Late Roman Copies: New Faces on Old Friends

Let us look once again at the copies based on earlier portraits of the ancient poets and philosophers. In the fourth century A.D. , cultivated people were still decorating their houses with mosaics and wall paintings that included the famous Greek intellectuals of the distant past. Most popular were Socrates and the Seven Sages, but occasionally there was a broader selection of philosophers, poets, lawgivers, historians, and orators.^[69] Even more interesting for our investigation than these examples of traditional decorative arts are the copies of sculptured portrait types. The exedra in the school at Aphrodisias demonstrates that these were still being produced in the fifth century, while copies of other kinds of Greek statuary had almost ceased to be made by the end of the third century. The setting at Aphrodisias explains the continuing interest in the great thinkers of the past. A number of these portraits are of strikingly high quality and attest to a level of skill and commitment on the part of the sculptor that we find elsewhere only in the best portraits of honoratiores .^[70]

But what makes the late copies so fascinating is the way the sculptors no longer strive to produce exact copies, as was true earlier, but instead consciously translate the prototype into the visual language of their own epoch. In some cases this is so extreme that we have difficulty identifying a portrait at all. The primary interest was obviously no longer to represent the individual appearance or specific characteristics of each of these great men of the past, but rather to emphasize certain capacities and mental powers that transcend the individual. This process of transformation had already begun in the late third century.

A portrait of Karneades in Bonn, for example (fig. 173),^[71] which dates to this period, can still be recognized by the furrowed brow and the turned-down mouth derived from the well-known type (cf. fig. 95). But the immediacy of the expression has been lost. His gaze no longer connects with an interlocutor but is directed upward. The

Fig. 173
Carneades. Late Antique version of the Hellenistic
portrait type in figs. 95–96. Late third century A.C.
Bonn, F. J. Dölger Institute.

only expressive element is the eyes themselves, which are proportionally larger and further accented by the powerfully arched brows. In a portrait likewise of the late third century, from Ephesus, Socrates has lost the last vestiges of the silenlike physiognomy (fig. 174).^[72] His gaze fixes the viewer. It is perhaps not surprising that a bust of Menander, also from Ephesus (fig. 175), was at first taken to be a portrait of a contemporary of Constantine the Great, so radically has the "copyist" altered the proportions and facial expression.^[73] The lines in the face and the gentle and vulnerable expression of the copies in Venice and Copenhagen (cf. figs. 46, 47) have been completely expunged. Instead, we simply stare into the enormous eyes. Compared to the Socrates, the expression is considerably intensified, yet the gaze is no

Fig. 174
Socrates. Late Antique version of the Late
Classical portrait type in fig. 35. Ca. A.D. 300.
Selçuk, Museum (from Ephesus).

longer directed at anyone. Instead it conveys an inner illumination that is by now familiar from the images of philosophers. In another portrait of Menander, the tondo formerly at Marbury Hall, this mediating quality of the expression is further heightened by the wide-open mouth.^[74] The late portrait of Pindar from the gallery in Aphrodisias (fig. 176) may at first glance seem more faithful. But a comparison with the Late Republican copy in Oslo (cf. fig. 7) reveals that here too the sculptor has modified the original expression of old age and mental strain through alterations to the forehead and eyebrows, in order to create a look of anticipated revelation.^[75]

I think these examples will make the point. Despite all the differences in individual detail and the variety of styles in different periods, all these heads are linked through the expression. By emphasizing the

Fig. 175
Menander. Late Antique version of the
Hellenistic portrait type in fig. 47. Constantinian
period. Selçuk, Museum (from Ephesus).

eyes and the forehead the sculptors wanted to convey the notion that these intellectuals of the past were also steeped in the spiritual and the divine. The absence of an individualized face assimilates these portraits to those of contemporary Romans, who often have a very similar expression. But in this way the sense of historical distance that was the basis for the exemplary status of these ancient thinkers is lost.

The process is symptomatic of the age and finds an exact parallel in the use that the Late Antique philosophers and theurgists made of the ancients. Like them, the copyist knew the original (in this case, the portrait, or replicas of it) but kept only as much of the old physiognomy as was necessary for the subject to be recognizable. His true interest was in his own striving for spirituality and mystic revelation,

Fig. 176
Pindar. Late Antique version of the Early
Classical portrait type in fig. 7. Early fifth
century A.D. Aphrodisias, Museum.

which he tries to find in the great figures of authority from the past. The ancients are no longer of interest for who they really were, but only as forerunners of contemporary forms of the search for the self. The nature and content of their writings no longer play any part in the shaping of the portrait. Menander is every bit as "spiritual" as Plato or Pythagoras. Whether poet or orator, philosopher or merely a pupil, all of these figures—Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Aeschines, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, Alexander, Apollonius—transform themselves into seekers after God, and in the process their portraits become ever more alike.

Through a lucky chance we have preserved two full-length portraits, of Homer and Plato, in a very rare art form, that will help sup-

port this interpretation. About the year A.D. 370 a flood caused the land around the harbor of Kenchreai to sink into the sea.^[76] A whole series of scenes in glass, including gods, mythological figures, donors, landscapes, and several famous Greek thinkers of the past, intended for the windows of a sanctuary of Isis at the harbor, was lost. These precious examples of glass mosaic in opus sectile technique were still in transport containers at the time and were found in the excavations at Kenchreai with their backings stuck to one another. (This explains why the illustration [fig. 177] is reversed.)

The portraits of Homer and Plato have nothing in common with earlier images of these men. Homer has the look of a Late Antique philosopher with long hair that, like Christ's, is parted in the middle (fig. 177). He wears a voluminous mantle; in his left hand he holds a book roll, while the right is raised in the gesture of a teacher. His eyes are open wide and directed at the viewer. Plato, however, looks ahead, his legs and hands drawn together, and contemplates. With his shorter hair receding at the sides, he stands in the same relationship to Homer as the apostles to Christ. The privileging of Homer by iconographical means is remarkable. Apparently the artists and patrons in the sanctuary of Isis considered Homer's authority to be higher than Plato's. If this were a Neoplatonic school, it would no doubt have been the other way around.

The iconographical setting at Kenchreai looks rather conventional. The mythological figures and the landscape scenes recall the earlier association of learning and country life in the ideology of the villa. But, as we have just seen, country life also played an important role for the Late Antique philosopher. Iamblichus, for example, despite his exercises in ascetism, was a wealthy man who owned several villas outside Apamea. But the fact that Homer and Plato are shown larger and more carefully rendered than the other subjects, and that they appear in the costume of the contemporary philosopher, suggests that these icons of classical learning were expected to be more than they had been in the sculptural decoration of the earlier Roman villa. They too have turned into teachers of wisdom.

The number of ancient poets and thinkers whose portraits were still

Fig. 177
Homer. Glass window from Kenchreai (reversed). Ca. A.D. 370.

being copied (or, rather, refashioned) in the fourth and fifth centuries is relatively small. Even Julian the Apostate wrote: "We should not concern ourselves with all the philosophers and teachings, but only those who fill us with wisdom and teach us something about God" (Ep. 300d–301a, cf. 301c). Proclus' views, a century later, are much more extreme: "If it were up to me, the only writings of the ancients that would still be read and propagated would be the oracles and the Timaeus [of Plato]" (Marinus Vit. Procl. 38). Fortunately not everyone was so narrow. Particularly in the schools of grammar and rhetoric, which carried on independently of the new religion and numbered Christians among their pupils, the range of interests was broader. So, for example, portraits of Menander still occur in considerable numbers, presumably because his diction was considered to be the perfect embodiment of the purest Attic Greek. Didactic and pedagogical concerns may also explain the late replicas of the portraits of Demosthenes and Aeschines.^[77]