The richly illustrated book presents a fresh argument and new evidence about the workings of the imperial image in the Antonine period, through the changing portraits of the emperor Commodus (180–192) — more than ninety survive. The study also publishes for the first time an important and previously unknown portrait of the emperor, currently in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The late Antonine period was in many ways the apogee of Roman marble portrait carving, and the new Commodus is one of its very best examples, from a workshop close to the imperial court in Rome.