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

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Roman Studies. Ancient history, it could be said, is composed of long and broad bands of unchanging social and political culture, punctuated in the upper levels by periods of upheaval and re-orientation. Ancient art works document and make visible both aspects: numbing continuity and static production on the one hand and sudden shifts and sharp turns in representation on the other. This paper takes as an example one of those periods of highly-charged visual re-orientation, the early fourth century A.D., and is intended as an alternative to the discussion and explanation of ancient images in this period in terms of artistic and formal processes. It aims to set an unusual and fat-faced late antique portrait (P1. I) in its proper context alongside the thin-faced portraits of a better known figure (P1. XII), and looks at the wider implications of this for the interpretation of imperial portrait sculpture as a significant expression of political ideology. The leanfaced man is Constantine, the other it will be argued is Licinius.The fat-faced portrait is a colossal head from Ephesus, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and, taken out of context and without a statue body, it may at first glance look comic, but I hope to show that it was once an important and meaningful player on the public stage. Since its first discussion the head has been dated in the fifthcentury A.D., and has been identified in its main publication as the mid-fifth-century emperor Marcian. This date and name are based on a detailed stylistic chronology and are open to question. Although the portrait is unusual on any view, a better context can be created for it elsewhere. Some questions are obvious: What kind of person is A shorter version of this paper was given as my inaugural lecture as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford in November I995. Versions were also given at Columbia and Uppsala Universities. I would like to thank the audiences on those occasions for helpful and interesting discussion, as well as the Editorial Committee of this journal for their thoughtful advice. Warm thanks to the following, who very kindly supplied photographs: A. (;alik (London), C. King (Oxford), E. Minchin (Canberra), B. Overbeck (Munich), D. Srejovic (Belgrade), and D. Willers (Bern). The following abbreviations are used: Age of Spirituality = K. Weitzmann (ed.), Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, 3rd-7th Century (I977); Alfoldi = M.-R. Alfoldi, Die constantinische Goldprdgung: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Bedeutung far Kaiserpoliti...

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

The towns of the Middle Roman Empire have left an array of grand columned marble architecture that makes classical sites, from Merida to Ephesus, still so imposing for the modern viewer. The great benefactors who paid for this strange marble culture and for everything else thought worthwhile in an ancient city received large public portrait statues set up on tall elegant moulded bases, set either in columned façades or posted around town at focal points of urban life (see below, Figs 1–2). In their method of signification these statue monuments shared more with poster hoardings than the gallery objects we think of as art. That is, they combined a commanding image with a loud complementary text. They were also different from the public statues of our own times in at least three other important respects — in their prominence, in their sheer quantity, and in that they mostly represented living persons. They were not isolated memorials but potent markers in local politics and aristocratic competition. Architectural setting, inscribed base, statue costume, and styled portrait head all combined to make sometimes complex statements about the subject.

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