8. Myth and Visual Narrative in the Second Sophistic – a Comparative Approach: Notes on an Attic Hippolytos Sarcophagus in Agrigento

In the decorated marble sarcophagi, produced in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries, death became the occasion for significant private expenditure which bears characteristics of what has been called ‘abjection’. Where we might see decay and decomposition, the rotting corpse, we are greeted by a visual feast of immaculate and immortal marble bodies ( Figure 8.1 a-d). The sarcophagus itself in its materiality – the wealth of figures and the richness of its narrative, the splendour of its painting and gilding – becomes a redemption for death and decay, and a principle means in the fight against the threat of oblivion. The making of the sarcophagus can thus be understood as a pious act of substitution in which the integrity of the body is symbolically reinstated. To use a mythological simile that seems fitting to a discussion of sarcophagi depicting the Hippolytos myth, this is much like the way in which Theseus piously pieces together the mangled portions of his son’s dismembered body – corpus fingit – in the horrific last scene of Seneca’s Phaedra. In this play, the integrity of the corpse is regarded as a prerequisite for proper mourning (1261): quam magna lacrimis pars adhuc nostris abest. A later Christian tradition would go the opposite way, reminding us of decay and decomposition in a memento mori that consciously pairs abjection with sublimation and catharsis in its artful representation of withering flesh. This, of course, implies the creation of a new paradox around life and death, and the promise of a very different exchange of bodies – but that is another story. It is not by accident that the emergence of richly decorated sarcophagi during the second century takes place at a time in which concerns about the body intensify, and in which the body becomes a main conduit for discourses