Jeannine Diddle Uzzi’s Children in the Visual Arts of the Roman Empire joins an increasingly crowded field of scholarship on ancient childhood, especially that concerned with the theme of its social “construction.” Recent work, from Beryl Rawson’s authoritative Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) to Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter’s new collection Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), has focused attention on how childhood was recognized and appreciated as a distinct developmental lifestage that, at the same time, was constantly reimagined (especially through art) to meet the needs of different social groups. Uzzi’s work shares an interest in the constructed nature of childhood but is notable for its emphasis on political ideology. For her, the images of Roman and non-Roman children that appear on state monuments distil the elite’s starkly contrasting visions of their futures and thus give access to “fundamental aspects of a Roman imperial ideology, an idea of Romanitas” (1).

Uzzi’s volume begins with a brief outline of her theoretical model (chapter 1), which draws heavily upon postcolonial theories of nationhood. This is followed by an extended discussion of the visual evidence and its limits (chapter 2), and six thematic treatments of that evidence (chapters 3 to 9). Roman children are treated first in a pair of chapters ordered thematically: “Imperial Largesse” (chapter 3), including scenes of congiarium, alimenta, and liberalitas, and “Public Gatherings” (chapter 4), encompassing images of sacrifice as well as games and processions. Discussions of the depiction of non-Roman children in chapters titled “Submission” (chapter 6), “Triumph” (chapter 7), and “The Battleground” (chapter 8) follow. Detailed studies of two monuments, the Anaglypha Traiani/Hadriani and the Ara Pacis, appear in the middle (chapter 5) and near the end (chapter 9) of the volume, respectively. Uzzi then returns to her theoretical model in chapter 10, the conclusion, where she reiterates the relevance and value of children’s representations to current debates about Roman imperialism and the family, and outlines avenues for future research. The book closes with an appendix on images from the private sphere, domestic and funerary, in which the author notes differences in both their function and tenor from those in official art.

Uzzi defines official art as those works that are largely public, monumental, and funded (or otherwise sanctioned) by the imperial government. Because of their dependence on shared models, objects that are diminutive in size (such as coins and a silver cup) or limited in viewership (such as sarcophagi) are discussed alongside those that are monumental and public, most being historical reliefs. The children depicted on these works are identified on the basis of certain key traits, including costume, hairstyle, and scale (30), and there is good discussion here of the ambiguity of both the nomenclature and iconography of “the child,” including the muddy issue of gender. However, due to the difficulty of identifying certain types of children and the constraints of space, the author limits her study to anonymous mortals, excluding imperial children, mythological figures, religious acolytes (camilli/ae), and slaves (31–32). The book’s title thus suggests a broader sweep than its contents actually offer. The end result is a survey of the representation of some one hundred and forty children in art, the majority of which are works of sculpture displayed at Rome (or its environs) and dating to between the reigns of Augustus and Septimius Severus.

In the seven chapters that form the backbone of the book, the author develops her central argument that the analysis of images of children as a collective “opens up a narrative of Roman identity” (1). This argument follows along two strands: first, Roman children are shown participating in a range of adult activities in public, especially in the presence of the emperor, in which they symbolize not only the solvency of the current government but also the future of their people; second, non-Roman children are distinguished from Romans not only by differences in their costume, jewelery, and hairstyle but also by artists’ tendency to depict them in postures and settings that highlighted their frailty (for instance, accompanied by their mothers—not fathers—in scenes of submission, captivity, or combat). The depiction of children in official art is thus seen as a high-stakes narrative of inclusion in or exclusion from Roman society: for while some images retail the benefits of peaceful allegiance to the imperial project (e.g., the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum), others warn of the dire costs associated with forceful opposition to it (e.g., Tropaeum Traiani at Adamklissi).

Generally speaking, I found many of the author’s arguments persuasive. There are, however, significant problems in her conceptual scheme and iconographic approach as well as in some of her individual interpretations. For instance, Uzzi’s claim in the introduction and conclusion that the concepts of nationhood and “identity” are central to her (and our) understanding of these images ultimately rings hollow. This is due in part to her insistence on the nation-state model, through which she appears to understand “being Roman” as a static, homogeneous yardstick against which artists could measure and fashion their mirror negatives, non-Romans. But this emphasis on dualism and difference, which runs throughout the book, leads her to some forced readings and overstated claims: for instance, she hastily brushes off the similarities between images of Romans and non-Romans in scenes of alimenta and supplication as unrelated (cf., 159), while she erroneously states that Roman foreign policy was never couched in civilizing terms and that artists never depicted “the peaceful incorporation of new territories into the empire” (161). In fact, the development of a “civilizing ethos” can be clearly traced in the art and literature of the reign of Claudius as well as Trajan, an ethos that included the active manipulation of children’s representations (see Rachel Kousser, “From Conquest to Civilization: The Rhetoric of Imperialism in the Early Principate,” in A Tall Order: Writing the Social History of the Ancient World. Essays in Honor of William V. Harris, ed. J.-J. Aubert and Z. Varhelyi, Munich: K.G. Saur, 2005, 185–202; Christian Heitz, “Des Kaisers neue Kinder. Romanitas und Barbarentum am Trajansbogen von Benevent,” Römische Mitteilungen 112 (2005/6): 207–24).

While Uzzi spends considerable effort scrutinizing the concept of nationhood in a Roman context, she surprisingly leaves “identity”—her heuristic frame (1, 3, 156, 158)—unexamined. For apart from her passing definition of this term at the start of her work, where she speaks of how non-Romans might be “educated in Roman culture, mores, and politics—what one might call ‘Roman identity’” (6), the author at no point distinguishes how “identity” differs from Romanitas (the two are used interchangeably throughout; cf., 16, 156). Nor does she justify why we need employ this term to understand Roman visual culture. Although “identity” has been widely embraced in the study of the ancient world, its nebulous definition and use as a blanket term has led in problematic ways to monolithic interpretations (see Tonio Hölscher, “The Concept of Roles and the Malaise of ‘Identity’: Ancient Rome and the Modern World,” in Role Models in the Roman World: Identity and Assimilation, ed. Sinclair Bell and Inge Lyse Hansen, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 41–56). The validity of employing “identity” as a model, then, should not be assumed (as it is here), but rather argued for (as nationhood is). Furthermore, the author’s overarching claim that representations of Roman children can and should be framed as a master “narrative of identity” is not borne out by her own discussion: the term “identity” (like Romanitas) appears almost entirely in the introduction and conclusion and is applied only once in her analysis of her corpus, at the very end (155).

For all of its theoretical language, Uzzi’s book is at its core a work of traditional formal analysis. The author emphasizes issues of iconography and patronage over the context of the object’s display or the audience’s reaction to it. She holds that we can separate objects from their viewers since “artistic intention exists independently from accessibility and reader response” (19). (This point-of-view is reinforced in the selection of the some seventy black-and-white images, most of high quality, which present the monuments in antiseptic isolation; there are no maps or ground plans.) While the privileging of the artwork’s moment of production in this way proves convenient for comparing disparate material from across the empire, it nonetheless raises questions about context that cannot be ignored. For instance, works as diverse as a war memorial in Dacia (fig. 46 ff.) and a battle sarcophagus in metropolitan Rome (fig. 57 f.) may share generic similarities in their iconography that justify their comparison, but how did considerations about their local audiences factor into their very creation (not just reception) in different ways? Recent discussions about the influence of different types of viewers (citizen, barbarian, etc.) upon the design of the Ara Pacis or Trajan’s Column would have proved instructive here (see e.g., John Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representations and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 315, Berkeley: University of California Press, 28–41). But Uzzi’s formalist approach does not allow for such lines of inquiry, and as a result her work—despite the theoretical bent of her opening and concluding chapters—appears curiously out of step with current scholarship, which owes much to reception theory (see Paul Zanker, “Nouvelles orientations de la recherche en iconographie. Commanditaires et spectateurs,” Revue Archéologique (1994): 281–93).

None of these issues and problems are helped by the unresolved growing pains associated with the project’s conversion from dissertation to book, including the author’s unfortunate penchant for hyperbole (e.g., 76: “The so-called Anaglypha Traiani/Hadriani has caused scholars enormous grief, with no end in sight”), her tendency to skirt the critical dilemma of identifying the monuments under study (several are unhelpfully said to have to “remain a mystery”; cf., 60, 77), and her incomplete consultation of the secondary literature on children in state art (notable gaps include Hanns Gabelmann, Antike Audienz- und Tribunalszenen, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984, esp. 163 ff.; Maria Radnoti-Alföldi, Bild und Bildersprache der römischen Kaiser: Beispiele und Analysen, Munich: Philipp von Zabern, 1999, esp. 128 ff.). Also frustrating is the volume’s poor standard of production in places: for although the body of the text itself is relatively free from errors (found on xi, xii, 54, 113, 130, 181), both the notes and bibliography contain numerous mistakes, including misspellings, dislocations in date and alphabetical order, and missing and dead-end references. Such errors are unfortunate, as they present Uzzi’s research in a form that both reflects poorly on her considerable labor and makes the end product less accessible to students and scholars alike.

In summary, the primary value of this work is to be found in its collection and thematic treatment of a scattering of mostly well-known monuments, reliefs, and coins that document the Roman elite’s construction of childhood through the vehicle of art. The author has gone far in accomplishing her stated goal of rehabilitating her subjects from their traditional role as inactive background figures to highly charged and highly visible cultural symbols. That said, her monograph struggles to reconcile the evidence with her theoretical and conceptual frameworks and thus ultimately fails to live up to its promise as an iconographic counterpart to Rawson’s social history of children (12). As a consequence, the definitive account of “children in the visual arts of imperial Rome” remains to be written.