The workshops of Aphrodisias and their products have long held an important place in the study of the sculpture and statuary of Roman Asia Minor. The ongoing excavations at this site have yielded many fine examples of relief and freestanding sculpture, some of which have been published previously in preliminary reports. R. R. R. Smith and his collaborators have produced the second major publication of Aphrodisian sculpture (after R. R. R. Smith, Aphrodisias I, The Monument of C. Julius Zoilos, Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1993). This volume, which covers work excavated through 2004 and includes both previously published and unpublished material, will be a valuable tool for those with interests in Greek elite self-presentation in the Roman Empire.

The publication is divided into two parts. Part 1, the introduction, begins with a lengthy chapter entitled “Local Contexts,” in which Smith lays out the aim of the volume: to understand the portrait statues within the specifically Aphrodisian historical context. The chronological limits of the study are fixed as the mid-first century BCE and the mid-third century CE, coinciding with the beginnings of Aphrodisias’s urban monumentalization and with the end of widespread portrait statuary production in the city. Very useful for all readers is the section on the archaeological contexts for the more than two hundred portraits and fragments included in the catalogue. Much attention is given to inscribed statue bases as evidence for the honorific practice of public portraiture. Smith’s discussion of the process by which a statue was granted, paid for, and set up is particularly helpful in guiding the reader toward an appreciation of the role of portrait statues in civic politics. There follows a brief but informative treatment of the style and technique that classical art historians associate with Aphrodisian workshops. The final section of chapter 1 takes up the issue of costume, which is the organizational rationale of the catalogue and, for Smith, the most important tool in the evaluation of a portrait and its subject’s role in the community.

Chapter 2 (“Portrait Statues and Local History”) is mainly a chronological survey of the portrait statuary included in the catalogue. Each chronological section is laid out according to major find places for portrait statues, and then according to gender and age. Throughout this chapter, Smith provides illustrations of the find spots of the more important portrait statues and fragments. The display contexts for honorific statuary are addressed in greater detail in the sections on the “Second Century AD” and the “Third Century AD,” the periods that saw the greatest number of awards of honorific statues. The Agora Gate and the Bouleuterion are given special attention in the former section; Smith contrasts the greater presence of Imperial portraits at the Agora Gate with the more local emphasis of the program at the Bouleuterion (58–65). The discussion of trends in portraiture from the second century lingers on two examples of clean-shaven elder male portraits; Smith categorizes them as part of a “minority strand” (61) in portraiture style that emphasized the virtues of integrity and restraint by eschewing the bearded faces popular during this period. The “Third Century AD” largely focuses on the portraits of Dometeinos and Tatiana and concludes with a section on sarcophagi, serving mainly to illustrate both the continuation of elite portrait styles into the late third century and the adaptation of these styles for the “middle-class” (73).

Following part 1 is a valuable appendix consisting of a table of the inscriptions associated with honorific portrait statues, divided by rank, groups, gender, and occupation. The table provides information about who was honored with a public portrait statue, by whom, on what grounds, and who was responsible for the setting up of the statue. These data afford a very interesting look at honorific practice in the city of Aphrodisias, but because the appendix is organized by social categories rather than by date, it is somewhat difficult to get a sense of how and why Aphrodisian elites were honored over time.

Part 2 is the catalogue itself, separated into sections on statues, busts, detached portrait heads, and portraits in relief. Within these broad categories, the entries are organized in chapters by costume and then by gender. These chapters begin with useful introductory essays describing the major portrait types and costume arrangements popular in the Hellenistic and Roman periods in the Greek East, and are good resources for readers seeking to gain a basic familiarity with this topic. The catalogue offers some new identifications for statues published previously. For example, what was formerly considered to be a portrait of Caesar is now suggested to be a portrait of Zoilos (102–3). The introductory essays and certain of the catalogue entries include greater consideration of the architectural contexts for the display of honorific portrait statuary, although they are limited to generalized statements. Chapter 7 (“Statues of Women”) is the only chapter in which entries are organized by the find spots of the statues; all other chapters list entries chronologically.

Thorough concordances, a museum index, and illustration sources follow the catalogue, as well as many black-and-white plates with high-quality images of all catalogued statues and fragments.

Smith’s analysis of Aphrodisian portrait statuary does not depart from the thesis and conclusions of his influential 1998 article, “Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century A.D.” (Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1998): 56–93). In both, Smith casts the choice of different coiffures, facial hair styles, and costumes as a self-conscious effort by provincial elites to emphasize a predominantly Hellenic cultural identity and shared civic values. Unlike his earlier article, which compared Aphrodisian examples with portraits from other major Greek cities, this volume makes few references to the deployment of honorific portrait statuary from other cities in the Greek East, and the examples that are cited tend to repeat those discussed in the “Cultural Choice” article. Such comparisons would seem to be essential to determining if certain behaviors were consistent across most Greek cities, or if the history of Aphrodisias—which owed a great debt in its early stages of urbanization to the patronage of Roman leaders and their agents—resulted in a particular local practice.

At various points throughout the book, Smith and his coauthors consider the find spots of the portrait statues, noting that these portraits were concentrated at major public sites, such as the Theater, Bouleuterion, and the Agora Gate. With the exception of the analysis of the second century CE statues of the Bouleuterion in chapter 2, these discussions omit consideration of ideal sculpture from these same buildings or how the effect of the portraits would have changed with the movement of portraits or the addition of further statues over time. An already large publication of honorary portraits cannot accommodate detailed discussions of the many ideal sculptures from the city, and the authors are rightly cautious in drawing conclusions about the physical context, since many of the statues were found in likely secondary contexts.

Nevertheless, Smith’s intense concern with the personal style of each recipient of an honorific portrait leads to an understanding of the statuary as examples from a portrait gallery rather than as elements in a much broader civic visual culture, in which portraits stood side-by-side with representations of deities and myths or personifications of peoples and civic institutions. The isolation of portrait statuary from its display contexts places the emphasis on the intentions and motives of the elites awarded the honor of a statue, rather than on the effect and understanding of the statues by ancient viewers. Indeed, one could argue that this treatment of portrait statuary fails to keep in mind the full intent of those who set up the statues, because surely they were aware that these depictions of civic notables would be viewed alongside ideal sculpture. For example, when noting that almost all the togate portrait statues come from the Theater, Smith says only that “it may be related to the fact that the Theater was the chief place of political assembly, in which citizenship and its varieties were most publicly constituted before the demos” (101). This point could be made even more effectively by noting that these togate statues emphasizing Roman citizenship and political identity were set alongside ideal sculptures that, according to Smith’s own preliminary publications, had strong Augustan and Roman associations.

Despite these quibbles, Aphrodisias II is an eminently useful book that reflects a tremendous amount of work by many talented scholars. Art historians, classicists, and ancient historians will all profit from it. It is to be hoped that future volumes will make available the totality of the exceptional sculptural evidence from Aphrodisias. In the meantime, Smith and his collaborators have established a solid foundation for further research on public statuary, sculpture, and civic politics from Aphrodisias and the Greek East.