This special issue of Art History explores both the objects of classical art and the cultural complexities of responding to them in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The concept of the ’embodied object’ is used to describe artefacts which interact with, extend, substitute or incorporate human bodies. Eight specially commissioned essays explore a range of different Greek and Roman objects, in different media. At the same time, contributions bring recent work in cognitive archaeology, material culture studies and Actor-Network-Theory into conversation with phenomenological approaches to art history. Bringing together leading voices in the field, this special issue demonstrates how much a theoretically engaged and historically grounded classical art history has to offer to art historians and classicists alike.