Rabun Taylor, although he does not claim as much, provides us with a sort of cultural poetics of mirrors and reflection in the Roman world. In other words, he does not offer us another typology or iconography of ancient mirrors (we have those already); nor does he dwell long on ancient thinking about the optics of reflection. Instead, he investigates the place of mirrors and reflection in the Roman imagination—especially their metaphorical use as agents of transformation. The subject requires him to be conversant with both textual sources and artistic depictions of the theme, and Taylor moves back and forth between the two with fluidity.

Taylor states right at the outset that there is “no such thing as a casual reflection” (1) in Roman art or literature, and to judge from his case studies, this is true. Still, some of his examples are more intriguing than others. Instances of women and goddesses consulting their mirrors are often fairly straightforward to interpret. As Taylor notes, aristocratic women were responsible for developing and maintaining their grooming or cultus, which meant that they were expected to check the mirror. Women were, of course, supposed to attend to other skills that were consonant with cultus: the ideal woman should not only be beautiful and carefully arranged but a witty conversationalist as well. But when faced with a choice, women who had some aspirations to being ladies were expected to cultivate their physical appearance above all. Taylor points out that even the (in some ways) masculine warrior-goddess, Minerva—in a moment that is captured by many works of art—throws away her double pipes after she catches sight of her own reflection and sees how she looks when she is playing them.

Nevertheless, Taylor’s scholarship makes it clear that the relationship of Roman men to their own reflections was considerably more interesting than that of Roman women. This is because it was both a necessary relationship and one fraught with danger. As we might expect, men were not supposed to study themselves too attentively or too long in the mirror lest they risk slipping into moral depravity. We therefore have few artistic depictions of men checking the mirror to see if their hair is in place; and rehearsal in front of the mirror was a particular taboo. (“Demosthenes owned a full-length mirror in which he practiced his rhetorical gestures; not surprisingly, his arch-rival Aeschines denounced him as a debauched girly-man” (23).) Taylor notes that an intriguing exception to this rule appears to have been made for actors, whose humble origins and lack of political ambition made it safer for them to examine their reflections, and who apparently used mirrors not so much to study themselves but as an aid in the fashioning of their characters.

But the Romans were, perhaps even more than most civilizations, obsessed with proper self-presentation. Status was constantly assessed and re-assessed through various widely accepted visual codes. What you wore, where you spent your time, what gestures you employed, where you sat at the theater or reclined at a dinner party, and what you looked like all broadcast to the world who you were and how others should react to you. In other words, although Roman men, at least those of a certain class, were not supposed to examine their physical appearance in the mirror too closely, they were nevertheless constantly being watched and evaluated on the basis of that appearance.

Under such circumstances, there flourished a separate strain of thought about mirrors, a philosophical strain that allowed reflections to serve even men—at least those of wisdom and judgment—as sources of self-knowledge and, therefore, as agents of self-correction. A quick peek in the mirror might remind a man of his age or station and prompt him to behave in a manner appropriate to both. One of the legends that best exemplifies this principle is that of Achilles on Skyros. In this well-known story, Thetis disguises her son as a woman and hides him among the court ladies on the island of Skyros so that he will not have to fight (and, of course, die) in the Trojan War, but he reveals who he really is by his ineluctable attraction to the weaponry that Ulysses brings to court. In Statius, when Achilles catches a glimpse of himself in a shield, he shudders and blushes simultaneously at what he sees (horruit erubuitque simul), and after that it takes only a little encouragement from Ulysses to convince him to join the Greeks and head off to Troy.

From the examples given, it is clear that instances like this one, of men catching their reflections on the fly and correcting themselves on the basis of what they see, tend to be preserved in textual sources, but not in the visual arts. I wonder if this is because there is no such thing as a fleeting moment in painting or sculpture—there are only moments frozen for eternity, and no man, certainly not Achilles, can afford to be captured examining his own reflection for all of eternity. So instead, in a couple of Pompeian depictions of the episode (one mosaic and one painting), Taylor points out that what we see on Achilles’ shield is not his reflection but instead a shield device depicting the hero as a youth, nude and therefore unmistakably male, being instructed at the cithara by the centaur, Chiron. In both depictions, Taylor observes that Ulysses’ spear points to the shield device as if to say that this is “the Achilles we all know and admire, the one we have come to reclaim” (150). These shield devices remind us of Taylor’s earlier observation that reflection in Roman culture often served as a metaphor for exemplarity: impeccable moral models were described, figuratively, as mirrors; and those who patterned themselves on such models were also characterized in this way.

Taylor also devotes effort to decoding and elucidating the role of mirrors in cult practice, particularly in Dionysian ritual, where they may have been used “as agents of fascination, entrapment and fragmentation” (98). In myth, the child Zagreus is mesmerized by a mirror, murdered, and reincarnated as Dionysus. Taylor suggests that the various mirrors and discs that appear in artistic depictions of Dionysian ritual may refer to this tale or indicate some ritual reenactment of it. Interestingly, in such ritual contexts, it is more common to find males peering into mirrors, since they are apparently not devices for self-inspection but tools for achieving ecstasy and experiencing epiphany.

In the course of his investigations, Taylor introduces some new terms, the most interesting of which, I think, is the “flexed gaze.” I admit to a certain innate ambivalence about most newly coined terminology, but the idea that Taylor presents here is a simple and powerful one: in the natural world and from most angles, no viewer would be able to see both the reflection and the “referent” (the thing being reflected) simultaneously. Works of art that open up the composition so that we can, at once, see both reflection and referent create a triangle that “has the effect of forcing the viewer into the subjectivity of the protagonist” (7–8). This is a remarkable observation, and one that carries a great deal of promise for further investigation. (In fact, to a certain extent, without quite articulating it the way Taylor does, Jas Elsner already recognized the effects that such a triangle can have on our interpretation of Roman depictions of Narcissus [Jan Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, esp. 167–176].) The concept of the “flexed gaze” suggests that there is much more to be gained from thinking deeply about the fact that scenes of reflection almost always create a triangle of protagonists that includes us, the viewers. Perhaps this is one reason why, as Taylor perceptively notes, we viewers almost always find the reflection even more interesting than what is being reflected.

Taylor’s topic proves to be a broad one. As he himself points out, reflections and mirrors can convey “femininity, beauty, eros, self-absorption, self-knowledge, divination, metanoia (change of heart) entrapment, liminality, spirit world, alterity, and death” (2). It would therefore be difficult, perhaps impossible, for a single thesis to govern all of the examples collected. Nevertheless, Taylor’s investigation recurs frequently to a few themes, especially those of transformation and gender, and the various resonances among his examples justify bringing all of them, divergent as they are, together in one fascinating volume.