Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2021
This article offers an account of Roman imperial cameos as an archaeological category, and argues that the production of large high-quality cameos was more restricted in time than currently allowed; that the controversial dates and subjects of individual cameos need to be set in the wider sequence of the main examples; and that early imperial praise poetry sits in relationship to court cameos in a way that can be usefully investigated around their shared concern to understand the particular character of imperial divinity. An Appendix gives details of forty-one examples illustrated and discussed.
This study started as a seminar and lecture paper given at Oxford, Harvard and Rutgers universities. Warmest thanks are owed to the following for PDFs, photographs, important suggestions, and helpful references: Gianfranco Adornato, Mary Beard, Marianne Bergmann, John Boardman, Kathleen Coleman, Cécile Giroire, Hans Rupprecht Goette, Ruurd Halbertsma, Christopher Hallett, Martin Henig, Stephen Heyworth, Gregory Hutchinson, Mario Iozzo, Julia Lenaghan, Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, Laure Marest-Caffey, Dimitris Plantzos, Georg Plattner, Thomas Runeckles, Gerhardt Schmidt, Stephanie Stoss, Claudia Wagner and Erika Zwierlein-Diehl, as well as four anonymous reviewers for this journal who gave generous and detailed suggestions for the article's improvement. Those mentioned should not be implicated in points of heterodoxy advanced here.