ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates Roman public portraits as external tools for the cognition of social relationships and for the acquisition and maintenance of knowledge about elite identities, beyond the mere storage of names and offices inscribed on their bases. It is argued that these statues afforded an array of sensory and emotional engagements that compelled attention and enhanced the effectiveness of information encoding. Furthermore, this chapter finds that the reiterative nature of these interactions between public portraits and ritual participants demanded the periodic retrieval of learned information, thereby supporting the long-term retention—memory—of the virtues of the portraits’ subjects.