Essay around 3-4 pages about the body in the ancient Greek and Roman world.

OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART Author(s): Mark Bradley Source: Papers of the British School at Rome, Vol. 79 (2011), pp. 1-41 Published by: British School at Rome Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41725302 Accessed: 19-09-2017 21:01 UTC

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Papers of the British School at Rome 79 (2011), pp. 1-41 © British School at Rome doi: 1 0 . 1 0 1 7/S006 82462 1 1 0000 1 8

OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART'

by Mark Bradley

This article explores the significance of sculptural and painted representations of f overweight ' and ' underweight ' body types in the visual culture of Roman Italy from the fourth century bc through to the late Empire , and considers the relationship of this imagery to Greek and Hellenistic precedents. In spite of the topical character of fat in 21st-century sociology, anthropology and medical science , obesity and emaciation in the ancient world remain almost completely unexplored. This article sets out to examine the relationship of fat and thin bodies to power, wealth, character and behaviour, and seeks to identify patterns and continuities in the iconography of fleshiness and slenderness across a stretch of several hundred years. Such bodies could be evaluated in a number of different ways, and this article exposes the diverse - and sometimes contradictory - responses to body fat in the art and culture of the Roman world. It first examines the significance of obesity and emaciation in language, literature and medicine, and then discusses visual representations under three headings: ' Fertility '; (The marginal and the ridiculous ', examining the relationship between body fat, humour and figures at the edge of civilized society ; and 'Portraits', exploring fat and thin in the portraiture of real-life individuals in the realms of philosophy, Hellenistic rulership, Etruscan funerary art and Roman public sculpture.

L'articolo esplora il significato delle rappresentazioni scultoree e pittoriche dei tipi di corpi ' sovrappeso ' e s sottopeso' nella cultura figurative dell'Italia romana dal IV secolo a.C. fino al Tardo Impero e considera la relazione di questo immaginario con i precedenti greci ed ellenistici. A differenza del carattere topico del grasso nella sociologia, antropologia e scienza medica del XXI secolo, l'obesità e la magrezza nel mondo antico rimangono argomenti quasi del tutto inesplorati. L'articolo si propone di esaminare il rapporto del corpo grasso e magro con il potere, la ricchezza, il carattere e il comportamento, e cerca di identificare i modelli e le continuità nell'iconografia della grassezza e della magrezza attraverso un arco cronologico di vari centinaia di anni. Simili corpi potrebbero essere valutati attraverso varie strade e questo articolo espone le diverse - e a volte contradditorie - risposte al corpo grasso nell'arte e nella cultura del mondo romano. Prima si esamina il significato dell'obesità e magrezza nel linguaggio, letteratura e medicina, e poi si discuta le rappresentazioni visuali sotto tre aspetti : ' la fertilità '; HI marginale e il ridicolo', esaminando la

1 This article represents one small part of a long-term project on foul bodies in the history, literature and art of ancient Rome. I owe a large debt of thanks to many individuals for suggesting approaches to this topic, identifying appropriate material and shaping my arguments: Michael Beer, Carl Buckland, John Clarke, Robert Coates-Stephens, Penelope Davies, Jill Dye, Robert Garland, David Haslam, Katharina Lorenz, Tracey Reeves, Alan Sommerstein, Nigel Spivey, Michael Squire, Peter Stewart, Lisa Trentin and Caroline Vout; the Editor and two anonymous readers of Papers of the British School at Rome ; audiences at Cambridge and Nottingham; as well as all the perceptive comments on my photo album from my Facebook friends. I am also grateful to the British Academy and the British School at Rome for providing the funds and resources with which to pursue this research. All translations are my own, and all abbreviations follow those listed in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (third edition).

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2 MARK BRADLEY

relazione tra il corpo grasso, l'umore e le figure al margine della società civilizzata; e 'i ritratti', esplorando grasso e magro nella ritrattistica degli individui della vita reale nel mondo della filosofia, del dominio ellenistico, dell'arte funeraria etrusca e nella scultura pubblica romana.

INTRODUCTION

When the Emperor Vitellius was executed at the foot of the Gemonian Steps in the Roman Forum on 22 December ad 69, he was pelted with dung and mud, and his grotesque personal appearance was derided: as well as being an incendiary and a glutton, Suetonius tells us, he was monstrously tall, lame, and had a face red from wine and an obese stomach (uenter obesus).2 According to Dio, the jibes focused on the emperor's decadent lifestyle (àocotía), signalled most visibly by his 'fat belly' (yaaxpoTticov).3 Earlier in his Life of Vitellius (13), Suetonius describes at length the emperor's insatiable appetite and gluttony, adding that he even snatched pieces of meat from sacrificial altars to satisfy his hunger.4 The integration of the emperor's corpulent appearance into the invective that legitimized his execution attests to the significance of the physical body as an index of behaviour, morals and ethics in Roman politics, as well as the enduring importance of physiognomic discourses in contemporary biography and historiography. Vitellius's stoutness underpinned the greed, excess and lack of control that characterized his principáte. And yet his portly frame was by no means a straightforward defect in the visual culture of early Imperial Rome: surviving portraits in sculpture and coins make no effort to play down the emperor's round face and pendulous chin (Fig. 1 and below, Fig. 15d).5 These were reminiscent (and perhaps deliberately so) of later portraits of Nero, which likewise emphasized the emperor's corpulent figure, stout neck and fleshy chin.6 Such representations of Nero sometimes have been considered alongside disparaging literary traditions as evidence for the emperor's gluttony, or as a provocative departure from traditional imperial iconography; others have argued that a fuller figure evoked the affluence and authority that traditionally was associated with autocrats throughout the mediterranean world.7 One thing

2 Suet. Vit. 17-18. Further, see Beer (2010: 119); Greenhalgh (1975: 114). 3 Cass. Dio 64.20 (Epit.). At 64.3.2 Dio reports rumours that Vitellius had spent no less than

900,000,000 sesterces on dinners during his short reign. 4 Like Claudius, Vitellius is credited with the habit of forcing himself to be sick in order to make

room for more food: see Crichton (1996: 203-7). For an excellent study of imperial gluttony, see Goddard (1994), which explores the prevalence of imperial eating and drinking as literary motifs in Suetonius's Lives and in Cassius Dio.

5 For discussion of the colossal head of Vitellius and references, see Johansen (1994: 24, no. 1); Varner (2004: 109-10, n. 42); cf. Kleiner (1994: plate 137). There is a number of fleshy portraits wrongly identified as Vitellius: see Smith (1997: 192). 6 See Suet. Vit. 11.2 on Vitellius's imitation of Nero. 7 On the fat later portraits (and their theatrical influences), see Sande (1996: 135-6); and Cain

(1993: 88-95); on their provocative effects, see Hannestad (1988: 327); see also Smith (2000) on

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 3

Fig. 1. Colossal head of Vitellius (height 52 cm), from Rome (allegedly found near the Piazza Colonna). Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 655A, inv. 3167. © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. (Reproduced courtesy of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.)

is clear: excessive flesh in the Roman world tapped into a highly subjective and versatile set of traditions about the relationship between personal appearance and social, political and economic status. Fat mattered.

Evidence for obesity, corpulence and emaciation in the sculpture and painting of Roman Italy is thin on the ground. From the Archaic period onwards, the default position for an ancient artist or sculptor setting out to represent the bodies of mortals, heroes and gods alike was to reproduce, in the case of males, a youthful athletic figure with modest musculature, tight skin, broad shoulders and narrow hips (the Doryphoros, for instance); and, in the case of females, a young healthy figure of child-bearing age with soft, supple skin, rounded hips and shapely breasts (the Aphrodite of Knidos being a typical example).8 It is sometimes argued that this ideal of Classical bodily perfection - at least in male bodies - had its origins in Polykleitos of Argos, a fifth-century sculptor who had written a treatise about how to represent the ideal physique based on a system of mathematical equations that produced tautness, symmetry and balance (Spivey, 2004: 58-9). This idealized model, the prevailing standard across Graeco-Roman art, echoed a widely recognized physiognomic doctrine in which the well-balanced mediterranean body occupied the desirable intermediate middle ground in terms of diet, climate and lifestyle. In medical

divine accessories in Neronian portraiture, commenting on the work of Bergmann (1998). On Nero's gluttony, see Suet. Ner. 27 ; Tac. Ann. 14.2. On this theme, see Goddard (1994: 67-8), who pointed out that many modern scholars readily have accepted Nero's gluttony as historical fact; cf. pp. 72-3 on Nero's desperate feasting towards the end of his principáte. 8 See Hallett (2005: 293-5) on the standardization of 'heroic' portraiture. On the attractive

'intermediate' female form, see Anth. Pal. 5.102.1; cf. 5.37.3-4 on girls who are too fat or too thin. For similar views, see Mart. 11.100; Ov. Ars am. 3.267.

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4 MARK BRADLEY

discourse, such bodies were physical manifestations of a moderate balance of humours and represented an ideal state of health, contrasting with the cold, moist and fleshy populations of the north, or the hot and parched bodies of skinny southerners.9 What this ideological standardization of body types means is that any variation in the shape or proportion of bodies represented in art is particularly striking: fleshy cheeks, double chins, flabby arms, love handles, excessive musculature, skin rolls and protruding bellies, as well as sunken eyes, bony cheeks and skeletal torsos, represented a conspicuous differentiation from the idealized norm, and these features brought with them various sets of political and moral associations that distinguished the subject-matter socially, economically and ethnically from the vast majority of somatic representations.10 Furthermore, it should be taken as axiomatic that every single aspect of a sculpted body is included for a reason: every finger bend, every wrinkle, every inch of fat adds a layer of meaning to the figure that is represented - 'images were not reflectors, but like texts and speakers, active participants in public discourse' (Smith, 1997: 194). In addition, it has been argued that there is a tendency in the history of western art to distort images of the body in order to amplify those parts that mattered most: the phalluses of apotropaic deities, for example, or the breasts and pelvic girdle of fertility goddesses (Spivey, 2005: 57-60; Woodhouse, 2008). This article approaches the slippery and elusive topic of fatness and thinness in Roman art out of an interest in the representation of deformed, disfigured or disproportionate body shapes in pre-Christian Roman society, religion and culture, and in what these transgressive bodily representations can tell us about Roman values and approaches to bodies at the margins of society. Topical though it may be, body fat in antiquity remains largely unexplored in modern scholarship: in spite of numerous isolated discussions of the significance of fleshiness or emaciation in ancient sculptural or painted representations, there remains no sustained discussion of the role of this phenomenon in ancient art, and body fat is barely touched upon in any of the recent studies of the classical body (in spite of a flurry of publications on excess and austerity).11 And although the theme of deformity and disability in the Graeco-Roman world has received some attention in the work of Garland (2010) and others, and individual somatic anomalies such as dwarves, hunchbacks and eunuchs have

9 For discussion and references, see Bradley (2009: 130-43). 10 See Spivey (2004: 59) on the three basic 'somatypes' derived from modern physiological classification: the ectomorph (thin), the endomorph (fat) and the mesomorph (in between). Cf. Stewart (2003: 59) on sculptural departure from ideal proportions; cf. Corbeill (1996: 9): 'the Romans tended to view physical peculiarities as marking a deviation from humanity's natural state'. 11 For recent studies of the classical body, see Wyke (1998); Porter (1999); Braund and Gold (1998). See also Corbeill (1996), especially pp. 14-56 on physical peculiarities. These studies tend to focus, instead, on the use of the body, or bodily excretions, and the relationship between eating and sexuality; consumption is a recurring theme, but very little attention is paid to its effect on the appearance of the body. Conversely, even work focusing on food and dining, such as that of Gowers (1993), seldom engages with somatic appearance.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 5

been the subject of some scrutiny, the significance of overweight or underweight bodies in Graeco-Roman literary or visual culture remains something of a scholarly blind spot. This is particularly surprising given the glut of recent studies in the field of sociology, anthropology and medical science of the classification and evaluation of fatness and thinness, and the significant historical and geographical diversity in approaches to different body shapes and sizes.12 Most recently, Haslam and Haslam (2009) have surveyed a range of historical, literary and visual evidence for overweight bodies in ancient, medieval and modern western cultures, with a particular emphasis on the way fatness has been formulated and evaluated culturally.13 Gilman's Fat : a Cultural History of Obesity (2008) examined public responses to obesity in a range of world cultures from the nineteenth century to the modern day, focusing (like Haslam and Haslam) on the cultural meanings of fat and the relationship of these meanings to the values and principles of the communities in which they operate. And in a splendid collection of essays edited by LeBesco and Evans Braziel (Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (2001)), authors challenged dominant twentieth-century representations of the fat body by examining a wide range of discourses and genres in the west in which body shapes have been appropriated and renegotiated. As these studies - alongside familiar scholarship on England's Falstaff, India's Budai and Japan's Sumo wrestlers - have demonstrated, a detailed study of classical flesh has a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the body in antiquity and its relationship to discourses of power, character and behaviour.

This article, then, sets out to assess the significance of sculptural and painted representations of 'overweight' and 'underweight' body types in the visual culture of Roman Italy, concentrating on the art of the early Principáte but ranging from the fourth century bc through to the late Empire. Because of the paucity of evidence available and because 'Roman' art is typically so difficult to identify, this study will integrate appropriate Hellenistic and Etruscan art alongside both Roman public art and Roman copies and adaptations of Hellenistic originals - all components of the visual culture of Roman Italy - as well as setting these examples against their Archaic and Classical Greek backgrounds. In so doing, it will seek to identify patterns and continuities in the iconography of fleshiness and slenderness across a stretch of several hundred years, and relate this to certain ideas that were current in ancient literary and medical circles. There is of course much at stake in how we choose to describe thin or fat bodies: 'obesity' is used in the modern west to designate a severe bodily condition that warrants immediate medical and remedial attention, and it is perhaps for this reason unwise to describe big-bellied

12 See, for example, Brown and Konner (1987) for an epidemiological perspective on cultural relativity in obesity, and varied correlations between adiposity, socio-economic class, gender and modernization.

13 For an earlier study, see Schwartz (1986). For a short survey of obesity in art, see Woodhouse (2008).

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6 MARK BRADLEY

Etruscans reclining on sarcophagi as 'obese', as has become traditional now in Etruscan scholarship; nor, if we accept the conventional view that thin bodies were the norm for all but the wealthy élite in mediterranean communities that were plagued by periodic food shortages and widespread poverty, is 'emaciation' necessarily such a helpful term for describing bodies with sunken cheeks and visible ribs.14 And it is clear that body types cannot be classified using objective variables such as waist size: a male waistline of more than 40 inches is designated high risk in the modern west, whereas anything over 36 inches with a full stomach was technically obese in seventeenth-century Europe (Haslam and Haslam, 2009: 201). Categories such as corpulent, fleshy, stout, paunchy, plump and pneumatic, as well as (at the other end of the spectrum) slender, scrawny, emaciated and skeletal, likewise carry with them loaded sets of values and responses that can affect significantly how we approach the subject, and the bodies of classical art in particular are vulnerable to misinterpretation. For this reason, the article will begin with an approach to art criticism that was championed by Pollitt (1974) by focusing on the significance of the Greek and Latin categories that were used to describe fat and thin bodies, and considering how they were deployed in contemporary literary ekphrasis and ancient medicine. It will then approach the visual material by concentrating on somatic features that represent a noticeable variation from the norm: pouches around the eyes, round cheeks, double chins, thick necks, heavy musculature, soft or pointed pectorals, bulging love handles, protruding bellies and wide hips, as well as hollow cheeks and skeletal torsos. We shall discuss visual representations under three headings: 'Fertility', focusing on images of fleshy women and well-fed babies; 'The marginal and the ridiculous', examining the relationship between body fat, humour and figures at the edge of civilized society, such as satyrs, transgressive deities, easterners, Herakles and the emaciated poor; and 'Portraits', exploring fat and thin in the portraiture of real- life individuals in the realms of philosophy, Hellenistic rulership and Etruscan funerary art, before exploring the integration of these models in Roman public sculpture. Wide-ranging though this material may be, it will become clear that the very interconnectedness of ancient traditions of body fat itself fed into the rich and complex discourses of the body in Roman art.

DISCOURSES OF FLESH: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND MEDICINE

A lexical analysis of Greek and Latin terms for fat and thin exposes one important pattern: ancient 'fat' was often synonymous with richness, prosperity or fertility, and 'thin' often corresponded to poverty and weak, feeble bodies. From Homer

14 Cf. Brown and Konner (1987: 40) for an example of diverse positive and negative categories used to describe body size among the agricultural Tiv of Nigeria.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 7

onwards, the Greek terms naxvq and tcícov could refer both to stout, ample frames and to men of substance (Aristophanes used both senses interchangeably), as well as soil that was rich and fertile; and those who were 'well-fed' (ewpacpfjç) were both fat and thriving.15 Conversely, an individual who was íg%vóç, à^ttcóç, ^ripóç or was typically both thin-bodied and poor, feeble or lacking in substance or status, and cpGíaiç (like the Latin tabes) described a slow process of wasting away, at the end of which lay death and extinction.16

Latin appears to have developed a more varied vocabulary for fat and thin, but the associations with substance and resources remained. Obesus was used to

describe bodies that were fat, stout or plump (as the Oxford Latin Dictionary translates it), although it was used rather infrequently and does not appear to have had the same pejorative connotations as our 'obese'. Catullus stereotypes an inhabitant of Etruria as obesus Etruscus (39.11), and Celsus, classifying different body types at the start of his De Medicina (1.3.13), describes some as obessi and others as graciles (slender). With typical moralizing verve, Pliny the Elder (in his discussion of the physiology of digestion) observes that the small intestines of man are particularly long and windy, and consequently that species in which the distance from the belly is longer are greedier ('magis auidi ciborum'); those with a particularly obese stomach ('obesissimus uenter') are less clever ('minus sollertes'); he later associates this condition with sterility.17 And Apuleius's ass, once it changes its diet from fodder to human food, fills its body with obese fat ('corpus obesa pinguitie compleueram') and so softens ('molliueram') its hide: the link between fat and mollitia (softness or looseness) is telling. Much more commonly used, the adjective pinguis (and its various compounds) meant fat/plump and rich as well as prosperous. Together with its positive associations, this lexeme could also (rather like Greek naxvq) describe someone who was thick or dense of mind, or loose, lazy and slothful. Other Latin terms denoted a specifically physical sense of 'fat': a man who was corpulentus was 'full-bodied', and not normally in a positive way; adeps/ adipatus normally described body fat or grease, but could be used by Cicero to associate the obesity of Catiline's co-conspirator Cassius with laziness ('nec L. Cassi adipes ... pertimescendam'; Cat . 3.16), and adipatus was sometimes used to describe coarse, bombastic language. Perhaps derived from this category, the noun abdomen is used frequently in Roman satire and invective as a metonym for gluttonous excess and carnal lust.18 Focusing specifically on the

15 Other less common terms such as oápKivoç or yaaxpcóôriç laid more emphasis on the physical flesh or gut, while ^utapóç referred primarily to the visible shininess endowed by fat or grease, and only by extension to rich, fertile objects and people (a sense sometimes reproduced in the Latin nitidus/nitescere). 16 On this vocabulary, see Grmek and Gourevitch (1998: 147). On the contrasting imagery of

Xercxóç and ; and their broader associations, see Asper (1997: chapter 4); cf. Pollitt (1974: 24) on À£tctóç, ia%vóç (and Latin gracilis) used to describe the physical proportions of the human body.

17 Plin. HN 11.200; 11.213 on sterility, reproducing an idea explored in Arist. Part. an. 651. 18 Cic. Pis. 17.41 ('ille heluo natus abdomini suo, non laudi'); cf. 27.66; Sest. 51.110.

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8 MARK BRADLEY

behaviour that led to big bellies, and a favourite of satirical writers, gula (and its adjective gulosus) referred to gluttony and insatiable appetites, a typical characteristic of the decadent élite of the early Empire. In a far cry from this, Ovid, writing to his wife from exile (Pont. 1.4.51-2), imagines her withered appearance and longs to embrace her no longer generous frame ('corpus non pingue'), adding that her love for him has made her slender (gracile). Latin terms for 'thin' normally implied, like Greek terms, a state of poverty and a lack of strength and substance: as Ovid shows, gracilis could put a more positive spin on thin bodies but still denoted weakness and meagreness, and could describe a plain, scanty style of life or speech. Tenuis and its derivatives were closer to the bone, and described feeble-bodied individuals who typically belonged to the poor underclasses.19 At the extremes, there was a category for emaciated (macer) and bodily emaciation ( macies ): such bodies were normally on the fringes of life and civilization.20 Greek and Roman writers seldom lost the opportunity to reflect on the social, moral or political ramifications of fat or thin bodies, and the associations of plumpness and leanness were part of a very old literary tradition. Penelope's curious 'fat hand' (xeipi ita^eirļ) at Odyssey 21.6 has been the subject of scholarly debate: it has been proposed recently that this formula is part of a shared martial imagery between Penelope and Odysseus.21 In a similar vein, Petronius's Encolpius describes the affluent Fortunata yanking her glamorous bracelets off her extremely fat arms ('crassissimis . . . lacertis') to show them off to Trimalchio's guests (Sat. 67.6). Xenophon's Memorabilia (2.1.22) tells of Heracles's encounter with two allegorical females at a crossroads: one (Virtue) was tall, fair, pure and modest; the other (Vice) was fleshy (no^ticapKÍa) and soft from overeating, her face heavily made up to enhance her natural complexion, and her figure modified to exaggerate its height. Xenophon's tale is a gendered philosophical exercise in associating physical appearance with morality and ethics; fleshiness is presented as a departure from the moderation that typifies virtue, and the result of an excessive lifestyle, that unwanted extra layer that was comparable to cosmetics.22 Philosophers and physiognomic thinkers accordingly correlated fatness and thinness with negative moral qualities and behavioural tropes in favour of intermediate physiologies.23 The outrageously fat and the

19 Although it sometimes could denote subtle or refined styles of language or clothes. 20 These terms sometimes could be used to describe things that were barren: for example, Varro, Rust. 1.24.2 'ager macrior'. The term uescus (consuming, wasted) could describe a similar state. 21 See Vergados (2009); cf. Wyatt (1978), especially p. 344 where Wyatt argued that 'the nature of the Jtáxoç will differ along sexual lines, denoting massiveness and strength in men, beauty in women'.

22 Discussed by Evans (1969: 46). noXuaapicicc was later associated with dullness of sense at [Arist.] Phgn. 807b; cf. Adamantius 362.8, 362.16; Pl. Resp. 556D, imagining a poor wiry sunburnt man on the battlefield alongside an elegant fat one. 23 See [Arist.] Phgn. 807b on the equation of fleshiness with dullness of sense; 808a on fat faces

and slyness; 808b and 810b on the physiology relating gluttony and dull senses; 810b on fleshiness

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 9

undernourished, unsurprisingly, are best represented in ancient literature in the field of comedy and satire. In Aristophanes, 'na%eíç Kai 7îàougîoi' ('the plump and the plush') is virtually a hendiadys, demonstrating a Classical Athenian dogma that all rich men were stereotypically fat: the First Creditor in the Clouds, for example, is ridiculed for his gigantic paunch, and big bellies are a regular tell-tale sign of laziness, incompetence, or social and moral excess.24 These tropes also persisted in Latin comedy: stocky gourmands and stick-thin girls abound in the surviving plays of Pļautus and Terence.25

The negative associations of corpulence as an index of decadence and excess are attested particularly well in the Roman period. Plutarch's Life of Cato depicts the stern and austere statesman accusing a fat knight of incompetence in public affairs (9.5): 'How can such a body be useful to the city, when everything between its throat and its groin is occupied by belly?'.26 Similarly, Aulus Gellius (6.22) describes a duty of the censors to confiscate horses from corpulent and excessively fat knights ('equitibus corpulentibus et praepinguibus'), on the grounds that so heavy a person ('tanti corporis pondere') could hardly perform his duties properly: this, he goes on, was an act of ignominia and the individual was demoted because he had overindulged and let his body swell out of all proportions ('cuius corpus in tam inmodicum modum luxuriasset exuberassetque'). Invective too honed in on the negative aspects of corpulence: big-bellied villains in Cicero's speech against Piso, or Antony in the Philippics, whose insatiable appetite and fleshy frame were reminiscent of a gladiator.27 And Roman satire is swimming with gluttons whose bellies were a tell-tale sign of their excess and moral weakness: Juvenal's 'Montanus' in Satires 4, whose belly, sluggish with its paunch ('tardus abdomine'), becomes a synecdoche for its owner (4.107), and Persius's Satires attack fat Romans who are both physically and morally corrupt.28

and soft femininity; 813b generally on ill-proportioned bodies. Cf. also Theophrastus's Characters on the significance of actions and gestures in the fourth century: see Diggle (2004). 24 Ar. Nub. 1214-58 (the First Creditor), especially 1237-8; cf. Pax 639. At Ran . 200, Dionysus

is described as 'big-belly' ( gastron ) by Charon when he reveals himself to be an incompetent rower; cf. Ran. 663, where Dionysus is asked to stick out his yaoTip, a word that can be used also to refer to the womb. On emaciated figures in Aristophanes, see the underfed chorus in Wealth (especially 218- 19, 253, 282), or the young girl at Eccl. 935 (' phthinulla ': 'Miss Twiggy'). Further, see Sommerstein (1996), especially p. 351 ('Idols of the dinner table'). Generally on this theme in the Classical period, see Davidson (1997), especially pp. 3-35 and 144-7 on the opsophagos ; cf. Davidson (1993). Big eaters were also a stock feature of Middle and New Comedy: I thank Alan Sommerstein for sending me an unpublished list of gourmands. Theophrastus, Characters 5 ('The obsequious man') appears to describe a man with a drinker's pot-belly: see Diggle (2004: 231-2). 25 See, for example, Plaut. Cist. 406; Epidicus 20; Ter. Eun. 314-16. 26 Cf. Vit. Mar. 34.3 on the old general hindered by his bulk. 27 Cic. Pis. 17; Phil. 2.63; cf. Fin. 2.8.24-5 for a reproach to Rome's gluttons. 28 Juv. 4.107 ('Montani quoque uenter adest abdomine tardus'). Pers. 1.57; cf. 3.98-102 on a

sickly glutton, his white belly swollen with food ('turgidus hie epulis atque albo uentre'), having a cardiac arrest at the baths; on this scene, see Reckford (1998: 347-8). Cf. Juv. 1.140-6 for a similar story. See Mart. 7.20 on a gluttonous parasite, with Damon (1997: 25-6); cf. Lucii.

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10 MARK BRADLEY

Imperial biographers, in line with the traditions of physiognomy, particularly associated physical appearance with the emperor's politics, morals and behaviour. The obese Vitellius is just one example. In Suetonius's Life of Nero (51), the biographer juxtaposes a description of the emperor's obese neck ('ceruice obesa') and pendulous belly ('uentre proiecto') to his excessive lifestyle ('qui luxuriae immoderatissimae esset'). And he makes a meal of the Emperor Galba's deformed body, so distorted (distortissimus) that he had to hold the flesh in with a bandage, a description that is immediately juxtaposed to an account of his insatiable gluttony and outrageous homosexual activities (21-2). Domitian too was 'deformis', with his baldness and fat stomach ('obesitate uentris', 18), a physical description followed immediately by an account of his paranoia and cowardice. The Historia Augusta also follows Suetonius's lead in identifying an emperor's physical defects as the inevitable result and manifestation of his lifestyle and (by extension) his political behaviour.29 But it is in the field of ancient medicine that most scholarly discussions of obesity and emaciation in antiquity are grounded. In particular, work by the French scholars Gourevitch and Grmek in the 1980s and 1990s has attempted to diagnose various fat-related conditions on the basis of surviving literary and visual representations; they have even suggested that the growing number of figurai representations of corpulent and emaciated individuals in the Hellenistic and Roman eras is evidence for a general decline in health in mediterranean society across the classical period.30 Other scholars have focused on more specific aspects of the subject, or approaches in ancient medical texts.31 Ancient medicine was not kind to fat: excessive body fat was connected to sterility, as it was believed that blood was transformed into fat instead of menstrual blood or

semen, and Galen argued that a big belly was a sign of a malformed spirit.32 These ideas spilled over into other fields of activity: Quintilian, for example, recommends that the orator reduces his body fat ('tenuendas adipes') and expels corrupted humours from his body if he is to remain healthy and robust (Institutio Oratoria 2.6). Thinness was considered medically safer than obesity, although it too was associated with infertility, miscarriages and other conditions.33 Doctors under the Roman Empire appear to have developed

11.207; Lucían, Symp. 11. Cf. Catull. 89, where Gellius's thin (tenuis/macer) body is connected to his incestuous habits: he touches what is nefas. 29 SHA, Quattuor Gordiani 21, where the Younger Gordianus is described as having an

enormous body ('corporis uasti'), in contrast to his father who resembled Augustus; cf. Pese. Nig. 6.6, whose strange lifestyle habits were compounded by his fatness ('magis pinguis'). 30 Gourevitch (1985); Gourevitch and Grmek (1987) (especially p. 364 on the decline of

mediterranean health); most recently, Grmek and Gourevitch (1998), especially chapter 6 ('Maigreur et émaciation') and chapter 7 ('Obésité et affections du ventre'). 31 See, for example, Guggenheim (1977; 1988). 32 For details, see Papavramidou and Chrisopoulou-Aletra (2007). Select references: Galen,

Thrasybulus utrum Medicinae sit an Gymnasticae Hygiene 37 (= Kühn V, 878); cf. Lucii. 684-5 on a puffy body ('distento corpore') in need of a purge; Plin. HN 11.212 on sterility in fat animals. 33 See Apth. Prog. 2.44; cf. 5.44.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 11

sophisticated diets and regimes for the treatment of obesity, including low-calorie foods and regular exercise and bathing, and a crude form of liposuction even appears to have been carried out in extreme cases.34

Ancient literature and medicine, then, adopted a predominantly critical attitude to fat and thin bodies, which were associated with irregular behaviour, moral laxity and incompetence, although it is clear that even here stocky and stick-thin figures could be subject to several different interpretations. It remains now to turn to evidence in the art of Roman Italy, where the polysemy of body fat was particularly striking. Plutarch, at the start of one of his Quaestiones Conviviales (5.1), recognized some of the ways in which art could operate differently from life in its representation of disproportionate bodies: 'When we see emaciated people ((pGioiicoúç) we are distressed, but we look upon statues and paintings of them with pleasure because our minds are captivated by imitations which we find endearing'.35 In fact, as Plutarch's provocative symposiastic debates demonstrate, representations of the body were much more complex and multidimensional, and the art of Roman Italy, at the crossroads of several converging traditions, exploited and developed the polyvalent registers of body fat in a number of fascinating ways.

FERTILITY

It has been observed that humans are amongst the fattest mammals on earth (Brown and Konner, 1987: 30). The critical role of body fat as an energy reserve has meant that fertility is the traditional starting-point for any study of the history of obesity. Perhaps the earliest and most prominent representations of body fat in western art are to be found on images of nubile women, where fleshiness and rolls of fat pointed unequivocally to a preoccupation with fertility, procreation and survival.36 In the Graeco-Roman world, it is in representations of Aphrodite and Venus in particular that swelling breasts, rounded abdomens and full hips were most emphasized, and art historians have demonstrated that this stereotype translated directly into classical images of the desirable and fertile female body.

This imagery had a very long tradition. The so-called 'Venus of Willendorf', the most famous of a series of palaeolithic figurines discovered across Europe dating to as early as 30,000 bc, shows a nude faceless female figure with inflated round hips and abdomen, full breasts and exaggerated rolls of fat.

34 The evidence is extensive, particularly in Caelius Aurelianus, who translated Soranus's On Acute and Chronic Diseases from Greek into Latin: for details, see Gourevitch (1985) especially pp. 198-203. See also Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 359 and nn. 24-6) on the growing concept of obesity as an illness under the Roman Empire. Cf. Plin. Ep. 6.16 on his uncle's 'amplitudo corporis' prior to his death, and the measures taken to treat his ill-health. 35 Discussed by Grmek and Gourevitch (1998: 147). 36 See Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 356) on the function of body fat as a food reserve and as

thermal protection, and the connection of this to images of fertility goddesses; see also Brown and Konner (1987: 34).

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12 MARK BRADLEY

These figurines, ironically labelled as 'Venuses' by their modern discoverers owing to their dissimilarity to idealized classical images of Venus, normally are considered to be symbols of female fertility due to the association between the well-fed female body and her capacity for childbirth. Bolder interpretations consider this body to be the female aesthetic ideal in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, perhaps due to the seasonal scarcity of food and the importance of investing in a long-term layer of protective body fat.37 Different patterns of feeding in the classical world, with reliable supplies normally available all year round, inevitably had an effect on the utility and aesthetics of female body fat. And yet it is clear that, in spite of the irony with which the Venus of Willendorf was named, images of Aphrodite and Venus as the 'ideal' female body in the Graeco-Roman world retained an emphasis on the display of body fat as an index of female fertility. Ancient medical literature held consensus that female fleshiness was a sign of fertility, and Polemo observes that a woman's body is 'moist and flabby': there was of course no Polykleitian female ideal.38 Terracotta figurines from the Hellenistic period continued to reproduce the same imagery as the palaeolithic 'Venus' figures, although (unlike the latter) these are normally interpreted as caricatured toys for infants and a far cry from the idealized classical female body.39 High-grade sculpture was more subtle and elegant in its iconography, integrating classical aesthetics with the residual image of flabby fertility. In particular, it is in the 'Crouching Aphrodite', a third-century bc Hellenistic prototype that was widely copied, imitated and adapted in Roman art, that we can detect the most striking exhibition of voluptuous fat.40 The very pose in which she is represented purposefully is designed to amplify these features, and sculptors reproducing the 'Crouching Aphrodite' had licence to exaggerate these details further: a Hadrianic copy from Tivoli, for example, exhibits no fewer than six fleshy folds as she crouches over (Fig. 2).41 These adipose rolls signal the playful sculptural animation that makes the upright Knidian Aphrodite crouch down, and indicate just how lifelike the subject has become; but at the same time her nude fleshiness feeds directly into a story about female fertility. Of course, the Crouching Aphrodite is no 'fatter' than any of the distinctly 'naturalistic' modern female models paraded as breaking the aesthetic mould in fashion circles in recent years, but (as with these supposedly transgressive

37 On these figurines, see Rice (1982); Duhard (1993); Dobres (1996). 38 Sor. Gyn. 1.34-5; Polemo 2.1.192-4F. Cf. D'Ambra (1996: 225), 'Women whose figures were broad and fleshy, evidence of health and well-being, were thought to be fertile'. On wetness and fullness as a female characteristic, see also Gleason (1995: 82-102 (especially p. 85)); Gold (1998 (especially pp. 373-6)). 39 See Thompson (1954: especially 90-1, plate 21). A famous example is the set of figurines discovered at Thebes in Greece and now in the Louvre: see Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 356). 40 On the 'Crouching Aphrodite', see Smith (1991: fig. 102 (the Crouching Aphrodite in Terme (108597)); Ridgway (1990: plates 112a-c - cf. plates 179-80 for the Medici Venus with fat around the hips and upper arms and a flabby bottom). 41 On this copy, see Calandra (1998a).

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 13

Fig. 2. Crouching Aphrodite. Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. Tivoli, Villa Adriana. Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome. (Photo: Mark Bradley. Reproduced courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali - Soprintendenza

Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma.)

models) her very exposure of fleshy folds forces the viewer to contemplate precisely why 'fat is beautiful', and one answer has to be its role in representing and animating the healthy, fertile three-dimensional female body.42 And it was precisely to signal fertility that images of Venus Genetrix, both the mother of the Julian clan and exemplar of Roman female fertility, were full-bodied, fleshy and voluptuous (Harcum, 1927; Fraser, 1935). This particular goddess, though normally depicted clothed, has her garments arranged in such a way as to draw attention to her full hips and fleshy breasts, and this iconography is also evident in surviving imperial statues of Juno, Ceres and Roma in whom the outward vestiges of fertility alluded to one of their traditional mythical roles, a characteristic that has been shown to translate directly also into imperial

42 Most recently on representations of Venus/Aphrodite and divine epiphany in sculpture, see Squire (2011: chapter 3, especially pp. 88-109). For a good example of a modern 'Crouching Aphrodite', breaking the fashion mould with her naturalistic flesh, see The Guardian , 2 September 2009, 'Too fat to be a model': http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/02/ lizzie-miller-model-fat (last consulted 01.04.11).

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14 MARK BRADLEY

portraits, such as those of Livia.43 It is no accident too that the nude body of Venus was the one chosen for idealized portraits of Roman matrons from the first century onwards, where Venus's full and fleshy figure - strikingly out of place beneath the mature sunken cheeks and scrawny neck - was 'worn as a costume', and the 'display of the voluptuous female form . . . [was] redefined as a sign of fertility' for matrons who might go through several marriages (D'Ambra, 1996: 220-1).44 Under the heading of fertility, one also might include the countless fat babies that populate Hellenistic and Roman art. At the feet of some adaptations of the crouching Venus stands the infant Cupid, like his mother a model of health and the sustainability of Roman life and, like his mother, plump and fleshy. This imagery is reproduced, with sometimes striking paunch, in scores of Putti sculptures, the baby Hercules (Fig. 3), as well as images of healthy Roman children.45 Such babies and infants are often depicted rather plumper than we might expect a real-life baby to be, with surface fat rendered visible across the whole body, accompanied by wide hips and prominent bellies, often amplified by the pose in which the infant is represented. In an environment with high levels of infant mortality even among the wealthy, ample and healthy levels of adiposity promised survival and alluded to the potential of that subcutaneous body fat to be shaped into adult muscle.46

THE MARGINAL AND THE RIDICULOUS

However, fat could also signal very different qualities. An early Classical Athenian red-figure drinking cup (kylix) found in the Etruscan city of Vulci and now in the British Museum shows on one side of its rim a sequence of nude athletes, everything on display, with contrasting body shapes (Fig. 4): the two on the right have idealized body types - they are 'mesotypes' - but not so the two youths on the left.47 One is lanky and hunched over, perhaps posing in the starting position of a sprinter, while in stark contrast the other heavyweight figure, holding boxing thongs in his hands, is leaning back to accommodate the

43 See Haussier (1995) on Juno-Hera, with discussion of the iconography; Stanley Spaeth (1994) on the identification of the fertility goddess on the Ara Pacis Augustae as Ceres; cf. Galinsky (1992) on the ambiguity of this representation; Bartman (1998) on portraits of Livia and their comparanda; cf. Winkes (2000: 31-42). Cf. Thompson (1996: 97) on a well-padded mid-first-century Roman matron as Cybele (with cornucopia); Calandra (1998b) on the Constantinian 'Barberini goddess'. 44 On the deliberately hybrid approach of Roman imperial portraiture, see below, pp. 27 and

31-2. On the idea of nudity as a costume, see Squire (2011: 148). 45 On representations of children, see Rawson (2003: 17-93); cf. Smith (1991: fig. 170 - a

chubby boy strangling a goose). 46 Curiously, the pregnant female is represented very rarely in ancient art. On the few surviving

examples, see Gourevitch (1988). 47 BM, inv. 200378; see Clark (1960: 19-21); Spivey (2004: 59, fig. 9). Cf. Finley and Pieket

(1976: plate 29b) for an alternative interpretation.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 15

Fig. 3. Baby strangling serpents, possibly Caracalla as the infant Hercules (height 64 cm). Colli Albani, second century ad. Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo, inv. MC 247/S. (Photo: Mark Bradley. Reproduced courtesy of Roma Capitale ,

Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali, Direzione Musei.)

Fig. 4. Red-figure cup by Pheidippos showing (on the outer rim) a sequence of athletes with contrasting body shapes. Vulci, c. 500 bc. British Museum inv. 1846,0512.2.

© Trustees' of the British Museum. (Reproduced courtesy of the British Museum.)

weight of his protruding belly. This curious vase-painting fits a pattern of ancient sporting types in which sprinters, wrestlers and boxers developed unusual or grotesque body shapes that suited their activities, but it also represents a comedic take on inappropriate gymnastic activities in Greek life, in which body shape becomes a tell-tale sign of behaviour and lifestyle.48 Such stereotypes, depicted at the margins of society and the edges of propriety, were also represented by the komasts or so-called 'padded dancers' of sixth-century black-

48 On the gluttony of Greek athletes, see Bazant (1982). I thank Jill Dye for sharing her findings on fat figures in Attic vase-paintings: of 45 vases featuring fat men in the CVA, 32 depict athletes. These representations were produced predominantly in the period 550-500 bc. Pausanias 6.24.1 describes wrestling, boxing and pancration games as 'heavy events' (ßapea). Cf. Shapiro (2000: 323-4) on the beefy appearance of boxers both on Attic vases and Etruscan wall-paintings. Cf. Pl. Resp. 403e-404a on the desirability of a carefully-moderated diet for the bodies of athletes.

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16 MARK BRADLEY

figure vases, revellers with distended stomachs and jutting buttocks, often depicted in unseemly and trangressive activities.49 These stereotypes are also evident in the stock characters of Greek comedy, in which the wealthy parasite was recognized by his giant paunch and distorted posture.50 Fat and thin bodies, then, were part of a shared cultural repertoire in which variation from the medium Polykleitian ideal corresponded socially and morally to a departure from acceptable lifestyle, particularly in the consumption of food and alcohol. Furthermore, recent work on distorted ideals in Greek vase-painting and on laughter and transgression in Roman visual culture has demonstrated that such examples of the 'bodily grotesque' fulfilled a performative function as counter-examples in ancient spectacle, not dissimilar to Mikhail Bakhtin's influential approach to the 'carnivalesque'.51 A glut or lack of body fat, then, could be a useful index of figures that stood at the margins of society or at the edges of acceptable behaviour. In Greek culture few figures pushed the boundaries of propriety as vividly as the companions of Dionysus: the unrestrained, inebriated and depraved satyrs who were stock characters in burlesque satyr plays, and particularly their leader Silenus (or Papposilenus), an elderly, bald, pot-bellied figure normally represented as Dionysus's tutor and closest companion. Images of satyrs, Sileni and Papposileni were ubiquitous features of Greek and Hellenistic vase-painting and sculpture, and were widely copied and imitated in Roman art. Along with their trademark pointed ears, unbridled nudity and outrageous drunken behaviour, soft and pendulous body fat sometimes marked out bodies of satyrs from respectable society, and a swollen belly and saggy flesh was a sine qua non in images of Silenus.52 Sometimes, his corpulence purposefully was exaggerated and grotesque: one second-century Roman copy at the Musei Capitolini (Fig. 5) shows Silenus sitting in a pose that accentuates his obese belly and displays the old satyr in all his fleshy nudity (Stuart Jones, 1926: 318-19, plate 79.11a). Sometimes, Dionysus himself was represented exhibiting corporeally the inevitable effects of a consumptive and decadent lifestyle, and sculptures of

49 The thirteen non-athletic fat males in the CVA are revellers. On komast dancers, see Smith (2010). 50 See Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 357) on terracotta figurines of fat comic actors in the Louvre. Cf. Stone (1981: 127): 'the actions of the play will seem funnier if we can picture them being performed by comic little fat people'; M. Clarke (2007: 41), on fat actors in Pompeian wall-painting. 51 Walsh (2009), with fat satyrs (pp. 16-17), pygmies (pp. 17-18), negroes (p. 57), Herakles (pp. 85, 90-1) and a welter of rotund divinities; M. Clarke (2007), especially pp. 7-8 on Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque body; pp. 74-81 on pygmies and Aethiopes ; pp. 134-40 on distorted bodies in the House of Menander at Pompeii. On the application of Bakhtinian theory to Roman satire, see Miller (1998). The iconography of otherness in Greek art has been explored recently by the contributors to the volume edited by Cohen (2000), see especially chapters by Padgett on satyrs, Sutton on drunken orgies, and Foley on the comic body. 52 On the representation of Silenus, see Zanker (1995: 32-9). See Walsh (2009: 16-17) on the transgressive iconography of satyrs on Greek vases. Cf. Smith (1991: 129, fig. 148 (leaning satyr)): 'soft, plump, and precociously human'.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 17

Fig. 5. Silenus. Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, second century ad. Partially restored. Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo, inv. MC 709/S. (Photo: Mark Bradley. Reproduced courtesy of Roma Capitale , Sovraintendenza ai Beni

Culturali , Direzione Musei.)

Dionysus or Bacchus from across Graeco-Roman antiquity typically reproduced soft feminine flesh and undefined musculature (Smith, 1991: fig. 77).53

Girth sometimes could be used as a characteristic stigma in Roman representations of bodies from the East. Besides the obvious connections sometimes drawn between flabby bodies and eastern decadence, eastern cults could be seen to parade inflated or disproportioned bodies. Perhaps the most striking example is the body of the Egyptian deity Bes, a fertility god who

53 From the Hellenistic period, images of Apollo too exploited similar iconography, portrayed as an effeminate young god with delicate, soft skin: see the first-century 'Apollo Kitharedos' at the Palazzo Altemps in Rome, inv. 8594, with flaccid pectorals. Cf. Smith (1991: 65, fig. 74); Ridgway (2002: plates 58a-c). This imagery fed directly into the fleshy portraiture of Roman figures such as Antinous: see Vout (2005: especially pp. 85-7).

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18 MARK BRADLEY

protected households, mothers and children from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and whose image was familiar in the Egyptianizing iconography of Roman Italy.54 In some traditions, Bes was a comic dwarf god, perhaps associated with pygmy tribes and his image may have performed an apotropaic role. Images of Bes in Roman art, often featuring in scenes from the cult of Isis (Figure 6 showing a fresco of Bes from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii) show the god as a short plump figure, bearded and pug-nosed, with exaggerated wide hips and a corpulent torso, much fatter in fact than images that survive from Pharaonic Egypt.55 Likewise, pygmies, a favourite component of exotic Egyptian scenes in Roman wall-painting, also typically were represented with short squat bodies and protruding stomachs (Versluys, 2002: 275-7). Excess body fat typically was associated also with the eunuchs of eastern cults such as Cybele, whose hormonal imbalance is well-known to have brought on weight gain: Polemo, for example, describes the eunuch Favorinus's bulbous brow, fleshy cheeks, fat legs and soft body parts as physical manifestations of his dissolute lifestyle, and images of Attis sometimes represent him in oriental clothing with a soft, fleshy feminine body and wide hips.56 This barbarian iconography, with its strange distorted and inflated bodies, was not restricted to the East: larger, moist and over-muscled northern barbarians frequently were represented with fleshy corpulence, and figures of African negroes, popular images in private collections in Hellenistic and Roman Italy, often exhibited protruding bellies as a symptom of their strange physiology.57 In a not unrelated artistic register, the Hellenistic period saw the development of artistic representations of Herakles that exaggerated the fleshiness and musculature of the hero in a way that mirrored the corpulent ideologies of the Hellenistic ruler cult (see below, pp. 23-5) but also significantly transcended them.58 Herakles was the uber-macho figure, and one that belonged as much to the genres of tragedy and comedy as to the world of the divine. In fact, comic representations of Herakles with wide hips and a big belly are well-documented on Greek vase-paintings from the first half of the fourth century bc: either as

54 See Wilson (1975); Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 357). 55 On the Temple of Isis frescoes, see Balch (2003), and Bricault, Versluys and Meyboom (2007), especially the chapters by Moormann, by J. Clarke and by Meyboom and Versluys. See also Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps inv. 77255: a first-century relief from a tomb along the Via Appia showing Bes flanking the goddess Isis. 56 See Tougher (2005), especially p. 61 on fat deposits on eunuch bodies; Polemo, De Physiognomonia 1.161.9-163. Cf. Gleason (1995: 3-20) on Favorinus and his appearance. On representations of Attis in art, see Hales (2002); Vermaseren (1977: 61-2, 72-5, figs 76, 78) for some paunchy examples. 57 Generally on representations of barbarians in Roman art, see Ferris (2000); on Roman negro sculpture, see Snowden (1970: 22-32 and (for example) fig. 56). 58 On Herakles in art, see Stafford (2005; 2011). Cf. Wyke (1999), focusing on appropriations of the classical 'bodybuilder' in modern western culture.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 19

'''"^ ■■ «rj^B

m

j^R;

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Fig. 6. Fresco showing the Egyptian god Bes from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, inv. 8916. (Photo: Mark Bradley. Reproduced courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali , Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei.)

the glutton, the rapist, or the violator of sanctuaries, this image of Herakles provocatively contravenes that of the well-proportioned muscled hero in order to evoke laughter. But even more serious images of the hero, particularly in later life, strike something of a pathetic figure in line with the tragic aspects of his story, and he frequently is depicted in Hellenistic and Roman art with a wide girth, flabby pendulous muscles, and a tortured, old and bearded face (the Farnese Hercules being a classic example); some of these representations deliberately imitate the iconography of wrestlers and boxers who, like Herakles, stood at the margins of civilized society, and this corpulent iconography in turn informed Greek and Roman representations of Giants and Cyclopes.59 Perhaps the most striking type belongs to that sometimes described as 'Herakles Epitrapezios' (either Herakles on the Table or at the Table, according to various interpretations): this was a prototype created by Lysippos from which were developed several other Hellenistic variations that were copied widely in the Roman world, such as the drunken urinating Herakles, a figurine of which

59 See Vermeule (1975); cf. Smith (1991: 70 and fig. 73) (and cf. fig. 138, Pitti Antaios and Herakles, clearly related to wrestler groups).

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20 MARK BRADLEY

was discovered at Herculaneum with soft musculature and a large swollen belly (Fig. 7). 60

Finally, it is evident that thin, emaciated bodies were employed also across the full range of ancient art to represent the marginal and the ridiculous. At the opposite end of the physical spectrum to Herakles, the old and infirm Geras ('Old Age' personified), bald, bent over and severely emaciated, was a favourite on Greek vases in his confrontation with Herakles (see Figure 8 for an early Classical red-figure vase from Cerveteri), allowing the artist to poke fun at extreme body types by contrasting young and old, muscled and thin. Emaciation was normally a sign of illness or old age, and in Hellenistic art it often pointed to poverty, although in philosophical contexts it could be a matter of free will, and an index of disciplined moderation and stoic abstinence. The usual emphasis in studies of food and famine in the classical world is that food resources were scarce for the majority, and therefore that malnutritioned and emaciated bodies were typical among social groups other than the wealthy élite.61 Consequently, artistic representations of individuals within those groups (normally produced, it should be noted, by the affluent and well-fed élite) used emaciation as a defining feature, and this iconography worked hand-in-hand with that of old age. Examples such as the Drunken Old Woman or the Old Fisherman are well-known, and images of workmen and tradesmen could be identified by, their lean and sinewy bodies.62 There is also a significant number of figurai representations of sick individuals who are little more than skin and bone, and emaciation in art could be exploited to draw attention to particular bodily disfigurements such as rickets, hunchbacks or giant phalluses (as Geras's depiction in Figure 8 demonstrates).63 Artistic representations of the emaciated body, then, could point to figures at the edges of civilization just as much as fleshy, flabby ones.

60 On the Herakles Epitrapezios, see Murray (1882); de Visscher (1962). On the 'drunken Herakles', see Nicholls (1982); Budetta (1990). The gluttonous Herakles Bibax also is thought to be an offshoot of the Lysippos prototype: see Cunliffe (1971: 52, 230). 61 See Garnsey (1988) generally on food and famine; cf. Garnsey (1999), with pp. 75-6 on cases

of gluttony. 62 For a good discussion of this sculpture type (though under the somewhat misleading heading of

'realism'), see Polliti (1986: 141-7). See also Smith (1991: figs 174, 179). 63 See Grmek and Gourevitch (1998: 147-55) on various copies, representations and

interpretations across the Mediterranean of emaciated figurines, with Paus. 10.2.6 for the tradition of medical dedications. Compare the fresco of Mikon and Pero in the House of M. Cornelius Fronto (IX.2.5) at Pompeii (now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale at Naples), in which the daughter nurses her starving and emaciated father with her own milk: see Corbeill (2004: 102-3 with fig. 16); this motif is represented also in a Hellenistic statuette discovered at Pompeii (Bonfante, 1997: 181-2).

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 21

Fig. 7. Drunken Herakles. Herculaneum, House of the Stags, inv. 75802. Marble, height 51.5 cm. © Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei. (Reproduced courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali ,

Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei.)

PORTRAITS

The bodies examined so far belong principally to figures in the realm of myth or fiction, and it is little surprise that they were shaped and moulded in order to exaggerate the most prominent physical features. This final section, however, is concerned with portraits of real-life individuals in which the artist distinguished his subject with the subtle and nuanced use of flesh, flab or thinness.

Several early portrait traditions that were prevalent in the visual culture of Roman Italy contributed to the language of fat and thin in Roman portraiture of late Republican and early Imperial Rome. Portraits of keynote Greek and Hellenistic philosophers, for example, were a familiar feature of the classical landscape, and they were a popular choice in both public and private collections across Italy in the Roman period. These archetypal figures quickly acquired an almost mythical status, and what they actually looked like in life was of rather less importance than the appearance to which collectors, viewers and followers expected them to conform. It is unsurprising that the prevailing representation of these figures imagined them as old, emaciated men with sunken cheeks, wrinkled brows, piercing eyes and (in full-length portraits)

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22 MARK BRADLEY

Fig. 8. Herakles and Geras quarrelling. Attic red-figure pelike from Cerveteri, Necropoli della Banditaccia, c. 500-450 bc. Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, inv. 48238. © Foto Soprintendenza Beni Archeologici Etruria Meridionale, Roma. (Reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici

delVEtruria Meridionale.)

skeletal torsos: they were typically so preoccupied with the world of the mind that a well-fed, well-exercised and well-attended body would be something of an anathema.64 It is unsurprising, too, to find that images of great literary figures such as Homer, or medical experts like Hippocrates, should conform to the same stereotype. Men of thought typically were distinguished from men of action by the quantity of flesh and muscle on display. Sometimes, however, philosophical portraiture could subvert stereotypes and toy with the viewer's expectations. Images of Socrates in particular have attracted scholarly attention because of their striking resemblance to the satyr Silenus, and portraits typically depict him with a snub nose, bulging eyes, jowly cheeks, widespread nostrils and thick lips. As Zanker and others have demonstrated, the paradoxical character and behaviour of Socrates was a well-established literary topos, and it appears that a tell-tale physiognomy was developed very early on in literary and

64 Generally on the image of the intellectual in antiquity, see Zanker (1995). Cf. Smith (1991: 41, fig. 22). On early Christian asceticism and fasting, see Grimm (1995: especially 230-5); Garnsey (1999: 95-7).

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 23

artistic circles (and persisted all the way through antiquity) that corresponded to the satyric features of the old, wise and characteristically obese Silenus.65 At the other end of the spectrum, Epicurus, founder of a school of philosophy that advocated a hedonistic lifestyle, often was depicted in portraits of the Hellenistic period as well as Roman copies and adaptations with a narrow elongated face, stern disciplined expression and sunken cheeks, an image that does not tally well with the long-lived stereotype of the indulgent Epicurean (or 'epicure') whose figurehead one might expect to be represented with plumper, well-fed features.66 In fact, the real Epicurus appears to have exercised a much more moderate style of hedonism, eating just enough bread to stave off hunger, and drinking just enough water to stave off thirst; the extreme emaciation in his portraits, therefore, might represent an attempt to distance Epicureanism from the pejorative stereotypes that quickly developed. It is clear, then, that body fat was a significant factor in the identification of philosopher portraits, and could be linked in interesting ways to the philosophy of the subject that was being represented: a curious third-century double-herm from Rome juxtaposes Socrates with the Stoic Seneca (Fig. 9), and plays up continuities not only in their upward-facing expressions and hairlines, but also in their jowly faces.67

At the same time as the various registers of philosopher portraits were being developed, fleshiness also became a widely recognized and positive characteristic of the affluent ruler in Hellenistic art. 'Tryphe', sometimes translated as 'the good life' but often used pejoratively of the decadent lifestyles of tyrants, became one of the defining features of Hellenistic kingship: in a highly critical commentary, Plutarch describes Demetrius as 'the most sophisticated of kings in luxurious living ( tryphai)' modelling himself on Dionysus, and the Seleucid usurper Diodotus (142-139 bc) assumed the name 'Tryphon' when he seized power in Coele-Syria.68 Many of these rulers accordingly distributed portraits of themselves for coin mints and sculpture workshops with round faces and double chins; even Alexander the Great (like

65 On visual representations of Socrates, see Amelung (1927); Zanker (1995: especially 33-9). For literary references to Socrates's satyric appearance, see Xen. Symp. 4.19.5; cf. Ar. Nub. 223; Pl. Tht. 143e, 209b; Meno 80a; Symp. 215b; Resp. 513a. Further, see Evans (1969: 46). 66 See, for example, the portrait in the British Museum, GR 1873.8-20-726. See Woolf (2009) on

ascetic approaches to pleasure and the rejection of decadence and luxury in Epicureanism. More generally on Epicurus's portraits, see Frischer (1982), especially chapter 5 on their various associations. Cf. Hor. Epist. 1.4.15-16, jokingly imagining himself as a follower of Epicurus in comparison with the Stoic and austere Tibullus: 'me pinguem et nitidum bene curata cute uises, cum ridere uoles, Epicuri de grege porcum'; cf. Ath. 546e quoting Epicurus himself endorsing indulgence of the belly: 'apxr| Kai píÇa mvxòç àya0o') xfjç yaoTpòç fļSoviļ'. On philosophical approaches to fat and thin bodies in Athenaeus, see Stoneman (2000: especially 418-19). 67 On this herm and on Seneca's mimesis of Socratic philosophy, see Staley (2002: 282-3). 68 Plut. Vit. Demetr. 2-4. See Smith (1988: 52) on tryphe and Tryphon. The precise meaning of

tryphě is debated: see Tondriau (1948); contra, Wallace-Hadrill (1982), especially p. 34 on Hellenistic models of divine kingship and their influence on Rome. Cf. Dench (1998), especially pp. 124-5 on tryphe as 'inappropriate decadence' in Classical Greek literature. Cf. Cass. Dio 64.2.1 on 'tryphe' as a defining feature of Vitellius's life and reign.

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24 MARK BRADLEY

4 :;'rr^É^SE^Í

Fig. 9. Small-scale double herm showing Socrates and Seneca. Third-century copy of a first-century original, Rome. Staatliche Museen, Berlin, bpk / Antikensammlung, SMB / Johannes Laurentius. (Reproduced courtesy of the Staatliche Museen, Berlin.)

certain Roman leaders who imitated him, see below, pp. 30-1) was depicted with a rounded leonine face with soft, chubby features, and Ptolemy III Euergetes ('the Benefactor') had a full fleshy face in his portraits (Fig. 10). 69 Nude statues of these rulers, such as the 'Terme Ruler' (traditionally identified as a bronze undiademed prince or dynast from the late third or early second century bc, but ' perhaps a Roman triumphal portrait), were often over-muscled, like contemporary statues of Herakles.70 However, the positive associations of corpulence in Hellenistic state iconography have little in common with the damning critiques of excess and obesity in extant literary descriptions of overweight Hellenistic tyrants. Gluttony, and its physical manifestation in the body, was a particularly popular theme in ancient discussions of eastern tyrants, many of whom were renowned for their obese frames that were symptomatic of their tryphe and a tell-tale sign of the nature of their rule. Athenaeus, in his inventory of tyrants in Deipnosophistai 12, cites a number of

69 On tryphe and Ptolemaic portraits, see Zanker (1989: 56-9). See also Richter (1965: 259-69, figs 1770-856); Smith (1988: plates 16, 17c, 79, 80); cf. Smith (1991: 214-15) on heads of Ptolemaic rulers with 'soft' features: especially figs 240 (a Ptolemaic queen in black stone with no chin, second century bc), 241, 283. 70 On the Terme Ruler and debate over its Hellenistic or Roman identity, see Hallett (2005: 145- 8); cf. Papini (2002), who has interpreted it as a triumphal statue of Manlius Vulso (cos. 187 bc); Ridgway (2000: 305-9). Cf. Smith (1991: 20, fig. 3): 'an exaggerated muscle style could be used to express a sense of power beyond that of a mere athlete'. In fact, the traditions of the strong, affluent and well-fed ruler who epitomized the 'good life' may have older origins in eastern monarchical iconography: see Waywell (1978) on images of Hecatomnid rulers in Caria from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, particularly the so-called 'Mausolus and Artemisia' group, especially pp. 41-8 ('portly forms'), 97-105, with an emphasis on 'unflattering corpulence'.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 25

Fig. 10. Gold octadrachm showing Ptolemy III (c. 246-222 bc); reverse: cornucopia. Minted in Alexandria. © Classical Numismatic Group; 87, Lot 701. (Reproduced

courtesy of the Classical Numismatic Group, Inc.; http://wunv.cngcoins.com.)

earlier writers who describe corpulent rulers: Dionysius of Heracleia, who hid his body behind a box when he gave audiences (12.549a-b); Ptolemy VII Physcon ('Fat Belly') and his obese matricidal son (12.549e-550a); and Magas of Cyrene, who was choked to death by his own fat (12.550c). In many of these accounts, it appears that gluttony and corpulence were both the cause and the symptom of their failings. The bodies of Hellenistic rulers, which were so influential for Roman imperial iconography, embraced two very different approaches to excess weight.71

And finally, in a not unconnected artistic register, the so-called 'obese Etruscan' was a figure represented on the lids of a large number of Etruscan sarcophagi and funerary urns across Etruria from at least the fourth century down to the first century bc. As noted above, the 'obesus Etruscus' was a stock figure in Catullus's survey of Italian types at 39.11, and Virgil speaks of a 'pinguis Tyrrhenus' playing a flute at a sacrificial altar (G. 2.193); it seems likely that both poets were responding to a widely-recognized Etruscan iconography, rather than that the inhabitants of Etruria were typically fat. This iconography is extraordinary because it was so widespread as a generic 'type', and is one of the only representations in antiquity of a fat body swollen from feasting that appears to be unambiguously positive.72 The figures are normally male (although there are some big-bellied females in the same pose), reclining on a couch and supporting their heads with one arm, typically holding a bowl or cup in one hand, and their upper body is normally nude, their sideways-leaning posture exposing a large, pendulous belly with sagging flesh around the

71 See Beer (2010: 116-21 ('Gluttony versus abstinence: the tyrant and the saint')); Thompson (2000), especially pp. 82-3 on tryphě and fatness. Cf. Ath. 12.550d, where Agarthacides contrasts the fat Magas with the austere Spartans who regularly inspected their soldiers to ensure none had a protruding stomach (12.550d). For other references, see Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 357). 72 On the 'obese Etruscan', see Clark (1960: 362); Liebert (2006: 229-31). See Heurgon (1964:

24-7), who played down the trait as characteristic of the population at large. For a brief discussion of some iconographical evidence relating to obesity in Etruscan art, see Tabanelli (1963: 70-2, plates 28-30). See also Gourevitch and Grmek (1987: 356-7).

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26 MARK BRADLEY

Fig. 11. 'Sarcofago dell'Obeso'. Early third century bc, Tomba dei Partunu, Tarquinia. Museo Nazionale Archeologico di Tarquinia, RC 9875. © Museo Nazionale Archeologico di Tarquinia. (Reproduced courtesy of the Museo

Nazionale Archeologico di Tarquinia.)

pectorals and upper arms (Figure 11 showing the best-known example). Some scholars have connected this body type to an élite Etruscan preoccupation with tryphě , represented most vividly by the banquet and closely connected to contemporaneous developments in Hellenistic culture.73 Although the 'obese Etruscan' does appear to be peculiar to Etruscan art, its iconography evidently spilled over into Roman life: a number of portraits survive with Latin inscriptions, and there are examples of Roman early Imperial 'Klinenmonumenten' and late antique sarcophagus lids representing large-bellied topless Romans (or perhaps Etruscans living in Roman communities) reclining on a dining-couch.74 Italian associations between girth and the good life were far-reaching.

Emaciated philosophers, corpulent Hellenistic rulers and obese Etruscans, therefore, represent three dominant influences in the art of Roman Italy on the public and private portraiture of Rome, each contributing in different ways to the significance and iconography of Roman flesh. Portraits of real-life Romans, of course, represent one area of Roman art in which unusual, idiosyncratic or non-ideal features have occupied a traditional and distinctive place: the 'warts and all' traditions of late Republican portraiture, most notably, have a well-

73 The association of the Etruscans with symposiastic tryphě was already made in antiquity: see Poseidonius in Ath. 153d; cf. Diod. Sic. 5.40. Most recently see Liebert (2006), who has argued that tryphě was a pervasive aspect of Etruscan life; see pp. 28-50 for ancient literary references to Etruscan tryphě ; and 230 on obese iconography and Hellenistic associations. Cf. Shapiro (2000), especially pp. 316-17 on Etruscan tryphě as a much earlier phenomenon. 74 The classic study of these is by Wrede (1977): see especially p. 412 and fig. 97 on a corpulent

headless male on a second-century Klinenmonument at Ostia (Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Ostia inv. 1262); cf. figs 70, 71, 92 (a female example); cf. Wrede, 1990: figs 37- 8, 40. See also a Seveřan sarcophagus lid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. 1993.11.1) for a deceased Roman couple, the male bare-topped; cf. Wrede (1990: fig. 16). Cf. Ridgway (2002: pl. 101) for a votive relief from Thebes in the Louvre (Ma39) showing a corpulent reclining figure.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 27

established history in scholarly discussion, and it long has been recognized that such portraits are not just a product of a concern with verism or direct imitation (Richter, 1955; Jackson, 1987). In fact, it is evident that rotund, jowly faces with double chins, thick necks and eye bags, as well as portraits with sunken cheeks and scrawny necks, continued to decorate houses, shrines and public spaces through the early Principáte and well into late antiquity: these physiognomies inevitably reproduced some corpulence in real life, but they were also part of an interactive social and political discourse in which fat and muscle deposits corresponded symbolically to the individual's wealth, status and behaviour. Evidence for such faces is available not only in sculpture, but also (in the case of emperors and important political figures) in coin portraits, where mints often appear to have employed the same models as those made available to sculpture workshops.75

Such portraits were particularly common in the first century bc, and a large number of unnamed disembodied heads, belonging to a range of evidently important personages, survive. With their often sullen expressions, wrinkled brows and saggy necks, these faces, we can be fairly sure, epitomized Republican gravitas , the superfluous flesh a tell-tale sign of vigorous military exercise, political experience and affluent seniority, as well as a rejection of the glamorous, idealized Hellenistic-style portraiture that was becoming increasingly popular in Rome. Such faces are less visible in portraits of the early Principáte, but there are some striking examples: a mid-first-century bust that has sometimes been identified as Domitius Ahenobarbus, consul in ad 32 and father of Nero, whose receding hair, wrinkled brow, bulbous nose, fat cheeks and saggy chin were altogether different from the idealized youthful portraits of the Julio-Claudians (Fig. 12). 76 From the Hadrianic period, a curious portrait of an unknown senior, bare-chested male, now in the Vatican, is striking not so much for its rounded face and fleshy neck, but for the sculptor's decision to endow him with the sagging pectorals of an older man (Fig. 13), an intriguing feature that suggests he was once active, toned and muscular but has now given himself over to a life of 'otium cum dignitate'. This feature is all the more notable because of the customer's decision to take advantage of the sculptural trend that had gained prestige under Trajan to extend the bust to below the breast line: this piece therefore directly exploits the fleshy possibilities of this new type to integrate the face of a mature Roman aristocrat with the declining torso of a Hellenistic philosopher, a hybrid artefact typical of the Second Sophistic.77 There are many examples, too, of female portraits from the Republic and early Principáte, but particularly the second century ad, where the fat neck, a

75 For a good overview of the relationship between sculpture and coin portraits, see Toynbee (1978). 76 On this bust and its spurious identification, see Smith (1997: 192). 77 See Fejfer (2007: 181-3); cf. Zanker (1995: 10). On the relationship between old age, exercise

and otium in the early Empire, see Cokayne (2007), especially pp. 216-19 on age and intellectualism. For 'otium cum dignitate', see Cic. Sen. 13.44-6.

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28 MARK BRADLEY

Fig. 12. 'Domitius Ahenobarbus' (cos. ad 32), reworked marble bust. Musei Vaticani, Chiaramonti Museum, New Wing, inv. 2222. (Photo: Mark Bradley.

Reproduced courtesy of the Vatican Museums.)

pendulous chin, jowly cheeks, expressive piercing eyes and arching muscled brows point to seniority, intelligence and gravitas - no-nonsense high-society matrons with masculine faces who could pack a punch and hold their own alongside their male peers.78 Drawing upon multiple traditions, fleshiness in all these portraits was reminiscent both of the assertive, affluent image of the Hellenistic ruler and the wealthy and well-fed Etruscan élite, as well as the iconographie vestiges of seniority. Such corpulent portraits were also matched, if not in gravitas then certainly in severitas , by a large collection of sculpted representations, clustered in the Republican period but evident also throughout the Principáte, of thin, sometimes emaciated faces with tight lips, sunken cheeks and slender necks, whose contours and wrinkles point unequivocally to seniority and status.79 These cold, expressive faces, which are reminiscent of certain philosopher portraits, direct the viewer away from status derived from affluence on to moral

78 For examples, see Kleiner and Matheson (2000: 6) and Vermeule (2000: 22); cf. Matheson (2000) on older women in Roman art. 79 For numerous examples, see Dench (1998), especially pp. 137-46, but with little focus on the physical manifestations of austerity (or excess).

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 29

Fig. 13. Portrait of an unknown man from c. ad 120-40. Formerly in the Palazzo Altieri. Musei Vaticani, inv. 1421. (Photo: Mark Bradley. Reproduced courtesy of

the Vatican Museums.)

associations with abstinence, moderation and activities of the mind. In Roman portraits, then, excess flesh competed with leanness for status and prestige.80

This 'compare and contrast' exercise also finds expression in the iconography of political conflict. In an important article in the Journal of Roman Studies (1997), Smith examined the competing styles of the portraits of Licinius I and Constantine in the early fourth century as part of what he termed a 'war of images' and conflicting ideologies. The portraiture of Licinius, with its long thick-set neck, bloated face, eye bags and heavy rolls of expertly sculpted flesh and muscle, along with the short cropped hair and stubble growth, modelled the emperor as a rugged but accessible no-nonsense experienced military commander, following in the vein of tetrarchie portraiture and hailing back to the round-faced corpulence of emperors like Balbinus and Valerian with their heavy stubbled appearance.81 Portraits and coins of Constantine, on the other hand, normally represented a 'classical' long, slender, youthful Apolline face

80 For an example of these portrait types combined, see the Augustan curvilinear funerary relief from Rome, Centrale Montemartini, inv. 2306. 81 Smith (1997: 191): 'energized flesh as a representation of personal strength and power'.

Licinius's portraits also appear to have imitated the plump appearance of Galerius, whom

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30 MARK BRADLEY

that was reminiscent of portraits of Augustus, a vision of the emperor as a clean- shaven civilian, the model of tranquillitas , and quite different from the aggressive militaristic portraits of his rival.82 These respective physiognomic traits also became part of a family tradition in the fourth century: Licinius II preserved his father's rotund face in his jowly portraits, and Constantine appears to have exploited the chiselled, deep-chinned, lean-faced portraits of his father, Constantius I, in order to blend dynastic imagery with the 'classical' traits of Augustan portraiture, and to have passed these on to his son, Constantine II.83 In fact it is clear that competing traditions of stout and lean portraiture were already evident as far back as the late Republic. The portraits of Pompey the Great, with their well-known Alexandrian hairline, also imitated the round faces and stocky appearance of Hellenistic rulers, and were quite different from the heads and coin portraits of Julius Caesar, with their narrow face, sunken cheeks and defined cheek-bones that exemplified his well-known discipline and moderation.84 And it is little surprise, then, that we find triumviral portraiture preserving the same opposition: Mark Antony with his jowly cheeks and sturdy neck - physical characteristics that were derided by Cicero in the Philippics - posing as the experienced, accessible military leader versus the young, lean Octavian, with his long slender neck, handsome face, high cheek-bones and narrow nose, whose portraits unambiguously proclaimed him divi filiusß5 And it is also clear that, after nearly a hundred years of highly stylized Julio- Claudian portraiture, a counter-type once again emerged that opposed an aggressive thick-set militaristic appearance to the refined slim youthful faces that characterized the first dynasty. It is in this context that we can best approach the portraiture of Vitellius, obese in the critical pages of imperial historiography, but the image of a hardened, experienced military commander in sculpture and on coins. Similarly, Vespasian's round-faced, wrinkled portrait, with its thick neck and affable toothless smile, was clearly reminiscent of his role as a rugged, accessible man of the camp, and some of these features were passed on in portraits of his sons, Titus and Domitian.86

Lactantius described (De mort. pers. 9.1-3) as horrifically obese: 'caro ingens, et in horrendam magnitudinem diffusa et inflata'. Cf. Euseb. Hist. eccl. 8.16.4. 82 Later portrait types of Constantine were modelled on those of Hellenistic kings, and accordingly exhibit a thicker neck and fuller cheeks: see Delbrueck (1933: 74-5, plates 2.21-4, 3.25-33). 83 On the importance of similitudo in dynastic portraiture of this period, see L'Orange (1984: 3-

6). 84 On the rhetoric of Pompey's portraits, see Giuliani (1986), especially chapter 2. On emaciated

coin portraits of Caesar, and the Hannibalic hero M. Claudius Marcellus, see Grmek and Gourevitch (1998: 155). On Caesar's contradictory portraits, see Zanker (2009).

85 On certain aspects of the competing propagandist portrait statuary of Antony and Octavian, see Zanker (1988: chapter 2).

86 On the transformative imagery of Vespasianic portraits, see Pollini (1984); more recently, see Varner (2004), especially chapters 5 and 6.

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 31

It is also evident that pervasive connections existed between imperial corpulence and Hellenistic kingship. Pompey's affinities to Alexander the Great, and the iconographical connections between his portraits and those of the Hellenistic kings, are well-documented; a statue from Aphroditopolis in Egypt sometimes identified as Mark Antony stands in the pose of Lysippos's statue of Alexander; and it takes little imagination to see a connection between the almost caricatured stoutness of Nero (particularly in his coin portraits) and the Hellenistic imagery that dominated the final years of his principáte.87 But we shall end with a very peculiar bronze statue of the short-lived emperor Trebonianus Gallus, which was reconstructed from several fragments and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 14). This statue is larger than life (2.41 m tall) and is a good fit to the sturdy, stubbled corpulence of third- century warrior-emperors that Smith interpreted as a model for the tetrarchie portraits and the imagery of Licinius I.88 But while it clearly makes a play for the established traditions of corpulent rulers, its disproportionately large muscular body intimidates through its sheer physical presence, and is reminiscent of over-muscled Herculean bodies of wrestlers, boxers and gladiators (indeed, his boots resemble those often depicted in images of boxers). The massive nude body, then, marked out this emperor as an extraordinary physical figure in the midst of the third-century crisis, while preserving in the commander's paludamentum (which is far too small for him) and the stern

; stubbled face, stout neck and cropped hair the auctoritas of a Roman military leader, and in the contours of the skin, wrinkled brow, fleshy torso and gently sagging pectorals the seniority and experience expected of an effective Roman emperor. But there is more. This statue clearly is modelled after Lysippos's bronze sculptures of Alexander the Great from the late fourth century bc, which were widely copied and imitated across the Mediterranean.89 These too were fleshy, heroic images, although more youthful, better proportioned and less stocky around the midriff. Trebonianus was drawing upon multiple traditions and associations in this imperial image: its corpulence both contrasted with the waif-ness of recent emperors and tapped into the strength and vigour of the camp and the exceptional physical presence of professional fighters and athletes. And far from harmonizing these traditions, the artist went to great lengths to underline the composite character of the piece: the head is some two- thirds the scale of the body and the inflated torso is almost a caricature of the Polykleitian ideal from which it is derived.90 The very disproportion of this

87 On the Antony portrait, see Stanwick (2002: figs 271-3). On Nero, see Hiesinger (1975), especially pp. 120-4; Smith (2000), especially p. 539. 88 On this statue, see McCann (1981: 630-2). 89 See Bieber (1964): especially pp. 24-41 on Lysippos; Kiilerich (1988). 90 On the Roman tradition of 'the body in pieces' (with an emphasis on conceptualizing the head

separately from the body) and brief discussion of the Trebonianus Gallus, see Squire (2011), especially pp. 145-53; cf. Hallett (2005), chapter 7 on the aesthetics of hybridity. See also above, p. 14, on the discordant heads of mature Roman matrons on Venus's body.

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32 MARK BRADLEY

I m

■ ':^mmĚlm^^ '' ' ' Fig. 14. Bronze statue of Trebonianus Gallus, ad 251-3. 2.41 m high. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 253. Rogers Fund, 1905. Inv. 05.30. © The

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

extraordinary statue, represented most strikingly by its gutsy display of flesh, marked a bold (and typically late antique) rejection of the orthodoxies of classical portraiture, and a provocative invitation to contemplate the hybridity of the emperor's body at a time when it was critically important to break the mould.

CONCLUSION

To return to where we started, ad 68-9 was an extraordinary year for the history of corpulence. As the coins in Figure 15 demonstrate, later portraits of Nero, as

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 33

b

Fig. 15. (a) Denarius of Nero, ad 67-8, minted in Rome (CNG, 79, Lot 1075). (b) Sestertius of Galba, ad 68-9, minted in Rome (CNG, 75, Lot 1013). (c) Denarius of Otho, ad 69, minted in Rome (CNG, 81, Lot 1007). (d) As of Vitellius, ad 69, minted in Rome (CNG, 78, Lot 1741). (e) Denarius of Vespasian, ad 69-70, minted in Ephçsus (CNG, 82, Lot 994). All © Classical Numismatic Group. (Reproduced courtesy of the Classical Numismatic Group , Inc.; http:// www.

cngcoins.comģ)

well as those of his short-lived successors Galba, Otho and Vitellius, and those of the founder of the Flavian dynasty, all followed a remarkably standardized pattern in depicting the emperor with a stout neck, heavily modelled rolls of flesh and protruding brows. Certain continuities in imperial iconography were important in a period of extreme instability, and the emperor (whoever he might be) had to be instantly recognizable to his subjects as a strong, sturdy military commander who was a force to be reckoned with. Numismatic portraiture during the civil wars, then, represented a straightforward visual discourse in which the emperor's natural stoutness corresponded to his military experience and prowess. But immediately surrounding this iconography we find a nexus of diverse and sometimes contradictory interpretations of flesh. The full face and fat neck of later representations of Nero evidently owe a great deal to the

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34 MARK BRADLEY

traditional fleshiness of Hellenistic ruler portraits, and Suetonius is able to describe that same neck as obesa, and a tell-tale sign of his extravagant lifestyle (Nero 51). Galba too, as far as Suetonius is concerned, had a deformed body that alluded to his gluttony and mollitia (Galba 21-2). The full-faced Otho, on the other hand, though compared to Nero (Otho 7.1) and claiming descent from the princes of Etruria (1.1), is not described as fat by Suetonius, and (perhaps influenced by his relative youth and noble suicide) Tacitus remarks that Otho's mind was not soft like his body ('non erat Othonis mollis et corpori similis animus'; Hist. 1.22). Vitellius was an open-and-shut case of gluttonous obesity in the pages of imperial biography, even though his portraits told a rather different story. 'Divus Vespasianus', on the other hand, was not fat but 'well-built' ('statura fuit quadrata'; 20.1), in line with the stability he brought to Rome. And his sons Titus and Domitian, in spite of the striking family resemblance displayed in their portraits, are described in rather different ways by Suetonius: the former had a fine body ('forma egregia'; Titus 3.1) with only a slightly protruding stomach ('uentre paulo proiectore'), whereas the tyrant Domitian is characteristically deformis and obesus (see above, p. 10). All these figures, then, demonstrate that visual representations of flesh in the Roman world were part of a very rich and complex cultural phenomenon. It would be wrong to claim that obesity, corpulence and emaciation were major themes in ancient art. The majority of corporeal representations in the Graeco- Roman world is honorific, standardized or idealized, and so presented bodies of a medium or athletic build; and this was very much in line with physiognomic, ethnographic and medical approaches to the body. However, this article has identified a number of subjects, both mythical and human, that were sometimes characterized by an excess of fat or flesh, or by a lack of it, and has attempted to establish some interpretative links between them. The very poses in which these bodies were represented often drew attention to their fleshiness or emaciation - crouching goddesses, reclining banqueters or hunched, decrepit old men - and body fat was part of a broader artistic discourse that animated or naturalized the subject-matter. Furthermore, these characteristics pointed to aspects of identity, behaviour, philosophy and morality that were deeply embedded in the values and principles of Graeco-Roman culture, and it is clear that we can trace important continuities and associations across Greek, Hellenistic, Etruscan and Roman sculpture and painting, which were all interrelated components of the art of Roman Italy. Body fat, then, was itself a costume that transformed the meaning and associations of both the nude and clothed body. An overweight or corpulent body could be a sign of health, vigour and prosperity, whether in the fertile and nubile female form or the stocky, fleshy frame of the assertive Hellenistic ruler, the disenfranchised wealthy Etruscan élite or the grand Roman imperator. Flesh was power, and this contrasted with the thin, feeble, emaciated bodies of the poor, sick or elderly that (we must assume) constituted the vast majority in ancient communities. At the same time, a range of artistic and literary registers emerged that interpreted obesity, particularly in males, as a symptom of over-

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OBESITY, CORPULENCE AND EMACIATION IN ROMAN ART 35

consumption and a tell-tale sign of sexual promiscuity, weakness and moral looseness. Conversely, and perhaps in direct opposition to this discourse, the thin, even emaciated body could convey an image of personal self-discipline, stoic moderation and intellectual rigour: the very ambiguity of flesh was as critical to understanding thin bodies as it was to understanding fat ones. Flesh, like other bodily features such as high cheek-bones, facial hair or wrinkles, was part of an organic and complex artistic imagery that contributed to a set of social, political and moral discourses about power and character. It is in the domain of Roman portraiture in particular that the complexity of flesh is played out most provocatively: mature matrons with the body of Venus, the competitive imagery of fat and thin in Roman politics, or the explicit hybridity of late antique statuary. A study of obesity, corpulence and emaciation in the Roman world needs to acknowledge this complex and organic nexus of overlapping, but sometimes oppositional, discourses. We must resist the temptation to jump to the conclusion that 'fat was beautiful' at any point in the Roman world: flesh, fat, bags, chins and bellies were components of a very old, multilayered iconographical tradition, and their integration into Roman art spoke volumes about the subject's background, authority, resources, behaviour and morals.

Address for correspondence: Dr Mark Bradley Department of Classics, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, Great Britain.

[email protected]

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