could convince no one to allow a couple of photographs. At some point, I felt that I was being escorted or better, hustled, from the museum. I will add, though, that ten years later, I finally succeeded in receiving a letter of permission to photograph from the head curator. (TF 3, DISCIPLES, apostles 49, 1318, and others)

In Agen, in southwest France the chapter house of the cathedral supposedly had a paleo-Christian sarcophagus. When I got there not only were the doors locked, but the locks looked like they had not been opened since the Cathars were burned at the stake. I pleaded, but with a shrug of his shoulders the cathedral priest, could have as well said, Professor, I don’t think the locks has been opened since we burned the Cathars at the stake.

Of course, part of my mission was to disconfirm information I had gathered. And though it was disheartening to travel fifty miles or more only to learn that a sarcophagus did not exist, it was necessary to what I had set out to do. St. Emilion, jewel of a village just east of Bordeaux, has sarcophagi behind the church in the catacombs, said the tourist brochure. But there were no sarcophagi, though the jewel was a mecca for the wealthy since it was the center of St. Emilion vintages ageing in caves (catacombs?).

In Tunisia, the rooms of the museum I needed were closed. Another Ferme pour Restauration. But I am not the public. I am a prestigious professor at a prestigious university in prestigious America. And the next morning I was met by a small contingent of suited officials and formally escorted through the halls of the third floor while receiving copious explanations in Arabic (of which I know maybe twenty words) and broken French. Unfortunately, the museum had only Punic material.

The end product and a by-product

With each trip the collection of photos grew, sometimes by fifty, sometimes by two hundred. There were mythological, warfare, seasons, and daily life sarcophagi; there were many that had bowers, or bowers with bucranium (bull’s heads) or Medusas; many had a carving of the deceased’s face; hundreds were bare or almost. During the early years of the sarcophagus search, there was no idea of a book, I was merely collecting and giving focus to my travels. But as I would explain to people what I was doing and, I suppose, justifying what I was doing, which there was no need, for whomever I would tell about my travels would response with how exciting, the word book began to slip in. Then there is the fact that I am an academic, and though my college focuses on teaching ability, not publishing, I still felt that to be worthy of my title, I should publish. So along with the locating and photographing of sarcophagi came the idea of making a complete corpus of existing sarcophagi and front panels.

Time for another personality admission. I like to collect things. I did not know that when I was eight and began collecting stamps, but there it was. Along the way, I decorated the shelves in the garden room with a thousand tin toys from different countries and different eras. Above the kitchen cabinets are a hundred tins, cookie tins, coffee, what have you. My wife and I also collect contemporary ceramic art. I guess my collection of sarcophagus photos is my academic stamp collection.

As with stamp collecting, though maybe not with baking powder tins, similarities frequently exist, and a jumble of fifteen hundred or more sarcophagi would miss what could be learned from them. Therefore, it became necessary to have a categorization scheme for the presentation of the caskets. Organizing is no easy matter, and it was apparent that there are two phases to the project. First and obviously, one has to construct a useful set of categories. To do this I adopted or adapted what other researchers have done, and I also developed my own classifications. Many friezes could easily fit in two even three categories, and so I tried to group by what I considered the most prominent or important feature on the casket. I admit there were many times that the decision was arbitrary, but a decision was required. This phase is fraught with difficulties, and different scholars are just as likely to disagree as agree on choices made. Second, one needs to understand what has been depicted. Certainly, many sarcophagi motifs are clear enough: here is a cross, bower, gorgon, a grouping of Muses, a battle scene. However, many friezes display themes and stories whose identification and meaning are far from obvious, and so make classification difficult. But more on this later.

One last remark. As I worked on this project, I began feeling as if I were bringing the Roman dead alive again. As I read the studies by Zanker, Ewald, Brilliant, and Cumont, I too wondered why anyone would want the story of a hunting trip or love affair that turned out badly on his or her sarcophagus. Why would someone select a fruited bower or oak-leaf garland or gorgon head or eagle or snake as decoration? Why would someone believe that a picture of an open door or a parted curtain, or a procession of fantastic sea creatures would signal to passers-by that the deceased had gone on to another place? Why would anyone believe that after he is dead he is still alive? Or that death was simply a long, deep sleep until she would be awakened as a glorified spirit or with a perfected body? Though not the purpose of this book, these questions and their graphic expression continues to fascinates me

Okay, this is eerie, but I have lived with these dead so long, they have become alive for me. I read Frontius’ epitaph, and Frontius is speaking to me. Here is another sarcophagus, a child’s, decorated with a cortege of sea creatures, and in it once laid a little girl, dead at fourteen, innocent and lovely, and so dear to her parents. As they come alive again, alive to a perfect stranger, they have gained in some small measure the immortality for which so many of them had wished. This catalogue cannot escape that wish.

Chapter Notes

¹. See Source Bibliography for a complete listing.

². Plaster duplicates were made in the nineteenth century as artists’ models.

³. Poem From An Old Roman Sarcophagus. www.gorustic.com/captain.htm. (inactive 7/2018)

⁴ Jamie Lendino, The History of Car GPS Navigation, www.pcmagazine, accessed April 16, 2012.

CHAPTER THREE

HOUSING THE DEPARTED

Afterlife

Did the people of the Roman Empire believe in the gods and trust the imagined powers of the various cultic rites? There were individual scoffers, but the many tribes, cultures, and ethnicities of the Mediterranean Basin were a superstitious lot, and enthusiastically trusted the gods and cultic rituals. Even members of the educated upper class were believers, as can be seen in fourth century historian Ammianus Marcellinus’s observations regarding the widespread belief in the power of amulets and charms and the reliance on astrologers, augurs, haruspices, prophets, saviors, soothsayers, and cultic ritual.¹ In City of God, Augustine does not deny the existence or power of all the Roman gods—what he asserts is not their non-existence, but only that They are not gods, but malignant fiends, and your eternal felicity is their eternal punishment.²

Did the people of the Roman Empire believe in the supposed powers of the various cultic rites to secure an afterlife? Tomb dedications reveal the scoffers, so the carvings on sarcophagi that appear to signal cultic allegiance, but with inscriptions that deny immortality, should be understood simply as decoration and nothing more. However, most inhabitants of the Mediterranean Basin did believe in the power of cultic rituals to guarantee the soul’s passage to the Isles of the Blest. Certainly, Plato believed in an afterlife, and the Republic’s Myth of Er and the stories and arguments in the Phaedo and Phaedrus amply demonstrate this. From the Myth of Er:

On the twelfth day, as he [Er] lay on the funeral pyre, he came to life again, and told what he had seen in the other world.

He said that when his soul left his body he joined with many others until they came to a wonderful place where there were two openings side by side in the earth, and two others in the sky just above them. Judges sat between them and pronounced judgment.³

Forgoing the myth, Plato and Aristotle claimed that if the soul was the form of life; it could not possibly admit of its opposite, death. The ancient world needed an eternal animator for bodily matter—"ruach" and "nefesh" for Jews, "psyche" for Plato and Aristotle," pneuma" for the Greek Stoics, and for Romans, "animus" and "spiritus."⁴

A serene afterlife was offered by the Eleusinian mysteries, Orphism, and the Christian patriarchs; the Isis cult offered eternal happiness; and, the Gospel of Bacchus promised a joyous one. These resurrection cults spread into the Roman Republic via Greeks living in southern Italy, and later as the Roman armies moved eastward into Hellas and Asia Minor, soldiers and tradesmen brought back with them the so-called Oriental (Mystery) cults. Later, in the era of the Roman Empire other resurrection cults and religions arose among which was an assortment of Jesus cults. Franz Cumont says of these practices:

The salvation ensured by the mysteries [cults] was conceived as identification with the god venerated by them. By virtue of this union the initiate was reborn. … He was deified or immortalized, after he had taken part, as an actor, in a liturgical drama reproducing the myth of the god whose lot was assimilated to his own. Purifications, lustrations and unctions, participation in a sacred banquet, revelations, apparitions and ecstasies—a complicated series of ceremonies and instructions helped to bring about this metamorphosis of the faithful whom a higher power absorbed or penetrated with its energy.⁵

The idea that the dead were somehow still alive or had enough life left to go on living after death, meant that the dead had to be treated properly, for they retained certain powers and so must be handled with caution. As Cumont notes, It [the funeral cult] proceeds from fear as much as from piety, for the dead are prone to resentment and quick in vengeance.⁶ Numerous cults and widespread superstition warned against unhappy spirits who were very much alive. Ovid, a chronicler of Roman mores, wrote:

Tombs, also, are honoured. Placate your fathers’ souls,/ Bring tiny tributes to the erected pyres./The dead desire little./ They want piety,/ Not rich gifts; deep Styx has no greedy gods./ … . But once, while armed for battle and waging long wars,/ They [Romans] abandoned the Parentalia./ But not with impunity. That ill-omened act,/ They report, charred Rome with suburban pyres./ I hardly believe it. Our ancestors, it is said,/ Left their tombs in night’s silent hour and wailed./ The city streets and the broad grassland howled, they say,/ With a hollow throng of shapeless souls.⁷

Moreover, if the dead were still alive, a Roman would not want the dead to be lonely or go unfed. Being dead, but not quite dead once-and-for-all, it is best to visit the dead at least once or twice a year. At Isola Sacra at Ostia, Italy, is a mausoleum with a triclinium before it so a dinner could be set for both the living and the interred.⁸ (TF 5, RELATED ITEMS, necropolis 18, 3463).

The one thing that is certain about the temper of the late Roman Empire is that the mass of people, a huge underclass, Christian and non-Christian, and a goodly portion of the educated upper classes were deeply and fundamentally superstitious. They longed for personal immortality in a heavenly afterlife, and they believed that the body needed an honorable entombment in order to secure an afterlife. If one believes that in some fashion the bodies of the dead need to be preserved in order that the dead can go on living after death, whether this is existence as a soul, a perfected body, or a being in the prime of life, a proper interment would be required.

Interment

During the years of the Roman Empire the dead were disposed of in a variety of ways. Where the geology would allow extensive tunneling, bodies were placed in hollowed-out niches in catacombs. Just outside the walls of Rome extensive catacomb complexes were cut into the soft volcanic tufa. Cities such as Syracuse and Lyon also had catacombs. A funeral pyre was the preferred Roman method of handling the dead before 125 (and would remain so afterwards for soldiers). The deceased was burned and the bones were placed in ossuaries or if all that was left were ashes, then urns, which in either case were placed in a mausoleum. Some dead were placed directly into sarcophagi, but when all that was left were bones, the bones would be transferred to an ossuary. Others were forever interred in a sarcophagus, and many times a sarcophagus would be re-opened for the bodies of the later-deceased wife or children. With the legalization of Christianity in 312, Christians began to construct martyria and introduced the practice of burying their dead under church floors and in crypts. When a saint was declared an intercessor, the area around his tomb became a crowded cemetery, the site of the sarcophagi of the many who wanted his aid in getting into heaven. For instance, a large cemetery developed around the tomb of St. Saturni, a third century martyr.⁹ In Death and Burial in the Roman World, J.M.C. Toynbee lists tumuli, columbarium, mausoleums (small, large, and colossal), tower tombs, garden graves, simple earth interment, catacombs, urns, ossuaries, and sarcophagi.¹⁰

The sarcophagus fashionable era spans the years between Emperor Hadrian’s reign and the twilight that signaled the approaching European Dark Ages, approximately 450. Around 125 many Romans switched from cremating their dead to inhumation, placing the body of the deceased in a coffin. It is possible that it was at this time the notion that there was bodily resurrection in the afterlife became a widespread superstition.¹¹ Because of Emperor Hadrian’s love of Greek art and his influence on the upper classes, some of these caskets were carved with scenes from a Romanized Greek mythology, others with cult symbolisms, and still others with Greek-inspired architectural motifs. Susan Walker notes: within a century of Hadrian’s death (AD 138) the trade in marble sarcophagi had spread to all provinces bordering the Mediterranean Sea and to many inland areas accessible by river and road.¹² As Europe slid into the Dark Ages, the use of carved stone caskets began to fade, carried on only by select clergy (best exemplified by the bishops’ caskets at St. Apollinaire in Classe just outside of Ravenna, Italy) or a very few other secure and well-situated individuals in the Merovingian era.

Sarcophagi were not buried, but were placed, free-standing on the sides of major roads just outside of cities, or on shelves in mausoleums likewise at roadside, or on tables carved out of tufa in a catacomb, or above ground in vast necropoleis. Sarcophagi have been found at the major thoroughfares leading into Arles and Mazan in southern France, or at the Komarom highroad trailing along the confluence of the Vah and Danube. Large mausoleums, some of which still stand today just outside of Rome, lined the Via Appia Antica. These structures were painted in bright colors and festooned with columns, pilasters, statuary, and bas- and high relief carvings. The Roman practice was to back up a sarcophagus against an interior mausoleum wall, and so Rome-originated sarcophagi are carved on three sides. Sarcophagi from the Asia Minor (modern Turkey) are carved on all four sides because they were not so placed.

Although Roman sarcophagi were clearly commissioned by well-to-do individuals (and like Hadrian with a taste for Greek aesthetics and subjects), sarcophagi were not exclusively an