The colossal statue in Ephesus and reading the Book of Revelation

In the Ephesus Museum in Selcuk there is the head and left arm of a colossal acrolith (a statue with stone head and limbs and body of wood) which is labelled there (and in the ruins of Ephesus) as a statue of Domitian. However, I think there is a strong case for believing this is a statue of Domitian’s older brother Titus—and this discussion throws significant light on how we read Revelation in the light of archeological evidence.

In the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk, in the room given over to the imperial cult, there is a marble head of colossal size, displayed next to a left forearm whose fist is clenched around a now-missing shaft. The label is clear enough: in Turkish and English it reads “Head and arm of Emperor Domitian, AD 81–96.” The same identification runs through guidebooks, tour talks and a good number of commentaries on Revelation, where the picture of Domitian towering over the cult of Ephesus has become a ready illustration of the “image of the beast” in Rev 13.14–15.

I first visited this statue in April 2009, and was not convinced that the label was correct. On the basis of that, I presented a paper to that effect at the British New Testament conference in September that year.

Having stood in front of it again (in April and September this year), I remain convinced that this is no Domitian. The face looks to me much more like that of Domitian’s elder brother Titus, emperor from 79 to 81. In what follows I set out why, by comparing the Ephesus head with portraits of the two brothers whose identity does not depend on a collector’s label. This process is not straightforward, since the provenance of all statues varies, and there is a danger of circularity—someone labelling one statue as Domitian because it looks like others!

I then ask what difference the identification makes to our understanding of the Flavian dynasty, to the significance of the temple at Ephesus, and to the way we read Revelation.

The find and the temple

The head and forearm were found in 1930 by the Austrian excavator Josef Keil, in the vaulted substructures of the terrace that carried the Flavian imperial temple in the upper city of Ephesus. Keil identified the head as Domitian, and the label has followed him ever since. The statue was acrolithic, which is to say that the head and extremities were of marble while the body was of wood, long since perished. (These are more common than we often realise—but you can see that it is the case here, since the edges of the arm and neck are finished, rather than broken.) The fist has a channel for a spear or sceptre. Estimates of the original height vary, from around five metres to more than seven, so something between three and four times life size. (I measure myself against it, and reckon it is 3.7 times life-size, so would have been around 6.8m tall.)

The temple itself was dedicated in AD 89/90. It is still often called the “Temple of Domitian”, but that is misleading. As Steven Friesen showed some time ago (originally in his Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family and also in Imperial Cults and the Revelation of John), it was a temple of the Sebastoi, the Greek equivalent of Augusti, and so a cult of the Flavian imperial family as a whole. It was built by the province of Asia, with the emperor’s permission, and its foundation made Ephesus neokoros, temple-warden of a provincial imperial cult, for the first time. A series of dedications set up by the cities of Asia, including Aphrodisias, mark it as a civic and provincial project. After Domitian’s assassination in 96 and the condemnation of his memory, his name was chiselled out of these inscriptions, and in several cases the dedication was redirected to the deified Vespasian—but the cult carried on.

The identification of the head has been disputed for decades. Georg Daltrop and Max Wegner, in the Flavian volume of Das römische Herrscherbild (1966), argued from the physiognomy that it represents Titus. Friesen, reviewing the question, notes that other art historians still hold to Domitian. The museum label, then, records Keil’s first judgement rather than a settled conclusion.

What the brothers looked like

Any comparison depends on knowing what the two emperors looked like, and that is less straightforward than it seems. Many of the best-known portraits came to their museums through Renaissance and Grand Tour collections, and the name attached to them was given by a collector or dealer. The busts of “Domitian” in the Louvre (from the Albani collection, the example that first provoked my interest) and at Chatsworth (see right; photographed last week) are good examples. Both have the cuirass, gorgoneion and brooch-pinned cloak that eighteenth-century restorers liked to add to ancient heads, and both have restored noses. Heads from the Farnese collection in Naples and the Glyptothek in Munich have similar histories. They might well be correct, but they cannot be used to establish the type.

So I have limited the comparison to portraits whose identity rests on an inscription, a findspot or an independent historical context.

The written sources fit this picture. Suetonius describes Titus as short and somewhat paunchy (Titus 3). Domitian he describes as tall and handsome in youth, but later bald, and so sensitive about it that he wrote a book on the care of the hair (Domitian 18). The elaborate frontal coiffure of his later portraits is the sculptors’ answer to the baldness.

Placing the Ephesus head

Set against these two groups, the Ephesus head sits with Titus on five of the six features that survive.

The most distinctive features of Domitian’s face are the hooked nose and the overhanging upper lip. On the Ephesus statue, the nose has gone, but the lip is clearly not there. The forehead seems to me decisive. The head was carved for a cult statue in the lifetime of Domitian, a man notably concerned with his image, and his approved portrait type never shows wrinkles. It is hard to imagine a provincial workshop adding three deep furrows to the brow of the reigning emperor. It is easy to imagine them on Titus, whose portraits show him as a mature and heavy-set man.

There are two serious arguments the other way. The first is the hair. A full surround of elaborate curls is closer in spirit to Domitian’s later coiffure than to Titus’s shorter curls. But the Ephesus curls are large, free-standing corkscrews. The securely Domitianic hair, on the Misenum bronze and the Palazzo Massimo head, is made of flatter crescent locks arranged in tiers. The Ephesus treatment looks more like the work of a colossal sculptor carving for a viewer several metres below than an attempt at either brother’s type.

The second is the context. Domitian was emperor when the temple was dedicated, and the fragments were found discarded in the vaults. That could fit the toppling of his statue after 96. But in a temple of the Sebastoi, a colossal image of the deified Titus is just what we would expect a loyal province to provide in 89/90. Unlike a statue of Domitian, it had no reason to come down in 96, and it could have reached the vaults through any later destruction of the temple.

However, the coins leave us in little doubt.

The evidence of the coins

Denarii are the firmest evidence we have, since the legend names the emperor and his titles fix the date.

Three denarii of Titus from AD 79–80 (RIC II 1, RIC II 6 and RIC II 7) show the same face on three different dies. The head is round and heavy. The jowl hangs low, with a deep fold beneath the jaw, and the neck is a thick column dropping almost straight from the chin. The nose is short and fleshy, and the brow is creased.

Three denarii of Domitian from his first year as emperor, AD 81 (RIC II 3, RIC II 16 and RIC II 22), show a different man. The neck is long and slender, the face a lean oval with a firm jawline, and the nose longer and straighter. On the earliest of them the engraver seems to have leaned on his predecessor’s portrait, as often happens at the start of a reign, but even there the neck is slimmer and the jowl has gone. By the end of the year Domitian’s own type is fixed, with a distinct fringe of locks over the forehead, and it never returns to the heavy build of his brother.

Set beside these, the colossus belongs unmistakably with Titus. The coins also answer the argument from the hair. Titus’s coin portraits show a dense mass of short curls over the whole head. A sculptor working at three or four times life size, for a viewer several metres below, could easily turn that into the bold corkscrews of the Ephesus head.

The reverses add something too. RIC II 1, struck in the first months of Titus’s reign, shows a Jewish captive kneeling at the foot of a trophy. RIC II 7 shows the Capricorn on a globe, the emblem of Augustus, laying claim to his inheritance and to rule of the world. Domitian’s first issues then continue his brother’s religious series, with the tripod, ravens and dolphin of RIC II 3 and the thunderbolt on the throne of Jupiter of RIC II 16, before Minerva, his own patron goddess, takes over in RIC II 22. Even on his coins, Domitian began his reign as the one who continues Titus’s work and legacy.

The dynasty and the temple

If the statue is Titus, the temple does not become any less imperial. But its centre of gravity shifts, from a living emperor’s self-promotion to a dynasty of gods with Domitian as their heir.

The literary sources make much of the rivalry between the brothers. Suetonius has Domitian complaining that he had been cheated of a share in power under Vespasian’s will, plotting against Titus throughout his reign, and leaving him to die. He adds, pointedly, that once Titus was dead Domitian gave him no honour except deification, and often disparaged him (Domitian 2). Dio hints at something worse (66.26). Yet deification was precisely the honour that mattered. Domitian built the cult of the divi into his whole programme in Rome. The Arch of Titus, with its dedication Divo Tito and its relief of the spoils of Jerusalem, the Porticus Divorum, and the Templum Gentis Flaviae all belong to it. His legitimacy rested on being divi filius and divi frater, son and brother of gods.

A colossal Titus at Ephesus fits that public face rather than the private rivalry. It suggests that in the provinces Domitian’s image was built on the family claim more than on his own person. And because the temple was a provincial initiative, the choice of Titus for a cult image would tell us how the elite of Asia read the emperor’s wishes. That is arguably more revealing than anything Domitian chose for himself.

The identification also makes sense of an absence. If the temple housed a group of Flavian cult statues, a colossal Domitian would have been removed and broken up after 96, when his name was cut from the dedications. Titus could stay. The surviving head need not mean that Domitian was missing from the temple. It may be what remains once he had been taken out, which would make the old name “Temple of Domitian” more misleading still.

Reading Revelation

What difference does this make to Revelation? I think there are three consequences, and they do not all pull in the same direction.

Institutions, not individuals

First, the head can no longer serve as a portrait of Domitian’s megalomania. The older picture of a living tyrant demanding worship and persecuting those who refused has already been dismantled, notably by Leonard Thompson. In its place, the work of Simon Price and Steven Friesen has shown imperial cult to be something promoted from below, by provincial and civic elites competing for honour. A colossal Titus, commissioned by the province, fits that account. It also fits Revelation remarkably well. In Rev 13.12–15 it is the second beast, the beast from the land, which makes the image and enforces its worship. That looks less like a monarch than a priesthood or a local establishment.

This shifts the focus of John’s critique away from a particular emperor and towards a system, and those who sustain it. It is entirely consistent with the way John handles Daniel. Daniel’s beasts are already explicitly kingdoms rather than individual rulers (Dan 7.17, Dan 7.23). John then fuses Daniel’s four beasts into a single composite creature, like a leopard, with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion, bearing ten horns (Rev 13.1–2). Four successive empires become one figure of imperial power as such, gathered up in Rome. Rev 17.9–11 does something similar by layering its interpretations. The seven heads are both seven hills and seven kings, and the eighth king “belongs to the seven”. The heads come and go, but the beast persists. The same is true of Babylon in Rev 18, which is judged through the laments of the kings, merchants and seafarers who lived off her. She is a political economy, not a person.

The form of the messages to the churches points the same way. They are not letters, since the whole of Revelation is the letter (Rev 1.4–5, Rev 22.21). As David Aune showed, they take the form of royal or imperial edicts, opening with tade legei, “thus says”, which is both the formula of a royal decree and the prophetic “thus says the Lord” of the Septuagint. The church in Ephesus lived in the shadow of the province’s new imperial temple. It hears a proclamation from a different sovereign, “the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand” (Rev 2.1), the ruler of the kings of the earth (Rev 1.5), who promises access to the tree of life in the paradise of God (Rev 2.7). The message never mentions imperial cult. Its form already declares who the real emperor is.

The destroyer of the Temple

Second, a Titus identification gives the image a sharper Jewish edge. Titus was the one who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. A cult image of him, three or four times life size, worshipped in a new temple in the leading city of Asia, would present the destroyer of God’s house enthroned in a house of his own. For the Jewish community in Ephesus, and for Christians shaped by the Scriptures of Israel, that is a provocative image. It belongs alongside the Iudaea capta coinage, the spoils carved on the Arch of Titus, and the Jewish tax diverted to Jupiter Capitolinus, which Domitian exacted harshly. It gives concrete colour to the trampling of the holy city in Rev 11.1–2. And it throws into relief the city of Rev 21.22, which has no temple at all, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb”.

The ruler who was and is not

Third, a deified Titus resonates with Revelation’s language about a ruler who dies and yet lives. The image is made for “the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived” (Rev 13.14). The beast “was, and is not, and is about to come” (Rev 17.8), a parody of the God “who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev 1.4, Rev 1.8, Rev 4.8). The usual background here is Nero, whether the legend of his return or the empire’s recovery from the civil wars of 68–69 under the Flavians. A cult image of a dead emperor made a god, kept present by his successor, shows the same pattern. Imperial power dies and yet continues to claim worship, laying hold of an eternity that belongs to God alone. I would treat this as resonance rather than as a key to the text.

None of this means that John ignores individuals. The number of the beast is “the number of a man” (Rev 13.18), and the most persuasive reading still takes it to point to Nero. But Nero functions as a type, the figure in whom the character of the beast was seen most nakedly, and whose pattern recurs. That may offer a way through the long impasse over dating. The question becomes not which emperor John had in view, but which pattern of power he was exposing, naming the figure in whom it had shown itself most plainly.

Two cautions are in order. The identification of the statue does not settle the date of Revelation. If John alludes to this temple at all, it is the dedication in 89/90 that matters, whoever the statue represents. And the message to Ephesus says nothing about imperial cult, while the “throne of Satan” is located in Pergamum, home of the province’s first imperial temple (Rev 2.13). The colossus is best used as evidence for the world in which the seven churches lived, not as the referent of any single text.

Conclusion

The colossal head in Selçuk is, I think, better identified as Titus than as Domitian. Its face matches the securely identified portraits of the elder brother and departs from those of the younger in just the features that matter most. If that is right, the temple at Ephesus emerges more clearly as what its dedications say it was, a provincial cult of a deified dynasty, in which Domitian’s own standing rested on his father and brother. And Revelation’s beasts look less like caricatures of one hated emperor and more like an exposure of the whole apparatus of imperial power, the city that sustained it, and the local elites who made its image and enforced its worship. That, I suspect, is what John was doing all along.

Reflection: on temples and statues

In reflecting on this statue and its place, two things have impressed themselves upon me.

First, as I have previously noted, the equivalent level of income in even the most prosperous region of the Roman Empire was, on average, poorer than the poorest countries in the modern world. In that context, the investment in the lavish building of a temple was a remarkable display of what we would call oppressive dictatorship. It is a statement of physical power, and though of course its construction would have created employment for many (though a large number of those would have been slaves), the contrast with the ordinary poverty of life is almost unimaginable.

Secondly, we might have a fascination with the ancient wonders, and might lament the loss of the ones that were destroyed, and the demolition of wonderful buildings. But we only do so because we are detached from their meaning and the role in confirming the dominance of imperial power. When Saddam Hussein was deposed in Iraq, and his statues toppled, no-one was lamenting the loss of art.

A note on the illustration at top

I have attempted, using AI, to imagine the statue in situ in the Temple of the Sebastoi as viewed from the Upper Agora in Ephesus. However, using a free image creator had its limitations! The statue is coloured in the usual way, and holds a spear as it would have done. The pediment, also coloured, includes an image of the Apollo-Leto myth, beloved of Domitian and the narrative behind Revelation 12.

The statue would, in reality, have been further back in the temple, and as we have seen likely been accompanied by another, actually of Domitian! The people in the temple are too small; by my measurement the statue would have been around 6.8 m tall, and the temple columns between 10 and 11 m tall, so the people would be nearly twice the height shown in comparison.

 References

• Aune, David E. “The Form and Function of the Proclamations to the Seven Churches (Revelation 2–3).” New Testament Studies 36 (1990), 182–204.
• Bergmann, Marianne, and Paul Zanker. “Damnatio memoriae. Umgearbeitete Nero- und Domitiansporträts.” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 96 (1981).
• Daltrop, Georg, Ulrich Hausmann and Max Wegner. Die Flavier. Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Julia Titi, Domitilla, Domitia. Das römische Herrscherbild II.1. Berlin, 1966.
• Friesen, Steven J. Twice Neokoros. Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family. Leiden, Brill, 1993.
• Friesen, Steven J. Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John. Reading Revelation in the Ruins. Oxford, OUP, 2001.
• Price, S. R. F. Rituals and Power. The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge, CUP, 1984.
• Thompson, Leonard L. The Book of Revelation. Apocalypse and Empire. Oxford, OUP, 1990.
• Suetonius, Titus 3; Domitian 2, 18. Dio Cassius 66.26.

Sources consulted online

• The King and I. The Apostle John and Emperor Domitian, Part 1 (on Keil, Daltrop and Wegner, and Friesen)
• Domitian Square, Ephesus (on the statue’s size)
• Temple of the Sebastoi
• FORTVNA Papers 3, Book on Domitian, major results (on Relief B and Henderson’s remark)