The statue was found by VangjeI Toçi in the 1960s during
excavations to build new houses on the northern outskirts of the city. It had
been unceremoniously reused as building material in what Toçi termed "a
rich urban dwelling" and was not in its original location. Unfortunately
we don’t know much more than that about its discovery.
Now upright once more and cleaned, the fragmentary statue
was a work of high quality, cut from finely grained Pentelic marble, suggesting
that this was not the product of a workshop producing generic products and
supporting its identification as an imperial statue. In its current condition
the statue is 1.67m high. It is missing the head, the upper part and right side
of the torso, both arms, the left foot and the right leg from below the knee.
The statue is in the tradition of the emperor in armour,
standing in the pose of an orator, as typified by the Augustus of Prima Porta,
a sculpture found in the villa of Livia, Augustus’ third wife. The Prima Porta statue
portrays the emperor
as ‘thoracatus’ (thorax-wearer),
that is commander-in-chief of the Roman army, in the pose of a Roman
orator. The stance of the statue looks back to works of the 5th
century BC sculptor Polykleitos, and in particular the contraposto pose of his
‘Spear Bearer’. The emperor in armour type has a range of variations, not only
in pose - in the case of the statue in Durrës, the weight of the subject is
unevenly distributed, with the left leg bent and the left shoulder raised – but
also in regard to the military garb and the iconography of the decorated
cuirass.
The decoration of the emperor’s cuirass (of the anatomical or
‘muscle cuirass’ type) was an opportunity to show the qualities or actions of
the emperor through figural scenes or symbolic imagery. In the case of statues
such as the one in Durrës, where the head is missing, the decoration of the
cuirass can often help with the identification of the emperor.
The Durrës cuirass of the statue is decorated with a more or
less symmetrical design of two Nereids facing one another as they ride on hippocamps
above two dolphins who meet at the centre of the stomach area. The upper part
of the cuirass is missing, we do not know what might have decorated the section
in the centre and above the Nereids.
Guntram Koch (see further reading, below) has identified six
statues which feature Nereids riding on sea creatures. Two of these are very
different to the sculpture in Durrës, but three (from Olympia, Bologna and the
Louvre) are helpful when considering the possible identity of the Durrës
statue. The examples in Olympia and the Louvre have Nereids riding hippocamps
above dolphins, the Bologna torso features Nereids riding sea monsters.
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| The Olympia Titus |
While the Louvre and Bologna examples are both headless, the
Olympia sculpture has the head of the emperor Titus – but the head is a
replacement.
Marco Cavalieri points out that though a statue losing its
head may be accidental, it can also be intentional, with the head replaced or
the statue reworked. The fact that all
of the statues with Nereids on the cuirass strongly suggests to Cavalieri that
the heads have been removed because of the identity of the subject. The
practice of damnatio memoriae meant that the statues of some emperors
were destroyed or reworked after their death, and since the Durrës statue can
be dated to the 1st century CE, that means that we can look at those
emperors to whom the practice of damnatio memoriae was applied during
that time period: Caligula (37-41 AD), Nero (54-68 AD) and Domitian (81 -96
AD).
Scholars agree that these statues do not fit the style
associated with the period of Tiberius and Caligula, but rather with the art of
the reigns of Nero and Domitian, and the torso of Bologna is now strongly
identified with Nero.
Eric Varner contends that the motif of the Nereids riding
hippocamps may have been created by Neronian artists. He suggests that dolphins and sea creatures
were introduced into the repertoire of cuirass decoration to celebrate Nero’s
dominion over land and sea, and that the Flavian emperors then also used this
imagery. He adds a statue from Narona to the list of those with hippocamps on
the cuirass and suggests that all of these fragmentary statues originally belonged
to portraits of Nero. We know that militaristic images of Nero were
disseminated across Greece, including at Olympia, where he had participated in
the Games. Varner proposes that the cuirassed portrait of Titus in Olympia was originally
from a portrait of Nero, as well as that of Domitian in Rome.
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| The Bologna Nero |
The Bologna torso was first convincingly attributed to Nero
by Guido Mansuelli. He sees a strong Hellenistic inspiration, harking back to the
Lysippean iconography of Alexander. Nero was a fan of Hellenic culture and it may be that this
depiction of the Emperor perhaps dated to around 67/68 CE, when Nero was in
Greece.
The question remains as to why the city of Dyrrachium erected
a statue of Nero. It was an important port on the Adriatic, and as the
beginning of the Via Egnatia, the gateway to the East, but the area also had
connections to ancestors of the Emperor. In particular Cnaeus Domitius
Ahenobarbus, held sway over the Otranto strait at the time of the Roman civil
wars in the years 42-40 BC.
On the same day as the battle of Philippi, Cn. Domitius
Ahenobarbus defeated the fleet of Cn. Domitius Calvinus, Octavian’s legate, in
the Ionian Sea, and for the next two years conducted operations with and with a
fleet of seventy ships and two legions along the coast of the Ionian Sea and up
to Dyrrachium. To commemorate his victory, Ahenobarbus had an aureus minted with
an image of his ancestor of the same name on the obverse and the depiction of a
temple on the reverse with the inscription NEPT CN DOMITIUS L F IMP. The coin
refers to the Temple of Neptune rebuilt by the general Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus
in the late 2nd century BCE following a naval victory. Inside
the temple Ahenobarbus had placed a sculpture of Neptune, Thetis and Achilles
surrounded by various sea monsters by the Greek sculptor Scopas, and other
sculptures from the temple include a Nereid on a hippocamp. Perhaps the
introduction of sea creatures into the repertoire of cuirass decoration by Nero
is an echo of his family’s historic mastery of the sea, with the realm of
Neptune now adorning the Emperor’s person.
The find spot of the statue does not help us understand its
original purpose as it was reused as building material. Imperial statues would
usually be found in public buildings, for example theatres or council chambers.
The Bologna torso was discovered in the same area where the city’s Roman
theatre was later excavated and the statue there would probably have been sited
at the top of the cavea as sculptural decoration. As yet, no theatre has been
discovered in Durrēs, though the city surely had one. We know from an
inscription that there was a library in Dyrrachium. Was the statue sculptural
architectural decoration of the library, theatre or other public building? A
close look at the back of the sculpture shows that the rear of the pteruges (the
skirt of multi-layered strips of leather or fabric) is very flat and straight
across, finished in a way that is unlike the front of the statue. Was this
because the lower part of the statue stood in front of something, perhaps a
part of the building?
Unfortunately, we can only speculate at where the statue
might have been, and why, but on the question of identity, the evidence seems
to point to Nero, thanks to the beautifully sculpted and preserved cuirass.
Further Reading
Cavalieri, M., La statua loricata di Durazzo e la politica
imperiale di fine 1 secolo d.C. in ANTICHITÀ ALTOADRIATICHE LIII, 2003
Koch, G, Ein romischer Kaiser in Dyrrachium, Mitteilungen
des Deutschen
Archaologischen Instituts, Riimische Abteilung, 1995
Varner, E., Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae
and Roman Imperial Portraiture, Brill 2004
Varner, E., Nero’s Memory in Flavian Rome in The Cambridge
Companion to the Age of Nero, CUP, 2017
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