Part II moves the focus of investigation to a series of topographically transitional and politically contested landscapes. The distribution and development of these borderzones sketch a picture of Hittite sovereignty that remained contested, often uncomfortably close to the imperial heartland and throughout its lifehistory. The emergent picture is also at odds with both modern notions of territoriality, where states are neatly bounded geographical entities with clearly defined, linear borders, but also with official Hittite ideological and legal notions of sovereignty.

The transformation of physical space is a powerful technique of political production, which results in potentially wide-ranging rifts in regional social and economic practices and their networked relationships. New and old Anatolian communities, however, had to be repeatedly socialised to accept as legitimate the new regime’s claim to sovereignty. Chapter 3, therefore, examines Hittite ritual as a performance of state, its material agents, and the significance of royal movement in the production and integration of central Anatolia’s new political landscapes, and in the legitimisation of surplus extraction from it.

Imperial images have been at the heart of historical debates on Roman history for several decades. This paper reflects on the historiographical context in which these debates took place, focusing on two debates in classical studies: the discussion about ‘propaganda’, which highlights the transmission of ideology (how and why imagery was communicated), and the debate about agency (who was communicating with whom). In many ways, this volume, with its emphasis on the social dynamics of imagery, places itself in that debate. Yet, the two larger historiographical debates should themselves be contextualised, as they were heavily influenced by contemporary politics and by the introduction of two major concepts in the social sciences: ‘framing’ and ‘agenda setting’. Political and academic contexts have consistently influenced the study of Roman imperial images. It may be useful to make the importance of ‘contexts’ – geographical and chronological – more explicit. An imperial image is always an image, but only in certain contexts will it have functioned as an imperial image. It may be worthwhile to focus less on what an image is and more on how and when images function in certain ways.

Chapter 4 examines the most significant and unsettled of Hittite borderlands, the region just to the north and east of the capital city and its hinterlands, where communities called Kaska in Hittite sources engaged over centuries in varyingly hostile as well as cooperative relationships with northern settlements more closely under Hittite state control and with military and administrative agents of empire.

This chapter argues that client kings played a significant, even leading role in disseminating the images associated with the princeps and the imperium Romanum at the outskirts of the empire. Dependent rulers faced a unique challenge, as they had to pay homage to the emperor as the superior authority while maintaining and communicating their own royal prestige and local legitimacy. In the context of these intricate dynamics, client kings developed a mode of representation that reflected their authority as well as the superiority of the emperor. To this end, they adopted and adapted models from the centre of the empire for their own purposes, turning modes of imperial representation into a shared idiom of power. However, the hierarchy between emperor and dependent ruler always remained clear and was reinforced through the imperial cult. Instead of undercutting the local legitimacy of client kings, the reverence of an even higher authority, elevated beyond mortality, was used to strengthen the position of dependent rulers whose power relied on the centre’s approval.

Chapter 7 examines the practices and materials through which imperial agents sought to assert non-violent authority and how the same technologies created social and cultural spaces for resistance, rejection or collaboration.

This chapter focuses on occupational associations from Rome, Ostia, and other great harbours of the Roman west during the second and the early third century, and explores how these groups, rooted in the middling social categories, used, reacted to, and even created imperial imagery and ideology. Members of these communities met in meeting places where imperial imagery was omnipresent. Imperial imagines were a part of the decorative schemes of places where feasts and rituals celebrated the majesty of the domus Augusta. These objects fostered the politicisation of lower classes, spreading ideological conceptions of the central power and, at the same time, expressed adherence to the imperium. Associations expressed deference towards imperial power with several goals in mind. One part of their motivation was not political or ideological, but social. They aimed to appear to be honourable communities, respected because of their official recognition and their integration into civic life. The wealthiest members encouraged their peers to express loyalty towards imperial power, because political loyalism belonged to a specific habitus expected of candidates for social and civic climbing.

This piece explores what the representation of the emperor on lead tokens can reveal about the dynamics of imperial ideology formation. In particular, I explore what effect mass (re)production had on the imperial image in the Roman world. Although representations of the emperor on large media and in important locations were often tightly controlled, on small media that were mass-produced, the image of the emperor escaped the control of the imperial authorities. Paradoxically, this meant that the imperial image increased in power, gathering innumerable associations and meanings as a ‘shared’ image. Allowing the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to be co-creators of imperial ideology meant that ultimately a more personalised, and thus more powerful, connection to the emperor was generated.

In Part I of this book, I argue that imperial networks are not born hundreds or thousands of kilometres from their capital city, but at its very threshold and the landscapes that surround it. Doing away with traditional centre-periphery dichotomies, Chapters 2 and 3 examine Hittite practices of empire-making in what is generally considered to be its political heartland. The analyses presented in this section suggest that rather than the well-integrated nation-like state from which Hittite imperial ventures were launched, the central Anatolian plateau was the first and ongoing target of its imperialism as well as the region most profoundly transformed by its imperialist ventures further afield.

Chapters in Part III focus on the capabilities of things to produce and negotiate imperial relationships, and engage with a series of long-standing questions concerning the impetus, directionality, and mechanisms of culture change within and beyond the networks of imperial authority.

The introductory chapter explores the methodology of approaching imperial imagery, from definitions and categorisations to modes of analysis. Defining imperial imagery as imagery that relates to imperial power, the authors reject universal models that purport to encompass all aspects of the production and use of such images in favour of context-based approaches which focus on the ways in which they became embedded in local image systems. The authors single out social dynamics, a term borrowed from economics, sociology, and psychology indicating how large-scale phenomena are the sum of many individual interactions. Social dynamics gives a way to understand how and why imperial imagery was created and used in Roman society at all levels. Imperial imagery had roles to play beyond the emperor’s own sphere, and he was often neither its author nor its audience; instead, individuals used imperial images to communicate with their immediate neighbours, geographically and socially. Multiple users and viewers across the spatial and social spectrums of the empire (and beyond) brought their own experiences to imperial images, and to understand them, we must analyse them in their local contexts.

Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8 commemorates the exiled poet’s receipt of a gift of silver images of the Caesars from Rome. This paper argues, with reference to Augustan coinage and Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, that the poem deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugation to imperial iconography and highlights their role in vesting it with power. Through comic deployment of the pathetic fallacy via a naïve narrative persona, Ovid shows how, from a provincial perspective, the emperor's numen might really appear to reside in his image, placing the emperor literally in his subjects’ hands. Pont. 2.8 therefore comments more generally on the interpretive possibilities, social practices, and psychology surrounding Roman imperial images, locating their power in plural, subjective, democratic acts of creative consumption.