Tonio Hölscher’s essay belongs to a particular moment in art-historical scholarship, not to mention Roman art history. The moment, to be more precise, is the mid-1980s, when semiotics was a thriving method of inquiry and two of the most formidable Romanists in the German language, Hölscher and Paul Zanker, both indebted to structural linguistics, separately set out to explain why Roman art looks the way it does. For example, Zanker, in his book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), explores the political language of both subject and style in Augustan art and architecture. His text, translated from German about one year after its original appearance, has become a staple of Roman scholarship. Largely overlooked by an Anglo-American audience, Hölscher’s contemporary text, Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987), is at long last translated into English and is now readily accessible. Coming nearly twenty years after its debut, how can Hölscher’s newly published essay speak to us today? The book’s thesis could be succinctly articulated as follows: Roman image-making embraced Greek forms to express Roman ideals. The basic premise of Hölscher’s argument is that in Roman art formal...