6. In the Guise of Gods and Heroes: Portrait Heads on Roman Mythological Sarcophagi

Abstract

The Roman practice of adding portrait heads to the characters on mythological sarcophagi is well known. These faces with their individualised features and period hairstyles gaze out at us from the pages of handbooks and catalogues, giving a vivid impression of the way that Roman lives and deaths could be directly equated with the fates of mythological figures. Yet this very ubiquity begs a question: just how representative of the larger category of Roman mythological sarcophagi are the chests with portrait heads? The aim of this paper is to conduct a close analysis of mythological sarcophagi with portrait heads, to look at what the presence of portraits adds to the mythological scenes and to ask whether they should be seen as simply intensifying the message of a mythological scene or of altering and nuancing it in a particular way. Despite the familiarity of sarcophagi with portrait heads, little analysis of these chests as a group has been done. While readings of some individual pieces suggest that the addition of portrait heads sometimes refocused the meaning of a myth in surprising ways, the prevailing assumption among scholars seems to be that portrait features on sarcophagi merely reinforce the normal message of the mythological subject matter. For many scholars, the portraits simply make explicit a message which may be more muted elsewhere. In Koortbojian’s words ‘all mythological sarcophagi assert analogies; the presence of the portrait features of the deceased merely intensifies and particularizes the monument’s message’. Greater analysis of the sarcophagi with portrait heads might be expected from Henning Wrede’s discussion of images assimilating individuals with particular gods. This discusses a number of mythological sarcophagi alongside statues or reliefs which show individuals in the dress of, or with the attributes of, divine figures. However, Wrede’s focus is necessarily selective, and depends on