Reading Heraklia's post on Kamm's website - surfing it will be one of my to dos in the weekend - made me realize there are a number of issues raised by Kamm in his Julius Caesar that might be interesting to discuss here in ADI with all of you knowledgeable people.

It's that I just finished reading his book and truly loved it and made a huge number of notes!

If I exaggerate... you can always virtually shoot me down :-)

I’ll start with the first one. In chapt.9, pag. 136 (paperback edition) he states about Cleo’s statue:

“If the statue represented Cleopatra as the mother goddess Isis, or as Isis-Aphrodite, then Caesar’s location of the gift, beside the goddess mother of the Julii, though unprecedented in republican Rome, was at least of genuine religious significance. That this is a valid hypothesis is suggested by the fact that, again according to Appian, Cleopatra’s statue was still there, in the temple of Venus Genetrix, 200 years later, in spite of her having in the meantime been declared an enemy of Rome.”

This statement really intrigued me. Is Kamm the only author making such a claim? Or maybe in the hardcover edition there also are references to authors and sources which are missing in the “no notes” economic version? Was it common practice to give a god’s statue the look of a true person? It surely happened a lot in later artworks, but in Rome?

In the previous paragraph he proposed that the statue might have been a gift to Caesar by Cleo, but here he gives it as a fact.

What do you think of these two propositions?