Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Book 74)

by Mary Beard

One hallmark of these sets of Caesars, like the Aldobrandini Tazze, was the sense of completion they implied. That was signalled by the numbers, I to XII, often printed or inscribed next to the imperial faces on paper or plaques, and sometimes even on more prestige painting and sculpture. These made an obvious incentive, for those who had not acquired the complete set all at once, to fill the gaps (and, of course, it was from the principle of ‘filling the gap’, or of getting the buyers ‘hooked’, that much of Wedgwood’s profit came). But the numbers were also about asserting a sense of order. That was partly in practical terms: they enabled anyone to line emperors up ‘correctly’ even if they could not quite remember whether Otho (VIII) came before or after Vitellius (IX); and, in the case of those imperial chairs (Fig. 1.12), no matter who drew the short straws of Caligula or Nero, they offered a diagram for the seating plan at dinner. There was, however, a bigger point. As one art historian has recently summed it up, numerical cycles of the Caesars ‘seemed to symbolize the encyclopaedic knowledge of collectors’; they reflected ‘a complete well-ordered knowledge of the past’.