Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power by Carlos F. Noreña (review)

This book offers a fresh perspective on the representation and communication of the Roman emperor's power in the western provinces of the Roman Empire during the period 69-235 C.E.. The study perforce focuses on imperial ideology, in particular its role in unifying the empire and legitimating the emperor's power (301-302), using as its evidentiary basis coinage and honorific inscriptions. Noreña's objective is to unpack the symbolic system that undergirded the emperor's power (14-21).

The book is divided into three parts. The first, "Representation," analyzes both the virtues of the emperor (his personal qualities) and the benefits of his rule (the advantages of empire and monarchy). The numismatic evidence is critical, since coins survive in sufficient numbers to allow the kind of quantitative analysis of the virtues and benefits favored by certain emperors and how the use of these attributes changed over time. As part of a taxonomy of Roman imperial virtues and benefits, Noreña points out that representations of liberalitas on coins (shown as a female personification) appeared only under Hadrian and then became a "fixture" on coinage from that point forward (87), despite the fact that liberalitas had long been an important monarchical virtue. Liberalitas did not appear in the coinage of Augustus, Noreña argues, because it would have highlighted the emperor's subventions to the treasury and gifts to senators, thus showing how the "central institutions of the state had come to the rely on the generosity of one man" (87). A significant change occurred in Trajan's reign, when this emperor's generosity became a defining virtue as evidenced by its emphasis in Pliny's Panegyricus.

Noreña takes up the issue of the diffusion of imperial ideology in the second part of his book, "Circulation." Coins might be termed official propaganda, at least in the sense that they were centrally produced with topical messages (192). Coinage, Noreña argues, was more effective in the long term, having its greatest impact through a "cumulative effect" by which imperial ideals were disseminated across the empire over a long period of time (197). Honorific inscriptions, on the other hand, can show how the imperial ideology formed from the emperor's virtues and benefits seeped into the language of the aristocracy. Noreña adduces a correspondence between the ideals represented on coinage and those expressed in honorific inscriptions through most of the period under discussion. In the inscription on Trajan's arch in Ancona, for instance (dedicated in 115 c.e.), Trajan is called providentissimus princeps (231). "This superlative epithet was, as far as we know, unprecedented, and it was precisely under Trajan that the corresponding virtue, Providentia, was first minted on imperial denarii, the denomination with the widest circulation" (232). Noreña terms this phenomenon an "ideological convergence" (235) through which the official ideology of coinage was co-opted by the aristocracy responsible for honorific inscriptions.

Noreña also points to a notable and significant shift in the communication of this ideology around the time of the Severans. "The underlying language of the official texts is no longer in harmony with that of the coins" (242). His conclusion is simple and compelling: the change in key posts of the administration of the empire from senators to equestrians led to a divergence in the imperial ideology communicated by coinage from that in honorific inscriptions. Similarly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of the term optimus to describe the princeps diminishes significantly in the third century in favor of dominus. This change in terms reflects a change in the attitude toward the emperor—from a model benefactor (optimus princeps) to absolute monarch—and this change played out in the diminishment of civic benefaction in imperial cities in this period. The shift from optimus princeps to dominus did not cause the crisis of the third century, but reflected it, showing that "the...