According to one London-based cosmetic surgery clinic, approximately nine percent of people have a Roman nose, while a further three percent have a Greek one. Now, we’re not going to speculate as to where those statistics came from, but we will say this: if you’re one of that 12 percent, please give the nose back. Its original owner misses it.

For proof, look no further than – well, pretty much any Roman or Greek statue. Face: check. Weirdly gaudy painted eyeballs? Check. Nose? Missing.

But why? If you’ve ever stopped to think about it, you’ve probably assumed that the overwhelming noselessness of these ancient artworks is just the inevitable result of time – that they’ve either been worn away by 2,000 years of weather, or else been broken off by some feckless Vandal or Visigoth. 

And, in a lot of cases, that’s likely true. “The statues we see in museums today are almost always beaten, battered, and damaged by time and exposure to the elements,” wrote Spencer McDaniel, a graduate researcher in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University and author of the website Tales of Times Forgotten, in 2019. 

“Parts of sculptures that stick out, such as noses, arms, heads, and other appendages are almost always the first parts to break off,” McDaniel explained. “Other parts that are more securely attached, such as legs and torsos, are generally more likely to remain intact.” 

It makes sense. Noses, as relatively dainty protrusions sitting almost as high off the floor as possible, will hit the ground both hard and fast when statues topple over. Breakages are inevitable – but do all the missing proboscises have such innocent explanations?

Who took all the noses?

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to lose one nose may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. Lose a few thousand, and people might just start to think you’re doing it on purpose. And according to Mark Bradley, a Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham, that’s exactly what happened to quite a few of these statues. 

“An overwhelming number of [the noses] have been deliberately targeted,” he wrote in a 2016 article for the historical blog Effaced From History. “A black basalt head of the emperor Tiberius’ nephew Germanicus in the British Museum shows a nose that has been clearly chiselled away, probably at the same time that early Christians carved a cross into the forehead of this pagan portrait.”

A similar fate seems to have befallen a statue of Aphrodite in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens: no nose, and a large cross chiseled into her forehead. Evidently, in these cases at least, removing the offending appendage was part of some ritualistic dethroning of a false idol.

But that still doesn’t answer the question: why the nose? 

In earlier civilizations, such as the Egyptians, the answer may have been a belief that the statue held some “essence” or “soul” of the entity it represented – and so to vandalize the figure would be to literally disempower the person or deity it showed. This kind of belief could get very specific, too: mutilation of the nose in particular was likely thought to “kill” the spirit of the icon, since it would theoretically remove the figure’s ability to breathe.

But some of these de-nosed Roman and Greek statues are from way later than that. Surely the reason for their mutilation was not so esoteric as that?

Punishment by proxy

A clue, according to Bradley, may lie in the ancient Roman and Greek justice systems – and in particular, the types of punishment doled out to those deemed guilty.

“Ancient iconoclasm is one thing, but this wanton destruction of ancient portraits alludes to traditions of real-life facial mutilation that is evident across the ancient world,” he wrote, “from Homeric Greece, the Persian Empire, Classical and Hellenistic Greece, and Republican and Imperial Rome right through to the Byzantine period.” 

In both the ancient world and later on during the Byzantine Empire, nose mutilation and removal was seemingly quite a common punishment, meted out to anyone from adulterers to deposed rulers. “In Egypt there was even a settlement called Rhinokoloura (‘the city of docked noses’) where banished criminals whose noses had been sliced off were sent into exile,” Bradley pointed out.

As well as these real-world examples, there are countless myths and legends featuring nose removal as punishment or humiliation: Herakles – yes, he of the inoffensive Disney movie fame – was nicknamed “nose docker” among some cultists because of his sheer enthusiasm for nasal snicking; the practice even plays an important part in the Odyssey, Bradley pointed out, when “one of Penelope’s suitors (dead or alive, it is not clear) is dragged outside the palace and his nose and ears are cut off, followed by his genitals, hands and feet.”

To deface a statue in this way, then, was to symbolically punish the figure it represented – and the sentences were by no means constrained to just mutilation.

Why would you behead a statue?

“Although I have no idea of the precise statistics,” Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, told the New York Times in 2023, “today we have many more parts (bodiless heads & headless bodies) than complete statues.” 

“This is clear in any gallery of Greek & Roman art,” Lapatin added. And while the reasons for that are sometimes innocent – falls, for example, or ancient traders turning one sellable artifact into two – many of these decapitations were, like the lost noses, purposefully removed as a means to undermine the authority of the figure represented by the statue.

“Every culture in the ancient world seems to do it,” Rachel Kousser, professor of ancient art at the City University of New York, told the Times. “The head is really powerful and damage to the head is seen as a particularly effective way of damaging power, whether it’s a ruler or a god or even just a private dead person.”

So, while many statues are indeed missing their noses – or their heads, arms, or genitalia – simply because of the ravages of time, in many cases, it’s evidence that whoever the statue once showed was outlived by some petty or highly motivated enemies. 

By “punishing” the figure according to the morals of their time, those who came later could create a symbolic break with the past, and that person’s supposed corruption – and if such a concept seems strange to you, keep in mind that we kind of still do it today. 

“Protesters in Martinique toppled two statues of the 19th-century abolitionist Victor Schoelcher last month, condemning him for authoring a decree that compensated slave owners for their losses,” pointed out Jean-François Manicom, curator of transatlantic slavery and legacies at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, in 2020. 

“In Bristol, a statue of the 17th-century slaver Edward Colston was dumped into the harbor. A monument in Antwerp honoring Leopold II, the Belgian king who plundered the Congo, will be relocated to a museum after it was defaced by demonstrators. And in the United States, statues honoring the explorer Christopher Columbus and the Confederate President Jefferson Davis were among those that were pulled down or, in Columbus’ case, beheaded.”

“Toppling statues is […] an assault on a realistic and symbolic replica of a person,” Manicom wrote. “Symbolic lynchings, it would seem, are still necessary to move from one epoch to another.”