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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2323287, member: 19463&quot;]<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/10/science/scholar-detectives-learn-how-augustus-idealized-his-image.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/10/science/scholar-detectives-learn-how-augustus-idealized-his-image.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/10/science/scholar-detectives-learn-how-augustus-idealized-his-image.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Over the years I have been led to believe that Augustus played with his public image more than most emperors bringing a degree of idealization to the portraits on coins and statues.&nbsp; That leads us to the possibility tht my coin does not look like Augustus but that Augustus was trying to look like my coin or, rather, the 1st century ideal of what an emperor should look like.&nbsp;&nbsp; Today we have plastic surgeons who would make Augustus look like his coins but he might have settled by having his coins made to look just a bit more perfect.&nbsp; The Archaic Greeks made statues of male and female ideals to demonstrate their concept of beauty.&nbsp; It is hardly a stretch to think that the die cutters of Spain might have been cutting attractive male ideals for their coins even before the ruler of the Roman world decided to use similar facial structures and call them his own.&nbsp; I am completely at a loss how we are to prove this sort of thing.&nbsp; There is considerable variation in the appearance of emperor portraits whether coin of lifesize. Ho do we know which looks like him an which looks like the &#039;him he wished to be&#039;?</p><p><br /></p><p>Museums all have portrait busts claiming to be one emperor or another but many are not labelled.&nbsp; How do we know that a certain portrait is actually Septimius Severus and not a rich merchant who adopted the hair and beard of the then current emperor like we now have people going to their beautician and saying make me look like (insert name of your favorite Hollywood idol)?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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