Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response (Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture & Representation)

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANCIENT CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION General Editors Simon Price R. R. R. Smith Oliver Taplin

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANCIENT CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation publishes significant interdisciplinary research into the visual, social, political, and religious cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. The series includes work which combines different kinds of representations which are usually treated separately. The overarching programme is to integrate images, monuments, texts, performances and rituals with the places, participants, and broader historical environment that gave them meaning.

Statues in Roman Society Representation and Response

PETER STEWART

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß P. C. N. Stewart 2003 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-924094-9 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wiltshire.

For my parents

acknowledgements This book is based upon my Ph.D. dissertation of the same title, which was prepared in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge between 1995 and 1998. Certain portions of the discussion have appeared in different forms as acknowledged in the notes and bibliography. Both in writing that thesis and in seeking to improve it for publication I have acquired many debts to friends and colleagues. I must first acknowledge the patient supervision of Nigel Spivey, whose advice I consistently and irritably ignored, only to find in time that it had sunk in and helped to direct my work. As a most perceptive teacher and a generous friend Jeremy Tanner provided constant encouragement and insightful comments on parts of the text. I have also learned much over the past few years from discussions with Mary Beard, Robert Coates-Stephens, Llewelyn Morgan, Felix Pirson, Lori-Ann Touchette, and Tim Whitmarsh, while Llewelyn Morgan and Tim Whitmarsh also provided expert advice on the more obscure of Latin and Greek texts. It goes without saying that many others have helped, perhaps without realizing it, and I should recognize the collective contribution of the classical graduate community at Cambridge, encounters in the British School at Rome, and former colleagues particularly in the departments of Classics and Archaeology at Reading University. More recently I have received valuable guidance from my Ph.D. examiners, John Patterson and Bert Smith, and from other sympathetic readers including Jas´ Elsner, Robin Osborne, Simon Price, and Oliver Taplin. I am grateful in addition to Joanne Berry, Amanda Claridge, Genevieve Liveley, Polly Low, and Ian Rutherford for comments and information on specific issues. As regards more practical challenges: in Rome Maria Pia Malvezzi opened doors; many of the problems of acquiring illustrations were banished through the energy and expertise of Sibylle Beck; and Jessica Hughes provided essential help by working on the Index. I am indebted to those institutions that waived or reduced reproduction fees for images and to the British Academy and the Research Committee of the Courtauld Institute of Art for defraying the costs that remained. I should also like to thank the staff of Oxford University Press, and particularly Hilary O’Shea for her great patience and assistance during the preparation of the book. Above all, however, my greatest personal debt is to my wife Anita and to my parents for every kind of help throughout. For four years my postgraduate work was funded by the British Academy and the very generous terms of a temporary lecturership in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge permitted its completion during 1997/8. Visits to Rome were made possible by additional support from the British Academy, the British School at

acknowledgements

vii

Rome, Clare College Cambridge, the Cambridge University Faculty of Classics, and the German Archaeological Institute. In acknowledging all of this assistance I am acutely aware that at several points the continuation of my academic work has depended not on my own efforts, but on the confidence and generosity of others. P.C.N.S.

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contents List of Illustrations

x

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

1. Defining Statues in Word and Image

19

2. The Appearance of Statues

46

3. Portrait Statues and the Statuesque

79

4. The Other Population of Rome

118

5. Statues in the Empire

157

6. Simulacra and Signa

184

7. The Private Sphere

223

8. Touching Statues

261

Conclusions

300

Bibliography

304

Index

327

list of illustrations 1. Marble relief from the Tomb of the Haterii, Rome. Crane next to a large tomb. Photo: Alinari 1875b. 2. Marble relief from the Tomb of the Haterii, Rome. Monuments in Rome. Photo: DAIR 81.2859 (Schwanke). 3. Marble statue of a Roman woman as Venus, from outside Porta S. Sebastiano, Rome. Photo: Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini. 4. Mural painting of a statue of Mars from the House of the Venus Marina, Pompeii. Photo: author. 5. Detail from illusionistic wall-painting in House of the Wedding of Alexander, Pompeii. Photo: Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei. 6. Marble statue of a man with family portraits (the ‘Barberini togatus’). Photo: DAIR 37.378 (Faraglia). 7. Marble statue of Claudius as Jupiter, Lanuvium. Photo: DAIR 33.136 (Bru¨gner). 8. Marble statue of a Roman woman as Venus, Lago Albano. Photo: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. 9. ‘Relief A’ of the Cancelleria reliefs. Domitian with head replaced by that of Nerva. Photo: Musei Vaticani, Archivio Fotografico, xxv.9.48. 10. Aniconic cippi and portrait busts on the tomb of the Flavii, Porta di Nocera necropolis, Pompeii. Photo: author. 11. Opus sectile panel with Dionysiac scene including image of Priapus, from the House of the Coloured Capitals, Pompeii. Photo: DAIR 64.1828 (Koppermann). 12. Female portrait statue of the ‘Pudicitia’ type. Photo: Musei Vaticani, Archivio Fotografico, xxxiv.18.59. 13. Funerary relief from the Via Statilia, Rome. Photo: DAIR 99.825. 14. Funerary relief with portrait of a naked man from the Via Appia, Rome. Photo: DAIR 63.1095 (Eisner). 15. Funerary altar of Tiberius Octavius Diadumenus. Photo: Musei Vaticani, Archivio Fotografico, xx.26.52. 16. Funerary Altar of Anicetus. Image of Jupiter. Photo: DAIR 72.474. 17. Funerary Altar of Anicetus. Image of Flavius Hermes. Photo: DAIR 72.3158. 18. Funerary stela of Pettia Ge and C. Clodius. Photo: DAIR 68.1447 (Singer). 19. Funerary altar from Rome: dextrarum iunctio. Photo: DAIR 39.814 (Faraglia). 20. Circus relief from Ostia. Photo: DAIR 39.557 (Faraglia).

3 4

5 39 41 48 50 52 55 71

77 94 95 96 98 100 101 105 106 107

list of illustrations 21. Palladion from the sculptural groups at Sperlonga. Photo: Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici del Lazio. 22. Relief representing adlocutio of Hadrian, from Arco di Portogallo, Rome. Photo: DAIR 54.41 (Sansaini). 23. Part of marble frieze from north side of the Arch of Constantine, Rome. Constantine on the Rostra. Photo: Alinari 17326. 24. Part of marble frieze from north side of the Arch of Constantine, Rome. Constantine’s largitio. Photo: Alinari 17325. 25. Antonine relief panels from south side of the Arch of Constantine, Rome. Photo: DAIR 60.2581 (Koppermann). 26. Adlocutio scene from the ‘Anaglypha Traiani’, Rome. Photo: DAIR 68.2783 (Felbermeyer). 27. Statue of Marcus Holconius Rufus, Pompeii (in situ during 1930s). Photo: after H. Eschebach, Pompeji: erlebte antike Welt fig. 100, courtesy of L. Eschebach. 28. Part of a painted frieze depicting equestrian statues by a colonnade, from the Praedia of Julia Felix, Pompeii. Photo: DAIR 75.1530 (Rossa). 29. Statue of Plancia Magna from Perge. Photo: courtesy of Prof. H. Abbasogˇlu. 30. Statue of Eumachia from Pompeii. Photo: DAIR 89.113 (Anger). 31. Bronze lamp surmounted by figure of Jupiter. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 32. Bronze lamp surmounted by figure of Cybele. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 33. Terracotta lamp from Roman Egypt with image of a temple-fac¸ade. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 34. Terracotta lamp with image of the Capitoline Triad. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 35. Terracotta lamp with image of Isis, Harpocrates, and Anubis. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 36. Terracotta lamp with image of Demeter, Serapis, and Isis in bust-form behind an altar. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 37. Aureus of Octavian. Reverse with image of the Temple of Divus Iulius. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 38. Sestertius of Tiberius. Reverse with image of the Temple of Concordia. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 39. Sestertius of Antoninus Pius. Reverse with image of the Temple of Faustina. Photo: copyright The British Museum. 40. Sestertius of Trajan. Reverse with image of the Temple of Jupiter(?). Photo: copyright The British Museum. 41. Sestertius of Severus Alexander. Reverse with image of the Temple of Jupiter Ultor. Photo: Soprintendenza per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico e Demoetnoantropoligico di Modena e Reggio Emilia. 42. West wall of the cubiculum from the villa at Boscoreale. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. All Rights Reserved.

xi 111 114 115 115 116 117

137 150 164 165 199 200 201 202 203 204 209 210 211 213

214 217

xii

list of illustrations

43. Marble statuette of Venus with Priapus, from the House of the Venus in Bikini, Pompeii. Photo: DAIR 59.816 (Koppermann). 44. Bronze figurine of Venus, ‘Sandal-binder’ type. Photo: DAIR 59.1944 (Koppermann). 45. Marble statue of the ‘Sauroctonos’ in the Louvre, Paris. Photo: copyright RMN—H. Lewandowski. 46. Head of bronze equestrian statue of Domitian/Nerva from Baiae. Photo: Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici delle Province di Napoli e Caserta. 47. Painted tondo from Roman Egypt depicting Septimius Severus and his family. Photo: DAIR 69.159. 48. Painting of a Christian destroying a cult statue, from the hypogeum of the Via Paisiello, Rome. Photo: after C. Carletti, RAC 47 (1971).

242 244 245

281 282

293

list of abbreviations AA AArch AE AJA AM

ANRW ASAtene BAC Bailey, BM Lamps

BCAR BICS BJ BMCRE

BNP

CArchJ Charisterion Orlandos CIL CP CPh DAIR D’Ambra, Context

Donohue, Xoana

Archa¨ologischer Anzeiger Acta Archaeologica L’Anne´e ´epigraphique American Journal of Archaeology Athenische Mitteilungen (Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archa¨ologischen Instituts. Athenische Abteilung) Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972– ) Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana Bailey, D. M., A Catalogue of the Lamps in the British Museum, 4 vols. (London: British Museum Press, 1980–96) Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Bonner Jahrbu¨cher Mattingly, H. (and Carson, R. A. G.), Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, 6 vols. (London: British Museum, 1923–62) Beard, M., North, J., and Price, S., Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Cambridge Archaeological Journal XAPISTHPION EIS ANASTASION K. OPLANDON, 4 vols. (Athens, 1965–8). Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1863– ) Carmina Priapea Classical Philology Deutsches Archa¨ologisches Institut (Rom) D’Ambra, E. (ed.), Roman Art in Context: An Anthology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993) Donohue, A. A., Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1988)

xiv list of abbreviations EAA

G&R HSCPh IG IGR ILS JAC JDAI JHS ¨ AI JO JRA JRS Lahusen, Ehrenstatue

LIMC LSJ

LTUR MAAR MAMA

Moormann, Pittura

Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung

NH NSc OCD

Enciclopedia dell’arte antica, classica e orientale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1958– ) Greece and Rome Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Inscriptiones Graecae (Berlin: Reiner/De Gruyter, 1873– ) Inscriptiones Graecae ad Res Romanas Pertinentes, 4 vols. (Paris: Leroux, 1906–27) Dessau, H. (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892–1916) Jahrbuch fu¨r Antike und Christentum Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archa¨ologischen Instituts Journal of Hellenic Studies ¨ sterreichischen Archa¨ologischen Jahreshefte des O Instituts Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Roman Studies Lahusen, G., Untersuchungen zur Ehrenstatue in Rom: Literarische und Epigraphische Zeugnisse (Rome: Bretschneider, 1983) Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Zurich: Artemis, 1981–1999) Liddell, H. G., and Scott, R., A Greek-English Lexicon, new (9th) edn., revised by H. Stuart Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940) Steinby, E. M. (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae (Rome: Qasar, 1993–2000) Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome Calder, W. M., et al. (eds.), Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, 8 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1928–62) Moormann, E. M., La pittura parietale romana come fonte di conoscenza per la scultura antica (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1988) Neudecker, R., Die Skulpturenausstattung ro¨mischer Villen in Italien (Mainz am Rhein: Philip von Zabern, 1988) Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Naturalis Historia Notizie degli scavi S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

list of abbreviations OED OLD PBSR PCPhS Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis

Platner–Ashby

PPM Price, Rituals

RAC RE

Reallexicon REG Rendiconti Napoli RIB

RM Sehlmeyer, Ehrenstatuen

SHA Steiner, Images

TAM TAPhA Zanker, Augustus

xv

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) Papers of the British School at Rome Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Das ro¨mische Kaiserbildnis in Staat, Kult und Gesellschaft, dargestellt anhand der Schriftquellen, (Berlin: Mann, 1985) Platner, S. B., and Ashby, T., A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929) Pompei: pitture e mosaici (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990–1999) Price, S. R. F., Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana Wissowa, G. et al. (eds.), Paulys Real-Encyclopa¨die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1893–1978) Lu¨bcker, F., Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914). Revue des ´etudes grecques Rendiconti della Accademia di Archaeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti di Napoli Collingwood, R. G. and Wright, R. P. (eds.), The Roman Inscriptions of Britain vol. 1, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Ro¨mische Mitteilungen (Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archa¨ologischen Instituts. Ro¨mische Abteilung) Sehlmeyer, M., Stadtro¨mische Ehrenstatuen der republikanischen Zeit: Historizita¨t und Kontext von Symbolen nobilita¨ren Standesbewusstseins (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999) Scriptores Historiae Augustae Steiner, D. T., Images in the Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) Tituli Asiae Minoris (Vienna: Hoelder, 1901– ). Transactions of the American Philological Association Zanker, P., The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988)

xvi list of abbreviations Zimmer, Locus

ZPE

Zimmer, G., Locus Datus Decreto Decurionum: Zur Statuenaufstellung zweier Forumsanlagen im ro¨mischen Africa (Munich: Beck, 1989) Zeitschrift fu¨r Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Introduction

At the Wfth mile from Rome the elevated course of the Via Appia widens into a small plateau and unusual place-names start to appear on the map. There is the modern suburb of Statuario; Lanciani mentions a farm of the same name.1 The Fosso dello Statuario marks the eastern extent of this area, while some plans mark ‘Riva Statuario’ just to the north. Older records refer to ‘sex columnas’ and above all, ‘Roma Vecchia’.2 These epithets testify to eighteenth-century excavations, and to the extraordinary wealth of sculpture that they uncovered. In the middle of the second century the brothers Quintilius Condianus and Quintilius Maximus chose this place as the site of their palatial villa which rivalled Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and was perhaps intended to imitate it.3 The exceptional haul of sculpture from the site—Neudecker traces sixty-three pieces to this provenance4—includes statues, herms, busts, and reliefs; some of them, including a variation of the famous Cnidian Venus,5 were early Imperial antiques by the time the Quintilii displayed them. They represent gods and humans, and Wgures from Greek myth. We must imagine this villa bristling with art-works. The Quintilii were famously wealthy and the luxury in which they lived may well have contributed to their execution in ad 182—a Wne illustration of the political signiWcance even of private property.6 But we know enough of smaller, anonymous properties to realize that they too were crowded with sculpture.7

1

R. Lanciani, Notes From Rome, ed. A. L. Cubberley (London 1988) 83. Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 191; cf. C. C. Vermeule, Greek Sculpture and Roman Taste: The Purpose and Setting of Graeco-Roman Art in Italy and the Greek Imperial East (Ann Arbor 1977) 66–7 on these sites. 3 T. Ashby, ‘The Classical Topography of the Roman Campagna, Part III, Section I’, PBSR 4 (1907) 1–159, at 90–5; F. Coarelli, Dintorni di Roma, Guida Laterza (Rome and Bari 1981) 55–8; A. Ricci, ‘La Villa dei Quintili’, BCAR 91 (1986) 607–15 on recent survey of the remains (614 on relation to Tivoli); on the sculpture, most comprehensively, Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 191–7, no. 39. 4 The majority are in Roman collections; Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 192–5. 5 Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 193, no. 39.18. 6 Dio 73.5.3–4; SHA, Commodus 4.9; Dio 73.13.4 (Commodus perhaps staying in the conWscated villa: see also Herodian 1.12.5). Herodian 1.8.8 on Commodus’ seizure of senatorial property. 7 By extrapolating from Neudecker’s other lists, for example, or from more intact houses and villas from Vesuvian sites and the sheer number of sculptures surviving from intensively excavated areas; or by reading Cicero’s concerns about ‘decoration’ (see M. Marvin, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica 2

2

introduction

Next to and beyond this site there were further residences, lining each major road and Wlling the areas between them in a halo around the city.8 The Villa of the Quintilii boasted a nymphaeum, thrust out onto the edge of the road, with tiered niches for statues.9 Otherwise, an Imperial traveller to Rome would have seen little or nothing of its luxuries. Yet the road from this point entered a world of sculpture, in every part of which statues assailed the viewer. The road itself, for a start, was lined with funerary monuments.10 Many—the more substantial—were adorned with portrait statues of the deceased.11 Reliefs from the Tomb of the Haterii seem to represent the tomb itself and conceivably other buildings along this route to the heart of Rome (Figs. 1 and 2): the spaces are crammed with sculpture—at least two full-scale statues, at least seven busts and many statuesque reliefs in the mausoleum scene alone. The smaller tombs could also have their statues, or high reliefs resembling statues, and in various periods reliefs on walls, altars, urns and sarcophagi alluded to the public portrait statues of the city and the sanctuary.12 Such distinctions between diVerent spheres of statuary display were often blurred. Second-century travellers might not have seen the classical ideal-sculpture of the villa complexes, but the bodies of Venus and other divinities might appear as props for funerary portraits by the roadside. Among the best of these ‘private deiWcations’ that survives is a Venus-statue found by the Via Appia, outside the Porta S. Sebastiano (Fig. 3).13 That spot (still well outside the city-walls until the 270s ad), marked the start of more concentrated, urban display of statues, for the Wrst major temples appeared: the sanctuaries of Mars, of the Camenae, the Tempestates, Honos and Virtus. Images on coins, whatever their distortions, give some impression of the fac¸ades and remind us of the place of sculpture on such buildings: the Series’, in E. D’Ambra (ed.), Roman Art in Context: An Anthology (Englewood CliVs, NJ 1993) 161–88), or by reading between the lines in the (imaginative and tendentious) works Statius (Silvae 1.3; 2.2), Pliny (Epistulae 8.18.11), or others. 8

See N. Purcell, ‘Town in Country and Country in Town’, in E. B. MacDougall (ed.), Ancient Roman Villa Gardens (Washington 1987) 185–203, at 189 and esp. n. 8 (with bibliography). 9 See W. Letzner, Ro¨mische Brunnen und Nymphaea in der westlichen Reichsha¨lfte (Mu¨nster 1990) 145, 196, 402–3; and generally on statuary in nymphaea, 258–62. 10 For which see M. Koortbojian, ‘In Commemorationem Mortuorum: Text and Image along the ‘‘Streets of Tombs’’ ’, in J. Elsner (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge 1996) 210–33. 11 P. Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs ro¨mischer Freigelassener’, JDAI 90 (1975) 267–315, at 279–80; J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (London 1971) 277. 12 See Ch. 3. 13 On these ‘deiWcations’ in general see H. Wrede, Consecratio in formam deorum: vergo¨ttlichte Privatpersonen in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein 1981); on the Porta San Sebastiano Venus see K. Fittschen and P. Zanker, Katalog der ro¨mischen Portra¨ts in den Capitolinischen Museen und den anderen kommunalen Sammlungen der Stadt Rom, iii. (Mainz am Rhein 1983) 52–3, no. 68, pl. 85; Wrede, (this note) 309, no. 294.

introduction

3

Fig. 1. Statues have a prominent role in the various depictions of buildings from the Tomb of the Haterii. (Marble relief from the Tomb of the Haterii on the Via Labicana, Rome. Crane next to a large tomb. Late Wrst/early second century ad. Vatican Museums, Lateran Coll. 9998. H: 1.04 m.)

acroteria on the roofs, sculptures on the pediments, statues Xanking the steps by which one approached; and then the dedications and the cult statue itself within. The Caelian sanctuary of Honos and Virtus was a special case, in fact. Restored by Marcellus in the late third century bc,14 it contained his infamous artistic spoils from Syracuse that would later symbolize the Hellenization of Roman culture. (These ornamenta were something of a tourist attraction, though most 14

Livy 27.25.7; dedicated by his son: Livy 29.11.13.

4 introduction

Fig. 2. Marble relief from the Tomb of the Haterii on the Via Labicana, Rome. (Monuments in Rome. Late Wrst/early second century ad. Vatican Museums, Lateran Coll. 9997. W: 1.58 m.)

had disappeared by the start of the Principate.15) Marcellus’ grandson also boastfully erected statues in this area for his grandfather, his father, and himself.16 Soon the road passed the Porta Capena and the scale of monuments was transformed. Once more the numismatic evidence helps us to imagine how the Imperial ediWces wore their sculptures. The potential was great. At the start of the third century, that massive repository of statuary, the Baths of Caracalla, was yet to be built. But a little further on, the Septizonium of Severus presented a new fac¸ade for the Palatine hill; we do not know what sorts of images may have adorned its niches, but the central alcove contained the statue of the emperor. Turning now to the north-east, the road reached the Colosseum, with a statue in each of the arches of the upper storeys.17 Next to it stood Nero’s Colossus itself, for several centuries the most imposing statue in the city.18 The route from here to the Capitol passed a sequence of enormous fac¸ades of temples and public buildings; all would have been furnished with statues, inside and out. The Via Sacra passed the sanctuary of Vesta, which may have been famous for not containing a cult statue, though at the same time it was considered to hold the most important statue of all: the Palladium brought from Troy by Aeneas.19 And then the road emerged in the Forum Romanum. Once again, the buildings that framed it—the temples and basilicas—were adorned with statues, but the open

15

Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.121. Livy 25.40.3; 26.32.4. Asconius, In Pisonem 12 (44) (commentary on Cicero’s speech). 17 See the Haterii relief (discussed in Ch. 3) and numismatic representations (P. V. Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types (London 1989) 40, Wgs. 60 and 60a). 18 M. Bergmann, Der Koloss Neros, Die Domus Aurea und der Mentalita¨tswandel im Rom der fru¨hen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein 1993). 19 Ovid, Fasti 6.295–8; Tristia 3.1.29; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.66. 16

introduction

5

Fig. 3. The bodies of divinities were employed as ‘props’ for funerary portraits outside Rome. (Marble statue of a Roman woman as Venus. From outside Porta S. Sebastiano, Rome. c. ad 100–120. Museo Capitolino, Rome, 245. H: 1.83 m.)

space was itself the oldest site for political sculpture.20 The Rostra rebuilt by Augustus was a magnet for statues, though they were erected only with senatorial consent.21 Prestigious equestrian statues in particular were associated at various times with this position of special honour, and the representation of the Rostra on the Arch of Constantine includes seated statues of Hadrian and 20 21

See Ch. 3 and 4, and on epigraphic remains E. de Ruggiero, Il foro romano (Rome and Arpino 1913). On the Rostra as a privileged location see Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 14–18.

6 introduction Marcus Aurelius, which may have been placed there (if real) a century and a half before (Fig. 23).22 The Anaglypha Traiani depict more peculiar statues in this area: an elaborate group of Trajan confronted by Italia, and the old statue of Marsyas the satyr, a symbol of political freedom—libertas—copies of which stood in other Italian cities (Fig. 26).23 From there one could ascend to the Capitol by the Gemonian steps where the bodies and the statues of traitors were mutilated and exposed. The two peaks of the hill were crowded with temples, and in the Area Capitolina next to the ancient Temple of Jupiter there were so many statues of kings, aristocrats and gods that Augustus could remove some of the private dedications to the Campus Martius.24 We could make further imaginative journeys through the Roman world of statues. For beyond this cross-section of the city and its suburbs there were the other areas of public display, all adorned with diVerent kinds of statue: there were the imperial fora, the temples and sanctuaries, the arches, basilicas, and porticoes; there were bath complexes, theatres, imperial mausolea, and stadia. Then there were the smaller public spaces of the city: the fountains and crossroads and shrines. And within the courtyards and gardens of the larger houses there were statues and private portraits, and images of the emperor; there were images of lares in the household shrines, and other decorative statuettes. And then there were the ritual processions of statues and eYgies by which they were exposed throughout the city, and there were the countless representations of statues in other media which both revealed and ampliWed their impact on the inhabitants of Rome. But in the end, what does any of this tell us? We can see, certainly, that objects identiWable to us as statues were much more numerous in the Roman world than they are in the modern West: that they were of greater concern to those who built in Rome and engaged in Roman cult or public life. We can see that this enormous population of statues comprised a huge variety of forms serving a multitude of functions, and that even the most speciWc sculptural forms were versatile, simultaneously deployed, like the Venus-statues, for quite diVerent tasks. This is a good start. Classical art historians sometimes tell how the ancient populations inhabited ‘cities of images’25 and, despite the phrase’s

22

Compare the statuary representation—a possible predecessor to Hadrian and Marcus?—identiWed by Torelli and Kuttner on the Anaglypha Traiani: M. Torelli, Typology and Structure of Roman Historical Reliefs (Ann Arbor 1982) 98; A. Kuttner, Dynasty and Empire in the Age of Augustus (Berkeley 1995) 45. 23 See Ch. 3 and Torelli, Typology and Structure, 89–118. On the Marsyas and libertas see P. B. Rawson, The Myth of Marsyas in the Roman Visual Art: An Iconographic Study (Oxford 1987) 224–5 and Torelli, Typology and Structure, esp. 105–6. 24 See Chs. 8 and 4 respectively. 25 e.g. C. Be´rard et al., A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Deborah Lyons (Princeton 1989): in the title and e.g. p. 7; M. Beard, ‘Adopting an Approach II’, in N. Spivey and

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doubtful implication of a contrast with the modern world, it may be useful to remember the scale of artistic production in a pre-mechanical age. But ultimately, that exercise tells us little more about the place of statues in Roman society than do the regionary catalogues from late antiquity or the other medieval expressions of admiration at the mirabilia Romae—the wonders of Rome. Nor does it tell us much about what this collection of statues meant, or what certain groups and individuals thought it meant, or wanted it to mean. For us, even to talk about ‘statues’ as a category is to make assumptions about Roman attitudes to art; the assumptions are fair, as we shall see, but they require justiWcation. This book examines characteristics of the Romans’ engagement with statuary. It is not mainly concerned with particular statues, long ago dislodged from their various ancient contexts, nor with the modern categories of ‘sculpture’, ‘portraiture’, ‘Wne art’ and ‘cult’, with which we have tended to organize archaeologically rootless survivals of ancient art. It is concerned rather with all the statues, viewed together according to Roman categories. It takes as its focus the apparently limitless subject of Roman statues—as a collectivity—rather than the generic ‘sculpture’. That particular perspective brings its own limitations, but it also exposes important aspects of Roman culture and society which have usually been overlooked in the past. The Roman culture of statues has been ignored because ‘statuary’, as such, has generally not been studied in recent times. The reasons for that neglect lie partly in the changing aesthetic attitudes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they demand some comment at the outset. Naturally, modern assumptions establish the parameters within which ancient statues have been viewed.

the death of the statue Baudelaire’s pamphlet-review of the 1846 Paris Salon contains one section provocatively entitled, ‘Why Sculpture is Tedious’.26 It is, primarily, an assault on the bland and hackneyed creations in the exhibition, but the author comments more generally on the condition of sculpture—an art that is at best complementary (to architecture), at worst both isolated and trivial.

T. Rasmussen (eds.), Looking at Greek Vases (Cambridge 1991) 12–35, at 14–15. Both these on classical Greece; cf. J. Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford 1998) 11–14 on the Roman world as a visual culture. 26

‘Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse’. Eng. trans. in J. Mayne (ed.), Art in Paris, 1845–62: Salons and Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire (London 1965) 111–13.

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James Hall has placed his distaste in the context of a long tradition of relative disdain for sculpture.27 Yet Baudelaire’s indictment comes at the beginning of a new period of discontentment with sculpture on the part of those who made the art their special concern, and the terms of their complaints are especially relevant here. The following century saw the evolution and establishment of new, broadly speaking ‘modernist’ approaches. During this transition statuary, having proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, eventually virtually disappeared from the Western art world; or where it survived, it was redesignated: the ‘statue’ became the ‘sculpture’.28 It is a question of terminology as much as fact. It is not that artists ceased entirely to produce objects that conformed to the popular deWnition of a statue. Even modernists continued, and continue, to do so. But the word ‘statue’ has all but vanished from the vocabulary of artists and critics. Few contemporary sculptors would be happy to have their work called ‘statuary’.29 There seem to be two reasons for this, and they are closely connected. First, ‘statue’ is a ‘social’ term, not an aesthetic one. The statue was public art with a perceived social function: generally to commemorate or to honour. Aesthetic merit was a secondary consideration. The sculptor was commissioned to produce a signiWcant artefact, not a work of art.30 And, to many people’s eyes, it showed. The transformation of sculpture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the disembedding of the art from its social context. The word ‘statue’ was always to be associated with the worthy civic memorials of municipal parks and squares. The second problem for the statue was its popular association with likeness. The portrait sculptures and naturalistic personiWcations of the nineteenth century were at odds with the broader concerns of modernists. Again, the human Wgure did not disappear from sculpture, but new words were required to describe it: the old terminology was too much burdened with the wrong associations. Harriet F. Senie’s 1992 account of public sculpture in America uses revealingly evasive phrases. The pure white, highly realistic works of George Segal are said to continue ‘the tradition of Wgural memorial sculpture’, that is to say, statuary; a statue by Joel Shapiro is described as ‘a Wgurative sculpture’. 27

J. Hall, The World as Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London 1999) esp. 78. 28 The early decades of sculpture’s transformation are described in S. Beattie, The New Sculpture (New Haven and London 1983); p. 2 on Baudelaire. A sophisticated recent treatment of the period and its phenomena is to be found in Hall, The World as Sculpture, esp. 218–52. See also R. Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, 2nd edn. (London 1991) 9–16. 29 I owe the observation to an artist and critic, Prof. Rod Carmichael. 30 See Beattie, The New Sculpture, 201–30; A. Yarrington, The Commemoration of the Hero, 1800–1864: Monuments to the British Victors of the Napoleonic Wars (New York and London 1988) 326–37 on patronage and the development of public sculpture.

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Moreover, the context for this last example is a complaint about incorrect readings of public sculpture. The uninitiated populace cling onto the notion that sculpture should substitute for living people. Shapiro’s sculpture is seen as the children’s character ‘Gumby’. The urge to make familiar identiWcations is beyond the control of the artist, or patron.31 In 1932, R. H. Wilenski published a remarkable lecture on modern(ist) sculpture, with the rather convoluted title: ‘The Meaning of Modern Sculpture. An Essay on Some Original Sculpture of the Present Day Together with Some Account of the Methods of Professional Disseminators of the Notion that Certain Sculptors in Ancient Greece were the First and the Last to Achieve Perfection in Sculpture.’32 In the course of his argument Wilenski attacks both features associated with the pre-modernist statue—its civic function and the importance of likeness. ‘The popular sculptors . . . are commissioned by architects to Wll odd corners on buildings with ornaments or Wgures; they are commissioned by town councils and other bodies to make monuments for public places; and they are employed by individuals who want ‘‘lifelike’’ portraits in marble or bronze.’33 It will be clear from the title of the essay that the old approach to sculpture is associated with ancient art. Wilenski damns the art of the ancients by taking it out of the hands of the connoisseurs and dilettanti and showing what it really is: not the surviving masterpieces of the great sculptors, but Roman copies which served a social function in a world where ‘every temple sanctuary, every public square, every rich man’s garden and vestibule had its forest of bronze and painted marble ninepins’.34 Wilenski is not against Great Art; he simply does not believe that it is to be found among the relics of the Graeco-Roman world or the statuary of the nineteenth century. The ancient world of ubiquitous statues is the subject of this book. Wilenski rejects it precisely because it is a world of statues-as-objects rather than sculptureas-art, and in making that clear he presents a picture of classical statuary in its context that has been slow to prevail even in classical art history. Classical scholars have, in fact, long understood that the statuary of antiquity was abundant and widespread, that stone sculpture was painted and there were many bronzes, few of which survive. Yet that knowledge has rarely aVected the 31

H. F. Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (New York and Oxford 1992) 39 and 4 respectively. For Senie the ‘lamentable split between an artist’s intentions and public perception’ is partly the fault of the isolationist art community and partly due to the ‘absence of art education’—which would presumably teach children the right way to read public art. The wrong way to view art will be a recurring theme in this thesis. 32 R. H. Wilenski, The Meaning of Modern Sculpture (London 1932). 33 Ibid. 3. 34 Ibid. 48 for quotation; note that the long-recognized ancient practice of painting statues is mentioned, further to undermine the stereotypical image of the ideal classical sculpture; see also 33–80 on Greek sculpture and its reception through the ages.

10 introduction direction of research. One way or another, 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. Indeed, there is still very little comment even on the basic functions of Roman statues. Perhaps it is fair to say that most classicists are on some level aware of the social importance of statues: as objects of cult, as tokens of social interaction among people or between people and gods; as tools for self-representation or displays of cultural status and prestige; as political propaganda; as a recurring feature in the works of almost every ancient writer. This awareness represents a broad appreciation that statues were important in ancient society, but the practices by which they were used are seldom explored. Readers of classical art history are left to make assumptions from ancient literary references or epigraphy.35 In the last few years, more has been written about the social context of ancient art, and especially by German scholars. Some, like Paul Zanker, are intellectual descendants of R. Bianchi Bandinelli, and like him they seek to explain the forms of Roman art in terms of patronage and social change. We shall return to diVerent aspects of Zanker’s work at various points in this book.36 Those who have concentrated on statues in particular have produced much more speciWc studies, primarily catalogues, which nevertheless help to create a useful model of the deployment of statues in the Roman world. We have several more or less thorough examinations of statues in certain regions or sites (which are mainly the products of epigraphists, since statue-bases are less mobile, more enduring, and more explicit sources).37 Alongside such epigraphic and archaeological research, we have a handful of studies which rely most heavily on written 35 At undergraduate level there is a common misconception, for instance, that emperors set up statues of themselves in public to promote their power: there is a confusion here between the ‘oVicial’ portrait iconography of rulers, and its use in any particular object. However, it is especially in introductory literature that the basic functions of art have begun to be explained; note R. R. R. Smith, ‘What Were All those Statues for? Greek and Roman Sculpture’, Omnibus 8 (Nov. 1984) 1–4; also A. Haward, Art and the Romans (Bristol 1999) 2–3. Cf. R. R. R. Smith, ‘Roman Portraits: Honours, Empresses, and Late Emperors’, JRS 75 (1985), 208–21, at 209–12: an important review article that puts honoriWc statues in their broader context. 36 See esp. Zanker, (n. 11); id., ‘Zur Bildnisrepra¨sentation fu¨hrender Ma¨nner in Mittelitalischen und Campanischen Sta¨dten zur Zeit der spa¨ten Republik und der julisch-claudischen Kaiser’, in Les Bourgeoisies municipales italiennes aux IIe et Ier sie`cles av. J.-C. (Paris and Naples 1983) 251–66. On Bianchi Bandinelli’s methodology (and ideology) see esp. his ‘Archeologia e cultura’, in R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Archeologia e cultura (Milan 1961) 3–45. Cf. discussion of his and other methodologies in M. I. Finley, ‘In lieblicher Blau¨e’, Arion ns 3/1 (1976) 79–95. Zanker was one of a number of young German scholars who worked with Bianchi Bandinelli. 37 See esp. Zimmer, Locus and G. Alfo¨ldy, Ro¨mische Statuen in Venetia et Histria: Epigraphische Quellen (Heidelberg 1985)—both giving bibliographical information on such approaches, and idem, ‘Bildprogramme in den ro¨mischen Sta¨dten des Conventus Tarraconensis: das Zeugnis der Statuenpostamente’, in A. Blanco et al. (eds.), Homenaje a Garcia y Bellido, 4 (Madrid 1979) 177–275; cf. review of his work by G. Lahusen, BJ 187 (1987) 774–9. Also, K. Ho¨ghammar, Sculpture and Society: A Study of the Connection

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evidence. T. Peka´ry and G. Lahusen are prominent in this Weld, and their groundwork is essential for much of what follows.38 While scholarship of this kind is valuable, it remains limited in scope and inherently ill-suited to address the role of statues in Roman society and the place of the collectivity of statues in Roman culture and in Roman thought. First, there is a tendency to absorb statues into the subject of ‘sculpture’—which assumes either that all sculpture was closely related in context or that statues and sculptures are the same thing39—or to deal with portrait statues speciWcally as part of the broad artistic genre of portraiture.40 Venerated statues of gods, meanwhile, are labelled ‘cult images’, and thereby comparison with other statues is avoided (except within the general study of sculpture).41 By and large, we have classiWed the Roman statue out of existence. Second, even where the concept of the statue is admitted, most scholars restrict themselves to one kind of statue—usually public, honoriWc portrait statuary.42 While functional distinctions are possible to maintain, as much can Between the Free-Standing Sculpture and Society on Kos in the Hellenistic and Augustan Periods (Uppsala 1993); ¨ berlieferung aus der Zeit der K. Tuchelt, Fru¨he Denkma¨ler Roms in Kleinasien: Beitra¨ge zur archa¨ologischen U Republik und des Augustus (Tu¨bingen 1979)—both on earlier periods, the latter adopting a broader historical approach; F. Martin, ‘The Importance of HonoriWc Statues: A Case-Study’, BICS 41 (1996) 53–70, based on her more extensive, unpublished doctoral thesis (London 1996): ‘The Award of Civic HonoriWc Statues in Roman Italy, c. 31 bc–c. ad 500’. (The latter is particularly useful in looking beyond the inscriptions themselves to various issues surveyed here.) See also R. R. R. Smith, ‘Late Antique Portraits in a Public Context: HonoriWc Statuary at Aphrodisias in Caria, a.d. 300–600’, JRS 89 (1999) 155–89. Important miscellaneous treatments of the function and social context of statues include: K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge 1978) 221–31; Price, Rituals, in the context of the imperial cult; A. P. Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’: Responses to Portraits and the Political Uses of Images in Rome’, JRA 7 (1994) 80–99; K. Stemmer (ed.), Standorte: Kontext und Funktion antiker Skulptur (Berlin 1995); and A. Oliver, ‘Honors to Romans: Bronze Portraits’, in C. C. Mattusch et al. (eds.), The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections (Cambridge, Mass. 1996) 138–60. 38 Note esp. Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis (also id., ‘Das Bildnis des ro¨mischen Kaisers in der schriftlichen ¨ berlieferung’, Boreas 5 (1982) 124–32); Lahusen, Ehrenstatue and idem (ed.), Schriftquellen zum ro¨mischen U Bildnis I: Textstellen, von den Anfa¨ngen bis zum 3. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Bremen 1984). See also, more recently, M. Sehlmeyer, Stadtro¨mische Ehrenstatuen der republikanischen Zeit: Historizita¨t und Kontext von Symbolen nobilita¨ren Standesbewusstseins (Stuttgart 1999), on republican statuary. 39 As in, for example, most handbooks of Roman art. Note the title of one study devoted to statuebases: Sculpture and Society (Ho¨ghammar, cited at n. 37). Interestingly, however, German authors will more readily use the word Statue. 40 e.g. Lahusen, Schriftquellen zum ro¨mischen Bildnis I; Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis; M. L. Anderson and L. Nista, Roman Portraits in Context: Imperial and Private Likenesses from the Museo Nazionale Romano (Rome 1988); J. C. Balty, Portra¨t und Gesellschaft in der ro¨mischen Welt (Mainz am Rhein 1993). 41 e.g. C. C. Vermeule, The Cult Images of Imperial Rome (Rome 1987); H. G. Martin, Ro¨mische Tempelkultbilder: eine archa¨ologische Untersuchung zur spa¨ten Republik (Rome 1992). 42 e.g. H. G. Niemeyer, Studien zur statuarischen Darstellung der ro¨mischen Kaiser (Berlin 1968). Smith, ‘What Were All Those Statues For?’, is almost alone in looking at various kinds of statue together but outside the category of sculpture.

12 introduction be gained from looking at the relationships among diVerent categories of statue: by asking to what extent an idea of ‘the statue’ existed in Roman thought, and by seeking to establish what it meant. A synthetic study of Roman statues in their social context is needed. That is not quite what is oVered here, though this book does bring together for the Wrst time a large range of varied material and scholarship. Although I have paid particular attention to some of the locations and functions of statuary, this is not strictly a sociological investigation. Rather, it concerns ancient representations of, and responses to, statues in their social context, and as a collectivity of objects in the Imperial city of Rome and elsewhere, rather than a more abstractly conceived artistic category. No approach of this kind can be successful if (like most archaeological and art-historical work in the Weld) it uses written and visual evidence merely as a quarry for fact.43 The sources have their own contexts; their own complexities; they demand sensitive treatment. Moreover, in examining the sources, we are dealing with texts, images and artefacts that were constitutive (as well as indicative) of Roman culture.44 These comments are intended to explain the title with its unusual reference to statues rather than sculpture, and to prepare the ground for what follows. We should not imagine that terminology is a matter of academic detail. The potential for names and categories to aVect our perceptions should be borne in mind throughout, for it is not always as obvious as it may seem. Many of the features of Roman statues may appear familiar to us. They Wt the still-prevalent popular conception of what a statue should be. The same images recur through history, such as Gross’s ‘dream of the moving statue’—the endlessly re-worked fantasy of the animated image.45 But the sense of tradition is partly an illusion. EYgies have appeared in every generation, but not free-standing statues in the familiar sense; the statue, designated as such, is essentially a Wfteenth-century import from the classical world. The word itself was adopted primarily from Latin around 1400, and the concept of the statue that went with it was also a reinven-

43

For a recent positive approach to the image of statuary in Greek literature see Steiner, Images—a book which deals with many issues addressed here. For critique of ‘sources’ and discussion of various matters relevant to this book see P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (London 2001). 44 On the reception and conception of statues in the rather diVerent context of Indian art see R. H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton 1997); his study has much in common with some of the topics covered here. While the scholars cited here have addressed some of these concerns (and their studies are an essential foundation), it must be emphasized that no work so far has attempted the sort of sociocultural overview presented here. The book is intended to complement, unite and reorientate existing research on Roman sculpture. 45 K. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY and London 1992).

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tion of antiquity.46 Before returning to the deWnition of statues in Chapter 1, some brief comments are due on representation and response, and on the methods and scope of this book.

representation and response This is a history of art in its social and cultural setting and it relies on ancient sources. It therefore shares the problem of all ancient histories. The sources are mere fragments which, in any case, embody a bias towards the literate, or literary, elite of the Roman world. Epigraphic sources may increase the constituency a little. Artistic sources (pictures, coins, reliefs, the statues themselves) have a special place in this study, yet they still constitute only the tiniest extract from the range of images that once existed. One inevitable, rather positivistic, solution to the problem of evidence is that our few extant fragments, rich and evocative as they are, present odd pieces of the puzzle, oVering some impression of the complete scene that can never be fully reconstructed. Put more accurately, in the study of Roman statuary we do not need more than a handful of sources to comprehend the symbolism of statues and the patterns of behaviour in which they were embedded. To some extent this is true, and the fact is exploited here. In Chapter 8, for example, a relatively small assortment of sources is used to reconstruct the behaviour of Romans in assaulting statues. But again, it is not my main aim to provide a synthesis of material relating to statuary and to establish how things really were. The sources are used here not as windows onto an external reality, but as the products of Roman thought and as actual examples of the process by which statues were given meaning or reinterpreted. The fragmentary nature of the evidence is oVset by the realization that our sources are part of the Roman culture of statues and symptoms of the social practices in which statues were involved.47 The emphasis in this book is on representation: on the manipulation of shared vocabularies and the insight this may oVer into the place of the most familiar of art-works in Roman culture. Representation implies response—a more or less conscious engagement with the subject. The viewer responds to statues by representing them. But we shall be concerned with other, more dramatic 46 On the English etymology of ‘statue’ see C. T. Onions, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford 1966) 865; OED, 866. On the ‘revival’ of the statue in the Renaissance see H. W. Janson, ‘The Revival of Antiquity in Early Renaissance Sculpture’, repr. in S. B. McHam (ed.), Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge 1998), 40–59. 47 Cf. J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge 1995) 10–13 on the problems posed by the partiality of evidence.

14 introduction forms of response: with the use of statues, the veneration of statues, contact with and violence against statues. Naturally, in these accounts also we are very largely reliant on literary representations of people’s actions,48 but they oVer some insight into the broader impact of statues on the Roman environment. It will be clear that the approach adopted here conforms to a general trend in which the author/artist is diminished in favour of the text/work of art and the meanings generated for it by the reader/viewer. But no single hermeneutic theory has been adopted as the key to the diverse evidence examined here. A more consistent approach has greater potential to elucidate the evidence when a clearly deWned set of related questions has been posed, and when the evidence is accorded some degree of homogeneity.49 Under these conditions the study of ancient material serves as a test case for the methodology employed as much as the methodology elucidates the material. This book is not predominantly concerned with the form or meaning—the production or interpretation—of particular works of sculpture. Very diVerent kinds of representation and response are examined in a variety of settings. An attempt is also made to treat all this evidence carefully, in context, and to avoid some of the risks taken by Freedberg and Gross in their respective studies of response and representation; they seek almost universal, recurring topoi or ‘basic, preintellectual, raw’ responses.50 ‘The viewer’ is an increasingly popular Wgure in the history of ancient art; the reader should be warned that this term will recur here too.51 Its ambiguity, however, should at least be acknowledged. Mention of ‘the viewer’ signals a general approach to the study of art—a reaction against formalism; but it is sometimes hard to pin down the meaning of the phrase. It can refer quite literally to a particular standpoint: the way a work of art was viewed in antiquity (rather than in well-illustrated modern texts);52 it may refer to the mental framework of an individual, within which an image is endowed with meaning; by extension, it may refer to the visual culture to which an ancient viewer 48

Cf. D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London 1989) p. xxii on response as ‘the symptoms of the relationship between the image and the beholder’. 49 Cf. e.g. Elsner’s study of artistic change in terms of the viewer’s ‘expectations’ Art and the Roman Viewer. For another apology on the selective use of theory see A. Stewart, Art, Desire, and the Body in Classical Greece (Cambridge 1996) p. xiii; like him, I opt for theoretical ecumenism. 50 Freedberg, The Power of Images, quotation from p. xx; Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue. On the subject of response in the study of historical images see also Burke, Eyewitnessing, esp. 178–83. 51 See e.g. R. Osborne, ‘The Viewing and Obscuring of the Parthenon Frieze’ JHS 107 (1987) 98–105; Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer; P. Zanker, ‘In Search of the Roman Viewer’, in D. Buitron-Oliver (ed.), The Interpretation of Architectural Sculpture in Greece and Rome (Washington 1997) 179–91; representing a variety of approaches. 52 e.g. Osborne, ‘The Viewing and Obscuring of the Parthenon Frieze’; V. Huet, ‘Stories One Might Tell of Roman Art’, in Elsner, Art and Text in Roman Culture, 8–31.

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belongs.53 It is, for the most part, this idea of communal patterns of response that I have addressed. Thinking in terms of the attitudes and expectations common to the inhabitants of a particular society is bound to diminish the rather artiWcial distinction between makers and viewers. That is important, for we must remember that the artist and patron are themselves viewers as well as the producers. The funerary inscription of Novius Blesamus, reviewing his oeuvre as a maker of statues, is one of the few pieces of evidence we have for the attitudes of Roman artists, and it presents the sculptor almost as a member of the public: a viewer not concerned with the details of individual commissions, but with the sculptures’ overall impact on the environment (see Ch. 4). In theory, general attitudes (which artists and patrons may share with the populace at large) can feed back into production.54 So this book is not intended to ignore the producers of sculpture; but it does deal with the particular category of response suggested by the epitaph. It is concerned with the general response; mass responses; non-speciWc conceptions of the statue as a certain kind of object in the Roman environment; the idea of statues in the city and the world as a collection of objects; aesthetic and nonaesthetic representations of statues in the public and the private sphere. The speciWc is subordinated to the general, and special attention is given to those representations of statues that transcend the circumstances of any particular commission. The aim, therefore, is to elucidate Roman responses to statues in the Roman world as they are articulated or manifested in extant literary, epigraphic, and artistic sources. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the language used to talk about statues (both religious and secular) and some Roman assumptions and expectations about what statues are or should be. They focus on the concept of statues as a particular kind of thing. Statues, in general, are typiWed in collections of proverbs from the Roman period, and also in illusionistic wall-paintings which ostensibly conjure up ‘real’ sculpture, but often refer beyond its mere fabric to ideas of lifelikeness and animation. Ideas about the appropriate or normal composition of the statue are embodied in a variety of texts, while abnormal statues—the ‘primitive’, the aniconic, the barbarian, the rustic and obscene—serve to reinforce conceptions of what statuary ought to look like. Crucially, Chapter 1 will introduce two areas of constant importance in the book: the vocabulary applied to statues, and the visual language, the iconography, used to represent them. Both are essential for understanding the meanings of statuary in Roman antiquity. 53 54

See esp. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer; id., Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, esp. 11–14. Cf. J. WolV, The Social Production of Art, 2nd edn. (London 1993) esp. 126 on the artist’s implication.

16

introduction

Chapter 3 develops the theme of statuary imagery, examining portrait statues and their broad signiWcance in Roman culture. More humble, funerary reliefs make allusions to these and other kinds of statue, and in so doing they establish and exploit an iconography of the ‘statuesque’ which was used to clarify the signiWcance of other works as well, including the statues themselves. Ultimately the associations of the statue were manipulated in representations of the Roman emperor. Chapter 4 takes in all kinds of statues, not merely portraiture, but it brings the discussion closer to earth, examining responses to statues within the urban environment of Rome and asking to what extent those statues were recognized, and valued, as a collectivity. Some contemporaries at least were very much aware of the proliferation of statues in the city, which had (negative) moral as well as political connotations. Yet for those who beneWted directly from the erection of statues, their prominence—literally their celebrity—was of huge signiWcance. In certain ways, moreover, the expanding population of statues could be regarded as a communal advantage, conforming to notions of ideal urban adornment. In these chapters and throughout I have chosen to concentrate on Rome and Italy. It is Rome that largely preoccupies ancient authors, and perhaps to some extent it sets an example for other communities. But Rome is also exceptional, while the provinces have their own peculiarities. Chapter 5 seeks therefore to place the metropolitan discussion in a wider geographical context. It looks at the question of how representative the capital was of the empire-wide culture of statues. Literary sources give some suggestion of ancient attitudes to the provinces and their art, while provinces like Asia and Britain proVer valuable evidence for regional variations in use. This chapter is not an attempt to describe the role of statues throughout the Empire, but an illustration both of the consistency and the diversity of responses to statuary. Chapter 6 turns to the ambiguity of cult statues and other images of gods. The deWnition of cult statues was variable and versatile, yet not open to unlimited appropriation but grounded in social practice and assumptions about such statues’ role. The shortcomings of traditional, positivistic interpretations are revealed here particularly through the case-study of gods depicted on Roman lamps. DiVerent observations emerge from the study of (cult) statues represented on coins and in wall-paintings. Once again, ‘statuesque’ iconography is shown to play a role in specifying the signiWcance of these images. Chapter 7 deals with the place of Greek statues in Roman (high) culture, and examines the strengths and weaknesses of the old and new orthodoxies on the function and meaning of sculptural copies and replicated ‘statue-types’. An important focus is the relation between ‘decorative sculpture’ in gardens or villas, houses, baths, and so on, and the cultic or honoriWc statues in sanctuaries and public spaces. The Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum perhaps invites overly

introduction

17

speculative and detailed interpretations of its sculptural programme, but it also oVers the basis for more general conclusions about the relationship of public and private sculpture. Finally, Chapter 8 is about more concrete responses: contact with statues and the signiWcance attached to certain kinds of contact. Sex and violence dominate the relevant extant sources, and most of this chapter is concerned with the forms and functions of ‘damnatio memoriae’ and related iconoclastic practices. From the fourth century, the vocabulary of disorder was adopted by Christian iconoclasts, and representations of their actions look back on a 400-year tradition of statue-riots. Here in particular (but also in the other chapters) images or works of art are viewed as integral elements in Roman society; their treatment by the ancient population serves to structure society; they are fully implicated in social interaction. Nor is it easy to separate ‘representation’ from the ‘reality’ of people’s relationships with statues. Among the recurring themes of this book is the statue’s mimetic quality as a full-body representation of the human form. More importantly, we shall see repeatedly that the modern boundaries established between portraits, cult images, dedications, and ‘statues-as-art’, while they existed to some extent in antiquity, were not so pronounced as they might seem. These functional boundaries were sometimes easily confused, with interesting consequences for our interpretation of the sources. Those who have read earlier versions of this discussion have sometimes expressed surprise (if not shock) that it pays little attention to the art-works themselves. This is something of an illusion. It is only statues that lose out in this interdisciplinary study. Ironically, statues themselves do not always oVer good evidence for general responses—especially not when they are treated individually or in detail. Nevertheless, art-works in other media have a large role to play, particularly in Chapters 3 and 6. Emphasis on the depiction of statues in other media is of the utmost importance, for although that topic has attracted sporadic attention, the methodology involved has not kept pace, for example, with work on sculptural copies. The primary intention remains the reconstruction of lost statues, and the contemporary context of the visual representations themselves is seen to oVer little but obstacles to that pursuit.55 In these eight chapters the theme of representation of and response to statues in the context of Roman society is approached in diVerent ways, using diverse 55

See F. Imhoof-Blumer and P. Gardner, ‘A Numismatic Commentary on Pausanias’, serial publication in JHS 6 (1885) 50–107; 7 (1886) 57–113; 8 (1887) 6–63; L. Lacroix, Les reproductions de statues sur les monnaies grecques: la statuaire archaı¨que et classique (Lie`ge 1949); G. Horster, Statuen auf Gemmen (Bonn 1970); Moormann, Pittura; Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types. Contrast the medieval study of M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge and New York 1989).

18 introduction evidence. The choice of subjects examined is, of course, largely arbitrary. But by cutting through Roman culture from diVerent angles, these complementary studies will help to Wll gaps and correct misapprehensions in Roman art history, and to reconstruct the ancient meanings of statuary. This book is not merely an anthology of thematically related studies. Without such a broad conception of the subject, crucial aspects of it would remain obscure, falling as they do now through the separate branches of classical art history. As I have said, my focus is the city of Rome, which is partly an arbitrary choice, in spite of its special signiWcance as a Wxed point (and an inXuential centre) for generalizations that will be seen to apply elsewhere. It has been necessary to restrict the geographical range of the book in order to allow an essential breadth of scope as regards the interrelated types of material and categories of sculpture. The usual qualiWcations of the terms ‘Roman’ and ‘the Romans’ should be taken as read.56 These are neither prescriptive, nor, strictly, descriptive. The subject is Roman Imperial society, and where ancient cultural distinctions are relevant they are addressed on their own terms. Finally, for the same reasons of economy, the book concentrates on the period from the very late Republic to the beginning of the third century ad, but later and earlier material is included where necessary (notably in the discussion of iconoclasm), and it is sometimes especially useful in bringing the intervening period into deWnition. The Greek cultural tradition in particular is intimately bound up in the art history of Rome, but where Greek precedents are discussed they are addressed speciWcally on the Romans’ terms. Some readers may be frustrated by the omission of topics of particular concern, and I hope that this necessarily restricted discussion will provoke further work in the Weld. For even after centuries of admiration for Roman statuary, the ancient literary and archaeological material, fragmentary though it is, has barely been made to explain itself.

56

Cf. detailed problematization in O. J. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven and London 1979) esp. 5–9; also J. M. C. Toynbee, Art in Britain Under the Romans (Oxford 1964) 1–2; D. E. Strong, Roman Art, 2nd edn. (London 1988) 11–12.

one

DeWning Statues in Word and Image

What is a statue? There is little ambiguity in the modern usage of the word. We use it to refer to free-standing sculptural representations of full figures; they are usually life-size or larger. The word is sometimes more loosely applied to include, for example, architectural sculptures, but the basic sense is clear. There is no doubt about the prominence of such objects in the Graeco-Roman world. Hundreds of artefacts survive that meet our expectations of the statue. Classical statuary is familiar not least for its influence on the art of recent centuries. In light of this it may seem perverse to ask whether statues really existed in Roman culture or what they actually were; but insofar as we are trying to think in Roman terms, the question is crucial, for the study of Roman culture—the analysis of language above all—would suggest that statues were not conceptualized exactly as they are today. This chapter and the next address the fundamental question of how the Romans thought about statuary—its nature and functions and typical forms— and the (rather diVerent) ways in which their assumptions are manifested in language and iconography. In fact, language and iconography are essential elements throughout this study and the ideas outlined below will be developed further in subsequent chapters. Although the concepts of statues examined here are often rather abstract and general in character, yet we shall come to see more clearly how important these are for the representation of statuary at work in society. Chapter 2 will deal with some of the ways in which statues were characterized in Roman culture, examining attitudes towards the head and body in portrait statuary, ideas of proper proportion and compositions, and the portrayal of statues that depart from the norm—statues from the distant past, or beyond the boundaries of civilization, and images that infringe the conventions of mimetic representation or artistic elaboration. But first we must focus more closely on the premises that both inform and emerge from Roman language and iconography. It is vocabulary that demands attention first as perhaps the most subtle and pervasive means by which Roman statues were represented and defined.

20 defining statues

t er m i n o l o g y Having seen the power of terminology to shape and reflect our own view of art and its history, we should begin with ancient vocabulary and the degree to which it may have shaped and reflected Roman ways of regarding statues. My intention is not to find the true definition of the Roman statue, and indeed, ancient diYculties in definition will emerge here and later on. We can, however, search for some basic ancient assumptions about the statue, and show where modern ones distort our understanding. It is important above all to establish that Romans recognized the statue as one particular thing: that sculptures serving a variety of functions in many diVerent contexts were regarded as having suYcient homogeneity to qualify as a particular kind of object. That is why the examination of the usual categories of statue— honorific and commemorative figures, cult images, and art-objects—is deferred to later chapters. The immediate aim is to examine all kinds of statues together. They were often viewed in quite diVerent ways; but the similarities are close enough to demand an overview of the subject, disregarding conventional categories that are largely modern inventions, and largely arbitrary. We shall see that diVerent classes of statuary existed, but they represent sometimes fuzzy concepts which are hard to maintain positively. Later chapters should show more clearly how Romans regarded their statues as a collectivity. But the question of terminology is the most immediate, for it appears to present a serious obstacle to this unified view of statuary. How could the Romans have recognized all three-dimensional, sculptural figures as the same kind of thing when no single word existed to denote it? Was antiquity ignorant of conceptual categories that we articulate? The problem is this: Latin has a familiar word for ‘statue’—statua—which lives on in most European languages. Common though it is, however, statua is not the only term for a sculpture in the round. Even in contexts where we can determine that the subject is certainly a statue as we conceive it, a variety of other words are used. After statua the most frequent words are simulacrum and signum. There are, besides, rarer labels such as colossus which have more specific meanings; and there are more general terms—notably imago (‘image’), eYgies (‘eYgy’, ‘likeness’) and species (‘image’, ‘figure’)—which cover many diVerent kinds of object (inevitably my translations of these terms are just crude equivalents). The first three words are the most relevant for us because they are the most problematic, and because they are very often used specifically to denote sculpture in the round.1 1

On terminology generally see R. Daut, Imago: Untersuchungen zum BildbegriV der Ro¨mer (Heidelberg 1975); G. Lahusen, ‘Statuae et Imagines’, in B. von Freytag Gen Lo¨ringhoV et al. (eds.), Praestant Interna:

defining statues

21

Mostly, of course, we rely on context to determine the meaning of the word. This discussion is not concerned with meaning as something that can be crystallized and scientifically recorded. Nevertheless, we can reach conclusions about the usage of words, and attempt to explain that usage. Our problem here is that the three most common Latin words for statue are used in separate contexts with surprising consistency, and to translate any of them as ‘statue’ is to obliterate the nuances of the original text. There has always been a tendency to do just that— admittedly, it is almost inevitable. Modern approaches to the sources are not aided by the assumption that the Romans were ignorant of irony or puns. One early discussion exemplifies the pitfalls. It is an entry in Pitiscus’s Lexicon Antiquitatum Romanarum, published in 1713: STATUA apud veteres dicebatur promiscue simulacrum, imago, signum. Triplicem istam appellationem uni rei accommodet Cicer. pro dom. c.43.2 (A statue among the ancients was called indisciminately simulacrum, imago, signum. Cicero pro Dom. 43 applies that threefold terminology to the one object.)

The passage in question is perhaps the only single piece of evidence that might be exploited to show that those three words meant the same thing, but it is a diYcult passage to which we shall return. A re-examination of the texts shows that diVerent sorts of statue are denoted in diVerent ways.3 Raimund Daut bases his detailed survey of statue-vocabulary on the works of Cicero, but his conclusions are generally matched in other, later texts (though naturally the subject-matter, genre and style lead to considerable variation in the frequency of particular words). The first point to note is that there appears to be a distinction between statues of gods and statues of mortals, where gods receive simulacra or signa and humans have statuae. Let us survey the diVerences. Simulacrum is often used in a very general sense to refer to all kinds of images and eYgies and representations; but in contexts where the subject is evidently a Festschrift fu¨r Ulrich Hausmann (Tu¨bingen 1982) 101–9; Donohue, Xoana; N. J. Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture: Ancient Meanings, Modern Readings (London 1996) 45–6. I do not deal at this point with references to statues of gods and men which omit any term for the statue, thereby blurring the distinction between representation and referent (on which see R. L. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’, Art History 2 (1979) 5–34). See also A. A. Donohue, ‘The Greek Images of the Gods’, Hephaistos 15 (1997) 31–45 for a perceptive revision of our view of cult statues and their terminology; her conclusions are less applicable to the Roman period, but are broadly similar to my approach in Ch. 6. 2

S. Pitiscus, Lexicon Antiquitatum Romanorum (Leeuwarden 1713) 844. Cf. C. Clerc, Les the´ories relatives au culte des images chez les auteurs grecs du IIme sie`cle (Paris 1915) 4 implies a lack of distinction in the 2nd-cent. ad Greek sources. While there is a distinction, Clerc seems sensitive to the underlying, unified concept of the statue outlined in this book. 3

22 defining statues statue, this image is usually a god and only very rarely a portrait statue of a mortal. When it is a mortal, the subject tends to be a king, a dynast, a dead emperor—all figures who can in some sense be treated as divine.4 A signum is a sign of any sort, very often a military standard. The word sometimes seems to be applied generally to statues, particularly art-works whose special aesthetic merit is implied,5 but not normally to honorific statues, and when it refers to sculpture in the round it usually means statues of gods. (Nodelman is perhaps misleading us in suggesting that signum is one of the commonest words for an iconic statue, without qualification, in an essay devoted to portraits, though the statement serves his explicitly semiotic approach.6) Statua almost always refers to free-standing sculptures of mortals, though it also appears to serve as an umbrella term for any statue when the function or subject is not specified or not important, especially in the examples that we shall return to in the Digests or in philosophical discussions; there, however, it is likely that the author has a specific image of human statues in mind.7 So it is with some consistency that statues of gods and statues of mortals are distinguished in Roman vocabulary. But, in Latin at least, there is one further distinction that is often ignored, and that is the diVerence between simulacrum and signum. The former word tends to be associated with cult images, that is to say with statues that are the focus of devotion rather than simply representations of the gods. This diVerentiation is not always clear from the context, but simulacrum (meaning statue) is not usually applied to what we might call ‘unconsecrated’ representations of deities, such as votive oVerings that are dedicated to the gods but not explicitly venerated. Indeed, where we can identify the bases of the latter their inscriptions use the word signum to refer to them, if they use any specific 4 Daut, Imago, 32–8. In Vitruvius 1.1.6 the word is applied to telamones (male anthropomorphic pillars) of Persians defeated by the Spartans, but since stress is placed on representation and the appearance of the sculptures, this seems to be an example of the more general usage of simulacrum (cf. Propertius 4.11.83; Lucretius 2.24; Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.212; Ovid, Heroides 6.91; Frontinus 3.8.3). This distinction is arbitrary of course: perhaps the phrase is simply an exception; but in most cases where simulacrum refers to the image of a normal human, it is clear from the context that the author is not concerned with sculpture. 5 Daut, Imago, 35–7, esp. 37 n. 22. Of course, the sort of ideal-sculpture admired as art or cultivated decoration by sophisticated Romans consisted, as a rule, of divine representations. There is a neat ambivalence in the use of signum, for the same word denotes the signatures of artists. 6 Daut, Imago 32–8. S. Nodelman ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’, in D’Ambra, Context, 10–26, at 11; cf. J. Onians, Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome (New Haven and London 1999) 157–8, arguing that use of signa betrays the superficiality of Roman responses to Hellenic sculpture. Pliny is unsure, in NH 34.34, whether or not the ‘Tuscanica signa’—Etruscan statues—plundered by the Romans from Volsinii were all gods or not: evidently the word suYces. Other examples of signa for mortal humans (outside art-critical contexts) include: Virgil, Eclogues 3.40; Horace, Odes 4.2.19–20; Vitruvius 7.5.6. 7 Pliny, however, uses the term statuaria apparently for any kind of bronze statuary. Cf., in Greek, Palaephatus’s use of andriantes for the products of both andriantopoioi; and agalmatopoioi: Palaephatus, De Incredibilibus 21(22).

defining statues

23

term at all. Signum can appear as a synonym for simulacrum: apparently it has broader significance; but this use is not very common, and often seems to be exploited for the sake of variatio—rhetorical variety. That seems to be the case in Cicero, In Catilinam 3.20–1: ‘[haruspices] iusserunt simulacrum Iovis facere maius . . . illud signum . . . illud signum . . . ut signum statueretur’ (‘the haruspices ordered the manufacture of a greater simulacrum of Jupiter . . . that signum . . . that signum . . . That the signum should be set up’).8 Daut’s studies reveal that simulacrum appears with the words for consecration, veneration, and active cult (consecratum or sanctum, and as the object of consecrare, colere, and venerari) whereas signum generally does not. Moreover, simulacrum appears in inscriptions as ‘the specific word for the cult image’ in phrases such as ‘[deorum c]onsentium sacrosancta simulacra’ (‘the sacrosanct statues of the Di Consentes [images of gods in the Roman Forum]’).9 Other literary references use the word simulacrum in contexts that leave no doubt that cult statues are involved. Caesar, for instance, describes citizens falling before simulacra in prayer (Bellum Civile 2.5.3); Pliny the Elder (NH 12.3) likens revered cult-trees to polished, shining simulacra in gold and ivory. The inscriptions on the base of a posthumous statue at Misenum (commemorating the augustalis Q. Cominius Abascantus) refer to his gift of statues of the Genius of the Municipality and the ‘Protectress of the Fleet’. In the first more general mention of them they are called statuae and then, when the particular concern is arrangements for the active cultivation of the images (cleaning, annointing, garlanding), they are referred to as simulacra.10 We must be clear that these terms are not separated by rigid semantic barriers and in reality (as we shall see) the distinction between a ‘cult statue’ and any other representation of a god (perhaps dedicated as a religious oVering), is not a sharp one. Yet no matter how cautiously one approaches these questions of usage, the tendency to employ simulacrum, signum, and statua in diVerent ways is strikingly consistent. Sometimes the ancient authors seem determined to uphold these diVerent meanings. Daut cites a number of passages where diVerent words are juxtaposed and are perhaps deliberately contrasted in their applications. Naturally we should acknowledge that the desire for variety may often determine these juxtapositions, while hendiadys and tautology are also factors. A good example is the phrase ‘statuae et imagines’ and its variants.11 It might literally be translated ‘statues and images’, but it is often taken to mean ‘statues and busts’. In reality, 8

For further discussion see Daut, Imago, 32–8. CIL 6.102: see also Ch. 6. Daut, Imago, 36–8. 10 For text and fullest discussion see J. H. D’Arms, ‘Memory, Money, and Status at Misenum: Three New Inscriptions from the collegium of the Augustales’, JRS 90 (2000) 126–44. 11 On the phrase see Lahusen, ‘Statuae et Imagines’; note that statuae is occasionally replaced with signa: ibid. 102 n. 24 (all epigraphic examples). 9

24 defining statues however, the very broad connotations of imago and the formulaic, almost idiomatic character of this very common expression prevent us from specifying the meaning so precisely. There is no reason why the words should be taken to refer to two quite diVerent kinds of art rather than statues alone. Nevertheless, plenty of cases seem unambiguous, for example: ‘simulacra deorum depulsa sunt et statuae veterum hominum deiectae’ (‘the simulacra of the gods were thrown down and the statuae of men of old were toppled’: Cicero, In Catilinam 3.19); ‘simulacro Iovis Olympii aut doryphori statua’ (‘by the simulacrum of Olympian Jupiter or the statua of the Spear-bearer’: Cicero, Orator 5).12 This apparent diVraction of the very concept of the statue is not as problematic as it first seems. It is certainly the case that diVerent kinds of statuary could be viewed as fundamentally the same sort of thing. For a start, the general terms for artistic representations which I have not examined here—words like imago, eYgies, species—are continually used in reference to statues of all kinds (not to mention images in other media), and this implies that the spectrum of sculpture can be embraced within a single, broad category. That is particularly so in the case of eYgies, which is applied equally to statues of men and gods (and appears as a synonym of simulacrum in Cicero, In Verrem 2.5.187).13 Also highly significant are those neglected, exceptional cases where statua does refer to the image of a deity.14 A character in Plautus’ Asinaria humorously demands cult honours (712–13): ‘si quidem mihi statuam et aram statuis’, he says (‘if you erect a statue and an altar to me’). It could perhaps be argued that the author’s use of statua arises from his recognition that Libanus, the character, is mortal, but then the joke appears less successful. Much later, Vitruvius refers to a ‘colossicus Apollo’ (‘a colossal Apollo’) as ‘statua’ (10.2.13). In 2.8.11 he seems to refer to a cult statue of Mars at Halicarnassus as ‘statua’, twice. Pliny’s discussion of colossi (NH 34.39–40) refers to them as ‘moles . . . statuarum’ (‘great masses of statues’), though all his examples are images of gods. In 33.41 he mentions ‘statuas Aegyptiorum numinum’ (‘statues of Egyptian divinities’); then in 36.58, ‘Memnonis statuae’ (‘statues of [the Egyptian god] Memnon’). Apuleius seems particularly fond of this usage and refers to statues of the goddesses Venus and Victoria as statuae in diVerent texts.15 Examples of this kind are exceptional, but they betray some conceptual blurring in the face of the general consistency of lexical diVerentiation. In later chapters we shall see how conventional distinctions are both supported and dissolved in the deployment and usage of statues themselves.

12 13 14 15

Daut, Imago, 33, and generally, 32–8. Daut, Imago, 39–40. It appears to be used for the sake of ‘poetical’ variety. These are not recognized by Lahusen, ‘Statuae et Imagines’, 102, or mentioned by Daut, Imago, 38. Apuleius, Apologia 34.3 (Venus); Metamorphoses 2.4.1–2 (Victoria).

defining statues

25

Before attempting an explanation of the linguistic tendencies described above, it is important to widen the scope of discussion by considering the parallel Greek vocabulary for statues. The slightly uneasy correspondence between the Latin and Greek languages of statuary helps clarify and explain Roman Imperial attitudes. At first sight the contemporary Greek terminology for statuary seems to match the Latin usage.16 Once again we have a variety of general words for images (notably eikon, corresponding precisely to imago), but once again two distinct terms predominate in those texts which refer unambiguously to statues. The word agalma conveys the same associations as simulacrum and signum: it refers to images of deities. In contrast, andrias is applied almost invariably to representations of mortals and seems to match the Latin statua. It is not surprising to find this correspondence in a largely bilingual empire.17 What might be surprising is that the correspondence is not more exact, given the apparent similarity in the functions of sculpture throughout the Empire. It might be tempting to avoid further discussion, arguing that no language translates altogether comfortably into another. True though this is, we should not ignore the place of language and vocabulary in society, adapting to its structures and aVecting it in turn. There is perhaps a tendency even among those who consider statuary vocabulary interesting and important merely to identify and distinguish the words, with limited reference to their broad context or social significance.18 But this is rather like classifying species of finch without regard to what their variety may imply about adaptation to their environment or the process of their evolution. So let us look at the problems. First, like their Latin counterparts, the words agalma and andrias are consistently distinguished in Greek literature of the Imperial period; and yet the epigraphic evidence from the Greek East reveals that living men were not infrequently recipients of honorific agalmata.19 Second, there is no distinction, 16 For more detail on Greek nomenclature of statues see Price, Rituals, esp. 176–9; Donohue, Xoana; Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture. 17 Good examples of direct translation on inscriptions can be found in R. A. Kearsley (ed.), Greeks and Romans in Imperial Asia: Mixed Language Inscriptions and Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Interaction Until the End of AD III (Bonn 2001) e.g. 68–9, no. 95; 130, no. 156; 130–1, no. 157. 18 See e.g. Daut, Imago. 19 e.g. REG 1893, 157–60 ¼ REG 1957, 361–75 (Iasos); IG 5.2, no. 515 (Megalopolis); IGR 3.192 (Ancyra); TAM 5.1, nos. 687–8 (Iulia Gordus); M. C ¸ etin S,ahin, Die Inschriften von Stratonikeia, Part 2.1 (Bonn 1982) 29, no. 536 (Stratonikeia). However, some such inscriptions refer to deceased honorands, e.g. C. Naour, ‘Tyriaion en Cabalide’, ZPE 29 (1978) 91–114, at 111–13; MAMA 8.412 (Aphrodisias). See Price, Rituals, 178. Price argues that location (in a sanctuary) accounts for the use of the word, which should not be taken to imply active cult of the recipient. However, this does not diminish the divine overtones of the ¨ berlieferung term. See also K. Tuchelt, Fru¨he Denkma¨ler Roms in Kleinasien: Beitra¨ge zur archa¨ologischen U aus der Zeit der Republik und des Augustus (Tu¨bingen 1979) 68–70 on this subject. He notes other locations for human agalmata (70) and considers the granting of agalmata to ordinary citizens as a development of honours for rulers from around the late 2nd cent. bc (69).

26

defining statues

not even a faint and flexible distinction, between cult statues and lesser images of gods: the word agalmata serves both. The latter discrepancy is less striking because of the diYculty of distinguishing diVerent kinds of divine image. But it is notable nevertheless. For some reason Latin has acquired a word with a more tightly circumscribed application to cult statues. This is not the consequence of some lexical deficiency in Greek, for simulacrum actually has a very close equivalent which is used to translate it in other contexts. That word is eidolon: the source of the English ‘idol’.20 In the fifth century bc it is used, like simulacrum, to cover a range of images—usually not concrete, but occasionally including what we might call statues (for example, the image of the dead ruler in Herodotus 6.58). But unlike simulacrum it does not acquire widespread use as a specific term for cult statues. That meaning has emerged by the fourth century bc, but in the specifically Jewish context of the Septuagint. Later it appears in the New Testament and in late antique Christian writings. Given the anti-pagan contexts it has all the connotations of ‘idol’.21 Why was it not used earlier as the analogue to Latin’s simulacrum? Greek and Latin etymology presents only partially satisfactory answers to these questions. It is true that andrias has an intrinsic association with images of humans; it is manifestly related to the Greek word for a man, and in fact it even has a Bronze Age antecedent with a related meaning.22 Similarly, there is some historical justification for the usage of agalma in the Roman period. Related as it is to agallo (‘glorify’ or ‘adorn’), an agalma was originally a pleasing gift, an adornment for the gods. By the middle of the fifth century bc it is frequently used to mean one particular kind of adornment: the votive or cult statue.23 It is important to remember that although etymology is helpful in revealing the origins of lexical diversity, it does not account for the continued use of these diVerent words to denote diVerent kinds of sculpture. In explaining that usage it is worth noting that andrias and agalma may have referred to the diVering social functions of the portrait statue and the divine image. In spite of their formal similarity (as anthropomorphic sculptures), the one served its function osten20 Similarly, although se¯ma and se¯meion correspond precisely to signum in other contexts, apparently they were not generally applied to statues. LSJ take the latter to refer, occasionally, to eYgies, but the reference given in support of this association is highly doubtful (Anticlides, a Hellenistic historian, as quoted in Athenaeus 11.473 b): both the text and the meaning are unclear; however, compare Maximus of Tyre 8.2.4. 21 e.g. Septuagint 4 Kings 17:12; 1 Corinthians 12:2; Donohue, Xoana, 60 and 98. The negative connotations of the word in this context may owe something to Platonic thought; throughout Plato’s work eidola (in a more or less general sense) are almost synonymous with lies and illusion: e.g. Theaetetus 150b–c; Republic 382b. 22 On this Linear B ancestor see F. A. Jorro, Diccionario griego–espan˜ol anejo I: diccionario mice´nico, vol. 1 (Madrid 1985) 26–7. 23 On agalmata see L. Gernet, The Anthropology of the Greeks (Baltimore and London 1981) 76–7.

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sibly by bearing the likeness of an elevated individual; the other was intended to confirm relations between the human and the divine through the creation and dedication of an appropriate artefact; likeness and mimesis in the latter case were not of key significance, as we shall see. What makes any notion of mere linguistic continuity or tradition particularly untenable as a single explanation for the diverse vocabulary of statuary, is the fact that a word like agalma can, in fact, be applied to mortals: the interchanging of the terms is not unthinkable, even though, as a rule, it does not occur. Since we do find that degree of flexibility in the terminology, we might expect the words agalma and andrias to have gradually become synonymous. Why did this not occur? We must seek some explanation in their continued usage, not simply in their historic development. An examination of Latin vocabulary leads to the same conclusion. The evidence is much sparser as we have relatively few inscriptions from before the first century bc, and even fewer literary texts. Statua and signum appear, diVerentiated in usage, in literature and epigraphy from the second century bc or a little before.24 Simulacrum is found first in Cicero, though it could have been used earlier:25 in Chapter 6 we shall see why this term is less likely to appear in inscriptions at least. Its appearance may owe something to the restricted Hellenistic use of eidolon to denote an idol. As with the Greek vocabulary, something may be said about the relevance of particular terms to social functions of statuary. Simulacrum was always easy to associate with likeness and replication, because it was used in a variety of contexts to mean likenesses of diVerent kinds, and not just works of art, while Cicero seems to recognize the root of the word in his figura etymologica: ‘nescio quid e quercu exsculpseram quod videtur simile simulacri’ (‘I carved out something in oak such as looks like a simulacrum’—here he refers to the draft of a letter to Caesar).26 Once again, the association with representation may seem less appropriate for cult images, as opposed to portraits, but one important role of the cult statue was still to create a ‘likeness’ of the absent god and to simulate its presence. The word signum is rather closer to agalma as it originally referred to something with a distinctive appearance and retained that meaning. Its application to images of gods may imply the importance attached to displays of piety in the dedication of elaborated votive sculpture, rather than any particular formal characteristics. The use of statua for the portrait statue is most surprising at first sight. It would seem that likeness is the essential feature of such images; but unlike the Greek andrias, the etymology of statua conveys no idea of representation. It is frequently associated with the verb 24 e.g. Ennius, Annales 411 ( ¼ Macrobius, Saturnalia 6.1.17); Ennius, Scipio 1–2 ( ¼ SHA, Claudius 7.7) (statua); Plautus, Rudens 560; CIL 1, Part 2 (2nd edn.), no. 42 (signum). 25 e.g. Cicero, Ad Atticum 13.28.2. 26 Ibid.

28 defining statues statuere (‘set up’) in ancient texts, as in the common phrase ‘statuam statuere’ (‘to set up a statue’). However, the emphasis on the erection of the statue rather than its portrait features perhaps reflects a concern with the conspicuous honour that the very creation of such a monument—not just its continued presence— represented.27 Such etymological interpretations of the words receive support in some ancient testimonies: not, of course, a reliable source as such, but an indication of the enduring potential for reading the terminology in that way.28 Etymological deductions of this kind are sound, as far as they go: but that is not far. While the words may seem to suit the various statues to which they are applied, there is no suggestion that they are inherently appropriate so that, for example, a portrait statue must always be denoted by a word that evokes ‘setting up’. Nor, again, can we assume that the force of tradition was enough to ensure the continued diVerentiation of statues with words that made special sense in a distant and obsure past. The use of variatio and the fact that the terms are ‘misused’ as we have seen, suggest that no strict diVerence would have been maintained for long without some reason, especially as some texts seem consciously to contrast the various words for ‘statue’. We must understand the language of statuary in its evolving contexts. So the questions remain. Statues of diVerent sorts were superficially rather similar and could be denoted with the same general terms such as ‘imago’; they were even used and displayed in similar ways. So why was there a tendency to use diVerent words when referring to diVerent contexts, to separate the human and divine consistently but not universally? And why does this diVerentiation find a similar but not identical expression in contemporary Greek? Before suggesting some speculative answers we should turn to the social and political context, of portrait statues especially, in the later Republican (or Hellenistic) period—the period in which the Latin vocabulary for statues first appears in extant sources.

roman statues in a hellenistic world According to the Elder Pliny, honorific statues were being erected in Rome in the fifth century bc and before. Although his assertions have sometimes 27 In late antiquity the word statua falls into disuse, at least in reference to sculpture. But it continues to mean something standing, something set up, such as a staV, or a column. (Statualis does appear in one medieval text, meaning ‘dumb’; a certain Ingulfus uses statuarium to mean a tomb (adorned with statues) and, poignantly, the same word could be used in the Middle Ages to mean a furnace in which scrap metal was melted down. For references see C. Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, vol. 6, repr. of edn. of 1883–7 (Graz 1954) 588. 28 Cassiodorus, Psalm. 96.7 l; Isidorus, Origines 8.11.6. Varro, De Lingua Latina 7.14; Cassiodorus, Psalm. 85.17 l.

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been accepted uncritically many of his claims are patently untrue.29 Whether or not the erection of any public portrait statues can be dated so early in Rome’s development, it is very likely that the growth of this phenomenon during the later Republic is closely related to—and evidently derived from— the public portrait honours of the Hellenistic Greek world after around 300 bc.30 The processes by which Greek portrait statues were produced in this period have been closely examined, specifically in the context of late classical and Hellenistic Athens.31 Here the decree of public honorific statues and other honours such as crowns by civic bodies, most often by the de¯mos (citizenry) and boule¯ (council), have been seen as the state’s means of reinforcing wealthy individuals’ psychological (and consequently financial) investment in the community. It was upon these benefactors that the Hellenistic poleis depended, and if the exaltation of individuals seems superficially to conflict with democratic or egalitarian ideals, it remained an essential characteristic of the societies developing at this time. Honorific portraits proliferated as part of a rapidly elaborated system of gift-exchange. The prestige of these honours would have rubbed oV on private dedications, which were increasingly common,32 but the superlative accolades were those statues or other awards dedicated by state institutions. Inscriptions on statue-bases and elsewhere often praise the benefactor in terms which are highly formulaic but lavish nevertheless. It is important to note in particular the divine overtones in some of the more elevated honours awarded to Hellenistic rulers, such as the acclamation of the recipient as sote¯r—saviour—and the exploitation of traditional divine or heroic forms in the statues themselves: pose and gesture, nudity, exaggerated scale and musculature.33 Humbler benefactors might be hailed as ktistai—‘founders’—evoking the heroic, semimythological founders revered in many cities.34 The ‘godlike’ Hellenistic benefactor or monarch was eventually superceded by the Roman military general and ultimately the emperor, but the divine connotations remain in honours for 29

T. Ho¨lscher, ‘Die Anfa¨nge ro¨mischer Repra¨sentationskunst’, RM 85 (1978) 315–57, at 327–42. Even Sehlmeyer, Ehrenstatuen, while aiming to treat such literary sources with caution (esp. 27–44) relies heavily on Pliny and others. 30 See also A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours: The Language of Power at Rome’, PCPhs 216 (1990) 143–81. 31 Note especially A. F. Stewart, Attika: Studies in Athenian Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (London 1979) 115–32; P. Gauthier, Les cite´s grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs (IVe–Ier sie`cle avant J.C.): contribution a` l’histoire des institutions (Bulletin des Correspondances Helle´niques, suppl. XII) (Athens 1985); WallaceHadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours’; J. J. Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic’, JRS 90 (2000) 18–50. 32 Stewart, Attika, 119. 33 See Gauthier, Les cite´s grecques, 46–53; Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage’, 40–3. 34 See Gauthier, Les cite´s grecques, 59–66.

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more humble personages.35 It is against this background that references to honorific portraits as agalmata should be viewed. Extant evidence for the situation in Rome is scarce and we know particularly little about portrait statuary before the second century bc.36 But at first sight we find the replication of Greek practices within Rome: honorific crowns, portrait statues with dedicatory inscriptions, gifts of statues from the senate and people of Rome (like the boule¯ and de¯mos of the Greek city).37 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has argued that this picture of straightforward hellenization is inaccurate. He demonstrates that the evidence for ‘oYcial’, senatorial dedications of honorific statues is very insecure (though this is open to some debate38) while there is some reason to suppose that many public portraits in the last two centuries of the Republic were private commissions by the subjects represented or by others close to them.39 That does not necessarily mean that statues functioned in a fundamentally diVerent way: they could be used to consolidate social relationships, though perhaps more often between patron and clients or between relatives than between individuals and the state.40 But whatever our conclusion on the sponsorship of public portraiture in this period, the suspicious and sometimes hostile response is quite obvious. Hellenistic Greece saw the institutionalization of euergetism and symbolic rewards. But in Rome, Wallace-Hadrill argues, the use of portraits in public was less systematic, more sporadic, a matter of ‘individual self-assertion’ by the Roman nobility.41 Privately commissioned portrait statues in the public spaces of the city were regarded as signs of ambitio—‘ambition’; that word also contains an idea of ‘going around’, canvassing: statues were personal advertisements which borrowed the vocabulary of power from Hellenistic Greece, but adapted it to 35 However, see Price, Rituals, esp. 40–7 for critique of over-simplified view of Hellenistic–Roman continuity. Ibid. 47–52 and Gauthier, Les cite´s grecques, 60–6 for explicit cult of Greek individuals. 36 This might, reflect the limited adoption of Hellenistic practices in Rome: Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours’, 157–8. For the fullest treatment of the largely literary evidence see Sehlmeyer, Ehrenstatuen. 37 Cf. on Delos an attempt to translate the honorific language of the Greek monuments into Latin: ‘virtutis beneficique ergo’—‘on account of his virtue and kindness’. For survey and commentary on evidence for the period see Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours’; Sehlmeyer, Ehrenstatuen; Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage’. On the corona civica as a prestigious Roman crown note e.g. Appian, Bellum Civile 2.106. 38 Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage’, 28–30 puts greater faith in the evidence for public honorific portraiture at least as early as the 4th cent. bc; he is also prepared to accept that Rome was ahead of the Greek cities in the use of certain honorific monuments including equestrian portraits (29 n. 53). See also Sehlmeyer, Ehrenstatuen, 277 n. 26. 39 Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours’, 161–6. 40 Though the relationships are analogous they may have engendered rather diVerent aesthetic choices: Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage’, sees verism as the product of patronal (i.e. not state-honorific) relationships, specifically in the context of Roman interaction with the Greek world. 41 Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours’, 158.

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a rather diVerent social and political environment. The most dramatic response to the proliferation of private statues was a purge executed by the censors of 158 bc.42 Finally, the divine and regal connotations of the more lavish rewards of the Greek world—rewards that were all too familiar to the nobility of an expanding Rome—were manifestly problematic when translated into the world of metropolitan Rome and Republican Roman tradition (which is not to say that these trappings were not accepted and exploited). Even such visual hints as heroic nudity (best illustrated by the Tivoli General with his undraped heroic torso and veristic face) may have generated tensions in late Republican culture.43 Tanner exposes the logic underlying these hellenized portraits of Romans which could serve to objectify patronage relationships between Greeks and Romans with their diVering symbolic models.44 Yet they could be perceived and presented as fitting poorly into Roman culture. Cicero manipulates these scruples in his prosecution of the corrupt former governor of Sicily, C. Verres. Explaining that the Syracusans had honoured Verres as sote¯r, ‘saviour’, he pointedly declares that no one word can translate that title in Latin—the concept, in a sense, does not (or should not) exist for the Romans.45 It is the similarities and the diVerences between Greek and Roman art and society in the Hellenistic/Republican period that help explain both the similarity and the diVerences in Greek and Latin vocabulary applied to statues. There are strong socio-political pressures that ensure the diVerentiation of divine and human images in Rome. The distinction is perhaps rather less important in the Greek world and agalmata enter the language of honorific decrees. Yet we shall see that in other ways, and in other contexts, the boundaries between diVerent kinds of statue were less clear-cut, less rigorously maintained. In that sense language does not just reflect diVerent conceptions of divine and human statues, but actually serves to create them. Can the same background help to explain the further diVerentiation of signa and simulacra in Roman thought? There are many possible reasons why a more specific term might have been needed in Latin but not in Greek to distinguish cult statues from divine images in general. It may be, for instance, that signum was simply too broad in its range of associations and objects of cult demanded an explicit term; in Greek the word agalma is at least linked specifically to religion. But it is also worth considering why it might have seemed necessary to disassociate cult statues from other kinds of image. Let us therefore return to the terminology concerned. 42 Sehlmeyer, Ehrenstatuen, 152–9 sees the purge as the traditional aristocracy’s attempt to defend its exclusive position against social newcomers. 43 44 Zanker, Augustus, 5–8. Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage’. 45 Cicero, In Verrem 2.2.154.

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The simulacra deorum—the cult images of the gods—may be perceived as hallowed objects, important in themselves, not only for what they represent. We cannot be more precise in defining the status of the cult image, because ancient views diVered considerably, from the ‘popular’ view of the statue as (virtually) the deity, to a more philosophical cynicism that combined with the Jewish tradition to feed the arguments of Christian apologists.46 Those questions of response will arise again later in the book. It could be argued that the language used for these images circumscribes them, setting them in a more exclusive category from ordinary representations of gods. They could then be interpreted as having a special nature, being imbued with the divine presence (like the consecrated host), or else being symbolically set aside from the normal world. In any case, words like sacer and consecratus imply separation and elevation. It is objects of this status that require altars, sacrifices, vows, and devotions. The terminology concerned with the dedication of sacred objects is not clear-cut, nor do we know much about the rituals or beliefs involved. But it does seem that ‘consecration’ represents more than just the elevation of an important object or the ‘declaration’ (dedicare has this sense) of what it is. Consecration can be seen as the transfer of something human to the sphere of the divine (as in the consecration—the deification—of the dead emperor).47 Now, it might seem that there is little obvious diVerence between an image of a god that is worshipped as an object of cult and an image of a god that is not (apart from the cult image’s tendency towards ‘grandeur’—size, wealth of decoration, variety of material, and so on). An inscribed base may make the object’s status clear, using language to define it; but formal diVerences are no doubt less obvious than those created through ritual and language. That uncertainty evidently explains why (according to Livy 26.34.12) the priests were called in in 211 bc to sort the spoils that the Romans had captured from the Campanians: ‘signa, statuas aeneas quae capta de hostibus dicerentur, quae eorum sacra ac profana essent ad pontificum collegium reiecerunt’ (‘They referred to the college of pontifices [priests] the signa, bronze statuae, said to have been captured from the enemy, to decide which of them were sacred and which profane’). It is likely that signum, as the usual word for a dedicated image of a god in Livy’s time and before, refers to divine statues; the author reverts to statua when describing their 46

N. H. Baynes, ‘Idolatry and the Early Church’, in id., Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London 1955) 116–43; see also Clerc Les the´ories relatives au culte des images, esp. 89–262. 47 See F. Dupont, ‘The Emperor-God’s Other Body’, in M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part 3 (New York 1989) 396–419. (Interestingly in Dio 75.4.3 and 75.5.4 the wax eYgy of Pertinax used in the ritual of his consecration is called an eidolon.) An inscription belonging to the mausoleum of Claudia Semne on the Via Appia refers to ‘simulacra’ of the deceased; this is a private ‘consecratio’; the phrase ‘in formam deorum’ (‘[consecration] into the form of the gods’) is used: CIL 6.15593; H. Wrede, ‘Das Mausoleum der Claudia Semne und die bu¨rgerliche Plastik der Kaiserzeit’, RM 78 (1971) 125–66, at 127.

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material (though it is also possible that portraits dedicated in sanctuaries are involved). The problem is to decide which of these images must be declared sacra, and which may be appropriated or melted down.48 Nomenclature is one means, therefore, of creating a hierarchy of images, of defining diVerences among statues where they might not be obvious. But the distinction is less consistently maintained among images of gods than it is between images of gods and portrait statues. Now perhaps this is what we should expect: when a term such as simulacrum has associations with the holiest of objects, it would seem wrong to apply it to images of humans; to use the word for statues of humans might be impious. Although signum is used more broadly and applied to statues with unspecified subjects, it is, on the whole, reserved for gods. This also is what we should expect. Yet that interpretation is back-to-front. We have seen how simulacrum is applied, very occasionally, to human figures. Again, this is a more general usage of the word; but it admits an ambiguity which would not be permissible if the connotations of the word made it so very exclusive. More significantly, the term is sometimes applied to three-dimensional representations of animals.49 It is much more likely that simulacrum with its divine associations is specifically not applied to honorific and public commemorative statues of human beings. In light of the political context in which, as we have seen, Republican portrait statuary developed, perhaps we should regard the more or less consistent refusal to apply the term simulacrum to humans as a positive act, denying any possibility of ‘godlike’ associations through statuary honours. Though we are short of early sources, it may even be significant that the word first appears and suddenly becomes popular in extant literature from the late Republic—at a time when the self-deifying projections of aristocrats and dynasts were becoming increasingly important in the political development of the Roman state and when cults of individual Roman oYcials were perhaps starting to proliferate in the Greek East.50 Perhaps its use increased, putting greater distance between the human statue and the divine statues that received devotion. These distinctions were not retained through the lack of a single concept of statues, but precisely because all statues could be presented as the same kind of thing, and since statues were primarily erected in honour of gods and prominent men, the potential for elision was dangerous. The danger was not necessarily genuine confusion; the iconography of Roman statues (especially ‘realistic’ facial features) would usually have made it obvious (as it usually is today) into which 48

See also Livy 25.40.2 and esp. Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.122, clarified in the Digests: Digesta 11.7.36. Gellius referring to a goat, crow, horses, dolphin: 5.12.12, 9.11.10, 13.15.1, 16.19.23; Suetonius, Nero 12.2; Tacitus, Annales 12.24.4. 50 Zanker, Augustus 5–25. On the cults see Price, Rituals, 42–3; Tuchelt, Fru¨he Deukma¨ler Roms in Kleinasien, 105–7. 49

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category the image fell. What is threatening is the potential for exploiting the resemblance between divine and mortal representations and the conceptual association that results. Certain individuals could escape from expected classifications. Cicero twice refers to Caesar’s murder by the portrait of the dead Pompeius, but he uses diVerent words for ‘Pompey’s statue’: in De Divinatione 2.23 he calls it ‘Pompei simulacrum’; in Philippicae 1.36 it is ‘Pompei statua’. Again, simulacrum was applied to kings and deified emperors after death (which was all right) and to Hellenistic kings during their lives (which in Roman eyes, was maybe not).51 There is a continual concern in Roman texts with the divine and hubristic associations of statues, especially those in precious metals.52 The perceived danger is especially clear in Pliny’s Panegyric in which Domitian the tyrant serves as an antitype to Trajan, the Optimus Princeps—‘the best of emperors’. Trajan does not aspire to divine honours. He has just one or two statues in the vestibule of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus—and these are of bronze. But under Domitian the whole precinct shone with gold and silver, or rather, it was polluted, ‘cum incesti principis statuis permixta deorum simulacra sorderent’ (‘since the images of the gods were soiled by being mixed with the statues of an incestuous emperor’).53 There is clearly a close association here between the statues of Domitian and those of the gods, and permixta (‘mixed up’) could be intended to suggest that the two kinds of statue are confused: Pliny certainly declares that Domitian sought to elide the diVerence between himself and the immortals. If that is so, then it is the light of Pliny’s words themselves which reveals the truth, by categorizing, separating, restoring.54 We are now in a better position to return to that passage of Cicero on which Pitiscus’s lexicon places so much weight.55 In 58 bc, Clodius drove Cicero out of Rome, destroyed his house and dedicated a temple of Libertas on the site. Where, asks Cicero, did the cult statue come from (De Domo Sua 111–12)? Tanagraea quaedam meretrix fuisse dicitur. Eius non longe a Tanagra simulacrum e marmore in sepulcro positum fuit . . . signum de busto meretricis ablatum isti dedit, quod esset signum magis istorum quam publicae libertatis. Hanc deam quisquam violare audeat, imaginem meretricis? (Apparently she was a certain Tanagran courtesan. A marble statue of her was placed on her tomb not far from Tanagra . . . [Clodius’s brother] removed the statue from the 51

Lahusen, ‘Statuae et Imagines’, 102; Varro, De Lingua Latina 9.79 (Alexander). Note Philo’s approval of Augustus for not accepting an agalma: De Legatione ad Gaium 148. 52 K. Scott, ‘The Significance of Statues in Precious Metals in Emperor Worship’, TAPhA 62 (1931) 101–23. 53 Pliny, Panegyricus 52.3. 54 Something similar occurs in the Historia Augusta, Severus 14.5, where Plautianus is said to have incurred Severus’ anger because he placed his own statue among the simulacra of the imperial family— ‘inter propinquorum et adfinium Severi simulacra suam statuam posuisset’. 55 See also Daut, Imago, 32–3.

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courtesan’s tomb and gave it to him, as a sign more of those people’s freedom than that of the state. Would anyone dare to violate this goddess, the image of a courtesan?)

Cicero means the alleged transformation of a prostitute’s portrait into a cult statue to appear absurd. Yet the passage incidentally exemplifies the humanstatue’s easy transition to divinity. Were it not plausible that the same sculpture could serve both purposes then the allegation, even if intended sarcastically, would fall flat. And Cicero is probably playing with a recognized vocabulary for statues. Does he choose simulacrum ironically, because the prostitute’s memorial will become a consecrated cult statue? Is this also the reason for the use of signum? Or is it simply to serve his pun, whereby the signum-statue of Liberty (the goddess) is a signum-sign of liberty? In any case, these games are facilitated by the recognition of a basic type of art, manipulated through language.

depictions of statues The question of definition does not end with language. The ambiguities of statue-vocabulary illustrate the uncertainty of calling a statue anything—of identifying and classifying it once and for all. It is not my intention to recreate a single ancient definition of the statue, but rather to deal with some ancient expectations and their expression. The following discussions in this chapter and the next move beyond the foundation of language to examine abstract ideas of what a statue is or should be (with some concentration on the idea of lifelikeness), before turning to diYcult cases: exceptions, aberrations, novelties, and archaisms, which are no less important in determining what is normal. Together these diVerent perspectives contribute to an image of the statue in Roman thought, as well as outlining the ambiguity of that image. The choice of examples for scrutiny is naturally rather arbitrary, but these cases are, I would suggest, symptomatic of broader traits in Roman culture, and they will serve to introduce certain themes which will re-emerge in subsequent chapters. How, then, might we apprehend ‘an image of the statue’ in Roman culture? If we wished to identify general Roman assumptions about statues, that is to say, the unintellectualized preconceptions of certain groups or individuals, we should have to catch them unawares. If this is sometimes possible, it is harder to be sure that the ancient evidence is as innocent as it might seem. What has been labelled the ‘popular’ view of art in the ancient world represents a broad array of attitudes the precise nature of whose ‘popularity’ is ill-defined, and whose ‘non-intellectual quality’ would be hard to prove and characterize further.56 So no such claims are 56

J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History and Terminology (New Haven and London 1974) 63–6 attaches these attitudes to ‘the average man’; he is criticized by Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’, 8–9.

36 defining statues made for the examples that follow. They illustrate, if not the Roman view of the typical statue, at least some Roman views of the typified statue. As we shall see, they often address the tension between life and lifelessness in sculptures that are notionally meant to map the dimensions and colours of the whole human body. Before returning to a variety of literary testimonies, I wish to focus briefly on a particular kind of statuary representation that will deserve a prominent place in subsequent chapters, namely the visual representation of statues in other works of art. In these cases iconography provides a ‘language of statuary’ quite separate from the vocabulary examined above, but no less valuable for gauging Roman attitudes and (quite literally) unspoken assumptions. It is in art above all that the ambiguous status of statues as images in the round becomes obvious. Inasmuch as they are representations they can never be real. But inasmuch as they are representations of the full human body (or something else from the external world), they are seldom viewed simply as material objects, but serve to reify the image to which they refer. The particular place of a given statue in a certain context, between the poles of realism and lifelessness, is always negotiable. Waxworks provide a better contemporary illustration than sculpture proper.57 Waxworks are supposed to astound by their likeness, which could never be achieved through more conventional sculptural media. Moreover, they are generally represented as being astonishing. It is normal for the subject to pose for publicity photographs next to his or her doppelga¨nger when it is first unveiled. There is, indeed, a tradition of representing waxworks (and other sculptures) in interaction with living people: the barriers are broken down by physical contact, homogeneity of clothing, and by the removal of pedestals, podiums, and cordons. The mode of portrayal in these cases is comic.58 Conversely, pedestals, cordons, flesh colour, clothing and adornment, and the ‘statuesque’ poses of figures can be used in illustrations to set waxworks or any sculptures apart from normal life, and to emphasize the fact that they are statues.59 The same diVerence in presentation may be applied to the eYgies 57 That conventional distinction did not apply to the same extent in antiquity; again, simulacrum, signum, eYgies and especially imago may be applied to various kinds of eYgy. Cf. the variety of lifeless objects that are involved in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and called signa (1.403–15, 3.419, 5.183); also Statius, Silvae 4.6.21 for the ‘locuturas mentito corpore ceras’ (‘waxes on the verge of speech with a fictive body’) together with artworks in other media. 58 See e.g. the engravings of 1787 and 1847 (Cruikshank) in A. Leslie and P. Chapman, Madame Tussaud: Waxworker Extraordinary (London 1978) ill. between pp. 40 and 41, and 152–3. Cf. Daumier’s satirical Pygmalion: E. H. Gombrich Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 5th edn. (London 1977) 81, fig. 63. 59 A Madame Tussaud’s advertising campaign in London (1999–2000) emphasized the material of the waxworks by depicting them in static poses, with reflections on the skin surface, etc.

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themselves. In Madame Tussaud’s, waxworks are presented both in illusionistic positions—as lifelike figures, part of the viewer’s own world—and also in the manner of sculptures on display, at least partly isolated from visitors. Post-medieval stone sculpture is not subject to this degree of ambiguity, largely because polychromy has been used only intermittently since the Middle Ages. Modern statues are pale and remote; they share the viewer’s world, but are rarely represented as truly illusionistic images. In museums we are used to the presentation of sculptures as lifeless artworks, out of reach or not to be touched. Consequently representations of statues in art play with the idea of lifelike characteristics to a much lesser extent than Roman representations, and waxworks oVer a closer analogy for portrayal of ancient statuary. Roman representations of statues in art, and more emphatically in literature, flirt with the illusion of life in sculpture. From Homer to Callistratus and beyond, the animation of lifeless material is the artist’s aim and the index of his mastery.60 The cliche´s and topoi that present the work of art as more or less alive are discussed in detail by R. L. Gordon. As he suggests: The metaphors are utterly self-conscious: but they all, in diVerent measure, gamble with the impermissible. They at once assert and deny that statues or painted figures are alive. ‘Living’ is broken down into its denotations: breath, sight, feelings, movement, skinsheen, facial expression. So far as one or two of these denotations may be taken as ‘suYcient’ evidence of ‘life’, the images live. But the whole inventory is never present, and the attempt to pass into the realm of the impermissible always fails.61

The various ‘denotations of life’ are invoked in both literary and artistic portrayals of statues. Yet there is a fundamental diVerence between these two forms of representation. A literary account may inform us, explicitly, or perhaps implicitly with references to signs of life, that a statue is outstandingly realistic. We may be told of the sculptor’s prowess or the artefact’s ability to deceive. In these cases we have no direct encounter with the statue. Its illusionistic eVect or lifelike features are conveyed to us by the author. Artistic representations of statues are more immediate. We are presented with the image of the statue and must respond to it ourselves: we are not presented with ‘an inventory’ of vital signs, but an instant vision. The consequence of this autopsy is that the artist depicting a statue must always make a statement—make a choice—about how lifelike it should appear, whereas the writer need not address the question at all. This does not make visual representations more honest, and in fact we shall repeatedly encounter the iconographical markers used to make statements about 60 The topos of the statue on the verge of life is addressed only selectively here as it has been well documented by others: see e.g. A. F. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (New Haven and London 1990) 73–5; N. J. Spivey, ‘Bionic Statues’, in A. Powell (ed.), The Greek World (London 1995). 61 Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’, 10.

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the character of statues depicted. Nor need they be less self-conscious. Nevertheless, the examples that follow, rather than making an overt rhetorical declaration about virtuoso sculpture, give the impression (or illusion) of betraying common assumptions about what statues are. In diVerent circumstances diVerent characteristics are emphasized. Illusionism, in its broadest sense, is to be found in Roman wall-painting of all four ‘Pompeian styles’. Some authors have implied that this is synonymous with illusion,62 but there is little that might be considered true, determined trompel’oeil and in some contexts the idea of deception is absurd.63 In terms of social function, Wallace-Hadrill prefers to consider illusionistic painting as evocative decoration: allusion (to grander settings) rather than illusion.64 Yet clearly verisimilitude is the defining feature of the frescoes, and this is most obvious in some of the common garden paintings which serve as painted extensions to real gardens. Plants receive a backdrop of illusionistic vegetation, often crowded with birds; the threshold between the real garden and its two-dimensional counterpart is usually marked by a painting of a fence. The sculptures of the true garden or peristyle are reflected in illusionistic paintings with urns, fountains, sphinxes, and more rarely, statues in human form. The House of the Venus Marina in Pompeii contains one of the more famous of these paintings.65 At the base of the south wall of the garden is a painting of the customary illusionistic lattice fence, and above this three panels are separated by vertical yellow bands. The left and right panels contain typical garden scenes with vegetation and birds. The central panel, from which the house takes its name, represents Venus rising from the sea, reclining in a giant shell and accompanied by two cupids. A statue of Mars (Fig. 4) is represented as if standing in front of the left panel, and a fountain basin appears on the right in the same way. Both stand on pedestals. In this case the wall looks flat: there are no recesses in the fence to give an impression of depth; but the sculptures create the illusory third dimension by means of their position, the angle of representation (as if seen 62

N. H. L. Ramage and A. Ramage, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Roman Art (Cambridge 1991) 61; W. F. Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius, i (New York 1979) 55. 63 e.g. light-wells painted as gardens (Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, i. 59–62) or the mystery frieze from the Villa of the Mysteries which is raised on a socle. 64 A. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton 1994) 25–6. Gombrich addresses the subject more generally, using, amongst others, the examples of gas candelabras and artificial electric coal-fires: E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, 2nd edn. (Oxford 1984) 173–5. 65 Pompeii II.3.3 (also known as the Casa della Venere in Conchiglia): PPM iii, 112–72, esp. 133–44; Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, i. 63–6, figs. 102–6; W. F. Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius, ii (New York 1993) 330–1; Moormann, Pittura, 159–60, cat. no. 178.

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Fig. 4. Lifelike elements are combined with consciously statuesque characteristics in a number of fictive sculptures in Pompeian paintings. (Mural painting of a statue of Mars. From the House of the Venus Marina, Pompeii II.3.3; c. 60s/70s ad.)

from the inside and above), and the use of highlights and shadows. The figure of Mars is predominantly white: an indication of the supposed material—evidently marble. He stands with his weight on his right leg; he holds a spear in his right hand and there is a foreshortened shield over his left arm. He is naked

40

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but for a red cloak that hangs down his back, and he wears a helmet with a feather crest. It is impossible to know how the painter set about this work and precisely what his aim was, yet we can at least observe that even the illusionism of this Mars ‘statue’ is not what it seems. Whatever the ultimate intention of such works was, the figure must be supposed to look like a real garden statue. And so it does. As in most Roman depictions of statues the pedestal identifies its nature. The painter is able to emphasize this further by mimicking the material of the sculpture with a pale pigment. The features of the face are coloured, and inevitably resemble the features of ‘living’ humans in wall-paintings. The faces of real statues were also painted (traces of pigment frequently survive, especially on the eyes). But the artist goes further than that. The helmet-plume is un-statuesque and organic, and there are no further features to distinguish the figure from a representation of a living person. Jashemski considers the statue to be stiV.66 But in fact the figure’s pose is not that of a marble statue, for besides the contrapposto (which actually oVsets any impression of rigidity) the body seems to tilt to its right, more than would be feasible for a statue in stone. And there is another interesting element, important but very easy to overlook: the absence of any struts or prop which would be necessary to support such a sculpture in reality. There are many less striking examples of this approach: sculpture, figurative and non-figurative as well, which seems to have been constructed with a general idea in mind rather than a clear impression of how the object would really appear (in a broad sense this might be seen as the hallmark of the third and fourth styles in Roman painting).67 The wispy realistic hair of the herms depicted in the House of the Wedding of Alexander is particularly strange (Fig. 5).68 Likewise the six illusionistic ‘pilaster’-herms of satyrs and maenads that survive in the House of the Cryptoporticus.69 Rooted to the painted architecture and inescapably statuesque because they have stone shafts in place of legs, they are nevertheless enlivened by their coloration and by the delicacy of the implements that they hold. Moormann notes this tendency to confuse the realistic and the lifelike, and sees it as an expression of a Hellenistic concept of artistic realism. Be that as it may, the painter is referring beyond the supposed subject of his work, to the living figure represented by the sculpture itself.70 66

Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, i. 63. This applies to the representation of objects other than just the sculptures discussed here, e.g. fountains on stalks in Pompeii VII.6.28 (Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, ii. 362–3, no. 77, fig. 427: destroyed in World War II); see also Moormann, Pittura, 44. 68 Pompeii VI.17[insula occid.].42 (also known as the Casa del Bracciale d’Oro): PPM vi, 44–145, esp. 117–28; Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, ii. 348–56, no. 60, figs. 405–20. 69 Pompeii I.6.2; PPM i, 254–69; Moormann, Pittura, 143–4, no. 148/1. 70 Many similar cases are to be found in Pompeii; Moormann, Pittura, provides the best source. Note particularly ibid. 162–3, no. 185/2 (PPM iii, 564–73), from the House of the Epigrams (Pompeii V.1.18). 67

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Fig. 5. Detail from illusionistic wallpainting. (From north wall of oecus 32, House of the Wedding of Alexander, Pompeii VI.17 (insula occidentalis).42. Herm of a satyr supporting painted panel. Mid-first century ad. Total H of wall: 3.8 m.)

Whatever motivated the artists who produced these things, the products encapsulate the statue’s shifting position, as a mere object that is usually accepted to be more than a mere object on account of its reference to the human form. The context may determine how a particular artist deals with this ambiguity. So, in a type of painting which evidently promotes virtuoso naturalism, the impulse to imitate nature almost eliminates the sculpture that is its actual subject.71

71

Perhaps something rather similar to this elision does occur in one literary text: an ekphrasis of the Elder Philostratus’ in Imagines 2.1. This is the description of a painting in which a statue of Venus is depicted. It is readily acknowledged as a statue until the painter’s illusionistic skills are praised and the image of a sculpture is treated as an image of the goddess herself: ‘the goddess does not want to seem painted, but she stands out as though one could seize her’.

42 defining statues

proverbs and impossible things To some extent proverbs and proverbial expressions represent a verbal equivalent to the visual cliche´s discussed above, for they too rely on what is notionally a shared assumption about what sort of thing statues are. Proverbs embody attitudes to statues that are apparently taken for granted. Proverbs are presented as the distillation of experience. Their gnomic qualities are recognized without question, because otherwise they would not be proverbs. There is no need to explain or qualify. There is no need to express surprise either at the eVectiveness of mimesis or at the gullibility of those who are aVected. Aristotle was the first writer whom we know to have listed proverbs or paroimiai.72 A number of collections were compiled in the Hellenistic period, no longer only for philosophical purposes, but for the use of other writers. In the Roman Empire they provided embellishments for rhetoricians and there were recompilations in this period.73 Elements of these have come down to us in the form of the Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum (the origin of which is largely Hadrianic). Naturally we also have recurring proverbial expressions from literary texts, from which a series of stereotypically statuesque characteristics soon emerges.74 Relevant expressions among the Corpus include the following: ’ i t^ ’ usomEn.75 on adusop Zton: ‘OB t o, ’Andri anti prEsbE Na^ uB i‘ kEtE uEi pEtraB· Ep

(A ship supplicates the rocks: applied to the obstinate/not to be put out of face. Similarly: we shall send ambassadors to a statue.) ’Andri ’ i t^ ’ on anaisy Zton.76 aB sfur ZlatoB· Ep

(A beaten-metal statue: applied to the senseless.) ’Andri ’ i b ’ Zr Ep ’ i kal^ aB mEn Ep asEoB, spouda^ioB dE an ZB proairEsEoB ’ oB, amEtak ’ ’ ilEi E^i’ nai· Sokr Est inZtoB ofE atouB.77

(A statue on a base and a good man with a righteous purpose should both be immovable. By Socrates.) The Corpus includes lists of so-called adynata or ‘impossible things’ attributed to Plutarch, such as ’Andri anta gargalizEiB78 (‘you tickle a statue’). Finally in 72

According to Diogenes Laertius 5.26: see also RE xviii.4, 1707–78 (entry by K. Rupprecht). RE xviii.4, 1707–78 (K. Rupprecht). 74 E. L. Leutsch and F. G. Schneidewin, Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, i, repr. (Hildesheim 1958); E. L. Leutsch, Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, ii, repr. (Hildesheim 1958). J. F. Boissonade, ANEKDOTA: Anecdota Graeca e Codicibus Regiis, repr. of 1829 edn., i (Hildesheim 1962) 394–8 for edition of the adynata. See also A. Otto, Die Sprichwo¨rter und sprichwo¨rtlichen Redensarten der Ro¨mer (Hildesheim 1962) 310, 331. 75 Leutsch and Schneidewin Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, i. 282. 76 77 Ibid. i. 383. Leutsch, Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, ii. 287. 78 Leutsch and Scheidewin, Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, i. 347 no. 45. 73

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Greek and Latin literature we find, for instance: ‘statua taciturnius’ (‘more silent than a statue’); ‘infantes statuae’ (‘speechless statues’); ‘in conlocutionibus sta’ a’ ndri ’ bo ulomai tuae’ (‘statues in conversations’); E’ g o g ar l aloB, ouk aB E^inai 79 (‘I want to be talkative, not a statue’). These expressions forcefully deny the very ‘denotations of life’ mentioned by Gordon. You cannot appeal to a statue: it is insensate. Wrought images have no feelings. They are motionless. They are unresponsive (‘tickle’—gargalizein— suggests successful tickling). Statues are also especially renowned for reticence.80 At first sight such proverbial expressions appear to establish a normal and normative world, for no doubt or ambiguity is admitted. Lords are drunk; judges are sober; bats are blind; pancakes are flat. If none of these statements is indisputable, at least they are presented as ideas taken for granted. Lists of proverbs create a canon of truism. And yet the aphorisms are not so simple. The ‘Impossible Things’, for example, often represent reason gone wrong rather than total absence of reason. They refer to the milking of birds, the plucking of eggs, the transportation of water in a sieve, the combing of clouds.81 It is true: you cannot milk a bird. But you can milk other familiar animals. You cannot pluck an egg, but you can pluck what produces it and emerges from it. You cannot carry water in a sieve, but you can do in a sieve-shaped bowl. You cannot comb the clouds, but they look like wool, which is combed. In the same way, you cannot tickle a statue, but you can tickle humans whom statues resemble and represent. The likeness of a statue to a living person, and more importantly perhaps the idea that a statue is intended to stand in for people, gives rise to the fantasy that the statue might do human things. To enshrine in maxims the fact that this manifestly cannot happen is also to admit the fantasy and the temptation to believe it. And in a world where people listened to sacred statues speaking and chained them to prevent them from moving, the fantasy, and its denial, are not as abstract as they may at first seem.82 79 Horace, Epistulae 2.2.83; Horace, Sermones 2.5.40; Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae 5.7.4; Lucian, Vitarum Auctio 3. For full discussion of the first Horace quotation see C. O. Brink Horace on Poetry: Epistles Book II (Cambridge 1982) 313–14. 80 Cf. the middle Latin statualis (dumb): Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, vi. 588. Stones are more commonly used in this sense: Brink, Horace on Poetry: Epistles Book II, 313; R. Tosi, Dizionario delle sentenze latine e greche: 10,000 citazioni dall’antichita` al Rinascimento nell’originale e in traduzione, con commento storico, letterario e filologico, 5th edn. (Milan 1991) 190–1, no. 413. See also Steiner, Images, 136–84 (esp. 136–45 on adynata, immobility, etc.). 81 Leutsch and Scheidewin, Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, i. 347, nos. 38 and 40; 348, nos. 50 and 51. 82 On such responses to statues see e.g. F. Poulsen, ‘Talking, Weeping and Bleeding Sculptures: A Chapter of the History of Religious Fraud’, AArch 16 (1945) 178–95; C. A. Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (New York and Oxford 1992), esp. 74–93 on binding; also D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago 1989) 74–6.

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conclusion What all such representations of statues imply, whether in words or images, is that the tension between life and art is ever-present. The question of where to locate the statue—how to define it—recurred in important aspects of Roman life, as we shall see, and one way or another it was apt to present itself whenever statues were represented or discussed. The material examined here shows how the diVerent options for answering it were implicated with one another, at least in two particular forms of representation. A more general observation about illusionism is due in parenthesis. The famous fantasies of the living statue, such as Pygmalion’s bride and the hapless man who tried to make love to Cnidian Aphrodite, are largely omitted from this discussion.83 They have been much discussed since antiquity. But it is worth stating one caveat that applies to the study of all such cases. We should not overestimate the degree to which the naturalism of statues themselves gives rise to the fantasy of animation, nor underestimate the beholder’s imaginative power to animate. The artist’s ability to transform lifeless material—what Gombrich calls ‘Pygmalion’s power’—has always held a fascination. The topos is, as Gross and Freedberg both show, one of the most enduring in Western culture.84 But even in the mythology of art’s achievements this power is limited: it is the miracle of Venus that transforms Pygmalion’s sculpture into flesh. Cnidia’s closet lover fails in his desire and dies in frustration. At the same time, though Pliny’s account of clandestine sex with the inanimate cult statue is well known, less familiar is his mention of the senator Passienus, who similarly carried on a liaison with a tree near Tusculum.85 These comments are a footnote to the discussion of illusionism in Roman art. But they also have a more immediate relevance for this book. First, aniconic objects sometimes served the same functions as mimetic representations, most notably in cult. Much of the response to those images is therefore independent of any clearly defined impression of lifelike qualities in the artefact. We shall return to that issue shortly.86 Second, other kinds of mimetic image, most obviously portrait busts, can be treated in much the same way as full statues. Although statues per se are the focus of this book, many of the practices and responses examined in the following chapters have a more general application. While the attention that Roman sources themselves pay to statues as such 83

Pygmalion: Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243 V.; J. Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the Real: Ovid’s Pygmalion as Viewer’, Ramus 20 (1991) 154–68. Cnidia: Lucian, Imagines 4; Pseudo-Lucian, Amores 16; Pliny NH 36.21; Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 4 (51P) pp. 130–3 in Loeb edn. 84 K. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY 1992); Freedberg, The Power of Images. 85 Pliny, NH 16.242. 86 The clearest discussion is Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’: detailed references in Ch. 2.

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justifies the particular focus of this study, it is worth commenting on the character of statues as opposed to other images, and specifically the relationship of busts or portrait-heads and full-figure representations. Chapter 2 therefore addresses these further aspects of the statue’s definition: the composition of the statue and the relationship of head and body; and ancient perceptions of artefacts that depart from the norm of mimetic representation or carefully elaborated, refined sculpture. These are some of the areas in which the definition of the statue becomes blurred, yet it is simultaneously strengthened by the identification of aberrant cases.

two

The Appearance of Statues

There are, no doubt, good psychological reasons why the head should have received individual attention in most artistic traditions, but from one perspective it is strange that the representation of people should so often have been achieved by this kind of visual synecdoche.1 It has sometimes been suggested that the concentration on the head in ancient portraiture—an emphasis inherited by modern Western art—was a particularly Roman or Italian characteristic, whereas the Greek artistic tradition made use of the entire human body for the representation of the individual.2 Less eVort is now devoted to identifying the distinctive characteristics of Roman art in this manner, and as Richter acknowledges, isolated heads, and speciWcally the ‘bust form’, are products of the Greek world. Portrait busts or heads are attested in the Hellenistic period, though we tend to associate them with Rome.3 Nevertheless, it is clear that portrait heads have a specially prominent place not only amidst extant Roman sculpture but in the conceptions of individual identity expressed in Roman literary sources. The Wrst part of this chapter is mainly concerned with Roman portrait statues, and it has two aims: Wrst, to illustrate just how the head and face have a privileged role in Roman portraiture, constituting in a sense a detachable element of the statue; second, to show that while the portrait body that turns a head into a statue may not be essential, and the two elements should not be viewed in quite the same way, head and body could be conceived as performing complementary roles in the presentation of the portrait subject.4 We shall come to see 1 On facial perception and communication see e.g. V. Bruce and A. Young, In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face Perception (Oxford 1998). 2 e.g. G. M. A. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks (London 1965) i. 3: ‘The Greek artist studied the personality of the ‘sitter’’ not only in the features, but in the stance, the gestures, and the drapery.’ Cf. related observations in e.g. R. Brilliant, Gesture and Rank in Roman Art: The Use of Gestures to Denote Status in Roman Sculpture and Coinage (New Haven 1963) 10, 26–31; J. D. Breckenridge, Likeness: A Conceptual History of Portraiture (Evanston, Ill. 1968) 10; J. Frel, Roman Portraits in the Getty Museum (Tulsa, Okla. 1981) 8–9; and P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley 1995) 10–11 on the reduction of Greek portraits to Roman herms. 3 G. M. A. Richter, ‘The Origin of the Bust Form for Portraits’, in Charisterion Orlandos i. 59–62. 4 See e.g. S. Nodelman, ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’, in E. D’Ambra (ed.), Roman Art in Context: An Anthology (Englewood CliVs, NJ 1993) 10–26, at 15–16.

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how literary references to statues in general are shaped by a series of premises about how these objects should be constructed, how they should appear, and what kind of representation they should oVer. But Roman portraits themselves are more immediately instructive.

heads and bodies The vast quantity of portrait busts or heads surviving from Roman antiquity and attested in written sources is ample evidence that the face could stand as a suYcient marker of an individual’s identity. But even as part of a full statue it often looks like an autonomous adjunct to the body. In practical terms, ancient statues were more often than not composed from separate pieces and marble portrait heads were literally slotted into neck sockets, as both surviving torsoes and heads with their frustrum-shaped bosses illustrate. The enormous range of Roman portrait heads in stone was also tailored to a relatively small range of body-types.5 There is usually nothing about the body or pose that speciWes the identity of the portrait subject in anything other than generic terms: it is the head which is, so to speak, tailor-made, just as the portrait faces on ‘massproduced’ sarcophagi were often left to be Wlled in later.6 This is, to a large degree, true of other periods of portraiture—portraits have so often served to place the subject in a generally recognized social role—and it is certainly true of Hellenistic and late Republican portrait statues. But in the Principate the repertoire of body-types was all the more repetitive, not only in iconography, but also in more subtle reWnements such as contrapposto or drapery folds. To describe the principles behind this sort of portraiture Richard Brilliant has coined the term, ‘the appendage aesthetic’. In a statue such as the ‘Barberini Togatus’ (Fig. 6), the speciWc identity of the subject, established by the particularized features of the original head, has been conceived as a symbolic addendum without regard to the integrity of the body. It would seem, therefore, that the sculptor had created the head as the principal visual clue for the purposes of identiWcation, set into a well-orchestrated environment similar in conception, if not in intent, to the scenic Xats with cut-outs for faces, popular among resort photographers early in the twentieth century. Indeed, the many headless togate statues that survive from antiquity are analogous to stage-sets without actors, even more when the sunken hole between the shoulders was prepared by a sculptor’s workshop, in advance, to receive a head (and an identity) carved and inserted by the master portraitist.7 5

Cf. observation in Frel, Roman Portraits in the Getty Museum, 8. Cf. J. Huskinson, ‘ ‘ UnWnished Portrait Heads’’ on Later Roman Sarcophagi: Some New Perspectives’, PBSR ns 53 (1998) 129–58 (focusing on problems of interpretation, with review of bibliography). 7 R. Brilliant, Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine (London 1974) 166–8. 6

48 the appearance of statues Fig. 6. Although the ancient head of the ‘Barberini togatus’ is not the original one, the statue illustrates Brilliant’s notion of the ‘appendage aesthetic’. (Marble statue of a man with family portraits. From Italy; c. late-Wrst century bc. Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, Braccio Nuovo 2392. H: 1.65 m.)

There are obvious economic advantages to this sort of production, or indeed to the reduction of Greek portrait statues to herms.8 But it also reXects, or helped perhaps to create, a general attitude to portrait statues and their symbol8

Zanker, The Mask of Socrates, (n. 2) 9–14 on the aesthetics and practicalities.

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ism. The body that supported the portrait-head, providing it with a necessary ‘podium’ in public contexts and rendering the honour of a portrait more conspicuous, was integrated in a system of symbolism separate from that of the head, its identiWable features and its physiognomy.9 That is most clearly demonstrated by ‘divinizing’ statues: portrait statues that represented an individual with the body of a god or goddess. The Jupiter-portraits of Claudius and the Venus-portraits of Roman women are well-known examples which have sometimes seemed preposterous to modern commentators. In these cases the necks and bodies are harmoniously joined but the realistic, individualistic features of the face—hair, wrinkles, protruding muscles and bone-structure—seem to clash with the smooth features or highly developed musculature of Idealplastik—idealized Hellenic classicism—as well as the poses and the iconography of gods. So we see Claudius in an over-life-size statue from Lanuvium, semi-nude, in the guise of Jupiter, left arm raised to hold a sceptre, right hand extended to hold a patera (Fig. 7). An eagle supporting his right leg conWrms the divine allusion. A similar statue was found at Olympia (belonging to the Metroon there), which suggests a common archetype. The same phenomenon can be seen with two other statues of the emperor: a half-draped standing Wgure in bronze from Herculaneum and a seated Wgure from a dynastic group at Cerveteri, though in these cases the association with Jupiter is less explicit.10 The incongruity of middle-aged features attached to a divinized body, especially inappropriate for the image of Claudius, leads Ramage and Ramage to wonder ‘whether the artist was making fun of an emperor who supposedly dribbled and was quite incoherent’. For Brilliant, ‘the transWguration of bandy-legged, middle-aged Claudius into Jupiter can only be seen as an elaborate put-on, legitimized by the fact that he was emperor and hence like Jupiter all-powerful. Only because his position and the imagery developed for the role coincided, was it possible to create such a portrait and cast old Claudius in it, knowing that the mechanisms for public acceptance existed, and Claudius-Jupiter would not appear incongruous’.11 Neither of these viewpoints is necessarily wrong (as the mockery of the DeiWed Claudius in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis should remind us) but the assumptions they

9

On portraiture as a semiotic system see Nodelman, ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’. Lanuvium: Vatican, Sala Rotonda, inv. 243; see G. Lippold, Die Skulpturen des Vaticanischen Museums (Berlin 1956) iii/1, 137–40, no. 550, pls. 40–2; W. Helbig, Fu¨hrer durch die ¨oVentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertu¨mer in Rom, 4th edn. by H. Speier, i. (Tu¨bingen 1963) 37–8, no. 45. The arms and some smaller features are restored. Olympia: G. Treu, Die Bildwerke von Olympia in Stein und Thon (Berlin 1897) 244–5, pl. 60.1; D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven and London 1992) 133, Wg. 107. Generally on these statues of Claudius (and for details of other examples): ibid. 129–35, Wgs. 106–9. 11 N. H. L. Ramage and A. Ramage, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Roman Art (Cambridge 1991) 111; Brilliant, Roman Art, 174. 10

50 the appearance of statues Fig. 7. The combination of middle-aged facial features with a divine body appears preposterous to modern viewers, but the ancient acceptance of such imagery requires explanation. (Marble statue of Claudius as Jupiter (the arms and various details are restored). From Lanuvium; c. ad 42/ 3. Vatican, Sala Rotonda, 243. H: 2.54 m.)

represent are potentially anachronistic, and even if we admit the possibility that contemporaries laughed at Claudius’ divine images, we also need to acknowledge that they could not have been inherently laughable on Roman terms, especially given the popularity of this kind of mixed representation from Repub-

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lican times onwards:12 in other words we have to understand how such seemingly incongruous statues could be deemed acceptable. Clearly this is impossible if the entire statue is conceived as using the same kind of representation—if it is a single naturalistic rendering of the whole person. It is this approach that leads us to see Claudius-Jupiter as an incongruous composition; if we maintained it we should have to accept that the statue was always necessarily a travesty in the eyes of a Roman viewer. Ramage and Ramage imply that the statue’s success depends upon the failure of the artist’s joke (or else the ancient spectator’s failure to appreciate the accidental humour of the juxtaposition). Brilliant’s more positive solution assumes that the statue, as a sort of text, employs two separate languages: the language of iconic representation that produces individualized portrait features, and the symbolic language of the body with its divine iconography (and the idealized physique is part of that iconography). A loose idea of overall verisimilitude remains, and determines the composition of the Wgure. But the success of the image is dependent on the separate conception of head and body, and the refusal to take their juxtaposition literally. We may, however, assume that the potential for mockery remains, since the whole Wgure can be interpreted as a naturalistic portrayal. The same principles apply to the Venus-portraits that Wrst appear, as far as we know, in the Flavian period.13 The nude body of a Venus is used as a prop for a more or less realistic head. As with male equivalents, the divine torso generally conforms to a recognizable statue-type of the deity. The Venus-types are arguably more various and more distinctive than those of other gods, and they were certainly familiar and widespread, though they may not have evoked speciWc archetypes; in the absence of other attributes, the familiar nudity implied a connection with Venus. Such statues were always or nearly always used for funerary monuments. They were employed by the Roman nobility, but seem to have enjoyed particular popularity among freedwomen in the second century.14 With these statues we have the same problem of incongruity, as is particularly clear in the Lago Albano Venus-portrait (Fig. 8).15 Here a naked 12

Cf. H. G. Niemeyer, Studien zur statuarischen Darstellung der ro¨mischen Kaiser (Berlin 1968) 54–64, on idealizing imperial portrait statues. 13 For a discussion of the deity-portrait in general see H. Wrede, Consecratio in formam deorum: vergo¨ttlichte Privatpersonen in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein 1981); for a list of private Venusportraits see H. Wrede, ‘Das Mausoleum der Claudia Semne und die bu¨rgerliche Plastik der Kaiserzeit’, RM 78 (1971) 125–66, at 157–63. For interpretation of Venus-portraits see: Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 177–9, 280–3; E. D’Ambra, ‘The Cult of Virtues and the Funerary Relief of Ulpia Epigone’, in E. D’Ambra, Roman Art in Context, 104–14; eadem, ‘The Calculus of Venus: Nude Portraits of Roman Matrons’, in N. B. Kampen (ed.), Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (Cambridge 1996) 219–32. 14 Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 281–3. 15 Wrede, Consecratio, 306–8, no. 292; D’Ambra (n. 13: Calculus) esp. 223–6, Wgs. 92 and 94 ( 231, n. 23 for further bibliography). IdentiWcations have been attempted (e.g. Marcia Furnilla in Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 177–9).

52 the appearance of statues Fig. 8. An explanation for the divinizing naked portraits of matrons has to be sought in the separate conception of head and body. (Marble statue of a Roman woman as Venus. Found near Lago Albano, allegedly at the ‘Villa of the Flavii’; c. ad 90. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 711. H. 1.83 m without plinth.)

body of the Venus Pudica (Capitoline Venus) type, accompanied by a Cupid whose feet alone remain, supported the head of a Roman matron. Her face is individualized (wide mouth, creases beneath eyes and above mouth, the shape of the nose) and her hair is arranged in the spongiform drilled curls typical of

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53

portraits in the late Flavian to Trajanic periods. This individual is neither very young nor rendered more youthful by smooth and regular classical forms. The apparent incongruity of head and body is heightened by the nudity of the Wgure which seems to imply at least immodesty, and possibly open sexuality. Though the Pudica pose has always been used ostensibly to suggest modesty,16 such statues appear quite inappropriate, especially given their context. Thus Ramage and Ramage, discussing the similar Porta San Sebastiano Venus-portrait (Fig. 3), Wnd it diYcult to overcome their surprise, and so assume that the modern aesthetic response must have prevailed among Romans also: ‘The notion of making a portrait of a wealthy woman, standing naked, having just come from the hairdresser, seems completely incomprehensible to modern taste; and indeed was not so common in antiquity either.’17 Once again, they may be right to imply ancient distaste for this form of portraiture (though in fact there is no reason to believe that its use was rare); we have little evidence of responses to such portraits, and the potential for subversive response is a matter for speculation. But we must assume a non-subversive response which accounts for the invention of these portraits, their widespread use and their longevity. This must surely be based on the separability of head and torso which permits the association of a particular person with a highly symbolic, universalized body. More recent research by Eve D’Ambra, partly reliant on ancient physiognomics, has started to show just how that symbolism may have worked.18 D’Ambra’s approach to the combination of head and body is similar to Brilliant’s, but she uses a diVerent metaphor, originally conceived by Larissa Bonfante.19 Rather than scenic Xats, the exposed Venus-bodies are referred to as ‘costumes’. This accords well with at least one ancient reference to a ‘divinized’ portrait statue, the Cupid-portrait of Germanicus’ son ‘in the attitude/apparel/ guise of Cupid’ (‘eYgiem in habitu Cupidinis’) which was adored by Augustus in his bedroom and later dedicated by Livia on the Capitol.20 The diVerent qualities of the statue head and body make visual deiWcation of this sort particularly easy. It is through the distinctive features of the face, regardless of whether they form an accurate likeness, that Roman art expresses personal identity. The body is then used to convey further information about the individual’s social persona. Gods, on the other hand, are more obviously identiWed not by the facial features, but by the more distinctive attributes associated with the rest of the body (although the iconography does involve the face as well,

16 17 18 19 20

Cf. perhaps Statius, Silvae 5.1.232— ‘ a Venus innocent in this stone’. Ramage and Ramage, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Roman Art, 134. D’Ambra, ‘The Calculus of Venus’. L. Bonfante, ‘Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art’, AJA 93 (1989) 543–70. Suetonius, Gaius 7

54 the appearance of statues most obviously in the disposition of facial hair).21 Consequently statues declare a dual identity where the signiWcance of the portrait head or face alone is limited. The ancient sources that mention this kind of ‘divine’ portrait usually stress appearance over actual identity: there is usually no confusion of statue and god, as there could be with cult images; these are images of ‘x as the god’.22 Yet such a confusion could arise in connection with imperial portraits. And this fact was exploited. Gaius, for example, is said (truthfully or not) to have wanted Phidias’ cult statue (agalma) of Olympian Zeus removed to Rome, and his portrait ’ features (E‘ auto^u E^idoB/‘[caput] suum’) imposed upon it.23 Besides the alleged megalomania of tyrants, there were many other cases of the reappropriation of statue-bodies by the substitution of portrait heads. For example, an equestrian statue by Lysippus was moved to Caesar’s Forum and the rider was given Caesar’s features, ‘Caesaris ora’. Under Tiberius a man was killed for removing the head from a statue of Augustus in order to replace it with another’s face. Numerous instances of this kind are listed in Blanck’s study of statuary reuse.24 The practice should be viewed alongside that easier procedure whereby only the inscription was changed (or added)—an indication perhaps of how little representational accuracy might really matter.25 It should be noted, however, that the Greek verb used by Dio Chrysostom for the transformation of statues in this fashion is metarrhuthmizein (to change the form or rhythmos of the Wgure) which implies that in spite of the changeable head, the form of the statue is seen as a unity.26 The activities associated with damnatio memoriae fall into the same category: that formal assault on an individual’s identity sometimes involved the placement of, say, the new emperor’s head on the body of the old, or the recutting of the old head to bear the successor’s portrait features.27 This subject is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8; it is enough here to cite one particularly striking and 21 The Carmina Priapea 9, 20, and 36 give a good impression of this perception of divine iconography, as Priapus compares his own identifying feature with those of the Olympians. 22 e.g. Suetonius, Gaius 7; Statius, Silvae 5.1.231–3 (though the two following lines employ the conceit that the deities themselves receive the deceased individuals’ features). 23 Suetonius, Gaius 22.2 and 57; Dio 59.28.2–3. 24 Caesar: Statius, Silvae 1.1.84–5; Pliny, NH 8.155; Suetonius, Divus Iulius 61. Tiberius: Suetonius, Tiberius 58. H. Blanck, Wiederverwendung alter Statuen als Ehrendenkma¨ler bei Griechen und Ro¨mern (Rome 1969). 25 See Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 31 (the Rhodian Oration); Pausanias 1.2.4; 1.18.3; 2.9.8; 2.17.3; Cicero, Ad Atticum 6.1.26; cf. similar image in Pliny, NH 35.4–5. Blanck, Wiederverwendung, 26–7, 65–94. 26 Dio 59.28.3. 27 Speed and economy were no doubt motives for this practice. It is often very diYcult today to detect the original form behind the recut head. J. Pollini, ‘Damnatio Memoriae in Stone: Two Portraits of Nero Recut to Vespasian in American Museums’, AJA 88 (1984) 547–55 suggests that the recutting itself was symbolically important, and F. Felten, ‘Ro¨mische Machthaber und hellenistische Herrscher: Beru¨hrungen ¨ AI 56 (1985), Beiblatt 110–54, illustrates this with clearer examples. und Umdeutungen’, JO

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well known example, the Cancelleria Reliefs in Rome; in Frieze A at least the head of Domitian has been recut, here as Nerva (Fig. 9).28 It is on the basis of this kind of evidence that Brilliant and others have conceived the ‘appendage aesthetic’. It does not only apply to heads and torsos: the Prima Porta statue of Augustus shows how a classical model (the Doryphoros by Polyclitus) could be manipulated with new gestures, the addition of a cuirass, and other trappings.29 But the partial autonomy of head and body is most notable in Roman portrait statues. A number of ancient authors quite incidentally exemplify or build upon the aesthetic assumptions that accompanied the creation of such works of art, but their testimony has been largely neglected in art-historical studies. Clearest of all in these ancient sources is the speciWc association of the head or face with the personal identity. We might predict this from the common use of the word caput to refer to a person’s life.30 The display of Cicero’s head and hands on the Roman Rostra was intended as a direct assault on the orator’s deWning attributes.31 Juvenal’s account of the damnatio memoriae of Sejanus dwells most graphically on the disintegration of the face, and when his bronze statue is melted down (10.62–4): ardet adoratum populo caput et crepat ingens Seianus, deinde ex facie toto orbe secunda Wunt urceoli, pelves, sartago, matellae.

Fig. 9. The reworking of sculptural portraits is a striking feature of damnatio memoriae. (‘Relief A’ of the marble Cancelleria reliefs. Domitian with head replaced by that of Nerva. Found in Rome near Cancelleria Apostolica; 90s ad. Vatican, Cortile delle Corazze, 13389–13391. W: 5.08 m.) 28 F. Magi, I rilievi Xavi del Palazzo della Cancelleria (Rome 1945); Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 191–2, Wgs. 158–9. 29 30 See R. Brilliant, Roman Art, 10. OLD 274, nos. 4, 7, and 8; cf. no. 5. 31 Plutarch, Cicero 48.4–49.1.

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The head burns that the people so adored and mighty Sejanus crackles! Then out of that face which was second in all the world are made pitchers, basins, a pan, and chamber-pots.

In Virgil’s Aeneid the beheaded corpse of Priam has lost its identity (2.557–8): iacet litore truncus avolsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus A torso lies on the shore, and a head wrenched from its shoulders, and a body without a name.

If all this material strengthens the impression of the head—or rather the body—as a separable element of the portrait, then other texts hint at the uniWed character of the whole statue and the complementarity of its components. In fact the statue’s appendages provide a topic for legal debate in the Digests of Justinian. Paul the jurist (c. early third century) examines the knotty problem of vindicatio (an action to claim property): in this case, essentially, can ‘A’ sue for possession of his object when something belonging to ‘B’ has been added to it.32 The question has diYcult hypothetical ramiWcations, as when, for instance, another person paints a panel that one owns, perhaps thereby creating a valuable work of art: as owner of the original board can one claim possession of the whole?33 However, the jurist’s main example concerns the integrity of the statue. (This is not an everyday problem, but belongs to a long tradition of using statues in theoretical debates from controversiae to discourses on kingship;34 we shall encounter further examples). If ‘A’ Wxes an arm or leg belonging to ‘B’ to a statue he himself owns, can he claim possession of the whole? The conclusion is that the composite statue becomes a single object and remains with ‘A’: ‘non posse dici bracchium tuum esse, quia tota statua uno spiritu continetur’ (‘it cannot be said that the arm is yours [B’s] because the whole statue is embodied in the one substance’). Another jurist, Cassius (Wrst century ad), makes an exception for appendages that are soldered rather than welded, since fusion of two pieces in the same material does not occur, but evidently the hypothetical problem and its solution are supported respectively by the realization that a statue’s components are separable and by a notion of the art-work’s unity.35 Yet another revealing comment appears in a letter by the Younger Pliny (2.5.11). Pliny has sent passages from a speech to his friend Lupercus, and 32

33 Digesta 6.1.23.2–6. Digesta 6.1.23.3. e.g. Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 10.2; and for Plutarch’s exemplary use of statues see J. Mossman, ‘Plutarch’s Use of Statues’, in M. Flower and M. Toher (eds.), Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell (London 1991) 98–119. For statues in the philosophical tradition see C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry: The ‘Ars Poetica’ (Cambridge 1971); note also e.g. Seneca, Epistulae 58 and 65. 35 Digesta 6.1.23.5. There are other examples as well: a handle or base attached to a bowl, a Wgure attached to a candelabra, a leg attached to a table. But for most of the discussion the jurist perseveres with the less mundane illustration. 34

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requests critical comment. He admits the submission of these extracts is not ideal, but he compares them to published books of such extracts, circulated because some passages are deemed complete in themselves. He uses another analogy: etenim, si avulsum statuae caput aut membrum aliquod inspiceres, non tu quidem ex illo posses congruentiam aequalitatemque deprendere, posses tamen iudicare, an id ipsum satis elegans esset. If you were to look at the detached head or some member of a statue, you would not be able to grasp its coherence or harmony with the rest, but you could still judge whether it was suYciently well formed in itself.

Again, the detachability of the Roman statue head is taken for granted, yet so is the superiority (in this case the aesthetic superiority) of the head that retains its proper place in the context of a full statue. If Pliny’s ‘books of extracts’ are like anthologies, then his statue-heads are reminiscent of galleries of herms, representing, in essence, the great literary and other Wgures of the past as a sort of sculptural anthology for the cultured Roman patron, yet in scaled-down form.36 Perhaps the most graphic expression of Roman assumptions about the integrity or disunity of the statue is to be found in the most unexpected of places: Varro’s contribution to an ancient philological controversy. This was the debate over analogia and anomalia in language—a Hellenistic legacy with Classical precedents.37 Analogists believed that there were rules underlying the inXection of words and that verbs could be conjugated and nouns declined according to regular patterns (broadly speaking the attitude that determines most modern methods of teaching Latin and Greek). The anomalists pointed to manifest irregularities as evidence that words had their own separate development, independent of each other. Anomalists emphasized the importance of usage, while many analogists employed their posited regular patterns as rules for how language should be used. In the passage that concerns us (De Lingua Latina 9.79), Varro is presenting the analogists’ perspective and he is anxious to show that the apparently irregular nominatives singular of what we would call third-declension nouns cannot be used to disprove analogia. These exceptional forms of the noun, he claims, do not show that these words have no analogia ( ¼ regularity), but that the nominative (caput) cannot be predicted from the analogia of the oblique cases; in other words, only the nominative case is irregular. Thus in theory, if we extend the pattern observed in the various cases, the nominative singular of 36 The term ‘avulsum caput’ is notably violent, and recalls the fate of statues after damnatio memoriae. Cf. also Virgil, Aeneid 2.558, cited above: ‘avolsum umeris caput’. 37 For summary see OCD 81. J. Collart, ‘Analogie et anomalie’, in Varron (Entretiens Hardt 9) (Geneva, 1963) 117–40 (including discussion) for a re-evaluation of Varro’s contribution.

58 the appearance of statues the word homo should be homen, the name Hercules should be Hercul, and so on.38 That this is not so does not undermine the fact that a pattern in other cases is evident. The Latin terminology is already highly suggestive: caput (‘head’) referring to the nominative singular; analogia—a word for resemblance— to denote regularity. Varro then explicitly likens the morphology of a thirddeclension noun to that of a portrait statue (9.79): Non, ut si in Alexandri statua imposueris caput Philippi, membra conveniant ad rationem, sic et Alexandri membrorum simulacro caput quod respondeat item sit? Is it not the case that just as if you place Philip’s head on a statue of Alexander, and the limbs conform to ratio, likewise if you put the head that belongs to it on the image of Alexander’s limbs it is just the same?

This diYcult and convoluted sentence seems to mean that whichever portrait head you Wt on the body, the limbs and torso will still conform to a regular pattern (ratio). Similarly, whichever form of nominative occurs, the other cases can still be declined, with predictably variable endings on the same stem. In the previous section (9.78), the same comparison is used to explain that regularity exists in the noun even when a particular case has fallen from use: ‘ut signa quae non habent caput aut aliquam aliam partem’ (‘like statues which lack a head or some other part’).39 This passage is not obviously a deliberate aesthetic judgement on Roman sculpture, yet it represents certain aesthetic premises; we should remember that most of our knowledge of Roman art criticism comes from such parallels in rhetorical or linguistic writings.40 Varro assumes that the changing of heads and other appendages is a commonplace image and that the head is largely independent of the standard body, though presumably there are limits to adaptation: the head of Alexander cannot be replaced by a cabbage or some other object, any more than Hercules can be the nominative singular form of hominis), and it is also signiWcant that the exchange of heads on his Wgurative statue involves close relatives! Particularly signiWcant is the manifest premise that identity is established by the head, even if the headless body is vaguely associated 38 ‘Non haec ostendunt nomina non analogian esse, sed obliquos casus non habere caput ex sua analogia’ (‘these nouns do not show that analogia does not exist, but that the oblique cases do not have a head according to their kind of analogia’). 39 In 9.78–9 statues are called statua and signa, and the particular examples may suggest that the author has portrait statues and statues as art-works, respectively, in mind; yet it is interesting to note that the words are eVectively used as synonyms. Simulacrum in 9.79 refers not to the statue as an object, but generally to the ‘simulacrum membrorum’— the image of Alexander’s limbs. 40 See e.g. Zanker, Augustus 239–63, or T. Ho¨lscher, Ro¨mische Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg 1987) esp. 54–60, on style. For rhetoric and art criticism see J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History and Terminology (New Haven 1974) 58–63. Varro uses the example of famous artists (in defence of innovation) earlier in this book: 9.12,18. Note also 7.1 and 9.108

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with an individual. The portrait-head is likened to the nominative case—the nominativus—the term being derived from the Latin for ‘name’— nomen. Again, the nominative singular is also referred to as the ‘head’ of the word. But besides these symptoms of Brilliant’s ‘appendage aesthetic’, the comparison reinforces an idea of the coherence of the portrait statue and the mutual dependence of its parts.41

monsters Of course, ideas of analogia and proportio, notions of how statues might or should be composed, varied greatly. For example, some writers of the Roman period are concerned with a much more explicit concept of harmony, proportion, and symmetria (‘commensurability’) in sculpture.42 In Lucian’s Imagines the narrator and his companion conjure up a fantasy statue of Panthea, the mistress of Lucius Verus, which is modelled on aspects of work by famous classical sculptors. The conception of a patchwork portrait recalls the ‘appendage aesthetic’ (though here we must remember that the self-conscious dialogue is more concerned with rhetoric than with art). Ultimately, however, Panthea’s composite portrait is no Frankenstein creation: in contrast to Varro’s statue, the beauty of this portrait depends on a harmonious blend of elements: suntiyenai ‘ ozein oB ‘ a’n eu’ ruym ‘ ma t kai arm otata dunaito, ful atton a o summigeB e’ ke^ino kai poikilon (‘to combine and join them as harmoniously as he can, retaining at the same time that mixture, and variety’).43 In Lucian’s Zeuxis (6) the discerning viewer who admires the famous painter’s novel representation of a family of ‘ centaurs is able to observe the skill with which Z‘ m^ijiB de kai Z‘ armogZ Z t^ on som aton (‘the blending and harmony of the bodies’) is achieved. In other words, there is a degree of artistic skill that can even create a uniWed Wgure out of naturally incompatible parts. In the contemporary works of Galen, the perfect body is repeatedly likened to the Canon of Polyclitus. It is characterized by the perfection of all proportions down to the smallest detail. This is symmetria, and it is likened to the correct

41

For more discussion of analogia etc. see especially Quintilian 1.6.1–4; cf. 5.11.34. Quintilian incidentally highlights the art-historical application of the term by discussing it not just as a system of proportions but also as one kind of likeness (hence ‘analogy’). Cf. Koortbojian on the importance of the analogical principle in the interpretation of mythological sarcophagus reliefs: M. Koortbojian, Myth, Meaning, and Memory on Roman Sarcophagi (Berkeley 1995) esp. 3–9; 3–4, n. 5 for further bibliography on analogy in the broad sense. 42 Pollitt’s translation skilfully conveys both the sense and the vagueness of the word symmetria: The Ancient View of Greek Art, 256–8. 43 Lucian, Imagines 5.

60 the appearance of statues mixture (krasis) of elements in the body which is the foundation of health.44 In De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 5.566, Galen quotes Chrysippus, who sees correct proportion as the basis of beauty, just as krasis is related to health. A more detailed discussion of the endlessly debatable Canon would be inappropriate here. But it is worth noting for the emphasis it places on the combination of all parts into a coherent and commensurable whole. This is not a principle that is readily applicable to realistic portrait-sculpture, and it is clear that symmetria applies to unindividualized, classical ‘ideal-sculpture’. The Polyclitan Wgure is perfect, but in real life it is never matched.45 Real people are compared with the ideal statue, but are usually found wanting (De Optima Constitutione 4.744). In the evolution of sculpture that emerges from the writings of Cicero and Quintilian, the ‘high classical’ style represented by the Canon is the culmination of artistic development; successors are inferior because they depict men as they are.46 Though the Roman portrait statue with its separately conceived head and body was not unprecedented, and for all we know the sorts of assumption described earlier existed in Hellenistic Greece, the ideal of symmetria contained in these sources surely represents a rather diVerent, and earlier, idea of what statues should be. That is a distinction belied by the terminology, applied as it is equally to the composition of both kinds of sculpture. Finally, the comments of Vitruvius stand out from the range of Roman premises and prejudices about the body’s proportions. Vitruvius’ architectural treatise discusses all the terms mentioned above,47 and in fact, the description of ideal human proportions in De Architectura 3.1.7 may be a reference to the Polyclitan Canon.48 At the same time, Pollitt argues that Vitruvius’ classical sources for architectural theory were possibly precedents for the Canon itself.49 His insistence on proper proportion (which can loosely be associated with representational likeness) partly accounts for his condemnation of the ‘candelabra style’ in contemporary wall-painting. This is characterized by ‘monstra’ or grotesques which lack ratio, rather than images copied from reality and ‘Wxed 44

Galen, Ars Medicina 1.342–3; De Temperamentis 1.565–6; De Usu Partium 4.351–3; De Optima Constitutione 4.744–5; De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 5.439–40, 566; De Sanitate 6.126; De Causis Pulsuum 9.92; De Semine 4.606; references are to Ku¨hn’s edition: Galen, Opera Omnia (Hildesheim 1965). For these and the other sources for the Canon see G. V. Leftwich, ‘Ancient Conceptions of the Body and the Canon of Polykleitos’, Ph.D. thesis (Princeton 1987) 80–96; see also id., ‘Polykleitos and Hippokratic Medicine’, in W. G. Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, The Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison, Wis. and London 1995) 38–51. 45 Except later by Byzantine emperors: Leftwich, ‘Ancient Conceptions of the Body’, 91–2. Lucian, De Morte Peregrini 9 calls someone a ‘canon of Polyclitus’, but ironically. 46 Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 81–4. 47 See esp. De Architectura 3.1.1. 48 Cf. references to Polyclitus in De Architectura 1.1.13; 3.praef.2. 49 J. J. Pollitt, ‘The Canon of Polykleitos and Other Canons’, in Moon, Polykleitos, 19–24.

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images from deWnite things’. His views are echoed in the Ars Poetica of Horace, which begins with an example of the violation of the rule, a painting with incompatible body-parts—a horse-man, a Wsh-woman—absurd to Horace, though instantly recognizable to us as a grotesque.50 Lucretius mentions similar monsters as purely hypothetical violations of the natural law (which he calls ‘certa ratio’).51 But in life as well as art the human form could breach proper aesthetic principles which are in turn exempliWed by admirable works of sculpture or painting. In his De Curiositate Plutarch contrasts the deformity of the ‘freaks’ displayed in the ‘market of monsters’ (teraton agora), and busy-bodies’ attraction to it, with the paintings and statues that provide a morally edifying spectacle in the city.52 This passage, as well as other evidence discussed by Robert Garland, suggests that the monster or deformed Wgure (teras, monstrum, portentum, or prodigium) was a cause of fascination, amusement, anxiety (in the case of omens), and indeed social prestige.53 But some, like Plutarch and Seneca54 disapproved, just as Vitruvius and Horace rejected the monstra of art. It would be interesting to know Vitruvius’ reaction to the Hellenistic sculptures of deformed bodies with ill-proportioned parts which were displayed in Roman properties. Some of these were marked by outsized phalluses,55 and we shall see how the ithyphallic god Priapus challenges artcritical expectations. It is worth brieXy considering three other monstra with particular art-historical relevance. The Wrst is the Emperor Claudius himself. For even if the divinizing statues of Claudius did not oVend Roman aesthetics, the real Claudius did, or such at least is the implication of ancient literature.56 According to Suetonius, Antonia used to call her son ‘a monster of a man, not Wnished by nature, but merely begun’: ‘portentum eum hominis dictitabat, nec absolutum a natura, sed tantum incohatum’.57 The translation does not reveal the fact that these are to some 50 Plato, Phaedrus 264c. Brink, Horace on Poetry: The ‘Ars Poetica’, esp. 81. Cf. Quintilian’s gloss on Horace (8.3.60). 51 Lucretius 2.700–10. In 5.837–44 (reXecting Empedocles) he accepts the past existence of deformed creatures which perished by a kind of natural selection. I owe the references to an unpublished paper by Gordon Campbell. 52 Plutarch, Moralia 520c. Compare again Lucian’s Zeuxis where the author regrets the acclaim he has acquired for mere ‘novelty’ (kainotes) just as Zeuxis’ skill in representing the unusual was overshadowed by the subject-matter itself. 53 R. Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World (London 1995) esp. 46–8 on deformed slaves and the ‘monster-market’. 54 Seneca, Epistulae 50.2. 55 ´ ros a` Pompe´i (Paris 1975) esp. 120–1, 131–8; cf. J. M. Padgett, ‘The Stable Hands of See e.g. M. Grant, E Dionysos: Satyrs and Donkeys as Symbols of Social Marginalization in Attic Vase Painting’, in B. Cohen (ed.), Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art (Leiden 2000) 43–70, at 46–8 with reference to Greek art. 56 57 Garland, The Eye of the Beholder, 50–2. Suetonius, Claudius 3.2.

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extent art-critical terms. So in Cicero, De Finibus 4.34: wisdom takes man ‘a natura inchoatum’ (‘only begun by nature’) just as ‘Phidias potest . . . signum . . . ab alio inchoatum accipere et absolvere’ (‘Phidias is able to take up and complete a statue begun by another’); and in Cicero, De OYciis 3.10, no painter could Wnish (absolveret) that part of the Coan Venus that Apelles left incomplete (inchoatam).58 It is all the more ironic, then, that the statues of Claudius as Jupiter were so very statuesque. Of course, whatever the nature of Claudius’ disabilities—and it is not entirely clear from the sources—he was evidently not the sort of visual monster that so oVended the aesthetics of Vitruvius and Horace. But shortly before they were writing such monsters had appeared among the emperor’s enemies. Augustan literature presents Cleopatra’s Egyptian, animal-headed gods as grotesques and monstra, as in Virgil, Aeneid 8.698–9: ‘omnigenumque deum monstra et latrator Anubis|contra Neptunum et Venerem contraque Minervam’ (‘the monstrous forms of the gods of every variety, and barking Anubis, against Neptune and Venus and against Minerva’). Similarly, in Horace’s ‘nunc est bibendum’ Ode (1.37.20–1), the emperor gives chase at Actium ‘daret ut catenis|fatale monstrum’ (‘that he might enchain the accursed monster’).59 Is this foreign iconography to be seen as a violation of certain Roman aesthetic principles? In any case such passages serve to distance Antony from Rome by association with his very alien (or alienated) Egyptian lover.60 There is perhaps a more general association of ‘good emperors’ with natural forms and ‘bad emperors’ with deformity. Garland sees all emperors as ‘patrons of human oddity’, but a certain rough pattern seems to emerge from the examples he cites. Those associated with monstra are: Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, Commodus, Domitian, Elagabalus—all of whose reputations are at least ambiguous, and mainly bad. Opposed to monstra are Augustus and Alexander Severus, both ‘good emperors’. One Wnal kind of aberration presents itself when we consider Roman attitudes to the body in art, and particularly the relationship of head and torso in sculpture. Herms were extremely common and popular in every period throughout the Roman Empire. The herm might be seen as a stunted statue.61 Were it just the head of a human or god on a stone pillar, it would be as acceptable, for 58

Cf. related references in Cicero, De Finibus 3.33; Pliny, NH 35.156; Quintilian 2.1.12. See also M. Malaise, Les Conditions de pe´ne´tration et de diVusion des cultes ´egyptiens en Italie (Leiden 1972) 244–51. 60 Cf. perhaps in Hellenistic art, the writhing, bestial and baroque giants on the Great Altar at Pergamon and some of their classicizing Olympian opponents: see A. F. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (New Haven and London 1990) 212. 61 See H. Wrede, Die Antike Herme (Mainz am Rhein 1985) for sources. Themistius, Orationes 26.316a–b counts herms as a variety of andrias. Compare, incidentally, the portrait herm of Rhoummas in the British Museum, carved out of a reused statue: an economic measure no doubt, but one that readily 59

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the Romans, as any other bust. But the genitals and arm-stumps carved on herms hint at the whole Wgure. These are truncated rather than half-formed statues. In painted representations of herms the withered arms are sometimes accentuated, and from the Wrst century bc, the upper arms are occasionally included in the real thing;62 on some herms and some representations of them the feet or legs are partially delineated.63 The erect phallus again may suggest a violation of normal proportions. The arm-stumps recall the ‘weasel-armed’ freaks that Plutarch mentions as attractions in the monster-market. Macrobius at least felt the need to explain the strange simulacra of Mercury/ Hermes, ‘quadrato statu . . . solo capite insignita et virilibus erectis’ (‘ ‘ standing four-square’’ . . . with only the head represented, and with genitals erect’). He did so in terms of cosmic symbolism.64 (It is signiWcant that he uses the word applied to what we would call cult statues, while ‘insignita’— ‘ marked with a characteristic identity’— hints at (and possibly helps to explain) the word signum: compare Dio Chrysostom’s use of the Greek ase¯mos, below). So herms might appear to be unusual statues, yet we Wnd no condemnation of them, no disapproval. They may fall on the boundary between statues and busts, but they do not obviously challenge Roman expectations or transgress the rules of composition, unless they are particularly poorly made herms, like those of Priapus (see below). Their antiquity, and more importantly the perception of their antiquity, is presumably the main reason for this. They were also particularly associated with Hermes, from whom they take their name, and with other deities represented in the same fashion. But there was, besides, a special virtue associated with their block-like form—their ‘quadratus status’. The works of Polyclitus himself are described by Pliny, following Varro, as ‘quadrata’ or ‘squarish’.65 What that means is less clear.66 The word is usually applied to herms or primitive sculptures resembling herms. Pliny says that Lysippus broke away from the tradition of ‘quadratae staturae’ with a new and untried ‘ratio’ (though he still cultivated symmetria).67 Quadratio seems to be associated both with ancient and venerable images and with the proportions of the Polyclitan presents itself: inv. GR 1948.10–19.1; D. E. L. Haynes and M. N. Tod, ‘An Inscribed Marble PortraitHerm in the British Museum’, JHS 73 (1963) 138–40; S. Walker, Memorials to the Roman Dead (London 1985) 61–2. 62

Wrede, Die Antike Herme 2. The herm being painted by a woman in a painting from the House of the Surgeon in Pompeii (VI.1.10) has fully developed arms: Naples, Museo Nazionale, inv. 9018; PPM vi. 75; N. B. Kampen, Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (Berlin 1981) 156, no. 51. 63 Wrede, Die Antike Herme 2. (Some female herms were also produced: ibid., 4.) 64 65 Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.19.14. Pliny, NH 34.56. 66 H. van Steuben, Der Kanon des Polyklet: Doryphoros und Amazone (Tu¨bingen 1973) 35–6; Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 263–9. 67 Pliny, NH 34.65. On application to herms etc. see M. J. Milne, review of E. Langlotz, Aphrodite in den Ga¨rten, in AJA 60 (1956), 201–5; Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 263–5.

64 the appearance of statues Canon—perhaps a certain ideal of relative rigidity in posture, admired because sanctiWed by tradition.68 If, however, the herm managed to remain respectable as a strange but traditional variant of the classical statue, there were still other classes of statuary which were recognizably exceptional, and which, by their manifest oddity, serve to clarify some further assumptions about the nature of statues.

primitive, alien, and aniconic statues The statues or representations of statues discussed so far have much in common. Certainly it matters whether one conceives of the statue has a homogeneous whole or as a composite of diVerent representations. It matters whether a particular human Wgure exempliWes or violates one’s expectations of how the Wgure should be composed. But as yet we have not considered those exceptional cases that challenge the deWnition of the normal statue, such as images so primitive, so outlandish or just so bad that they hardly qualify as proper representations at all. It must be stressed from the outset that little material evidence survives for the most ‘primitive’ or the most basic and unelaborated art in the Graeco-Roman world, so that literary representations are almost all there is to study. Many have been skilfully analysed by A. A. Donohue, who reminds us that such sources cannot be used as quarries for archaeological fact. Nevertheless, the very absence of other evidence permits unsubstantiated claims which appear to be more reliable than they are, simply because the impossibility of substantiating them is recognized.69 These assumptions thus evade higher critical standards. That is certainly the case with the supposed ‘rustic herms’ of Priapus examined in the following section. In Roman literature there are two histories of statuary. The Wrst is the one most familiar to us, handed down to us by Pliny above all, but dependent on Hellenistic art-historical writings. This is the story of development from archaic Greek sculpture to the naturalism of the classical and late classical periods, after which good art, or its development, stopped (‘cessavit deinde ars’: NH 34.52). The process might be traced back to Daedalus, a miraculous craftsman whose works, in some accounts, mimicked living human beings and took on a life of 68

For fuller discussion see J. Onians, Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome (New Haven 1999) 36–41. 69 R. L. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’, Art History 2 (1979) 5–34, at 12; Donohue, Xoana, esp. 1–8 and 177–94. For sources and discussion see also C. Clerc, Les the´ories relatives au culte des images chez les auteurs grecs du IIme sie`cle apre`s J.-C. (Paris 1915) 10–31.

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their own, though in fact Pliny’s ‘history of sculpture’ extends only to the eighth century bc.70 Certain writers recognize that the works of Daedalus would now (that is, in the classical period or later) look stiV and unconvincing.71 This more rational historical approach sees Daedalus’ contribution as a formal one: he is the Wrst artist to manipulate the limbs so as to create an illusion of life.72 Thereafter statues become less and less stiV, more and more lifelike, reaching a peak of perfection with the work of Phidias (as far as Quintilian and Cicero are concerned) or Lysippus (Pliny).73 This evolution is presented through lists of prominent artists, many of whom contribute some innovation or distinctive feature to Greek sculpture. Pliny’s version comes in the context of a discussion of metals and stones (as part of Nature’s bounty) and their use and abuse by mankind. The systematic chronology is therefore rather mixed up, but extended lists appear in NH 34.49–53 and 54–93 for bronze work (‘statuaria’), then 35.53–148 for painting, and 36.15–32 for sculpture in marble. The museographic information in these three books suggests that the stylistic development of Greek art can be traced in the monuments of Rome itself. Rome is thus the heir of this artistic tradition. However, Italy’s art history is not neglected, and similar observations are made about the development of native sculpture and painting through the centuries.74 Much of this parallel art history is based on observation of the old art-works of Rome. Once again, although Pliny’s chronology still informs discussions of early Roman sculpture, in some cases at least it is deWnitely very wrong, and these mistakes (assuming that they are ‘mistakes’ in the modern sense) are based on an association of the statue itself with the antiquity of the person represented.75 As Donohue shows, in none of the examples cited by Pliny, or in other authors’ incidental references to the history of art, is there any question of naturalistic Wgural sculpture being at any stage impossible.76 It is never invented. There is no ‘Wrst man to make a statue’. Pliny can conceive of ‘the origins of painting’ but consciously passes over the question.77 These are histories of details and reWnements, while the general characteristics of the statue are a given. 70 Pliny, NH 36.11. On Daedalus see e.g. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’, 8–9; Donohue, Xoana, 165–6. 71 72 Plato, Hippias Major 282a1; Pausanias 2.4.5. Themistius, Orationes 26.316a–b. 73 On these diVerent perspectives see Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 81–4. Perfection is not equated to realism, however, since Demetrius, for example, is criticized for going too far in this direction: Quintilian 12.10.9; cf. Lucian, Philopseudes 18–19. 74 Pliny, NH 34.15–16, 18–25, 27–34; 35.4–23, 115–21. 75 See T. Ho¨lscher, ‘Die Anfa¨nge ro¨mischer Repra¨sentationskunst’, RM 85 (1978) 315–57, at 327–37. 76 Donohue, Xoana, 197–8. 77 Pliny, NH 35.15. However on speciWc forms of craft/media see Pliny, NH 35.151–3 (Butades’ invention of terracotta modelling etc. and the invention of plaster-casting). Cf. Diodorus Siculus 5.55.1–3 on the Wrst people to make images of the gods.

66 the appearance of statues It is particularly surprising, perhaps, that Pliny does not deal especially with the primitive or aniconic since he is so much concerned with the manipulation of materials provided by nature (though the scope of his discussion is no doubt largely determined by his reliance on other texts). There is a missing link in the evolution of statuary, between the mining of the raw materials and the formation of the naturalistic image. This might seem to suggest that the subject of these artchronologies (namely, recognizable art) circumscribes the examples chosen. Only what is known to be art is included. Doubtful pre-Daedalic cases are omitted. However, the deWnition of proper statues is much less clear in a diVerent art-historical, or antiquarian, tradition which deals with the ‘missing link’ and the age before art. This comprises the texts concerned with primitive or barbarian cult and its objects. Aniconic cult images are linked to more recognizable classical statues by their function rather than their form. Aesthetics are initially irrelevant, for these simple holy objects are merely symbols of the gods. Apologists for idolatry, like Dio Chrysostom (in his twelfth, ‘Olympic’, discourse) or Maximus of Tyre, and Christian apologists denouncing pagan practices (notably Clement of Alexandria, Themistius, Eusebius), evoke the cult of the very ancient past to fuel their arguments.78 The theory was that primitive man (and that included contemporary barbarians) worshipped objects that took the place of the absent gods; these could be natural features, or aniconic images, barely the products of humanity. To the pagans this was proof that idolatry was a natural impulse, and that some substitute for divinity was necessary. Dio Chrysostom, for instance, writes (Orationes 12.61): ’ ’ ’rZ yEo ‘ stE kai polloi t^ uB Eponom azousi iai tEwnZB o o on barb aron pEniai tE kai apor 79 ’ ’ ’ ’ kai dEndra arg a kai as ZmouB liyouB, oudam^ Z o ikEi otEra t^ ZB morf^ ZB. i Consequently many of the barbarians, for lack of craftsmanship and diYculty with it, name mountains gods, and unworked trees, too, and shapeless stones, things which are by no means whatever more appropriate in shape than is the human form. (trans. Donohue)

For Christians, combining Jewish polemic and traditional classical, antiquarian speculation, this propensity for idolatry among primitives can be used as a kind of lowest common denominator of idol-worship; the evolution of idolatry is transformed (as Donohue puts it) ‘into a bleak and unappealing vision of an objectionable practice’.80 78

For a detailed discussion of the ‘evolutionary’ model of idolatry and the topoi associated with it, including numerous references, see Donohue, Xoana, 121–50. For Greek aniconism in general see also Steiner, Images, 80–9. 79 Note asemos is equivalent to ‘insignitus’— unworked, unmarked—as used by Macrobius, above. 80 Donohue, Xoana, 126–7.

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These authors, and others, present a picture of the development of statues in the very beginning, and with speciWc reference to their function within cult. It appears that there is little art-historical interest per se, though Dio Chrysostom’s main subject is the famous statue of Olympian Zeus by Phidias, and Clement loosely combines the two histories of sculpture, connecting its aniconic origins with the famous works of much later artists.81 It may seem that the geographically or chronologically distanced objects of cult among primitive peoples are of little relevance to contemporary Roman statues. Their nature is clear; it is taken for granted, as the Plinian art history shows. Yet those who write about primitive cult and aniconism deliberately confuse matters. They do not vaguely associate the primitive objects with modern statues: they frequently embrace them all with the term agalma.82 Maximus says (8.3) that a’ galm aton dE ou’ w Ei^‘ B n omoB, ou’ dE E^i‘ B tr opoB, ’ ’ ‘ oudE tEwnZ mia, oudE ulZ mia (‘agalmata have no one rule, nor one mode, nor one art, nor one material’). He goes on to say that the Greeks speciWcally use human form and ‘accurate art’ for their agalmata. Of course, we have seen how the word agalma had had a general use in the context of cult: one might say that agalmata—as pleasing adornments for the gods—are generally statues, but it does not have to be so. Besides, Clement says that the primitive, aniconic agalma of Samian Hera became an, apparently iconic, statue which was andriantoeides, ‘(mortal) statue-like’ or anthropomorphic.83 This seems to imply a distinction between cult statues and other forms of agalmata. Or does it merely imply that some statues—aniconic statues—do not look like statues? The matter is unclear. Then again, Pausanias diVers from other authors in contrasting ancient, unworked cult objects (stones) with agalmata.84 If the iconic/artistic and the aniconic agalmata were accepted as quite diVerent objects serving a similar purpose, why bother to contrast them directly? Yet Dio Chrysostom refers to dendra arga (unworked trees)—assuming that elaboration ’ i ’ ntoB ouw is the norm; Pausanias describes the Heracles at Hyettus as, o liyou dE a’ rgo^u kat a t o a’ rwa^ion (‘not an agalma with a’ g almatoB sun tEwnZ i art (techne¯), but an unworked stone, according to the ancient fashion (archaion)’);85 Maximus lists types of agalmata, some made with art (techne¯) and 81

Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 4.40P–41P. Maximus of Tyre 8.1–4; Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 4.40P–43P; Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 3.7.98d–99d. 83 Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 4.40P. 84 Pausanias 7.22.4. The ambiguity is increased by the fact that there is sometimes no sharp distinction to be made between the iconic and the aniconic artefact; Clement suggests that simple peoples used logs which were slightly worked, though not enough to give them human form (this is Clement’s explanation for the word xoanon—an object that is scraped: Protrepticus 4.40P). 85 Pausanias 9.24.3. 82

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others embraced through need (chreian);86 Callimachus, quoted by Plutarch, quoted by Eusebius, declares, in reference to the old agalma of Hera, ‘not yet the well carved work of Smilis, but according to the ancient custom, you were a plank not carved by chisels, for thus did they then set up the gods’ (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 3.8.1; Donohue’s translation).87 Arnobius says that this cult image was venerated ‘ante usum disciplinamque Wctorum . . . pro Iunone’ (‘in place of Juno . . . before the knowledge and discipline of artists’).88 These authors write of anti-art (or ante-art) rather than non-art, and some of their themes will reappear in the next section in a speciWcally Italian context.89 We might confuse matters further by citing the story of the Daedala festival at Plataea. For the purpose of reconciliation-through-laughter, we are told, Zeus dressed a tree-trunk as a bride, calling it Daedale: the festival re-enacts the scene, and the clothing turns an aniconic agalma into an iconic representation.90 On the basis of this evidence, and other similar Greek and Latin texts discussed by Donohue, we cannot determine a single view of the tradition of cult statuary or the origins of statues in general. The criteria for judging ancient or unusual statues are diverse, and, naturally, diVerent authors have divergent motives in characterizing cult statues in the Wrst place. Sometimes the combination of diVerent ideas creates odd paradoxes. Lucan, for example, describes a sacred Gallic grove, audaciously and sacrilegiously cut down by Caesar, in which, ‘simulacraque maesta deorum | arte carent caesisque extant informia truncis’ (‘the sombre simulacra of the gods lack art, and appear formless [made from] felled tree-trunks’).91 The word simulacra is used here because of its common application to statues used as cult images. These objects have that function, yet they are not images of anything but themselves, as ‘arte carent’ and ‘informia’ imply.92 Such inconsistencies need not matter when conWned to the upside-down world of barbarians, or to the very ancient, prehistoric past. But they are not always so marginal. Pausanias’ comments on ancient cult images are ostensibly based on the observation of the second-century Greek landscape. These apparent survivals from prehistory include completely aniconic images. In Roman Italy, as we shall see, such primitive images are presented as part of the present. 86

Maximus of Tyre 8.9. There is doubt as to how much of the Plutarch quotation is actually Eusebius: Donohue, Xoana, 134–5. 88 89 Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.11. Cf. Pausanias 1.36.2.; 2.9.6; 10.19.3; Tertullian, Apologia 16.5. 90 Pausanias 9.3.1–9; Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 3.1.85c–86b; Donohue, Xoana, 137–9. 91 Lucan, Bellum Civile 3.411–13. 92 Cf. the language applied to Priapus, below. While Lucan hardly oVers us an ethnographic document, partially worked logs matching his description survive from late iron-age Celtic Europe and illustrate the grey area between iconic and aniconic cult images: see e.g. S. Deyts, Les bois sculpte´s des sources de la Seine (Paris 1983). 87

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R. L. Gordon stresses that the ancient serialization of the two approaches to the representation of gods (iconic and aniconic), is pseudo-history. Pausanias’ failure to diVerentiate the two kinds of statue, in function or in any respect other than form, denies any conception of direct opposition, in spite of the comparisons or contrasts he and others occasionally make. Gordon sees the two types of image as diVerent options with corresponding advantages and disadvantages. The aniconic image is ‘utterly particular, non-generalizable and non-reproducible; the iconic image is ‘universal’, but it is restricted by the need to concentrate on one aspect of Greek (or classical) conceptions of divinity, namely, ‘that gods were (like) people’.93 Still, the dominance of one representational option, anthropomorphism, meant that even to ancient eyes aniconic ‘statues’ could appear as curiosities. When Tacitus recounts Titus’ visit to the sanctuary of Paphian Venus, he pauses brieXy to describe the cult and the unusual form of the goddess’s image ‘which is not used elsewhere’. Besides other unique features of the temple and its cult, simulacrum deae non eYgie humana, continuus orbis latiore initio tenuem in ambitum metae modo exsurgens, sed ratio in obscuro. The statue of the goddess is not in human form, but it is circular, and it is broader at the base, rising to a small circumference at the top, like a turning-post. The reason, however, is obscure.94

Tacitus feels the need to point out that this is not an iconic image, especially as its function must qualify it as a kind of simulacrum. That is part of its strangeness, though it is apparently the particular form that makes it unique. The singular nature of non-anthropomorphic images could also be exploited for special eVects. The funerary monuments of Cyrene oVer a bizarre series of female statues dating between the Classical Period and the beginning of the Roman Empire. Their symbolism is uncertain; they are probably images of Demeter or another funerary deity. What is unusual is that, although naturalistic and conventional in most respects, they are distinguished by aprosopia: they lack sculptured faces, the front of the head being rendered as a smooth, convex plane, almost as if a post had been dressed up in clothes and a wig. Doubtless, these images were not shocking to regular viewers, but evidently they were originally conceived as a self-conscious and striking departure from the statuary norm.95 All these representations of statues and other cult images are revealing. It is with assumptions about the predominant signs of cult in the contemporary 93

Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’, 12–13. Tacitus, Historiae 2.2; 2.3 (see also Maximus 8.8). Ratio is a particularly appropriate choice of word, given the discussion above. 95 See L. Beschi, ‘Divinita` funerarie cirenaiche: storia delle ricerche’, ASAtene 47–8, ns 31–2 (1969–70), 133–341; extended discussion of aprosopia at 326–36. D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago 1989) 72 with Wg. 28. 94

70 the appearance of statues Graeco-Roman world that the authors address the strangeness of the past, or the peripheries of empire, or the cultural exceptions within the Empire itself. They provide no precise deWnition of cult statues, but rather doubts and ambiguities, and diVerences of opinion which together constitute the range of conceptions of statues in the Roman Empire. They show that one of the ‘deWning’ characteristics of a statue (certainly an essential characteristic as far as the English language is concerned), the representation of a person or creature in a more or less lifelike manner, is called into question by the social functions that they may share with superWcially very diVerent artefacts. And while likeness or anthropomorphism, as Gordon shows, are useful and eVective strategies for serving these functions, they do not account for the whole meaning or eVect of statues.96 This discussion has centred on images of gods for the obvious reason that portraits do not invite an aniconic approach to representation. But we might consider herms again at this point, which are common to divine and human representation, and which may be classiWed as statues (indeed Themistius likens herms to block-like pre-Daedalic sculpture in the same passage cited above in which he implicitly classes herms among andriantes).97 But more peculiar than herms is a class of object—not statues in any sense, but perhaps imagines—which defy expectations of portraiture in the most striking way. These are the aniconic cippi or ‘Stelen in Hermenform’ which appear in funerary contexts in Republican and early Imperial Campania.98 They are tufa, limestone or marble slabs surmounted by discs, which presumably represent the human head, since the backs have carved hair.99 The slabs often have concise funerary inscriptions that name the recipient. The aniconism is clearly deliberate, since it is not complete, and since the cippi are sometimes used for the highest class in local society (including a duovir, an aedile, and two priestesses).100 Most of these stelae were used to mark urn burials and a tube for pouring libations into the ground. Some are attached to grave architecture: there is a small building over the burial, or else the cippi Wll niches in the fac¸ade of a larger ediWce. The latter are especially striking, for some of the niches are occupied by aniconic cippi, while others contain more familiar portrait busts. The Porta Nocera necropolis at Pompeii, and especially the Tomb of the Flavii and the Tomb of Eumachia, provide vivid illustrations 96

For an innovative anthropological perspective on such issues see A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford 1998), esp. ch. 7. 97 Themistius, Orationes 26.316a–b. 98 For detailed discussion see V. Kockel, Die Grabbauten vor dem Herkulaner Tor in Pompeji (Mainz am Rhein 1983) 16–18; note also Un impegno per Pompei, 32–6. Coins from associated burials points to their appearance at least as early as the 2nd cent. bc. The origins are unknown, though wooden originals have been suggested: Kockel, (above, this note), 17. 99 One exceptional example from the tomb of the Vesonii in Pompeii has a bearded face carved on the reverse: Un impegno per Pompei, 36. 100 Kockel, Die Grabbauten, 17–18.

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(Fig. 10).101 This apparently casual mixture of forms suggests that, locally at least, they are not opposed. Nor are they either chronologically or socially distinguishable. Nor, in most cases, is the function obviously diVerent. At the same time, the partial anthropomorphism of the gravestones suggests an awareness of expectations—expectations of what a funerary sculpture ought, normally, to be. There seems to be an allusion to that more widespread form, but a decision not to accept it. We do not know what motivated that choice. A tradition going back to an aniconic past is highly unlikely given the degree of elaboration and the antiquity of iconic representation even among the lower social ranks.102 UnidentiWed religious scruples may be involved; it is just possible that the cippi could represent the ‘guardian spirit’— the iuno or genius of the deceased person.103 Whatever the background, the form and context of these peculiar

Fig. 10. In Campania aniconic images were juxtaposed with a variety of more conventional portraits on funerary edifices. (Stone portrait busts and ‘aniconic cippi’ on the tomb of the Flavii, Porta di Nocera necropolis, Pompeii.) 101

Cf. the Precinct of the Epidii (Fondo Azzolino): Kockel, Die Grabbauten, 18. Contrary to P. Pensabene, ‘Cippi funerari di Taranto’, RM 82 (1975) 263–97, esp. at 280–88. See also Kockel, Die Grabbauten, 18. 103 Distinguished by the gender-speciWc hairstyles. Two cippi are dedicated to iunones: CIL 10.1023 and 10.1009. Inscriptions in the dative may be connected with dedications to genius or iuno; see Kockel, 102

72 the appearance of statues monuments, like the images at Cyrene, seems to represent an awareness and exploitation of the paradox of aniconism in a mimetic world.

fine art and coarse art: the case of priapus Finally, we might expect ‘bad’ statues to oVer a useful illustration of what, to Roman eyes, a ‘good’ or successful statue should be. But generally speaking ancient writers are more reluctant than modern art historians to express opinions about quality in their sculpture. Certainly, we have encountered assumptions about the composition or character of statues, and declarations of taste and aesthetic preference. But the Roman artist’s technical ability is usually taken for granted. Only occasionally do we Wnd references to artistic failure in the production of statues, as when Arrian complains about statues of Hadrian and Hermes, and associated altars, at Trapezus on the Black Sea, criticizing their material and execution and the poor verisimilitude of the portrait.104 An exception is the literary representation of ‘primitive’ sculpture in contemporary Rome, which perhaps has something in common with the abnormal productions of barbarians or of primitive antiquity. The image of the aniconic art of a distant past was important for the representation of cult in the early Empire. In the Augustan period and earlier artistic and cultic simplicity could be associated with virtue and tradition. Greek art by famous names could be associated with the import of decadent, Hellenistic luxury—luxuria—which spoilt ‘Romana simplicitas’ and threatened the mos maiorum—ancestral customs—and which was, more to the point, implicated in the self-promotion of individual dynasts at the expense of republican stability.105 These notions were articulated in a language of refusal and rejection. When it suits them, Roman writers are happy to remain uncultivated and harsh—ferus: the word is sometimes used to describe barbarians, and to some extent it was convenient to present Romanness as something akin to barbarism or the crude civilization of a primitive past.106 Livy’s Cato laments the ridicule into which traditional terracotta anteWxes on Roman temples have fallen, while the artworks of Athens and Corinth are praised. In the text of his Verrine orations, Die Grabbauten, 17. On the signiWcance of blank or ‘unWnished’ portrait faces—surely not explained or excused by practical or economic factors alone—see J. Huskinson, ‘ ‘ UnWnished Portrait Heads’’ on Later Roman Sarcophagi: Some New Perspectives’, PBSR ns 53 (1998) 129–58 (134 on the cippi). 104

Arrian, Periplous Maris Euxini 1–2. Cf. Fronto’s comments on poor likenesses of Marcus Aurelius throughout the Empire: Ad M. Caesarem 4.12.4. Both authors have speciWc motives for their comments which are not concerned with art-criticism per se. 105 J. J. Pollitt, ‘The Impact of Greek Art on Rome’, TAPhA 108 (1978) 155–74; Zanker, Augustus; M. Crawford, The Roman Republic, 2nd edn. (London 1992) 81–4. 106 Since archaism has virtues and lacks corruption: e.g. Horace, Epistulae 2.1.156, cf. Odes 3.4.33.

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Cicero feigns ignorance (or pretends to feign ignorance) of Greek Wne art.107 Varro’s character Axius, in the dialogue De Re Rustica (3.2.5), proclaims that in his rustic villa there is no trace of a work by Lysippus or Antiphilus, but labourers and shepherds instead: that is to say, cultura in the sense of ‘cultivation’ rather than ‘culture’. The primitive or aniconic cult image has an important part to play in this construction of simplicity. Tibullus, for example, appeals to the Lares of his forefathers, relics of a better age: nec pudeat prisco vos esse e stipite factos: sic veteris sedes incoluistis avi. tunc melius tenuere Wdem, cum paupere cultu stabat in exigua ligneus aede deus. And do not be ashamed to be made of an old log: just so you protected my forefather’s estate. People kept better faith back then when, with a meagre cult, the wooden god stood in a little shrine.

Tibullus may not be an obvious Augustan propagandist, but the sentiment he conveys was certainly part of the Augustan ideology of Italian renewal. Zanker argues that the moral associations of antiquity were exploited in archaistic art of the period and that classicism also could connote such virtues as gravitas and auctoritas in opposition to Xorid Hellenism.108 In one way or another, the virtues of primitive simplicity were attached to all kinds of Roman cult. But Priapus above all, and Wgures associated with him, were presented in literature and art as icons of rustic simplicity.109 There are many sides to Priapus. He was the patron deity of Lampsacus, popular in Hellenistic Alexandria, introduced into Rome by the second century bc,110 but he remained, as far as we can tell, without any organized cult. The image of Priapus that concerns us here is that of a rustic and ridiculous god, impotent and earth-bound in spite of the violent, sexual threats he makes in the poems devoted to him (the Carmina Priapea (CP)) as he watches over orchards and gardens. 107

Livy 34.4.4; Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.4; 2.4.94. Zanker, Augustus, ch. 6, 239–63; cf. similar approach to style in Ho¨lscher, Ro¨mische Bildsprache. 109 For a more detailed discussion see P. C. N. Stewart, ‘Fine Art and Coarse Art: The Image of Roman Priapus’, Art History 20 (1997) 575–88. Generally on Priapus: H. Herter, De Priapo (Giessen 1932); A. Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor, rev. edn. (Oxford 1992). In artistic representations it is sometimes hard to be sure that an ithyphallic Wgure is supposed to be Priapus; in some cases the artist may only have had a vague identity in mind. But the image of rusticity presented here is most often attached speciWcally to Priapus. 110 E. M. O’Connor, Symbolum Salacitatis: A Study of the God Priapus as a Literary Character (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, and Paris 1989) 23–5; W. H. Parker, Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God (London and Sydney 1988) 11. 108

74 the appearance of statues This Wgure of Priapus is presented as inferior art. The god and his cult image are portrayed as one and the same thing. His substance is generally coarse, most often wooden. It is perishable, and, as we see from Martial’s Epigram 8.40, it is easily dispensible. It is generally assumed that the Roman countryside was genuinely full of such images, but it is impossible to prove this from polished literary or artistic representations. These cannot be used as documentary evidence for a real rustic cult. No coarse cult images survive, but we would not expect them to.111 More signiWcant, perhaps, is the shortage of inscriptions relating to the rural cult (or any cult) of Priapus;112 such inscriptions have been used in the study of another ‘unoYcial’ rustic cult—that of Silvanus.113 We can be fairly sure that herms were not a genuine rustic art form in Roman Italy, though herms of Priapus frequently appear in painted or sculptural landscapes.114 We do best to regard the image of the rustic Priapus as an invention by or for an educated and self-consciously sophisticated part of Roman society, just as the ancient cult images studied by Donohue are constructed by generations of Roman writers with their own far from objective concerns. Priapus’ rustic simplicity is carefully composed. He is a rusticated god, reminiscent of the sacro-idyllic landscapes in which he often features. (There signs of urban development, or their reverse, crumbling ruins, are combined with seemingly more authentic images of pastoralism and rural piety.) But these observations should not diminish the importance of Priapus or any other primitive or foreign statues as an antitype to the ideal, reWned classical statue. Priapus, in fact, is represented as the very antithesis of good art—as positively bad art, hardly art at all. Four main points are repeatedly emphasized in the poems relating to Priapus: Wrst, he is ludicrous and religiously inferior; second, he is ‘rude’ in belonging to the sphere of the obscene; third, he is badly crafted; and Wnally, he lies on the boundary between art and nature. In fact, all of these features are connected. The Priapus of classical art and verse undoubtedly serves the same function as any cult statue. He is merely a poor version. There is no doubt that he is a statue: made by an artisan, set up to represent a god iconically, the recipient of oVerings, sometimes expressly placed within a shrine; but the normal words for such a statue, like those discussed above, are replaced by the likes of lignum rude (coarse wood) or truncus (a log or trunk). So a paradox is immediately established. 111 There is an unpublished herm from the House of the Mosaic Atrium at Herculaneum, but it clearly belongs to an urban garden setting: Moormann, Pittura, 56 and 248, n. 334. 112 When inscriptions appear they do not seem to represent the simple piety of peasants, and some belong to the sophisticated world of the Carmina Priapea; however, that is not to belittle their religious character: e.g. CIL 11.3862. 113 P. F. Dorcey, The Cult of Silvanus: A Study in Roman Folk Religion (Leiden 1992). 114 On the general subject see Wrede, Die Antike Herme.

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Priapus himself declares that he is a ‘petty god of rural cult’.115 He makes selfdefeatingly ridiculous claims to equality by the comparison of his iconographical attribute (the phallus) with the attributes of the Olympian gods.116 Priapus’s obscenity may seem obvious, though Roman conceptions of the obscene cannot be taken as read and deserve the detailed study carried out by Amy Richlin. Priapus belongs to the sphere of the obscene.117 SigniWcantly, his obscenity is associated with his status as ‘low art’ in a way that suggests the modern double meaning of ‘rude’ and ‘coarse’. This is most clearly demonstrated by CP 10: Priapus ad puellam se quod ligneus esset irridentem Insulsissima quid puella rides? non me Praxiteles Scopasve fecit, non sum Phidiaca manu politus; sed lignum rude vilicus dolavit et dixit mihi: ‘tu Priapus esto!’ spectas me tamen et subinde rides? nimirum tibi salsa res videtur adstans inguinibus columne nostris. Priapus to a girl laughing at him because he was wooden: What are you laughing at, you daft girl? I was not made by Praxiteles or Scopas; I was not polished by the hand of Phidias. As coarse wood the farm-steward carved me, and he said to me: ‘Be Priapus!’ Yet you look at me and laugh? Truly you regard as a joke the column standing in my groin.)

This is Priapus’ refusal to be masterpiece of statuary, the product of a famous Greek sculptor. And the cause of the girl’s mockery is ambiguous. Although the last two lines suggest that the phallus is funny (and this is usual for Priapus), the previous lines and the Latin title make the primitive fabric and artistry of the statue the real reason for derision.118 What is coarse or rude in sexual terms— what belongs to the sphere of the obscene—is confused and associated with coarse or rude manufacture, with art that is not ‘polished’ or ‘e-rudite’.119 Obscenity is not to be connected with Wner art-works, and certainly not with names like Phidias—the most famous and the loftiest sculptor of all time.120 Consequently Priapus’ assertion in Martial’s Epigram 6.73 that he is not made by 115

CP 14.5–6; Cf. 37.5 and 53.5; also Fulgentius, Sermones Antiqui 11. CP 9, 20, 36. Cf. 1, 39, 75. It is also worth noting that there is relatively little typological variety in the artistic representation of Priapus: Herter, De Priapo, 20, 104–14; H. Blanck, ‘Il Marapara: Eine Priapstatue in Formello’, RM 86 (1979), 339–50. 117 For which see Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 1–31. 118 The title appears in the MS. Harleianus 2578. See Plato, Hippias Major 282a1 for a precedent for laughing at primitive sculpture. 119 The word politus mirrors ‘coarse’ in its connotations. It denotes the actual fabrication of a work of art, that involves polishing, but implies that which is culturally polished and also ‘polite’. 120 Quintilian 12.10.9; Pliny, NH 36.18–19; Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 196–8, 400–1. 116

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a ‘rude farmer’, that he does not look like wood, and that his phallus of everlasting cypress is ‘worthy of the hand of Phidias’, is ironic.121 For a moment our characterization of good and bad art is confused. But ultimately the boast proves absurd. The point is emphasized by the double-entendre: a phallus worthy of the hand of Phidias. The god refuses once again to be Wne art in Columella’s De Re Rustica 10.29–32, which is a plea for rustic simplicity in rural cult: neu tibi Daedaliae quaerantur munera dextrae, nec Polyclitea nec Phradmonis, aut Ageladae arte laboretur: sed truncum forte dolatum arboris antiquae numen venerare Priapi. Do not seek the gifts of Daedalus’ right hand, nor the product of Polyclitus’ or Phradmon’s or Ageladas’ art: but the trunk of an old tree that happens to be carved which you may venerate as the god Priapus.

A similar contrast occurs in artistic representations of Priapus, where the rustic statue, sometimes standing on a makeshift stone podium, is often juxtaposed with more elaborate, costly statues, as in one opus sectile panel in Pompeii (Fig. 11).122 This emphatic inferiority and deliberate exclusion from the patterns of artappreciation is, at times, closely linked to Priapus’ natural condition. In verse, he is usually wooden, and therefore close to being an aniconic trunk or branch. He is halfway between divinity and Wrewood, a trunk that just happens to be carved— ‘forte dolatus’. At the start of Horace’s Satire 1.8 Priapus says: Olim truncus eram Wculnus, inutile lignum cum faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum maluit esse deum. Once I was a Wg trunk, useless wood, and then a craftsman, unsure whether to make a stool or a Priapus, decided that I should be a god.

Little separates nature from art here, and only chance or whim determines that a god is created rather than a stool. One painting from the House of Julius Polybius in Pompeii shows a rural scene with Dionysiac elements.123 To the right of the picture there is a rugged wooden Priapus, and immediately next to him, a similarly gnarled tree in the same colour. Very little distinguishes the two. 121

Cf. Martial 6.49. Pompeii VII.4.31 and 51 (the House of the Coloured Capitals); Naples, Museo Nazionale, inv. 9979. For more detailed discussion of this and other artistic representations see Stewart, ‘Fine Art and Coarse Art’. 123 Pompeii IX.13.3; G. Cerulli Irelli (ed.), La pittura di Pompei: testimonianze dell’arte romana nella zona sepolta dal Vesuvio nel 79 d.c. (Milan 1991) pl. 101. 122

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Fig. 11. In some images the rustic Wgure of Priapus on a makeshift podium is contrasted with more elaborate and costly statuary. (Marble opus sectile panel. Dionysiac scene including image of Priapus. From the House of the Coloured Capitals, Pompeii VII.4.31–51. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 9979. H: 0.21 m.)

No Wgure in Roman art or literature is so expressly deWned as an outcast from the norms of cult, art, and culture. This Priapus is anti-art, and as such, he serves to elevate and underpin proper cult, proper statues, proper art. To do so he must be a clown. He must be legitimately laughable in a way that genuinely primitive and sober deities of the Roman countryside could not be.124 Pliny restrains himself from laughing at the rustic shrine of Clitumnus;125 the famous Cato, as we have seen, condemned the mockery of traditional, simple art. Ovid, in Ars Amatoria 3.113–28, shows up and exploits the problem that arose in the Augustan age through the tension between development and tradition. Rome left in brick could not pretend to be a great Hellenistic metropolis. Transformed to marble it embodied the sins associated with luxuria, the rape of nature and false cultus (Ovid uses this Rome as a simile for female adornment). Priapus stands as a reminder of the negative features of primitive rusticitas; he invites laughter as a relatively recent Greek import whose obscenity and inferiority were circumscribed. It may be that he was deliberately used in the early Empire as a foil to development, for it is to this period that all of the evidence examined here belongs.126 In any case, in the context of this study, the coarse Priapus is the expression of what normal cult statues are not. 124

Laughter is an important part of civilized self-deWnition: K. A. GeVken, Comedy in the Pro Caelio, Mnemosyne Supplement 30 (Leiden 1973); Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 57–80; Stewart, ‘Fine Art and Coarse Art’, on this aspect and for a more detailed discussion of Priapus’ role in early imperial Rome. 125 Pliny, Epistulae 8.8. J. A. North, ‘Religion and Rusticity’, in T. J. Cornell and K. Lomas (eds.), Urban Society in Roman Italy (London 1995) 135–50, at 136. 126 On the dating of the Carmina Priapea see Parker, Priapea, 36–7; Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 141–3. The image of Priapus examined here is not necessarily a Roman invention; the fabric or pettiness of Priapus is emphasized in some Hellenistic verse: Anthologia Graeca 9.437, 10.7, 8, 9. Similar precedents might be found in Hellenistic and, arguably, earlier Greek art (e.g. Parker, Priapea, pl. 3). But Roman

78 the appearance of statues

conclusion All of these sources, the art-works themselves and the diverse literary texts that involve statues, are symptomatic of Roman attitudes. The choice is not comprehensive, nor should we assume that either texts or artefacts represent a deliberate or explicit commentary on aesthetic values or art-critical ideals. But like the language and imagery of statuary examined in Chapter 1, they help to identify the shifting intellectual parameters within which statues of diVerent kinds were created and viewed. We have noted some Roman assumptions about what statues are, especially the dual symbolism that emerges from the incorporation of a portrait head within a more generalized statuary body. We have also seen how those elements complement each other, and how characteristics like iconic representation and lifelike naturalism, as well as skilful, sophisticated elaboration, are crystallized as ‘normal’ features of statues, partly perhaps because of their absence from recognizably exceptional cases. Some of these observations apply primarily to portrait statues, others to statues of deities; but such is the overlap in attitudes that I have so far avoided separating these diVerent kinds of sculpture. The following chapters will do that to a greater extent; but it will quickly become apparent that such distinctions are Xexible. We begin, in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, with the use and reception of portrait statues in Rome and further aWeld, and notably, with generalized Roman notions of the statue or statuesque characteristics per se, rather than responses to individual monuments or their subjects. evidence is clearer and has survived in abundance, and it is likely that the Roman Priapus was a new elaboration of old themes, perhaps to be associated with a ‘vogue for Priapus in the late Republic and early Empire’ (Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 143). Archaism in Augustan art (see Zanker, Augustus: note Priapus on 245) may have been an attempt to modernize the ancient, so avoiding a choice between innovation and tradition.

three

Portrait Statues and the Statuesque

There is no question that Romans conceived of the portrait as a true likeness.1 Of course, there are degrees of likeness, and Roman portraits were highly conventional, appealing to physiognomical assumptions, displaying symbolic markers of social persona or character, exploiting adherence to or departure from well-known precedents.2 But when ancient texts address the functions of portraits, it is physical resemblance to their subject that emerges as the underlying premise. So it is that portraits are often said to perpetuate the memory of the dead, make present those who are absent, or lend insight into the personalities of those who have never been seen.3 And like the human face, the realistic portrait was a conspicuous sign of individual identity. Some explanation is therefore due as to why none of these qualities is much addressed in this book. It should be clear already, from the juxtapositions of heads and bodies examined in Chapter 2, that the Roman portrait statue meant far more than a simple facial likeness. For a start, the very existence of a public statue was an important honour, so much so that (despite the labours of modern art historians) the head with its portrait features could even become something of an irrelevance. That disturbing fact is strikingly illustrated by the sporadic practice in the Greek eastern Mediterranean of rededicating old public, portrait statues to new (Roman) recipients, without executing any physical changes to the sculpture. Admittedly our best source is an indignant, condemnatory speech to the Rhodians by the orator Dio Chrysostom; but the practice is mentioned by others and the recycling of statues on Rhodes was not a unique aberration.4 Inappropriate though such cheap honours appeared to some ancient authors, it 1 Examples of this attitude are numerous, but note for example Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 2.7.7. ¨ hnlichkeit ’), 101–3. Some relevant references are discussed in Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, ch. 13 (‘A 2 See e.g. S. Nodelman, ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’, in E. D’Ambra, Context, 10–26. 3 For examples addressing such functions see the following: Statius, Silvae 3.3.201; Pliny the Elder, NH 34.17; CIL 6.1727; CIL 5.532; CIL 6.30106; Horace, Odes 4.8.13–14; Suetonius, Augustus 31.5; Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 4.9.105; Cicero, Ad Familiares 5.12.7, De Re Publica 6.8. The fullest explanation, encompassing most of these reasons, is in Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 2.7 (on the statua triumphalis of Vestricius Spurinna). 4 Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 31. Cf. Cicero, Ad Atticum 6.1.26; Plutarch, Antony 60; Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 37.40 (probably the work of Favorinus); Pausanias 2.17.3 (a statue of Orestes rededicated to Augustus); Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 134–6 (rededication of an honoriWc chariot).

80 portrait statues and the statuesque is highly signiWcant that they emerged, for it shows that the very idea of a public statue was an estimable honour, even when the object very obviously failed to do what portrait statues were ostensibly supposed to do. Similarly when the Elder Pliny complains about the decline of accurate portraiture and the carelessness with which portraits are used in Roman homes—they are merely trappings rather than authentic, cherished, ancestral memorials—he implies that there was an esteem for portrait images in general, divorced from their traditional commemorative function (NH 35.4–5): Imaginum quidem pictura, qua maxime similes in aevum propagabantur Wgurae, in totum exolevit. aerei ponuntur clipei argentea facie, surdo Wgurarum discrimine; statuarum capita permutantur, volgatis iam pridem salibus etiam carminum. adeo materiam conspici malunt omnes quam se nosci, et inter haec pinacothecas veteribus tabulis consuunt5 alienasque eYgies colunt, ipsi honorem non nisi in pretio ducentes, ut frangat heres forasque detrahat laqueo. itaque nullius eYgie vivente imagines pecuniae, non suas relinquunt. Indeed the painting of images, by which extremely accurate likenesses were passed on through the ages, has died out. Bronze shields are set up with silver images, the portraits only barely distinguishable from each other; the heads of statues are switched, about which sarcastic poems have even been common before now. That is how much everyone prefers their material to be seen rather than to be recognized themselves; and in the midst of these things they piece together picture-galleries with old paintings and devote themselves to the images of strangers, while as for themselves they hold that honour resides only in monetary value, so that their heir may break up the portrait and drag it outdoors with a noose!

Pliny’s rhetorical lamentations should not necessarily be taken to illustrate a decline in the portrait tradition in the Wrst century ad (and Flower argues for the continued preservation at least of revered ancestral masks throughout the Principate).6 But one chronological change is clear: in the later Roman Empire, although the idea of the portrait statue as a mimetic representation of an individual is perpetuated in literary texts, many images of emperors have become stereotyped to the extent that they are literally indistinguishable. The statue has messages to communicate other than the facial appearance of a particular subject. Above all, the language of honoriWc decrees and the iconography of full statues themselves reveals an elaborate codiWcation of statuary types, by which location, size, pose or mount, material, and attire, all say something about the status of the recipient. There are many instances of this hierarchical language 5 6

The reading of consuunt is not certain. H. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford 1996) 256–69.

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of statue-types, but it is well illustrated by the rather extreme case of the Wrst-century ad magistrate L. Volusius Saturninus.7 Saturninus had died in ad 56 at the age of 93, by which time he had been occupying the very highest political oYces for over Wfty years and under Wve emperors. His innocuous longevity perhaps made him a useful symbol of ‘republican’ political traditions.8 At any rate Nero requested for him extraordinary posthumous honours that included, besides a state funeral, a magniWcent array of public portraits. These are recorded on a Flavian inscription from the lararium of the family home at Lucus Feroniae:9 item statuas ei| [ponend]as tr[ium]fales in foro Augusti aeneam, in templo novo div[i Au]gussti (sic)| [m]armoreas [du]as, consulares unam in templo divi Iuli, alteram [i]n| [P]alatio intra tripylum, tertiam in aria Apolinis (sic) in conspectum (sic) curiae,| auguralem in regia, equestrem proxime rostra, sella curuli residentem at| theatrum Pompeianum in porticu Lentulorum. and likewise the erection of triumphal statues for him—a bronze in the forum of Augustus and two marble statues in the new temple of the deiWed Augustus— and also consular statues, one in the temple of the deiWed Iulius, a second within a pavilion on the Palatine, a third in the precinct of Apollo within sight of the Curia; and also an augural statue in the Regia, an equestrian statue next to the Rostra, and a statue of him seated in the curule throne at the theatre of Pompey, in the portico of the Lentuli.

These statues of Saturninus are quite exceptional. We know of no other single award on such a scale, except perhaps the outpouring of statuary and other honours decreed or permitted by the senate throughout the Empire to commemorate Germanicus—those recorded on the Tabula Siarensis. Indeed the Tabula Siarensis perhaps provides a point of reference: an early Imperial standard against which the pitch of posthumous aVection for Saturninus can be gauged. And his honours include categories hitherto unknown (statuae consulares and augurales). Yet at the same time we do have many lists of similar honours, to be made from various materials and erected in diVerent locations; so Saturninus merely represents an extension of the language of honours, and an unusually elaborate example of the way in which full portrait sculptures could be employed to

7 On the Volusii Saturnini and the inscriptions from Lucus Feroniae see W. Eck, ‘Die Familie der Volusii Saturnini in neuen Inschriften aus Lucus Feroniae’, Hermes, 100 (1972), 461–84; J. Reynolds, ‘Roman Inscriptions 1966–1970’, JRS 61 (1971) 136–52, at 142–4. Cf. Tacitus, Annales 3.30 and 13.30.2 on Saturninus’s longevity and death. 8 Tacitus, Annales 13.28.1; 13.30.2. See also Eck, ‘Die Familie’, 473–5. 9 Eck, ‘Die Familie’, 463.

82 portrait statues and the statuesque construct, or reconstruct, an individual’s public identity within the Roman urban environment.10 Likeness usually receives no mention in records of honoriWc awards. It is no doubt taken for granted. What deserves explicit mention is the elaborate typology of statues: the framing of honoriWc portraits, to which we shall return later. Consequently, this chapter does not attempt to discuss portraiture as such in any detail. Roman portraiture in general has received much close attention in the past.11 Instead I wish to concentrate on the concept of the portrait statue, its connotations, and its characteristic or stereotypical features. Emphasis is placed not on the identity and identiWcation of the individuals represented, but on the generalized conventions of portrait statuary, and on the ways in which such conventions were recognized and exploited in diVerent artistic images. I have similarly chosen to pass quickly over other topics that have been explored in detail elsewhere, such as the debate over the origins of Roman portrait-forms12 or the general functions of portrait statuary in the Roman Empire.13 Nevertheless, something of this background is necessary for understanding Roman attitudes to portrait statues; so it is with their social functions that we must begin, before turning to visual and literary manifestations of their impact on Roman thought.

10

M. Bassaeus Rufus received three statues in Rome in his lifetime, under M. Aurelius and Commodus: CIL 6.1599; Nonius Balbus received Wve at Herculaneum: CIL 10.1430–4. For the imperial honours on the Tabula Siarensis (esp. 1.1–21), comparable in scale to those of Saturninus, see text and commentary in J. Gonza´lez, ‘ Tabula Siarensis, Fortunales Siarensis et Municipia Civium Romanorum’, ZPE 55 (1984) 55–100; commentary in C. B. Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period (Cambridge 1997) 109–10. 11 See e.g. J. D. Breckenridge, Likeness: A Conceptual History of Portraiture (Evanston, Ill. 1968); R. Brilliant, Portraiture (London 1991) passim; Nodelman, ‘ How to Read a Roman Portrait’. 12 On the origins of Roman portraits etc. see E. H. Richardson, ‘The Etruscan Origins of Early Roman Sculpture’, MAAR 21 (1953) 75–124; T. Ho¨lscher, ‘Die Anfa¨nge ro¨mischer Repra¨sentationskunst’, RM 85 (1978) 315–57, esp. 324–44; A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Arches and Greek Honours: The Language of Power at Rome’, PCPhs 216 (1990) 143–81; J. J. Tanner, ‘Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic’, JRS 90 (2000) 18–50. On the verism controversy see e.g. R. R. R. Smith, ‘Greeks, Foreigners, and Roman Republican Portraits’, JRS 71 (1981) 24–38; E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (New York 1992); J. Bazˇant, Roman Portraiture: A History of its History (Prague 1995) esp. 68–76; Tanner, as above, this note. 13 See e.g. Lahusen, Ehrenstatue; Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis; R. R. R. Smith, ‘Roman Portraits: Honours, Empresses, and Late Emperors’, JRS 75 (1985) 208–21; A. Oliver, ‘Honors to Romans: Bronze Portraits’, in C. C. Mattusch et al. (eds.), The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections (Cambridge, Mass. 1996) 138–60; cf. W. Eck, ‘Senatorial Self-Representation: Developments in the Augustan Period’, in F. Millar, and E. Segal (eds.), Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects (Oxford 1984), 129–67 (in the context of general discussion of senatorial self-representation); C. B. Rose, ‘ The Imperial Image in the Eastern Mediterranean’, in S. E. Alcock (ed.), The Early Roman Empire in the East (Oxford, 1997) 108–20. On funerary portraiture see below.

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the uses of portraits What, then, was the place of portrait statues in the Roman Empire? Broadly speaking, they were used in the same contexts as their Hellenistic precedents.14 They were funerary memorials, marks of honour or self-advertisement in the private sphere, or cult dedications in honour of deity and individual; they were self-promotional statements by the patrons of building works, or honours for the relatives of those patrons (which was almost the same thing); they were public, honoriWc rewards or gifts by state, community, clients, or associates. In each of these cases the ostensibly recognizable head of the recipient was framed and explained by the social, topographical, and artistic context, and by the accompaniment of a dedicatory inscription. Portrait busts performed the same roles, but as we shall see, the use of a full-body representation increased the expressive potential of the portrait (besides oVering a practical and imposing mode of open-air display). As far as funerary or commemorative portraiture is concerned, most scholarly attention is devoted to the ancestral masks (and perhaps other portraits) called imagines maiorum; these were the shady objects of Roman aristocratic prestige, sometimes supposed to have been permitted by an even shadier, elite ius imaginum (‘right to have images’) during the Republic.15 The role of ancestorportraits may at least have diminished, as Neudecker suggests, in the Principate, even though they apparently remained in use; there are plenty of literary references to them in this period, but those authors sometimes present the galleries of ancestor-images as something remote and abstract. What the evidence from certain properties and written accounts suggests is a display of portraits of more immediate relations and friends, and the veneration of genii and imperial images in the lararium, rather than a genealogical pageant.16 Full statues commemorating the dead had a smaller place in the private sphere, yet they existed. The Barberini Togatus (Fig. 6) may belong to this category, and it is an extraordinary, self-conscious representation of portrait display itself, with a stylistic diVerentiation of the busts that implies a sense of chronology.17 The statue probably belongs to the early Principate. The use of funerary statues in domestic contexts is also attested by Pliny the Younger’s reference to Regulus, who commissioned ‘statuae et imagines’ for his 14

In general see Smith, ‘Roman Portraits’, 209–10. Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 113–27 (esp. 113–23 on the Republic). Critique of the idea (a modern invention) in Peka´ry’s review of Lahusen in Gnomon 57 (1985) 387–9; also in Flower, Ancestor Masks, 53–9. For the ancestor-portraits in general: ibid.; G. Lahusen, ‘Funktion und Rezeption des Ahnenbildes’, RM 92 (1985) 261–89. 16 Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, esp. 83; he deals with literary references as well as material evidence. 17 Lahusen, ‘Funktion and Rezeption’, 281–2. 15

84 portrait statues and the statuesque deceased son.18 However, most references to private funerary images do not actually specify that they are busts rather than full-scale portraits. Statues had a more obvious place on or by tombs. Zanker suggests that in the late Republic and early Principate only the more lavish tombs bore sculpture in the round, and he points out that even the elaborate tomb of Eurysaces outside the Porta Maggiore just has portraits in high relief (as on other contemporary tombs).19 Statues in durable materials were a considerable extra expense.20 It is perhaps partly for this reason that they have such a prominent place in the tomb scene from the Haterii reliefs (Fig. 1)—the identiWed remains of which include only portrait busts—and in the apparently very similar tomb of Priscilla, as portrayed by Statius.21 As we shall see, statues were certainly part of the ideal funerary memorial.22 As with other forms of funerary display they were often erected by surviving relatives or associates (and the images of the living might be juxtaposed with those of the deceased), but they could also be provided for in the will of the deceased.23 All such memorials were to be found in sanctuaries as well as the sites of tombs themselves.24 Under the Principate, public portrait statues were generally not erected by the individual represented. That point cannot be overemphasized, for portraits are so often studied in isolation from the texts and inscriptions that explain their function and place them in society that it is easy to regard them as an uncomplicated form of self-promotion, especially in the case of emperors. Emperors were no doubt involved in the production of their ‘oYcial’ portrait image, but the operation of that image in society depended upon the participation of others, above all the patrons who were responsible for its instantiation in speciWc works of sculpture throughout the Empire.25 In fact, as far as the ruler was 18

Pliny, Epistulae 4.7.1; cf. Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 80–3 for further discussion and examples. P. Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs ro¨mischer Freigelassener’, JDAI 90 (1975) 267–315, at 280–1 and see Wgs. 13–15. He cites the graves by the Porta Nocera at Pompeii as an example of the more lavish tomb, adorned with full statues in the round. 20 This is indicated by the lists of prices for burial expenses and various kinds of statue in Italy in R. Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies, 2nd edn. (Cambridge 1982) 162–3, 166–71. 21 Statius, Silvae 5.1.231–7; eYgies is almost certainly used here to mean full statues. 22 In Digesta 11.8.1.6 Ulpian (early 3rd cent. ad) implies that the adornment of the tomb is a religious imperative, or at least the expected norm: ‘religionis interest monumenta extrui et exornari’ (‘the building and adornment of monuments is in the interests of religion’). 23 See e.g. Petronius, Satyricon 71; for a real-life parallel see the instructions in CIL 13.5708; also CIL 11.5939 (probably actually referring to statues erected in the forum of Citta` di Castello). 24 See n. 37 below for some examples. 25 For speculation about the process see e.g. E. Bartman, Portraits of Livia: Imaging the Imperial Woman in Augustan Rome (Cambridge 1999) 18–24; S. E. Wood, Imperial Women: A Study in Public ¨ ber das Herstellen von Portra¨ts: ein Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Leiden 1999) 5–7. More fully: M. Pfanner, ‘U 19

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concerned, a display of reluctance or refusal to accept statuary honours was desirable.26 Claudius’ prohibition on the erection of portrait statues in Rome notionally allowed those private individuals who had built or restored public works to erect their own statue (or those of relatives) in the relevant location, but in practice this rarely occurred within the city of Rome.27 It was usually expected that one’s statue would be commissioned by someone else (though the recipient’s interest in the portrait was also recognized28) and references to the personal erection of public portraits are negative in tone as with Sp. Cassius, Gallus, and Plautianus.29 In private or semi-private contexts the erection of one’s own portraits seems to have been more acceptable, though it is hard to determine with certainty that this has occurred in any particular case. In a ‘votive room’ in the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi, the actor C. Fundilius Doctus seems to have placed his own statue (his name inscribed in the nominative case) together with a statue dedicated to his patron Fundilia (named in the dative).30 Surviving bases testify to a veritable gallery of portrait statues in the Villa of the Aspri at Grottaferrata; on one of these the recipent is named in the nominative— ‘Asper bis consul’ (‘Asper twice consul’)—and Asper may therefore have commissioned it, though on private property it is also quite conceivable that a relation was responsible for such a monument without a formal dedication.31 The other ten bases at Grottaferrata are dedications to this Asper (consul for the second time in ad 212) and at least one other family member, perhaps his son.32

Beitrag zu Rationalisierungsmassnahmen un Produktionsmechanismen von Massenware im spa¨ten Hellenismus und in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit’, JDAI 104 (1989) 157–257. 26

Augustus, Res Gestae 24; Claudius’ letter to the Alexandrians: text from a papyrus (P.Lond. 1912), in e.g. H. I. Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt: The Jewish Troubles in Alexandria and the Athanasian Controversy, Illustrated by Texts from Greek Papyri in the British Museum (London 1924) 1–37; Pliny, Panegyricus 52. 27 See Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 81 n. 81 for the few known cases in Rome. Personal statues and public benefactions could once again be provided for in a will, as in the case of CIL 11.5939. 28 See Ch. 4 for discussion. 29 Pliny, NH 34.30; SHA, Severus 14.5 (Dio 75.16.2—a contemporary source—does not indicate any such personal involvement on Plautianus’s part); Eck, ‘Senatorial Self-Representation’, 131. Cf. Seneca, De BeneWciis 5.8.2: no one is said to set up a statue to themselves as their own patron. 30 K. Stemmer (ed.), Standorte: Kontext und Funktion antiker Skulptur (Berlin 1995) 218–23, esp. B69 and B70 on 221–2 (by G. Zimmer); P. G. Bilde, ‘The Sculpture from the Sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, Types and Contextualization: an overview’, in J. R. Brandt, A.-M. L. Touati, and J. Zahle (eds.), Nemi— Status Quo: Recent Research at Nemi and the Sanctuary of Diana (Rome 2000) 93–109, esp. 98 and 102. CIL 14.4273 and 4274. 31 CIL 14.2514; Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 78 (Neudecker believes that it was commissioned by the recipient). 32 For these Aspri see Dio 78.5.3; 79.22.2–4.

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These are ‘spontaneous’ honours even if they were erected under some degree of supervision by the Aspri.33 They are honoriWc gifts from ‘friends’ (amici), client provinces (Britannia and Mauretania Tingitana), an individual client(?), and a client beneWting from his patron’s forensic services.34 This odd practice of erecting portraits to one’s patron within his home is documented elsewhere.35 The Villa at Sette Bassi contained busts of two men, one of which was provided by a group of minor magistrates, the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis.36 At Grottaferrata, however, the eleven, large, apparently togate statues on substantial, inscribed bases seem to have been intended to imitate public, honoriWc displays (scarcely possible with this scale and density, even outside Rome). That this portrait gallery was not unique is suggested by Pliny’s complaint in Naturalis Historia (34.17): ‘mox forum et in domibus privatis factum atque in atriis: honos clientium instituit sic colere patronos’ (‘soon a forum was created even in privates houses and in atria: the honour felt by clients led them to cultivate their patrons in this way’). Portrait statues, not merely images of deities, were frequently dedicated in sanctuaries, at shrines or, once again, at graves as oVerings, on behalf of oneself or someone else, sometimes deceased, or again, under the terms of a will.37 The deiWed emperor was of course an exceptional case, receiving portraits as dedications in a variety of public contexts, and we shall return to certain aspects of the imperial cult in Chapter 5.38 From a modern perspective, however, the most familiar kind of Roman portrait statue was the public, honoriWc statue, erected in honour of the individual represented by clients or dependent organizations (colleges of priests, guilds, and so on), or communities, including, of course, the senate and/or people of Rome. The emperor might be seen as a kind of universal patron and it is usually 33

They may have stipulated the proper terms for the honoriWc inscriptions or even conceivably played an active role in the commissioning of the works, but they cannot be considered to have been set up by the Aspri as such. For evidence of the subject being consulted on his statue and inscription see CIL 11.6123 (letter to the recipient from the municipality of Forum Sempronii is recorded on the base). 34 CIL 14.2505, 2507, 2512; 2508 and 9; 2511; 2516; the relationship in 2506 and 2513 is unclear. See Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 77 and 160–1, no. 19. 35 Tacitus, Dialogus 8. Eck, ‘Senatorial Self-Representation’, 134–5 with n. 42 for further sources. Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 78 for a fuller discussion of such practices. 36 Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 79 and 207–9, no. 50, pl. 22.1– 2. 37 e.g. CIL 11.5400 (various death-bed bequests, including statues in the Temple of Hercules: I take ‘statuae’ in this inscription to imply that the statues are portraits of the dedicant, but they could conceivably be images of the god); cf. also CIL 6.782 and 3679 (the former a Venus-portrait, the latter a double dedication to deity and deceased individual, who is portrayed as deity: H. Wrede, Consecratio in formam deorum: vergo¨ttlichte Privatpersonen in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein 1981) 313–14, no. 306; 187; no. 107; 233–4; see also 187–92. 38 For some representative examples related to sites discussed here see the following. Cuicul old forum: AE 1916, 14; CIL 8.8319; Zimmer, Locus, 64, C37; 61, C22. Rome: CIL 6.880 (an ex-voto), 881, 1025, 1057, 31380.

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assumed that the receipt of statues in the capital was his (or rather his family’s) prerogative.39 Peka´ry has vigorously opposed the idea of an imperial ‘Bildnisrecht’—an exclusive right to receive portraits—but in the most important public spaces at least, it is hard to believe that statues were granted without imperial or senatorial approval, and there seems to have been a tacit understanding that these were sensitive areas.40 To a certain extent the picture so far presented of the use of statues is deceptive, for in public areas at least ‘private’ portrait statues—that is to say images of individuals who were not members of the imperial house—were overshadowed (sometimes literally) by imperial monuments. As far as we can tell there was no fundamental diVerence between the practices surrounding the commissioning and erection of most imperial statues and those of other honorands. Although portraits of emperors might have tended to employ an even narrower range of stereotypical bodies—for instance the cuirassed statue was common—nevertheless there is little sense of any discrete imperial iconography. It was perhaps the particular strength of portrait statuary as a medium for honouring the ruler that it grew out of and relied upon a more or less universal honoriWc system. Still, to any inhabitant of a Roman city the dominance of the ruler, his family, and his predecessors would have been obvious. In Rome itself the overwhelming majority of surviving statue-bases traced to the Forum Romanum had imperial recipients. Of thirty-Wve candidates discussed by Ruggiero, thirty-two are imperial. His literary references show a similar imbalance, though not all locations were so exclusive and we should remember the concentration of statues presented, for example as triumphal awards, to private individuals under the Principate—in the Forum of Augustus and then the Forum of Trajan.41 Still, the bias is obvious and it exists throughout the Empire, though there is much greater scope for nonimperial public portraiture outside Rome. At Pompeii, non-imperial statues have a distinctly less obvious place; they are dwarfed by imperial monuments at the busy south end of the forum and some may have been removed to nearby colonnades to make space for the latter.42 39 For the emperor as universal patron cf. Philo, De Legatione ad Gaium 149, calling Augustus the ‘common benefactor’ (koinos euergetes). On restrictions on statues in the capital see J. P. Rollin, Untersuchungen zu Rechtsfragen ro¨mischer Bildnisse (Bonn 1979); Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 124–5; Oliver, ‘Honors to Romans’, 145. 40 Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 143–48; Peka´ry, Review of Lahusen, 387–8; T. Peka´ry, ‘ ‘‘Bildnisrecht’’ ’ Boreas 13 (1990) 51–2. See also Eck, ‘Senatorial Self-Representation’, 143. 41 E. de Ruggiero, Il Foro Romano (Rome 1913) 476–96 on the Forum Romanum; the other bases belong to Stilicho and Tarrutenius Maximilianus. Unsurprisingly, the majority of bases date from the 4th cent. or later, followed in frequency by the 2nd cent. and the reign of Augustus. It is possible that imperial portrait bases were less prone to reuse. Forum of Augustus: e.g. CIL 6.1386; Tacitus, Annales 4.15. Forum of Trajan: see e.g. CIL 6.31640, 1599, 1710, 1721, 1727 and others listed in Platner–Ashby, 239–40. 42 P. Zanker, Pompeii: Public and Private Life (Cambridge, Mass. 1998) 102–3.

88 portrait statues and the statuesque The well-preserved old forum at Cuicul (Djemila) in Numidia provides excellent evidence for public statuary display.43 Here imperial portraits predominate, especially on the western side of the square, in and near the basilica.44 Nevertheless, the leading families associated with communities in both the eastern and western parts of the Empire are still well represented by extant statue-bases. We shall return to these sites later.45 My separation of various kinds of portrait statue is rather artiWcial, for the portraits have much in common and the functional divisions among them cannot be rigidly maintained. Ancestral images and funerary portraits were closely related and could be treated variously as cult-objects or dedications to gods.46 The sculptures in the Villa of the Aspri show that even ‘public’, honoriWc statuary could converge with the family portraiture in the ‘private’ sphere (and of course copies of Greek portraits—philosophers, kings, writers, orators, and so on—were employed as private ‘decorations’ of houses and villas). We will also see how funerary sculpture often alluded to the characteristics of honoriWc statues. More signiWcantly, the portrait statue is not easily distinguishable from the cult statue or divine representation. We have seen how certain portrait Wgures are called simulacra. The portrait statue of the emperor above all is diYcult to pin down. Moreover, all statuary dedications (indeed all dedications), whether ‘secular’ or ‘religious’, were labelled in similar formulaic terms.47 At Cuicul, the sight of the rank of divine and human statues Xanking the eastern side of the old forum underlines the formal similarity between these diVerent kinds of statue.48 But the inscriptions that label them suggest a more conceptual resemblance between them. First of all, there is the dative, dedicatory formula already mentioned. Starting at the northern corner of the forum by the entrance to the Curia we Wnd bases for statues of Diocletian, Pietas, Constantius I, the Genii of the local senate and people, Jupiter Optimus 43 It should be noted, however, that like the forum in Pompeii, the old forum in Cuicul was just one of the areas of public display in the city: Zimmer, Locus, 17–37, esp. 17–19 on the site. 44 Again, there is a disproportionate number of statues from Late Antiquity, though Antonine works predominate (much of the building work in this area dates from the mid-second century). On the private recipients of dedications on this site see Zimmer, Locus, 31–2. 45 A number of works have been devoted to the more detailed discussion of honoriWc portrait statues: see especially Lahusen, Ehrenstatue and Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis for overviews, but see bibliography in Introduction, esp. n. 37. 46 See references in nn. 15 and 16 above; cf. the simulacra of Claudia Semne: CIL 6.15593; H. Wrede, ‘Das Mausoleum der Claudia Semne und die bu¨rgerliche Plastik der Kaiserzeit’, RM 78 (1971) 125–66, esp. at 127. 47 Typically with reference to the recipient, his or her career, status or identity, the reason for the commission or source of the idea, details of the donor and perhaps a mention of the nature of the object given, its cost or source of money required and the legal permission granted by the local authorities (LDDD—locus datus decreto decurionum, ‘site granted by decree of the decuriones’). 48 See Zimmer’s reconstruction: Locus, 35, Wg. 15.

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Maximus between them, Fortuna Redux, Gargilia Marciana (signiWcantly smaller than her lofty neighbours), Concordia, Victoria, Hercules—and a similar mixture continues along this side. The statues are Antonine or Severan, except for those of Diocletian and Constantius. The inscriptions on all of them are notably similar in pattern.49 In particular, the dedications to Pietas, Jupiter, and Fortuna hardly diVer at all in formula from those of the portrait statues with them.50 This may be partly due to these divinities’ close association with the emperor: ‘to the Piety of the emperor [Antoninus]’; ‘to Jupiter the preserver and protector of the emperor [Caracalla]’; ‘to Fortuna the Restorer of the emperors [Severus, Caracalla and Geta]’.51 The suggestion underlying much of this book, that categories of ancient statue were Xexible, is further supported by the fact that the statues of the Genii, Concordia (associated with Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus), Victoria Augusta, and Hercules Augustus are designated ‘statuae’, rather than ‘signa’.52 It is also very important to remember that the inscriptions are not straightforward explanatory labels for the statue. They refer primarily to those towards whom the honour is directed and consequently they have a certain autonomy. On the southern side of the forum at Cuicul a base records an honoriWc dedication to the daughters of Ti. Claudius Subatianus Proculus, governor of Numidia ad 208–10.53 But the size and surface of the base show that only one statue could have stood there. Incidentally, it is clear that the man himself is the real object of honour—through his daughters—as perhaps it is members of the imperial family who are the real recipients of the dedications to deities mentioned above. (Those dedications, indeed, are not explicitly stated to be representations of the deities, though this is a reasonable assumption.)54 The categorization of Roman statues poses problems. Yet the exercise is not quite anachronistic and to Roman eyes there would have been obvious, intrinsic characteristics that set some statues apart from others in form, iconography, and typology: gods did not always look like men, nor cult images like votive oVerings. And when I refer to the blurring of boundaries between diVerent kinds of 49

Ibid. 54–8, C1–C11. Ibid. 54–6, C2, C5, C7 ( ¼ AE 1916, 17; 19; 15). 51 Ironically enough Geta’s name has been erased and replaced with an alternative formula at the time of his damnatio memoriae. 52 Zimmer, Locus, 57, C9; 57–8, C10; 58, C11 ( ¼ respectively CIL 8.8300; 8.20148; AE 1914, 236). On the epithet ‘Augustus’ for gods see BNP i. 351–2. It is possible that ‘statua’ was the more usual term applied to deiWed virtues such as Concordia, but it would be very hard to pursue any essential distinction between these and ‘real’ deities. 53 Zimmer, Locus, 62–3 and pl. 6, C27 ( ¼ AE 1911, 107). 54 In some cases, if the top of the base is intact, the ‘footprints’ on its surface aVord some impression of the statue that it supported. Dimensions of Subatianus base: 1.52 (total height)  0.58  0.54 m.; Zimmer, Locus, 31 on treatment of its surface. 50

90 portrait statues and the statuesque statuary I do not mean to imply that the ancient viewer was often confused or mystiWed by, for example, the anthropomorphism of divine images or the semi-divinity of imperial portraits. But the categories of sculpture converged; paradoxes were evident; the divine connotations of idealized statues could be threatening, or contemptible. In Chapters 1 and 2 we repeatedly observed an attempt to enforce boundaries through language and context. The character of any particular statue was ritually established in the act of dedication, dedicatio: the public declaration of what the object was.55 It could be argued, for example, that a statue of the emperor was not to be aVorded its full status before ‘consecration’, thus avoiding unfair accusations of treason against those who melted or sold newly made images.56 (Christians were wilfully collapsing this Ximsy distinction when they drew attention to the pagan process of manufacturing gods.57) The object’s status was declared and reinforced in the legal terminology of the Digests: res privata, res publica, res quasi publicata, res sacra (private, public, quasi public, and sacred property/material respectively). Naturally such abstract classiWcations may have been less distinct on the ground, which is, indeed, one reason for their elaboration in law.58 The recognizable portrait image had its own form of symbolism that set it apart from other statues. The portrait, acknowledged as such, embodies a relationship between the art-object and another entity, which underlies any other statements about its status and that of the individual it portrays. That most basic aspect of the likeness is passed over here not because it is unimportant, but because its importance is so manifest that many treatments of Roman portraiture have dwelt on resemblance at the expense of the portrait itself and its context and meaning within society: the portrait statue was a special kind of object, lent authority by its perceived resemblance to an individual.59 To reiterate, Roman writers are indeed concerned with likeness in portraiture and its contribution to commemoration, gloriWcation, honour, and veneration: motives united by the desire to manipulate the image (and therefore identity) of the individual in ways impossible for the original itself; in other words, to extend the potential for recognition in time and space. Yet, as the case of Volusius Saturninus so graphically demonstrates, there were many other variables in the production and the impact of a portrait. As I have mentioned, these included the habitus or dress and social role of the Wgure (‘consular’, ‘triumphal’, ‘togate’, and so on) as well as the image’s posture, the possible inclusion of a horse or a 55

Cf. the discussion of consecratio and terminology in Ch. 1. Digesta 48.4.5.2; 48.4.6. 57 See Ch. 6. 58 R. Du¨ll, ‘Zum Recht der Bildwerke in der Antike’, in Studi in onore di Emilio Betti, iii (Milan 1962) 129–53. 59 Brilliant, Portraiture, passim. 56

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chariot, and the very material employed. The latter categories represent a hierarchy, from the chariot-mounted statue to the pedestrian Wgure; from gold statue to marble. Cicero proposes that Servius Sulpicius (for whom he seeks the award of a posthumous statue) would have been more pleased, ‘aenea statua futura, et ea pedestris, quam inaurata equestris’ (‘that it should be a bronze statue, and pedestrian one at that, rather than a gilded equestrian statue’). This is a suggestion of modesty that resists and therefore reinforces the normal scale of values.60 These hierarchies can help to set the emperor apart. A third hierarchy should be added: that of location. The prominent, public, political spaces were the most prestigious. Some of the ramiWcations of this are examined in the following chapter.61 Prestigious honours gravitated towards the Rostra or equivalent area in Rome or elsewhere.62 Further honour could be expressed by granting the recipient (or his heir) a choice of location (regardless of de facto restrictions that remained).63 Other positions were specially appropriate for the type of statue involved—for example, Saturninus’ augural statue (statua auguralis) was erected in the Regia.64 Lahusen and others have described this language of dedications in admirable detail and in this context I shall make just one further observation.65 Statues erected within this framework presented the honorand in a variety of forms, making statements about his or her rank and status, social role, and relationship with others; but the description of the system is signiWcant in itself. For the range of statue-types and options for honoriWc commissions is delineated in ancient texts (and sometimes on the statue-bases themselves).66 Of these, the inscription from Lucus Feroniae is just an exaggerated example. In short, to talk about statues was as important as portraiture itself. The rest of this chapter is concerned with the artistic representations of portrait statuary in particular contexts, and here too we Wnd that the ‘incidental’ characteristics of statues have acquired as much importance as portrait likeness. 60

Cicero, Philippicae 13. Generally, see Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 7–44; H. G. Niemeyer, Studien zur statuarischen Darstellung der ro¨mischen Kaiser (Berlin 1968) 28–37 (imperial images). 62 Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 14–18; for a non-metropolitan example see CIL 14.375 (Ostia). 63 CIL 10.3903. 64 Eck, ‘Die Familie der Volusii Saturnini’, 471–2 (also 469 nn. 2 and 4: CIL 6.1377 and 1599 for examples of varieties of appropriate garb). 65 See esp. Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 45–65 on the types of honoriWc statuary. On all the variables see also F. Martin, ‘The Award of Civic HonoriWc Statues in Roman Italy, c. 31 BC—c. AD 500’, Ph.D. thesis (London 1996), esp. 70–107 (note also 67–8 on Saturninus). 66 For examples illustrating the possible range of types either for diVerent people or for the same recipient see e.g.: Pliny, NH 34.18–21; CIL 6.1599. (Greek honoriWc inscriptions from the Roman Empire often include a range of diVerent kinds of image, as if multiplying the impact of the honour: e.g. not untypical is REG 70 (1957) 361–75 (at Iasos): ‘to honour him with all the Wnest and greatest honours, and to set up a painted image and a bronze image and a marble image of him in whatsoever locations he wishes’.) 61

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statuesque imagery There are few places in which the abstract concept of the statue is more frequently evoked than on the funerary monuments of those who could not aVord real statues. Portraits of freedmen on reliefs, stelae, and altars lined the roads into Rome and other Italian towns from the late Republic to the second century ad.67 Around the second half of the Wrst century bc these portraits are particularly associated with the ‘veristic’ style, and that harshly realistic form of representation prevailed among this ‘middle class’ even when Augustan classicism was predominent elsewhere. It is therefore regarded as a conservative style: an expression of romanitas by those who were least socially secure.68 It appears that verism had at Wrst been the distinctive style of Roman upper-class portraiture. The allusion to the display of aristocratic ancestral images (imagines maiorum) is reinforced by the cupboard doors that appear on some funerary reliefs, loosely recalling the cupboards in which a family’s portraits were apparently preserved.69 Verism raises the question of ‘modality’ in portraiture: style carries its own message about how the image should be ‘read’—in this case, as an extremely truthful representation that preserves memory and evokes high social class. This is a matter of evocation. When viewed together, the rows of veristic portraits begin to look less individual, and there could have been no question of ignoring the actual status of the deceased. No doubt within this class the expression of shared values and aspirations was an aYrmation of status in itself.70 With the recognition of modality, the ‘window’ onto reality becomes opaque and the portrait is revealed not as a truthful document but as an artefact making a particular kind of encoded and tendentious reference to an individual.71 In a slightly diVerent way, many funerary portrait reliefs of freedmen and others throughout our period represent people as statues: they harness the signiWcance of the statue itself to frame the portrait image and bring additional connotations to what is ostensibly an independent, iconic representation intended to perpetu67 Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs’; M. Koortbojian, ‘In Commemorationem Mortuorum: Text and Image Along the ‘‘Streets of Tombs’’ ’, in J. Elsner (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge 1996) 210–33. There is no proof that all the monuments associated with freedmen are correctly assigned, but their similarity justiWes attribution to broadly the same cultural milieu. 68 See e.g. Koortbojian, ‘In Commemorationem Mortuorum’ 219–21. 69 S. Walker, Memorials to the Roman Dead (London 1985), Wg. 4; Flower, Ancestor Masks, 7–9 (qualifying the traditional interpretation) and pl. 1. 70 Cf. the illusionistic architecture of Roman wall-painting, intended, in Wallace-Hadrill’s view, not to deceive but to evoke a grander setting: A. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton 1994) 25. 71 Cf. Nodelman, ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’—implicitly—on the semiotics of the portrait statue.

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ate memory.72 Before identifying those connotations and examining the eVect of statuary imagery we should brieXy examine the forms that are used to generate them—the repertoire of motifs that amounts to a Roman iconography of the statuesque. In Chapter 1 we observed some of the challenges that arise from distinguishing representations of statues from those of living humans. The artist may use several techniques to establish the artiWcial nature of a Wgure, though some of these means are less decisive than others. They include the exploitation of typology, style, ‘labelling’ and framing devices (the representation of a statue-base, prop, or strut,73 an architectural niche called an aedicula, or other suggestive contexts or juxtapositions). Paint was also used to diVerentiate Wgures, as with the pale, marble complexion of the Mars in the House of the Venus Marina in Pompeii (Fig 4), but statues themselves were painted roughly to resemble reality, so that distinction was probably not sharp. Some comment is due on each of these techniques. Statue typology must be treated with caution. Kleiner indicates statuary precedents for several types of draped Wgure appearing on funerary reliefs, namely the togatus/palliata—a Wgure wearing the toga or female mantle—with arm in sling (as well as a variant of the same), the well known ‘Pudicitia type’ with the hand raised to the face in a gesture of modesty (Figs. 12 and 13), the ‘Fundilia type’ a restrained and well-draped Wgure called after Fundilia’s portrait statue in Copenhagen, and the ‘Berlin type’, in which the woman’s palla is stretched right across the chest and draped over the left arm.74 The ancestry of these types does not necessarily mean that the reliefs alluded to statues of wealthier citizens, nor even that they appeared especially statuesque. Perhaps a less ambivalent allusion is made through a relatively unusual Wgure-type: that of the heroic nude. Only a handful of these portraits survive in relief.75 They are curtailed frontal representations of youths, naked but for a chlamys cast over the left shoulder. One full-length version survives—a well-known relief from the fourth mile on the Via Appia—and this seems to make a clear reference 72

Cf. Koortbojian, ‘In Commemorationem Mortuorum’, 214 on this function (but he recognizes the formulaic aspect of the reliefs). 73 Struts appear to be given deliberate prominence on a Prometheus sarcophagus in Rome (Museo Capitolino, Sala delle Colombe; H. Stuart Jones, A Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures Preserved in the Municipal Collections of Rome: The Sculptures of the Museo Capitolino (Oxford 1912) 142–3, no. 13, pl. 34) and perhaps the discus of a lamp in the British Museum (D. Bailey, A Catalogue of the Lamps in the British Museum, ii. Roman Lamps Made in Italy (London 1980) 40 and 203, Q996). These cases are not, however, clear-cut. 74 D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Group Portraiture: The Funerary Reliefs of the Late Republic and Early Empire (New York 1977) 158–72. 75 Ibid. 167–70 and catalogue nos. 49, 55, 88; Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs’, 304–6, Wgs. 44 and 46. The relief of Gessius in Boston is a more Roman, cuirassed version of the same Wgure (ibid. 303–4, Wg. 43); cf. the tunicate L. Septumius (Kleiner, Roman Group Portraiture, 169, cat. no. 39).

94 portrait statues and the statuesque Fig. 12. It is possible to identify various statuary precedents for the poses of Wgures represented in funerary reliefs, such as the ‘Pudicitia’ type in which the woman’s right hand is held to the face in a gesture of modesty. (Female marble portrait statue of the ‘Pudicitia’ type. Probably from Rome; c. late Wrst century ad. Vatican, Braccio Nuovo, 2284. H: 2.09 m.)

to a recognizable statue-type (Fig. 14). The type has at least one Greek precedent in a classical statue of Diomedes.76 But in the Wrst century bc it was adapted for portrait statues with struts in the form of a Hellenistic cuirass and several very 76

Kleiner, Roman Group Portraiture, 169.

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Fig. 13. Marble funerary relief of a standing couple, both Wgures recalling statuary precedents. (From the Via Statilia, Rome; c. 70–50 bc. Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, Braccio Nuovo 2142. H: 1.8 m.)

similar examples survive, most of them apparently from the vicinity of Rome.77 It is likely, though not certain, that this original statue-type was used for funerary portraits and invited imitation by those of more limited means, though some heroized Wgures of this kind were undoubtedly public dedications, as the statue

77

D. E. E. Kleiner and F. S. Kleiner, ‘A Heroic Funerary Relief on the Via Appia’, JDAI 90 Beiblatt (1975) 250–65. The ‘Pseudo-Athlete’ from the House of the Diadumenos in Delos is an earlier version of the same basic type, though he lacks the cuirass.

96 portrait statues and the statuesque Fig. 14. The relief from the fourth mile on the Via Appia seems to make a clear reference to a recognizable statue-type. (Marble funerary relief with portrait of a naked man. From the Via Appia, Rome. Late Wrst century bc. H: 2.20 m.)

of C. Ofellius Ferus in Delos demonstrates.78 The reliefs at least seem to be expressions of the status acquired by the sons of freedmen, who were eligible for military service. There is an additional dimension to the aspirational message if these reliefs do indeed allude to the prestige of an expensive portrait statue. If the statuesque quality of such reliefs is in doubt, the full-length version from the Via Appia is perhaps more explicit, for it includes a representation of the discarded 78 V. Kockel, Portra¨treliefs stadtro¨mischer Grabbauten: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und zum Versta¨ndnis des spa¨trepublikanisch-fru¨hkaiserzeitlichen Privatportra¨ts (Mainz am Rhein 1993) 227–28; P. Zanker, ‘Zur Bildnisrepra¨sentation fu¨hrender Ma¨nner in mittelitalischen und campanischen Sta¨dten zur Zeit der spa¨ten Republik und der julisch-claudischen Kaiser’, in Les bourgeoisies municipales italiennes aux IIe et Ier sie`cles av. J.-C. (Paris 1983) 251–66, esp. at 252–3.

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cuirass which is iconographically important, but which is also a functional addition to the three-dimensional statue. Allusions to Greek statue-types may be intended in certain funerary reliefs throughout the Empire which visually ‘deify’ the individual represented.79 Such reliefs tend to manipulate a relatively limited repertoire which includes, for example, the Venus Pudica and the Boston Hercules types.80 The degree to which a particular statue-type might have been recognized and intended as such is still debatable. But some remarkable examples survive from Italy, in which the allusion is more emphatic. These are onomastic images such as the funerary altar of Tiberius Octavius Diadumenus on which there appears the Wgure of the Diadumenos of Polyclitus (Fig. 15).81 The altar of Helpis in Florence bears the image of the archaistic statue of Spes in Rome—probably an Augustan creation—that also appears on Claudian sesterces.82 Boschung relies heavily— and perhaps too heavily—on these images and on other representations of famous statues on grave reliefs as evidence for a popular interest in and response to ‘nobilia opera’ (well-known masterpieces) in the city of Rome.83 There is no proof that such statue-types did not reach funerary reliefs less directly or intentionally through the repertoire of the ‘copy-book’: for instance, given the instruction to represent a diadem-binder, the sculptor might easily have resorted to the schema of the Diadumenos without any intention of more subtle allusion. But there is at least a strong likelihood that these cases betray the use of typology to endow the deceased with the associations of (particular) statues. Style is an even less straightforward means of alluding to statuary.84 The elements of high classical style might be considered ‘statuesque’ to modern eyes and they may have carried some of the same connotations in antiquity, especially as the diVerentiation of successive styles was articulated in Roman literature through the canon of famous artists and their works (the Doryphoros of Polyclitus is particularly prominent).85 But any ‘statuesque’ associations of classical styles are at best imprecise. They were, at any rate, capable of being generated by any particular viewer. Verism or realism could have been associated 79

80 See Wrede, Consecratio, on the phenomenon. Ibid. 54 and 62. On such images in general see T. Ritti, Immagini onomastiche sui monumenti sepolcrali di eta` imperiale (Roma 1977). On Diadumenus: D. Boschung, ‘Nobilia Opera: zur Wirkungsgeschichte griechischer Meisterwerke im kaiserzeitlichen Rom’, Antike Kunst (1989) 8–16, at 8; Ritti (this note) 313, no. 74, pl. 12.2. 82 Ibid. 9; BMCRE i. 182–3 and 191, nos. 124–35 (pl. 34.11–12) and 192–6. 83 Boschung, ‘Nobilia Opera’. 84 On the retrospective use of the various styles see B. S. Ridgway, The Severe Style in Greek Sculpture (Princeton 1970) 130–42; eadem, The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture (Princeton 1977) 303–19; eadem, Fifth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture (Princeton 1981) 228–41. 85 The ‘semantic system’ that seems to emerge from such references is formulated by T. Ho¨lscher, Ro¨mische Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg 1987). Zanker, Augustus examines the application of such a system to Augustan ideology. 81

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Fig. 15. The altar of Tiberius Octavius Diadumenus appears to make a punning allusion to the famous Diadumenos by Polyclitus. (Marble funerary altar from Rome. Early Imperial. Vatican, Belvedere, 1142. H: 0.85 m.)

speciWcally with the bust or portrait face, but not more broadly with the portrait statue. Archaism, however, was repeatedly employed (arguably from the classical period on) to mark cult images apart from human representations.86 Archaistic features such as stiV, swallow-tail folds in drapery and rigid, angular poses could have been used, in theory, to represent an individual in the likeness of a statue. In practice this does not occur in portraiture, except obliquely as in the relief of Helpis. But we shall see how archaism aVected the signiWcance of real 86

J. J. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge 1986) 175–84; Ridgway, Archaic Style, 303–19.

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statues. Other markers of rigidity and lifelessness such as frontal or proWle representation add to the vocabulary of the statuesque; the repetitious frontality of busts and full Wgures in funerary reliefs is often noted, but the allusion is not forceful. ‘Labelling’ as such has little role to play in reinforcing the statuesque appearance of relief portraits: that is to say, there are no explicit references to this kind of allusion on the monuments themselves. However, the placing of dedicatory inscriptions on a statue base represented in relief does underline the message that the Wgure is to be conceived as a kind of statue. For example, the funerary altar of L. Marcius Anicetus, Marcia Helpis and T. Flavius Hermes found on the Via Appia depicts statues of Jupiter and Juno on two sides (they are labelled as such on their bases and conform to common types: Fig. 16).87 A third side shows a banquet scene featuring Anicetus and Marcia his wife. The fourth side presents Flavius Hermes in the guise of Hermes/Mercury riding on a ram (Fig. 17). The Wgure is not typical but, although it does not look like a statue, it is mounted on a base and the main dedicatory inscription for the altar is written on this pedestal in the manner of a statue-dedication.88 ‘Framing’ devices are the most prominent and eVective means of alluding to statuary. Figures on funerary reliefs are often Xanked by columns, beneath an arch or gable, and this kind of aedicula clearly alludes to the setting of a cult statue.89 The motif is often used on coins, gems, and other objects like votive plaques to facilitate a shorthand representation of a statue within a temple. We can see this kind of framing on the altar of Anicetus where it enhances associations created by the depiction of bases and juxtaposition with two unambiguous images of cult statues. It is the depiction of bases above all that, in various media, serves to distinguish representations of statues from other Wgures. The motif is especially common on funerary relief portraits. These bases do not feature in the late Republican and early Imperial reliefs of Roman freedmen which generally present portraits as busts or as if gazing out of windows in the funerary ‘house’.90 They are frequent, however, on grave-stelae from all over the Empire. There are numerous examples from the eastern provinces (including some ‘late Hellenistic’ monuments) but the practice of rendering portrait Wgures

87

The name ‘Iovis’ is an alternative nominative form of ‘Iuppiter’. Wrede, Consecratio, 256–8, no. 167, pl. 31.1–4. 89 See e.g. ibid. (where we should particularly expect to Wnd such funerary representations), nos. 91, 99, 150, 167 (the altar of Anicetus), 176, 238, and 243. Many more images bear a vaguer resemblance to shrines. The aedicula motif becomes especially common in the ‘architectural’ representations in sarcophagus reliefs. 90 Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs’, 272–6. 88

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Fig. 16. The representation of plinths and dedicatory inscriptions lend a statuesque quality to relief portraits. (Marble funerary Altar of Anicetus. Image of Jupiter. From the Via Appia, Rome; c. ad 70–90. Museo Civico, Velletri, 1590. H: 0.64 m.)

with bases on stelae, altars, and sarcophagi was widespread and enduring.91 Sometimes the base is a plain block or panel—occasionally a mere suggestion of a pedestal—while often it is inscribed, as on the altar of Anicetus, and decorated with the mouldings that one would expect to Wnd, more or less elaborated, on a real statue-base. Such references to statuary were not restricted

91

A detailed survey would be impossible in this context; however, the following are diverse examples from some important corpora and monographs. Sarcophagi: H. R. Goette, Studien zu ro¨mischen Togadarstellungen (Mainz am Rhein 1990) S11, S14, S84 (all togate); G. Koch, and H. Sichtermann, Ro¨mische Sarkophage (Munich 1982) no. 500. North Italian stelae: H. Pflug, Ro¨mische Portra¨tstelen in Oberitalien: Untersuchungen zur Chronologie, Typologie und Ikonographie (Mainz am Rhein 1989) nos. 56 and 301. Eastern stelae: E. Pfuhl and H. Mo¨bius Die Ostgriechischen Grabreliefs, i. (Mainz am Rhein 1977) nos. 117, 178, 184, 263, 412, 629, 630, 635, 636, 664, 784, 894; nos. 117, 178, 263, 664, and 894 are late Hellenistic (2nd to 1st cents. bc) and show that statuary allusion had broadly pre-Roman precedents, as with so many aspects of Roman funerary art; some of the conclusions outlined here are doubtless relevant to the Hellenistic world and are not necessarily peculiar to the later period.

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Fig. 17. Marble funerary Altar of Anicetus. Image of Flavius Hermes.

to funerary sculpture, as a rare survival of Wrst-century tomb paintings from Me´rida in Spain attests. Deceased family members are depicted on the interior walls of the Tomb of the Voconii; on the end wall of the mausoleum are images of C. Voconius and his wife Caecilia, depicted standing on a single pedestal that is painted to resemble a real marble statue-base.92 While commentators have noted the recurrence of statuesque features in relief portraits, there has been little eVort to analyse those features or to explain their signiWcance. Relevant comments can be recounted brieXy. Zanker sees the truncated statue-types on freedmen’s reliefs as an economic means of assimilating one’s family to the self-representations of the Roman upper class.93 Kleiner lists the relevant statue-types as she perceives them, but without commenting on their signiWcance.94 PXug sees features such as the representation of a base and the frontality and parataxis of Wgures as imitations of grave architecture decorated with statuary.95 Boschung too sees statuesque reliefs as a surrogate for unattainable statuary monuments; he is particularly concerned with the depiction of ‘nobilia opera’ in grave reliefs, and he regards them also as a 92 L. Abad Casal, La pintura romana en Espan˜a (Ca´diz 1982) i. 79–81 and ii. 60–2, Wgs. 106, 108–9; Lo Sguardo di Roma 142 with Wg. 93 94 Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs’, 280 and 308. Kleiner, Roman Group Portraiture, 158–72. 95 PXug, Ro¨mische Portra¨tstelen, 79–81.

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substitute for the villa-decorations of the wealthy.96 Koortbojian examines relief busts of children in association with the images of ‘living’ adults: a juxtaposition that makes the busts appear more ‘sculptural’, the other portraits more lifelike. As far as statuesque imagery is concerned, he notes the statuary precedents without commenting on the possible signiWcance of their manipulation in the reliefs of freedmen.97 Wrede does not discuss the use of statuary imagery to any great extent, but in the context of his study it is evident that the examples in his catalogue serve the expression of ‘personal deiWcation’.98 The allusions to public statuary that are embodied in these funerary portraits are ambiguous and diverse. We can spot elements of the three-dimensional grave monuments of the wealthy, honoriWc statues to which only a few of the aristocracy could aspire, particularly in the city of Rome, and cult images which symbolized veneration for the deceased. But whichever kind of statue these reliefs evoked, they represent a class within Roman society (the great majority in fact) for which statues were familiar and powerful symbols, yet objects generally beyond their reach. The common element in these allusions is therefore aspiration, as Zanker, PXug, and Boschung suggest. Yet full-scale statues and public cult-honours were so obviously unattainable, and so obviously unattained, that these evocations of grandeur must have served as conventional symbols within the ‘middle class’: as with the conservative verism of the liberti, there could have been no question of deceiving the viewer as to the status of the family represented. Instead, the statuesque visual vocabulary was used as a familiar iconography to express such concepts as divinity, immortality, social importance. This kind of communication is not so much aspiration, as the adoption of a prestigious, Roman visual language—the language of statuary display—to express ideas appropriate for any Roman tomb.99 We have already encountered two sources that subtly reveal how those on the outside of the Roman social and political elite internalized the prestigious connotations of honoriWc portrait statuary, borrowing the language of public honours but adapting it for a quite diVerent form of display within the funerary sphere. The Wrst is the relief from the Tomb of the Haterii that depicts a grandiose mausoleum, newly decked with sculptures of many sorts including busts and what appears to be a Venus-portrait (Fig. 1). We do not know to what extent 96

Boschung, ‘Nobilia Opera’, 14. Koortbojian, ‘In Commemorationem Mortuorum’, 214 and 218. 98 Wrede, Consecratio. 99 Cf. E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Tradition of General Knowledge’, in E. H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and Art (London 1979) 9–23 for a kind of ‘sub-culture’ communicating in the language of metaphor. 97

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such sculptures might have graced the real tomb, though several busts do survive.100 Secondly, Statius’s description of the Tomb of Priscilla, wife of Abascantus, presents a literary analogue. In this text (which is a valuable commentary on the practice of representing the dead like gods), Priscilla is portrayed in an assortment of divine forms (Statius, Silvae 5.1.231–3): mox in varias mutata novaris eYgies: hoc aere Ceres, hoc lucida Gnosis, illo Maia tholo, Venus hoc non improba saxo. Soon you are renewed, changed into various images: here a Ceres in bronze, here bright Cretan [Diana], there Maia in a round shrine, a Venus innocent in this stone.

The passage is evidence for a general desire for statuary display on funerary monuments. Perhaps the prestige of statuary is evoked in the likely use of Greek statue-types. More importantly, Priscilla is sanctiWed, converted ‘into the form of the gods’ in the words of an inscription from Claudia Semne’s tomb on the Via Appia.101 But the Tomb of the Haterii and the words of Statius’ poem betray a less obvious allusion. In their obsession with a multiplicity of sculpture, and speciWcally in their obsession with portraits in a variety of shapes, a range of guises, there is an echo of the great public honours that include portraits in diVerent materials, in diVerent locations or, in the case of such worthies as Volusius Saturninus, diVerent postures or public roles. Many of those honours are posthumous and so have something in common with tomb sculpture. Otherwise the language of proliferating public portrait statuary has been adapted to representation forms—and people—that had no place in the forum. This is the privatization of honoriWc symbolism, transformed to Wt the cultural conventions and expressive needs of a diVerent social stratum.102 In isolating and analysing all of this evidence I do not wish to overemphasize the signiWcance of the statue or statuesque characteristics in themselves. The evocation of statues is not exactly an end in itself, but may serve, for example, as an easy means of signalling divinity or citizenship without any conscious elevation of the statue as a privileged art-form. And yet there is some reason to believe that the statue came to have speciWc funerary associations so that statuesque features symbolized death and commemoration. Sometimes the motives of base or aedicula are used to frame the relief portraits of a married couple who are united in the display of Wdelity known as dextrarum 100

D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven 1992) 197–9, Wg. 167–8. On this see Wrede, ‘Das Mausoleum der Claudia Semne’. 102 Wrede, Consecratio, for full discussion of the whole phenomenon of ‘deiWed’ funerary portraits and their social contexts. 101

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iunctio—the joining of their right hands.103 The early Imperial stela of Pettia Ge from Regium Lepidum, for instance, mounts Pettia and her husband C. Clodius, a freedman, on what appears to be a slight podium, between pilasters with a pediment (Fig. 18).104 The architrave inscription records Pettia’s commissioning of the monument for both of them; the tools of a stone-worker—Clodius’ trade—are depicted on the base of the monument, and presumably it was made on his death, in which case the couple are displayed in a memorialized pose of Wdelity that crosses the boundary between life and death. The stela of M. Cassius Cacurius from Mediolanum (late Wrst century ad) was made by the husband for his whole family.105 He and his wife are represented sitting on a very low pedestal within a Doric aedicula, right hands clasped. In this case the monument may predate any of their deaths, and the sign of the dextrarum iunctio looks forward to enduring Wdelity in the future. A more familiar example is oVered by an early Imperial funerary altar in the Museo Nazionale Romano, on the front of which is depicted a hand-clasping couple on a low pedestal with Corinthian aedicula (Fig. 19).106 The inscription was originally painted on, so we do not know the precise circumstances of the commission. These examples are not unusual. It may be that the statuesque modiWcation of the common pose conveyed a stronger sense of immortality—or the immortality of the marriage bond—through memorialization: that the features of the statue per se are associated with death and enduring social relationships.107 The use of the aedicula once again evokes the ‘personal deiWcation’ documented by Wrede. But these cases also provide the background for a unique representation of dextrarum iunctio which is much more forcefully statuesque. This is the early second-century ‘circus relief ’ in the Vatican Museums (Fig. 20).108 It is a relatively small panel, around a metre long and Wfty centimetres high, with 103

Generally, see EAA iii. 82–85, Wgs. 109–13; Reallexikon iii. 881–8; R. Brilliant, Gesture and Rank in Roman Art: The Use of Gestures to Denote Status in Roman Sculpture and Coinage (New Haven 1963, passim). The broad signiWcance of the gesture is clear from numerous literary references. On some reliefs of freedmen the gesture is isolated in the form of disembodied hands: Zanker, ‘Grabreliefs’. 104 Reggio Emilia, Museo Civico inv. 150. PXug, Ro¨mischer Portra¨tstelen, 81, n. 478; 177, no. 56, pl. 13.1; CIL 11.961. In this and the following example the Wgures seem to conform loosely to statue-types listed by Kleiner. 105 Milan, Museo Archeologico, inv. 9.6623. PXug, Ro¨mischer Portra¨tstelen, 81, n. 478; no. 301, pl. 46.1; CIL 5.5985. 106 Rome, Museo Nazionale, inv. 124514. A. Giuliano (ed.), Museo Nazionale Romano: le Sculture i/1 (Rome 1979) 260–4, no. 161 (P. Rondini). 107 Cf. Brilliant, Gesture and Rank, 21: ‘Most probably the handshake expresses that continued community of the dead and the living within the bounds of the familiar society which in itself constitutes immortality.’ 108 Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Profano (formerly in the Lateran collection). O. Benndorf and R. Scho¨ne, Die antiken Bildwerke des Lateranensischen Museums (Leipzig 1867) 22–4, no. 34. G. Rodenwaldt, ‘Ro¨mische Reliefs Vorstufen zur Spa¨tantike’, JDAI 55 (1940) 12–43, at 12–22. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 236–7, Wg. 201.

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Fig. 18. Motifs like the aedicula and podium frame relief portrayals of couples in the display of Wdelity known as dextrarum iunctio. (Marble funerary stela erected by Pettia Ge. From Reggio Emilia. Late Wrst century ad. Museo Civico, Reggio Emilia, 150. H: 2.46 m.)

parts in high relief. It probably comes from a tomb of a circus dominus factionis (an oYcial in the organization of chariot races), perhaps in the Ostian necropolis. This work has attracted attention almost exclusively for its style which is typically ‘popular’ and served Rodenwaldt’s search for the origins of late antique art. The greater part of the relief is occupied by a scene of quadriga-racing, apparently in the Circus Maximus. The spina that runs along the centre of the circus is marked

106 portrait statues and the statuesque Fig. 19. Marble funerary altar. Couple in dextrarum iunctio. (From Rome (?); c. 40s ad. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome, 124514. H: 0.94 m.)

by an obelisk, two columns bearing statues of Victoria and another female Wgure, and another group of columns for supporting the dolphin-Wgures used to count laps; triple metae (turning-posts) appear at each end. A charioteer drives his team from left to right in front of the spina and is also depicted standing behind it with the palm of victory in his hand. A sparsor (responsible for dampening down the course) is working in front of the horses, and to his right is an individual rider.

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Fig. 20. There is little doubt that the woman represented in the Vatican’s circus relief is intended to look statuesque. (Marble funerary relief. Circus scene. From Ostia (?); c. early second century ad. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Profano, 9556. H: 0.5 m.)

These Wgures are on roughly the same scale though with disproportionately large heads. By naturalistic standards they are too large for their architectural setting, which is depicted in inconsistent ‘earthquake perspective’. Isolated on the left, and yet within the same architectural setting, a togate man is represented, facing the viewer, and much larger than any of the other Wgures. Commentators have identiWed him as the dominus factionis and the deceased recipient of the memorial. It is the Wgure of his wife that is unusual. She stands on a plain podium to the left of her husband, dressed in a chiton and mantel. The man and woman clasp each other in the conventional pose of dextrarum iunctio, but contrary to the norm they do not look towards each other; the wife stares straight ahead, and since her base is angled obliquely towards our right, she does not confront the viewer either. Rodenwaldt could not conceive of her as a statue because of the lifelike interaction between the two Wgures,109 but given the direction of her gaze and the pedestal on which she stands, there can be no doubt that this is a

109

Rodenwaldt, ‘Ro¨mische Reliefs’, 18.

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statuary representation. Kleiner sees this as an attempt to explain that the recipient’s wife had predeceased him, and that seems more than likely.110 The circus relief appears to use statuesque symbolism to make a statement about the status of an individual represented by a portrait image, as well as emphasizing the solidity of the bond that survives even death: she is dead and remembered, revived through memorialization. These monuments imply an association between statuary commemoration and the social acknowledgement of death which is perhaps more obvious in our own culture, aVected as it is by thoughts of Don Juan, civic statues of heroes, and Victorian mausolea. Kenneth Gross records the unselfconscious declaration of a 4-year-old child: ‘Mama, when I die, I don’t want to be buried, I want to be a statue.’111 It is the portrait that gives a statue this speciWc charge. The notional expression of identity through likeness remains the object of the funerary statue. Yet the very idea of a statue, deWned by its statuesque features, acquires a signiWcance of its own which is partly independent of the portrait image. Good Romans, as it were, became statues when they died.112

statuesque statues We have been concerned so far with a narrow section of material: the funerary reliefs of those excluded from any possibility of statuary honours which record a certain response to such unattainable memorials. The remainder of this chapter surveys two diVerent forms of statuesque representation that constitute a logical extension of that language. First, if relief portraits can be expressly statuesque, then the same may be true of statues: portrait statues can be made to look like statues. Second, if the image of the statue was so evocative, then could living people not be presented as statues? The Wrst proposition may seem paradoxical. The statue-like quality of the statue is, in a sense, very obvious. For a variety of reasons most statues tended 110

Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 236. K. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY 1992) 19. Cf. ibid. 21, in discussing M. Serres: the statue ‘becomes a way of stabilizing our relation with the corpse, with the idea of death and the taboos it sets in place’. Such observations are useful on one level, but do not aVord much purchase on the ancient material in particular. 112 Note Tertullian, Apologia 12.7 cold statues for dead people. Interestingly Tertullian is bothered by the adoration of these funerary statues as objects of cult, and in De Spectaculis 12 he states explicitly that the dead are considered divine, and their images etc. are therefore idolatrous. Cf. also N. H. Baynes, ‘Idolatry and the Early Church’, in id., Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London 1955) 116–43, at 118 and 127 on ‘dead’ statues in Justin and John of Damascus. Also Steiner, Images, 145–7 and 151–6 on the resemblance between statues and the dead. 111

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towards certain norms which were imitated and enhanced to create a visual vocabulary of the statuesque. Roman artists relied on a limited repertoire of poses or models; the materials themselves imposed practical restrictions on the dynamism of Wgures; the inscription was often necessary for the identiWcation and explanation of the statue; the base anchored it, elevated it and protected it. This is quite simply what statues were like, and it took a special baroque eVort to break the conventions and challenge what was feasible or customary in sculpture. The statuesque character of portrait statues was generally not the result of determined self-reXexivity on the part of the artist. On the other hand, we need only consider examples such as the architecture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century churches to see how artefacts can be made to conform to their own stereotypes without any particular regard to functionality (in this case it is characteristics like neo-gothic components, or stained-glass windows, or steeples, for instance, that mark adherence to an identiWable idiom.) As far as Roman statues are concerned, typology is most important. Besides the conventional body-types and poses which most portrait statues employed, there were some less usual types which seem, at least to us, to make open reference to the artiWcial nature of the portrait. These are body-types ‘copied’ from well-known Greek statues. The Venus-portraits examined in Chapter 2 always make use of common statue-types (the Venus Pudica, the Venus of Arles). Catalogues of ancient sculpture have often identiWed less distinctive Greek archetypes behind even draped Wgures.113 Now, it is certain that Roman writers did not always recognize a speciWc Greek masterpiece in Roman copies.114 The body might be chosen from the repertoire because of the suitability of its iconography and not for the sake of arthistorical, typological allusion. The viewer might never have realized the origin of some copies.115 Moreover, in the unstable territory of response, we have to choose a point at which it is plausible that a particular viewer would recognize a conventional pose. Who, in antiquity, knew the body of, say, the Athena of Velletri when they saw it swathed in Roman drapery? Would the famous Prima Porta statue of Augustus have been regarded as a copy, though we have no diYculty recognizing the Doryphoros of Polyclitus beneath its armour? We should therefore qualify D’Ambra’s statement that the Venus-portrait’s nudity was excused by allusion to myth, divinity, and ‘the famed Greek work of art on which the statue is modelled’.116 113

See e.g. clear examples in R. West, Ro¨mische Portra¨t-Plastik, ii (Munich 1941). For fuller discussion see Ch. 7. 115 Cf. the warnings of M. Marvin, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series’, in D’Ambra, Context, 161–88. 116 E. D’Ambra, ‘The Calculus of Venus: Nude Portraits of Roman Matrons’, in N. B. Kampen (ed.) Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (Cambridge 1996) 219–32, at 221. 114

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And yet we can be sure that certain relatively distinctive types such as the Venus Pudica were reproduced in great numbers, with evident consistency, on various scales and in diVerent media, for a great number of examples survive. It is surely impossible that anyone could have failed to recognize in these portraits a kind of conventional body that was common in sculptures of another sort. The same thing might apply to the Prima Porta portrait. These were, if not copies of archetypal statues, at least stereotypical statuary Wgures. SigniWcantly, two of the rare ancient references to statuary ‘types’ concern the Doryphoros and (probably) the Venus Pudica.117 We have already seen the importance of style (speciWcally of verism) in modifying the meaning of certain portraits. It is harder to Wnd a style that is distinctively statuesque in three-dimensional portrait statuary. Again, classicism has the potential to carry such connotations, but the message is not forceful. Archaistic features are much more obviously ‘statuesque’. Whatever aura of archaic sanctity they may have been intended to conjure,118 their association with old cult statues was so well established that archaism, including the archaic features of frontality and rigidity, instantly meant ‘cult statue’ and it was exploited from the Wfth century bc on to distinguish such eYgies from ‘living’ Wgures in artistic representations. In the Roman context a graphic sculptural example is the Palladion in the Diomedes group from the imperial grotto at Sperlonga (Fig. 21). Such features might well have been used for portrait statues also, but they were not. Perhaps they conXicted with the naturalism implied by the pursuit of likeness in portraiture. It is not out of the question, however, that statuesque imagery was partly responsible for the rigid frontality of some late Roman portraits, especially in the light of the material discussed below. The statue gallery at Grottaferrata is a clear indication that in some circumstances unnecessarily large bases could be employed to make portrait statues look like statues. Other more subtle aspects of the statue were sometimes likely to have been deliberately used or incidentally perceived as symbols of statuary: the marginalized portrait features literally slotted into stereotypical bodies, or the usually less than discreet props that incongruously supported statues in stone. This statuesque imagery could serve speciWc functions: it anaesthetized the viewer of a naked matron, turning her nakedness into artistically conventional nudity;119 it allowed the emperor to embody the moral qualities attached to the

117

Philostratus, Imagines 2.1; Seneca, Epistulae 65.5. See Ch. 7 for further discussion. See Zanker, Augustus, esp. ch. 6, 239–63; Ho¨lscher, Ro¨mische Bildsprache. 119 Cf. Dio 58.2.4: Livia excuses the exposure of naked men before her, likening them to mere statues in the eyes of the chaste. 118

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Fig. 21. Archaism had long been used to distinguish ‘living’ Wgures from eYgies in artistic representations. (Marble sculpture of the Palladion. From the Theft of the Palladion group, ‘Cave of Tiberius’, Sperlonga; c. early Wrst century ad. Sculptural groups at Sperlonga. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Sperlonga. H: 0.82 m.)

Doryphoros and the art of Wfth-century Greece.120 But whatever the motives in any particular case, the formulation of the statuesque involved a shared conception of what a statue typically looked like. Its characteristics were ampliWed, even caricatured. Such formalism undermines the illusionism that was the ostensible purpose of portraits in the Republic and Principate. The portrait may cease to refer to its living counterpart and begin to refer to itself. And then it is only a small step to the appearance of real people as statues. 120

Zanker, Augustus, esp. 245–52.

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people as statues The Doryphoros (and the Canon) of Polyclitus provided a standard for living men right through antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages.121 In ancient literature, the principle of analogy permitted an easy transition from human to statue and back. Women provide the models for Aphrodite statues, which provide the model for portraits of women.122 Literary heroines are compared to agalmata.123 Troops wear bronze armour and become statues.124 These transformations are the subject for another book.125 But one rather more concrete manifestation of the statuesque in Roman society demands a brief discussion here. In the Roman Empire the emperor’s exposure to the populace was mediated by statues. It is perhaps not surprising that the living emperor should then present himself or be presented in the form of those statues. They were, to a large extent, the reality of his visible presence in public, and they had the potential to carry all the connotations of portrait statuary that we have already seen: prestige, endurance and immortality, semi-divinity, and aesthetic perfection. In the context of late antiquity we can perhaps add an emphasis on the unchanging, abstract authority of the transcendent emperor. The best known case is Ammianus Marcellinus’ description of the entrance of Constantius and his troops into Rome in ad 357 (16.10.8–10): sparsique cataphracti equites . . . personati, thoracum muniti tegminibus et limbis ferreis cincti, ut Praxitelis manu polita crederes simulacra, non viros . . . Augustus itaque faustis vocibus appellatus, non montium litorumque intonante fragore cohorruit, talem se tamque immobilem, qualis in provinciis suis videbatur, ostendens. Nam et corpus perhumile curvabat portas ingrediens celsas, et velut collo munito, rectam aciem luminum tendens, nec dextra vultum nec laeva Xectebat et (tamquam Wgmentum hominum) nec cum rota concuteret nutans, nec spuens, aut os aut nasum tergens vel fricans, manumve agitans visus est umquam. Quae licet adfectabat, erant tamen haec . . . patientiae non mediocris indicia. And scattered among them were the full-armoured cavalry . . . masked, clad in protective breast-plates and wearing iron belts, such that you would think them simulacra polished by the hand of Praxiteles rather than men . . . And so, being called Augustus with supportive cries, amidst the resounding thunder of hills and shores, he did not shudder, putting on the sort of show of steadfastness that he used to display in his provinces. For 121 See G. V. Leftwich, ‘Ancient Conceptions of the Body and the Canon of Polykleitos’, Ph.D. thesis (Princeton 1987). 122 e.g. Praxiteles’ alleged use of Phryne as a model for the Aphrodite of Cnidus: Athenaeus 13.590. 123 Note also that the word agalmatias, as in Philostratus, Vitae Sophistarum 2.25.6, is very close to the modern usage of ‘statuesque’. 124 See Ammianus Marcellinus, 16.10.8 (below). 125 Cf. the detailed discussions of literary and philosophical statues in Steiner, Images.

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he bent down passing through high gates, though he was very short, and as if his neck were in a vice he kept his gaze straight ahead, and he did not turn his face to right or left, but as if he were an eYgy of a man he never appeared to jerk his head at the jolt of the wheel, nor spit, nor wipe or rub his mouth or nose, or move his hand about. Admittedly these were aVectations, but they . . . were nevertheless signs of his exceptional endurance.

The statuesque repertoire used here is a convenient means of saying that Constantius displayed himself as a sort of icon or an ostensory on a chariot. It does not exactly explain the image of the statue, except in that it illustrates once again the statue’s ambiguous position between the lifeless and the lifelike, this time with particular force because this statue is genuinely alive. But the account is particularly vivid in the context of an empire where statues diVused the imperial image, and at a time when they were markedly ‘statuesque’ in just the way described. The civil wars of ad 68–9 provide a clearer rationale behind an emperor’s self-presentation as statue. When the troops rally to Otho’s cause in Tacitus, Historiae 1.36, non contenti agmine et corporibus, in suggestu in quo paulo ante aurea Galbae statua fuerat, medium inter signa Othonem vexillis circumdarent. Not content with raising him on their shoulders, they (placed Otho) on a platform on which had stood the golden statue of Galba shortly before, and amidst the standards they surrounded him with their ensigns.

In Tacitus’ eyes, the elevation of the man into the place of the previous emperor’s image serves to establish what he is. Otho, as statue, becomes emperor. Or at least, that is the intention, though a little later, speaking from the same dais, Otho expresses doubt over his position; he is not a private citizen, having been nominated princeps, but while Galba is alive he cannot truly be emperor: ‘Quis ad vos processerim, commilitones, dicere non possum’ (‘Who I am as I come before you, men, I cannot say’).126 It is the most eloquent of statements on the dynamics of a coup d’e´tat and it illustrates the political uncertainty that statue-destruction serves to clarify, as we will see in Chapter 8. The force of the statue’s image and of statuesque selfrepresentation in typifying and hence reinforcing the identity and authority of the emperor can be seen in some of the most prominent and famous extant monuments from Rome, on which the ruler is depicted in that privileged site for statuary honours, the Roman Forum. The emperor is often depicted in tribunal scenes: stock, propagandistic poses through which the monarch can be portrayed doing what good emperors are supposed to do.127 Usually the emperor 126 127

Tacitus, Historiae 1.37. H. Gabelmann, Antike Audienz- und Tribunalszenen (Darmstadt 1984)

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sits on a recognizable chair: there is no question of his being an eYgy. But sometimes the tribunal is barely distinguishable from a podium, and at that point the portrait of the emperor becomes statuesque: the conventions of Roman naturalistic representation can no longer provide straightforward markers to separate the living and the artiWcial.128 One of the most ‘statuesque’ of all such scenes comes from the Arco di Portogallo (Fig. 22). On one of the reliefs Hadrian stands on a podium reading Fig. 22. At times the tribunal on which the emperor is represented as standing closely resembles a statue-base and the Wgure of the emperor himself becomes distinctly ‘statuesque’. (Marble relief representing adlocutio of Hadrian, from the Arco di Portogallo, Rome (most of the emperor’s head is restored); c. ad 136–8. Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, 832. H: 2.67 m.)

128

Once again, we do not know the role of pigment in reinforcing or obstructing the comparison, though, as we have seen, statues themselves were painted to be ‘lifelike’, so we may doubt that the relief painter made any distinction.

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Fig. 23. Constantine is represented as the centre of attention, standing frontally in the middle of the speakers’ platform; the only other frontal Wgures are the portrait statues of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius that Xank him. (Part of the marble frieze on the north side of the Arch of Constantine, Rome. Constantine on the Rostra; c. ad 312–15. H: 1.08 m.)

Fig. 24. Constantine appears seated on a podium in the pose of the imperial statues in the other, adlocutio, scene. (Part of the marble frieze from the north side of the Arch of Constantine, Rome. Constantine’s largitio. c. ad 312–15. H: 1.06 m.)

from a codex and surrounded by Wgures on the ground—the Genius Senatus and the Genius Populi Romani, three men and a boy. Half a temple fac¸ade can be seen in the background to the right. This is likely to be a scene of alimenta (largesse); Kleiner sees the podium as a simpliWed Rostra on account of the presumed setting, in the Forum Romanum, though it appears just like any statue-base. The fourth-century frieze on the north side of the Arch of Constantine presents the emperor as the centre of attention. Constantine faces the viewer while the other Wgures are turned in three-quarter poses, most of the faces directed towards him. In the Rostra scene (adlocutio—addressing the crowd), the emperor stands in the middle of the platform (Fig. 23), the only other frontal Wgures being the portrait statues of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius that Xank him. In the scene of largesse opposite, Constantine himself is seated on a podium in the pose of the statues, distinguished essentially by his chronologically speciWc trabeate toga (Fig. 24). He is inserted into the role of a good emperor and into the schema of an imperial statue. On several of the Aurelian panels from the same monument we Wnd Constantine/Marcus on a base-like podium, just as on the Arco di Portogallo relief (Fig. 25).129 129

A. Giuliano, Arco di Costantino (Milan 1955), 17, 18, and 20, nos. 34, 35, 40–5.

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Fig. 25. The earlier imperial relief panels reused on the Arch of Constantine include images of Constantine/Marcus Aurelius on base-like podiums. (Marble Antonine relief panels from south side of the Arch of Constantine, Rome. c. ad 176–80. H: 3.14 m.)

The Anaglypha Traiani preserve the most ambiguous of these representations. On the adlocutio relief (Fig. 26), an emperor stands accompanied on the Rostra; the crowd confront him as he administers congiarium, alimenta (largess), or some similar ritual display of imperial generosity.130 The Rostra is deWnitely identiWable here, but is simpliWed and has the mouldings of any statuebase. Behind the crowd appears the statue-group of Trajan with Italia and her daughters. This real statue is mounted on a base, but sits on a more delicate throne (as also in numismatic representations131). The emperor (whether he is Trajan or, more likely, Hadrian) and the statue are assimilated; each has the qualities of the other; and the confusion is increased by the ambiguous status of the ancient Wg-tree, the Ficus Ruminalis, which appears on both reliefs next to the statue of Marsyas. Is its ‘base’ the stand for an artiWcial, model Wg-tree, or a statuesque fence to protect a real tree’s trunk? Such was the social, political, and ideological signiWcance of the emperor’s portrait that no portrayal of his public presence could entirely ignore the image of the statue and its connotations. The vocabulary of the statuesque inevitably formed part of the vocabulary of imperial display. 130

M. Torelli, Typology and Structure of Roman Historical Reliefs (Ann Arbor 1982) 89–118; Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 248–50. 131 P. V. Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types (London 1989) 76–7.

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Fig. 26. The unidentiWed emperor on the ‘Anaglypha Traiani’ stands on the Rostra, but the familiar monument has been reduced and simpliWed, and it has the typical mouldings of a statue-base. The living emperor is thereby assimilated to the statue of Trajan that faces him. (On the marble ‘Anaglypha Traiani’, Rome. Adlocutio scene; c. ad 118–19(?). Curia, Foro Romano, Rome. H: 1.68 m.)

conclusions Statues were not merely instruments serving the artiWce of naturalistic portraiture. This is not an impression that one would receive from reading art-historical work on Roman portraiture, and that point underlies the approach adopted in this book. Through a conventional division of labour and attention to separate bodies of evidence, art history is normally concerned with the faces of Romans— the developing style of realistic representations and very occasionally their immediate context if, as in the case of the Prima Porta statue, that is extraordinary. Bodies, bases, and the formulaic social framing of statues are left to historians and epigraphists. This chapter has been an attempt to combine elements from both bodies of material. It must, however, be viewed alongside conventional art-historical treatments of the Roman portrait. The aim is to pursue the broader signiWcance of the portrait statue, which in turn aVected the meaning of the portrait in context. The production of portrait statues depended on rules and expectations, types, norms, and conventions. Mimesis was only part of this process, and its medium was signiWcant in itself. For diVerent groups within Imperial society the portrait statue meant diVerent things; its image could be exploited for varying eVects. But whatever the intention in any particular case, a vocabulary of the statuesque was employed which itself testiWes to the collective impact of statuary on those parts of the Roman population examined here.

four

The Other Population of Rome

Just as in Rome, besides the Romans, there was also a populace of statues . . . 1

The other populace. The stone and bronze crowd. A forest of sculpture. There is no doubt that statues proliferated in the public spaces of the Roman city in a manner quite alien to our experience of the modern civic centre with its carefully elevated sculptural furniture. The recurring metaphors of the second population or the forest of statues are the result of later generations’ astonishment at this burgeoning assemblage. Yet we should not immediately assume that ancient viewers were surprised by or even particularly conscious of the statues around them. Graeco-Roman writers often describe and scrutinize the city of Rome, but few dwell on the abundance of images. Statues were important in Roman society, certainly, but did Roman responses to them accommodate an awareness of statuary as a discrete urban phenomenon? This chapter examines ancient evidence for the self-conscious appreciation of statues in the Roman environment. It deals with some visual and literary representations of statues as common features of the Roman world, as a collectivity of objects, a collection or a ‘population’ worth discussing as such. These representations bring us a little closer to solving a question too broad and diYcult to answer fully: namely, to what extent did Romans of the Principate notice the multitude of statues around them? Or did they take their numbers for granted? Next, two diVering approaches to statuary are examined. The Wrst is a recognition that great numbers of statues posed practical, political, or moral problems, and that limitation was required. The second is a desire on the part of individuals to promote statues and enhance their impact in public places, and more generally than this, a notion that the proliferation of statues provided 1 ‘ . . . so besides this real world there is another world of illusion, mightier almost, in which the majority live’ (‘Wie in Rom ausser den Ro¨mern noch ein Volk von Statuen war, so ist ausser dieser realen Welt noch eine Welt des Wahns, viel ma¨chtiger beinahe, in der die meisten leben’), J. W. von Goethe, Maximen und ReXexionen (1826), no. 293. The metaphor goes back, at least, to the passages of Cassiodorus discussed here (see below). Cf. also C. Goudineau, ‘Les Villes de la paix romaine’, in P. A. Fe´vrier et al., La ville antique des origines au IX e sie`cle (Paris 1980), 233–391, at 279: ‘toute une foule en pierre ou en bronze’. It is discussed by R. Kassel, ‘Dialoge mit Statuen’, ZPE 51 (1983) 1–12, at 1 n. 3. Kassel fails to Wnd precedents earlier than Cassiodorus, or between Cassiodorus and Goethe.

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desirable urban adornment. In short, the concern here is the response of diVerent groups within Roman society to statues in general, as a particularly conspicuous facet of their culture. If we look beyond the period of immediate concern in this book, we have no diYculty Wnding such responses in the ‘museographical’ ideas of late antiquity. One example is particularly vivid. In the early sixth century, the Roman-Gothic minister Cassiodorus formulated two enthusiastic pleas for the preservation of Rome’s sculptural heritage.2 Divorced from the social and religious circumstances of their creation, the city’s statues were at risk: the balance between intrinsic and symbolic value had tipped in favour of the lime-kilns and furnaces.3 In his Formula Comitivae Romanae (Variae 7.13), the draft of an oYcial letter, Cassiodorus laments the vulnerability of statues in the open streets and calls for greater vigilance. There are several signiWcant assumptions in this formula that are important for the ways in which they resemble and diVer from the earlier perceptions which will be discussed below. The statues of Cassiodorus’ Rome deserve reverence on account of their aesthetic value, as works of art (‘Roman beauty’, ‘singular beauty ’); they are the valuable property of the community and the product of the whole world (‘divitiae generales et labor mundi’) and their loss provokes ‘public grief ’. Their fate is ‘the gravest of losses’ and the perpetrators themselves deserve to be dismembered: ‘qui decorem veterum foedant detruncatione membrorum faciuntque illa in monumentis publicis, quae debent pati’ (‘[those] who deWle the beauty of the ancients by hacking oV limbs and do to public monuments what they ought to have done to themselves’). Finally, the collectivity of statues constitutes an enormous population whose lifelike qualities are (somewhat ironically) stressed: ‘populus copiosissimus statuarum, greges etiam abundantissimi equorum’ (‘a most plentiful population of statues, even the most abundant bands of horses [i.e. equestrian monuments]’); ‘statuae nec in toto mutae sunt, quando a furibus percussae custodes videntur tinnitibus ammonere’ (‘nor are the statues altogether mute, since they seem to ring out a warning to the guards when they are struck by thieves’). 2

Cassiodorus, Variae 7.13 and 15. Or so Cassiodorus implies. On the fate of statues etc. in late antique Rome see R. Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome: A Sketch of the History of the Monuments, repr. of 1901 edn. (New York 1967) 28–76; M. Greenhalgh, The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages (London 1989) 11–14; J. Curran, ‘Moving Statues in Late Antique Rome: Problems of Perspective’, Art History, 17 (1994), 46–58; N. Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture: Conservation, Modernization, Production (Aarhus 1994) 18–19 with n.19. The late (garbled) Syriac description of Rome attributed to Zacharias Rhetor, possibly derived, like the regionary catalogues, from a 4th-cent. source, includes a reference to ‘31 great marble pedestals’ : I. Guidi, ‘Il testo siriaco della descrizione di Roma, nella storia attribuita a Zaccaria retore’, BCAR 12 (1884) 218–39, at 224; R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Codice topograWco della citta` di Roma, vol. 1 (Rome 1940) 320–34 for Zacharias (and 63–192 on the Curiosum etc.). This may suggest that they had already lost their statues. 3

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Some of these ideas recur in the Formula ad Praefectum Urbis de Architecto Faciendo in Urbe Roma (a formula to the urban prefect on the creation of an architect in the city of Rome—Variae 7.15). Rome is a miraculous construction— ‘that wondrous forest of structures’—and care must be taken to renovate its fabric. The statues in particular are beautiful masterworks, and the whole city surpasses the Seven Wonders of the World. Rome’s statues rival the living population created by nature—‘Has primum Tusci in Italia invenisse referentur, quas amplexa posteritas paene parem populum urbi dedit quem natura procreavit’ (‘ The Etruscans are said to have been the Wrst in Italy to discover these statues, and posterity, having embraced them, gave a population to the city almost equal to that created by nature’).4 Part of the wonder of Rome arises from the realism, the vivacity of the sculptures. These statues had little place in the workings of sixth-century society, or at least they had a new function, either as raw material or as a sort of ‘cultural heritage’, prized for their aesthetic merit. Many if not all of the statues considered by Cassiodorus must have been honoriWc or commemorative portraits (as the repeated references to men and horses show). As we have seen, under the Empire the purpose of such works was partly to perpetuate the subject ’s memory.5 But one of Cassiodorus’ phrases betrays the extent to which that had changed. Once the statue was held to be the source of fame after death, but now the city’s architect will see beautiful works ‘still retaining the signatures of their creators, so that as long as the reputation of praiseworthy men survived, the image of their body preserved the likeness of their living being (‘auctorum suorum scilicet adhuc signa retinentes, ut quamdiu laudabilium personarum opinio superesset, tamdiu et similitudinem vivae substantiae imago corporis custodiret ’).6 There is no question that statues are a crucial part of Cassiodorus’ vision of Rome and his views certainly Wnd precedents in the fourth and Wfth centuries. But as we shall see, their origins lie even further back in the Principate. In fact, Cassiodorus represents the culmination of, or sequel to, an earlier Imperial 4

This is no gross exaggeration, as the population of Rome had by this stage dwindled; see R. Krautheimer, Rome: ProWle of a City, 312–1308, 2nd edn. (Princeton 1988) 65. 5 See Ch. 3. 6 I take ‘laudabilium personarum’ to refer to the subjects represented by statues, as the ‘et similitudinem’ perhaps implies. In theory, however, it could refer to those in 6th-cent. Rome whose judgements ensured the survival of statues, or, indeed, the artists whose ‘signa’ remain on the works. In any case, the statues are not themselves the cause of lasting fame. (All this depends on the assumption that Cassiodorus is thinking of commemorative statues rather than Greek works that had long since ceased to serve a commemorative or honoriWc function. Such is the implication of the following sentence, quoted above: ‘Has primum Tusci in Italia invenisse referentur’). The idea that ‘opinio’ should determine the survival of statues, and not the reverse, perhaps originates in the topos of virtue outliving memorials: see e.g. Cicero, De Re Publica 6.8; Ammianus Marcellinus 14.6.8. For slightly diVerent approaches cf. Polybius 9.10.1; Horace, Carmina 4.8 and 4.9; Cicero, Ad Familiares 5.12.7.

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tradition. We return now to examine those earlier attitudes from an age when statues were more fully engaged in society.

some visual representations We may perhaps imagine that some of the public spaces and sanctuaries of the Classical Greek world were also Wlled with statues;7 but although they are frequently represented in visual imagery of the period (cult statues in particular), and the remarkable nature of statues often attracted the attention of writers, there is scarcely a trace of any signiWcant concern with statues as an important part of the urban, or rural, environment. If the Hellenistic world engendered an interest in ‘art for art’s sake’ and witnessed the growth of public portrait statuary, the sheer number of statues, as a form of ‘art’ encountered everywhere, every day, seems to have been taken for granted before the Roman period, or at least, little literary evidence survives to suggest otherwise. In the Roman period attitudes appear to have been diVerent. This was perhaps partly because of the implication of honoriWc statues in adversarial politics and patronal relationships—they were recognizably important to the structure of Roman society. But as we saw in Chapter 1, this custom owed much to the honoriWc conventions of the Hellenistic cities. Other possible reasons are discussed below. Statues very frequently occur in Roman artistic representations. More to the point, they are common elements in scenes of the identiWable Roman urban environment; some examples come from prominent public monuments: as we have seen, on the Anaglypha Traiani which depicts the Roman Forum we Wnd the famous statue of Marsyas (also shown on coins) and the statue group of Trajan with Italia and her children (Fig. 26);8 again, one of the fourth-century reliefs on the Arch of Constantine juxtaposes the emperor on the Rostra with statues of his illustrious predecessors, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius (Fig. 23; at least Wve free-standing statues—depending on interpretation—are represented on the whole arch, besides architectural sculpture and smaller eYgies). Such images must not be taken (as they often are) merely as documents. What they choose to include and exclude, the styles selected, the compositions and juxtapositions employed, are all potentially signiWcant.9 The Flavian or early Trajanic 7 J. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, iii (Stuttgart 1902) 16 once again employs the ‘second population’ metaphor. Cf. N. J. Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture: Ancient Meanings, Modern Readings (London 1996) 455 on the failure of the Greeks to tell us about their statues: ‘Why should they bother to distinguish the wood from the trees, in this forest of statues?’ 8 See Ch. 3. 9 Cf. e.g. D. Wardle, ‘ Vespasian, Helvidius Priscus and the Restoration of the Capitol’, Historia 45 (1996) 208–22, at 219 on numismatic depictions of the Capitol and its statuary.

122 the other population tomb of the Haterii provides a vivid illustration. Its famous ‘Via Sacra’ relief depicts a series of buildings from the city of Rome (Fig. 2). They clearly include the Colosseum, though the identiWcation of the other four major structures is controversial (it is not certain that these are buildings along the Via Sacra—the route of a corte`ge—as some have thought, or whether they belong to diVerent regions of the city).10 It is agreed, however, that despite the inaccuracy of the details represented (at least as regards the ‘plebeian’-style relative scales) the images of buildings represent real, speciWc ediWces from the city. Starting on the left we have: an arch (labelled ‘Arcus ad Isis’—the arch at the temple of Isis) which has three passages, each entirely Wlled with a statue of a deity, and more sculptural decoration above the attic; next comes a small arch or colonnade seen in proWle with sculptural horses on the roof; then there is the Colosseum, with three sculptural eagles and three human Wgures Wlling the arcades; after that we see a large arch in proWle, a chariot group on top and a tall statue beneath; then the Arch of Titus (labelled ‘Arcus in Sacra Via Summa’) with a large statue of Roma(?) beneath, Xanked by architectural statues or reliefs; Wnally, a temple, possibly that of Jupiter Stator, with the cult statue visible between the central columns as is customary in depictions of temples. The prominence of statues is remarkable. In the case of Roma and the Minerva Wgure under the Arcus ad Isis the statues seem to be important in communicating location (close to the Temple of Venus and Rome, and a Temple of Minerva, respectively). This association of statues with localities was perhaps widespread, for we know of a vicus (a neighbourhood) in Rome that derived its name from a statue—the vicus statuae Valerianae—and also of six place-names elsewhere that refer to statues (one ‘Ad Statuam’ and four ‘Ad Statuas’ in Italy, Pannonia Inferior and Spain).11 Moreover, military diplomata and vadimonia (legal undertakings to appear at a given time and place) often use prominent statues in Rome as well as parts of buildings to specify the location of documents displayed in the metropolis or agreed meeting-places (for example: ‘which is posted on the Capitol in Rome behind the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, on the base of Q. Marcius

10 F. Castagnoli, ‘Gli ediWci rappresentati in un relievo del sepolcro degli Haterii’, BCAR 69 (1941) 59–69 addresses previous theories and presents his own. See D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven 1992) 196–7 (with Wg. 165) for a more recent summary. 11 The vicus: CIL 6.975 (under Regio XIV) and the Notitia Regionum and Curiosum Urbis Regionum in H. Jordan, Topographie der Stadt Rom im Alterthum, ii (Berlin 1871) 567 at line 13 of the text; cf. reference to ‘statuavalerianenses’ in CIL 6.31893. See L. Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore 1992) 372; LTUR iv. 372 (also 310–11, 329–30, and 353–72 on various other landmark statues in ancient Rome). On the place-names see: RE (2nd ser.) iii (a), 2232, and for explanation see G. F. Gamurrini, ‘Ricognizione delle mansiones ad Novas, ad Statuas, ad Graecos, lungo la via Cassia, da Chiusi a Firenze’, NSc 1898, 271–6.

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Rex’; ‘in the Forum of Augustus in front of the triumphal statue of Cn. Sentius’).12 The statues on the Haterii relief are outsized in comparison with some of the architecture (notably the shrunken Colosseum), and the manner of representation employed tends to express importance through scale.13 Castagnoli, who rejects the idea of the buildings’ topographical connection, suggests that the statues appearing as ‘Wllers’ in the empty spaces undermine any sense of a realistic representation, but give it ‘the character of an abstract conception’.14 This is the abstract conception of a city of statues. We might also note that the one famous statue that is perhaps to be more securely linked with a Wrmly identiWed structure on the relief, the Colossus of Nero which ultimately gave the Colosseum its nickname, is deWnitely not to be seen.15

counting statues The abundance of statues in the city of Rome and the Roman world is addressed much more directly in literary testimonies, most fully, perhaps, by the Elder Pliny. He says much about the perceived history and purpose of statues in the Roman environment, but when it comes to the question of numbers, it is what he refuses to say that is particularly interesting. The Naturalis Historia is about the world, invoked by the very Wrst word of the main text—mundum. The book begins with a discussion of the world in its broadest sense (that is, the planet and the Stoic cosmos16), and works down through the various aspects of nature and their relevance to mankind, ultimately dealing with art as adaptation, and exploitation, of nature’s products. In this encyclopaedic work, Pliny frequently ‘pursues’ information and reproduces it in painstaking detail. The verb often

12 CIL 16.5; Platner-Ashby, 49–50; Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 9. See also AE 1969–70, 29 (no. 96; cf. no. 97); B. Kellum, ‘The Phallus as SigniWer: The Forum of Augustus and Rituals of Masculinity’, in N. B. Kampen, Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 170–83, at 171 and 181 n. 18. Some at least of these directions cannot have been merely a form of words, as Kellum puts it ‘The statues must have been legible, probably even to the illiterate, since people were directed to a tribunal [in the Forum Augustum] according to which statue it stood in front of’. Cf. CIL 6.9673, locating a business in reference to the ‘statue of Plancus’. 13 Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 196, Wg. 164 and pl. on 166. 14 Castagnoli, ‘Gli ediWci rappresentati in un relievo’, 61. 15 M. Bergmann, Der Koloss Neros, Die Domus Aurea und der Mentalita¨tswandel im Rom der fru¨hen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein 1993) esp. 17–18 on the rather confusing sources for the Colossus’s life after Nero. 16 Cf. J. Isager, Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art (London 1991) 32 on this aspect of the work.

124

the other population

used for such research is persequor.17 The author sets out to ‘pursue’ the countries of the Middle East (6.96); he ‘pursues’ the shore opposite Arabia (6.163); he ‘pursues’ the various dyes from shellWsh (9.129); exotic trees (12.14); even the medicinal properties of the hyena (28.92), and so on.18 He mentions others who have or have not pursued matters diligently.19 Occasionally he admits the diYculty, the impossibility or the pointlessness of pursuing a topic.20 Three times in his work, however, Pliny refuses on principle to pursue his topic to the end. In 2.85 it is the height of the clouds, sky, sun and moon: in quis tamen una ratio geometricae collectionis numquam fallacis possit non repudiari, si cui libeat altius ista persequi, nec ut mensura—id enim velle paene dementis otii est21— sed ut tantum aestumatio coniectandi constet animo. In these matters only the method of geometrical inference which is never false can avoid rejection, if anyone wanted to pursue such questions more deeply, and without the intention of establishing a precise measurement—for to wish for that marks an almost insane idleness (otium)—but merely a conjectural calculation.

It is reasonable to guess at the height of the sky, but to attempt an accurate calculation is virtually madness—strong condemnation from one as interested in details as Pliny. It may seem reasonable to claim that only the demented try to calculate the height of the sky, but Pliny does not exactly suggest that the sky has no height; it is the degree of otium that matters; this is a trivial pursuit, a reprehensible waste of time. Towards the end of the Naturalis Historia, after a discussion of various types of gemstone, Pliny proclaims that he shall go no further (37.195): Cum Wnis nominum non sit—quae persequi non equidem cogito, innumera ex Graeca vanitate—indicatis nobilibus gemmis, immo vero etiam plebeis, rariorum genera digna dictu distinxisse satis erit. Since there is no end of names—which I have no intention of pursuing, innumerable as they are because of Greek vanity—having mentioned the precious gems, and even common ones indeed, it will be suYcient to indicate the varieties of rarer gems worthy of comment.

Another dimension is introduced here. The vanity of pursuing the subject further seems to be associated with the vanity of Greek gems, the proliferation of which is yet another manifestation of the luxuria contracted from the Greek world. The opening passages of Book 37 display the author’s consternation as he 17

For this sense of the word see OLD under deWnition four (esp. 4b). Cf. Pliny, NH 8.102, 13.40, 15.24, 19.139, 20.78, 22.119 for similar phrases. 19 Ibid. 6.170, 19.32, 21.13, 28.5 (of those who have studied the Xavour of human parts!). 20 Ibid. 3.46; 6.58, 7.116; 18.105. 21 Cf. the almost identical phrase of Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Grammaticos 1.178 when he condemns ’ uB Est ’ in (‘it is close to madness’). the words made up by analogists (cf. Ch. 2): maniaB Egg 18

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recounts examples of vanity (37.6). Worse still, from Book 33 we learn that the removal of gems and precious metals from under the Earth is a violent abuse that cannot come to good (33.2: ‘we delve into her entrails and seek wealth in the realm of the dead’).22 In this context Pliny’s language is particularly interesting: in searching for minerals in the Earth, ‘persequimur omnes eius Wbras vivimusque super excavatam’ (‘we pursue all her veins and live above what we have hollowed out’). This more substantial ‘pursuit’ is surely associated in the author’s mind with the ‘pursuit’ of the subject of gems, which must be limited if it is to stop short of vanity. Nevertheless, Pliny’s approach is ambiguous. Why start on gems at all? So as to be comprehensive perhaps, and because gems are exquisite distillations of nature’s majesty which surpass her other products (37.1). But Pliny does not limit his study to the natural product when, in 37.196, he mentions the relative values of diVerent shapes, or when, in the following four chapters, he gives advice for the detection of forgeries. His excuse (that ‘even luxury should be protected against fraud’) seems rather lame. These two refusals to pursue topics are important for our understanding of a third, in 34.35, when the author addresses the proliferation of bronze statues. Pliny writes of statuaria in the following terms: sed haec ad inWnitum effloruit, multorum voluminum opere, si quis plura persequi velit; omnia enim quis possit? But this art has Xourished to an extent beyond limits—to Wll a work of many volumes if one wished to pursue it extensively, for who could cover it all?

Some examples follow (34.36): the 3,000 statues on the stage-background of M. Scaurus’ temporary theatre (vanity for Pliny; presumably impressively conspicuous consumption in Scaurus’ eyes); Mummius, who ‘having conquered Achaea Wlled the city’ but did not leave enough money for his daughter’s dowry; Lucullus’ imports; great numbers of statues in Rhodes, Athens, Olympia, and Delphi. Then again (37): ‘quis ista mortalium persequi possit aut quis usus noscendi intellegatur?’ (‘what man could pursue those statues, and what use could be felt in knowing them?’). Utility is very important to Pliny.23 The uselessness of enumerating statues is like the measurement of the sky; a rough idea will suYce, and here that is provided by the few examples.24 The cases of Scaurus and Mummius imply, however, that, as with the gems, the vanity of the objects studied is one reason for the vanity of excessive scholarly attention. 22

Isager, Pliny ou Art and Society, passim, on moral aspects of Pliny’s ‘art history’. For instance, the cabbage is useful as a medicine and therefore especially worthy of ‘pursuit’, after the example of Cato himself (NH 20.78); see Isager, Pliny on Art and Society, 25 and 31 on utility. 24 Cicero also says that it would be ‘long and unnecessary’ to mention all the art-works in Asia and Greece in detail: In Verrem 2.4.135. 23

126 the other population As with Pliny’s cosmology at the beginning of the work, the ideas of limited enquiry that emerge in these passages may owe something to Stoic philosophy.25 There are, indeed, some close parallels with Seneca’s comments. In demonstrating the self-suYciency of philosophy, as compared with mathematics, Seneca rejects mere calculation, ‘for the wise man seeks out reasons and explanations for natural things, but the mathematician merely pursues and calculates their numbers and measurements’.26 So it is likely that Pliny’s reluctance to calculate numbers or carry his pursuit of knowledge too far is due in part to his Stoic ideas. But this is not simply a Stoic text, and the close of Pliny’s discussion in 34.37 shows in a striking way that he is not simply a Stoic, and that his thinking reXects contradictions more generally present in Roman culture. After all his ‘Stoic’ restraint and his scorn for luxurious accumulation of statues, he admits that he will say something about the most famous artists like Lysippus who executed 1,500 works. Why? Because it may be pleasurable—‘voluptarium sit’. Voluptarius is not a particularly common word, and it is usually used in a derogatory sense, particularly with reference to Epicureanism.27 Sallust uses it to refer to the softening of Roman troops by Asian luxuries, including ‘signa, painted panels, and engraved vessels’.28 Pliny’s account has a more general signiWcance. His ‘statuary’ is viewed as a single phenomenon over and above the individual activities of artists, patrons and collectors.29 It has grown and Xourished almost organically—‘effloruit’—and without limit. ‘Without limit’, ‘ad inWnitum’ in the Latin, suggests excess and transgression, and therefore has Stoic connotations.30 But it also means, literally, ad inWnitum. Excessive proliferation of statues is wrong and one symptom of this transgression is the supposed impossibility of counting the statues. The same applies to gems: ‘Wnis nominum non sit’ (‘there is no end to their names’). We do not expect Pliny to know how many statues there are in the world or in Rome (though in later centuries Zacharias and the compilers of the regionary catalogues had more conWdence in this respect). The world population of statues, however, was clearly not literally inWnite, and the exaggeration is signiWcant. Elsewhere, the topos of innumerability is applied to the statues of individuals. 25

Isager, Pliny on Art and Society, 32–42 for Stoic connections and idea of limits of discovery. Seneca, Epistulae 88.26–8; compare esp. Pliny, NH 2.85. Seneca then uses the example of the study of mirrors (the wise man knows how they work, but the mathematician simply knows how to use them for certain eVects) which Pliny addresses in NH 33.129. Pliny and Seneca resemble each other also in their condemnation of luxurious marble columns: Seneca, Epistulae 115.8; Pliny, NH 36.44–61; 36.6–8 and 45. 27 See Cicero, In Pisonem 42; Tusculanae Disputationes 2.18, 5.88; De Finibus 1.37; Ad Atticum 12.2.2; Seneca, De Otio 7.3; De Consolatione ad Polybium 6.4. 28 Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 11.6. 29 Statuaria in NH 34.35 refers primarily to bronzes, but necessarily covers all kinds of statua. 30 Isager, Pliny on Art and Society, 32–3 on limitations of knowledge. Cf. Seneca on the winds (but presumably without moral force) Naturales Quaestiones 5.17.5 (‘InWnitum est, si singulos velim persequi’). 26

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We are told that Tiberius’ notorious praetorian prefect Sejanus was adored while he was in power; his numerous statues were an indication of his importance in Roman society.31 But retrospectively (and after his fall from grace has been marked by the destruction of his portraits) it is the representation of these statues as ‘innumerable’ that damns him: ^‘ Z ‘ aB a‘i tE ’ ‘ tE boul t o g ar toi pl^ ZyoB t^ on andri anton on Z kai Z‘ ipp ’ u, oud ’ E EjZr ’ iymZsEn a’ n tiB. fulai kai oi‘ pr^ otoi E’ stZsan auto^ For one could not have counted the multitude of statues of him set up by the senate and the equestrian order and the tribes and the foremost citizens.32

The Panegyric to Trajan by Pliny the Younger (nephew of the encyclopaedist) shows more clearly that innumerability could be applied as a hallmark of bad emperors. It uses obvious contrasts to accentuate the diVerence between Trajan as the best of leaders—optimus princeps—and ‘other principes’ (namely Domitian and his predecessors in crime). Trajan does not aim for immortality. He feels honoured to stand before the temple in the form of a statue (52.2) and he enters merely to adore the gods. In the vestibule of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Trajan has one or two statues (52.3–4): unam alteramve et hanc aeream cernimus. At paulo ante aditus omnes, omnes gradus totaque area hinc auro, hinc argento relucebat seu potius polluebatur, cum incesti principis statuis permixta deorum simulacra sorderent. Ergo istae quidem aereae et paucae manent manebuntque quam diu templum ipsum, illae autem et innumerabiles strage ac ruina publico gaudio litaverunt ’ [my emphasis] We see just one or two, and these are bronze. But not long ago every approach, all the steps and the whole precinct gleamed with gold here, silver there, or rather, they were polluted since the simulacra of the gods were mixed up with statuae of an incestuous emperor. And so these statues of yours, being bronze and few in number remain, and shall remain, as long as the temple itself, whilst those innumerable gold ones lie toppled and broken as a sacriWce to public joy.33

An account of the destruction follows. Domitian’s statues cannot be counted, but we can almost see Pliny counting out Trajan’s few: ‘unam alteram . . . hanc . . . cernimus’. Did Domitian really transgress some moral code in permitting ‘innumerable statues’? During his reign the positive impact of so many statues must have been as strong as the negative impact of their spectacular destruction when he fell. Moreover Tacitus writes that the images of Germanicus were practically 31

See esp. Juvenal 10.58–64 on the reversal of fortune; cf. also Ch. 8 on the destruction of statues. Dio 58.2.7. 33 For the negative interpretation of emperor-statues in precious metals see K. Scott, ‘The SigniWcance of Statues in Precious Metals in Emperor Worship’, TAPhA 62 (1931), 101–23. Cf. Dio 74.14.2a (on Didius Iulianus): statues in bronze tend to last longer than those in precious metals. 32

128 the other population innumerable—‘statuarum locorumve in quis coleretur haud facile quis numerum inierit’ (‘one could not easily enumerate his statues and the places in which they were cultivated’)—and Tacitus shows no disapproval.34 But Germanicus was not an emperor deposed, and posterity venerated his memory rather than seeking to condemn it. Pliny ignores this ambiguity, presenting his criticism as an appeal to absolute moral standards. He even hints at a causal link between innumerability of statues and their destruction: Trajan’s few remain and shall remain, Domitian’s innumerable ones were sacriWced. It is certainly true, however, that from the start emperors were cautious in these matters. Or they were careful, at least, to appear careful. They are represented, or represent themselves, as refusing statuary honours proposed by others. According to Dio (53.27.3), Agrippa had to drop his plan to place Augustus’ statue in the Pantheon (which was the closest thing to a ruler-temple in the Augustan city); instead, the image was relegated (like Trajan’s) to the temple vestibule, which it shared with statues of Caesar and Agrippa himself.35 In Res Gestae 24, Augustus personally claims to have melted down around eighty silver statues of himself (he is perhaps deliberately vague, as if the exact number was of little concern) and he translates these honours from citizens into pious oVerings in the temple of Apollo.36 A document from the reign of Claudius oVers Wrm contemporary evidence for this sort of display of modesty. Claudius’ letter to the Alexandrians (of ad 41) restricts the erection of statues in his honour in respect to site, material, and exposure, lest they be ‘oVensive’ (phortikos).37 Pliny himself writes to Trajan requesting permission to move statues of ‘just emperors’ from his estate to a temple which he is building, and to add Trajan’s image. The ruler’s response is lukewarm: ‘although I am very frugal when it comes to this kind of honour, nevertheless I shall allow it.’38

the overpopulation of statues The discussion so far has had two purposes. First, to show, using the evidence of particular writers and art-works from the late Republic and early Empire, that at least some authorities did not take for granted the enormous number of statues in Rome and the Roman world. There is an awareness that statues are a 34 36

35 Tacitus, Annales 2.53. See Zanker, Augustus, 144. See Suetonius, Augustus 52; although an alternative version claims that he spent the proceeds: Dio

53.22. 37 P.Lond. 1912, in H. I. Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt: The Jewish Troubles in Alexandria and the Athanasian Controversy, Illustrated by Texts from Greek Papyri in the British Museum (London 1924) 1–37, speciWcally 23–4. 38 Pliny, Epistulae 10.8–9.

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conspicuous element in the environment, and that awareness provokes a response. In addition, although we are often concerned with honoriWc portrait statues, the distinction of that category is sometimes ignored, most clearly in the Elder Pliny’s ‘statuary Xourished’ (and here Pliny’s broad view of the phenomenon of statuary makes no distinction between Greece and Rome). These statues are part of the environment, outside the control of individuals. The second point is that the reponses to statues examined above assume that their proliferation is important to society; it is linked to moral concerns and political ideology. We turn now to the apparently more practical problems posed by urban statues. If every generation added its own population of statues to Rome and the cities of the Empire, then surely public space would eventually run out? This is not merely hypothesis; there is a certain amount of archaeological evidence to suggest a massive accumulation.39 We cannot have any accurate impression of how many statues (literally) fell by the wayside, or were otherwise destroyed or recycled.40 However, from a very early stage in the growth of the city of Rome there is evidence of state or magisterial intervention. According to Livy (40.51.3), the leader of the senate for 179 bc, M. Aemilius Lepidus, had the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol cleaned up and in the process removed the statues from the columns round about: ‘quae incommode opposita videbantur signa’ (‘which seemed to be placed in the way’).41 He removed other clutter as well: shields and military standards of every kind. A little later, according to the Elder Pliny: L. Piso prodidit M. Aemilio C. Popilio iterum cos.42 a censoribus P. Cornelio Scipione M. Popilio statuas circa forum eorum, qui magistratum gesserant, sublatas omnes praeter eas, quae populi aut senatus sententia statutae essent, eam vero, quam apud aedem Telluris statuisset sibi Sp. Cassius, qui regnum adfectaverat, etiam conXatam a censoribus. According to L. Piso, when M. Aemilius and C. Popilius were consuls, the latter for the second time, the censors P. Cornelius Scipio and M. Popilius removed all the statues of former magistrates around the Forum, except those set up by the will of the people or senate, and indeed, they melted down the statue that Sp. Cassius, who had aspired to monarchy, had erected to himself at the Temple of Tellus.43

This is not obviously an attempt simply to clear space or tidy up the central public area of the city. The motive is appropriate for the censors: the curbing of ambitio—destabilizing ambition. The image of a man who threatens the very 39

Note K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge 1978) 220. Deterioration: cf. Cicero, Philippicae 14, ‘statuae intereunt tempestate, vi, vetustate’ (‘statues perish through weather, violence, or age’). Recycling: Dio Chrysostom’s Discourse 31 (the Rhodian Oration) and Pliny, NH 35.4–5. Generally, see W. Eck, ‘Senatorial Self-Representation: Developments in the Augustan Period’, in F. Millar and E. Segal (eds.), Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects (Oxford 1984) 129–67, at 158 n. 48. 41 This, of course, was the site of Domitian’s innumerable statues. 42 43 i.e. 158 bc; see CIL 12 p. 25 (the Fasti Capitolini). Pliny, NH 34.30. 40

130 the other population constitution of the state receives a punishment that preWgures the sort of iconoclasm discussed in Chapter 8. Pliny concludes: ‘nimirum in ea quoque re ambitionem providebant illi viri’ (‘evidently in that matter also those men guarded against ambitio’). It is diYcult to know how this statement should be read, since a little earlier Pliny seems to praise ambitio without any obvious irony (34.17): the practice of erecting statues was accepted ‘a toto orbe terrarum humanissima ambitione, et in omnium municipiorum foris statuae ornamentum esse coepere’ (‘by the whole world in the most civilized ambitio, and statues began to be an adornment in the fora of all the municipalities’). In any case, the political, ideological, and moral signiWcance of the censors’ act is made manifest. It is evident that statues were powerful symbols at this time (note Cato’s attempts to forbid female statues in the provinces reported in Pliny, NH 34.31), and these actions to reduce numbers in certain situations seemed worthy of note more than a century or two later, to Livy and the Elder Pliny (and presumably to any intermediate sources on which they relied). Later accounts of the imperial removal of statues reproduce the same themes and they also illustrate some concern not only over what should be done with proliferating statues, but also what could and should not be done. Before examining them, however, we should brieXy reconsider the diVerence between the Republican and the Imperial contexts for the display of honoriWc statues. Ambitio was central to the competitive political system of Republican Rome and the accounts of Livy and Pliny, though essentially both Imperial, suggest that statues were an important instrument for the self-promotion of individuals. Even though they were usually not erected by their portrait subjects, as representative likenesses of public Wgures they served as a sort of advertisement.44 In fact the word ambitio implies not only ambition and competition, but also, more literally, public soliciting of votes.45 Portrait statues were also proof of patronage and social and political status. Monarchy partly suppressed this system and Augustus may have intended to emphasize that fact, for although he boasted the restoration of the Res Publica, the years of devastating civil war appeared to have arisen from Republican political conXict.46 That, indeed, may be the message of the Forum Augustum, the imagery of which insists on foreign victory rather than internal conXict.47 This was a new Forum for a new Rome, and the statues of ‘summi viri’ (illustrious men from the past) that Xanked it presented a new kind of display—not separate commissions as the product of competition and individual ambition, 44

Zanker, Augustus, 5–8. In early Imperial literature it sometimes denotes ‘display’ or ‘ostentation’: see OLD s.v. ambitio 6. 46 Zanker, Augustus, 89–98 on the restoration of the republic. 47 Ibid. 214–15 The Forum’s caryatids may have had the same meaning if viewed in the light of Vitruvius’ explanation in De Architectura 1.1.5. 45

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but a centrally ordered, uniWed, linear portrait-gallery of historical Wgures, with conXict edited out. Zanker explains the change in the following terms: For the old aristocracy, and even for those who now rose within the imperial administration, the urge to show oV became pointless, at least in Rome itself. The fact that Augustus now dispensed public honours and determined who would receive a statue in the available space still remaining in the Forum Augustum obviated any desire for selfgloriWcation.48

Or at least it reduced the potential for self-gloriWcation.49 The Forum Augustum provided an exemplum for the public areas of other towns. This is apparently the case in Pompeii’s Forum, where statues of local notables were neatly and regularly placed within the colonnades on the east side, and the Eumachia building, which seems, like Augustus’ forum, to have displayed statues of Aeneas and Romulus (here on its colonnaded fac¸ade) and conceivably ‘summi viri’ as well.50 It is notable, however, that what remains of the pre-imperial period bases around the forum of Pompeii implies a more or less egalitarian, more or less uniform size and positioning of honoriWc statues before Augustus’ transformation of Rome, and this perhaps suggests the degree of control exercised by the local council, the decuriones.51 Yet even here the interest in non-imperial honoriWc statues seems to have declined in the early decades of the Principate and the existing statues were obviously overshadowed by the massive imperial monuments of which the bases survive at the south end of the forum, the political centre of the town.52 This digression provides the background, and part of the explanation, for the next two major clearances of Roman statues that we know of from the literary sources. According to Suetonius, Gaius 34 that emperor, statuas virorum inlustrium ab Augusto ex Capitolina area propter angustias in campum Martium conlatas ita subvertit atque disiecit ut restitui salvis titulis non potuerint, vetuitque posthac viventium cuiquam usquam statuam aut imaginem nisi consulto et auctore se poni.

48

Zanker, Augustus, 291. For greater detail on the Forum Augustum see P. Zanker, Forum Augustum II: Das Bildprogramm (Tu¨bingen 1968) esp. 14–16. Ancient literary evidence appears in Augustus Res Gestae 21 (and 35); Ovid, Fasti 5.551–98; Pliny, NH 22.13; Suetonius, Augustus 31.5; SHA, Severus Alexander 28.6 (imitation of the Forum Augustum in the Forum Nervae). On possible inspiration of the pageant of heroes in Virgil, Aeneid 6.755–892 see J. Morwood, ‘Aeneas, Augustus, and the Theme of the City’, Greece and Rome 38 (1991) 212–23, at 222 n. 22. 50 On Pompeii: Zanker, Augustus, 320–3, 326–8; id., Pompeii: Public and Private Life (Cambridge, Mass. 1998) 93–107. 51 On the necessity of more or less uniform statues in imperial towns see Eck, ‘Senatorial SelfRepresentation’, 145. 52 Zanker, Augustus, 326–7. 49

132 the other population toppled and dismantled the statues of illustrious men that Augustus had brought into the Campus Martius from the Area Capitolina because of congestion, and he did it so thoroughly that they could not be restored with the inscriptions intact; then he forbade the erection of statues or images anywhere in the future, for anyone still alive, unless he had consented and given his authority.

Now, it may be that the Area Capitolina was congested with statues, and it was up to the restorer of Rome to clear it up.53 That is certainly the pretext; Suetonius’ explanation possibly quotes a contemporary, perhaps an epigraphic, account. It shows at least that such an explanation made sense at the time. But the same anxiety underlying the arrangement of the Forum Augustum, the desire to limit individual self-promotion, may have motivated this removal also. As far as the display of statues was concerned, the Area Capitolina had an outstanding symbolic value. On this site old statues told a similar history of Rome to that of the sculptures of the new Forum:54 here were the ‘simulacra deorum’, Romulus and Remus with their wolf, the kings of Rome, L. Brutus, Fabius Maximus, Aemilius Paullus, Metellus, the Scipiones, Q. Marcius Rex, Julius Caesar, and naturally Augustus himself (struck by lightning, according to Dio, in ad 1455). Once again, military diplomata and other notices were posted here on the bases of the statues; that is how we know of the image of Marcius Rex, for example.56 Precise locations are speciWed; we should not assume that the Capitoline statues were famous in the provinces as individual landmarks, but the insciptions do show that statues could be conceived as markers—they oVered a means of locating the smallest of inscriptions in this famously central place.57 In any case, it is probable that in this most privileged site for statuary display, Augustus wished to remove the images of nobiles who did not belong in the reinvented past and also perhaps to prevent future erection of statues by potential rivals; in Lahusen’s words: Congestion, which Suetonius cites as the reason for the removal of the statues of the viri illustres, will have played only a subordinate role. Rather, the honoriWc statues of various ages and types which had been accumulated on the Capitol in the course of the centuries without any uniWed concept, did not conform to the statuary programme of the maiores Augusti and summi viri which Augustus wanted to realize in his new forum.58

53

Platner–Ashby, 49 leaves it at that. See Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 7–12 for a more comprehensive list and the references from which it is compiled. Also Platner–Ashby, 49. 55 Dio 56.29.4 56 See Platner–Ashby, 50 for examples. Marcius Rex: CIL 16.5, from a bronze tablet found near Traunstein in Noricum, dated 15 June ad 64; the master-copy Wxed ‘in basi Q. Marci Regis pr(aetoris)’. 57 The abbreviation—in basi plus name—shows the interesting conXation of subject and representation, discussed elsewhere. 58 Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 11. 54

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If it seems strange that Suetonius gives no hint of this, we should remember that his reference comes in the context of a condemnation of Caligula: the whole point is to contrast Caligula’s behaviour towards the statues with Augustus’ before him, so we should not expect any criticism of the latter. Caligula’s actions are discussed in greater detail below. For now we should just note that he also is presented as acting for political reasons, albeit chaotically and without a pretext. The removal and prohibition of statues is intended to avoid any kind of competition with the emperor. The Wnal literary example of this kind comes from Dio’s account of the reign of Claudius. Two concise but complex passages concern us. The Wrst comes in Dio 60.5.4–5. Claudius is presented as a modest ruler who, like Pliny’s Trajan, is anxious to forbid any trappings of divinity, even those oVered by others:59 kai Ei’ k ona mian, kai ta utZn ’argur^ an, ’andri antaB tE d uo walko^ u tE kai liyou cZfis’ nal ’ ’ ataia g ar p anta t a toia^ uta a omata E^’inai, kai yEntaB a ut^ oi t a pr^ ota ElabE: m ’wlon t^ Z gE p olEi parEwEin E’ lEgE· p anprosEti poll Zn mEn zZmian, pol un dE kai o ’ ndri ’lla E’ rga kai a anton kai ’anayZm aton tEB mEn g ar oi‘ naoi p anta dE kai t aa ’ ‘ ‘ wr EpEpl Zroto: o stE kai pEri E’ kEinon boulE usEsyai E’ fZ a Z pr^ ajai. And he accepted at Wrst only one image—and this a silver one—and two statues, of bronze and stone, that had been voted for him. For he said that all such expenditures were vain and moreover caused considerable waste and a nuisance for the city. For all the temples and all the other public buildings were Wlled with statues and dedications (anathe¯mata), so that he said that he would consider what should be done even with them.

The sequel comes in 60.25.2–3, after Claudius’ swearing in of the magistrates: ’ EpEid Z tE Z‘ p oliB poll^ on Ei’ k onon E’ plZro^ uto (E’ j Zn g ar a’ nEdZn to^iB boulomEnoiB ’ E’ n graf^ Z ka i E n walk^ o l i yo tE dZmosiE u Esyai), t a B t E plEiouB au’ t^ on ‘EtErosE poi i i i ^ ‘ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’   mEtEyZkE, kai EB t o EpEita apZg orEusE mZdEni idi otZ Z Z boul Z E’ pitrEcZ , oi an m , i i  kai kataskEu oB E’iZ ’Z asaito
to^ uto poiE^in ’EjE^inai, pl Zn E’i tiB E’ rgon ti o’i kodomZk ZkE. to utoiB g ar d Z, to^iB tE suggEnEsin au’ t^ on i‘ stasyai ’En to^iB worioiB E’ kEinoiB E’ f^ Since the city was being Wlled with many images (for it was possible for anyone who wanted freely to display themselves in public in a painting or bronze or stone), he moved most of them elsewhere, and for the future, he forbade any private citizen to do this, unless the senate had given permission, with the exception of those who had constructed or restored a building: he allowed them and their relatives to have their images set up in the places concerned.60 59

Cf. Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 72–6 for similar instances. There is little material evidence for private self-promotion of this kind in connection with buildings in Imperial Rome, but for the evidence that does survive, and the much more plentiful evidence for the Republic, see Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 80–4. See also T. Mommsen, Ro¨misches Staatsrecht (Leipzig 1887) 447–52; Mommsen and Lahusen see this honour as eVectively limited to a very small circle from the reign of Augustus onwards. 60

134 the other population This is Claudius behaving as an emperor should.61 It is possible, as with Augustus and Caligula, to see a political motive for these restrictions: the quenching of an ambitio that might threaten the monarch’s power; but Dio’s picture suggests an ostensibly more commendable kind of behaviour. The restriction on statues is applied Wrstly to the emperor himself. If it is directed against personal ambition then it nevertheless recalls Piso the censor’s clearance of the Forum: there are opportunities to acquire a statue through virtue, if the boule¯ permits it, or if the subject has performed some act of euergetism towards the city. As it is, anyone can appear in public as a statue without restraint. And Claudius does not propose the destruction of statues that already exist: they are simply moved out of the way. Moreover we see Claudius behaving as a good emperor even as we read. He personally will think about the problem and decide what must be done: a little further on in the text the decision is made. We can only speculate about the reality of the activities underlying Dio’s account, our only source, and the speeches, decrees and inscriptions that may inform it. But it seems at least to indicate a concern with the statues of Rome that was to be addressed publicly and demanded a public response. And it is not just a problem with some statues of one person or in one place, or honoriWc statues alone. Claudius is concerned with the whole population of statues here: in all the temples and public works. It is not inappropriate to return to Cassiodorus’ metaphor, for if it has a precedent in any extant ancient literature, it may be here. Claudius declares that statues are vain (mataia),62 a waste of money (ze¯mia), and a nuisance (ochlos). The last word is commonly used of nuisances; here it clearly refers to the overcrowding of Rome. But ochlos usually carries connotations of multitude and is often used to refer to crowds or, more generally, the populace. No other extant text before Cassiodorus goes so far in expressing the sheer, overwhelming number of statues in the city of Rome: the city is full. The multitude of images is further associated with Rome by Dio’s almost punning juxtaposition of the words polis (‘city’) and polus (‘much/many’) in their various forms. Yet whether this vision is Dio’s invention or Claudius’, it remains a representation, an image of a Rome that is overcrowded with statues. Was this image underpinned by any practical problem? 61 The Wrst passage is followed by a description (60.6.8–9) of other commendable actions concerning statues and the city of Rome. Notably, statues appropriated by Caligula were returned to the cities of the Empire; and Claudius kept his own name oV buildings (like Augustus (Res Gestae 20) and Hadrian (the attribution of the Pantheon to Agrippa in its dedicatory inscription). 62 Cf. P.Oxy. 58.20 (in B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt (eds.), The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, i (London 1889): an oYcial in Egypt in AD 288 complains of the number of administrators involved in the estates of the treasury (mataia analomata) and asks for rationalization.

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We must assume that such must have been the case at least in some important areas of statuary display, though the diYculty was presumably solved more often by local intervention (as with the apparent displacement of Republican statuary from the south end of Pompeii’s forum) than by grand political gestures. From outside Rome there survives at least one inscription that hints at the problem caused by congestion of public places with honoriWc portraits. It is an Imperial inscription from Cirta in Numidia: viam com[meanti bvs incomm[odam par tim adstruct[is crepi dinibus aequa[tisque statuis qvae it[er totius fori angust[abant ex aucto[ritate D. Fontei Fr[ontoniani The road unWt for traYc (was restored) by the authority of D. Fonteius Frontonianus, partly with the construction of adjacent bases/pavements, and with the straightening of the statues that were clogging passage through the whole of the forum.63

The reconstruction is that of Mommsen in CIL,64 but despite variations in the possible readings, the general message is recognizable: an individual with authority has taken action to clear a passage through the forum area, presumably by moving back the accretions of statues which had grown along the edges of the thoroughfare. It is possible that pressure of space may also have inXuenced the brothers Sextus Cornelius Maximus and Sextus Cornelius Petroninus in Saldae (Bougie) in Mauretania, when they restored the disintegrating equestrian statues of an illustrious great-uncle but removed them from the forum to adorn a temple.65 Peka´ry is probably correct to connect such movements with the everincreasing number of imperial portraits requiring prominent positions (they would surely have continued to dominate more and more of the Pompeian forum had its development not ended in the Wrst century),66 though imperial images themselves would have been under pressure, as the over-representation of late antique statue-bases at sites such as the Forum Romanum eloquently demonstrates. It may be impossible to assess the extent of the problem of overcrowding in Roman towns and cities, but these sources serve to show, albeit incidentally, that in some situations a problem was recognized and addressed. The following 63

CIL 8.7046. Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 41 with n. 163. The sense of partim is not entirely clear; an alternative would be ‘raptim adstructis’—‘with the rapid construction’. 65 66 CIL 8.8935. Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 41 with n. 163. Ibid. 64

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section in this chapter will take a diVerent approach to the subject. It will deal with one of the causes of proliferation and raise the possibility that a superabundance of statues could sometimes be regarded as a public beneWt rather than a nuisance.

celebrity If the clogging of public places was sometimes a problem, it did not simply result from increased numbers of public statues. The obstacle was created by a concentration on particular places. It is no surprise that those who erected statues favoured public places. But the sources, and to a certain extent, the archaeological remains, suggest that there was more to it than that. To be particularly eVective an honoriWc statue almost had to be in the way. It beneWted from being in the midst of milling crowds, which perhaps ensured that it did not just become a neutral part of the environment, noticed only when erected, threatened, or moved. The Numidian inscription seems to say that the statues had been erected in a thoroughfare, and had accumulated around the artery, constricting the circulation of traYc. Had past citizens somehow obtained permission to erect statues in awkward places? Did this simply result from the shortage of space if the area could later be cleared ‘with the straightening of the statues’? Even in the Principate, the public portrait statue served the political process of ambitio—of canvassing attention if not votes—and this is perhaps the sense of Dio’s use of the Greek word de¯mosieuesthai (to be displayed in public). The relatively discreet and egalitarian arrangement of non-imperial images in the Pompeian forum and elsewhere67 might seem to contradict this principle, though it is likely that the statue-lined porticoes in front of the market-building and Eumachia building in Pompeii were as busy as anywhere in the forum area. In this town, however, one Wgure did end up in a special place of honour, not in the forum but at a junction on the Via dell’Abbondanza, in front of the Stabian Baths. This was obviously a notable commission for a prominent person from the community, M. Holconius Rufus (Fig. 27).68 The details of the inscription indicate a date between 2/1 bc and ad 14. According to the text this most senior of local magistrates was a ‘patron of the colony’, a ‘priest of Augustus’, and tribunus militum a populo. The last was evidently a civilian honour during the 67

For parallels see for example the relatively well-documented arrangement of statues in the fora of Cuicul and Thamugadi: Zimmer, Locus. 68 The statue, now in the Museo Nazionale in Naples (inv. 6233) is discussed in detail in P. Zanker, ‘Das Bildnis des M. Holconius Rufus’, AA 1981, 349–61. On the Holconii see J. H. D’Arms, ‘Pompeii and Rome in the Augustan Age and Beyond: The Eminence of the Gens Holconia’, in R. I. Curtius (ed.), Studia Pompeiana et Classica in Honor of Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, vol. 1 (New Rochelle, NY 1988), 51–74.

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Fig. 27. Holconius’ statue in Pompeii was evidently part of a monument that included images of his relatives. The location, at a bustling crossroads in the heart of the town, need not be seen as an undigniWed, secondary setting, for passing crowds would ensure ‘celebrity’. (Marble cuirassed statue of Marcus Holconius Rufus, Pompeii (in situ during 1930s). Between c. 2 bc and ad 14. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 6233. H: c. 2.02 m.)

reign of Augustus, but one that had obvious military overtones: the cuirassed statue appears to be based upon the cult image of Mars Ultor from the temple in Augustus’ forum and Zanker believes that unlike most of the statues in the Vesuvian towns it was manufactured in Rome itself.69 These two aspects of the work suggest Holconius’ close relationship to the centre of political power. But above all this elevated Wgure was evidently placed in a tetrapylon along with statues of other family members at one of the town’s biggest crossroads. The Via dell’Abbondanza was closed to wheeled vehicles at this point, but clearly remained a bustling thoroughfare.70 D’Arms sees this position as ‘a particularly undigniWed setting for a statue of Pompeii’s single most distinguished citizen’, 69

Zanker, ‘Das Bildnis’. Cf. R. Laurence, Roman Pompeii: Space and Society (London 1994) ch. 6, 88–103 and esp. maps 6.1–6.8 for other material manifestations of street activity in Pompeii. 70

138 the other population and he suggests that the original place of honour was in the forum, which was devastated in the earthquake of ad 62.71 This might be true, yet in one respect there was no better site for an honoriWc statue: celebrity was directly related to the attention of crowds. In nearby Herculaneum an even more illustrious local aristocrat, M. Nonius Balbus, illustrates the importance of crowded locations in enhancing the honour of a portrait statue. An inscribed altar next to the Suburban Baths at Herculaneum records a decree of the town council on the death of Balbus who had been a senator and proconsul.72 They resolved on the advice of one M. OWllius Celer to award a series of posthumous honours, the Wrst of which was an equestrian statue (perhaps the one preserved in the National Museum in Naples73) that should stand in the most frequented place ‘celeberrimo loco’. There is no exact location; that is not important. The point is that the statue should be placed explicitly in the most crowded place, for maximum exposure, maximum honour. There are numerous similar examples; a few will suYce to demonstrate the point. Cicero writes critically of a statue of Piso erected at his own behest, ‘celeberrimo in loco’.74 L. Vitrasius Silvestris, a benefactor of Cales, was honoured with a statue and a letter of praise, the latter displayed ‘in celeberrimo loco’.75 On the death of Gaius Caesar in ad 4 he was honoured by the Pisans with an arch decorated with statues ‘celeberrimo coloniae nostrae loco’ (‘in the most frequented place in our colony’).76 Another inscription comments speciWcally on the function of such memorials;77 under Antoninus Pius, L. Fabius Severus is honoured at Tergeste with a decree,78 statuam ei auratam equestrem primo quoque tempore in celeberrima Fori [n]ostri part[e] poni et i[n] basi eius hanc nostram c[o]nsensionem adque hoc decretum inscribi uti ad posteros nostros tam volt[us] amplissimi viri quam facta per[m]aneant that a gilded equestrian statue should be erected to him, and at the earliest opportunity, in the most frequented part of our forum, and that this consensus of ours and this decree should be inscribed on its base, so that both the face and the deeds of the most esteemed of men should endure to posterity 71

D’Arms, ‘Pompeii and Rome’, 60. The idea is supported by Zanker’s observation that a new head was put on the statue after the earthquake: Zanker, ‘Das Bildnis’, 352–5. 72 For a full discussion of Nonius, his family and the evidence of this and other inscriptions etc. see L. Schumacher, ‘Das Ehrendekret fu¨r M. Nonius Balbus aus Herculaneum (AE 1947, 53)’, Chiron 6 (1976) 165–84 (with transcription). See also AE 1947, 53 itself. 73 See F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven 1981) 158–61 on restorations etc. 74 75 76 77 Cicero, In Pisonem 93. CIL 10.4643. CIL 11.1421. CIL 5.532 (p. 61). 78 CIL 5.532. On this and similar inscriptions see F. Martin, ‘The Award of Civic HonoriWc Statues in Roman Italy, c. 31 BC–c. AD 500’, Ph.D. thesis (London 1996) 72–4.

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Then in ad 144 the decuriones of Brundisium honoured their patron’s dead daughter with a statue, ‘quam frequentissimo loco publice poni’ (‘to be placed at public expense in the busiest place’).79 Seneca also inadvertently underlines the importance of celebritas in making an impact, conveying a message even to a reluctant audience. The famous and unique equestrian statue of the heroine Cloelia is a monumental oddity at the busiest point, celeberrimo loco, on the Sacra Via in Rome: an image that should put the young men in their litters to shame. The notion of honoriWc public exposure could also be expressed in Greek formulae.80 The very word celebritas encapsulates the connection between crowded, public places and celebrity in the modern sense. The Elder Pliny writes that equestrian statues have ‘celebrity ’ at Rome—‘equestres utique statuae Romanam celebrationem habent ’—and the primary sense here of celebratio is ‘widespread use’ or ‘popularity’. But it could well cover the notion of exposure as well, and of the recipient’s resultant fame. The exposure of all kinds of statues in frequented locations remained important even (or perhaps especially) in late antiquity, as those examples discussed by John Curran demonstrate. In this period various statues were moved out of less conspicuous parts of the city of Rome. Curran sees this movement not as a result of the secularization of pagan religious art (moved from pagan sanctuaries into more neutral public spaces), but as a limited form of civic benefaction in straightened times. It was easier to adorn the more crowded areas by moving old statues than it was to erect new works: ‘Statues, because of their individual fame and artistic value, were an obvious and inexpensive expression of this philotimia [the pursuit of public honour].’81 The examples cited stress the contrast between concealed places (‘abdita loca’) and crowded ones (‘celeberrima loca/celebritas’).82 The force of this contrast—in relation to all statues, including cult images—is conveyed by one of Cicero’s accusations against Verres, the corrupt former governor of Roman Sicily.83 Verres is the appropriator of public property; Sicilian public grandeur has become his own private luxury. And now, religiones vero caerimoniaeque omnium sacrorum fanorumque violatae, simulacraque deorum, quae non modo ex suis templis ablata sunt, sed etiam iacent in tenebris ab isto retrusa atque abdita, consistere eius animum sine furore atque amentia non sinunt. 79 AE 1910, 203; NSc 1910, 146–47; R. K. Sherk, The Municipal Decrees of the Roman West (BuValo 1970), 25, no.14. 80 Seneca, Consolatio ad Marciam 16.2. Other more or less similar literary examples include: Cicero, Pro Sestio 140; Tacitus, Annales 4.67; Propertius 4.2; Pliny, NH 34.24. On Greek equivalent see K. Tuchelt, ¨ berlieferung aus der Zeit der Republik und Fru¨he Denkma¨ler Roms in Kleinasien: Beitra¨ge zur archa¨ologischen U des Augustus (Tu¨bingen 1979) 79. 81 Curran, ‘Moving Statues’; quotation from p. 55. 82 83 Ibid. 56 n. 23 for examples. Quoted here: CIL 10.3714, 1563. Cicero, In Verrem 2.1.7.

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The cults and sacred rites of all the shrines and sanctuaries he’s deWled, and the cult statues which he has not only removed from their temples but also hidden away so that they lie in darkness, these do not allow his mind to rest free of raging madness.

These last examples have less to do with the direct gloriWcation of individuals, than with the idea of public statuary display as an adornment for the city and its buildings. Though the late inscriptions reXect on the benefactor, the ostensible motive for their actions is the creation of public magniWcence, and we turn now to that long-lasting ideal.

urbem decorare et orbem When in Dio’s history the Emperor Claudius declares that the statues of Rome are a vain expense, he is rejecting in word, if not necessarily in deed, a familiar and central aspect of Roman socio-political activity. That such an approach should be acceptable (in word, if not in deed) perhaps owes something to the enduring topos of virtue as a memorial that outlasts any material monument. Virtue lives on when statues have crumbled. The origins of this moral attitude may lie in the Hellenistic or classical Greek world.84 In any case, Polybius presents an early version in the ninth book of his histories. Here he asks if the Romans were right or prudent to transfer the splendours of Syracuse to Rome in 211 bc and although the discussion is inconclusive, he is inclined to criticize their actions, for Rome’s empire arises from a culture that originally lacks such adornments, which in various ways provoke envy and hate.85 The passage is prefaced and concluded with moral exhortations (9.10.1 and 9.10.12): oliB, a’ ll’ E’ k t^ ZB t^ on o’iko unton a’ rEt^ ZB . . . O u’ k E’ k t^ on ’Ejo kosmE^itai p upoiB, ’all a . . . E’ ndojotEran poiE^in t Zn sfEtEran patrida, m Z grafa^iB kai t sEmn otZti kai mEgalocuwiai kosmo^ untaB a’ut Zn. A city is not adorned by superWcial trappings, but by the virtue of its inhabitants . . . . . . to increase the glory of their native land, adorning it not with paintings and reliefs, but with dignity and magnanimity.

In its contrast of material adornment with the splendour of virtue Polybius’ approach closely resembles the later elevation of virtue over mere sculpture. But he is not concerned with honoriWc memorials for individuals, and his moralization is directed at the behaviour of the whole Roman nation. He may be reacting against the attitude that common booty served to glorify the city of Rome; the 84

See above, n. 6. Polybius 9.10. The passage is an interesting condemnation of plunder written by a Greek but on Roman terms. 85

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implication is that such an attitude was held, or at least debated (9.10.3). However, at the very end of the discussion (9.10.13) Polybius states that on this occasion the Romans used the adornments of private houses to embellish their own homes as well as embellishing the city’s public works with state-owned property. Although he does not sound pleased by any such appropriation of Sicilian property, there may be an implicit contrast with the subsequent appropriation of public art by individuals. That is certainly a recurring theme in Cicero’s condemnation of Verres. For Cicero does not, in this context, see too much wrong with the public appropriation of art acquired as booty in war. But Verres is said to have robbed the Sicilian allies of public property for the sake of private luxury.86 The appropriated art of the Sicilians is repeatedly considered as ‘ornamenta urbium’—the ornaments of the cities: Cicero has a clear conception of these works as public adornments and common property among the Greeks, and we may assume that this conception was familiar also to his audience and readership.87 It is not enough that some of these works ended up as public property in Rome, for they were not spoils of war, but cultural property unlawfully removed.88 (We are told, in fact, that Verres has even committed this crime in Rome while praetor urbanus.89) While Cicero underlines the aesthetic importance of these works to the community that has lost them, he does not view them as autonomous works of art in the modern sense, for they include the holy anathe¯mata (‘dedications’) of the temples, the ‘decora atque ornamenta fanorum’ (2.4.97). In fact, Verres’ crime is all the more grievous because he personally appropriates even these and turns them into a mere art collection, or indeed, furniture for his homes. In In Verrem 1.14 Cicero presents a concise summation of this argument: Idem iste praetor monumenta antiquissima, partim regum locupletissimorum, quae illi ornamento urbibus esse voluerunt, partim etiam nostrorum imperatorum quae victores civitatibus Siculis aut dederunt aut reddiderunt, spoliavit nudavitque omnia. Neque hoc solum statuis ornamentisque publicis fecit, sed etiam delubra omnia sanctissimis religionibus consecrata depeculatus est; deum denique nullum Siculis, qui ei paullo magis adfabre atque antiquo artiWcio factus videretur, reliquit. The most ancient of monuments, some of them gifts of the richest kings, which they intended as an adornment for the cities, and others, indeed, the gifts of our generals, who gave them or returned them to the Sicilian states upon their victories—all of them have 86

Cicero, In Verrem esp. 2.1.53–5. For relevant comments see Cicero, In Verrem 2.1.54–5; 2.1.57; 2.2.86; 2.2.113; 2.3.9; 2.4.3; 2.4.5–6; 2.4.71–2; 2.4.93; 2.4.97; 2.4.103; 2.4.120–3; 2.4.126; 2.4.133; 2.5.126; 2.5.184; 2.5.186. 88 Ibid. 2.2.113; 2.3.9. 89 Ibid. 1.12; Cicero mentions this accusation only in passing, which might imply that it was conspicuously untrue! 87

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been stripped and plundered by that same praetor. Nor did he do this only to the statues and public ornaments, but he even despoiled all the temples consecrated with the most sacred cults; he has not left the Sicilians with a single god whose workmanship he reckoned above average in quality or antiquity.

Cicero’s approach to urban statuary and other art-works and the frame of mind to which it appeals provides a backdrop for the Augustan demand for publica magniWcentia (public magniWcence) over private accumulation of art.90 His evident approval for those generals of the past who respected Greek public ornamenta also helps to explain Augustus’ vaunted restitution of sacred ornaments to the temples of the Greek East—ornaments which had been removed by Antonius.91 There is some evidence to suggest that even the Roman populace at large may have had some notion of art-works as public property.92 Most famous is the story told by Suetonius that Tiberius’ personal appropriation of the Apoxyomenos of Lysippus provoked public disorder.93 Cicero claims (In Verrem 2.4.93) that Verres produced the same eVect in Agrigentum when he removed an Apollo by Myron from the Temple of Ares. Such behaviour is in contrast with that of C. Claudius, who like a modern museum curator borrowed (and returned) a Cupid by Praxiteles from his friend, Heius of Messana, ‘tam diu dum forum dis immortalibus populoque Romano habuit ornatum’ (‘while he had the Forum decorated to the glory of the immortal gods and the Roman people’). Heius’ house was open to visitors anyway: ‘domus erat non domino magis ornamento quam civitati’ (‘his house was not so much an ornament for its master as for the state’)—until, that is, the arrival of Verres.94 Richard Gordon discusses in greater detail the signiWcance of collective artistic property as a source of symbolic capital for individuals (compare Pliny’s view of the painter in the past as the common property of the lands, ‘res communis terrarum’).95 But the ideal of public adornment is not simply applicable to works of art-as-art. It applies to art and artefacts of various kinds and it applies to statues in particular. The word ornamenta, so often encountered in this context, seems to refer mainly to statues.96 The holy ornamenta of temples are probably mostly dedications and 90

On publica magniWcentia see Zanker, Augustus, 135–56. Augustus, Res Gestae 24; see T. S. Scheer, ‘Res Gestae Divi Augusti 24: die Restituierung go¨ttlichen Eigentums in Kleinasien durch Augustus’, in C. Schubert and K. Brodersen (eds.), Rom und der griechische Osten: Festschrift fu¨r Hatto H. Schmitt zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart 1995) 209–23 for a full discussion of the rhetoric and the truth it avoids. 92 On this see also D. Boschung, ‘Nobilia Opera: zur Wirkungsgeschichte griechischer Meisterwerke im kaiserzeitlichen Rom’, Antike Kunst 1989, 8–16. 93 Pliny, NH 34.62. Note comments by R. L. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’, Art History 2 (1979) 5–34, at 27. 94 95 Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.3–7. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’, 22–3. 96 Note erection of statues e.g. in CIL 8.8935 ‘for adorning the temple’ (‘ad ornandum templum’) and CIL 6.1658 as ‘adornments of the basilica’ (‘ornamenta basilicae’). 91

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images of deities (the translation, anathe¯mata—for which see the Greek text of Augustus’ Res Gestae 24—is more obviously associated with statues). Ornamentum is not, however, a synonym for signum or statua. Statues are ornamenta; ornamenta need not be statues. Ornamentum therefore deWnes one of the functions served by statues. Publica magniWcentia (the phrase is Cicero’s) was an ideal most commonly associated with the construction of public works, famously in the preface to Vitruvius’ De Architectura.97 It naturally involved statues, since statues were adornments of buildings and, as we have seen, they could be used to commemorate those who commissioned or restored the buildings concerned. Yet the ideal of urban magniWcentia is also applied occasionally to statues per se. Livy (41.20.9) says that Antiochus, for all his peculiarities, showed magniWcentia and was truly regal in his muniWcence towards cities and attention to the cult of the gods: one example of this is his adornment of Delos with altars and ‘an abundance of statues’ (‘Delum aris insignibus statuarumque copia exornavit’). It is notable that the word statuae is used here: it appears as a generic term and the statues are not merely valuable as cult dedications. Non-honoriWc statues were also important for Agrippa’s programme of public magniWcence as mentioned by Pliny the Elder: exstat certe eius oratio magniWca et maximo civium digna de tabulis omnibus signisque publicandis, quod Weri satius fuisset quam in villarum exilia pelli Certainly a magniWcent speech of his survives—one worthy of the greatest of citizens— on making all pictures and statues public property, which would have been better than for them to be ‘exiled’ in villas.98

(It is unclear whether the reference to the ‘magniWcent’ speech is intentionally ironic.) So far we have looked at two rather diVerent impulses towards the maximum exposure and proliferation of statuary in public places. One is the desire for personal celebrity through public display of portraits, or perhaps more accurately the desire of those who commissioned monuments in certain circumstances to enhance the honour bestowed by the statue. The exposure of the statue here relates to the status of the individual and his or her speciWc relationship with those who are supplying the image. The second case involves much more general 97 Cicero, Pro Murena 76 ‘Odit populus Romanus privatam luxuriam, publicam magniWcentiam diligit’ (‘The Roman people hate private luxury; they love public magniWcence’). Vitruvius, De Architectura 1.Pr.2; similar sentiments in 7.Pr.15 and Livy 5.24.6, 6.4.12, 41.20.5, 45.28.4; Seneca, De BeneWciis 3.32.4 and Pliny, NH 35.26 on Agrippa’s building programme. On the tradition of the marvels of Rome see C. Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge 1996) 96–109. 98 Pliny, NH 35.26. Cf. Strabo’s eulogy of Agrippan Rome which is adorned with agalmata—perhaps in this context just ‘works’ or dedicated buildings, but possibly hinting at the abundance of (cult?) statues: Strabo 5.3.8 (C235–36).

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ideas concerning the public, aesthetic beneWts bestowed by sculptural adornments, and the moral requirement for public access to art. In the latter case we seem to be dealing especially with dedications in sanctuaries, images of gods, or old, Greek sculptures. Yet the two concepts of exposure or ‘celebrity’ are not unrelated. There is a hint of this in Pliny’s comments on the Augustan development of Rome. After the reference to Agrippa’s speech he mentions the emperor’s display of two paintings in the busiest part of his Forum ‘celeberrima in parte’. Whether conscious or not, this seems to be an allusion to the language of statuary honours.99 Furthermore, the two approaches are linked by the fact that even the honoriWc statue became public property when erected in a public place, and so it added to the ornamenta of the city. As Nista puts it (though the force of the juristic evidence is not entirely clear): ‘The preponderance of the state was in fact so evident, that it invalidated the concept of property for the erected statue, even for that private citizen who had raised it at his own expense. In this case in fact, the statue became ornamenta rei publicae and therefore immovable.’100 The concept of portrait statues as communal ornamenta in the Roman city is also implied for the later Empire by the evidence discussed in Curran’s study.101 However, several earlier sources suggest the familiarity of this idea particularly clearly. The most overt statement is perhaps that of the jurist Paulus (second century ad) preserved in Justinian’s Digests.102 He writes that it is customary to allow the erection of statues and images in public which will be adornments of the state, ‘concedi solet ut imagines et statuae quae ornamenta rei publicae sunt futurae in publicum ponantur ’.103 Robinson speculates on who might have had the say over whether a particular statue was erected in a locality before the creation of the supervisory post of curator statuarum, though she states that the comment in the Digests ‘seems to imply a general assumption that such things 99

Pliny, NH 35.27. L. Nista, ‘Ius imaginum and Public Portraiture ’, in M. L. Anderson and L. Nista, Roman Portraits in Context: Imperial and Private Likenesses From the Museo Nazionale Romano (Rome 1988) 33–9, at 35. For discussions of laws relating to statues see R. Du¨ll, ‘Zum Recht der Bildwerke in der Antike’, in Studi in onore di Emilio Betti, iii (Milan 1962) 129–53; F. Musumeci, ‘ ‘‘Statuae in publico positae’’ ’, Studia et Documenta Historiae et Iuris 44 (1978) 191–203. 101 Curran, ‘Moving Statues’, and note esp. CIL 6.1658: Gabinius Vettius restored the Basilica Iulia with statues moved there as ornamenta; what applies to one particularly public building applies to public space generally; again, the exposure of statues is important. Cf. dedicants as ‘ornatores loci/patriae’ in CIL 6.1767, 8.22743; AE 1938.3. 102 Digesta 43.9.2. 103 Cf. the wording of Pliny, NH 34.17: ‘foris statuae ornamentum esse coepere’ (‘statues began to be an adornment for fora’). 100

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will be a good, rather than any requirement for permission in individual cases’.104 Those parts of the Digests relating to the law of fruition indicate a laissez-faire approach to private construction in public, just as we should expect in Roman law. Building in general is well regarded (43.8.17): ‘Si quis nemine prohibente in publico aediWcaverit, non esse cogendum tollere, ne ruinis urbs deformetur ’ (‘if someone has built in public without opposition, removal should not be required, lest the city be deformed by ruins’). Obviously steps should be taken to prevent the blockage of public roads,105 but the Cirta inscription discussed above implies that in fact such strictures could be broken, and the juristic writings should probably be taken as statements of abstract principles in any case. This section in the Digests is followed by Paulus’ opinion on statues, quoted above. The jurists are more outspoken in regard to monuments on sacred sites, yet their prohibitions are not without qualiWcation: ‘Quod ait praetor, ne quid in loco sacro Wat, non ad hoc pertinet, quod ornamenti causa Wt, sed quod deformitatis vel incommodi’ (‘ The praetor’s aYrmation that nothing should be made in a sacred place does not apply to that which is made for the sake of adornment, but to what causes unsightliness or nuisance’).106 A sequence of decrees (beginning with the ‘Senatus consulta de aediWciis non diruendis’) gives a more vivid impression of the importance of buildings as adornments of the Empire as well as the ideal of public restorations.107 Buildings are not to be destroyed for the sake of property deals. A restatement of a decree of ad 44/6 which was issued by the senate in ad 56 suggests that such practices were most reprehensible, ‘especially in this era in which it was more seemly for new works to be erected and everything to be adorned than for any part to be disWgured with the ruins of buildings’. Finally, Digests 33.7.12.16 draws a distinction between the ornamenta and instrumenta (‘equipment ’) of a house, deWning ornamenta in manifestly aesthetic 104

O. F. Robinson, Ancient Rome: City Planning and Administration (London 1992) 79. This very slight juristic evidence is augmented by regular epigraphic formulae—such as L(ocus) D(atus) D(ecreto) D(ecurionum), which points to the need for central approval from the decuriones in Imperial towns—and e.g. by Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 1.17, which implies the need for the emperor’s permission in the centre of Rome. The truth is, we do not fully know what precedures were involved, but for some more detailed discussion see Du¨ll ‘Zum Recht der Bildwerke’ and Musumeci ‘ ‘‘Statuae in Publico Positae’’ ’, as well as Eck, ‘Senatorial Self-Representation’. For a general discussion of all legal issues see J. P. Rollin, Untersuchungen zu Rechtsfragen ro¨mischer Bildnisse (Bonn 1979). 105 106 Cf. Digesta 43.8.35, which also uses the word commeare. Digesta 43.6.1.2. 107 CIL 10.1401; S. Riccobono et al. (eds.), Fontes Iuris Romani Antejustiniani, 2nd edn., repr. (Florence 1968), 288–90, no. 45. Cf. similar ideas in 431–3, no. 80; SHA, Hadrianus 18.2; Digesta 18.1.52, 30.41, 39.2.48.

146 the other population terms, as ‘quae ad voluptatem [pertinent], sicut tabulas pictas’ (‘those things that are associated with pleasure, such as paintings’): it is a deWnition that can perhaps be carried over to representations of sculpture as ornamenta of cities and sanctuaries. While the mention of statues along with other questions of public construction in the Digests reminds us that they could all be regarded as similar sorts of ornamenta the ideal of statues speciWcally—of whatever kind—as adornments of the city and the Empire is articulated in the epitaph of the sculptor Novius Blesamus on his funerary altar, found in Rome:108 Blesamus hoc Novius requiem sortitus in aevom [line erased] contra locus sanctus plausu qui excepit agresti cum primum fundo venerat hic dominus parebat nemo fauni nymphaeque sonabant laetitiam divom sensit et ipse locus hic olim statuis urbem decoravit et orbem nomen habet populus corporis hic tumul(us) Blesamus Novius, having obtained eternal rest in this [line erased] opposite, the sacred place which received him with rustic applause when Wrst this master had come to the plot. There was no one to be seen; the fauns and nymphs were murmuring. The place itself felt the joy of the gods. This man once decorated the city and the world with statues. The people hold his name; this is his body’s grave.

Assuming that the deceased was a sculptor—and there is no obviously superior explanation—his oeuvre is presented here as a uniWed, autonomous body of work rather than the product of individual commissions serving the particular needs of patrons. We might expect the sculptor at least to view his work in this way. Nevertheless, there is an assumption here that Novius has lasting fame among the populace because of his work, and that work has adorned public spaces as the decoration of the city and the world. Surely this conception of artistic production as common property would have been familiar to those who happened to read the inscription. If the epitaph expresses the sentiments of the

108

CIL 6.23083; the language implies an early Imperial date. See also G. Becatti, Arte e gusto negli scrittori latini (Florence 1951) 38 and 450, no. 329. In spite of the format on the stone the verses form elegiac couplets, the pentameter lines written in smaller script; a line has been chiselled out. The vocabulary and content (and the odd reversal of the artist’s names) recalls an honoriWc inscription for the painter who adorned the temple at Ardea, as recorded by Pliny, NH 35.115.

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artist himself, it does so in the language of the ‘viewer’ rather than the patron or producer. The word decorare itself, together with its cognates, encapsulates the association between aesthetic adornment and virtue manifested in the honoriWc statue. Statues are ornamenta of public places and can accompany the ‘decorations’ of Imperial-period ‘triumphatores’—the ornamenta triumphalia.109 At the same time decora can be honourable achievements—virtuous deeds that ‘adorn’ the individual; decor itself represents ‘decorum’ and ‘virtue’.110 Decoration and decorum are closely related (as the semi-aesthetic ideal of decor—meaning something like ‘appropriateness’—in private sculptural displays should imply111). The epitaph of Novius uses the poetic cliche´ of urbs et orbis, orbis in urbe, which can Wrst be traced in the age of Augustus, and speciWcally, perhaps, in association with Agrippa’s propagandistic projects.112 Perhaps the urban sculptor should not be accused of exaggeration since, according to that other elegiac poet, Ovid, the city and the Empire had the same extent: ‘Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem.’113 For Novius the adornment of the city, and therefore the world, with statues, is something to boast about, and his boast stands in contrast with the concerned remark of Pliny the Elder about Mummius’ ‘Wlling’ the city with statues. What emerges from all this evidence is a sense that statues, even honoriWc statues serving very speciWc commemorative functions, could be regarded as normal and desirable adornments of the city. That is not to say that they could be treated unproblematically as ‘mere decoration’, nor that the Roman observer considered all public statuary to be art in the modern sense. The networks of associations are complex and broadly aesthetic responses took various forms. But what we see is the opposite approach to that of Dio’s Claudius—an approach aligned with the individual drive for ‘celebrity’ through public exposure. Except perhaps in a few uniWed building schemes like the Forum Augustum, there is no evidence to suggest that the ideal of a city full of statues resulted in any large-scale programmes of sculptural adornment in the earlier Empire. Statues—whether portraits or ‘decorative’ sculptures—were bound to follow architectural development and the public spaces of new foundations or 109

Lahusen, Ehrenstatue, 70–7. See e.g. Tacitus, Annales 15.50 (the proposed murder of Nero); Livy 3.12.2 (could perhaps refer to honours received); Cicero, De Legibus 1.21.55 (something like ‘honour’: held by the Academics to be the utmost good); Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 25.3 (‘decus atque pudicitia’), 54.5. 111 For this sense of decor see M. Marvin, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series’, in D’Ambra, Context, 161–88. 112 C. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, Mich. 1991) 44, 110–11, 114. The phrase recurs in various forms. Besides Nicolet’s references, see Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.174 and Sidonius Apollinaris, Carmina 7.556. 113 Ovid, Fasti 2.684 110

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re-foundations like Cuicul quickly attracted imperial and private portraits and dedications.114 But by the time Constantine invented the entire city of Constantinople as a New Rome, sculptural adornment was evidently seen as a requisite of the Roman (capital) city. As far as we know, it was not portrait statues that the emperor shipped there from the cities of the East, but Graeco-Roman ideal sculpture—signa rather than statuae et imagines (and certainly not simulacra).115 In any case, the erection of honoriWc statues was already a declining custom by the fourth century.116 But it is signiWcant that sculpture was thought necessary. The later designer of the column of Arcadius, which is partly known from old drawings, has represented parts of the city crammed with a diversity of statuary (apparently including portrait statues, whether old or new).117 Unfortunately relatively little archaeological material survives from Constantinople in this period and we have little detailed information on the display of sculpture in the new imperial capital.

moving statues As the word might suggest, the distinctive feature of most statues is that they stand still. They are consequently prone to become just part of the background to urban life. It is easy to see how honoriWc statues could be considered together as a class of ornamenta, rather than portraits of individually famous people, and also to understand how the identities of forgotten portraits could be changed. A series of wall-paintings from the Praedia of Julia Felix in Pompeii depicts scenes of ‘daily life’ in the town—apparently Pompeii, but it could be any town—with equestrian statues in the background. Trading, legal proceedings, and various other activities take place by a colonnade, in front of a series of equestrian statues.118 Only in one, poorly preserved scene is a statue the appar114

See Zimmer, Locus. On the transfer of statues see C. Mango, ‘Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder’, DOP 17 (1963) 55–75, esp. 56–9. Cf. Jerome Chronicon (ed. Fotheringham, p. 314, 24; Migne p. 498): ‘dedicatur Constantinopolis omnium paene urbium nuditate’ (‘Constantinople is dedicated with the denuding of almost all the cities’): perhaps with connotations of ‘nudity’ as well as ‘denuding’. Compare Herod’s adornment of Berytos with statues—copies of old works but also andriantes: Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 20.212. 116 R. R. R. Smith, ‘Roman Portraits: Honours, Empresses, and Late Emperors’, JRS 75 (1985) 208–21, at 217. 117 See E. H. FreshWeld, ‘Notes on a Vellum Album Containing Some Original Sketches of Public Buildings and Monuments, Drawn by a German Artist who Visited Constantinople in 1574’, Archaeologia, 72 (1922) 87–104 and pls. 15–22 for illustrations and discussion of the 16th-cent. FreshWeld Album which is our only surviving evidence for these scenes. 118 Pompeii II.iv.3. PPM iii. 251–7 with photos. Also S. Nappo, ‘Fregio dipinto del praedium di Giulia Felice con rappresentazione del foro di Pompei’, Rivista di Studi Pompeiani, 3 (1989), 79–96. For 115

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ent centre of attention: somewhat implausibly a man seems to sit and draw it; in any case it appears to be the focus of his activity. In another scene four Wgures are looking towards a row of three statues, but they are actually reading notices of some kind displayed along the front of the statue-bases (Fig. 28).119 This is not to suggest that statues were invisible, nor even that their identities were quickly forgotten (we have seen, for example, that the texts of military diplomata refer to statues in Rome by the names of those represented). But it is easy for the signiWcance of statues to become dormant, evoked only when the Wgure is Wrst erected, moved, removed, touched, damaged or destroyed, or when it becomes a focus for ritual activity (as with British war memorials once a year). The last consideration perhaps sets cult images apart from other statues, for although often to be found secluded in temples, with an altar providing the focus for ritual, that ritual was nevertheless directed towards the image.120 In general, however, the static statue often faced not celebrity, but oblivion. This tendency of statues to sink from individual prominence could hold advantages for some. They became the instrument of the person who interpreted them by exegesis or inscription. Objects that are always, on some level, symbolic lend themselves to re-invention, and this in turn may be subverted. Pausanias does just this with his brief but telling reference to a statue of Orestes in a Heraion near ‘ E’iZ basilEuB A’ugoustoB ’OrEstZn Mycenae: t on g ar E’ pigramma ’Ewonta oB ^ ’ Einai lEgousin (‘they say the statue that bears the inscription saying that it is the Emperor Augustus is Orestes’). As we have seen, Dio Chrysostom addresses the much larger problem of statue-reinterpretation on Rhodes with an impassioned appeal: the Rhodian honoriWc portraits have become like actors— hypokritai—assuming diVerent roles at diVerent times.121 He too is talking about Greek statues becoming Romans, though he does not exactly say so. The inscription from Saldae mentioned above apparently records the actions of a family to revive the original signiWcance of an honoriWc statue—that of the brothers’ propatruus. This is not only an act of piety: it is an act of self-promotion by the new benefactors. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that piety and selfpromotion are not easily separable: that piety makes sense only in the circumstances of the present. On a larger scale we can see that the movement of statues of all kinds was an important means of drawing attention to them: statues that moved about the city were monuments that people noticed and considered. clearer (though debatable) drawings see S. Reinach, Re´pertoire de peintures grecques et romaines (Paris 1922) 249, no. 2; 249, no. 3; 253, no. 1. See also ibid. 249, nos. 4 and 5. 119

PPM iii. 256, Wg. 122. Reinach, Re´pertoire de peintures 255, no. 5; 249, no. 6. Cf. J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge 1995) 198–9 on this relationship. 121 Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 31.155. On incorrect ‘labelling’ in antiquity see D. E. Strong, ‘Roman Museums’, in D. E. Strong (ed.), Archaeological Theory and Practice: Essays Presented to Professor William Francis Grimes (London 1973) 247–64. Note also Cicero, Ad Atticum 6.1.26. 120

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Fig. 28. It was easy for the signiWcance of public statues to become dormant; here passers-by read notices displayed along the bases of statues. (Part of a painted mural frieze. Equestrian statues by a colonnade. From the Praedia of Julia Felix, Pompeii II.4.3. Mid-Wrst century ad. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 9068. H: 0.67 m.)

Above all it was processions that provided the means of exposing statues, not simply because they moved through the city, but because the procession was intended as a display which involves great numbers of people both as spectators and participants. Others have discussed some of the important features of

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triumphal, funerary, cult, and circus processions in the Roman world, but some brief comments here will help to place the display of statues within these spectacles. 122 The Imperial writers make much of the famous early triumphs as the Romans’ Wrst major encounter with Greek art or luxuria.123 Plutarch suggests that the anathe¯mata brought from Syracuse in 212 bc were intended to be a spectacle in ’ ciB) and an adornment for the city the triumph (pr oB t on yriambon o p olEi k osmoB), an alleged motive discussed above.124 Plutarch seems to (t^ Z i believe that this Wrst exposure to the ornamenta presented a powerful image. That impression is certainly supported by other sources. In 194 bc the triumph of Flamininus lasted for three days and included an exhibition of bronze and marble statues from the Greek cities and the private collections of the Macedonian kings.125 In 187 bc M. Fulvius Nobilior processed with 285 bronze statues and 230 in marble (his Wgures may well be derived from an inventory).126 In 168 bc Aemilius Paullus returned with so many statues and paintings that 250 wagons were required to transport them and a whole day to see them.127 We are told that the general Mummius Wlled the whole of Italy—‘totam replesset Italiam’—with statues and paintings.128 Unlike the massive spectacles of the Hellenistic kings, these processions moved around Rome through narrow streets and by a circuitous route. But the triumphs were exceptional occasions. We should remember that processions of sculpture occurred more routinely. They took place at funerals or the opening of circus contests, as well as more overtly religious rituals. Like modern processions in India, parts of Europe and elsewhere, cult processions may have served to expose images that were otherwise rarely seen. But in doing so only on special occasions they increased the impact of the images involved.129 122

Each kind is studied in depth by H. S. Versnel, Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman Triumph (Leiden 1970); see also J. Ko¨hler, Pompai: Untersuchungen zur hellenistischen Festkultur (Frankfurt am Main 1996). There are important similarities among them, and statues or portrait images play a prominent role in each. They also had an exaggerated role in the extravagant processions of Hellenistic monarchs, e.g. the procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus described in Athenaeus 5.196a–203b, or the procession of Antiochus in Athenaeus 5.194c–195f and Polybius 30.25; interestingly the latter was supposed to be an attempt to rival a Roman, Aemilius Paullus (194c). 123 See e.g. Plutarch, Marcellus 21.1; Livy 25.40.1–3, 34.4.4; Pliny, NH 35.150. J. J. Pollitt, ‘The Impact of Greek Art on Rome’, TAPhA 108 (1978) 155–74, at 158–9. 124 125 126 Plutarch, Marcellus 21.1. Livy 34.52.4–5. Livy 39.5.13–16. 127 Plutarch, Aemilius Paullus 32–3; the statues included the Athena by Phidias that ended up in the Temple of Fortuna Huiusce Diei on the Palatine (Pliny, NH 34.54). 128 [Aurelius Victor], De Viris Illustribus 60; Strabo 6.381. 129 For representations of such processions see for example the relief from Chieti (ill. in Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 123, Wg. 2); the carpenters’ procession painted in Pompeii VI.7.8,12 (PPM iv. 389–91; A. Burford, Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society (London 1972) 12); cf. also the procession painting in Pompeii VII.9.47 (House of the Marriage of Hercules): PPM vii. 373–5. On processions to the theatre

152 the other population When it came to images of individuals, especially images of the emperor, the movement of these objects in procession reinforced their presence amidst the population. From literary sources we learn that Germanicus’ eYgy was carried to the circus;130 the senate decreed various honours for Caligula including the yearly procession of his golden image up to the Capitolium;131 Fronto believes that the senate used to process carrying the image of Cato;132 Titus erected a golden statue for Britannicus on the Palatine, ‘et alteram ex ebore equestrem, quae circensi pompa hodieque praeferetur, dedicavit prosecutusque est’ (‘and he dedicated and attended another, equestrian, statue of ivory, which is paraded to this day in the circus procession’).133 In the light of such processions, Ammianus Marcellinus’ description of Constantius in his triumph, standing motionless like a statue, begins to make particularly good sense.134 No doubt the distinction between full-scale statues and smaller, more portable eYgies and imagines is important in this context. But the principle remains the same: that movement prevents the kind of symbolic atrophy to which portrait images are prone. The same motive more obviously underlies the movement of statues with the intention of embellishing public spaces. Curran, once again, illustrates this phenomenon with speciWc examples from Late Antiquity.135 Such behaviour occurred, however, even earlier. For the museographer of ancient Rome, statues are often hard to pin down.136 The late second and early third centuries (especially perhaps the reign of Severus Alexander) bear witness to signiWcant Xuidity in the population of statues. In the Historia Augusta, for instance, we read that Severus Alexander assembled old statues of summi viri in Trajan’s Forum, ‘statuas summorum virorum in foro Traiani conlocavit undique translatas’, besides bringing artists from everywhere to erect many colossi in Rome and ‘suitably adorning’ the Temple of Isis and Serapis with statues.137 It is possible with sacred symbols suggesting the divinity of emperors, see L. R. Taylor, ‘The Sellisternium and the Theatrical Pompa’, CPh 30 (1935), 122–30; and A. L. Abaecherli, ‘Imperial Symbols on Certain Flavian Coins’, CPh 30 (1935), 131–9. 130

Tacitus, Annales 2.83 Dio 59.16.10 132 Fronto (Naber 2.1, p. 129; Loeb vol. 2, 150–1). 133 Suetonius, Titus 2. Cf. Severus’ honours for Pertinax: Dio 75.4.1. Pertinax’s funeral is the best evidence we have for the elaborate funerary rituals formulated for emperors and the bizarre phenomenon of ‘the emperor’s second body’, for which see F. Dupont, ‘The Emperor-God’s Other Body’, in M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part 3 (New York 1989) 396–419. 134 Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10. 135 Curran, ‘Moving Statues’. 136 See e.g. entries for statues in Platner–Ashby; Richardson, New Topographical Dictionary; LTUR iv (310–11, 329–30, and 353–72). 137 SHA, Severus Alexander 26.4 (and 25.9; 26.8). Also, as mentioned above, he remodelled the Forum Nervae after the Forum Augustum (28.6–7)—there seems to be a suggestion that such actions in Rome are connected with his desire to be seen as a true Roman (i.e. not a Syrian). Numismatic evidence also 131

the other population

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that at least some of the major sculptures in the Baths of Caracalla (which were conceivably planned under Septimius Severus and perhaps Wnally completed under Severus Alexander) were moved there from other locations, and that might include the famous Farnese Hercules.138 A set of papyrus fragments survive in Geneva on which is written statistical information concerning a district in Egypt.139 The papyrus has been reused to copy what must be some kind of catalogue of art-works. It is scarcely decipherable, but seems to mention artists and works of art, with brief descriptions and sometimes further information. It is quite possible that one of the works referred to is the Farnese Hercules, which is signed by a certain Athenian sculptor called Glycon, for the text (lines 6–7) reads as follows: ...He´rculem Gl[.....]is ful ......]em migratio´nis....

Nicole reconstructs it as, ‘Hercules Glyconis ful... ...eiusdem migrationis’ (‘Glycon’s Hercules (?...)...of the same move’).140 The text may possibly be datable to the Wrst century. However, a number of features point to a Severan date and the papyrus may even be a catalogue of art-works in the Baths of Caracalla. It is the mention of a migratio that is most signiWcant, for it implies, whatever the date and location, that a number of sculptures, including the Hercules, were moved en masse. The Geneva papyrus provides rare and precious evidence for the ‘cataloguing’ of works of art in the Roman Empire. But we must be aware of the tradition behind this fragment, and behind all the evidence discussed in this chapter: the tradition of listing and counting statues in the Roman city. From the earlier Principate, before the regionary catalogues and the description of Zacharias rhetor, only hints survive. We have seen the very precise Wgures in Livy’s account of the triumph of M. Fulvius Nobilior. More conspicuous traces of temple inventories survive elsewhere.141 For instance, part of one was discovered in Cirta (including for example a detailed description of a silver suggests a concern with the city’s architecture: see R. V. Nind Hopkins, The Life of Alexander Severus (Cambridge 1907) 171–5. 138

Richardson, op. cit. (n. 11) 387–9 for general discussion. More speciWcally J. DeLaine, The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome (Portsmouth, RI 1997) 15–16 on dating; 75–83 on the sculpture. For latter see also H. Manderscheid, Die Skulpturenausstattung der kaiserzeitlichen Thermenanlagen (Berlin 1981), 73–6, nos. 46–68 and esp. 74, no. 51 for the Farnese Hercules; Marvin, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture’. 139 Geneva Papyrus Latin VII: see J. Nicole, Un catalogue d’oeuvres d’art conserve´es a` Rome a` l’e´poque impe´riale: texte du papyrus latin VII de Gene`ve (Geneva 1906). 140 The lacuna restored with ‘ . . . lycon . . . ’ has space for Wve letters and shows traces of an ‘l’ and ‘n’, so the identiWcation seems fairly secure: Nicole, op. cit. (n. 142) 16. 141 See Strong, ‘Roman Museums’ on the inventories and care of the city’s statues.

154

the other population

Jupiter-statue—‘Iovis Victor Argenteus’).142 The museographic detail of Pliny’s ‘art-historical’ chapters may be based in part on oYcial records. The precincts and porticoes that often form the backdrop of his lists were usually at least linked to sacred spaces and their treasures are not straightforward museum displays, though they have prompted modern scholars to think of the capital as a ‘Roman museum’.143 The most intriguing inventory is La Regina’s posited catalogue of state-owned sculpture in the city of Rome—‘tabulae signorum urbis Romae’— which is ‘reconstructed’ from numbers marked on some sculptures, including the famous ‘Terme General’ (the numbers in that case are engraved on the statue’s stomach; the arrangement of numbers seems to follow the pattern for citing speciWc items on series of tabulae).144 All of these lists may have been more or less specialized, practical records, and sparse as the evidence is, it implies little about generalized Roman representations of statues. But it does at least indicate some of the roots of late Roman ‘curatorial’ attitudes towards the sculptural property of Rome.

conclusions Romans took notice of statues in their environment. This discussion has sought to explain some of the ways in which this happened and some of the reasons for documented reponses. We have seen that statues had a collective value, as a single though varied class of objects, apart from their value as individual portraits, dedications, memorials, private ornaments, or cult images performing more narrowly deWned roles in society. It was inevitable that the collective signiWcance of statues should increase as the interests of individual patrons declined.145 The Christian apologists devoted much of their eVort to condemning idolatry. Curran reviews the material for traditional arguments—that from the reign of Constantine statues were secularized, therefore neutralized, by removal from temples to other public buildings; and more radically, that statues were often destroyed.146 Curran himself oVers, as we have seen, a diVerent interpretation. Yet even from the Christian writings themselves we can perceive a concern with the statues of Rome, not simply as discredited cult images, not as 142

CIL 8.6981, 8.6882. Strong, ‘Roman Museums’; Pollitt, ‘The Impact of Greek Art on Rome’, 157. 144 A. La Regina, ‘ Tabulae signorum urbis Romae’, in M. R. Di Mino (ed.), Rotunda Diocletiani: sculture decorative delle terme nel Museo Nazionale Romano (Rome 1991). 145 On continuity, change and decline in the tradition of portrait-statuary see e.g. R. R. R. Smith, ‘Late Antique Portraits in a Public Context: HonoriWc Statuary at Aphrodisias in Caria, A.D. 300–600’, JRS 89 (1999) 155–89. 146 Curran, ‘Moving Statues’. 143

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individual memorials for forgotten men of the past, but as ornamenta for the city. Prudentius is a prime example:147 Marmora tubenti respergine tincta lavate, o proceres! Liceat statuas consistere puras, artiWcum magnorum opera; haec pulcherrima nostrae ornamenta Want patriae, nec decolor usus in vitium versae monumenta coinquinet artis. Leaders, wash clean the marbles which are stained with dripping spray [of blood from sacriWces]! Let the statues be allowed to stand in purity—the works of great artists; let them become the fairest adornments of our state; nor may any depraved use deWle the monuments of art turned into vice.

This is an appeal for the puriWcation of ancient art: it is to be respected as art (for that is its true value) not soiled by pagan cult. Yet the appeal draws upon older ideals: sculpture has not simply changed, or lost, its function in response to the rise of Christianity. The old ideal of statues as ornamenta takes precedence now in the absence of other interests. The notion of public ornamenta is convenient for a Christianizing empire that wishes to preserve the form of Roman culture and society while adapting its content to the new religion. There is other evidence of the development of that ‘aesthetic’ ideal into a curatorial attitude towards statues. It was probably in the reign of Constantine that the Wrst curator statuarum was created.148 There is also archaeological evidence for the repair of earlier public monuments.149 It is this development that ultimately gives rise to Cassiodorus’ complaints. Cassiodorus may belong to a later historical period, but his views, and particularly the views that he presents in his formal and exemplary ‘formulae’, are no less informed by the actions and ideas, ideals and literary topoi of those who went before. When we return to look at the thirteenth and Wfteenth formulae of Variae 7, we can see that they owe something to the precedents examined above. As with the ornamenta of the past, there is (or should be) a public interest in communal works of art which beautify the city. The idea of the second, artiWcial population of statues may have a precedent in the words of Dio’s Claudius, but this image of the city’s statuary as a collectivity is certainly foreshadowed in some of the representations we have discussed. Cassiodorus’ world was not that of 147

Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.502–6. The Wrst reference is in the reign of Constantine: CIL 6.1708; note also CIL 6.1159 and Notitia Dignitatum 4.14. For discussion see L. Homo, Rome impe´riale et l’urbanisme dans l’antiquite´ (Paris 1951); A. Chastagnol, La pre´fecture urbaine a` Rome sous le Bas-Empire (Paris 1960) 469; Strong, ‘Roman Museums’, 253–4; Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 45; M. Greenhalgh, The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages (London 1989) 11–14 (on this post and other attempts at preservation in late antiquity); Robinson, Ancient Rome. 149 Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture. 148

156 the other population the Principate. Society had changed, and with it the role of art in society; but the formulae belong to a tradition of writing about statues in the Roman environment. They are composed of long-familiar words and ideas, which, like the statues themselves, are now reused to mean something new: ‘that we might renew the deeds of the men of old,’ as Cassiodorus puts it, ‘and clothe new things with the glory of antiquity.’150 150 Cassiodorus, Variae 7.15.1. See P. C. N. Stewart, ‘The Destruction of Statues in Late Antiquity’, in R. Miles (ed.), Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London 1999) 159–89 for further discussion of earlier ideas echoed in Cassiodorus’ texts.

five

Statues in the Empire

There is hardly any need to justify this study’s focus on the city of Rome, for the capital of the Empire was in so many respects a social and cultural reference point, the centre of power (in Bianchi Bandinelli’s phrase1) and the place with which many of our literary sources at least are frequently preoccupied, whether explicitly or not. Yet in certain respects these terms are problematic. To call Rome the ‘focus’ is to suggest that it was surrounded by an expansive Imperial society that was essentially similar even if it receives less detailed scrutiny both here and in extant ancient writings. At the same time, to call the city a centre of power or inXuence is perhaps to imply that Roman society was not homogeneous and that the veneer of Roman Imperial culture concealed Wssures—that there was something other than metropolitan culture upon which the capital’s ‘inXuence’ might be detected. The approach to statuary adopted here is particularly vulnerable to such problems, for I have attempted neither to examine Rome in strict isolation, nor to place it within a comprehensive survey of the Empire’s sculpture—the latter a monumental task, and certainly not what I intend in this chapter. And yet I have written of a Roman culture of statues: a shared range of assumptions that extends beyond the city. Indeed I have often extended the discussion to other parts of Italy and the provinces, such as Pompeii and Cuicul, when those places seem to present the best evidence for illustrating certain points. This innocent admission exposes an additional issue: namely the heterogeneity of evidence in Rome and the Empire. To be more speciWc, inscriptions, archaeology, and literary sources tell diVerent stories about diVerent people. In this chapter I want brieXy to address the question of diversity in the Empire-wide culture of statues. It should be stressed once more that this is not a survey of statues in the provinces, and Rome remains the focus. But only through a more careful look at some provincial examples will the place of statues in Roman Imperial society become clearer. And so, having made some further observations about the peculiar status of Rome itself, I shall be employing a small selection of examples from east and west to qualify and throw into relief 1

R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome, the Centre of Power: Roman Art to ad 200, trans. P. Green (London 1970): similar title in the various translations.

158 statues in the empire the suggestions advanced elsewhere. Two very diVerent regions will receive greater attention: Wrst, Asia Minor (and in it the Carian city of Aphrodisias which has proved to be among the best sources of information on portrait statuary and sculpture in general in the Greek eastern Empire); second, the western provinces, where I shall review the evidence from Tarraconensis in Spain and above all the meagre evidence from Britain in which—signiWcantly—almost no trace of statuary survives. The emphasis here is on inscriptions because of the opportunity they oVer to throw into relief the discussion of language in other chapters, but clearly there is much work still to be conducted on the meaningful varieties of style and sculptural techniques in diVerent parts of Italy and the provinces. Zanker’s survey of the reception and reproduction of the imperial portrait image in the provinces of the Empire demonstrates the potential value of such studies.2

metropolitan statues We have already seen how exclusive the most central public areas of the capital were, as was bound to be the case even if the emperor and senate did not seek to impose restrictions upon the production of monuments. Outside the old forum developments such as the Forum of Trajan could oVer fresh opportunities for the dedication of portraits in the city’s centre, but the physical and political restraints were pronounced. It is hardly surprising that the literary evidence and archaeological remains record statues only of the imperial family and sociopolitical elite as the recipients of portrait statues in these locations, though many others could at least have been involved in the process of the commission by virtue, say, of their membership of guilds.3 The well-preserved statue-bases at Cuicul show how outside the capital the social spectrum of potential honorands was somewhat extended. The population of statuary is still overwhelmingly dominated by divine or imperial images of one kind or another, but it admits members of the local aristocracy. It would be tempting to see sculptural displays in the fora of such towns as miniature versions of Rome’s public spaces. There are broad similarities in the form and context of honours, and honoriWc inscriptions and statues were often awarded or at least permitted by the community’s own ‘senate and people’. There are also more speciWc examples of (probably conscious) imitation, for the ‘quotations’ from the Forum of Augustus that we Wnd in Eumachia’s building in Pompeii are paralleled elsewhere. Details of the architecture and sculptural 2

P. Zanker, Provinzielle Kaiserportra¨ts: zur Rezeption der Selbstdarstellung des Princeps (Munich 1983). In fact dedications by various professional corpora are relatively common among the statue-bases recorded in CIL 6. 3

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decorations of the Forum Augustum have been recognized also at Arezzo, and in Spain, at Tarragona, Cartagena, and Me´rida. There were no doubt many other imitations in municipalities where the evidence has been lost or poorly studied.4 However, in other ways the notion of the municipality or colony as a miniature Rome obscures some of the signiWcance of the statuary that we Wnd there. Images of emperors and their families still predominate: their position is not degraded in any way, and their honours are no less impressive. But here there is sometimes room for the petty nobility who are now brought into the proximity of the emperor. The importance of statuary honours in Imperial towns was perhaps precisely their ability to mimic those of the metropolis while subtly including people who would have had no place in Rome’s elite. In other words the statues of Roman towns collapse the distance between the emperor and the local nobility, collectively embodying but also telescoping the social and political hierarchy of the Empire. The relative accessibility of some of the highest honours (such as gilded and equestrian statues) might have devalued these symbols to some extent, but their use in Italy and the provinces tapped into the aVective power that they had acquired in metropolitan society. The experience of being honoured in the language of Imperial Rome was not necessarily undermined by any rational awareness of one’s position on the ladder of Imperial society as a whole. It would also be rather deceptive to view all the honoriWc statuary even of Italian towns in precisely the same way, for they did not all enjoy quite the same relationship with the capital. The decuriones (town councillors) of Pompeii, for example, could turn the monuments of their forum into a rather more inclusive version of the centre of Rome. But it was not always so easy to collapse the distance between the local elite and the pinnacle of power. There were often individuals, like the much honoured M. Nonius Balbus in Herculaneum who belonged in both worlds. The diVerence is highlighted by a comparison of Balbus—the leading man in his community—with Marcus Holconius Rufus (Fig. 27; see also Ch. 4), who was similarly pre-eminent in Pompeii, probably in the same period.5 If Holconius’ titles and the material and iconography of his pedestrian marble statue hinted at his relationship with the city of Rome, then it was nevertheless overshadowed by Balbus’ actual importance in the capital. A native of nearby Nuceria, according to CIL 10.1429, M. Nonius Balbus was 4 P. Zanker, Forum Augustum: das Bildprogramm (Tu¨bingen 1968) 16; J. L. de la Barrera and W. Trillmich, ‘Eine Wiederhollung der Aeneas-Gruppe vom Forum Augustum samt ihrer Inschrift in Me´rida (Spanien)’, RM 103 (1996) 119–38; W. Trillmich, ‘Il modello della metropoli’, in J. Arce, S. Ensoli, and E. La Rocca, Hispania romana: da terra di conquista a provincia dell’impero (Milan 1997) 131–41 (Trillmich has been largely reponsible for the identiWcation of these imitations). On similar inscriptions at Pompeii, Arretium, and Lavinium see A. Degrassi (ed.), Inscriptiones Italiae, 13/3 (Rome 1937) 57–72. 5 On Balbus, his family and the diYculties of dating see L. Schumacher, L., ‘Das Ehrendekret fu¨r M. Nonius Balbus aus Herculaneum (AE 1947, 53)’, Chiron 6 (1976) 165–84.

160 statues in the empire honoured with citizenship in Herculaneum, to which he was a generous benefactor. Balbus had been proconsul of the province of Crete and Cyrene and remained its patron. In fact the Cretans dedicated a bronze equestrian statue to him in Herculaneum.6 It was common practice to honour a patron in this way (Rome saw the erection of honoriWc statues by client communities from as early as the 280s bc if Pliny is to be believed) and such statues might be matched by local monuments.7 This kind of facilitation of relationships, this long-distance bonding could traverse extraordinary barriers of geography and context as we saw with Asper’s statues at Grottaferrata some of which were dedicated in the patron’s own home by grateful provinces. In any case, Balbus was evidently a Wgure of great eminence: praetor, proconsul and one of the true Roman nobility. He even appears to surface in Dio’s histories.8 ‘On account of his merits’ the ordo of Herculaneum posthumously rewarded this aristocratic, ‘international’ patron with an equestrian statue ‘in the busiest place’— ‘ celeberrimo loco’— as well as other honours.9 Similarly, in the old forum at Cuicul the dignitaries who Wnd their way into the company of gods and emperors have more than local horizons. Of the dedicatees having no imperial connection, two are actually provincial governors as well as patrons of the community; two more are the daughters of a local man, Tiberius Claudius Subatianus Proculus, who had held the most distinguished of oYces and was consul designate in ad 209/10 (oddly, their base seems only to have supported a single statue).10 Only one, a certain Gargilia Marciana, appears to have received her honour as a result of speciWcally local activities, and she was the mother of equestrian sons: in other words her sons had acquired high status in the metropolitan social hierarchy.11 It is true that Cuicul’s public statuary appears more exclusive than that of other towns: it was, after all, a colonia and an imperial foundation. And in the forum of Thamugadi (Timgad), another Numidian colony in which the well preserved remains of statuary dedications have been catalogued by Gerhard Zimmer, we Wnd a greater number of ‘private’ dedications (at least eleven).12 But here too the dedicatees are usually of very high social status, their rank declared by an assortment of titles or connections that indicate links with Rome or other parts of the Empire. 6

CIL 10.1430–4; 1430 on the equestrian statue. See Pliny, NH 34.32 on the Wrst instances of ‘foreigners’ (‘ab exteris’) erecting statues in Rome. Cicero gives details about the Sicilians’ erection of gilded statues of Verres at Rome: In Verrem 2.2.114, 145, 150. The Cretans’ dedication to Balbus at Herculaneum (see esp. CIL 10.1430; also 1431–4) illustrates the continuation of the practice. 8 9 Dio 50.2.3. AE 1947, 53; Schumacher, ‘Das Ehrendekret’. 10 On ‘private’ dedications at Cuicul see Zimmer, Locus, 31. The daughters of Proculus: ibid. 31, 62–3 and pl. 6, C27 ( ¼ AE 1911, 107). 11 Ibid. 56–7, C8. 12 See Zimmer, Locus, 40 on private dedications, and for the particular cases see 70–1, T3; 71, T4; 72, T7; 72–4,T9; 74–5, T11; 75, T12; 78–9, T25; 79, T27; 80, T34; 80–1, T35; 82, T40. 7

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Above all the images of the imperial family make it impossible to see Rome merely as a large-scale model for countless smaller Roman communities. The honours dedicated to the emperor and his relatives in the towns of the provinces serve inevitably to reinforce the dominance of Rome (or more strictly the emperor himself) as the centre of power. It was from Rome that the ‘oYcial’ image of the emperor emerged.13 Though we cannot truthfully say how it was diVused we can imagine that at some stage this process involved communication with the emperor or his administrators: appeals for permission to erect a statue, polite refusals or provisos, permission reluctantly granted: the kind of formal exchange represented in Claudius’ Letter to the Alexandrians or, on a more personal level, by the correspondence of Pliny the Younger.14 The communication itself was no doubt an important part of the value of a dedication by those who arranged it: a token of connection, but one that always betrayed Rome’s gravitational pull. The text of Augustus’ achievements—his Res Gestae—oVers a clearer analogy. Originally displayed on bronze pillars by the emperor’s mausoleum, it was replicated elsewhere in the Empire. Its contents are known from the specimen that survives intact at Ancyra (on walls of the temple of Rome and Augustus) and in fragments from Pisidian Antioch and Apollonia. These texts are local documents honouring the deiWed emperor, but their content, copied from a metropolitan archetype, binds them permanently to the city of Rome and its very fabric. As Jas´ Elsner observes, ‘it wrote the ideology of empire in the form of the biography of the emperor into the sacred and civic hearts of the cities of Asia Minor where it was inscribed’ and he calls the monumental text ‘a signature of empire, a written contract for the relations of centre and periphery’.15 More humble documents were also copied in this manner, and of course we have seen how the diplomata— discharge records—of soldiers in distant parts of the Empire located their metropolitan copies by reference to the capital’s statues and buildings. Besides all these subtle distinctions between Rome and the towns of the Empire it was simply always the case that Rome was superior in the grandeur of its amenities and ornamenta. In Chapter 4 we saw how this image of muniWcence survived long after the city lost its political pre-eminence. In ad 357 it was the archetypal city of statues that Constantius entered (and so it was doubly appropriate that Ammianus should metamorphose the emperor and his troops 13 For recent discussions of the issue see E. Bartman, Portraits of Livia: Imaging the Imperial Woman in Augustan Rome (Cambridge 1999) 18–24; S. E. Wood, Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 ¨ ber das Herstellen von Portra¨ts: ein bc–ad 68 (Leiden 1999) 5–7. More detailed analysis in M. Pfanner, ‘U Beitrag zu Rationalisierungsmassnahmen und Produktionsmechanismen von Massenware im spa¨ten Hellenismus und in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit’, JDAI 104 (1989) 157–257. 14 Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 10.8–9. 15 J. Elsner, ‘Inventing Imperium: Texts and the Propaganda of Monuments in Augustan Rome’, in J. Elsner (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge 1996), 32–53, quotations from 49 and 52.

162 statues in the empire into graven images16). And in expressing concern for Rome’s heritage Cassiodorus was presumably not particularly concerned about the plunder of statues from smaller towns. In other respects Rome’s statues were not merely more numerous, richer, better, and grander. The increasing dominance of the imperial family as a subject for public portraits made for anomalies: in a sense Rome became the exception rather establishing the rules. But though the emperor’s statue was dominant in the city, it might be argued that in other ways it lacked the kind of power that it could hold elsewhere in his territory. It lacked some of the potential for embodying his subjects’ emotional investment in the regime. Above all perhaps, metropolitan statues, while they no doubt possessed something of an aura of authority, were unable to serve a role in any explicit cult of the living ruler. This key aspect of Hellenistic royal statuary could not adequately be translated into the society of Republican or Imperial Rome. That is clear, for example, from stories of emperors like Gaius who supposedly (and perhaps not unreasonably) attempted to imitate the divine symbolism of the Greek ruler-cult, or the posthumous reception of Nero’s colossus.17 However, I shall return to this question with some qualiWcations below. It brings us back to the sort of cultural discrepancy observed in the vocabulary of statues. It is therefore appropriate to turn to the Hellenic eastern regions of the Empire to look further at how the usage of provincial statues resembled and diVered from metropolitan practice.

the greek east Any brief survey of this kind is reliant on well-preserved and published epigraphic evidence from sites such as Aphrodisias in Caria (where the surviving sculpture itself has also enjoyed relatively intense investigation in recent years). When compared with the evidence from other provinces and from Rome itself the statue-bases and honoriWc records of these sites reinforce the impression given by surviving statuary: an impression both of extraordinary consistency in the broad form and functions of portrait statues across the Empire, and at the same time marked diVerences in detail and in emphasis—even perhaps explicit contrasts between Hellenic and western traditions. A related point has been illustrated by Mary Boatwright with reference to an apparently quite exceptional monument, the city gate of Perge in Pamphylia 16

Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10. Gaius: see esp. Dio 59.28; Nero: see S. Carey, ‘In Memoriam (Perpetuam) Neronis: ‘Damnatio Memoriae’ and Nero’s Colossus’, Apollo 152, no. 146 (July 2000) 20–31. For absence of clear cult of living emperor in Rome see Dio 51.20.7–8; BNP i.206–10, 348–63. 17

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which was rebuilt in around ad 121, along with a horseshoe-shaped courtyard and archway, by a local noblewoman of Roman descent called Plancia Magna.18 The complex channelled those entering the city through an elaborate walled enclosure where on each side they would have seen two tiers of niches containing statues of deities and of Perge’s mythical or heroized ‘founders’ and benefactors—including Plancia Magna’s father and brother: twenty-eight Wgures in all. Exit from the courtyard was by means of an arch dedicated (in Latin and Greek) to Plancia’s home city—the patria/patris. Bilingually inscribed bases testify to statues of Artemis, the Genius or Tyche of the city and the Emperor Hadrian with his two immediate predecessors and female relatives.19 The scale and number of statues involved, and the fact that the complex was dedicated by a woman in her own name alone, are unusual. Boatwright notes as a local distinction the patriotic orientation of the dedication to the city itself and its goddess rather than to the emperor in the Wrst instance. Yet she also Wnds parallels not only in other Greek monuments such as the nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus at Olympia, but in the arch of Melia Annina at Zara in Dalmatia. Plancia’s monument may even echo the Forum of Augustus.20 And it is not fundamentally diVerent from the building and statues sponsored by Eumachia in Pompeii which also combine a dedication by a priestess to female deities (Concordia and Pietas) with references to the imperial family and to the male relative(s) of the patroness.21 Like Eumachia, Plancia’s inXuence and beneWcence was rewarded with statues. There survives in good condition one of two she received from her freedmen, set up to Xank a divine image in the niches of a structure near her gate (Fig. 29).22 The form of this surviving portrait is similar to Eumachia’s (Fig. 30) in spite of the geographical and cultural distance between them. It conforms to the so-called Large Herculaneum Woman type, in which the tunicate female swathes her self-contained body in the folds of a himation. The type was widespread throughout the Empire, east and west.23 It was commonly used for imperial women who perhaps oVered a model of public virtue to match that of the togate male, but it involved forms of clothing that were virtually identical in both halves of the Empire and which are essentially similar to the formal conventions of Hellenistic portrait statuary. Important though individual women like Eumachia and Plancia were in their own societies, their portrait representations place them within the generalizing 18

M. T. Boatwright, ‘The City Gate of Plancia Magna in Perge’, in D’Ambra, Context, 189–207. On the range of inscriptions see M. C ¸ . S,ahin, Die Inschriften von Perge, i (Bonn: Habelt, 1999) 107–64. 20 Boatwright, ‘City Gate’, 204 and 198. 21 The building is dedicated in Eumachia’s name and that of her son Numistrius Fronto: CIL 10.810. 22 S,ahin, Die Inschriften von Perge, 153–6, 161–3, nos. 123–4. 23 For a recent discussion that seeks to understand the type in its contemporary context see J. Trimble, ‘Replicating the Body Politic: The Herculaneum Woman Statues’, JRA 13 (2000) 41–68. 19

164 statues in the empire Fig. 29. Plancia’s inXuence and beneWcence were rewarded with statues. The statue-type is conventional and widespread for women in the Empire, the carefully draped body connoting female virtue. (Marble statue of Plancia Magna. From Perge, Turkey. 120s ad. Antalya Museum, A3459. H: 2.01 m.)

Graeco-Roman paradigm of female modesty and propriety. The choices made for female body-types in the eastern provinces were perhaps rather more stereotypical and predictable than in Italy, but those types that do recur throughout the Empire contribute to a sense of common values. Ironically the women’s individual identities are better expressed by their manifest gifts to the community than by their classicizing images. The function of the statues is to demonstrate their perfect adherence to agreed ideals. At Wrst sight their male counterparts also appear to diVer only slightly from each other. To our eyes there seems to be little to distinguish between the wrapped Wgures of Greek men in the himation and the similar but more voluminous and curvaceous statues of togate Roman citizens. It is reasonable to

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Fig. 30. There was relatively little diversity in the clothing of female public statues, east and west. (Marble statue of Eumachia. From Pompeii. End of Wrst century bc. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 6232. H: 1.94 m.)

suppose that they appeared superWcially similar to ancient eyes—in contrast perhaps to the more outlandish dress of trousered barbarians24—and promoted some sense of continuity between eastern and western imperial culture. Yet the diVerences were certainly not lost on ancient viewers and are frequently emphasized in Roman literary references.25 24

See e.g. Valerius Maximus 2.6.10. See e.g. Suetonius, Augustus 98.3; Tiberius 13.1; De Grammaticis 9; Pallium is used to denote the himation in Latin and it is often nearly synonymous with Greek culture as the toga is with Roman: e.g. Valerius Maximus 2.2.2. 25

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Smith has shown how diVerences between Greek and Roman clothing, coupled with the complementary messages of Greek and Latin inscriptions or Greek and Roman names served on some familiar monuments like Herodes Atticus’ nymphaeum or the Philopappus tomb in Athens to position the subject between the two cultures, harnassing the beneWts of both kinds of symbolism.26 There are many other ways in which the style and iconography of portrait statues could negotiate for them a position between diVering artistic and cultural traditions. At the same time we should recognize the potential for diversity in the values and meaning locally attached to particular statuary conventions in the various regions of the Empire. When we examine the statuary bases or inscriptions from Greek cities on their own (collectively but in isolation from their monuments or companion texts) it is harder to observe such meticulous exploitation of symbolic ‘bilingualism’. And yet they still allow useful comparisons with similar material from the Latinspeaking regions. First, it is important to stress the essential resemblance among them. In the Greek parts of the Roman Empire public portrait statues and all other kinds of statue played similar social roles. In the public spaces of the Greek cities statues were erected by the leaders of the community in reward for the recipient’s valued services, works and donations. They were set up around the agora or in porticoes, on theatre fac¸ades and near public buildings—in the ‘most frequented’ places. We are dealing with the same tradition in east and west. Indeed we have seen how closely the public honours of the Roman Republic resembled those of the other Hellenistic states. When Pliny the Elder looks back at the development of portraiture in Natural History 34.16–17 he perceives a seamless development, from the Wrst Athenian portraits and the growth of public statuary to the more recent Roman habit of using images to create ‘fora in private homes’. And once again the use of statues to cement relationships between patrons and clients across the Empire favoured homogeneity. The language of statuary honours was spoken throughout. Still, there were diVerences in dialect and inXection. The inscriptions that record or explain statuary honours are also similar in east and west yet they betray the adaptation of the same basic practices to the particular needs and expectations of Greek society. In Chapter 1 I speculated about the reasons for subtle diVerences in the Greek and Latin terminology applied to statues. A similar approach to the complete texts of some inscriptions brings to light further minor but perhaps signiWcant discrepancies.

26

R. R. R. Smith, ‘Cultural Choice and Political Identity in HonoriWc Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century ad’, JRS 88 (1998) 56–93.

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Perhaps the most obvious linguistic diVerence is the grammatical case in which the recipient of the statue is identiWed. Latin inscriptions almost invariably name the recipient of a statue in the dative case. Greek dedications are more varied. They routinely identify the subject in the accusative, ‘labelling’ the image that has been created rather than implying the process in which it is implicated. The dative case is also used, but rarely for mortal recipients of statues: it is much more commonly employed for gods and is obviously the norm on inscribed altars.27 So when the dative is used for imperial subjects it is possible that it carries divine connotations, elevating, perhaps almost ‘consecrating’ the emperor with words. Certainly there are examples where such a reading is more plausible. Price, for example, Wnds ‘a clear religious overtone’ in the dative dedication of Vespasian’s statue in the imperial temple at Cestrus, contrasting as it does with the other, later emperors at the site, all identiWed in the accusative.28 But that is a temple, and one that very particularly privileges Vespasian in the presence of his successors. There is no obvious, consistent pattern in the usage of the dative of dedication for emperors and Paul Veyne argues forcefully and rather convincingly against this sort of interpretation of inscriptions on bases (as opposed to altars, which are another matter).29 His comments oVer a useful antidote against the temptation to understand cultural diVerences in purely functional terms, for he suggests that dative dedications on Greek statue-bases merely reXect the inXuence of Latin—the language of many of the recipients (and the second language of the dedicators). His observation is supported, amongst other things, by the apparent attraction of one language towards the other in bilingual inscriptions, a process that also works in reverse: two Latin inscriptions on Pergamene bases name the imperial recipients (Elagabalus and his family) in the accusative case.30 A more straightforward variation appears in the word-order of the formulaic, dedicatory inscriptions, for Greek bases regularly place emphasis on 27 There are countless examples, but note e.g. at Aphrodisias inscribed bases recording joint dedications to emperors and the patron deity Aphrodite—divine protectors near and far: MAMA 8.448 and 449. 28 Price, Rituals, 179 with examples including the statues in the imperial temple at Cestrus (273, cat. no. 146: the earliest emperor is referred to in the dative, the associated imperial statues are labelled in the accusative case). 29 P. Veyne, ‘Les honneurs posthumes de Favia Domitilla et les de´dicaces grecques et latines’, Latomus 21 (1962) 49–98, at 68–79. 30 T. Wiegend, Zweiter Bericht u¨ber die Ausgrabungen in Pergamon, 1928–32: das Asklepieion (Berlin 1932) 54–55, no. 7. Note a similar case in the colonia of Lystra (MAMA 8.5): ‘Divum Aug(ustum)| Col(onia) Iul(ia) fe|lix gemina| Lustra| consecravit| d(ecreto) d(ecurionum)’ (‘The Colonia Julia Felix Gemina Lystra consecrated [this statue of] the DeiWed Augustus by decree of the decuriones’). For a good example of the dative in bilingual dedicatory inscriptions see the bases of statues for Germanicus and his family at Ephesus, each inscribed with identical Latin and Greek inscriptions: L. C. Bo¨rker and R. Merkelbach (eds.), Die Inschriften von Ephesos, ii (Bonn 1979) 52–3, no. 256; C. B. Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period (Cambridge 1997), 176–7, no. 117.

168 statues in the empire the dedicators of statues, who are named at the start of the text. Latin inscriptions begin by identifying the dedicatee. The dedicator, whether an individual or private group, or the community in the form of people or senate/ordo, is usually given second place. As far as such public dedications for private individuals are concerned, the Greek city generally names the dedicating authority before all else. The order of elements in these formulaic inscriptions is not casually or unthinkingly reproduced. Often, for example, the order can be reversed in deference to the status of a particularly important (royal or imperial) recipient, as noted by Nawotka in his study of texts from Miletus. In fact this is the norm for emperors, though there are exceptions.31 Otherwise the text reXects and communicates the perception that the city is paramount. It is, after all, by virtue of investment in the community that the individual has received the honour, whereas a benefactor of a more straightforwardly hierarchical Roman town might be more overtly privileged as a superior ‘patron’ of the community. Coupled to this perception of Greek cities is the fact that sites such as Aphrodisias from which plentiful material survives oVer a much greater number of inscriptions marking statuary honours for ‘private’ (that is non-imperial) individuals. These are important people on whom the community depends and they may have had connections extending far beyond the city32 but they are not predominantly governors, senators and the like. The pattern is widespread and one has the impression of the revered but distant emperor being inserted into the local hierarchy of honours—albeit at the most exalted level—rather than the statuebases collectively mirroring or manipulating the metropolitan hierarchy. Finally, the language used to identify the Greek recipient of a statue and to explain the honour is peculiar to the culture of Hellenic euergetism, and particularly that of the Roman period. Not only are non-Roman dedicatees conventionally referred to using single Greek names and patronyms (hardly surprising in itself),33 but the reasons for the dedication are frequently expressed in highly abstract terms. Often, for instance, rather than an emphasis on the abbreviated rendering of the subject’s cursus honorum—his succession of posts and 31

K. Nawotka, Boule and Demos in Miletus and its Pontic Colonies from Classical Age until Third Century A.D. (Warsaw 1999) 82. Note however that on occasion a particular word in the body of the text can be emphasized by it position or size; thus in MAMA 8.451 (a base dedicated to Caracalla), the de¯mos as dedicating authority appears only in line 10 but stands out from the rest of the text). 32 Cf. S. E. Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge 1993) 154–6 on such connections. On the dependence of the city and the role of statues in securing assistance see Ch. 1 and, for a more detailed case-study, K. Ho¨ghammar, Sculpture and Society: A Study of the Connection Between the Free-Standing Sculpture and Society on Kos in the Hellenistic and Augustan Periods (Uppsala 1993) esp. 64. 33 Even Roman-style names can be presented with a similar emphasis, the father’s name given in full rather than incorporated in abbreviated form as was the Latin convention: e.g. MAMA 8.496, ‘ d^ ’ nt ’ ntoniou Dokimiano^u n TibEriou Klaudiou A o ZmoB TibErion Klaudion A onion Dokimian on ui‘ o ‘ rmion (‘the people [erected this], Tiberius Claudius Antonius Docimianus Hermius son of Tiberius E Claudius Docimianus’).

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magistracies—we Wnd the evocation of time-honoured Greek civic virtues such as agathia and andreia. Honorands are called megas (great), philopatris (patriotic), philopolite¯s (devoted to one’s fellow-citizens), euergete¯s (benefactor), ktiste¯s (restorer), andreios (possessing manly virtue), agathos (good), ze¯sas kosmos (living decently), and so on. Arete¯ (virtue/excellence) and eunoia (good sense) are frequently evoked.34 Latin is not without such references—for example inscriptions cite honos (dignity), virtus (virtue) or merita (merits/services) as motivations for spontaneous awards and honours for women necessarily tend towards the abstract—but it lacks the determined translation of practical benefactions or beneWts of patronage into generalized qualities of character. This should not be seen as vagueness or the dilution of the honour. All the terms of praise were highly resonant on account of their long history; a word like ktiste¯s, for instance, could ultimately be connected to the Hellenistic cult of founder-heroes and those who were venerated as saviours of the city.35 In the Greek context the extreme manifestation of that habit is the Graeco-Roman statesman Tiberius Julius Celsus’ library at Ephesus, where (broadly speaking) the kinds of virtue normally recounted in inscriptions have been embodied in labelled statues that accompany the images of Celsus himself on the fac¸ade of his monument: Sophia (Wisdom), Arete¯ (Excellence), Episte¯me¯ (Knowledge) and Eunoia (Good Sense). It is interesting that these feminine personiWcations are very similar to statuetypes commonly used for the representation of real women and include (with minor variations) the Large Herculaneum Woman type, as if to suggest (and they probably do) that the women so portrayed were essentially the embodiment of virtue.36 As with the discussion of terminology in Chapter 1, what we are dealing with is diVerences in nuance: variations on the theme of statuary honours which are sometimes barely noticeable to us, certainly hard to explain with reference to any fundamental cultural contrast or divergence of attitudes between Greek East and Latin West. Once again underlying the linguistic distinctions that I have emphasized there was a shared code of social behaviour; usage diVered in diVerent parts of the Empire, but common characteristics of this ‘language’ of statuary honours were readily recognizable. There is one respect at least in which we might argue that practices in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean were distinct—and this brings us back to some of the suggestions advanced in Chapter 1: that is, once again, the matter of 34

For these and other motivations for honours see e.g Ho¨ghammar, Sculpture and Society, 72 n. 299 (focusing on the Hellenistic and early Roman statues of Cos). 35 See P. Gauthier, Les cite´s grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs (IVe–Ier sie`cle avant J.C.): contribution a` l’histoire des institutions (Athens 1985) on the Hellenistic euergetes and note 59–66 on founders, new ‘founders’ and divine honours. 36 For the statues see: F. Eichler in F. Wilberg et al., Forschungen in Ephesos, v/1 (Vienna 1953) 47–57.

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the imperial cult. In the Hellenistic period traditional forms of honour had been adapted in order to elevate and express loyalty to Alexander and his successors.37 For the greatest beneWts bestowed by the most powerful of benefactors divine honours were appropriate. Yet the veneration of rulers as deities was not a question of mere Xattery or superWcial symbolism. The perceived gifts of royal patronage were literally god-like. To all intents and purposes the ruler could be seen as occupying the same social position as a deity. There is some disagreement about the sense in which the veneration of Roman emperors represents the continuation of this symbolic system.38 In any case the imperial cult in the eastern provinces does serve to set Greek images of the emperor apart from the sorts of dedication we are most familiar with from Italy and the western provinces. The diVerences are sometimes considerable: above all the veneration of living emperors’ portraits as cult images in temples rather than mere dedications in temple vestibules or sanctuary precincts. Although Fishwick details many varieties of imperial cult in the western provinces and in Italy itself, it would certainly be wrong to suggest that this kind of explicit worship of the living emperor occurred in Rome during the Principate.39 Sometimes we also detect more subtle variations in emphasis such as the designation of dead or living emperor in Greek inscriptions as theos—god—as opposed to the Latin divus (in the singular form applied almost exclusively to emperors and therefore more like ‘deiWed’). Perhaps most importantly the cult of the emperors with their temples and sanctuaries, altars and statues was, like some of the other statuary dedications considered above, a centripetal cult, serving to reinforce long-distance relationships with the absent emperor or the imperial house and thereby also emphasizing the distance and the diVerence. This is further underlined by that fact that imperial cults were often devoted to Rome and Augustus. Therefore insofar as Greek imperial cult provided a motive and a context for the dedication of imperial portraits it marked out necessary diVerences in usage particularly between Rome and these provinces. Yet it may be wrong to overemphasize this aspect of diversity in the deployment of statues in the Empire. That is because the divine honours bestowed by Greek cities were not completely detached from the political reality of the emperor’s position in Rome, and because such honours were not as alien to Roman Imperial culture as our surviving sources may imply. 37

C. Habicht, Gottmenschentum und griechische Sta¨dte (Munich 1970) surveys all aspects of cult of mortals till the mid-3rd cent. bc; for more analysis and later focus see Gauthier, Les cite´s grecques; Price, Rituals, 25–40. 38 See Price, Rituals, esp. 40–7 for discussion 39 D. Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire (Leiden 1987–92).

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Divinity was only one facet of the emperor’s image in the Greek East and the position of imperial portraits between the sphere of the divine and mortal society was often ill-deWned. Informative in this respect is an inscribed decree from the Temple of Apollo Ptoios at Acraephia in Boeotia which includes and responds to Nero’s grandiose decree granting freedom to all the Greeks.40 In response to this unprecedented gift the boule¯ and de¯mos award divine honours. The altar of Zeus the Saviour is to be dedicated to the emperor with a new inscription: ‘To Zeus Eleutherios [‘the Liberator’] Nero’; and statues—agalmata—of ‘Nero Zeus Eleutherios’ and the ‘goddess Augusta Messalina’ are to be installed in the temple of Apollo Ptoios along with the ancestral gods—therefore in the cella itself. Nero is called ho kurios (‘the lord’— as is the Lord God in the New Testament) and the New Helios—a divine title with earlier Roman and Hellenistic parallels. At the same time, however, that name is immediately preceded by Nero’s political titles and oYces in the Roman manner and there seems an awareness throughout that the divine honours are at the disposal of the political bodies in the community. The inclusion of Nero’s words and the expressed desire that the city might be ‘seen to have poured out every honour and reverence to the house of the lord Augustus Nero’ reinforce the impression both that political exchanges and religious concerns are implicated with each other and that the former are not subsumed beneath the latter. Incidentally, the names of Nero and Messalina were almost entirely erased from this inscription after the fall of the regime. Nero’s involvement with the Greek cities is an appropriate example, for Nero’s threatening philhellenism has an important role in his posthumous abuse and behind the abuse we can perhaps detect the actions of an emperor (and his subjects) who had internalized the political culture of the Hellenistic world and had introduced it prematurely into the city of Rome. The foremost example of his inappropriate adoption of Hellenistic royal imagery is perhaps the Golden House. At its entrance stood the colossal, gilded-bronze statue of the sun-god, Helios or Sol which may have been intended as a divinizing representation of the living ruler as the (admittedly hostile) later sources suggest.41 Nero’s behaviour was used in retrospect to condemn him. But, as Elsner argues, it is easy to imagine a more positive construction of his regal activities had he managed to survive as long as Augustus, and his building works in Rome were certainly not unprecedented.42 We can also detect occasional indications 40

IG 7/1, 2713; Rose, Dynastic Commemoration, 136–8, no. 67. It is plausible that the ‘portrait’ of Nero was conceived in that way and that is the scholarly consensus, but for discussion of the controversy see Carey, ‘In memoriam (perpetuam) Neronis’ and for sceptical re-evaluation of the sources see R. R. R. Smith, ‘Nero and the Sun-god: Divine Accessories and Political Symbols in Roman Imperial Images’, JRA 13 (2000) 532–42, at 536–7. 42 J. Elsner, ‘Constructing Decadence: The Representation of Nero as Imperial Builder’, in J. Elsner and J. Masters (eds.), ReXections of Nero: Culture, History and Representation (London 1994) 112–27. 41

172 statues in the empire that the trappings of the imperial cult were not unknown even in Rome itself, though direct worship of the emperor as a living god did not occur in any formal way in the capital.43 Arguably connotations of divinity attached to any dedications of statues in precious metals44 but most notable perhaps because of its date and context is the collection of ‘about eighty’ silver statues awarded to Augustus and subsequently converted into gold votives to Apollo in an act of conspicuous modesty and piety:45 In templis omnium civitatum provinciae Asiae victor ornamenta reposui, quae spoliatis templis is cum quo bellum gesseram privatim possederat. Statuae meae pedestres et equestres et in quadrigeis argenteae steterunt in urbe XXC circitur, quas ipse sustuli exque ea pecunia dona aurea in aede Apollinis meo nomine et illorum, qui mihi statuarum honorem habuerunt, posui. As victor I replaced in the temples of all the cities of the province of Asia the ornamenta [i.e. anathe¯mata—dedications] which he with whom I had waged war privately appropriated after despoiling the temples. Around eighty statues of me—pedestrian, equestrian, and mounted in chariots, made in silver—stood in the city, which I myself removed and from the proceeds I placed in the temple of Apollo golden oVerings in my own name and in the name of those who extended me the honour of statues.

These are unparalleled gifts in the city of Rome. Although Augustus refers to them as statuae (andriantes in the Greek translation) and there is no explicit suggestion of divine honours, the scale of the dedications, covering as it does a range of forms including the most prestigious quadriga, and especially the precious material, suggest that these are honours more appropriate for a Hellenistic king. And at least to the inhabitants of the Greek east that is essentially what Augustus was. Other honours which we know of in Rome do not come close to this. We cannot reconstruct the circumstances of these dedications, but in the city of Rome in the few years after 31 bc (the date implied by the text 46) we have to suppose that many or all of these gifts were set up in or near temples. Now the fact that Augustus boasts of his modest removal of the statues demonstrates that such honours were not straightforwardly compatible with Roman traditions. The reference to the statues immediately follows the restoration of religious ornamenta appropriated by Antony and Cleopatra. There is no break in the text as we know it from Ancyra—not even a new line. The 43

Note Dio 51.20.6–8: contrasting Roman practice with the cult of the living emperor among provincial subjects. For general discussion of the contrast see BNP i.348–63. 44 K. Scott, ‘The SigniWcance of Statues in Precious Metals in Emperor Worship’, TAPhA 62 (1931) 101–23. 45 Augustus, Res Gestae 24. 46 Suetonius, Augustus 52 says that the statues were set up ‘olim’ (‘once’, ‘in the past’) which might suggest that Augustus was changing his image at this time (cf. this account in Zanker, Augustus) but the word may simply mean ‘previously’— in other words Augustus acts after the event. Dio 53.22 implies a date of 27 bc or after, though his reference is vague.

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juxtaposition implies that Augustus has no desire for the sort of trappings hoarded by his enemies in the east. Yet the reference also shows that at least in this time of instability and uncertainty such statues could make sense in the Roman environment. It is another example, perhaps, of the common heritage shared by Greece and Rome by the period of the late Republic and early Empire, even if there are also clear signs of divergence. However, just one qualiWcation is due. Who made these statues and why? If the location of the reference in Res Gestae 24 is signiWcant the implication is that these gifts are a direct response to Augustus’ victory at Actium. If they were made, say, by the senate or people of Roman and other bodies or individuals in the city then this would be a moment of extraordinary importance: an unrivalled spontaneous expression of loyalty by the Roman populace in the language of Hellenistic honours. But the suggestion is that these precious statues were oVerings from the Greek states to which Augustus had restored Antony’s booty. If so, they illustrate the massive extension of the Greek system of honours to Rome itself. Yet the conversion of these gifts into votives for Apollo by Octavian, almost the ‘New Apollo’, would have had a special resonance for the Greek dedicants.47 Suetonius also mentions the silver statues in the context of a catalogue of modest and prudent gestures by Augustus and immediately before refusal of the dictatorship oVered by popular acclamation.48 SigniWcantly the honour of the statues in Rome is linked to the oVer of temples in the provinces (which he insists must be dedicated in the name of Rome as well as his own). Suetonius goes on to say how Augustus (unlike Domitan a century or so later) refused the title ‘dominus’ which could be seen as a Latin version of kurios.49 Finally Dio Cassius also seems to refer to the melting of the silver statues, scurrilously implying that the proceeds were used to Wnance restoration of the roads around Rome at the emperor’s ‘personal expense’.50 Dio’s reference is vague, but he does say that the statues were set up by friends and by certain ’ rguro^uB pr peoples (’andri antaB tin aB E‘ auto^u a oB tE t^ on filon kai pr oB d Zmon tin^ on gEgon otaB), ‘friends’ in this case probably referring to personal or national clients or allies overseas. In diVerent periods we can detect aspects of the use of images in Rome that recall the veneration of imperial portraits in the Greek east, and one thinks especially of the processions of precious images (generally but not always after the death of the emperor).51 All of the evidence examined in this section suggests that although there were obvious and important cultural diVerences between 47

For Augustus and Apollo see Zanker, Augustus, esp. 44–53. 49 50 Suetonius, Augustus 52. Ibid. 53. Dio 53.22.3. 51 In this connection note also the ivory image of Julius Caesar presented to him in 45 bc as well as others that made clear his divinity: Dio 43.45; 43.14.3–7. Interestingly the hostile Dio implicitly distinguishes the former ‘andrias’ from the ‘agalmata’ of the gods that accompanied it. 48

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Rome and the eastern provinces the similarities in the broad form and use of portrait statues represent a measure of homogeneity that literally allowed the inhabitants of the Empire to communicate in the same language of honours, even when diVerences in presentation and context, and especially (as Smith shows) diversity of iconography, highlighted disparities or allowed them to be manipulated. As a general observation this applies to statuary in most parts of the Roman Empire. But we should now turn to an area which at Wrst sight presents an utterly diVerent picture.

statues in britain In the art history of Roman Britain one of the most often quoted and least helpful literary sources is a passing comment by Suetonius in his life of the Emperor Titus.52 The author tells us that before his accession Titus won a great reputation for diligence and restraint when he served as an oYcer in Britain and Germany, ‘as is evident from the multitude of statues and images and their inscriptions in both provinces’ (‘sicut apparet statuarum et imaginum eius multitudine ac titulis per utramque provinciam’). Even allowing for exaggeration (and part of Suetonius’ intention is a comparison with Titus’ revered father Vespasian and wayward brother Domitian53), the contrast between this reference and the reality of Romano-British (and to some extent northern Gallic and German) archaeology could hardly be more striking. Not only does the extant sculpture of Roman Britain lack portraits of Titus— young or old—but images of any emperor are scarce. We have no securely identiWed marble portraits of emperors from Britain. There are a couple of famous bronze statue-heads recovered from rivers: a Julio-Claudian head, perhaps that of Nero, from the River Alde in SuVolk and one of Hadrian from the Thames at London.54 Otherwise there are mere fragments of full-scale statues.55 There is an almost total lack of evidence for non-imperial portrait statuary. And of the statue-bases that testify to lost or displaced portraits in other parts of the Empire only one reasonably unambiguous example survives in Britain: the base 52

Suetonius, Titus 4.1. Quoted e.g. by J. M. C. Toynbee, Art in Britain Under the Romans (Oxford 1964) 46; most recently by M. Henig, ‘Art in Roman London’, in I. Haynes, H. Sheldon, and L. Hannigan (eds.), London Underground: The Archaeology of a City (Oxford 2000) 62–84, at 67. 53 Cf Suetonius, Vespasian 1.2 where statues are also used to characterize the emperor’s virtues. 54 General discussion of these and related pieces in Toynbee, Art in Britain 46–51. For the River Alde head as Nero see H. Jucker, ‘Iulisch-Claudische Kaiser- und Prinzenportra¨ts als ‘ Palimpseste’’ ’ , JDAI 96 (1981), 236–316, at 307–9. 55 See M. Henig, The Art of Roman Britain (London 1995) 61. Among the most recent Wnds is part of an arm from a bronze statue found in the City of London in 2001: unpublished, but see Minerva Magazine 6/4 (July–August 2001), 5 with photograph.

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of a statue awarded to Tiberius Claudius Paulinus at Caerwent by the civitas—the res publica—of the Silures.56 In fact all sculpture is relatively rare in Britain. Even in the massive villas of the provincial rich such as Woodchester in Gloucestershire Wnds of decorative marble sculpture are limited to a handful of pieces.57 The bulk of the province’s surviving Wgurative sculpture belongs in the sphere of religion; we have, for example, a comparatively large number of votive reliefs. There is a variety of possible reasons for the anomalous character of statuary production in Roman Britain. Some are quite mundane. It could be that a disproportionate number of British statues were executed in bronze. Bronze sculpture would have been both prestigious and practical in a land that lacked its own sources of marble. Bronze sculpture was also prone to recycling in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages and relatively little survives from elsewhere in the Roman Empire. Sculpture in imported marble would also have been liable to reuse and especially to destruction in the lime-kilns. We Wnd concentrations of sculpture in areas like the north of England and the Cotswold hills which readily yielded supplies of suitable local stone, but rather than suggesting that certain forms of production were restricted by the availability of raw materials, this imbalance in the record might imply a greater degree of reuse of imported stone precisely in those areas that lacked local building materials. It is also entirely plausible that the stone votive reliefs that survive from parts of Roman Britain were matched elsewhere by perishable sculptures in wood (and iron-age wooden sculptures occasionally do survive from France and the British Isles). On all such questions literary evidence oVers no help. And yet the paucity of sculpture in Britain represents too great a contrast with Italy or the Mediterranean provinces for any of these material explanations to explain much. They may help to account, say, for the limited extent of private sculpture in British villas: here we can imagine other art-forms such as mosaics, precious metals, and wall-paintings oVered ample means for self-representation: perfectly satisfactory within local society, though conceivably a little unfamiliar to the eyes of some outsiders. One thing that is peculiar about the absence of public portrait statuary is that elsewhere it usually marks important relationships that extend beyond the local community. This fact is best illustrated once again by the ubiquity of imperial statues in almost every other part of the Empire. In the case of the emperor at least the erection of statues served as, and possibly reXected, a form of communication between loyal subject and distant ruler. If this sort of communication across the lands had not occurred then we should have to be surprised, in fact, at 56

RIB 311. For these see M. Henig, Roman Sculpture from the Cotswold Region, with Devon and Cornwall (Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani, i/7) (Oxford 1993) 3–6, nos. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, pls. 2–4. 57

176 statues in the empire Suetonius’ knowledge of and interest in the statues allegedly awarded to the prince Titus. Yet it must be stressed again that emperors did not set up their own statues, nor do we have any reason to believe that they demanded or expected them. There was no obligation for the nobility and communities of Britain to honour the emperor in this particular way, especially perhaps as Britain was Wrst fully introduced into the Empire and its customs at the time when Claudius was supposedly reacting against the custom of statuary honours at Rome. As we observed in the statue-gallery in the Villa of the Aspri at Grottaferrata, the province of Britannia had the means to honour a patron on his own ground. There were surely other ways of maintaining close links with the centre of power. The really signiWcant gap in the evidence from Britain is the lack of interest in the local use of portrait statues, whether images of imperial patrons or local benefactors. Others have discussed the similar shortage of surviving inscriptions, remains of signiWcant public buildings like stone theatres or epigraphic references to public works or monuments.58 In Britain the ‘epigraphic habit’— the disposition towards durable Latin inscriptions as a means of commemoration or display—is limited. The overall quantity of inscriptions is small compared with that of other provinces and the inscriptions that do survive come not from the local urban centres, the so-called ‘civitas capitals’, but overwhelmingly from the ‘military zone’ of northern England.59 Details of individuals’ public muniWcence are scarce, though they include the intriguing inscription of Marcus Ulpius Ianuarius, aedile of the community of Petuaria (Brough-on-Humber), who furnished a theatre with a stage around ad 140.60 In examining the whole phenomenon of architectural muniWcence as recorded in Romano-British inscriptions, Blagg also notes the bias towards northern Britain and shows that religious structures predominate. In addition he observes Britain’s disproportionate number of benefactions by groups rather than individuals: for example by the councils of civitates or even collectively by the province.61 What is particularly useful about Blagg’s survey is his use of 58 M. Biro´, ‘The Inscriptions of Roman Britain’, Acta Archaeologica, 27 (1975), 13–58; E. Fre´zouls, ‘Everge´tisme et construction urbaine dans les Trois Gaules et les Germains’, Revue du Nord, 64 (1984), 27–54; M. Millett, The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cambridge 1990) 78–85; T. F. C. Blagg, ‘Architectural MuniWcence in Britain: The Evidence of Inscriptions’, Britannia 21 (1990) 13–31; and in an overview, T. W. Potter and C. Johns, Roman Britain (London 1992). On the ‘epigraphic habit’ and the evidence of inscriptions in Britain see J. C. Mann, ‘Epigraphic Consciousness’, JRS 75 (1985), 204–6. 59 Biro´, ‘The Inscriptions of Roman Britain’. 60 RIB 707, a limestone slab now in Hull Museum. The inscription has a dual purpose as it dedicated the act of muniWcence to the divine house of the Emperor Antoninus Pius. 61 Blagg, ‘Architectural MuniWcence in Britain’, esp. 18–19 on benefactors. Besides Grottaferrata RIB 5 oVers evidence of a collective dedication by the province.

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Fre´zouls’ statistics for the provinces of Gaul and Germany to make comparisons. Britain’s relative shortage of civic benefactions is paralleled in its northern neighbours. There are interesting regional anomalies such as the unusual proportion of recorded sacred buildings in Britannia and Germania Inferior, or the fact that Belgica shares Britain’s high proportion of corporate dedications. Neither Fre´zouls nor Blagg is primarily interested in epigraphic records of statues but they do include such inscriptions in their statistics and this reveals extraordinarily low numbers in all the provinces except Lugdunensis and Germania Superior.62 These Wgures trace only inscriptions recording benefactions that involve statues. They ignore, for example, the statue-base of Paulinus (see below) and actual surviving fragments of statues; yet if incorporated such evidence would, if anything, strengthen the pattern that emerges for Britain.63 To a certain extent the relative absence of inscriptions and architectural benefactions in Britain and the northern provinces can be linked to the lack of extant statuary, not by a straightforward appeal to some notion of patchy Romanization64 (though cultural diVerences may play a role) nor to the idea of limited provincial wealth65 (which seems unlikely when it comes to honoriWc portraits), but by thinking about the social functions of statues. Millett, for instance, invokes an image of Romano-British aristocrats with an established rural power base and little investment in the competitive urban politics that characterized elite society in most other regions of the Empire.66 Public statues in themselves were not competitive status symbols, at least not in any simple way, for they were the products of others—groups and individuals eager to honour and reward the recipient. But we can imagine that such honours lost their force in a society where urban celebritas was not at a premium. Moreover, statues were very often the reward for an individual’s benefaction, so to that extent they provide an index of potential benefactors’ interest or lack of interest in euergetism. Of course the same principles help to explain the scarcity of ‘cult statues’ and inscriptions recording them (though we do have some fascinating survivals67) as well as statuary dedications in sanctuaries or even perhaps 62 One/two in each of the other provinces, nine claimed for Britain (though even this seems an unacceptably high calculation on the basis of extant inscriptions). 63 See Blagg, ‘Architectural MuniWcence in Britain’, 19 and n. 21 on omission of honoriWc statues. 64 Partial Romanization implied, for example, by Biro´, ‘The Inscriptions of Roman Britain’. 65 Potter and Johns, Roman Britain, use this, perhaps accurately, as the explanation for a lack of greater acts of muniWcence. 66 Millett, The Romanization of Britain, esp. 80–5. 67 Exceptional examples in limestone, bronze and marble include respectively , the Uley Mercury: Henig, Roman Sculpture from the Cotswold Region, 22–3, no. 62, pls. 17–18; the Bath Minerva: B. W. CunliVe and M. G. Fulford, Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani, i/2. Bath and the Rest of Wessex (Oxford 1982) 9, no. 26, pl. 7; the Mithras from the Walbrook Mithraeum: J. M. C. Toynbee, The Roman Art Treasures from the Temple of Mithras (London 1986) 5–10.

178 statues in the empire funerary statues. The expense was not justiWed by social needs which could be satisWed in other ways. It would be quite wrong however to suggest that Britain was untouched by the symbolism of statuary that prevailed elsewhere. The surviving sculpture itself shows a striking variety of styles, ranging from the simplest or most abstract of votive reliefs, apparently shaped by the ideas of Celtic religion, to polished fragments of the most ‘classical’ kind.68 The majority of works do depart in some way from what we see as the norms of Mediterranean, Graeco-Roman sculpture, whether in scale, material or style. And yet classical iconography is pervasive. Similarly Zanker has shown how in the Roman provinces the standard portrait image of the emperor was adapted to local artistic traditions and symbolic priorities, yet basic components of the iconography remain intact.69 It is perhaps appropriate to stress the consistency of iconography throughout the Empire, for it strengthens the impression of a kind of common language, adopted everywhere, but not always used in the same way or to the same extent. This is exactly what we Wnd with the empire-wide system of portrait honours. To say that Britain lacked the sort of statuary that can be found elsewhere, that statues did not perform the same role in the society of the northern provinces, is not to say that the idea of Roman statues was unknown or misunderstood, or that these provinces lacked the social institutions necessary to operate a system of statuary honours. It is perfectly plausible that some elevated individuals like Titus did receive major dedications of statues. The Romans of Britain knew how to ‘speak’ this language, but they did not always choose to do so. We do not possess much detail about the society of Roman Britain, but we Wnd references to institutions and magistracies of the sort that elsewhere played a prominent role in the commissioning and regulation of statues and other monuments: duoviri, aediles, the local town council (ordo decurionum). At Caerwent the ordo of the civitas of the Silures erected a statue with an inscribed base, essentially identical to what we Wnd elsewhere in the west.70 The recipient of the statue at Caerwent is not a surprising candidate for this rare example of the local civic bodies behaving like those of other provinces. He was Tiberius Claudius Paulinus, commander of Legio II Augusta some time in 68

M. J. Green, ‘God in Man’s Image: Thoughts on the Genesis and AYliations of Some RomanoBritish Cult-Imagery’, Britannia 29 (1998) 17–30. For classical works see the cult images above or, e.g., marble or bronze sculptures from Lullingstone in Kent or the richer Cotswold villas: G. W. Meates, Lullingstone Villa (London 1955) 81–9, Wgs. 18–19, 23–9; Henig, Roman Sculpture from the Cotswold Region, 3–7. 69 Zanker, Provinzielle Kaiserportra¨ts. 70 Duoviri in (Glevum) Gloucester: e.g. RIB 2477, 2486–8. Aedile at Petuaria: RIB 707—see above; ordo at Caerwent: RIB 311; for epitaph of decurio at Gloucester see RIB 161. On such institutions in Britain see also G. de la Be´doye`re, Companion to Roman Britain (Stroud 1999) 95–105.

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the second decade of the third century when this base was set up. He had served as proconsular governor of Narbonensis and in ad 220 he became governor of the province of Britannia Inferior (a post possibly held by the future emperor Gordian I just four years earlier).71 In other words he was a locally based aristocrat with extraordinary inXuence in Rome and other provinces. His statue was a useful investment. It is unfortunate that we can only speculate about the aesthetic role that the statue itself played in negotiating the relationship involved here. Was it classical in form? Did it imitate the image of the emperor? On the other hand, the building inscription of M. Ulpius Ianuarius mentioned above shows how the expressive power of Roman dedicatory language could be harnessed to bolster the dedicator’s position and enhance his own prestige. The language must have been recognized and understood, and it is perhaps used here like the display of statues in other places to compensate for the relatively low status of the aedile: from our perspective being aedile in the vicus of Broughon-Humber does not appear such a lofty position and it is doubtful whether the proscaenium he built ranked as one of the great monuments even of ancient England.

statues in spain Britannia oVers an extreme case of the kind of variability that exists in the Imperial system of statuary symbolism: not so much a thorough diVerence of form, but a diversity of social contexts in which this language might be adopted and exploited. I want to Wnish this survey by turning brieXy to one of the western provinces of the Roman Empire in which statues, in contrast, were far from rare. The province is Hispania Citerior (eastern Spain)—and speciWcally the legal district known as the Conventus Tarraconensis which included the colonies of Tarraco, Barcino, and Valentia, and such municipia as Emporiae and Saguntum. From this region well-documented evidence for statues has survived in abundance and has been gathered and analysed by Geza Alfo¨ldy.72 The picture it presents is not dissimilar to that of other western sites like Cuicul and Thamugadi, but the sheer quantity of epigraphic evidence oVers a more reliable picture of a region than do

71

Paulinus: RIB 311 (the statue-base); 1280 (in governorship); CIL 13.3162 (including his letter to a friend and client in Gaul). Gordian: RIB 1049, partially surviving later damnatio memoriae. 72 G. Alfo¨ldy, ‘Bildprogramme in den ro¨mischen Sta¨dten des Conventus Tarraconensis: das Zeugnis der Statuenpostamenta’, in A. Blanco et al. (eds.), Homenaje a Garcia y Bellido, iv (Madrid 1979) 177–275. For a more comprehensive survey of inscriptions from the area see id., Die ro¨mischen Inschriften von Tarraco (Berlin 1975).

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studies of small individual sites. The provincial capital Tarraco accounts for more than half of the entries in Alfo¨ldy’s catalogue of inscribed statue-bases: 247 bases from one city—a stark contrast with the British evidence. Here we can see clearly the degree to which the metropolitan Roman usage of statues did correspond to that of the provinces as well as appreciating some interesting distinctions. Collectively, Alfo¨ldy argues, the statues of Tarraconensis embody the social and political ideology of the Roman Empire as seen from the province. Various provincial elites—priests, equestrians, decuriones—are eVectively displayed in a hierarchy that locates them close to the emperor and the gods. Gods and emperors are linked by cults of the deiWed Augusti and by the general proximity of these two predominant classes of statuary; they are also associated more delicately as at Cuicul in the application of the epithet ‘Augustus’ to both.73 As a focus for imperial cult as well as the political centre of the province the monuments of Tarraco itself were orientated towards Rome. The participation of various social groups in the creation of statuary honours for senators or members of the imperial family, and the resulting symbolic presence of both these recipients in the civic and religious centre of the city served to make Tarraco the literal embodiment of relations between Rome and its empire. As in the other western sites we have examined imperial statues are prominent in the public places of the towns in this area, yet once more it is possible to perceive a greater degree of inclusivity in the social spectrum represented by surviving bases. While statues dedicated to emperors are (in relative terms) quite numerous at Tarraco—twenty bases survive—and they outnumber monuments for local magistrates or indeed dedications to gods, they nevertheless account for a fairly small proportion of those catalogued by Alfo¨ldy.74 Of course many of those ‘private’ recipients of statues in the city were from the very highest social ranks, including the priests (Xamines) of the provincial imperial cult (and their wives, the Xaminicae) whose images were routinely set up in the sanctuary of the Augusti at the end of their period of oYce.75 (More than seventy such statues are attested by bases from Tarraco: a huge proportion of those surviving.) But there were other signiWcant groups including, for example, the ‘colleges’ of wealthy freedmen, the seviri augustales (in fact the Wgures for Barcino are somewhat skewed because of the deluge of honours—some twenty statues—to an augustalis named L. Licinius Secundus from his colleagues and the city’s decuriones. In Tarraco and elsewhere various statues were set up for other private individuals by 73

Alfo¨ldy, ‘Bildprogramme’, 194. Ibid. 235–75 for Tarraco and comparable towns, discussed below. 75 Ibid. 179 and 237. For regulations concerning these statues in the province of Narbonensis see CIL 12.6038. On these statues and the character of statues in general at Tarraco see W. E. Mierse, Temples and Towns in Roman Iberia: The Social and Architectural Dynamics of Sanctuary Designs from the Third Century b.c. to the Third Century a.d. (Berkeley 1999) 234–6. 74

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‘friends’, clients, or relatives. Taken as a whole, the provincial record represents the spectrum of statuary honours. It is also instructive to relate the Wgures at Tarraco in particular with the proportions of recipients recorded on bases from two other towns where the volume of Wnds warrants a comparison. The towns concerned are the colonia of Barcino and the municipium of Saguntum where the total numbers of inscribed statue-bases are seventy-Wve and thirty-nine respectively. Here we Wnd a broadly similar picture, yet there are clearly greater opportunities for the display of public portraits for less elevated recipients. For instance, whereas at Tarraco senatorial statues are more than double those for local magistrates, honoured as such, at Barcino the latter almost equal emperors and senators put together, and at Saguntum they surpass them and represent more than a third of the bases that survive. It is unfortunate that the outstanding body of extant epigraphic evidence from Tarraco is not precisely matched by surviving sculptures. That is to say, although much sculpture has been discovered in Tarraco much of it comes from sites other than the city forum and the ‘provincial forum’ with its sanctuary of the imperial cult which have supplied so many inscribed bases. So we do not have the opportunity to relate speciWc sculptures to their inscriptions. But what does exist is still informative when compared with the epigraphic repertory, for it too points to the homogeneity of practices across the Empire. In Eva Maria Koppel’s catalogue of sculpture from Roman Tarraco we Wnd a small number of headless togate adults and boys, cuirassed statues and draped women which, in spite of occasional individual traits not peculiar to the region, are essentially indistinguishable from their counterparts elsewhere.76 Indeed Koppel uses comparanda from all areas of the Empire to place these statue-bodies in their typological or stylistic context. The images themselves, particularly when divorced from the heads and the inscriptions that helped to anchor them as individual representations, embody the lingua franca of portrait sculpture in the Roman Empire and like the sculptural displays attested by statue-bases in Cuicul and elsewhere they serve in some measure to collapse the diVerence between Rome or Roman culture and political authority and the provincial elite. In practice of course the hierarchy would have been perfectly discernible through the context and labelling of the statues as well as viewers’ expectations of how diVerent statue-types were used: a group of three near-identical cuirassed bodies from the theatre almost certainly belonged to imperial Wgures (perhaps Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus) even though there is no intrinsic 76 Koppel Die ro¨mischen Skulpturen von Tarraco. Togati: 15–16, no. 4, pl. 4; 16–17, no. 5, pl. 5. With bulla: 17–18, no. 6, pl. 6.1–2; 18–19, no. 7, pl. 6.3–4; 35–6, no. 48, 15.1–4; cf. fragment of lower part of togatus: 82, no. 108, pl. 43.3. Cuirassed: 19–20, nos. 8–10, pls. 7–8. Woman in palla: 37–8, no. 56, pl. 17. Woman of ‘Pudicitia’ type: 77–8, no. 99, pl. 38.3–4.

182 statues in the empire indication of status in the sculptures. However, sculptural typology was accommodating, allowing the humbler dignitaries of the provinces to partake in monumental forms that held a universal authority. The extraordinary body of evidence that survives from Spain illustrates the importance of statuary for diVerent groups at the apex of provincial society. The inscriptions of Tarraconensis recall the relatively inclusive accumulations of honours in Africa and even Asia Minor. Local notables might receive in their own spheres a kind of honour whose authority was recognized and respected throughout the Empire and which was validated by the images of the gods and emperors that shared the public spaces of provincial towns, sometimes evidently in close proximity. Within the full spectrum of Imperial civic accomplishments the merits of these honorands were comparatively minor and the statues were often bestowed by relatives and close associates, but that was a distinction diminished perhaps in the inscriptions and certainly to a large extent in the statues themselves: usually more humble in material and iconography than those of the emperor, but essentially sharing the restricted repertoire of forms familiar in Rome itself.

conclusion This chapter has attempted to bring into sharper focus the variety of practices surrounding honoriWc portrait statues in the Roman Empire. The degree of basic conformity we have observed assures the value of evidence from all over the Empire for a study that concentrates on Rome and Italy. Yet I have also sought to convey something of the diversity in actual usage of the Imperial language of statuary honours. The discrepancies are due in part to geographical, or rather social diVerences in quite disparate provinces. But they are also due to the fact that all these places were not Rome. The deployment of statues—particularly statues of the absent emperor—seeks to bridge the gap between Rome and the provinces and in doing so betrays (in diVerent ways and to diVerent degrees) an orientation towards the centre of the Empire and an appropriation of its symbols. In the context of this book these examples provoke a more general conclusion. The evidence reviewed above is primarily ‘historical’ rather than traditionally arthistorical source material. The use of inscriptions has allowed comparisons between the capital and the provinces, but where they are well preserved (as in Spain and Africa) and where they never existed in the same numbers (in Britain and the northern provinces) they oVer what is in sociological terms a rather fuller picture of the place of statues in society. At the same time, the culture of statuary in Rome and Italy is over-represented by literary evidence, which consists of

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texts by a small section of (often metropolitan) society which usually does not seek to make the same declarations about individuals as the inscriptions do; they take much for granted (and pay little attention themselves to the distinction of provincial and metropolitan art); their scope is wide, but they are nevertheless highly selective. Both kinds of text are involved in a process of representing statues in society: reXecting and constructing their meanings. But their engagement with the images is of a diVerent order. Therefore, in comparing portrait statues in Rome and the provinces we are not precisely comparing like with like. This is not necessarily a disadvantage as long as the problem is recognized. Finally, the aim of this study is the analysis of the texts and images which comment on statues, locating them in their social contexts. I have not therefore dwelt on the monuments themselves, though as I have suggested the ‘language’ of iconography oVered opportunities for the expression of participation in a Greek or in a broader Roman Imperial culture. The diVusion of classical style might be similarly regarded as common visual currency, for highly elaborated and more or less naturalistic statues in this tradition are to be found in every province. Yet we also Wnd many stylistically distinct local manifestations of conventional Roman statuary, in Italy as well as the provinces, which to metropolitan eyes no doubt appeared odd and ‘provincial’ (as Hadrian’s statue at Trapezus appeared to Arrian77) but which must be presumed to have perfectly satisWed their patrons’ and immediate viewers’ conception of what statues were for. Arrian’s commentary on this kind of provincialism is unique as well as opaque and the full diversity of ancient responses to such portrait statues is beyond the scope of this study or the sources it employs. Having explored diVerent aspects of portrait sculpture in the city of Rome and the Empire we should return to the evidence for other sorts of statuary: Wrst, to conceptions of religious images and, second, to rather more aesthetic attitudes towards works of sculpture in the domestic sphere.

77

Arrian, Periplus Ponti Euxini 1.

six

Simulacra and Signa

‘Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem.’ So writes Pliny the Elder: ‘When one mortal helps another, that is god.’1 We are so used to following his Natural History as a museographical guide to the sculptures of Rome that we forget the author’s particular philosophical–ideological standpoint. Pliny is an outspoken agnostic, and insofar as he considers divinity at all, he does so in the language of Stoic cosmology. Pliny himself deceives us. He proclaims that his encyclopaedia is a dull collection of facts. He appends a list of contents so that hard-working Titus (to whom the work is dedicated) need not plough through the book but can look up the facts that he needs. His ‘catalogue’ of works by famous Greek artists in Rome and elsewhere reads like an ancient inventory and at certain points it is arranged in alphabetical order. It is easy to view this as objective or neutral description. Indeed it reads not unlike the temple inventories, or the Greek periegetic descriptions of Pausanias, who is interested in ‘art-historical’ facts and names in spite of the more obviously religious concerns that underlie some of his writings.2 But unlike those texts Pliny deXates the claims of polytheistic ‘superstition’ from the outset, repeatedly rejecting the trappings of traditional Roman religion, including anthropomorphic representation.3 Of course, he is not the only Roman writer to do this,4 but his work has long been exploited as the only extensive ‘art-historical’ text to survive from antiquity.5 We must therefore recognize that his presentation of the statues of Rome, so many of which were in some sense religious, cannot but be informed by the attitude he adopts towards nature and divinity. Art arises from Nature. It is discussed in the context of raw materials. Divine statues are minerals, not gods. In the ‘art-historical’ books, 34–6, the simulacra deorum are presented as the works of particular artists. Their religiosity is ignored, where other writers, including the Younger Pliny,6 might combine 1

2 Pliny, NH 2.18. See e.g. J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge 1995) esp. 144–50. Note esp. NH 2.14–27. 2.14 speciWcally addresses the appearance of god. 4 Cf. e.g. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura; Cicero, De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. 5 On the history of Pliny’s reception see J. Isager, Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art (London 1991) 9–17. 6 See Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 3.6. 3

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the aesthetic and cultic aspects of art. It hardly matters whether the object may be termed a simulacrum, signum, or statua: the details of manufacture are what is signiWcant.7 Again, this approach is quite diVerent from the descriptions of Pausanias (and presumably the stories of the Greek sanctuary-guides) which are equally concerned with the creators of Wne art-works and the materials that they use, but which take religious territory and cultic practice for granted as the context for display. Pausanias comes to great statues as a kind of pilgrim, describing them as he meets them, not lumping them together according to ‘art-historical’ classiWcation by artist or age.8 We have already brieXy seen how the Christians and their pagan predecessors told their own stories about the statues of the Roman world. They systematically reduced them to ridicule by imposing upon their symbolism—upon the makebelieve or practical understanding that statues were on some level divine—a systematic rationalism with which the idols were incompatible.9 To a Christian like Augustine who enumerated the countless petty divinities that controlled every aspect of life,10 often in contradiction of each other, or to the generations of critics who revealed the base, material nature of the cult images, it was impossible to reply that this was not the point. For it was not at all clear what the point was. The same is true to some extent of transubstantiation in the Christian tradition, but that is a doctrine much more directly subject to the theological and philosophical speculation of the Church. The character and function of cult images in ancient Rome could be presented in a variety of ways, but until someone tried to force those representations into a uniWed system, there was no hierarchy of beliefs or theological touchstone. Cicero and the philosophers might try to rationalize Roman religion or criticize it on rational grounds; but that did not invalidate the established images and practices of ‘traditional’ cult.11 Inconsistency and hypocrisy were simply not a signiWcant problem, until somebody forced the issue (as in Augustine’s painfully systematic demolition of paganism). 7

See especially NH 34.9; 34.49; also 36.88. For Pausanias as pilgrim see Elsner, (at n. 2) 125–50. For other literary approaches to cult statues in this period see C. Clerc, Les the´ories relatives au culte des images chez les auteurs grecs du IIme sie`cle apre`s J.-C. (Paris 1915). 9 See N. H. Baynes, ‘Idolatry and the Early Church’, in N. H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London 1955) 116–43 on pagan precedents for Christian scepticism; cf. D. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge 1998) 92–5 on such attitudes. On idolatrous belief see also E. Bevan, Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and in Christianity (London 1940) esp. 14. On the opponents of idolatry and other aspects of the response to divine images in literature see Clerc, Les the´ories. 10 Augustine, De Civitate Dei esp. 4.7–27; cf. Pliny, NH 2.14–22 for a pagan parallel. 11 Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome, passim on these questions. 8

186 simulacra and signa But for our purposes it is not quite suYcient just to call Roman religion a dynamic ‘system of systems’12 and probe no further. The proper way to understand cult images was not the only problem in antiquity. Even within the rituals and representations of ‘traditional’ Roman religion—even among those who were happy to use this system without complaint, what we would call the cult image was only ever partially deWned. In a study that speciWcally addresses ‘images of the gods’ in Greek culture (though throughout the classical era), Alice Donohue draws attention to the Xexibility of divine imagery and to the artiWciality of modern attempts to deWne cult images in terms of the focus of worship. She highlights the role of ancient Christian writers in constructing a mythology of the cult image, and illustrates the weakness of distinctions between the so-called cult images and other representations.13 While I have preserved the controversial term here, and it is largely supported by Latin terminology at least, the Roman concept of the cult statue demands a similar caution. Above all we need to recognize how such distinctions were continually constructed, diminished or reinforced in Roman culture, rather than having any absolute existence. Before examining the problem further, we should look at the contrary evidence: evidence for the demarcation of a discrete social position for cult statues. We have observed the fairly consistent lexical diVerentiation of three kinds of statue in Roman society: the statua or andrias (a portrait statue of a human being); the simulacrum or agalma (the statue of a god, often elevated as a privileged image and the recipient of active cult, standing in for the absent deity); and in Latin, the diVerentiated signum, which denoted images of gods in general (especially dedications), and by extension therefore notable ‘works of art’. We should be suspicious of the clarity with which vocabulary alone appears to distinguish such categories. Chapter 1 showed how these more speciWc words for the statue appear to have delineated functions or types of representation that were otherwise theoretically unclear, where clarity of connotations defused some of the tensions generated, for example, by public portraiture. Crucially, the distinction between divine and human representations, between cult statues and portraits, was reinforced, even though treatment of the emperor (powerfully) presented challenges to those categories. Language provided the most deep-rooted and pervasive means for articulating diVerences among statues that were superWcially very similar and, as we have seen, conceptually related. The simulacrum–signum distinction was less consistent in the Latin language, non-existent in Greek, and politically less important. But in practice—when the production of statues is viewed in the context of social relationships—this distinction and the others appear to arise from the needs and 12

Ibid. 141.

13

A. A. Donohue, ‘The Greek Images of the Gods’, Hephaistos, 15 (1997) 31–45.

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expectations of those who commissioned the works, as the epigraphic evidence reveals. Portrait statues and signa are much more frequently mentioned on inscriptions. We can get a rough picture of this from CIL volume six which covers the city of Rome. Here the word statua occurs nearly 100 times. It is generally clear from records of portrait dedications (either on the base or inscribed elsewhere) what relationship is encapsulated in the honour. As we have seen, the cost of the dedication is also sometimes recorded; so the portrait statue is generally explicitly placed in the context of hierarchical relationships and self-promotion. The publicly dedicated images of gods are presented in similar terms. As gifts to divinities they also reify hierarchical social relationships. Now, it is no reXection upon the religious commitment of Roman dedicators to suggest that public honours to gods were less useful in terms of self-promotion. The signum and its inscription could express the wealth and status of the dedicant, and even his orientation towards the imperial family if the recipient was a deity such as Hercules Augustus or Pietas Augusta. But in the end it is portrait statues that are most prominent in the civic spaces of Roman cities. Signa would have been much more prominent in sanctuaries; but even so, there are no more than Wfty references at most to signa as statues of gods in CIL 6 (not all the references are clear in their meaning). However, references to both signa and statuae overwhelm appearances of the word simulacrum in inscriptions from Rome.14 There are fourteen cases in all. Only about half of these refer to statues of gods as such.15 These examples commemorate the erection or restoration of cult images, about which it was not so easy to boast on the base of the statue itself. But most of the statues concerned here are part of more substantial acts of beneWcence, respectively: an unidentiWable work ‘along with’ statues; building works including a shrine or temple; the restoration of the Porticus Deorum Consentium; and (CIL 6.597) the restoration of a statue, along with shrine and altar, and the elaboration of a second altar. Our inscriptions are concerned with large, clearly deWned, public cult images in the city’s temples. It was certainly possible to acquire prestige and express one’s relationship with the gods by commissioning or restoring such monuments, but the opportunities were extremely limited compared with the opportunities for erecting dedicatory portraits or signa: the latter could be at least as prominent and expense was the only obstacle. The simulacra with their altars, which provided the focus for active cult, were eVectively at the disposal 14

G. Alfo¨ldy, Ro¨mische Statuen in Venetia et Histria: epigraphische Quellen (Heidelberg 1985) 36–7 notes the rigid usage of signum and statua on his north Italian statue-bases, but the absence of any further distinction with simulacrum: but simulacra did not have, or did not need to have, inscribed statue-bases, so they may be largely invisible in the epigraphic record. See also Price, Rituals, 179. 15 The ‘abnormal’ cases include the funerary simulacra of Claudia Semne (6.15593) and ‘simulacra’ at another tomb (6.38710).

188 simulacra and signa only of the very wealthy, whose self-promotion was grander in scale. The statue itself ended up with a lower proWle, at least in the epigraphic record.16 In fact, the diVerential outlined here was sharper than the index to CIL 6 reveals, for the functions of many signa and statuae would have been quite recognizable from the formulae on their inscribed bases and more often than not these words do not actually appear there. There was no need to specify what the base supported. Finally, an additional indication, however inaccurate, of the relative abundance and social utility of portrait statues comes from the lists of Zacharias Rhetor who (admittedly in the Christian era) only bothers to mention 144 gods in Rome (and these in precious materials) as opposed to 3,785 bronze portrait statues (plus twenty-two horses—equestrian statues—and two colossi).17 So the range of vocabulary applied to statues in literary sources does not merely reXect abstract, conceptual distinctions, but was grounded in social practice. This is an important point for any broadly sociological approach to statuary. We have seen repeatedly how the boundaries between diVerent kinds of statue could be blurred or transgressed. But the formation of those categories in the Wrst place was embedded not merely in the minds of the Roman populace, but in their activities and relationships. As far as large-scale, public, visible, and static monuments are concerned, there can be no doubt that their oYcial, legal–religious status further served to classify them. We have brieXy encountered the establishment of that status through dedication or consecration. Unfortunately we have no detailed evidence for the form of the rituals through which a public statue was identiWed, or the form of words which they employed.18 Yet we know that rituals were performed at the dedication of statues, that they were marked by public festivities and largesse.19 One clear example is the generosity of the second-century Augustalis Q. Cominius Abascantus, recorded on his statue-base at Misenum. When he dedicated in the forum statues of the Genius of the Municipium and the Protectress of the Fleet (‘quarum dedicatione’) he made donations to his colleagues and other local citizens. His wife, Nymphidia Monime, later made her own donation and laid 16

Also in Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 9.39 where the author describes his projected restoration and expansion of a temple of Ceres: the statue (apparently the main image though it is called a ‘signum’) receives only a passing mention. 17 On Zacharias and the regionary catalogues see R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Codice topograWco della citta` di Roma, vol. 1 (Rome 1940). The Notitia Regionum refers to ‘aedes [or aediculae] CCCCXXIIII’ (‘424 temples’), but does not bother with statues separately: ibid. 161, line 8. 18 See Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, ch. 15, 107–15 on the extant evidence. Animation ceremonies are well attested for the consecration of cult images in other civilizations—see e.g. Z. Bahrani, ‘Assault and Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East’, Art History, 18 (1995) 363–82. Susan Kane Wnds fascinating evidence for theurgic ritual at the sanctuary of Demeter at Cyrene, though this is not typical of other parts of the Empire: S. Kane, ‘Two Limestone Goddesses from Libya: Sculpture from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore/Persephone at Cyrene’, Apollo, 144, no. 413 (July 1996) 23–7. 19 Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 110–11.

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on a banquet for the Augustales at the dedication of Abascantus’s own posthumous statue.20 It is interesting that Arnobius is prepared to suspend the usual, mockincredulity of the Christian critique by having a pagan explain to him in Adversus Nationes 6.17: neque nos aera neque auri argentique materias neque alias quibus signa conWunt eas esse per se deos et religiosa decernimus numina, sed eos in his colimus eosque veneremur quos dedicatio infert sacra et fabrilibus eYcit inhabitare simulacris. Nor do we consider that bronzes or fabric of gold or silver or other materials in which signa are cast are gods or sacred divinities in themselves; rather, in them we venerate and cultivate those whom sacred dedicatio brings into them and allows to inhabit fabricated simulacra.

However, he then undermines the intellectual pagan position by summoning the image of unfortunate gods compelled by the rite of dedication to reside in base materials! So in language, custom, and ritual, cult statues and other statues were distinguished and deWned. The material that we have examined so far belongs to the very public sphere. We shall see much less clear-cut cases shortly. And yet, even in the public sphere—even when language, custom, and ritual declare what certain objects are, what they mean, and how they should be treated—there are breaches of category that demonstrate how arbitrary the distinction can be. We saw in Chapter 1 how the vocabulary of statuary is both highly consistent and Xexible: to the extent that signum can be used instead of simulacrum apparently for the sake of linguistic variety. The appearance of the various terms on the inscriptions examined above seems to match the function of the statue as we infer it. But not always. One of the references to a simulacrum comes from a marble, nude statue of Apollo Citharoedus which was found on the site of the temple of Jupiter Dolichenus on the Aventine in Rome.21 M. Aurelius Oenopio Onesimus and Septimius Antonius carried out the dedication ‘ex praecepto I.O.M.D.’ (‘on the instruction of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus’), as recorded on the statue’s tree-trunk support. But the main inscription on the base reads: ‘Antonii Mariani pater et Wlius simulacrum Apollinis statuerunt’ (‘the Antonii Mariani 20

Text (text ‘A’) and commentary in J. D’Arms, ‘Memory, Money, and Status at Misenum: Three New Inscriptions from the collegium of the Augustales’, JRS 90 (2000) 126–44, at 130–5. Perhaps we can also gain at least some impression of the importance of ceremonial language from the dedication of the Ara Numinis Augusti at Narbo (ad 11/12): CIL 12.4333; text and discussion also in BNP ii. 240–1. This text seems to suggest a Wxation with precise public recognition and declaration of the altar’s status, as the word ‘dedicare’ (literally ‘declare/proclaim’) should anyway imply. 21 CIL 6.408; for the dedicants cf. 6.406. Statue now in Potsdam: see M. Ho¨rig and E. Schwertheim, Corpus Cultus Iovis Dolicheni (CCID) (Leiden 1987) 244–6, no. 380 (later discoveries from excavation of the site are in the Capitoline Museum in Rome).

190 simulacra and signa father and son erected [this] simulacrum of Apollo’). The statue is evidently a dedicatory representation of the god, and not explicitly the object of cult.22 Yet it is labelled as ‘simulacrum’. Perhaps this is just a loose use of the term: again it should be stressed that neither the distinction between the ‘cult statue’ and the dedication nor the words denoting these diVerent kinds of image was clear-cut. But so consistent is the use of simulacrum for epigraphic references to the venerated cult image that it is hard not to see this as an evocation of the prestige that would be associated with the funding of the principal cult statue itself.23 Moreover it was always possible for any dedicated image of a god to be turned into a focus of cult. Indeed it is possible that the phrase ‘signum cum basi’ which is not uncommon on statuary dedications does not always mean ‘a statue with its base’ (the obvious translation) but rather ‘a statue with an altar’. Not only did altars sometimes closely resemble statue-bases in shape and mouldings, but in one bilingual funerary inscription from Go¨lhisar in Asia Minor the Greek word basis—essentially the same as the Latin—is actually used to translate the Latin ‘arula’—‘little altar’—in the phrase ‘statuam cum arula’.24 Once again, what all of this evidence implies is that certain assumptions existed about what sort of thing the cult statue was (and these expectations were perhaps shaped by experience of the conventional temple cult image with all its prestigious associations). But these were expectations rather than clear-cut and consistent religious beliefs or compelling normative values. The language of the cult image arose from social practice rather than conceptual distinctions. Even among the painstakingly precise taxonomies of Roman law, the religious status of a statue was not always clear, or at least, the terms were suYciently vague as to elude modern scholarship. Language often appears to challenge norms as well as reinforcing them. Much of the material in this book accords with that idea. The portrayals of divine statues can appeal to no Wrm criteria for determining types of divinity. Surviving legal aYrmations are the closest thing we have to a deWnite aYrmation, yet the Digests do not deal with simulacra and as we shall see, they recognize their own limitations in other areas of religious deWnition. It is important to remember that these texts are not commentaries on an external, artistic reality. The symbolism of the individual statues themselves is if anything more vague. Certainly, the absence of individualistic facial features on a portrait or the presence of iconographical features associated with deities may 22

It was not unusual to dedicate an image of one god in the sanctuary of another: see e.g. Alfo¨ldy, Ro¨mische Statuen, 42. 23 Cf. the extravagant dedication of six signa, a relief, a ‘Greek Xoor’, an enlarged podium, marble revetments and an opus signinum-Xoored hall for Silvanus by the freedman Abascantus in CIL 6.656. 24 R. A. Kearsley (ed.), Greeks and Romans in Imperial Asia: Mixed Language Inscriptions and Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Interaction Until the End of ad III (Bonn 2001) 68–9, no. 95.

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distinguish sculptural representations of humans and gods. But when those conventions are mixed to produce divinized humans or individualized gods, the identity of the statue is deliberately destabilized.25 Open imperial cult in particular altered the viewer’s expectations. Of course, in the majority of cases there may, in practice, have been little possibility of genuine confusion about the identity of the statue. Likewise there was no clear aesthetic diVerentiation of cult statues and other images of gods. It is this fact that leads Martin to restrict his study of Roman ‘temple cult images’ to those statues whose context or ancient use is securely attested.26 This is perhaps an overly restrictive approach, though it is necessary for the creation of the Wrm corpus which he intends. Of course, not all cult statues looked like the Olympian Zeus. They were not all seated, with their backs engaged to the rear wall of the shrine. They were not all gilded or over-life-size, nor did they all have impressive inlaid eyes or the other polychrome trappings of divinity. But we need only look at Martin’s examples, or the images on coins, or literary accounts, to realize that such features were recurring characteristics.27 Any statue with those features might have the look of a cult image. This kind of connotation is impossible to gauge, but it gets lost as a variable when we say, simply: there was no consistent means of distinguishing cult statues and other divine images and therefore they all looked the same. Naturally, once we have a physical context, there may be further concrete, formal indications of the status and function of the statue, namely, the shrine itself and above all the altar which made active cultivation of the image possible. The representation of such features, as we shall see, could serve to specify the sort of image being depicted. And again, the use of style—notably archaism—could play a role even in the statue’s own self-classiWcation. But ultimately even the most regulated customs and the most conventional of symbolism did not amount to a consistent culture of religious images. The status and meaning of a particular statue were always provisional. We should not see this as ambiguity, in the sense that there was a correct meaning that had become obsured. Nor is it intentional ambivalence or ‘polysemy’ (except, arguably, in the case of the emperor’s statue). Roman society allowed for a series of practices involving statues of gods which did not have to be explained in order to make sense to those involved. This is perhaps clearest when we move out of the well-ordered sphere of established public cult, and in some cases there appears to be an explicit debate about how images should be treated. 25

See e.g. Zanker, Augustus, 230–8. H. G. Martin, Ro¨mische Tempelkultbilder: eine archa¨ologische Untersuchung zur spa¨ten Republik (Rome 1992) 9. He too puts the weight on the act of consecration, but he does not seem to accept a linguistic distinction between simulacra and signa. 27 Note Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 12 on the Olympian Zeus. 26

192 simulacra and signa Lucian’s satirical dialogue, Philopseudes—‘The Lover of Lies’—may not seem to be a reliable source of hard evidence, but he does, incidentally, make use of an image that exempliWes the versatility of statues. The narrator’s host possesses a variety of sculptural adornments in his home, which include the Diadumenos of Polyclitus and the Tyrannicides by Critius and Nesiotes. Among these is a realistic statue of the Athenian general Pellichus.28 This is not a cult statue, but on account of its healing powers and its ability to walk about at night and take baths, it is aVorded special respect. It is adorned with Wllets and wreaths, and gold and silver leaf, and coins are left by its feet or stuck to its legs with wax. These are the votive oVerings—the euchoi—of those who have been healed by the statue, which is nevertheless still called an andrias. The oVerings are not obviously the joke in this story: this sort of loose religious veneration of non-cultic statues was apparently a familiar phenomenon. The emperor’s image was garlanded and honoured as a numinous icon and the practice is not without precedent in the Republican period.29 Epicurus’ image received the sort of cult that other philosopher-portraits would never have attracted. Now, no one except the emperor himself could have complained about the veneration of his statue. But the worship of Epicurus could arouse scorn30 and Lucian’s narrator makes it clear that there is something strange about venerating a portrait. He will remain sceptical and shall not fear the andrias, he says, as long as it is the work of Demetrius of Alopece—a maker of men, not gods. He goes on to condemn similar worship of Hippocrates, who ought to receive at most the normal honours to the dead. ‘Religious’ responses to ‘secular’ images and the criticism they provoke are related to the topic of ‘magical’ statues. Besides the various attitudes to cult statues which ranged from belief in a present god to the treatment of images as ‘mere symbols’, there were other ways in which a statue could become magically animated, with or without divine intervention.31 The segregation of these cases

28

Lucian, Philopseudes 18–20. See esp. Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 108–9; also K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge 1978) 221–31. Cf. Cicero’s relative Marius Gratidianus who received statues ‘in every neighbourhood’ which were venerated with incense and candles as a result of his cunningly revealing to the multitude plans for resolving an economy crisis: Cicero, De OYciis 3.80. 30 Pliny, NH 35.5. 31 Baynes, ‘Idolatry and The Early Church’, 132. On Greek evidence see C. A. Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (New York and Oxford 1992) passim; see also e.g. Lucian, De Dea Syria; Dio 54.7.2–3, 58.7.1–3; Tibullus 2.5.77 (weeping statues). This introduces the abundant evidence for portents involving statues, too extensive to address here, but see e.g. J. Mossman, ‘Plutarch’s Use of Statues’, in M. Flower and M. Toher (eds.), Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell (London 1991) 98–119 and K. F. Smith (ed.) The Elegies of Albus Tibullus (Darmstadt 1978) on the Tibullus above. (In rationalist terms there is one obvious reason for omens involving statues: they worked as prominent lightning conductors). 29

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within the domain of ‘magic’ rather than religion owes something to their diVerent treatment in ancient sources. Indeed some cases were condemned as fraud.32 Some cases probably were fraud. A head survives in Copenhagen (originally a portrait of Epicurus in fact) with a channel cut from its back to the mouth—apparently so that the sculpture could be made to speak.33 Of course, there is no reason why such mechanically animated statues could not have served their cultic function adequately. Why should a ‘speaking’ statue be any more of a fraud than an inanimate eYgy? Until, that is, someone starts asking unanswerable questions about the precise nature of the animation and of the participants’ beliefs. There is a danger therefore—and in this respect Martin is justiWably cautious— in trying to determine positively what is or is not appropriate to cult, what a simulacrum or a signum ought to look like. Furthermore, the problems of inconsistency become more acute when we consider a diVerent kind of signum: the sculpture displayed (in modern terms) as a ‘work of art’. When are signa religious, and when are they valued for their aesthetic appeal? Are works of art desirable for their own sake? This is not just a matter of ancient controversy or diVering opinions: we Wnd diVerent answers even from the pen of the same author. We shall return to this issue in the next chapter, as well as the whole subject of statuary as art, collecting, copying, and reproduction. But for now I want to continue the discussion of religious statuary by examining its representation or evocation in examples of material from the ‘minor arts’ and wall-painting. The subject of the statues themselves deserves more scholarly attention. Roman cult statues have suVered surprising neglect. Two monographs on the subject stand out from various, narrower studies. Martin’s book is short and limited in scope (the author having abandoned his originally more ambitious plan34). Although he is concerned with the active function of statues in ancient society (in art as a component rather than a mirror of society), he does not have space to pursue attitudes to cult statues or the ways in which these images were used.35 The other work, Vermeule’s The Cult Images of Imperial Rome is actually primarily a study of gods depicted on coins; they are often shown in association with temples; their iconography may suggest statuary models. Indeed, coins may be our best source of evidence for the cult statues of the city, few of which survive. 32 Accusations of fraud particularly by Christians: Theodoret, Historia Ecclesiastica 5.22 (talking statues); Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium 4.41 (talking skulls); cf. similar criticism in Lucian, Alexander 26. Cf. also Plutarch, Coriolanus 38, charitably rationalizing and explaining away religious phenomena such as sweating or speaking statues. 33 F. Poulsen, ‘Talking, Weeping and Bleeding Sculptures: A Chapter of the History of Religious Fraud’, AArch 16 (1945) 178–95. 34 35 Martin, Ro¨mische Tempelkultbilder, 10. Ibid., esp. 7–8.

194 simulacra and signa But it is not Vermeule’s aim to put these works into their social or cultural context.36 I must admit that in spite of the need for further investigation in this Weld, that sort of explanation and contextualization is not my main aim either. For that reason I return to the representation of statues. However, an analysis of imagery in the minor arts aVords interesting insights into the whole culture of religious statuary, as well as helping to elucidate these media themselves and the visual representation of statues in general. The main purpose of what follows is to illustrate some of the ways in which the idea of cult statuary could be manipulated or reproduced in quite diVerent representational contexts. In doing so it will elaborate upon some of the arguments advanced above and in previous chapters. We shall examine three very diVerent examples. First, I shall deal with the Wgurative images on Roman lamps.37 This is a relatively extended discussion; lamps provide an especially relevant case-study for three reasons. They further elucidate some of the complexities of Roman religion and cultic representations that we have already touched on. These tiny reliefs may seem to be quite diVerent from large-scale statues, but that assumption is, to some degree, deceptive. In re-evaluating them we must question our approach to all kinds of religious imagery. Lamps also provide an enormous body of well studied material through which the image of the cult statue circulated in Roman society; and in this case—as with the funerary monuments discussed in Chapter 3—the image of the statue—statuesque iconography—seems to have had a role in qualifying the meaning of these symbols. Finally, in the past lamp decorations have been pressed into service as documentary representations of lost statues and they provide a perfect illustration of the problems arising from that method. The second example is coinage. Cult statues are often depicted on coins, sometimes within their temples. These appear to be very simple depictions, but as we saw in Chapter 1, the visual representation of statues is never straightforward and the representational conventions employed on coins reveal something about the underlying assumptions with which the engravers approached their subject. Similar observations may be made of intaglios and less obvious objects like votive plaques. I then wish to examine the place of statuary imagery within the decorative schemes of late Republican and early Imperial wall-painting. Despite the long36

C. C. Vermeule, The Cult Images of Imperial Rome (Rome 1987). For overview of Roman cult images see also K. Stemmer (ed.), Standorte: Kontext und Funktion antiker Skulptur (Berlin 1995) 250–65 (contributions by C. Witschel, who is cautious about the distinction between sacred and profane images of god: 250). Cf. also Steiner, Images, ch. 2, 79–134 on Greek cult images, especially in literature. 37 A fuller discussion of cult images on lamps appears in P. C. N. Stewart, ‘Cult Images on Roman Lamps’, Hephaistos, 18 (2000) 7–28.

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acknowledged and profound diVerences among the four conventional manners of wall-painting in this period, the statue, speciWcally the divine image, is a common recurring motif—one of the many which contribute to the subdued and allusive religiosity of Roman frescoes.

gods on lamps Roman lamps were certainly mundane objects. The quantity and distribution of surviving clay lamps testiWes to their primary, non-symbolic function of providing light. Literary references to lamps, such as they are, are predominantly concerned with this practical function. However, the moulded relief disks of lamps often bore Wgured decoration from the period of the late Republic on and the image of a Graeco-Roman deity was one of the most frequent subjects. Decoration on lamps has tended to matter mainly for the study of lamp typology and production, for lamps themselves are valuable dating tools in archaeology. Some archaeologists have commented on the art-historical importance of the Wgured decorations: as art, as reXections of larger art-works copied onto lamps, or as evidence for the ideology and imagery of ancient cultures.38 But on the whole, the imagery on lamps has been labelled away as ‘mere decoration’. Bailey is the most careful and conscious in his rejection of the images’ signiWcance, arguing that there is no consistent correspondence between the iconographical themes of lamps and their functional context.39 This is sound reasoning which successfully undermines the unconsidered assumption that iconography indicates function. But it is also Xawed in certain important respects, and these Xaws have implications for the deWnition of the cult statue. We know that lamps were prominent in Roman cult as dedications or oVerings. Deposits of lamps are found by temples and in domestic lararia, texts refer to their symbolic use in cult, and sometimes the lamps themselves are inscribed with dedicatory phrases.40 But those decorated lamps recovered from 38 e.g. O. Broneer, Corinth, 4/2, Terracotta Lamps (Cambridge, Mass. 1930) 3, 24–5; D. M. Bailey, Greek and Roman Pottery Lamps (London 1963) 7; A. Karivieri, The Athenian Lamp Industry in Late Antiquity (Helsinki 1996) e.g. 20. 39 Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 6; also id., Greek and Roman Pottery Lamps, 12. 40 Sanctuary deposits well documented e.g. at Cosa: C. R. Fitch and N. W. Goldman, Cosa: The Lamps (Ann Arbor 1994), note esp. 9; lararia: G. K. Boyce, Corpus of the Lararia of Pompeii, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 14 (Rome 1937), 102 (see under Lamps for examples); J. T. Bakker, Living and Working with the Gods: Studies of Evidence for Private Religion and its Material Environment in the City of Ostia (100–500 ad) (Amsterdam 1994) 10 and 14; dedication: e.g. Bailey, Greek and Roman Pottery Lamps, 12 and 25; Bailey, BM Lamps iii. 339–40, no. Q2722; Karivieri, The Athenian Lamp Industry, 62–3. On general discussion with an impressive range of literary evidence: M. P. Nilsson, ‘Lampen und Kerzen im Kult der Antike’, in M. P. Nilsson, Opuscula Selecta, vol. 3 (Lund 1960) 189–214; note esp. Juvenal 12.92. For introduction to functions of lamps see Bailey, Greek and Roman Pottery Lamps.

196

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temple deposits are not exclusively, or evenly largely, ‘religious’ in their iconography,41 and arguably ‘religious’ themes are to be found on lamps discovered elsewhere. So at Wrst sight the repertoire of images on lamps has only the loosest of connections with the functions to which they were put. Yet there are two broad, theoretical problems with this conclusion. First, temples are not the only locations in which lamps could be considered to have a religious function. Many of our lamps are probably from tombs, which were regarded as religious property and, as we have seen, shrines to the departed. Many more must be from lararia or small public shrines. As objects of smallscale piety lamps may have been ‘religious’ objects in contexts that are not conspicuously cultic, at least not in the archaeological record. Even if we knew the precise ancient contexts of lamps (and we rarely can42) it is hard to imagine a context in which a particular lamp can be said to be deWnitely not religious. It is conceivable that the lamp created or embodied its own cultic context, just as a portable altar might.43 This raises the possibility that iconography is more important than physical context in determining what is a ‘religious’ object. The second problem with Bailey’s critique is a certain positivism that is typical of studies of antiquity. It begins with the premise that the images on lamps must either (a) be relevant to the objects’ (religious) function, or (b) have no direct connection. Having established that not all lamps in religious places had religious iconography, and that religious iconography is to be found in apparently secular places, we reject any suggestion of a direct link. But this denies any possibility of inconsistency. The prominence of non-religious imagery among dedications, for example, does not mean that images of gods on votive lamps, when they appeared, were mere decoration intended ‘to attract the purchaser’.44 It only implies that votive lamps did not have to have cultic iconography. Likewise, even if we could demonstrate that a lamp bearing the image of a god had deWnitely not 41 By the Capitolium in Cosa, for instance we Wnd a galloping horse, a comic mask, an Eros, Sol, chickens, and a ‘plastic’ lamp in the form of a barbarian, among many plain examples: Fitch and Goldman, Cosa, 54–5, nos. 215; 121–2, no. 585; 125, no. 607; 125, no. 608; 147, no. 728; 186, no. 986 (this represents a sequence from the 3rd cent. bc to the 3rd cent. ad. There is similar diversity among the Wnds at the shrine of Liber Pater (early 4th cent. ad). It is, of course, diYcult to be sure that these are votive remains, when the site is disturbed and the published record is not primarily intended to record Wndspots. I use Cosa as an example because of the length of the lamp sequence and the quality of publication. 42 The eventual publication of Pompeian Wnds may change this: several house-inventories are forthcoming. I am grateful to Dr Joanne Berry for material from her inventory of Insula I.9 in Pompeii, which at least suggests that lamps bearing images of gods were common. Also useful is material from the lamp workshop in Pompeii I.xx.2–3: G. Cerulli Irelli, ‘Una oYcina di lucerne Wttili a Pompei’, in M. Annechino et al., L’instumentum domesticum di Ercolano e Pompei (Rome 1977) 53–72. 43 Apuleius was accused of witchcraft using a portable altar and a lamp: Apologia 42.3. On the interpretation of the passage and on use of the lamp in divination (following papyrological evidence) see H. E. Butler and A. S. Owen (eds.), Apulei Apologia sive Pro Se De Magia Liber (Oxford 1914) 101. 44 Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 6.

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been considered as anything other than a light, that would only imply that ‘religious’ lamps could be used for mundane purposes. In this case, as in many others, it is wrong to seek one single answer, one correct meaning, to the complete exclusion of another, though this does lead to more satisfying conclusions. A rather diVerent analogy might be the late second- or early third-century ‘Good Shepherd’ lamps on which the traditional pastoral decoration was capable of being activated as a religiously pregnant Christian image.45 Having noted these objections, however, can we go further and suggest that cultic iconography did in fact sometimes have something to do with the function of the lamp? Lamps themselves were oVerings; but so was the act of burning oil in the lamp.46 Scented oils could be burned in honour of the deity, just as incense was burned on altars.47 Lamps used in this way were not just gifts but also, like real altars, the means by which one might give service to the deity. That potential function is evoked by the imagery of altars and sacriWce that frequently appears on lamps in a variety of forms: actual depictions of altars,48 bulls’ heads,49 decorative swags,50 and, most suggestively, the application of normal lamps to small, three-dimensional models of altars, which appear from the shape of the altar-top to have served as incense burners.51 In these cases there is no doubt about the association of incense-burning, lamps and altars, and the Xame of the oil lamp presumably carries connotations of the Xaming altar.52 It should be stressed once more that this association of ideas does not imply that all lamps with altar motifs were supposed to be cult implements, though that original intention may have motivated the lamp-maker—or the creator of 45

See P. C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York and Oxford 1994) 116–31. 46 e.g. Seneca, Epistulae 95.47; Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones 6.2; CIL 6.676 and 30811 (photograph as frontispiece of Bailey, BM Lamps iv); 6.31165; 9.1456; cf. Cicero, De OYciis 3.80 (incense and candles). Other references in Nilsson, ‘Lampen und Kerzen’. 47 See e.g. Codex Theodosianus 16.10.12; CIL 6.30102. Cf. CIL 6.10248 (funerary commemoration). For detail on funerary lights see G. McN. Rushforth, ‘Funeral Lights in Roman Sepulchral Monuments’, JRS 5 (1915), 149–64. 48 e.g. Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 149, Q834; 170, Q905; 173, Q917; 238–39, Q1100 (Fortuna; the goddess is also commonly depicted without the altar); 239–40, Q 1102 (multiple nozzles); 297–8, Q1207 (with statuettes of lares—it is hard to believe that such lamps were not intended primarily for lararia, in which similar lares are often painted, invariably next to an altar; at any rate this is clearly the iconographical source. See Boyce, Corpus; 298, Q1208.) I rely primarily on Bailey’s catalogue, as the largest and most respected museum publication of Italian lamps. 49 e.g. J. Perlzweig, The Athenian Agora, vol. 7, Lamps of the Roman Period, First to Seventh Century After Christ (Princeton, 1961) 132–3, nos. 1036–60; cf. ‘plastic’ lamps in form of bulls’ heads: e.g. O. Waldhauer, Kaiserliche Ermitage: die antiken Tonlampen (St. Petersburg 1914) 64–5, nos. 508–12; Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 258–59, Q1140–2. 50 e.g. Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 413, Q602bis EA. 51 Waldhauer, Kaiserliche Ermitage 64, no. 506; Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 252–3, Q1125 (Italian, 1st cent. ad): see 252–3 with references for similar lamps; iii. 205, Q1853 (African, 2nd cent. ad). 52 Lamps could be lit and placed on a proper altar before the god: Pausanias 7.22.2.

198 simulacra and signa the original archetype or poinc¸on from which the iconographical types were derived.53 For the moment all we need conclude is that the lighting of a lamp— especially a lamp with the appropriate iconography—might at any time have been reminiscent of the burning of substances on the altar, and the act may sometimes have been intended to simulate that form of oVering on a smaller scale. This brings us back to the representation of cult images in particular, for it was not merely as a focus for pious actions that the altar linked worshipper to deity. The altar, conventionally, was placed in front of the cult image of the god and although in Chapter 8 we shall touch on a variety of practices by which people could ‘interact’ with a divine statue, it was chieXy through sacriWces on the altar that this occurred. The god presided over the activity at the altar, looking out through the specially opened doors of the temple building, if there was one.54 This axis linking the temple and cult statue with the altar is presented as a religious norm by Vitruvius.55 It is therefore possible to imagine the Xame of the lamp as a substitute for a real altar, and the statuesque images of gods that appear on lamps take the place of full-scale cult images. This analogy is most obvious in the case of those few surviving bronze lamps to which an actual statuette of the deity has been added. Perhaps the two most impressive examples are in the British Museum, both dated to the third or fourth century ad. Both of them are two-nozzled brass lamps. The Wrst bears a Wgure of Jupiter (Fig. 31).56 Behind each nozzle is a suspension loop, and chains are attached to each of these and to the midriV of the Wgure, mounted on the rear of the lamp. All three chains meet each other in a ring. It is not known whether these attachments are ancient and whether they belong to the lamp. The Wgure to the rear is a crude standing representation of the god, naked but for a cloak wrapped around his waist and draped over his left shoulder. He holds a sceptre in his left hand and a schematic thunderbolt in his right. This Wgurine stands on a platform, within an aedicula, very much like those relief shrines we have already seen on grave stelae. It consists of Corinthian columns surmounted by an arch. In front of the Wgure on the body of the lamp lies a curled-up, sleeping dog. 53

Some lamps were clearly meant for special purposes or occasions, notably the New Year lamps inscribed ‘annum novum faustum felicem’ (‘happy and fortunate new year’). I am aware of no obvious, signiWcant tendencies in the repertoires of particular lamp workshops. 54 Note P. Zanker, ‘In Search of the Roman Viewer’, in D. Buitron-Oliver (ed.), The Interpretation of Architectural Sculpture in Greece and Rome (Washington 1997) 179–91, esp. 183 on involvement with the god in such ceremonies and selective representations on coins and other media. 55 Vitruvius 4.5.1 and 4.9. See also J. E. Stambaugh, ‘The Functions of Roman Temples’, ANRW 2.16.1, 554–608, at 571–2; Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 357 n. 10. 56 Bailey, BM Lamps iv. 63, no. Q3778.

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Fig. 31. The rough but rather statuesque Wgure of the god, its setting within the aedicula, and its frontality as it looks out from the ‘shrine’ over the altar-Xames of the lamp, all indicate that this Wgurine is a representation or simulation of a cult statue. (Bronze hanging lamp surmounted by Wgure of Jupiter; c. third/fourth century ad. British Museum, London, Q3778. W: 16.4 cm.; H of Wgure: 16.1 cm.)

The rough but rather statuesque Wgure of the god (typical iconography and statuary pose with slight contrapposto), its setting within the aedicula, and its frontality as it looks out from the ‘shrine’ over the altar-Xames of the lamp, all indicate that this is a representation or simulation of a cult statue, the recipient of worship in the form of the burning wicks. Lamp number Q3769 in the British Museum is a very similar piece (Fig. 32).57 The goddess Cybele (detached since antiquity) is dressed in a long tunic and cloak; she holds a sceptre in her left hand and a patera in her right. Her aedicula has roughly doric colums, and the arch dips in the middle to meet the Wgure’s neck. Two lions stand before her on each side. Other examples of this sort of three-dimensional bronze lamp survive elsewhere and from diVerent parts of the Empire.58 57

Ibid. 61–2, no. Q3769. A Minerva in Berlin (possibly a Renaissance forgery), an unidentiWed Wgure and a Tyche on two lamps from Saida, a Tyche in Connecticut together with busts of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Mercury, a similar lamp with a dog but with the Wgure missing in Florence, Hercules and Telephos in the Dutruit Collection (allegedly from Sardinia). See Bailey BM Lamps iv. 62 and 63 (with bibliography); on the Saida Tyche see also A. De Ridder, Les Bronzes antiques du Louvre, ii: Les Instruments (Paris 1915); and for the 58

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Fig. 32. Bronze hanging lamp surmounted by Wgure of Cybele; c. third/fourth century ad. British Museum, London. Q3769. W: 11.7 cm.; H of Wgure: 13.7 cm.

What is particularly interesting is that the much more common relief images of gods on ceramic lamps are very similar in certain respects. From Egypt we have elaborate lamps which imitate temple fac¸ades, with or without a visible cult image in the cella. Their burning wicks hold the position of altars before the temple and the god (Fig. 33).59 We also Wnd more three-dimensional versions: lamps which hung as little model temples, illuminated by lamp-nozzles beneath or in front of the cult statue.60 Such objects strongly suggest the relationship between the god (represented by a statue or cult image) and the worshipper (represented by the Xame-cum-altar). But these associations are also conjured up by the representation of deities on the discus of more ordinary clay lamps. Connecticut example see LIMC vol. 8/1, 445, no. 278; vol. 8/2, 294. The technology, such as it was, was apparently applied to other vessels, as illustrated by the Wgure of an actor(?) from Marseilles, now in Avignon: H. Oggiano-Bitar, Bronzes Wgure´s antiques des Bouches-du-Rhoˆne (Paris 1984) 112–13, no. 232. 59

e.g. Bailey, BM Lamps iii. 241, Q1974; 241, Q1975; 249, Q2042. e.g. M. Fjeldhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Catalogue: Graeco-Roman Terracottas from Egypt (Copenhagen 1995) 89–94, nos. 69–75; 96, nos. 77–9. These, however, are exceptional cases: the model temples were used in the festival of Neith at Sais, and lamps in general have a much more prominent role in Egyptian cult than elsewhere. See ibid. 89 on Neith, and D. J. Thompson, Memphis Under the Ptolemies (Princeton 1988) esp. 29 and 78. 60

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Fig. 33. Many Egyptian lamps imitate temple fac¸ades, with or without a cult image inside. (Terracotta lamp from Roman Egypt. Image of a temple-fac¸ade; c. Wrst century ad. British Museum, London, Q1975. W: 18.5 cm.)

Loosely corresponding to the more popular deities of Roman religion, images of gods on lamps take many forms including broadly mythological subjects, isolated busts, and divine attributes like the caduceus of Mercury (or the chi-rho symbol of Christ).61 However, I am primarily concerned with images of gods that look like cult statues. But what do cult images look like? I have already suggested some of the diYculties in establishing this; but again, there is a certain iconographical vocabulary that is frequently employed to represent them. We shall return shortly to the repertoire of motifs employed, but for the moment it is enough to note that many representations of gods on lamps are isolated Wgures, facing out towards the viewer (and, obliquely, towards the altar-nozzle), and conforming either to recognizable statuary types, to the usual poses of cult statues, or to the groups of deities which we know to have been cultivated in imperial temples. These are the sorts of Wgures familiar from schematic representations of deities in their temples on coins, gems, votive plaques, and so on. A typical example might be the representations of the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva which occur on Italian lamps from the Wrst to second century ad (Fig. 34).62 Numismatic representations of the group diVer, and there is doubt about their relationship to the cult statues themselves. In any case 61 62

For which see R. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven 1981) 5–7. Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 7–8 (with parallels and variants); also 309, Q1238 and Q1239.

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Fig. 34. Divine triads on lamps resemble depictions of cult statues in other media such as coinage. The frontality of the Wgures is particularly suggestive of statuary. (Terracotta lamp with image of the Capitoline Triad. From Italy; c. ad 50–125. British Museum, London, Q1238. W: 12.0 cm.)

the Triad will have received diVerent treatment, especially in regard to the deities’ attributes, in other temples outside Rome. The important thing is that the triads on lamps look like depictions of concrete cult images on coins and in other media: the three Wgures are enthroned and face the viewer as statues would within the Roman temple. Again, it is perhaps the frontality of the images that distinguishes them most clearly from other kinds of Wgured decoration. This sort of frontal, statuesque cluster of gods is not uncommon. For instance, we frequently Wnd similar representations of the Egyptian deities Isis, Harpocrates, Anubis, and Serapis (Fig. 35).63 The Wgures of Mercury, Fortuna, and Hercules are represented by a lamp of Italian origin in the British Museum.64 All of these groups have distinct groundlines, which may help to imply the presence of a statue-base. Roman lamps also commonly display isolated Wgures in the typical poses of classical deities. They stride like the Artemision god or stand to confront us. Poseidon is the subject of one such representation, another mid-Wrst-century Italian lamp in the British Museum; he poses in pronounced contrapposto upon 63

e.g. Q862 in the British Museum (Italian, mid-1st cent., with the gods ‘labelled’ on the base of the lamp): Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 161; generally, 31–32. For variations in the frequency of these individual gods within their groups, in Egypt and elsewhere, see V. Tran Tam Tinh, Corpus des lampes a` sujets isiaques du Muse´e Gre´co-romain d’Alexandrie (Que´bec 1993). 64 Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 174, Q921.

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Fig. 35. Terracotta lamp with image of Isis, Harpocrates, and Anubis. From Italy. Mid-Wrst century ad. British Museum, London, Q862. W: 8.1 cm.

a short groundline, a trident in his right hand and a dolphin nestling in his left.65 We Wnd similarly statuesque Wgures on Italian lamps depicting, for example, Attis and Cybele,66 Aesculapius and Hygia,67 and Mercury.68 Figures of this sort in various media are often assumed by cataloguers to be derived from a speciWc statue. Indeed, perhaps the most familiar example is the Athena ‘Promachos’ represented in three-quarter pose on lamps found throughout the Empire in the Wrst six centuries ad. The bust of Athena with Corinthian helmet has also been seen as a common ‘reXection’ of Phidias’s statue, though Lundgreen has recently demonstrated the weakness of the foundation on which this identiWcation rests.69 In sum, all of these examples, and the greater body of material that they represent, are reminiscent of the depiction of cult statues behind their altars which is so common in other media and especially on Roman coins. The altar is missing but implied by the Xame that takes its place. One lamp in London does 65

66 Ibid. 171, Q910. Ibid. 309–10, Q1240 (late 1st cent.). Ibid. 348, Q1339 (c. ad 175–225). 68 Ibid. 369, Q1397 (Wrst half of 3rd cent.). Cf. the genius on Bailey, BM Lamps iii. 187, Q1695 (Africa, second century). 69 B. Lundgreen, ‘A Methodological Enquiry: The Great Bronze Athena by Pheidias’, JHS 117 (1997), 190–7, at 194–5, with detailed references. Example in British Museum of the full Wgure: Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 347–8, Q1338 (c. ad 175–225). 67

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include the altar: it is depicted between a row of heads on the discus (busts of Demeter, Serapis, and Isis) and the nozzle; that is, presumably, behind the real Xame as one looks down on the lamp from the front (Fig. 36).70 This reinforces the impression that divinities in general can be viewed on the discus of a lamp as objects of cult. So far this case-study has produced three limited conclusions. First, it is wrong to reject any connection between function and iconography either on the grounds that the association is irregular and inconsistent, or on the assumption that function can be determined by the lamp’s broad provenance. Second, there was a common assimilation of altars and lamps, resulting from the use of lamps in cult, as dedications or oVerings and as oil- or incense-burners. Third, that the images of gods on lamps drew upon the imagery of cult statues, and that the juxtaposition of these deities to the lamp-Xame mimicked the relationship of cult statue and altar in Roman religion. There is no way of proving a Wnal hypothesis: that these lamps, as religious objects which literally embodied the burning of an oVering in front of the divine image, could be regarded in Fig. 36. Terracotta lamp with image of Demeter, Serapis, and Isis in bust-form behind an altar. From Egypt. Second century ad. British Museum, London, Q2045bis. W: 7.7 cm.

70 Bailey, BM Lamps, iv. 131, Q2045bis (Egypt, 2nd cent.). Cf. a relief from the Jupiter Dolichenus sanctuary on the Aventine, where busts of Jupiter and Juno above an altar, and of the Dioscuri, closely resemble those on lamps (illustrated e.g. in E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome (New York 1981) i. 524, Wg. 646).

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antiquity as a kind of portable ‘shrine’. To make that assertion we should need more explicit evidence—almost certainly written evidence—for ancient attitudes to lamps as cult-objects. References to lamps of any kind are rare, and there is little non-archaeological evidence for Roman responses to ceramics in the religious sphere or any other. What we can say with more conWdence is that many lamps on which gods appear seem in some sense to simulate the relationship between a full-scale statue, its altar, and the participant in cult. It is impossible to establish on what level this simulation worked. Was the god on a lamp a ‘real’ cult image, or a depiction of a cult image? Did it take the place of the deity for the purposes of, say, domestic cult, or was it merely an allusion to the consecrated statues of public religion? Both of these possibilities may be correct. The form of the lamps, their iconography and common association with religion allowed for, or even suggested, their use as self-contained instruments of cult, complete with an image of the god and a miniature altar. On the other hand, unless we assume that lamps displaying these particular iconographical features were never used purely for the mundane function of providing light, we should have to assume that the religious iconography was interpreted on diVerent levels according to circumstances. Nor should we assume that lamp-makers were consciously following a scheme when creating these images. In trying to interpret these lamps we should avoid distinguishing positivistically between genuine religious intention and secular lack of attention to cultic iconography. Roman cult involved a much more subtle and inconsistent blend of responses. In short, the symbolism of these particular lamps had at least the potential to be taken at face value: we can say no more. Yet in the context of the study of statuary representations there are further possible observations, Wrst, concerning the nature of Roman religion and the ancient deWnition of cult images and, second, about the visual vocabulary of the statuesque which was used to reduce the ambiguity of the iconography examined above. It may seem inherently unlikely that tiny, mass-produced images of gods in terracotta relief could ever be viewed as objects of serious cult. Statues are much more convincing substitutes for absent divinities. Yet we have already seen how tricky the deWnition of a proper cult statue can be. We have also seen how Roman writers themselves recognize and play with the challenge that abnormal cases posed for the deWnition of the cult statue. The obscenity of Priapus; the primitive form of the ancient or rustic god; the aniconic object that was nevertheless treated as a ‘cult image’; and indeed, miniature Wgures, like Vindex’s statuette of Hercules Epitrapezios mentioned in poems by Statius and Martial: a Wgurine whose size belies its religious and art-historical status as

206 simulacra and signa a work of Lysippus.71 We must also remember that public cult images, while not exactly mass-produced, were certainly copied and created out of copies.72 While the distinction between public and private cult should not be too rigidly maintained, the rituals, images, and declarations of public cult, by their very nature, imply a degree of consensus: the processes have to make reasonable sense to a relatively large body of people.73 Private cult is perhaps more Xexible, more adaptable as a result.74 Certainly, the Digests give the impression that public religion was more highly regulated (in this case apparently because of the practical need to deal with disputes). Roman law covers dedications and deWnes in some detail what should and should not be considered sacred. For example, Marcian (third century ad) declares:75 Sacrae autem res sunt hae, quae publice consecratae sunt, non private: si quis ergo privatim sibi constituerit sacrum, sacrum non est, sed profanum. Those things are sacred that have been consecrated publicly/by the people, not privately. So if anyone has privately determined that a thing is sacred, it is not sacred, but profane.

Now evidently this apparently contradictory statement settles the pragmatic question of what should legally be considered sacred. But the contradiction has a point. Outside the legal sphere, it was conceivable that an individual could decide what was or was not sacred. No doubt even domestic cult had established rituals and conventions of which we know nothing. But we do know that things could drift in and out of the sphere of Roman religion. Objects could be ‘determined as sacred’ that had not been sacred before. For instance, house VII.15.3 in Pompeii seems to have had a shrine containing a bronze statuette of Priapus among other gods, and yet, as we saw in Chapter 2, the cult of Priapus in Italy is attested by few of the normal sources for cult activity, such as dedicatory inscriptions, altars, or temples.76 Denis Feeney describes in greater detail the Xexibility of a religious system in which the boundaries between literature and cult are uncertain and changeable.77 Against this background it is easier not only to see the cult images depicted on lamps as objects of cult, but also to understand how variable their cultic status may have been. Yet, at the same time the iconography of the gods depicted on Roman lamps employs certain speciWc motifs that resist ambiguity. They highlight the fact that these are representations of statues, not merely of gods. Most obviously, perhaps, we encounter Wgures that appear to conform to recognizable statue-types, 71 Statius, Silvae 4.6; Martial 9.43–4 (cf. 7.72.7). See E. Bartman, Ancient Sculptural Copies in Miniature (Leiden 1992). 72 73 Vermeule, The Cult Images, passim. Cf. Digesta 11.7.3 for importance of consensus. 74 See Bakker, Living and Working with the Gods, 1–4 for a precise deWnition and justiWcation of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the study of cult. 75 Digesta 1.8.6.3. 76 77 Boyce, Corpus, 72, no. 329. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome.

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like the Hunting Diana, or the Crouching Venus, or indeed, the Capitoline Triad.78 It has been noted that statuary models are especially conspicuous on Corinthian lamps of around the second century.79 But the use of statue-types was so widespread in Roman visual culture that it is diYcult to know if the archetype would have been recognized in such cases or if its reproductions were even considered to be ‘statuesque’. However, our images of gods have more obviously statuesque characteristics. Apart from the frequent ground-lines beneath Wgures, which might arguably evoke the statue-base, sometimes the deities are very obviously depicted as busts:80 there is no question here that they are concrete cult images rather than generalized portrayals of the god. The three-dimensional bronzes stand within a columned arch or aedicula which in other representations, notably on coins, is the convention for the representation of cult statues; the device occasionally appears on discus reliefs also.81 And we have one unique case—an unidentiWed mythological scene with a man and a woman on a ground-line; unexplained struts join parts of the woman’s Wgure, and it is conceivable that, as Bailey suggests, these are actual representations of the real struts on a statuegroup.82 Such attention to detail would be exceptional, but not unparalleled if we recall the apparently deliberate strut evident on the Wgure of Man on the Capitoline Museum’s Prometheus sarcophagus.83 Statues were the most prominent means through which Romans approached their gods. The use of statuesque iconography on lamps strengthens the suggestion that the images of gods are cult images. The same principle applies to the gravestones discussed in Chapter 3. And perhaps statuesque imagery could even be used to make religious paintings into a more familiar form of cult image: the painting from the Temple of Adonis at Dura-Europos has been convincingly reconstructed to include a mock statue-base.84 And again, the Roman use of archaism shows that even cult statues themselves could be made to look more statuesque. The presentation of gods as statues on Roman lamps does not necessarily make their use as portable shrines more plausible. But it does clarify and enhance the iconographical message of the lamps, as read on its own terms. We remain ignorant of the precise contexts in which that message was modiWed. 78

Diana: Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 209–210, Q1014; Venus: ibid. 224, Q1058. Broneer, Corinth, 98–100. 80 e.g. the Dioscuri on Bailey, BM Lamps ii. 195, Q986; 325, Q1283. 81 e.g. ibid. 313, Q1248. 82 Ibid. 203, Q996; 40 and 203. 83 H. Stuart Jones (ed.), A Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures Preserved in the Municipal Collections of Rome: The Sculptures of the Museo Capitolino (Oxford 1912) 142–3, no. 13, pl. 34. 84 M. I. RostovtzeV, F. E. Brown, and C. B. Wells (eds.), The Excavations at Dura-Europos. Preliminary Report of the Seventh and Eighth Seasons of Work, 1933–1934 and 1934–1935 (New Haven 1939) 158–60, Wg. 44. 79

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statues on coins In the past the images on lamps have not been accorded a functional role in Roman life and they have received relatively little attention in their own right. To a limited extent representations of statues on coins have received more sensitive treatment. This is partly because scholars interested in the reconstruction of lost buildings and statues have studied coins more intensively and have come to recognize their distortion of reality. Hill and others have tried to reconstruct lost monuments from the evidence of coins, but are quick to recognize that the engravers did not intend to leave a document for our beneWt.85 There is no denying that coins do provide invaluable evidence for reconstructions, and in that regard they are useful and informative. But a crucial aspect of numismatic representations has attracted virtually no interest: why are statues depicted as they are? Why are diVerent iconographical conventions employed? Various aspects of artistic schematization have been noted.86 In the case of statues the most obvious artiWce is the frequent visibility of the image ‘within’ the temple, viewed through unrealistic gaps in the central column. The parted columns may otherwise be depicted as they were, or they may be reduced to the residual columns and gable of the aedicula motif. Possibly in some cases the aedicula is conceived as a kind of baldachino from inside the temple, used to represent the whole sanctuary.87 As in other Roman art-forms scale and perspective vary considerably. The earliest clear numismatic representation of this kind of temple is on a denarius of M. Volteius in 78 bc.88 It shows the Wrst temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Before long the cult statue was displayed within the building. By 36 bc Octavian’s aurei and denarii show the image of Divus Iulius within his projected temple (Fig. 37).89 The fac¸ade here is highly schematic: a podium, four iconic cylinders for columns, two on each side of the simple Wgure, a slab-like inscribed 85 F. Imhoof-Blumer and P. Gardner, Ancient Coins Illustrating Lost Masterpieces of Greek Art: A Numismatic Commentary on Pausanias (Chicago 1964) 1–3; L. Lacroix, Les reproductions de statues sur les monnaies grecques: la statuaire archaı¨que et classique (Lie`ge 1949) 1–28; M. J. Price and B. L. Trell, Coins and their Cities: Architecture on the Ancient Coins of Greece, Rome, and Palestine (London 1977) 15–17; Price, Rituals, 180–1; Martin, Ro¨mische Tempelkultbilder, 9; P. V. Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types (London 1989) esp. 7–8; Lacroix’s treatment of the material is the most extensive and sophisticated. Hill’s is the less well attuned to artistic conventions and to an extent he sees the distortion of external reality in the numismatic images as the consequence of artistic lack of skill or, from the late 2nd cent. on, decline; he sees the ‘artistic license’ of good engravers as a more insidious obstacle. Zanker, Augustus, 8–9 is perhaps too trustful of coins in identifying statues of Octavian; but contrast id., ‘In Search of the Roman Viewer’. 86 Price and Trell, Coins and their Cities, 19–57 for the best short summary. Other accounts in the sources listed above (n. 85). 87 Ibid. 21. 88 M. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge 1974) 399, no. 385/1, pl. 49. 89 Ibid. 537–8, no. 540/1, pl. 64; Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, 22.

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architrave for identiWcation, and a delicate gable above, framing the Sidus Iulium (the star that had marked Caesar’s apotheosis). This pattern endured until the later Empire: we Wnd similar aediculae on coinage of the third century. Some elaborate images continue but most are limited to a few simple lines around the cult Wgure, which is nevertheless recognizable.90 Even the simplest of cult statues may have distinctive poses but, fortunately for those seeking to imagine real Roman fac¸ades, some representations are much more intricate and include the most delicate of details. The best known example is the Tiberian sestertius on which appears the Temple of Concord in the Roman Forum (Fig. 38). Besides the necessary simpliWcation of small details there is barely any of the conventional schematism here, and although the cult statue is visible through the colonnade, its central columns have hardly been moved apart. Nine statues are shown on the roof, and another two Xank the front steps. Though Hill’s suggestion that ‘with the help of Pliny’s catalogue it is possible to identify them with a fair degree of accuracy’ is optimistic to say the least, and his attempt to do so elsewhere is too speculative,91 the fact remains that the artist here is visualizing the building in a quite diVerent, more literal and less codiWed manner. Often this sort of more detailed treatment of the temple turns it into the backdrop for a sacriWcial scene (as also on reliefs like those of the ‘Ara Pietatis’92), Fig. 37. By 36 bc Octavian’s aurei and denarii show the image of Divus Iulius within his projected temple. The schematic mode of representing temples and cult statues endured into the later Empire. (Aureus of Octavian. Reverse with image of the Temple of Divus Iulius; c. 35 bc. British Museum, London, Grueber BM Cat. Coins Roman Republic ii.32.)

and as late as Constantius I at the start of the fourth century ad we Wnd the Capitoline temple depicted like this in stunning detail.93 The schematic and realist modes of representation might be seen as nothing more than diVerent artistic preferences (and most commentators seem to have worked from this assumption). However Zanker has suggested that there is a broadly chronological trend at least in the rendering of architectural ornamentation.94 Simple, immediate visual ‘slogans’ seem to give way to displays of 90 91 92 93 94

Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, esp. Gallienus’ Mars: 10, Wg. 2. Ibid. 19; id., ‘The Temple of Concordia on Sestertii of Tiberius’, Numismatic Circular (1978) 66. D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven 1992) 141–5. Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types 26, Wg. 33. Zanker, ‘In Search of The Roman Viewer’.

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simulacra and signa Fig. 38. Some numismatic representations of temples include the most delicate of details. The conventional schematism is almost entirely absent from images of Tiberius’ Temple of Concord. (Sestertius of Tiberius. Reverse with image of the Temple of Concordia; c. ad 36. British Museum, London, BMCRE i.116.)

ornamentation at the expense of legibility. In the early Empire the accentuation of individual sculptures served programmatic statements; later, repetitive slogans lost their interest for the Roman observer, while architectural elaboration became an increasingly prominent aspect of the city. But cult statues tend to be emphasized continuously and to remain visible; for they must be clear in order to recall the memory of festivals and rituals through which the populace encountered them in their temples.95 The identiWcation of this trend demands that later schematic depictions be tidied away as retrospective exceptions, and a building like the Temple of Concord is seen as ‘programmatic’ rather than ‘ornamental’— which is a fairly arbitrary choice. Yet Zanker may be broadly correct. Especially interesting is his insistence on relating this change in representational mode to the tastes of ‘the viewer’. In this case he does not go into theoretical detail on the ‘aesthetics of perception’, but it is clear that he is concerned with the common visual culture—the artistic language, in the fullest sense of the metaphor (not just iconography)—that producers and receivers of images shared.96 That is, of course, his concern elsewhere.97 Consideration of the viewer is also reminiscent of Elsner’s work. Elsner identiWes two ways of viewing, and therefore two modes of representation, in the Roman Empire: the literal and the symbolic. He then traces the ascendancy of symbolic viewing as the matrix for late antique style.98 Can we learn anything more from this about responses to religious statuary (besides their possible role in evoking speciWc ritual events)? It is Wrstly important to note that the speciWc depiction of cult statues in their temples is also subject to diVerent modes of representation. Zanker suggests that the visibility and prominence of the cult statue on coins did not reXect everyday life. These are certainly not ‘truthful’ images, even if such a thing were possible. But some statues are more realistic than others. Some representations use detail and perspective to refer to a cult statue with greater speciWcity. 95

96 Ibid. 183. Ibid. 179, 182–3. P. Zanker, ‘Augustan Political Symbolism in the Private Sphere’ in J. Huskinson, W. M. Beard and J. Reynolds (eds.), Image and Mystery in the Roman World (Gloucester 1988) 1–13, pls. 1–8; id., Augustus. 98 Elsner, Art and The Roman Viewer. 97

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Most of the Wgures of gods resemble living Wgures: only their types and poses are statuesque; their context identiWes them as cult images.99 But some are portrayed as tangible objects mounted on pedestals, and some are ‘elevated’ from the ground level of the frontal fac¸ade in what must be a reference to receding space: the statue is placed in its real location at the back of the temple cella. So for example, coins of c. ad 150 showing the fac¸ade of the Temple of Faustina include an obviously elevated cult image with a pronounced groundline or base (Fig. 39).100 The second temple of Divus Augustus is shown on coins from 158 on, marking the temple’s restoration. The cult statues of Augustus and Livia are depicted on a prominent groundline, perhaps within a shrine, and their elevation is especially striking (Hill notes it in this case and takes it to be suggestive of perspective).101 Many other coins have clearer bases, or perspective, or sometimes a relatively realistic depiction of the colonnade in which the central pillars are not signiWcantly parted.102 There is no obvious pattern behind the use of these diVerent systems of representation. Both approaches are to be found among Zanker’s more ornamental numismatic fac¸ades of the middle Empire; both are to be seen on coins of the Greek cities;103 but speciWcity may be loosely associated with the tendency towards sculptural detail. Several of the metropolitan examples are Antonine, but they are certainly not restricted to this period. They are nearly all associated with the building or restoration of the temple and may evoke the prestige of a major sculptural commission, but less exact depictions of statues tend to commemorate public works also.

Fig. 39. Some cult statues on coins are portrayed as concrete objects mounted on pedestals, and some are ‘elevated’ from the ground level of the frontal fac¸ade in what must be a reference to receding space. (Sestertius of Antoninus Pius. Reverse with image of the Temple of Faustina; c. ad 150. British Museum, London, BMCRE iv.1508.)

99 Price and Trell, Coins and their Cities, 19 liken these images to epiphanies. Sometimes the cult image is so odd as to be identiWable as a unique object: see D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago 1989) 67–8 on aniconic images, etc. 100 Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, 12–13, Wg. 6. 101 Ibid. 20–1, Wg. 20. 102 e.g. illustrations of bases: Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, 9, Wg. 1; 17, Wg. 13; 23, Wg. 24; 23, Wg. 25; 25, Wg. 29; 28, Wg. 39; 29, Wg. 40; 32, Wg. 47; 39, Wg. 58; elevation: 16, Wg. 11; 26, Wg. 32; 28, Wg. 37; 33, Wg. 49; closed colonnade with either base or elevation: 9, Wg. 1; 26, Wg. 32; 32, Wg. 47. 103 Price and Trell, Coins and their Cities, passim.

212 simulacra and signa The answer may lie with the precise practices and preferences of individual engravers’ workshops, and may be unfathomable. But the diVerence in approach is relevant here because it provides a visual, iconographical parallel for our variant representations of cult statues in written sources. At one extreme, we have gods portrayed as statues: as identiWable objects standing in for absent divinity. As such they may evoke the prestigious associations of temple restoration or construction which included the installation of the cult image itself. As far as representations of metropolitan buildings are concerned, these works stand for imperial patronage. It should be stressed that this is realism and not necessarily accuracy of representation. The documentary reliability of the images remains in doubt (and is unveriWable), while we have depictions of the statue of Vesta within her round shrine in the Forum Romanum even though this temple, as opposed to the shrine on the Palatine or the Porticus Deorum Consentium, probably contained no image.104 The choice is between two ways of referring to the present deity, rather than between truth and exaggeration. At the other extreme, we have gods that modern viewers at least may see as epiphanies. They are not tied to pedestals or any concrete setting but simply to the temple itself. There is a conceptual shift here from the ‘simulacra deorum in suis templis’ (‘the statues of the gods in their temples’)105 to ‘templa deorum’ (‘the temples of the gods’)—paying no precise attention to the images themselves. In one sense this parallels the ‘catachresis’ described by Gordon, whereby the statue of the god becomes, simply, the god. However, the statue’s pedestal and the use of perspective should perhaps not be seen simply as two manifestations of the same kind of speciWcity. Indications of bases are much more varied, ranging from clearly identiWable pedestals to mere groundlines. Statues with obvious bases are sometimes still exaggerated and stand massively in the fac¸ade of the temple.106 But the elevation of cult statues to convey depth is much more obvious and unambiguous, as those examples cited above show. Moreover, unlike other suggestions of speciWcity, it is not to be found in the coins of Greek cities illustrated by Price and Trell. In

104

The fact that Ovid (Fasti 6.295–8) is our only explicit source for the absence of the statue ought to arouse suspicion, but it is difficult to see what his joke might be if he is lying here, and denarii of Q. Cassius in 55 bc appear to display the absence of an image. On the coins see Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, 23–4; Vermeule, The Cult Images, 66–7. Generally: F. Bo¨mer, P. Ovidius Naso, Die Fasten, ii. Kommentar (Heidelberg 1958) 359–60; G. Herbert-Brown, Ovid and the Fasti: An Historical Study (Oxford 1994) 74–9; M. Guarducci, ‘Enea e Vesta’, MDAI(R) 78 (1971) 73–118, at 89–118 (Palatine shrine); H. Jordan, Topographie der Stadt Rom im Alterthum, ii (Berlin 1871) 68. 105 Cicero, In Verrem 1.7. 106 Very striking exaggeration in e.g. Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, 29, Wg. 40 (Domitianic depiction of Serapeum).

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fact Lacroix, whose study is limited to Greek coins, suggests that no such representations appear on coinage.107 This is a more profound diVerence of perception and representation. It requires a diVerent representational grammar. It obliges the observer to view the cult images literally and it reXects that vision on the part of the artist. It results in a reduction of scale that renders the cult statue almost illegible, and probably did so in antiquity. Sometimes we may Wnd speciWc reasons for this choice, other than the broad process described by Zanker. Hill discusses representations of temples in porticoes from the reigns of Trajan and Severus Alexander (Figs. 40–1).108 They are very similar and may both represent the temple of Jupiter Victor on the Palatine. There is strong evidence to show that this is the same as Elagabalus’s Temple of Elagabal and that it was restored to Jupiter by Alexander. On this coin the cult statue is almost as high as the temple itself and practically sits in front of the colonnade. There is no doubt about the object of cult here. But the earlier example is perhaps the best illustration of perspective. The cult image is vanishingly small, and appears to be placed, properly, at the back of the cella (on the same level as the rear parts of the lateral colonnades that recede on each side). In this case there is no political point to be rammed home. Conversely, some of the most schematic representations from the third century are explicitly dedicated to named deities in the coins’ inscriptions.109 There is apparently a need for clarity of verbal and visual expression in those cases.

Fig. 40. In Trajanic representations of (perhaps) the Temple of Jupiter Ultor, the cult image is vanishingly small and appears to be placed at the back of the cella, on the same level as the rear parts of the lateral colonnades that recede on each side. (Sestertius of Trajan. Reverse with image of the Temple of Jupiter(?); c. ad 105/6. British Museum, London, BMCRE iii.863.)

More generally, perhaps the lack of perspective on Greek coins of the Roman Empire is to be explained by the local connotations of the buildings and cult images represented. They are major monuments associated with the individuality of those cities. Sometimes the engraver stretches the limitations of the medium to depict elements of the local topography.110 Not only Greek but also Roman sources explain in no uncertain terms how signiWcant cult statues could be in the 107 108 109 110

Price and Trell, Coins and their Cities; Lacroix, Les reproductions, 16–17. Hill, The Monuments of Ancient Rome as Coin Types, 33–6, Wgs. 49–50. Ibid. 10, Wg. 2; 29, Wg. 41; 37, Wg. 52. Price and Trell, Coins and their Cities, 27–33.

214

simulacra and signa Fig. 41. Much greater emphasis is given to the cult image on coins of Severus Alexander, perhaps stressing the emperor’s restoration of traditional cult. (Sestertius of Severus Alexander. Reverse with image of the Temple of Jupiter Ultor. ad 224. Galleria Estense, Modena.)

self-deWnition of Greek communities under Roman rule.111 Schematic representations serve this message most eVectively. The coin-types representing monuments of Rome are not engaged in the same kind of communal self-expression. We know that the images depicted are often commemorations of imperial building works and perhaps clear identiWcation of the cult was generally less important than its physical setting. Cult statues are depicted as cult statues are, in their correct location, and not as symbols of a shared culture and identity. Be that as it may, the important thing here is the potential for visual language, as well as words, to recreate the image of the sacred statue according to circumstances. Finally it should be added that parallels are sometimes to be found on Roman engraved gemstones, which are hard to date or locate in their social context, but which often recall the techniques and motifs of coin dies.

wall-painting Besides sculptural relief there is perhaps no other medium that yields so many statuary representations as wall-painting. These are the subject of a monograph by Eric Moormann which uses a catalogue of nearly 350 individual examples as sources for real sculpture and its place in late Republican and early Imperial culture.112 In reality, all forms of statues were often implicated in architectural schemes, erected in the intercolumniations of colonnades and in arches, displayed in niches on fac¸ades and in interiors. In some form or other classical architectural elements dominated the wall-paintings with which we are most familiar, those of Pompeii and its neighbouring settlements from about 100 bc 111

Esp. Polybius 9.10.7–10; Cicero, In Verrem esp. 2.1.59. Pausanias, passim (cf. discussion in Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 127–55). On appropriation of sacred art-works as cultural war see T. S. Scheer, ‘Res Gestae Divi Augusti 24: die Restituierung go¨ttlichen Eigentums in Kleinasien durch Augustus’, in C. Schubert and K. Brodersen (eds.), Rom und der griechische Osten: Festschrift fu¨r Hatto H. Schmitt zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart 1995), 209–23 (the truth behind Res Gestae 24). On coins speciWcally: Lacroix, Les reproductions, 328–31. 112 Moormann, Pittura.

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to their destruction by Vesuvius in ad 79. Consequently it should hardly be surprising that statuary images are also ubiquitous in these decorative schemes. The great number singled out by Moormann in these paintings and numerous other Wgures reminiscent of statues testify to the familiarity of statues and the ease with which they were imaginatively reproduced in painting. But there is a certain limitation involved in writing of ‘statuary representations’. The images identiWed as such take a variety of forms. They combine the features of statuesque iconography examined above in rather diVerent ways. Some Wgures are obviously and unambiguously made to look like statues, especially because of the rendering of their material or the representation of a podium. In other cases we are dealing with Wgures that reproduce statue-types, or which look ‘statuesque’ in a rather less clearly deWned sense. Often all that allows them to qualify as imitations of sculpture is their engagement in an architectural context, posing on consoles, for instance, or supporting other features in the role of caryatids or atlantes.113 Moreover, the creation of fantasy Wgures and grotesques in certain periods (particularly in the later Wrst century bc and the period of the ‘Fourth Style’ from around the mid-Wrst century ad) purposely unravelled the coherent construction of sculptural Wgures in wall-painting. Without underestimating the usefulness of Moormann’s study for enhancing our knowledge of real sculptures, their materials and colours, trends in stylistic preferences, and the reception of Greek prototypes, we should be cautious about using the statuesque images in wall-paintings as documentary sources that refer beyond themselves. Their greatest importance collectively is, as I have suggested, that they illustrate the familiarity of statues, the internalization of statuary iconography and typology within the visual vocabulary of this art-form. Most of the images involved are representations either of gods or of Wgures like maenads that broadly speaking inhabit the same realm. In that respect they also provide evidence for the role of statuesque imagery in creating an atmosphere of religiosity in interior decorations. This is also conveyed by the frequent inclusion of objects with religious signiWcance such as masks, torches, garlands, the mystical vannus or winnowing-basket of Dionysus, and other oVerings. Many individual Wgurative panels represent mythical or religious themes and the sacro-idyllic landscape paintings that depict cult objects and activities in a pastoral setting (often including statues, herms of Priapus and similar) are common throughout the period. However, in examining the relevance of statuary representations for the broader subject of cult images I shall concentrate on a handful of images that quite explicitly depict religious statues. Such images made a brief appearance in Chapter 1. There I argued that illusionistic depictions of statues are particularly 113

Ibid. 9–10.

216 simulacra and signa informative because the artist is obliged to make decisions about the character of the statue that can be avoided in verbal descriptions. We looked at images of gods in that context. Examples like the illusionistic Mars-statue in the House of the Venus Marina at Pompeii (Fig. 4) are not unambiguously objects of cult. In this case the god appears as a mock garden-statue and as the consort of Venus in her shell also painted on the rear wall of the little peristyle garden. We shall return to the problem of distinguishing cult images from other works of art: for now it is suYcient to note that the illusionistic frescoes that appear in the earlier Wrst century bc and become more ambitious and elaborate over the following sixty or seventy years increasingly present images of statues which are far less ambivalent.114 An early and eloquent example of illusionistic cult statuary is that which provides the focal points of the west and east walls in Cubiculum M of the villa at Boscoreale.115 Here on the left-hand, west wall a bronze statue of Diana with quiver and radiate crown stands facing the viewer in an architectural setting reminiscent of a sanctuary (Fig. 42). She is placed beneath a kind of elaborate aedicula with entablature supported by two iconic columns viewed in proWle: the syzygia that commonly appears in landscape paintings.116 Behind her is a wall. The area is decked with garlands and oVerings and a satyr-mask hangs above the statue. The scene is Xanked by detailed architectural perspectives which seem to evoke an impossibly wealthy and complex villa.117 The three elements in the decoration are divided by ornamented Corinthian columns standing in the foreground plane of the painted wall. Diana’s statue is stiV and manifestly artiWcial, its arms conventionally extended to hold torches. But its nature is all the more clear because of the illusionistic realism of the painting. In that sense the painting—which is paralleled in less spectacular survivals—is unlike the images we have examined on lamps and coins. It does not depend on schematic iconographical conventions to clarify the nature or function of the statue depicted or of our relationship with it. Yet a closer look at the painting shows that there are some similarities and that the expressive capacity of illusionistic painting simply increases the potential for commenting on or manipulating the viewer’s engagement with the subject, rather than reXecting an altogether diVerent approach to representation. Although the details of the syzygia surrounding the cult statue are distinctive, viewed from a distance (the distance partially manufactured by recession in the 114 On all aspects of the subject see Moormann, Pittura. For convenience in locating speciWc motifs within decorative schemes in various houses I employ references to Moormann’s catalogue in this section. 115 See P. W. Lehmann, Roman Wall Paintings from Boscoreale in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cambridge 1953) for fullest discussion of the paintings in the villa, and 82–131 speciWcally on the cubiculum. Moormann, Pittura, 92, cat. 004/4. 116 Lehmann, Roman Wall Paintings, 108–9 on syzygiae. 117 Full argument for interpretation as villa: ibid. 95–108.

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Fig. 42. The illusionistic paintings at Boscoreale manipulate the viewer’s relationship with cult statues as objects in space. (Wall-painting from west wall of the cubiculum from the villa at Boscoreale. c. 50–40 bc. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 03.14.13.)

painting) it serves a similar function to the more schematic and symbolic aediculae we have seen in other media: it frames and identiWes the statue. In this case the image’s base is out of sight, obscured by some sort of dark drapery, but its sculptural character is conveyed by its coloration and its pose that identiWes it with a familiar statue-type. The manner in which the illusionistic painting distances the statue from the viewer serves (like the implied recession on

218 simulacra and signa certain coins) to locate the image as an object in space. Perhaps most importantly the viewer is prevented in his or her imagination from approaching the statue.118 It stands on the far side of a wall and closed gate and we must admire it, or venerate it, from afar. But this is not passive viewing. The foreground of the painting which is visually accessible to the viewer contains the fresh traces of active cult, implying that we or people close to us are directly involved in the very rituals that help to elevate this statue to the position of a cult image. Furthermore the angle from which the fantasy villa-buildings on each side are depicted implies a viewing position directly in front of the statue. On each side of the sanctuary entrance are round altars with cinders still burning, and with them small cylindrical pillars supporting bronze statuettes: on the left a winged deity; on the right an image of Diana herself, in form and colour virtually identical to the main statue. These give the impression of votives dedicated close to the temple, though the votives themselves provide a focus for cult. Finally, in the middle of the scene, directly before the gate, is a larger altar, itself topped by stillburning cinders, and other oVerings. On the far right of this wall (at the end apparently occupied by a bed) we Wnd the continuation of the theme in another scene of a secluded shrine, a tholos within a portico. The end wall of the cubiculum bears a famous image of a highly cultivated ‘rustic’ landscape with grottoes and pergolas. The other side wall, the east wall, essentially mirrors the west wall. The eVect is the same, though the cult statue is diVerent. Here it is a female Wgure in chiton holding in her left hand an oVering dish containing perhaps sacred objects; her right hand is extended. This may be another statue of Diana; it is certainly the focus of veneration in the sanctuary and surely not a votive statue of a priestess as Lehmann suggests.119 The statuettes on columns in this painting depict respectively a female Wgure in chiton who carries a Wllet in her hands and a Wgure similar to the cult statue on the west wall but holding a spear or sceptre in her right hand. In the past there has been much discussion about the origins of the iconography in this room and attention has been drawn in particular to the passage in Vitruvius, De Architectura 7.5.2 where he likens some paintings (evidently of the ‘second style’) to theatre scenes (scaenae frontes) in tragic, comic, or satyric manner.120 At any rate we need not suppose that the paintings are intended as a solemn and thorough recreation of a sanctuary. But the logic of the paintings supposes that the viewer is actively involved with its subject as a bystander or visitor to the sanctuary. The nature of the cult statue is determined not only by 118

On the question of access to real Greek and Graeco-Roman temples see P. E. Corbett, ‘Greek Temples and Greek Worshippers: The Literary and Archaeological Evidence’, BICS 17 (1970) 149–58. 119 Lehmann, Roman Wall Paintings, 110 (with further discussion in n. 113). 120 See also Vitruvius on theatres: 5.6.9. For summary of approaches see Lehmann, Roman Wall Paintings, 91–4 (demolishing various arguments) and esp. 91 n. 23 for references.

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its own iconography, not just on formal grounds, but by being embedded in rituals and exchanges that notionally involve the viewer. The cubiculum paintings from Boscoreale are exceptionally well preserved and unusual in their subtle complexity. But some similar observations can be made about the way in which other paintings from around the mid-Wrst century bc position and manipulate the viewer on the threshold of a sacred space. In the Villa of the Mysteries, for example, the highly ‘architectural’ decoration of Cubiculum 16 includes a glimpse of a tholos with a (probably) female statue oVered to the viewer as a focus for attention and ‘framed’ by a Wctive arch in the foreground plane, and yet permanently out of reach beyond an elaborate stone wall.121 In Oecus 15 in the Villa of the Poppaei at Oplontis the various real exits from the excavated parts of the room are surpassed by an illusionistic gateway to the grandest of sanctuaries. Though no statues are visible here, the impressive receding porticoes of the sanctuary draw the eye into the imaginary space. The impression of a barrier is created by a heavy colonnade and wall in the foreground, yet here the temple gates lie invitingly open.122 Meanwhile paintings of tholoi in the adjacent room (14) resembled those at Boscoreale and the Villa of the Mysteries, exposing statues of Venus and another Wgure to view, while Diana/Hecate appears on the other wall.123 However, in the second half of the Wrst century bc the impression of depth beyond the central focus of the wall becomes less pronounced. The views in the centre of decorative schemes appear Xatter, like paintings on the wall rather than actual views into a world beyond, and in due course the central images are in fact more or less explicitly presented as paintings.124 One painting preserved in the National Museum at Naples presents a view of a tholos and temple-like structure in between the central columns. As bystanders we are involved with the activity in this Wctive space. Two women appear to leave oVerings on the steps of the tholos which is closed oV yet reveals behind its barriers the upper part of a silver statue of Venus.125 However, the scene is restricted in scale, conWned to the central section of the wall and appears above a socle decorated with birds and vegetation: a greater barrier to the plausibility of the scene than the illusionistic podium of the dado at Boscoreale. Thereafter images of cult statues and people venerating them with oVerings and sacriWces do remain common, but only within independent scenes, particularly in landscape paintings. 121

Moormann, Pittura, 225–6, cat. 306/4. See e.g. R. Ling, Roman Painting (Cambridge 1991) 28 and Wg. 26. 123 Moormann, Pittura, 241, cat. 341/3. 124 On the development see Ling, Roman Painting, 33–42. 125 Painting from Pompeii VII.xvii(Ins. Occ.).39; PPM vi. 36, Wg. 56; Moormann, Pittura, 203–4, cat. 263; now in Naples, Museo Nazionale inv. 8594, the painting is often attributed to the Praedia of Julia Felix. Note Wctive statues of ‘poets’ in a nearby exedra: PPM vi. 37–40, Wgs. 57–66; Moormann, Pittura, 202, cat. 262/3. 122

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This is not the place either to debate the merits of the ‘four styles’ as a classiWcatory or analytical scheme for Roman wall-painting or to try and explain why decorative schemes evolved in the way they did. No simple formula is likely to hold the key. But it will be useful to make a few further comments about the place of cult images in later wall-paintings. The advent of the so-called third style in the later Wrst century bc marks a pronounced departure from the representation of depth and illusionistic Wgurepainting, though neither disappears altogether. We have already encountered Vitruvius’ disgust at the changes in taste which marked the transition.126 He presents the new fondness for irrational, fantastical architecture and for grotesques as a disintegration of the realistic architectural schemes that had been favoured for so long. It is easy to understand the disappearance of illusionistic statuary in the same light, but this is not quite accurate. The sorts of statue mentioned above do not evolve into grotesques. They largely disappear as important subjects in paintings.127 The implausible fantasy statues brieXy referred to by Vitruvius and catalogued by Moormann are incidental Wgures that often serve as architectural elements. Their implausibility is directly connected with the disintegration of the architectural motifs themselves. So we cannot exactly trace the development of images of cult statues through the transition in styles, at least not by comparing like with like. There are one or two exceptions.128 One of the most curious examples from the period of the third style (painted in the early Wrst century ad) is the gardenpainting that occupies a whole room in the House of the Orchard in Pompeii.129 Here six pallid, male statues on T-shaped bases seem to nestle amidst the luxuriant plants behind a fence on three of the walls. The statues themselves are Egyptian in style, and like the images in real Egyptian paintings they appear two-dimensional, rendered in ‘simultaneous representation’; the head and legs are more or less in proWle, while the shoulders are frontal. Although this room belongs to a tradition of illusionistic garden-painting the impulse to Egyptianize seems to have obliterated most of the usual illusionistic techniques and the observer’s engagement with the world of the statues and their setting is intentionally diminished: an appropriate shift of emphasis for the decor of the period. The last forty years or so before the destruction of Pompeii are characterized by a plurality of decorative schemes and motifs—the Wnal years of the third style and the so-called fourth style. Minor, incidental images that imitate statues or 126

Vitruvius 7.5. Once again there are good examples within isolated central paintings, e.g. in Triclinium C in the House of C. Sulpicius Rufus (Pompeii IX.9.18) depicting an enclosure with altars and statues beyond. Moormann, Pittura, 219, cat. 301/1. 128 Moormann, Pittura, 42–4. 129 Pompeii I.ix.5. Moormann, Pittura, 42–3 and 151, cat. 160. 127

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sculptural elements become more common as complex architectural schemes once again take a more realistic form and the interest in illusionistic, spatial recession re-emerges. We also Wnd larger, illusionistic Wgures that more obviously recall the statue-paintings of a century before. These include the naturalistic gods that appear in elaborate tiered fac¸ades that seem to be inspired once more by theatrical scenes. Some of the Wgures presented within this new architectural setting are ambiguous in nature. Others are manifestly conceived as statues and are mounted on bases. But by the very nature of the architecture they are usually projected towards the viewer as objects to behold at close quarters rather than statues towards which ritual activity is directed. It is the garden-paintings of this period that most closely resemble the powerful illusionism of the mid-Wrst century bc. The Mars in the House of the Venus Marina is a prime example but it is paralleled elsewhere at this time. In fact Moormann identiWes more than twenty cases of illusionistic statues within fourth-style garden-paintings, deities as well as ‘ornamental’ Wgures like sphinxes or nymphs.130 Like Mars they combine lifelike characteristics with the pallor of stone sculpture and bases. They show that in making the unavoidable decision about what a statue should be, how it should be depicted, the very techniques of illusionism, with its power of animation, are exploited to draw attention to the images’ artiWciality. But what the garden-paintings perhaps refuse to do is place the viewer in a particular religious relationship with the gods. Unlike the secondstyle paintings at Boscoreale or Oplontis, these images leave the status of the deities undecided. Are they garden ornaments? Are they venerable gods? It is an ambiguity that reXects the unstable status of real sculptures in gardens and houses, and which we shall explore further in the next chapter.

conclusion In essence all the evidence surveyed here points to conclusions that apply also to portrait statues and to statues in general. The perceived nature of the statue is largely determined not just by its appearance, by its form and iconography, but by the variable web of language and behaviour in which it is embedded. The status of divine images is established as much by its participation in relationships as by abstract conceptions of how the objects should be deWned. At the same time visual imagery is of great importance. The makers of lampdecoration, coin-dies, and wall-paintings, and artists in all diVerent media, were obliged more than writers to make (perhaps subconscious) decisions about the manner in which divine statues were depicted. Behind these choices 130

Moormann, Pittura, 44–7.

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lie unresolved questions about the relationship between the image and the god, between animating verisimilitude and the artiWciality that characterized cult objects, and also about the relation between these statues and the people who used and encountered them in society. Stylistic and iconographical choices were naturally also of huge importance for cult statues themselves. Images of gods could be made to look more like typical cult statues in reality as well as in representations (in much the same way that Victorian churches were made to look more like churches, with redundant steeples and neo-gothic windows). But this was not always the case, and language as well as iconography sometimes militate against the division of statues into discrete categories either in antiquity or in modern scholarship. We now turn to another challenge to modern conceptions: Roman attitudes to statues as art.

seven

The Private Sphere

We began our introductory journey into the world of Roman statuary with a glance at the opulence of a luxurious villa on the Via Appia. The Hellenized sculptural decoration of the Villa of the Quintilii was physically not far removed from the commemorative portraits on the street of tombs or even the monuments of the capital itself. Yet these were the cultured furnishings of the private sphere—the trappings of otium—of ideal retreat from the negotium or business of the city. We have mainly been concerned with the public sphere or the semi-public funerary displays of those who were eVectively excluded from participation in the urban economy of statuary honours. Yet we have also repeatedly found that it is never easy consistently to separate the public and private worlds of Roman art.1 We have seen that the language used to describe domestic statues draws upon a more general vocabulary, and in particular the word signum is periodically employed to refer to works of art with perhaps a recognized decorative or aesthetic value, and not only speciWcally to images of gods. We have seen how Verres notoriously changed public works into private property; how public and private cult may have related to and diVered from each other; and how patrons might receive statuary honours or display their own portraits in private property—a subject to which we shall shortly return. In looking at public statues we have also touched on subjects such as copying, statuary typology, and especially the relationship between Roman usage of art and the Greek tradition: topics that are profoundly signiWcant for understanding private, domestic sculpture.2 1 For general discussion see E. K. Gazda’s introduction in E. K. Gazda (ed.), Roman Art in the Private Sphere: New Perspectives on the Architecture and Decor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula (Ann Arbor 1991) 1–24, at 4–6. 2 For discussion of the identity of Roman art and its place within the Hellenic tradition see e.g.: H. Jucker, Vom Verha¨ltnis der Ro¨mer zur bildenden Kunst der Griechen (Frankfurt 1950); J. J. Pollitt, ‘The Impact of Greek Art on Rome’, TAPhA 108 (1978) 155–74; O. J. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven 1979); P. Zanker, ‘Zur Funktion und Bedeutung griechischer Skulptur in der Ro¨merzeit’, in H. Flashar (ed.), Le classicisme a` Rome aux 1ers sie`cles avant et apre`s J.-C., Entretiens Hardt, 25 (Geneva 1979), 283–314; id., Augustus; M. Beard and J. Henderson, Classical Art: From Greece to Rome (Oxford 2001). Also especially relevant: J. M. C. Toynbee, The Hadrianic School: A Chapter in the History of Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), and the works on copying cited below.

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It is therefore important at this stage to take a brief look at the place of statuary in the private sphere and to think in particular about its connections with the variety of statues and social practices that we have examined in previous chapters. I want to begin with some discussion of the reception and reproduction of Greek statuary in the Roman period. In addressing the supposed problems of cultural interaction and the status of private ideal sculpture it will be necessary to adopt the same conceptual Xexibility that was required to appreciate the cultic representations. I shall be surveying some of the diYculties of interpretation presented by Roman copies, and they help to show the Xuidity of any distinction we might want to make between statues as domestic ‘decoration’, and those works that appear to have performed a more active role in the social exchanges of religion or public life. Finally I shall look at some of the formal and functional relationships between private and public sculpture of diVerent kinds.

s t atu es as ar t It is in the subjects of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’, Roman collecting and connoisseurship, that Roman-period perceptions of the Greek statuary tradition are most clearly deWned. Literary sources constantly present a neat picture of Greek artistic production and Roman reception or appropriation.3 In this perceived transfer of cultural property, Greek statues that in their own world might have served the same social functions as the Roman statues studied above, are metamorphosed into art-objects. Art as such may have been invented in the Hellenistic period, but it is in the Roman Empire especially that we begin to recognize characteristics of the more modern art-world, including the aesthetic appreciation of Greek statues that so irritated Wilenski. This, at least, is the conventional picture. Three aspects of the conventional view deserve some re-examination here because they are of particular importance to the place of statues in Roman culture and to speciWc themes addressed in previous chapters. First, there is the Roman practice of ‘collecting’ and displaying statues whose style and iconography are rooted in the Greek past. How clearly is this practice identiWed in Roman sources, and what was the status of these ‘Greek’ works as high culture? Second, there is the practice of copying Greek statues, traditionally seen as a symptom of Roman art-historical and art-critical sensitivity, but subject to reevaluation in more recent works. Finally, there is a diVerent kind of ‘copying’— 3

Classically: Virgil, Aeneid, 6.847–8; Cicero, In Verrem (all the speeches); Pliny, NH 33–7, passim. Generally, see Pollitt, ‘The Impact’. By the 2 cent. ad the distinction was hard to maintain.

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the reproduction of Greek ‘statue-types’—which was responsible for communicating the form of statues throughout the Roman world. Reproduced Wguretypes have sometimes been tapped as a source of information on lost works. But how important was the image of the statuary archetype in the proliferation of these motifs, and to what extent were ancient viewers conscious of their antecedents? We Wnd all the trappings of the modern art world in Roman antiquity.4 The ‘intuitive’ skills of the connoisseur (often exempliWed by his appreciation of Corinthian bronze) are positively or negatively portrayed in the writings of Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Juvenal, Petronius, Statius.5 The antiquity and genealogy of works of art was of some concern.6 Fine works of art commanded high prices and forgery may have been perpetrated to gull eager collectors.7 The porticoes and temples of the city of Rome were crammed with so many famous paintings and sculptures, and other works as well, like gems, that they have been seen as ‘Roman museums’.8 Yet rather too much weight has been placed on a few sources in order to reinforce the impression of the Roman appreciation of ancient statues as art.9 Problems are presented both by the language in which these sculptures were discussed, and by the nature of the material itself. Ancient sources present a stark contrast between two value systems, in crude terms, that of the aesthetically-minded and not always very masculine Greeks, and the virile and practical Romans. In most cases the Greek–Roman contrast is more complex: eVeminacy and moral corruption are to be associated with Greek Asia and Asianism in (rhetorical) style, and that was a sentiment with which even an Augustan Greek, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, could concur.10 But Cicero implies that love for art was an un-Roman idea; he tries to get his audience to understand why the Sicilians robbed by Verres are so upset by things ‘which perhaps to us seem triXing and silly’ (‘quae forsitan nobis levia et contemnenda esse videantur’). Elsewhere he pretends to forget the names of famous artists, 4

For general discussion see E. Bartman, ‘Sculptural Collecting and Display in the Private Realm’, in E. K. Gazda (ed.), Roman Art in the Private Sphere: New Perspectives on the Architecture and Decor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula (Ann Arbor 1991), 71–88. 5 For collected sources see esp. G. Becatti, Arte e gusto negli scrittori latini (Florence 1951); Pollitt, op. cit. (n. 2). 6 Classic statement in Statius, Silvae 4.6. For detailed references see Bartman, op. cit. (n. 4), 75 and 84–5 nn. 28–9. 7 Phaedrus 5 Prologus; for Apollo Piombino as forgery: B. S. Ridgway, ‘The Bronze Apollo from Piombino in the Louvre’, Antike Plastik, 7 (Berlin 1967), 43–75, at 68 and 70–1. 8 D. E. Strong, ‘Roman Museums’, in D. E. Strong (ed.), Archaeological Theory and Practice: Essays Presented to Professor William Francis Grimes (London 1973), 247–64. 9 Cf. critique in Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 91–104. 10 Zanker, Augustus, esp. 1–4 (introduction) and 239–63 (ch. 6).

226 the private sphere and needs prompting.11 Pliny the Elder, as we have seen, attributes the distasteful excesses of art-loving and connoisseurship to ‘Greek vanity’. So we are left with an impression that the Roman admiration and demand for Greek works of art contradicted traditional Roman values. Pollitt sees this as an internal tension between ‘Catonians’ and connoisseurs which was balanced in the early Empire and only Wnally resolved at the end of the Wrst century (compare the observations on Priapus in Chapter 2).12 For Zanker the crisis in Roman culture was eVectively resolved in the reign of Augustus with a satisfactory blending of Greek and Roman heritage.13 For Gruen, the problem was never really so bad: whatever the useful anti-Greek rhetoric, the Roman elite were fully versed in the Hellenic tradition at an early stage; we must remember that even that arch-hellenophobe, Cato the Censor, had a good knowledge of Greek and Greek culture.14 We should think rather of the political threat presented by the use of Greek images of power in the context of Roman public life. It is not at all clear that any such arguments fully explain the response to Greek art and culture in our sources. They may all be partially correct, but they insist on models of conXict and resolution or reality and rhetoric. It may be that there were Catonians opposed to connoisseurs and that the latter won out in the end. But how do we deal with Cicero’s claims to ignorance of and lack of concern for Greek art? His letters provide us with some of our best evidence for Roman ‘collecting’ and the canon of great artists pervades his other works. This has been seen as a pragmatic attempt to keep the Catonians on board as he makes the case for the downtrodden Sicilian Greeks.15 But the second Verrine oration was never even delivered. It is a sophisticated literary text, published to be read by literate and literary people who would know exactly how disingenuous the author was: providing that mattered to them. Was hypocrisy recognized in quite the same way in Roman culture? Cicero’s aVected ignorance of high culture is rhetorical, but it does not amount to deception or oratorical sleight of hand. DiVerent messages were appropriate to diVerent contexts, and here Cicero makes a display of one kind of message—the ‘Catonian’ message—because it is appropriate. And when he criticized Verres for his excessive connoisseurship (and pretty incompetent connoisseurship at that), his words should not be seen

11

Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.5; cf. 2.4.132 and 2.4.134 stressing contrast between Roman and Greek fondness for works of art. 12 Pollitt, ‘The Impact’. E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY 1992), 224–7 summarizes and criticizes similar approaches to the problem in relation to the Republican period. 13 Zanker, Augustus, passim and esp. 337. 14 Gruen, Culture and National Identity, esp. 52–83 on Cato and 223–71; cf. observations on Cato etc. in Crawford, The Roman Republic, 2nd edn. (London 1992), 81–4. 15 Pollitt, ‘The Impact’, 163.

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as hypocrisy, but as the exploitation of a particular well-established rhetoric of public abuse.16 We should perhaps see the tension between Greek culture and Roman tradition, between love of Greek art and Roman morality, as a tension between two systems of thought, not separate groups of people. It was possible to slip from one system to the other according to context. Incompatibility was not necessarily a problem. Once again we Wnd what, in the case of Roman religion, Feeney called ‘a system of systems’. It should be noted that this provides a better explanation for Nero’s notorious philhellenism than the idea that Nero had genuinely done unprecedented things.17 Arguably, Nero was not a notorious philhellene because he had an excessive love of Greek culture, but because he failed to die in his bed and those who fell from power generally suVered the most ferocious condemnation through whatever vocabularies of abuse were available.18 (In fact the success of this strategy perhaps partly accounts for Pliny the Elder’s reservations about love of Greek art.) We are still left, as it were, with the Catonian and the connoisseur’s systems of thought. But when we look speciWcally at the collection of statues as art, the two systems become entangled in the sources because it is no longer quite so clear which statues are art as such and which are more functional. Language in particular admits ambiguity. As I have already suggested, it is embodied in the word signum, referring not only to divine statues but also to works by famous artists as well as private sculptures (primarily statues) used in the adornment of Roman property. In this sense it comes closest to the modern use of ‘sculpture’ (see Introduction); hence the title of the modern international project, Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani—‘Corpus of Sculpture of the Roman World’. We saw that according to Livy the college of priests in the third century bc had to decide which of the spoils from the Campanian victory were sacred, and which profane: speciWcally which signa were sacred and which signa profane.19 Signa could be regarded as works of art in the modern sense, but as with other kinds of sculpture they were not treated exclusively in this way: they did not have a distinct status of their own. Statues that were viewed as Wne art were deWned by such nebulous associations as the fame of the artist. There was no institutional 16

See e.g. Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.33. For further argument along these lines see J. Elsner, ‘Constructing Decadence: The Representation of Nero as Imperial Builder’, in J. Elsner and J. Masters (eds.), ReXections of Nero: Culture, History and Representation (London 1994), 112–27. 18 Ibid. on the construction of Nero’s ‘decadence’; cf. E. R. Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation of the Roman Visual Landscape’, in E. R. Varner (ed.), From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture (Atlanta, Ga. 2000), 9–26, at 9–10 on the importance of survival for determining an emperor’s posthumous reputation. 19 Livy 26.34.12. 17

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art establishment to say what could or could not be disembedded from its religious context. This is Verres’ problem. He is not a victorious general and he has no college of priests to validate his appropriation of plunder. The things that Verres collects as art are still the sacred signa of the Sicilians.20 The fact that valued works of art were treasured as precious, sacred objects in the sanctuaries of the Greek world was sometimes brutally exploited by Roman generals. Writing in 70 bc Cicero mentions several works of art that characterize the identity of the Greek states that possess them. They include Myron’s heifer in Athens. Fifty years later that classical masterpiece adorned Augustus’ Rome.21 Augustus presented himself as the stereotypical good Roman general, returning to the cities of Asia the temple-dedications that Antony had ‘appropriated for his private use’. But Scheer shows how he also appropriated the most precious of statues from cities on the losing side, from the Aetolians and Acharnians and the Calydonians, removing them to new foundations.22 But this is not simply a matter of turning sacred objects into profane art; even to Roman eyes the diVerence between art-objects and inviolable dedications was unclear. Cicero’s excuses on behalf of the art-loving Greeks are well known. Less familiar is his preceding statement that the Sicilians are aggrieved because of their piety: ‘omnes religione moventur’ (‘they are all moved by religious feeling’).23 That reason needs no explanation to the Roman audience. And even as regards those works fully appropriated into the Roman context, apparently valued as art by connoisseurs, it is not at all obvious when a cultsignum becomes an art-signum. We should not, of course, assume that the confusion of language indicates a true confusion of ideas. The mind is more eVective than is usually acknowledged in Wltering out superXuous connotations in a particular context. When Cicero corresponds with Atticus over the purchase of signa to decorate his villa, there is nothing to suggest that he is confused about the diVerence between decor (a sense of what is aesthetically appropriate and appealing) and religion.24 But at the same time he does not necessarily conceive his adornments as something altogether diVerent from 20 Note Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.17–18—distinguishing the ornamental from the sacred among Heius’s plundered property. 21 Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.135; Propertius 2.31.7–8. 22 Augustus, Res Gestae 24; discussed by T. S. Scheer, ‘Res Gestae Divi Augusti 24: die Restituierung go¨ttlichen Eigentums in Kleinasien durch Augustus’, in C. Schubert and K. Brodersen (eds.), Rom und der griechische Osten: Festschrift fu¨r Hatto H. Schmitt zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart 1995) 209–23. 23 Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.132. 24 Cicero, Ad Atticum 1.1, 1.3–11; Ad Familiares 7.23. See M. Marvin, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series’, in E. D’Ambra (ed.), Roman Art in Context: An Anthology (Englewood CliVs, NJ 1993) 161–88, esp. 180–4 for convenient text of the relevant letters with discussion.

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the signa in public sanctuaries. And when we do Wnd images of gods in private properties, it is not easy to say whether they should be considered ‘religious’ or not, though some have tried.25 More than this, Lori-Ann Touchette argues against the traditional view that the sculpture found or mentioned in Roman villas and houses is purely aesthetic or ‘decorative’. She cites numerous examples of cult, shrines, and religious sculpture within the private sphere.26 Then again, in the public sphere, the famous works of art mentioned by Pliny and others27 did not Wll ‘Roman museums’ but temples, sanctuaries, and their porticoes like the Porticus Octaviae and its neighbouring sanctuaries.28 The respect with which these works might be regarded was the same respect which they had received in Greek sanctuaries. Finally, the form of classical ‘ideal-sculpture’ that was popular in the private sphere did not say anything clear about its status as art, or at least the statements it made were rather more subtle, less direct. As we have seen, ‘statuesque’ features might help to underline the signiWcance of a portrait statue or a cult image. Inscriptions on bases could also serve to deWne the statue in these cases. But what is the distinctive character of a statue divorced from those sorts of functions? Sculptures recovered from villas generally lack signiWcant pedestals with inscribed ‘labels’. They may look statuesque because of their idealizing classicism, but many Wnd stylistic or iconographical precedents in Hellenistic art and they often exploit Hellenistic illusionism: they pretend to be real rather than drawing attention to their craftsmanship. These features in themselves may be hallmarks of virtuoso sculpture, but they are ill-deWned characteristics. As we have seen, to an extent Priapus’ claims about his own status both challenge and reveal assumptions about what sort of statue was Wne art; but the criteria are vague and involve either characteristics like ‘polish’ applied to all good statues, or else reference to contact with the ‘hand of ’ famous artists which is not a visible feature except to the eyes of the ancient expert. Besides, while this is a debate about the nature of Wne art, the characters involved—the polished statues and the rustic Priapus—all function as religious images. Having said all that, it would be wrong to suggest that the category of socially ‘disembedded’ art did not exist. It is implied by those sources cited above and in another Weld of art—that of wall-painting—it is Xaunted in illusionistic 25

Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 31–9 (though Neudecker himself is aware of complexities). L.-A. Touchette, The Dancing Maenad Reliefs: Continuity and Change in Roman Copies (London 1995) 34–6. 27 See Pollitt, ‘The Impact’, 170–2 for list of works and sources. 28 See e.g. Pliny, NH 36.34–6, 42–3 and similar throughout Books 34–7. Note however Pliny’s desire for silence to contemplate public art, evoking the modern gallery, in NH 36.27. 26

230 the private sphere ‘pinacothecae’ or ‘picture-galleries’.29 Connoisseurship was a means to articulate cultivation and social status. It was a means of social self-assertion and exclusivity (as mockery of daft connoisseurs like Trimalchio demonstrates).30 To serve that broad social function and to provide aesthetically appropriate adornment of a villa31 the statuary that was elevated as art had to be more than just the means for honour, commemoration or religious devotion. And if we see connoisseurship as mystiWcation, then it was no doubt facilitated by the very diYculty of determining what could be considered as a work of Wne art. Touchette’s objections to the idea of private sculpture as mere decoration are intended to support her treatment of neo-attic reliefs as ‘religious’ art, but she is sensitive to the diYculties of any such division and suggests that the distinction of art and religion is perhaps inappropriate for the Roman world.32 However, much of the evidence suggests not that the distinction was inconceivable in antiquity, but that it was Xuid and inconsistent. Once again, the deWnitive, positivistic categorization of ancient material is inadequate for the explanation of ancient responses, but that does not mean that categorization is irrelevant or purely anachronistic. In certain circumstances, particular statues might be seen as works of art or as sacred objects or as both. The functions and associations of the work might be vague and ill-deWned, yet the categories might also come into focus. One of the most distinct indications that ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and religion were not exclusive Welds also seems to suggest an awareness of those Welds on the part of the ancient author. The Younger Pliny writes to Annius Severus of a little statue of an old man that he has purchased out of a legacy.33 This letter is a masterpiece of selfrepresentation in which the author manages to display the skills of a connoisseur while disclaiming them, and portrays himself as a public benefactor while still engaging in art collection and self-advertisement. In summary his comments are as follows: I’ve just bought a Corinthian bronze, though it’s not very big; it’s a Wne work of art, as far as I have the expertise to judge, which is not very far; but even I can appreciate this statue [signum] because it’s a nude, so everything is out in the open; it is a representation of an old man [description follows]; you see the same signs of old age if you look at the back; the patina shows that it is an antique; even an artist would be attracted to it, let alone an amateur; that is why I bought it though I am a 29 See E. W. Leach, ‘Patrons, Painters, and Patterns: The Anonymity of Romano-Campanian Painting and the Transition from the Second to the Third Style’, in E. D’Ambra (ed.), Roman Art in Context: An Anthology (Englewood CliVs, NJ 1993) 133–60; B. Bergmann, ‘Greek Masterpieces and Roman Recreative Fictions’, HSCPh 97 (1995) 79–120, at 98–107. The display of numerous paintings in a ‘gallery’ was recognized as a form of collection. 30 In the Cena Trimalchionis (Petronius, Satyricon 26–78). 31 32 As in Cicero’s case: see Marvin, ‘Copying’. Touchette, The Dancing Maenad Reliefs, 34. 33 Pliny, Epistulae 3.6.

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complete novice; not that I bought it to keep—I do not have a single Corinthian bronze in my house—but to display in a busy place in my home-town, preferably in the temple of Jupiter [‘verum ut in patria nostra celebri loco ponerem, ac potissimum in Iovis templo’—my emphasis]; it is worthy to be a dedication; therefore can you arrange for a base to be made in whatever marble you like, and if you see Wt can you have my name and titles inscribed on it. This is a perfect example of the uncertain position of a signum as a sculpture and a dedication, both art and cult. But Pliny is so obviously trying to have his cake and eat it, or perhaps rather showing oV that he can draw the line between connoisseurship and piety, that we cannot put this down to a mere confusion about categories. The signum as a treasured work of art can easily become a temple oVering and there is an explicit connection here between the aesthetics of the collector, the aesthetics of the dedicator giving a suitable and pleasing gift, and the aesthetics of sculptural adornment in a town. But the transfer of such an art-work from private to public, from art to cult or civic adornment, is not an insigniWcant step. It is a deliberate statement, the crux of Pliny’s self-righteous letter.

sculptural copying The Roman production of copies has been seen in the past as proof of the high regard in which Roman patrons held the inaccessible creations of great Greek sculptors. We know Romans acquired antiques for their properties. This is conWrmed not only by Pliny’s letter and similar literary references, but by surviving ‘antiques’ such as those recovered from the early Wrst century bc Mahdia wreck, or indeed the antique copy of the Scopasian Pothos displayed next to a second-century version in the Via Cavour house in Rome.34 But while a variety of more or less venerable works of decorative sculpture were certainly accessible, genuine works by the likes of Polyclitus or Praxiteles were in shorter supply. The sculptures described by Pliny the Elder (assuming that they were the real thing) reached Rome through Republican plunder or Imperial appropriation. In the private sphere, despite literary references to villas crammed with the works of the famous Greek sculptors, it is highly unlikely that such pieces were widespread. 34

Survey of Mahdia artworks: W. Fuchs, Der SchiVsfund von Mahdia (Tu¨bingen 1963); various discussions of the wreck in G. H. Salies (ed.), Das Wrack: Der antike SchiVsfund von Mahdia (Cologne 1994) and see esp. G. H. Salies’ own contribution: ‘Der antike SchiVsfund von Mahdia: Entdeckung und Erforschung’, 5–29, at 19–23 on its ‘antiques’. Via Cavour: E. Bartman, ‘Decor et duplicatio: Pendants in Roman Sculptural Display’, AJA 92 (1988) 211–25; eadem, ‘Sculptural Collecting’, 75. Cf. the archaic and classical works displayed in Augustan Rome, notably on the Palatine: Zanker, Augustus, 240–5.

232 the private sphere So according to the conventional story, from the later Hellenistic or Republican period onwards copies began to stand in for unobtainable masterpieces of sculpture. In modern scholarship, these more or less accurate reproductions were the sources for lost statues by famous artists and became the subject of intense Kopienkritik—the criticism or analysis of copies—which was partially analogous to textual criticism.35 Copies were identiWed as such when more than one survived, forming a replica series; when features such as unsightly struts or props seemed to imply that the composition had originally been executed in the less brittle material of bronze; and when the characteristics of a composition matched a literary description; less reliably still, classical style was taken to imply derivation from an old original, rather than any later fondness for neoclassicism. In some cases those identiWcations are relatively secure. For example, the Aphrodite/Venus of Cnidus by Praxiteles was Wrst successfully identiWed in Roman copies by comparison with the goddess depicted on coins of Cnidus in the Severan period.36 The Tyrannicides of Critius and Nesiotes, which survive in at least ten fragmentary or complete Roman copies, are represented in other media from the Wfth century bc on.37 But in many other cases the positing of lost originals must remain highly speculative. This approach to sculptural copies continues, albeit with qualiWcations:38 even the most conservative art historians accept that Roman patrons manipulated copies, that the replicas were produced in response to Roman taste, and the process of reproduction in sculpture was a creative one.39 However, some more recent scholarship has questioned the very principles on which the traditional approach rested. Miranda Marvin shows that there is no predictable pattern by which the most famous works of antiquity were copied.40 Copying, where it actually occurred, 35 On the earlier history of copy-studies see M. Bieber, Ancient Copies: Contributions to the History of Greek and Roman Art (New York 1977), 1–9; E. K. Gazda, ‘Roman Sculpture and the Ethos of Emulation: Reconsidering Repetition’, HSCPh 97 (1995) 121–49, at 124–9. 36 F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven 1981) 330–1. 37 See S. Brunnsa˚ker, The Tyrant-Slayers of Kritios and Nesiotes: A Critical Study of the Sources and Restorations (Stockholm 1971); and for plaster-cast fragments found at Baiae: C. Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgu¨sse aus Baiae: griechische Bronzestatuen in abgu¨ssen ro¨mischer Zeit (Berlin 1985). 38 e.g. A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 25. 39 e.g. J. Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Classical Period (London 1985) 8, 15–18; C. C. Vermeule, Greek Sculpture and Roman Taste: The Purpose and Setting of Gaeco-Roman Art in Italy and the Greek Imperial East (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). On diVerent kinds of creative manipulation of classical Greek models and stylistic precedents see P. Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen: Studien zur Vera¨nderung des Kunstgeschmacks in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz 1974) esp. pp. xv–xx. 40 Marvin, ‘Copying’; eadem, ‘Roman Sculptural Reproductions, or Polykleitos: The Sequel’, in A. Hughes and E. RanVt (eds.), Sculpture and its Reproductions (London 1997) 7–28.

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served more general aesthetic attitudes. Cicero’s letters make it clear that ‘decor’ (something like ‘suitability’ and ‘elegance’) motivated patrons stocking the various parts of their properties with trivialized, Greek-style sculpture. The aim was to create an appropriately cultured atmosphere, not to recreate famous masterpieces. While Marvin’s argument is forceful, it does not exclude the possibility that the more conventional view of copying applied in some cases. Cicero is concerned with bulk orders of sculpture: he does not write as a connoisseur in these cases, but that does not mean that the connoisseur’s attitude to copies never existed. Ridgway focuses on the very considerable evidence that Roman copying was a form of creative reproduction, not even necessarily bound to the Greek original or its signiWcance as a work of art. Consequently Roman copying and collecting was selective; ‘copies’ did not always refer to or draw upon a speciWc prototype; and more strikingly, copying or replication occurred in classical antiquity also, even at the moment of production. Similar observations from a Roman perspective have been oVered by Bergmann and by Gazda, the former dealing largely with the pursuit of copies among surviving Roman paintings.41 Perhaps the most inXuential exponent of the revised concept of Roman copying is Amanda Claridge, whose unpublished work evidently helps to inform some of the conclusions of, among others, Ridgway and Marvin.42 Claridge’s argument runs as follows.43 Roman workshops were capable of making very accurate copies using measuring points (though not anything like an elaborate ‘pointing machine’ as was once thought44); this is illustrated by, for example, the series of four Praxitelean satyrs found at Castelgandolfo.45 Whatever the reason for this in diVerent situations, the motive was not obviously the reproduction of the work of Praxiteles or any other great classical sculptor, for clearly identiWable examples of this kind are actually relatively rare and generally limited in their 41

B. S. Ridgway, Roman Copies of Greek Sculpture: The Problem of the Originals (Ann Arbor 1984) esp. 6–11. Cf. Mattusch’s observation that nearly identical original sculptures like the Riace bronzes may derive from the same preliminary model: C. C. Mattusch, Greek Bronze Statuary from the Beginnings through the Fifth Century b.c. (Ithaca, NY 1988) 208. This evidence reminds us that even the most faithful techniques of reproduction could be (and generally were) used to produce very free reproductions, including the use of moulds and casts. The famous deposit of plaster-casts from Baiae has usually been taken as evidence for a copyist’s workshop, but even the most positive discussions recognize that they served to adapt Greek originals to the Roman context, and not to replicate them precisely: Boardman, Greek Sculpture 18; Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgu¨sse, 181–8. Bergmann, ‘Greek Masterpieces’; Gazda, ‘Roman Sculpture’. 42 Ridgway, Roman Copies, 3 (quoting a personal communication from Claridge); Marvin, ‘Copying’, n. 18. 43 This summary is based on oral presentations. I am grateful to Amanda Claridge for reading it. 44 e.g. by G. M. A. Richter, Ancient Italy: A Study of the Interrelations of its Peoples as Shown in their Arts (Ann Arbor 1955) 105–11. P. Rockwell, The Art of Stoneworking: A Reference Guide (Cambridge 1993) 122 (and 126 n. 23) also rejects the notion of a Roman pointing machine and cites an unpublished lecture by Claridge. 45 Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 141 (cat. 9.2) and pl. 5.

234 the private sphere geographical distribution. Familiar sculptural replicas like those of the Doryphoros of Polyclitus, for instance, are few in number and may be restricted to the area of Latium and Campania, besides which they diVer from each other quite considerably: strict accuracy at least cannot have been intended. Copies were eVectively executed freehand. In fact, most of the statues that have been assumed to be copies of speciWc Greek originals actually employ widespread, standard body-types; there is not a large repertoire of basic body-types at the sculptor’s disposal. Some surviving sculptures may well reproduce the forms of classical statuary, but only because workshops operate by imitation (or a sort of creative inertia): it is always easiest to follow the guidelines of a model rather than creating something new unless there is a particular need to innovate, and in fact the repetition of Greek-style or classical-style work was exactly what the patron desired. Again, the close mutual resemblance of the Riace bronzes shows most clearly that there may not have been a single original to copy.46 In short, there is barely any sound evidence to support the traditional picture of Roman copying as the reproduction of famous Greek sculptures for its own sake. The precise motives of sculptors consciously or unconsciously repeating earlier models and the changing preferences for diVerent kinds of statue in diVerent contexts remain to be explained, but not simply in terms of art-appreciation. That does not exclude the possibility of copying cult statues where diVerent, non-aesthetic motives apply.47 The arguments of Claridge and Ridgway are powerful, and perhaps to a certain extent they are coming to represent a new orthodoxy on the subject of Roman copies.48 But constructed as they are within the traditional framework of thought they react against the old point of view, which has not been easy to dislodge, and they therefore risk overstatement of the case. Some qualiWcations are due. Whether we say that copies were intended to replicate important originals or that they were not intended to make such recognizable allusions, the arguments for each explanation share some assumptions, perhaps because the revisionist approach responds directly to conservative objections. For example, in both approaches there remains a certain segregation of religious and aesthetic meaning in Roman sculpture. Claridge accepts the possibility of deliberate reproduction of religious statues such as the Cnidian Venus, but rejects the idea of 46 It has long been argued that famous sculptors may have made multiple originals in some cases: e.g. G. Spano, ‘Le rappresentanze di Artemis e Aktaion e l’Aphrodite di Doidalses’, Atti della Reale Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti, ns 10 (1928) 1–82 on possible diVerent versions of Doidalsas’s crouching Aphrodite; cf. Pliny, NH 36.20 on the draped version of Cnidia. 47 See Ridgway, Roman Copies, 8. 48 Noted by N. J. Spivey in G&R 44 (1997) 100. However for partial defence of copies and argument for a renewed kind of copy-criticism see C. H. Hallett, ‘Kopienkritik and the Works of Polykleitos’, in W. G. Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, The Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison, Wis. 1995), 121–60.

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copying motivated by the demands of connoisseurs. But we have seen that those Welds are not hermetically sealed. If the Venus-statue found in Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli was recognized as an imitation of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, whose celebrity is attested in Imperial literature (which is likely though not certain), we need not perceive contemporary responses purely as a function of some ‘religious’ interest. The famous masterpiece of sculpture and the cult statue could be the same object; both religious and aesthetic or art-critical interests could have resulted in the production of an intentional copy. In this light the parameters of the debate need to be adjusted. Besides this, while it may well be that most ‘copies’ originating with classical prototypes followed the stock models of workshops, and ancient texts barely mention the process of artistic copying at all, it is hard to believe that statues like the Doryphoros of Polyclitus, when they appeared, did not and were not intended to evoke the famous statues mentioned in Roman texts. To accept that we should have to imagine a literary tradition of discussing the Doryphorus and the canon of Polyclitus, and also a tradition (albeit limited) of reproducing Polyclitan statues, but no precise realization on the part of patrons, that the literary topos and the actual sculptures were related.49 Of course, the recognition of such copies might have been limited to a highly educated minority, nor does it deny the sculptures other meanings in context: replication of a masterpiece need not have been the overriding objective. Finally, the assertion that the most plausible candidates for identiWcation as deliberate reproductions are not actually very close to each other need not aVect the recognition of at least some of these works as copies. Demand for greater homogeneity (and by implication, accuracy) results from the standards set by modern media and mechanical reproduction. It is true that Roman copyists could attain such accuracy, but as Claridge suggests, we do not know their reasons. It need not have had anything to do with copying as such: for this the requirements were more Xexible. To say that is partly to support the revisionist view of copying as a creative process. But it also raises new possibilities for the recognition of a copy as a quotation, or citation, of a speciWc statue. It is unlikely that the copying controversy is to be solved with a single explanation of Roman artistic practices. It does, however, help us to understand and put in perspective the admiration of past Greek art in the Roman Empire. For all its contemporary resonances the Roman cultivation of statues as Wne art is not easy to explain in isolation from the public use of statuary in other social spheres, and particularly in religion. The issue of ‘quotations’ in copying also leads to further questions about statuary typology in Roman art, and this is a matter of considerable relevance 49

On the particular question of Polyclitan copies see: Hallett, ‘Kopienkritik’; Marvin, ‘Copying’.

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to some of the images discussed in earlier chapters. For the consideration of ‘statuesque’ iconography has introduced the potential for Wgure-types to identify particular images as statue-like—belonging in a recognizable statuary tradition. This is not copying as such, but a sort of intertextuality.

statuary typology Statues perhaps constituted the main medium by which the inhabitants of the Empire encountered or visualized their gods, so it is not surprising that when statues appeared to people in their dreams (a common portent in the literature) they were said to take the form of their familiar cult images.50 The fact that authors record as much suggests a recognition of statue typology—of the transferable, formal characteristics of paradigmatic statues. Statue-types shaped Roman imagination. Nevertheless it is an isolated example of such an awareness. It is true that Cicero also emphasizes the archetypal status of artistic representations:51 a parvis enim Iovem Iunonem Minervam Neptunum Vulcanum Apollinem reliquos deos ea facie novimus qua pictores Wctoresque voluerunt, neque solum facie sed etiam ornatu aetate vestitu. For from childhood we know Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, and the other gods by the face that painters and sculptors have wanted them to have—and not just the face, but also their adornments, their age and their attire.52

But while this is certainly an acknowledgement of iconography, it does not imply either a consistent form for the gods (as opposed to the recurrence of attributes) nor reference back to a particular statuary model. For modern typologists it is the paradigm embodied in a particular work of art that gives shape to other representations which can, in turn, be classiWed by reference to the archetype. Figures in all media are labelled ‘Athena of Velletri type’, ‘Venus Victrix type’, ‘Boston Heracles type’, and so on. These labels are not meaningless: they serve to highlight the consistency of motifs that demonstrably do recur in Roman Wgurative art; nor are such attributions eschewed in this book. But we need to treat them with the appropriate degree of imprecision. As in sculptural ‘copying’, some motifs are diVused with remarkably little alteration, sometimes certainly 50

See e.g. C. Clerc, Les the´ories relatives au culte des images chez les auteurs grecs du IIme sie`cle apre`s J.-C. (Paris 1915) 49–50; P. C. Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton 1994) 28–35. 51 Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.81. 52 Cf. D. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge 1998), 97–104 on literary gods and Dio Chrysostom 12 on the Olympian Zeus.

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because of the processes of mechanical reproduction.53 Much more commonly, however, there is only a broad correspondence among Wgures assigned to a particular type, and it only takes a glance through the illustrations of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae to see that there is plenty of uncertainty at the edges of these categories. Ancient literary and material evidence does, in fact, suggest some sense of typology; but ancient priorities are not the same as ours, and just as with Claridge’s copies, the (statuary) archetype for a motif is not always recognized or esteemed. The ‘modest Aphrodite’ in a (real or Wctional) painting described by Philostratus is a kind of Wgure type.54 The type—presumably the recognized conWgura’ froditZB tion of limbs in this case—is called a sche¯ma: kai t o sw^ Zma t^ ZB A Ai’ do^uB (‘and her form was that of the modest Aphrodite’). Sche¯ma in Greek meant ‘format’ or ‘design’ in a general sense and was not especially, or precisely, used in art criticism.55 It broadly corresponds to the Latin forma. In this case Philostratus may be thinking of what would be called today the Venus Pudica type: if ‘modest’ is the epithet for a particular kind of Aphrodite then the Wgure with hands held in front of breasts and groin is the most likely candidate. The use of sche¯ma certainly suggests that a particular arrangement of the body is to be envisaged. But there is no sense of allusion to a well-known archetype—only to the generic Wgure-type. Pausanias is rather more concerned with origins when he refers to the naked Graces: ‘who it was who Wrst represented the Graces naked, either in sculpture or in painting, I was unable to discover.’56 This comment comes amidst a general discussion of traditions relating to the Graces, so for once the author is not primarily concerned with art and artefacts. The only speciWc formal quality mentioned is nudity, but it seems that he is thinking of a widely used iconographic formula, presumably the interlocked naked graces with which we are most familiar in dozens of examples from all media. He goes on to write that in abandoning the old draped depictions more recent artists have changed the Graces’ sche¯ma.57 This is apparently a reference to a predominant form of depiction which would have been familiar to the reader, and that impression is supported by extant works. Again, however, while Pausanias is conscious of a ‘type’, there is no real concern with the archetype, whatever it may be. 53 See H. Froning, ‘Die ikonographische Tradition der kaiserzeitlichen mythologischen Sarkophagreliefs’, JDAI 95 (1980) 322–41 on scenes transferred from silverware via casts. 54 Philostratus, Imagines 2.1. 55 J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History and Terminology (New Haven 1974) 258–62. 56 Pausanias 9.35.6. 57 Pausanias 9.35.7. On the Three Graces type see LIMC vol. 3/1, 203–10; see also Bergmann, ‘Greek Masterpieces’, 98.

238 the private sphere There may be a similar awareness of a well-established format in the Suidas, which refers to the statue of Nemesis at Rhamnous E’ n ’AfroditZB sw Zmati (‘in the sche¯ma of Aphrodite’) but this may be a general reference to Aphrodite’s appearance (common to various types of image).58 More explicit is Aristides Orationes 48.41, where a vision of Athena is described. As usual the god takes the form of a statue—in this case the Athena Parthenos. She holds the aegis and resembles Pheidias’ work ‘in beauty and magnitude and in her entire sche¯ma’. Still the terms are imprecise, even if the notion of an archetype is present, and this is not any sort of art-historical statement. Of all the literary suggestions of typology, Seneca’s is the most elaborate. In Epistulae 58 he summarizes the Platonic categorization of diVerent kinds of ‘being’ (ou’ sia / quod est). These include, of course, ideal forms (ideae) and the form of an object which is the embodiment of the ideal (idos). ‘The artist imitates the Wrst; the second he makes.’59 And then Seneca resorts to the old artistic analogies including the statue: Habet aliquam faciem statua; haec est idos. Habet aliquam faciem exemplar ipsum, quod intuens opifex statuam Wguravit; haec idea est. The statue has an external appearance; this is the idos. The model has another appearance, on which the artist gazes in making the statue; this is the idea.

‘Model’, in this context, seems to refer to that which the statue represents rather than anything more technical like a copy-book. In Epistulae 65 the subject is ‘causes’ as deWned in the various philosophies. Once again statues are used as an illustration of what constitutes the causes. These include the purpose of the statue (propositum), whether Wnancial gain, if it is to be sold, or glory, if it is intended to win a reputation, or religion, if it is meant as a temple-oVering: ‘vel pecunia est haec, si venditurus fabricavit, vel gloria, si laboravit in nomen, vel religio, si donum templo paravit’. The idea as pattern is yet another cause. The pattern may presumably be internal or external, but Seneca still does not seem concerned with the real technology of artistic creation. Yet suddenly, towards the end of the letter, the author provides an analogy for form as one of the causes of a creation (65.5): Neque enim statua ista doryphoros aut diadumenos vocaretur, nisi haec illi esset inpressa facies. For that statue would not be called ‘doryphoros’ or ‘diadumenos’ if this appearance had not been impressed upon it.

He could be talking about generic names applied to certain statuary subjects (and this in itself would be relevant to our discussion); but given the implication 58 59

Suidas, see under ‘ P amnousia NemesiB; Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 262. Seneca, Epistulae 58.21.

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that these words are artistic labels (they have Greek endings), there is little doubt that the famous works of Polyclitus are intended. This is no surprise—we have seen Polyclitus cited elsewhere as an exemplum. But the recognition of speciWc works conforming to speciWc patterns and identiWed by common labels is a rare occurrence in ancient sources, and one that has to modify the arguments of Claridge and Marvin. This is about as close as we could expect to come to an explicit explanation of typology in ancient literature. We should also note that although Seneca is concerned with particular statuary types he does not seem to mean unique statues; he refers to the appearance that will lead the viewer to call a statue the Doryphoros or the Diadumenos. In other words, he may be talking about ‘copies’ conforming to those types. It might be objected that Seneca is rather exceptional; his interest in form is that of a philosopher, and he uses the philosophical topos of the statue with particular attention to its exemplary possibilities. But although his special concerns lead him to consider questions of relevance to us, his treatment of typology actually has more in common with other ancient sources. The common element is imprecision. Certainly, in abstract terms, his discussion of form is sophisticated. His use of famous statues implies an educated interest in high culture. Yet the criteria by which those statues are identiWed are completely ignored: that is a matter of common sense or common understanding. We all know what those works look like. But in an age before large-scale mechanical reproduction, before the viewer came to expect an extremely high degree of correspondence between original and reproduction, there could have been considerable leeway in the deWnition of a type. Figures that appear quite diVerent to our demanding eyes could have been recognized as members of a type because of the recurrence of certain, vaguely deWned features: hands held in front of the naked Venus; a certain stance, or angle of contrapposto; hands held up to bind a Wllet round the head of a muscular, unclothed youth. Insofar as the sources discussed above are concerned with type or schema, they refer only to broad characteristics that will be instantly recognizable to the Roman viewer (or reader). However, that in itself does not necessarily suggest imprecision in their idea of iconographical types. It would be diYcult to Wnd precise written references to types in the modern world, yet the demand for accuracy in reproductions is high, except in self-consciously sketchy genres such as cartoons and caricatures. It is when we look at the reproduction of speciWc motifs in Roman art that we see both a concern with consistency of iconographical type, broadly deWned, and a Xexibility as regards the detail. What marks the type apart from other representations of the same subject is the repetition of certain elements in certain positions (again, like the hands of the Venus Pudica). The list of repeated forms may be quite long: even very subtle details may be reproduced in many versions,

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so there is no straightforward process of simpliWcation; but at the same time it may only take a few standard features to constitute the basic iconographical schema. The point here is similar to Claridge’s view of sculptural copying: although very close copies can be produced, faithful adherence is not usually considered necessary. Figure-types provide the artist’s starting point; but Wdelity to an archetype is not required. It is the vague ‘schema’ that is reproduced. But why adhere to a schema at all? For all their Xexibility, Roman artistic motifs are diVused with a consistency which is not matched in, say, classical Greek art, or European neoclassical art. We might appeal to the aesthetics of the Roman craftsman, ancient expectations of what art was supposed to be, ideas of originality, the composition of workshops and the demands of mass-production. We do not know enough to pursue these lines far. But the usual preliminary answer is a technical one: it involves a shadowy medium of transmission called the ‘copy-book’. Roman artists must have routinely drawn upon repertoires of motifs. As in the case of copying, there was a habit of imitation and continuity which was only disrupted when a particular need for change arose. Only a mechanism such as pattern-books could have facilitated the diVusion of types across the Empire and through centuries.60 No copy-books survive, however, nor is there any reference to them in surviving texts.61 We do have some evidence for the ostensibly accurate copying either of models or of original works of art. There are numerous references in classical literature to paradeigmata, models or patterns produced by artists and especially architects. The term appears several times in this sense in Roman Imperial texts.62 We can also see how certain motifs were transmitted through the manuscript tradition: one extreme case is an image of Aratus with a muse that appears on a third-century mosaic and again on a twelfth-century manuscript of his work.63 We can actually see the preparatory outlines traced on the Vatican Virgil and on the Ilias Ambrosiana the barest guidelines seem to indicate the 60

See e.g. J. M. C. Toynbee, Art in Britain Under the Romans (Oxford 1964) 10–11; B. Andreae, Motivgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu den ro¨mischen Schlactsarkophagen (Berlin 1956) 17; R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Hellenistic–Byzantine Miniatures of the Iliad (Ilias Ambrosiana) (Olten 1955) 18. 61 A series of Egyptian Late Period preliminary drawings on papyrus, held in Berlin, represents a quite separate artistic tradition, where grid-lines aided reproduction. Pliny, NH 35.145 refers to ‘preliminary drawings’—‘liniamenta reliqua’; but these are pentimenti or sketches on the unWnished panel itself, not separate drawings. 62 Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 204–15; note esp. Plutarch, An Vitiositas ad Infelicitatem SuYciat 3 (Moralia 498 e). The word tupos may have had similar implications, but has particular connotations of moulding: see Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art, 272–93. 63 Bianchi Bandinelli, Hellenistic–Byzantine Miniatures, 18, Wgs. 1 and 2.

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recomposition of motifs copied from an earlier book.64 But these signs of the artist’s method represent an extreme of Wdelity in the imitation of models. Much more common was the process of abstraction whereby the artist need only be concerned with reproducing the salient features of a Wgure-type. The abstraction of important characteristics could take place at various stages. The lost copy-books could have contained simple sketches, perhaps with important features explicitly marked (as on one preliminary portrait-sketch from Egypt).65 They could have been more detailed, in which case it was the artist who selected the principal elements in the composition. Or there could have been a very slow process of modiWcation as the motif was diVused through pattern-books and artworks in diVerent media. Certain portable media like ceramics could have transmitted images as eVectively as books. And to some extent repertoires of motifs could have been transmitted in the minds of artists and passed on by demonstration. Given the uncertainty surrounding all these possible mechanisms it is perhaps more appropriate to think very broadly of a ‘copy-book process’ rather than trying to imagine the media of transmission in a concrete way. Whatever the stages in the process, we can be sure of the outcome. Certain Wgures became widespread, retaining shared elements but ultimately diVering in form and conception from their archetypes. This process of selection and transformation comes into focus when we look in particular at statue-types. The modes of reproduction ensure adherence to distinctive elements of a statue-type, but often with an obvious disregard for the form of the original. The Sandal-Binder Venus is clearly recognizable in its essentials: a naked woman twists down towards her right to remove or adjust a sandal on her raised left foot. The torsion of the body is balanced by her extended left arm. But while the type may be recognizable, it embraces a multitude of variations (there are over 180 examples in bronze, marble, and the minor arts—more than for nearly any Greek statue).66 There may have been a famous original unkown 64

Ibid. 92–4. S. Walker and M. Brierbrier, Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (London 1997) 122–3, no. 118. This is a reused portrait panel, mid-2nd cent. ad; the sketch in black ink shows outlines of bust and basic details; inscriptions perhaps refer to the colour of the stripe on the subject’s tunic, her necklace, her eyes (instruction unclear), her hair (to be thick), and something to do with ‘two colours’. The sketch is apparently intended to guide the painter. Walker believes that the end product can be identiWed in the same collection, the Phoebe Hearst Museum in California. 66 The most extensive study is that of E. Ku¨nzl, ‘Venus vor dem Bade: ein Neufund aus der Colonia Ulpia Traiana und Bemerkungen zum Typus der ‘‘Sandalenlo¨senden Aphrodite’’ ’, BJ 170 (1970) 102–62; see also D. M. BrinkerhoV, Hellenistic Statues of Aphrodite: Studies in the History of their Stylistic Development (New York 1978) ch. 4, 70–97. For overviews of the type and its study see LIMC vol. 2/1, 57–8; C. M. Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art (Ann Arbor 1995) 83–5. 65

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to us.67 But there is no obvious desire to replicate that original. One well-known example, the ‘Venus in bikini’ from Pompeii (Fig. 43) has its own individualizing decoration: gilding and metal ornamentation.68 But among the many variants Fig. 43. Individualizing decoration on Venus statuettes of the ‘Sandalbinder’ type demonstrates that behind their creation there was no desire to replicate a well-known original. (Polychrome marble statuette of Venus with Priapus. From the House of the Venus in Bikini, Pompeii I.11.6. Before ad 79. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 152798. H: 0.62 m.)

67 Some have suggested Polycharmus’s ‘standing Venus’ mentioned in Pliny NH 36.35; see BrinkerhoV, Hellenistic Statues of Aphrodite, 73, 95–7. 68 From House of the Venus in Bikini (House of Maximus) in Pompeii, I.xi.6. Now in Naples, Museo Nazionale, inv. 152798.

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there are some striking departures from the apparent form of the statuary original. Many of the reproductions have the Wgure’s hand resting upon a pillar or support. Ku¨nzl takes this to be a technical necessity for marble replicas, and where the same feature occurs in bronze he considers it merely to represent the inXuence of marble: the original was a bronze statuette, gracefully poised, without support.69 But the position of the Wgure’s left arm in most of the versions—held forwards with the wrist bent and the hand hanging down (Fig. 44) is the pose of an arm with support. BrinkerhoV is surely right to see the frequently represented prop as a feature of the original, in whatever medium.70 What we Wnd, however, is that this feature is often omitted, and even if the isolated Wgure is aesthetically more pleasing to the modern viewer, it makes little anatomical sense.71 Why then should it disappear from some replicas? It would seem that the artists in these cases, or the creator of the patterns or models on which they relied, abstracted those salient features which constituted the basic sche¯ma. The support was recognized as a functional addition to marble statues and was edited out of representations in other media. We seldom Wnd it, even in representations that are explicitly statuesque (like the Mars in the House of Venus Marina). So although the support was part of the original composition of the Sandal-Binder, the ‘copy-book process’ of typological abstraction (whatever mechanisms that actually involved) led to the disappearance of the support in some versions. In other cases it remains: the artist may have included it consciously, or may have used a model which included it as one of the salient features. A more surprising modiWcation for the sandal-binder is the disappearance of the sandal. She is actually more likely to be a sandal-unbinder (Sandalenlo¨serin), but she was certainly conceived as doing something with her sandal. It makes less sense that she should just be reaching to touch her bare foot. Yet on at least thirteen of the bronzes the sandal was omitted (it is also absent from Wve marble works and twelve terracottas, but could have been painted on).72 It may have been the ‘narrative’ focus of the scene, but it was not a very prominent feature to survive in the replica tradition. A second well-documented Greek statue which also has numerous reproductions in diVerent media, the Sauroctonos or ‘Lizard-Killer’ of Praxiteles (Fig. 45), displays this process of selection even more strikingly. For here we can go further than positing the characteristics of the statuary original. We can be pretty sure 69

Ku¨nzl, ‘Venus vor dem Bade’; 115, 126–7, 130–4, 136. BrinkerhoV, Hellenistic Statues of Aphrodite, 78–9. 71 In some cases the prop may have been lost subsequently, but not in all: see Ku¨nzl, ‘Venus vor dem Bade’, Beilage for statistics; there is no obvious sign of a support on e.g. B8, B24, B27, B35 in Ku¨nzl’s catalogue; B35 is from Herculaneum and preserves its ancient base, without a prop attached. 72 Ibid., Beilage and 110. Both of these omissions begin early, on late Hellenistic replicas. 70

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Fig. 44. The ‘Sandal-binder’ type was probably intended to include a prop for the Wgure’s left arm, but this feature is often omitted. (Bronze Wgurine of Venus. From Herculaneum. Before ad 79. Museo Nazionale, Naples, 5133. H: 0.175 m.)

that the thirty or so73 representations of a languid, S-curved youth aiming to spike a lizard on a tree or pillar are derived, ultimately, from the marble statue by Praxiteles, described by Pliny in NH 34.70: ‘fecit et puberem Apollinem subrepenti lacertae comminus sagitta insidiantem, quem sauroctonon vocant’ (‘he also made a youthful Apollo lying in wait for a lizard creeping towards him, 73

Just over thirty, including seven coin types. See W. Klein, Praxiteles (Leipzig 1898) 108–11 (in note), augmented by G. Horster, Statuen auf Gemmen (Bonn 1970) 83–91. Generally on the type see also LIMC vol. 2/1, 199.

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Fig. 45. Marble statue of the ‘Apollo Sauroctonos’. (From Roman Italy. After original by Praxiteles, mid-fourth century bc. Louvre, Paris, MA441. H: 1.49 m.)

which they call sauroctonos’). Here is an indisputably famous Greek statue: once again it has a Greek title. The sculptural copies diVer somewhat in the eyes of connoisseurs (and have fuelled an intricate, almost philological criticism aimed at reconstructing the lost work of one of history’s greatest sculptors), but they are basically extremely similar.74 It is true that Martial (who mentions a statuette with this sche¯ma among other signa in precious and base materials in his ekphraseis of ‘apophoreta’ or Saturnalia gifts) does not even mention 74

Klein, Praxiteles, 111–13.

246 the private sphere Praxiteles.75 But the epigram is headed ‘Sauroctonos Corinthius’: the Greek label again and the stereotypical material for connoisseurs—Corinthian bronze. In fact he need say no more. It is instantly clear what he is talking about. Against this background it is hard not to see these copies, for a change, as deliberate evocations of the famous original, which is not to say that exact replication is an aim, nor that the prestige of the famous work could not have been subordinated to considerations of decor or the general cultural ambience of the new context. However, while the same may be said of representations in other media—on coins and gems—the artists who produced these images were demonstrably not always concerned to preserve the precise form or sense of the original, but merely the basic features of the sche¯ma in more or less detail. If, besides the basic pose of the Wgure, the artist has a sketch or visual checklist emphasizing salient characteristics, several adaptations are likely to occur. Some elements may be dropped from the repertoire; the syntax of the Wgure may be disrupted so that the elements no longer make logical sense (as with Venus’ sandal; this is also frequently observed in the ‘diVusion of classical art’ in other lands76); and some elements may be adapted in a way that makes more sense in context but does not correspond to the form of the original. We Wnd a mixture of these changes on gems representing the Sauroctonos.77 First, in all those examples preserving the tree, this is no longer subject to the restrictions of marble or even bronze in real sculpture: it becomes a thin, willowy branch.78 On several coins and gems the tree is replaced by a column. This variant may represent an important copy or a diVerent version of the theme— perhaps a cult statue—but this variability nevertheless testiWes to the perceived lack of importance in deWning a type.79 The other variable feature which implies the importance of present context over adherence to an original statue is the size of the lizard. It generally tends to be larger on the gems than on the sculptural copies (though usually not unrealistically so), and on one second- or thirdcentury jasper from Aquileia, admittedly with rather coarser features than many, the lizard has been schematized into a small alligator, hovering with splayed legs next to the tree.80 The artist here at least is making the meaning of the scene as clear as possible, though it could be argued that this is a way of signalling ‘The Sauroctonos’ as such, rather than emphasizing the action depicted. More puzzling are the glass-paste intaglio now in Leiden and the coins of Apollonia ad Rhyndacum from which the lizard itself is missing. It is certainly a very small detail, marginalized because it is attached to a tree or column that is 75 76 77 79

Martial 13.172: ‘Crafty boy, spare the lizard creeping towards you; it desires to die by your Wngers.’ J. Boardman, The DiVusion of Classical Art in Antiquity (London 1994) esp. 7–8. 78 Horster, Statuen auf Gemmen, 83–91. Ibid. 83–7, pls. 17–19.1–2. 80 Ibid. 87–9. Ibid. 85, pl. 18.1.

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usually only a functional part of the original sculpture, but it does seem to be an indispensable part of the sche¯ma if the sche¯ma is to be understood in its original sense.81 The implication of these examples is not that artists often misunderstood statue-types. It is true that the original sense might be lost, but, it would seem, only because the process of transmitting types highlighted speciWc characteristics rather than elevating the fame of the original or valuing faithful reproduction. Certainly, statue-types could be reproduced in the most intricate detail (gems in particular are often virtuoso works, and were regarded as such in antiquity). Such detailed representations may have conveyed even subtle stylistic traits of lost Greek statues. The work of those classical archaeologists who adapted the methodology of literary criticism to ‘copy-criticism’ is not necessarily ill-founded, nor need the artist’s ignorance of or lack of regard for an archetype have rendered his reproductions inaccurate. But in most cases the process of reproducing types appears to have been a much more Xexible, and less sharply motivated practice. The evidence of provincial art, notably RomanoBritish art, reinforces the impression that typology involved only the essentials of a particular Wgure. Repeatedly we Wnd images that use the classical iconographical repertoire but depart from it in style, technique, proportion and composition. Most sculptors would have been familiar with expectations of what a statue should look like, yet even among the Graeco-Roman works of Italy we Wnd sculptures that have all the essential features of a recognizable type but which do not look right; one Venus Pudica in the Museo Nazionale Romano, for example, is conventional, and carefully polished and gilded or painted, but its head is obviously too large for our approval.82 These few examples are rich and well documented sources for an undoubtedly much more complex process of transmission and reproduction of Roman artistic motifs. Though we can only speculate about the nature of this process, the evidence apparently supports Claridge’s view of sculptural reproduction. Where, then, does this leave the statue-type? Does the identiWcation of a statuary archetype mean anything for our studies? One further observation is necessary. While the ‘misunderstanding’ or loss of meaning of the original statue may imply that the archetype is simply not relevant, the schematization of the statue-type may also reXect the fame and familiarity of the work from which it is descended. This is easier to accept in the diVusion of sculptural motifs in other media, for in this case there is simply no 81

Ibid. 87, 89 and pl. 19.3 and 4. L. Lacroix, Les reproductions de statues sur les monnaies grecques: la statuaire archaı¨que et classique (Paris 1949), 306–9 (coins from Domitian to 3rd cent. ad). 82 Rome, Museo Nazionale, inv. 125: see A. Giuliano (ed.), Museo Nazionale Romano: le sculture, vol. 1.2 (Rome 1981) 320–1, no. 28 (found in the Tiber, and, according to Emanuela Paribeni, intended ‘for a not very exacting or reWned clientele’).

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possibility of an exact copy and the images are generally small. It is harder to see how a statue of the Sauroctonos could lose the lizard and retain its original signiWcance as a copy: the omission would be too obvious. But a gem or a coin depicting a recognizable Wgure of this type could allude to the famous original without needing the narrative detail. The type means Praxiteles; why bother with killing lizards? The motif acts as a trigger for broader cultural associations. More generally, even if the statue-types that appear so frequently in all artforms had lost their association with an original work of art, they continued to be used in sculpture and many would have been recognizable as ‘statuesque’ body types. Some of the Venus-types like the Venus Pudica are so simple and widespread that it would be foolish to link them with an imagined original statue. And yet a great number of sculptures of Venus fall into those few types (this, as we have seen, is especially noticeable in the case of the Venus-portraits). Again, Pausanias cannot identify the archetype of the naked Graces, but he knows that it is the sort of thing that frequently appears in sculpture and painting. Furthermore, as we have seen in funerary portraiture and in the depiction of gods on Roman lamps, other statuesque motifs are used alongside typology to make Wgures look like statues, as the context demands. This restriction of meaning, pinning a type down to the medium of sculpture, serves diVerent functions in the examples discussed in Chapters 3 and 6. But in some cases it may be used to emphasize allusions to statues as works of art in particular.83 Gem-engraving perhaps oVers the most plausible evidence for this sort of allusion. The ‘statues on gems’ studied by Horster often have very pronounced groundlines, frequently involve statue-types with relatively distinctive, less generic poses, and although the Sauroctonos’ tree may not resemble a real statuary prop, the corresponding elements in some of the other types are sturdier.84 Perhaps a third meaning of the word signum—‘seal’ or ‘signet’—made recognizable statuary motifs a particularly appropriate subject for gems! Leaving aside the artistic prestige of particular statues, coins as we have seen emphasized the statuary character of Wgures using the motifs of aedicula and pedestal. It is worth noting that the Sandal-Binder is represented on Greek coins of the Roman Empire together with her support.85 Sometimes the support is a dolphin, sometimes a tree-stump; it hardly matters; the important thing is that 83 Cf. Richter, Ancient Italy, 68–9 for statuary images on gems; J. M. C. Toynbee, Roman Medallions (New York 1944) 212–28 dealing with medallions. 84 See esp. Horster, Statuen auf Gemmen, 49–54, pl. 9 (Apollo Citharoedus)—support all the more signiWcant because it does not match known sculptural copies. The ancient fame of statues like the Sauroctonos or the Diadumenos (ibid. 67–71), rendered on gems with great and perhaps often accurate detail, also suggests at least occasional allusion to a well known original. 85 Ku¨nzl, ‘Venus vor dem Bade’, 161, F14; LIMC vol. 2/1, 58, nos. 474; vol. 2/2, 46 (Aphrodisias and Apollonia).

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a support is inserted, or left in; it is no longer a technical feature of a sculptural original which is mistakenly omitted from the basic sche¯ma; it is now a positive indication that this is a statue, presumably a cult statue that for some reason is associated with the religion and civic identity of the city concerned. Images of Greek statues were transmitted through the typological practices (or inertia) of artists in the Roman period. In some cases the reference may be deliberate; in other cases not. Sometimes the ambiguity of a statue-type was restricted using the ‘vocabulary’ of the statuesque. Sometimes the presumed statuary originals of a type appear to have had no relevance to the image in its new context. Once again we see motifs drifting into and out of often poorly deWned categories. It does not do justice to these images to say deWnitively that they either are or are not deliberate ‘copies’. This is analogous to deWning some phrases in our language, exclusively, as either quotations or cliche´s.

private and public The discussion of copies and typology has taken us away from the subject of Roman decorative statuary in the private sphere, for its relevance extends beyond ancient notions of Wne art, collecting and connoisseurship. Typology is crucial for our more general appreciation of the imagery of statues in Roman art. I now want to return to the statues of Roman houses and villas, but not as an insulated sphere of sculptural production. As I have already suggested the statues encountered in these places were not straightforwardly diVerent from the religious images, honoriWc portraits, funerary memorials and so on. Let us therefore consider some of the kinds of statuary that appeared in domestic settings and their functional and formal relationship with the material examined in earlier chapters. The tastes and demands of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have ensured that precise provenances are known for relatively few of the statues and other sculptures that once adorned Roman villas in Italy. Yet the assemblages that have been partially reconstructed, notably by Richard Neudecker, allow us to envisage a generic context for the thousands of villa-sculptures that survive in modern collections. We are dealing here largely with works of ‘idealsculpture’—idealized images that draw upon the classical tradition to represent subjects from Graeco-Roman myth and religion. Many pieces can be related to the world of Dionysus—satyrs, maenads, nymphs and the god himself—and related Wgures such as centaurs. Certain Olympian gods are common: Venus (and Cupid), Minerva, Apollo and Diana, Hermes. Others like Juno and Jupiter are less popular; Hercules makes a regular appearance. Statues representing these subjects often belong speciWcally to the Hellenistic tradition (especially images of

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Venus and Dionysiac Wgures) and they are accompanied by decorative reliefs and herms of similar character.86 We Wnd in addition various athletic Wgures, animal sculptures and diVerent sorts of portrait to which we shall shortly return. Sculptural assemblages of a similar kind evidently also appeared in more restricted urban contexts such as the houses at Pompeii where, for example, the House of the Vettii produced, among other Wgures, small free-standing sculptures of Priapus, Dionysus, and satyrs. Literary sources conjure up an ambience of reWned and cultured leisure in Roman villas (which the smaller houses must have imitated in their gardens) that was furnished in reality by such sculptures as those that survive.87 There seems to be a world of diVerence between this largely light-hearted and certainly apolitical de´cor and the sculptural trappings of Roman public life such as the honoriWc portrait statues with which we have been largely concerned. The apparent contrast is engendered not only by the thematic emphasis of sculpture in the domestic sphere but also by formal diVerences: the consistent reliance on earlier Greek stylistic and iconographical models (I shall say no more about ‘copying’ at this stage), and the sense in which the ideal sculptures—or speciWcally the full statues—in this domain tend not to draw attention to their own artiWce; in particular such statues generally lack the substantial bases that were, as we have seen, deWning characteristics of statues in public. These sculptures peopled their luxurious landscape.88 The notion of a world of Greek culture removed from Roman public life is not a modern Wction: it is well attested in ancient literature.89 But it is not quite accurate to suggest that the nature of sculpture in Roman villas allows a sharp line to be drawn between public and private life. In particular the imagery of religion bridges the gap. The repertoire of gods and goddesses encountered in villas may be selective: some were more at home in the garden than the forum. That distinction of habitat is reXected in forms of the divine images encountered here: a lolling Bacchus Wts more comfortably than an enthroned Jupiter. But in spite of doubts about the degree of religious intent that might have motivated such displays, the question still presents itself. We have to make an eVort to assert any categorical distinction between public religion and the religiosity 86

Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 31–9; note statistic based on his catalogue: 31. P. Zanker, Pompeii: Public and Private Life (Cambridge, Mass. 1998) 135–203. On the structure and de´cor of Pompeian houses (and villas) see also J.-A. Dickmann, Domus frequentata: anspruchsvolles Wohnen im pompejanischen Stadthaus (Munich 1999) esp. 309–12 (on atria and otium) and 348–58 (on house and villa gardens and sculpture). 88 Cf. Neudecker’s description of the mythological sculptures in the large peristyle of the Villa of the Papyri as ‘staVage of an aurea aetas’: Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 112. 89 The most sustained and elaborate Imperial expression is perhaps to be found in Statius’ poem on the villa of Pollius Felix at Surrentum (Silvae 2.2), though conspicuous retreat from public life did have particular advantages under Domitian. 87

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apparent in private sculpture.90 And once again the ambivalence of the word signum hinders the attempt at constructing exclusive categories. The typical sculpture of Roman villas might also be found in more obviously public places. For ideal sculpture graced, for example, real sanctuaries, theatrical fac¸ades and bath complexes. Baths are an interesting case, occupying a liminal position between public life and private de´cor. In iconographical range their sculptural decorations resembled those of villas with images.91 They encompassed similar elements of religiosity and personal cultivation (here involving the care of the body as well as the mind). What these similarities suggest is not that there was no diVerence in the character of public and domestic sculptural assemblages but that the distinction is complex and reXects the diVering contribution of particular Greek sculptural traditions to diVerent spheres of activity or sculptural settings in the Roman Empire. It is not just a matter of private art bleeding into the public domain. A common heritage was adapted to settings that were diVerent but need not be diametrically opposed. Conversely, we shall observe shortly the intrusion of ‘public’ sculpture into the domestic setting in what is perhaps a rather more self-conscious fashion. The picture I have so far presented of the sculptural furnishings of the private sphere is somewhat distorted, for it omits one important class of sculpture— portraiture—that occupied all areas of Roman life. It is possible of course to make distinctions between public and private portraiture—between family images, often in the form of busts, and portraits exposed in public spaces and buildings, or at least in the semi-public contexts of sanctuary or tomb. We might also attempt to separate the galleries of famous personages in the past, particularly Greek Wgures, from the more immediate social and political signiWcance of contemporary Romans’ portraits.92 We shall return to some of these distinctions. But while there is some merit in observing them none can be consistently upheld in precisely these terms. There is plentiful evidence for the display and veneration of imperial portraits in the private sphere: the house or villa was not exclusively devoted to family images.93 The bust form was also used for portraits in public places and full statues were employed for representations of distinguished Greeks and evidently for family images. The word imago is frequently used to describe all kinds of portrait images in public and private contexts. We Wnd fewer references to portrait statues as such, but the vocabulary of statuary 90 See Ch. 6 and note esp. Touchette, The Dancing Maenad Reliefs; Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 31–9 cautiously plays down the religious signiWcance of private sculptures. 91 Generally see: H. Manderscheid, Die Skulpturenausstattung der kaiserzeitlichen Thermenanlagen (Berlin 1981); J. DeLaine, The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome (Portsmouth, RI 1997). 92 Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 64–91 deals in separate sections with images of intellectuals etc. (‘imagines illustrium’) and ‘Roman portraits’, the latter subdivided between private and imperial portraits. 93 Ibid. 84–91.

252 the private sphere that we have scrutinized does not accommodate subtle distinctions between types of portrait. On the other hand, it is interesting that Pliny the Elder isolates his discussion of portraits in private settings at the start of Book 35 of the Natural History, which deals with painting. Here a discussion of the ‘novelty’ of setting up gold, silver, or bronze images in Roman libraries of ‘those whose immortal spirits speak to us in these places’ follows his famous account of ancestral images: there is no fundamental distinction between the two (uplifting) kinds of portrait—family images and (sometimes Wctional) representations of past intellectual giants.94 Some of these points are illustrated by the remarkable Wnds from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and the portraits from that site also help us to present a rather more reWned account of the relation between domestic and public sculpture. The villa does not warrant attention because it is typical of the Roman use of sculpture (it is exceptional as an archaeological source and was exceptional in antiquity for its wealth and possibly its de´cor), but because it oVers a rarely paralleled example of a largely intact range of sculpture in a speciWc location. No matter how individual the motivation was for the display of sculpture, we can expect it to respond to more general Roman values and expectations. The Villa of the Papyri was discovered in 1750 and explored in the Bourbon excavations under R. J. Alcubierre for the next fourteen years.95 It was never uncovered and remains buried some 30 metres underground. The sculptures recovered from the site were removed in the characteristic manner of the earlier excavations in the Bay of Naples, that is through precarious underground tunnels. Our knowledge about the Wnd-spots of the works as well as their setting is largely based on the far from comprehensive contemporary notes and plans of Karl Weber who conducted the work. He was operating under pressure and in diYcult circumstances, backWlling his own tunnels as he wormed through the site. Sculptures had been displaced in antiquity by the Xow of mud through the villa and perhaps even by subsequent tunnelling. So we should not expect his information to be precisely accurate; indeed excavations at the site since 1986 have established that it is not.96 This uncertainty fuels debates over the programmatic arrangement of art in the villa. Nevertheless for eighteenth-century archaeology the records are almost unparalleled in their modern value. The known sculptures of the villa were mainly located in three areas: the atrium and the small, square peristyle (more or less corresponding in location to the canonical layout of the Roman house) and an elongated large peristyle 94

Pliny, NH 35.9–10. Note that NH 35.12 explicitly contrasts the public and private spheres. For account of the excavations see C. C. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae (Cambridge 1998) esp. ch. 3, 77–106. 96 Ibid. 99–100. 95

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extending towards the north-west, reminiscent perhaps of a gymnasium or palaestra, or arguably a stadium.97 The most comprehensive evaluation of the sculptures and their context by M. R. Wojcik perhaps oVers the most accurate assessment of the original Wndspots although in a few cases this is still open to questioning, as are identiWcations of some of the portraits. The brief summary that follows is derived from her account as well as Neudecker’s.98 The atrium contained bronze statuettes of fauns, silens and cupids (most from around its impluvium). But it was also occupied by weightier subjects: busts of at least two, perhaps originally three Hellenistic rulers. The atrium opened onto the small peristyle. It is possible that the famous bronze statues of ‘dancers’ or ‘Danaids’ found in the portico of the large peristyle had been removed from bases Xanking the narrow pool in the centre of this area.99 Otherwise this area of the villa was adorned with herms and bronze busts including the only bronze ‘copy’ of the Doryphoros of Polyclitus reduced to a herm and ‘signed’ by the Athenian Apollonios: evidence either of the artist’s disregard for comprehensive replication or for the sheer familiarity of the model evoked? It was accompanied around the colonnade by a ‘Phidian’ head of an Amazon and several portraits resembling philosophers, the striking bust with long curled locks often identiWed as a Thespis (on the basis of a fragmentary inscription), and the probable portrait of a Roman. A minor adjacent room evidently held small labelled bronze busts of Demosthenes, Hermarchus, Zeno, and Epicurus. The small and large peristyles were connected by another room similar to a tablinum. Here were displayed idealized athletic busts, a marble statue of a striding Athena Promachos, a small bronze bust of Epicurus and several portraits of more or less individualized though unidentiWed Romans. Dating of all these sculptures is insecure and relies chieXy on stylistic and technical observations, but it would seem that a female bust is somewhat later than the other pieces, perhaps mid-Wrst century ad, and all the Roman portraits here may have been later additions to a collection of Greek-style images formed in the late Republic.100 The large peristyle produced more than forty works in bronze and marble counting the ‘Danaids’. These included statuary Wgures of ‘orators’ and other individuals in the mould of Greek ‘writer-thinkers’, as well as various deities. In the centre of the area were larger bronzes with conventional Dionysiac or natural 97 For interpretation as stadium see P. G. Warden, ‘The Sculptural Program of the Villa of the Papyri’, review article in JRA 4 (1991) 257–61, at 259; P. G. Warden and D. G. Romano, ‘The Course of Glory: Greek Art in a Roman Context at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum’, Art History 17 (1994) 228–54. 98 M. R. Wojcik, La villa dei papiri ad Ercolano: contributo alla ricostruzione dell’ideologia della nobilitas tardorepubblicano (Rome 1986); Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 105–8, 148–55. 99 I. Sgobbo, ‘Le danzatrici di Ercolano’, Rendiconti Napoli 46 (1971) 51–74. 100 Wojcik, La villa dei papiri, 135–9.

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subjects, together with a few more unusual specimens like twin bronze statues of runners or wrestlers. Finally two rooms separated from the core of the villa complex, beyond the large peristyle, yielded a marble statue of a youth and four bronze cupids. With its strange association of orators and intellectuals, Greek kings and Roman citizens, idealized youths and followers of Bacchus, Olympian gods and wild animals, it is little wonder that this extraordinary body of sculpture attracts so much attention and proves so tempting to those who would resolve its meaning. The uncertainty of the dating means that this collection (if it is a mainly uniWed collection) need not be as early as the mid-Wrst-century bc wall decoration; some of the sculptures seem to have been displaced, perhaps owing to renovations after the earthquake of ad 62, and identiWcation of some of the works is still a matter of individual speculation. But most commentators are agreed on one thing: that the arrangement of sculptures was carefully thought out and that it conveys an intellectual message or messages appropriate to aristocratic values in the late Republic or early Principate.101 It is certainly true that the range of subjects represented in the Villa of the Papyri contrasts with some of the ensembles that survive from other Pompeian sites (houses like the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, villas like the Villa of the Poppaei at Oplontis102) where an apparently blander collection of ‘rococo’ and Dionysiac sculptures evokes in a generalized and conventional manner an atmosphere of hellenized otium. Care was obviously taken in the construction of the villa’s de´cor if only in the choice of which types of sculpture belonged together—for example bronzes at the ends and centre of the large peristyle; Dionysiac subjects in the middle, along the euripus; marble herms Xanking it. Yet in spite of the wealth of evidence available and the optimism of its interpreters the nature of any programme intended in the speciWc arrangement of the sculptures remains far from clear. DiVerent authors allow for varying degrees of intentional complexity or leeway for ancient interpretation. Most agree that the sculptures and their setting evoke an Epicurean ideal of cultured retreat, that their content is in some sense didactic, and a thematic contrast is repeatedly identiWed in many of the sculptures—a contrast between intellectuals and men of action and political engagement, and perhaps by implication between otium and negotium. Distinctions of this sort receive diVering emphasis. 101 Key studies (which include references and discussion of other work) are: D. Pandermalis, ‘Zur Programm der Statuenausstattung in der Villa dei Papiri’ AM 86 (1971) 173–209; G. Sauron, ‘Templa Serena. A propos de la Villa des Papyri d’Herculaneum: les Champs-Elyse´es epicuriens. Contribution a` l’e´tude des comportaments aristocratiques romains a` la Wn de la Republique’, MEFRA 92 (1980), 277–301; Wojcik, La villa dei papiri; Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 105–20, 147–57; Warden and Romano, ‘The Course of Glory’. 102 Oplontis comparison: ‘The Course of Glory’, 261.

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For example Wojcik resists Pandermalis’s positive oppositions but in a more Xexible manner she still sees the display of sculptures as an amalgam of potentially conXicting values.103 Some of the speciWc interpretations are speculative and rather tendentious,104 and they have been partly informed by unfounded attributions of the display to L. Calpurnius Piso (the patron of Philodemus) or other famous Roman nobles of the late Republic. Even if we assume that the arrangement of sculptures is programmatic we should perhaps allow for ancient uncertainty about its meaning or for the potential that a largely eclectic assortment of images might permit discussion and reinterpretation.105 In any case the exact interpretation of any programme need not concern us and (perhaps rather perversely) we can ignore some of the detail aVorded by our sources and consider the implications of the villa’s sculpture for the relationship between public and private sculpture, statues and busts, and diVerent kinds of portrait. The Wrst point to note is that the intellectual dichotomy between public and private domains—between otium and negotium—is not a necessary apparatus for understanding why rulers, statesmen, orators and generals should be included among images of illustrious intellectuals from the past. Neudecker is particularly keen to avoid any unduly abstract and programmatic interpretation and sees the eclectic assemblage of works, particularly in the large peristyle, as a rather vaguer evocation of sanctuary, gymnasium and mythological landscape by turns.106 More speciWcally, however, his corpus of literary and archaeological material furnishes evidence for one common meaning and notional function underlying the variety of portraits in properties like the Villa of the Papyri. There is, for example, the verse inscription on the shaft of a headless herm from the villa at Casale MaruY (Frattochie). It was found in 1926 along with two satyrs, a Minerva and a female portrait statue. We can presume that there were also herms of Cato (probably Cato Uticensis) and Socrates.107 The inscription closely associates the images of Greek philosopher and Roman magistrate as appropriate and inspiring elements in the garden retreat, presided over by the muses: vatum digna m[odis veterum] monumenta virorum vites [aspicis et l]ucos violaria tecta. Graiorum vultus et musis dedita templa lilia poma rosae vites arbusta coronant 103

Wojcik, La villa dei papiri, 259–84. See e.g. Warden and Romano, ‘The Course of Glory’, 235 on the busts in the corners of the large peristyle: ‘The message may be unclear, but we have entered a world where human and divine have been combined, taking us beyond the merely human with intimations of immortality and possibly apotheosis.’ 105 See more recent argument by Sheila Dillon, ‘Subject Selection and Viewer Reception of Greek Portraits from Herculaneum and Tivoli’, JRA 13 (2000) 21–40. 106 Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 110–14. 107 R. Paribeni, NSc (1926) 282–6; Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 68 and 159, no. 17. Note also Dillon, ‘Subject Selection and Viewer Reception’, 38. 104

256 the private sphere Socratis os [habitumque] et vivida corda Catonis produnt signa satis ut genus [inde scias.]108 You behold the monuments of ancient men worthy of poets’ verses, you behold the vines and groves and secluded gillyXower-beds. Lilies, fruit-trees, roses, vines and plantations crown the faces of Greeks and temples dedicated to the muses. The face and character of Socrates and Cato’s living spirit are revealed by sculptures [signa], enough that from them you might know their kind.

Cato might not seem at home in this environment, but there is further evidence that the idyllic villa garden was not merely reserved for satyrs and philosophers. Portrait images of worthy Greeks and Romans were intended to be instructive, exemplary and representative of past wisdom and virtue. All kinds of celebrities, and not just intellectuals, could Wnd their way into the domestic sphere as examples of right behaviour. Seneca declares that he ‘venerates’ images of great men, by which he implies great thinkers, but he speciWcally includes the examples of Marcus Cato and Laelius Sapiens (a second-century bc general and statesman) among Greek philosophical heroes (of course the ideal aristocratic Roman should be soldier and statesman and intellectual combined).109 In his praise of the decorations of Pollius Felix’s villa at Surrentum Statius refers to his admirable and venerable wax sculptures, bronzes and paintings by famous artists and then, ora ducum ac vatum sapientumque ora priorum quos tibi cura sequi, quos toto pectore sentis, expers curarum atque animum virtute quieta compositus semperque tuus. The faces of leaders, poets and wise men of old whom you take pains to follow, whose example [lit. whom] you take completely to heart, free from cares, composed in your calm virtue and always in control of yourself.110

Moreover, in their exemplary function all these images are very similar even to the cherished family images traditionally displayed in or near the atrium of a house: not just the ancestral masks with which Harriet Flower is primarily concerned, but busts like those that the Barberini Togatus appears to be showing oV. Ancestral images of whatever kind appear to have served (as Flower observes for the Roman Republic) as an external conscience for the present generation 108 Note echo of Lucilius 486–8, ‘ut pueri infantes credunt omnia signa aenea vivere . . . credunt signis cor inesse in aenis’ (as infant boys believe that all bronze sculptures are alive . . . they believe bronze sculptures contain a heart’). 109 Seneca, Epistulae 64.9–10. 110 Statius, Silvae 2.2.69–72. For more references and general discussion of images of ‘illustrious men’ see Neudecker, Skulpturenausstattung, 64–74; P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley 1995) 203–10.

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and the embodiment of traditional values.111 But as well as shaming the scions of noble families they oVered a more positive stimulus to virtue, as writers from Polybius on make clear.112 They were also elevated as ethical exemplars in just the same manner as the portraits of famous men. (At this point it is also worth noting Flower’s compelling argument that the statues of summi viri in the Forum of Augustus drew upon the private imagery of aristocratic atria with their labelled ancestor masks.113) Already in the Wrst half of the Wrst century bc the character of Brutus in Cicero’s dialogue Orator is said to have a portrait of Demosthenes among his family images: ‘Demosthenes . . . cuius nuper inter imagines tuas ac tuorum . . . cum ad te in Tusculanum venissem, imaginem ex aere vidi’ (‘Demosthenes . . . whose bronze image I recently saw amidst your images and those of your family . . . when I visited you at your Tusculan villa’).114 This evidence simply suggests that portraits of Greeks and Romans, thinkers and Wghters, statesmen and ancestors or family relations could work in similar ways, enjoying an analogous position in the sculptural display of a villa in spite of the diVerences that did exist between them.115 It does not mean that the constructed oppositions that have been detected at Herculaneum did not exist, but it shows some of the associations between apparently diVerent types of sculpture and the necessity of thinking about them together rather than sorting them into academic categories or relying on programmatic oppositions to explain the juxtaposition away. The ancient literary sources display no preoccupation of this kind. Is it also hard to relate the sculptures to the ‘social structure’ of the villa in the manner adopted by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and John Clarke in their respective studies of Roman interior decoration?116 The attempt to distinguish, say, grand, public parts of the villa for the initial reception of visitors or clients and more privileged, luxurious, semi-private areas is partly thwarted by the fact that most of the villa as we know it, with its decorative bronzes, courtyards and library was dedicated to the life of learned leisure and it lacks the sort of diVerentiation in the decoration that has been perceived elsewhere. Moreover, the idea of the axis of fauces, atrium, tablinum, peristyle as a conventional spatial hierarchy through which a visitor penetrated the house and encountered its master is undermined by the possibility that the visitor actually entered this building through the large 111

H. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford 1996) 12–15. Polybius 6.53–4; for other sources see Flower, Ancestor Masks, 281–325 (Appendix A). 113 114 Ibid. 224–36. Cicero, Orator 110. 115 E. J. Dwyer, Pompeian Domestic Sculpture: A Study of Five Pompeian Houses and their Contents (Rome 1982) 128 makes a similar observation about houses, though the urban evidence is rather more scanty: ‘it is clear that the imagines illustrium, philosophers, poets, and prominent Romans, received similar treatment in the Pompeian house.’ 116 J. R. Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy 100 b.c.–a.d. 250 (Berkeley 1991); A. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton 1994). 112

258 the private sphere peristyle. That would not be an anomaly: it is what Vitruvius prescribes for suburban (or strictly speaking ‘pseudo-urban’) villas, explicitly contrasting them with normal houses.117 Nevertheless if some of the portraits of Romans found in the ‘tablinum’ area are family images (albeit from a later phase of the villa) we can perhaps suggest that they had a more or less traditional location close to the atrium.118 Despite these qualiWcations it is possible that consideration of social function may help us to reach some conclusions about the relationship between domestic sculpture and the statues of the public sphere. In this regard the subject-matter of representations, as we have seen, is not necessarily their most revealing aspect. In the literary sources the diverse portrait images found in villas are presented as if they are essentially the same kind of art. They oVer the same sort of visual and intellectual ediWcation. It is also diYcult to discriminate between various spheres of sculptural display. However, if we compare the sculptures of the Villa of the Papyri more speciWcally with some of the spaces of sculptural display addressed in previous chapters—in particular with the fora of Roman towns—it is perfectly clear that we are not dealing with the same sort of material. There is indeed a formal diVerence: in the villa portraits tend to take the form of busts. Most of the actual statues of the Villa of the Papyri seem to represent broadly speaking ‘mythological’ subjects. But even the portrait statues, one of a Roman subject, lack the base and inscribed dedication that are so characteristic of honoriWc statues in urban public places. Something similar applies to the images of gods; any of them might easily have stood in sanctuaries—there is nothing unusual about their iconography—but here they lack the customary dedicatory inscriptions. What is more signiWcant, however, is the functional diVerence betrayed by that contrast. The portraits and divine images of villas do have a social signiWcance because collectively they embody and express elite claims to social and cultural status. But individually they are divorced from the kinds of social exchange or interaction that trace relationships among people and their gods in the world of Roman public life. The diVerence is perhaps underlined by the general architectural setting of the peristyles in the Villa of the Papyri. The large peristyle in particular is strongly reminiscent of the Graeco-Roman gymnasium. The gymnasium was a place of intellectual as well as physical education and could contain portraits of athletes, orators, and philosophers as well as images of gods (often in the form of herms).119 The open space surrounded by a rectangular portico was a common 117

Vitruvius 6.5.3. Dwyer, Pompeian Domestic Sculpture, 127 and 128 notes the distinction in Pompeian houses, though few ‘ancestral portraits’ have been found there. 119 On all aspects of the gymnasium see J. Delorme, Gymnasion: ´etude sur les monuments consacre´s a` l’e´ducation en Gre`ce des origines a` l’Empire romain (Paris 1960) esp. 362–74 on sculptural and painted decorations. 118

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feature of its architecture. Pointing to the bronze Doryphoros herm in the small peristyle Wojcik Wnds an echo of the gymnasium here also120 and in fact, bearing in mind that libraries and baths were often incorporated within gymnasium complexes we can almost conceive the whole recorded area of the Villa of the Papyri as a kind of evocation of this setting for Greek culture and education—for paideia.121 However, as Cicero’s letters concerning the appropriate ornamenta for his villa-gymnasium should suggest, such elements in the Roman villa were, so to speak, domesticated varieties of Greek public art and architecture.122 In the real gymnasium one would have found inscribed honours, portrait statues with bases dedicated not only to great men of the past but also to contemporary magistrates, benefactors and kings. What is missing in the villa sculptures is the engine of social interaction that generated these art-forms in the Wrst place. A Wnal example of Roman villa sculpture demonstrates most clearly what even portraits in these contexts lack that sets them apart from works in diVerent settings. It is the case of conscious emulation of the public sphere to which I brieXy referred in Chapter 3: the Villa of the Aspri at Grottaferrata. The gallery of portrait statues from client provinces and individuals seems literally out of place, for both the lost togate statues and their formulaic inscriptions mimic honours in the public sphere, reminding us again of Pliny’s comment about ‘fora even in private houses’.123 The villa was perhaps an appropriate place to display these images that embodied relationships of patronage that were commonly played out in the wealthy Roman house. But what we Wnd in the exceptional statues of Grottaferrata is the privatization of honours that had developed their typical form in the public sphere. In appropriating this public language of statuary honours the Aspri and their clients ampliWed it. The gallery of statues that resulted probably exceeded the rewards that anyone, even perhaps members of the imperial family and certainly the celebrated Volusius Saturninus, could ever expect to receive in one public location.

conclusions The very idea of the ‘private sphere’ in the analysis of Roman art and architecture has rightly been questioned even by those who use it.124 Of course we can Wnd legal distinctions between public and private property—res publica and res privata—or a cultural distinction between otium and negotium, but it is hard to locate essential features of either domain. The diVerentiation of material 120 121 123 124

Wocjik, La villa dei papiri, 192–3. 122 Delorme, Gymnasion, esp. 331–2 on libraries and 246–50 on baths. See above, n. 24. Pliny the Elder, NH 34.17. e.g. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society, esp. 17–23; Gazda, Roman Art in the Private Sphere, 4–6.

260 the private sphere culture—of sculpture in this case—is also diYcult to pursue with any consistency. But the evidence reviewed above demonstrates that modern categories are partially underpinned by ancient material and attitudes, and that conventions could be distorted and exploited in creative ways just as the portrait gallery at Grottaferrata transplanted ‘public’ statuary into a domestic context to manipulate its conventional, prestigious associations. The distinction between statues and other sculptural forms is partly dissolved in the private sphere. We have seen ancient texts refer to all these works as signa and that term not only obscures any contrast between religious and nonreligious sculptures but also implicitly lumps statues as such with other sculptural forms. Yet in practice the distinction might be signiWcant because of the monumental trappings of the statue (its base and inscription) and the connotations they carried as much as any aesthetic contrast. In the Villa of the Papyri the more substantial bronze and marble statues exempliWed the wealth and resources of the patron and enhanced the impression of scale and grandeur in the villa, but the Roman concentration on faces and heads (also betrayed by some of the quotations above) meant that artist and patron had no scruples about reducing Greek portrait-types or even apparently famous statues like the Doryphoros to mere herms. This is one of countless illustrations of the Xexibility of Roman artistic typology and the instability of conceptions about art or art-collecting in the luxurious setting of the aristocratic home. My focus in this chapter as in previous chapters has been the conceptual history of statuary in Roman culture: semantic distinctions, ideals and expectations, the blurring of articulated distinctions between categories of sculpture. Texts and ideas also inform the following chapter but we shall also be Wnishing by considering an altogether more physical kind of engagement with statues.

eight

Touching Statues

The painter Giorgio de Chirico was fascinated by the remnants of classical sculpture. Famous fragments, statues and statuesque objects frequently appear in his ‘metaphysical’ scenes which preWgure the work of the surrealists. In his paintings and in his writings de Chirico imagined a world in which statues left their pedestals and joined the human race.1 The surprise of seeing statuary in unaccustomed places reveals the invisible barriers that usually keep it apart. We are most familiar with these barriers in the highly regulated environment of the museum and de Chirico reacts against its conventions when he imagines the ‘mysterious aspect’ of a statue in a real armchair, or looking out of a window, or in the unfamiliar context of a bedroom. Like Wilenski he invokes the ubiquity of statues in the ancient world, in this case to underpin his fantasy of nonmuseological settings: ‘Among the ancients one saw [the statue] everywhere: on the outside and inside of palaces and temples, in gardens and towns, in sea-ports and in the courtyards of houses.’2 This fantasy involves the mixing of the two populations, and, implicitly, contact between them. Physical contact with statues seems to activate the illusion of life in the lifeless artefact. Modern illusions or fantasies of this kind are explored at the start of Gross’s book The Dream of the Moving Statue.3 The person who ‘interacts’ with a statue, touching it as if it were alive, animates it just as the armchair does. Until relatively recently such imagined contacts belonged almost wholly in the intellectual domain of writers and artists. But increasingly the involvement of artefacts as agents in human relationships—not just passive objects of attention—has come to inform art-historical studies. A seminal work was David Freedberg’s The Power of Images, Wrst published in 1989. Freedberg’s shift of emphasis towards aVective responses to images is echoed in a variety of modern studies, notably Belting’s Likeness and Presence (which focuses on the Middle Ages) and the late Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory in Art and Agency. It has 1 Text in M. Fagiolo (ed.), De Chirico, il meccanismo del pensiero: critica, polemica, autobiograWa, 1911–43 (Turin 1985) 277–8. 2 Ibid. 277. 3 K. Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY 1992).

262 touching statues also reached the Weld of classical art, as is most obvious in the title of Andrew Gregory’s article, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, to which we shall return. It seems appropriate that this book, which takes as its focus all kinds of response to statuary, should end by emphasizing the importance of emotional and immediate relations between people and statues. Unlike Freedberg, however, I wish to insist as far as possible on the cultural speciWcity of the responses outlined below. I shall be dealing with transgressive encounters, reversals of the norm, and above all with the highly-charged symbolism of violence against portraits. But it is not enough simply to recover these phenomena from beneath the rationalizing and formalistic accounts of traditional art history; it would be distracting to strive as Freedberg consciously does (and not without some justiWcation) to explain the material with reference to ‘unreWned, basic, preintellectual, raw’ responses to art, responses which transcend culture.4 The representations and responses to be explored in this Wnal chapter diVer from much of the art and literature that we have already seen. But these things also belong to the Roman culture of statues. It is in the context of Roman society that they made sense, and it must be in that context that we attempt to explain them. It is important Wrst of all to modify de Chirico’s image of ancient statues that are not placed within ‘well deWned lines’. Despite the tendency already described to move the statue around and increase exposure to it, it remained a spectacle rather than an object for manipulation. Approaches to statues were controlled by their context, whether this was the palace, the temple, the garden or the house. In an architectural setting the statue was out of reach and, except in selfconsciously unusual cases such as that of the Farnese Hercules in the Baths of Caracalla, the viewer is usually expected or obliged to observe the sculpture from the front.5 Statues in public places were set up on pedestals (one of the barriers mentioned by de Chirico) and the main text was on the front of the base. Where bases of honoriWc statues survive in situ, as in the forum at Pompeii, they are generally arranged by the sides of the public space. Figures which approach cult images in painted landscapes such as the Yellow Frieze in the House of Livia do so at a respectful distance.6 We should expect our modern museographical rituals to be matched by a variety of rituals and norms of behaviour in Roman life. Sometimes, as with modern waxworks, there is an attempt in the Hellenistic tradition to obscure the boundary between art and life. We have seen this principle already in the illusionism of Pompeian houses; it animates baroque 4

D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago 1989), pp. xix–xx. 5 The Hercules holds an apple of the Hesperides behind his back. (Note however that connoisseurs defy this expectation by their thorough scrutiny: Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 3.6.3.) 6 Yellow Frieze: W. J. T. Peters, Landscape in Romano-Campanian Mural Painting (Assen 1963) 35–42, pls. 8–9.

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displays such as the Sperlonga sculptures or the Farnese Bull.7 Such sculptures are not obviously statuesque, and like the surreal, fantasy statues they share their own imaginary world with the viewer. But the boundaries remain, for example in the water that separates the viewer from such groups, and they continue to keep their distance.8 In fact, when we do hear about contact between people and statues it normally involves less spectacular works. It is obvious that people often touched statues for practical purposes: to make them, paint them, polish them, restore them, to prepare casts for copying, to treat the surface, to move or adjust them, and so on. Such mundane activities are almost completely ignored in the ancient sources. We touch many things in daily life, but to comment on that contact is to elevate the act to a higher level of signiWcance. Everybody took it for granted that statues were manufactured. When the process is described by the Christian Tertullian it is for a speciWc purpose: to illustrate the paradoxes that arise when manufactured objects are treated as gods on earth.9 At the same time, contact with statues by those who revered them is very frequently represented in ancient literature. It was a regular and familiar activity, and many of the sources mention it only incidentally. Yet it was also a special act with its own rules and assumptions.10 It is also connected with the notion of animation or immanence. In the framework of ritual people touched revered images (as they still do) in ways appropriate to human beings. They kissed them, crowned them, garlanded them and sprinkled them with Xowers. They clothed and anointed them. They left wax tablets on their laps (in the lap of the gods).11 7

Cf. Moormann, Pittura, 44 on illusionistic painting. On the bull: J. DeLaine, The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome (Portsmouth, RI 1997) 75–7, 265. 9 Tertullian, Apologia 12. 10 Cf. Gorky’s accidental infringement of the rules in his incorrect kissing of an icon: Freedberg, The Power of Images, 320–1. 11 Examples are numerous; a selection follows. Flowers, garlands, etc.: e.g. CIL 6.9797; 12.533; Juvenal 12.86–90; on the crowning and uncrowning of Marsyas in the Forum Romanum: Pliny, NH 21.8–9. Clothing and anointing, etc.: CIL 8.9052, 13–14; Ovid, Fasti 4.133–4 on women attending to the statue of Fortuna Virilis; will of Cominius Abascantus at Misenum: J. D’Arms, ‘Memory, Money, and Status at Misenum: Three New Inscriptions from the collegium of the Augustales’, JRS 90 (2000) 126–44, at 136, lines 16–17 (cleaning, anointing, and decorating with violets and roses). Coins, tablets, etc.: Lucian, Philopseudes 20; Juvenal 10.54–55 on the laps of cult images; ‘incerare’ may mean ‘to smear with kisses’ rather than ‘place wax tablets on’: see J. D. DuV (ed.), D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae XIV: Fourteen Satires of Juvenal, new edn. (Cambridge 1970) and OLD s.v. incero; further references in J. E. B. Mayor (ed.), Thirteen Satires of Juvenal with a Commentary 3rd edn., vol. 2 (London and Cambridge 1881) 84–5; otherwise for kissing: Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.94. Generally see also E. Kuhnert, De Cura Statuarum apud Graecos (Berlin 1883) 59–72 on Greek sources; H. S. Versnel, ‘Religious Mentality in Ancient Prayer’, in H. S. Versnel (ed.), Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World (Leiden 1981) 1–64; L.-A. Touchette, The Dancing Maenad Reliefs: Continuity and Change in Roman Copies (London 1995) 36 and n. 228; Steiner, Images, 106–13 (Greek statues). 8

264 touching statues Although such behaviour was doubtless universal—it has widespread parallels today, notably in Hinduism and not least in Christianity—it was also taken for granted; the extant references tend to reveal little about general attitudes to the touching of images, except when they have a very particular point to make, as when Cicero emphasizes the degree of reverence for a statue assaulted by Verres, whose mouth and chin were worn down from the kisses of devoted worshippers.12 Ultimately we know relatively little detail concerning the Romans’ approaches to their gods. So we need not expect to learn much about routine contact with statues, any more than we can study the attitudes of ‘the man in the street’ in any detail. The one major exception is the practice of iconoclasm which was both common and outstanding inasmuch as it disrupted the web of honour and veneration that surrounded the use of statues in the Roman world. Most of this chapter is devoted to the destruction of statues. But Wrst some comments are due about those other cases of disrespectful contact with statues which the sources, for one reason or another, deemed worthy of comment.

sex and violence Vandalism is the kind of contact with statues most familiar to our society. Were statues vandalized during the Principate? Hannestad believes so: ‘In fact vandalism against sculpture was a not uncommon problem, according to the Digests.’13 The Digests refer to the stoning of one’s father’s funerary statue ‘placed on a monument’: this, according to Labeo (died ad 10/11), was a matter of iniuria (injurious treatment), not sepulcrum violatum (violation of the tomb).14 The reference does seem to suggest that such vandalism was conceivable, but unlike some other judgements in the Digests it is not declared to be a response to a particular legal case. It is a judicial problem, a hypothetical case. That is not to say that such vandalism did not occur, but merely that the source uses this example for a further end: it is not intended as a document from real life.15 The senate voted Caesar and Caligula the honour of a bodyguard for their statues: surely this implies a threat? But in fact, this step must have been largely symbolic. The guard is an honour in itself. Caligula was also voted a personal 12

Cicero, In Verrem 2.4.94. N. Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture: Conservation, Modernization, Production (Aarhus 1994) 18 (in n. 19 he suggests that scholars have concerned themselves with vandalism only in cases of damnatio memoriae). 14 Digesta 47.10.27. 15 We also have references to the incidental destruction of statues, e.g. Tacitus, Historiae 3.7.1. 13

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guard, but this obviously does not imply that he had previously been left unprotected.16 The statues oVer the means to expand the honour, just as they represent in themselves the expansion of the ruler’s presence.17 In any case, the vulnerability of the imperial image is hardly representative of statues in general.18 The theft of statues is occasionally mentioned in literary fantasies19 and the threat was not unknown in reality: a statue-base from Cirta in Numidia records a man’s pious restoration of his grandmother’s statue which had been stolen— ‘furto ablatam’.20 Except in the last unusual case, the circumstances of which are unknown, it is clear that these examples do not correspond to the modern conception of common disrespect towards public monuments. At best they stress the symbolic power of statues and their potential to serve various kinds of public expression. Vandalism of statues in peaceful times may have been common. They may have suVered the sort of graYti that we encounter on Pompeian walls.21 But we do not know, and the sources are not concerned to tell us. Nor is violence against statues attached to any one idea; it has no single image, except perhaps when it comes to the iconoclastic violence discussed below. A more coherent yet complex picture emerges from sources concerned with sexual contact between people and statues. Not only is ‘agalmatophilia’—‘love for statues’—regarded as a transgressive anomaly (and therefore something worth talking about) but it also serves as a reminder that the statue is not alive for anyone but the likes of Pygmalion, and that Xirtation with statues—Xirtation with the idea of animation—is the limit.22 In his misogynistic sixth satire Juvenal describes the hideous behaviour of disgraceful Roman wives (6.308–13): . . . Pudicitiae veterem cum praeterit aram. Noctibus hic ponunt lecticas, micturiunt hic 16 Note W. Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge 1995) 14 on the tyrannical associations of bodyguards. 17 See K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge 1978) 221–4. 18 Cf. Tertullian, Apologia 29 which mentions the soldiers who guard the emperor’s image. But he too has his own concerns: his point is that the idols whom Christians are expected to appeal to do not aVord protection for the emperor’s statues, images and temples. 19 Lucian, Juppiter Confutatus 8, 16; Priapus: Martial 6.72; Anthologia Graeca 11.15.1 (Lucillius). 20 CIL 8.7063; Lo Sguardo di Roma 269. 21 On scurrilous graYti on the images of fallen tyrants see E. R. Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation of the Roman Visual Landscape’, in E. R. Varner (ed.), From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture (Atlanta, GA 2000), 9–26, at 14 (Nero with inscription ‘victo’ instead of ‘victori’) and 22 n. 61. Cf. also Cicero, Philippicae 14, implying violence as one cause of statues’ destruction. 22 On agalmatophilia: Freedberg, The Power of Images, esp. ch. 12, 317–44. J. Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the Real: Ovid’s Pygmalion as Viewer’, Ramus, 20 (1991), 154–68 esp. 167 n. 26 for other cases. Also M. Bettini, Portrait of the Lover (Berkeley 1999); Steiner, Images, ch. 4, 185–250, esp. 250.

266

touching statues eYgiemque deae longis siphonibus implent inque vices equitant ac Luna teste moventur inde domos abeunt: tu calcas luce reversa coniugis urinam magnos visurus amicos.

. . . when she passes the ancient altar of Pudicitia. Here they put down their litters at night; they piss here, and drench the image of the goddess with long jets, and ride on her in turn, while the moon witnesses their motions; then they go home. In the daylight you tread in your wife’s urine on your way to see your lofty friends.

‘This’, suggests Courtney, ‘was a danger to which statues were exposed.’ And perhaps that is true.23 But whether Juvenal is caricaturing the behaviour of real Romans or presenting a grotesque perversion of reality, his account is certainly not a document. It is intended (for whatever reason) as an invective against women; the passage is composed of rhetorical contrasts; the statue is the poet’s instrument for the depiction of immodesty and sexual impropriety, for the nighttime transgression by women of the day-time normality inhabited by men. And immodest acts with statues often seem to be used symbolically. In particular, nocturnal contact with statues is used to typify unusual sexual behaviour. According to Pliny the Elder (NH 21.9), the famous statue of Marsyas in the Roman Forum was crowned under cover of darkness by Julia the daughter of Augustus, and this is presented as an ostensibly obvious misdemeanor not unlike the scene conjured up by Juvenal: ‘apud nos exemplum licentiae huius non est aliud quam Wlia divi Augusti, cuius luxuria noctibus coronatum Marsuam litterae illius dei gemunt’ (‘among us [i.e. the Romans] there is no other example of this licence than the daughter of the DeiWed Augustus: that god’s letters lament the crowning of Marsyas during her nocturnal romp’).24 These sources give us insight into the sources themselves. Perhaps ancient authors are not especially concerned with the maltreatment of statues in itself. Or perhaps on the whole statues were not as vulnerable as we might assume. Cult images were generally preserved in temple buildings; public statues were elevated on substantial bases. And possibly legal retribution was a serious

23 E. Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London 1980) 111, listing also related references. In particular, note Juvenal 1.131 on the Egyptian ‘at whose image it is right [fas] not only to piss . . . ’), implying a strict prohibition in the case of some statues; see also SHA, Caracalla 5.7. See Reallexicon s.v. Genetalien 21 for general connotations of urinating on things or people. Curiously, Latin Papyrus VII in Geneva (see Ch. 4) contains the reference: ‘[Mer]curium Olympium sifon . . . ’ (line 28). J. Nicole, Un catalogue d’oeuvres d’art conserve´es a` Rome a´ l’e´poque impe´riale: texte du papyrus latin VII de Gene`ve (Geneva 1906) 26 hopes that this work did not suVer a fate that inspired Juvenal. 24 Cf. also the rites associated with the deity Mutinus Tutinus (or Priapus); though similar, they are rituals presumably excused by religion. However, once again our knowledge of such things comes from Christian writers who are openly concerned to discredit all aspects of pagan idolatry. See E. M. O’Connor, Symbolum Salacitatis: A Study of the God Priapus as a Literary Character (Frankfurt 1989) 24.

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deterrent; it must have been so in the case of imperial images.25 However, we need not assume that statues attracted violence for its own sake. If the reasons for modern vandalism are complex and hard to deWne, that does not mean that there are no reasons. Except in the case of accidents we need not assume that the Romans’ treatment of statues, their contact with statues and the damage they did to them, was random or gratuitous. That is most clearly demonstrated by the kind of violence towards statues that is most fully documented.

‘damnatio memoriae’ and spontaneous statue-destruction From the Wrst century bc until the end of the fourth century ad, in the city of Rome and also in the Empire, there was no generation that had not witnessed the symbolic destruction of statues and other portrait images.26 Many had participated. This was the practice most commonly referred to today as ‘damnatio memoriae’. In the strictest sense it involved the annihilation of a traitor’s social persona. The outcast who had fallen from power or favour was executed and anything that might preserve his or her memory or identity was erased. Property was sold oV or destroyed; the victim’s praenomen (Wrst name) might be lost to his family (as the Claudian gens lost the name Lucius27); burial could be forbidden; portrait images were destroyed; the name was removed from inscriptions.28 It is diYcult to Wnd a term that adequately embraces all the violent activities of this kind. I have used the word ‘iconoclasm’—appropriate because of its derivation from eikon (image, portrait) though it is more generally applied to a very diVerent kind of violence against religious images which occurred in eighthand ninth-century Byzantium. I shall also continue to use the terms damnatio memoriae or damnatio, but it must be stressed that this term meaning ‘condemnation of memory’ is a fairly modern invention. It is well suited to the kind 25

See Digesta 48.4.4–5 (the question of whether accidental damage amounts to treason). Cf. the story of Peter ‘healing’ the emperor’s statue in the New Testament Apocrypha: Acta Petri (The Acts of Peter) 11. 26 For a recent survey of the whole phenomenon of damnatio memoriae see C. W. Hedrick, History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin, Tex. 2000), p. xii and ch. 4, 89–130; E. R. Varner (ed.), From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture (Atlanta, Ga. 2000). 27 Suetonius, Tiberius 1. 28 On various sanctions with further references see Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’, 10 and 20 n. 15. We now have detailed insight into one case of oYcial damnatio—that of Piso (accused of Germanicus’ murder). Tacitus, Annales 3.14 and Dio 58.11.1 and 5 tell of the popular assault on his image before his oYcial condemnation. The recently published decree illustrates the rhetoric of senatorial condemnation and the various aspects of damnatio: W. Eck, A. Caballos, and F. Ferna´ndez, Das Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre (Munich 1996); M. GriYn, ‘The Senate’s Story’, JRS 87 (1997), 249–63.

268 touching statues of socio-legal annihilation with which we are concerned, and indeed it is based on ancient juristic phrases such as memoria damnata or memoriam accusare.29 Yet I also want to undermine any sense that the legal dimensions of this practice are of fundamental importance. I aim to present damnatio memoriae as a broader cultural phenomenon. Recent studies within rather diVerent disciplines have greatly developed our understanding of iconoclastic behaviour in the Roman Empire. In particular Charles Hedrick has presented a highly sophisticated account of memory, purge, and rehabilitation, concentrating particularly on late antiquity. Eric Varner is responsible for an exhibition and a catalogue devoted especially to the material remains of damnatio memoriae.30 Both texts are of the utmost relevance to what follows. In the past the general legal aspects of damnatio have received more detailed discussion.31 The range of punishments that are loosely associated with the term were applied to all kinds of individuals, some of whom are more famous for their downfall than for anything else. Frequently, however, we encounter damnatio in connection with the more famous and more graphic condemnations of fallen emperors. The emperor defeated by his enemy was declared publicus hostis—a traitor to the Roman state—and the usual legal measures might be ordered by the senate. We have very many mutilated inscriptions that bear witness to the widespread execution of the decree. But the most vivid impression is created by literary accounts of the actual destruction of images. The portrait of the emperor was ubiquitous, so the oYcially sanctioned destruction of this image aVected every part of the Empire with a massive spectacle of symbolic violence. The large and prominent statues of emperors in public places must have made a particularly striking impression when crowds pulled them from their bases and then, as we shall see, dismantled them, abused them, and dragged them through the streets. Such violence was inXicted upon the body of the emperor himself. But there was only one corpse, and thousands of statues. Statues gave greater exposure to the annihilation of the enemy, as they did to the emperor’s ruling presence before his fall. It was usual for the same fate to befall the emperor’s family. We associate the destruction of statues with the fall of rulers and the phenomenon is familiar today from the symbolic actions attendant upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern 29 F. VittinghoV, Der Staatsfeind in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit (Berlin 1936) 64–74; Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 135. (The term was used as the title of a dissertation by Schreiter-Gerlach in 1689.) 30 Hedrick, History and Silence. Exhibition at Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta and Yale University Art Gallery between September 2000 and March 2001: Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’. 31 See esp. RE 4.2059–62 (BrassloV); VittinghoV, Der Staatsfeind in der ro¨mischen Kaiserzeit; T. Mommsen, Ro¨misches Strafrecht (Leipzig 1899).

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Europe. Similar scenes occurred in Hungary in 1956, and also on the death of Salazar in Portugal. Further examples can be found in this and previous centuries and iconoclasm of this kind was common in other ancient civilizations.32 It is therefore tempting to see the statue-destruction of damnatio as one instance of a universal activity. Wherever images are employed to symbolize a regime or an individual they will be used symbolically, or some would say ‘magically’,33 to aVect the subject or express relationships to that person. This is no doubt true to an extent. But as I have already suggested the particular forms of iconoclasm discussed below belong speciWcally to Roman society. They arise from its structures and correspond to the normal Roman use of statues. It is important, as we shall see, not to bring certain prejudices to the study of Roman statue-destruction. Besides this, historical parallels tend to reinforce a tidy view of the subject that associates violence towards images almost exclusively with the rejection and fall of a ruler. It is true that the Roman imperial family received more images than anyone else. But unrelated individuals also suVered damnatio throughout the Empire. Sejanus is a particularly well-known example,34 but there were less signiWcant cases which are extremely revealing: some of these are discussed in the next section. Moreover, it is easy to overlook those occasions on which angry crowds, acting spontaneously, and not according to any oYcial decree, inXicted violence upon the emperor’s images. This happened to ‘good’ emperors as well as ‘bad’, but Roman history, largely shaped by the accounts of victors and survivors—irons out these irregularities. Only a few are mentioned, but it is hard to believe that there were not more: the statues of Poppaea in Rome; those of Tiberius in Gaul before his accession to power; Constantine’s also; and famously, the images of Theodosius and his family at Antioch in ad 387.35 Such acts of violence take the same form as ‘oYcial’ damnatio, but they belong to the Weld of what has been called ‘spontaneous statue-destruction’.36 In actual 32 Further comparisons esp. in Mayor, Thirteen Satires of Juvenal, 87 and Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 135; also Freedberg, The Power of Images, 246–82 and 378–428. On the ancient Near and Middle East: Z. Bahrani, ‘Assault and Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East’, Art History, 18 (1995), 363–82. For further bibliography see A. P. Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’: Responses to Portraits and the Political Uses of Images in Rome’, JRA 7 (1994), 80–99, 94–5, n. 63. 33 As suggested by Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, 96–7. The term ‘magic’ is rather ambiguous and it is diYcult clearly to conceive of what it means in eVect; however, see A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford 1998) for a sophisticated theoretical discussion of how such sympathetic ‘magic’ might be understood. 34 Juvenal 10.58–69. 35 Poppaea: Tacitus, Annales 14.61; [Seneca] Octavia 780–805. Tiberius: Suetonius, Tiberius 13. Constantine: Nazarius, Panegyricus Constantini 12 (Panegyrici Latini, Bude´ edn. vol. 2, 175–6). Antioch: John Chrysostom, De Statuis 21.11 and see below. Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, 95 suggests that the Tiberian example represents a response to the Emperor’s manifest feelings towards the exile. 36 Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, ch. 19, esp. 139–42.

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fact there is generally very little indication as to whether the destruction of statues mentioned in a literary source is ‘spontaneous’ violence or the result of a decree. It is usually the urban populace—the mob—who are said to carry out the destruction, but that need not make it spontaneous. When we hear of the fall of a ‘bad’ emperor, accompanied by mob violence, it is likely that an oYcial decree of damnatio was issued by the senate; the crowd may act simultaneously, or in anticipation of the decree, but they may also be serving as the agents of the senate.37 This point is crucial: as with so many Roman institutions, damnatio memoriae was, so to speak, delegated. We do have some evidence for centralization: the decree itself and the legal process;38 senatorial deliberations on the form of Commodus’ damnatio;39 a fragmentary Egyptian papyrus of ad 212 recording an edict of the prefect Baebius Iucinus, passing on the order from the senate for the damnatio of an unmentioned, unmentionable victim, who must be Geta.40 There is also a dedicatory inscription from Pannonia which records the mission of an oYcer41 sent to deal with troops who had refused to remove the imperial images of a defeated regime from their standards: ‘ad eradendum nomen saevissimae dominationis missus’.42 But the sources say little about military execution of the order, except where military images, in the barracks or on the standards, are concerned. In the sources it is the urban populace who assault the prominent public portrait statues (though we do not know who dealt with the inscriptions), and it was up to each individual or association of citizens to contribute to the common eVort of annihilation. Papyri have been found in Egypt from which Geta’s name has been erased.43 In theory at least, complicity might be enforced. According to the epitome of Dio 78.12.5, ‘if one so much as wrote Geta’s name, or even said it, he was immediately killed’.44 (No doubt Dio had looked forward to writing that sentence.) Tacitus records that the senate ordered the destruction of Messalina’s images in public and in private: ‘censendo nomen et eYgies privatis ac publicis locis demovendas’.45 (Very much later the Theodosian Code includes a similar order for the 37

Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, 95 brieXy mentions that the impulse for destructions came from above. He observes that the anticipation of a ruler’s fall, i.e. with a view to eVecting it, tends to be restricted to the army. 38 Dio (epitome) 79.17 on Macrinus’s reluctance to risk an oYcial damnatio of Caracalla; Tacitus, Annales 11.38.3; Dio 60.4.5 on Claudius’s resistance to an oYcial damnatio of Gaius; SHA, Maximini Duo 12.11 (senatorial order). 39 SHA, Commodus 18.12. 40 ¨ gyptische Urkunden aus den Staatlichen Museen Berlin. Griechische BGU 2056 in H. Maehler, A Urkunden, vol. 11, Urkunden ro¨mischer Zeit (Berlin 1968) 77–8; Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 137. 41 For diVering interpretations see S. Dusˇanic, ‘The End of the Philippi’, Chiron, 6 (1976), 427–39, at 435–6. 42 43 AE 1935, 48–9, no. 164; Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 136–7. Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 137. 44 Cf. [Seneca] Octavia 611: Agrippina’s damnatio imposed ‘mortis metu’ (‘by fear of death’). 45 Tacitus, Annales 11.38.3.

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damnatio of Eutropius.46) Private participation was expected. And there are often fewer surviving portraits of disgraced emperors—presumably the destruction was very thorough, though evidently not consistently so.47 At Ostia a troop of vigiles (Wremen or watchmen) was responsible for throwing into their latrine the statue-base of Diadumenianus, the son of Macrinus. A head of Domitian was found in an ancient well at Munigua in Andalusia.48 In all such cases central authority could only have been responsible for instructions and a few prominent exemplary actions. It was up to the Empire to follow that lead. We now recognize, especially in the light of Zanker’s work, that Roman imperial ‘propaganda’ functioned in a similar way.49 The widespread reproduction of centrally created imagery was, at Wrst, a response to the dominant ideology, and represented adherence to it. The destruction of images in public and private would have had a similarly cohesive eVect. The notion of public execution of justice was deeply ingrained in Roman culture, as Nippel illustrates.50 The devolution of violence was always familiar. However, the destruction of images might be seen to engender an unstable cohesion. If an emperor beneWted from the universal spectacle of his predecessor’s extermination, then he also had to recognize that his own successor could enjoy the same support in time. The irony was not lost on Tacitus, who has Vitellius forced at knife-point to watch his statues falling and to look at the Rostra and the place of Galba’s death; and then he is dragged to the Gemonian Steps where the corpse of Flavius Sabinus had been displayed—for Vitellius had permitted his lynching not long before.51 We shall see the role apparently played by rumour and uncertainty in the provocation of statue-riots. The destruction of statues by crowds, and more importantly the loud, spectacular and ritualized abuse of the toppled statue oVered a symbolic clariWcation of an uncertain political situation. But it could also be used in the attempt to precipitate a crisis and a shift in power. This seems to be the case with the unsuccessful and hopeless riots against Tiberius and Theodosius. It is particularly clear in the case of Rufus’s army under Nero, the army being an inherently more likely agent for political change. According to Dio (epitome 63.25.1–2), when the rebel Vindex had killed himself, Nero’s general mourned him,

46

Codex Theodosianus 9.40.17. Hedrick, History and Silence, 107–13 on limits to implementation. Note also comments on spread of Domitian’s punishment in F. Grosso, ‘Aspetti della politica orientale di Domiziano’, Epigraphica, 16 (1954) 117–79, at 165–6; E. D’Ambra, Private Lives, Imperial Virtues: The Frieze of the Forum Transitorium in Rome (Princeton 1993) 7. 48 Peka´ry, Kaiserbildnis, 134. Lo Sguardo di Roma 51 (note by Daniel Cazes). 49 Zanker, Augustus. 50 Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome, esp. 39–46. 51 Tacitus, Annales 3.85. 47

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’ ’ ’ ’ Zn, kaitoi t^ ’ oi EgkEim Enon, ouk t Zn dE autokr atora arw on stratiot^ on poll akiB aut^ ’ ElZsE dEjasyai, dunZyEiB an ’ rad ‘ ioB Epituw ’ ’ ZB gEnEsyai drast Zy ZB a ut^ Zri oB tE g ar ^’ kai isw ’ Zr Zn ’ un mEg an alZn kai pr oyumon E^i’ wE, ka^i’ oi‘ strati^ otai t aB mEn to^ u ’ ’ ’  NEronoB Eik onaB kayE^ilon kai sunEtrican, aut on dE Kaisara kai Augouston ’ omazon. on .

He refused to accept imperial power, although the soldiers frequently urged it upon him and he could have got it easily; for he was a man of action and had a large and enthusiastic force, and the soldiers pulled down Nero’s images and shattered them, and they were calling him Caesar and Augustus.

As far as Dio is concerned, the manipulation of statues in this way is a powerful factor in the struggle for power which might aVect events to the same degree as having an army or personal ambition.52 Nevertheless, we do not know of any such demonstrations that obviously brought down a ruler, though they may have helped. It is little wonder that the destruction of statues is presented as an accompaniment to a coup d’e´tat or the seal upon a movement of power. In any case, the destruction of statues was only loosely subject to centralized control (and the next section deals with the ancient exploitation of that fact). If we are to make a distinction, as Peka´ry does, between damnatio memoriae and spontaneous statue-destruction, then it must be based on the response of the crowd to stimuli: the senatorial decree or knowledge of that decree, and the initiative and leadership of individuals or small groups within the crowd itself. On the basis of the evidence available we can rarely make such a distinction with conWdence. Those occasions on which oYcial damnatio was resisted53 imply that the decree was normal and expected on the fall of an emperor, yet the written sources give the impression that spontaneous and righteous anger on the part of the multitude was usual. It will be more fruitful here to concentrate on the end product—the violence itself—and to leave aside the questions of legal process or organization. What we quickly discover is that a pattern of disorder emerges. Before dealing with the social function of iconoclasm and its manipulation in written sources it is worth examining some of the recurring features of statue-destruction and damnatio as they are represented in the sources, as well as some of the meanings that were attached to them. Chanting. Chanting lent uniformity and purpose to the dissatisfaction of the crowd, or the crowd might be exploited to articulate a message of discontent. The games, at which the emperor confronted the people, were a suitable setting 52 According to Ammianus Marcellinus 14.7.15–16, the oYcer Montius tried to prevent the troops from arresting the emperor’s envoy Domitianus, by saying that they might as well pull down the emperor’s statues: clearly a very familiar symbol of rebellion. 53 By Claudius in Dio 60.4.5 and Macrinus in Dio 79.17.

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for such complaints.54 Chanting was a normal activity, led and manipulated by professional claques.55 By the fourth century, the theatrical claques could be seen as an independent, inXuential, and subversive force, and they may have been responsible for the progress of the riot at Antioch in 387.56 In normal circumstances the chant seems to have been a ritualized statement of relationships between the ruling individual and large groups—not only the urban populace, but also the senate. The Theodosian Code begins with an extract from the minutes of a meeting of the senate in ad 438. Statements are interspersed with repeated declarations of approval by the senators, and they are rounded oV with a long chorus of acclamations of the Augusti: ‘dearer than our children, dearer than our parents [sixteen times]! Exterminators of informers, exterminators of false accusations [twenty-eight times]! Through you come honours, through you our property, through you all things [twenty-eight times]!’ And so on. Such acclamations must have been part of the senatorial debate much earlier, for Dio describes the acclamations of the senate in his time at Severus’ funeral speech for Pertinax (epitome 75.5.1: ‘we shouted approval many times during his address, now praising, now lamenting Pertinax, and our shouts were greatest when he concluded’). Regularized shouting was therefore a familiar form of expression and communication at all levels of society. As with the treatment of statues it indicated the position of the crowd. In several sources it is presented as the prelude to statue-destruction or lynching. In the Historia Augusta’s version of the damnatio of Commodus, the senate chant phrases which are an odd perversion of the sort of language in the acclamations of the Theodosian Code;57 for example: parricida trahatur . . . delatores ad leonem, exaudi Caesar, Speratum ad leonem . . . hostis statuas undique, parricidae statuas undique, gladiatoris statuas undique, gladiatoris et parricidae statuae detrahantur! Let the parricide be dragged . . . informers to the lions, hear us Caesar, Speratus [perhaps an informer] to the lions . . . the enemy’s statues are everywhere, the parricide’s statues are everywhere, the gladiator’s statues are everywhere; let the statues of the gladiator and parricide be dragged down!

According to Suetonius the damnatio of Domitian was accompanied by senators shouting ‘with the bitterest kind of cries’ (‘acerbissimo adclamationum genere’).58 54 P. J. J. Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership and Collective Behaviour in the Late Roman Republic (Amsterdam 1987) 143. 55 Ibid. 78; R. Browning, ‘The Riot of A.D. 387 in Antioch: The Role of the Theatrical Claques in the Later Empire’, JRS 42 (1952) 13–20; Cf. Cicero’s annoyance: Pro Sestio 115, 124–7. 56 Browning, ‘The Riot of A.D. 387’. 57 SHA, Commodus 18–19. This is allegedly copied from the earlier account by Marius Maximus. 58 Suetonius, Domitian 23.1.

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Dio recounts (48.31.4) how crowds shouted protests at the games under Antony and Octavian, aggrieved by their treatment of Cato. This was a prelude to the toppling of their statues. Although Tiberius suVered no oYcial damnatio the urban crowds were said to have chanted at his death, ‘Tiberium in Tiberim’: ‘to the Tiber with Tiberius’.59 Vitellius was faced with a crowd demanding the life of Sabinus, mixing threats with adulation: ‘minas adulationesque miscet’.60 Dio (epitome 74.2.1) explicitly states that the crowd adapted theatre chants at the time of Commodus’s damnatio. Toppling the statue. The next stage in the statue-riot was the toppling of the statues themselves. It was not an easy business. The details are scarcely mentioned and do not seem to matter much in representations of damnatio. Stoning of statues took place, but served no practical purpose and does not seem to have been a suYciently spectacular form of abuse to merit mention in the sources.61 In fact, people were not stoned to any great extent.62 In this connection we should remember that Roman cobble-stones were large and heavy. There was only one simple way to topple a statue: by tying a rope around the neck and pulling. This is revealed in the common words applied to the destruction of statues, such as suro and kathaireo in Greek, detraho in Latin, which all suggest dragging or pulling down.63 Slightly more detail is revealed by Libanius’ account of the Antiochene riot and the painting in the Via Paisiello catacomb, discussed below, for which this technical discussion provides the background.64 The spectacle of toppling must have been an important part of the routine and Juvenal implies as much in his famous account of damnatio (a generalized description, but applied in particular to Sejanus): ‘descendunt statuae restemque secuntur’—‘down come the statues in obedience to the rope’.65 Cicero describes Verres’ bungled attempt to appropriate a statue of Hercules in In Verrem 2.4.95: ropes and crowbars fail and his force has to abandon the attempt while under attack from a crowd of citizens.66 It is interesting that in 2.2.160–2 Cicero describes the quick and successful toppling of Verres’ own portrait statues in Sicily, and later their digniWed oYcial removal. Is Verres a failure even at this most basic act of vandalism? It is hard to know whether Cicero, in this earliest account of statue-removal, is exploiting the conventions of a practice already well 59

60 Suetonius, Tiberius 75. Tacitus, Historiae 3.74. Dio 78.2.6; John Chrysostom, De Statuis 21.11; Digesta 47.10.27; see also the Via Paisiello catacomb, below. Cf. the stoning of temples in Suetonius, Gaius 5. 62 A. S. Pease, ‘Notes on Stoning among the Greeks and Romans’, TAPhA 38 (1907), 5–18; Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome, 43. 63 e.g. as used in Dio 59.30.1a; 63.25.1; SHA, Commodus 1819. For a graphic illustration of the process (a photograph taken in Iran in 1979) see Freedberg, The Power of Images, 391, Wg. 179. 64 65 Libanius, Orationes 22.8. Juvenal 10.58–59. 66 Cf. [Seneca] Octavia 796–9 for the technique. 61

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established in the Roman or Hellenistic world (where the honour of a statue was occasionally withdrawn), or whether his observations are more innocent. Mutilation. The mutilation and dissection of the statue is symbolically much more important, and it is a recurring feature. The actions seem to be derived from the treatment of the victim’s corpse; Nippel points to the ‘topos’ of the body ripped limb from limb by the crowd.67 Elagabalus’ downfall is particularly vivid: he and his mother had their heads cut oV, they were stripped, and their bodies were dragged through the city. The emperor’s corpse was dumped in the Tiber, and his mother’s was discarded elsewhere.68 There are many parallels for such mutilations.69 This is exactly the routine employed elsewhere for statues. Collectively the sources tell us that the statues as well as the bodies of Marius, Piso (the supposed murderer of Germanicus) and Domitian were mutilated.70 These cases are representative of the parallelism between the body and its sculptural substitute. The statue serves that purpose better than any other image since its limbs are analogous to the parts of a body. Dio claims (epitome 74.2.1) that the crowd (de¯mos) wished to drag and dismember the corpse of Commodus and actually did this to his portraits (eikones) which evidently proved an easier alternative. Dragging the statue. The mutilation of the corpse sometimes involved dragging as the angry crowd processed through the city.71 In Rome the Gemonian Steps could become an important destination, for this was where the bodies of traitors were customarily displayed.72 Piso’s headless body was dragged here.73 Tiberius’ prison guards were strangled and dumped here upon the emperor’s death.74

67

Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome, 43–4. On corpse-mutilation see also Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’, 10. 68 Dio 80.20.2; SHA, Elagabalus 17. 69 Cicero: Plutarch, Cicero 48.4; Piso: Dio 58.11.5, cf. his statue in Tacitus, Annales 3.14; Sabinus: Tacitus, Historiae 3.74; Vitellius: Suetonius, Vitellius 17, Orosius 7.8.8, Tacitus, Historiae 3.84; Domitian: Procopius, Anecdota 18.12.21; Perennis: SHA, Commodus 6.2; Cleander: Dio 72(73).13, Herodian 1.13.6; Commodus (threat): Dio 74.2.1, SHA, Commodus 18.3; Theophilus: Ammianus Marcellinus 14.7.6; Montius and Domitianus: ibid. 14.7.15–16; Bishop Georgius: ibid. 22.11.8–9. Cf. also the story of Romulus: Livy 1.16.4; Florus 1.1.17; Valerius Maximus 5.3.1; Plutarch, Romulus 27.5. Also, Sulla and Catiline against Marius Gratidianus: Seneca, De Ira 3.18.1. Here and in Suetonius/Orosius on the death of Vitellius, emphasis is placed on the slow rate of mutilation, the mutilators apparently taking pleasure in the act. 70 Seneca, De Ira 3.18.1; Dio 58.11.1; Pliny, Panegyricus 52. 71 Processions occurred at Antioch (see below) and Alexandria (with the body of Bishop Georgius: Ammianus Marcellinus 22.11.8–9); for Rome note Tacitus, Annales 14.61; Dio 72(73).13. 72 E. H. Richardson, ‘The Etruscan Origins of Early Roman Sculpture’, MAAR 21 (1953), 75–124, 345. 73 74 Tacitus, Historiae 3.74. Suetonius, Tiberius 75.

276 touching statues Vitellius was killed and mutilated here, where Sabinus had lain.75 There also exist many general references to the dragging of ‘traitors’.76 And the statues were dragged in the same way. Piso’s were dragged speciWcally to the Gemonian Steps. We have less topographically precise references to the dragging of statues of Gaius, Poppaea, and a competitor of Nero in a tragic competition.77 The senatorial chanting on the death of Commodus included calls not only for the dragging of the body itself and but also for the dragging down of the statues.78 Disposal. Proper burial was of paramount importance in Roman culture and assaults on the public enemy involve attempts to prevent it. According to the Historia Augusta Commodus’ remains were buried before anyone could prevent it. The senate was outraged, opposing proper burial and once again demanded the toppling of the emperor’s statues and the eradication of his name.79 Corpses ended up in the sewage system as with any other refuse, and this usually meant the river.80 But the act is highly symbolic and we see it committed against statues on various occasions. The statues of Nero’s competitor were thrown ‘into the latrines’.81 There is the case of the statue-base from Ostia as well as the head from Munigua (see above and n. 48). A number of fragments of bronze statues have been found in the Tiber and other rivers, and it is possible that they were thrown there during disturbances.82 The reversal of norms. A survey of these aspects of statue-destruction and damnatio reveals a constant trend. The normal order is reversed. It is possible to associate this with other aspects of ‘licence’ in diVerent contexts, but in particular it seems to constitute a negation of the symbolism through which the previous emperor’s authority or the social persona of the damned individual was constructed, and therefore, by implication, an assertion of normal values in the normal world that has been restored through violence. Pliny the Younger’s panegyric of Trajan is in many respects a construction of Trajan in opposition to Domitian, and as we have seen symbolism of statues and their destruction plays a signiWcant part in 75

Tacitus, Historiae 3.84; Suetonius, Vitellius 17. Juvenal 10.66–7; Dio 74.2.1; SHA, Commodus 18.12; Dio 72(73).13; Herodian 1.13.6; SHA, Elagabalus 17; Ammianus Marcellinus 14.7.15–16. 77 Dio 59.30.19; [Seneca] Octavia 797; Suetonius, Nero 24.1; Dio 74.2.1. 78 79 SHA, Commodus 17–20. Ibid. 20. 80 Suetonius, Tiberius 75; Suetonius, Vitellius 17 and Orosius 7.8.8; Dio 58.11.5; SHA, Elagabalus 17; Herodian 1.13.6; Ammianus Marcellinus 14.7.15–16. 81 Suetonius, Nero 24.1. 82 A. Oliver, ‘Honors to Romans: Bronze Portraits’, in C. C. Mattusch et al. (eds.), The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections (Cambridge, Mass. 1996) 138–60, at 152–3; Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’, 17 (including further Ostian examples). 76

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this fabrication. In the case of Octavia, the veneration of her images is an accompaniment to the destruction of Poppaea’s. Flowers correspond to ropes: ‘eYgies Poppaeae proruunt, Octaviae imagines gestant umeris, spargunt Xoribus, foroque ac templis statuunt’ (‘they knocked down the portraits of Poppaea; they carried Octavia’s images on their shoulders; they sprinkled them with Xowers and set them up in the forum and the temples’).83 The literary topos of reversal of fortunes—the great Wgure laid low by fate—is sometimes applied to damnatio, and most explicitly to Sejanus in Juvenal’s treatment of the theme.84 But more speciWcally the symbolism of the damnatio itself can make a spectacle of the reversal of normal status. The Egyptian decree discussed above for the damnatio of Geta refers to the victim as ‘asebastatos’ (something like ‘most unworthy of reverence’) in contrast with Caracalla who is ‘eusebastatos’ (‘most reverend’). Similarly, Eusebius refers to the condemned Maximian as ‘dussebastatos’.85 The negative terms appear to present a straightforward attack: the damned individuals are very ungodly (or very un-august). But more than this, they present an absolute negation of what it is to be the emperor—the Augustus was, in Greek, the Sebastos. In this sense Geta and Maximian are not only ‘un-reverend’ individuals but also ‘un-emperors’. Finally, we have seen already how the favourable chants of the senate and the people of Rome were inverted in shouts of condemnation. The dragging of statues might be seen as an inversion of the normal honoriWc processions of statues through the city. The ill-treatment of statues is the opposite of the honour they were intended to receive and bestow. The representation of statue-destruction in our surviving sources is a picture neither of systematic and oYcially executed punishment nor of random violence lacking purpose or direction. While we certainly encounter topoi in these accounts—in the choice of language used to describe the crowd’s behaviour, or the interpretation of these situations—there is no reason to believe that the actions described did not take place roughly in the way they are described. The archaeological evidence supports this assumption. It seems, therefore, that in the pattern of statue-destruction and damnatio we have a kind of topos that is lived out by actors on the ground: a series of conventions which shape collective behaviour in exceptional, though not uncommon, circumstances. The signiWcance of this is discussed below. 83

Tacitus, Annales 14.66. Juvenal 10.58–69. For references to the convention see C. R. Whittaker, Herodian, Loeb edn. with trans., introd. and notes, vol. 1 (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1969) 86 n. 1. Note esp. Pliny, Panegyricus 52.4 and Dio 59.30.19, the latter on Gaius who was treated as a god but had now become the sacriWcial victim; although this account is in Greek, there is perhaps an allusion to the Latin hostis meaning both sacriWcial victim and public enemy. 85 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 8.13.15. 84

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The picture presented above is one that I wish to pursue further, but at this point I should acknowledge that it is bound to be something of a distortion. First, it is in one sense ahistorical. The written sources themselves militate against any attempt to chart a developing history of iconoclasm through the Roman period. Together they present damnatio as a homogeneous phenomenon, and while that consistency in literary representations is interesting in itself, it is almost certain to obscure a more complex tradition within which each case of violent transformation was coloured by what had happened in the past or shaped by the political and social conditions of the period. It is hard in other words to see how the destruction of statues might have diVered between incidents or changed through time. A hypothetical example might be the damnatio memoriae of Geta, which even in literature gives the impression of unprecedented severity and thoroughness: an illusion perhaps, but at least a reminder of the potentially deceptive simplicity of this account. A related issue is that of archaeological evidence. It may seem perverse that only a handful of artefacts is used here to illustrate the destruction of images. There are good reasons for this omission—apart from the obvious one. (In fact the remains of eVaced or assaulted portraits and inscriptions are not particularly uncommon and Varner makes good use of them).86 Yet they only represent the merest traces of the social processes examined here and although it is important that they substantiate the conventions of literary accounts, they have limited eloquence as ‘sources’ in this particular sort of survey. One thing they do not explain, for example, is what all the violence we have encountered was supposed to be for.

the meanings of iconoclasm Though people may act in a predictable way, and join together in a crowd situation to do the same things, the meaning of their actions is less stable. We might assume that the individuals involved could have diVering motives and perceptions of the situation. This is certainly true of detached observers. Consequently, this discussion is concerned with two diVerent kinds of response: Wrst, the active response of urban crowds to honoriWc statues when the circumstances of the honorand are perceived to have changed; second, representations of that response. It is important to remain aware of both aspects. In the literary texts describing iconoclasm two main motives are given: the literal assault on memory, and revenge or bloodlust. These are not necessarily 86

Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’.

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contradictory, and the latter applies particularly to the execution of violence whereas the former is an ultimate goal. Both deserve some comment. Memory. There is no doubt that damnatio memoriae is an appropriate term for some kinds of iconoclasm. Sources are quite explicit about the purpose of imagedestruction and related activities. According to Cicero, Piso’s troops lynched his statue ‘lest his memory remain’—‘ne . . . memoria moreretur’.87 In Suetonius, Nero 24.1 the emperor wishes to destroy the memoria of his competitor. The Egyptian decree already mentioned refers to the removal of Geta’s mneme (Greek for ‘memory’); Nazarius, referring in his panegyric of Constantine to the attempted damnatio of the emperor, links the threat of ‘Constantine’s oblivion’ to the downfall of humanity.88 There are other such references.89 Tacitus is particularly ironic. When Claudius, old and confused, seems unaware of the fall of Messalina the senate decree damnatio and so aid his forgetfulness: ‘iuvitque oblivionem eius senatus censendo nomen et eYgies . . . demovendas’ (‘and the senate aided his forgetting by decreeing the removal of her name and images’).90 But we should be precise about what sort of oblivion this is.91 Tacitus’ sarcasm depends on a false identiWcation of real memory-loss with the communal aVectation of oblivion that results from damnatio. The Empire is united in a pantomime forgetfulness. We know some of the details of the victims’ fate precisely because ancient authors are so ready to recount them. Even when names are suppressed the discussion of the punishment remains a spectacle and the victim leaves a conspicuous space in society. Caracalla decrees that the very name of Geta must not be uttered, but it is literally vital that his subjects should remember whom to keep quiet about. This is like a ritual game: ‘don’t mention youknow-who’. Of course, everybody knows who. The point is not that the population should forget, but that the victim should be obviously unworthy of social existence; not that violence should be done, but that violence should be seen to be done.92 To this end it seems that the statuebase was often left in place, at least for some time, so that the erasure of the evil name could be displayed. That would account for the great number of mutilated inscriptions that survive. It is also worth noting that only part of the full name is 87

Cicero, In Pisonem 93. Nazarius, Panegyricus Constantini 5 (Panegyrici Latini, Bude´ edn. vol. 2, 176). 89 Dio 60.22.3 (Gaius); SHA, Commodus 19.1; 20.4–5; SHA, Elagabalus 17. 90 Tacitus, Annales 1.38.3. 91 On this issue see above all Hedrick, History and Silence. Note also S. Carey, ‘In Memoriam (Perpetuam) Neronis: ‘‘Damnatio Memoriae’’ and Nero’s Colossus’, Apollo, 152, no. 146 (July 2000), 20–31. 92 Contrary to Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, 97, claiming that damnatio memoriae was ‘methodical in its attempt to prevent recognition of the original’. 88

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erased (i.e. not imperial family names such as Antoninus), and that it is often still possible for us to read what the name had been. In the Verrine orations Cicero comments on the importance of bases in testifying to the symbolic removal of statues. He tells how the people of Tauromenium threw down Verres’ statue but left the base, ‘because they thought it would be more serious for him if people knew that his statue had been thrown down by the Tauromenians than if they thought that none had ever been set up’ (‘quod gravius in istum fore putabant si scirent homines statuam eius a Tauromenitanis esse deiectam, quam si nullam umquam positam esse arbitrarentur’.)93 Elsewhere, he remarks on the role of the statue-base as a memorial to Verres’ plunder.94 A further suggestion of the importance of display comes from Claudius’ decision to prevent Gaius’s formal damnatio. There was no order for the destruction of statues, but instead Claudius had them vanish by night.95 The loss of identity, and especially the name or the distinctive features of the face, is the most commonly mentioned feature of damnatio or iconoclasm.96 The melting of the bronze image of a face is a recurrent topic and a vivid depiction of social oblivion, though it has the disadvantage of leaving no trace of mutilation. On the other hand it oVers more scope for the representation of utter degradation, as when one says that this jug, or that bedpan used to be Sejanus. For this reason even the practical recycling of metal could be a sensitive matter and we can imagine that Augustus’ melting down of his own statues must have been dressed in conspicuous ceremony in order to avoid misunderstandings. Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus were also keen piously to prevent the Ephesians from honouring them with images cast from old statues of their predecessors.97 The face or head is particularly important in representations of the fate of Sabinus, Domitian, Cleander, the Maximini, Constantine, and also on the inscription from Aquincum mentioned above.98 Writing around the end of the fourth century, Jerome suggests that the removal of the face from the statue of a fallen tyrant is a customary procedure (In Abacuc 2.3.14–16): 93

Cicero, In Verrem 2.2.160. Ibid. 2.4.78. 95 Dio 60.4.5. Cf. 79.19.2 for Macrinus’s ‘secret’ removal of statues of Severus Alexander. 96 See Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’, 14–16 (he suggests that sensory organs—eyes, nose, mouth, and ears—are typically evident in surviving mutilated portraits). 97 Sejanus: Juvenal 10.58–67. Cf. Pliny, NH 33.83: a table made out of god; an interesting adaptation of Juvenal’s image appears in Prudentius, Peristephanon 10.299–300—gods made from melted pots etc. For other meltings see: Cicero, In Catilinam 3.19; Dio 60.22.3; Tacitus, Annales 15.22 (Nero’s image struck by lightning); Pliny, Panegyricus 52.5; Dio 68.1, 76.16.2, 78.12.6, 79.17.1. Augustus’s statues: Res Gestae 24. The Ephesians: A. C. Johnson, P. R. Coleman-Norton, and F. C. Bourne, Ancient Roman Statutes (Austin, Tex. 1961) 214, no. 259. 98 Tacitus, Historiae 3.74; Pliny, Panegyricus 52.4; Dio 73.13; SHA, Maximinus 23.6; Nazarius, Panegyricus Constantini 12 (Panegyrici Latini, Bude´ edn. vol. 2, 176); see also John Chrysostom, De Statuis 21.11. 94

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si quando tyrannus obtruncatur, imagines quoque eius deponuntur et statuae, et vultu tantummodo commutato ablatoque capite, eius qui vicerit facies superponitur, ut manente corpore capitibusque praecisis caput aliud commutetur. It is as if, when a tyrant is slain, his statues and images are also toppled, and the head is removed and changed only in respect to the face: the victor’s features are placed upon it, so that the body remains and the head is cut oV at the front, and another head is put in its place.

The Cancelleria reliefs (Fig. 9) and the equestrian statue of Domitian/Nerva from Baiae (Fig. 46) are a perfect illustration of this change, but Blanck cites sources for many other examples.99 It is diYcult in some cases, as we have seen, to determine whether the reworking of a portrait head was a matter of economy or whether it had symbolic value (and this symbolism may only be ephemeral); but in some cases there can be no doubt that the so-called ‘appendage aesthetic’ is being exploited to symbolize the insertion of a new ruler into the role (but not necessarily the character) of the old. This can work in a positive way: the reliefs of the Arch of Constantine include heads that perhaps replace those of Hadrian,

Fig. 46. The removal or replacement of facial features is a recurring feature of damnatio memoriae. (Head of fragmentary, bronze equestrian statue of Domitian, converted into portrait of Nerva. From Baiae, Italy; c. ad 95(?), converted ad 96–8 or soon thereafter. Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei, Baia, 155743. H of rider: 1.3 m.)

99

On the Baiae portrait: F. Zevi, ‘Equestrian Statue of Nerva from Miseno’, in The Horses of San Marco, Venice (Milan 1977), 44–7; R. Cantilena, and P. Rubino (eds.), Domiziano/Nerva. La statua equestre da Miseno: una proposita di ricomposizione (Naples 1987). On the phenomenon in general see H. Blanck, Wiederverwendung alter Statuen als Ehrendenkma¨ler bei Griechen und Ro¨mern (Rome 1969); Varner, From Caligula to Constantine, passim; Varner, ‘Tyranny and Transformation’, 11–14.

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Fig. 47. In many cases of ‘damnatio’ there is in reality no doubt about who has been removed from the scene. (Painted wooden tondo depicting Septimius Severus and his family (Geta defaced). From the Fayyum, Egypt; c. ad 199. Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. H: c. 0.36 m.)

Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius for instance, but there is no question of an attempt to remove their memory and every possibility that their recognized merits were intentionally harnessed here.100 And there are famous examples which, like other aspects of damnatio, leave no doubt as to who is missing: the Severan family groups on the Arch of the Argentarii in Rome and the well known painted tondo from Egypt (Fig. 47).101

100 For a positive view (with discussion of the historiography) see J. Elsner, ‘From the Culture of Spolia to the Cult of Relics: The Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Forms’, PBSR 68 (2000). J. Pollini, ‘Damnatio Memoriae in Stone: Two Portraits of Nero Recut to Vespasian in American Museums’, AJA 88 (1984) 547–55, at 547 points to the benign reuse of portraits of earlier imperials who were no longer considered important. 101 See e.g. A. Bonanno, Portraits and Other Heads on Roman Historical Reliefs up to the Age of Septimius Severus (Oxford 1976) 147–9; K. Parlasca, Ritratti di mummie, Repertorio d’arte dell’ Egitto greco-romano, series B, vol. 2 (Rome 1977) 64–5.

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Revenge. We might expect that revenge and pleasure in violence were important motives which underlie comparable activities in diVerent cultures and periods of history. Whether or not psychology would support this assumption, the idea is expressed by several ancient authors. Most notably, Pliny declares the joy with which the populace savaged the statues of Domitian as if by so doing they could hurt the man himself. In Cicero’s account of the assault on Piso’s statue by his mutinous troops, the release of pent-up hate and the annihilation of memory are both presented as motives: ‘ne . . . memoria moretur . . . sic odium, quod in ipsum attulerant, id in eius imaginem ac simulacrum profuderunt’ (‘lest . . . his memory remain . . . thus they poured out the contempt they had held for him against his image and likeness’).102 Incidentally, Cicero states that this statue was chosen for its special likeness—‘statuam istius persimilem’. The importance of likeness is worth remembering, though it is not often stressed and any sort of loose analogy between an object and the person represented oVered suYcient reason for its destruction. Juvenal (10.67) says that the damnatio of Sejanus is a source of universal joy. The abuse of Gaius and his images is presented as an expression of revenge.103 The senate rejoice at Domitian’s death and embark on a wild iconoclastic celebration.104 There is delight at the death of Maximinus, followed by immediate destruction of statues.105 Mockery is a recurring feature of damnatio to which we shall return. The destruction of images is certainly an emotional, and emotive, process.106 But we shall see that there are expectations of what form this bloodlustful revenge should take.

the myth of mindless violence In his study of Republican unrest in Rome, Vanderbroeck makes use of sociological theories of ‘collective behaviour’, that is to say the interaction of individuals within groups who do not behave according to established norms of organized society. In eVect this usually means riots.107 There are strict limitations to this approach. Theories of collective behaviour are based on the observation of detailed, modern case-studies and they are set within a broader understanding of the workings of modern society than we can acquire for 102 Cicero, In Pisonem 93. The use of simulacrum here could be ironic (it is called a statua just before) but there seems to be an implication of hubris on Piso’s part, since he is stated to have wanted this statue set up in the busiest place: it is normally for others to bestow such an honour. Alternatively the word may be used in a vaguer manner to stress that it is only an image—a mere ‘simulacrum’ in the modern sense. 103 104 105 Dio 59.30.1a. Suetonius, Domitian 23. SHA, Gordiani 13.6. 106 Generally, on ‘instrumental’ and ‘expressive’ behaviour, see Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, and esp. 95–6 on revenge, joy and fear in iconoclasm (with further examples). 107 Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership.

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antiquity. Vanderbroeck himself acknowledges the diYculties to some extent, but he suggests that, nevertheless, ‘some general sociological notions and conceptions are useful in ancient history’.108 Two related notions about collective behaviour are of considerable importance to this study. These are most clearly stated by Turner and Killian.109 First, the crowd does not usually behave irrationally.110 This contradicts the assumption that ‘the fury of the Roman mob’, as Hannestad calls it, was a chaotic, random outburst.111 The meaningless fury of the mob is a myth. Yet the idea of ‘mindless violence’ is resilient and is even applied to disturbances in contemporary society (and especially to the carefully planned and ideologically motivated violence of terrorism). Turner and Killian explain that, ‘The basis of these errors lies in the fact that in folk-usage we tend to confuse rationality with behaviour in conformity with the dictates of culture. When an individual follows uncritically the courses of action which are sanctioned in his society we think of him as a reasonable person, largely because he is (a) like us and (b) predictable and therefore easy to deal with.’ Conversely, the non-conformist is unpredictable, diYcult to deal with and to understand. In fact, behaviour should be considered rational ‘when it is an eYcient way of achieving some goal’ or when the individual considers all the alternatives of which he can be aware in deciding his action.112 The unpredictability of abnormal behaviour is mitigated, as far as we are concerned, by Turner and Killian’s identiWcation of the ‘conventional crowd’.113 Individuals may wish to join together to recreate the satisfaction of an earlier crowd experience (when the last person suVered damnatio, for example), but an element of spontaneity is necessary for inhibitions to be overcome. However, a type of situation can be recreated in which such an experience is likely to occur and can be reproduced (so, for instance, on the fall of a favoured individual, the populace may come out on the streets and mill around, waiting for the stimulus of leadership or rumour to spark the riot). In the Roman context we cannot be sure whether the statue riots are not often carefully orchestrated by the authorities, but it does not seem so, and in some 108

Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership, 10. R. H. Turner and L. M. Killian, Collective Behavior (Englewood CliVs, NJ 1957) esp. 16–19, 157–61. (Their approach to collective behaviour is summarized by Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership, 11–13.) Cf. C. J. Couch, ‘Collective Behavior: An Examination of Some Stereotypes’, in R. R. Evans (ed.), Readings in Collective Behavior (Chicago 1969) 105–19 (repr. from Social Problems, 15 (1968) 310–22) esp. 109–10 and 114, which twelve years after the publication of Turner and Killian is still trying to exorcise false preconceptions about crowd behaviour. 110 It behaves emotionally, but emotion is not the distinguishing feature of this kind of social behaviour: see Couch, ‘Collective Behavior’, 110. 111 Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture, 18 n. 19. 112 Turner and Killian, Collective Behavior, 17. 113 Ibid. 157–61; see also Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership, 12–13. 109

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cases it was deWnitely not. Again, the spontaneity of the crowd is inherent in the institution of damnatio. More signiWcantly, the repetition of a form of crowd behaviour results in the emergence of a pattern: ‘Certain sorts of expressive or even aggressive behavior come to be deWned as appropriate to this type of situation’ (the hurling of paving stones is identiWed as a convention of Parisian riots in a way that it is not in the Roman city).114 Finally, the conventional patterns of disorder set limits on the behaviour of the crowd (even licence can have its own rules).115 These ideas are of the utmost importance for our image of the iconoclastic crowd. Andrew Gregory uses sociological theories of symbolism to elucidate Roman responses to portraits and images.116 He stresses that popular iconoclasm had both a ‘cognitive’ and an ‘aVective’ component—corresponding respectively to the ‘ideological’ aim of imposing oblivion or aVecting the individual represented by the portrait, and to the desire for revenge and similar emotions. These components are not easy to isolate. In this discussion I want to deal speciWcally with examples of apparently ‘mindless’ riots in which statues were destroyed, where the unpredictability of the crowd’s actions, as they are represented, cannot easily be explained even as purely expressive behaviour; we shall see that there is method in their mindlessness and there are possible explanations for why the sources portray these events as they do. In any case, we have seen that there is a pattern of behaviour in accounts of iconoclasm; even if this is further simpliWed and standardized by the organizing discourses of ancient authors there seems little doubt that people actually lived these patterns. And it is not surprising that some such patterns should emerge. Even if we imagine a crowd driven by blind fury (if such a thing exists), or blind drunkenness, or some similar stimulus, its violence is bound to be articulated in a basic vocabulary of action. Even cries of anger are culturally speciWc. Moreover, the Turner and Killian model of conventional collective behaviour explains the mechanisms by which an elaborate grammar or syntax of violence could evolve. These rules of disorder are those examined in the previous section. The existence of such rules is also suggested by a few accounts of their violation. If even the righteous fury of the urban plebs is observed to follow a pattern, then what happens when the Bad Emperor himself turns to the destruction of images? Augustus reduced the number of statues in the Area Capitolina by removing them to the Campus Martius. There were other similar attempts at control, as we saw in Chapter 4. Gaius, however, was said to have destroyed the statues in the Campus Martius out of jealousy, and he did it so thoroughly that they could not be restored with the inscriptions intact: ‘ita subvertit atque 114

115 Turner and Killian, Collective Behavior, 157. Ibid. 160–1. Gregory, ‘ ‘‘Powerful Images’’ ’, 94–8; J. J. Tanner, ‘Art as Expressive Symbolism: Civic Portraits in Classical Athens’, CArchJ 2 (1992) 167–90. 116

286 touching statues disiecit ut restitui salvis titulis non potuerit’.117 Now this is presented as gratuitous violence; it does not demonstrate a shift in power and the victims are unworthy of punishment. But more than this, the implication is that Gaius destroyed the bases of the statue as well. The evidence from Ostia must imply that this could occur in damnatio, but we have plenty of bases that are largely intact in spite of erasures and the literary accounts of iconoclasm refer only to the statue itself. Similarly, Nero infringes the rules of damnatio by destroying the statues of his opponent in a singing competition. If this story seems to represent a miniature model of imperial power struggles, it still portrays Nero as a petty and childishly petulant dictator.118 Finally, Caracalla was said to have raged at his executed brother (orgizeto), pelting his images with stones: an emperor out of control.119 Again, there seems to be an expectation not only that the emperor, but also the senate that decrees the damnatio, should refrain from such physical participation. There is a hint of surprise in Suetonius’ account of Domitian’s damnatio in which the senators rush to the Curia and joyfully have images of the emperor destroyed before their eyes (‘etiam . . . coram’).120 History records another series of incidents in which the rules of popular disorder were apparently violated when the populace in various communities came out on the streets and destroyed an individual’s statues by mistake. First of all there is the case of Poppaea and Octavia. Retrospectively this looks like a popular uprising and that indeed is the implication of the play Octavia (traditionally attributed to Seneca).121 Tacitus also says that Poppaea was afraid lest Nero submit to the will of the multitude. But his version of events stresses that the popular rush onto the streets arises from the news that Nero has recalled Octavia: in other words, it is a response to the emperor’s actions as the populace perceives them rather than a proactive attempt to change the situation.122 There is a lacuna in the text of the Annals, but it also appears that there is some mention of a rumour or report as the stimulus to action. Given the evidence already examined for the devolution of violence and the populace’s tendency to clarify situations of uncertainty by rioting and destroying portraits it is likely that Tacitus’s multitude are acting in accordance with the emperor’s decision to restore Octavia, which would have implied the fall of Poppaea. The author mentions that the crowd’s veneration of Octavia’s images was even accompanied by acclamation for Nero: ‘etiam in principis laudes’. Next, there is the famous case of Favorinus the Gallo-Roman Greek sophist. Favorinus had been awarded statues by the cities of Corinth and Athens. The 117

Suetonius, Gaius 34. Suetonius, Nero 24.1. In Octavia 609–13 Agrippina’s ghost mentions her own damnatio as the act of a raging tyrant: ‘saevit in nomen ferus/ matris tyrannus’ (609–10). 119 120 Dio 78.12.6. Suetonius, Domitian 23.1. 121 122 [Seneca] Octavia 792–805; Tacitus, Annales 14.60–1. Tacitus, Annales 14.61. 118

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thirty-seventh oration in the corpus of Dio Chrysostom is generally accepted to be Favorinus’s speech to the Corinthians in response to their removal of his statue.123 We do not know why this happened, but the Athenians also threw down his statue and Philostratus oVers an explanation.124 He says that Favorinus had quarrelled with the emperor and survived—one of the great paradoxes of his life. The quarrel may have been provoked by Favorinus’ appeal against the liturgy—to be high priest of Augustus—in his home town of Arles, though there were other reasons too.125 The sophist backed down over this issue in anticipation of Hadrian’s opposition. Now Hadrian was acting whimsically, for fun, to relieve the burden of empire, but the Athenians did not appreciate this and they quickly toppled Favorinus’ statue as if he were the emperor’s ‘ polEmiot worst enemy: walk^ Zn Ei’ k ona katEbalon to^u a’ ndr oB oB atou t^ oi a u’ tokr atori. Some rules are certainly infringed in Philostratus’ account: Hadrian’s random behaviour is hardly that of the ideal ruler; it is stressed that the magistrates themselves were at the forefront of the violent assault. But on the whole the event obeys an accepted logic. The emperor’s enemy must not have statues standing. The communication that brought news of Hadrian’s disapproval was unlikely to have conveyed subtleties. Communities throughout the Empire were apparently watching out for signs of the status quo, and responding accordingly. Statues were the most obvious symbols of the state of Imperial society, and they could be updated. The next famous misunderstanding occurred in the reign of Septimius Severus. The victim was the emperor’s close associate, the consular C. Fulvius Plautianus. According to the Historia Augusta the emperor ‘was very friendly with him, but having realized his true character he conceived such a hate for the man that he named him a public enemy, and having had Plautianus’ statues thrown down, he made him famous throughout the world for the gravity of his punishment; he was angry chieXy because Plautianus had placed his statua among the simulacra of Severus’ relatives and connections [propinquorum et adWnium]’.126 The account goes on to say that Plautianus was later restored, that his daughter was married to Caracalla,127 and that ‘those who had called Plautianus a public enemy were exiled’. Later, however, Plautianus was executed (ad 202). It actually seems unlikely, though not impossible, that Plautianus could have suVered a properly formulated damnatio memoriae (being declared an 123 See M. W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Representation in Ancient Rome (Princeton 1995) ch. 1, 3–20. 124 Philostratus, Vitae Sophistarum 489–92. 125 Gleason, Making Men, 146–7. 126 SHA, Severus 14. The use of statua and simulacrum in this way suggests both the formal and functional similarity of the two kinds of statues, and the importance of their diVerentiation. 127 Flavia Plautilla was eventually exiled and killed after her father’s death. Oliver, ‘Honors to Romans’, 153 states that an intentionally damaged bronze statue of her was found at Sparta in 1964.

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enemy, having his statues shattered) while still alive. Dio oVers a slightly diVerent account, and it is essentially the account of an eyewitness.128 He says that the emperor was displeased at the number (ple¯thos) of Plautianus’s images and had some of them melted down. This, as we have seen, was no neutral act but a recurring feature of ritualized iconoclasm. So a rumour spread to the cities that the prefect had been overthrown and killed; consequently, some of them destroyed his images, for which they were later punished. This was not a popular movement—one of the accused was the governor of Sardinia. But a picture of erratic communications emerges, and above all the expectation of communities throughout the Empire that they should respond to shifts of power with the symbolic act of iconoclasm. In the turbulent times of the later fourth century we hear once again of rumours (or false messages) causing riots: this was the case in Constantinople in the summer of 388 (just over a year after the notorious events at Antioch), when the false rumour of Theodosius’ defeat by Maximus led to disturbances.129 Browning notes that according to John of Nikiu (seventh century ad) such a rumour also spread before the Riot of the Statues (see below), but he rejects the notion because ‘his chronology is hopelessly confused’.130 Nevertheless, it is signiWcant that a false report of a power change was seen as a plausible prelude to the destruction of statues. One more record of apparently mistaken iconoclasm survives from Trajan’s Forum. It is a reinscribed statue-base found in front of the Basilica Ulpia which provides the focus for Hedrick’s recent book.131 Erected in ad 431 under the supervision of a close relative, and in honour of his son the praetorian prefect, it bore the statue of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus. This—pagan—Nicomachus had been closely implicated in the usurpation of Eugenius (ad 394) and may have suVered an oYcial damnatio as a result. But nearly forty years after his death the inscription includes a letter from Theodosius II and Valentinian III to the senate redeeming his memory and condemning what had been done against him as the result of a ‘blind allegation’—‘caeca insimulatione’ and against the will of the princeps.132 The text is vague and diYcult to decipher, but the repeated references to memory, and the context, suggest that this statue compensates for an earlier destruction of statues by a mindless mob, perhaps stirred up by enemies of the Flaviani. This may actually be another example of citizens acting 128

Dio (epitome) 76.16.2–5. Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica 5.13; Sozomen 7.14; Ambrose, Epistulae 40.13. Browning, ‘The Riot of a.d. 387’, 13. 130 Browning, ‘The Riot of a.d. 387’, 13 n. 7. 131 CIL 6.1783; G. B. De Rossi, ‘Iscrizione di Nicomacho Flaviano’, Annali dell’Instituto di Correspondenza Archeologica, ns 6 (1849) 283–356; Hedrick, History and Silence, esp. 1–5 and 247–58 on the base itself. 132 CIL 6.1783, lines 18–19; Hedrick, History and Silence, 220–2 on the evasive language of the text. 129

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in accordance with their expectations of the emperor’s will. At any rate it appears to illustrate the ancient myth of mindless (or blind) violence. From these cases two patterns emerge: the logic of ‘unoYcial’ statue-destructions and the tendency to reject some iconoclasm as illegitimate by appealing to the notion of mindlessness. In each case we have seen reasons for the apparent spontaneous destruction of statues: a sensible response to circumstances on the part of communities throughout the Empire. This was the tradition of ‘self-help’ that was deeply ingrained in Roman society, but as with the spontaneous production of ‘propagandistic’ images it served the ruling regime well, for it was expected that communities would follow their leader in this way and their symbolic iconoclasm made for social and political cohesion. The same sort of self-orientation towards the emperor was, of course, responsible for the erection of many statues in the Wrst place. It may seem that the risk involved in such actions should be a deterrent, but punishment for mistakes may not have been so severe or so frequently imposed as the few relevant sources suggest. Or the consequences of failing to act when the authorities did expect it may sometimes have been worse. And indeed, it may be that ‘accidental’ iconoclasm was not as accidental as it later seemed. We do not know, for example, that Hadrian did not expect Favorinus’ statues to be destroyed: later he could wash his hands of the aVair by suggesting a ‘misunderstanding’ or the foolishness of his subjects.133 That is why ‘mindless’ mob violence is such a useful concept. For Theodosius II it was ‘blind’. The mob in Octavia is driven by furor and rabies (madness and rage), though the chorus simultaneously accept that it has a consilium (plan or strategy). The idea of blind violence can be used to condemn actions retrospectively. When Maxentius held Rome, Constantine suVered a kind of damnatio and his images were destroyed: this makes good sense. But when the situation was reversed, Nazarius was able to call these actions ‘blind madness’—‘caeca dementia’.134 We have already seen how Caracalla’s iconoclasm was supposedly motivated by rage.135 Libanius, although he hints at the dire involvement of the claques in the organization of the Antioch riot,136 points out that the crowds responsible for the destruction of the imperial images were drunk—their violence was paroinia.137 Libanius also seems astonished that the images even of the 133

It is tempting to compare the sources’ mention of rumours with the dynamics of rumour in studies of collective behaviour, but the term could stand for various kinds of communication, including a letter, later disowned. 134 Nazarius, Panegyricus Constantini 12 (Panegyrici Latini, Bude´ edn. vol. 2, 176). 135 Dio 78.12.6. 136 On the riot in general see Browning, ‘The Riot of a.d. 387’, and G. Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria (Princeton 1961) 426–33; disturbances grew out of an orderly protest against a new levy, and the crowd moved through the city, at one stage seeming to attempt an assault on the governor’s palace, before Wnally attacking the imperial statues and being suppressed; Browning deals with the claques speciWcally. 137 Libanius, Orationes 22.7.

290 touching statues emperor’s family should suVer in the riot, although this was typical of iconoclasm. His evocation of mindlessness may not be a simple expression of disdain for the rioters (though he utterly condemned them). The idea that the Antiochenes, inspired perhaps by the curial class, had deliberately and thoughtfully assaulted the imperial statues had much more serious implications. Even when the actions of iconoclasts are accepted as justiWed violence, the sources frown upon the actors. Dio is certainly happy with the damnatio of Commodus, but he seems critical of the mob.138 This attitude makes the active involvement of senators or emperors all the more noteworthy. There was a long tradition of branding the Roman mob as an emotional and unthinking mass who could be steered by populist leaders.139 Unsurprisingly that idea appears in the late Republic. But no riot would look like a riot without an unruly crowd. This literary crowd is almost all we see of mass, ‘popular’ responses to statues. The internal dynamics of the crowd, its structures and leadership, are largely eVaced. Yet we can speculate about the patterns that emerge in their behaviour and reWne our picture of the symbolic power of statues in these extreme circumstances.

late antiquity Stories of emperors and their downfalls often make an eVort to explain what happens on their demise, but this does not mean that damnatio and iconoclasm were unfamiliar practices. The communities of the Empire knew what to do when damnatio occurred; it was, after all, the opposite of the universal practice of erecting honoriWc statues. Every community with statues had the opportunity to destroy statues. The surviving written sources alone suggest that such opportunities arose in essentially every generation. Archaeological evidence Wlls in some of the gaps. And it is reasonable to assume that many more cases left no record. It is hard to believe that the third century did not see the destruction of statues of many emperors or ‘usurpers’, as well as other individuals on a lesser scale. At any rate, by the late fourth century, as mentioned above, St Jerome could present the normal pattern of iconoclasm as a regular occurrence: ‘when a tyrant is slain’. It is also worth remembering that the Historia Augusta, which provides so much evidence for earlier iconoclasm, belongs very roughly to this period. The fourth century brought a new form of iconoclasm which engages much more attention from ancient historians.140 The new security of the Christian 138

139 Dio (epitome) 74.2.4. Vanderbroeck, Popular Leadership, 187–8. On this subject see also P. C. N. Stewart, ‘The Destruction of Statues in Late Antiquity’, in R. Miles (ed.), Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London 1999) 159–89. 140

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Church under Constantine emboldened Christians to launch an oVensive against the trappings of paganism—the temples and the cult statues within them—and to reinforce by violence the principles of the apologies against idolatry. Iconoclasm, from now on, has new associations. There is no doubt that the destruction of idols took place: suYcient written accounts and archaeological traces survive. But we could overestimate the extent of this violence. For a start, there is no very strong evidence for the central organization of iconoclastic activities and movements tended to arise spontaneously and spasmodically in diVerent parts of the Empire. We know most about the activities of local leaders, the bishops and their ‘mobs’, in the provinces of the Empire and there is much less evidence of direct assaults against sanctuaries and statues in Rome itself. The destructive and triumphalist zeal of Eusebius is mitigated by the controversies (over the Victory in the Curia at Rome, for example) that still continued later in the century. There is also the fact that pagan statues remained on display as adornments of the city. And in the Wfth century St Augustine himself had reservations about the destruction of pagan statues; he and others were certainly hostile to spontaneous iconoclasm.141 We can be sure, however, that with the ascendancy of Constantine, the church changed its attitude to iconoclasm. In perhaps ad 305 or 306 the Council of Elvira in Spain aYrmed that the destruction of idols (idola) was neither sanctioned by the Gospels nor by the actions of the apostles, and that those who died for it were not to be considered martyrs. In the reign of Constantine writers such as Firmicus Maternus and Eusebius present it as a Christian duty.142 We cannot safely say much about the extent to which the Christian populace performed this duty, and the sources generally put more emphasis on the destruction of temples or the disruption of worship than on the idols themselves. But the subject is important here because in certain respects it seems to belong to the tradition of iconoclasm examined above: it certainly belongs to the same culture, to the same empire, but studies of Christian iconoclasm tend to bracket it within the Weld of Church history or the development of Christianity. Were idola really so diVerent from statuae? Did the habit of damnatio have no bearing on Christian iconoclasm? In the Wrst few days of 1865 the famous explorer of catacombs, G. B. De Rossi, inadvertently discovered one of the most graphic illustrations of Christian iconoclasm, though one that is hardly known or discussed today. He was looking for the Catacombs of St Pamphilus in Rome, but instead, crawling 141

J. C. G. Thornton, ‘The Destruction of Idols—Sinful or Meritorious?’, Journal of Theological Studies, ns 37 (1985) 121–9, at 126–7. For overviews see BNP i. 369–88; S. R. F. Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Cambridge 1999) 164–71. On the bishops see G. Fowden, ‘Bishops and Temples in the Eastern Roman Empire, a.d. 320–435’, Journal of Theological Studies, ns 29 (1978) 53–78. 142 Council of Elvira, Canon 60; Thornton, ‘The Destruction of Idols’, 123.

292 touching statues through a series of underground tunnels, he found himself in what turned out to be an isolated hypogeum.143 In one cubiculum that is still intact (though Xooded) beneath the Via Paisiello, he discovered painted wall decorations, including Wgured scenes from the usual repertory of early Christian art: Jonah thrown into the sea, the raising of Lazarus, the healing of the paralytic, an apparent Good Shepherd, Noah in his ark (a large chest in these early representations), Jonah under the gourd tree, Moses striking the rock, perhaps Abraham and Isaac, the three young Hebrews in the Fiery Furnace. There is no obvious programme behind the location of these extant scenes. There are a few iconographic anomalies such as the stonework of Lazarus’ tomb: the closest parallels point to a date in the second half of the fourth century. These paintings were part of the redecoration of the cubiculum which apparently occurred when two new loculi were roughly cut in the plaster of each side-wall. Although their content is mostly conventional, their form is extremely unusual, for they seem to be amateur sketches, abnormally small, rapidly painted on coarse plaster. Some of the subjects are only identiWable because we recognize parallels with other catacombs. All of this suggests that the anonymous hypogeum of the Via Paisiello is a private catacomb, outside the control of the Church. (This is Ferrua’s explanation for the unique iconography of the Via Latina catacomb.)144 But there is a further anomalous image in the tomb. Next to the Fiery Furnace, between the loculi on the left wall there is a scene of statue-destruction (Fig. 48). The statue in question appears to be a naked male Wgure on a pedestal. In the left hand it holds a sceptre or staV; in its right hand there is a circular object, probably a patera. The iconography of the statue could suggest an imperial portrait, but De Rossi rejects this interpretation on the grounds that naked imperial statues belong to the earlier Empire. If it represents a particular deity, then Jupiter is the most likely candidate. The statue is Xanked by two men in short tunics. All commentators have taken the man on the left (not illustrated here) to be a stone-thrower. The right-hand Wgure is clearer: raising his arms in the air he clutches a rope attached to the statue’s neck. Given the context of the

143

The hypogeum has been aVected by subsequent building work. After De Rossi’s visit it was lost again until 1918. There is no mention of it then until 1954 when a proper study was conducted for the PontiWcia Commissione. Carletti ’s 1971 publication is the result: C. Carletti, ‘Ipogeo anonimo di Via Paisiello’, RAC 47 (1971) 99–117. See also G. B. De Rossi, ‘Un esplorazione sotteranea sulla Via Salaria Vecchia’, BAC (Jan. 1865), 1–8; De Rossi’s drawing appeared in the 1996 touring exhibition ‘The Gaze of Rome’ (‘Lo Sguardo di Roma’; p. 50 in catalogue: see bibliography). For a fuller discussion of the hypogeum in the context of statue-destruction see Stewart, ‘The Destruction of Statues’. 144 A. Ferrua, Le pitture della nuova catacomba di Via Latina (Vatican City 1960) 95–101; Carletti, ‘Ipogeo anonimo’, 117; W. Tronzo, The Via Latina Catacomb: Imitation and Discontinuity in FourthCentury Roman Painting (University Park, Pa. 1986) 71–2, n. 2.

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Fig. 48. The context makes it clear that the representation of statue-destruction in the Via Paisiello hypogeum is a scene of Christian iconoclasm, though the statue resembles some earlier portraits of the emperor himself. (Painting on plaster. A Christian destroying a cult statue. From the hypogeum of the Via Paisiello, Rome; c. late fourth century ad? Currently removed for restoration.)

painting there can be no doubt that this is the only extant ancient depiction of Christians destroying a pagan idol.145 Perhaps one of the reasons why this site has been so neglected is that it is diYcult to explain. De Rossi and others have assumed that the scene belongs to the Theodosian backlash against paganism, as evidenced also in the Theodosian Code. In particular they point to the order of ad 407 that ‘if any images [simulacra] stand even now in the temples and shrines, and if they have received, or now receive, any worship of the pagans, they shall be torn from their foundations [suis sedibus evellantur], since we recognize that this regulation has 145

The destruction of the idol of Dagon depicted in the synagogue at Dura Europos is a representation of iconoclasm by divine agency. In this frontier town it may, however, hint at damnatio, for the cult statue seems to resemble the mural image of the deity from the temple of Adonis across the road, which itself suggests the iconography of the Roman emperor: Robert, Comte de Mesnil de Buisson, Les Peintures de la synagogue de Doura-Europos, 245–256 apre`s J.-C. (Rome 1939) 77; M. I. RostovtzeV, F. E. Brown, and C. B. Wells (eds.), The Excavations at Dura-Europos. Preliminary Report of the Seventh and Eighth Seasons of Work, 1933–1934 and 1934–1935 (New Haven 1939) 158–63, Wg. 44; W. G. Moon, ‘Nudity and Narrative: Observations on the Synagogue Paintings from Dura-Europos’, in W. G. Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, The Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison, Wis. 1995) 283–316, at 299.

294 touching statues been very often decreed by repeated sanctions’.146 There is little else to say: the scene is just what we should expect from zealous Christians. We do not know what the peculiar circumstances were that gave rise to this imagery. Anomalies do not help us to make general observations. Yet in one sense the picture is an important reminder of how (literally) to view iconoclasm. There is no surviving visual representation of damnatio memoriae, but if such an image existed it might well look just like the scene from the Via Paisiello. That painting’s basic meaning is clear in context. But if it were taken out of context, only the nudity of the statue would indicate that it was an idol, rather than the statue of an emperor with some iconographical aYnity with Jupiter. And if we take the picture out of its apparent chronological context as well, there is nothing to indicate whether the statue is human or divine. Naked representations of emperors had existed. And if we wished to illustrate the Jupiter-type used in the painting we might use the famous statue of Claudius as Jupiter from Lanuvium (Fig. 7; Ch. 2). Of course, the Via Paisiello painting is a Christian image representing the destruction of an idol: it is not an image of portrait-destruction, and if it carries connotations of that sort of iconoclasm we have no way of proving such a response. But it does show very clearly how weak the distinction between those two activities is, at least in terms of visual representation. There are also faint hints that the destruction of idols might be indebted to the ideology of damnatio. The Via Paisiello iconoclasts are depicted in a frontal pose and the rope-puller at least has his arms raised in the common orant gesture. This is unusual: orants are always passive Wgures, receiving salvation or deliverance— like Noah or the three Hebrews in this cubiculum. It is peculiar to represent a rioting orant, very directly responsible for his own deliverance. But as Theodor Klauser demonstated, the orant Wgure in art has pagan parallels and precedents in representations of Pietas with extended hands, notably on coins up until c. ad 300.147 The pagan meaning of the motif suggests a reason for its adoption by Christian artists; it implies that something of the pagan meaning was transferred to the Christian orants too, though this is by no means certain and it is likely that the Christian Wgures carried a variety of associations. It may be that the Via Paisiello artist retained the memory of piety in his rendering of the orant rioter and perhaps associated the virtue speciWcally with iconoclastic riots. The destruction of Poppaea’s images was followed by pious adoration of Octavia’s—the people carried them on their shoulders, sprinkled them with Xowers and stood

146

Codex Theodosianus 16.10.19 ( ¼ Sirmondian Constitutions 12). T. Klauser, ‘Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der christlichen Kunst II’, JAC 2 (1959) 115–45. The gesture is considered to be universal and is mentioned in scripture, but Klauser argues that the palaeoChristian artistic motif is derived from pagan art. 147

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them in the Forum.148 The destruction of the images of the two Maximini was followed by adoration of the ‘divine’ Gordiani.149 And besides this religious piety, the destruction of the images of one ruler was generally followed by gestures of loyalty towards a new one.150 It is just possible that the Via Paisiello iconoclasts are displaying the sort of piety that accompanies the fall of one regime and the start of another (this metaphor of the ‘regimes’ of paganism and Christianity was underpinned by the political reality of fourth-century conXicts between more and less Christian emperors).151 Another association between the secular and divine is suggested by the immediate context of the iconoclasm scene, which is juxtaposed with the Fiery Furnace. The Apocryphal version of the story ends with the Wnal destruction of the graven image that the three young men refuse to worship,152 while in a number of fourth-century representations of the story, such as that of the Sarcophagus of Adelphia in Syracuse’s National Museum, the cult image is actually a bust of a Nebuchadnezzar in the form of a Roman emperor—recalling the refusal of Christians to revere the imperial image.153 But besides the anonymous hypogeum there is rather more concrete evidence to suggest that damnatio and idol-destruction were related. At Trier in the time of Gratian, at the sanctuaries in the Altbachtal, the statues were apparently deliberately destroyed by Christians; the sculptures were left standing but without their heads, a road was constructed over part of their sanctuary and a few temples were converted into dwellings.154 A broken torso of a Venus-statue used to stand near the church of St Matthias as a target for stones thrown by passersby; a medieval inscription claims that it had been made an object of ridicule by St Eucharius.155 These objects are reminiscent of the statues mutilated and mocked by iconoclastic crowds, and beheading in particular could be seen as an attempt to remove the images’ identity in the manner of a damnatio. It could be argued that the desire to mutilate and behead an eYgy is universal and instinctive, but it is hard to avoid the secular precedents. And there are other examples of beheading. The well-known bronze head of Sulis Minerva from Britain seems to have been wrenched oV its body.156 Ralph MerriWeld’s inquest on the 148

149 150 Tacitus, Annales 14.61. SHA, Maximini Duo 23.6–7. e.g. Dio 63.25.1. Cf. also Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.56—virtuous action in the destruction of the temple of Asclepius. 152 The Apocryphal account, Daniel, Bel and the Snake. 153 Several examples discussed by T. F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton 1993) 81–3, Wgs. 58–60. 154 E. M. Wightman, Roman Trier and the Treviri (London 1970) 229. 155 E. Espe´randieu, Recueil ge´ne´ral des bas-reliefs, statues et bustes de la Gaule romaine, vi (Paris 1915) 272, no. 5037; T. K. Kempf and W. Reusch, Fru¨hchristliche Zeugnisse im Einzugsgebiet von Rhein und Mosel (Trier 1965) 17, no. 1. Wightman, Roman Trier, 229. 156 B. W. CunliVe, Roman Bath (Oxford 1969) 34, pl. 11. 151

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sculptures of Londinium reveals that, while Christian iconoclasm is not a satisfactory explanation for all ancient damage to cult images, there are reliable examples: the sculptures buried for safe-keeping in the Walbrook Mithraeum include a head of Mithras that had already been lopped in half at the neck, apparently with a right-handed blow from something like an axe.157 There are other traces of destruction. The headless body of a deity, possibly Mercury, was found in the Wll of a ditch at Bow, in association with material from the Wrst half of the fourth century, and seems to have been the victim of iconoclasm.158 If these fragments hint at decapitation and mutilation as a common feature of the two kinds of iconoclasm, then some of the literary accounts suggest an association of the two in the minds of the authors, which is a kind of interpretatio Christiana, perhaps, of traditional statue-destruction. Eusebius’ panegyric delivered at Tyre, included in his Historia Ecclesiae, proclaims the triumph of God over evil.159 Christ, who is the slayer of tyrants (tyrannoktonos) is the teacher of piety and destroyer of the evil (eusebeias; asebo¯n: cognate words recur); the devil is explicitly associated with godless tyrants who are his agents (asebo¯n tyranno¯n; dussebo¯n archonto¯n); and he deceived people through idols (eido¯la). Now Christ has made evils vanish—so completely ‘that they seem never to have had even a ‘ mZdE p ’ name’ (oB opotE onom asyai dokE^in). And now thanks to Him the most exalted of emperors can ‘spit upon the faces of dead idols . . . and laugh at old, inherited deceits’. Some of Eusebius’ vocabulary is reminiscent of damnatio. The reference to the oblivion of evil is particularly signiWcant, as are the clear references to Constantine’s ‘tyrannical’ predecessors and rivals. The victory of Christianity involves a kind of damnatio of evil, and this is manifested in the abuse of cult images. In the Vita Constantini Eusebius addresses the theme of iconoclasm more directly. In 2.45, 4.23 and 4.25 Constantine is presented as a destroyer of idols. Iconoclasm is described in detail in 3.54. And the terms are interesting. The statues are broken up and stripped of their precious material, melted down, and exposed to ridicule (E’ pi gEloti kai paidi^ ai ); the bronze idols 157

R. MerriWeld, ‘Art and Religion in Roman London: An Inquest on the Sculptures of Londinium’, in J. Munby and M. Henig (eds.), Roman Life and Art in Britain: A Celebration in Honour of the Eightieth Birthday of Jocelyn Toynbee, ii (Oxford), 375–406, at 376–8, pl. 17; J. M. C. Toynbee, The Roman Art Treasures from the Temple of Mithras (London 1986) esp. 2 and 5–10. The head was not repaired, which suggests that the sculptures were quickly buried after an assault. This possibly took place in the Wrst quarter of the 4th cent. ad. 158 MerriWeld, ‘Art and Religion’, 394, pl. 17.V(a). The best examples of beheaded statues from Britain are the R. Alde head and the head of Hadrian from the Thames, which, however, do not seem to have suVered either from Christian iconoclasm or damnatio (Boudicca is usually blamed for the former): ibid. 390–4. A marble eagle, possibly decapitated, found in a military rubbish pit from late Wrst-century Exeter, may possibly have been part of a statue of Nero as Jupiter which was assaulted at his fall: J. M. C. Toynbee in P. T. Bidwell et al., The Legionary Bath-House and Basilica and Forum at Exeter (Exeter 1979) 130–2, Wg. 44, pl. 20. 159 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 10.4.10–16.

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are pulled down with ropes and dragged. The dismemberment of the statue and its dragging are familiar from political iconoclasm, though Eusebius presents their ‘mutilation’ as a practical measure designed to expose the cult images for what they are—mere stone and metal.160 Mockery is also a feature of secular iconoclasm and the lynchings that accompany it.161 When Eusebius describes the damnatio of Maximinus in the Historia Ecclesiae (9.11.2), he refers to the toppling and destruction of his statues, and the mockery of the crowd (gelos . . . paidia . . . enubrizein). This is reminiscent not only of the passages in the Vita Constantini, but also the Triennial Oration, in which Constantine is said to have sent out his friends to end idolatry; they supervise the destruction of statues which takes place ‘with much ridicule and dishonour’: (8.3).162 Then again at 8.4 the idols are said poll^ oi gEloti kai sun ai’ swunZ i to have been stripped of their valuable materials and led oV with ropes. We can Wnd other hints and resonant phrases in Christian writings of the period. In De Consensu Evangeliorum 1.16 St Augustine says that the thirdcentury Christians would have liked to see the destruction of temples and cult statues and the damnatio of sacriWces: ‘eversio templorum et damnatio sacriWorum et confractio simulacrorum’. The term damnatio suggests the sort of language on which the modern phrase damnatio memoriae is based, and it is explicitly connected with iconoclasm. Prudentius appeals for someone who will close the temples and condemn their thresholds— ‘damnat limina’.163 The Wfthcentury Syriac sermon of Jacob of Saroug speciWcally associates the dismemberment of idols with mockery and derision, and the annihilation of demons’ portraits.164 Much more explicit evidence is provided by Jerome In Abacuc 2.3.14–16 and Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum. The quotation from Jerome referred to above comes in the context of the victory of Christ, who removed the heads of squadrons of demons led by their prince/emperor, ‘princeps daemoniorum’. He goes on to explain this concept with mention of the downfall of Julian, Maximian, Valerian, Decius, Domitian, and Nero. So damnatio can be associated with the defeat of evil and rise of Christianity. Lactantius rejoices that God has ‘extinguished and deleted the enemies of His name’ (1.7) by bringing down tyrants; in 3.2–3 he mentions the damnatio of Domitian, who, ironically, is 160

There is also the still more practical motive of raising revenues: D. Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian (London 1978) 80. 161 Besides Eusebius see: Plutarch, Pompey 1.2 (kathubrisantes); Suetonius, Vitellius 17 (ludibria); Josephus, Antiquitates Iudaicae 19.357 (aphubrizon); Dio 74.2.1 (exubrizein); Herodian 1.13.6 (enubrisantes; lelobemena). 162 Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum 8.41: Christians are accused of mocking pagan statues. 163 Prudentius, Peristephanon 2.479. 164 L’Abbe´ P. Martin, ‘Discours de Jacques de Saroug sur la chute des idoles’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenla¨ndischen Gesellschaft (1875), 107–47.

298 touching statues famous for the removal of his memoria. In these texts the destruction of pagan cult statues and the demise of pagan emperors, with their honoriWc statues, are part of the same process: the fall of the tyranny of evil, and the rise of the Kingdom of God. In the past the picture has been distorted by the conventional separation of cult images/idols and portraits.165 The Christians were certainly doing something new. But when a crowd was raised to wreck a temple and its statues, it was a crowd familiar with the tradition of statue-destruction, and although it could act in new ways in accordance with the new ideology it possessed an inherited language of expressive violence. The writers who discuss Christian iconoclasm must be aware of the traditions of violence and the conventions for describing it and it is hardly puzzling that some of their language is familiar. Sometimes, perhaps, the hints are deliberate and reXect the association of defeated tyranny with Christian ascendancy; sometimes their accounts seem to present a Christian gloss of much older activities. In any case, we should not be surprised that such echoes of damnatio exist, but rather that they are not more obvious. The image of iconoclasm endured and perhaps Cassiodorus is manipulating it himself when he condemns the mercenary destruction of his city’s statues (see above).166 The culprits are presented not as scrap metal merchants or thieves, but as impious iconoclasts who should suVer the same dismemberment (‘detruncatio membrorum’) as they inXict, in traditional fashion, on the statues. Their actions are treated as if they were symbolic—as if to deny that the statues have lost their symbolic value.

conclusion Statues were indeed powerful images. Yet when we talk of the power of images we are really concerned with something rather diVerent, namely the responses of people who made and used and beheld them. The power of statues was derived from Roman society’s investment in them. Their importance lies in the relationships in which they were involved. In that sense the more immediate and sometimes emotional engagements with statues that we have examined in this chapter are merely one aspect of the social and cultural history of statues to which this whole book seeks to contribute. Yet they are also rather diVerent from what has gone before. We are used to perceiving statues as symbolic objects: as part of the spectacle of the ancient 165 Pagan assaults on cult images do appear in the sources, but rarely: Dio 24.84; Cicero, In Catilinam 3.19 (along with statuae); Propertius 4.5.27–8; Suetonius, Gaius 5, Artemidorus 2.33. See also Versnel, ‘Religious Mentality’, 38–40. 166 Cassiodorus, Variae 7.13.

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city167—as things to be looked at. They have been called systems of signs.168 Their iconographic codes have been subjected to decades of detailed study. Therefore most of the responses examined in previous chapters arise from perceptions of statues. The ideas described arise from an impression of the place that statues occupy in the Roman environment. The barriers that separate the living population from its sculptural counterpart ensure that statues are usually encountered eVectively as visual images rather than objects, and again, they are literally elevated on pedestals. So in that respect the forms of response discussed in this chapter are exceptional. The sources present them as such, for that is the reason for their interest in the Wrst place. These responses are based on the fact that statues literally add an extra dimension to the visual image. It is possible to abuse or lynch a painting, but statues oVer a greater invitation to contact, above all because as threedimensional, naturalistic representations they have an homologous relationship with what they represent. The sources sift out those responses that are deemed to be unimportant and merely oVer us a fragmentary picture of contact with statues. Not only do they Wlter the evidence, but they play a part in making it evidence—in showing that certain actions are responses and in representing their signiWcance. Nevertheless, we are not only concerned with a literary construct. Beneath or beyond the sources we catch glimpses of huge Roman populations (populations with their own ideologies) which are in touch with statues. In special circumstances, and particularly in iconoclastic movements, these people ceased to be idle viewers with lazy eyes and were obliged to deal with certain statues in their midst. Their actions, as represented in the historical or archaeological record, allow us to speculate about their attitude, and they testify to the universal relevance of statues among the population at large. 167

For which see D. Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge 1996) though she in fact neglects statues. 168 S. Nodelman, ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’, in D’Ambra, Context, 10–26, at 11.

Conclusions

Statues were ubiquitous in the Roman world. Whether they were displayed as public honours or memorials, collected as works of art, dedicated to deities, venerated as gods or violated as symbols of a defeated regime, they were recognized, individually and collectively, as highly signiWcant objects. In contrast with statues in the modern West, they were implicated in every area of Roman life. This book has explored the ways in which statues and images of statues functioned in such a society. I have addressed a series of separate questions about the meaning of these artworks. A number of new interpretations emerge, some of which have a signiWcance quite apart from the main themes of this discussion. They involve, for example, the notion of a coherent ancient concept of the statue underlying the variety of vocabulary involved; the manner in which language and iconography served to reinforce the distinctions between categories of statuary that were otherwise conceptually unstable; the literary and artistic Wction of Priapus and its relevance for ideas about sculpture and ‘Wne art’ in the Roman Empire; positive and negative views of the collectivity of statues in the Roman city and the public stake even in the display of statues with which the population in general were not directly concerned. I have sought to demonstrate that portrait statuary had a range of connotations that could be exploited to convey messages about individuals and their place in society; that representations of statues in other media were not mere ‘reXections’ of sculpture, but performed particular roles in their social context; that violent responses to statues are not to be viewed as mindless acts, for they obey a logic that unites a more or less ‘oYcial’ damnatio memoriae with ‘spontaneous iconoclasm’ and they can be understood in functional terms as part of the mechanism of Roman society; and Wnally that early Christian iconoclasm (or at least its portrayal in the sources) is a modiWcation of this non-Christian tradition. Such observations are relevant to diVerent topics within the Welds of history, art history, and classical archaeology. They Wll gaps by re-evaluating familiar evidence or attending to sources that are overlooked. They challenge some weak assumptions that have been allowed to stand for so long that they have fossilized into factoids. They are intended, even when speculative, to suggest diVerent ways of addressing ancient evidence. They have, however, more than this in common. They share a methodological foundation and they are all the result of an approach that has rarely been pursued in the past. My treatment of the subject

conclusions

301

of statuary is inclusive rather than random. As far as is practicable, I do not begin with narrow categories of objects or a single set of questions the limitations of which reXect preconceptions about what the material means. So the range of topics covered here is not so much eclectic as expansive. I have begun with the hypothesis (not quite a conviction) that conventional classes of statuary must be explained at least partly in relation to each other, and that none of them can be approached satisfactorily without an awareness of their context in the Roman cultural environment and their role in Roman society. From this angle, the study of individual objects, the motives for their production and their immediate reception, reveals only part of the picture. So I have dwelt on the life of these objects in society, and in particular, on the most general of responses to them. Yet the book is not intended simply as a collection of essays arising from this common shift of emphasis. The separate elements of this study are not just linked in methodology or in overall theme, inasmuch as they represent diVerent facets of the same phenomenon: that is to say, the Roman culture of statues. Besides examining language in Chapter 1 and throughout, I have used the analogy of language to explain ancient ideas of likeness and the aesthetics of statuary. I have used it to investigate the dynamics of imperial iconoclasm (and here the actions themselves and their representation in literary sources begin to merge); I have used it, Wnally, to tease out the complexities of statuary or statuesque iconography in the Roman world. To some extent the linguistic model is a convenient and familiar tool for the analysis of all kinds of meaning. But more than that, I have been concerned throughout with the underlying structures of meaning and the social relationships in which Roman statues were embedded. The diVerent aspects of statuary examined in this book together serve to illuminate that cultural context, and the objects themselves—the statues— while they may make some sense in isolation or in their immediate context, must nevertheless derive much of their historical signiWcance from the values and expectations of the society in which they actually operated. In attempting to explain this signiWcance I have concentrated especially on the themes of lifelikeness or mimetic representation versus artiWciality, and of categorization or deWnition. Other features of the culture of statues could have been pursued through highly varied bodies of evidence. The Elder Pliny shared that culture with the author of Novius Blesamus’ epitaph. His consular nephew could communicate with the rioters who hacked at the images of Domitian: they shared the culture of statues. The manufacturers of clay lamps shared a visual vocabulary with men of the status and education of Cicero. This is not to say that the meanings of statues were simple or invariable, nor that diVerent social groups responded to them in the same way. What we can say is that the culture of statues was something that the Roman population had in common, and even when the meanings of statues diVered or were contested, or when

302 conclusions people appropriated them or (sometimes literally) fought over them, the conXict took place over the same territory. These aspects of the subject are illustrated by the preceding chapters, and most clearly of all, perhaps, by the custom of iconoclasm as it was acted out on the ground, represented in the historical sources, and ultimately appropriated by the writers and zealots of Christian late antiquity. Therefore, in examining ancient responses to statuary, we can at least attempt a holistic approach. The areas examined above represent a structured eVort to cut through the culture of statues—to take sections from it—in diVerent directions. In examining more and less abstract attitudes in antiquity, more and less direct responses, literary representations, and visual portrayals of statues, I have tried to be as representative as is possible within the limitations of a short study. In the Introduction I suggested that this is not quite the synthetic introduction to Roman statuary that is needed. However, it is a synopsis in the sense that I have sought to bring together primary and secondary material from classical subdisciplines that are traditionally rather isolated. My broad conclusion is that where the interpretation of ancient culture is concerned, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. The connections between the various areas covered here, and between the variety of sources exploited demonstrates the potential of an interdisciplinary outlook. In spite of this, I have consciously omitted one important subject which would have extended the scope of the book impossibly, namely self-consciously literary representation of statues: the role of the statue as a literary Wgure. This is a slowly expanding Weld,1 but although it is certainly relevant to the arguments advanced here, it would have shifted the emphasis of the book away from the Wrm ground of the Roman urban environment and the relationships played out within it. This social context of art has suVered much worse neglect and demands prior attention. With these comments in mind we can encapsulate much of the preceding discussion with several general conclusions. 1. Representations. The ubiquity of literary and visual portrayals of statues does not in itself mean that statues were overwhelmingly signiWcant, but neither does it mean that their appearance is an innocent, spontaneous phenomenon: 1 See e.g. R. Kassel, ‘Dialoge mit Statuen’, ZPE 51 (1983) 1–12; J. Mossman, ‘Plutarch’s Use of Statues’, in M. Flower and M. Toher (eds.), Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell (London 1991) 98–119. Y. L. Too, ‘Statues, Mirrors, Gods: Controlling Images in Apuleius’, in J. Elsner (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge 1996) 133–52. Compare also discussion of Tacitus in R. Turcan, ‘Tacite et les arts plastiques dans les Histoires’, Latomus 44 (1985) 784–804, at 784–5; and more recently and comprehensively D. T. Steiner, Images in the Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought (Princeton 2001).

conclusions

303

it demands explanation in terms of ancient systems of representation. This is demonstrated by the use of evidence here, and especially by the signiWcance of visual representations in relief, on lamps and coins, and in other media: viewed in context, they yield more information about Roman culture and society than conventional techniques such as copy-criticism. The sources are better viewed as the fabric of ancient history, not merely as a window upon it. 2. The idea of the statue. The iconography that can be constructed from the visual representations and from the stylistic choices made by producers of statues (archaism and so on) can be combined with the ideas and images examined especially in Chapters 1 and 2 to suggest that the generalized concept of the statue did exist in Roman antiquity, even when it was negotiable. 3. Social signiWcance. As it happens, the ubiquity of statues in all kinds of representation does seem to reXect their importance in Roman life: implicated in social relations (even when oVered to the gods), the acknowledged furniture of the urban environment, and part of the metaphorical language at least of the literate elite. The positive and violent responses to statues explained in Chapters 4 and 8 conWrm that their signiWcance was by no means limited to those who had the greatest stake in individual monuments. 4. Categories. The frequent specialization of modern works of scholarship on statues prevents them from doing justice to the ancient evidence. There was a uniWed concept behind the Roman diVerentiation of statues, which makes that consistent categorization, especially in the pervasive medium of language, particularly interesting and revealing. I have demonstrated (in Chapters 1 and 6) the political and social signiWcance of those categories. Ultimately this book is founded on a paradox. Roman statues have been for several centuries among the most familiar icons of the Western artistic tradition.2 The men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who unearthed the treasures of ‘Roma Vecchia’ on the Via Appia, or worked systematically along the ancient villa-lined shore of Latium, were literally extracting from the remains of antiquity those objects which they considered most important. Those statues have retained their prominence in modern culture, in spite of the subsequent reaction against the excavators’ historical assumptions and aesthetic ideals.3 Yet we have been slow to adapt this heritage, to re-evaluate it and to put statues back into the world in which they were made—in which they collectively made sense. When we do, we Wnd that they were much more profoundly signiWcant than even the antiquarians imagined. 2 On their role in high culture at least see e.g. F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven and London 1981). 3 Cf. O. J. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven and London 1979) for shifting perspectives on Roman art since the Renaissance.

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index Numbers in italics refer to illustrations acclamations, see chanting Actium 62, 173 Adelphia, Sarcophagus of 295 Ad Statuam/Ad Statuas 122 adynata 42–3 Aemilius Lepidus, Marcus (cos. 179 bc) 129 Aemilius Paullus 151 statue of 132 agalma 25–7, 30, 31, 67–8 agalmatophilia 44, 265–7 Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius 128, 143–4, 147 Agrippina 270 n. 44, 286 n. 118 Alcubierre, R. J. 252 Alde, River, Suffolk 174 Alexander the Great 58, 170 Alfo¨ldy, G. 179–80 Altbachtal 295 analogia 57–9 andrias 25–27 Anicetus, altar of 99, 16, 17 aniconism 66–72 Annius Severus 230 anomalia see analogia anthropomorphism 69–71 Antioch 269, 273, 274, 275 n. 71, 288–90 Antiochus IV 143, 151 n. 122 Antoninus Pius, statues of 89, 181 Antonius, Marcus 142, 172–3, 228, 274 Antony, see Antonius, Marcus Aphrodisias 158, 162, 168 Aphrodite, see Venus Apocrypha: New Testament 267 n. 25 Old Testament 295 Apollo, statue of 249, 189 Apollonia 161 Apollo Ptoios, temple at Acraephia 171 ‘appendage aesthetic’ 47–59 aprosopia 69 archaism 97–9, 207

Arezzo 159 Arnobius 189 Arrian 72, 183 Artemis, see Diana Asianism 225 Aspri, villa of 85–6, 110, 160, 176, 259 Athena, statues 109, 207, 238, 253 see also Minerva; Phidias Augustine, St 185, 291, 297 Augustus: as benefactor of all 87 n. 39 modesty 34 n. 51, 134 n. 61 and monstra 62 Res Gestae 128, 161, 172–3 statues of 128, 149, 280 statues toppled 274 use of statues 53–4, 132–3, 142–3, 172, 228, 285 see also Prima Porta statue; Rome, Temple of Divus Augustus Aurelius Oenopio Onesimus, Marcus, dedication by 189 Bacchus, see Dionysus Baebius Iucinus 279 Baiae: plaster casts 232 n. 37 statue of Domitian/Nerva 281, 46 Bailey, D. M. 195–7, 207 Barberini Togatus 47, 83, 256, 6 Barcelona, see Barcino Barcino 179, 181 Bassaeus Rufus, Marcus 82 n. 10 Baths of Caracalla 153, 262 see also Farnese Bull; Farnese Hercules Baudelaire, C. 7–8 Belting, H. 261 Bianchi Bandinelli, R. 10, 157 Blagg, T. F. C. 176–7 Bonfante, L. 53 Boschung, D. 97, 101–2

328 index Boscoreale: cubiculum from villa 216–9, 221, 42 Boudicca 296 n. 158 Brilliant, R. 47, 49, 51, 55 Britain 174–9 Britannicus, statues of 152 Brough-on-Humber 179 Brundisium 139 busts 46 Caerwent 175, 178 Caligula 152, 162, 264–5, 277 n. 84 damnatio memoriae 270 n. 38, 276, 280, 283 and Olympian Zeus 54 and statues in Campus Martius 131–3, 285–6 statues removed by 134 n. 61 Calpurnius Piso, Gnaeus 267 n. 28, 275–6 Calpurnius Piso, Lucius 138, 255, 279, 283 Cancelleria reliefs 55, 281, 9 Capitoline Triad 201–2, 34 Caracalla 89, 270 n. 38, 277, 279, 286–7, 289 Cartagena 159 Casale Maruffi, villa at 255 Cassiodorus 119–21, 134, 155–6, 162, 298 Cassius, jurist 56 Cassius Cacurius, Marcus, stela of 104 Castelgandolfo 233 catacombs: of St Pamphilus 291 see also Rome, Via Paisiello Cato the Censor 72, 77, 130, 226 Cato Uticensis 255–6 celebritas 136–140, 144 chanting 272–4 Christians 154–5, 290–8 Cicero 233, 259 De Domo Suo 34–5 Verrine orations 31, 140–3, 226, 228 circus relief, from Ostia 104–8, 20 Cirta (Numidia) 135–6, 153–4, 265 Claridge, A. 233–5, 239–40, 247 Claudia Semne, tomb of 32 n. 47, 103, 187 n. 15 Claudius, 61–2 and damnatio memoriae 270 n. 38, 279, 280 restrictions on statues 85, 128, 133–4, 147

as Jupiter, statue from Lanuvium 49–51, 294, 296 n. 158 7 Claudius Paulinus, Tiberius 175, 177–9, Cleander 280 Clement of Alexandria 67 Cleopatra 62, 172–3 Clitumnus, shrine of 77 Clodius, Publius 34 Cloelia 139 coins 2–3, 4, 208–214, 38–41 collecting, see connoisseurship collective behaviour 283–5 Colossi 24 Cominius Abascantus, Quintus 23, 188–9 Commodus 1 n. 6, 62, 82 n. 10 damnatio memoriae of 270, 273, 275, 276, 290 Concordia, statue at Cuicul 89 connoisseurship 224–31 consecration 32 Constantine 269, 279–80, 289, 291, 296–7 see also Constantinople; Rome, Arch of Constantine Constantinople 148 Column of Arcadius 148 riots 288 Constantius I 88–9, 209 Constantius II 112–3, 152, 161, copies 231–6, 236–7 Corinthian bronze 225 Courtney, E. 266 Crete and Cyrene, province 160 Cuicul (Djemila), old forum 88–9, 148, 157–8, 160, 179–81 cult statues 66–70, 184–222 see also agalma; simulacrum curator statuarum 155 Curran, J. 139, 144, 152, 154 Cyrene, sanctuary of Demeter 188 n. 18 Daedala festival 68 Daedalus 64–6, Dagon, idol of 293 n. 145 D’Ambra, E. 53, 109 damnatio memoriae 54–6, 267–99, 9, 46–8 Daut, R. 20 n. 1, 21 de Chirico, G. 261–2 Decius, emperor 297 deformity 59–64

index Delos 143 Demetrius of Alopece 192 Demosthenes, bust of 253 De Rossi, G. B. 291–3 dextrarum iunctio 103–8, 18, 19, 20 Diadumenianus 271 Diadumenus, see Octavius Diadumenus Diana, representations of 163, 218, 249 Digests of Justinian, see law Dio Chrysostom 54, 66–7, 79, 149 Diocletian, statue at Cuicul 88–9 Diomedes, statue of 94 Dionysus, statues of 250 diplomata, military 122, 132, 149, 161 Djemila, see Cuicul Domitian 34, 62, 174, 250 n. 89 damnatio memoriae of 271, 273, 275–6, 280, 281, 283, 286, 297, 301, 46 statues of 127–8, 129 n. 41 Domus Aurea, see Rome, Golden House Don Juan 108 Donohue, A. A. 20, 64–6, 68, 74, 186 Dura-Europos: Temple of Adonis 207, 293 n. 145 Egyptianizing art 220 Elagabalus 62, 167, 213, 275 Elsner, J. 161, 171, 210 Elvira, Council of 291 Emporiae 179 Epicurus, images of 192–3, 253 ‘epigraphic habit’ 176 euergetism 168 Eugenius 288 Eumachia, see Pompeii Eusebius 296–7 Eutropius, damnatio memoriae of 271 Fabius Severus, Lucius 138 Farnese Bull 263 Farnese Hercules 153, 262 Favorinus 286–7, 289 Feeney, D. 206, 227 Flamininus, see Quinctius Flamininus Flavia Plautilla 287 n. 127 Flavius Sabinus 271 Flower, H. 80, 256–7 Fortuna Redux, statue at Cuicul 89 Freedberg, D. 14, 44, 261–2

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Fre´zouls, E. 176 n. 58, 177 Fulvius Nobilior, Marcus 151, 153 Fulvius Plautianus, Gaius 287–8 functions of statuary 10 Fundilius Doctus, Gaius 85 funerary art 2, 69–70, 83–4, 92, 2, 19 see also Via Appia; catacombs Gaius, emperor, see Caligula Gaius Caesar 138 Galba, emperor 113, 271 Gargilia Marciana, statue at Cuicul 89, 160 Garland, R. 61–2 Gell, A. 261 gems 124–5, 246, 248 Germania 174, 177 Germanicus 53, 127–8, 152 Geta 89, 270, 277–9 Glycon, see Farnese Hercules Go¨lhisar 190 Gordian I 179 Gordon, R. L. 21 n. 137, 69–70, 142, 212 Graces 237 Gregory, A. 262, 285 Gross, K. 12, 14, 44, 108, 261 Grottaferrata, see Aspri, villa of the gymnasia 258–9 Hadrian 134 n. 61, 287, 289 bronze head from London 174, 296 n. 158 statue at Trapezus 72, 183 statues of 72, 163, 183 villa at Tivoli 1, 235 see also Rome, Arch of Constantine; Rome, Arco di Portogallo Hannestad, N. 264, 284 Haterii, tomb of 2, 84, 102–3, 122–3, 1, 2 Hedrick, C. 268, 288 Heius of Messana 142, 228 n. 20 Hellenistic statuary 28–30 Helpis, altar of, Florence 97–8 Hera, see Juno Heracles, see Hercules Herculaneum: House of the Mosaic Atrium 74 n. 11 statue of Nonius Balbus 160 Suburban Baths 138 Villa of the Papyri 16, 252–5, 258, 260

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Hercules 67, 89, 97, 205, 249 see also Farnese Hercules Hermes, statues of 72, 99, 249 herms 62–4, 70 see also Priapus Herodotus 26 heroic nudes 93–7, 14 Hill, P. V. 208–9, 211, 213 Hippocrates, veneration of 192 Hispania Citerior, see Spain Holconius Rufus, Marcus 136–8, 159 27 Horster, G. 248 iconoclasm, see damnatio memoriae illusionism 36–41 imagines maiorum 83 imperial cult 162, 169–74, 180 Jacob of Saroug 297 Jerome, St 280–1, 290, 297 Julian the Apostate 297 Julius Caesar 34, 62, 68, 264 images of 23, 54, 62, 68, 128, 132, 173 n. 51 Juno, statues of 68, 249 Jupiter, statues of 154, 249, 294, 48 Jupiter Optimus Maximus 88–9 see also Rome, Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus

Marcus Aurelius 280 images of 82 n. 10, 89, 181, 280 see also Rome, Arch of Constantine Marius, statue of 275 Marsyas, statue of 6, 116, 121, 266, Martin, H. G. 191, 193 Marvin, M. 232–3, 239 Maxentius 289 Maximian 277, 297 Maximinus 283, 297 Maximus, usurper 288 Melia Annina, arch of, Zara 163 Me´rida 159 Tomb of the Voconii 101 Messalina 171, 279 Metellus, statue of 132 ‘mindless’ violence 283–90 Minerva, statues of 249 Misenum, statues at 23, 188 Mithraeum, at Walbrook, London 296 monstra, see deformity Moorman, E. 40, 214–5, 220 Mummius 125, 147, 151 Mutinus Tutinus 266 n. 24 Myron: Apollo of 142 heifer of 228

Killian, L. M. 284 Lactantius 297–8 Laelius Sapiens 256 Lahusen, G. 11, 20 n. 1, lamps 194–207, 31–36 lararia 195–6 Large Herculaneum Woman, statue type 163, 169 law, Roman 144–6, 206 Licinius Secundus, Lucius 180 Livia, 53, 110 n. 119 Lucian 59, 61 n. 52, 192 Lucius Verus 59, 89, 181, 280 Lucullus, Lucius Licinius 125 Lugdunensis 177 Lysippus 54, 63, 126 Apoxyomenos 142, 205–6 Mahdia shipwreck 231 Marcellus, Marcus Claudius 3–4, Marcius Rex, Quintus, statue of 132

Nebuchadnezzar 295 Neith, egyptian goddess 200 n. 60 Nemesis, statue at Rhamnous 238 Nemi, sanctuary of Diana 85 Nero 62, 81, 227 see also Rome, Golden House; Rome, Colossus of Nero cult of 171 and damnatio memoriae 271, images of 174, 280 n. 97 Neudecker, R. 249, 253, 255 Nicomachus Flavianus, Virius 288 Nonius Balbus, Marcus 82 n. 10, 138, 159–60 Novius Blesamus 15, 146–9, 301 Nymphidia Monime 188 Octavia 277, 286, 289, 294 Octavian, see Augustus Octavius Diadumenus, Tiberius 97, 15 Ofilius Ferus, Gaius, statue of 95–6 Ofillius Celer, Marcus, statues of 138

index Olympia, nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus 163, 166 Oplontis, Villa of the Poppaei at 219, 221, 254 Orestes, statue at Mycenae 149 Otho, emperor 113 Palladion 4 see also Sperlonga Panthea 59 paradeigmata 240 Paulus, jurist 144–5 Pausanias 184–5 Peka´ry, T. 11, 135, 272 Pellicus, magical statue of 192 Pergamon, Great Altar at 62 n. 60 Perge, city gate of 162–3 Pertinax 273 Pettia Ge and C. Clodius, stela of 104, 18 Petuaria, see Brough-on-Humber Phidias: Athena Parthenos 151 n. 127, 238 Athena Promachos 207 Olympian Zeus 54, 67; 75–6 Philip II of Macedon, hypothetical portrait of 58 Philopappus, tomb of, Athens 166 Philostratus 237 Pietas, statue at Cuicul 88–9 pinacothecae 230 Piso, see Calpurnius Piso Pitiscus, S. 21, 34 Plancia Magna 163–4, 29 Pliny the Elder 28–9, 80, 123–6, 184, 227 Pliny the Younger 56–7, 127, 128, 230–1 Pollitt, J. J. 60, 226 Pollius Felix, villa of, Surrentum 250 n. 89, 256 Polyclitus 59–60, 63–4, 112, 235, 239 Diadumenos 97, 192, 248 n. 84, 15 Doryphoros 55, 97, 109–10, 112, 234–5, 253, 259 Pompeii 157 Eumachia, statue of 163–4, 30 Eumachia building 131, 136, 158, 163–4 forum 87, 131, 135–6, 159, 262, 28 four styles (painting) 38, 220–1 House of the Coloured Capitals 76 House of the Cryptoporticus 40 House of C. Sulpicius Rufus 220 n. 127

331

House of Julius Polybius 76 House of the Orchard 220 House of the Surgeon 63 n. 62 House of the Venus in Bikini 242 House of the Venus Marina 38–40, 93, 216, 221, 243, 4 House of the Vettii 250, 254 House of the Wedding of Alexander 40, 5 Porta di Nocera necropolis 70, 10 Praedia of Julia Felix 148, 28 Stabian Baths 136 Via dell’Abbondanza 136–7 Villa of the Mysteries 219 Pompey, statue of 34 Poppaea, statues of 269, 276–7, 286, 294 portraits 46–59, 79–117 Praxiteles: satyrs 233 Sauroctonos 243–7, 45 Venus of Cnidus 1, 44, 112 n. 122, 232, 234–5 Priam 56 Priapus 68 n. 92, 72–7, 205–6, 215, 226, 229, 250, 266 n. 24, 300, 11 Prima Porta statue 55, 109–10 primitive sculpture 64–77 Priscilla, wife of Abascantus, tomb of 84, 103 ‘private’ art 223–60 processions 150–2 proverbs 42–3 Prudentius 155, 297 Ptolemy Philadelphus 151 n. 122 Pudicitia-type statues 93, 12, 13 Pygmalion 44 Quinctius Flamininus, Titus (cos. 198 bc) 151 Quintilii, Villa of the 1–2, 223 Ramage, N. H. L. and Ramage, A. 49, 51, 53 Regulus 83–4 Republican statuary 28–35 Rhodes 149 see also Dio Chrysostom Riace bronzes 234 Ridgway, B. S. 233–4 Riot of the Statues, Antioch ad 387, see Antioch Rodenwaldt, G. 105, 107 Romanization 177

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Rome 118–56 Ara Pietatis 209 Arch of the Argentarii 282 Arch of Constantine 6, 115, 121, 281, 23–5 Arch of Titus 122 Arco di Portogallo 114–15, 22 ‘Arcus ad Isis’ 122, 2 Area Capitolina 6, 131–132, 285 Campus Martius 6, 285–6 Capitol 6 Colosseum 4, 122–3, 2 Colossus of Nero 4, 123, 162 ficus ruminalis 116 Forum Augustum 81, 87, 123, 130–2, 144, 147, 152 n. 137, 158–9, 163, 257 Forum Romanum 4, 87, 113, 115, 135 Forum Traianum 87, 152, 158, 288 Gemonian Steps 6, 271, 275 Golden House 171 House of Livia 262 Porticus Deorum Consentium 187 Porticus Octaviae 229 Regia 91 sanctuaries of Vesta 212 sanctuary of Honos and Virtus 3–4 Septizonium 4 Temple of Concordia 209–10, 38 Temple of Divus Augustus 211 Temple of Divus Iulius 208–9, 37 Temple of Elagabal 213, Temple of Faustina 211, 39 Temple of Isis and Serapis 152 Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus 34, 122, 127, 129, 208–9, 37 Temple of Jupiter Dolichenus 189 Temple of Jupiter Victor 213 Temple of Minerva 122 Tomb of Eurysaces 84 Via Cavour, house in 231 Via Paisello (catacomb) 274, 292, 294–5, 48 vicus statuae Valerianae 122 Rufus, general under Nero 271–2 Sabinus, Flavius 274, 276, 280 Saguntum 179, 181 Saldae (Bougie) 135, 149 satyrs, statues of 233, 250 Scaurus, Marcus, theatre of 125

Scipiones, statues of the 132 Sejanus, Lucius Aelius 55, 127, 269, 277, 280, 283 Seneca 238–9 Senie, H. 8–9, Septimius Antonius 189 Septimius Severus 34 n. 54, 282, 287 47 Septuagint 26 Servius Sulpicius 91 Sette Bassi, Villa at 86 Severus Alexander 62, 152, 213, 280 n. 95, 41 Sicily, see Verres signum 20–1, 22–3, 25, 27, 31–3, 187, 189–90, 248 Silvanus 74 simulacrum 20–7, 31–5, 68, 187, 189–90 Smith, R. R. R. 10 n. 35, 166, 174 Socrates, herm of 255 Spain 179–182 Sperlonga 110, 263, 21 statua 20–1, 22, 23–5, 27–8, 187 Statuario, suburb of Rome 1 ‘statuesque’ imagery 92–117, 206–7 Stoicism 126 Subatianus Proculus, Tiberius Claudius, statue at Cuicul 89 Sulis Minerva, head of 295 symmetria 59–61 Syracuse 151 Tabula Siarensis 81 Tarraco 159, 179–81 Tarraconensis 158, 179–82, Tarragona, see Tarraco Terme General 154 terminology 7–8, 11, 20–35, 186–90 see also agalma; andrias; signum; simulacrum; statua Thamugadi (Timgad) 160, 179 Theodosius I, statues of 269, 271, 288 Theodosius II 288–9, Tiberius 54, 62, 269, 271, 274–5 Timgad, see Thamugadi Titus 69, 174, 178, Tivoli General 31 Torre Annunziata, see Oplontis Trajan 34, 115, 121, 127–8, 276, 282, 26 Trapezus 72, 183 Trimalchio 230

index Turner, R. H. 284 typology 93–7, 109–10, 236–249 Tyrannicides, the (statues) 192, 232 Ulpius Ianuarius, Marcus 176, 179 Valentia 179 Valentinian III 288 Valerian 297 vandalism 264–5 Vanderbroeck, P. J. J. 283–4 Varner, E. 268, 278 Varro, Marcus Terentius 57–9 Venus, statues of 24, 41 n. 71, 249, 250 of Arles 109 Paphian 69 Pudica 53, 97, 109–110, 239, 247–8 Sandal-Binder 241–3, 246, 248–9, 43, 44 see also Praxiteles, Venus of Cnidus Venus-portraits 2, 6, 49, 51–3, 102–3, 109–11, 235, 248, 295 3, 8 verism 92, 97–8, 102 Vermeule, C. C. 193–4

333

Verres 31, 139–42, 160 n. 7, 223, 225–6, 228, 274, 280 Vespasian 167, 174 Via Appia 1–4, 93, 96, 99, 103, 223, 303 Victoria, statues of 24, 89, 291 Vindex 205, 271 Vitellius 271, 274, 276 Vitrasius Silvestris, Lucius 138 Vitruvius 60–1, 218, 220, Volusius Saturninus, Lucius 81–2, 90–1, 103, 259 wall-painting 38–41, 214–221 waxworks 36–7, 262 Weber, K. 252 Wilenski, R. H. 9, 224, 261, Wojcik, M. R. 253, 255, 259 Woodchester, Gloucestershire 175 Zacharias Rhetor 188 Zanker, P. 10, 73, 84, 101–2, 137, 158, 178, 209–11, 213, 226, 271 Zeuxis 61 n. 52