This book argues that Romans credited certain living persons with the capacity to function as cult statues, that is, as images and vessels of the divine. After addressing the cultural context that produced the idea that humans can become images of the divine, the text shows how emperors, bishops, and others imitated the aesthetic, immobility, and material setting of statuary to establish themselves as iconic and how their role as mediators with the divine was eventually transferred to new categories of material objects, such as relics and icons. The figure of the iconic person thus is shown...