371

PENELOPE J. E. DAVIES

Romans initially shared a visual culture with other cities of central Italy but came

to embrace the visual arts of two principal cultures in the course of their long his-

tory: Greek and Egyptian. Artworks imported from Greece and Egypt found new

homes in Rome, and artists and architects working for a wide range of patrons

produced art and buildings in Rome that resembled or evoked the visual culture of

these lands. Art historians accept that Rome fully absorbed Greek and Hellenizing

art, that these works fulilled distinctly Roman functions (evident, for instance, in

elite collecting and copying practices, Augustan and Hadrianic classicism, and the

Second Sophistic movement), and that they informed Roman art deeply and irre-

vocably. By contrast, Egyptian and Egyptianizing art (henceforth Aegyptiaca), as

described by modern scholars, seems to have existed within Rome without becom-

ing Roman and without shaping Roman art; it remained distinctly other.1 As Molly

Swetnam-Burland has noted, interpretations of Aegyptiaca are overwhelmingly

political and tied to the person of Augustus.2 Comparison of how the two cultures

arrived in Rome may shed light on their diferent fortunes there, but there is little

doubt that modern attitudes are at least partially responsible for constructing those

fortunes. A brief engagement with a few works of state art, particularly the irst

obelisks of Rome, suggests that there are ways to think of Aegyptiaca as Roman—

harmonizing efortlessly with Roman political practice, answering Roman needs

and tastes, and shaping Roman art.

Adventus

here is no dearth of evidence for Greek or Hellenizing art in Rome in the irst

two centuries of the Republic. Yet it was M. Claudius Marcellus’s sack of Syracuse

in 211, and the successive campaigns of generals such as M. Fulvius Nobilior in

Ambracia in 187 and L. Mummius in Corinth in 146, that inundated the city with

Greek works.3 hese men paraded captive art through the streets in spectacular

triumphs as spoils—proof of thorough conquest achieved under their imperium,

tangible evidence of individual excellence.4 Ater the rituals of triumph, they dedi-

cated many of the better spoils in sanctuaries and other public spaces, rendering

conquered property to the state and asserting that individual excellence had been

deployed in the service of that state. So extensive were Mummius’s spoils that he

used them to adorn the entire city and still had enough in reserve for gits to other

cities in Italy and beyond.5

Many of these objects would survive to catch Pliny the Elder’s eye in the irst

century c.e., and his writings restored them to some measure of their status as

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME

Adventus and Romanitas

372

Greek masterworks. Yet at the time of their arrival in the city, they played a familiar

role in a distinctly Roman political game. Whereas Greek states developed a system

of lasting visible honors, such as statues and crowns, to help reconcile inequalities

of status with the egalitarian framework of the polis, Rome, by contrast, had no

state-authorized code of honors.6 Politicians felt its absence: visibility was a basic

prerequisite for electability. Individuals therefore took it upon themselves to honor

themselves. In turn, constant evolutions of the constitution served to control poten-

tial exploitations of the visual arts for self-promotion through a series of checks and

balances. For instance, only magistrates could vow, dedicate, and let contracts for

public buildings. hose magistrates had term limits, and a set of laws banned poli-

ticians from holding repeat magistracies back to back.7 he history of republican

state art is a history of the struggle by magistrates to maneuver within and around

these state controls to promote themselves. hey dedicated temples in the name of

piety and exploited their magisterial mandates to advance their careers through

censorial and aedilitian building, and victorious generals translated the transient

fame of a triumph into lasting renown by showcasing their plunder and inancing

public monuments as venues for display with portions of their war booty.8 hus,

ater his triumph in 146, Q. Caecilius Metellus used gains from his Macedonian suc-

cess to commission the Porticus Metelli as a backdrop for the Granikos Monument

by the famed Lysippus, which he had seized from Dion.9

In the face of stringent regulation, in other words, the display of captive art

presented a politician with a legitimate means of advertising his conquests to pro-

mote himself. As these things went, Greece was not just any nation. Many Romans

looked to Greece and its colonies with admiration for the monumentality of their

cities and the wealth of their artistic and literary traditions.10 Soon ater the Pyrrhic

War, Latin literature had begun to take shape using Greek models, so that Greek

culture informed Roman entertainment and education.11 For a general, Greece was

the cultural jackpot; in a city with rigid controls on material benefactions, those

responsible for its conquest could present themselves as responsible for a dra-

matic inlux of Eastern wealth as well as the git of the perceived sophistication

of the Greek world. Victors over Greek lands therefore strove to make that con-

quest part of their political identity. Strategies included adopting cognomens such

as Ambraïcus or Macedonicus to underline their conquests, just as conquerors of

other lands adopted Africanus or Hispanus; using poets such as Ennius to praise

their deeds, as Greek monarchs did; and employing Greek painters to extol them

with images. With the right of the triumphator, they built public monuments that

stood out precisely for their Greek qualities. Some, like Fulvius Nobilior’s Temple of

Hercules Musarum, honored Greek subjects; others were constructed out of Greek

materials, like Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus’s marble Temple of Jupiter Stator,

the irst of its kind in Rome, designed by architect Hermodorus from Salamis on

Cyprus, or the round temple of dazzling white Pentelic marble by the Tiber, possibly

vowed by Mummius (ig. 1).12 Frequently winning the censorship thanks to their

triumphs, they used state funds to refashion Rome in the image of a Hellenistic city,

with stoa-like porticoes and basilicas named for themselves, such as the Basilicae

Fulvia and Sempronia. Whatever their meanings were in Greece, Greek art forms

DAVIES373

and materials donned a new and autonomous identity in Rome, serving a distinctly

Roman political game. hat game lay at the center of Roman elite life, in which

much was at stake: higher magistracy, extraordinary military command, or proro-

gation—all of which could yield great fortunes in the short term. In the longer term,

they promised posthumous memory for an individual coupled with family renown,

a leg up to future generations.

he catch was this: the collegial and collaborative nature of the republican sys-

tem prevented any one individual from monopolizing the identity of conqueror of

Greek lands. he political fruits of Greek conquest were distributed and diluted

among several consecutive commanders; in fact, though later Roman authors per-

ceive a dramatic change (for the worse) in Rome at this time, they do not agree on

which general was to blame.13 he long process of Greek conquest only exacerbated

what was inherent in the system, and in efect the value of Greek “liberation” and

the power of Greek art were relegated to the state.14

As Swetnam-Burland stresses, Egyptian visual culture was present in Latium

before the annexation of Egypt in 31; Egyptian imports in tombs, the Nilotic mosaic

of Palestrina, and a marble head of a Ptolemaic queen are but a few examples of

Aegyptiaca in earlier Rome.15 he Iseum Campense, too, probably slightly pre-

dates the conquest of Egypt.16 Still, the massive surge of Aegyptiaca occurred with

Octavian’s victory over Cleopatra and Mark Antony and his triple triumph in

29 b.c.e.:

Fig. 1

Round temple by the Tiber,

actual state

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 374

On the third day the subjugation of Egypt [was commemorated]. Now all the

processions proved notable, thanks to the spoils from Egypt,—in such quanti-

ties, indeed, had spoils been gathered there that they suiced for all the proces-

sions,—but the Egyptian celebration surpassed them all in costliness and

magniicence. Among other features, an eigy of the dead Cleopatra upon a

couch was carried by, so that in a way she, too, together with the other captives

and with her children, Alexander, also called Helios, and Cleopatra, called also

Selene, was a part of the spectacle and a trophy in the procession. Ater this

came Caesar, riding into the city behind them all.17

Egypt’s adventus to Rome bears some similarities to the entry of Greek art into

Rome: spoils from the conquest of an art-rich nation, used to commemorate a gen-

eral’s success and handed over to the city as works of public art. Like late-third- and

second-century generals, Octavian dedicated a previously vowed temple in thanks

to his protective god, Apollo, next to the Temple of Victoria on the Palatine, and

like the buildings they commissioned, his bore the stamp of his enemy: Egyptian

motifs embellished its terra-cotta revetments (ig. 2).18 On the Campus Martius,

the triumphal venue par excellence, he erected monuments with greater or lesser

Egyptian qualities: the Pantheon, begun around 28 b.c.e. and inspired by a Greco-

Alexandrian concept,19 and the Horologium Augusti, centered on an Egyptian obe-

lisk (ig. 3).

Despite these similarities, Egypt’s adventus took place against a radically altered

backdrop. Regardless of neglect during decades of civil unrest, Rome was a grander

city than it had been at the end of the third century, thanks to increased wealth

and spending on architecture, the use of good building stones and concrete, and

the imprint of Greek models of urbanization. Moreover, since the war against

Mark Antony was a civil war, Octavian—and those anxious to please him—was

forced to demonize Egypt as a foil in prewar and immediately postwar propaganda.

Playing up its otherness was a relatively easy task, as Romans were not schooled

in Egyptian language and culture, and few could presumably read hieroglyphs. A

pantheon of gods envisioned with animal features must have been equally alien. As

scholars have recognized, bringing Egypt to Rome became a manifesto against an

Egyptianized Mark Antony, who had notoriously requested in his will that he be

buried in Alexandria—even if he should die in Rome—and whom many Romans

perceived as having sold out to his Egyptian queen.20

Most of all, Rome’s political climate had changed. With the disintegration of

republican ideals in the irst half of the irst century b.c.e., Octavian’s pretense at

sharing power or entertaining limits on his authority was at best halhearted. As a

result, his monopoly of the totality of Egypt’s conquest—spoils, style, materials—as

a vocabulary of legitimation went unchecked and unchallenged, and he was able

to tie it irmly to his name alone over an extended period. When other contem-

porary Romans commissioned monuments in an Egyptian style, as C. Cestius did

with his pyramid tomb of around 12 b.c.e., scholars believe that they did so to state

allegiance to Augustus, buttressing his authority through forms associated with his

legitimating conquest.21

DAVIES375

Fig. 2

Terra-cotta revetment from

the Temple of Apollo on the

Palatine, Palatine Antiquarium

Fig. 3

Horologium Augusti,

reconstruction

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 376

he climate of Rome had changed enough by the time of Egypt’s adventus to

allow its close association with Augustus. Yet that is not to say that in all Roman

minds it remained that way or that that was its sole identity. he fact that in the

modern imagination Egypt breaks away from Augustus only ater events every bit

as colorful as the conlict with Cleopatra—the alliance of Hadrian and Antinoüs

and the latter’s mysterious death in the Nile—suggests that the thoroughness of the

linkage of Aegyptiaca with Augustus is also partially a modern construction, arising

from a forceful Augustan propaganda that scholars are still dismantling.

Romanitas

For most art historians, Greek art, having arrived in Rome, was absorbed as a

Roman phenomenon sometime between the second century b.c.e. and the second

century c.e., and Roman art absorbed Hellenizing styles wholeheartedly. In our

minds at least, Egyptian art, by contrast, never seems to have been absorbed or

to have cast of its exotic aura: it sits apart, beside but not part of Roman art. It is

likely that modern imperialism, coupled with existing political allegiances, helped

to shape these diferent scholarly conceptions. In fact, Caroline Vout believes that

art historians today are even less inclined than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century predecessors to embrace Egypt as part of Roman culture; the latter “thought

little of the inclusion of an Egyptian-looking monument in their canon of Roman

Classicism.”22 It is by now commonplace to describe Roman art as an art of syn-

cretism, and to recognize that art and artists from elsewhere helped to form it, yet

there is a danger when deining the concept of syncretism of also inadvertently

imposing restrictions on it—allowing, for instance, Syrian forms to penetrate

Romanitas as harbingers of an open Judeo-Christian tradition (as in second-century

“baroque” architecture ater Apollodorus of Damascus, or the decursio reliefs of the

Column Base of Antoninus Pius, with their closest parallels in Eastern art),23 but

not Egyptian forms. If, as Swetnam-Burland inds, artists responsible for Egyptian-

looking and Egyptian-themed art in Rome were the very artists who were also cre-

ating Hellenizing art and art in other styles, cross-fertilization, however subtle or

unconscious, seems inevitable.24

On one level, a past scholarly reluctance to accept that Romans actually believed

in their gods probably got in the way of accepting some Egyptian monuments as

truly Roman. As alien as the Roman pantheon may have seemed to modern Western

eyes, Egyptian gods may seem even more remote—a problem only exacerbated by

the hostile barbs of Horace and Virgil. In reality, as with the state gods, Romans

spent huge sums on dedications to Egyptian gods in Rome, suggesting that their

devotion must be taken seriously.25 On fragment 35 of the Forma Urbis Romae, rows

of squares inscribed into the plan of the Iseum on the Campus Martius appear to

indicate that lines of small inscribed obelisks, found in the area (and now dispersed

among the Piazza della Rotunda, Piazza della Minerva, and Piazza dei Cinquecento

in Rome and the Boboli Gardens in Florence), once graced its open court, along

with a series of sphinxes and the Vatican’s cynocephalic baboon. Scholars have been

more concerned with the foreignness of these obelisks—establishing their Egyptian

DAVIES377

authenticity—than with exploring how they functioned in this Egyptian cult space

in Rome, peopled by at least some high-ranking city Romans.26 A similar fate

has befallen two small uninscribed obelisks that once lanked the entrance to the

Mausoleum of Augustus (later moved to Piazza dell’Esquilino by Sixtus V in 1587

and to Piazza del Quirinale by Pius VI in 1782): despite their blatant funerary con-

text, scholars have tended to focus on their disputed role in the mausoleum’s origi-

nal design and on their ideological signiicance (igs. 4, 5).27 his is understandable:

our information on the Iseum is patchy, and we know substantially more about

Augustus’s political agenda than about his religious beliefs or his views on an ater-

life. He was an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries and perhaps the Samothracian

Mysteries, but there is no record of his adherence to the cult of Isis.28 Yet Vout

suggests that even those Romans who were not devotees of Isis perceived the art of

Egypt—with its rigid and compact forms, its durable materials, and its central role

in the Egyptian cult of the dead—as an art of preservation and commemoration. Its

frequent evocation in Roman funerary contexts is unlikely to have been a purely

decorative or ideological conceit.29

he particular character of Egyptian art may help to feed a sense of its separate-

ness. Egyptian art stands apart from that of other ancient Mediterranean cultures

for its conservatism in style and forms over an unusually long period of time. his

conservatism shapes stark criteria for recognizing Egyptian art—so stark, perhaps,

that we fail to notice its subtler manifestations. In fact, Egyptian motifs are present

on monuments that feature prominently in the canon of classical Roman art. On

the exterior of the Ara Pacis enclosure, for instance, a meander band separating the

acanthus frieze below from the procession friezes above is a Hellenized version of

an Egyptian hieroglyph for a labyrinth (ig. 6).30 he conservatism of Egyptian art

may also make it harder to conceive of it as meshing with the art of other cultures,

and harder to accept as Egyptian when diluted. In reality, Egyptian styles and icono-

graphical motifs merge easily into (Hellenizing) Roman art: the abstract conven-

tions of elite Egyptian igural art meshes masterfully with the those of the archaizing

style on the terra-cotta revetment plaques from Augustus’s Temple of Apollo (see

ig. 2). Lotus-palmette anteixes from the same temple (ig. 7), and on the interior of

the enclosure of the Ara Pacis (ig. 8), stand in easily as Egyptianized versions of the

Greco-Roman palmette or anthemion design, which has a long history in Italic art

(as seen, for instance, in the attic of the Tomb of the Sempronii on the Quirinal, of

the mid-irst century b.c.e. [ig. 9]).31 Forms mesh just as felicitously: Alexander’s

mausoleum in Alexandria seems to join with the Italic tumulus tomb to provide a

mausoleum for Augustus, and columns outside Roman aristocratic tombs morph

into obelisks lanking the entrance.32

Conversely, when a work of art is blatantly Egyptian in origin or form, there is

a risk of being blinkered as to its Roman qualities. Although Augustus’s Egyptian

monuments in Rome were tokens of conquest, marked in our eyes by foreignness,

they it so seamlessly with contemporaneous Roman ways of thinking and elite

political strategies for winning popular favor that, almost paradoxically, it is tempt-

ing to believe that he selected and repositioned them speciically for ease of transla-

tion between cultures.

Fig. 4, 5

Obelisks from the Mausoleum

of Augustus

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 378

DAVIES379

Fig. 6

Ara Pacis Augusti, meander

relief

Fig. 7

Palmette antefix from the

Temple of Apollo on the

Palatine, Palatine Antiquarium

Fig. 8

Ara Pacis Augusti,

lotus-palmette frieze

Fig. 9

Tomb of the Sempronii

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 380

DAVIES381

he obelisk now standing in Piazza del Popolo was quarried in Heliopolis,

under the Nineteenth Dynasty kings Seti I and Ramesses II (r. 1294–1279, 1279–

1213). Augustus transported it to Rome and had it erected on the spina of the Circus

Maximus sometime around 13–9 b.c.e. he obelisk in Piazza Montecitorio also

came from Heliopolis, where it had been commissioned by Psammetichus II (r.

594–589 b.c.e.), and arrived in Rome about the same time. here it functioned as

the gnomon for a meridian line or sundial, the Horologium Augusti, located on the

northern Campus Martius, close to Augustus’s Mausoleum and the Ara Pacis (see

ig. 3). Immediately on arriving in Rome, these obelisks were inserted into a well-

established Roman language of autorepresentation. Like Mummius’s sculptures,

they were spoils, even if they were expropriated well ater the triumph of 29, and

they became religious dedications, turned over to the people of Rome. Identical

inscriptions state the purpose of the spoils, to demonstrate a foreign nation’s sub-

ordination to Rome:

imp. caesar divi f.

augustus

pontifex maximus

imp. xii cos. xi trib. pot. xiv

aegypto in potestatem

populi romani redacta

soli donum dedit.33

he obelisks worked metonymically: just as they were subordinated to the power of

the Roman people, so was Egypt. For them to function in their new context, their

Egyptian origin was paramount, and so was an understanding that through capture

they were rendered Roman. his transformation in identity is played out in the

superposition of aegypta over populi romana.

he transformation is also implicit in the dedication. he generic signiicance

of obelisks to Egyptians as symbols of the sun was probably clear to at least some

Romans. Later, between 193 and 220, Tertullian acknowledged their solar conno-

tations—“he massive obelisk is put up for the sun”—as Ammianus Marcellinus

did too in the fourth century—“An obelisk is a very pointed stone, rising gradu-

ally somewhat in the shape of a turning post to a loty height; gradually it grows

slenderer, to resemble a sunbeam.”34 Even a casual observer could make out scenes

of kings performing oferings to solar gods on the lowest sections of their shats

(ig. 10). Yet the new inscriptions clarify that Amun-Re, sun-god of the Egyptians,

had been Romanized; he had been overridden by Sol, the indigenous Italic sun-

god whose worship in Rome dated back to at least the fourth century b.c.e. and

lourished under Augustus in league with the cult of Apollo.35 hese tapering gran-

ite monoliths were the perfect spoils for Roman tastes. Ancient commentators on

triumphs picked out novelty spoils, and the obelisks answered the call as irsts on at

least two counts. One was fabric. When describing triumphal processions, ancient

authors specify materials carefully; they distinguish silver vessels from gold, marble

statues from bronze, and Pompey’s portrait fashioned out of pearls earns a special

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 382

mention.36 Romans had seen their construction materials improve steadily with

territorial expansion—from wood, mud brick, terra-cotta, and relatively poor local

tuf to more durable tuf from Fidenae and Veii and aesthetically pleasing marbles

from Greece.37 By the time these obelisks were imported, Romans were familiar

with a wide variety of colored stone, such as glistening white Pentelic marble, used

for the round temple by the Tiber, and whitish gray Hymettan marble, introduced

by L. Crassus at the beginning of the irst century.38 he obelisks were the irst large-

scale public monuments fashioned out of red Aswan granite, with its deep, iery hue.

What is more, Romans were already developing a ledgling taste for the power

implicit in monoliths. Strabo mentions monolithic columns of marble from

Hierapolis, and Pliny describes monoliths in the Basilica Pauli, though it is not

clear to which phase they belong. Mamurra may have used monolithic columns

of Carystian marble (cipollino, from Euboea) in his house in the mid-irst century

b.c.e.39 Aswan granite had a quality unparalleled in any stone known to Romans:

it was dense enough not to collapse under its own weight even at tremendous size.

At 23.9 and 29.5 meters, these obelisks must have been the irst monoliths on any-

thing resembling their scale. As irsts, they nourished an imperialistic mentality

that rejoiced in collecting the unusual resources of the known world—a sort of

Alexandrian encyclopedism turned proprietary. Otherness was essential, as was

submission to new ownership.

he obelisks’ novelty also fulilled a Roman appetite for spectacle. heir extraor-

dinary size and weight necessitated the construction of a tailor-made ship to trans-

port them, spectacular enough in its own right to be displayed at Puteolanum ater

Fig. 10

Circus Maximus obelisk,

detail of kings making

offerings to solar gods

DAVIES383

use.40 he challenges did not end there. In 1586, when Domenico Fontana repo-

sitioned the obelisk from Caligula’s Circus to the center of Piazza San Pietro for

Sixtus V, he discovered just how daunting an engineering problem it was to erect

a 327-ton obelisk. He considered his operation—a public spectacle employing nine

hundred men and seventy-ive horses—an achievement suicient to merit detailed

description in Della trasportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabriche di Sisto V,

published in Rome in 1590. Add to Fontana’s task the challenge of erecting an obe-

lisk on the narrow raised spina of the Circus Maximus, and one can only imagine

the engineering feat Augustus orchestrated. he engineering spectacle, like the obe-

lisks’ monolithic quality, was part of their “wow factor.” Janet DeLaine has docu-

mented how enthusiastically Romans responded to monumentality and especially

to undertakings that represented seemingly impossible engineering challenges.41

his is clear from the types of monuments that late republican politicians built with

the aim of gaining favor with the populace. Overwhelming size, in and of itself,

made a deep impression—a phenomenon architect and politician Catulus counted

on when constructing his vast substructio beneath the “Tabularium,” which merited

a commemorative inscription independent of whatever stood on top.42 Part of the

appeal of Pompey’s theater-portico complex, too, must have been its sheer enormity.

Other magistrates went for ingenuity in engineering: the twin wooden theaters of

C. Scribonius Curio, built around 53 b.c.e., gained notoriety because they turned

on a pivot, sitting back to back for plays in the morning and joining together as an

amphitheater for gladiatorial shows in the aternoon.43 Some Romans may have

seen great feats of engineering like the erection of the obelisks as a relection of the

know-how that led to military conquest.

he physical contexts for the obelisks were also unequivocally Roman. In

Augustan Rome, the Circus Maximus was perhaps the most Roman of spaces,

where Romans of all ranks met for a quintessentially Roman form of entertainment.

It was also one of the earliest monuments of Rome; Romans dated its initial articu-

lation to the time of the irst kings.44 As for the Montecitorio obelisk, the new con-

text Augustus commissioned for it set it irmly in contemporaneous Roman power

games. Pliny describes how he hired an Alexandrian mathematician and astrologer,

Facundus Novius, to devise the horologium or solarium. Excavations beneath via di

Campo Marzio in 1980 revealed its pavement as relaid in Domitianic times, with a

bronze line and bronze letters spelling out signs of the zodiac in Greek—Parthenos,

Leon, Taurus, and probably Krios, as well as seasonal changes—Etesiai pauontai

(Etesian winds calm) and therous arche (summer begins).45 hese designations are

consistent with Alexandrian weather patterns, emphasizing the foreign and special-

ist nature of the monument. It was not the irst public clock in Rome. According

to Pliny:

Marcus Varro records that the irst public sun-dial was set up on a column

along by the rostra during the First Punic War . . . and that it was brought from

Sicily thirty years later than the traditional date of Papirius’ sundial

[264 b.c.e.]. he lines of this sundial did not agree with the hours, but all the

same they followed it for 99 years, till Quintus Marcius Philippus who was

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 384

censor with Lucius Paulus placed a more carefully designed one next to it, and

this git was received as one of the most welcome of the censor’s undertakings.

Even then however the hours were uncertain in cloudy weather, until the next

lustrum, when Scipio Nasica the colleague of Laenas instituted the irst water-

clock dividing the hours of the nights and the days equally, and dedicated this

time-piece in a roofed building [159 b.c.e.]. For so long a period the divisions

of daylight had not been marked for the Roman public.46

Apart from Papirius’s sundial, which stood in the grounds of the Temple of

Quirinus, these earlier clocks were located in the Forum, and their primary use

was to time sessions in law courts. he Solarium Augusti, sited some distance away,

did not share this purpose. Christopher Smith describes a pattern among late

republican politicians of purchasing specialist knowledge as an assault on the patri-

cian tradition; thus Julius Caesar hired Varro, and Caesar and Augustus employed

Vitruvius to undermine a patrician authority based in polymathy.47 Julius Caesar

had also employed Sosigenes of Alexandria to transform the civil year and correlate

it with the solar year; in doing so, he wrested the calendar from the control of the

priests. Augustus ine-tuned the changes, adding a leap year to Caesar’s calendar

in 8 b.c.e. he solarium presumably represented something grander than earlier

clocks: Caesar’s and Augustus’s reorganization of time, of the Roman calendar, of

the cosmos.48

Inserted into Roman spaces or patterns of behavior, the irst large-scale mono-

liths—and all the challenges that they represented—gained an inluential foothold

in the Roman vocabulary of authority. To add power and majesty to Roman build-

ing projects, subsequent architects incorporated massive monolithic columns of

gray and pink Aswan granite into their designs, as in Nero’s Baths and the Forum

Pacis. Some reached a staggering ity feet in height, as in the Temple of Deiied

Trajan and Plotina and probably in the Pantheon as initially planned.49 One such

column commemorated Antoninus Pius on the Campus Martius.50 he Circus

Maximus obelisk even shaped the iconography of circus architecture—such obe-

lisks rapidly became standard installations on circus spinae throughout the empire,

as far aield as Tyre, Caesarea, and Antioch51—before becoming emblematic of the

Roman circus: with its striking vertical presence, it served as a locating device in

chariot race scenes on children’s sarcophagi and funerary reliefs, especially in the

early second century c.e.52

A cursory examination of the political and physical contexts of just a handful of

Aegyptiaca in early imperial Rome suggests that, in a reversal of Octavian’s initial

alienation of things Egyptian in the late thirties, such objects harmonized more lu-

ently with contemporaneous Roman forms, itted more easily into Roman patterns

of behavior, and shaped Roman art at a level that merits closer scrutiny.

Notes

1. Molly Swetnam-Burland, “Egyptian Objects, Roman Contexts: A Taste for

Aegyptiaca in Rome,” in Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World, ed. Laurent

DAVIES385

Bricault, Miguel John Versluys, and Paul G. P. Meyboom (Leiden: Brill, 2007),

113–36. See also Caroline Vout, “Embracing Egypt,” in Rome the Cosmopolis

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 177–202.

2. Molly Swetnam-Burland, forthcoming.

3. M. Fulvius Nobilior: Livy 38.43.9–10. L. Mummius: Livy Epitomae 52; Velleius

Paterculus 1.13.4; and De viris illustribus 60. Also L. Aemilius Paullus (Polybius

31.25.6–7; Plutarch Aemilius 32–33).

4. See, most recently, Jean-Luc Bastien, Le triomphe romain et son utilization politique

à Rome aux trois derniers siècles de la République (Rome: École Française de Rome,

2007); Mary Beard, he Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007);

and E. La Rocca, “La processione trionfale come spettacolo per il popolo romano:

Trioni, spettacoli moderni,” in Trioni romani, exh. cat. (Rome: Electa, 2008), 34–55.

5. As inscribed bases in Parma, Pompeii, and elsewhere bear witness. See, most

recently, Enzo Lippolis, “Triumphata Corintho: La preda bellica e i doni di Lucio

Mummio Achaico,” Archeologia classica 55 (2004): 25–82.

6. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Roman Arches and Greek Honours: he Language

of Power at Rome,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 36 (1990):

143–81.

7. Andrew Lintott, he Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).

8. Penelope J. E. Davies, Art and Persuasion in the Roman Republic (Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Tonio Hölscher, “he Transformation of

Victory into Power: From Event to Structure,” in Representations of War in Ancient

Rome, ed. Sheila Dillon and Katherine Welch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

2006), 27–48.

9. Velleius Paterculus 1.11.13, 2.1.2. For extensive bibliography, see Lexicon

Topographicum Urbis Romae (Rome: Bretschneider, 1995–), vol. 4, 130–32, s.v.

“Porticus Metelli” (entry by A. Viscogliosi).

10. According to Livy (40.5.7), a group of Macedonians visiting Rome in the early sec-

ond century “made fun of . . . the appearance of the city, not yet beautiful in either

public or private domains” (trans. Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome [Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996], 101).

11. Livius Andronicus probably presented his irst tragedy around 240; his Odyssey was

probably commissioned for the triumph of his patron, Livius Salinator, ater the

Illyrian Wars: Cicero Brutus 72; and Bastien, Triomphe romain, 13.

12. Velleius Paterculus 1.2.3, 1.11.5; Livy Periochae 52.7; Valerius Maximus 7.5.4; and

Eutropius 4.14.2. See Adam Ziolkowski, “Mummius’ Temple of Hercules Victor and

the Round Temple on the Tiber,” Phoenix 42, no. 4 (1988): 309–33.

13. Bastien, Triomphe romain.

14. A telling index of this, perhaps, is that recent research suggests that when it came

to works of art taken as spoils but not dedicated publicly, the triumphator was

permitted to display them in his home but merely as their guardian: they properly

belonged to the state; see J. Bradford-Churchill, “Ex qua quod vellent facerent:

Roman Magistrates’ Authority over Praeda and Manubiae,” Transactions of the

American Philological Association 129 (1999): 85–116.

15. Swetnam-Burland, “Egyptian Objects, Roman Contexts”; Michel Malaise, Les

AEGYPTIACA IN ROME 386

conditions de pénétration et de difusion des cultes égyptiens en Italie (Leiden: Brill,

1972); Anne Roullet, he Egyptian and Egyptianizing Monuments of Imperial Rome

(Leiden: Brill, 1972); and also Filippo Coarelli, “Iside,” in Egittomania, ed. Stefano de

Caro, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 2006), 58–67.

16. Katja Lembke puts its earliest incarnation in 43, or under Julius Caesar: Das Iseum

Campense in Rom: Studie über den Isiskult unter Domitian (Heidelberg: Archäologie

& Geschichte, 1994); and Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae 3: 107–9, s.v. “Iseum

et Serapeum in Campo Martio, Isis Campensis” (entry by Filippo Coarelli).

17. Cassius Dio 51.21.6–9 (trans. E. Cary).

18. Maria José Strazzulla, Il principato di Apollo: Mito e propaganda nelle lastre

“Campana” dal tempio di Apollo Palatino (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1990).

19. William Loerke, “Georges Chédanne and the Pantheon: A Beaux Arts Contribution

to the History of Roman Architecture,” Modulus: he University of Virginia School of

Architecture Review (1982): 40–55.

20. Konrad Krat, “Der Sinn des Mausoleums des Augustus,” Historia 16 (1967):

189–206.

21. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae 4: 278–79, s.v. “Sepulcrum: C. Cestius” (entry

by C. Krause).

22. Vout, “Embracing Egypt,” 179.

23. Lise Vogel, he Column of Antoninus Pius (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973),

67–81.

24. Swetnam-Burland, “Egyptian Objects, Roman Contexts.”

25. Swetnam-Burland, “Egyptian Objects, Roman Contexts.”

26. Erik Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, vol. 1, he Obelisks of Rome (Copenhagen: Gad, 1968).

27. D. Boschung, “Tumulus Iuliorum—Mausoleum Augusti,” Hete des Berner

Archaeologisches Seminars 6 (1980): 38–41; and E. Buchner, “Ein Kanal für

Obelisken: Neues vom Mausoleum des Augustus in Rom,” Antike Welt 27 (1996):

161–68.

28. Jane C. Reeder, “Typology and Ideology in the Mausoleum of Augustus,” Classical

Antiquity 11, no. 2 (1992): 265–304.

29. Vout, “Embracing Egypt.”

30. C. N. Deedes, “he Labyrinth,” in he Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation

between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World, ed. S. H. Hooke (London: Society for

Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1935), 4–11; and Penelope J. E. Davies, Death and

the Emperor: he Funerary Monuments of the Roman Emperors from Augustus to

Marcus Aurelius (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 59–60, 196 n. 30.

31. Maria Antonietta Tomei, Museo Palatino (Milan: Electa, 1997) 61, nos. 36a–b; and

Henner von Hesberg, Monumenta: I sepolcri romani e la loro architectura (Rome:

Longanesi, 1994); Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae 4:297, s.v. “Sepulcrum:

Sempronii” (entry by C. Lega).

32. Filippo Coarelli and Yves hébert, “Architecture funéraire et pouvoir: Rélexions sur

l’hellenisme numide,” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome: Antiquité 100, no. 2

(1988): 761–818; Davies, Death and the Emperor, 49–74.

33. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum [CIL] 6.701.

34. Tertullian De spectaculis 8; Ammianus Marcellinus 17.4.7.

DAVIES387

35. G. H. Halsberghe, he Cult of Sol Invictus (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 26–29.

36. E.g., Plutarch Aemilius Paullus 32–33; Livy 34.52.4–5; and Pliny Natural History 37.12.

37. Marie Jackson and Fabrizio Marra, “Roman Stone Masonry: Volcanic Foundations

of the Ancient City,” American Journal of Archaeology 110 (2006): 403–36.

38. Pliny Natural History 36.49; Gabriele Borghini, ed., Marmi antichi (Rome: L’Erma

di Bretschneider, 2004), 249.

39. Strabo 9.5.16.437; and Pliny Natural History 36.48, 36.102.

40. Pliny Natural History 36.70.

41. Janet DeLaine, “he Temple of Hadrian at Cyzicus and Roman Attitudes to

Exceptional Construction,” Papers of the British School at Rome 70 (2002): 205–30.

42. CIL 12 737 = 6 1314. On the ex-“Tabularium”: Pier Luigi Tucci, “‘Where High Moneta

Leads Her Steps Sublime’: he ‘Tabularium’ and the Temple of Juno Moneta,”

Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 6–33; and Filippo Coarelli, “Substructio et

Tabularium,” lecture delivered at the British School at Rome, April 2008.

43. Pliny Natural History 36.117–20.

44. See sources in Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae 1:272–77, s.v. “Circus Maximus”

(entry by P. Ciancio Rossetto).

45. Edmund Buchner, Die Sonnenuhr des Augustus (Mainz am Rhein: Zabern, 1982);

Michel Schütz, “Zur Sonnenuhr des Augustus auf dem Marsfeld,” Gymnasium 97

(1990): 432–57; and Paul Rehak, Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern

Campus Martius, ed. John G. Younger (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2006),

80–87.

46. Pliny Natural History 7.213–15 (trans. H. Rackham).

47. Christopher Smith, “Varro and the Contours of Roman Antiquarianism” (paper

delivered at “Before and Ater Palladio’s Rome: Antiquarianism from Antiquity to

the Nineteenth Century,” conference at the British School at Rome, February 2008).

48. See Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus, and the Fasti,”

in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. M. Whitby, P. Hardie, and

M. Whitby (Oak Park, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1987), 221–30; and Denis Feeney,

Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley: Univ. of

California Press, 2007).

49. Paul Davies, David Hemsoll, and Mark Wilson Jones, “he Pantheon: Triumph of

Rome or Triumph of Compromise?” Art History 10 (1987): 133–53.

50. Vogel, Column of Antoninus Pius.

51. John Humphreys, Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing (Berkeley: Univ. of

California Press, 1986), passim.

52. See, for instance, Diana E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven: Yale Univ.

Press, 1992), 236; A. Aymard, “Relief funéraire romain représentant les jeux du

cirque,” Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (1957): 71–72;

C. Belting-Ihm, “Ein römischer Circus-Sarkophag,” Jahrbuch des Römisch-

Germanischen Zentralmuseums, Mainz 8 (1961): 195–208; G. M. A. Hanfmann, he

Seasons Sarcophagus in Dumbarton Oaks (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951);

and L. Vogel, “Circus Race Scenes in the Early Roman Empire,” Art Bulletin 51

(1969): 155–60.

546

ELIZABETH BARTMAN is an independent scholar with a special interest in Roman art, col-lecting, and the reception of the antique. She is the author of Ancient Sculptural Copies in Min-

iature (1992) and Portraits of Livia: Imaging the

Imperial Woman in Augustan Rome (1999).

CORINNE BONNET is a professor of Greek his-tory at the University of Toulouse II—Le Mirail. She is involved in the study of religious interac-tions in the Mediterranean world. She has written several books on the Phoenician and Punic cul-tures and has published several essays on Franz Cumont and his intellectual environment. She is also a specialist in ancient historiography, studies of reception, and scientiic correspondences. She was member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 2009.

MARIA BROSIUS is a reader in ancient history at Newcastle University. She holds a doctor-ate from the University of Oxford for her study Women in Ancient Persia (1996). Her research focuses on political and cultural links between the classical and Near Eastern worlds, with special emphasis on how documents are constructed to facilitate the transmission and exchange of infor-mation and knowledge. Over the past ten years she concentrated her research on ancient archives, resulting in the publication Archives and Archival

Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the

Ancient World (2003). From 2005 to 2007 she held a prestigious Leverhulme Major Research Fellow-ship to investigate the development of archival practices and the transmission of knowledge through a professional scribal class.

KEVIN BUTCHER is a professor in the Depart-ment of Classics and Ancient History at the Uni-versity of Warwick, having formerly taught at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of Roman Syria and the Near East (2003) and Coin-age in Roman Syria (2004).

ADA COHEN is an associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College, where she teaches courses on ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern art. She is the author of he Alexander

Mosaic: Stories of Victory and Defeat (1997) and Art in the Era of Alexander the Great: Paradigms

of Manhood and heir Cultural Traditions (forth-coming from Cambridge University Press), as well as coeditor of and contributor to Constructions of

Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (2007) and

Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal

II: A Cultural Biography (2010).

PENELOPE J. E. DAVIES is an associate pro-fessor in Roman art and architecture at the Uni-versity of Texas at Austin. Author of Death and

the Emperor: Roman Imperial Funerary Monu-

ments from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius (2000; 2nd ed., 2004) and coauthor of Janson’s History of

Art (2007), she currently focuses her research on public art and politics in Republican Rome.

MARIA CECILIA D’ERCOLE is an associate professor of ancient history at the University of Paris I—Sorbonne. She specializes in cultural and economic contacts in ancient Mediterranean, in Greek and Roman colonization, in ancient Adriatic trade and landscape, and in ancient carved ambers. She is the author of several books and articles on these subjects and was a visiting scholar at the Getty Villa in fall 2007.

I. M. FERRIS is a professional archaeologist and independent scholar based in Birmingham, England. His research interests include Roman Britain, Romano-British art and artifacts, and Roman art and material culture more broadly. His irst book, Enemies of Rome: Barbarians hrough

Roman Eyes, was published in 2000 and his sec-ond, Hate and War: he Column of Marcus Aure-

lius, was published in 2009.

STEVEN FINE is a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University and director of the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies. Fine’s most recent book is Art and Judaism in the Greco-

Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology

(2005, revised edition 2010), which received the Association for Jewish Studies’ Joshua Schnitzer Book Award (2009).

ERICH S. GRUEN is the Gladys Rehard Wood professor of history and classics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1966. He served as president of the American Philological Association in 1992. He is the author of Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts, 149–78

bc (1968), he Roman Republic (1972), he Last

Generation of the Roman Republic (1974, 1995), he Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (1984, 1986), Studies in Greek Culture and Roman

Policy (1990, 1996), Culture and National Identity

in Republican Rome (1992, 1994), Heritage and

Hellenism: he Reinvention of Jewish Tradition

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

551 ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Davies

Figs. 1, 2, 4–10 Photo: Penelope J. E. DaviesFig. 3 Illustration: Edmund Buchner

Bonnet

Fig. 1 Photo: Corinne BonnetFigs. 2, 3 Courtesy Matthew M. McCarthy (Oxford)

Quinn

Fig. 1 From Hélène Bénichou-Safar, Le tophet de Salammbô: Essai de reconsti-

tution (Roma: École Française de Rome, 2004), pl. xxv. Copyright École Française de Rome

Figs. 2, 4–6, 9 Photo: Josephine Crawley QuinnFig. 3 Credit TK from LouvreFig. 7 From Veronica Wilson, “he Kouklia Sanctuary,” Report of the

Department of Antiquities in Cyprus (1974): pl. xxi, igs. 1 and 7. Used by permission of the Director of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus

Fig. 8 From Carthage: L’histoire sa trace et son écho (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1995), 115. Credit TK

Wallace-Hadrill

Fig. 1 Credit TK

D’Ercole

Fig. 1 From Fede Berti and Giovanni Guzzo, eds., Spina: Storia di una città tra

Greci ed Etruschi (Ferrara: Comitato Ferrara Arte, 1993), 35 (ig. 27)Fig. 2 From Ottavio Bocchi, Osservazioni di Ottavio Bocchi gentiluomo

Adriese sopra un antico teatro scoperto in Adria agli eruditissimi signori

Accademici della Nobile Accademia etrusca dell’antichissima città di

Cortona (Venice: Simone Occhi Stampatore, 1739), pl. xi, no. 2

Butcher

Fig. 1 Photo: Andreas KroppFig. 2 Photo: Kevin Butcher, 1995Fig. 3 Photo: Kevin Butcher, 1994Fig. 4 Photo: Kevin Butcher, 2005

Cohen

Fig. 1 Courtesy of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, München

Fig. 2 Photo credit: Hervé Lewandowski. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Fig. 3 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, HamburgFig. 4 Photo: he British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.

ac.uk. Used with the permission of Michael HeathFig. 6 James Fund and Museum purchase with funds donated by contribution.

Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, BostonFigs. 7, 8 Digital image © 2010 J. Paul Getty TrustFig. 9 Photo courtesy 16th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities,

Hellenic Ministry of Culture