Ancient Analogs of Museums.pdf

Ancient Analogs of Museums
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Abstract and Keywords
While the Romans did not have museums, practices of collecting and display were fully
developed in Rome. Romans used collections of objects to substantiate, reinforce, and
broadcast particular views of the world. This chapter shows how current work in museum
studies opens new avenues of research into Roman art. It draws on recent scholarship on
collecting that explores debates over cultural property, questions of viewing, and the role
of collections in the construction of personal and imperial identities. It is here—with the
appropriation of patrimony, with the creation of art, and with ideas of a universal artistic
heritage—that we find ancient analogs of modern museums.
Keywords: museums, collecting, temples, villas, cultural property, loot, art, viewing, identity
Introduction
THE term museum comes from the Greek mouseion, a place connected to the Muses and
their arts. The most famous of antiquity was the Mouseion at Alexandria, a royally funded
cult center of learning, well known not because of any collections of objects but because
of its scholars and its connection to the Library of Alexandria (El-Abbadi 1992; MacLeod
2000, 1–15). The ancient mouseion was something quite different from the modern
museum (Findlen 1989; Lee 1997). But ancient analogs of the modern museum—public
and private efforts to collect, organize, and display works of art and cultural artifacts—
did exist and had important social functions. More to the point, modern museum studies
offer new ways of thinking about Roman art and cultural patrimony. This essay lays out
recent insights in museum studies and looks at directions for applying them to ancient
Rome.
Josephine Shaya
The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture
Edited by Elise A. Friedland, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, and Elaine K. Gazda
Print Publication Date: Mar 2015 Subject: Classical Studies, Classical Art and Architecture
Online Publication Date: Mar 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199921829.013.0039
Oxford Handbooks Online

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Ancient Museums?
Over forty years ago, Donald Strong compared the spoils and historical memorabilia
collected in Rome’s public and religious buildings to objects collected in museums.
Strong argued that while Romans did not have museums in a modern sense, “museums”
of a kind did exist. Republican generals and later emperors displayed collections of
cultural artifacts together with historical memorabilia in temples, porticoes, and
triumphal monuments. Strong used the analogy with museums to highlight the role that
these buildings played as repositories of wealth, spoils, and historical relics (Strong
1973).
Strong was not alone; many before and after him have drawn similar analogies
(e.g. Lehmann 1945; Beaujeu 1982). Quasi-museums included public displays of loot in
temples, porticos, theaters, and baths, as well as private collections in villas and palaces.
Moved by ancient descriptions of spoils and historical memorabilia, researchers have
complied lists of noteworthy objects that accumulated in ancient Rome. The Porticus
Octaviae, for instance, contained renowned sculptures, including Praxiteles’s Eros of
Thespiae, an Eros with a Thunderbolt, two statues of breezes, four satyrs, an Artemis and
Asclepius by Kephisodotos (Praxiteles’s son), three statues of Aphrodite (one by Pheidias),
a Pan and Olympus by Heliodoros, an ivory statue of Jupiter, Lysippos’s Granikos
monument, and a bronze seated statue of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi (LTUR 4:
141–5). Other well-known public collections were found in the Porticus Metelli, the
Porticus Liviae, the Porticus Pompeiana, the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, and the
Templum Pacis, just to name a few.
But we would be mistaken to see ancient analogs as modern museums in embryo. Roman
collections rivaled modern ones in their acts of cultural possession and appropriation, but
their intellectual frameworks and intentional purposes differed. Temples, for example,
accumulated votive offerings (both newly commissioned and dedicated spoils) that
framed rituals involving animal sacrifice, incense burning, and the oiling and bedecking
of statues. Nevertheless, the museum is a potent analogy for antiquity. While the Romans
did not have museums, practices of collecting and display were fully developed in Rome.
The History of Collecting
In the 1980s, a wave of studies on the history of museums changed the way that scholars
think not only about museums but about collecting and display more broadly. The
literature quickly branched out to include research into all sorts of collections and today
museums and collecting are central topics in art history and cultural studies (Alsop 1982;
Bourdieu 1984; Stewart 1984; Clifford 1988; Pomian 1990; Karp and Lavine 1991;
Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Kaplan 1994; Pearce 1994; Bennett
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1995; Duncan 1995; Preziosi and Farago 2004). While ancient collecting is one of the
least-studied areas in this literature, it is clear that various practices of collecting and
display existed in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome (Harper 1992; Pearce
and Bounia 2000; Shaya 2005; Thomason 2005; Tanner 2006, 219–34; Prioux 2008;
Rutledge 2012).
Recent work on museums and the history of collecting offers a set of analytic tools and
methods with which to approach ancient analogs of museums. This literature points us to
the complex arguments and messages constructed in material form by collections. In
sum, the accumulation, selection, organization, and description of objects express ways in
which cultures make sense of the world: to know a collection and its hierarchies is to
know a way of thinking (Foucault 1970; Elsner 1996; Bounia 2004, 7–14; Starn 2005).
Today, debates about the acquisition, ownership, and display of cultural property
are at the forefront of museum studies and on the front pages of newspapers. The
literature emphasizes the value that some objects acquire as tangible expressions of
cultural, religious, or personal identity. Possessed by others and displayed in new spaces,
objects take on new meanings, often loaded with moral and political significance. A
related insight is that collections radically transform the meaning of the objects that have
been collected. Collected objects come to have different meanings from those that their
makers intended, meanings created not only by their movement from one context to
another, but also by the ways in which they are displayed and by the narratives in which
they are framed. Viewers, furthermore, selectively see and interpret objects based upon
their own knowledge and experience. Politics, ideas of ownership and authority, cultural
and religious beliefs, education, gender, and more all play a role in the interpretation of
objects.
In recent years, Roman art historians and archaeologists have drawn on such thinking not
to suggest an equivalency between Roman collections and modern museums, but to
better explore how ancient collections worked, what was at stake in their creation, and
how they were viewed. Much of their research has focused on the significance of
collections in the private sphere (Neudecker 1988; Bartman 1991; Mattusch 2005;
Stirling 2005; Dillon 2006, 39–57), but some have looked at public collections or the
broader phenomenon of Roman collecting in general (Pollitt 1978; Bryson 1994; Kuttner
1999; Carey 2003; Bounia 2004; Isager 2006; Miles 2008; Rutledge 2012). This
scholarship explores questions of viewing, debates over what we call cultural property,
and the role of collections in the construction of personal and imperial identities.
Acquisition
As noted above, debates over the acquisition and ownership of cultural property are at
the forefront of museum studies today (Renfrew 2000; Skeates 2000). Do cultural
artifacts have a fixed location where they rightly belong? What should be the fate of
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cultural property in times of war or unrest? Should local populations have control over
their cultural patrimony?
Such questions have prompted new thinking about the Roman booty taken from South
Italy, Sicily, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere (Gruen 1992, 84–130; Beard 2007;
Östenberg 2009). For centuries Roman writers described with awe and fascination
wagonloads of loot paraded in triumphs through the city and subsequently showcased in
its monuments. We get a sense for the way Romans imagined the scale of the spoils from
descriptions like those of Livy, who recounted the 515 bronze and marble statues that
Fulvius Nobilior paraded through Rome after the sack of Ambracia in 187 BC (Livy
39.5.16). While other ancient cities had collections of captured cultural artifacts, Rome
was exceptional in the extent and the celebration of them.
Romans were much more concerned with the question of the impact of loot on the
character of Rome than on its absence from the peoples from whom they took it. Over
generations, Roman writers repeated the topos that Rome, once lacking in luxury,
conquered the East and was seduced and corrupted by its abundance (Livy 25.40.1–3;
Plin. HN 33.148, 37.12–14; Plut. Vit. Marc. 21.5; August. De civ. D. 3.21). Cato famously
likened the statues brought back from Syracuse to “an enemy horde” let into the city
(quoted in Livy 34.4.3–4).
This trope did not stop Roman elites from appropriating Greek art (see essays 3.3,
Anguissola; and 3.6, Touchette). Hellenization was a fundamental feature of Roman
aristocratic culture from the city’s beginnings, and it only accelerated in the second
century BC when the voracious Roman appetite for things Greek fueled a revolution in
Roman art and literature. Through the aggressive absorption of Greek language, ideas,
and arts, the Romans shaped their own literary and artistic traditions (Feeney 1998;
Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 3–35). In the process, Romans projected their anxieties over
imperial expansion onto its profits. The very ideas of loot and luxury became touchstones
in cultural debates about the meaning of Rome’s absorption of materials and ideas from
the East (Gruen 1992, 55–83, 223–71). The key context for the discussion of Roman
collecting is the cultural appropriation of Greece.
Along with conquest, many objects came to Rome through extortion. Cicero’s attack on
Verres, the notorious Roman praetor who was brought to trial in 70 BC for exploiting the
province of Sicily, illustrates its scale and rapaciousness. The often violent tactics that
Verres had used to seize ancient votive offerings, cult statues, and privately owned works
of art only added to Cicero’s larger picture of his brutal exploitation. In his defense,
Verres might have argued that his behavior was no different from that of many Roman
governors. The existence of the extortion court, Cicero’s line of argument that the court
should not protect its own, and evidence for other Romans charged with extortion (some
of whom Cicero defended) point to widespread practices.
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While Cicero and the court had no qualms about taking art from enemies, plundering
Rome’s allies or provinces for one’s own private enrichment was, at least in public,
reprehensible. Along with illustrating the violence of Roman extortion and the
fundamental yet frequently ignored principle that one did not purloin art for one’s private
advantage but for the adornment of the temples and the city (Cic. Verr. 2.1.54–5), Cicero’s
prosecution also speaks to the role that loot played in larger debates about Rome’s
relationship to its provinces. The statues that Verres displayed in the forum and the
Comitium from Asia and Achaea, Cicero asserted, were “magnificent to the eye, but bitter
and grievous to the heart and mind” for to plunder Rome’s allies was to plunder Rome
itself (Cic. Verr. 2.1.58). Their display, however, also shows that the statues, together with
countless other Greek works in the city, delighted many (like Verres).
Margaret Miles has argued that Cicero’s remarks signal the very beginning of the close of
the era of looting the Greek world (Miles 2008, 251). With the consolidation of power in
the hands of Augustus and the gradual extension of the idea of Rome to include the
provinces, the attitudes heralded by Cicero gained ground. While the plundering did not
suddenly cease, Miles argues, it was drawing to an end. In the Res Gestae, for instance,
Augustus boasted that he had returned to the cities of Asia the temple dedications that
Antony had seized for his own private use (RG 24.1). The political expediency of such
remarks points to an evolving attitude toward plunder that later imperial writers
echoed when they illustrated the deviant characters of emperors like Caligula and Nero
with indignant stories of art theft. But these stories, too, suggest that appropriations
continued. And while Augustus failed to mention in the Res Gestae his own appropriations
of statues from those on the losing side of the war, he was careful to record the scale of
his dedications: “I consecrated gifts from spoils in the Capitoline temple and the temple
of Divine Julius and the temple of Apollo and the temple of Vesta and the temple of Mars
Ultor, which cost me around 100,000,000 sesterces” (RG 21.2; Scheer 1995).
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Logic
Recent studies in the theory of collecting emphasize that collections have a logic; in the
eyes of collectors, collected objects belong together. Governed by rules for what to
include and what to exclude, collections communicate something greater than their parts:
they might tell a story, witness an event, represent an idea, or demonstrate a particular
view. One way to access this knowledge is to investigate the ideas of classification and
order within a collection (Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 4–9). Studies of how collectors classify,
describe, and exhibit objects bring the stories that collections tell to light.
The Lindian temple chronicle—a remarkable inscription erected in 99 BC that cataloged
treasures from a Rhodian temple as well as miracles of the goddess Athena—offers a
compelling ancient example to which we can apply this mode of analysis. About thirty
years before Cicero’s prosecution of Verres and during a time of increasing Roman
hegemony in the East, the Lindians erected the stele to commemorate the legendary
possessions of their temple, including an inscribed bronze cauldron from Kadmos, a silver
drinking cup from Minos, bracelets of Helen, statues called Daidaleia, weapons from
Alexander the Great, and much more. A decree tells how the inscription came to be made:
because time had destroyed the ancient offerings, the Lindians commissioned two local
scholars to draw up a record of the objects together with a list of testimonials to them,
followed by accounts of Athena’s epiphanies.
A deep antiquarian spirit runs through the record. Arranged in chronological order, each
entry begins with the donor’s name followed by a description of the gift, its material, its
inscription, and references to literary works, letters, and temple archives that attested to
it. The catalog demonstrated who the Lindians had been and how they reached their
present. The impressive scholarly apparatus, with 103 citations from at least twenty-five
different sources, celebrated the offerings’ fame, testified to their authenticity, and
glorified Athena to whom they had been given. The epiphany stories that close the record
attest to just what the treasure demonstrated, namely the renown and power of Athena,
her long devotion to Lindos, and the history of her temple (Higbie 2003; Shaya 2005; Platt
2010).
Roman temples, like those in Greece, housed treasures that belonged to and evoked the
gods—offerings (including spoils) that witnessed the manifest power of divinities
worshipped for generations and images that embodied the gods. What made Rome
different was the larger geopolitical situation of the treasures. If the Lindos stele sold a
heroic vision of Lindos to locals and visitors, Roman collections attested to Rome’s
mastery of the world.
One of the best-known collections from Rome was created for the porticoes that
framed the Forum of Augustus and the temple to Mars Ultor (see essays 3.3, Anguissola;
4.6, Kellum; 6.1, Squire; and 6.4, Moormann). Its logic was seductively straightforward.
More than one hundred larger-than-life-sized statues of Rome’s leaders, ranging from
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Aeneas to Drusus (stepson of Augustus) represented the advancement of the Roman
Empire. Each image was labeled with a grand title, below which a longer inscription set
forth the leader’s most noteworthy accomplishments. Together, the statues and
inscriptions told a story of the growth of the empire. For 500 years, Rome’s leaders held
the same offices and priesthoods. What changed were Rome’s size and enemies; the
inscribed lives resounded with the names of armies defeated, places conquered, and
peoples and kings paraded in triumph.
As many scholars have shown, the collection traced a simple unity of purpose from the
city’s foundation to its present and placed the continuity of this purpose in the trust of
Augustus, whose self-aggrandizing equestrian statue stood in the center of the forum and
tied the whole thing together (Spannagel 1999, 259–62; Rutledge 2012, 250–57). With the
consolidation of power in the hands of Augustus, the past was reimagined as a time in
which Rome’s leaders undertook a long, unified, and great imperial project—the very
building of Rome.
Such a programmatic reading of the collection, however, is only part of the story, for it
assumes an audience that fully understood the intentions of Augustus. While the
collection had a logic, viewers also came to their own understandings of it. Some of the
statues, for instance, served as meeting points for litigants appearing before the courts of
the urban praetor and the praetor peregrinus. Litigants used them in their negotiations of
the court system (Bablitz 2007; Shaya 2013). The reception of the collection also would
have changed over time as more objects were added: relics, imperial memorabilia, spoils,
honorary statues, and images of emperors and gods. The collection that had originally
told a story about the building of Rome became the core of an even larger collection that
spoke to the achievements of Rome and its emperors with the support of its gods.
Context
The relationship between objects and context is a central concern in studies of collecting.
How objects communicate depends on their context and how they are displayed within
that context (Newhouse 2005, 8). The appropriation, movement, and display of objects
speak to relationships of power between previous owners, current possessors, and
viewers. The spatial and architectural placement of objects also cues certain types of
viewing: display engenders interest by setting objects apart from the ordinary and
encouraging viewers to attend to them closely (Alpers 1991; Greenblatt 1991).
Torn from their original ritual and civic settings, objects that were carted off from
conquered cities were at first displayed as symbols of victories in wars that took place in
faraway lands. Greek art became a medium through which generals demonstrated claims
to power. Our earliest sources for such displays are republican statue bases inscribed
with the names of generals and places conquered: “Marcus Claudius, son of
Marcus, consul, took [this] from Henna” (a Sicilian town captured in 214 BC; CIL 6.1281);
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“Lucius Quinctius, son of Lucius, took [this] from Leukas” (an Akarnanian city sacked in
197 BC; CIL 1.613); “Marcus Acilius, son of Gaius, consul, took [this] from Scarphea” (a
city in near Thermopylae sacked in 191 BC; CIL 1.2926). As Tonio Hölscher (2006)
argues, through such displays, generals and their descendants reaped the profits of their
victories in the form of increased status and authority.
Years later, literary references to statues and paintings displayed in Rome’s temples and
porticos echoed these inscriptions, noting who captured what from where. Pliny the
Elder, for instance, observed that Aemilius Paullus, famed for his triumph over Macedon
(168 BC), had dedicated an Athena by Pheidias in the Temple of Today’s Fortune (Plin. HN
34.54). The statue perpetuated Paulus’s second-century BC victory well into the first
century AD.
The places such objects
were displayed were long-
living memorials of the
prowess of Rome’s
generals and the backing
of the gods (Beard 2007,
21, 263; Bravi 2012). An
entire fifth century BC
pediment depicting an
Amazonomachia, perhaps
taken from the Temple of
Apollo Daphnephoros at
Eretria in Euboea,
crowned the entrance to
the Temple of Apollo
Sosianus (figure 6.3.1; La
Rocca 1985). A triumphal
procession (figure 6.3.2)
parading around the
interior frieze and
embracing the temple’s
contents—an ancient
cedar-wood image of
Apollo from Seleucia (Plin.
HN 13.53), Niobids by
Scopas or Praxiteles (Plin.
HN 36.28), an Apollo by
Philiscus of Rhodes, a
Latona, a Diana, nine
Muses, a nude Apollo, and another image of the god with his lyre by Timarchides
Click to view larger
Figure 6.3.1 Fifth-century BC pediment from Temple
of Apollo Sosianus. Rome, Musei Capitolini, Centrale
Montemartini.
Figure 6.3.2 Interior frieze from Temple of Apollo
Sosianus, late first century BC. Rome, Musei
Capitolini, Centrale Montemartini.
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(Plin. HN 36.35)—made the connection between Apollo’s possessions and triumph clear.
Such displays played an important role in fixing conquests in public memory; years later
Pliny observed that it was Sosianus who had brought the ancient cedar-wood Apollo to
Rome (Plin. HN 13.53).
One of the remarkable things about plunder in Rome is that it ended up in so many
contexts: in temples certainly, but also in porticos, theaters, bath buildings, fora, palaces,
and villas. The powerful—cults, emperors, generals, and the rich—displayed spectacular
objects that made clear the reach of their power. Pliny recounted that the theater of
Scaurus, built in 58 BC, was “made up of things collected from all over the world,”
including 3,000 bronze statues (Plin. HN 36.115; see essay 4.1, Longfellow). In 55 BC,
Pompey filled his theater complex not just with paintings, tapestries, and statues, but
even with living trees transported from Asia and Africa that brought a conquered
landscape home to Rome (Kuttner 1999, 345–50).
Viewers brought their own perceptions, understandings, and agendas to these displays.
Spoils that commemorated victories meant something very different to the defeated who
poured into Rome as slaves, immigrants, and envoys (Edwards 2003, 57–9; see essay 6.2,
Trimble). Ambassadors from Asia and Achaea, Cicero wrote, stood in the forum with tears
in their eyes as they gazed upon images of their gods stolen from their sanctuaries (Cic.
Verr. 2.1.59). The second-century BC Greek historian Polybius condemned the Romans for
adorning their city with the possessions of others rather than with their own virtues.
When a victor collects around himself stolen treasures, Polybius wrote, the
treasures almost invite those who were robbed to come and inspect them. For the
defeated, he continued, not only jealousy, but a sort of passionate hatred for the victors
flares up, for memories awakened of their own disaster enhance their hatred of its
authors (Polyb. 9.10.10; Williams 2012).
Art
Collecting and display have played a key role in the construction of images as works of
art and in the creation of the discipline of art history (see essays 1.1, Bartman; 1.3,
Mallampati Gleason; and 3.3, Anguissola). Roman collecting played no small part in
turning the category of art into what Jeremy Tanner has aptly called an “autonomous
province of meaning” (Tanner 2006, 220). Here, in the making of art to be viewed,
studied, and discussed, analogies with the museum are again useful.
The treasures in the Templum Pacis demonstrated Rome’s centrality both in geopolitical
terms and as heir to the world’s artistic heritage (La Rocca 2001, 195–207; Noreña 2003,
79–92; see essay 4.6, Kellum). Vespasian filled the forum with famous Greek sculptures
looted by Nero to furnish his Golden House and other marvels, such as an Egyptian
greywacke figure of the Nile, a renowned painting of Ialysus by the fourth-century
Rhodian Protogenes, a Scylla painted by the fourth-century Theban Nicomachus, a battle
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of Issos painted by Helena, the bronze cow of Myron, a statue of the Olympic victor
Cheimon by Naukydes, a statue by Pheidias, and another by Lysippos (LTUR 4: 67–70).
According to Josephus, who defected to the Roman side in the First Jewish Revolt and
traveled the elite circles of Flavian Rome, the forum was the conclusion to Vespasian’s
conquest of Judaea. Like the triumph, it laid the treasures of the Jews at Rome’s feet. The
spoils were added to the precinct where “all those works that people had travelled over
the whole world to see were collected and deposited” (Joseph. BJ 7.158). The forum was
both a victory monument and a public art gallery where Romans could view masterpieces
whose significance transcended cultural boundaries.
The epigraphic framing of
images from the Tempum
Pacis echoes Josephus’s
reading of the spoils.
Among the objects
discovered in its
excavations were bases
that once carried statues
by the Athenian sculptors
Polykleitos, Leochares,
Praxiteles, Kephisodotos,
and Parthenokles (La
Rocca 2001, 197–201). The
Greek inscriptions are to
the point: “The Athenian
Leochares’s Ganymede”;
“The Argive Polykleitos’s
Pentathlete Pythokles of
Elis” (figure 6.3.3). They
celebrate the artist and his
subject, not the general or emperor who brought the work to Rome. Rather than “art as
plunder” (Miles 2008), here we have plunder as art.
The appropriation of statues and paintings and the valorization of them as art were
complementary processes. As Tanner observes, the theft and purchase of renowned
statues and paintings gave rise to writings on art and the creation of new ways of
exhibiting and viewing it; the appreciation of art, in turn, motivated further collecting
(Tanner 2006, 220). The roots of this kind of aesthetic viewing (and appropriation) lay in
the collecting practices of Hellenistic kings, who poured immense resources into
the acquisition and display of old and new works of art (Kuttner 2005; Calandra 2011). A
series of statue bases dedicated in the temple of Athena Nikephoros in Pergamon and
inscribed with the names of ancient artists and the cities from which the statues were
taken attests to the appropriation of works of art by Attalos I (r. 241–197 BC) and the
subsequent valorization of them as masterpieces (Tanner 2006, 222–8). Literary evidence
adds detail: following the sack of Corinth, Attalos II (r. 160–138 BC) is said by Pliny to
Figure 6.3.3 Base for statue of the athlete Pythokles
by Polykleitos, originally from Olympia. Rome,
Templum Pacis, first century AD. Rome, Museo
Capitolini.
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have paid 600,000 denarii for a painting by the fourth-century Aristeides (Plin. HN 35.24;
Howard 1986). By creating art collections, building libraries, and maintaining court poets
and philosophers, the Attalids laid claim to Hellenic culture (Gruen 2000). Here, culture
itself was something to be possessed.
This aesthetic way of viewing only grew stronger with the Romans among whom
knowledge of art as its own domain became a marker of cultural distinction. The
valorization of art was closely connected with looting and expropriation, as well as with
the art market, copying, art historical writing, and travel to see works of art that “must
be seen.” Many sources—Varro, Quintilian, Cicero, Pliny, Statius, Martial, Petronius, and
more—show how cultivated persons viewed art: they brought to it a sophisticated
aesthetic vocabulary, a conversance with its history, a knowledge of ancient artists’
names, a familiarity with iconography, an understanding of Greek myths, and an
appreciation of materials. We see such learning on display in Pliny’s “art historical”
pages, which place statuary and painting within a larger chronological history of art,
while identifying personal styles, recounting anecdotes about artists and their works, and
discussing the properties of artistic materials (Isager 1991; see essay 6.1, Squire).
Along with becoming a hallmark of elite taste and distinction, art also became a realm
through which one could be morally educated. Temples, porticoes, and villas were spaces
for learned discussions about deep allegorical meanings of images. Such conversations
occur in many texts (e.g., Tabula Cebes), where they follow a familiar pattern: typically a
viewer does not understand an image; an interpreter appears—a philosopher/teacher
type—who promises enlightenment (Elsner 2007, 189); through careful exegesis, the
interpreter reveals the allegorical meaning of the image for the viewer (and the reader),
offering insight, even salvation, couched in moral or philosophical terms.
Identity
Studies in the history of collecting have long recognized the role that collections play in
the materialization of cultural and personal identities. Public collections bear on larger
questions of what constitutes the community, the past, the truth, and who exercises the
power to articulate and define this knowledge (Kaplan 1994, 2; Bennett 1995, 148–9).
Private collections, too, express the self, communicating such values as the status, power,
and education of their owners (Clifford 1985, 237–8; Pomian 1990, 165).
The wealthy filled their villas with artworks that were expressions not only of their power
and prestige but also their intellectual pursuits and pleasures (see essay 4.3, Gazda).
Cicero aimed to create spaces in his villa—an Academy (Att. 1.4.3), Lyceum (Div. 1.5.8),
Amaltheam (Att. 1.16.18), gymnasium (Att. 1.6.2) and palaestra (Fam. 1.8.2)—that evoked
the Greece of his reading, imagination, and travels (Neudecker 1988, 8–18; Bergmann
2001; see essay 6.1, Squire). Owners of well-appointed villas lived among images of Greek
philosophers, poets, leaders, athletes, gods, nymphs, and heroes, together with portraits
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of their own ancestors, honorific statues, and even tombs, as the vast sculpture collection
from the Villa of the Papyri near Herculaneum demonstrates (see essays 2.4, Mattusch;
3.3, Anguissola; 3.6, Touchette; and 6.1, Squire). As John Bodel aptly put it, the villa was
“an extension of the man” (Bodel 1997, 5). Its decoration played a key role in
constructing and communicating its owner’s identity (Wiseman 1987; Tronchin 2012). In
the second half of the first century AD, perhaps in response to restrictions on elite self-
commemoration in Rome’s public spaces, poets began to praise their patrons through
descriptions of their villas and artworks. As Pliny the Younger’s elaborate “villa letters”
show, rich patrons, too, shaped their own reputations through loving descriptions of their
estates.
In the emperors’ hands, villas and collections took on epic dimensions. A well-known
passage from the fourth-century Historia Augusta stated that Hadrian had inscribed
upon his Tiburtine villa “the names of the most famous provinces and places; for
example, he called one the Lyceum, another the Academy, the Prytaneum, the Canopus,
the Stoa Poikile and [the Vale of] Tempe. And, so that he would not omit anything, he even
made an Underworld” (SHA Hadr. 26.5). The villa reflected Hadrian’s travels both in the
empire and in his mind. Its collection of sites and statues made up an eclectic assortment
of references to the Mediterranean past that reached back a thousand years. Several
hundred sculptures survive scattered among many modern museums including replicas of
the Caryatids from the Erechtheion, a Knidian Aphrodite, Amazons by Pheidias, Tiber and
Nile gods, as well as imperial portraits, and images of Hadrian’s favorite, Antinous (see
essay 3.7, Swetnam-Burland). Embracing this vast collection, the villa itself embodied
Hadrian’s Rome as the culmination and steward of Mediterranean culture and history
(MacDonald and Pinto 1995, 146).
A telling foil to Hadrian’s Villa and its engagements with Greece and Egypt is Pausanias’s
Guide to Greece. As Hadrian collected monuments and arts of empire, Pausanias, too,
collected (in his text at least) the “things most worth knowing” of Greece (Paus. 1.39.3).
While other Greek travel books were rooted in particular places, describing a city,
sanctuary, or even a monument, Pausanias set out to portray the whole of Greece and
articulate its cultural importance. As Jaś Elsner has shown, this Greece was a fantasy
(Elsner 2001, 18). Pausanias shepherded his reader through an imaginary world—a
textual museum of sorts—in which a selected past revealed Pausanias’s political and
religious identity. But there was also a physical world behind the text, with monuments
transformed by the ravages of time and a history of warfare and looting. Thefts were
remembered for generations; well over a century after the event, Pausanias noted that
Augustus had taken the ancient Tegean statue of Alean Athena to Rome (Paus. 8.46.5). It
is in such absences, in the memory of them, and in Pausanias’s valorization of Greece that
we find ourselves on the other side of Rome’s “museums.”
(p. 633)

Page 13 of 18
Conclusion
While Romans did not have museums, they did collect. What difference does it make to
look to museum studies when thinking about their collecting practices? Today most of us
encounter Roman art in museums. Those institutions shape to a great degree the ways in
which we see and engage with antiquities. Museum studies have much to say about our
practices of viewing and the history of our field (see essays in part I, Collecting,
Conservation, and Display). At the same time, this field opens up meanings of objects that
are constituted by forces not visible in the objects themselves.
While the Romans did not have museums, there are important historical links between
Roman collections and our own museums. Much of the history of Roman art from
antiquity to the present lies in the collection, imitation, appropriation, adaptation, and
display of cultural artifacts. Roman collecting played a key role in creating aesthetic
viewing practices and in the invention of art history. To a remarkable degree, it
has shaped our knowledge of Greek art. The wider frames around the educated viewing
of such works are those of acquisition, spoils, loot. It is here—with the creation of art,
with the rise of educated viewing, with antiquarianism, with the appropriation of cultural
patrimony, and with ideas of a universal artistic heritage—rather than with the mouseion
at Alexandria that we find the roots of the modern museum.
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Josephine Shaya
Josephine Shaya, The College of Wooster.

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