ABSTRACT
The portraits of the Roman emperors must be studied not only from an aesthetic perspective; rather they must be examined also for the ideological and political message which they are meant to convey. Thus the members of the First Tetrarchy are regularly portrayed with a stern, even frightening countenance. But even Constantine’s earliest portraits, on coins minted at Trier in 306, show a departure from that model by a softer, more natural modeling and by a classicizing tendency.
