Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture by Molly Swetnam-Burland (review)

Roman senators who were sent out to govern conquered provinces made a habit of enriching themselves by looting the local landscape. The province of Egypt was no exception, but the looters were the emperors themselves. They looted now not in order to adorn private quarters but to place symbols of their power in the public structures of Rome itself. Swetnam-Burland provides fascinating insights into how objects like obelisks were transported and erected and how Romans might have come to regard them not as bizarre objects of conquest but as routine features of the cityscape. Egyptian artifacts attracted the private sector as well. She analyzes the repurposing of imported objects as well as the market for goods in the Egyptian style manufactured in Italy, the appetite for which was often whetted by Romans who traveled to Egypt. In a study on this topic, we expect to find discussion of the extravagant—for example, the small pyramid, which survives today, that Cestius had built for his own tomb. More surprising is the great variety of small objects and the uses to which they were put: an alabaster vessel reused as a cinerary urn, or the integration of Egyptian images such as serpents and baboons into otherwise standard Roman art, or the various ways in which Egyptian religious symbols and concepts are deployed in Roman letters. Horace famously remarked about the Hellenizing trends in Roman art forms that "captive Greece captured Rome," but Greek and Roman art partook of similar representational realism. Egyptian objects did not, yet they too succeeded in capturing the Roman imagination.