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1 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure in military costume, c. 145 CE. Marble, height:
relief 2.13 m; figure 1.51 m. Rome: Capitoline Museums. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1438.

2 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure with crossed arms, c. 145 CE. Marble, height: relief
2.13 m; figure 1.51 m. Rome: Capitoline Museums. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1437.
3 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure holding curved sword and flowers, c. 145 CE. Marble,
height: relief 1.68 m; figure 1.51 m. Rome: National Museum. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1444.
4 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure holding pomegranate and flowers, c. 145 CE. Marble,
height: relief 1.70 m; figure 1.51 m. Rome: National Museum. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom, 1999.1445.

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 PERSONIFICATIONS AND THE ANCIENT
VIEWER: THE CASE OF THE HADRIANEUM
‘NATIONS’

JESSICA HUGHES

INTRODUCTION
Some of the most exciting work on classical art in recent decades has focused on
the figure of the viewer. Scholars working to uncover the meanings of ancient art
have shifted their focus away from its makers and patrons, in a bid to reconstruct
the experiences and responses of those who looked at it. This approach has shed
new light on monuments as familiar as the Parthenon and the Ara Pacis, as well
as drawing attention to previously neglected aspects of ancient material culture.1
However, the viewer has remained conspicuously absent from the study of ‘alle-
gorical’ art. This is surprising, given the fact that allegorical images by their very
nature represent one thing in the form of something else, and therefore implicate
their viewers in a particularly complex and self-conscious act of interpretation.
This article offers an initial attempt at the reappraisal of allegorical figures from
classical antiquity and places particular emphasis on the dynamics of their
construction and reception.
The literal meaning of allegory, as Marina Warner has summarized it, is
‘‘‘other speech’’ (alia oratio), from allos, other, and agoreuein, to speak openly, to
harangue in the agora; it signifies an open declamatory speech which contains
another layer of meaning.’2 While the etymology of the term concerns the spoken
word, much of the theoretical discussion of allegory has centred upon written
texts.3 Nevertheless, visual allegories were also widespread in antiquity, and were
adopted with enthusiasm by artists and audiences in later periods. The most
common type of allegorical image is the personification, which represents an
abstract or non-human concept in the form of a human body. The inherent
ambiguity of these figures (how do we differentiate the personification of Virtue,
for instance, from a ‘real’ virtuous woman?) is mitigated by the provision of visual
or textual clues: some personifications are identified by written labels; others are
differentiated from the figures that surround them by artistic style, or size; others
carry ‘unreal’ attributes, like globes, or cornucopiae.
The personifications discussed in this article have been interpreted as repre-
senting the provinces or nations of the Roman Empire. They are depicted as
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00646.x
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141–6790 . VOL 32 NO 1 . FEBRUARY 2009 pp 1-20
& Association of Art Historians 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 1
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 P E R S O N I F I C AT I O N S A N D T H E A N C I E N T V I E W E R

idealized females carrying an array of large weapons and wearing the varied
costumes of their distant homelands (plates 1–8). I refer to these figures as
‘nations’, but it is important to stress at the outset that my use of this term is
simply a convenient shorthand: the modern term ‘nation’ fails to reflect the real
character and diversity of ethnic groupings within the Roman Empire, or the
relationships of these groups to the territory they occupied. Of course, on the
other hand, the nation personifications themselves work quite hard to disavow
any sense of the real diversity of the Roman world. The setting of the formally
similar human bodies within relief frames of identical shape and size imposes an
unnatural uniformity onto the Empire, (mis)representing it as an easily quanti-
fiable collection of discrete and equal units.
Which nations do these figures represent? As they were found without any
identifying inscriptions, previous studies of the relief series have all attempted to
identify the nations from an interrogation of their individual costumes and
attributes. Any difficulties encountered in this task are perceived as simply
marking our remoteness from the classical past, where viewers are thought to
have interpreted these same images with fluency and ease. Here I argue that these
nation personifications would have eluded the ancient viewer, too, regardless of
whether or not they originally bore identifying labels. I base this argument on an
analysis of the process by which the figures were made, which reveals that the
unique, identifiable characteristics of the individual nation have been sacrificed
in the construction of an holistic and balanced ‘group aesthetic’. This phenom-
enon is observable more widely amongst figural groups in classical and classi-
cizing art. In the case of the Hadrianic nations, however, it has particularly
profound ideological consequences, both for the nation whose identity was
distorted by its inclusion in the group, and for the Roman viewer who contem-
plated these exotic, monumental figures.

T H E H A D R I A N I C N AT I O N S I N C O N T E X T
My first task is to describe the historical and archaeological context of the
Hadrianic nations and, in the process, to expose some common misconceptions
about the nature of the Empire that they represent. The Proconnesian marble
reliefs were excavated between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries from the
area around the Piazza di Pietra, which lies off the modern Via del Corso just
south of the Antonine Column, within the boundary of the ancient Campus
Martius.4 Nineteen reliefs survive from what was potentially a much larger
series.5 Each relief originally measured over two metres in height, and each
shows an almost life-sized figure standing on the lower moulding of the relief
frame with her head receding into the upper moulding. Although the reliefs were
found without any accompanying inscriptions, they were immediately inter-
preted as representing personifications of provinces or nations of the Roman
Empire. This genre of image had a long ancestry in Roman imperial art, the most
well-known and well-preserved precedent being the first-century CE series of
figures from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, which were discovered in 1979. At the
Sebasteion, inscribed bases identify the personifications as ethne of the Roman
Empire collected during the reign of Augustus.6 Other monumental series of
nation personifications are mentioned in ancient texts, like the series of fourteen

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5 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure with knotted costume, c. 145 CE. Marble, height: relief
2.14 m; figure 1.51 m. Rome: Capitoline Museums. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1434.
6 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure with vexillum (standard), c. 145 CE. Marble, height: relief
2.17 m; figure 1.48 m. Rome: Capitoline Museums. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1433.
7 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure with double axe, c. 145 CE. Marble, height: relief
2.16 m; figure 1.54 m. Rome: Capitoline Museums. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1435.
8 ‘Nation’ relief from the Hadrianeum showing figure with Phrygian-style cap, c. 145 CE. Marble, height: relief
2.16 m; figure 1.50 m. Rome: Capitoline Museums. Photo: K. Anger, D-DAI-Rom 1999.1436.

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.
9 The Hadrianeum building in the Piazza di Pietra, Rome. Photo: Brugner, D-DAI-Rom 1934.0193.

nationes commissioned by Pompey after his conquests in the East, and the elusive
Augustan ‘porticus ad nationes’.7
Like their predecessors, the Piazza di Pietra figures are female – not the
scruffy, empty-handed women who were supposed to represent ‘real’ barbarians
in Roman art, but idealized icons of femininity, whose blank, classicizing faces,
unwieldy weapons and masculine costumes (see, for example, plate 1) helped
scholars to decide that they represented allegorical figures rather than realistic
‘ethnic portraits’.8 The figures originally decorated the attic of a portico struc-
ture, which flanked (and may even have surrounded) the building whose
remaining columns are visible today in the wall of the municipal borsa (plate 9).9
For a long time this building was thought to be the basilica of Neptune, a
structure which the Historia Augusta tells us was restored by the Emperor
Hadrian.10 However, it was re-identified at the start of the twentieth century as
the temple of the Deified Hadrian, or ‘Hadrianeum’, dedicated in 145 CE by that
emperor’s adopted son and heir, Antoninus Pius.11
Since the re-identification of the building there has been a strong desire to
write it – and its personification reliefs – into our modern stories about Hadrian’s
foreign policy, and Antoninus’s filial piety. In Hadrian’s lifetime he made two long
journeys around the Roman world, now, in Jocelyn Toynbee’s words, ‘the most
striking, significant and familiar feature of his reign’.12 These journeys were
memorialized by a series of coins minted between 134 and 138 CE, discussed at
length in Toynbee’s study of The Hadrianic School in 1934.13 Twenty-five provinces

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or provincial cities appear on three different reverse types (the obverse always
bears a portrait of Hadrian). The first reverse type shows a single personification,
inscribed with the name of the province it represents (plate 10). As on the other
types, this personification bears stereotypical attributes, chosen to evoke (and
construct) provincial identity: Achaea bears an amphora, Aegyptos an Isiac
sistrum; Arabia a camel, and so on. The second reverse type shows the personifi-
cation sacrificing with the Emperor to commemorate his arrival in the province:
the legend of this type reads Adventus plus the name of the province in the locative
case (plate 11). A third reverse type has the legend Restitutori with the name of the
province in the genitive case: here the Emperor grips the hand of the kneeling
province, as if to raise her up (plate 12). Studies of the Hadrianic province coins
unanimously agree that they embody a philosophy of unity and respect towards
the empire they portray. Toynbee, whose book remains the standard study on the
coins, writes that:

They reflect the great idea for which Hadrian stood, the idea of the Empire as a vast unity, a
brotherhood of fellow-citizens of the world living together on an equality in prosperity and
peace, under the aegis of a beneficial central government, to which the well-being of each
member was a matter of vital interest.14

This perception of the coins as commemorating the shared benefits of empire was,
in turn, mapped by scholars onto the province reliefs from the Hadrianeum.15
Toynbee, for instance, stated that:

The underlying idea and spirit of the Hadrianeum Provinces and of the ‘province’ coin-series
are essentially the same. In the reliefs, the Provinces appear, not as unwilling, conquered
subjects, but as peaceful, contented, prosperous units of the Roman world. They show no signs
of ‘resignation’, they adopt no ‘attitude of grief’.16

Other scholars offered similar readings. Eugenie Strong contended that the
Hadrianeum personifications were made from an entirely different mould to the
more aggressive ethnographic ‘portraits’ of earlier periods:

The conception, it has been well pointed out, is not so much of the conquered country; it is no
longer the Germania, the Gallia or the Judaea capta, who sit desolate on the reverse of so many
Imperial coins, as of the friendly allied province, tenderly regretful, perhaps, of past inde-
pendence, yet proud to be raised to equality with Rome.17

Roger Hinks agreed, commenting that none of all the figures ‘represents a
province as capta or devicta’, and noting that the figures seem to represent
outlying provinces of the empire, the clearest beneficiaries of ‘Hadrian’s foreign
policy of pacification and unification’.18
In the decades after their discovery, then, the province personifications were
incorporated into broader eulogies of the Roman Empire at the height of its
power. But a closer look at the iconography of the personifications indicates that
there is far more at stake than these accounts suggest. In the first place, several of
the Hadrianeum nations do, in fact, bear strong iconographic similarities to those
captured barbarians of earlier art. The personification in plate 2, for instance,

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10 Hadrianic ‘Province’ coin, minted c. 134–138 CE. Silver denarius,

diameter 17 mm. Private collection. Photo: courtesy of the Classical
Numismatic Group, Inc., www.cngcoins.com.

11 Hadrianic ‘Adventus’ coin, minted c. 134–138 CE. Silver denarius,

diameter 17 mm. Private collection. Photo: courtesy of the Classical
Numismatic Group, Inc., www.cngcoins.com.

12 Hadrianic ‘Restitutor’ coin, minted c. 134–138 CE. Bronze sestertius,

diameter 31 mm. Private collection. Photo: courtesy of the Classical
Numismatic Group, Inc., www.cngcoins.com.

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13 ‘Trophy’ relief from the Hadrianeum, c. 145 CE. Marble, 1.97  2.33 m. Rome: Capitoline
Museums. Photo: Faraglia, D-DAI-Rom 7667.

crosses her arms over her stomach: such a gesture was frequently used in
triumphal representations from earlier periods of imperial Art, as in the sculpted
barbarians which decorated the Forum of Trajan (some of which are now visible in
their re-used context on the Arch of Constantine).19 Secondly, the nation reliefs
were discovered along with a number of ‘trophy’ reliefs, representing conquered
enemy armour (plate 13).20 The trophies originally alternated with the nation
personifications at the top of the portico, facing the temple.21 Their place on the
architecture of the building would have reflected the old Roman practice of fixing
enemy spoils to porticoes and temple buildings.22 Meanwhile, the placing of the
personifications between the trophy reliefs would have suggested the nations’
own status as conquered booty.23
The trophy reliefs were so far incompatible with their expectations of
Hadrianic imperialism that some scholars excluded them entirely from their
reconstructions of the building. Toynbee argued that ‘the Trophies themselves are
scarcely in harmony with the spirit of the Province reliefs, which do not
commemorate the triumphs of Roman arms, [and] it is perfectly possible that the
Provinces and Trophies did not belong together.’24 Toynbee’s optimistic vision
appears to have been shared by the post-antique restorers of the figures. For while
the restorations were limited for the most part to repairing damage to the outer
frames and missing corners, two of the figures had lost hands, which were
replaced with new attributes. The personification shown in plate 3 was given a
new right hand holding a sheaf of corn and flowers; while both the hands of the

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personification shown in plate 4 were also restored with their attributes – a

pomegranate in the right, and flowers and corn (again) in the left. These
restorations are fundamentally misleading, for while the personifications in the
province coin series do indeed carry flora and fauna, none of the other Hadria-
neum figures are shown with agricultural produce; rather, they carry weapons.
The Hadrianeum personifications were not envisioned as peaceful representatives
of distant lands bringing the varied resources of empire into its centre, but rather
as warriors. And while for some they may have called to mind provincial auxili-
aries serving in the Roman army, epiphanized here as obliging guardians of the
imperial temple, the potential for them to revolt would have been perennially
present.25
Both scholars and restorers of the reliefs, then, have tried to iron out differences
between the Hadrianeum reliefs and the Hadrianic and Antonine coin series, partly
because of their expectation, or desire, to see unity within the corpus of images
commissioned by a single imperial dynasty. However, as I have underlined here,
there are some marked differences between the vision of empire presented by the
coins and those presented by the Hadrianeum reliefs. One difference perhaps
outweighs all the others in its importance. While each of the provinces represented
on the coin reverses has her name written in large letters, curling around her body,
those on the reliefs were found without any inscriptions. No inscribed bases like
those accompanying the ethne at Aphrodisias have been found at the Hadrianeum;
neither is there any conceivable space for such blocks in the architectural structure
of the portico. Neils Hannestad has suggested that ‘When [the personifications]
were set up, the names were probably painted on the flat relief background,
corresponding to the coin inscriptions.’26 But there would be no obvious place
for these inscriptions to fit on the background of the reliefs. Moreover, according to
the current restoration, the attic of the portico stood fifty Roman feet (14.8 m) above
the ground.27 At this distance, any inscriptions that might have been painted onto
the reliefs would scarcely have been legible, even to literate viewers.

I N T E R P R E T I N G P E R S O N I F I C AT I O N S
Reading an inscription is not, of course, the only way to get information out of an
allegorical figure. Personifications in ancient art and literature wore and carried
distinctive costumes and attributes, which, in theory, bore a meaningful rela-
tionship to the concept they represented. For those allegorical figures which also
bore identifying written labels, these costumes and attributes served to confirm
existing perceptions or create new stereotypes about the personified entity. For
those figures without identifying inscriptions, the costumes and attributes
ostensibly provided the means to recognize the personified concept, this time by
drawing on preconceived ideas about what it ought to look like. Literary texts
from classical antiquity preserve numerous accounts of viewers interacting with
personifications in this way. One of the best-known examples is the epigram
describing an anonymous viewer’s vision of Lysippos’s Kairos in the Anthologia
Graeca (275):

A. Why do you have a pair of wings on your feet?

B. I fly like the wind.
A. And why do you carry a razor in your right hand.

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B. As a sign to men that my appearance is more abrupt than any blade [is sharp].
A. And your hair, why does it hang down over your face?
B. So that he who encounters me may grab it.
A. By Zeus, and why is the back of your head bald?
B. Because nobody, once I have run past him with my winged feet,
can ever catch me from behind, even though he yearns to.28

The question-and-answer form of the epigram provides the framework for a

normative representation of how to read allegorical imagery, whereby each
symbolic attribute is to be interrogated, unfolded and inscribed into a mean-
ingful relationship with the abstract concept represented. In this case, the
personification has already revealed its own identity as ‘Kairos’ (‘Time’ or
‘Opportunity’), but in other texts, the reader is left to identify an unnamed
allegorical figure from a list of their physical and behavioural characteristics. For
example, in Xenophon’s account of the Prodikean Choice of Herakles, that hero is
confronted by two personifications at a crossroads. Only ‘Kakia’ (‘Vice’) identifies
herself by name, while her companion remains anonymous, simply being
described by the author as unadorned, sober and modest.29 Recognizing her as
‘Arete’ (‘Virtue’) is not difficult, especially as she is represented as the polar
opposite of her companion.30 But the fact that the reader is left to name her
independently is significant, because it suggests that the mechanics of this sort of
allegorical interpretation had been internalized by people in antiquity. It also
bears witness to the tacit agreement between author and readers as to what
(female) ‘Virtue’ actually is.
Scholarship on the Hadrianeum figures is based on this same idea, that the
correct way to interact with a personified figure is by unravelling the meaning of
its symbolic attributes. The conventional approach to the reliefs involves taking
each figure individually, listing its attributes, and attempting to find parallels for
them in ancient material and literary culture, with the ultimate goal of identi-
fying the figure that holds or wears them. Modern scholars, then, approach the
Hadrianeum personifications in much the same way that many of the ancient
viewers would have done. However, while the ancient viewer looking up at the
reliefs on the top of the portico would have had to fall back on their existing
knowledge about the ethnography of the Empire, the modern scholar is able to
call on a whole range of literary and visual sources – often obscure, and rarely
contemporary – in their priviliged, eye-level scrutiny of the reliefs.31 Given all the
advantages of this retrospective viewpoint, it seems surprising and potentially
uncomfortable that the identities of the figures are all heavily contested. The
personification in plate 5, for instance, was identified by Hans Lucas as Egypt, on
account of her semi-nudity and her knotted costume, which is similar to that
worn by priests of Isis; Toynbee later re-identified the figure more precisely as the
city of Alexandria, after comparisons with coins; then Erika Simon offered a new
identification of the figure as Achaea, firstly on account of her headband, which
evokes the iconography of statues of Olympian athletes, and secondly because of
the fragmentary attribute which has been identified tentatively as an anchor,
referring, perhaps, to Athenian control of the sea.32
For these scholars, our failure to decipher the iconography of the personifica-
tions is simply evidence of our own remoteness from the ancient world, whose

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inhabitants interpreted the same images unproblematically.33 In his study in 1939

of Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art, for instance, Hinks complained of the Hadria-
neum figures, ‘It is true that they have not all been successfully identified, but this
difficulty is due rather to our ignorance than to any lack of care on the artist’s
part.’34 However, the notion that personifications could be problematic for the
ancient viewer finds strong support in ancient literary texts. In the ‘Kairos’ epigram
cited above, the attributes are ambiguous and esoteric, and the viewer has to ask
the statue itself for help in understanding their significance. Another particularly
vivid example is found in the first book of the Ars Amatoria, where Ovid advises his
reader/protégé on how to impress a girl at a triumphal procession:

And when some girl among them asks the names of the monarchs, or what places, what moun-
tains, what rivers are borne along, do you answer everything, nor only if she ask you; ay, even if
you know not, tell her as if you knew it well. That is Euphrates, his forehead fringed with reeds; he
with the dark blue locks hanging down must be Tigris. These, say, are Armenians, here is Persia,
sprung from Danae; that was a city in the Achaemenian valleys. That one, or that, are chieftains;
and you will have names to give them, correct, if you can, but if not, yet names that are fitting.35

The personifications mentioned here are closely related to the Hadrianeum

personifications, representing units of imperial geography in human form, this
time in an explicitly triumphal context. The two rivers, the Euphrates and the
Tigris, are represented in the form of personifications well known from mosaics
and the plastic arts. ‘Persia’ and the un-named Achaemenid city may also have
been personified in images like the Hadrianeum reliefs, and the reference
to Persia’s ‘birth’ from Danae might be particularly evocative if she were shown in
anthropomorphic form.36 However, the interest of this passage does not lie in
its recording of possible iconographic antecedents for the Hadrianeum personi-
fications. Rather, it offers proof that such images could be problematic for the
ancient viewer attempting to identify them: the boy, Ovid admits, probably has
no idea who or what these personifications are supposed to represent – not that
this really matters, as the girl to whom he is talking certainly will not know
any better. Moreover, the passage also indicates the extent to which the inter-
pretation of images functioned in antiquity to configure networks of social
relations. Identifying the personifications correctly meant that the viewer had
the cultural resources to recognize their attributes, and the mental agility to
put them together to tell a coherent story. That such displays of cultural capital
could contribute directly to the construction of social status is implied in the
boy’s (anticipated) conquest of his girlfriend, and the simultaneous demonstra-
tion of Ovid’s own intellectual superiority over the pair of woefully unsophisti-
cated adolescents.
These texts confirm that the interpretation of personifications was sometimes
problematic for the ancient viewer. However, simply attributing the ancient
viewers with ignorance is as unsatisfactory and as methodologically unsound as
attributing them with positive knowledge of the same facts. The kind of top-down
analysis which sees ‘meaning’ as ‘meaning at the original moment of conception’
(rather than at the different points of an image’s reception) has always been the
dominant approach in art history for a very good reason: any other approach
generally depends on speculation. In fact, in the introduction to his recent book

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on Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans, John Clarke states ‘My method is purposely
speculative. At the end of many of the case studies I construct scenarios – ‘what if’
viewing scripts.’37 This approach is admirable in as much as it draws attention to
the plurality of an image’s meanings, and alternative viewers other than the
upper-class male, but once this aim is achieved, it is inadequate as a way of telling
us what images ‘really meant’ to their ancient audiences. However, I would argue
that the Hadrianeum figures give us a valuable opportunity to prove, rather than
simply to assume, that certain images were problematic for the ancient viewer.
This opportunity lies in re-inserting the individual personifications into their
original context of the group.

THE GROUP AESTHETIC

The modification of individual figures within a group to complement and interact
with one another was a formal development linked to the increasing ‘naturalism’
of classical Greek art. In Geometric and Archaic art, groups were normally
constructed through the identical multiplication of individual figures, as in the
famous scene of mourners around a bier portrayed on the belly of the Dipylon
amphora.38 In such images, the conceptual similarity between figures was
reflected by the physical similarity of their bodies and gestures: the definitive
characteristic of the individuals portrayed was that they were (all) mourners or
tribute-bearers, and their lack of visual differentiation only served to emphasize
their social connection. However, in the Classical period, groups of figures began
to embody the sense of balance between difference and similarity that has been a
basic element in the construction of figural groups in Western art ever since. The
group of bronze ‘dancers’ from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (plate 14)
provides one famous, large-scale example.39 The dancers still draw our attention
to the fact that they belong to a group, being of equal size, made from the same
material and dressed in the same kind of columnar garment. In the National
Archaeological Museum in Naples the sculptures are also placed at equal distance
from one another, as they may have been in their original display context.40
At the same time, any sense of repetition or hieratic stillness is alleviated, because
the artist made each dancer hold her arms in a position that complemented
and contrasted with the poses of the rest of her company. Even this decorative
group of figures without attributes shows us how taking any one of these figures
singly, in isolation, would leave our understanding of that figure somewhat
impoverished.
This subtle modification of a figure to respond to its neighbours applies not
only to poses and gestures, but also to the costumes and attributes that it wears or
carries. Images of the four Seasons provide us with a particularly cogent example.
In Egypt and early Classical Greece, the three Horai were nature goddesses and
were visually identical; in Hellenistic and Roman times their number rose to four,
and they were each given different attributes, to symbolize the four seasons of the
year.41 In these later images, it is clearly membership of the group that defines
both the iconography of the individual personification, and the conceptual
boundaries of the abstraction it represents. For example, in many representa-
tions, Winter is portrayed as a markedly older figure than the other Seasons; often
she looks ‘back’ at the other figures, signalling, with that gesture, that she marks

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the end of the year. In other representations, the change in the meteorological
climate is also registered in the changing of costumes, from Spring’s light tunic to
Winter’s heavy mantle.
Significantly, in the majority of cases each Season holds or wears attributes
deemed suitable for showing both continuity and contrast amongst all four
figures – generally fruit and/or foliage. And while each attribute makes logical
sense in its relation to its wearer (flowers bloom in Spring; wheat grows in
Summer; and so forth), the connection between attribute and personified concept
would not necessarily be the obvious choice, were each Season considered
in isolation. For example, the figure of Winter in a Season mosaic from Ostia

14 Group of ‘dancers’
or ‘peplophoroi’ from
the Villa of the Papyri,
Herculaneum, first
century BCE – first
century CE. Bronze,
height 1.50 m. Naples:
National Museum.
Photo: Schwanke,
D-DAI-Rom 1979.0523-
4; 1985.1155, 1160, 1163.

(plate 15) is represented wearing a ‘cloak’ of aquatic foliage.42 This attribute

successfully illustrates Winter’s simultaneous continuity with, and difference
from, the other Seasons, who were also shown wearing foliage: the aquatic
foliage was clearly chosen for this purpose rather than because it was itself
intrinsically ‘wintery’, and there is a sense in which the amount we can
learn from our personification about the character of Winter as a concept is
actually very limited. This subordination of the individual element to the
group frequently problematizes the identification of figures when they are
removed from their original context. For instance, the British Museum has in its

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collections a statue dating from the second century CE of a heavily draped

reclining female holding a hare in a basket, whose identity has fluctuated
between the personification of Winter and the personification of the province of
Hispania.43
If we now turn back to the Hadrianeum personifications, it is clear that here,
too, the iconography of the individual personification has been modified to
complement and interact with the other members of the group. This is imme-
diately visible at the level of the pose. Nine of the figures turn their heads varying
degrees to the left, while six turn varying degrees to the right. In 1979, when the
nations were still thought to belong to the interior of the Hadrianeum temple,

Anna-Maria Pais took these variously oriented gazes to suggest that the nations on
the walls of the cella originally all turned to look towards the statue of the
Emperor.44 In their new place at the top of the external portico, the figures could
still have been oriented to face the temple, or, equally, they might have been
arranged according to alternating left- and right-hand gazes. Whichever of these
reconstructions is correct, most viewers would agree that the head-turn of the
figures serves as a formal device to relax the potentially stiff frontality of the long
row of figures, which bears little or no meaningful relationship to the character
of the individual nation. The same would go for the position of the figures’ hands,

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which are variously shown as outstretched, crossed, touching a shoulder, or

fiddling with a cloak. Gestures and body language sometimes do impinge on the
identity of the personification – the case of Virtue and Vice at the crossroads is a
good example. However, in this long series of nations, as with the Herculaneum
dancers, most viewers would simply view the bodily stances of the individual
figures as functioning, collectively, to create an internal aesthetic of regulated,
balanced diversity. In other words, the turning of the heads and the gesturing
hands, together with other bodily features like the opening and closing of the
figures’ mouths and their shifting contrappostos, would be read, on the whole, as
redundant signifiers, lacking corresponding signifieds.
Few viewers would approach a group of figures like the Hadrianeum perso-
nifications expecting to identify or understand them fully from their gestures.
Nevertheless, the same principle of studied diversity is also visible in the head-
dresses, hairstyles, costumes and weapons of the Hadrianeum figures. Of all the
head-coverings worn by the figures, every one is different. A number of the figures
have bare heads, but even amongst these, no single hairstyle is replicated. Every
single one of the surviving weapons is also unique, as are the costumes, with their
complicated drapery folds, and their tassels, fringing, knots, ties, bands and pins.
The crucial question is whether these unique outfits and attributes are really to
be read as accurate reflections of the ethnography of empire, or if they belong to
the same class of purely decorative variation that marked the bronze statues
from Herculaneum? Did the ‘real’ women of any particular province, on seeing
that their neighbours in the next province tied up their hair, really (all) decide to
leave theirs flowing down on their shoulders? Did the inhabitants of Moesia
pick up a short dagger so that they would not be confused with the inhabitants
of Phrygia, even if a long axe would be a lot more effective at mowing down
their enemies? Perhaps they did – material culture was certainly used in antiquity
to create distinctive national identities. But by raising the possibility that the
figures’ costumes and attributes, like their gestures, are the result of studied
artistic improvisation, I aim to problematize the idea that we can neatly divide
the formal and iconographic characteristics of the individual personifications
into ‘those which exist purely for aesthetic/decorative variation’ (as the contra-
pposto, head-turns and other ‘embodied’ features would conventionally be seen)
and ‘those which bear a concrete, semantic meaning’ (i.e., the visibly cultural
costumes and attributes).
The notion that the costumes and attributes may be decorative improvisa-
tions rather than accurate inventories of ethnic difference would help to explain
the problems which modern scholars have encountered in identifying the
individual nations (not to mention the suspiciously Roman feel of some of
the weapons and hairstyles).45 However, even if we suppose that the artists of the
Hadrianeum reliefs did faithfully reproduce clothes and weapons as observed, the
process of identifying the nations would still be problematized by the subordi-
nation of the individual element to the context of the group. Unlike the Hadrianic
province coins, whose personifications held a wide range of evocative attributes
(Panathenaic amphorae, camels, etc.), every one of the Hadrianeum figures held a
weapon, regardless, presumably, of whether this was their most definitive and
easily recognizable characteristic in the mind of the Roman viewer. By contrast, it
is possible to compare the literary descriptions of the provinces by ‘geographical’

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15 Details from Seasons Mosaic from the imperial palace at Ostia, showing (left to right, top to bottom)
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, mid-second century CE. Rome: San Paolo alle Tre Fontane. Photo: Hutzel,
D-DAI-Rom.

writers like Pliny and Strabo. While these texts clearly do not give an objective
representation of the Empire, they nevertheless admit far more heterogeneity
than does the Hadrianeum group.46 We learn from Pliny, for instance, that ‘the
cheese most highly prized at Rome, where the goods of all nations are judged side
by side, is from the provinces of Nemausus.’47 At the Hadrianeum, a personifi-
cation of Nemausus would have to be recognized by its military equipment,
regardless of the fact that the most evocative symbol of Nemausus for a Roman
viewer was its cheese.

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It has been shown how far the appearance of the individual personification
is determined by its environment – that is, by its inclusion in a larger series.
The construction of a balanced group, where each single element complemented
all the others, necessitated at least a biased selection of costumes and attri-
butes, if not a free improvisation of these features. In the case of the Hadrianic
nations, this mode of representation had profound consequences for the way in
which the Empire was presented to the viewers back in Rome. As far as the
Hadrianeum is concerned, each nation of the Empire only makes visual sense
when inserted back into the group: in this way, the whole (Empire) becomes an
holistic, quasi-natural entity, in being shown to equal more than the sum of its
parts. This visual Gestalt may have been underscored by the way in which the
reliefs were arranged on the building. It is interesting to note that, while the
original display of the reliefs remains a controversial issue, all the suggested
reconstructions envisage them as surrounding or flanking the temple, whether
on the podium, the portico, the attic, or around the walls on the temple
interior.48 Rome, embodied by the imperial temple building, may thus have
literally been surrounded by her Empire; in this case, the ancient viewers may
have been prompted to make analogies with those Roman season mosaics in
which personifications of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter revolve around a
central emblema of ‘Annus’, the personification of the year.49 Like the seasons in
these mosaics, the nations of the Empire can be understood as constitutive
components of the centre; at the same time, neither Annus nor Roma is reducible
to the sum of the parts that surround it.
Most important here, however, is the fact that the subordination of the
individual nation to the group as a whole renders the interrogation of individual
costumes and attributes inappropriate: any viewer – ancient or modern – who
stops to consider the single figure in the hope of finding out which nation it
represents, and what that nation is like, is bound to be disappointed. This reading
of the Hadrianeum personifications as figures that simultaneously solicit and
problematize interpretation has clear implications for our understanding of the
temple building in its sociopolitical context. As Pierre Bourdieu has stated
(writing about the reception of high culture more generally):

When the message [of a work of art] exceeds the possibilities of apprehension or, to be more
precise, when the code of a work exceeds in subtlety and complexity the code of the beholder,
the latter lose interest in what appears to him to be a medley without rhyme or reason, or a
completely unnecessary set of sounds or colours. In other words, when placed before a message
which is too rich for him, or ‘overwhelming’ as the theory of information expresses it, he feels
completely ‘out of his depth’.50

Once the ‘subtlety and complexity’ of its imagery has been exposed, the Hadria-
neum building ceases to represent (just) a shared celebration of Roman power
over the foreign enemy: instead, the viewing of this imperially commissioned
building becomes a way of reinforcing existing power hierarchies within the
ancient metropolis. The Hadrianeum personifications constructed an uncom-
prehending viewing subject, whose failure to interact successfully with the
personifications implicitly rationalized their position as the ruled subjects of the
Empire. A similar process is visible in the passage of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria discussed

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above. Here, the lazy incomprehension of the protagonist raises a smile:

however, if this alienation of the viewer is seen not as an isolated, fictional
episode, but as a potentially accurate reflection of how Roman citizens experi-
enced monumental representations of ‘their’ Empire, then the implications are
rather more sinister.

CONCLUSION
In this article I have challenged two closely related assumptions about the
production and reception of allegorical images in antiquity. Firstly, I have used
ancient texts and images to dispute the pervasive notion that personifications
were easily interpreted by their ancient viewers. By extension, I have problema-
tized the widely held belief that allegorical personifications were used by patrons
to facilitate the straightforward communication of information to diverse and
largely illiterate audiences.51 In formulating these ideas I have focused my
attention on a series of personifications which lack any identifying inscriptions.
However, it should not be too hard to see how this reading might also be applied
to groups of personifications which did have their names supplied. If excavations
ever produced a series of identifying inscriptions for the Hadrianeum figures, the
reading of them given here would have to be only slightly modified. The biased
selection and/or free improvisation of the figures’ costumes and attributes would
still mean that the appearance of the individual personifications failed to match
up to the preconceived notions of the nation represented: in this way, the figures
would continue to underline the viewer’s dependence on the imperial patron as a
revealer of previously unknown facts.
I hope to have indicated that introducing the figure of the viewer into the
study of ancient allegorical art can provide positive and useful information about
the function and meaning of these images in ancient society. In the specific case
studied here, considering the dynamics of reception has indicated the double-
sided nature of such imperially motivated representations of empire. On the one
hand, monuments like the Hadrianeum ostensibly served to illustrate and cele-
brate the power of a (unified) Rome over her foreign nations; on the other hand,
these exotic images of empire served as a mechanism to stratify and subordinate
the viewing population of the city. The choice of the classicizing, allegorical mode
for the representation of the Empire at the temple of Hadrian was a loaded one –
far from allowing the easy and immediate communication of facts to its audi-
ence, it actually enacted the disenfranchisement of the Roman viewer from any
real knowledge or control of the empire to which they belonged. Modern scholars
who lament our inability to reconstruct the intentions and knowledge of those
who commissioned and designed the Hadrianeum sculptures may, therefore, take
cold comfort from the fact that this sense of alienation was probably shared by
the majority of viewers who looked at these images in antiquity.

Notes
This article develops a theme from my 2005 Courtauld PhD thesis, ‘Embodiments
of Empire – Roman Imperial Geography in Human Form’. I thank Peter Stewart,
Robin Osborne, Mary Beard, and the two anonymous readers for Art History for

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improving earlier drafts of these ideas – any mistakes of course remain my own. I
also thank the AHRC and the Courtauld Institute for funding my doctoral
research, and the British School at Rome for the Rome Award that I held from
October 2003 to January 2004.
1 See, for instance Robin Osborne, ‘The Viewing
and Obscuring of the Parthenon Frieze’, Journal
of Hellenic Studies, 107, 1987, 98–105; Jas Elsner,
‘Cult and Sculpture: Sacrifice in the Ara Pacis
Augustae’, Journal of Roman Studies, 81, 1991, 50–
61; John Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans:
Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy,
100 BC–AD 315, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London,
2003.
2 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Alle-
gory of the Female Form, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1985, xix.
3 The term ‘allegorical’ has been debated since
antiquity, but in this article my use of the word
is general and conservative. See Jon Whitman,
Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval
Technique, Oxford, 1987, especially appendices 1
and 2 on the histories of the terms ‘Allegory’ and
‘Personification’.
4 On the limits of the Campus Martius, see T. P.
Wiseman, ‘Campus Martius’, in Eva Margaret
Steinby, ed., Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae,
Rome, 1993, vol. 1, 220–4.
5 For reasons of space, only eight figures are illu-
strated here. All the surviving figures can be seen
in the most recent publication of the building
and reliefs: Marina Sapelli, ed., Provinciae fideles: il
fregio del tempio di Adriano in Campo Marzio, Milan,
1999. Drawings of four other now-lost figures
(preserved in manuscripts) are shown at Sapelli,
Provinciae, 78–80. For the reconstructions of the
temple portico where the reliefs were displayed,
see Amanda Claridge ‘L’Hadrianeum in Campo
Marzio: storia dei rinvenimenti e topografia
antica nell’area di Piazza di Pietra’, in Sapelli,
Provinciae, 117–27. If this portico extended not
only along one side of the temple but all around
its perimeter (as Luigi Canina argued at the end
of the nineteenth century, and as the latest
reconstruction continues to allow), this could
mean that in excess of eighty figures were to be
seen on the building. Claridge, ‘L’Hadrianeum’,
125.
6 For discussion of the type of monument, see
R.R.R. Smith, ‘Simulacra Gentium: the Ethne from
the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias’, Journal of Roman
Studies, 78, 1988, 50–77; Paolo Liverani,
‘‘‘Nationes’’ e ‘‘Civitates’’ nella propaganda
imperiale’, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Arch-
ologischen Instituts. Römische Abteilung, 102, 1995,
219–49; and Ann Kuttner, Dynasty and Empire in
the Age of Augustus: The Case of the Boscoreale Cups,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995, 69–93.
7 For Pompey’s fourteen nationes, made by Copo-
nius, see Pliny, NH 36.41, Suetonius, Nero, 46. The
18
Augustan Porticus ad Nationes, whose location is
unknown, appears at Pliny, NH 36.39 and Servius,
Ad Aen. 8.722: see Filippo Coarelli, ‘Porticus ad
Nationes’, in Steinby, ed., Lexicon Topographicum,
vol. 4, 138–9.
8 For the typological division of province and
nation personifications into realistic ‘provinciae
captae’ and idealized ‘provinciae pia fideles’, see
Piotr Bienkowski, De Simulacris Barbararum
Gentium Apud Romanos, Krakow, 1900.
9 In 1831 Canina and Fea found a wall made from
peperino underneath Palazzo Cini, and claimed
that it formed part of the external wall of a
portico. Luigi Canina, Indicazione topografica di
Roma antica, Rome, 1850, 182. Canina subse-
quently reconstructed this portico as forming a
large rectangular enclosure with the temple at
the centre. Canina, Gli edifizi di Roma antica e
contorni cogniti per alcune reliquie descritti e dimos-
trati nell’intera loro architettura, Rome, 1848, 312,
pl. 144. Cf. Canina, Pianta topografica di Roma
antica, Rome, 1850, pl. 2.
10 SHA, Hadr., 19.
11 Hans Lucas, Zur Geschichte der Neptunsbasilika in
Rom, Berlin, 1904, 3, 24–7. Cf. SHA, Verus, 3.
12 Jocelyn Toynbee, The Hadrianic School: A Chapter in
the History of Greek Art, Cambridge, 1934, 2. On the
imperial journeys, see Helmut Halfmann, Itinera
principum: Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen
im Römischen Reich, Stuttgart, 1986. For general
information about Hadrian’s relationship with
his Empire, see Mary T. Boatwright, Hadrian and
the Cities of the Roman Empire, Princeton, 2000.
13 Toynbee, Hadrianic. On the coins, see also Paul
Strack, Untersuchungen zur römischen Reichspr.agung
des zweiten Jahrhunderts. Teil II: die Reichspr.agung
zur Zeit des Hadrian, Stuttgart, 1933. Strack
showed that the figures on the coins do not
correspond precisely to the imperial adminis-
trative divisions of the provinces, and are there-
fore better understood as representing gentes or
nationes.
14 Toynbee, Hadrianic, 3.
15 The similarities between the Hadrianic and
Antonine series – in both iconography and
‘spirit’ – are discussed by Toynbee, who sees the
two series as produced by the same school of
artists, if not the very same workshop. Toynbee,
Hadrianic, 147, cf. 156. In a review of Bienkowski’s
study (1900, see note 7 above) Percy Gardner
endorses Bienkowski’s use of the Hadrianic coins
as comparative material for the reliefs: ‘[The
reliefs] were fully discussed by Dr. Lucas in a
paper in the Jahrbuch of the Institute for 1900:
but Dr. Lucas was not altogether successful in
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understanding or attributing the statues, prob-
ably because he missed the true key to them,
which is furnished by that remarkable series of
coins issued in the reign of Hadrian, and
commemorating his journeys into the various
provinces of the Roman Empire. On these coins
we have not only figures of the provinces visited,
but the name of the province in each case. They
thus enable us to attribute the uninscribed
statues of the Basilica of Neptune.’ Percy
Gardner, ‘Bienkowski’s iconography of barbar-
ians’, Classical Review, 16: 2, March 1902, 137–8.
However, attempts to identify the reliefs from
the coins only highlight the incongruity between
these series. See, for instance, Toynbee, Hadrianic,
156–9.
16 Toynbee, Hadrianic, 156.
17 Mrs Arthur Strong, Roman Sculpture from Augustus
to Constantine, 1907, London and New York, 245.
18 Roger Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art,
London, 1939, 74.
19 See Catharine Edwards, ‘The Art of Conquest’, in
Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf, eds, Rome the
Cosmopolis, Cambridge, 2003, 67–8, fig. 3. One of
the figures from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias
holds her arms in the same position: see Smith,
Ethne, pl. 2. For the iconography of captured
barbarians and their relation to the Roman nation
personifications, see Bienkowski, De Simulacris.
20 For the trophy reliefs, see Sapelli, Provinciae, nos. 2,
4, 11, 14, 16, 18 and 30–2. On trophies in Greece
and Rome generally, see Tonio Hölscher, ‘The
Transformation of Victory into Power’, in Sheila
Dillon and Katherine E. Welch, eds, Representations
of war in ancient Rome, Cambridge, 2006, 29–34.
21 Claridge, ‘L’Hadrianeum’, 125.
22 The topography of the immediate area also
connects the nations to war. The temple was
situated in the Campus Martius, the military
zone of the city; moreover, entry to the precinct
where the nations were displayed was gained
through a triumphal arch. See F. Castagnoli, ‘Due
archi trionfali della via Flaminia presso piazza
Sciarra’, BCom, 70, 1942, 74–82.
23 Cf. Livy 22.57.10: ‘They gave orders that armour,
weapons and other equipment should be made
ready, and took down from the temples and
porticoes the ancient spoils of enemies.’ See Ida
Ostenberg, Staging the World: Rome and the Other in
the Triumphal Procession, Lund, 2003, 20; and
Katherine E. Welch, ‘Domi militiaeque: Roman
domestic aesthetics and war booty in the
Republic’, in Dillon and Welch, eds, Representa-
tions, 110–12.
24 Toynbee, Hadrianic, 155.
25 The ambiguity of such representations is
dramatized in the eerie episode recorded by
Suetonius, when the fourteen personifications of
Pompey’s long-since conquered and incorporated
nationes turn against the Emperor Nero in a
nightmare, moving towards him from all sides.
Suetonius, Nero, 46: ‘modo a simulacris gentium
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ad Pompei theatrum dedicaturum circumiri
acerique progressu.’
26 Niels Hannestad, Roman Art and Imperial Policy,
Aarhus, 1986, 198. See also Anna-Maria Pais, Il
‘podium’ del tempio del divo Adriano a Piazza di Pietra
in Roma, Rome, 1979, 122.
27 Claridge, ‘L’Hadrianeum’, 125.
28 Translation from J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient
Greece: Sources and Documents, Cambridge, 1990
[1965], 103. For this statue, see Andrew Stewart,
‘Lyssipan Studies I: The Only Creator of Beauty’,
AJA, 82, 1978, 163–71.
29 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.1.20–34.
30 The simplest examples of this phenomenon are
pairs of personifications which illustrate oppo-
site and mutually exclusive concepts. In this
story of the choice of Herakles, for instance, the
polarization of the concepts of Virtue and Vice is
achieved by measuring both figures against
exactly the same parameters: cosmetic adorn-
ment, facial expression, speech and movement.
Vice is made up to look whiter and rosier than
reality, while Virtue wears only ‘purity’ for
adornment; Virtue wears white clothing while
Vice wears clothes ‘in which her bloom would be
most conspicuous.’ Virtue’s eyes are ‘modest’,
Vice’s eyes are ‘wide-open’; Vice speaks loudly,
and immediately; Virtue, correspondingly,
speaks quietly, after a modest pause. The road
Virtue offers is ‘long and hard’, whereas the road
offered by Vice is ‘short and easy’. The char-
acterization of Virtue and Vice using the oppo-
site ends of the same spectrum effectively
represents the total opposition of the lifestyles
that each figure represents. Herakles cannot be
both virtuous and ‘vicious’ – the choice is a clear
one between long and short, difficult and easy.
31 John Clarke’s criticism of the unempathetic
slant of much modern scholarship seems tailor-
made for many previous studies of the Hadria-
neum figures: ‘The only viewer that modern
scholarly literature has given us [is] an upper-
class male who knows everything because he has
read all of Greek and Latin literature and has the
advantage of photo archives and history books
. . . No ancient viewer had the advantages of the
modern scholar; to see Roman art exclusively
from the scholar’s point of view is to distort its
purposes and meanings for the Roman viewer.’
Clarke, Art, 12.
32 See Lucas, ‘Neptunsbasilika’, 10; Toynbee,
Hadrianic, 156–8; Simon in Helbig, F.uhrer durch die
öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altert.umer in
Rome, 1963–72, vol. II, 245.
33 One exception is found in Paolo Liverani’s
discussion of a typologically similar group of city
personifications from an imperial monument in
Ephesos. Here, Liverani raises in passing the idea
that the ancient viewers may not have been able
to identify the individual personifications:
‘Dubito, infatti che lo spettatore efesino di media
cultura potesse riconoscere a colpo d’occhio
tutte le personificazioni presenti su questi rilievi
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. . . Non sembra, dunque che tali rappresenta-
zioni fossero cosı́ caratteristiche e di impiego
tanto frequente da essere immediatemente rico-
noscibili.’ However, he continues to assert that
the figures would have been universally recog-
nized as generic city personifications: ‘Le figure
erano globalmente riconoscibile come personifi-
cazioni di città.’ Liverani, ‘Nationes’, 242. The
reading of the Hadrianeum personifications
given here can be transferred to the Ephesian
city personifications to support Liverani’s intui-
tion that not all viewers could successfully
identify the cities portrayed. I would, however,
disagree with the categorical statement that all
ancient viewers necessarily accessed the
‘secondary’ meaning of such figures as allego-
rical portrayals of cities or nations, as opposed to
simply accepting them as representations of the
‘real’ human bodies of foreign women.
34 Hinks, Myth, 74.
35 Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 1.219–27. Trans. J. H. Mozey for
the Loeb Classical Library. On this passage, see
Clarke, Art, 10, and Mary Beard, ‘The Triumph of
the Absurd: Roman Street Theatre’, in Edwards
and Woolf, Cosmopolis, 35–7.
36 For the appearance of nation and province
personifications in triumphal processions, see
Ida Ostenberg, Staging the World, 216–24. Ovid’s
Tristia, 4.2 provides a vivid description of perso-
nifications carried in a triumph of Tiberius: ‘This
thing with broken horns and sorry covering of
sedge was the Rhine himself, discoloured with
his own blood. See! Even Germany is borne along
with streaming locks, seated in grief at the feet
of the unconquered leader. Offering her proud
neck to the Roman axe she wears chains on that
hand in which she carried arms.’
37 Clarke, Art, 12.
38 John Boardman, The History of Greek Vases, London,
2001, fig. 13.
39 Carol Mattusch, The Villa of the Papyri at Hercula-
neum: Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection, Los
Angeles, 2005, 195–215.
40 This similarity between statues was also a prac-
tical measure in bronze-working: see Mattusch,
Villa, 212. Our expectations of visual symmetry
in such sets of figures have led to a sixth bronze
‘dancer’ being excluded from the group, because
of her slightly smaller size and the fact she is
20
the only one wearing sandals. Mattusch, Villa,
214–15.
41 See Ellen Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy
Philadephus, Oxford, 1983, 51. Examples of these
images can be found in David Parrish, Season
Mosaics of Roman North Africa, Rome, 1986.
42 Mid-second century CE, from the imperial palace
at Ostia. See the Lexicon Iconographicum Mytholo-
giae Classicae (henceforth LIMC) vol 5.1, s.v. ‘Horai/
Horae’, 528, no. 167.
43 For the identification as Winter, see LIMC, 5.1, s.v.
‘Horai/Horae’, 521, no. 95; she is identified as
Hispania by Toynbee, Hadrianic, 106.
44 Pais, Podium, 101, 118–19.
45 Ostenberg, Staging the World, 22, note 39,
comments on depictions of trophies in Roman
art generally: ‘Even if many depictions are
extremely thorough in detail, each shield,
cuirass or greave is often depicted ‘‘incorrectly’’
when compared to the actual arms used by the
enemy forces at that specific time. On the reliefs,
there is often a mixture of Greek, barbarian and
at times perhaps even Roman pieces, contem-
porary and historical.’ See E. Polito: Fulgentibus
Armis: Introduzione allo studio dei fregi d’armi
antichi, Rome, 1998.
46 Although Trevor Murphy sees similar ‘centra-
lizing’ tactics at work in Pliny’s Natural History:
‘the role of the Encyclopedia . . . was to assimilate
the diverse kinds of information that Pliny’s
research had turned up and to express them in
terms digestible by Roman culture.’ Trevor
Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire
in the Encyclopedia, Oxford, 2004, 15.
47 Pliny, NH 11.97.
48 Claridge, ‘L’Hadrianeum’, 121–5.
49 See Parrish, Season Mosaics, 47, esp. note 176.
50 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Outline of a sociological theory
of art perception’, International Social Science
Journal, 20: 4, 1968, 589–612 (2.3.3).
51 One of the most important works on personifi-
cation to come out in recent years describes the
personifications on Attic document reliefs as
‘ephemeral devices making the substance of the
document intelligible to the illiterate, or merely
lazy, viewer’. Emma Stafford, Worshipping Virtues:
Personification and the Divine in Ancient Greece,
London, 2000, 15.
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009