Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture & Representation – serie

The Hellenistic Period witnessed striking new developments in art, literature and science. This volume addresses a particularly vibrant area of innovation: the study of animals and the natural world. While Aristotle and his followers had revolutionized fields such as zoology and botany during the fourth century BC, these disciplines took on exciting new directions during Hellenistic times. Kings imported exotic species into their royal capitals from faraway lands. Travel writers described unusual creatures that they had never previously encountered. And buyers from a range of social levels chose works of art featuring animals and plants to decorate their palaces, houses and tombs. While textual sources shed some light on these developments, the central premise of Art, Science and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean is that our surviving artistic evidence permits a fuller understanding. Accordingly, the study brings together a rich body of visual material that invites new observations on how and why knowledge of the natural world became so important during this period. It is suggested that this cultural phenomenon affected many different groups in society: from kings in Alexandria and Pergamon to provincial aristocrats in the Levant, and from the Julio-Claudian imperial family to prosperous homeowners in Pompeii. By analysing the works of art produced for these individuals, a vivid picture emerges of this remarkable aspect of ancient culture.

Using both textual and iconographic sources, this richly illustrated book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. The study also aims to refine knowledge of the various connections between Attic comedy and comic vases from South Italy and Sicily (the so-called 'phlyax vases').After introducing comic texts and comedy-related vase-paintings in the regional contexts, The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE considers the generic features of the comic body, characterized as it is by a specific ugliness and a constant motion. It also explores how costumes —masks, padding, phallus, clothing, accessories— and gestures contribute to the characters' visual identity in relation with speech : it analyzes the cultural, social, aesthetic, and theatrical conventions by which spectators decipher the body. This study thus leads to a re-examination of the modalities of comic mimesis, in particular when addressing sexual codes in cross-dressing scenes which reveal the artifice of the fictional body. It also sheds light on how comic poets make use of the scenic or imaginary representations of the bodies of those who are targets of political, social, or intellectual satire. There is a particular emphasis on body movements, where the book not only deals with body language and the dramatic function of comic gesture, but also with how words confer a kind of poetic and unreal motion to the body.

Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts uses literature, inscriptions, art, and architecture to explore the relationship of elite Greeks of the Roman imperial period to time. This wide-ranging work challenges conventional thinking about the temporal positioning of imperial Greece and the so-called 'Second Sophistic', which holds that it was obsessed above all with the Classical past. Instead, the volume establishes that imperial Greek temporality was far more complex than scholarship has previously allowed by detailing how contemporary cultural output used the past to position itself within tradition but was crafted to speak to the future. At the same time, the book emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary analysis in any explication of elite culture in Roman Greece, since abundant extant evidence reveals its purveyors were often responsible for the production of both literature and material culture. Strazdins shows how these two modes of cultural production in the hands of elites, such as Herodes Atticus, Arrian, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Polemon, Pausanias, and Philostratus, exhibit a shared rhetoric oriented towards posterity and informed by a heightened awareness of the fragility of cultural and personal memory over large spans of time. The book thus provides a sophisticated analysis of the tensions, anxieties, and opportunities that attend the fashioning of commemorative strategies against the background of the 'Second Sophistic' and the Roman empire, and details the consequences of embroilment with futurity on our understanding of the cultural and political concerns of elite imperial Greeks.

Why are so many Hellenistic kings shown with one arm in the air? Could posture distinguish the slave from the citizen? Was there a Hellenistic etiquette of sitting down? How did Hellenistic Greeks feel about the bodies of the disabled and the elderly? And what did it mean to Tuck-for-Luck?This richly-illustrated book brings together a wide range of Hellenistic art objects, and reveals how ancient social attitudes were encoded in the body language of their subjects. Incorporating approaches from anthropology and archaeology, it considers a wide range of social groups, from the elite to slaves, and examines the postures, gestures, and body actions which were considered appropriate to each.By examining Hellenistic kings, queens, public intellectuals, citizen men and women, Africans, servants, paidagogoi, fishermen, peasants, old women, dwarfs, and the disabled, this study provides important new insights into what is 'Hellenistic' about Hellenistic Art, and into the anxieties of Hellenistic society. In doing so, it not only reconsiders familiar concepts such as the 'individuality' of the civic elite and the apparent passivity of women, but also reveals Hellenistic attitudes towards issues such as old age, race, and child abuse, and explores power, prejudice, and the role of art in both reflecting and enforcing social stereotypes.

Ancestry played a continuous role in the construction and portrayal of Roman emperorship in the first three centuries AD. Emperors and Ancestors is the first systematic analysis of the different ways in which imperial lineage was represented in the various 'media' through which images of emperors could be transmitted. Looking beyond individual rulers, Hekster evaluates evidence over an extended period of time and differentiates between various types of sources, such as inscriptions, sculpture, architecture, literary text, and particularly central coinage, which forms the most convenient source material for a modern reconstruction of Roman representations over a prolonged period of time. The volume explores how the different media in use sent out different messages. The importance of local notions and traditions in the choice of local representations of imperial ancestry are emphasized, revealing that there was no monopoly on image-forming by the Roman centre and far less interaction between central and local imagery than is commonly held. Imperial ancestry is defined through various parallel developments at Rome and in the provinces. Some messages resonated outside the centre but only when they were made explicit and fitted local practice and the discourse of the medium. The construction of imperial ancestry was constrained by the local expectations of how a ruler should present himself, and standardization over time of the images and languages that could be employed in the 'media' at imperial disposal. Roman emperorship is therefore shown to be a constant process of construction within genres of communication, representation, and public symbolism.

When we are confronted with a work of art, what is its effect on us? In contrast to post-Enlightenment conceptions, which tend to restrict themselves to aesthetic or discursive responses, the ancient Greeks and Romans often conceived works of art as having a more dynamic effect on their viewers, inspiring them to direct imitation of what they saw represented. This notion of 'mimetic contagion' was a persistent and widespread mode of framing response to art across the ancient world, discernible in both popular and elevated cultural forms, yet deployed differently in various historical contexts; it is only under the specificity of a particular cultural moment's concerns that it becomes most useful as a lens for understanding how that culture is attempting to negotiate the problems of representation. After framing the phenomenon in terms general enough to be applicable across many periods, literary genres, and artistic media, this volume takes a particular literary work, Terence's Eunuch, as a starting point, both as a vivid example of this extensive pattern, and as a case study situating use of the motif within the peculiarities of a particular historical moment, in this case mid-second-century BC Rome and its anxieties about the power of art. One of the features of mimetic contagion frequently noted in this study is its capacity to render the operation of a particular work of art an emblem for the effect of representation more generally, and this is certainly the case in the Eunuch, whereby the painting at the centre of the play functions as a metatheatrical figure for the dynamics of mimesis throughout, illustrating how the concept may function as the key to a particular literary work. Although mimetic contagion is only one available Greco-Roman strategy for understanding the power of art, by offering an extended reading of a single work of literature through this lens, this volume demonstrates what ramifications closer attention to it might have for modern readers and literary criticism.

Why say thank you with a portrait statue? This book combines two different and quite specialized fields, archaeology and epigraphy, to explore the phenomenon of portraits in ancient art within the historical and anthropological context of city-states honouring worthy individuals through erecting statues, and the development of families imitating this practice. This transaction tells us a lot about the history of these cities and how ancient art worked as a construction of relations during the Hellenistic period (c. 350 BC-c. AD 1), which is marked by a political culture of civic devotion, common decision making, and publicness. As honorific statues were considered public art, the volume also investigates the workings of images, representations, memory, and the monumental public form of permanent inscription, to see what stories the Hellenistic city-states can reveal about themselves.

This volume addresses the treatment and perception of historic buildings in Imperial Rome, examining the ways in which public monuments were restored in order to develop an understanding of the Roman concept of built heritage. It considers examples from the first century BC to the second century AD, focusing primarily on the six decades between the Great Fire of AD 64 and the AD 120s, which constituted a period of dramatic urban transformation and architectural innovation in Rome. Through a detailed analysis of the ways in which the design, materiality, and appearance of buildings - including the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and hut of Romulus - developed with successive restorations, the case is made for the existence of a consistent approach to the treatment of historic buildings in this period. This study also explores how changes to particular monuments and to the urban fabric as a whole were received by the people who experienced them first-hand, uncovering attitudes to built heritage in Roman society more widely. By examining descriptions of destruction and restoration in literature of the first and second centuries AD, including the works of Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Elder, Martial, Tacitus, and Plutarch, it forms a picture of the conflicting ways in which Rome's inhabitants responded to the redevelopment of their city. The results provide an alternative way of explaining key interventions in Rome's built environment and challenge the idea that heritage is a purely modern phenomenon.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Fears of tomb desecration, plundering, robbing, and looting have been present in societies throughout history. In ancient Greece and Rome, tombs were protected by law, and any kind of tomb violation was considered sacrilege. However, by the late Roman Empire, the social practice of tomb plundering had become a common occurrence. Despite archaeological evidence of its frequency, ancient tomb robbing has attracted little scholarly interest and legal and historical documents have rarely discussed the pilfering of tombs and subsequent appropriation of tomb decor for building purposes in late antiquity. Drawing on archaeological, literary, legal, and epigraphic sources, Tomb Plundering in Late Antique Italy investigates when, where, and why tomb plundering became a widespread phenomenon. It also addresses who was responsible and how broader historical and urban transformations led to the more frequent destruction of older tomb monuments in late Roman Italy. Both the social practice of tomb robbing and the associated appropriation of funerary material for new construction were an important part of recycling processes during the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. By exploring how people engaged and interacted with their material past, Cristina Murer presents new perspectives on late antique society, thereby broadening ongoing debates about transformations during this pivotal period.

One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work argues that the Natural History offers a sophisticated account of the world as empire, in which art as much as geography can be used to expound a Roman imperial agenda. Reuniting the 'chapters on art' with the rest of the Natural History, Sorcha Carey considers how the medium of the 'encyclopaedia' affects Pliny's presentation of art, and reveals how art is used to explore themes important to the work as a whole. Throughout, the author demonstrates that Pliny's 'chapters on art' are a profoundly Roman creation, offering an important insight into responses to art and culture under the early Roman empire.

Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as spectacle and performance. Ida Ostenberg analyses how Rome presented and perceived the defeated on parade. Spoils, captives, and representations are the objects, and the basic questions to be asked concern both contents and context: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? The triumph was a crowded civic celebration, when spectators met with coins from Spain and Asia, Jewish temple treasures, silver plate and furniture from opulent royal feasts, trees from eastern gardens, Punic elephants appearing as in battle, kings, long known by name only, and ferocious barbarians dressed in outlandish costumes. Ostenberg aims to show what stories the Roman triumph told about the defeated and what ideas it transmitted about Rome itself.

Statues of important Romans frequently represented them nude. Men were portrayed naked holding weapons - the naked emperor might wield the thunderbolt of Jupiter - while Roman women assumed the guise of the nude love-goddess, Venus. When faced with these strange images, modern viewers are usually unsympathetic, finding them incongruous, even tasteless. They are mostly written off as just another example of Roman `bad taste'.This book offers a new approach. Comprehensively illustrated with black and white photographs of nude Romans represented in a wide range of artistic media, it investigates how this tradition arose, and how the nudity of these images was meant to be understood by contemporary viewers. And, since the Romans also employed a variety of other costumes for their statues (toga, armour, Greek philosopher's cloak), it asks, `What could nudity express that other costumes could not?' It is Hallett's claim that - looked at in this way - these `Roman nudes' turn out to be documents of the first importance for the cultural historian.

Statues are among the most familiar remnants of classical art. Yet their prominence in ancient society is often ignored. In the Roman world statues were ubiquitous. Whether they were displayed as public honours or memorials, collected as works of art, dedicated to deities, venerated as gods, or violated as symbols of a defeated political regime, they were recognized individually and collectively as objects of enormous significance.By analysing ancient texts and images, Statues in Roman Society unravels the web of associations which surrounded Roman statues. Addressing all categories of statuary together for the first time, it illuminates them in ancient terms, explaining expectations of what statues were or ought to be and describing the Romans' uneasy relationship with 'the other population' in their midst.

One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work argues that the Natural History offers a sophisticated account of the world as empire, in which art as much as geography can be used to expound a Roman imperial agenda. Reuniting the 'chapters on art' with the rest of the Natural History, Sorcha Carey considers how the medium of the 'encyclopaedia' affects Pliny's presentation of art, and reveals how art is used to explore themes important to the work as a whole. Throughout, the author demonstrates that Pliny's 'chapters on art' are a profoundly Roman creation, offering an important insight into responses to art and culture under the early Roman empire.

This important new study looks at the intersection of Greek and Egyptian art forms in the funerary sphere of Roman Egypt. A discussion of artistic change, cultural identity, and religious belief foregrounds the detailed analysis of more than 150 objects and tombs, many of which are presented here for the first time. In addition to the information it provides about individual works of art, supported by catalogue entries, the study explores fundamental questions such as how artists combine the iconographies and representational forms of different visual traditions, and why two distinct visual traditions were employed in Roman Egypt.

The enduring importance of Greek athletic training and competition during the period of the Roman Empire has been a neglected subject in past scholarship on the ancient world. This book examines the impact that Greek athletics had on the Roman world, approaching it through the plentiful surviving visual evidence, viewed against textual and epigraphic sources. It shows that the traditional picture of Roman hostility has been much exaggerated. Instead Greek athletics came to exercise a profound influence upon Roman spectacle and bathing culture. In the Greek east of the empire too, athletics continued to thrive, providing Greek cities with a crucial means of asserting their cultural identity while also accommodating Roman imperial power.

In Truly Beyond Wonders Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis investigates texts and material evidence associated with healing pilgrimage in the Roman empire during the second century AD. Her focus is upon one particular pilgrim, the famous orator Aelius Aristides, whose Sacred Tales, his fascinating account of dream visions, gruelling physical treatments, and sacred journeys, has been largely misunderstood and marginalized. Petsalis-Diomidis rehabilitates this text by placing it within the material context of the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamon, where the author spent two years in search of healing. The architecture, votive offerings, and ritual rules which governed the behaviour of pilgrims are used to build a picture of the experience of pilgrimage to this sanctuary. Truly Beyond Wonders ranges broadly over discourses of the body and travel and in so doing explores the place of healing pilgrimage and religion in Graeco-Roman society and culture. It is generously illustrated with more than 80 drawinsg and photographs, and four colour plates.

In antiquity, Rome represented one of the world's great cultural capitals. The city constituted a collective repository for various commemoratives, cultural artefacts, and curiosities, not to mention plunder taken in war, and over its history became what we might call a 'museum city'. Ancient Rome as a Museum considers how cultural objects and memorabilia both from Rome and its empire came to reflect a specific Roman identity and, in some instances, to even construct or challenge Roman perceptions of power and of the self. In this volume, Rutledge argues that Roman cultural values and identity are indicated in part by what sort of materials Romans deemed worthy of display and how they chose to display, view, and preserve them.Grounded in the growing field of museum studies, this book includes a discussion on private acquisition of cultural property and asks how well the Roman community at large understood the meaning and history behind various objects and memorabilia. Of particular importance was the use of collections by a number of emperors in the further establishment of their legitimacy and authority. Through an examination of specific cultural objects, Rutledge questions how they came to reflect or even perpetuate Roman values and identity.

Statues of important Romans frequently represented them nude. Men were portrayed naked holding weapons. The naked emperor might wield the thunderbolt of Jupiter, while Roman women assumed the guide of the nude love-goddess, Venus. When faced with these strange images, modern viewers are usually unsympathetic, finding them incongruous, even tasteless. They are mostly written off as just another example of Roman `bad taste'. This book offers a new approach. Comprehensively illustrated with black and white photographs of its subjects, it investigates how this tradition arose, and how the nudity of these portraits was meant to be understood by contemporary viewers. And, since the Romans also employed a range of costumes for their statues (toga, armour, Greek philosopher's cloak), it asks, `What could the nude images express that other costumes could not?' It is Christopher Hallett's claim that - looked at in this way - these `Roman nudes' turn out to be documents of the first importance for the cultural historian.

Statues are among the most familiar remnants of classical art. Yet their prominence in ancient society is often ignored. In the Roman world statues were ubiquitous. Whether they were displayed as public honours or memorials, collected as works of art, dedicated to deities, venerated as gods, or violated as symbols of a defeated political regime, they were recognized individually and collectively as objects of enormous significance.By analysing ancient texts and images, Statues in Roman Society unravels the web of associations which surrounded Roman statues. Addressing all categories of statuary together for the first time, it illuminates them in ancient terms, explaining expectations of what statues were or ought to be and describing the Romans' uneasy relationship with 'the other population' in their midst.

In this volume, Milette Gaifman explores a phenomenon known as aniconism - the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art. Drawing upon a variety of material and textual evidence dating from the rise of the Greek polis in the eighth century BC to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries AD, this book shows that aniconism was more significant than has often been assumed. Coexisting with the fully figural forms for representing the divine throughout Greek antiquity, aniconic monuments marked an undefined yet fixedly located divine presence. Cults centered on rocks were encountered at crossroads and on the edges of the Greek city. Despite aniconism's liminality, non-figural markers of divine presence became a subject of interest in their own right during a time when mimesis occupied the center of Greek visual culture. The ancient Greeks saw the worship of stones and poles without images as characteristic of the beginning of their own civilization. Similarly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the existence of aniconism was seen as physical evidence for the continuity of ancient Greek traditions from time immemorial.

Why say thank you with a portrait statue? This book combines two different and quite specialized fields, archaeology and epigraphy, to explore the phenomenon of portraits in ancient art within the historical and anthropological context of city-states honouring worthy individuals through erecting statues, and the development of families imitating this practice. This transaction tells us a lot about the history of these cities and how ancient art worked as a construction of relations during the Hellenistic period (c. 350 BC- c. AD 1), which is marked by a political culture of civic devotion, common decision making, and publicness.As honorific statues were considered public art, the volume also investigates the workings of images, representations, memory, and the monumental public form of permanent inscription, to see what stories the Hellenistic city-states can reveal about themselves.

This book is an archaeological and art-historical study of the images and monuments of Roman 'client' kings in the Near East from the Taurus to Edom (modern South East Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan) in the important transitional period between the downfall of the Seleucid empire and Rome's establishment of provincial administration across the entire region. In this volume, Kropp treats royal portraits, tombs, palaces, coins, and temples as historical documents and aims at uncovering royal identities and ideological aspirations. In particular, he focuses on the six major players: the Kommagenian, Emesan, Ituraean, Nabataean, Hasmonaean, and Herodian dynasties. The images and monuments discussed show an endless variety of eclectic styles, shapes, and types - a result of individual, deliberate choices from an array of cultural and artistic options, such as Hellenistic, Roman, and Persian. The study of their origins and importance therefore places monuments, like the Khazneh at Petra or the Temple at Jerusalem, in their proper context and allows a more nuanced understanding of their creation as expressions and constructions of royal personas.

Tombs and burial customs are an exquisite source for social history, as their commemorative character inevitably expresses much of the contemporaneous ideology of a society. This book presents, for the first time, a holistic view of the funerary culture of Rome and its surroundings during the third century AD. While the third century is often largely ignored in social history, it was a transitional period, an era of major challenges - political, economic, and social - which inspired creativity and innovation, and paved the way for the new system of late antiquity.Barbara Borg argues that during this time there was, in many ways, a return to practices known from the Late Republic and early imperial period, with spectacular monuments for the rich, and a large-scale reappearance of collective burial spaces. Through a study of terraced tombs, élite monuments, the catacomb nuclei, sarcophagi, and painted image decoration, this volume explores how the third century was an exciting period of experimentation and creativity, a time when non-Christians and Christians shared fundamental ideas, needs, and desires as well as cemeteries, tombs, and hypogea. Ambition continued to be a driving force and a determining factor in all social classes, who found innovative solutions to the challenges they encountered.

This study explores Roman luxury villa architecture and the Roman luxury villa lifestyle to shed light on the villas' design as a dynamic process related to cultural, social, and environmental factors. Roman villas expressed a novel architectural language which was developed by designers appropriating the existing stylistic and thematic vocabularies of Hellenistic and Roman architecture. Zarmakoupi seeks to describe and explain the ways in which this architecture accommodated the lifestyle of educated leisure and an appreciation of the Roman landscape, and how, in doing so, it became a cultural phenomenon and a crucial element in the construction of Roman cultural identity. In their effort to accommodate the Greek style, Romans created something completely unprecedented in the history of architecture. Through an analysis of five villas from around the bay of Naples (c. 100 BCE - 79 CE), the volume shows that in designing for luxury, Romans developed a sophisticated interplay between architecture and landscape, an interplay which is still seen in architectural design today.