Introduction

Reading the chapters of this volume so far, one might be struck by the relative lack of personal names, or of individual biographies. This does not reflect our ignorance of “great men” in the ancient world—Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (written in the decades around A. D. 100) alone provides a remarkable cast of characters—although admittedly women, children and barbarians do, by and large, remain obscured in our extant literary texts.

Why the relative lack of the “personal” therefore? To a great extent, this mirrors a dominant archaeological concern with tracing and analyzing structures of human organization and self-representation, rather than the vicissitudes of any single life-story. That emphasis is today being reconsidered and modiied, with the rise of post-processual approaches in archaeology, approaches that encourage material exploration of the individual, individual experience, memories, and emotions. Classical archaeology, with its rich mixed data-set of text and material culture, emerges as a potentially productive arena for such investigations.

“Finding individuals” in the archaeological record, however, is no straightforward task. It is exceedingly difficult to connect an individual life-history with a specific constellation of material remains: a landscape, a house, a city, a sanctuary. Tombs and their associated acts of individual commemoration appear a better way forward, though caution is required even there. The persona remembered in death, it is now realized, rarely echoes the full complexity of a life experience; moreover, the interventions of those surviving (and organizing the funeral and grave monuments) often mask or modify commemoration to their own purposes. Finally, certain social and political configurations, such as the Athenian democracy, outright discouraged the public expression of individual achievement and family emotion.

The difficulty of the endeavor does not justify its neglect, however, and it is vital to consider, as far as possible, the ways and means through which people made their mark upon the worlds in which they lived. This chapter explores this problem through a variety of strategies: not least by choosing to examine how men of power (Alexander the Great, Roman emperors) crafted their personal image—the public self they wished to promulgate—through gesture, portraiture, and architecture. The extent to which this reflects an actual individual consciousness, versus the desire to represent accepted values and virtues, will remain a debated point. The force and significance of these decisions, however, are clear in their visible consequences, traceable in the success or failure of political regimes and in the daily lives of subjects or enemies. In this analysis, the “archaeology of the individual” in classical antiquity emerges as a complicated intersection of the personal and the political.