The hallmark of the fourth-century Roman Empire was a ‘unitary bureaucratic organism’, an integrated imperial aristocracy, which had emerged under Constantine. Political reforms generated elite spatial mobility networks that spanned multiple locales across the empire, and, despite regional differences, senatorial officials came to share a distinct cultural outlook, born from the uniformity of a literary and visual culture, and were able to sustain a supra-regional institutional framework under conditions of intensifying fragmentation. After briefly introducing the global aristocracy of the late Roman Empire, this article will explore literary records of senatorial honorific dedications in the West and in the East for the period from 330 to 395 and provide a series of case studies that illustrate the perception of these inscribed monuments in specific spatial contexts.Footnote 1 The awarders of honorary statues used standardised formulas mediating the ideological world-view of the senatorial elite self-perceived as a global class. This article deals with two kinds of space: the local assemblages of which these statues were a part, and the global networks to which they testified.Footnote 2
Who were the viewers of late antique honorific statues and readers of accompanying inscriptions?Footnote 3 They can be roughly classified into two categories: late ancient statue beholders encountering them within cityscapes, sacred spaces, and in domestic contexts from the fourth to the seventh century, and inhabitants of medieval urban spaces from the eighth to the tenth century, long after the statue habit was lost, interacting with the statuary and inscribed legacy of their cities and towns in a number of ways, including observing, reading, copying, and interpreting ancient dedications.Footnote 4 Late antique spectators and medieval onlookers who appreciated urban statue and ‘written spaces’ around them demonstrate significant differences in perception even if they beheld the same monuments.Footnote 5
Both earlier and later viewers of these statues experienced them as embedded in networks of space and time, but in profoundly different ways. For the late antique beholders, they made claims about elite power on the urban scale and also constructed imperial networks of space and elite mobility which enabled them to imagine an ordered imperial οἰκουμένη that in fact never existed. To the medieval spectators, however, the ancient statues appeared more as objects of wonder. They were understood in their immediate urban contexts, tied to local history, although often inaccurately. But the place of these statues in global imperial networks became much vaguer, at times entirely detached from geographical space – as is evident from the growth in the anthologised epigram, severed even from its own physical statue.Footnote 6
If ancient dedications not only glorified their recipients, but also functioned as publicity for social, political, and spatial networks of late Roman governmental elites, accounts found in middle Byzantine – better described as the medieval Eastern Roman – patrographic attestations on the other hand mythologise the origin of ancient monuments and highlight the feelings experienced by a contemporary beholder when confronted with inscribed statuary. In this article, I will suggest some considerations about the material conditions in which late antique artworks and more specifically statues were set, staged, and perceived, their interaction with the urban contexts, the material conditions of accessibility, and the ways in which their mise-en-scène had an impact on their perception. I will argue that ancient and medieval literary evidence of the statue and epigraphic representation of Roman senatorial elites in late antique ‘honorific spaces’, as an element of how we construct the ‘grand narrative’ of empire-wide spatial mobility, is shaped by various historical experiences of viewing statuary and related epigraphy.
I begin with an overview of the impact of spatial displacement on the formation of a new trans-regional governing class.Footnote 7 Senatorial aristocrats – civil and military, traditional and new, western and eastern – feature as both statue honorands and awarders of statues, primarily in the centres of power but also in provinces. I look first at literary evidence of late antique statues in the context of their original installation that shows viewers relating to honorific monuments as part of local, urban assemblages. Second, I investigate how the statues constructed the global space of the late Roman Empire, tracing elite movement across it and the careful choice of a city to place a monument. Third, I examine senatorial statues in their local contexts in the medieval period and how they were comprehended by later interpreters whose (mis-)readings were based on cues from the monuments’ spatial position in the city. Lastly, collections of epigrams show that this understanding of a global elite becomes completely disconnected from the geographic places where they were first inscribed but still proposes an idea of imperial space. On the basis of a selection of late antique and medieval literary texts, I conclude that the statues and the honorific language of their inscriptions, by which aristocracy and rulers originally articulated and spatialised their interactions within the urban fabric and with which they proposed a spatial network of elite mobility, was primarily perceived by later viewers in their immediate spatial context. The global claims of empire persisted, but the texts that bore them were increasingly detached from the original settings and even from the material carrier of specific statue monuments.
Global aristocracy in the late Roman Empire
The late Roman Empire was a spatial phenomenon. It was the political structure that encompassed much of the European continent and Mediterranean in the unified and centralised administrative framework. During the fourth century, in a new way, aristocracies from throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world were amalgamated in one hierarchically structured institution.Footnote 8 The expansion of the senatorial order had profound dislocating effects. The formation of an expanded imperial government prompted thousands of aristocrats to leave their towns and to relocate to imperial centres, maintaining, however, ties to their home communities. The compulsion to mobility was to a great extent also a result of the official duties of the senatorial office holders such as those in the provincial administration.
This extraordinary phenomenon of supra-regional aristocracies is rarely scrutinised in existing scholarly accounts from a spatial perspective. The new institutional arrangements created new patterns of geographical and political mobility.Footnote 9 These transformations impacted aristocratic identity, charting the ways in which imperial officials conducted their relations with emperors, other representatives of trans-regional aristocracy, and the local societies from which they stemmed. Inscribed statues are key witnesses to these changes, revealing the ways in which the Roman political order was conceptualised by senatorial elites in late antiquity. Thousands of such monumental texts have survived, offering the rare opportunity to interpret statuary distribution throughout the empire by studying the spatial representation as well as sculptural portrait and epigraphic self-fashioning of the late Roman senatorial aristocracy. With a new perception of the empire as a unified world-state, the self-understanding of the imperial aristocracy had also changed.
An impressive example of the idea of an empire and its spatial organisation is the Notitia Dignitatum from the end of the fourth century, a hierarchical list of all civil and military officials for the western and eastern half of the Roman Empire, which also registered all provinces and cities in the area of responsibility of each functionary.Footnote 10 Late Roman civil post holders are listed according to their rank and respective administrative regions, with illustrations of their insignia. Military units and their places of garrison under each army commander, such as dukes on the Roman frontiers, are also depicted in accompanying graphical visualisations. The insignia in the section for duces and comites rei militaris of the Notitia are displayed in the form of maps, which feature most prominently scattered walled enclosures.Footnote 11 It is worth noting that they are rarely exact ‘maps’ of the territory in the modern sense;Footnote 12 relative hierarchy is more important than strict geographical relationships in how the different landmarks are disposed on the page.
In other ways too, imperial hierarchical lists were less about geographical and more about social relations. The lists were chiefly used to document distinctions of rank among state dignitaries in official encounters at the imperial court. As Johannes Preiser-Kapeller points out, these differences had a dual spatial dimension: on the one hand, ‘the position of rank allocated to a dignitary partly depended on the relative (strategic, economic, or religious) significance of the province or city in his area of responsibility within the framework of the empire’, while, on the other hand, ‘this rank became manifest in the relative spatial proximity of the dignitary to the emperor in court ceremonials’.Footnote 13 As opposed to the ideal of the unity and cohesion of the late Roman Empire, the changes in these lists indicate the dynamics of the socio-spatial arrangements at both scales: both in terms of the organisation of political territories and in terms of placement in processions and ceremonies. Aristocratic power and hierarchical standing of the senatorial officials relied on the proximity to the emperor and court as well as on the strength of traditional networks of patronage.Footnote 14
The dynamic social framework of spatial arrangements centred on the emperor becomes visible in aristocratic honorific dedications of the time. The spatial extent of senatorial power relied on social networks across the empire but especially on the proximity to the imperial centre. The late imperial state shared power with aristocrats, who were not synonymous with it. To rule over vast territorial expanses, as well as to safeguard military and administrative cooperation, emperors had to share power (and often land) with senatorial elites to ensure the political coherence and durability of the imperial state. We have to reckon with different strengths and qualities of senatorial networks and different densities of senatorial power. A network of concentric circles of patronage revolved around the person of the emperor and the imperial court. To understand late Roman ranks as represented in official titles, as recorded in the Notitia and in honorific inscriptions, is to grasp the dynamics of this set of relationships and networks. Thus, the spatial extent and intensity of imperial rule depended on the range and stability of networks of patronage, where elite groups had (depending on the extent of the engagement with the imperial centre) room to negotiate the extent of their integration into the imperial project.
These dynamic relationships were important both to the elites and to the emperors, who sought legitimacy for their fragile rule. As both an ideological and an administrative composition, the Notitia envisages the unified late Roman Empire at the time when it had all but disintegrated, and transfers of officials between the western and eastern courts were no longer in place after 395.Footnote 15 Both the Notitia and much of the imperial legislation and epigraphy construct an order, a united empire that encompasses the whole inhabitable world and is carefully structured by a hierarchy of officials, forming a spatial network. This ideological outlook has been linked to the figure of the emperor and the imperial court. Further, the rhetoric of the honorific inscriptions allows tracing a far-reaching shift in the public image of the emperor and the imperial aristocracy. Senators as commissioners of epigraphic texts represented the emperor no longer as a Roman magistrate, one of the senators, but as a universal ruler. Accordingly, the self-representation of the senate shifted from that of a republican elite to that of an institution whose members overcame divisions of geography, ethnicity, and culture, conceiving the space of empire as one.Footnote 16 The ideological picture of the senate as an explicitly global class is projected in the standardised language deployed by the commissioners of honorific monuments.Footnote 17 In the relationship to the emperor, both the senate of Rome and that of Constantinople had found themselves dealing with a court that (until 395) was not expected to be resident. Thus, symbols of proximity to distant emperors became manifested in the honorific dedications by aristocrats with regular frequency.
The transformation of the institutions of the imperial state in the fourth century thereby impacted the self-representation of the senatorial aristocracy as integrated into the imperial system. The evidence shows a prevailing, trans-regional tendency for senators and imperial officials to be drawn from the provincial aristocratic spectrum.Footnote 18 The experiences of office holders of provincial oligarchic origin (former curiales) in the West – above all those from Gaul – compared to an entrenched body of resident senatorial families in Rome, was much more similar to that of their eastern counterparts than has been previously thought. As in the West, the rise of ‘new men’ in the East equally demonstrates social continuity between the imperial administration, senatorial elites, and provincial oligarchies.Footnote 19 In the situation of spatial and social dislocation, a developed cosmopolitan culture, discernible from inscriptions and contemporary literary texts, served as a crucial link for the governing classes of the empire, geographically diverse though they were.
Statues in their local contexts in late antiquity
In the East, the imperial adlecti of the senate of Constantinople who rose to high ranks could be honoured with statuary dedications placed in the senate itself. The eminent rhetorician Themistius, adlected by the letter of the emperor to the Constantinopolitan senate in 355, responded with a speech of thanks (Or. 2), reciprocated by Constantius by bestowing on him statuary honours: ‘… and the bronze statue [is a reward for] this panegyric speech …’ (4 54b).Footnote 20 This bronze statue of Themistius is known to have been set up in Constantinople between 355 and 356.Footnote 21 In another speech (4) delivered in Constantinople on 1 January 357, Themistius boasts about a bronze statue which he had received for an earlier panegyric in honour of Constantius. Franz Alto Bauer has suggested that the statue was probably installed in one of the senate venues at Constantinople, as Themistius delivered this speech in a senate house and referred to the monument as if it was visible to all.Footnote 22 The statue therefore must have been a public honour put up in one of the two senate houses, either in the AugusteumFootnote 23 or in the one at the forum of Constantine,Footnote 24 with Bauer insisting on the former. Themistius’ statue in the senate thus becomes a ‘theatrical’ prop and setting (mise-en-scène) for his oration. In 357, Themistius, as the spokesman for an embassy from the senate of Constantinople, delivered an oration before Constantius at Rome. Conversely, the western senator Lucius Aurelius Avianius Symmachus, who undertook diplomatic missions including to the eastern court of Constantius in 361, was honoured with two gilded statues: one – still extant – in the Forum of Trajan in Rome and the other in Constantinople, as recorded on the base of the former.Footnote 25
Prestigious venues saw the accumulation of honorific statues near each other. Another bronze statue for Themistius, who acted for over thirty years as a senatorial leader, was set up at an unknown location in the city, probably also a senate house sometime between 361 and 384 (11).Footnote 26 He mentions it four times, thrice in conjunction with the previous statue (17.214b; 31.353a; 34.457).Footnote 27 Proconsul (358–9) and prefect (384) of Constantinople, Themistius served, in his own words, on ten embassies for the eastern senate between 355 and 384 (17.214b; 31.352c–d). Both statues were possibly set up in the same senate house where Themistius delivered his speech in praise of the emperor Theodosius (17) in 384. If the first statue was granted by Constantius, the second one was, as Themistius states, from another awarder. He served no less than five emperors from Constantius to Theodosius for some twenty-five years of his unprecedented public career. The awarder must have been one of the successive emperors, most probably Valens, which would limit the dating to the period from 364 to 378. These accumulated imperial honours embodied in the form of statue representations, which celebrated achievements of an individual senator, helped also to promote the prestige of the institution where they must have been placed, the senate of Constantinople.Footnote 28 I suggest that these late Roman senatorial monuments could be better understood as part of a general ‘panegyrical milieu’,Footnote 29 in which the public inscriptions, which, like panegyrics, ostentatiously praise both emperors (as dedicators) and imperial officials (as dedicatees), find their place in the spatial and symbolic heart of the eastern capital.
Late antique statues as constructing imperial space
Dedications to high imperial office holders set up a spatial and hierarchical relationship between the centres of power and provincial cities across the empire. Honorific statues dedicated to praetorian prefects, the most important civil senatorial office holders, recorded at the top of the officials’ list in the Notitia, were ordinarily put up in the provinces of specific prefectures which they headed. Thus, Flavius Philippus, praefectus praetorio Orientis (probably from 344 to 352)Footnote 30 and consul (in 348), received, while still in office, a series of honorary statues in a number of eastern cities under Constantius II. Philippus incurred the risks – mentioned in the imperial letter from Ephesus – related to his embassy at the camp of the usurper Magnentius, recounted by Zosimus (2.46–7). For this, he was awarded the exceptional privilege of gilt statues by the emperor’s decree (epistola), known in the original Latin from Ephesus, in optimis urbibus (‘in the most splendid cities’) in the part of the empire ruled by this emperor sometime after the battle of Mursa, either in late 351 or early 352.Footnote 31 These monuments were not a posthumous rehabilitation of the memory of Philippus, but were bestowed for loyal service, encouraging emulation of the prefect’s example. Of the six known statues for Philippus – all in the praefectura praetorio Orientis nominally under Gallus – four are attested epigraphically (Ephesus, Perge, Laodicea on the Lycus, and Chytri), while the remaining two are only documented in the literary record (Alexandria Troas and Constantinople). It is to the latter two that I now turn.
The Renaissance humanist Cyriacus of Ancona, the greatest antiquarian traveller of his time, while journeying in Asia Minor in the early fifteenth century, saw an inscribed version of Constantius’ decree in Alexandria Troas in Hellespontus.Footnote 32 Cyriacus recorded (with mistakes) seven lines of the lengthy and by that time fragmented Latin inscription that preserves an epigraphic copy of the same ‘sacred letter’ found at Ephesus and Laodicea, set up in the public space as part of the monument accompanying an honorary statue. The dedication commanded by the emperor – which is today entirely lost – was probably put up by the authorities of Alexandria Troas. Not only it is unlikely that Cyriacus could have seen the honorific statue itself at such a later date, but also the inscribed marble plate that accompanied it originally was relocated perhaps into the wall structure of some building where he copied the incomplete text from the disordered joining of several fragments. Not only was the ‘old’ inscription intelligible,Footnote 33 even in its damaged state, with the significant parts of the text missing or partly damaged; well-chiselled late Roman monumental capitals in the first place must have attracted the epigraphist’s attention, who copied it despite it being broken and lacunary. A fragmentary inscription for the high imperial official, as seen more than a millennium after its erection, must have stood out on account of its visibility among the rest of the city’s epigraphic monuments.
As another imperial communication (oratio ad senatum) from Perge indicates,Footnote 34 Constantinople was to initiate a series of statue dedications for Philippus, who was among the founding members of its senate. It suggests that the senator started his career under Constantine as curator palatii in the service of Constantius Caesar. The imperial letter commands the first statue to be specifically erected in the city where the senate resided, without specifying the location, however. By erecting the statue, Constantinople set the example that other cities had to follow in putting up their own monuments to the prefect of the East. An instance of a traditional pattern known from the early empire, in which important texts were ordered to be inscribed and displayed in multiple locations, the honorific monuments were intended to be viewed by separate audiences in multiple, single locations in the first place. But travellers across the eastern part of the empire would be confronted with the prefect’s statues again and again, testifying to the global reach of Philippus’ (and, by implication, Constantius’) power.Footnote 35
The order of the imperial oratio is corroborated by a literary testimony by John Lydus (De mag. 2.9.6) of a statue of Philippus, praetorian prefect, said to stand at Chalcedon:Footnote 36 ‘In the beginning the prefect used to be girded with a sword since he had also the power over weaponry and this can be ascertained at present with one’s very eyes if, that is, anyone, being a lover of antiquity, should cross over to Calchedon [sic] and closely observe the statue of the prefect Philippus.’Footnote 37 It is however not entirely clear whether this statue is the one intended for the eastern capital. The imperial letter to the senate found in Perge together with a host of statues across the prefecture of the Orient construct a spatial network of power relationships.
Senatorial statues also demonstrate elite mobility around the empire. A literary reference to a bronze statue erected for a native of Africa, Sextus Aurelius Victor, famous historian and governor of the province of Pannonia Secunda, comes from Ammianus Marcellinus.Footnote 38 The historian mentions (21.10.6) that the emperor Julian on campaign in the Balkan region had stayed at Naissus: ‘There he made Victor, the writer of history, whom he had seen at Sirmium and had bidden to come from there, consular governor of Pannonia Secunda, and honoured him with a statue in bronze.’Footnote 39 While the record suggests the date of 361, it is not specific about the location of the statue. Ulrich Gehn speculates that the context in which the statue is recorded makes it probable that it was set up in Sirmium, the provincial capital of Pannonia Secunda of which Victor was appointed governor, but it cannot be excluded that it was put up in Naissus where the imperial audience takes place, or even in Rome.Footnote 40 Even if the appointment to the governorship of Pannonia Secunda was made at Naissus, Gehn thinks that it is unlikely that the statue was set up there as the city lies in the province of Dacia Mediterranea, and it was highly exceptional for provincial governors to be honoured outside their provinces.Footnote 41 Heike Niquet has argued that the statue was erected in the Forum of Trajan,Footnote 42 a popular site for prestigious bronze statuary for senatorial aristocrats where several statues to men of letters were also set up,Footnote 43 and where Ammianus might have seen it. Yet, the most probable location would be the capital of the province where Victor was appointed as consularis. Statues for governors, civic or imperial commissions, were commonly set up in city fora or similar prominent urban locations.
Dedicated by provincial cities and their officials, new honours were ordinarily placed alongside older statues in the vicinity, usually in the most prestigious urban locations crowded with monuments. This was certainly the case in the Italian cities, where there was a considerable statue population of urban fora. The Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus describes (De redito suo 1.575–8), with sentimental feeling, as appropriate to an elegy, the honorific inscription on the statue dedicated to his father, the high court official Claudius Lachanius, which he saw with his own eyes in the forum of the Tuscan town of Pisa: ‘Here [at Pisa] was shown to me the statue of my revered father, erected by the Pisans in their market-place. The honour done to my lost parent made me weep: tears of a saddened joy wet my cheeks with their flow.’Footnote 44 In the central urban location the monument to the former governor must have been one among many others, albeit not preserved in the epigraphic record.
Lachanius, who had held the offices of comes sacrarum largitionum and quaestor, belonged to the group of landowners from Aquitaine, who pursued careers in the imperial government. The poet continues (1.579–86) with recollection of the long and successful career of his father first in the provincial administration, then in the palatine bureaucracy, and lastly holding the chief administrative urban post: ‘For my father once was governor of the land of Tuscany and administered the jurisdiction assigned to the six fasces. After he had passed through many offices, he used to tell, I can recall, that his governorship of Tuscany had been more to his liking than any.’Footnote 45
Franz Alto Bauer compares Rutilius’ record to the circulation of the verse inscriptions in the East. According to him, if Libanius (Ep. 66) only indicates that it was customary to exchange statue epigrams in his time, the testimony of Rutilius (1.586–90) seems to attest to their reception and literary rework: ‘Nor was he mistaken, being an equal favourite with those whom he esteemed: their mutual regard inscribes in verse (canit) undying gratitude, and old men who can remember him make known to their sons how firm of purpose he was and at the same time how kindly.’Footnote 46 The poet presumably quotes from the inscription the cursus honorum of his father, who was first consularis Tusciae et Umbriae, then comes sacrarum largitionum, quaestor sacri palatii, and finally praefectus urbi Romae (1.583–6):Footnote 47 ‘For neither the management of the sacred largesses, important though it be, nor the authority of a quaestor had brought him more pleasure. His affection, inclining more towards the Tuscans, did not hesitate to give an inferior place, if piety lets it be said, even to his prefecture in Rome.’Footnote 48 The author, however, neither quotes the entire cursus honorum directly from the inscription, nor was the Pisan inscription in the literary form of an epigram. The literary record confirms the statue dedication for Lachanius as consularis Tusciae et Umbriae set up in the forum of one of the Tuscan towns at about 389.Footnote 49 At court, Lachanius served as comes sacrarum largitionum and quaestor of Valentinian II in 389 or of Theodosius I and Arcadius in 392–5, before reaching the (unspecified) urban prefecture, following a mixed career path which had become especially attractive for the traditional aristocracy since Gratian onwards.Footnote 50 The statue attesting to senatorial mobility is said to have been erected by the Pisans, but it is not specified whether this was actually decided or carried out by the ordo or the populus.
Latin honorific inscriptions still followed the western tradition of diligently citing offices of a honorand in prose (cursus honorum inscriptions), which had already for centuries engaged with the reality of elite movement across large geographies.Footnote 51 Predating his court offices and city prefecture, Lachanius’ inscription probably praised his good deeds (the formula ob merita) for a maximum of two years, the average length of a provincial governorship.Footnote 52 By the end of the fourth century governors could receive honorific statues only when they were already out of office. Rutilius seems to return to the statue inscription only once again when he emphasises that at the end of his career what his father liked most was his earliest undertakings in Etruria for which he received recognition from the grateful subjects. The Pisan statue was a public honour in the city’s most conspicuous site, the forum, while on retirement Lachanius probably returned to south-western Gaul, from where he originated. This example demonstrates how the location of the statue matters on a larger scale, as it shows the son where his father first served, as well as how late antique viewers understood the cursus inscriptions as constructing ordered, hierarchical space of global elite movement.
Late antique statues in their local contexts in the middle Byzantine period
Evidence from medieval Constantinople shows that a very different relationship developed between late antique statues and their new viewers. The medieval interpreters used the spatial context of late antique statues to decode their meanings. In the early years of Constantine’s foundation of Constantinople, sometime between 330 and 337, the senator Eleutherius received supposedly an honorific statue in the city’s eponymous harbour. A passage from the Patria (2.63), a tenth-century account of Constantinople, guiding its reader through the history and monuments of the Byzantine imperial capital, reads as follows: ‘On Eleutherios. The harbor of Eleutherios was built by Constantine the Great. A stone statue of the a secretis Eleutherios stood there, bearing a basket on his shoulders and a shovel in his hand, all of stone.’Footnote 53 The other evidence for this statue is another passage in the Patria mixing historical facts with fiction and urban legends (3.91): ‘Constantine the Great built the harbor of Eleutherios, when he also built the city. And the patrician Eleutherios assisted him with the construction. A marble statue of Eleutherios stood at the harbor, holding a basket and a shovel.’Footnote 54
The information in the Patria is derived from the Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai, an early eighth-century account of Constantinople’s monuments.Footnote 55 However, the harbour of Eleutherius, allegedly filled with the rubble from the newly built forum of Theodosius in the late fourth century, is not mentioned in the Parastaseis and is only known from this tenth-century source. Its location – if it ever existed – is unknown,Footnote 56 and the identity of Eleutherius, allegedly the donor of the harbour, who is said to have been imperial secretary (Patria 2.63) and patricius (3.91) under Constantine, is obscure. No senator of this name is known in the earlier fourth century. Moreover, the title a secretis attributed to Eleutherius is not recorded before the fifth century.
This example of the Patria is most fantastical and unreliable as it is difficult to imagine an ancient honorific statue of the highest-ranking senator carrying a basket and a shovel (φέρουσα πτύον καὶ ἑξακάνθηλον).Footnote 57 At the same time, the omnipresence of statuary accompanied by inscriptions in the late antique city, the centre of the statue habit, is beyond doubt. Many ancient and late antique inscriptions were still visible in situ in the early and middle Byzantine periods. Constantinople, in particular, possessed up to the Fourth Crusade numerous statues and other artworks, most of which were certainly equipped with inscriptions, as shown by the Parastaseis and Patria. Although it is possible that this is a description of a Hellenistic statue, it could not have been the statue to the Constantinian official put up in the 330s. While a real statue is perhaps documented in this literary record, it is highly implausible that it could have been an honorific statue for Eleutherius, if he ever existed. The awarder of the dedication is not recorded.
The fact that the western senators played a role in the foundation of the city is uncontested, but the Patria’s detailed references and catalogues of names are meant to produce the ‘effect of reality’ and thus cannot be taken for granted. Another mythical literary account of a statue to Eleutherius, alongside eight other statues, supposedly erected by Constantine in the Constantinopolitan ‘Smyrnion’ (330–7), is furnished by the Parastaseis (7) (and Patria (2.93)):
The place called Smyrnion near the Tetradesion portico has below the ground, in the part ten fathoms to the north, nine statues (stelai), near the church of St Theodore. Of these statues (stelai), four are of Constantine the Great and his wife Fausta, and Hilarion the praepositus, and his third son, also named Constantine [sic].Footnote 58
The statues in this account (Parastaseis 7) were supposedly set up by Constantine to remind him of the people he had unjustly executed:
The remaining five statues (stelai) are of Severus, Harmatius, Zeuxippus, Viglentius the builder of <Ta Viglentia> and Eleutherius who built the palace at the Senate. All these people were executed by the sword and having been commemorated in statues (stelothenta) by him who had wronged them, they were implored with prayers for forgiveness by the sinner.Footnote 59
Besides his wife Fausta and son Crispus – here wrongly named ‘Constantine’ – whom he indeed ordered to be killed, they reportedly included a group of people whose very existence is highly dubious. Eleutherius, whose statue, together with four others (Severus, Harmatius, Zeuxippus, and Viglentius), is said (Parastaseis 7) to have been buried by Arians in the Tetradesion: ‘Both his own children and many of their descendants took over this duty until the time of Valens the Arian. And the Arians, unable to endure their defeat by Constantine, buried them in the Tetradesion portico mentioned above near <the church of> S. Theodore until the present day.’Footnote 60 Eleutherius is credited by the Parastaseis and Patria with building of the palace near the senate and by the Patria with the supposed construction of a harbour known as the Eleutheriou. But the etymology is almost certainly fictional. The statue and house (Patria 3.91) of Eleutherius reportedly stood near this harbour. The statue supposedly erected between 330 and 337 was allegedly buried under the Smyrnion, close to the church of Theodorus. It is only known from this source and its location within the city is uncertain.Footnote 61 The Smyrnion was in the proximity of the ‘embolos of Tetradisius’, which is probably identical with the octagonal colonnaded hall called the tetradesion octagonon, mentioned by the Patria (3.31), on the Mese, between the basilica (ta Basiliskou) and Hagia Sophia.Footnote 62
The Parastaseis (7) and Patria (2.93) accounts also tell of a statue of praepositus Hilarion among the nine statues supposedly erected by Constantine I in the Smyrnion. Among the six high-ranking magistrates mentioned in the literary record, Hilarion, who might have been Constantinian praepositus sacri cubiculi,Footnote 63 is reported to receive a statue, in a group with Constantine I, Fausta, and Constantine II (probably wrongly named instead of Crispus).Footnote 64 It is at its most implausible and unreliable as the four statues in such account were supposedly set up by Constantine to remind him of people he had unjustly killed. Timothy Barnes assumes that the name and office were presumably on a genuine statue, although the identity and the date are uncertain.Footnote 65 Unlike other officials in the report, Hilarion is mentioned together with the imperial honorands and in relation to them. The difference with the other senators named is crucial: he is said to have been a court official. However, this group of the palatine administration (domestici) is not known to be honoured with statue dedications until the end of the fourth century.Footnote 66 As the literary record of a statue honouring a eunuch is not epigraphically corroborated for this period, the account of a dynastic statuary group that allegedly included the praepositus alongside Constantine, his wife, and their son is fantastical.Footnote 67
The remaining five officials are all legendary builders in Constantinople. All of them gave their names to city quarters: they appear to have been randomly put together and linked with the story of being all put to death unjustly.Footnote 68 Besides the above-mentioned Eleutherius, to whom two building projects are ascribed by the Parastaseis, ‘Zeuxippus’ is a name derived from the popular public baths near the Hippodrome, and Viglentius is said to have allegedly constructed the Viglentia that were in fact built by Viglentia, mother of the emperor Justin II.Footnote 69 Lastly, both Parastaseis and Patria speak of statues to Severus and Harmatius supposedly located in the same place. This account is almost certainly spurious, as the two individuals are not attested elsewhere. The Patria relates (3.108) that a city quarter was named after Severus, patrician and adopted brother of the seventh-century emperor Constans II. The Severianae may have also taken their name from Severus.Footnote 70 The account of a statue of Harmatius is only marginally less eccentric. Harmatius was an eponymous founder of the Armatiou quarter in the tenth district of the city, according to the Patria (1.71). If Severus and Harmatius are rightly identified, their monuments could not have existed in the period of 330–7. At any rate, the inclusion of these officials in the group of members of the imperial family is improbable. These (mis-)identifications represent popular versions or oral traditions that grew around statues.
Lastly, the Parastaseis also record three statues of other high-ranking officials – quaestor Galenus, prefect Julian, and consular Serapius – reportedly set up at Hagia Sophia alongside honorific imperial monuments:Footnote 71
Ἐν τῇ μεγάλῃ ἐκκλησίᾳ τῇ νῦν ὀνομαζομένῃ ἁγίᾳ Σοφίᾳ στῆλαι ἀφῃρέθησαν υκζ΄, αἱ πλεῖαι μὲν Ἑλλήνων ὑπάρχουσαι· … Ἐκ δὲ τῶν Χριστιανῶν ὀλίγαι μὲν ὡσεὶ π΄· καὶ δέον ἐκ τῶν πολλῶν ὀλίγας μνημονεῦσαι·Κωνσταντίνου, Κωνσταντίου, Κώνσταντος, Γαληνοῦ κυαίστορος, (Ἰουλιανοῦ Καίσαρος καὶ ἑτέρου Ἰουλιανοῦ ἐπάρχου), Λικινίου Αὐγούστου, Οὐαλεντινιανοῦ καὶ Θεοδοσίου καὶ Ἀρκαδίου τοῦ ὑιοῦ αὐτοῦ, Σεραπίωνος ὑπατικοῦ καὶ Ἑλένης μητρὸς Κωνσταντίνου τρεῖς· ἡ μὲν μία πορφυρᾶ διὰ μαρμάρων, ἡ δὲ ἑτέρα διὰ ψηφίδων ἀργυρῶν ἐν χαλκῷ κίονι καὶ ἡ ἄλλη ἐλεφαντώδης Κύπρου ῥήτορος προσενέγκαντος· ἅστινας Ἰουστινιαὸς μερίσας τῇ πόλει τὸν ναὸν τὸν μέγιστον ἀνεγείρει μετὰ πίστεως καὶ πόνου. Οἱ δὲ πεπειραμένοι τῶν προειρημένων περιερχόμενοι τὴν πόλιν καὶ ξητοῦντες εὑρήσουσιν οὐκ ὀλίγας.
Parastaseis 11
At the Great Church which is now called S. Sophia, 427 statues (stelai) were removed, most of them of pagans. … There were only a few of Christians, about eighty. Out of the many it is worth mentioning a few: Constantine, Constantius, Constans, Galen the quaestor, <Julian Caesar and another Julian, the eparch>, Licinius Augustus, Valentinian and Theodosius and Arcadius [and] his son, Serapio the governor, and three of Helena, the mother of Constantine; one of porphyry and [other] marbles, another with silver inlay on a bronze column and the other of ivory, given by Cyprus the rhetor. These statues Justinian distributed about the city when he built the Great Church with faith and effort. Those who know the foregoing find a good number of them if they go round the city and look for them.Footnote 72
These monuments would also date to the fourth century, yet none of the honorands can be identified. The Parastaseis reports that Justinian relocated statues from the area of St Sophia and reinstalled them around the city, while rebuilding the church.Footnote 73 The text names statues ‘of Christians’ among the pagan majority.Footnote 74 The Parastaseis suggests no pre-Justinianic location for this exaggerated number of statues, either originally set up there or formerly transferred, despite two previous buildings from the fourth and early fifth century. If there is any historical kernel in this report, Sarah Bassett has proposed that the statues must have stood to the south, on the Augustaion square.Footnote 75 But the account in the Parastaseis of the three non-imperial statues once allegedly at St Sophia is unreliable. Setting imperial and non-imperial statues at the same site would also be uncommon. The patrographic literature provides contemporary evidence that medieval viewers were (mis)interpreting late antique monuments, based on the statues’ spatial relationship to each other.
Statues in a global context and their interpreters
The experience of beholding a single statue featuring in the scattered literary records contrasts sharply with the experience of viewing statuary assemblages. Similarly, reading individual inscriptions from statue bases differs significantly from curated collections of epigrams decoupled from the original context of their production. Verse inscriptions honouring governors were more common in the Greek Roman Empire. Some epigrams composed for senatorial officials are only known from the Greek Anthology but were once legible on statue bases throughout the Greek-speaking East.Footnote 76 Honorific verse dedications for high-ranking imperial functionaries feature in the Greek East from the fourth to the sixth century, and without further dating criteria, one cannot assign a closer date to many of those monuments. It is most likely, however, that many were set up in the fourth or earlier fifth century, when the statue habit was still in place in the eastern cities. Late antique inscriptional epigrams, defined by their metre and lexicon, created to serve as dedications on monuments, were later copied from the statue bases, collected together, and transmitted in anthologies for circulation as reading material for pleasure, in contrast to their earlier honorific function.Footnote 77 Three examples of honorific epigrams for high-ranking honorands in the provincial government copied by the authors of the Anthology from the genuine dedications suffice to demonstrate this practice.
One is an epigram (42) preserved in the Planudean Anthology which originally accompanied a statue of Theodosius, governor (proconsul) of Asia.Footnote 78 It was set up in Smyrna, one of the largest and noblest cities of the province. Two elegiac distichs read: ‘The proconsul (ἀνθύπατος) Theodosius, great in council, leader of Asia (Ἀσίδος ἀρχόν), we have set up in a marble statue (εἰκόνι μαρμαρέῃ) because he awakened Smyrna and led it, much sung about, into the light again with marvelous works.’Footnote 79 The monument was most probably decreed by the city of Smyrna, although the awarder is not recorded in the inscription. The honorand is celebrated by the Smyrnans for his good counsel and his virtue as a governor. Theodosius’ office is explicitly mentioned in the text (v. 2), and he is additionally styled ‘leader of Asia’ (v. 1). He is also celebrated for his construction activities (vv. 3–4) in his restoration of Smyrna, perhaps after an earthquake.
Another literary record of a statue, likewise in Smyrna, in the Planudean Anthology, is the epigram (34) under the name of Theodoretus grammaticus: ‘On the statue of the office holder (ἄρχων) Philippus in Smyrna. From Philadelphia this reward [was sent to] Philippus. Note how the city remembers [his] justice (εὐνομία)’.Footnote 80 Philippus, the honorand, just like Theodosius, is styled ‘archon’, the Greek term often used for provincial governors. Gehn suggests that Philippus also was a governor (proconsul) of Asia, as the statue was awarded by another city in the province, Philadelphia (modern Alaşehir), while the rhetoric of justice and remembrance is indicative of high imperial office holders and provincial governors who acted as judges in particular. The Philadelphians presented to Philippus a statue as a reward for his just administration. It is unknown whether Theodoret copied the epigram from a statue base which he saw in Smyrna, or authored the poem based on the text of the inscription he found.Footnote 81
Yet another testimony of a statue, honouring Nicolaus, allegedly patriarch of Alexandria, is preserved in the literary record of the Planudean Anthology (22). An elegiac couplet reads: ‘To the same. Gregorius set up the image of Nicolaus, a pillar of justice (εὐνομία), and a donation testifying to his temperance (σωφροσύνη)’.Footnote 82 Gehn suggest Constantinople as a possible provenance since numerous epigrams in the Anthology can be located there, but this cannot be ascertained, and the lexical choice points to a honorand in the regional administration. The elegiac distich as a verse metre is frequent in late antique honorific inscriptions, but it would be uncommon in the middle Byzantine era. The epigram must refer to a statue as it uses vocabulary associated with statue dedications (στήλη, εἰκών, ἀνάθημα, and ἵστημι). The allusions to justice and temperance correspond to those in the epigrams to late Roman governors. If Nicolaus was most probably a high imperial office holder in the provincial administration (provincial governor, vicar, or praetorian prefect), nothing is known of Gregorius. These epigrams do not mention a location, but must have been put up in the public space of the cities. While verse inscriptions to high imperial magistrates flourished in the Greek East throughout late antique period, provincial statue dedications become sporadic after the mid-fifth century. In the Anthology epigram becomes an honorific form detached from place albeit still posing an abstract ideal of global empire. The gathering of various epigrams from the statue bases meant the creation of ‘virtual statue collections’ divorced from a concrete material counterpart, a gallery of great men, the spectator of which could no longer be assumed to know who they had been and why they had been worth representing.
The perception of late antique portrait statuary and its inscribed bases
Honorific statues in their local spatial settings reveal the ways in which members of the senatorial order constructed their relationship with the imperial court, senate, and the broader public of dedicatees in the fourth-century Roman Empire. Themistius reveals his perception of his own two statues awarded to him on the imperial command as articulated in his public orations. These monuments publicising the rewards of loyal service to the emperors were probably placed in the senate alongside others intending to distinguish its members and encourage imperial appointees to emulate them. In his oration on the election to the city prefecture (17), given in front of the senate of Constantinople, Themistius praises Theodosius who appointed him and acknowledges that, on the imperial scale, the formal honour attached to the prefecture ranks much higher than any rewards he had previously received from the emperors, including the statues, which he could point out to his audience. While acting as urban prefect delivering the speech concerning his presidency of the senate (31), addressed as ‘conscript fathers’, he again could call to witness the honorific monuments visible to his listeners in the curia to remind them of his good deeds as memorialised in sculpture. Ultimately, Themistius’ self-defence against criticisms of his prefecture after he had left office (34) – whose intended audience was again the same senate – justifies the received double statue honour as he used his paideia for the common good.
The elusive traces in both late antique and medieval literary accounts also furnish fragments of historical evidence of how the memory of the members of the senatorial order was created, reshaped, and perceived through inscribed statuary dedications constructing imperial space. Many inscriptions highlight the eternalisation of the memory of the honorand by means of statues erected to serve as an example to follow for future generations, as Rutilius explicitly suggests. Lydus testifies that the name of praetorian prefect had been remembered almost two hundred years after his death as his statue was still standing in the sixth century. Despite the obscure end of Philippus’ career, the statue dedicated to him by the emperor in the vicinity of Constantinople was preserved for centuries, as a testimony of his loyalty to the emperor, and the prefect’s eminent descendants may have contributed to the perpetuation of his memory. For Lydus, the standing monument serves as a reminder not only of Philippus’ fame, but also of the glory of the prefectorial office itself, displaying the attributes of the uniform dress of the highest-ranking official in the service of the empire. Ammianus possibly acknowledges the achievements of his fellow historian when he refers (21.10.6) to the statue honour commanded by the emperor for Victor, ‘a man who must be emulated for his sobriety, who became prefect of the city much later’.Footnote 83 The context in which the statue is mentioned indicates that it was put up in connection with Victor’s newly acquired governorship and mobility required by this office. Sobriety here possesses the connotation of self-restraint and seriousness, which are the virtues for which provincial governors in the regional administration of the empire are often praised in local honorific dedications.
Rutilius records his own emotional reaction upon seeing the monument awarded to his father. In his words, the statue dedicated by the grateful provincials to his now long deceased parent made him shed tears of joy. It evoked the memory of his father’s long and glorious imperial aristocratic career, which started with the governorship of Tuscany. The inscription in the city forum, the most prestigious urban location – as read by Lachanius’ learned son almost three decades after it had been put up – memorialises the Pisans’ benefactor, who is remembered as their governor for his outstanding virtues. Public dedications by the provincial cities, their institutions and officials, were ordinarily set up at the decree of the assembly as a reward for governors’ services at the end of their term in office. Rutilius had no difficulty in reading the script: the legibility of the dedicatory inscription and the visibility of the honorary statue produced the moving filial response reflected in his verses. But in terms of epigraphic visibility, Lachanius’ inscription shown to his son would be one of many in the statue-packed space of the provincial urban forum, as was the case of many cities.
Once we move into the later period, it is clear that the ‘old’ statues in Constantinople and surroundings were omnipresent in the minds of its inhabitants, as they passed by them daily. This is clearly illustrated already by the sixth-century author John Lydus (De Mag. 2.9.6), who suggests his reader, if they happen to be a lover of antiquity, to cross over from Constantinople to Chalcedon and seek the confirmation of his words by closely observing the vestimentary code of the statue to the imperial official installed there almost two centuries ago. When in the middle Byzantine period the authors of the Parastaseis tour the reader through the city, as the guides who could narrate the urban history and legends, they repeatedly emphasise the sense of admiration provoked at the sight of the statues that were still standing in the capital.Footnote 84 The patrographic literature delights in the accounts of the beholder’s experience of astonishment when confronted with the city’s most fantastical statues, such as that with the shovel and bucket oddly identified as Eleutherius the patrician. In the section ‘about spectacles’ (37–43), the Parastaseis often note that a monument can still be seen, as from the mid-seventh century the statue habit, once ubiquitous in the Roman world, was discontinued. New statues were no longer set up, and even in Constantinople the uniform practice of late antiquity had broken down and completely disappeared. Monuments’ freedom from any tie with their original function and context of installation prompted a new emotional experience of the medieval viewer gazing at vast collections and statue ensembles distributed throughout the capital.
But it was not merely strangeness and monumentality of the capital’s ‘statue population’ that must have made an overwhelming impression on the visitor. Certainly, medieval patrographic texts highlight the sensations of awe and pleasure that would be provoked in the onlooker by the city statuary. But the Parastaseis (38) proceed to stress the feeling of wonder that arises in the medieval spectator also from viewing late antique inscriptions in the Forum of Constantine: ‘if anyone looks closely at the inscriptions of the Forum, he will be even more amazed’.Footnote 85 This is not only because, as the Parastaseis assert, the ancient inscriptions were no longer understood and were perceived as encrypted text – they were often still legible.Footnote 86 Cyriacus was faithfully reproducing the broken provincial inscription despite the actual condition of the plaque rendering some words indecipherable. Yet, composed in a higher language register than their medieval descendants used, both late antique prose inscriptions and verse epigrams on statue bases were no longer intelligible as they memorialised in stone long-forgotten imperial officials from a distant past.
The long tradition of creating epigrams to serve as inscriptions continued in the Byzantine Empire but already within a different media genre and context. What differed is the monuments to which epigrams were attached: the practice of statue dedications set up for high imperial officials in the Greek East, like those of Theodosius, Philippus, and probably Nicolaus, whose bases were inscribed with honorific poems, became rare after the middle of the fifth century and almost completely vanished after the sixth century. Collected by erudite circles, verses created for inscriptional use which now are no longer preserved in situ were gathered in epigrammatic collections, such as the Anthologia Graeca. As verse inscriptions celebrating imperial aristocracy started to circulate in manuscript form, liberated from a physical connection with an honorary monument, as texts gathered for a present or future reader who appreciated poetry, readers were able to enjoy them for their aesthetic qualities alone and poets were motivated to write them. In book form, the epigrams could also include the name of their author, as in the case of Theodoret – a feature only rarely encountered in epigraphic texts. Even in their pure literary form, detached from actual geographical space, these epigrams still preserve a concept of global empire.
All in all, the honorific monuments erected in the different loci of the Roman state mediated imperial ideology. Like the Notitia, which was rather an administrative and at the same time ideological document, they were meant to emphasise the unity and cohesion of the late Roman Empire and its ‘unitary bureaucratic organism’. The inscribed texts were not only displayed to be read but also to signify the imperial and aristocratic power through their monumental appearance. Yet already from the end of the fourth century fragmentation of the empire shattered its supra-regional institutional framework. By the middle Byzantine period, the stability of the imperial order of the unified empire and with it the world of late Roman global aristocracy glorified in the honorific dedications had entirely disappeared along with the statue habit itself. With the decline of the old statue habit, a new statue culture emerged in the medieval Eastern Roman Empire that viewed late antique statue dedications in an antiquarian light, rather than as an integral part of an empire-wide honorific language. With their initial context and function lost, the statues came to be perceived as objects of wonder, whereas the inscriptions, albeit perfectly readable, turned into encoded messages.
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