The image of the rulers and the role of the military costume in the Near East from the Hellenistic to the Roman Age

This paper analyzes the role of the military costume in the portrait of the Hellenistic and Roman rulers in the Near East from Alexander to the third century AD. Even if there is little contemporary evidence, two important monuments as the so-called Sarcophagus of Alexander and the Nemrut Dağ, the portraits of the Near Eastern rulers in other media as coins or gems, the so-called ‘cuirassed gods’ and the later imperial images of Alexander and Seleucus allowed to highlight the major role of the cuirassed image in the iconography of the Hellenistic sovereigns in the Near East. Alexander brought in the region a new military habitus that was immediately and consciously used to emphasize both the Greek identity and the authority of the king. The cuirassed statue, with a few exceptions, prevailed also in the portraiture of the Roman Emperors. However, the Imperial Age gradually introduced also a ‘new’ element, the fully decorated cuirassed statue that had been elaborated in the Augustan Rome. This ‘Roman’ model was not immediately accepted, but in the second century the statuarytypes used in the Near East were often the same used in the western provinces as well. In this way, the fully decorated breastplate became a true symbol of the power of the Roman emperors