The portraits of the great writers and thinkers from antiquity are never photographic likenesses. Many of these images were created long after the subject's death, and few tell us very much about the historical individual. Yet these visual representations can become fascinating witnesses to the role and function of the intellectual in ancient Greco-Roman society when seen in the context of the cultural aims with which they were created.

In this richly illustrated work, Paul Zanker offers the first comprehensive history of the visual representation of Greek and Roman intellectuals. Zanker draws on a variety of source materials such as Graeco-Roman literature, historiography, and philosophy, in addition to artistic renderings; his work takes the reader from the earliest visual images of Socrates and Plato to the figures of Christ, the Apostles, and contemporaneous pagan and civic dignitaries.

Through his interpretations of postures, gestures, facial expressions, and stylistic changes of particular pieces, we come to know these great poets through all of their various personas - the prophetic wise man, the virtuous democratic citizen, or the self-absorbed bon vivant. Zanker's analysis of the ways the iconography of influential thinkers and writers changed demonstrates the rise and fall of trends and the movement of schools of thought and belief, each successively embodying the most valued characteristics of the period and culture.

Zanker provides a new and deeper perspective on the interaction of visual representation and classical culture from the fifth century B.C. to the fourth-century A.D.