The latest blockbuster at Seattle Art Museum is an anomaly: 50 tons of Roman art from the Louvre, much of which has never before been moved from its final resting place in Paris. The Louvre put it on the road in order to raise money. SAM, which refuses to say how much it paid for the show but is charging a special required fee of $20 as opposed to its suggested-donation general admission of $13, is hoping to draw crowds and to prove its new facility is a home worthy of the gods. There's marble, glass, and gold, divided into rooms separated by theme: Citizenship; Foreigners, Slaves, and Freedmen; The Emperor; Death. It's a terribly restrained, sexless, official view. Here are some keys that unlock it a little:
1. Almost half of what's in the show got to the French capital through Napoleon's sticky hands. Invading Italy in 1797, he grabbed art from the Vatican Museum and leading families, but he didn't need to steal from the best of the private collectors, the Borghese family. Camillo Borghese was in debt and he was Napoleon's brother-in-law, so he sold hundreds of sculptures, reliefs, and busts to Napoleon. (After his fall, some of the stolen art was returned and some kept, in exchange for French works.) The wheeling and dealing of the distant past doesn't open up the Louvre to claims on its collection today: Its Roman art was amassed before the invention of international laws that govern how antiquities are collected.
2. How all this art got to Seattle is a secret, says Anna Hayes, a registrar with the American Federation of Arts, which planned the high-security trip. She can say that it came to the United States in four shipments by cargo plane. She won't say exactly how it moves inside the country (it has been in Indianapolis and will go to Oklahoma City). Augustus may already have been on I-5.
3. According to architect Rem Koolhaas, the Roman empire had an "operating system." Like a franchise, it repeated architectural elements in all its cities: a forum, a coliseum, aqueducts, and two intersecting central roads. You see its corporate branding in the map of Carthage at the show's entrance. The emperors disseminated copies of official portraits of themselves in full-length marble. Portraits of regular people, meanwhile, stood in public in order to demonstrate the right ways to dress and behave as citizens.
4. Emperors can be identified by hair alone. Augustus, for instance, wore a fork in the middle of his bangs and two claw-like pinchers to the right, as evidenced in a youthful, larger-than-life official sculpture of him in the show that was stolen from the Vatican Museum and kept in France by treaty agreement. It would have been one of many identical sculptures. (Women's hair, given its own entire salon-like room in the exhibition, was both elaborate and tightly controlled.)
5. The relationship between the sculptures and the emperors was political and largely fantastical. Augustus made himself look younger while Caligula, who reportedly resembled livestock, made himself beautiful. In the aftermath of Caligula's excesses, Claudius emphasized his advanced age in his sculptural portraits (he was known to fall asleep at meetings).
6. In contrast to architects, artists in the Roman empire were thought of as lowly craftsmen, and sculptures were often made on assembly lines—one guy would make the foot, another the face, and so on, according to University of Washington assistant professor of Roman art Margaret Laird. Only one of the sculptures in the show is signed.
7. These sculptures weren't intended to be seen as creamy monochromes. They were originally painted, especially to highlight the eyes, the hair, and the clothing. On the head of a young priest in the "Religion" section, you can make out the faint trace of an iris in the right eye.
8. Roman religion was, above all, accommodating. It continually had to make room for newly annexed heathens. There were all sorts of gods for all sorts of things, culminating in Mithraism, the final, doomed competitor with Christianity for religious dominance in the empire. No one knows quite what Mithraists practiced (its failure may be attributable to the fact that it was only open to men), but we do know that they met in caves. One relief, discovered in present-day Lebanon and featuring Mithras, his helper animals, the four seasons personified, and the signs of the zodiac, is the epitome of the jumble.
9. Despite the fact that one of the few colored-stone sculptures in the show is a black-marble figure who looks to be of African descent and is labeled as a slave, Roman slavery applied to all races. In addition, it's even possible that this figure—and the small figure next to him, wearing a charm that usually was reserved for citizens—doesn't represent a slave at all, Laird says. The reason is that it's almost impossible to determine who's a slave, as opposed to, say, a worker, in Roman art. They have no definitive identifying marks (like citizens or soldiers do), unless they're wearing the patterns of particular owners.
10. Most of these sculptures don't look like fragments because they've been fixed up, whether recently or in the 1700s or 1800s. The boy Nero's head, for instance, is mounted on an alien body. You can see the break in his neck. A marble head of his mother, Agrippina, is missing a nose and a chin. It seems fitting. Nero did, after all, have to try several times before finally killing her. 
