Detail of Sebasteion panel depicting Tiberius and a captive.
On all of the Sebasteion panels, as on so many other Roman reliefs, the carvers were working in from the front of the blocks shaping the key details of the design as they moved deeper into the stone rather than defining each form and carving back to a single plane. This is very clear in this detail where very little stone was carved away along the righthand side of the captive figure. The fact that this panel was carved from one block, like all of the panels used in the Sebasteion, means that they could quite easily have been carved before they were inserted into the building during construction, but there is no proof that this was necessarily so.
