Roman Emperors - Part 2

 Nero to Vespatian

Nero, the 5th Roman emperor, reigned from 54 to 68 AD.  Considered one of the worst emperors, he is famous for having "fiddled while Rome burned."  Technically that can't be true (the violin was not invented yet), but Nero did sing and play the lyre, giving public concerts that were said to be so bad that some people feigned death to avoid attending them.

Contemporary writings about Nero were far from impartial, so it's hard to separate fact from fiction, but their accounts of his sex life were lurid.  In addition to marrying three wives (not simultaneously), Nero married two men: first the youth Porus, whom he castrated and treated as his wife, and later the freed slave Doryphorus, in which case Nero played the part of the bride.  Marriage between men was not legal, but as emperor, he could do whatever he pleased.

(Statue of Nero in the Aphrodisias Museum in Turkey)

After the fire that destroyed Rome, Nero built a huge palace with a 100-foot-tall bronze statue of himself called the Colossus of Nero.  The statue is long gone, but this is a tiny picture of it carved into an amethyst gem.

A later emperor moved the statue, using 24 elephants, next to what we call the Colosseum, which is named after the Colossus statue.  This is an artist's conception of what it looked like.  The thing he's holding is supposed to be a rudder, not an umbrella.  The statue was altered to represent the Roman sun god Sol Invictus, hence the rays coming out of its head.  Does that remind you of the Statue of Liberty?  It should.  Both statues were modeled after the even more ancient Colossus of Rhodes, a representation of the Greek sun god Helios and one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.

After Nero's death, men vied for power, resulting in the Year of the Four Emperors in 69 AD.  This is the 7th emperor, Otho, who reigned for 3 months before committing suicide after losing a battle to the 8th emperor, who reigned for 8 months before being murdered by ...

(Statue of Otho, Louvre museum)

Vespatian, the 9th emperor and final winner.  Sculptors generally tried to make the heads of these statues a realistic likeness, but the bodies were an idealized muscular form, as is obvious in this statue, where the head and the body clearly don't go together.

(Statue of Vespatian, Baia Archaeological Museum, Italy)

Roman Emperors - Part 1

 Caesar to Claudius

The Romans, like the Greeks, were not prudish about the human body.  Citizens lounged and socialized naked in communal public baths, separated by sex.  Sculptors represented mythical heroes and gods as nude statues.  Roman emperors would certainly not have appeared nude in public, but it was considered entirely proper to make nude statues of them, putting them artistically into the same category as heroes and gods.

Julius Caesar was not an emperor, but he belongs in this group.  He was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC by a group of senators who feared he was planning to become emperor.  This statue of Caesar in the Louvre museum in Paris was made sometime between 27 BC and 14 AD.

After Caesar's assassination, civil war erupted for control of Rome, and the winner was Caesar's nephew and adopted son Octavian, who proclaimed himself the first Roman emperor under the name Augustus Caesar.  This statue in the Louvre dates from the 1st century BC.

The next emperor, Tiberius, left no nude statues that we could find, but this equestrian statue in the British Museum is thought by some to be the third emperor, Caligula.  Caligula has gone down in history as one of the worst emperors, evil and possibly insane.  It's hard to reconcile that reputation with this handsome youth.

This statue of the fourth emperor, Claudius, dates from 48 AD and was found in Herculaneum, a city which was buried by the same eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii.  Claudius was afflicted by a limp and almost certainly did not have the muscular body of this statue.  The heads of these statues are thought to be realistic representations even if the bodies are idealized heroic forms.

More Roman emperors to come.