Description
Roman portraiture is sufficiently stylized that it is not always clear who is depicted. The soft, round faces and sleepy, up-turned eyes of these two figures are part of the general facial style of the late empire, especially the third and early fourth centuries, (see, for example the faces of the winged season figures on the Seasons Sarcophagus, early fourth century, BZ. 1936.65). The relative rank of these two figures is a little clearer, given that one is bearded and stands in front of the other. These are probably two co-emperors from the Tetrarchy, a system inaugurated by Diocletian in 293 CE, by which he divided the increasingly unwieldy empire in half geographically, and set each half under the rule of two co-emperors, a senior with the rank of “Augustus”, and a junior with the rank of “Caesar”.
In public monuments depicting the four rulers, sculptors strove to erase the differences among the four rulers, in order to convey the official optimistic view that the tetrarchs ruled as one. Throughout Roman and Byzantine art, however, luxury objects made for the eyes of the elite of the palace, often relaxed the official standards of propaganda. Here, then, the two co-rulers are shown as individuals, with the evidence of their hierarchy.
The gem is cut from a larger work, which might have shown all four tetrarchs. Researchers favor the identification of these as Diocletian and Galerius, who jointly ruled the Eastern half of the Empire from 293 to 305. In this case, the two Western tetrarchs on the missing section would have been Maximian and Constantius Chlorus.
- J. Hanson
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