The Medea Sarcophagus in Berlin’s Altes Museum is 227 centimeters long and 65 centimeters high, carved from white marble in Rome around 140–150 AD, found near the Porta San Lorenzo on the city’s eastern edge. It is one of the finest examples of Roman mythological sarcophagus relief in any collection, and it depicts, in four continuous scenes reading left to right, the story of a woman who poisoned her rival, murdered her own children, and escaped in a dragon-drawn chariot to avoid the consequences. This is what a wealthy Roman family chose to carve on the box that would hold someone’s bones. The choice is not self-evidently logical. Making sense of it requires understanding something about how Rome thought about death that is not immediately obvious from the surface of the stone.

In a case in the Altes Museum in Berlin, ten painted wooden panels are arranged across two shelves: five on the upper row, five below. They show men, women, and children. The youngest is perhaps eight or nine years old. The oldest appears to be in his fifties, though age is difficult to assess with confidence from encaustic wax portraits of the first through third centuries AD. What is not difficult to assess is the gaze. Every one of these faces looks directly out of the panel, directly at whoever is standing in front of the case, with the same frontal directness. They were painted to look at you. Eighteen centuries later they still do, and the effect has not diminished.

The Romans buried their dead outside the city. This was law and custom simultaneously — the Twelve Tables prohibited burial within the city limits, and the prohibition was observed with sufficient consistency that the great roads leading out of Rome were lined with tombs for kilometers. The Via Appia’s funerary landscape, stretching from the Porta Capena south through the Alban hills, was among the most concentrated assemblages of monuments to the dead in the ancient world, ranging from the elaborate mausolea of senatorial families to the simple markers of freed slaves and soldiers. Death organized itself along the roads the living traveled, which meant that Romans moved through the presence of their dead every time they left the city.