The Last Statues of Antiquity

The monumental squares, streets, and public buildings of ancient towns were filled with large bronze and marble figures. By the third century important cities of the empire could have over a thousand such statues, looking down from their pedestals on the life of the city below. Indeed the habit of erecting statues in public to rulers and prominent local figures was a defining characteristic of the ancient world. The dedication of statues expressed the relationship between rulers and ruled and articulated the benefaction-and-honour system of city politics. Statues also played a significant role both in defining civic identity, and in forming and perpetuating a city's collective memory.

In the fourth to sixth centuries AD, statues continued to be erected in many parts of the empire; but already the uniform practices of earlier imperial times had broken down and become attenuated. By the mid-seventh century, the statue-habit, once so ubiquitous, had completely disappeared from the Roman world. Not even in Constantinople were new statues set up.

The aim of our project is to document and examine these remarkable changes, in the context of historical and cultural developments within the Roman world between the fourth and the seventh centuries A.D. The changes are quantifiable, at least approximately, because the evidence available is so extensive; and they provide an effective way of measuring and visualising the broader transformations that created first 'Late Antiquity', and eventually the 'End of Antiquity' itself.

Our project involves the collection of all the evidence, empire-wide, for the erection of new statues: statue-bases with inscriptions (which provide most of our data); fragmentary and whole statues themselves; and scattered references to new statues in historical and literary texts. This systematic work of collection has never been done before.

Preliminary research suggests about 1,700 new statues can be documented from this period, and reveals that these were distributed very unevenly, both geographically and chronologically, in patterns that look highly significant, if sometimes puzzling. For instance, by the fourth century new statues seem already to be very rare in the northern provinces (which is interesting but not unexpected, given the early decline of traditional civic culture in these regions), but they also appear to be uncommon in the Levant, despite a flourishing urban life in this area.

A principal aim of our project is to chart accurately these processes of change and contraction, looking not only at the distribution of statues, but also at the type of person erecting statues, and at the type of honorand. This will produce important and novel results, that have never been examined in a comparative way, empire-wide; and, crucially, it will provide the relevant data for an intelligent analysis of why statues persisted in some areas, but disappeared in others. Some of the most obvious variables we shall explore are the decline of traditional civic politics and civic identity, the arrival of new barbarian rulers, the impact of christianization (with its hostility to 'idols'), the emergence of new artistic forms (such as mosaics in churches), and the continuity or loss of craftsmanship skills.

Our aim is to produce an accessible study of 'The Last Statues of Antiquity', in book form, supported by a well-designed searchable on-line catalogue, freely available. This catalogue will be the essential foundation on which our arguments will be based; but it will also act as a free-standing resource usable by scholars, students, and the interested public. This data-base would be useful, as a teaching and research tool, both for people with broad interests (for example, in urban history and archaeology, in late Roman art history, or in the politics of the later Roman world), and for more specialist projects, such as costume-history, marble studies, and the development of letter-carving.