AJA

Spread throughout the necropoleis surrounding Pompeii are hundreds of humble stelae that share an unusual form. As rectangular standing stones topped with disks, they resemble stylized human busts; examples featuring carved hairstyles on the rear of the disk make clear that this association was intentional. Known as columelle, the grave markers were used from the first century B.C.E. through the first century C.E. not only at Pompeii but in all the cities of southern Campania.

This article investigates a Roman marble portrait sculpture with divine attributes known as “Portrait Statue of a Woman as Cybele.” Now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the portrait has been interpreted by scholars as depicting a priestess of the goddess.

This article reexamines two blocks with archaistic reliefs found southwest of the forum of Roman Corinth in the mid to late 1970s. These blocks are dated to the Augustan period by style and have three divinities represented on each. I propose that the figures represented on the reliefs should be identified as Roman gods, not Greek ones, as all previous scholarship has claimed.

Although discovered more than 50 years ago near Amelia (Italy), a bronze cuirassed statue of Germanicus has gained relatively little attention. Represented on its elaborate breastplate is the death of Trojan Troilus at the hands of Achilles. The author of the principal monograph on the statue proposes that it originally portrayed King Mithridates VI, who saw himself as a new Achilles in his war against Rome.

A group of marble statues, all bearing the dedication of Klaudios Peisōn, were found together in 1981 in the South Baths of Perge. They appear datable to the principate of Antoninus Pius, when the baths were enlarged. To date, however, these statues have not been examined as a group, and little attention has been paid to the role of their donor.

Recent fieldwork and study by the Pompeii Forum Project allows us to expand and refine our understanding of the urbanistic development in the area of the Pompeii Forum, in the context of our previous interpretation of the overall state of Pompeii Forum studies (AJA 117 [2013] 461–92).