Was demythologization driven by a change in taste among Rome’s aristocratic elite, as they increasingly retreated from public life to the comforts of their rural villas? This chapter turns to sarcophagi featuring bucolic and philosopher imagery, the most popular of the mythless genres, and to theories that appeal to politics, especially the changing political fortunes of Rome’s traditional senatorial families, when trying to account for their popularity.

Was the demythologization of Roman sarcophagus reliefs driven by a burgeoning Christian faith? To put it more succinctly, was myth a casualty of Christianity? This long-standing theory proposes that sarcophagi featuring mythless imagery – seasons, shepherds, philosophers, and hunters – gained in popularity because such imagery was religiously neutral and thus capable of appealing to both traditional “pagan” and new Christian clientele alike, a flexibility that the old mythological sarcophagi did not have. Testing this hypothesis requires that we consider Christian numbers and purchasing power in the city of Rome in the third century, as well as the question of who, exactly, was carving early Christian sarcophagi.

Was demythologization a response to the Third-Century Crisis? With the empire reeling from the combined pressures of civil war, barbarian invasion, plague, and economic depression, perhaps Rome’s elite were drawn to bucolic, seasonal, and philosophical scenes for the allegorical tranquility they offered, as a form of refuge from the turmoil of real life? This chapter interrogates this thesis, with far-reaching implications for how we understand similar arguments launched about other periods in world art.

The Introduction first sets the stage by inviting the reader to consider a few Roman sarcophagi in depth. Serving as an introduction to these compelling objects, this also reveals just how odd it was that deities and mythic heroes came to be expelled from their surface decoration in the third century. It then contextualizes that oddity through an overview of main developments within Roman sarcophagus production from the second through the fourth centuries. The book’s scope and terms are then addressed, and its structure laid out.

This chapter addresses the question of whether we have drawn too strong a distinction between the mythic and the non-mythic. What happens if we consider not iconographic criteria, but modal ones? Taken from the viewpoint of function rather than subject matter, the distinction between mythic and mythless imagery becomes shaky indeed. This chapter first revisits the relationship between the mythological and the so-called biographical sarcophagi, then shows how close attention to Roman sculptural technique – what we might call “material iconography” – provides traction for understanding how Roman viewers imagined the relationship between these genres.