Twenty years on : the cycle of Julio-Claudian portrait statues from Melite in their historical context

Abstract

This article deals with a group of twelve fragments of marble sculptures derived from the excavations of the remains of a Roman house within the ancient town of Melite. Eleven pieces, in varying states of conservation, were brought to light in 1881 during a clearance operation conducted without any record of the location of the finds. A single piece, a togate statue of larger-than-life size was retrieved in 1922 during an extension of the excavation of the same house. Some of the more substantial and iconographically distinctive pieces – the two heads and the headless draped statues – have featured briefly and sporadically in various publications over the last century, but always separately, without the required details, and without any attempt to relate them with one another, let alone to consider them as part of a small cycle of portrait sculptures of an imperial family. Although a brief account of three portrait statues of this group was previously published by the present author, and most of the individual pieces have been temporarily placed by him online, no holistic assessment of the whole cycle in their historical context has ever been undertaken. The purpose of this article is to fill that gap. Apart from highlighting the appurtenance of some pieces to their respective statues, the reconstruction of a cycle of portrait-statues of Julio-Claudian date, and the identifcation of each statue with a member of that same family, that is, the emperor Claudius, his daughter Claudia Antonia, his adopted son Nero and his wife Agrippina, the article seeks to explore the possible motivations behind the insertion of the cycle in a domestic context. In the absence of textual evidence, a desire by the owner of the house to express and manifest his loyalty to the current political powers is hypothesised.