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