Harvard Art Museums

Sarcophagus Sections with Men Fighting Amazons

Date

c. 230 CE

Medium

Pentelic marble

Culture

Roman

Department

Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art & Numismatics

Institution

Harvard Art Museums

The clash between men and Amazons, a mythical tribe of female warriors from the exoticized “East,” was a common motif in Greek monumental and Roman funerary art. This version has no dominating hero or obvious outcome and can be read on many levels. The conflict tests the boundaries between male and female, civilization and barbarism, human “reality” and the not-quite-human world of myth, and perhaps it offers a reminder of the violence—and strangeness—of death. The sarcophagus also plays into a broader story of elite taste in the second century CE, when wealthy Romans often chose to ornament their sarcophagi with Greek mythological scenes. A sarcophagus like this one, executed in Roman sculptural style but with a Greek subject, would have provided both a final resting place for the body or bodies and a lasting tribute to the wealth and cultural sophistication of an individual or family.

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