Lucian’s Imagines, the literary portrait of Panthea, mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus, offers rich material for resistant readings of the relation between Greek-educated subject and Roman ruler in the second century. Yet the fact that any potential critique of power in it is expressed through means provided by and consonant with Roman power makes any resistance in it difficult to pin down. This chapter compares the Imagines with another second-century literary portrait of power, the self-portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Verus’ co-emperor, in Book One of the Meditations. These portraits of fragmented identities are executed with the same combinatory technique: Panthea’s body and soul are the sum of the best picks from Greek paideia, and the emperor’s self is the sum of the exempla provided by the people in his life. But this commonality highlights, by contrast, the irreconcilability of the respective models and purposes, which makes the Imagines’ neglect of its contemporary world stand out more sharply as a sign of resistance.

This chapter unveils the author’s view of what was at stake in demythologization: the viewer’s attitude to chronology, to temporality, to characters defined by their residence in earlier time. For confirmation of this claim, the chapter studies archaeological evidence from Rome’s suburbium, examining the altered spatial relationships between house and tomb that came to dominate in the Late Empire. This reveals what was at stake in the third-century disappearance of mythic figures from sarcophagi: new demands among the living, manifested in multiple domains of Roman life, for greater proximity to their dead.