Rachel Catherine Patt

Using a rarely explored format of Roman portraiture, the gold-glass medallion, I argue that the yearning desire for someone absent can illuminate the force of intimacy behind such small-scale private images. Known as pothos in ancient Greek, this longing both catalyzed portraiture’s invention anecdotally and grounded the artistic genre conceptually in a web of absence, memory, and surrogacy. Employing visual, literary, and epigraphic evidence alongside gold-glass medallions, I advance pothos as an interpretive tool to demonstrate the rich emotional tenderness afforded by some Roman portraits, expanding our notion of the genre beyond its more common political and honorific associations.

Spectacular and rare gold-glass portraits from the third century CE have long been associated with Alexandria as the place of production on the basis of inscriptions on two examples in Brescia and New York City. This article reconsiders the archaeological, literary, and especially epigraphic evidence for such a connection and ultimately concludes that the grounds on which the connection rests need to be reconsidered. The inscriptions were identified as Alexandrian Greek given the terminations of words in iota almost one hundred years ago, but I demonstrate the absence of such a dialect and offer an alternative onomastic reading to resolve the problem of the iota endings. I propose that the designations on the gold-glass roundels instead represent a specific kind of nickname that flourished in the later Roman Empire and that popularly ended in –i in Latin or –ι in Greek inscriptions. Evaluating the dissemination of the Alexandrian hypothesis over decades of scholarship, the article concludes that the desire to attribute the gold-glass portraits to Alexandria is part of a larger impulse in Classical art history to assign especially remarkable and luxurious works of art without proveniences to ancient metropolises.