The Archaeology of Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Chapter Six: Violent Discourses: Visual Cannibalism and the Portraits of Rome’s “Bad” Emperors

121 Chapter Six Violent Discourses Visual Cannibalism and the Portraits of Rome’s “Bad” Emperors Eric R. Varner Abstract The mutilated and altered images of Rome’s “bad” emperors vividly narrate the violent political transitions that characterized regime change in ancient Rome. Beginning with Caligula, portraits of overthrown rulers were subjected to anthropomorphic attacks. Eyes, mouths, and ears were mutilated in an effort to deprive imperial effigies of any metaphorical ability to see, speak, or hear. These attacks were also closely related to the desecration of corpses (poena post mortem) carried out against the remains of capital offenders and others whose status as noxii made their physical bodies especially liable to violation. Similarly, full-length statues could be decapitated, mirroring another form of corpse abuse as well as capital punishment. Mutilated and headless images remained on public view as potent markers of posthumous denigration. Significant numbers of marble portraits of the “bad” emperors were also physically transformed in the early empire. Representations of Caligula, Nero and Domitian were reconceived as likenesses of victorious successors or revered predecessors . The displacement of one emperor by another visually cannibalized the original portrait and its associative power. Many of these redacted images left readable signs of the substitution that had occurred. The mutilation and transformation of imperial images constituted a dynamic and lasting corollary to real political violence in an ongoing struggle as living and dead emperors vied for legitimacy. History and Violence against Images Not surprisingly, images feature prominently in historical accounts of the violent upheavals marking the overthrow of an individual emperor or dynasty. Indeed, for the Romans visual and concrete manifestations of an individual’s identity were the primary 122 The Politics and Identities of Violence targets of violence directed against memory (Hales 2003:47–50). As Nero lost control of the military and political situation in A.D. 68, the troops of Rufus Gallus attacked representations of the emperor at the time of the revolt of Vindex (Cassius Dio, Roman History 63.25.1). After Nero’s suicide, Plutarch records angry crowds dragging the emperor’s statues through the Forum Romanum (Galba 8.5). In A.D. 69, a portrait of Nero’s successor Galba was wrenched from a legionary standard to broadcast the military’s repudiation of the emperor’s authority in Rome (Tacitus, Histories 1.41.1; Gregory1994:80) and his statues were destroyed during the rioting that followed his murder (Plutarch, Galba 22, 26.7). Indeed, A.D. 69, “the year of the four emperors,” was a watershed period for factional violence ; late in the year, after his defeat by Flavian partisans, Vitellius was compelled to watch the destruction of his statues in the Roman Forum before he was tortured to death and his corpse jettisoned in the Tiber (Tacitus, Histories 3.85; Suetonius, Vitellius 17.1–2; Aurelius Victor, Caesaribus 8.6; Kyle 1998:219; Scheid 1984:181–182, 185). Pliny the younger famously describes the demolition of the golden portraits of the last Flavian emperor Domitian after his murder in A.D. 96, and the author employs an anthropomorphic rhetoric clearly intended to link the dismemberment of the emperor’s representations with the violation of his physical body (Panegyricus 52.4–5). In Pliny’s account, the faces of the portraits are trampled in the dust and the images are threatened with the sword, attacked with axes, and finally hacked into mutilated limbs and pieces. Furthermore, Domitian’s portraits are violated as sentient beings able to experience pain. The conceptual collapsing of image and body underscores the portraits’ functions as simulacra, artistic doubles of the emperor’s physical presence (Baudrillard 1994; Hersey 2009; Stewart 2003:184–222). By Late Antiquity, statues and portraits could function quite literally as effigies that “allowed access to the spiritual through the material” (Stewart 1999:162; Ambrose, Expos. Psalm 118.10.25). Indeed, Cassiodorus, writing in A.D. 537 is still able to refer to Rome’s statues as if they were a second population of the city (quas amplexa posteritas paene parum populum urbi dedit quam natura procreavit, Variae Epistulae 7.15; Edwards 2003;44, 46; Stewart 2003:118–156). The corporeality of portraits is often stressed in historical narratives of political or even religious destruction. Earlier in the first century during the principate of Tiberius, Sejanus, like Vitellius, is forced to witness the destruction of his statues before his execution and they are attacked by the angry mob as if they were assaulting Sejanus himself (Cassius Dio, Roman...