Quite a bit "dark-washed". Aurelius was likely from the Balkans/Dacia, maybe even descended from Roman settlers, Carus was probably from southern Gaul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carus

Vespasian and Domitian were Italian nobles. Tacitus (who was Italian too) and Florianus were half-brothers, so they should be similar.

Marcus Aurelius family comes from Spain, and his mother was a noble Roman woman... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domitia_Calvilla ...and his father's mother was a Roman woman too.

It is all just speculation but compare it to this artistic rendition:

https://i.redd.it/92np45xeap521.jpg

Actually what irks me is his son Commodus: This is not how blonde people, even with a tan, even black haired Italians with a tan and narcistically coloring their hair with gold glitter, look like.

I meant with first Aurelius = Aurelian

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian

> "The ancient sources do not agree on his place of birth, although he was generally accepted as being a native of Illyricum"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyricum_(Roman_province)

I swear this was posted a couple weeks ago and there was a big thread on how “white-washed” it was. I can’t find the post now.

> Marcus Aurelius family comes from Spain

And that is Spain before the Moorish invasion. A similar asterisk could be added to much of the rest of North Africa regarding Muslim conquest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24172603

This is awesome. While listening to The History of Rome podcast, I went to Wikipedia to see whatever type of media there’s to see how the people looked like. For the old times, it’s of course statues, and sometimes only coins. For the late emperors there are paintings too, but fairly unrealistic.

Is it a coincidence George Clooney's face looks the same as a lot of those renders?

Now I wonder if this has to do with the learning set or that those face types are very common.

Those emperors paid a lot of sestertii to make sure their bust came out looking like George Clooney.

I do always wonder what the basis of such machine learning rendering is. There's various traits that we, in modern times, associate with good-looking, successful people, and those traits often come back in face databases because those are commonly based on celebrities.

I can imagine that celebrities in Roman times would look quite different and therefore would produce completely different renders for the same pictures and statues.

I really want to believe that that's what Nero looked like. I'm pretty sure he tried to get me to prop him up for a keg stand at a college party.

Augustus looks likes Daniel Craig, a bit.

Not a coincidence, this article doesn't seem to mention it, but in the Times (London) write-up it states the training data was similar-looking celebrities, and names Craig for Augustus.

Nero looked like Ramzan Kadyrov (the present Chechen leader). Both are also quite deranged. This is a pretty spectacular project!

And he had a "neck beard."

My physical education teacher in High School was the spitting image of Trajan (this was late 90s). We were blown away the first time we saw a picture of Trajan in our texts. He used to call his Cadillac a "battlewagon" but after we showed him the picture he called it a "chariot" instead. Fun memories..

Ah, so that's the what Zuck Cut is trying to reference.

Oh, let's play the game of "who would be the best actor to play each emperor"! A few obvious ones:

    * Gallienus: Pedro Pascal
    * Decius: Clive Owen
    * Maximinus Thrax: George Clooney
    * Augustus: Daniel Craig

How about the others?

That is essentially the game the author played, and then used those faces as the training data for the render - this article doesn't seem to mention it though. You're right with Craig.

Maximinus Thrax: Tchéky Karyo

Augustus reminded me of Tony Hawk

This project is so hilarious and humanizing, I love it!

* Quintillus: Ben Affleck

* Herennius Etruscus: Colin Farrell

Tiberius: Tim Apple

There's a conspicuous number of young dudes who were emperor for a few years or less and stopped being emperor because they died. It seems that emperorhood is bad for one's health.

Also, many of them were killed by praetorian guards. Obvious fix: disband the praetorians. Oh wait, actually we need those to protect against assassins!

OK, I have a question that has been bugging me for years. How do these Romans shave? Finely stropped bronze blades that must dull immediately? Did they pluck their whiskers?

Seems metal razor were invented at least 2000 years prior the Roman Empire. "Around 3000 BC when copper tools were developed, copper razors were invented. The idea of an aesthetic approach to personal hygiene may have begun at this time, though Egyptian priests may have practiced something similar to this earlier. Alexander the Great strongly promoted shaving during his reign in the 4th century BC because he believed it looked tidier." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaving#History

Apparently everyone was clean shaven until Hadrian(?) and then he did the beard thing so well the next line 10 emperors wore beards.

I feel like they should have used more pictures of people from central Italy in their dataset. These images look very northern european to me.

Well, they are using the descriptions that have come down to us from Ancient times, and I don't know how much the Ancient Romans differ from modern Romans in terms of their racial aspects. Italy has had a lot going on since ancient times in terms of peoples that have migrated there.

Trajan and Augustus rather look the same. Also I wonder if this would expand to include Constantine and beyond?

They almost all look the same (or at least have the same weird smirk). Is that an artifact of the methodology or is is a problem with the training set because all roman sculptors were trained by the same school?