Images of the gods were omnipresent in the Roman world. Cult images served many functions, but some were the focal point of ritual activity in temples and are termed ‘idols’ in this book. After exploring both the ancient and modern terminology of cult images, this chapter turns to evidence for belief in the divinity of idols. Many ancient writers, including Arnobius of Sicca, give a sense that many Romans perceived idols to be divine, or at least endowed with agency. It is suggested that this aspect of Roman religion can be understood through cross-cultural comparisons and anthropological theories of agency in religious art. To help us build a complete picture of the place of Roman cult images in Roman religion, and to avoid the problem of the so-called museum effect, the book adopts a biographical approach, exploring the births, lives, and death of cult images. It focuses on cult images and temples in the western Roman Empire, including Rome, Gaul, and Germany, from the Roman Republican period, or the pre-Roman Celtic and Germanic Iron Age, to late antiquity and the early medieval period.

The realization that cult images existed in the Iron Age has profound implications for our understanding of Romano-Celtic art. These earlier images likely served as the basis for later provincial representations of native divinities, which are not, as often proposed, later imperial period inventions. This chapter opens with an exploration of the continued use of Iron Age idols in the Roman period. Wooden images probably served as the main vehicle of transmission of iconography from the Iron Age and first century AD to the more abundant Roman stone representations of native divinities of the second and third centuries AD. The chapter considers monuments that contain purely native or combined native and Roman iconography, including depictions of Cernunnos, the mother goddesses, and Jupiter columns, before turning to the varied style and distribution of images of the gods with conventional Roman iconography. A final section examines how Mithraic cult images differed in form from earlier more static representations of the gods. We should envisage cult images as being continuously born throughout the Iron Age and Roman imperial period, existing side-by-side and in competition with older and newer images, with iconography following current and local trends and demands.

Through the assembling and reassembling channeled by storage in nested, heterogeneous containers, Chapter 5 pieces together a fragmented knowledge landscape within the atrium houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum. As storage disentangled objects from their previous functions and associations, it created maneuver space for often disempowered groups to subtly leave their mark on the dynamics of the house.

Chapter 3 juxtaposes practices of grain and wine storage before and after Roman conquest in the northwest Mediterranean. It finds resonances between the open-ended future enacted by Iron Age grain storage in silos and Roman-period wine storage in dolia, and contrasts this with the controlled future facilitated by the Italian practice of above-ground grain storage, as implemented in the new urban colonial network.

Chapter 1 critiques the notion of “surplus” as abstract, ahistorical, and immaterial. After reviewing archaeological scholarship on storage and redistribution, which has focused either on the micro scale of the farmer or on the macro scale of state, it proposes a new framework for the study of storage, focused on material and temporal transformations.

A study of warehouse plans at Ostia and Portus in Chapter 5 finds a spectrum of storage, with Ostia catering for products of various kinds and qualities, and Portus geared towards the turnover of bulk commodities. This chapter replaces a much-rehearsed opposition between private and public agencies in the supply of the city of Rome with a model of different temporal registers: a shorter-term one of rapid gain and profit with minimal risk, and a longer-term one that could amount either to speculation or to patronage.

Chapter 2 analyzes how shared architectural strategies of disconnection, monumentalization, and diversification of villa storage facilities in Late Republican and Early Imperial Central Italy nevertheless created distinct socio-economic opportunities based on the products stored – grain, water, and wine – and the rhythm of their material transformation. Such differences allowed farmers to position themselves in relation to a shared normative template of the “good farmer.”

Chapter 6’s focus on reproduction returns to the schism between farmer (micro) and state (macro) that has plagued the archaeology of storage. The Roman empire, it argues, did not scale up as a pyramidal model, in which each level controls the previous one through simplification; instead, Roman storage was cast as family business regardless of scale, and articulated a kaleidoscope, in which certain shared concerns and models formed fickle joins between different worlds and their actors, without ever truly merging or subsuming them.

The Epilogue discusses three interventions that exceed the thematic and historical bounds of this book: respectively materializing Roman socio-economics, softening the empiricism of the material turn, and rethinking Rome’s position in histories of empire.