HADRIAN AND THE LIMITS TO POWER Hekster, Olivier
Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology,
01/2020, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1_SI
Journal Article
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Roman emperors were influenced by precedent and by the expectations of various groups in the Roman Empire that followed from precedent. Yet, imperial decisions by individual emperors influenced ...groups of Romans and changed their expectations for later emperors. This article analyses this process through the lens of the emperor Hadrian. It pays particular attention to Hadrian’s accession, and to the consequences that the way in which he came to power had for some of his imperial behaviour, noticeable the way in which the emperor dealt with the provinces. Both the constraints which Hadrian faced in his early reign because of the context in which he came to power, and the ways in which his mode of reign seems to have shifted expectations for later rulers are reflected in the way the emperor was (numismatically) represented.
Throughout Roman history, members of the imperial family featured regularly in central coinage, on reliefs and statues, and in inscriptions – both in Rome and the provinces. Roman emperorship was ...a de facto dynastic system, which explains the sustained emphasis on imperial fathers, mothers, wives and children. Only very rarely was lineage wholly ignored. This posed major problems for imperial representation under the so-called Tetrachy; an explicitly non-dynastic imperial system, not organised by bloodline but governed through collegiate rule. How could such ‘corporate government’ present itself in a society that was used to dynastic terminology when indicating predecessors and intended successors? This article explores some of the alternative modes through which tetrarchic representation aimed to present non-dynastic rule, and shows how these alternatives proved ultimately unsuccessful. Apparently, the constraints of tradition in imperial imagery were too stringent to overcome.
Abstract
Portraits of Roman emperors are traditionally recognised by their unique coiffure patterns, a method that runs the risk of ignoring portraits that do not cohere to the standardised image of ...the emperor. This article investigates whether it is possible to recognise and distinguish emperors using the facial features of their portraits. By using a technique called transfer learning, it utilises existing deep-learning facial recognition models, augmented with images of Roman imperial portraits, to provide a new empirical foothold in the debate of Roman emperor recognition. The results of the experiments demonstrate that by only a limited amount of training, such a so-called “pre-trained” model (i.e., InceptionResnet-V1) is able to correctly classify most images in the dataset of Roman emperors. As such, this article has made a first step towards applying facial recognition models to the study of ancient imperial portraiture.
A concise, cross-referenced resource introducing the Roman Empire, its historical context, and main issues if interpretation and debate. The book includes translated source materials and ...illustrations of archaeological and material evidence.
Roman coinage forms an astoundingly rich body of material. That applies to coins struck by the centre as much as so-called provincial coinage. The latter can be roughly categorised as 1) coins struck ...by cities in the east of the Roman Empire, and for the Julio-Claudian period also in the west (in the western provinces, cities stopped issuing coins around the end of Claudius’ reign); 2) coinages issued in the name of federations of cities (koina) or coins celebrating alliances between cities (so-called homonoia-coins); 3) coins struck by ‘friendly kings’; and 4) so-called ‘provincial issues’ — mainly drachms, didrachms and tetradrachms, but also bronzes — that were mostly struck by important mints such as Alexandria, Antioch and Caesarea (in Cappadocia), probably under the supervision of Roman magistrates, to circulate in specific provinces.1
This article takes an historical approach to analyse ways in which political changes are shaped and perceived. It compares ancient Athenian and Roman examples to highlight the difference between ...changes in governance that are explicitly referred to as innovations or adaptations to a new situation, and those that pretend to be continuations of existing practices. Athenian democracy, which mainly developed in the sixth century BC, is an example of an explicit adaptation. The Roman transition from Republic to Empire in the late first century BC illustrates a disguised form of adjustment. These two examples highlight the importance of 'anchoring' changes by making use of known concepts or structures. This is an important element to take into account when adapting governmental structures to changes in society, since it strongly influences how those changes are perceived.
Roman emperors were at the pinnacle of society. They were supreme commanders of the armies, the highest priests and the ultimate source of law and justice. These three roles were made clear to the ...inhabitants of the empire from the reign of Augustus onwards through a variety of media. Public ceremonies showed emperors leaving the city for campaigns, and returning in triumph, at sacrifice, or sitting in judgement. Inscriptions likewise indicated the main roles of emperors through titulature or narrative. The military and the religious leadership of emperors were also made abundantly clear through public monuments and on centrally issued coinage. Yet, throughout Roman imperial history these last two types of source material are surprisingly silent on the emperors’ legal role.
The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire discusses ways in which notions, practice and the ideology of justice impacted on the functioning of the Roman Empire. The papers assembled in this volume ...follow from the thirteenth workshop of the international network Impact of Empire. They focus on what was considered just in various groups of Roman subjects, how these views were legitimated, shifted over time, and how they affected policy making and political, administrative, and judicial practices. Linking all of the papers are three common themes: the emperor and justice, justice in a dispersed empire and differentiation of justice.
Within the discipline of ancient history, diverse types of sources, such as coins, inscriptions, portraits and texts, are often combined to create a coherent image of a particular ruler. A good ...example of how such a process works is the way in which reconstructions by modern scholars of the emperor Nero tend to look for a clearly defined ‘Neronian image’, by bringing together various types of primary evidence without paying sufficient attention to these sources’ medial contexts. This article argues that such a reconstruction does not do justice to the complex and multi-layered image of the last Julio-Claudian. By focusing on one particular aspect of Neronian imagery, the propagation of this emperor’s ancestry, we will argue that different types of sources, stemming from varying contexts and addressing different groups, cannot unproblematically be combined. Through an investigation of the ancestral messages spread by imperial and provincial coins, epigraphic evidence and portraiture, it becomes clear that systematic analysis of ancient media, their various contexts and inconsistencies is needed before combining them. Such an analysis reveals patterns within the different sources and shows that, in creating imperial images, rulers were constrained by both medial and local traditions. Modern studies of ancient images should therefore consider this medial and geographical variety in order to do justice to the multi-faceted phenomenon of imperial representation.
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