“Expanding the Limits of Private Portraiture in Roman Macedonia: The Sebasteion at Kalindoia in Context”

Lindsey Mazurek, Indiana University, Bloomington

This paper explores the expanding functions of private portraiture in Roman Macedonia, focusing on questions of agency, religion, and space. Previous studies of Greek portraiture in Hellenistic and Roman Greece, particularly the work of scholars like John Ma (2013), Guillaume Biard (2017), R.R.R. Smith (1998), and Sheila Dillon (2006), see portraits as part of political and urban developments, placing them within the economy of euergetism that drove the development of post-classical cities. Portrait sculptures, they argue, could represent individuals, preserve memory, and complete transactions between humans and/or gods. But many examples, particularly from Roman Macedonia, complicate that picture. Seemingly wayward images like Theagenes’ portrait from the agora of Thasos (described in Pausanias) exceed these limits, performing previously unrecognized religious and social functions.

In order to examine this problem more thoroughly, I take the portraiture display in the Sebasteion at Kalindoia as a case study. The site preserves a wealth of inscriptions and portrait statues set up between the 1st century BCE and 3rd century CE, including a family portrait group set up by a woman named Flavia Mysta. She created a novel display of family portraiture that seems to work beyond our existing understanding of what private portraiture can do. As part of a building renovation, Flavia Mysta set up a portrait of herself, her husband, and their daughter next to a statue of Augustus. The room’s layout imitated a neighboring shrine to the imperial cult, which would have given viewers a distinct impression of its locale as a sanctuary in which imperial shrine and family heroon had been merged. Private portraits here are operated as cult images, pushing us beyond the boundaries of the portrait’s work as prescribed in previous research.