Stone Sarcophagi of the Roman Empire

About the Book

Over fourteen expeditions I drove a hundred thousand miles across four continents searching out churches, cathedrals, baptistries, catacombs, archeological sites, art galleries, antiquities museums, necropoleis, classical gardens, castles, fortresses, palaces, and private homes--any place that had a Roman Empire era stone sarcophagus. Beside the work of locating and cataloguing sarcophagi, the project I set for myself twenty years ago, I composed explanatory material to say how I did my work, noted what was to be found sculpted on sarcophagi, and developed a schema for organizing the various visual characteristics found on sarcophagi. On the model of outsider art, my work is outsider scholarship—yet here is documentation of 1,932 presently existing Roman Empire sarcophagi.

About the Author

Prof. Barry Ferst, Ph.D. is a philosophy professor at Carroll College, a liberal arts Catholic college in Helena, Montana. Over the past thirty-eight years he has developed philosophy courses which use readings, digital images, artifact copies, and other pedagogical devices to present to students philosophical ideas in the intellectual and historical context in which they originated. He has directed numerous humanities symposia that focus on contemporary issues and has brought to campus and the civic community scholars of national reputation. His research specialization focuses on the impact Greco-Roman philosophical speculation had on the three Abrahamic faiths.