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1 results

  • Chapter 6 - Portraying Power

  • from Part III - Identity Negotiation
  • Edited by Daniel Jolowicz, Downing College, Cambridge, Jaś Elsner, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
  • Book:
    Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire
    Published online:
    23 December 2022
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023, pp 139-157

  • Summary

    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.