Shadi Bartsch writes:

The arc from early to imperial Rome provides the organising principle for Catharine Edwards’s excellent book, which takes death and the representation of death as lenses through which to highlight some of the most striking characteristics of Roman culture. In analysing the ancient treatment of death, she shows that it is not only inextricable from other aspects of that culture – military, aesthetic, philosophical, political – but also informed by the persistent idea of dying with (or for) an audience. Death in Ancient Rome deals with gladiators and soldiers as well as senators and generals, but in all cases the emphasis is on the concern of the Roman upper class to stress the exemplary and spectacular nature of such deaths. Spectacle had always been a part of Roman valour: in war, both the ritual act of devotio – in which a military leader sacrifices his life to the gods in order to guarantee a victory – and the doomed bravery of an ordinary soldier depended for their effect on the way they were witnessed; part of the value of the act was its ability to inspire others by self-display.

(LRB 15 November 2007)

Yale | hardback 287 pp. |ISBN: 9780300112085