Debates over cultural patrimony and the ownership of ancient art make headlines today. Margaret Miles’s Art as Plunder reminds readers that this was also the case in late Republican Rome. Her book promises to explore “the origins of art as cultural property and the competing claims that arise when it is seized, appropriated, and collected by a stronger authority” (1). Miles investigates ancient attitudes and expectations about loot, ranging from the Sumerian period to the early Byzantine era, with special attention to those articulated by Cicero in his Verrine orations. But that’s not all. Turning to the modern reception of the Verrines, Miles argues that Cicero’s ideas about the ownership and proper use of art were a touchstone for late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European debates about the expropriation of art, and thereby contributed to the creation of the twentieth-century concept of cultural property.

Drawing on literary texts, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence, Miles opens chapter 1, “Art as Roman Plunder,” with a brief overview of Near Eastern and Greek attitudes toward plunder. Her examples range widely to include the victory stele of Naram-Sin carried off by the Elamites to Susa, stories of the theft of the Palladium, and literary and archaeological evidence for the Persian sack of Athens. They provide a sense of the attitudes and traditions surrounding the theft of art in warfare. The spoils went to the victors, but there was some ambivalence about loot seized from temples, for the theft of sacred property could have dire consequences. Cautionary tales about the fates of those who robbed the gods (whose temples were full of loot) abound. Yet such sacrilegious thefts, Miles argues, increased over time, with a marked upsurge in the Hellenistic period as leaders needed wealth to pay their mercenaries and furnish their courts.

From these antecedents, Miles turns to accounts by Roman historians of acts of plunder. She uses Livy’s retelling of the sack of Veii to highlight themes that recur in literary presentations of the looting of cities during the Republic: problems of discipline and greed, questions concerning authority over the booty, debates over its subsequent use, and concern for the proper attitude toward images of the gods. Between the time of the sack of Veii and Sulla’s sack of Athens, Romans hauled massive amounts of loot home. These spoils, key to triumphal processions, were integral to Rome’s imperial image. Miles concludes the chapter with a discussion of descriptions of “beneficent” generals, beginning with Scipio Aemilianus and ending with Augustus, who repatriated plundered artworks or protected temples and their treasuries.

Chapters 2 and 3, “The Roman Context of Cicero’s Prosecution of Verres” and “Cicero’s Views on the Social Place of Art,” are the heart of the book. Here, Miles turns to the case against Verres, the notorious Roman praetor who exploited and oppressed the province of Sicily. Brought to trial in 70 BCE on charges of extortion, Verres fled into exile before the trial’s conclusion. Miles carefully puts Cicero’s speeches in their historical context by first offering an overview of the history of Sicily from the legendary visit of Aeneas to Cicero’s own day. She then describes the logistics of Verres’s trial; the history, composition, and setting of the extortion court; the charges leveled against Verres; the outcome of the trial; and the publication of the Verrines.

Having laid down this groundwork, in the following chapter Miles explores Cicero’s ideas about the ethics of the ownership of stolen art. Launched in the midst of a rise of private collecting in the Roman world (as seen in Cicero’s own collecting practices), the Verrines reveal the ambivalence felt by some Romans about the theft and expropriation of art in the provinces. Cicero drew notable distinctions between art captured in wartime as opposed to in peacetime and between public and private uses of art. He denounced Verres as a pirate who robbed Rome’s allies in order to furnish his own personal collection of luxuries. This chapter is particularly rich, containing discussions of the ways in which Cicero sought to convey the value of the art stolen by Verres to a Roman audience. It also offers a detailed examination of the methods that Verres reportedly used to seize both public and private art. Cicero contrasted his portrait of the avaricious Verres, who had clearly violated property rights, with an idealized image of Scipio Aemilianus, who was said to have repatriated art to Sicily that had been stolen by the Carthaginians. Miles argues that such judgments about the proper use and ownership of art were not unique to Cicero; rather, Cicero called upon attitudes held by many elite Romans when making his case against Verres.

In chapter 4, “Roman Display of Art from Lucullus to Lausos,” Miles again takes up a broad brush, ranging from the late Republic to the foundation of Constantinople. She argues that Cicero’s case was so compelling and widely known that it shaped later Roman attitudes (most notably those expressed by Pliny the Elder) about the purposes and ownership of art. Whereas Republican generals continued to plunder art in the mid-first-century BCE, the private consumption of art changed form, as stories surrounding Lucullus and other piscinarii (fish-fanciers) show. With Augustus, Miles asserts, the Roman era of acquisition of art as loot began to draw to a close. Art, especially antique Greek art, was not so frequently plundered; instead, Greek art was more often produced for Roman patrons. Verres was a negative example; writers used similarly indignant stories about the rapacious treatment of the arts in both the provinces and Rome to reveal the deviant characters of Caligula and Nero. Miles sees a new development in attitudes toward the ownership of art with the foundation of Constantinople. The plundering of the Greek provinces to furnish the new capital once again excited criticism, but that did not stop this trend in usurpation, as the famed collection of Lausos, the Grand Chamberlain under Theodosius II, attests.

The final chapter of the book, “Art as European Plunder,” traces the modern reception of Cicero’s ideas about art as expounded in the Verrines. The speeches provided important historical background to eighteenth-century debates over the ethics of collecting and the fate of wartime booty. Cicero was such an authority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France that his thinking contributed to the emergence of modern ideas about cultural property as a special category of possessions that should be protected both in war and peace. Verres again appears as a negative example in the trial of Warren Hastings (the first governor general of India), in Lord Byron’s and Edward Dodwell’s protests against the theft of the Elgin Marbles, and in complaints of the French artist Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy about Napoleon’s despoliation of Italy. The Duke of Wellington’s decision to repatriate Napoleon’s loot marks a new era in the European treatment of spoils and paves the way for the further development of the concept of cultural property. “Roman experience,” Miles asserts, “helped shape the reasoning that provided the historical genesis and foundation for our current laws on the ownership of art” (2).

Miles’s epilogue, “The Continuing Plunder of Art,” begins with the Lieber Code, written for Union soldiers in the United States in 1863, which contains the first legal recognition of cultural property as a special category of objects protected in war. Miles continues with a brief overview of twentieth-century international agreements developed to protect cultural property. She then turns to the recent plundering of archaeological sites and to lawsuits issued by the Greek and Italian governments seeking the restitution of stolen art from the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She closes with a final plea for the repatriation of the Elgin marbles. An appendix reproduces particularly important documents on the plundering of art used in her study.

This is an important book. It will be of interest to scholars of antiquity and those working on questions of cultural patrimony in the modern world. The reader comes away with a sense of how cultural attitudes toward loot have changed over time and of how the plundering and subsequent display of cultural property has worked in practice, both in the ancient and modern worlds. However, the analysis raises a few questions. One wonders, was Verres really such a special case, as Miles claims? The existence of the extortion court, Cicero’s line of argument that the court should not protect its own, and the evidence that Miles presents about other Romans charged with extortion (such as Q. Pleminius and Q. Servilius Caepio) suggest otherwise. Also one wonders about the extent of the impact of the Verrines on later Roman attitudes toward the plundering of the provinces. The shifts that Miles documents might have had more to do with the changing relationship of the provinces to the center, to changes in provincial government, and to the geographic extension of the very idea of Rome. Likewise Constantine’s plundering of the provinces might attest to further developments in the relationship between the imperial capital and the rest of the empire. In short, there is more to say about the Roman history of looting the provinces, but Miles offers an important beginning. She also presents a richly textured analysis of a key source for the history of collecting. Finally, she demonstrates the importance of the Roman case to the much-debated issue of cultural patrimony.