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E. J. Dwyer, Pompeian Domestic Sculpture: a Study of Five Pompeian Houses and their Contents (Archaeologica XXVIII). Rome: G. Bretschneider, 1982. Pp. 178, 55 pls., 1 text-fig.

types—c. 150 are collected by F. in the notes—may lurk wayward pieces intended as versions of an imperial type but not now detectable. For types III, IV, VI, and IX, F. has only a very few ' grey ' pieces each. The two each for types III and IX seem fairly certain, those for IV and VI not so. Type II has no sculptured examples, which F. thinks not significant. But similar gaps occur with Lucilla and Crispina: both have three coin portrait types of which only two have sculptured versions. It is possible that some variations in image, like small hairstyle changes, could have been put through the mints more easily, and might not have been considered sufficiently important to be put through what must have been the less agile machinery for the distribution of types in the round. Alternatively, such variations could merely have originated in and stayed within the mints; in this case one should be careful in the classification of official portrait types as against variants. Concerning the occasions for the creation of the portrait types, F.'s thesis I think must be roughly right. This is an interesting area of archaeological hypothesis, for no ancient source ever tells us what a portrait type was made for. Dates of first appearance on coins must be correlated with likely historical events—contemporary or slightly preceding. Portraits mediated the imperial family to the empire and new types were probably therefore connected with dynastic events: conferring of titles, adoptions, marriages, apotheoses, and the like. The best explanation for Faustina's unusual number of types is that they celebrated her fecund production of an unusual number of heirs. But F. presses this too rigidly. The numismatic evidence could fit with such a view, but even if the coins could be precisely dated they would not fully prove the thesis, because the portrait types could well have appeared in other media some time before they were put on coins. Portrait types need not be connected with the occasions to which the (often different) political messages of the coin reverses allude. While F. is probably right for the majority of the types, it is as likely—perhaps more so—that type I, which presents Faustina as a very young girl, was made for her marriage to Marcus in 145 as for the birth of her first child, a girl Domitia, in 147. Similarly the popular type VII could have been made for Marcus' accession in March 161 rather than for the twin boys' birth in August of the same year. (These two types would then coincide with the accepted hypothetical dates for Marcus' portrait types II and III.) F. admits the former possibility but does not mention the latter. More flexibility is probably needed in this area, as with typology. F.'s summing up of the significance and expression of Faustina's portraits (chapter vi) is slightly disappointing. One misses some account of the meaning of her image in its context. Although F. shows himself hard-headed (p. 62, n. 51) about modern psychological/sentimental interpretation of the ' real' character revealed in imperial portraits, he does little to define the content of Faustina's image. Imperial portraits are not unconscious reflectors of their time but were made to express positive political and dynastic ideas. On one level one can get at these ideas through imperial titulature and slogans. However, while the titles stay the same, the portraits change markedly. On this other, visual, level, they become important historical documents of the changing nature of the principate— though necessarily hard to interpret. They are not documents for reading anything so banal as the changing fortunes of empire expressed in the supposedly lascivious or worried faces of the rulers. Rather they were a medium through which successive imperial governments sought to convey to Roman subjects their ideas and perceptions of the princeps' role or ' character '. How these perceptions changed we can try to read in the portraits. Naturally F. could not undertake this broader task here. But it is very much to be hoped that F., perhaps with his collaborator P. Zanker, could be persuaded to write a general history of official imperial portraiture such as is sadly lacking in any language. F. thinks (n. 1) the time not yet ripe, but with Wegner's Herrscherbild series nearly complete and many of its gaps already filled by other and more recent work (much of it by F.), an overall study of the statistics, distribution, typology, and historical content of imperial portraits could very usefully be made, setting out simply what we can know for certain about the whole system of official Bildnispropaganda—if that is the right word. The great advances in this field and their value are not much known or accessible to ancient historians reliant on texts, who generally remain quite naive in front of imperial portraits.