A magnificent Roman bronze tondo, now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which displays an elderly male figure, was excavated in the Ulus area of Ankara in 1947, and identified as a portrait of the Roman emperor Trajan. This article rejects this identification and argues that this is a private portrait of a prominent citizen of Ancyra dating between c. AD 100 and 130. A fragmentary inscription which contains a decree of the Association of Performing Artists dating to the reign of Hadrian (AD 117-138) records that one of the benefactors of this association should be honoured with two gilded shield-mounted images, and it is argued that the Ankara bronze tondo was one of these images. The subject of the inscribed decree, and therefore the person portrayed by the tondo, was either a well-documented Ancyran cultural benefactor called Ulpius Aelius Pompeianus, or an anonymous contemporary figure of the Hadrianic period.