The Material Lives of Roman Slaves is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the archaeology of Roman slavery. Rather than regarding slaves as irretrievable in archaeological remains, the book takes the archaeological record as a key form of evidence for reconstructing slaves' lives and experiences. Interweaving literature, law, and material evidence, the book searches for ways to see slaves in the various contexts - to make them visible where evidence tells us they were in fact present. Part of this project involves understanding how slaves seem irretrievable in the archaeological record and how they are often actively, if unwittingly, left out of guidebooks and scholarly literature. Individual chapters explore the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility and between appearance and disappearance in four physical and social locations - urban houses, city streets and neighborhoods, workshops, and villas.

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This essay takes up the theme of eclecticism in Roman domestic decoration by exploring the wide range of representations of gods in Roman houses. Specifically, it examines painted and sculpted images of deities in the House of the Gilded Cupids at Pompeii to shift attention from issues of style and the attendant debates on copies, both of which have largely dominated discussions of painted and sculpted displays in domus . This paper, instead, situates the seemingly haphazard collection of gods within the contexts of Roman religion and collecting practices more generally and aims to demonstrate that despite their presumed “kitschy” or idiosyncratic quality, these displays were perhaps a bit more canonical than we have allowed them to be.

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