The title of Peter Stewart’s Statues in Roman Society subtly delineates the major premise of his innovative study: that the modern notion of sculpture hinders our ability to understand the quotidian functions of statues within Roman society. As explained in his introduction, “classical art history has generally been concerned with Roman sculpture as a kind of art, not Roman statuary as a remarkable accumulation of objects working in society” (10). Using a variety of approaches, Stewart attempts to reintegrate Roman statues into their physical and social contexts, and at the same time, to provide a thought-provoking criticism of some of the conventional methodologies that have created this separation. Stewart’s book is difficult to classify, and he makes clear from the outset that it is not strictly a sociological investigation (12). But Statues in Roman Society is also not a work of art history in the conventional sense. Unlike other important studies dealing with the ancient reception of Roman art, such as Jaś Elsner’s Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) or John R. Clarke’s recent Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), Stewart devotes little space to the well-studied major monuments,...