Power and Self-Representation in the Greek and Hellenistic Worlds
Module Code: HICL207S6
Tutor: Dr Caspar Meyer
The peoples of the ancient Mediterranean were inclined to define their identities through objects and visual representations. Such ‘political monuments’ survive in a range of contexts and media, offering a powerful but refracted mirror image of how different communities envisioned their foundational order. This course explores how the art and architecture of Classical Greece and the Hellenistic world articulated the changing relationship between person and social power. We try to recover the ritual or civic-ceremonial contexts that gave meaning to ancient buildings and artefacts, and explain how their figured decoration guided the repeated events of public and private life. To this purpose we examine what kinds of subjects were shown in particular types of setting and how the figural and narrative repertoire shifted according to dominant social norms and ideals of statehood. The period saw the emergence of a new visual system to portray individuals as members of a status group of the Greek city-state. It drew on a closely studied and theoretical understanding of the human body performing status-defining activities, such as warfare, athletics, feasting, and love-making. With the expansion of the Greek world in the fourth century BC the system was widely adopted in societies where its underlying code carried very different implications. This course takes a special interest in what the transformation and local reception of the Greek body image reveals about cultural interaction and mutual perceptions between Greeks and non-Greeks.Among the themes considered are: Persian contacts and aristocratic self-styling in Archaic Greece; feasting and its significance for elite ideologies; force and restraint in athletic heroization; sexuality and emotional self-perception in Classical Athens; Greek notions of Oriental monarchy; the role of gift exchange in Greco-Scythian elite collaboration; allegories of Macedonian conquest and rule; replication and dissemination of ruler ideology through portraits; women and philosophers in Hellenistic society; religion and royal self-representation in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleukid Asia; historical commemoration in Republican Rome; scenarios of power in the Augustan empire.
Preliminary readings:
Bulloch, A. W. et al. (eds.), Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World (Berkeley, 1993).
Hallett, C.H. The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC – AD 300 (Oxford, 2005).
Miller, M.C. Persia and the West in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge, 1997).
Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. (ed.), Peisistratos and the Tyranny: A Reappraisal of the Evidence (Leiden, 2000).
Shapiro, A.H. Art and Culture under the Tyrants in Athens (Mainz, 1989).
Smith, R.R.R. Hellenistic Royal Portraiture (Oxford, 1988).
Stewart, A.F., Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1997).
Stewart, A.F., Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics (Berkeley, 1993).
Zanker, P. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988).