ABSTRACT
While Agrippina the Elder was not as successful as Livia was with her large Imperial cameo, her son, Caligula, nonetheless became emperor. Agrippina the Younger followed the examples set by her mother, Agrippina the Elder, and great-grandmother, Livia, and commissioned the first of two Imperial cameos: the now fragmentary cameo of Caligula and Roma. This fragment, with its figures larger than those on the Gemma Augustea, likely would have been even larger than its predecessors, all in Agrippina the Younger’s attempt to persuade her brother, the emperor Caligula, to adopt her son, Nero, as heir. This chapter attempts to reconstruct the original cameo, based on the continuing dialogue occurring between these large Imperial cameos. Like the Grand Camée de France, the cameo fragment belongs to stage three of the life cycle of iconography, and its original state must have contained additional complex and mature Roman iconography. In the fragment, Agrippina the Younger makes a bold decision to flatter her brother. Roma is relegated to Caligula’s left side, declaring not only that the emperor is a god but also that he has a higher status than the goddess Roma, something that was taboo in Roman art at that time.
