Valerie Hope

Death and disease in the ancient city

This innovative volume draws on recent research in archaeology, ancient history and the history of medicine to discuss how people in the ancient world understood and dealt with illness and death in the urban environment.

Words and Pictures: the Interpretation of Romano-British Tombstones *

A tombstone removed from its context loses much of its evocative nature; disassociated from the remains it was intended to commemorate its original function is obscured. The tombstone continues, nevertheless, to communicate through text and also images. Its removal may mute the impact of the message but if the stone remains un-shattered and un-concealed it is not easily silenced.

Constructing Roman identity: Funerary monuments and social structure in the Roman world

Hundreds of thousands of tombstones survive from the Roman period. This paper explores the value of this source to the Roman social historian, using historical and sociological studies of funerary evidence, particularly of the Victorian period, to provide comparative models. It is argued here that information drawn from Roman tombstones does not allow the development of simple demographic assertions about the population of the Roman Empire. Instead it is suggested that Roman tombstones were a medium for communicating social status and as such had a particular appeal to specific groups within Roman society. To illustrate this the chronological variations detectable in the use and construction of tombstones are described and related to changing patterns in the expression of status and social mobility. In particular the funerary monuments erected to freed slaves and auxiliary soldiers are examined to illuminate how the identity of the deceased was constructed and communicated through both text and images. Th...

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’: the practical and symbolic treatment of the Roman war dead

Abstract In literary sources death in Roman battle was often portrayed as glorious, yet how the bodies of the war dead were treated was far removed from this ideal. This paper focuses on this dichotomy, and the seeming contradictions in attitudes and behaviours. In ancient Rome, the war dead were little remembered, respected and mourned for. After battle the bodies of dead soldiers were hastily gathered and disposed of en masse. There were no war memorials that listed the names of the dead, no military war cemeteries that acted as places of pilgrimage, little battlefield tourism and no annual commemorative rituals. This stands in stark contrast to the tombstones set up by soldiers in peacetime, to the arches and columns that celebrated victories in the city of Rome, to the triumphal processions that filled its streets and the tales of military bravery that formed literary set pieces. On the one hand to die for Rome was presented as glorious, on the other hand the reality was bloody, brutal and seemingly soon forgotten. This paper investigates how the bodies of soldiers were treated post-battle, uniting the limited archaeological evidence with a range of literary texts. Why was the basic treatment of military corpses deemed acceptable, and how were those corpses manipulated in real, and literary, games of power and politics?