Glamorous intellectuals

Portraits of pepaideumenoi in the second and third centuries AD

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20071009
AutoresBarbara E Borg, Barbara Borg (0000-0002-5671-0672, autor correspondente)
Ano2004
Páginas157-178
Data de publicação2004-11-24
Open AccessSim
TipoCHAPTER
PeriódicoPaideia (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/9783110204711.157
OpenAlexW4239289349
ISBN9783110204711
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6

One of the most striking features of the Roman Empire is the importance given to the self-representation of members of the élite -and not just the élite -in statues and portrait images.Public places and buildings, as well as houses, villas, horti, and tombs, were filled with painted, sculpted, and cast portraits which could be dedicated by a city, province, collegium, friend or admirer, or a family member.The monuments themselves conveyed information about the person honoured, the reason for the dedication, his or her status, offices, virtues etc. Inscriptions, dress and posture, as well as the portrait head, all worked together to communicate their messages to the viewer.For the historian, such monuments are a highly valuable source of information about the norms and ideals on which the society was built.If it is indeed true that the strange intellectuals whom Philostratus called sophists and honoured with biographies, incorporated ideals accepted and acknowledged by the rest of the Roman élite, there should be a good chance of finding these ideals expressed in portraiture as well.Paul Zanker, in his book The Mask of Socrates, has elaborated on the much older idea that the fashion of wearing a beard, made popular by the emperor Hadrian, demonstrated an affinity with Greek philosophy on the part of the person who wore it.Zanker began with the chronological coincidence of two phenomena.On the one hand, for a Roman of the first centuries BC and AD, Greek paideia, and in particular Greek philosophy, was a somewhat precarious occupation and acceptable mainly in the realm of otium.During this same period, portraits even of known intellectuals presented the same clean-shaven and austere look as that of any other distinguished Roman citizen (fig.2). 1 This attitude changed over time, and with Hadrian (fig.56), so he argued, both intellectual occupations and wearing a full beard became acceptable not only for adult men but even for the Emperor, so that, from then on, wearing a beard became a sign of ambition in the field of Greek paideia.Moreover, the fact that beards became

Art · Art history · Portrait · Classical Antiquity Studies · History