Roman Tombs and the Art of Commemoration

Barbara E. Borg is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on Greek and Roman art, archaeology and history, and her monographs include Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century CE Rome (2013). She is editor of Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic (2004) and A Companion to Roman Art (2015).

• 1. In search of deceased senators; 2. Reviving tradition in Hadrianic Rome: from incineration to inhumation; 3. Family matters: the long life of Roman tombs; 4. Straddling borderlines: divine connotations in funerary commemoration.

Advance praise: 'This is an outstanding piece of work – the product of a very long period not only of thinking about this material but of doing fundamental research into what we know archaeologically. Borg is a pioneer in the new era that has been systematic about the study of assemblages – notably looking back into the old archives as well as at relatively rare modern finds. The book casts vibrant new light on questions of monument and memory, the shift from cremation to inhumation, the problems of individual apotheosis; it brilliantly marshals archaeological evidence against a series of epigraphically generated assumptions about individualism and against familial commemoration in the context of the Roman tomb, which dominated the scholarship of last generation.' Jaś Elsner, University of Oxford