Premise, promise, and procedure

Republican leaders needed voters, followers, and allies. Scholars can presume leaders worked to persuade people to aid and follow. G. makes the important observation that persons attuned to those leaders may have been using seal images to demonstrate that alignment, even if not directed to do so. Portraits started to occur in multiples by the 1st c. BCE, and those in significant numbers imply a striving politician; somehow one could get hold of these things, which may or may not have been distributed by the subject themselves. The occurrence in the last decades of civil war of mass-made molded glass and paste intaglios with political emblems does indicate coordinated distribution. The materials and sometimes lack of finesse indicates that they might at times have gone to a much lower social order than many other gem seals reached.Footnote ⁵ G.'s book traverses Augustus's period of domination and touches upon that of his successor. After that, while dynasts worked to secure some consensus, at Rome factional politics were mainly over (in any Republican sense), and competitive instrumentalization of the intaglio stopped.Footnote ⁶ G. has a prelude in Middle Republican “Italic” gems of the 3rd–2nd c. BCE, before the Hellenistic current hit; in his evolutionary scheme, “self-representation,” the domain of normative male social roles and concerns, characterizes this production. Truly political gems, whose images constituted propaganda by or for a politician in the service of power, do not seem to G. to have emerged before the 1st c. BCE. He interestingly traces a thread of military use of seals and the targeting of seal propaganda at soldiers. Otherwise, the book mostly focuses on Rome, where G. sees politics centered; he tries to broaden regional workshop attributions, sometimes with success, sometimes not (see below, on Messana and Cherchel).

The book should be esteemed, but also used with care. Detailed commentary would need a much longer review, but I offer here some particular observations and details. Criticism is offered in the spirit of urging people to take seriously much of what is not critiqued. I omit the closing section 13.13 (326–28) on cameo-cut “luxury objects,” small portrait reliefs and large plaques (“state cameos”), and vessels, in stone and glass, many well known, others less so. These may not suit well a project about wearable intaglios meant at least notionally to make and circulate images; the smaller dynastic portrait cameos were of a scale perhaps to be worn, but often they were too large to be costume elements in period fashions. To assess G.'s take on these iconographically complex objects made in a courtly context would need a separate review.

A capacious historiographical narrative addresses the history and publishing of museum collections, the major archeologically located clusters of seals and sealings, and work on political gems (Chapter 2, 2–15).Footnote ⁷ I suggest the reader jump to Chapter 11, where G. examines 2,913 gems “related to politics in the Republican and Augustan period” and determines that 2,433 of them are “propaganda and self-presentation” (250). There is no attempt to assay how much of gem production and consumption overall was political; that is perhaps an unworkable project, except in tight regional studies, but one that might be seen as the ideal. This chapter describes ancient distribution, with maps to chart reliably known provenance (i.e., by city and regionFootnote ⁸), “said to have been found,” or sites of purchase, as well as provenience maps and charts. Chapter 12 (“Statistics”) presents G.'s findings for the 1st c. BCE dissected numerically. Gems for individual politicians, classes of propaganda, some objects, and patronage of engravers are tallied by period as percentages. This has its attractions, but sharp divides based on asserting what gems mean when they fit categories of “commemoration” or “promotion of faction” or “promotion of political ideas” can be arbitrary. The author is laudably interested throughout in the affordance of even the most propagandistic of gems to be used to non-political ends: he notes many had images that could seem auspicious, to be used as amulets in their owners’ understanding. This affects many seals people have wished to tie to Sulla, Caesar, and Octavian/Augustus. Historians and archaeologists of religion should take note: as in small, so in large. The ability of viewers to turn images into non-factional concerns also has bearing on the reception of much grander politico-religious monuments.

After laying out models of propaganda and introducing the different categories of evidence and some contexts (triumphs, collecting) of seal production for patrons, G. goes more deeply into what got onto gems, and why, in the 3rd–2nd c. BCE (“Employment of gem engravers”). In “Beginnings” (45–68) he addresses the standard topic of “Hellenistic influence”: the shift to new techniques and some new stylistic modes, as well as the introduction of the genre of the portrait gem, linked to the conquest of Greek territories and close contact with the world of the Hellenistic kingdoms. With that came encounters with artisans who signed works of high value, “artists,” and collectionism. Seals came west, and so did seal cutters. Such narratives of the “Hellenistic” vs. “Roman” in glyptic scholarship invite dialogue with the rich and ongoing discussion in art history and cultural history on Rome's position in the Hellenistic Mediterranean and the place of “Greek art” in Roman communities.

Entangled with this political history is the fact that for centuries connoisseurs have striven to build a corpus of artisans’ signatures (sometimes forged) and to distinguish “hands” among unsigned gems. Wobbling on Marlowe's “shaky ground,”Footnote ⁹ G.'s project and others collude with a post-antique fetishizing of the naturalistic intaglio as masterpiece and its maker as a fine artist. That process brings prestige (and money) to museums, dealers, collectors, and exhibitions – and to scholars of those things. G., like others, enlists name artists into the service of attested leaders, building this into the catalogue structure and constructing what could be called “salons.” The premises are that great artists worked for great men, main players on the historical stage as we now glimpse them, and great men caused movements in taste, for style and content. The proposition that a datable patron can date a stone, and an artist, thus supplying chronologies even where there is no stratigraphic context, tempts many, including G. Patrons are found by tying iconography to what is known of their actions. For a Late Republican society, avid to consume fine things domestically, where the great might follow trends as much as set them, these are questionable premises. Political power did not automatically equate to taste-making auctoritas relative to other senators and knights, the circles of amicitia in which people noted one another's possessions; successful gemmarii surely made a living off many people, including quietly anonymous people of means, not just the consuls of the year.

Many glyptic studies, which G. follows, tie images from myth and of deities to “great man” propaganda; this is used to construct and explain fashions, that is, clusters, of seal types. Mythological stories were looked to in Roman culture as exempla.Footnote ¹⁰ Romans looked to divine protectors and took them as talismanic badges; triumphant generals very often set up a temple to their protector(s) and encouraged particular cults. Could intaglio images of legends and deities therefore be weaponized as propaganda, manifest acts of fealty and adherence to the great man's power? This can work to some extent with Caesar, and Augustus, perhaps, staking a claim to the stories of the Fall of Troy and of Aeneas's emigration to Italy, although even those could appeal to people for reasons other than political fealty. Retrojecting this concept onto uncontextualized gems is chancy. G. rightly rejects a number of propositions, though he accepts more than I would. This approach shapes and sometimes warps the understanding of why an image was produced. Why would you sign off with the Flaying of Marsyas? A political reading may tempt many to ascribe a Sullan or Octavianic date, as their divine patron in conquest and dominion was Apollo (76, 173, 224). A problem with many of these postulations is that we cannot soundly date gems stylistically and formally with the granularity it takes to assign something to Marius vs. Sulla, Pompey, or Caesar, Brutus or Octavian, in the politically crowded 1st c. BCE.

Sometimes G. seems unaware of larger discussions in Hellenistic and Roman studies of practices he investigates. I will single out the term and topic of “collection” for important practices of owning gems that bulk large in this book. It requires unpacking. “Amass” might be preferable, for it could apply to a coffer at Pompeii holding four intaglios, Octavian inheriting his mother's two seals, or the very large documented luxury collections. There is extensive work on other media and display contexts, private and public, for Late Republican elite collectionism, its entanglements with “Greek” art, and the range of object behaviors (buying new things, buying old things, and, in wars of conquest in the Greek and Asian sphere in the late 3rd and 2nd c., taking things as spoils).Footnote ¹¹ It would have been good to see engagement with discussions of other Republican art that appraise the phenomenon of “Greek” art, when things were produced by Greeks for Romans that could be specifically shaped for that market. In amassing even just two rings, one gave oneself the choice of which to use, in which circumstances. A ring, including a seal ring, marked Roman men of high rank. Sources for G.'s period tell us that by the 1st c. BCE, men were usually expected to wear only one ring (though reproving texts show that many wore more), as G. and others stress. But they are not saying a man owned only one seal ring. The very incidence of “propaganda” gems, and of gem fashions, signals ownership of multiple things and variations in what to wear or seal with (not always the same thing). Seals and rings were so needed by free men of many classes – and by the 1st c. BCE by many women too – that they were certainly not waiting to acquire a propaganda intaglio, nor, when they got one, tossing a prior seal away. Did one really use Pompey's face to correspond with one's wife or brother, or jettison portrait rings showing one's ancestors?

G. discusses, naturally, as do Hellenistic and Roman glyptic studies, the import of seal and seal ring as objects, from badge to talisman and more; his additions to this work are very valuable. This, and the practices of acquisition and amassing, gift and inheritance, call for engagement with human-thing relations as anthropologists, art historians, and archaeologists have long debated them: object agency, entanglement, standardization, objects’ “representation” of persons, commoditization, transactional gifting, “objects in motion” in the Hellenistic and Roman global context, etc.Footnote ¹² The book project deals, in essence, with objects’ power to provoke, instantiate, and call upon memory; that invites engagement with the profuse Romanist work on intersections of “memory” with monuments, places and things.

As a last note on social histories that one would like G. to expand, I flag women, not only as subjects (portraits) on seals but also as their owners. G.'s default owner/audience, propagandist/propagandized, is male and free(d). That is a natural consequence of focusing on gems that are both actors in and epiphenomena of partisan politics for the 2nd and 1st c. BCE. But it assumes that more free men than women were literate, and also engaged commercially and institutionally, so that men handled things they needed to seal far more than women did. G. considers women only insofar as they are portrait subjects, which is rare and “for decorative purposes” (62, 88–89, 129). I would not back away so quickly from elite women's claiming of rank and importance – even if just among the extended family and guests – when they wore a ring, whether bought, or gifted from male or female kin (89). By 100 BCE, if not well before, elite women and those of lower orders aiding in family shops and workshops had a stake in being literate, and they would generate and handle letters, documents, and accounts needing seals. Archaeology and texts show they had them. Certain domains of imagery G. treats as liable to be political, male by default, can as easily have been women's gems – for example, Fortuna, Minerva, and Venus and Amores.

Texts and stones

Things matter. Texts are things. They can be crucial, and G. makes them so to prove practices and attitudes that mute things cannot describe. Examples come mostly from standard studies, although they are often misreported and exploited positivistically. Double-checking the sources so as to report them accurately, with direct quotation (in text or appendix), would have saved G. from what comes across as error. It would also have made the book more of the valuable compendium it can be. This section and the following address some of these instances affecting G.'s master narratives.Footnote ¹³ Regional workshops get invented, for instance, when G. uses a stray lawyer's speech mentioning a Sicilian, Heius of Messana, who owned four statues, to prove Sicilian production (Cic. Verr. 2.4.3–7). The much-studied carver, also named Heius, who G. – without due source criticism – says stands out for imitation of “sculptural prototypes” (112), must have served the collector Heius of Messana, and so the gem carver can be identified as an important Sicilian workshop head (111–12, 126, 137, 194, 257, 265).Footnote ¹⁴ Statues abounded in Italy and Sicily. Glyptic and textual data show Heii of means and rank in central Italy and Rome from the 2nd c. BCE on.Footnote ¹⁵ This signals an Italo-Roman carver, an exciting prospect because many carvers sign as Greeks. For G., Dio Cassius (48.12.2) proves integration propaganda in action by describing veterans of Octavian and Antony using “specific types of rings and gems” to ratify a copy of a compact between their leaders (316), but Dio says only that the soldiers sealed something, not what was on the seals (which were not unusual possessions). One telling example for the history of Augustus's glyptic image is G.'s suggestion that Tiberius punished the wearing of Augustus's image on a ring as sacrilege (317); Suetonius (Tib. 58, uncited), however, says that Tiberius forbade polluting the deified emperor's image by carrying it into latrines and whorehouses, a rather different rule. Mithridates VI Eupator is a huge topic in the book, as so often for scholars of Hellenistic and Republican gem practices, going on the notation (see below) that Pompey, in the booty from his conquest of Mithridates, showed off a collection of (gem) “rings,” dactyliotheca (Plin. HN 37.5.1). Over hopefully, G. adds that Appian (Mith. 115) says Mithridates owned 2,000 engraved gems and vessels decorated with precious stones, seized by Pompey; Appian, however, mentions only vessels and begemmed horse-trappings, the stones of which would not have been cut with images.

Two cases especially stand out for how G. handles texts by means of tenuous readings to make what would be major contributions to our fundamental understanding of how intaglio gems were used in the Late Republic and early empire. In the first case, concerning Juba II, a meaningful chapter in Hellenistic/Roman intaglio production, Romanization, and the existence of actual books on gem intaglios hangs on misreported text and problematic statements of resemblance. In the second case, concerning Pompey, the social history of Roman engraved gem collecting, that which drove the craft's prosperity, turns on a datable historical crux seemingly proved by a problematic text. Throughout, G.'s reliance on Pliny overlooks that for Pliny and other Latin authors, gemma meant any prized stone used as a “gem” without necessarily implying a cut seal. Remains and texts show that plain gems were worn on rings (and in earrings and necklaces), and applied to metal wares and costume, for the sake of beauty and sometimes talismanic effect.Footnote ¹⁶ In examining case studies of Juba II and Pompey, we can see how G. reconstructs their behavior and its ancient impact regarding intaglios.

An African prince, his books, and his gems

Juba II of Mauretania (ca. 48 BCE–23 CE) grew up in the court of Augustus, having been brought to Rome as a small child after the death of his father, Juba I of Numidia, who had allied with Pompey's forces in Africa against Caesar and lost. The child, who figured in Caesar's triumph, was fostered by him. Caesar's nephew took up that guardianship; Juba was later married off to the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra Selene, also fostered at court, and established as client king of Mauretania. He wrote prolifically, including treatises on the antiquities of Rome, learned geographies, and other works. G. falsely has him write a book on engraved gems, an ancient prototype for modern glyptic scholars.Footnote ¹⁷ Interested in production outside Rome and Italy, G. posits that Juba's capital Cherchel (Iol-Caesarea) was a center for production and esteem of engraved gems. He proposes that at least two late 1st-c. BCE gem cutters known from signatures – Aulos and Gnaios – served Juba II. G.'s Pliny “observes that the ruler was a keen connoisseur and enthusiast of engraved gems and that he even wrote a treatise about gemstones which was one of the sources Pliny used to produce his work” (127; see 55, 209, 315, 317), a book that raised Juba's status at Rome in propaganda fashion (311). These data, and supposed gem portraits of Juba II, make the prince a model of client-kings imitating Augustus's interest in propaganda gems (317), exemplifying the spread from Rome of centers of propaganda glyptic (i.e., Romanization). In itself, that is always of interest.

Pliny, however, says nowhere in the Natural History that Juba II discussed engraved gems. Pliny quotes Juba II as a source for geographic and natural lore at many points; G. does not describe these references. Book 37, which addresses esteemed and interesting stones, cites Juba on where stones occur and their oddities. Not all are types used for body ornamentation or seals, and even those known to be used for jewelry are reported as curiosities and natural resources (37.24, 69, 73, 108, 114). An example, from Juba, is how topaz belongs to the Ptolemaic court fascination with humongous lumps: HN 37.108 notes a hunk of topaz from the then-new mine on Topazos Island so big that Ptolemy II had it carved into a 4-cubit-high statue of his wife Arsinoe. Much that Juba II names concerns early Ptolemaic royal prospecting for and exploitation of precious and semi-precious stones. Minerals, fine alabaster, and stone curiosities also occur in other books (33.118, 36.163). All come from Juba II's geographical works Libyca, Arabia, and Assyria, which discussed natural resources, flora and fauna, human settlement, and geographic features of northern Africa and regions eastwards, seasoned with the anecdotal. It is clear from the snippets that the cultivated scholar knew his Theophrastos (On Stones) and other writers on stone and gem substances. Like any Roman-bred elite person of his era, Juba II will have owned at least one nice seal. Perhaps he collected intaglios more broadly. But Pliny gives no evidence that Juba was deeply interested in intaglios or wrote about them. G. cites for such authorship Thoresen (55, 127, 311), but Thoresen says the references to Juba II throughout HN are from the geographies.Footnote ¹⁸ Misreporting of secondary literature is not uncommon in the book. Exciting phantom intaglios emerge; for instance, a class of intaglios commemorating the invasion of Britain.Footnote ¹⁹ G.'s eminent Cornelii Scipiones yield both a signet device of the 3rd c. BCE to which an ancient source attests – a strikingly early appearance of gem propaganda – and a ring with the same device in the family tomb, a wonderful example of Republican aristocrats alluding to eminent ancestors by replicating an ancient family seal (45).Footnote ²⁰

I would have liked to see G. probe more deeply into the question of among whom this client prince's intaglios circulated and why – if, that is, the intaglios really do show him. Among several problematic attributions (cat. 8. 183–84 with Figs. 286, 287, and cat. 9.1274–79 with Fig. 746), only one has a potential provenance: 9.1275, a carnelian in Munich said to have been found at Izmir, an odd place to find the king of Mauretania. Authors have wished this intriguing personage to have gems, not least signed ones. G. hesitates over these links, but his maybes, as so often, slide into strong-ish hypotheses that will attract historians and art historians. We get the claim that a gem signed by “Gnaios” in the British Museum (G.'s cat. 8.182, as “40-20” BCE, Fig. 284, head of a young Hercules shouldering a small club) is Juba II.Footnote ²¹ However, this smooth-cheeked Hercules has standard ideal features and lacks Juba's diadem. Nothing visible makes this Hercules an actual person, let alone a king, including by comparison to extant statuary heads of Juba II, at least one of them with solid provenance from the French excavations at Cherchel.Footnote ²² G. posits that the coin in Fig. 285, a Hercules issue of Juba II, is “similar” to this gem (127), but the two look nothing alike.

G. notes Zwierlein-Diehl queried the recut inscription,Footnote ²³ and the gem's authenticity, and that others doubt the royal attributions but omits their reasons (127). Cat. 8.813, Fig. 286 signed by “Aulos”, “Perhaps Juba II?” (355), is “very similar” to the BM gem (127). It also depicts a young Hercules bust with club on shoulder; the faces are not remotely alike, nor does this figure look like coin images and statuary images of Juba II, and it lacks a diadem. It has an extraordinarily craggy nose, different to the straight profile of the first gem. I would posit this imago purports to be a Roman, shown with a bit of a veristic twist, whom the gem praises (a gift?) as having the strength and prowess of one of Rome's favorite deities; this is a trope of Republican and Imperial praise for elites of the Republic and after, and of their self-fashioning. Aulos, and Gnaios, are said, on no evidence, to work for Juba II (127, as part of “personal branding”; 194, 215, 295); we get the gem attributions again (e.g., 94, 295 Gnaios), get the six queried Juba II intaglios as certain (209, and see 315), documenting Juba's taste, and hear the Juban intaglios match Augustan classicism (317). It typifies the mode one could call “hypothesis creep” in much of the book for attribution of artist personalities, portrait subjects, and linkage between famous people and signing craftsmen: equivocating at first, but then marshalling speculation into attested fact.

A general and collector

A challenge at the heart of the book project is the handling of a text about Pompeius Magnus's triumph, which G. uses to help date, as definitively post 61 BCE, the phenomenon of wide-scale gem signet usage and amassing. What we know is in Pliny (HN 37.11), in reference to Pompey's triumph over Mithridates VI Eupator and his dedication in the Capitolium of a dactyliotheca from Mithridates’ collection. I translate:

This Scaurus was likely the man who was Pompey's chosen quaestor in 65 BCE for the Mithridatic War, Pompey's eminent elder contemporary and amicus.Footnote ²⁴ This suggests young Pompey, avid to win over the nobilitas, emulated Scaurus's collecting. What does Pliny mean by a remarkable span of elapsed time (diuque nulla alia fuit) between what Scaurus did and Pompey in 61 BCE? Perhaps his Scaurus was not Sulla's stepson but rather an earlier Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (d. 89 BCE), consul of 115 BCE and triumphator, censor of 109 BCE.Footnote ²⁵

Pliny (HN 37.12) notes, and I translate: “That victory of Pompey's, however, first made taste tend towards pearls and gemmae, just as (the victory of) L. Scipio and Cn. Manlius towards worked silverwares and Attalica garments [cloth of gold], and that of L. Mummius, to Corinthian bronzes and panel paintings. To make this known more clearly, I append the words of the acta of the triumphs of Pompey himself.” G. takes the triumphal displays as an example of the display of glyptic, engraved gems. But besides the one intaglio and collection of rings (dactyliotheca, some of which may have been unengraved), Pliny names objects other than seals, from gem boards to gem vessels, including gem-encrusted clothing and things (HN 37.13–18). Pompey's triumph showcased luxurious displays and items that incorporated esteemed stones, but Pliny does not make it a turning point for all gem-seal use and amassing, let alone for mass production of engraved gems for others or a taste for engraved seal rings (contra 55, 94).Footnote ²⁶ The proposition that a particular triumph started a particular fashion is famously problematic: Roman writers perform critique of the Republic's fall as a decline in Roman morals due to the empire's very success as indexed in triumphs. And Pliny and his sources try to date artifact behaviors by datable historical persons and events known to them, seeking an inventor. Their information is patchy, tied to other ends than art history of artifacts.

Pompey's practice is, rather, a symptom of, as much as a spur to, an intensified interest in owning gemstones and gem seals that gathers steam in the 1st c. BCE under competitive pressures. Scaurus, before Pompey, surfaces as an intensive amasser of things;Footnote ²⁷ behind that name are surely many others, stretching back to the 2nd-c. age of conquests, and the operation of a market in which dealers offered old as well as new things.Footnote ²⁸ G. finds no evidence of collecting before Scaurus, but that is not evidence of absence; few Latin texts of the 3rd–2nd c. BCE survive to tell us about peoples’ possessions (except, importantly, in fiction tied to reality, as in Plautus's Curculio). We hear that Caesar loved to buy gemmae (111; along with other art and table silver, Suet. Iul. 47); it is doubtful that he needed Pompey's example to point the way that Scaurus, and surely others, had set. Competitive dactyliotheca dedication vis-à-vis Pompey's one votive is another thing: Caesar gave Venus six. Pliny is tracking dactyliotheca votives specifically, which he or his sources could find, perhaps in records, certainly in the sanctuaries whose votives Pliny loved to prowl, as the “art books” show (HN 34–36).

Coda

Pliny's sources have perished, but Republican and Augustan seals survive. G. does much to draw attention to them in an intriguing narrative with very many strong points and propositions; its weaknesses are that of much of its subfield. An admirably broad project such as this – situated carefully in its primary sources, exercising due impulse toward skepticism, and taking up whole practices alongside individual case studies – can find favor with friendly art historians, as well as archaeologists and historians. With this book G. has offered them all valuable material. His wish to bring glyptic into mainstream Roman art history will, I hope, succeed, and I look forward very much to reading what he writes next.