This made adoption a standard method of appointing an heir. Since the Roman Empire had a high rate of child-mortality, many of the rulers did not have surviving biological sons. Roman imperial succession was in practice a dynastic system. Modern studies of ancient images should therefore take these medial and geographical variety into account in order to do justice to the the multi-faceted phenomenon of imperial representation. Such an analysis reveals patterns within the different sources and shows that, in creating imperial images, rulers were constrained by both medial and local traditions. Through an investigation of the ancestral messages spread by imperial and provincial coins, epigraphical evidence and portraiture, it becomes clear that systematic analysis of ancient media,their various contexts and inconsistencies is needed before combining them. By focusing on one particular aspect of Neronian imagery, the propagation of this emperor’s ancestry, we will argue that different types of sources, stemming from varying contexts and addressing different groups, cannot unproblematically be combined. This article argues that such a reconstruction does not do justice to the complex and multi-layered image of the last Julio-Claudian. A good example of how such a process works is the way in which reconstructions by modern scholars of the emperor Nero tend to look for a clearly defined ‘Neronian image’, by bringing together various types of primary evidence without paying sufficient attention to these sources’ medial contexts.

Within the discipline of ancient history, diverse types of sources, such as coins, inscriptions, portraits and texts, are often combined to create a coherent image of a particular ruler.

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