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COLOUR AND MEANING IN ANCIENT ROME. By MARK BRADLEY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xiii, 267.
BRADLEY'S BOOK TARGETS "something of an intellectual black hole in classical perception studies" (x), addressing the difference between ancient and modem perceptions of colour amongst elite Romans of the early empire. He states that in doing this he is attempting to bridge the gap between several important studies of colour in ancient Greece, most notably the gap between E. Irwin's Colour Terms in Greek Poetry (Toronto 1974), M. Clarke's "The Semantics of Colour in the Early Greek Word Hoard" (in L. Cleland and K. Stears [eds.], Colour in the Ancient Mediterranean World [Oxford 2004] 131-139) and E. James's study Light and Co/our in Byzantine Art (New York 1995). He draws on a variety of sources and genres (philosophy, rhetoric, elegy, satire) and his approach is wide-ranging, including chapters on ancient perceptions of the colours in the rainbow, the treatment of colour and perception in philosophy, the use of colour as a tool of classification and evaluation of Roman material culture in Pliny; the development of the term color in rhetoric; the use of colour words to describe the body by the Roman elegists and an examination of one of the most significant colour terms in the ancient word, purpura. At first glance this array of subjects seems bewildering and the material of each chapter quite disparate. At some stages in various chapters I began to wonder where Bradley was going with certain points and whether and how he was going to draw all these threads together. His conclusion, however, does a reasonable job of reconciling the very different material and showing how various concepts relate to one another.
Bradley's wide-ranging approach to this subject helps uninitiated readers to orient themselves both within the cultural context of the ancient world and the more specific one of the early empire at Rome. His chapter on the treatment of colour and perception in philosophy is particularly helpful in this regard for it enables...