The Peoples of Empire

In order to say what the BR personifications stand for as a group, one must know how they resemble or differ from contemporary Augustan and earlier ethnic personifications. In particular one ought to discuss the tradition of groups of such personifications. How and why were ethnic personifications used in the arts that would have been the heritage of the audience of the BR group? The only comprehensive study published on ethnic personifications is Toynbee's, on the Hadrianic province reliefs, but she only reviewed the Republican and early imperial evidence to find parallels for the attributes of individual Hadrianic personifications. Therefore I seek to explain Greek and Roman traditions up through Augustus, to show how groups of personifications—corporate images or assemblages—were used in the late Republic and early Empire to express a newly self-conscious Roman imperialism. The BR group and the Ara Pacis personification group mark a further development, which I treat in the section, entitled "Benevolent Imperium, " on the tone and message of Augustan corporate assemblages.

The presence of ethnic/national personifications is not a particularly surprising feature of this scene. Romans had already learned the mode of ethnic personification from the Greeks, including the convention of making such personifications female, as here. Consider, after all, the experience of Roman soldiers, generals, diplomats, and tourists visiting the hot tourist spots of Greece. At Delphi, for instance, they could see the following monuments: a group put up by the Cyrenaians of their "founder," Battos, standing in a chariot being crowned by Cyrene, his horses led by Libya (Paus. 10.15.6); an Aitolian trophy for victory over the Gauls, showing Aitolia decking a trophy with arms (Paus. 10.18.7); a trophy put up by the Phliasians portraying a defeated Aegina (Paus. 10.13.6); a Tarentine trophy (commemorating the defeat of the Messapians), which included chained captive women (Paus. 10.10.6); and one might compare

the Tarentine trophy showing the heroes Taros and Phalanthos standing on the body of Opis, king of the Iapygi (Paus. 10.13.10).^[17] These Tarentine pieces, in turn, would have had echoes in Tarentum itself—that is, well within the Roman sphere after the conquest of Italy.

In the long and continuous record of Roman coinage such personifications start to be used in the first century B.C., although Romans would have met with such images already in the previous century in their expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean. Good testimony to this process of assimilation is the fresco cycle of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, a replica of the mid-first century B.C. of paintings in a Hellenistic palace of the third century B.C. (fig. 61):^[18] in one panel an armed Macedonia lords it over a personification of Asia/Persia, probably read by the Roman patron as Parthia.^[19] Hellenistic royal dominion is also evoked in the Neo-Attic Chigi relief (fig. 59),^[20] produced for a Roman client in the late Republic or early Empire;^[21] here, Europe and Asia (labeled korai in mural crowns)^[22] hold up a shield that depicts Alexander's battle with Darios at Arbela (he epi pasi mache ).^[23] Compare a relief from the same workshop in the Villa Albani (fig. 60): Hercules drinks with satyrs and maenads named after the continents and lands traversed during the Labors (labels extant: "Europe," "Italos");^[24] they toast this Stoic victor omnium terrarum . There may have been Roman depictions of this kind in the second century B.C. (especially paintings and models made for triumphal processions), but the evidence of the coins may not be so misleading: ethnic personifications on personal signets do not arise much before the coins.

Greek ethnic/national personifications were of various kinds, falling into two basic categories—the celebratory or friendly and the domineering or hostile. As in the Hellenistic paintings reproduced at Boscoreale, one might commemorate victory by personifying the people beaten, shown in a submissive posture, with the intent to celebrate that submission; in a satiric painting of the fourth century B.C. of Timotheos, son of Konon, Fortune cast a net about a number of personified cities to symbolize their conquest (Plut. Sull. 6). Greek cities and states might also personify themselves, in various ways. Besides celebrating the Tyche, the living spirit of one's own city, a Greek people would often make an image of its friendly relations with another Greek political entity by showing itself personified in some friendly attitude toward its ally: thus the panels crowning the stelai of Athenian treaty inscriptions from the fifth and fourth centuries^[25] or the tableau of Corinth and Ptolemy in the procession staged by Ptolemy II Philadelphos ca. 276 B.C. (Ath. 201C).^[26] Finally, a

corporate entity made up of a number of distinct city-states might be visualized as an assembly of personifications: the same Ptolemaic procession of 276 celebrated Alexander's liberation of the Greek states of Asia Minor with such an assembla e (Ath. 201C). Compare Ptolemy IV Philopator's Homereion, where he ringed Homer's statue with personifications of the cities that claimed Homer as a native son.^[27]

The best-known "corporate assemblage" in the late Hellenistic Greek world is at Lagina. In the 120s, the symmachia of the autonomous cities of the League of Asia, which funded the Temple of Hekate there, had itself represented on the temple frieze by a series of personifications grouped with Roma.^[28] This sanctuary had close ties to Rome—in return for benefactions by Sulla it instituted a cult of Roma with games in her honor, and the site will have been visited by Roman travelers thereafter.^[29] That Romans picked up on this kind of "list" offered by a politico-religious organization is shown by two Augustan projects, the Altar of Rome and Augustus at Lugdunum and the Augustan arch at Susa in the Cottian Alps. The altar's inscription named all the Gallic tribes enrolled in 10 B.C. in the cult of Augustus;^[30] the arch, set up to mark the passage of the Cottian Alps into Roman suzerainty under the client-king Cottos, was inscribed with the names of all the relevant Alpine tribes.^[31] The inscriptions, as well as the architectural forms of the monuments themselves, must have been suggested to the native patrons by Roman military / diplomatic agents in place.

The kind of image seen at Lagina was also transmitted by the Greeks, through Greek placement of monuments in Rome honoring Roman patrons. Augustus' governor of Hispania Ulterior in 22–24 B.C., P. Aelius Lamia, was honored by a monument set up among the temples of the Largo Argentina, a long basis with personifications of the cities of Hispania Ulterior standing over their inscribed titles; the model for this will have included the early Augustan dedication for a Rufus, proconsul of Bithynia, honored as patron and euergetes by eight cities of Bithynia. At some time between A.D. 17 and 22, fourteen cities of Asia Minor put up a similar monument to Tiberius in the Forum Julium for aid received after an earthquake (fig. 47). A decade later a copy was made of Tiberius' monument in Puteoli (extant today), where the personified cities were transferred to a frieze running around the base of a statue of Tiberius (fig. 62).^[32] A similar Italian commission is documented by the "Throne of Claudius," fragments of an Augustan statue basis from the imperial honorific series at Caere (fig. 63).^[33]

This monument used to be assigned to the emperor Claudius, who we know to have been to the Etruscans a devoted benefactor knowledgeable about (not to say enamored of) their culture; this "Throne of Claudius" has now been convincingly redated to ca. 10 B.C., one of several menuments put up in the theater at Caere by the local magistrate Manlius.^[34] The exact occasion is not specifically commemorated on coinage, but the monument can, like Tiberius', be reconstructed from a reduced version erected by an interested community, in this case one of the twelve cities itself, Cerveteri/Caere, funded by the head of the chief local clan (gens Manlia ). Its reliefs do not seem to have actually ornamented a "throne," or for that matter an altar;^[35] they seem rather to have decorated some kind of elaborate ornamental base^[36] for an honorific imperial statue of Augustus.^[37] Statues of the twelve cities were carved each upon a pedestal,^[38] under garlands. There can be no doubt, given the wealth of comparable material, that they quote like the later Puteoli basis (fig. 62) from a full-scale group that was arranged about a monumental emperor portrait in Rome,^[39] and perhaps in one or more of the cities represented.^[40] (The Augustan Lares cult altar of Manlius draws similarly on official prototypes established at the capital.)^[41]

The same tradition, in which a favored foreign group put up a personification to honor its Roman patron, was probably embodied in the monument set up in Augustus' Forum by Hispania Ulterior Baetica (ILS 103 = Ehrenberg and Jones 1976, 42), a gold statue of Augustus probably accompanied by personifications, like the coins showing Pompey or his son between personifications of Tarraco and Baetica (fig. 57; CRR 1037a, 1038a). The monument given Aelius by his province would have been for general patronage similar to that attributed to Augustus by the Spanish, "quod beneficio eius et perpetua cura provincia pacata est"; the two monuments were probably contemporary.^[42] The Boscoreale cup is not the only Julio-Claudian relief to translate such groups into narrative two-dimensional tableaux; on a Julio-Claudian monument on the Via Appia, a relief showed the cities of Italy in procession with laurel in a supplicatio to the emperor,^[43] conceived (as later on the Arch of Beneventum; see fig. 91) as a group of gracious, classically draped females with mural crowns.^[44]

To go back in time, the Romans of the Republic reacted to Greek formulations in various ways. Most obviously honors received from Greek cities taught them to personify their own state, "Roma," as a goddess. They also took up the Greek formula for visualizing friendly relations between political/national entities to commemorate amicitia and fides: an

issue of 70 B.C. shows Italia and Roma clasping hands (fig. 51; RRC 403) to demonstrate the reconciliation following the Social Wars; the aid rendered to the Pompeians in the 40s by Spain is suggested by coins showing Hispania welcoming representatives of the Pompeian forces (fig. 55; RRC 469).

Basically friendly also are coins on which personifications designate the sphere of authority held by a given official—"my province"^[45] —into which category the Pompeian Spanish coinage falls (see also p. 79). Personifications here, as it were, delimit a career.^[46] Cn. Plancius' coin of 55 B.C. paired Macedonia, a jeweled female bust in a kausia, with a reverse whose symbols (goat and weaponry) referred to Crete, the other locus of his activities (fig. 54; RRC 432/1). Aurei and denarii of Q. Cornuficius in 42 B.C. have a bust of Africa backed by two spears (a variant has the goddess Tanit; obverse, appropriately, Jupiter Ammon; RRC 509/1); C. Antonius made similar reference to Macedon on an issue of 43 B.C. (RRC 484). Another Pompeian issue, ca. 46 B.C., showed Pompey or his son between personifications of Tarraco and Baetica (fig. 57; CRR 1037a, 1038a). Early imperial texts describe how Romans could visualize in personified form an area bound up with an individual career: Drusus the Elder was said to have been visited by Germania, personified as a giant woman in native dress, who addressed him in Latin to tell him how far his conquest of Germany could extend (Suet. Claud. 1.2; Dio 55.1.3); Curtius Rufus claimed to have been visited as a young man (early first century A.D.) by "Africa," who prophesied his future proconsulship over her province (Tac. Ann. 11.21).

The earliest "career coin" is L. Postumius Albinus' denarius of 81 B.C. (RRC 372/2), which celebrates A. Postumius Albinus' praetorian imperium in Spain (pr. 180); a dignified veiled bust of Hispan [ia ] localizes the reverse tableau of the togate Albinus standing between a legionary eagle and a magistrate's fasces with axe.^[47] Next is Mn. Aquillius' denarius of 71 B.C. (fig. 52; RRC 401/1); it depicts the consul of 101 B.C. extremely dramatically as a warrior succoring a wounded Sicilia. The composition is strongly reminiscent of Hellenistic sculpture groups narrating epic themes (e.g., the "Pasquino" type); this coin has a very good chance of referring to an actual sculptural monument erected in Rome.^[48] The concept of succoring one's province is probably expressed also on L. Staius Murcus' issues of 42-41 B.C., where a heroic male figure with a sword raises up a female personification before a trophy (MURCUS IMP.; RRC 510; fig. 56). These "succoring" compositions are repeated under Augustus

when L. Aquillius (18/14 B.C.) to honor his ancestry^[49] reissues Mn. Aquillius' type (fig. 53).^[50] Such imagery is passed back in turn to the Greek cities,^[51] a process paralleled elsewhere:^[52] on an aes from Sardis,^[53] Tiberius reaches out to the kneeling city.^[54]

In all of these Roman formulations, of course, Rome and its representatives are dominant, although friendly, in the historical situation commemorated. For a real treaty between equals,^[55] one must look to a denarius minted ca. 90/88 B.C. by the Marsian Confederation, which shows itself as a male personification with its ally Mithridates VI. There is also the curious phenomenon of Romans extending one of their own religious concepts, that of the genius of a people or place: a coin of Q. Metellus Scipio of 47-46 B.C. depicts the Genius terrae Africae (RRC 460/4; lionheaded female with disk headdress and ankh scepter), and another coin of C. Antonius represents the Genius of Macedon (CRR 1286). This mode of personification seems not to develop further, but it is an interesting formulation in its own time. Akin to Greek ideas of the Tyche of a city-state, it ties in with the "personal" use of personifications described above.

By and large, though, most Republican references to other peoples and places in art commissioned by Romans are not only personal but triumphal in nature. Such references include depictions of trophies, captives, submissive kings, and so on, and personifications are but one aspect of the genre of references to foreigners. This is not particularly surprising, nor is it in itself evidence of a particularly brutal imperialistic mind-set. In the Republic, the state itself did not commission works of art, and this goes for the images on coins as well. Individuals enjoying or seeking public prominence commissioned those works, and they wanted to celebrate themselves or their ancestors or to compliment a fellow member of the elite. Contacts with foreigners that were of propaganda value in seeking public power consisted of victories over those foreigners. Even the images of friendship or support cited above describe the support of lesser entities, not of equals.

This is where Roman formulations of corporate entities differ from the Greek. The Romans were not, or at least never thought of themselves as, members of a body of equals: they dominated a corporate body of clients and possessions. They belonged to a corporate body as heads of empire, not as one of a number of states equal in a symmachia . And the occasion where Roman audiences of the Republic were most accustomed to seeing a collection of images depicting a number of peoples and places was the triumph: the procession celebrating one individual's victories, explaining and praising them by means of paintings of cities taken, images of cities

and rivers, strings of actual captives led to symbolize the defeat of their entire peoples.^[56]

It is also to the ceremony of the triumph, with its documentary displays, that we generally attribute the characteristically Roman interest in precise variations in barbarian or foreign costume, jewelry, armor, coiffure, and physiognomy, which is observable in Roman panegyric literature and art as well as in the detailed records kept of so many triumphs. Such ethnographic precision, as seen in depictions of "typical" or historic foreign warriors and leaders (cf. the Parthian on the Primaporta cuirass), fuses with the Greek tradition of feminizing exemplary abstractions and thus produces a distinctively Roman type of individual ethnic personification: the female personification in male ethnic dress. This was a standard option by the Augustan period, as we know from cuirass statues (the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64) and Turin statue), Arretine ware (the Puteoli cup; cf. figs. 65–66), and the BR group. It occurs earliest on Pompeian coinage by Minatius Sabinus; there an imperator receives a shield from a kneeling personification (right) in female dress and is saluted (left) by a female personification in male ethnic dress (fig. 57; RRC 470/1b). As other aspects of this coin composition are familiar from early imperial commemorative reliefs, it is likely that all aspects of the composition correspond to contemporary norms for (lost) monumental paintings and reliefs.^[57] The coin and a companion type^[58] also show what we see in the BR group, the combination of "male" and "female" personification types. The reasons for such combination seem to vary. In these examples of the first century B.C. it seems to be made for the sake of emphasis and variatio or to "couple" two personifications (e.g., the BR Gallia and Hispania); in the Hadrianeum province series, "male" dress has sometimes been seen as distinguishing provinces with embattled frontiers or those under imperial control, but in the early groups at any rate no automatic warlike/peaceful dichotomy can be meant.

All this is the background for the monuments of Pompey, and later those of Augustus, featuring long inscriptions naming as precisely as possible every tribe and nation beaten by that general. After defeating Sertorius in Spain, Pompey set up a great tropaeum in the Pyrenees inscribed with the names of the 876 (!) oppida that he had reduced in Hispania Ulterior (Pliny HN 7.96, 3.18; Sall. H. 3.89M); this seems now to have been a tower monument,^[59] like the "stone towers decorated above with enemy arms" (Florus 1.37) set up already in 121 B.C. by Domitius Ahenobarbus and Fabius Maximus in Gaul.^[60] For his third, Eastern triumph, he enumerated his deeds and conquests in a Latin inscription in Rome in the

Temple of Minerva (transcribed in Pliny HN 7.97); he also set up a longer inscription of the same sort in Greek in multiple copies at cult sites throughout the Greek East (Diod. 40.4.1). These are the Republican precedents evoked by Augustus' tropaea in the Alps that bore the names of conquered Alpine tribes—one of ca. 25 or 29 B.C. (Dio 43.26) and one of 14 B.C. for the campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius, the great tower monument at La Turbie (Pliny HN 3.136)^[61] crowned with his portrait as Pompey's had been with Pompey's portrait (HN 37.15). Such inscribed lists depended directly on the paraphernalia of triumph—compare Pompey's inscriptions with the praefatio, or explanatory placard, borne before the procession in his third triumph (transcribed in Pliny HN 7.98). Pompey's inscriptions in the East parallel Augustus' Res gestae, also promulgated throughout the Greek East at cult sites: note that the early Augustan Diodoros calls Pompey's inscriptions tas idias praxeis, which is conceptually cognate with the Latin res gestae: hoti ho Pompeios tas idias praxeis has sunetelesen epi tes Asias anagraphas anetheken, hon estin antigraphon tode (40.4.1).^[62]

Such triumphal texts have numerous visual analogues, in figured monuments like Pompey's images of the fourteen peoples over whom he triumphed,^[63] placed in his theater complex, or Augustus' Porticus ad Nationes,^[64] itself obviously meant to trump Pompey's monument. Compare on the contemporary tomb reliefs discussed in chapter 2 the defeated personification at an imperator's feet (fig. 3) or the shuffling captives led to his spear. I explore the Augustan evidence, citing Republican precedents where they exist.

A valid document of Augustus' own thinking is provided by the instructions left in his will for his funeral, formulated early in his reign and duly carried out in A.D. 14. He specified a parade of images of the peoples he had conquered, very like the images carried in a traditional triumph; if faithfully copied by Severus for Pertinax's funeral, then they were bronze statues of different peoples in ethnic dress.^[65] Compare the funeral of the great Aemilius Paullus, whom Augustus may have had in mind as an example (Plut. Aem. 39.4.5); his bier was carried by representative clients from the peoples he had conquered—Iberians,^[66] Macedonians, and Ligurians—while others followed in the funeral procession calling him euergetes and soter . Augustus' funeral procession may or may not have had a more domineering tone than Aemilius' procession; the triumphal mode dominates other Augustan funerary monuments, like the Campus Martius tomb that celebrates the deceased's "worldwide" triumph with Celtic and Oriental captives.^[67] The spectacle of Augustus' funeral may have been previewed decades earlier in 12 B.C., at the funeral of Agrippa, which Dio

tells us was carried out in the same way in which Augustus' was later held: kai ten ekphoran autou [Agrippa] en to tropo en ho kai autos [Augustus] meta tauta exenechthe epoiesato (54.28.5). There is also good evidence, supplied by Velleius and by comparison with the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, that when Augustus' Forum (plan 123) was dedicated in 2 B.C. it was decorated with a similar assemblage of visual references to the peoples conquered by Augustus.

Velleius tells us that the Forum was resplendent with the tituli of the peoples Augustus conquered: "Divus Augustus praeter Hispanias aliasque gentis, quarum titulis forum eius praenitet, paene idem facta Aegypto stipendiaria . . ." (2.39.2). The wording implies a sequence of discrete references rather than, say, the inscription under Augustus' quadriga in the middle of the Forum; and it is likely that Velleius is referring to a sequence of images and not just to a sequence of inscribed tablets. First of all, it is difficult to imagine inscriptions attached to no image; second, such shorthand, titulus for image plus inscription (titulus ), is common usage in the Republic and Empire for assemblages of images whose titles were of key importance, namely, the assembly of portraits to form a family stemma in the atria of Roman aristocrats.^[68]

This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by the decorative program of the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, a closed portico extending from the Temple of Aphrodite Prometor (i.e., Caesar's Venus Genetrix). The second story of the north portico carried in its intercolumniations depictions of peoples conquered by Augustus, each with the prominent title ethnous—on, a direct cognate with Velleius' gens—ae/i . The extant sequence is notable for its meticulous citation of individual tribal groups to refer to tribally organized peoples, reminiscent of the trophy inscriptions described above, and for its inclusion of territories that were conquered by Augustus only in the sense that they were taken away from his Roman rivals in the civil wars (Sicily, Crete, Cyprus),^[69] as well as client kingdoms not administered directly as provinces by Augustus (the Bosphoros, Judaea). Even though the decoration as such seems to have been executed under Tiberius, it obviously replicates a series formulated for and by Augustus himself, some derive the series from (a description of) Augustus' funeral assemblage of personifications.^[70]

The Sebasteion complex as a whole is very obviously based directly on the precedent of the new kind of forum built in Rome by Caesar and by Augustus,^[71] noted patrons of Aphrodisias; both the Forum Julium and the Forum Augustum took the form of an extended closed portico stretching away from a large cult temple (plan 122). A cult epithet translating the

Latin Venus Genetrix is known from only one other Greek dedication, a Julio-Claudian imperial portrait statue;^[72] it is a direct translation of the Latin Venus Genetrix, and the temple at Aphrodisias is obviously meant to quote the Temple of Venus Genetrix that dominated Caesar's Forum and that introduced a new cult aspect of Venus to the Romans themselves. This is confirmed by the extant inscription for the goddess's statue, which greeted visitors atop the propylon to the Sebasteion, calling her Aphrodite Prometor Theon Sebaston,^[73] that is, genetrix of the Augustan house. As the Sebasteion itself, then, is so evidently inspired directly by the imperial fora in Rome, I think that in conjunction with the Velleius passage it confirms a sequence of images decorating the Forum of Augustus that enumerated the peoples and places Augustus had conquered up to 2 B.C.^[74]

Vergil's proem to Georgic 3 hints at such a program—lines 13–70 consist of a fantastic ekphrasis clearly inspired by the early stages of Augustus' Forum (which had been planned since before Actium). Vergil says he is going to build a portico complex centered on a temple to Augustus himself; the portico will be decorated with statues of Augustus' Trojan ancestors, and its temple doors will be decorated with scenes of Augustus' triumphs—compare Ovid's ekphrasis on the completed Forum and the Temple of Mars Ultor (Fast. 5.550ff.); it will have a theater (like Pompey's theater plus Temple of Venus Victrix plus porticoes), whose curtain will be woven with figures of British captives posed so that when the curtain is up they will seem like caryatids.^[75] The extant Jupiter clipei of the Forum arcades preserve at least two distinct types (Jupiter Ammon and a Celtic torqued Jupiter; figs. 68–69)^[76] that at present supply at least an East-West metaphor for empire; perhaps the series included more, which could have been labeled.^[77] The architrave over the clipeus and caryatid zone in fact carried a row of standing decorative elements in alternating projection (over the caryatids) and recessions,^[78] and this is the most logical place to hypothesize a series of statues and/or symbolic (trophy) elements. A series of images in this location would constitute an excellent formal parallel for the siting of the Aphrodisias "forum" series, as well as for the trophies lining Trajan's Forum.^[79]

Vergil's formulations are closely linked to Augustus' own thinking, whether dependent on it or reinforcing it. Thus we should look also at the well-known fanfare to Augustus that ends the ekphrasis on the Shield of Aeneas in the Aeneid at 8.722f.: after the battle of Actium, Augustus in triumphal epiphany is attended by a string of captives from all over the known world, sitting to receive their submissio on a sella curulis before

the Temple of Apollo (and in front of his own house!) on the Palatine.^[80] (The "Sheath of Tiberius" is an actual piece of armor decorated with an allegory of world rule and an ethnic personification; figs. 117–18). It is in reference to this very passage that Servius describes Augustus' Porticus ad Nationes, which leads to the conclusion that the peoples portrayed on that monument were representative in sum of Augustus' world rule.

This Portico of the Nations must have incorporated statues of various gentes, like the assemblage that Pompey placed in his theater complex. There is a good chance that one should visualize it as some kind of caryatid porch.^[81] Augustus is known to have employed such a conceit in his restoration of 14 B.C. of the Basilica Aemilia fronting the Forum (plan 122), lining its interior with a series of Parthian captives in colored marbles as' caryatids; these figures, which look forward to the Erechtheion caryatids of Augustus' Forum, whose clipei echo the Basilica Aemilia's facade, were given a particular Augustan twist by being stood on bases carved with luxuriant garlands, equating the new Golden Age of pax with the humiliation of the ancient foreign enemy.^[82] The deployment of Parthians as caryatids was a recognizable quotation of the "Persian Porch" at Sparta, which commemorated Sparta's part in the fifth-century Persian Wars with a caryatid porch carried by emblematic Persians.^[83] Brutus may already have copied the Classical monument for one of his country villas, as Hadrian was to copy the Erechtheion caryatids for his Tibur villa (Cic. Att. 15.91; cf. 13.40: "Parthenon"); a cinerary urn from Volterra shows that the Greek concept of ethnic caryatids had certainly passed to Italy by the first half of the first century B.C.^[84] Vergil's highly decorative caryatid Britons, a motif partly frivolous, partly serious, are well matched by the Augustan decoration of Room E at the Villa Farnesina; its central aedicula incorporates dancing Persian caryatids into a fantastic structure about Apolline rule and Dionysiac conquest of the East.^[85] Compare a Greco-Roman grave stele (Munich inv. 509) of the early first century B.C. from Erythrai, an "illusionistisch und phantasievoll" heröon whose pediment is supported by winged Persian caryatids kneeling in the frieze zone.^[86]

Thus it is probable that what Augustus built was a kind of caryatid porch borne by diverse ethnic personifications representing the peoples of the Empire, as defeated subjects. This is the kind of Augustan assemblage behind such later Julio-Claudian monuments as the imperial cuirass statue from Tusculum (now Turin, Castello d'Aglie),^[87] whose front pteryges (cuirass lappets) are decorated with individual ethnic personifications crouched in dejection—the emperor portrayed is literally girdled in his

victories.^[88] The contemporary impact of Augustus' commissions is documented^[89] by the decoration that the citizens of Pisa planned for their arch to honor the recently dead Gaius and Lucius:^[90] the attic was to bear statues of Gaius, Lucius, and probably Augustus, flanked by images referring to all the peoples conquered^[91] or received into fides by Gaius/Augustus.^[92]

All these Augustan assemblages of personifications glorify the act and attitude of dominance, in the triumphal mode typical of so many inscriptions and texts. The same tone governs the use of personifications in many other media. Court luxury objects include the Berlin cameo vase, on which Venus Genetrix sits by a slumped Parthian captive at the birth of an Augustan prince (fig. 7); compare the "real" captives in the exergue of the Gemma Augustea (fig. 16). There are the victory monuments in the provinces, which reflect the iconography of the capital^[93] —the trophy group at Lugdunum Convenarum with captives and personifications of Gaul and Spain,^[94] the trophies and captives on the arch at Glanum,^[95] Armenia and Germania on the arch at Carpentras,^[96] the male and female captives flanking the inscription at La Turbie,^[97] and the arch at Pisidian Antioch, whose central spandrels show emblematic bound Pisidians.^[98] The same taste is shown by a series of Campana plaques made for the private homes of central Italy, beginning in the Augustan period, which excerpt that portion of a triumph where captives are paraded on wagons and litters, or else show emblematic Gallic captives on either side of a battlefield trophy.^[99] These mass-produced plaques imitate for domestic installation such monuments as the Temple of Apollo Sosianus, whose interior frieze (ca. 19 B.C.) depicted Octavian/Augustus' great triple triumph.^[100]

Imperial portraits showing the emperor as a general in a cuirass are obviously about military domination, and several early imperial examples incorporate personifications as well as emblematic captives. Best known are the personifications on the cuirass front of the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64).^[101] There Gallia (fig. 64d) and Hispania (fig. 64c),^[102] slumped in dejection, flank (a group with) an emblematic Parthian, to celebrate Augustus' recovery of standards from Parthia, Spain, and Gaul—a visual paraphrase of the boast in Res gestae 28–29.^[103] This assemblage, of course, delineates the East-West worldwide reach of Augustus' vengeance and hegemony.^[104] With this can be compared a fragmentary, but superb, early imperial cuirass statue from Amphipolis, whose central device is a captive paired with a seated personification.^[105] The Julio-Claudian figure in Turin, whose pteryges have each a dejected personification, has already been mentioned; the pteryges of a fragmentary Augustan cuirass statue from Gaul have emblematic Gallic captives (fig. 82).^[106] Comparable is an Augustan

relief in Rome (Pal. Beletti), where a cuirassed Augustus brandishes an aplustre at a seated, dejected Egypt/Africa.^[107]

Last, there is the testimony of some Arretine pottery. This fine molded ware was manufactured primarily in the Augustan period in central Italy, for use there and for export especially to the north. Its devices often copy fine silver and/or famous monuments from the capital.^[108] As in silverwork, most of the surviving corpus has mythological, Dionysiac, erotic, idyllic, or other nonpolitical iconography; with three other fragments,^[109] the types discussed here seem the only examples of explicitly political iconography. They are certainly Augustan. The scheme of a cup from Puteoli (now lost)^[110] paired a seated mourning figure identified by the inscription GERMANIA, who, like the Primaporta provinces or the BR Gaul, was a female in male Celtic dress, with a chained pair of male captives labeled ARSACIDAE (the Armenian dynasty) and PARTHI; this fondness for inscribed labels also marks the Dresden handle, on which an armed female is labeled GERMANIAS (fig. 67).^[111] A scheme known best on a cup from Orbetello has, like the BR Augustus cup, an identical composition on each side (fig. 65).^[112] A naked imperial hero with mantle, scabbard, and downturned spear stands by a tropaeum, which is decorated with the arms appropriate to the grieving ethnic personification who approaches the hero; on one side this is Germania, on the other Armenia, both in female dress. The same workshop (L. Avillius Sura) adapted from these stamps a different scheme, where the nude imperator twice faced Armenia across a backdrop of garlands and bucrania (fig. 66).^[113]

The prominently deployed inscriptions and figure types of the first cup scheme recall official triumphal commemorative. The second cup scheme has been viewed as copying a freestanding statuary group in the capital, especially as the imperial figure type strongly resembles that used for Octavian on a columna rostrata in Rome erected for Actium;^[114] reliefs from the Aphrodisias Sebasteion now show that the entire group, nude imperator -trophy-personification, draws on a formula established for imperial statuary and/or monumental relief.^[115] The trophy group set up ca. 25 B.C. at Lugdunum Convenarum by a team from Rome, to celebrate Augustus' triple triumph of 27 B.C., offers parallels for both schemes—twin figure groups of personification, trophy, and captive.^[116] Both cup schemes allude to worldwide conquest by pairing the north and west and south and east frontiers of Augustan expansion, typical of Augustan monuments and programs;^[117] the choice of Germany/Armenia to produce this antithesis recalls the Augustan city gate at Carpentras in Gaul, among other examples.

The imagery of these cups might have been formulated at almost any time after the events they allude to, Drusus' campaigns in Germany from ca. 10 B.C. on and the first Armenian settlement and the "humiliation" of Parthia in 19 B.C., when Tiberius won his spurs. The hero on each side of the Orbetello cup (fig. 65) might be Augustus, or perhaps brother princes are meant, such as Drusus the Elder (who conquered Germany) and Tiberius (who oversaw the "submission" of Armenia at the time of the return of the Parthian standards). H. P. Laubscher and others adduce events of A.D. 1 and 3—that is, Gaius in Armenia and M. Vinicius in Germany; this is possible, but I think it far more likely that all these western Germany/Armenia pairs refer to the activities of the Claudii Nerones, either Drusus and Tiberius or simply Tiberius.

Whatever their specific reference to events of Augustus' reign, both cup schemes are very important to our discussion. Simply because they are items of mass-produced pottery,^[118] they show how the iconography of ethnic personifications could be disseminated at large.^[119] As fine-quality Arretine ware, they reinforce and expand our knowledge of the imagery formulated for official, public statuary and relief. Finally, in the character of Arretine ware, they may reproduce models in silver that would be directly comparable to the BR cups. In this sense, they make the BR cups less unique, as examples of silverware alluding directly to Augustan conquests; on the other hand, their extremely limited compositions highlight by contrast the distinctive nature of the BR cups' decoration and its ties to the most sophisticated monumental narrative relief