Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century A.D.

Abstract

The towns of the Middle Roman Empire have left an array of grand columned marble architecture that makes classical sites, from Merida to Ephesus, still so imposing for the modern viewer. The great benefactors who paid for this strange marble culture and for everything else thought worthwhile in an ancient city received large public portrait statues set up on tall elegant moulded bases, set either in columned façades or posted around town at focal points of urban life (see below, Figs 1–2). In their method of signification these statue monuments shared more with poster hoardings than the gallery objects we think of as art. That is, they combined a commanding image with a loud complementary text. They were also different from the public statues of our own times in at least three other important respects — in their prominence, in their sheer quantity, and in that they mostly represented living persons. They were not isolated memorials but potent markers in local politics and aristocratic competition. Architectural setting, inscribed base, statue costume, and styled portrait head all combined to make sometimes complex statements about the subject.