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359 Pages
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad academic audience. The series is a venue for both methodologically innovative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confines of Byzantine studies.
The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies. The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other fields, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is a substantially revised version of my Ph.D. thesis, which was generously funded by a Humanities studentship at the University of Nottingham. My supervisor was Doug Lee, who is the best anyone could hope for: thank you for putting up with my nonsense and keeping me on track. I was extremely fortunate to hold a residential Rome Award at the British School at Rome early in my Ph.D., an experience which had an enormous impact on the content and direction of this book; particular thanks are due to Christopher Smith and Robert Coates-Stephens. My external examiner was Mark Humphries. Not only did Mark make my viva a (mostly) enjoyable experience, but he also went into the process with a full understanding that this was only the beginning of his troubles. Thank you for spending the following years writing endless letters of recommendation, for your advice and mentoring, and for everything you do to make late Roman history a more welcoming field.
I have had the dubious pleasure of moving five times for work as an early career academic, holding teaching posts at UCL, Nottingham, Durham, and St Andrews, before arriving at Trinity College Dublin in the summer of 2018. One drawback of this itinerant lifestyle is that this project has taken longer to complete than I would have liked. The advantage has been having the privilege of working with lots of inspiring colleagues, and drawing upon the collective knowledge, expertise, and— most important of all—kindness and encouragement of so many. I owe special thanks to the following: at UCL, Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway; at Nottingham, Mark Bradley, Carl Buckland, John Drinkwater, Lynn Fotheringham, and Oliver Thomas; at Durham, Ted Kaizer, Sarah Miles, and Phillip Horky; at St Andrews, Michael Carroll, Dawn Hollis, Jill Harries, Tom Harrison, Jason K6énig, Carlos Machado, Roger Rees, and Rebecca Sweetman.
I would also like to thank Laura Conroy, James Corke-Webster, Thomas Coward, Nicola Ernst, Christopher Farrell, Richard Flower, Becca Grose, Arianna Gullo, Jack Lennon, Julia Pfefferkorn, Shaun Tougher, and Robin Whelan: you are all examples of the best that academia has to offer. Myles Lavan was characteristically generous with his time as my office mate in St Andrews and even after I left Scotland: a huge thank you for all your insight and advice. A special thanks to Eleri Cousins for finally convincing me that I’d produced a ‘book-shaped object’. Thank you to my new department at Trinity for all your support, especially to Martine Cuypers for her help in the final stages of this project.
Thanks are also due to those in the field who have spent so much of their time and energy cataloguing and publishing epigraphic material, and especially to those who have made that material easily accessible online (Oxford’s Last Statues of Antiquity database and the EpigraphikDatenbank Clauss/Slaby were particularly important for this project: my gratitude to their creators and contributors). I am grateful to the following individuals and institutions for their generosity and assistance in securing image permissions for this book: the American Numismatic Society (especially Elena Stolyarik), Maria Daniela and Agnese Pergola at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, Manfred Clauss, Nino Svonja at the Arheoloski muzej u Splitu, and Paolo Jorie at the Museo Correale, Sorrento. To the series editors and especially Sam Stocker at Palgrave: thank you for your professionalism and understanding.
Thank you to my many students over the years. You are endlessly inspiring. I cannot believe I get paid to talk about the Romans with you.
For reading, advice, distraction, and encouragement, a big thanks to Nick Akers, James Collings, Clare Corbett, Becky Harley, Kate Jacobs, Maroula Perisanidi, Amy Skilbeck, Laura Trimingham, Laura Turnage, everyone at InfoCat Ltd., and Phoebe and the kitkats. My love to my grandmother, Mary, who was always encouraging of my academic ventures (and once commented that the emperor Maxentius looks like ‘a very handsome chap’). I am sorry that you aren’t here to see the final product, but you have certainly left your mark. Last but not least, thank you to my parents, Carole and David. There is no way I could have done this without you: this book is dedicated to you.
Introduction
When all hope was destined to fail and the will to make peace abandoned, who could doubt that he [Maxentius] was divinely delivered to your arms, when he had attained such a degree of madness that he even provoked, on his own, the one whom he ought to have tried to win over? Oh, what sharp and painful stings you have, insult, when inflicted by an inferior! Behold, for sorrow! (words come with difficulty), the violent overthrow of revered images and the vile erasure of the divine face! O impious hands, O savage eyes! ... But in the end what do you gain, blind madness? This face cannot be destroyed. It is fixed on the hearts of all men. It does not shine by the gilding of beeswax or the dye of pigments, but blossoms forth through the longing of our spirits. Constantine will only be forgotten when the human race is destroyed.
Nazarius, panegyric in praise of Constantine!
l Pan, Lat. IV(10) 12.1-5 (after Nixon and Saylor Rodgers trans.): Cum spes omnis frigere debuerit et voluntas pacificandi alienata sit, quis dubitet divinitus armis tuis deditum, cum co dementiae processerit ut ultro etiam lacesseret quem ambire deberet? O quam acres dolorum aculeos habes, contumelia quam imponit inferior! Ecce enim, pro dolor! (verba vix suppetunt), venerandarum imaginum acerba deiectio et divini vultus litura deformis. O manus impiae, o truces oculi! [...] Sed quid tandem adsequeris, caeca dementia? Aboleri vultus hic non potest. Universorum pectoribus infixus est, nec commendatione cerae ac pigmentorum fucis renitet sed desiderio efflorescit animorum. Una demum Constantini oblivio est humani generis occasus.
This passage is a fitting point of departure for an examination of Roman concepts of political disgrace since it highlights many of the contradictions which surround the phenomenon. Firstly, it represents a divergence from the conventional view of image-destruction as a punishment inflicted posthumously on disgraced officials or failed emperors. Here, the expected scenario is inverted, with the ‘bad’ emperor Maxentius attacking the images of the ‘good’ emperor Constantine. Moreover, far from being overthrown or dead, Constantine was still alive and ruling when these attacks are said to have taken place; the portrait abuse instead serves as both an overture to, and justification for, Maxentius’ own elimination and disgrace. Secondly, the passage highlights the obstacles to using such literary accounts as evidence for genuine practice. Not only is this passage the only surviving piece of evidence, either literary or material, which suggests that Constantine’s honorific images were attacked as part of this civil conflict, the context also makes its veracity questionable, since it forms a climactic moment in a speech delivered almost a decade after Maxentius’ death, praising the character and justifying the actions of his conqueror. Nevertheless, it has consistently been accepted by modern commentators as proof of an actual, historical event.
Damnatio memoriae is a modern phrase, used as an umbrella term for a wide range of measures which the Romans used to denigrate, distort, or nullify the memories of those who were, for various reasons, deemed to have been disgraced. These measures changed with the passage of time, along with wider shifts in cultural priorities and forms of commemoration. From the confiscation of property, razing of houses, and banning of names and funerary honours in the insular aristocratic world of Republican Rome,° actions grew more public and ostentatious in the context of the empire, when images of the emperor, imperial family, and other officials were prominent and widely disseminated. Portraits were vandalised, removed, or recarved into others; dedications could be disfigured or altered; a victim’s name and titles could be erased from inscriptions with varying degrees of thoroughness; official legal acts could be nullified; coins could be countermarked. In rarer cases, such as that of Maxentius, a victim’s body was treated with the disrespect and malice customarily reserved for criminals and other social outcasts.* The past twenty years have witnessed a significant growth of interest in these phenomena: their mechanics, motivations, and the contradictions which were inherent in their use.> These modern investigations have urged us to view damnatio memoriae not as a monolithic or homogenous set of penalties, but instead as an inventive and adaptive process, and thus a lens through which the priorities of an age can be examined.
This book is an examination of political disgrace from Constantine’s rise to power until the accession of Julian, the last of the Constantinian emperors. This period, encompassing roughly the first half of the fourth century CE, was a time of profound political, religious, and cultural change, and witnessed an unprecedented number of emperors suffering from the penalties associated with political disgrace.° Surviving literary and material evidence indicates that, of seventeen emperors and other major imperial claimants, fifteen were inflicted with some form of these measures.’ This prevalence can be explained by features particular to this age, above all the establishment of a collegiate form of imperial government, increasing the number of emperors holding power at any one time, which combined with political instability. Meanwhile, our understanding of the political situation is also complicated by our reliance, particularly for the earlier years of the fourth century, on Christian sources which were written or revised in the aftermath of the Great Persecution. Disgrace is a central theme of such narratives, and these Christian discourses have had a significant impact on the ways in which scholars have interpreted events. As a consequence, the Constantinian age presents a unique opportunity to explore the later evolution of Roman notions of political failure and dishonour.
Despite several influential publications over the past twenty years which redress the concept, a view prevails that so-called damnatio memoriae was centralised, immediate, and totalising. This book uses four detailed and contrasting case studies to draw out distinctive features of these practices which stand at odds with this perspective. My central argument is that the penalties associated with political disgrace were neither immediate nor universal, neither centrally imposed nor regulated. By contrast, I argue that they reveal a spectrum of local responses to political change. As a consequence, this book not only shines light on Roman concepts of political disgrace, but provides wider insights on how imperial power could be communicated, understood, and interpreted across wide swathes of geographical space. Moreover, its argument that the transformation of these political figures into objects of disgrace was a communal enterprise, created over an extended period of time in a variety of media and by a range of different people, resonates with wider academic discourse on memory as a social and collective phenomenon.®
The Constantinian dynasty was built on the failure of its imperial opponents. In practice, this was an uneasy foundation since, more often than not, these opponents were either closely related to or even part of the Constantinian family. This book’s first case study is Maximian (r. 285-310), former Augustus of the Tetrarchy and the father-in-law of Constantine, who was eliminated by the younger emperor in 310. The survival of multiple literary accounts of the destruction of Maximian’s honorific images has cemented his position as a paradigm of political disgrace. However, the most puzzling feature of this episode is the fact that, seven years after he had killed his father-in-law, Constantine began issuing coinage which declared that he was now a dipus, a deified figure. I unravel this episode through a close examination of the surviving literary, numismatic, and epigraphic evidence, the latter in particular revealing a wide variety of local responses to Maximian’s downfall in different regions of the empire. Tracing the evolution of Maximian’s posthumous status until the time of Julian, I argue that the emperor embodies the complexity of Roman attitudes to imperial memorialisation, one which extends beyond the binary of ‘damned’ versus ‘deified’. Maximian was never forgotten, but nor was he simply ‘rehabilitated’. Instead, he blurred the lines between political honour and political disgrace.
The second chapter considers another close ally turned opponent of Constantine: the emperor Licinius (r. 308-324) who was married to Constantine’s sister, Constantia. Licinius was Constantine’s final imperial rival from the disintegrated Tetrarchy, so the deconstruction of his legitimacy, as well as the rewriting of his relationship with Constantine, formed a cornerstone of Constantine’s authority as sole ruler of the empire. Constantine and Licinius’ turbulent decade-long co-emperorship, with its initial inconclusive civil war, leading to a new treaty where the borders between their territories were redrawn, provides the ideal conditions to trace distinct stages of reactions in a contested political environment. This chapter lays out most clearly one of this book’s key arguments: that condemnation was neither immediate nor necessarily posthumous, but part of a protracted process which could begin before a ruler had even been decisively defeated.
Crispus (r. 317-326), the eldest son of Constantine, who was eliminated by his own father in mysterious circumstances, is my third case study. Like Maximian, Crispus has been regarded as an archetype of damnatio memoriae.? However, rather than being inspired by literary descriptions of the destruction of his images, this view is based on the conspicuous silences which surround his downfall, which create the impression that he had been ‘vaporised’ without any form of public explanation. After establishing the status and position which Crispus occupied within his father’s regime, and how the treatment of his posthumous memory features in both ancient and modern explanations of his death, I turn to a full consideration of the epigraphic evidence for his disgrace. This understudied body of material offers contemporary documentation of the different kinds of reactions generated by Crispus’ elimination. Rather than a centrally driven campaign to forget Crispus by expunging all traces of him from the empire, what emerges is a situation where some were hesitant to attack the young emperor’s memory, whilst others openly and proudly dishonoured him.
The final chapter moves forward a quarter of a century to an empire inherited by Constantine’s sons. It examines the case of Magnentius (r. 350-353), the emperor who eliminated Constans, Constantine’s youngest son, gaining control of half of the empire, and then posed a prolonged threat to Constantius I, the last surviving son of Constantine. As an individual who stood outside of the Constantinian dynasty, Magnentius garnered a western support base of individuals who had formerly served Constantine and his sons. Consequently, this chapter not only examines how Magnentius was treated both during and after his eventual defeat, but also how the memory of the Constantinian dynasty was managed in the territories which fell under the new emperor’s control. Constans and Magnentius, both failed emperors, were in similar ways reduced to the status of tyranni (‘tyrants’) after their removal, transformed into scapegoats who were condemned in isolation, allowing for the survival and absolution of anyone who had supported them. Here, we witness a reframing of the past to meet the ongoing needs of the present, a present that treated recent events with selective amnesia and selective commemoration.!°
An obvious question is: given the prevalence of disgraced emperors in the late third to mid-fourth centuries, why these particular four case studies? This book prioritises depth over breadth, an approach designed to avoid the assumption that disgrace followed a standard pathway, and to do justice to the large and complex body of material evidence. My methodology weighs surviving literary evidence against this material evidence, chiefly inscriptions, so a key rationale behind my choice of focus is the quantity and territorial distribution of these sources. The four case studies were also chosen with balance in mind, as each of them exemplifies a scenario where disgrace unfolded in a distinct way. An important factor in this is the disparate relationships between the examined individual and Constantine or his sons: a broken alliance between a senior and a junior emperor (Maximian); a troubled relationship of nominal equals (Licinius); a junior emperor viewed as an ideological extension of his father (Crispus); an imperial claimant who remained determinedly unrecognised by his would-be co-emperor (Magnentius).
Though each chapter has its central focus, each also incorporates at least two additional individuals with whom the central figure’s disgrace was somehow entangled. My examination of Maximian’s posthumous reputation involves a detailed treatment of the regime of his son, Maxentius, as well as some discussion of Diocletian, his colleague of over twenty years. The case of Licinius requires consideration of his young son, Licinius Iunior, as well as the emperor Maximinus Daia. Due to the proximity of their relative downfalls, analysis of the epigraphic evidence for Crispus’ disgrace requires revisiting the Licinii, as well as a discussion of possible connections to the disappearance of Crispus’ stepmother, Fausta. Finally, my chapter on Magnentius involves considerable analysis of the treatment of the ideological and material legacy of Constans, as well as some thought about the precedent set by the death of Constantine II a decade earlier. Hence, through its four case studies, this book aims to do due justice to the breadth and complexity of evidence, practices, and attitudes surrounding political disgrace in the Constantinian era.
POLITICAL MEMORY, DISGRACE, AND OBLIVION
This book’s four case studies and overarching arguments are embedded in wider themes of memory, disgrace, and the rhetoric of forgetting, all of which have a considerable history in modern scholarship. The 1936 doctoral thesis of Freidrich Vittinghoff was the first detailed modern study of the methods by which the Roman state attacked the memory of those deemed to be public enemies. In his close examination of the ancient legal and technical language used to target remembrance, Vittinghoff highlighted that the term damnatio memoriae belongs to the early modern rather than the ancient world and was never used by the Romans themselves.!! Vittinghoff also drew attention to some of the inconsistencies found in practice, such as the case of Caligula, an emperor who was never officially condemned by the Senate but still suffered a form of de facto condemnation, since inscriptions survive where his name has been erased.!* Hence, it has long been recognised that Roman. attitudes to political disgrace were intricate and evolving, and the modern use of a static label or concept to encompass these practices is inherently problematic.
However, damnatio memoriae is still commonly used in modern scholarship, both of the Roman world and beyond, as well as in contemporary journalism.!* The key reason for this is the convenience of the term, combined with the sense that it encompasses a concept and phenomena which are timeless and ubiquitous across cultures. One of the greatest appeals of damnatio memoriae is its universalism. From the pulling down and destruction of public statues to crowds vandalising the signs of streets named after disgraced leaders, these practices evoke our imagination because we see them at play in our contemporary world.!* Yet it has been observed that, in these modern contexts, iconoclasm is an ineffective way of creating oblivion. From the widely disseminated photographs of these instances of violent attacks, to the statue plinths which are left vacant in city centres, these moments become memorials of disgrace in themselves, far more eye-catching and enduring than the original forms of commemoration.!®
Psychological approaches to the ways in which humans create and forget memories have explored the paradoxical roles which personal or authoritative agency can play. For example, the research of American social psychologist Daniel Wegner demonstrated that ordering people to forget or avoid thinking about something can have the opposite effect, leading the object or event to become more deeply ingrained in memory, a phenomenon for which he coined the term ‘ironic process theory’.!° Though it zs possible to make individuals intentionally forget something (so-called motivated forgetting), the right conditions need to be in place, such as deliberate avoidance of the object of recollection, active exclusion or suppression of ideas, or a change in physical context.!7 The kind of conspicuous defamation created by ancient practices, where the oncehonoured figure’s fall from grace is paraded, clearly does not meet these conditions. Hence, damnatio memoriae is a pantomime of forgetting. Memory occupied a central position in Roman culture.!® However, scholars of the Roman world were relatively slow to engage with the socalled memory boom which has touched disciplines as diverse as history, social sciences, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and neuroscience over the past thirty years.!? Dammnatio memoriae is the aspect of Roman memory-practices which attracted the earliest attention. A handful of articles were published over the half century which followed Vittinghoffs monograph,”° but it was the 1990s which witnessed a growth in interest, particularly in American scholarship, not only in the practices associated with damnatio memoriae, but also in the creation of a more comprehensive and critical approach to the ideology and inherent contradictions of the phenomenon. An important contribution to this was the discovery in Spain in the late 1980s of bronze copies of the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre, a senatorial decree which outlines the punishments to be inflicted on the Roman aristocrat Piso, who had been accused of treason during the reign of the emperor Tiberius.?! This document, which contains a number of specifications concerning the treatment of Piso’s public memory (the banning of his name, its erasure from specific inscriptions, the removal of his statues and images from both public and private places), stimulated discussions about the meaning and precedents of these punishments, as well as their intended effects.??
When the major works on Roman attitudes to political memory and disgrace are placed side by side, what is striking is the range of different approaches which the topic has stimulated. The work of Eric Varner has centred on mutilated and reworked portraiture and sculpture, and related issues of image and body destruction.?* Harriet Flower’s seminal The Art of Forgetting, which focuses on the Republican and early Imperial periods, contemplates the manipulation of political memory in a broader sense, as an aspect of Roman ‘memory space’, encompassing not just portraits, dedications, inscriptions, and monuments, but also rituals, oral traditions, and written texts.7* Charles W. Hedrick’s History and Silence represents another kind of approach. Hedrick used a single inscription from the end of the fourth century, honouring the condemned and then rehabilitated senator Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, as a springboard into a variety of discussions on issues such as the character of paganism in late antique Rome and the commemorative functions of editing. His fourth chapter, ‘Remembering to Forget’, draws upon the works of social theorists such as Jan Assmann and Paul Connerton, which have been fundamental to the wider academic ‘memory boom’. Using modern examples of the manipulation of collective memory as points of reference, Hedrick highlights the dangers inherent in bringing the same expectations to ancient practices, especially for how systematically measures were applied.?> He makes a compelling argument that, in the Roman context, it was the intention that actions disgracing individuals should be incomplete, since they gained their symbolic force from the visibility of their implementation.
Despite these important contributions to our understanding of Roman political disgrace, certain myths of damnatio memoriae persist. Three misconceptions are widespread in scholarship. First, that it was possible to declare or impose ‘the’ or ‘a’ damnatio memoriae, as though it was a standard or customary legal procedure.?° Second, that measures were implemented in a methodical or systematic manner, when a holistic review of the surviving evidence demonstrates that generally only a fraction of material was ever affected.?” Third, and most pervasive, is the idea that such measures were designed to forcefully and completely erase a victim from collective consciousness, to make them ‘disappeared’ like an eliminated opponent of a totalitarian regime, or an ‘unperson’ such as in George Orwell’s novel 1984.28 Outside of Roman scholarship, damnatio memoriae has become a paradigm of social memory control at work, one which both foreshadowed and inspired these modern manifestations and dystopian visions.??
This book uses the unique conditions of the Constantinian period to offer new perspectives on these ideas of so-called damnatio memorive. Drawing upon the extensive material evidence from the first half of the fourth century, above all the hundreds of inscriptions which have survived from across the Roman world, and integrating them with literary evidence, I reconstruct the political and social environment within which the actions associated with disgrace were carried out. My discussions pay close attention to temporal and regional intricacies, arguing that these practices were uneven and inconsistent across time and space, reflecting self-guided actions by individuals and communities responding to political events rather than central enforcement. Through a close examination of the subtleties of these responses in four contrasting case studies, I aim to open new avenues for our understanding of the diversities of ancient experiences of, and reactions to, wider political change.
Terminology
Harriet Flower is clear in her reservations against using damnatio memorive and avoids it throughout her monograph, though accepts that it might be used as a convenient and familiar shorthand.*° Some scholars have followed suit and now avoid the term, though this does not necessarily mean that they avoid falling into the traps it poses.*! Varner and Hedrick use damnatio memoriae throughout their work, acknowledging its modern origin with varying degrees of explicitness.*? It remains common in scholarship.*?
The main issue is a lack of suitable alternatives. Hedrick suggests ‘repression’, ‘purge’, and ‘anathematization’, the last of which seems somewhat fitting, whilst the first two seem too evocative of the twentiethcentury totalitarian models which he maintains are anachronistic.*4 Flower offers ‘memory sanctions’, which is well suited to her broad conception of Roman ‘memory space’. Both this phrase and the framework which supports it have been highly influential, especially since they move analysis beyond erased inscriptions and pulled-down statues, and make space for discussions of the generative as well as destructive qualities of such processes.*> However, it is not without flaws, since the word ‘sanctions’ carries implications of official authorisation and fixed legal procedures.
It has been suggested that the pervasiveness of damnatio memoriae means that we can never discard the label, despite the sometimes reductive ways in which it is still employed.*° In this book, I only use it when addressing the arguments of others, and especially in cases where the anachronisms the phrase engenders are particularly apparent. I also avoid ‘memory sanctions’ because, in the period on which this book focuses, the senate of Rome had long been obsolete as a body for deciding the posthumous commemoration of emperors, and the reliability of literary sources which claim that emperors personally ordered such measures is questionable.*” Though the policies and ideologies crafted and communicated by emperors and their courts were of paramount importance in deciding the treatment of the legacies of imperial rivals, this book seeks to create a distinction between these centralised messages and the ways in which they were—or, in many cases, were not—implemented by different actors across the empire.
The Fashioning Disgrace of this book’s title refers to the collective and communal process whereby a once-honoured political figure was transformed into a disgraced figure. Physical evidence is central to this. Unavoidably, my analysis focuses on the objects and monuments which have happened to survive the passage of time, though I recognise the roles which now-lost material might have played. When, in my analysis, I speak of the ‘physical manifestations’ of an individual’s political identity, his ‘material presence’ or ‘political memory’, I mean aspects which existed because of this individual’s status, because he was an emperor. The image and name of an emperor were present in a variety of media, well beyond the portraits, statues, or statue bases that now draw the most attention. All of these media and behaviours, such as the issuing of coinage or the practice of inscribing an emperor’s name as a consular date, were intrinsically associated with the emperor’s authority: their use constituted the recognition of his legitimacy, in regions both inside and outside of his direct sphere of control.*® These physical aspects of imperial identity could then be targeted as a potent way of rejecting this emperor and the status which he had held, thus reversing his honoured position, and retrospectively nullifying the relationships and alliances which he had formed with his former co-rulers. In particular, actions taken against the imperial name as it appeared on various kinds of inscription are a key focus in this book.
DISCOURSES OF DISGRACE
The example with which I began this introduction, in which the orator Nazarius gives his account of Maxentius’ destruction of Constantine’s images, illustrates a central theme of this book, namely the ways in which the literary evidence for iconoclasm and related practices fail to correspond with the surviving material evidence. There has been a tendency in modern scholarship to focus on literary accounts of these acts of destruction and then use selective examples of surviving physical evidence, such as damaged statues or erased inscriptions, to reinforce and confirm their content.*? Whilst written accounts might refer to the wholesale, empirewide destruction of an individual’s images and other dedications, material evidence—particularly epigraphic evidence—tells a different story, where the majority of the physical traces of an emperor’s political memory survived the ‘campaign’ unscathed.
I do not seek to disregard literary accounts, but to give weight to the circumstances in which these narratives were created. The destruction and disgrace inflicted on imperial victims was an imagined process as much as it was a tangible one, and this reality should be acknowledged from the outset. As we have already seen in the case of Nazarius’ panegyric, authors had their own political, moral, religious, or aesthetic reasons for mentioning—or, equally, not mentioning—these practices. Moreover, such accounts are rarely eye-witness reports, but instead formed part of wider narrative discourses which drew upon literary conventions, imagination, and as we will see in the case of Christian writers, a certain level of wishful thinking. Ultimately, the writers who engaged in these discourses, envisioning how these long-established methods of inflicting dishonour could play out in their own or past environments, were constructing their own monuments of disgrace. This does not mean that we should expect to find them replicated in the archaeological record. My discussion explores the gap between this rhetoric and reality, and what it means for our understanding of Roman notions of political dishonour.
Agency in Iconoclasm Discourses
Physical traces left on an object and the archaeological context of its discovery can reveal clues as to who might have carried out attacks. They might, for example, give some indication of the intentions behind such modifications: was it a careful and premeditated erasure, requiring time and skill, or a violent and perhaps impulsive assault? Parallels have been drawn between the find-spots of mutilated statues in sewers, latrines, cisterns, and rivers, and literary accounts of the posthumous desecration and deposition of the bodies of some fallen emperors.*? Nevertheless, archaeological clues such as these are few and far between, and most evidence reveals little about the political and cultural framework of such attacks, or the motivations which lay behind them.*! Literary evidence has an important role to play in supplementing these gaps in our understanding, particularly in furnishing possible answers to key questions, such as who might have ordered such attacks, or who was considered responsible for carrying them out.
Two distinct themes can be detected in literary accounts of political iconoclasm: image-destruction which takes place as the result of a command from an authority (either the Senate or the emperor), and that which is the result of sporadic mob violence.*? In practice, however, this division was blurred. As we will see in due course, in the case of legal evidence there was a considerable gap between intention and actual implementation, and it was recognised that centralised commands could be ineffective. Moreover, literary accounts often present mobs as the instruments which enforced centrally-decided policies. As Bats has pointed out, it is rare that ancient authors describe the formal mechanics or procedures behind such orders in any detail, focusing instead on aspects such as the humiliation brought about by the destruction or mockery of his statues.
For example, Lactantius, in his narrative of the destruction of Maximian’s honorific images, specifies that these measures were taking place ‘at the order of Constantine’ (Constantini iussu, De mort. pers. 42.1), but reveals nothing of who was actually executing this order, or where it was being implemented.
This ambiguity is typical of the literary accounts from the period under discussion, which tend to focus on the dramatic consequences of disgrace, favouring general statements of systematic obliteration over descriptions of specific examples of iconoclasm. Lactantius asserts that, as a result of Constantine’s order, Maximian’s portraits were pulled down ‘everywhere’ (ubicumgue), omitting mention of the fact that the emperor only had direct control over Britain, Gaul, and Spain at this time. Likewise, Eusebius claims that Maximinus Daia’s portraits were destroyed ‘in every city’ (Kata Mdoav WOALY, Hist. eccl. 9.11). Ancient authors also tended to focus on the destruction of portraits and statues as the manifestations of political memory that were most charismatic, as well as most intimately connected to the faces and bodies of those they represented.*# The removal, relocation, warehousing, or careful recarving of statues, all of which were very common in Late Antiquity, rarely get a mention.*> Less dramatic actions taken against epigraphic dedications—the key form of evidence used in this book—also tend to be passed over in these accounts.
Ancient writers are frequently cryptic about who initiated such attacks or who precisely was responsible for carrying them out. They tend to use passive verbs, describing the action of tearing down images or statues without indicating who was actually doing it.4° This lack of specification creates the impression that these are the deeds of an abstract general public, a manifestation of the people’s hatred towards the fallen ruler. Consequently, accounts of these practices in the fourth century should not be seen in isolation, but as part of a much longer discourse which linked these disgrace-inducing activities to tyrannical and failed regimes. For example, Eusebius’ vivid account of the destruction of Maximinus Daia’s portraits, where the mob pulls down, smashes, defaces, and mocks his images, has literary parallels from earlier in the Principate. In his panegyric to Trajan, Pliny the Younger described the Roman public gleefully participating in the wholesale destruction of Domitian’s portraits, smashing the deposed emperor’s likenesses as though they were inflicting damage and pain on the emperor himself (Plin. Pan. 53.4.11). The fact that in both cases these descriptions of body and effigy destruction form part of accounts which champion the victims’ successors should immediately raise suspicions about their accuracy. This is compounded by the fact that there is little archaeological evidence that Domitian’s portraits were intentionally mutilated. More often they appear to have been warehoused or carefully recarved into images of other emperors.*7
We need to differentiate clearly between political iconoclasm as a historical occurrence and political iconoclasm as an imagined process. Take, for example, the so-called Riot of the Statues of 387, where the imposition of a new tax levy in Antioch resulted in an outbreak of urban violence where the images of the emperor Theodosius I and his family were torn down, dragged, and abused. The event and its consequences were widely discussed at the time, including by John Chrysostom and Libanius, both eyewitnesses with different agendas and perspectives.** By contrast, we have the panegyric of 321, in which Nazarius accuses Maxentius of having attacked the portraits of Constantine. In this case, the orator was delivering a speech in praise of the emperor who had defeated Maxentius, and uses this allegation to reinforce a portrait of Maxentius as a ruler who had been prone to outbursts of uncontrollable rage, who had exhibited impiety and disrespect to his imperial colleagues, and who therefore deserved to be deposed.*? This finds parallels in other accounts, such as Lactantius’ description of the emperor Galerius’ furor (rage) when sent the zmago of the newly-elevated Constantine. Lactantius envisages a scenario where Galerius was so enraged by this gesture that he almost burned the portrait, along with the man who had brought it (25.1-2). Neither Nazarius nor Lactantius are describing historical episodes. They are generating literary constructions, a decade or more after the event, designed to legitimise Constantine by presenting him as a victim, and his former colleagues as unworthy to have shared imperial office with him. This characterisation of the unfit emperor, unable to control his passions and, as a consequence, carrying out acts of irrational ferocity against the political memory of a rival, finds resonance with earlier traditions. The most conspicuous example is the campaign that Cassius Dio claims Caracalla inflicted on his own brother Geta, including venting his anger on the stones which had held the dead emperor’s statues and melting down any coin which held his image.°° The prevalence of such instances of political disgrace in both the literary and the material record of the Severan period provides a valuable background against which the fourth-century material of this book can be evaluated.*! For example, in terms of agency, literary accounts of such campaigns often present the emperor as the instigator and the army, particularly the Praetorians in Rome, as both the principal audience for declarations of a rival’s disgrace and the instrument of the subsequent attack.°? It has been argued that the physical evidence for Geta’s disgrace throughout the empire, which is unprecedented in its thoroughness, indicates the involvement of soldiers.°* Not only is this reflected in the practical reach of the campaign’s implementation, it also aligns with literary evidence which indicates the military’s deep-seated engagement with the ideology of Geta as a disgraced figure, whose state of dishonour was intrinsically linked to the survival and well-being of the ruling emperor, Caracalla. Evidently, careful attention needs to be paid to the circumstances surrounding such literary accounts of iconoclasm and political disgrace.
Far from a faithful description of real events, such stories were often designed to fulfil wider ideological or narrative purposes within an author’s work. As we will now see, nowhere is this more applicable than in the case of Christian discourse of the early fourth century.
Political Disgrace in Christian Discourse
Lactantius’ On the Deaths of the Persecutors and Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine provide the most contemporary and extensive literary accounts of the tetrarchic and Constantinian periods. Their polemical nature is generally recognised in modern scholarship, as is the effect that this tone has had on our perception of Constantine, particularly his rise and consolidation of imperial power, his relationship with other emperors, and his attitude towards Christianity.°* However, the impact which our reliance on these sources has had on our perception of political disgrace in the period this book examines is an issue which needs addressing.
Both authors provide vivid accounts of the destruction of imperial images: of Diocletian in Lactantius; Maximian in Lactantius and in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine; and Maximinus Daia in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History.°° Some modern commentators have used these passages as proof of historical occurrences and for the continued existence of damnatio memoriae in this period.°° However, it is rare that adequate consideration is given to the ways in which these episodes were shaped by their authors’ identities and intentions. The idea that material obliteration and disgrace were the God-sent punishments inflicted on emperors who had persecuted the Christians is found throughout the writings of Lactantius and Eusebius. Both engaged in these established discourses, appropriating and adapting tropes to achieve their own ideological aims in the new religious and political environment of the aftermath of the Great Persecution.
The On the Deaths of the Persecutors is Lactantius’ own monument to the political disgrace which he saw operating in the past and present. Beginning his account at the dawn of imperial persecutions of the Christians, Lactantius describes a sequence of emperors who suffered various forms of posthumous dishonour: Nero who simply vanished (2.7); Domitian whose name was erased beyond memory (3.3); Decius whose body was left on the battlefield as carrion for wild beasts and birds (4.3); Valerian who was skinned and hung in a Persian temple as an enduring trophy of Roman failure (5.6). He then adds the emperors of recent years to this pattern of imperial disgrace. A prolonged and graphic description of Galerius rotting away in agony on the eve of his picennalia, the twentieth anniversary of his rule (33). Maximinus Daia, whose excruciating death mirrors the tortures he had inflicted on the martyrs he created (49). The once great emperor Diocletian, who starves himself to death in his lonely retirement palace, having been the first emperor to watch, powerless, as his honorific images were torn down before his own eyes (42).
This pattern is echoed in the writings of Eusebius. His account of the public dishonour inflicted upon Maximinus Daia’s statues comes directly after his description of the emperor’s illness and death, where the defeated ruler’s body wastes away, disintegrating whilst he is still alive until it becomes nothing more than a ‘tomb for his soul’ (tagov avt® tHsS Woxns, Hist. eccl. 9.13). So after literally—corporeally—disappearing, the final shame for Maximinus is the posthumous destruction of all his honorific images. The result is the state of total dishonour which Eusebius claims was the ultimate punishment for all imperial persecutors: ‘even their names were forgotten; their portraits and tributes received deserved disgrace’.°”
Lactantius makes his narrative intentions clear in the introduction of his pamphlet, declaring his goal to recount and publicise the fates of the persecuting emperors ‘so that all who were far away and all who are yet to come will know the extent to which God revealed his virtue and majesty in the destruction and obliteration of the enemies of His name’.°® This is an excellent example of the paradox which lies at the heart of acts which target memory and commemoration. Far from creating a state of oblivion or amnesia, Lactantius is evoking the topos of the reversal of fortune, illustrating how these individuals who had risen so high had themselves suffered fates worse than death for their crimes against the Christians.°? The grisly ends suffered by these persecuting emperors are the ironic reversal of the war which they had waged against the church: in striving to destroy (extinguere) and obliterate (delere) all traces of Christianity, they instead created the conditions of their own destruction and obliteration. Hence Lactantius’ conclusion of his pamphlet, where he triumphantly declares that God’s judgement has manifested in his punishment of Diocletian and Maximian: ‘truly, the Lord has obliterated them, and erased them from the earth’ (nempe delevit ea dominus et erasit de terra, 52.3). His choice of wording is significant: deleo, to expunge, delete, undo; and erado, the verb used to describe the action of scraping or striking something away.°? Like a name on an inscription, these emperors have literally been scraped off the face of the earth for their crimes against the church.
It is important to recognise that the worldview found in Lactantius and Eusebius was not universal. For them, imperial success or failure was defined almost exclusively by an emperor’s attitude and behaviour towards Christianity.°! Dishonour, image-destruction, and body destruction all had their parts to play in the creation and propagation of this rhetorical construction. By contrast, such themes rarely feature in non-Christian writings of the fourth century.
CENTRAL DIRECTION AND LOCAL ACTION
A key characteristic of the damnatio memoriae myth is that the phrase describes a static or standardised legal punishment which could be deployed against emperors or other prominent individuals. In reality, there was no formal way to ‘carry out a damnatio memoriae’, ‘declare’ or ‘proclaim a damnatio memoriae’, ‘perform damnatio memoriae’, or abolish the memory’ of an individual in the Roman world.°? Recent studies have stepped away from these definitions of damnatio memoriae as an official legal penalty, connected in particular with the crimes of perduellio or maiestas (treason).°* As both Flower and Hedrick have stressed, the phrase should not be taken to indicate either a static judicial concept or the triggering of a formal procedure.® Rather, the penalties associated with disgrace formed a loose repertoire of measures which targeted political memory in different ways, and could be employed alone or in various combinations depending on the conditions or requirements of particular cases.
That being said, the issuing and dissemination of imperial edicts would have played a fundamental role in communicating an individual’s fall from power to the empire at large.® In some cases, these laws could stipulate certain measures designed to influence familial or public memorialisation. The most prominent example of this is found in the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre, six bronze copies of which were discovered in the late 1980s in the region of ancient Baetica. Issued in 20 CE, this senatorial decree outlines the punishments to be inflicted on the disgraced aristocrat Piso. Among other penalties designed to target Piso’s reputation and posthumous commemoration, such as a ban on the mourning of his death and the prohibition of the use of his portrait mask at family funerals, it orders that his statuae (statues) and imagines (likenesses) are to be removed from wherever they are on display.°° A comparable example, from almost four hundred years later, can be found in a law of 399, preserved in the Theodosian Code, in which the emperors Arcadius and Honorius specify the penalties to be inflicted on the disgraced eunuch and former consul Eutropius. These have clear resonances with those imposed on Piso, including measures such as the confiscation of Eutropius’ property, and then a long and expansive specification that all of his statues (statuas) and likenesses (simulacra), made out of any material and in both public and private places, should be removed ‘lest they pollute they eyes of those who look at such images’.°”
The S.C. de Cn. Pisone ends with lengthy provisions for the law’s dissemination, stipulating that it should be read out publicly and inscribed in bronze, then hung in ‘the most frequented city of every province and in the most frequented place of that city’, as well as next to the standards (signa) at the heart of the legionary winter quarters.°® These provisions illustrate the importance of—and difficulties inherent in—communicating and enforcing such instructions. It could take weeks for such an edict to reach parts of the empire. Even then, its implementation at a local level was not guaranteed, since it was dependent on the enthusiasm and diligence of local governors, or those further down the administrative hierarchy, such as municipal officers.©?
Vittinghoff had already raised this issue of the gulf between what was instructed and the extent to which these instructions were actually enforced, particularly in the regulation of private space.”? He argued that, although laws or literary texts might stipulate the complete eradication of traces of an individual, contemporary Romans must have been well aware that this was impossible. The intention was not to completely suppress recollection of the condemned, but to make a public and symbolic statement which reframed their memory, branding with infamy what had formerly been honoured and respected, and making their disgrace serve as a warning against similar transgressions.’! The convoluted and venomous language of the edict condemning Eutropius, especially the use of terms that denoted impurity or disease (sordes, ‘filthy’; contagione foedans, ‘polluting by contact’), illustrates that this law was not concerned with the literal erasing of Eutropius, but instead with publicising the extent and nature of his political disgrace.”? Both the Eutropius and Piso edicts were declarations of the emperors’ and Senate’s authority to regulate the legacies of prominent individuals. When interpreting the material evidence for such attacks, it is crucial to bear in mind that the actual implementation of these laws was of secondary importance to the statement made by their pronouncement.”°
No law stipulating penalties targeting the name, images, or remembrance of an individual survives from the period examined in this book. However, of the thirteen laws preserved in the Theodosian Code which abolish the legislation of defeated imperial rivals (Cod. Theod. 15.14), five date from the first half of the fourth century, addressing the defeats of Maxentius, Licinius, and Magnentius.’* Gathered together under the title De infirmandis his quae sub tyrannis aut barbaris gesta sunt (‘concerning the annulment of things carried out under the tyrants and barbarians’), this group of laws was issued across a hundred years, from the defeat of Maxentius in 312 to the usurpation of Heraclianus against Honorius in 413. They address issues such as whether a defeated rival’s edicts, rescripts, gifts, or administrative appointments should remain valid, and whether private civil agreements executed during this time, such as wills or slave manumissions, should be honoured. Whilst they tend to be inflexible in their invalidation of a rival’s regulations, condemning them to be removed from legal records, on the whole they demonstrate an appreciation of the chaos that would ensue if all legal activities from the ‘time of tyranny’ (tyrannicum tempus) were nullified. A law of 395, issued by Arcadius and Honorius in the aftermath of the defeat of Eugenius, illustrates this tension between rhetoric and pragmatism. The edict ends with a flourish, ordering that ‘the very time of tyranny shall be considered as though it had not been’ (tempus vero ipsum, ac si non fuerit, aestimetur, Cod. Theod. 15.14.9), but only after specifying at great length all the different forms of legal activities which should remain valid.
As in the case of the edicts targeting Piso and Eutropius, the proclamation and dissemination of these laws were designed to make a rhetorical statement, not to eradicate all traces of these opponents. All thirteen use the term tyrannus in reference to the overthrown rival. Neri has suggested that tyrannus/ twpavvocg was devised by Constantine and Licinius together during their co-emperorship as a common catchword to discredit their opponents, Maxentius and Maximinus Daia. The term then evolved over the course of the fourth century, developing a closer affinity to political illegitimacy until it came to denote a ‘usurper-—someone who had illegally seized imperial power—in a narrower, more literal sense.”° However, as Mark Humphries has argued, this distinction between a usurper/tyrannus and a legitimate emperor was not a question of the validity of the ruler’s accession, but whoever had, through their military success, been left to define the nature of a civil conflict.”° The use of tyrannus in these laws is a public declaration of this victor’s prerogative, one which, as we will see particularly in the cases of Licinius and Magnentius, was mirrored and reaffirmed in other media, such as public oratory and dedicatory inscriptions. Along with related catchwords, such as ‘enemy’ (TorEWLLOS; EXOPOc; imimicus; hostis), this terminology played a central role in repackaging emperors during and in the aftermath of their downfalls. As I argue in the case studies of this book, these catchwords surrounded these figures with an aura of disgrace. At a local level, this could then be interpreted as validation or encouragement for attacks on their political memory.
Literary accounts provide an insight into the role which imperial edicts could play in facilitating such behaviour. For example, in his narrative of the emperor Maximinus Daia’s downfall at the hands of Licinius in 313, Eusebius describes Licinius and Constantine posting in the public notices that Daia was ‘the common enemy of all’ (kowwog &mavtwv TOAEWLOS) and a ‘tyrant’ (twpavvocg). Though nothing is said about the law containing specifications targeting Daia’s images, Eusebius claims that its posting incited a violent campaign of iconoclasm against the honorific dedications of both him and his children ‘in every city’ (kata mdoav moxtv). Their portraits were thrown down or blackened with paint, and his statues were smashed and mocked by the crowds (Hist. eccl. 9.11). Accounts such as this further underscore the communal nature of political disgrace. Through their selective re-definition of the recent past, imperial edicts created the conditions to maintain the status quo of both the present and the future: the tyrannus was condemned in isolation, and the rest of the community conformed to and enforced this new political reality.
In the timeframe which this book covers, the most unambiguous statement linking image-destruction to the directives of an emperor comes from the On the Deaths of the Persecutors of the Christian apologist Lactantius. Lactantius claims that the fall of Maximian was followed by Constantine issuing a ¢#ssus—command or decree—which instructed that the disgraced emperor’s imagines were to be torn down (42.1). The circumstances surrounding this episode are discussed in full in chapter two.
THe MATERIALITY OF DISGRACE
Roman concepts of dishonour and disgrace were centred on their physical expression, be they actions against portraits, statues, inscribed names, coins, or even the bodies of victims. The material evidence for these practices which has survived the considerable passage of time is scattered and inconsistent. Nevertheless, its analysis opens up valuable avenues for our understanding of political change as a process that was socially, culturally, and geographically dispersed and complex. Many of the forms of evidence drawn upon in this book are similar to those used in previous studies of Roman disgrace. However, modes of political commemoration had changed by the fourth century, and these developments pose new problems but also present fresh opportunities. Some sources of evidence, such as portraiture, statues, and coins, become a less useful gauge of these activities in the later empire. Nevertheless, this absence can be filled by the rich and varied epigraphic corpus.
Portraits
In his monograph investigating the effects of political disgrace on imperial portraiture, Eric Varner identifies three patterns of response: deliberate mutilation, with the portrait either being disposed of, or alternatively left on display as an enduring mark of shame; warehousing, when portraits were removed from view; and recarving, either in the immediate aftermath of an emperor’s downfall or considerably later, after the portrait had remained in storage for many years.’7
However, this approach encounters obstacles when applied to the material surviving from Late Antiquity. The many emperors of the Tetrarchy and the Constantinian dynasty were intentionally designed to be virtually indistinguishable in order to project a sense of political and dynastic unity.”° Such portraits, now out of context and separated from their statue bases, can only be identified in general terms as representing ‘a Tetrarch’ or ‘a Constantinian emperor’. In the absence of an inscription or label identifying a specific emperor, it must have been equally hard for ancient audiences to single out a disgraced emperor from any other. An additional factor is how prolific the recarving of portraits had become by the fourth century, so reuse cannot be interpreted as an intentional attack on the portrait’s original subject.”? As Bauer has concluded, the loss of individualism in imperial portraiture, combined with changes in attitudes to and practices of reuse, must have had a significant impact on curbing politically-motivated portrait destruction in later periods.°° As a consequence, Licinius is this book’s only case study which considers portraiture, since he is one of the only examples of an emperor in this period who sought stylistic distinction from his imperial colleague and rival, Constantine.
We must also bear in mind that, though we focus on the marble sculpture that survives, this represents only a fraction of imperial representations in ancient contexts. Though marble statues were vulnerable to later reuse as building materials or to be burnt to make lime, they survive in far greater numbers than bronze statues, which tended to be melted down and are now rare survivals.8! We know from literary sources that imperial images could be wooden statues, or images painted on panels.®? Rare examples of such painted images survive, such as the famous tondo of the Severan family from Fayum in Egypt where Geta’s face is erased, or the tetrarchic frescoes from the temple of Luxor, which are discussed in chapter two. Imperial images could be smaller objects in precious materials, which, though diminutive, could possess considerable symbolic power as the focus for demonstrations of loyalty, especially if they were used in contexts such as on military standards.8* We know from depictions on ivory diptychs that the imperial image could also feature prominently on ceremonial consular robes, or as embellishments on furniture.°*
Coinage
Since the creation of coins was an integral part of an emperor’s authority, some have identified attacks on them as an important way of targeting a ruler’s claims to legitimacy.®> Similar to the alterations made to inscriptions, surviving examples of altered coins demonstrate a lack of definitive rules as to how such modifications could be carried out, with multiple techni dT ral, th be divided i fficial alter-
ques attested.°° In general, these can be divided into official alter ations, such as mints countermarking names and images, and more sporadic, informal, and isolated acts of vandalism, found on a very small number of surviving examples.°”
Some ancient accounts describe centrally organised campaigns to wipe out all traces of an emperor’s coinage by recalling and melting down his issues. Cassius Dio claims that the Senate ordered this for the bronze coins of Caligula, and that, a hundred and seventy years later, Caracalla did the same to Geta as part of a comprehensive series of measures designed to obliterate his brother’s physical memory.*® There is one example of comparable behaviour from the period this book examines. Peter the Patrician, writing in the mid-sixth century but drawing upon earlier sources, claims that the emperor Licinius melted down gold victory coins of Constantine on the eve of their final conflict, an advertisement of his refusal to recognise his colleague’s military successes.8? Literary sources generally present such instances as extreme and unreasonable, driven by excessive hatred or jealousy. However, there may be truths to such claims. For example, it has been suggested that a law of Constantius II which banned larger coins was designed to take his opponent Magnentius’ issues out of circulation.?” Moreover, a meticulous study has demonstrated that, later in the fourth century, Theodosius I recalled the coinage of his rival Magnus Maximus.”!
Though mutilated coins are not discussed in this book, numismatic evidence plays an important part in each of its four case studies. Coins provide valuable insights into the messages which imperial courts chose to communicate, and the alliances which they formed with one another.?? During the tetrarchic period, emperors practised reciprocal minting, striking coins in the names of all emperors and thus emphasising empirewide political unity, a practice also found in honorific inscriptions.?* This continued during the dissolution of the Tetrarchy, though emperors could deviate from this custom, using coin-minting as a way of severing links with a rival or even rejecting his authority altogether. As will be demonstrated particularly in the cases of Licinius and Magnentius, coin iconography and minting patterns can be used to trace the ebbs and flows of this recognition and repudiation.
The Power of the Imperial Name
Our modern perceptions of iconoclasm find their roots in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and before that the eighth-century Byzantine controversy from which the term ‘the breaking of images’ derives; as a consequence, it has been argued that we tend to accord images greater power and significance than written or inscribed words or names.°* As we have seen, ancient literary accounts of the measures associated with political disgrace likewise tend to focus on portraits, statues, and images. In the Roman world, both religiously- and politicallymotivated iconoclasm depended on sculptures and images being more than simple objects, since these representations were seen to embody the umen—divine essence—of what they represented, whether a ruler or a god.°° As in Near Eastern cultures, these images were intrinsically connected to their prototype, to the extent that any hostility inflicted on an image was seen to carry over to the represented individual: ‘a kind of magical transference’, as David Freedberg has described it in his broad study of iconoclasm.”°
This is a conspicuous feature of literary accounts of iconoclasm, such as Pliny the Younger’s description of the destruction of Domitian’s portraits, which is presented as an act of communal surrogate corpse abuse: they were struck ‘as if blood and pain would follow every blow’ (ut si singulos ictus sanguis dolorque sequeretur: Plin. Pan. 52.4).?” In the empire, the maltreatment of, or misbehaviour in the vicinity of, imperial images could be seen as a treasonable offence.°* Aggression inflicted on an emperor’s representations could be taken literally as an assault on the emperor himself. Hence Theodosius’ harsh response to the attacks on his imagines at Antioch, which John Chrysostom and Libanius attempted to temper, passing them off as the result of daemonic intervention and collective madness.”?
Though obviously less connected with the human body, the name of a ruler also embodied his mumen.'°° Studies of Near Eastern practices of iconoclasm have emphasised how, in ancient contexts in which writing was a relatively new and elite phenomenon and thus intrinsically connected with power and authority, attacks on names could be just as— if not more—potent than attacks on images.!°! Naming, in particular the inscribing of names, played a central role in Roman culture, defining and performing familial, social, religious, and political identities. For example, examinations of Roman practices of magic have demonstrated the important roles which an individual’s name played in facilitating actions such as curses, enabling the same kind of ‘magical transference’ as attacks on an individual’s image.!°
The measures associated with political disgrace underline that an individual’s name was commensurate with his identity, and therefore vulnerable to censorship or attack.!°? For example, along with other penalties targeting remembrance, the S.C. de Cn. Pisone stipulates that Piso’s eldest son should change his praenomen from that of his disgraced father, and that Piso’s momen should be removed from the inscribed base of a statue of Germanicus in the Campus Martius in Rome. Literary accounts of political disgrace similarly underline this link between the removal of an emperor’s name from inscriptions and the obliteration of his political and personal legacy. In the case of Domitian, Lactantius makes the claim that ‘even the memory of his name was erased’ (etiam memoriae nominis eius erasa sunt, 3.2). He explains that this was due to the severity of the Senate’s campaign against the disgraced emperor’s nomen: they had reaped their vengeance on inscriptions (titwli) bearing his name so that no traces survived, thus wiping Domitian from the monumental landscape of Rome.
The imperial name as it appeared on inscriptions was seen to possess an associative power akin to that of imperial imagines as the embodiment of the emperor’s or empresses’ office and identity. Accordingly, assaults inflicted on imperial titles and names through attacks and erasures inflicted on pre-existing inscriptions were a key method by which a ruler’s shift from honoured to dishonoured could be marked. In the timeframe which this book examines, such attacks are the most extensive body of surviving material for tracing the effects of political disgrace. Consequently, epigraphy forms the evidential backbone of the four case studies examined in this book.
Erasing Inscriptions
The tendency of ancient literary sources to focus on image abuse, combined with the seemingly insurmountable quantity and geographical extent of surviving inscriptions, has limited the interpretative possibilities of epigraphic evidence. This is compounded by the fact that many catalogues, particularly older volumes, do not consistently record whether inscriptions have been erased. This modern impulse to restore material, or record it how it was originally ‘intended’, is also a common barrier to our understanding of mutilated portraiture.!°* It overlooks the fact that these modifications are a crucial aspect of the object’s story. When erasures are recorded, the method used, or effect this created, is not always specified. The manner of erasure—for example: is the name still legible? How much skill was involved in its removal?—can provide important clues as to the motivations behind such measures, or the individuals who carried them out. The prevalence of online epigraphic databases with photographs has gone a long way to remedying this issue, though it can still be a challenge to capture details such as the surface textures left by alterations.
There are many unanswered questions concerning practices of erasing and altering texts. An obvious issue is the differentiation between ancient motivations for modifying texts, which were not only carried out as a result of political disgrace, but also for reasons of economy, to recycle material, or to make corrections.!°° The new appreciation of ancient attitudes towards reuse has demonstrated the importance of understanding the afterlife of monuments. Rather than simply being erected and ignored, dedications could be actively re-evaluated and changed over time.!°° In the case of imperial dedications, they could be adapted to fit rapidly changing political circumstances, sometimes on multiple occasions. Such modifications could be positive. Examples survive from the period this book examines where an emperor has been ‘upgraded’ on a pre-existing dedication, such as changing his title from ‘Caesar’ to ‘Augustus’ after he had risen to the senior imperial office.!°” However, by far, the most common form of modification was negative: erasures or attacks designed to assault a ruler’s name, and therefore his identity and mumen, and to negate the position of authority and respect which the original inscription claimed he held.
This practice epitomised the contradictions which were inherent in measures targeting political memorialisation, since the removal of the disgraced individual’s name drew more attention to it through visible mutilation or absence.!°° Materiality and context were central to this, since the erased text might remain in its original environment, actively shaping the understanding and opinions of viewers.!°? It is possible that some dedications were removed from view, turned around or even completely destroyed in order to make an individual’s presence disappear,!!° but an erasure created a different effect. In most cases, it left a visible scar on an inscription’s surface which would be understood as a symbolic blot of infamy.!!! A handful of inscriptions survive from the period this book examines where an emperor’s name has been erased so thoroughly that we cannot say for certain who was honoured, though the identity is more likely to have been known by ancient viewers who were familiar with the original dedication.!!2 However, the fact that the majority of such names are still legible over one and a half thousand years after they were altered, or can be identified with relative ease from an inscription’s context, is a testament to how such modifications were not concerned with forgetting but with advertising the victim’s dishonoured status.
We cannot know for certain who was responsible for carrying out such attacks, though a close examination of the methods used can shed some light.!!? The surviving evidence demonstrates a wide variety of techniques, from the rough or smooth removal of the stone’s surface, to vandalising, where lines or gouges were struck across the offending letters, to incisions which blurred the outline of texts, to meticulously executed erasures, where the remaining inscription was carefully modified in order to make the intervention appear as seamless as physically possible. Each approach would have created a distinctive effect in the context of its execution, as well as requiring differing levels of time, effort, resources, and skill.
Targeting an emperor would have also called for only a relatively basic grasp of literacy, since both Latin and Greek inscriptions tended to be formulaic, and imperial names and titles were generally the most prominent and easily identifiable parts of an inscription, usually featured first, and in some cases differentiated by colour.!!* Since a political system with multiple rulers was a characteristic feature of the later empire, it is common for inscribed dedications from this time to honour imperial groupings which consist of two, three, four, or even five or six honorands. This created a scenario where one, two, or occasionally three or four, imperial names have been erased, but the other names left untouched, leaving the disgraced name juxtaposed against those of the still-honoured emperors. This phenomenon further underlines the potential of late antique material for opening new angles in our understanding of these practices.
A number of chronological, geographical, and practical trends can be identified in epigraphical erasures. Crespo Pérez, who has surveyed all published Latin and Greek inscriptions which exhibit politically-motivated erasures, revealed a spike of activity under the Severan dynasty, which corresponds to a peak in general epigraphic habit.!!5 The early fourth century represents the second highest quantity of epigraphic erasures. Crespo Pérez has also identified regional variations which remain constant from the first to fourth centuries, such as comparatively higher instances in Italy and Africa, and lower rates in eastern provinces.!!° The function and context of an inscription certainly played an important role in whether or not it was erased. The erasure of an emperor’s name on a building dedication was different from, for example, its erasure on a dedication in a religious sanctuary, or a milestone besides a road outside a city.!!7 Those set up in recent memory were generally most vulnerable. The erasure of imperial names where they appear as part of consular dating formulas is rare, particularly on tomb epitaphs.!!® Of the four case studies examined in this book, the proportion of inscriptions where an individual’s name has been erased ranges from just over a quarter at the highest, to less than ten per cent at the lowest.
Milestones
Milestones—the typically columnar stones which, by definition, marked every mile of each major road of the empire—have sometimes been overlooked in favour of other forms of epigraphic dedication. An obvious explanation for this is aesthetics, as they tend to be more crudely executed than other inscriptions, coupled with the formulaic nature of their content. Another reason is that they tend to survive in poor or fragmentary conditions, since their position in between settlements has left them at a greater risk of reuse, damage, and destruction.!!® However, in recent years, there has been rise in academic interest in milestones, both in the considerable task of collating and mapping their location in different regions, and in appreciating their historical value as expressions of imperial ideology.!*°
Milestones are an important source in this book, since they represent a significant proportion of the surviving epigraphic evidence in both Greek and Latin for fourth-century emperors: from sixty-five per cent in the case of Maximian to eighty per cent in the case of Magnentius. The late third and early fourth centuries mark the apex of milestone production, with more surviving from the tetrarchic period than any other era of Roman history.!*! Originally practical objects which marked distance and direction between settlements, from the early imperial period they started to be used to commemorate building or repair work undertaken by an emperor. By the late third century, milestones generally served as honorific dedications with imperial names in the dative, expressions of imperial legitimacy and territorial control. Their erection has been identified as marking the presence of an emperor in a region, or celebrating his accession as a vote of loyalty, or commemorating imperial anniversaries. !?7
Campaigns of milestone production provide valuable evidence for political partnerships whose significance might be overlooked with the benefit of hindsight, such as the treaty between Constantine and Maximian in Gaul in 307 (examined in chapter two), or the reinforced alliance between Constantine and Licinius in 317 (discussed in chapter three).
Imperial names were erased on milestones, though the proportion is notably lower than other forms of epigraphic dedication.!7° The reason for this is not entirely clear, though it could be explained by their comparative lack of prominence, or their position outside of urban centres. Another important consideration is their different patterns of reuse. It was extremely common for milestones to be inscribed with new dedications which could overlap older ones, sometimes multiple times, resulting in erasures and palimpsests which cannot be attributed to political attacks. !?4 Despite these complexities, this book emphasises their potential as sources to trace reactions to political change in environments outside of cities.
A Note on Epigraphic Methodology
Each of this book’s four case studies is supported by an index of epigraphic material, compiled using three online databases, the ClaussSlaby Epigraphik-Datenbank, the Packard Humanities Institute’s Searchable Greek Inscriptions, and the database created in 2012 as a result of Oxford University’s Last Statues of Antiquity project, directed by R. R. R. Smith and Bryan Ward-Perkins.!?5 These online resources were supplemented by a variety of epigraphic publications, such as the journals L’Année épigraphique (AE) and Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG), as well as a range of more geographically focused catalogues and articles. In order to aid the reader’s navigation of the large volume of evidence drawn upon in the first three case studies, the material is tabulated in appendices at the end of the book. In the interests of space, only erased inscriptions are included.
In each case study, I separate milestones from other forms of dedications because their high volume and lower erasure rate can distort the data significantly. This creates a second group which includes all other forms of dedication, including statue bases, building inscriptions, plaques, inscribed edicts, and altars, and also a small number of bronze documents such as military diplomas. I divide all these inscriptions into three categories: unerased, erased, and uncertain, the last of which acknowledges the considerable quantity of inscriptions where, due to their fragmentary state, it is now impossible to conclusively say whether an emperor’s name has been attacked or left untouched. Latin, Greek, and some bilingual inscriptions are included, though it should be noted that Greek texts account for a comparatively small proportion of the material in this period. This reflects their confinement to Greek-speaking areas such as the Balkans, Greece, Asia Minor, and the Near East, as well as wider shifts in epigraphic habit from the Diocletianic reforms of the late third century onwards, leading to a rise of Latin inscriptions in regions where Greek was the most common language.!7°
The purpose of these indexes is not to provide an exhaustive catalogue of all surviving inscriptions where the individual in question appears, but rather to gain a greater understanding of the phenomenon of epigraphic erasure in the broadest possible sense, including the numbers involved and their geographical distribution. This approach allows a discussion of regional variations in treatment, as well as illustrating the large quantity of unerased material. Following this broader overview, I subject the erased inscriptions to a closer examination, supported by the appendices which provide additional details, such as the nature and function of inscriptions, their provincial and urban contexts, and the erasure techniques employed.
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