INTRODUCTION

The museums of Roman art and archaeology are filled with statues of the emperors and their families, almost anonymous in their similarity. Alongside them are inscriptions reiterating the same dedication to Imperator Caesar whomsoever. Decontextualised in this way, we might lose the experience of how they would have been encountered in the past. Yet at the same time this formulaic repetition can still provide an insight into one of the things which held the empire together: the power and ideology of the Roman emperor, and the tension between the institution and the individual holding that power at any moment. When Augustus gained supreme power as princeps, he set the Roman political system on a track from which it was not to deviate for the duration of the empire: whilst the rhetoric of a return to Republican democracy might appear in elite texts, the events of history demonstrate that it was never again seen as a viable alternative. The ability of specific individuals might be challenged, but not the figure of the emperor as the holder of political authority. His rule stretched over the vast distances of the Roman Empire, at the centre of a system of shared cultural values, but for the majority of his subjects he was a remote and distant figure. Some towns enjoyed a privileged relationship: he might reside there for a time, or act as benefactor, but these were exceptions.