Search

This article is dedicated to a variety of problems related to the education of the heirs of the Valentinian-Theodosius dynasty. It covers the biographies of the tutors of the royal children (Auso-nius, Themistius, Arsenius, Antiochus, Anastasius, Petronius Maximus), evaluates the activities of the court schools, traces the transformation of the status of the tutors assigned to the heirs to the throne, describes the principles of their recruitment, and makes an attempt to reconstruct the curriculum of their schools. The conclusion is made that in contrast to the 1st – 3rd century A.D., the status of the court teacher had significantly strength-ened. The educational programs of the court schools generally repeated the curricula of the ordinary grammar and rhetorical schools of the Empire. The article argues that the teachers of the heirs, as a rule, were chosen from the segments of the nobility, in whose support the government was most interested at the time. In addition, it is noted that children of prominent officials and mili-tary officers were involved in the education of future sovereigns. This practice introduced a competitive element into the educa-tional process and served as a guarantee of the loyalty of the fa-thers of classmates of the heirs.

The article focuses on the funerals of Roman emperors, specifically those from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE.

AbstractFocusing on the Life of Heliogabalus in the so-called Historia Augusta or Imperial History, an anonymous late fourth century CE work, the chapter argues that beautiful rulers who cross dressed with abandon were part of late Roman imperial masculinity and its representation. This was so because the Christian emperor Theodosius was very aware of same-gender or homoerotic attraction as unifying force, which he also employed to strengthen the rule of his sons, made full co-rulers as children. However, as the highly satirical Life of Heliogabalus makes clear, gorgeous, soft young emperors had to maintain and make visible specific power relations. If they could not demonstrate that they controlled their generals rather than the other way round, the power of homoerotic attraction could backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Archaeological materials show the existence of the god Sarapis throughout the Mediterranean, where a considerable number of epigraphic, artistic and numismatic objects remain. The presence of Sarapis in the Mare Nostrum is the result of the spread of Egyptian cults. This paper looks at Sarapis and his relationship with different Roman emperors, by way of the coins these latter had minted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragments of marble revetment and floor slabs as well as some broken statuary and vessels were recovered from the excavation of a Roman temple in the harbor town of Berenike on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. Petrographic analyses, including optical, cathodoluminescence, and scanning electron microscopy as well as isotopic analyses (δ13C, δ18O, 87Sr/86Sr), were conducted to determine the provenance of the marble. The aim was to reconstruct the commercial ties that led to this prized building stone being brought to Berenike. Most, if not all, of the slabs are of banded gray to white marble showing properties indicative of a Prokonnesian origin. This marble, exploited on Marmara Island (Sea of Marmara, Turkey) and extensively utilized throughout the Mediterranean, including Egypt from at least the second century A.D., might have been procured from the marble depots in Alexandria. This could have involved engaging a team of Bithynian master craftsmen for the project, presumably to embellish the main temple of the city during the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The statuary and vessel finds are composed of white marble representing several sources. Some coarse‐grained specimens were surely extracted in Prokonnesos. For others, the source is uncertain and the likely candidates are Prokonnesos, Paros (Cyclades, Aegean Sea), and Ephesos (Aegean coast of Asia Minor). The fine‐grained varieties represented high‐quality Dokimian (Afyon region, Asia Minor) and most likely expensive Parian (lychnites type) marble. Marble from the ancient Gebel Rokham quarries in Egypt was also examined for comparison, but its properties have excluded this source in the case of the marble artifacts from Berenike analyzed in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the bodily shame that Romans inherited from the Etruscans, the emperors displayed naked in sculptures to enshrine their divine status. What factors determined that, for four centuries, this paradigm prevailed in the life of ancient Rome despite the transgression of morals? The theomorphic nude fulfilled functions of a divine „costume” which the emperor wore before his people to win their trust and loyalty. The supreme nude portrait was clothed in conventional meanings, which belong to a visual language specific to the Greco-Roman world. Anthropometric measurements confirm the conjunction of two complementary visual concerns: that of the Romans for facial identity and that of the Greeks for bodily identity. In this long and imperfect process, facies and habitus united in a fundamental theomorphism of Greco-Roman culture, with an anthropometric constant translated plastically remarkably rigorous – the pelvic golden section. While the idealization of the face had to be achieved within the limits of the emperor’s real features in order to make him recognizable, the perfection of the genital portrait was already canonized by the Greek masters. The measurements in this study show that the pelvic golden section may be an explanation for this recurrent plastic transliteration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]