ROGERS FUND, 1913 / METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Souvenirs are ubiquitous today. We collect them when we travel. We receive them as gifts when friends or family return home from their own vacations. Whether it is a magnet of the Colosseum, a figurine of the Statue of Liberty, or a keychain of the Eiffel Tower, many of us live surrounded by inexpensive, mass-produced objects that represent famous places.
We tend to think of souvenirs as a modern phenomenon, born of industrialization and globalization, but they have a long pedigree stretching back to the ancient Mediterranean. Visitors to Athens could buy miniature prize amphoras as keepsakes of the Panathenaic Games, and travelers to Ptolemaic Egypt could purchase little faience pots with the faces of the ruling queens. It was in the Roman Empire, however—with its bureaucratic unification, common languages of Latin and koine Greek, standardized currency, and relative ease of travel—that an ancient culture of souvenirs truly flourished. Far from being mere tchotchkes, these souvenirs are vital to understanding how Romans came to know their world and the empire that shaped it.1
What constituted a Roman souvenir? As today, the possibilities were nearly endless. An ancient Roman visiting the Great Pyramids in Egypt might have snagged a stone fragment to carry home as a memento just as somebody today might bring home a pebble from a beach vacation. These types of repurposed souvenirs, as well as perishable souvenirs such as food or drink, generally either do not survive or are indistinguishable in the archaeological record. An ancient tourist’s treasured piece of a pyramid looks like just another chunk of limestone to an archaeologist.
Fortunately, though, we can recognize commercially available objects that represented and commemorated cities and landmarks around the Roman Empire. Some of these ancient Roman souvenirs represented cities, as today one might buy a snow globe with the Manhattan skyline. Glassmakers in the port city of Puteoli along the Bay of Naples, for example, produced a series of glass flasks in the late third to early fourth centuries engraved with the cityscapes of Puteoli and the neighboring resort town of Baiae. The flasks show major monuments such as Puteoli’s amphitheater, theater, stadium, and temple, and Baiae’s luxury bathhouses and ostriaria, or artificial beds for cultivating oysters, a local delicacy. Yet the flasks do not offer photographic snapshots of these cities. Instead, their makers highlighted buildings patronized by Roman emperors, thereby connecting Puteoli and Baiae with imperial power and largesse and burnishing the cities’ reputations as top-tier tourist destinations. Purchased as souvenirs on the Bay of Naples, the flasks traveled widely around the western Mediterranean, as far away as Spain, North Africa, and Germany. For many, these souvenirs would have been the only way they “saw” the cities of Puteoli and Baiae. The flasks thus played a vital role in shaping the urban image of these cities as centers of imperial patronage and prestige.
Other Roman souvenirs commemorated visits to pilgrimage sites. According to the Book of Acts, Paul’s preaching in Ephesus caused an uproar among craftspeople who produced objects for sale to visitors to the Temple of Artemis (Acts 19:23–41). Particularly irate was a silversmith named Demetrius, who crafted miniature silver shrines of the Ephesian temple. Though none survive, these miniature temples might have been left as votives by some purchasers; other people surely took them home as souvenirs of their visit to the great Temple of Artemis.
Demetrius’s silver shrines reproduced a religious building dedicated to the cult of a goddess, but they commemorated a famous tourist attraction as well: The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. For some, the miniature temples were souvenirs of religious pilgrimage; for others, leisure travel. Even the souvenir flasks of Puteoli and Baiae belie any strict dichotomy between sacred and secular souvenirs in the Roman world. Many of those flasks were found in burials, and one example was excavated in northern Italy at a temple complex with other votive objects.
These inextricable links between religion, tourism, and leisure are visible not only in souvenirs of cities and pilgrimage sites, but also in souvenirs of cult statues, that is, statues that embodied gods and goddesses and received worship. Although many such statues were reproduced in miniature, several spawned veritable souvenir industries, including both the Artemis of Ephesus, which stood inside the goddess’s great temple, and the Tyche of Antioch, sculpted by the famous Hellenistic artist Eutychides and housed in an open-air shrine in Antioch in Roman Syria. These and other cult statues were replicated as figurines and vessels and on lamps and finger rings, among other items.
CORNING MUSEUM OF GLASS
Although these souvenirs could commemorate pilgrimages, they also commemorated touristic travel and acted as souvenirs of the cities that these cult statues personified. A glass perfume bottle in the shape of the Tyche of Antioch, for example, probably did not receive worship. Filled with the perfumes for which Antioch was famous, it did act as an effective souvenir of that cosmopolitan city. Souvenirs transformed statues of goddesses into landmarks that stood not simply for religious experience but also for places, as the Statue of Liberty has come to personify New York.
Ancient souvenirs also collapsed time and space. They brought cities and monuments to many different locations around the Roman Empire. Souvenirs rendered cities, temples, and cult statues affordable and accessible to people from a wide range of socio-economic groups, in a wide range of places. Somebody in Italy might have had to be wealthy to travel to Antioch and see Eutychides’s statue of the Tyche in person, but people of much lesser means could buy a miniature souvenir figurine of the statue.
It is easy to overlook inexpensive souvenirs in favor of the monuments they represent. But just as today we know many “original” Greek statues through later Roman copies, many people in the Roman Empire envisioned places such as Puteoli or Baiae, or cult statues such as the Artemis of Ephesus or Tyche of Antioch, through miniature souvenirs. Though small themselves, souvenirs’ effects on how people came to know the Roman Empire and its cultural heritage were mighty.
Souvenirs are ubiquitous today. We collect them when we travel. We receive them as gifts when friends or family return home from their own vacations. Whether it is a magnet of the Colosseum, a figurine of the Statue of Liberty, or a keychain of the Eiffel Tower, many of us live surrounded by inexpensive, mass-produced objects that represent famous places. We tend to think of souvenirs as a modern phenomenon, born of industrialization and globalization, but they have a long pedigree stretching back to the ancient Mediterranean. Visitors to Athens could buy miniature prize amphoras as keepsakes of the Panathenaic […]