‘Futures past’ on the Roman frontier: Kommagene and Mauretania

People making art on the Roman frontier were concerned with shaping their futures, just as much as commemorating their pasts. However, art from the edges of the Roman world is usually confined to study through the past-inflected lenses of memory and identity. I apply the concept of “futures past” (Reinhart Koselleck) to art from two Roman frontier kingdoms, Kommagene and Mauretania, to reveal the futures rulers on the edges of an expanding empire hoped to hold on to.

In Kommagene, astrological symbols in the Nemrut Dağı monumental complex of Antiochos I (r. 70 BC – 38 BC) envisaged a divine, royal cosmology for a kingdom free from Rome’s reach. This imagined future collapsed: Antiochos’s successors chose instead to adopt the iconography of Rome’s imperial destiny, and Nemrut Dağı fell out of use even before Kommagene’s annexation.

By contrast, Juba II of Mauretania (r. 25 BC – 23 AD) and his wife Kleopatra Selene commissioned dynastic portraits of their illustrious Numidian and Egyptian ancestors, alongside images of their son Ptolemaios in Roman regalia. They hoped sculptures of the young heir would show Mauretania growing into a place within the Roman Empire.

When we analyze the variety of past futures that art works from kingdoms facing Roman conquest contained, they become rich records of decisions made by people under pressure. I suggest exploring these futures offers a new way to understand the agency of frontier artworks, while keeping in sight the imperial realities that shaped the lives of their makers, patrons and audiences.