Chapter 9 re-examines Hittite imperial decline and collapse in the light of two post-collapse communities and their divergent engagement with, and rejection of, its material and ideological heritage. What comes after political collapse, what is abandoned, and what continues to be re-produced in the generations that follow illuminate critical facets of imperial practice and structure on the one hand, and spotlight decisions and processes that contributed to political disintegration on the other.

Chapter 6 examines the tensions between imperial rhetoric, the arresting symbolism of natural boundary markers, and the political ambiguities of routine border practice along its most distant edges in eastern Anatolia and northern Syria.

The practice in provincial towns of raising statues to emperors is often interpreted as a mode of communication between emperors and subjects, whether as top-down distribution of imperial ideology or as from-below declarations of loyalty to the regime. This chapter explores ways in which imperial statues communicated vertically, on the initiative of locals and with local aims. Using inscribed statue bases from Roman North Africa, it describes how imperial honorific monuments were exploited for the career purposes of local elites, and accompanied significant advancements by both individuals and communities. Imperial monuments and priesthoods became indispensable tokens of local standing, displaying and confirming the local powers that be. They were consequently much desired, and access to them could be opened or closed as it suited the aims of the imperial administration. Both locals and emperors could thus exploit the imperial image – the one for their potency, the other for how demand for them fuelled local peer-to-peer competition – but without communicating directly through them.

This chapter examines monuments and objects depicting the Roman emperor as a violent agent of conquest which were produced in the eastern provinces during the first and second centuries CE. Imagery of the emperor subjugating and enslaving peoples and provinces could be found on large public buildings, such as the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, as well as on statues, coins, and terracotta votives. The creators and patrons of these imperial representations were influenced both by local (Greek, Egyptian) and by Roman concepts of rulership and artistic traditions. This desire to depict the violent treatment of foreign peoples by Roman emperors demonstrates that eastern patrons and artists sought to identify themselves with the civilised world of Rome, rather than with the subjugated barbarian ‘other’. The Roman emperor was thus envisioned as a protector of his people, and a guarantor of their safety and security. But it is probable that these images also carried a more sinister message, reminding the emperor’s subjects that he could punish them as well.

This chapter examines the role that the Roman imperial court played in the genesis of imperial imagery intended for public display. It argues that the realities of court society have implications for hypothetical reconstructions of who commissioned, designed, and approved such images: ostensibly independent sites of decision-making – ‘senate’, ‘inner circle’, ‘moneyers’, ‘emperor’ – were deeply interconnected. Furthermore, the influence and power of different individuals and groups at court ebbed and flowed, and although such changes never guaranteed particular images, they set new limits on what was possible. With controversial images, artists and their patrons could also exploit the fact that viewing is always conditioned by the viewer’s background knowledge and assumptions, so different audiences could be encouraged to see different things in the same image. A detailed case study of public images of the emperor in the presence of members of his guard units is used to illustrate how some images became more (and then less) possible over time, and how different types of viewers were invited to see varying things in the same image.

Chapter 2 approaches this process from a landscape perspective, tracing continuities and ruptures in Anatolia’s long-term settlement traditions and the more and less successful practices of an emergent centralising state institution to de-place the spatial logic of preceding centuries and the communities and political regimes they instantiated.

The preceding chapter touched on three critical events in the Pentekontaetia, the period of nearly fifty years between the defeat of the Persians in 479 BC and the beginning of Peloponnesian War in 431. These were the revolts, first, of Naxos around the year 470, the second of Thasos in the mid-460s, and, finally, that of Samos in 441–440. Athens’ suppression of each of these uprisings left its mark in the cities’ coinages – at Naxos minting ceased; at Thasos and Samos it was halted, only to resume later. The linkage between these political events and breaks in the coins’ chronologies is derived from various numismatic factors, including the evidence of hoards. In this chapter we turn to five other developments in this period in which coins enhance the written historical sources with substantial detail.

Kyzikos is a fitting polis with which to conclude this book because its coinage and two extant lead weights provide unparalleled insights into one major subject city’s relationship with Athens that we would not otherwise know about in such detail. Their coinage and the weights advertize, uniquely, as far as we know, a close relationship with Athens.