The Last Statues of Antiquity, the collaborative project directed by R. R. R. Smith and B. Ward-Perkins, gathers into a single database all extant late-antique portraits. As a member of the research team, I was given the opportunity to study all the portraits that are either known or conjectured to represent traditional culture-heroes. This exercise gave me new eyes for viewing two old portraits from Aphrodisias, until now not identifiable. One, excavated in 1982, is a clean-shaven portrait, once fancifully identified as Julius Caesar (fig. 2); the other, first published in 1958, is a bearded portrait broken off a bust (fig. 13). Neither of these two heads is immediately recognizable as a representation of any known individual by the scholarly method which works so well with portraits of Early and High Imperial Roman emperors: That is, neither is identifiable as following any known portrait type by the application of the rules of Kopienkritik, whereby a scholar establishes the indisputable dependence of two sculptures on a model by finding precisely shared details between two heads-details of hair locks, face, pose, or attributes. In late antiquity, however, fidelity to inherited models was more fluid, and a bold re-interpretation-in terms of contemporary portrait-style-was perhaps even to be desired. This is particularly true in the case of the portraits of traditional culture-heroes: The many highly variable portraits of Menander (here fig. 6) or of Socrates may serve to demonstrate this point. © 2018 Journal of Roman Archaeology L.L.C.
