Classics Colloquium with Lindsey Mazurek

In his 1st century CE Rhodian Oration, the orator Dio Chrysostom complained that the people of Rhodes were committing an unbearable outrage: taking down old portrait statues, giving them new inscriptions, and re-erecting them to honor new individuals, mostly Romans. Scholars of Greek portraiture have largely taken Dio at his word, assuming that reuse was a new phenomenon that arose in the Greek-speaking world only because of the pressures of Roman imperialism. But if we look further afield in time and space, new contextual information offers a more complex picture of portraiture reuse in Roman Asia Minor. I survey three examples of reused portraiture from Asia Minor to think about why communities reused private portraits and what functions they expected these new sculptural assemblages to perform. I conclude by turning to Sardis, where 4th century BCE portrait bases are reused to hold statues of Lydian animals like lions and eagles, changing function to serve a new narrative function. At all three sites, local elites reused earlier portraits to manipulate narratives of time, bringing past, present, and future into a close and dynamic dialogue.