The Seated Togate Emperor: An Augustan Honorific Portrait Type
It has sometimes seemed that in the imperial period freestanding portraits and relief sculpture avoid showing the emperor togate and enthroned, as in the case of Republican honorific portraiture.[7] This is noteworthy: consuls at least, and emperors certainly, exercised many of their ceremonial and administrative duties seated, but we do not seem to have corresponding images, as we do for high officials shown as orators, priests, generals, and so on. Perhaps such a portrait type was generally avoided because seated images were associated with images of the gods; this hypothesis would be borne out by the fact that seated emperor portraits, which do exist, usually portray their subject like a cult statue, half-naked and often on a colossal scale, like images of Jupiter.[8]
With regard to freestanding portraits and relief sculpture, we should perhaps consider that superbia (overweening pride) could be imputed to someone who receives fellow magistrates seated.[9] Since Roman portraits often meant to imply the real presence of the person portrayed (as implied by damnatio memoriae, legal strictures against lèse-majesté in the presence of imperial portraits, and so forth), then an image of a high magistrate seated would perpetually meet all spectators as such—that is, the subject would perpetually confront the viewer in a potentially arrogant mode. It may simply be the case that a seated statue was felt to be a rather difficult form for commemorative—inane atop a column, invisible upon an arch; suitable only for a group on a pedestal not above eye level, it needed more space than a standing figure and would not back so easily against a wall in an atrium, for example. There are no ancient explanations.
The figure type of a seated togate emperor does occur in the imperial period, though rarely. It is so uncommon that it figures as a separate category in no modern work on the typology of imperial portrait statues, nor
has it been studied for the Republic. As K. Fittschen observed in 1977, "Für die mit Toga bekleideten Sitzstatuen fehlen sowohl Materialsammlung wie Untersuchung."[10] When Mason Hammond in 1953 investigated seated emperor types (focusing on coinage) he was not interested in the distinction between togate and seminude portrayals.[11] Fittschen was interested in a Republican series of statues that occur from the first half of the first century B.C. Grave monuments for Romans of the senatorial class, these statues portrayed the deceased as a man of culture and letters (like the late imperial aner mousikos sarcophagus portraits), that is, in a portrait based on Greek seated philosopher types. The deceased was shown sitting on a Greek klismos with literary appurtenances like book scroll and/or scroll basket; the earliest example is togate, but others often wear the Greek chiton and himation. All, however, are distinguished as Romans, and as senators, by the fact that their senatorial shoes (calcei ) are carefully detailed;[12] a most telling example is a reworking of ca. 50 B.C. of a pair of fourth-century Greek seated literary portraits (one, inscribed, of the comedian Poseidippos) to be installed in a townhouse on the Viminal. The heads are recarved as Roman portraits with Roman coiffures, signet rings are added, tunics are decently indicated under their mantles, and the shoes are altered by carving and bronze additions into senatorial calcei .[13]
Seated togate statues also occurred as grave portraits by the first century A.D., depicting the deceased not as a homo Musarum but as a functioning magistrate and/or patronus . At Republican Pompeii a tomb at the Porta Nocera had grave statues of a man in the toga exigua and of his wife, both seated;[14] a statue with senatorial calcei in the KLM office in Rome is from Velletri;[15] in North Italy, at Aquileia, in the first century B.C. a local magistrate was depicted on his subsellium;[16] at Altinum fragments indicate a father and son sat as duumviri in a funerary aedicula,[ 17] as did a statue with senatorial calcei now in Este;[18] and there is a "senator" from Vigevano now in Milan.[19] Among later examples at Rome,[20] T. Schäfer highlights the Villa Massimo (Claudian)[21] and Palazzo Falconieri (Antonine) senators,[22] whose elaborate sellae curules stressed their magisterial cursus . There are comparable relief depictions, like the grave relief from Chieti (ca. A.D. 50) where Lucius Storax sits at the center of the municipal senate on a sella curulis, much larger than his fellow magistrates.[23] Less famous are the Republican and Augustan bisellia panels just cited (p. 35) and tomb decorations, where the deceased as magistrate receives petitioners.
By the later first century A.D. seated funerary statues were erected also in the provinces—in Gaul, for instance, as it became steadily more Romanized. Well known is the testament of a high-ranking Gaul of the Lin-
gones who received Roman citizenship under Domitian for aid against the rebellion of Civilis. The detailed instructions for his funeral and monument at Andematunum (CIL XIII.2.1.5708)[24] mix with Gallic burial customs a prescription for an Italian-style funerary cella to be built of Luna marble imported from Italy, and a statua sedens in (even more chic) exotic marble (ex lapide quam optumo transmarino ).[25] Compare a magistrate's tomb portrait (togate, on cushioned sella curulis ) in local limestone from near Langres.[26] These commissions by local nabobs outside the capital follow fashions set slightly earlier in Rome and its immediate neighborhood (cf. the Villa Massimo statue). Compare the parody of such a monument in the "testamentary" instructions given by the nouveau-riche Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon (chap. 71), roughly contemporary with the monument of Lucius Storax.[27]
Grave monuments, however, are something different from honorific monuments erected in the city of Rome, even if they reflect the conventions of such monuments. We do know of seated togate statues, which seem eventually to have been restricted to the emperors, from a handful of scattered references and depictions; no certain fragments of such a statue from before the late Empire are now extant.[28] The type seems to have been a specifically Julio-Claudian innovation, which influenced later imperial commissions. The only epigraphic evidence for Rome, an inscription from Lucus Feroniae, names in a list of nine honorific statues for L. Volusius Saturninus a togate statue residens on a sella curulis in the Porticus Lentuli at Pompey's theater.[29] The fourth-century Historia Augusta supplies the only literary reference: the Life of Macrinus, which offers at 6.8–9 a similar list of (four) honorific statue types in an imperial letter, including statuas sedentes civili habitu, or seated togate statues.[30]
Official letters in the Historia Augusta are generally considered inauthentic, that is, made up by the fourth-century author. The letter may be invented, but it might easily be based on surviving accounts of the acta of Macrinus and his Senate or on the record of the actual statues if they were made. The author certainly shows himself conversant with the standard types of imperial honorific portraiture from Rome, and it is also the case that Julio-Claudian coin depictions of seated togate imperial statues ascribe them to senatus consulta . The text, then, may or may not document a real commission by Macrinus, but it is still a solid Late Antique document of the statuary type in question.
The Historia Augusta passage has good fourth-century artistic parallels at Rome. The oratio panel carved for the Arch of Constantine (fig. 36) shows that emperor as an imperator on the rostra in the Forum.[31] Seen head-
on, he is flanked at either end of the rostra by a seated statue of a togate emperor holding a scroll and a globe, just like the BR Augustus. These statues depict Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius; the Constantinian panel is analogous to Macrinus' purported commission, in attempting to show Constantine as political successor in direct line from these exemplary second-century emperors by associating him with their statues. Contemporary with this image are the Tetrarchic/Constantinian fragments in Alexandria and Istanbul of togate porphyry colossi seated on ornate thrones;[32] contemporary with the subject is the colossal porphyry second-century emperor (probably Hadrian) from Caesarea.[33] The Antonine emperors' statues in the relief may have been erected in or near the lifetimes of their subjects, or they could be Constantinian commissions. They are certainly the kind of statue to which the Historia Augusta refers so elliptically; they show too the longevity in portrait sculpture of the BR figure type with its globe and scroll.[34]
It is time for Julio-Claudian evidence. The most famous example is the Divus Augustus depicted on Tiberian sestertii minted in Rome in A.D. 22–23 (fig. 46). On the obverse (DIVUS AUGUSTUS PATER) Angustus sits on a backless throne, footstool under his feet, wearing a radiate crown, grasping a scepter in his left hand and holding out in his right a branch of olive or laurel; behind is a large altar. This statue has rightly been identified as the "signum divo Augusto patri ad Theatrum Marcelli" noted by the Fasti as dedicated by Tiberius and Livia,[35] which Tacitus (Ann. 3.64) says was put up shortly before A.D. 22, and which the Arval Acts (A.D. 38) note as a locus for imperial cult ("[ad theatrum M]arcelli ante simulacrum Divi Augusti"). (It filled in for Augustus' worship while his divus temple—completed by Caligula—was under construction.)
This togate Augustus is posthumous; we still need evidence for images of living emperors instead of divi . In the same series of sestertii as the Divus Augustus commemorative, another type shows Tiberius himself togate and enthroned; the statue it must depict can be identified with a monument that stood in the Forum Julium. This group is the best example of a discrete class of Julio-Claudian monuments, with Augustan roots in the senatorial honorific tradition, described in the discussion of ethnic personifications.
In 17 B.C. fourteen cities of Asia Minor were devastated by a terrible earthquake, and Tiberius responded with major financial aid, which won compliment even from Tacitus and Suetonius. In gratitude, these cities erected a monument to Tiberius in the Forum Julium that included statues of themselves in personified form, grouped around a portrait of Tiberius
(Phlegon Mir. frag. = 13 FGrH 257, frag. 36.13). In A.D. 30 an imitation of this monument was erected in Puteoli (which had a large Greek population); extant today is its large base, on whose sides are carved the personifications of the relevant cities (fig. 62). On top of the base once sat an honorific statue of Tiberius;[36] the form of this statue is given by the sestertius of A.D. 22–23 with its legend CIVITATIBUS ASIAE RESTITUTIS (fig. 46).[37] The original in Rome will have had the form of a long base on which the city personifications stood, instead of being carved on its sides. The S(enatus) C(onsulto) reverse of the sestertius, shared by the Divus Augustus coin, indicates that the monument to Tiberius was sanctioned by the Senate, and its design was undoubtedly cleared by the emperor; like Augustus before him, Tiberius not infrequently turned down at Senate meetings honors that the Senate had just voted to him if he considered them too invidious or grandiloquent.
At some time between A.D. 17 and 22, therefore, Tiberius had a statue of himself erected in the public heart of Rome, which portrayed him as a seated togate magistrate in the presence of personifications. His statue differed from that of the Divus Augustus in that he wore a laurel wreath, held in his raised left hand a much shorter scepter reaching only to the top of his chair, had a patera in his right, and sat on a sella castrensis with fringed seat cover (fig. 47). This togate dress, with the "military" seat and laurel, shows that Tiberius appeared here as a high magistrate with a governor's consular powers over the province: of Asia—an exact parallel to the depiction of Augustus on BR I:2, in the same kind of position of authority over the territory of the people (Gauls) portrayed in that scene.
Together, this Tiberius portrait and its coin image show Tiberius' promulgation of an image of himself, holding a scepter and linked to personifications, which is no more or less "extreme" than the image of Augustus on BR I. Such images could evidently be set in the heart of official Rome, in the old Forum or in the new imperial fora, and could be sanctioned by the Senate. In his acceptance of honors and his choice of images, Tiberius was, if anything, generally more conservative than Augustus, following Augustan precedent as much as possible and even rejecting honors that Augustus had accepted (titles like Pater Patriae, cult temples in the East such as at Gytheion, etc.). Any honor that Tiberius was content to accept is extremely likely to have a good Augustan precedent, even where the evidence for this precedent is now lost.
Early Julio-Claudian monuments in the periphery of the capital document a type of honorific sculpture group where a benefactor to non-Roman polities under his control is shown seated, surrounded by person-
ifications of the entitles he has benefited; and in this sort of monument, the emperor can be shown togate upon a chair of office. W. Eck's recent work allows us to add to the Tiberian monument evidence for senatorial honorific sculpture groups put up in Rome under Augustus.
These monuments took the form of a long basis, in the center of which was placed a portrait of the Roman (pro)consul being honored; about it on either side were arranged the statues of the communities honoring their governor and benefactor. One such monument was put up ca. 22 B.C. to L. Aelius Lamia from the cities of Hispania Ulterior; another went up around the same time in the Campus Martius to a Rufus who had been proconsul in Bithynia from the peoples and cities there. These monuments are now known only from their inscribed bases, so that we do not know if the Roman magistrate was togate or not, standing or seated. However, as these monuments are analogous to the Forum Julium monument, because they commemorate the benevolent exercise of consular authority, their protagonists may very well have appeared, like Tiberius, as magistrates exercising this authority, togate and seated; compare the representation of Sulla seated, in the statue group that showed him receiving the surrender of Jugurtha by Bocchus (denarius of Faustus Sulla, 57 B.C.; fig. 50).[38]
So, the BR image of Augustus with personifications is bracketed temporally by Tiberius' seated imperial benefactor-and-personifications monuments at one end and at the other end by senatorial consular benefactor-and-personifications monuments of Augustus' own reign. I think that it is plain that in his own lifetime Augustus had monuments erected that equalled or excelled those he permitted to his magistrates, and that such a monument will have been the prototype for those of his successors, as it seems to have been for the Caere monument of 10 B.C. On this monument, one would expect him to have looked like the Forum Julium Tiberius, that is, togate upon a sella curulis / castrensis or symbolic simulacrum thereof, holding authentic or symbolic emblems of authority, in the company of personifications of peoples benefited by his rule. BR I:1 shows exactly such a monument in the process of being "put together": the togate emperor, enthroned on a symbolically modified sella curulis (rusticated to indicate fertility), holding a rotulus and symbolic globe, will shortly be confronted or flanked by personifications of the peoples he rules and benefits (as specified by the action of BR I:2). The cup image is identical in outline to the "missing link" postulated above, which could have been postulated just as well if the BR cup had never existed. Given this evidence, I think that it would be the height of illogic to say that a
depiction like BR I:1 would have been impossible in Augustus' lifetime in a public honorific monument, when such a significant portion of the cup panel can be demonstrated to depend on an observable genre of commemorative sculpture.
Thus far I have postulated at least one seated togate portrait of Augustus in Rome during Augustus' lifetime. Such a figure will have inspired Tiberius' portraits of Augustus and of himself as seated and togate and will, with the radiate-crowned Divus Augustus type, have continued to inspire Augustus' successors. The Roman statue type was used also in Augustus' lifetime for honorific statues of him in the East, as in a monument put up at Gortyna by the koinon kreton (probably their cult statue), which is documented by a Claudian coin issue showing Augustus (THEOS SEBASTOS) togate on a sella curulis, as on the BR cup, and holding an akrostolion instead of a globe (fig. 45).[39] (It may not be fortuitous that the seated togate type is associated here, as in the Roman monuments, with a confederation of communities.) Traces of Augustan seated togate types that vary from his posthumous statue can also be discerned in the coinage of Julio-Claudians besides Tiberius. (I omit post-Julio-Claudian coinage, as there is less likelihood of Augustan monumental prototypes for the later coinage.)
At the beginning of his reign Caligula issues dupondii whose reverse proclaims his titulature and whose obverse proclaims the consensus ordinum of Senate, equites, and plebs Romana;[40] This obverse (fig. 48) shows him togate on a sella curulis, bareheaded, both arms bent, as on the BR cup, and holding a branch in his right hand. Claudius has a set of commemorative types for his father, Drusus, with Drusus' portrait and titles on the obverse; on one reverse (fig. 49) Claudius togate sits facing left on a sella castrensis with fringed seat cover (different in form from Tiberius'), arms bent at his side, a branch in his right hand and a rotulus in his left. The sella is set on a pile of weapons, a globe between its feet.[41] Both these coins are likely to reproduce official statues and in any case constitute official images in themselves. The point is that they do not follow the seated emperor type seen under Tiberius, where the emperor has his left arm raised to clasp a scepter and wears something on his head. Instead they conform to the seated type seen on the BR cup (and on the Cretan League issue; see fig. 45): a seated emperor who is bareheaded, his left arm bent at his side, holding a symbolic object only in his right hand. The exact three-quarter figure type seen on these coins cannot derive directly from the cup, but the coins testify to a common monumental tradition, with pre-Caligulan roots. As this tradition is also pre-Tiberian, we end up with
some kind of official Augustan prototype; it is such a prototype that Claudius must be quoting, in any case, as he was hardly likely to use an image that had only Tiberian and Caligulan manifestations.
I mentioned above the famous statue group of Sulla, Bocchus, and Jugurtha known from coin depictions (fig. 50). This group used a seated portrait in an abbreviated historical narrative, not just a purely symbolic grouping. Such groups may have existed under Augustus also. It is possible that coins of 8/7 B.C. from Lugdunum (fig. 87) on which the togate enthroned emperor touches hands with a baby held up to him by a Gaul depict a freestanding statue group (on this type and BR I:2 see chapter 4). My speculative evidence for this is involved with my last documents for the seated togate statue type and the linked genre of emperor-and-personifications, the so-called Anaglypha Traiani and the Hadrianeum sculptures. I discuss these monuments not just because they afford simple iconographic parallels but because the monumental programs of these emperors were (as is well known) characterized to a high degree by paraphrase of Augustan prototypes. When both these would-be Novi Augusti in succession are demonstrated to have erected prominent sculpture groups that independently refer back to the same sort of early imperial genre, a case for an Augustan statuary prototype for the BR-type Augustus is strengthened, and an account of its influence more complete.
The "Anaglypha Traiani"
This is the traditional English sobriquet given to a set of reliefs found in the Roman Forum at its eastern end (now housed in the Curia; see figs. 37–40), whose dimensions and subsidiary cuttings have suggested to many that they were part of a balustrade (stone topped by metal grillwork) for a rectangular enclosure about some sacred spot or monument in the vicinity, such as, perhaps, the Marsyas or ficus Ruminalis depicted on the reliefs themselves. Two of the four reliefs show in mirror image the animal triad for a suovetaurilia sacrifice (bull-ram-pig);[42] the other two are documentary reliefs depicting the emperor at complementary tasks, in complementary roles, in analogous compositional frames. (Possibly these reliefs were amphiglypha, that is, an animal procession and a documentary scene on either side of one wall.) Unfortunately, the heads of all figures have been damaged, in particular that of the emperor in each scene, so that the pieces must be dated by style and historical inference; there is fierce controversy as to whether they are Trajanic or Hadrianic. The two documentary reliefs consist of an oratio to the plebs performed by a togate em-
peror (fig. 37) and a burning of records (e.g., remission of debts) initiated by an emperor in tunic and paludamentum (figs. 38, 40). Both scenes are set in the Forum Romanum against a backdrop of the actual buildings and monuments there visible—the imperial address is given from the rostrum before the Temple of Divus Julius; the record burning is carried out below the Rostra proper.[43]
My first interest is in the statues depicted in these reliefs. The records-burning panel shows at far right a statue of a female personification or divinity set at the corner of the Rostra, with some object against its near leg (fig. 40);[44] this is the same spot where imperial portraits are situated on the Arch of Constantine oratio panel (fig. 36), indicating that they replaced earlier seated figures. A cognate statue group appears in the oratio relief at the far right of that panel. These figures (like the Rostra statue) are on the same scale as the "living" actors (fig. 39): a togate emperor seated on a draped throne balances a scepter in his raised left hand, his right arm bent at the side and the forearm extended; at left, a standing female personification holds on her left hip a clothed baby that twists on the goddess's arm to reach out its little arms to the seated emperor; the personification rests her right hand on the head of a child standing pressed against her right thigh (broken away). The breaks on the relief ground show that the emperor and baby in fact touched hands. The point is obviously to stress symbolic identity between the emperor in the statue group and the later, living emperor making a speech at left; just so, the divinity represented on the tax-burning relief is signified to be the patron of the emperor there.[45]
Who is depicted in this statue group? The answer depends in large part on the date one assigns to the relief. The emperor shown cannot be the same person as the emperor orating from the Temple of Divus Julius—no work of Greek or Roman art seems to include in a single frame a depiction of an individual and a depiction of a depiction of that individual. The statue group must show an emperor who reigned prior to the emperor who is orating, and he must be an emperor exemplary for the imperial orator. If the protagonist is Trajan, this must mean a Julio-Claudian emperor, most likely Augustus; if the protagonist is Hadrian, as is more probable, then the group will represent Trajan as he is shown on alimenta coinage (fig. 41).[46]
The records-burning relief is key to dating the set. In one view, this record burning is that ordered by Hadrian in 118 (Hist. Aug. Vita Hadr. 7.6), which is said in CIL VI.967 to have been the first example of such forethought.[47] However, the Vita Hadriani says that the burning was car-
ried out in the Forum Traiani, where in fact CIL VI.967 was found. Also a Hadrianic relief (the Chatsworth relies does show a record burning, against the remains of an architectural backdrop that is different from any portion of the Anaglypha, and this has been taken to be the Forum of Trajan.[48] M. Torelli maintains that the relief shows a remission of debts by Trajan in 106, linking to a notice in the Chronicon Paschale for that year the fact that the statuary group of the oratio was shown by Mason Hammond to resemble the Trajanic coins of 108–110 commemorating the alimenta extended to Italy (BMCRE III, pl. 33.2 = 184, no. 871) (cf fig. 41).[49] This view has been criticized (by R. R. R. Smith, followed by M. T. Boatwright) because the evidence of CIL VI.967 should cancel the "dubious temporary remission of taxes" reported by the Chronicon;[50] these most recent authors find no evidence sufficient to convincingly resolve the problem of date and occasion.
We can begin by correctly identifying the emperor in the debt abolition scene. With one exception, all think that the statue placed on the Rostra (fig. 40) is the emperor "supervising" the occasion,[51] while the paludatus (misidentified as wearing the hooded paenula ) is a lictor. Yet it is plain that the enlarged paludatus immediately below the Rostra must be the emperor, who is setting the first flames to the record pile. Note his enlarged size, the way he is flanked and backed by two paludate lictors (a triad familiar from the Trajanic Column and Beneventum Arch panels), is further framed by a broadened foreground "niche" of lictor-togatus, and most especially is hallowed (when the head existed the effect would have been even more dramatic) by the arch between the two temples in the background. The paludatus perfectly complements the oratio imperial togatus, who also stands and gestures, hallowed by the architectural background (pediment of the Temple of Castor); the positions of ficus Ruminalis and emperor are neatly reversed, while on the other hand a seated draped statue is set at right on each panel.
By figure style, the reliefs certainly look as if they are at least late Flavian (compare the menorah relief, Arch of Titus; fig. 108) or Trajanic. Although most heads are battered or missing, enough remains to show that very few figures were bearded. On the other hand, the neck of the paludate emperor in the tax-burning scene seems to show traces of a beard, which makes the reliefs definitely Hadrianic. The careful pairing of deeds by an emperor togatus/paludatus, in compositions connected with imperial benefits, is extremely similar to the pairing that structures the choice of episodes for the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, exemplified in
the facing passage reliefs (figs. 91–92). If the reliefs are Trajanic, the parallel is contemporary; if they are Hadrianic, then the Beneventum formula is a paradigm, as for the Arch of Constantine panels.[52]
Arguments based on CIL VI.967 are dubious at best. What that inscription actually says is that Hadrian is the first to really assure the security of present and future generations because he has remitted a truly significant amount of money; it does not claim that Hadrian was the first to remit debts to the treasury. How could it do so, when second-century authors like Appian (BCiv. 5.130) were fully aware that Augustus himself, for example, had remitted tax debts in his first big adventus to Rome, after the fall of Lepidus. The inscription is still significant, however, for it indicates that Hadrian had staged such a remission; also, the location of an official account of this act in the Forum Traiani may explain why the Historia Augusta puts the ceremony here. One would expect the records to be most easily disposed of near the Rostra in front of the Treasury (the Temple of Saturn), from which they had to be extracted, which is where the Anaglypha locates such a ceremony. The later Hadrianic Chatsworth relief is thought to depict the porticoes of the Forum of Trajan, but it could simply show the lower portions of some of the Forum porticoes, at an angle different from that used on the Anaglypha.
It is ordinarily a dubious proceeding to contradict textual evidence on the grounds of an artistic representation whose own date is not yet secure. However, the text in this case is the notoriously inaccurate Historia Augusta; the archeological record offers a reason why the Historia might have gotten its facts wrong; and the iconography of the Anaglypha tax-burning panel accords in other ways with official Hadrianic propaganda about this event, that is, with its numismatic commemoration. Hadrian commemorated his remission of taxes in A.D. 119–121 with several related types centered on the same figure, a standing male in tunic and paludamentum facing three-quarters left, putting a torch, lowered in his right arm, to a pile of records and cradling some long object in his left arm. One variant shows this figure alone; another shows him saluted by several citizens at left; a third reverses the scheme, with two citizens at right (figs. 42–43).[53]
The central figure of this issue has always been identified as a lictor, carrying fasces, and has been (rightly) identified with the figure who sets the first torch on the Anaglypha Traiani panel, on whose left shoulder have been noticed breaks attributed to a bunch of fasces . However, as I have shown, this so-called lictor is in fact the emperor himself, and the pattern of breaks from hand to arm to shoulder does not correspond to
the straight line of a bunch of fasces . If the emperor held anything at all in his left arm (the breaks could simply be dents in drapery), one would expect perhaps an unlit torch, possibly a sheathed sword. By the same token, the coin figure seems to be an emblematic representation of the emperor himself. On any other coin one would take an isolated three-quarter figure in the paludamentum, displayed upright and at ease as here, to be the emperor; he does correspond to the Anaglypha emperor; and in the multifigure compositions, the groups of citizens are noticeably smaller than this figure and raise their arms to salute him, like the crowd saluting in the Anaglypha oratio . These points seem to rule out the possibility that this figure can have been read as a mere lictor. If the figure on the coins is carrying the fasces, then I think this has to be taken as a symbolic attribute, like a cornucopia or scepter, for instance. A reidentification of the coin appears sound; whatever one feels, it remains the case that Hadrian's numismatic commemoration of his remission of taxes uses the key figure of the Anaglypha depiction as its prototype, and so strengthens the relief's claim to "official" authenticity as a document of Hadrian 's performance of the ceremony.[54]
Appian's passage is worth further comment, for it corresponds closely to the narrative structure of the Anaglypha. It has Octavian/Augustus' remission announced in orations (a ) to the Senate and (b ) to the plebs —the latter, exactly what is shown happening on the oratio panel; speech and remissions are associated with his triumphal entry into Rome in a pompe, some kind of military adventus probably in the form of an ovation, as well as with a kind of official accession. Speeches and remission are associated also with the restoration of civil pax and abundance to Italy (for Octavian had just broken Sextus Pompey's blockade of the grain fleets), and all this in turn is connected with the grant of an honorific statue of Octavian in the Forum.[55] The Anaglypha connects a remission of debts with a speech specifically addressed to the plebs, alludes to its protagonist's military, as well as civil, auctoritas, and associates the occasion with a monument in the Forum that is itself about imperial maintenance of the fertility of Italy. I think that Hadrian's ceremony, carried out so near in time to his accession to power, is likely to have been quite explicit about its Augustan antecedents—that it was carried out in the same way and that we see the same themes, as well as the procedure itself, worked into the Anaglypha depiction. This is borne out by the architectural setting of the two panels, which is made up of buildings associated with Augustus,[56] including details like the use of the Actian arch to help frame the imperial party in the oratio (fig. 37), for which "true" perspective had to be altered.[57]
The evidence so far points to a Hadrianic date for the reliefs, and so for an identification of the seated togate emperor group (fig. 39) in the oratio panel as an earlier emperor; the group appears on Trajans alimenta coinage (fig. 41). At left Italia holds a little girl in her left arm and rests her right hand on the head of a little boy at her side (broken away on the relief); Trajan sits at right on a throne, togate, with an eagle-tipped scepter in his left hand; the baby in Italia's arms reaches out to Trajan, who extends to her something in his right hand. The statue group is arranged so that Trajan's right hand meets that of the baby girl; on the coin the draftsman garbled this, so that the baby's outstretched hands go over, rather than meet, Trajan's. The composition shows a symbolic Italia with the puer alimentarius and puella alimentaria, who appear on their own on other Trajanic coinage and on an honorific statue base for Trajan from Terracina;[58] they appear also in the alimenta panel of the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, where the personified cities of Italy hold infant children and where the little puella and her older brother are prominent among the human actors (fig. 91). The evidence of the coinage and the Terracina base permits Trajan's scepter on the Anaglypha to be restored with an eagle on its tip, the triumphator's scepter; this conforms to the military and triumphal associations of the alimenta on the arch, where in distinction to the togate emperor in the facing sacrifice panel, Trajan performs the alimenta in military dress.
So, the Anaglypha Traiani depicts a statue group put up for Trajan in the Forum Romanum, commemorating his benevolence to the communities of Italy in the form of an alimenta program for Italian children. It is extremely interesting that a seated togate emperor portrait, in type resembling the Forum Julium Tiberius with bare head and scepter, should make one of its rare appearances here under Trajan in an artistic and political context identical to that of the Julio-Claudian monuments discussed above: for imperial benefits to the cities of Italy, the seated togate emperor shares a pedestal with an ethnic personification of the entity benefited. The parallel to the Julio-Claudian monument type is obvious, and obviously deliberate (Tiberius' group, for instance, was on view only a short distance away). The only difference is that here, in the interests of a telling narrative, the multiple communities of Italy are condensed into a single personification rather than being shown as a band of personified communities, as on the Beneventum alimenta (fig. gi). It is no accident that Trajan located his allegory of imperial authorship of the well-being and fertility of the SPQR near the ficus Ruminalis and the statue of Marsyas (fig. 37), which stood next to each other in this part of the Forum, both notable
and emotion-laden landmarks from the Republican past. The political significance of these monuments was tied to the dignity and well-being of the Roman plebs, for whom they remained potent symbols.[59] The truth of this interpretation by Torelli is borne out by the Anaglypha, which selects from all the freestanding monuments in the Forum this trio (Trajan's alimenta group, Marsyas, and the ficus Ruminalis ) to comment on Hadrian's announcement of his benefice to the plebs .[60] Note that in the same series where the emperor/lictor coinage quotes one of the Anaglypha reliefs, the other is quoted on a coin where Trajan's Italia and her children now greet the living Hadrian, seated on a "real" tribunal, as symbols of LIBERTAS to the people.[61]
Above I showed that there must have been a group or groups of Augustus with personification(s) resembling the documented senatorial monuments of his reign and the imperial monuments of his own dynastic successors. Trajan's monument was certainly meant to show not just vague ties to the Julio-Claudian past but specific links to Augustus. (Hadrian, by showing himself orating in apposition to Trajan's group, manages to align himself with his adoptive father and with Augustus at one and the same time.) There are further ties between Trajan's group and Augustan art, however.
The composition used for Trajan's allegorical group is structured around a meeting between the seated emperor and a baby who is held out to him by a standing figure functioning as the infant's parent, and with whom he makes physical contact. In all of Roman art, this striking and emotional composition occurs only once with different actors: on the Gaul-and-baby coinage of 8/7 B.C. (fig. 87). Augustus, togate and seated, touches the hand of an infant held out to him by its standing parent (see chapter 4; BMCRE 1, pl. 12.13–14; CNR IV, cat. 129), symbolizing Augustus' extension to Gallia of the benefits of his pax . No other documentary or symbolic group in any medium depicts a baby in this way; the group seems to be an outright invention of the Augustan period (it may have some very vague antecedents in Attic grave stelai),[62] with no other future save here. An emphasis on children, especially very young children, is widely known to be an especial feature of Augustan art, which lapses after Augustus' reign; the sudden prominence of children in Trajan's alimenta propaganda, especially with female personifications, must have been part of his general program of "Augustanism."[63] The seated emperor-and-baby composition, I believe, must have been borrowed outright from the Augustan composition documented by the Lyons coinage, whose symbolic content is also very close to that of the Trajanic group.
One wonders, however, why a major statuary group would be based on a much older coin composition, as its sole Augustan reference; the unique reappearance of the Augustan composition under Trajan could best be explained by the hypothesis that the Lugdunum coinage depicts an Augustan statue group, in the same way that the group documented by the Anaglypha was depicted on contemporary coinage.
The Hadrianeum Seated Emperor and Personifications
When people think of Roman ethnic personifications, the sculptures that probably first come to mind are the set associated with the Hadrianeum, of which a portion are prominently displayed in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome (fig. 70). Uncovered between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in the area of the temple (part of whose colonnade is immured in the walls of the Borsa in the Piazza di Pietra), twenty-one panels are now known wholly or in part. Once brightly painted, they would have been identified by painted inscriptions. Associated with them are the remains of nine plaques showing decorative arrangements of military equipment; although these items are not mounted as trophies, but rather arranged in chiastic compositions of two elements each, the plaques are usually called trophy panels.[64] The findspot by the Hadrianeum and the fact that the set parallels the unique numismatic series of twenty-five province types issued under Hadrian have led scholars to the correct conclusion that the reliefs come from the Temple of Divus Hadrianus dedicated by Antoninus Pius in A.D. 145; architectural data and the fine condition of the reliefs' surfaces point to their placement in the interior of the temple cella (plan 125). The marble trophy panels and personification panels veneered the projecting and reentrant faces of a socle zone, consisting of plinths projecting from the cella wall to carry an interior colonnade, sumptuously articulating the temple interior around eye level.[65] The trophy panels are in low relief, but the provinces are so completely undercut as to seem persons/statues standing on ledges before the plinth face proper; in the dim light of the cella, the differences in relief height would have served to pull the provinces forward, while the dimmer niches would have seemed to recede even more deeply.
The province reliefs have always figured in Roman art surveys and have been the subject of a vast scholarly literature. Almost all of this devotes itself, following the still authoritative discourse by J. Toynbee, to identifying individual provinces on the basis of their attributes (cf. the introduction to chapter 3). Only A. M. Pais made an effort to keep before the
reader the setting of these reliefs and to reconstruct its effects, emphasizing that they were arranged to frame the major element of the temple, the colossal seated statue of the emperor Hadrian. Toward this figure the frontally disposed provinces all turned their heads, left/right/straight according to their placement on the side and end walls of the cella; the trophy plaques were also oriented left/right according to their placements.[66] When the spectator walked into this temple, he was immediately surrounded by the vivid, expressive figures of the peoples of empire, their gaze pulling the viewer's also toward the emperor as he moved up the cella toward the statue; and we know enough about imperial divus cult figures to assert that the emperor was seated. Standing before the plinths of the columns upholding the temple roof, these guardian figures seem to personify the edifice of Hadrian's empire.
Readers can see where this description tends. The interior of the Hadrianeum confronted a spectator with something very like the BR emperor and provinces group. It constitutes the Julio-Claudian emperor-and-personification monument type, as it were, with its ends bent forward, fitted into a rectangular space. The animation of a colonnaded facade lining a rectangular space by caryatid figures standing before niches with symbolic plaques had been developed for the Forum of Augustus, where the attic story thus articulated the idea of empire (figs. 68–69; plan 123); in the Forum of Trajan, the Forum Augustum caryatids had already become figures (male Dacians) standing before an architecturally supporting member, rather than caryatids proper.[67] A further crucial link is now supplied by the early imperial decoration of the Sebasteion precinct at Aphrodisias, which includes ethnic personifications carved also on plaques as if standing before them, on little garlanded plinths, in association with a colonnaded facade (though here in the intercolumniations). If the Aphrodisias precinct quotes decorations in the Forum Augustum itself, then this latter would constitute a more exact parallel for the articulation of the Hadrianeum cella.[68]
The Augustan references are indisputable. The building of such a complex for the newly dead Hadrian must have been meant explicitly to recall the parade of personifications at the funeral of Augustus;[69] it will have seemed to freeze eternally in stone not only this recorded moment but also Augustus' audience to the nations depicted on the Shield of Aeneas. It will certainly have echoed in its structure Augustus' Porticus ad Nationes, as in concept the provinces ringing the inner altar of the Ara Pacis (fig. 71).[70] (Chapter 3 discusses the Augustan prototypes for the visualization of empire as a group of personifications and for a "benevolent" view
of the Empire's subject peoples.)[71] And it will have recalled the kind of Augustan monument reconstructed in the preceding pages: the seated emperor flanked by personifications of the communities he has benefited by his rule, doing him perpetual homage. The Augustan model might have been followed also for the divus cult statue; if Hadrian's statue looked like the Divus Augustus worshipped in Rome by the Theater of Marcellus (fig. 46), then he will have been togate and seated in the midst of all the provinces. Finally, I think that one can be sure that the idea for this complex was Hadrian's, just as we know that Augustus' funeral was carried out after his own detailed specifications.[72]
Some of the monuments compared here to the Hadrianeum have been compared to it before, but seldom are the architectural and iconographic contexts of these comparanda fully visualized. This has been true most of all for the Hadrianeum itself, whose province panels cannot completely be appreciated except in apposition to the lost Divus Hadrianus statue in their midst. When they are visualized in their original, full context, as a pseudosculpture group framing this seated colossus, it can be seen that they deliberately evoke an image of Hadrian as Novus Augustus by means of their similarity to Augustan visual formulations of benevolent imperium, especially the kind of honorific group alluded to by BR I:1