Two men meet on a battlefield; it is getting late, towards the close of a long day's fighting, the first since Achilles deserted the Greeks. The catalogue of this day's deadly confrontations, which has filled much of Books 4 and 5, looks as if it is about to get another victim's name appended to it. Homer introduces the episode at 6.120 by setting the scene as if for a duel, but ends it not only without a fight but with what appears to be a reconciliation, when they finally (6.232) leave their chariots to shake hands. This, if nothing else, has made the meeting of Glaucus and Diomedes famous; with its amiable, irenic outcome, and its unique emphasis on mutual understanding, the scene is widely regarded as an oasis of common decency amid the war-ethos of the surrounding books.

This comment occurs in the closing sequence of the epitaphios of 431/0 attributed to Pericles. The speech was delivered at the public funeral held for Athenian casualties in the first year of the Archidamian War. The earlier part of the speech was devoted to praise of the characteristics, practices, and values of the Athenians as a democratic and imperial community. The features which Pericles is reported as stressing were those which ‘made Athens great’, those by which her dominance was shown. From these is derived the glory achieved by those who died ‘as became Athenians’ (2.43).

‘Classical’ Greece? The very term exudes stability, permanence, confidence, authority, excellence, perfection (in a teleological sense), even possibly glory – as in ‘The Glory that was Greece’. Consider, for instance, the following paean of eulogy pronounced in 1914: ‘The Greeks were explorers in every field of knowledge and art, where they showed in the highest degree the desire for truth and the love of the beautiful’. All of them, always? In any case, to quote that well-known philosopher Pontius Pilate (John 18. 37–8), what is Truth, and is not Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Consideration of Tetrarchic portraiture has usually focused on the extant porphyry sculptures (plates 2, 6, 7, 9, and 10). This was perhaps inevitable, since the arresting eyes of the Cairo bust or the stubby legs of the Vatican groups are certainly curious. Few scholars have resisted the temptation to pronounce their aesthetic judgement (and why not?), but none has been as caustic as Bernard Berenson who saw in them ‘the meanest symptoms of decay’, an effect into which the sculptor had ‘simply blundered and stumbled’. Berenson's book and many of the other academic works which refer to the porphyry sculptures address the wider issue of style and, in particular, stylistic change in Late Antiquity. They cite the same art, but draw a range of conclusions: L'Orange proposes parallels between style and the structure of society; Kitzinger suggests a conscious approximation to a ‘sub-antique’ style; and Bandinelli sees the porphyry work as exceptional, specialized and short-lived. Without neglecting the porphyry sculpture, the present essay aims to consider the whole range of surviving portraits and to make sense of them within the relatively narrow field of Tetrarchic ideology. This necessarily involves the question of style and, therefore, has points of contact with the above ideas. However, the present study is primarily ‘internal’, drawing together images diverse in form and location. Patterns are soon apparent, but the Tetrarchy had to establish its ideological stability and credibility if the government were to endure. It collapsed quickly (A.D. 284–311), but in this respect, Tetrarchic portraiture offers a good example of the power of art to manipulate its audience by instilling belief.

In his journal for December 31st, 1851, Thomas Babington Macaulay recorded an encounter with Thomas Love Peacock: ‘I met Peacock; a clever fellow and a good scholar. I am glad to have an opportunity of being better acquainted with him. We had out Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and several other old fellows, and tried each other's quality pretty well. We are both strong enough in these matters for gentlemen. But he is editing the Supplices: Aeschylus is not to be edited by a man whose Greek is only a secondary pursuit’ (Life II, 556). This encounter is an illustration of the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain the close study of the Greek and Latin languages was far from being the exclusive preserve of professional scholars and teachers of the classics. Macaulay once wrote that he read Greek ‘like a man of the world’ (Letters III, 111), that is, as someone actively involved in public life, not cloistered in a university or a school. This applied to Peacock as much as it did to Macaulay. By 1851 Peacock had already published six of the seven novels for which he is best known today, but he had also spent about thirty years in the service of the East India Company, during which he had risen to the rank of Examiner: he was in effect a very senior civil servant. His formal schooling had ended when he was twelve, so that he was largely self-taught as a classicist. It was perhaps characteristic of such an autodidact that ‘he delighted to ask an Oxford first-class man who Nonnus was, and to find he could get no information’, and that he should pepper his novels with recondite classical quotations.