"Caryatides probantur inter pauca operum": Pliny, Vitruvius, and the Semiotics of the Erechtheion Maidens at Rome

Copies of the maidens from the south porch of the Erechtheion on the Athenian Akropolis were employed extensively in Augustan monuments in Rome, most famously in the Forum of Augustus. This paper examines the origins of the conflation of Vitruvius's term "caryatid" and the Erechtheion maidens as well as the semiotics of their employment as part of Augustus's iconographic vocabulary of triumph. By using a contextualized diachronic approach to evidence and adopting Broucke's argument that the copies of the Erechtheion maidens found in 1952 at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli were salvaged from the Domitianic Pantheon mentioned by Pliny as being "caryatids in a class of their own," this problematic conflation of terms can be traced back to the first century A.D.