Historical significance of facial hair in Octavian’s depictions

Abstract

It is generally accepted that beard in Roman portraits appeared for first time in Hadrian’s times. The beginning of this trend was properly searched in the Greek world, but the presence of facial hair can already be observed in the Julio-Claudian period. Indeed, it was Augustus, when we still refer to him as Octavian, who started a trend that later will be followed by some of his descendants or successors in charge.Taking into consideration the information provided by ancient sources and the opinions expressed by different scholars, we want to discover what was the real functionality of the beard that Octavian used to depict himself in portraits from 43 to 36 B.C. We are going to focus our research in Roman numismatics. The doubtful preserved sculpture examples of the emperor wearing barbula, focusing our attention on the only portrait with these features classified as Augustus in Hispania.