R. R. R. Smith

The Imperial Reliefs from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias

In 1979, during his continuing excavation of the city of Aphrodisias, Professor K. T. Erim discovered a large temple and sanctuary complex dedicated to Aphrodite and the Julio-Claudian emperors (the Theoi Sebastoi ). It had a remarkable sculptural display of which much has survived—there are about eighty relief panels. The complex would probably have been called a Sebasteion: we know from an unrelated inscription that there was one at Aphrodisias. It is of great interest to both the historian and art-historian of the early empire, giving a rare combination of buildings, sculpture, and inscriptions from a unified excavated context and providing an unrivalled picture of the physical setting of the imperial cult in a Greek city. The sculptured reliefs give a great range and combination of iconography quite unexpected in such a context—mythological, allegorical, and imperial. The myth panels seem to offer a missing link between the iconographic repertoire of the Hellenistic world and that used under the Roman empire, while the allegorical and imperial panels give a detailed plcture of the emperor and Rome as seen from the Greek East that is not available elsewhere.

The Portraits of the Greeks

G. M. A. Richters monumental three volume work, The Portraits of the Greeks, was published in 1965 and quickly became the standard reference in the field. Shortly before her death, Richter prepared a one-volume edition of that classic work, which has now been revised and updated by the Oxford scholar R. R. R. Smith.

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

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 facades 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.

Simulacra Gentium: the Ethne from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias

Series of provinces and peoples were something new in Roman art. They were a distinctively Roman way of representing their empire visually, and reflect a distinctively Roman and imperial mode of thought. Such images are most familiar to us in sculpture from the reliefs that decorated the temple of Hadrian in Rome, and on coins from the ‘province’ series of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. We know, however, from various written sources that extensive groups of personified peoples were made at Rome under Augustus. Recently, the discovery of such a series in relief at Aphrodisias, there called ethne (peoples), allows us for the first time to see what an early imperial group of this kind looked like. The new reliefs were part of the elaborate decoration of a temple complex, probably called a Sebasteion, dedicated to Aphrodite Prometor and the Julio-Claudian emperors. I have already published in this journal the reliefs with imperial scenes, which portray the Roman emperor from a Greek perspective. This article publishes the ethne reliefs which, it will be argued, set out to reproduce or adapt in a much more direct manner an Augustan monument in Rome. The use of an Augustan-style ‘province’ series in Asia Minor is a telling illustration both of some of the mechanisms in the transmission of imperial art and of a Greek citys identification with the Roman governments view of its empire.

Greeks, Foreigners, and Roman Republican Portraits *

The first part of this paper looks briefly at Greek representations of foreigners and the first individualized Greek portraits and the connections between them. The second part looks at Roman Republican portraits and the problem of the origins of their style and suggests that they should be seen in a historical and psychological context as a Greek reaction to a new group of foreigners of special concern to Greek artists and Greeks in general.

Historical and religious memory in the ancient world

PREFACE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 1. Introduction PART I: RELIGIOUS PASTS AND RELIGIOUS PRESENT 2. Memory and Ancient Greece 3. Sappho in the Underground 4. Memory and its uses in Judaism and Christianity in the early Roman empire: the portrayal of Abraham 5. Statues in the temples of Pompeii: Combinations of gods, local definition of cults, and the Memory of the City PART II: DEFINING RELIGIOUS IDENTITY 6. Rituals and the construction of identity in Attalid Pergamon 7. Memory and identity in the Graeco-Roman cults of Isis 8. Epigraphy and ritual: the vow of the legionary from Sulmo 9. Building Memory: The role of sacred structures in Sphakia and Crete PART III : COMMEMORATING AND ERASING THE PAST 10. You shall blot out the memory of Amalek : Roman historians on remembering to forget 11. The discovery of old inscriptions in Antiquity and the legitimation of new cults 12. Abercius of Hierapolis: Christianisation and social memory in Late Antique Asia Minor 13. Defacing the gods at Aphrodisias

Troilos and Achilles: A Monumental Statue Group from Aphrodisias

A remarkable blue-grey marble horse with a white marble rider, found in the Basilica at Aphrodisias, has been a focus of recent research. The article describes the archaeology and history of the monument—how it can be reconstructed, with its base and in its precise setting in the Basilica. The group was a daring composition that had already fallen and been restored once in antiquity. What emerges is firstly a new full-size hellenistic-style statue group whose subject can be identified as Troilos and Achilles, and secondly a striking example of the long second lives of classical statues in late antiquity. The horse was a great public monument of the early imperial period that was moved to the Basilica probably in the mid-fourth century AD, where it has a well-documented context. The subject of the group can be identified both from epigraphy and from its iconographic antecedents, and its version of the subject can be related to a particular strand in the rich later literary representations of the story.