Craftsmen and Customers

Abstract In considering the images used on child sarcophagi the workshop is an obvious place to start: here customers’ demands met with the craftsmen’s supply. However little is known about their actual interaction, one can imagine what might have been at stake for each party: range of choice, the use of popular compositions and the devising of new ones, the qualities of the particular marble, and how to maximize customer appeal must have been questions of regular concern. In fact at the end of the day, issues like these may have been as influential as ideology in the creation of images on Roman sarcophagi; and this is even more likely for the decoration of children’s sarcophagi which required the workshop to be particularly responsive to a special need. Yet they rarely seem to get the attention which they deserve (possibly because they raise so many unanswered questions). To redress the balance this section has been placed at the start of my discussion. The first part of it looks at factors to do with design and production, the second considers evidence about the social status of people who bought or used these sarcophagi, and the last part looks at some cases where the sarcophagi can be considered in the context of their original setting.