Was Socrates really the ugliest man in Greece? What character traits did an ancient politician try to project? How did a Roman emperor want to appear? An ordinary Roman? The answers to these and other questions lie in the portraits of ancient Greece and Rome. Some portraits depict well-known individuals, while others show people unknown to us. What do the personal choices of such representations tell us about the subjects? Factors such as age, gender, dress, seem obvious, but how does one portray character, status, temperament? We will explore these questions through a chronological overview of portraits from ancient Greece and Rome. As we will see, portraits convey a fascinating blend of individual personalities and the values and attitudes of the society that produced them.
