prince [and] exterminator of the Medes, the offerings brought to you by Eustathios, at the same time father and son of the Rome which you hold: a horse rearing over a Victory, a second Victory who crowns you and you yourself astride this horse, fast as the wind. Thus high has your power risen, O Justinian – and on the earth the champions of the Medes and Scythians will remain forever in chains. The existence of these equestrian statues of Justinian at Constantinople suggests that the central theme of the Barberini ivory reprises a lost type popularised by these statues, rather than that it created a new type. At least one other example of this type survives, on a bronze weight, now held at the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens (right). It bears an exact copy of the central motif of the Barberini ivory, with less detail and on a highly reduced scale. Rather than the bronze being directly modelled on the ivory, it is more probable that they both derived from a single model, perhaps a lost equestrian statue in the hippodrome. This does not cast doubt on the bronze, like the diptych, being the product of an imperial workshop and an official object. However, the bronze remains a more modest copy of the model, cheaper and thus perhaps meant for a wider circulation than the ivory. The existence of this smaller copy confirms the popularity of this type of propaganda image under the rule of Justinian and also speaks of the emperor's zeal for making and spreading these images on very different media, from the monumental figurative sculptures in full three-dimensions to reliefs, bronze miniatures and ivory panels. Justinian's reign contained many wars that ended in victory, or more often wars that could be presented propagandistically as such, thus justifying the production of this type of object. The pre-eminent position of a barbarian traditionally identified as a Persian as well as the type's parallels with the statuary group of the Augustaion invites the viewer to consider that the creation of this image type was occasioned by the “perpetual peace” concluded with Sassanid Persia in 532, although stylistic criteria suggest a later date. Notes References Marco Cristini, Eburnei nuntii: i dittici consolari e la diplomazia imperiale del VI secolo, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 68, 2019, p. 489-520. Antony Cutler, "Barberiniana. Notes on the Making, Content, and Provenance