Emanuel Mayer’s ambitious The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE–250 CE is divided into two distinct methodological parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is a synthesis of significant trends in the economic history of the Roman imperial period that emphasizes the abundant presence of a prosperous mercantile class across the Roman Empire. Adopting Max Weber’s definition of the middle class as a well-defined group that “shared cultural traits as well as economic opportunities” (18), Mayer proceeds to collect a wealth of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that ancient cities were dominated by production-oriented commercial classes that either rented or owned a significant percentage of property in any given Roman city, thereby establishing an imprint of its own distinctive values on urban material culture.

The second part (chapters 4–5) aims to identify those values in Roman middle-class art. In Mayer’s estimation, much of the core corpus of private or quasi-private Roman art—especially funerary reliefs, portraits, sarcophagi, and domestic frescos—should be understood on its own terms. Throughout, Mayer takes aim particularly at the hypotheses of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Paul Zanker, who have proposed, each in his own way, that nonelite art was driven by a universal tendency to emulate the literary and artistic culture of the elite (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Rome’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Paul Zanker, Pompeii: Public and Private Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). To be sure, these artistic genres and their subject matter owe a debt to elite prototypes, whether in art or literature; but Mayer insists that the impulses driving the choice and manipulation of styles or motifs were quite distinct. Art of the Roman aristocracy consistently strove for emotional distance, favoring either public or intellectual life, or both. Nonelite art was far removed from both, appealing more to affective and aesthetic impulses.

Chapter 4 focuses on the self-presentation of the mercantile class in commemorative art. In my estimation it presents the most persuasive evidence for Mayer’s grand thesis. He challenges the widespread notion that Roman funerary sculpture of the second and third centuries CE reflects the Hellenized upper-class’s intellectual fondness for erudite mythological reference. Though it borrows, as always, from elite culture, it has its own frame of reference that emphasizes the emotions attendant on love and loss. Mayer gives credit to recent work by such scholars as Henning Wrede, Björn Ewald, and Zanker, who have opened up the study of funerary art to a subtler mode of analysis by revealing an aesthetic that centered on commemorative strategies quite different from those used by the elites (Henning Wrede, Consecratio in Formam Deorum: Vergöttlichte Privatpersonen in der römischen Kaiserzeit, Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1981; Paul Zanker and Björn Christian Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben: Die Bilderwelt der römischen Sarkophage, Munich: Hirmer, 2004). One common strategy was to “divinize” the dead metaphorically by exalting their virtues in life. The Trajanic-era tomb of Claudia Semne is characteristic. The deceased woman’s bust appears on a small tympanum with portrait features, but also the attributes of Venus. Was this divinizing tendency as class specific as Mayer believes? It is a question that needs to be taken outside the funerary realm, for there was contemporaneously a widespread tendency in freestanding statuary to plant portrait heads on mythological types. Would all those women and men posing as Venus and Mars have belonged to the mercantile class?

The commonplace depiction of mythological episodes in middle-class tombs, Mayer contends, has an equally distinctive purpose: to emphasize the drama of grief. As an early but especially well-preserved instance of this, he discusses the famous tomb of the Haterii, which on the one hand highlights the trade that brought this family its fortune—construction—and on the other, with its depiction of gods of the underworld and the Rape of Persephone, can be read as an appeal to the viewer’s emotions. Sarcophagi, however, represent the most telling class divide. Among the many cases where the class status of a sarcophagus’s dedicatee can be known or guessed, thematic divisions are startling. Most sarcophagi representing mythological scenes can be attributed to the merchant class; those of the senatorial class, with a few exceptions, tend to commemorate the social rank and public life of the deceased. The choice and manner of mythological representation is equally interesting. The most popular scenes—such as Apollo and Diana killing the Niobids, Orestes and Pylades learning of Agamemnon’s murder, Luna visiting the sleeping Endymion, and Venus with the dying Adonis—consistently emphasize either the heroism of the principals or the pathos of loss, or both; and they are indifferent to following the canonical, “literary” versions of the stories. To call too much attention to the proper stories of these heroes would subject them to unwelcome indictment; for with some exceptions (mostly female), these heroes were deeply flawed themselves. For this very reason, popular mythic scenes did not suit the funerary aretalogies of aristocrats.

Surely Mayer is right that most mythological sarcophagi could not have been intended to relay “paradigmatic and exemplary stories about death, which were somehow applicable to the deceased” (145–46). His alternative explanation, as far as it goes, convinces. However, his evidence is geographically biased, heavily favoring Rome and its vicinity. He has less to say about the East, where priorities were often very different. The recent work of Esen Öğüş, for example, suggests that many of the Severan-era columnar sarcophagi of Aphrodisias belonged to the educated upper middle class, who celebrated their enhanced status following Caracalla’s edict of universal citizenship in 212 (Esen Öğüş, “Columnar Sarcophagi from Aphrodisias: Iconography, Self-Representation, and Civic Identity in the Roman East,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010). Yet those commemorated on them are rendered in a rarefied and restrained aristocratic manner—in proper public garb holding scrolls, or in the pudicitia stance, sometimes accompanied by Muses. Others pose as lone gods with portrait features; by and large, they are utterly unentangled in untidy narratives.

With chapter 5, on domestic art, Mayer reaches the high-water mark of his polemic. Having ventured the farthest, he risks the most; for here in particular he must contend with a crowded field of distinguished historians and critics who favor some version of the mimetic model of Roman nonelite art. Wallace-Hadrill and Zanker take the brunt of his criticism, since their work on Vesuvian houses has been especially influential. Mayer’s chief objection is once more that their concept of “trickle-down aesthetics” mistakenly presumes that middle-class homeowners were emulating aristocrats by using art to project their public personae and social aspirations. Their real intent, he argues, was to appeal to private, immediate impulses and emotions by replicating favored forms and motifs. Time and again, Mayer emphasizes that mythological scenes ignore the canonical narratives, but in this context in order to create an aesthetic impression. Thus Narcissus is often shown looking out at the viewer, not at himself, subverting the self-absorption at the center of his story; he becomes, instead, a desirable object who responds to the viewer’s desire. Or the dying Pyramus at the House of Octavius Quartio might be shown as a hunter (which he was not) simply to relate him to a pendant image of the dying hunter Actaeon. Images are paired because of their formal or aesthetic relationships, not to form a literary, thematic unity.

This is all defensible, even if it rests on somewhat selective and anecdotal evidence. But Mayer seems to lose his way when dealing with the four Pompeian painting styles. Little about the first and second styles, he argues, genuinely mimics palace or villa architecture or vistas; they are essentially frameworks for creating fanciful pastiches. What of the third and fourth style, with their retreat from believably allusive architecture to the fanciful columnar filigrees that frame fictive pinacothecae? After an unnecessary entanglement in Vitruvius’s famously vituperative treatment of the third style, Mayer concludes that by and large these styles cannot be imitative or allusive—the architecture is too fanciful. It is a strange argument on several counts, and it sidesteps some important dimensions of Roman social life that ought to play a part in his discussion. For example, he says little about the stage scenery so obviously represented in the second style, or the intimations of staged myths such as appear in the fourth style. Why? The well-documented influence of theater on Roman wall painting, especially the second and fourth styles, would seem a rich source of signification to the nonelite. The middle classes attended the theater, where they were exposed to canonical mythological texts or their down-market interpretations, and their visual staging. Second, Mayer overemphasizes some admittedly tendentious efforts to argue that Pompeian painting styles emulated elite architecture. Yet the thing most similar to middle-class painting is not architecture but upper-class painting. Numerous examples of the third and fourth styles survive in aristocratic settings, such as the Villa Farnesina and the Domus Aurea at Rome and the grand villas near Pompeii. In no significant way do their frescos differ from those in the finer middle-class houses at Pompeii or Herculaneum. How would Mayer account for this continuity across the class divide?

With a more nuanced line of argument, Mayer probably could have resolved these problems to the reader’s satisfaction. My discomfort lies at the more fundamental level of definition. If there is a systemic weakness to this interesting and provocative book, it is ironically that too often in the heat of the argument the distinction between the elite and nonelite is lost. To buttress his contention that the middle classes spurned intellectually coherent artistic programs, Mayer cites the behavior of Cicero and the owner of the Villa of the Papyri—aristocrats both—as exemplars of just the same tendency (188–92). And it seems misguided to suppose that the epitaph dreamed up by Petronius’s fictional, clownish arriviste Trimalchio, which includes the assurance that he never listened to a philosopher, should reflect the values of “conservative Roman nobles, who liked to display an entirely theatrical, and sometimes even self-ironic, anti-intellectualism in public” (111). It is equally puzzling that Mayer should adduce as a model of the showy tombs of the “upper class and political elites” of the late Republic and early Empire the altar tomb of Naevolia Tyche and Munatius Faustus at Pompeii. Faustus, a freedman who presumably achieved his status as Augustalis through a successful career in interregional commerce (famously, his tomb represents a merchant ship), fits Mayer’s definition of the middle class perfectly. Maybe the tomb seemed elite to him because of the bisellium represented on one side, a symbol of elected magistrates. Category errors such as these illustrate a peculiar internal inconsistency in his argument.

Was there a point at which sheer success and wealth distanced a Roman from his middle-class origins, even if he retained the cultural norms and social networks of his mercantile origins? Could a successful businessman, via enfranchisement and political office, become an aristocrat in his own right? Perhaps we have no difficulty thinking of Trimalchio, or his real-life avatars like Eurysaces, the bakery mogul at Rome, as middle-class men; for despite their wealth they still fit Weber’s definition of men with shared cultural traits and economic opportunities, and as freedmen they would have been denied full franchise and public office. But in provincial cities, as Mayer himself observes, we struggle to pigeonhole the decurial or equestrian classes—many of them deeply implicated in commerce—as middle class, elite, or something in between. I suspect that Roman society was too manifold to admit of such simple categories, except in circumscribed geographic areas like Rome and the Bay of Naples. Despite these shortcomings, Mayer’s book opens a legitimate debate about a universal problem in the social history of art. Anyone interested in the mechanisms of class identity in aesthetic choices will find much to appreciate in this book.