INTRODUCTION: THE ARTISTIC CONSTRUCTION OF EMPIRE, A.D. 100–250

We have seen how early imperial artists created compelling new images of the traditional pantheon, transforming Classical types such as the Aphrodite of Capua in order to do so. These images were specific to a particular historical milieu, the emulative and eclectic society of the early principate. At the outset, these images were distinctly experimental in character, insofar as they drew on a visual language still in the process of formation, and sought to represent a new and evolving imperial order. Later, as the “semantic system” was codified and the principate stabilized, these visual representations, too, took on stable, canonical form.

The present chapter will turn more fully to the reception of these canonical images, and will focus on the period of the High Empire, c. A.D. 100–250. It will explore some of the ways in which they allowed patrons to represent their ties to the past, their aspirations for the future, and their unique local identities within a broad, heterogeneous empire. Like the literary texts of the Second Sophistic, or the many honorific inscriptions produced by the period's “epigraphic habit,” High Imperial divine sculptures helped elite Romans to negotiate a place for themselves within the imperium Romanum; they mediated between the Urbs and the Orbs, the city of Rome and its world empire.