Hello my name is Thorsten Opper. I'm a curator in the Department of Greece
and Rome here in the British Museum. Welcome to my corner.
One of my interests and specialisms really is Roman portraiture or ancient portraiture
in general. I love ancient sculpture. I find portraits quite intriguing. What we could do
today is just look at ways we can study a portrait head like this. What we should be looking out for,
what the key questions are how you contextualize it. How you turn it back
from a dead object into something meaningful that carries a message and how we can how we
can really put ourselves in the position of a Roman who would have looked at this at the time.
There's a lot of background that we can bring to bear and that makes it really fascinating.
For me there're different aspects. It's not even about how naturalistic they are it's the message
they were meant to carry and how to decode that. So there's your immediate gut reaction. If you
look at a portrait you have a face of someone so so there's a meeting metaphorically speaking of
individuals and and you know even that is quite powerful, gazing in into the eyes of Nero now
is something special but it's it's the little coded messages. It's reconstructing how it would
have looked imagining what type of body it sat on, how you're meant to see it. Just going right in
it's a portrait of the emperor Nero who reigned from A.D. 54 to 68. over his lifetime
Nero had four different portrait types. Portrait types are usually
created for a specific occasion. In the exhibition the first statue of nero you'll see shows him as
a boy twelve, thirteen years old. That's probably when he was adopted by Claudius and built up as a
successor. So that was the first occasion where he needed to be known to by the Roman public, where
his images were produced and put out there. The next big occasion was in A.D. 54 when he became
emperor after Claudius's death. This portrait, our bronze head clearly belongs to Nero's second type
so the type created in A.D. 54. The third type came in in A.D. 59 for his five-year anniversary
on the throne and then probably the last type in A.D. 64 for his ten-year anniversary on the
throne. These are the big occasions that mark an emperor's reign. This gives us a fairly good
indication when this this was produced A.D. 54 to 59 roughly. Often they only had coins so two
dimensional sources the model they had when they made this bronze version of the head the profile
is very clear and it compares very closely to inscribed coin portraits of Nero. That's
how you identify portraits of Roman emperors really, the coins are very clear they're named
and they give us dates of offices, so we know who it is and roughly when the portrait was created.
It's a bronze head bronze, copper alloy. These very rarely survive from antiquity.
There are only one or two other Nero portraits in bronze that have survived so ours is very special.
This is a life-sized roughly life-sized head you can probably compare my head to to the the bronze
portrait the measure for comparison usually is chin to top of the head - chin to crown.
In this case that's about 23 centimeters which is considered just about life-sized. Most Roman
portraits ancient portraits are taller. They look slightly funny and I think you can appreciate it
from where you sit now. There's an odd shape to the face. There's this small pointed chin
which is quite typical for Nero but it's accentuated here, the producing ears are
quite significant. You find those in many Nero portraits. One thing that's immediately obvious
is that the eye sockets are empty. That's the way the head was cast they were originally filled
with coloured stone coloured glass. sometimes in in a local northwestern province context
they can be enameled. I think here it was probably stone so you'd have a white eyeball and a proper
dark iris and pupil so very lifelike one of our other great objects in the British Museum is
the Meroë head of Augustus. That's one of the very few heads that have survived from antiquity
with the original inlet eyes and that's roughly how we have to imagine our Nero here.
Now as we said the proportions of the face
look a little bit unusual especially at eye height. It changes when you see him from below.
You need to remember that this was part of a statue originally, so it would have been seen from
below at an angle. We've only in the run-up to our exhibition commissioned new photographs after
a lot of discussion and they're taken from a lower angle and straight away it changes the
proportions. He looks a lot more authoritative and imperious in that way. What I also found
quite interesting because only the frontal view is usually online or in books; I'll turn
it slightly into profile and I don't know what you think, but it looks a lot more Roman to me
in profile. And fantastic that the nose is preserved, you don't often get that with
marble statues when they fall over the nose is the first thing to go. It has this typically Julio
Claudian form it's slightly aqualine so rarely preserved you can see that it's very broken here
we'll come back to why that is. I'll turn it a little around for you so you can see what we
have here is the original neckline and I've read some of the reports that were done of it, the
scientific examination there's some traces of solder at the back of the neck and that indicates
that the whole statue was cast in different parts. It's often easier to do it that way
that it was linked to a body there now you don't want an unsightly solder line visible so that's
a clear indication that the body was draped in a toga the official roman costume if you like,
or more likely in this case with Nero and an emperor in military body armor. Roman portraits,
an important thing is really the messages they carry. And they were not we are now used to...
Well now we're used to selfies or to passport photographs so it's really the face that matters.
In official Roman portraiture it's the whole body. So it matters if you're in a toga for
example that shows you're a Roman citizen, if you're in military armor whether you're
standing, whether you're on horseback whether you're sitting. You know these all carry messages
the inscription is very important for context all this is lost here we really only have the face.
But we can painfully reconstruct. Sometimes we can identify certain body types that may have gone
with these statues that gives us a fuller meaning. It was discovered in spring 1907 by a local school
boy in the muddy bed of the river Alde in Suffolk. Someone local bought it off that school boy, a Mr
Holland and displayed it. But a year later in 1908 it came to London for the first time.
It was displayed by the society of antiquaries and they had one of their
regular meetings and they discussed it. And we have minutes of the meeting and it was
identified straight away as a Roman portrait of the Julio Claudian period. So the Julio Claudians
are the imperial family from Augustus to Nero. The first five Roman emperors. But the identification
was quite open, you have to understand at that time portraits weren't really
researched. There weren't many publications with photographs for comparisons and so on, so
different names were put forward. In 1915 there was a first article that linked the
head to Claudius in particular, other names had been mentioned before his predecessor other
princes of the period and it linked it to Claudius but also to Colchester,
the Roman capital at the time. Colchester is about 40 miles to the southwest of the find
spot. It was heavily corroded when it was found. It's now been cleaned and conserved.
The only small bits where we can get an idea of the original surface according to the scientific
reports here above the right eye there's an area where you have a little bit of the original black
patina left but clearly it's quite well preserved other than the physical damage it suffered when
it was torn down. That's also an indication that it probably wasn't on display for very
long if it was made the earliest in A.D. 54 maybe ripped down in A.D. 60/61 that gives you a fairly
short window for how long this would have been out on display. We see quite savage marks on the head
it was clearly hit from the right with a sharp implement. Here
you can see a very deep indentation and holes as well. It's probably struck repeatedly
and also here the back. I mean you see it better in profile you can probably see a dent
here it hasn't pierced the bronze but someone whacked it really hard why would they do that?
With Nero there are two possible scenarios. After his death through enforced suicide in A.D. 68
many of his statues were toppled over and removed. There was something we now call,
it's a modern term, really damnatio memorae the condemnation of his memory. So that's
his images were removed, destroyed, toppled, taken off display. His name was erased from
inscriptions. So that's a potential scenario for this statue too although you wonder why it would
then end up 40 miles to the north in a river. It doesn't really make sense. The other is,
and that theory came up in 1914 for the first time, that it's linked to an event in Britain
that was hugely significant in Nero's reign, and that's the Boudicca rebellion in A.D. 60/61.
Britain had only been conquered, the core part of the province
has just been turned over to a civilian administration. But really all around towards
Wales and the North were tribal territories. There was ongoing warfare and you have to think of the
province swarming with soldiers, with military contractors, with tax farmers. The sources tell us
that there was a lot of uncontrolled exploitation. The locals were treated with great disrespect.
Britain was one of the provinces where the Roman army and their commanders in particular
could still hope to make booty like in the old days. That wasn't possible in
other parts of the empire anymore. Boudicca was the the leader, the queen of the Icini tribe.
She'd taken over from her late husband it seems that the Romans tried to take over Boudicca's
territory. That often happened. The system of rule was based on treaties with local rulers,
but that didn't mean that you could pass on your kingdom say or your tribal
teritory to your descendants. Sometimes it was incorporated in the Roman province. That's what
may have happened here. It's also reported that Romans suddenly called in loans, raised taxes.
So there was great discontent that erupted in a violent rebellion against Roman rule. And the
Icini, led by Boudicca and other allied tribes went to the capital to Camulodunum, Colchester
and sacked it. There were no city walls at the time. The Romans had to flee to the local temple
which was a giant temple of Claudius the founder of Colchester of Roman Colchester.
They held out for two three days, and then the whole place was burnt down and they were
all killed and slaughtered. The rebels moved on, or freedom fighters, moved on, sacked Londinium
and Verulamium modern St Albans. And only afterwards where they defeated in battle.
But the conflict was very brutal. The image of the emperor really stood in for the emperor
himself for the person of the emperor so like you have church asylum now, you could
go and hug the the image of the emperor and that would keep you safe for for a while. So no
surprise that there's a real hatred then of course, that is taken out on the statue. So
why the river Alde? What is it about the find spot and the background? I said the river Alde is in
Suffolk. In antiquity in the Roman period it may have formed the border between tribal territories
between the Icini to the north in Norfolk and Trinovantes just to the south. That's the tribal
formation around Colchester. So one possibility is that the the Icini or Trinovantes
during the rebellion tore the statue down, hacked off the head, highly symbolic.
Maybe took it off and then ritually deposited it in the river. A very well-established tradition
in the northwest provinces are these water deposits; jewelry booty a lot of weapons,
also in the Thames for example they found lots of skulls so it's highly symbolic and
putting it in that river if that river also was a tribal boundary probably invests that boundary
with added significance. Importantly Nero now is associated with totally different values
our image of Nero and that's something we're trying to to question in the exhibition is
a monster megalomaniac a deluded artist you can project that on an isolated head,
but if you imagine him as a full statue in military body armor as commander-in-chief
the aura of the image is completely different and that's really crucial
to go back to the way a roman public in Nero's day would have seen his images.