Post #3187448

@Tarnport during the Tetrarchy the portraits were stylized and all look more or less the same, which is definitely a part of trying to make the office bigger than the man. The past century had been full of emperors who did what they could to be seen as one of the boys, a regular soldier, but that had the effect that every tinpot general thought they had a shot at becoming emperor. Anyway, with the Tetrarchy we stop being able to tell how an emperor looked from the coins alone. We see the same sort of thing happening during the Constantinian era, and after that art really did regress and we lose overall quality.