Jonathan Steward, Ralegh Radford Rome Awardee (January–March 2026), discusses his project Bodily Anxieties, the Sea, and the Dead in Ancient Rome in this blog.
Do you fear death? What about death scares you? Do you have a plan for the fate of your corpse? What if the plan goes wrong? And do you want to think about death and the dead body at all?
Every morning for the past three months and, indeed, for many months before that, I have woken up and thought about death. Not my own: my PhD examines how the Romans of the late republic and early empire—around the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD—interacted with and imagined dead bodies. My work brings together a wide variety of sources and media to build a broad-strokes picture of Roman attitudes to death: how do Romans imagine dead bodies in their literature, and in the in the art and inscriptions that decorated their tombs, urns and sarcophagi? I care far less about the ‘reality’ of death than how it was perceived. Death two millennia ago can seem at once charmingly familiar and strikingly alien: a Roman idea of a ‘good death’ could simultaneously include holding hands with loved ones at the moment of your death, and having your relatives pick your fragmented bones directly out of your funeral pyre afterwards.
At the BSR, I’ve been researching and writing about the anxieties around death which filled the Roman imagination. Fears about death are not necessarily rational or real: one need only look at myths of vampires, zombies, and ghosts throughout history (and even the Romans had ghost stories, albeit not very scary ones). A particular fear rears its head in the Greek and Latin literature written in the Roman cultural milieu of the early empire: death at sea. It appears in generic lists of ‘bad deaths’; there are well over fifty poems written in a roughly one-hundred-year period at the turn of the millennium which tackle death at sea; and the theme even appears in oratorical exercises.
Such a death was more common in the ancient world than today, but, then again, so was death by tuberculosis, and the Romans seem not to have shared the later Victorian romanticisation of consumption, for example. Roman poetry seems to revel in aesthetic overload: bodies are churned up, flung on to foreign shores, and even eaten by fish (‘novel food for far-off fishes’, noua longinquis piscibus esca, Propertius Elegies 3.7.8, among many others). Not to therapise the ancient Romans, but it does seem unlikely that a pure, visceral fear of the sea motivates their writing: what are they really afraid of? These poems ask what’s left of a person when they die. They worry: how will you be remembered, once your body has decayed and dissolved?
This world of vanishing bodies and devouring fish fits in with broader Roman conceptions of the sea as a mythical realm of impossibilities. Indeed, when I’ve ventured out of the BSR library and its excellent collection of catalogues, I’ve toured the many museums of Rome in search of marine motifs and even made it to the formerly seaside necropolis of Portus, known as Isola Sacra. Today, the ocean still holds a certain mystic allure: we are charmed by dolphin documentaries, fascinated by the bizarre and unsettling creatures of the deep sea, and our popular media is full of tales of pirates, mermaids, and more. There are the familiar Graeco-Roman myths of the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the birth of Venus/Aphrodite, but, more generally, mythological and hybrid sea-creatures like nymphs, hippocampi, and sea-centaurs populated mosaics, frescoes, and reliefs in homes, baths, tombs, and sarcophagi. These sarcophagi in particular depict what is sometimes called a ‘marine thiasos’, a world of impossible, transforming, hybrid beasts and beautiful, eroticised nymphs playing among swirling seas. It is an image of pleasure and unreachability which speaks to (and masks) an anxiety about loss and death, about the transforming and decaying body within the coffin. In the broadest of terms, my research seeks to probe the fears and fantasies which fuel our relationship to death across time.
