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The Province of Achaea in the 2nd Century CE
The Province of Achaea in the 2nd Century CE explores the conception and utilization of the Greek past in the Roman province of Achaea in the 2nd century CE, and the reception of the artistic, cultural, and intellectual outputs of this century in later periods. Achaea, often defined by international scholars as “old Greece”, was the only Roman province located entirely within the confines of the Modern Greek state. In many ways, Achaea in the 2nd century CE witnessed a second Golden Age, one based on collective historical nostalgia under Roman imperial protection and innovation. The chapters in this volume are holistic in scope, with special emphasis on Roman imperial relations with the people of Achaea and their conceptualizations of their past. Material culture, monumental and domestic spaces, and artistic representations are discussed, as well as the literary output of individuals like Plutarch, Herodes Atticus, Aelius Aristides, and others. The debate over Roman influence in various Hellenic cities and the significance of collective historical nostalgia also feature in this volume, as does the utilization of Achaea’s past in the Roman present within the wider empire. As this century has produced the highest percentage of archaeological and literary material from the Roman period in the province under consideration, the time is ripe to position it more firmly in the academic discourse of studies of the Roman Empire. The Province of Achaea in the 2nd Century CE will appeal to scholars, students, and other individuals who are interested in the history, archaeology, art, and literature of the Graeco-Roman world and its reception. Anna Kouremenos is Macricostas Endowed Teaching Fellow in Hellenic and Modern Greek Studies at Western Connecticut State University, USA, and Lecturer in Ancient History at Quinnipiac University, USA. She has published widely on the history and archaeology of Roman Greece, insularity and identity in the ancient Mediterranean, and the reception of antiquity. Her current research interests lie primarily in Hellenism in the 2nd century CE – with an emphasis on the Hadrianic period – and the reception of Roman Hellenism in later periods.
Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies
Recent titles include: Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry Edited by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer Ancient History from Below Subaltern Experiences and Actions in Context Edited by Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel Jean Alvares Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Jr. Married Life in Greco-Roman Antiquity Edited by Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet Future Thinking in Roman Culture New Approaches to History, Memory, and Cognition Edited by Maggie L. Popkin and Diana Y. Ng Aristotle and the Animals The Logos of Life Itself Claudia Zatta The Aeneid and the Modern World Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vergil’s Epic in the 20th and 21st Centuries Edited by J.R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni The Province of Achaea in the 2nd Century CE The Past Present Edited by Anna Kouremenos For more information on this series, visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeMonographs-in-Classical-Studies/book-series/RMCS
The Province of Achaea in the 2nd Century CE The Past Present Edited by Anna Kouremenos
First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Anna Kouremenos; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Anna Kouremenos to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-01485-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01487-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17882-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface 1
Introduction: collective historical nostalgia in 2nd-century Achaea
vii xv xix 1
ANNA KOUREMENOS
PART I
Social and Literary Approaches to Achaea’s Past in the 2nd Century CE
11
2
13
Memory and identity among the ephebes of 2nd-century Achaea NIGEL M. KENNELL
3
Pausanias book X: a detour to the fringes of “classical” Greece
35
FRANK DAUBNER
4
Hadrian and the dramatic festivals of Achaea
56
MALI SKOTHEIM
5
The battle of Chaeronea: nostalgia vs. idealism in 2nd-century Greek prose
73
SULOCHANA R. ASIRVATHAM
PART II
The Greek Past in the Roman Present: Politics and Religion 6
91
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios: worshipping Hadrian in Athens 93 FRANCESCO CAMIA
7
Remembering Philopoemen: Achaean pasts and presents of Messene under Rome ELIZA GETTEL
117
vi Contents 8
Politics of the past: Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in Achaea
143
GIORGOS MITROPOULOS
9
Herodes Atticus and the sanctuaries of Achaea: reinterpreting the Roman present via the Greek past
166
ESTELLE STRAZDINS
PART III
Past and Present in the Visual Culture of “Old Greece”
191
10 Remembering classical Greece: Hadrianic and Antonine imperial portrait sculpture
193
PANAGIOTIS KONSTANTINIDIS
11 Between the local past and a global phenomenon: Isiaca in 2nd-century Achaea
223
DAFNI MAIKIDOU-POUTRINO
12 Sculpture for “ordinary” people in 2nd-century Achaea
247
STYLIANOS E. KATAKIS
13 The past in the round: Roman provincial coinage in the Argolid
283
DAVID WEIDGENANNT
PART IV
Beyond Spatial and Temporal Boundaries: Hadrian and The Reception of Achaea’s Past
315
14 Hispania Graeca: Hadrian as a champion of Hellenic culture in the West
317
JUAN MANUEL CORTÉS COPETE
15 “The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus”: a cultural history of Hadrian’s Arch
345
ANNA KOUREMENOS
16 Afterword
375
EWEN BOWIE
Index
385
Illustrations
Figures 0.1 Map of the Roman Empire, mid-2nd century CE (Vyron Antoniadis) xxi 0.2 Map of the province of Achaea with major cities, 2nd century CE (Anna Kouremenos and Vyron Antoniadis) xxii 3.1 Pausanias’ routes through Phocis (modified from Hutton 2005, 87, fig. 4.1) 41 6.1 Altar dedication to Hadrian Soter from Ermou Street, Athens (after AD 1961–1962, Chron., tav. 31 γ) 95 6.2 Plan of the area of the Temple of Olympian Zeus with the so-called Panhellenion south of it. Athens (reworked after E. Greco et alii, Topografia di Atene) 96 6.3 Athenian coin bearing the legend AΔPIANEIA on the reverse (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, M 5922). [https://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b85652147]) 97 6.4 Seat of the Theatre of Dionysus for the hiereus of Hadrian. Athens (after Maass 1972, tab.IX) 97 6.5 Statue base of the god Hadrianos Panhellenios. Eleusis (Photo: Willers 1990) 101 7.1 Map of Messene’s agora (E. Gettel) 129 7.2 The structure identified as the Treasury in Messene’s agora (Photo: P. Themelis, Society of Messenian Archaeological Studies. Reproduced with permission) 130 7.3 The structure identified as the Treasury in Messene’s agora (Photo: P. Themelis, Society of Messenian Archaeological Studies. Reproduced with permission) 130 8.1 Portrait of Herodes Atticus from Kephisia. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 4810 (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund) 144 8.2 Portrait of Marcus Aurelius from Athens. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 572 (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund) 145
viii Illustrations 8.3 Portrait of Lucius Verus from Athens. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 3740 (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund) 8.4 Portrait of Commodus from Athens. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 488 (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund) 9.1 Reconstruction of the Nymphaeum at Olympia by Renate Bol (Bol 1984, pl. 5) 9.2 Marble statue of a bull with an inscription identifying Regilla as the dedicator on its flank, from the Nymphaeum at Olympia. Now in the Olympia Museum (Inv. 373) (Image: D-DAI-ATH-1979/467, Gösta Hellner. By permission of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development). 9.3 Restored elevation of Herodes’ Gate of Eternal Concord, Oinoe, Attica (Mallwitz 1964, taf. 3) 9.4 Keystone from the Gate of Eternal Concord, Oinoe, Attica, bearing an inscription relating to Herodes’ “space”. Now in the Marathon Museum, Vrana (IG II2 5189) (Image: D-DAI-ATH-Attika-479, Gösta Hellner. By permission of Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica / Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports) 9.5 Curse-inscribed herm of Achilles. Now in the Epigraphic Museum, Athens (EM 12466; IG II2 13195) (Image: Epigraphic Museum, Athens. By permission of Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports) 9.6 Heroic relief of Polydeukion found at the Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron. Now in storage at the Brauron Museum (Inv. 1181) (Image: E. Strazdins. By permission of Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica / Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports) 9.7 Marble inscribed stele from the village of Bey, near Marathon. Now in the Marathon Museum, Vrana (Inv. 22; IG II2 3606) (Image: Ephorate of the Antiquities of East Attica. By permission of Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica / Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports) 10.1 Cuirassed Portrait Statue of Hadrian, Athens, Agora Museum inv. S 166 (American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports - Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens) 10.2 Cuirassed Portrait Statue of Hadrian, Piraeus Archaeological Museum inv. 8097 (Photo: P. Konstantinidis; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and Islands)
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Portrait Statue of Hadrian in Heroic Nudity from Koroneia, Thebes Archaeological Museum inv. 167 (Photo: © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia) 10.4 Portrait Statue of Hadrian in Heroic Nudity from the Nymphaeum at the Criterion Hill (Larissa suburb) of Argos, Argos Archaeological Museum inv. 90 (EFA/Ph. Collet; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of the Argolid) 10.5 Cuirassed Portrait Bust of Hadrian, Astros Archaeological Museum (after Smith and Melfi 2018, fig. 32; with kind permission of G. Spyropoulos) 10.6 Statue of Antinous, Delphi Archaeological Museum inv. 1718 (Photo: P. Konstantinidis; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Phocis) 10.7 The main entrance of the sanctuary of Eleusis, c. the middle of the 2nd century CE; plaster model reconstruction by J. Travlos (after J. Travlos, “Γύψινα προπλάσματα αναπαραστάσεως του ιερού της Ελευσίνος,” Prakt. 1973, pl. 234; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society) 10.8 The western arch of the main entrance of the sanctuary of Eleusis, a copy of the Hadrian’s Arch in Athens; drawing by D. Giraud (after Giraud 1991, fig. 49; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society) 10.9 Portrait Statue of Agrippina I from the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus, Olympia Museum inv. Λ155 (D-DAIATH-1979/416: G. Hellner) 10.10 Peplophoros Portrait Statue, Eleusis Archaeological Museum (Photo: P. Konstantinidis; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Western Attica) 10.11 Plan of the southwest corner of the sanctuary of Eleusis, c. the end of the 3rd century CE; plan by D. Giraud (after Giraud 1991, fig. 137; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society) 10.12 The southwest corner of the sanctuary of Eleusis, c. the middle of the 2nd century CE; plaster model reconstruction by J. Travlos (after J. Travlos “Γύψινα προπλάσματα αναπαραστάσεως του ιερού της Ελευσίνος,” Prakt. 1973, pl. 235; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society)
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x Illustrations 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 11.9 12.1
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Isiac presence in Roman Achaea (D. Maikidou-Poutrino) Plan of the sanctuary (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica) Statue of Isis, south pylon (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica) Statue of Isis, west pylon (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica) Statue of Isis, room of the lamps (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica) Male statue (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica) Isiac sites mentioned by Pausanias (D. Maikidou-Poutrino) Isis Tyche © Acropolis Museum 2016 (Photo: V. Tsiamis) Isis Panthea © Acropolis Museum 2016 (Photo: V. Tsiamis) Bust of a man from the area north of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, c. 130–140 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 249 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund) Herm of the kosmetes Sosistratos, c. 141/142 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 385 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund) Herm of the kosmetes Onasos, c. 141/142 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 387 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund) Honorific stele for the ephebes, Hadrianic, 117–138 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 1468 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund) Bust of Herodes Atticus from Kephisia, 3rd quarter of the 2nd century CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 4810 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund) Bust of Polydeukion from Kephisia, 3rd quarter of the 2nd c. CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 4811 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund) Portrait of a young man from Athens, 4th quarter of the 2nd c.–beginning of the 3d c. CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 361 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund)
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Illustrations xi 12.8
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Bust of a woman from Athens, Trajanic 98-117 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 3550 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund) Statue of Elpinike, daughter of Herodes Atticus, from Olympia, 149–153 CE. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. Λ 165 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute, Neg. no. D-DAIATH-1979-0436: G. Hellner) Statue of Herodes Atticus (?) in himation from Olympia, 149–153 CE. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. Λ 152 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute, Neg. no. D-DAIATH-1979-0444: G. Hellner) Statue of Herodes Atticus in toga from Olympia, 149–153 CE. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. Λ 154 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute, Neg. no. D-DAIATH-1979-0440: G. Hellner) Statue of a man in the “Aeschines” type, from Epidaurus, late 2nd c. CE. Epidaurus, Museum, inv. no 13 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund: K.V. von Eickstedt) Statue in the style of the “great Herculaneum woman”, from Athens, Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 3606 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund) Stele of Epigonos, Elate, and Ision, from Athens, Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1308 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund). Stele of Nike, from Athens, Antonine Period. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1303 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund) Stele of Alexandra, from Athens, 2nd quarter of the 2nd century. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1193 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund: Y. Patrikianos) Small sarcophagus with garlands, from Athens, c. 140–150 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1191 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture
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xii Illustrations and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute D-DAI-ATH-1974/58: G. Hellner) 12.18 Sarcophagus with Erotes, from Patras, Late Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1187 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute D-DAI-ATH-1974/69: G. Hellner) 12.19 Sarcophagus with the Caledonian Hunt, from Patras, Late Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1187 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute D-DAI-ATH-1974/69: G. Hellner) 12.20 Portrait statuette of a woman from Aetolia, middle of the 2nd century CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 4019 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund) 13.1 Hadrianic coin with Danae on the reverse (LHSNumismatics 2006, 282 no. 1186.3 (AE, 7,78 g, 24 mm, 11 h) 13.2 Coins depicting Perseus, minted under Hadrian (left), Antoninus Pius (middle), and Lucius Verus (right) (left: LHS-Numismatics 2006, 282 no. 1186.2 (AE, 12,34 g, 26 mm, 10 h) middle: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, Pl. I, 21 (AE, 22 mm); right: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 142 (AE, 7,83 g, 24 mm, 9 h)). 13.3 Coin minted under Hadrian showing Diomedes with the Palladion (Staatliche Münzsammlung, München, Photo: Sergio Castelli (AE, 11,9g, 27 mm, 7 h) 13.4 Coins minted under Antoninus Pius showing Diomedes holding the Palladion (left and middle); the Palladion in a temple (right) (left: Classical Numismatic Group Inc. 2009, no. 2873 (AE, 8,97 g, 24 mm, 3 h); middle: Auctiones A.G. 2003, no. 332 (AE, 9,54 g, 24 mm); right: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, Pl. K, 42 (AE, 9,43 g, 25 mm, 5 h)) 13.5 Coin minted under Commodus showing Theseus on the reverse finding the gnorismata (LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320–321 no. 1341.3 (AE, 8,85 g, 22 mm, 7 h) 13.6 Athenian coin of the 2nd century CE showing on the reverse Theseus lifting the stone to find the gnorismata (Classical Numismatic Group Inc. 1996, no. 375 (AE, 8,96 g, 23 mm) 13.7 Coins of Troezen (left) and Athens (right) showing Theseus fighting the Minotaur in Crete (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 232 (AE, 9,81, 24 mm, 12 h) Classical Numismatic Group
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Inc., Electronic Auction 481, 2. Dec. 2020, no. 238 (AE, 6,89 g, 24 mm, 3 h) 295 Two coin-types minted under Commodus for the Troezenians showing Hippolytus; the subject of the third coin on the right is possibly also Hippolytus (left: ImhoofBlumer and Gardner 1887, Pl. M, 8 (AE, 8,88 g, 23 mm, 12 h); middle: Oikonomidou 2003, 115 fig. 8, Athens, Numismatic Museum © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Numismatic Museum; right: LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320-321 no. 1341.2 (AE, 9,61 g, 21 mm, 9 h)) 296 Three coin-types of Epidaurus minted under Antoninus Pius, depicting Asclepius (left: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 193 (AE, 6,28 g, 21 mm, 1 h); middle: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, 2012.3 (AE, 8,65 g); right: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 195 (AE, 22 mm, 1 h)) 298 Statue of Antinous from a Roman villa at Els Munds. 2nd century CE. Photo: National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona (MNAT 45406) 323 Map of the western Roman provinces showing Hadrian’s journey in the early years of his principate (J.M. Cortés Copete) 325 Map of Italica in the 2nd century CE (J.M. Rodríguez Hidalgo, A. Jíménez, M.A. Pérez, M. de Alba, J.M. Cortés Copete) 329 Statue of Aphrodite Anadyomene. Parian marble, 2nd century CE. From Italica. Archaeological Museum of Seville. (CE05396). © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: M. García) 332 Statue of Hermes Dionysophorus. From Italica, 2nd century CE. Archaeological Museum of Seville. (CE00108). © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: M. García) 333 Statue of the Diadumenos. From Italica, 2nd century CE. Archaeological Museum of Seville (CE00101). © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: M. Camacho) 333 Bust of Hadrian. From Italica, 2nd century CE. Archaeological Museum of Seville. (CE00151). © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: G. Mendo) 334 The east side of Hadrian’s Arch with Lysicratous Street in the background (Photo: M. Gianni) 346
xiv Illustrations 15.2
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Fragmentary portrait of Hadrian from the agora of Athens. Thasian marble, c. 130–138 CE. National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 632 (Photo: C. Raddato. With kind permission of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund) 347 Traces of orange-brown paint on the attic of Hadrian’s Arch (Photo: www.wandertoes.com) 349 Hypothetical reconstruction of the east side of the arch with a painting depicting Hadrian in the central section of the attic. The Parthenon and the road onto which modern Lysicratous Street was built are visible through the archway (Reconstruction by D. Tsalkanis, C. Kanellopoulos, and L. Tsatsaroni; reproduced with permission from www.AncientAthens3d.com and the authors) 352 Hypothetical reconstruction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus from the northeast, with the colossus of Hadrian behind the temple and Hadrian’s Arch on the right (D. Tsalkanis, C. Kanellopoulos, and L. Tsatsaroni 2019, 175; reproduced with permission from the authors) 353 View of Athens published by Jacob Spon in 1674 (Laborde 1854) 356 Illustration depicting Hadrian’s Arch, known colloquially at that time as the Arch of Theseus (Le Roy 1770, 16) 357 Shepherds and their flocks passing through Hadrian’s Arch (Stuart and Revett 1762, Chapter II, pl. 16) 358 “Hadrian’s Arch” at Shugborough, Staffordshire, England. Tixall sandstone. Built in the 1760s (Photo: S. Craven) 359 J.M.W. Turner. The Gate of Theseus, Athens. c. 1830. Watercolor over pencil. Private collection, UK (Photo: www.clayton-payne.com/artworks/9428/) 360 Pavlos Mathiopoulos. Hadrian's Gate. c. 1915. Oil on canvas. Private collection (Photo: www.elniplex.com) 361 Konstantinos Parthenis. The Walk of the Caryatid. 1938. Oil on canvas. Private collection (Photo: Sotheby’s The Greek Sale Catalogue) 362 Giorgos Bakirtzis. The Freedom of the Greeks, 1944-1945. 1977. Mixed media on canvas. National Gallery, Athens (Photo: T. Kimbari) 363
Tables 4.1 Competitions at the Mouseia in Thespiae in the 2nd century CE 13.1 Estimated number of OV-dies for Argos and Epidaurus using the method described in Esty 2011 13.2 Coin finds in Greece of coins minted in the 2nd century CE in the Argolid
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Notes on Contributors
Sulochana R. Asirvatham is Professor of Classics and General Humanities at Montclair State University, USA. Her main research interests include the reception of Alexander the Great, imperial Greek literature, ancient ethnic identity, and ancient historiography. She is the co-editor of Between Magic and Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Society (2001) and of another volume forthcoming, The Courts of Philip II and Alexander the Great: Monarchy and Power in Ancient Macedonia. Ewen Bowie, now an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, UK, was Praelector in Classics there from 1965 to 2007, and successively University Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He has written on early Greek elegiac, iambic and melic poetry; Aristophanes; Herodotus; Hellenistic poetry; and many aspects of Greek literature and culture under the Roman Empire. He has published a commentary on Longus, Daphnis and Chloe (2019); edited a collection entitled Herodotus. Narrator, scientist, historian (2018); and co- edited collections entitled Archaic and Classical Choral Song (2011) and Philostratus (2009). His collected papers (three volumes) are being published with the title Essays in Greek Literature and Culture: the first volume will appear late in 2021. Francesco Camia is Professor of Greek Epigraphy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. A former student of the Italian Archaeological School at Athens, Greece (2001–2003), from 2008 to 2015 he was Researcher in the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens, Greece. His research activity is focused on the study of the Greek world during the Roman period, with a focus on the religious landscapes of cities (cultic, social, and institutional aspects) and their economic and financial implications. He has dealt in depth with the Roman imperial cult in Greece, on which he has published various articles and the monograph Theoi Sebastoi. Il culto degli imperatori romani in Grecia (provincia Achaia) nel secondo secolo d.C. (2011). He is also the author of Roma e le poleis. L’intervento di Roma nelle controversie territoriali tra le comunità greche di Grecia e d’Asia Minore nel secondo secolo a.C.: le testimonianze epigrafiche (2009).
xvi Notes on Contributors Juan Manuel Cortés Copete is Professor of Ancient History at the Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain. His research interests include the Greek world under Roman rule, the Second Sophistic, and the emperor Hadrian. He has published on Aelius Aristides and Greek epigraphy of the imperial period. He is currently working on a monograph about letters and other imperial constitutions from Hadrian’s chancellery. Together with E. Muñiz and F. Lozano, he edited the volume Empire and Religion. Religious Change in Greek Cities under Roman Rule (2017). Frank Daubner is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Trier, Germany. He worked as an archaeologist and historian in Germany, Greece, and Italy. His main research interests are Roman Greece, the entangling of Greek and Roman history, and the archaeology and history of Epirus and Macedon. He is the author of Bellum Asiaticum. Der Krieg der Römer gegen Aristonikos von Pergamon und die Einrichtung der Provinz Asia (2003) and Makedonien nach den Königen (2018). He has also edited the volume Militärsiedlungen und Territorialherrschaft in der Antike (2011). Eliza Gettel is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University, USA. She has deep interests in the social and political history of the Greek world under Roman authority. Her current research focuses on how koina or so-called federal states of the Greek mainland survived and transformed within the Roman Empire. Previously, she has published on the koinon of the Achaeans in the Roman imperial period, Greek federal coinages, displaced persons in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, and connections between the disciplines of classics and early anthropology. Stylianos E. Katakis is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He has previously worked as an archaeologist for the Ministry of Culture (Ephorate of Antiquities of Euboea), Greece. His main research interests focus on the Roman period in Greece, especially Euboea, Attica, the Peloponnese, and western Crete. He is the author of Epidaurus. The Sculpture of the Roman Period from the Sanctuary of Apollo Maleatas and Asclepius (2002, in Greek), and Athens, National Archaeological Museum, I. Attic Sarcophagi with Garlands, Erotes and Dionysiac Themes, Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani, Greece I, 2 (2018) as well as of many articles on Greek sculpture of the Roman period. He is co-director of Athens University’s excavations at Rafina (east Attica) and Epidaurus. Nigel M. Kennell is an Honorary Research Member at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His research interests include Spartan history and Greek civic institutions. He was a research assistant and visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, USA; a chercheur associé at le centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Collège de France, Paris; visiting fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK; and has had a long association with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. He is the author
Notes on Contributors xvii of The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta (1995), Ephebeia: A Register of Greek Cities with Citizen Training Systems in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (2006), and Spartans: A New History (2010). Panagiotis Konstantinidis is Post-doctoral Researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He has previously taught Ancient Greek Art at the Open University of Cyprus and the Athens School of Fine Arts. His research activity focuses on Greek and Roman sculpture, with a special interest in Greece during the Roman Imperial period. He has published various papers in academic journals and collective volumes, while his PhD thesis entitled Female Dynastic Portrait Statues from Greece (late 1st c. BCE–5th c. CE) is currently in press. Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino is a PhD candidate in the School of History and Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her doctoral studies are funded by a scholarship from the Academy of Athens. Her main research interests center around religious connectivity in the Isiac cults with a focus on mainland Greece during the Roman period. She holds a Master’s degree in Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and has participated in the Aristotle University’s excavations at Vergina. Giorgos Mitropoulos has recently completed his PhD thesis at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, entitled The model of the Roman emperor and the imitatio imperatoris: Dialectics of influence between the princeps and the provincials in the Greco-Roman East (31 B.C.–A.D. 235) (2020, in Greek). His dissertation, generously funded by the Onassis Foundation, treats the theme of the exemplum of the Roman emperor and his imitation in the Hellenophone provinces. His main research interests include Roman Greece and Asia Minor, the formation and diffusion of imperial ideology in the provinces, and the sociopolitical evolution of the koina in Hellenistic and Roman Greece, topics on which he has published various papers in academic journals and collective volumes. Mali Skotheim is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India. Her research concerns Greek drama and dance in the Roman period. She has published on Augustan policy toward the Greek festivals, satyr drama in the Roman era, attitudes toward ancient actors, and festival culture in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. She is currently working on a monograph on the Greek dramatic festivals under the Roman Empire. Estelle Strazdins is Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is a cultural historian of Greece with a particular focus on the Roman imperial period and its reception in literature, material culture, and scholarship. Her first book, Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts, is forthcoming. She has previously published
xviii Notes on Contributors on Herodes Atticus, Philostratus, Arrian, Lucian, and the relationship between Greek myth and early Jewish apocalyptic. David Weidgenannt is Research Assistant at the Institute of Numismatics and Monetary History at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is currently preparing a dissertation on the role of coinage in the Arcadian, Aetolian, and Achaean Leagues. He co-edited the volume Strategies of Remembering in Greece under Rome (100 BC–100 AD).
Preface
The idea for this volume arose over the course of various discussions during the past few years with friends and colleagues across the continents. These discussions had one dominant theme: how did the Greeks in the Roman period deal with their past and why did the Romans promote it? With this theme in mind, I set out to create a volume that would explore varied aspects of the Greek past in the Roman period, with a geographical focus on “old Greece”, that is, the province of Achaea. This volume presents a synoptic view of how the past was understood in Achaea and beyond in the 2nd century CE, drawn from the scholarly work of contributors based in ten different countries, the results of which are published in the sixteen chapters that follow. In discussing the topics of the chapters with the authors, it soon became clear that almost every one of them had been planning to write about Hadrian, since he practically dominated Greece during his principate, with echoes reverberating until today. Indeed, I had to discourage a few authors from writing specifically about him, since in that case we would have ended up with a volume only on Hadrian and Achaea. My thought was for the themes of the chapters to reflect a perspective of greater breadth. Nonetheless, as the chapters demonstrate, the Hadrianic period does take precedence, followed by the reigns of his successors, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus and Commodus. Similarly, I wanted the contributions to not be Athenocentric, and to also reflect trends in other cities of the province of Achaea and further afield. I think this volume succeeds in addressing the latter issue better than the former, for reasons that will become obvious to the reader. A number of individuals were instrumental in the production of this volume. Ewen Bowie was most helpful and encouraging of this venture and served as well as a scholarly inspiration to myself and other contributors. For permissions to reproduce images, and discussions of various artifacts and materials in their collections, I am indebted to: The Greek Ministry of Culture, and Sports The National Archaeological Museum of Athens, The National Gallery, The Numismatic Museum, The Ephorate of the City of Athens, The Ephorate of West Attica, The Ephorate of East Attica, The Ephorate of Piraeus and the Islands, The Ephorate of Phocis, The Ephorate of Elis, The Ephorate of the Argolid, The Ephorate of Boeotia, The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, The German Archaeological Institute,
xx Preface The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, The Archaeological Museum of Seville, and The National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona. The staff in the libraries at Western Connecticut State University and Quinnipiac University, my current employers, were most helpful in tracking down published material at short notice and providing welcoming facilities to complete this volume. I also extend my gratitude to Nick Brock, Amy Davis- Poynter and the editorial team at Routledge for a most pleasant and timely publishing experience. Finally, special thanks are due to several individuals who aided me in a number of ways during a most challenging year around the world: David C. Capps, Vyron Antoniadis, Lindsey A. Mazurek, Jody Michael Gordon, Charikleia Papageorgiadou, Georgios Spyropoulos, Stephanie Roussou, Chrysanthi Tsouli, George W.M. Harrison, Vasiliki Stefanaki, and Kleio Tsonga. Anna Kouremenos New Haven, December 2021
Figure 0.1 Map of the Roman Empire, mid-2nd century CE. Source: (Vyron Antoniadis).
Figure 0.2 Map of the province of Achaea with major cities, 2nd century CE. Source: (Anna Kouremenos and Vyron Antoniadis).
1 Introduction Collective historical nostalgia in 2nd-century Achaea Anna Kouremenos
In the 8th book of his Description of Greece, Pausanias presents a poignant description of one of the ancient monuments of Mantineia in Arcadia: παρὰ δὲ τοῦ ὄρους τὰ ἔσχατα τοῦ Ποσειδῶνός ἐστι τοῦ Ἱππίου τὸ ἱερόν, οὐ πρόσω σταδίου Μαντινείας. τὰ δὲ ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν τοῦτο ἐγώ τε ἀκοὴν γράφω καὶ ὅσοι μνήμην ἄλλοι περὶ αὐτοῦ πεποίηνται. τὸ μὲν δὴ ἱερὸν τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῶν ᾠκοδομήσατο Ἀδριανὸς βασιλεύς, ἐπιστήσας τοῖς ἐργαζομένοις ἐπόπτας ἄνδρας, ὡς μήτε ἐνίδοι τις ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν τὸ ἀρχαῖον μήτε τῶν ἐρειπίων τι αὐτοῦ μετακινοῖτο: πέριξ δὲ ἐκέλευε τὸν ναὸν σφᾶς οἰκοδομεῖσθαι τὸν καινόν. τὰ δὲ ἐξ ἀρχῆς τῷ Ποσειδῶνι τὸ ἱερὸν τοῦτο Ἀγαμήδης λέγονται καὶ Τροφώνιος ποιῆσαι, δρυῶν ξύλα ἐργασάμενοι καὶ ἁρμόσαντες πρὸς ἄλληλα. By the foot of the mountain is the sanctuary of Poseidon Hippios, not more than a stade distant from Mantineia. About this sanctuary I, like everyone else who has mentioned it, can write only what I have heard. The modern sanctuary was built by emperor Hadrian, who set overseers over the workmen, so that nobody might look into the old sanctuary, and none of the ruins be removed. He ordered them to build the new temple around it. Originally, they say, this sanctuary was built for Poseidon by Agamedes and Trophonius, who worked oak logs and fitted them together.1 This passage is valuable in understanding the cultural and political climate of the province of Achaea in the 2nd century CE for two main reasons: first, it conveys the direct agency of a Roman emperor in preserving the architectural remains of the Greek past, and demonstrates his interest in local cults and religious traditions; and second, by building a new sanctuary around the old one, it illustrates how the Roman regime was adamant about including the Hellenic past prominently in the Roman present in this particular city. One may wonder what stood within the ruins of the old sanctuary – treasured relics? Poseidon’s power? – that needed to be protected from the gaze of the workmen while they were laboring to build a new structure around it. In the Classical period, there was a taboo associated with looking inside this DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-1
2 Anna Kouremenos particular sanctuary – whoever entered the abaton and transgressed the rule was condemned to death by Poseidon. The older temple surrounded by the new Roman structure may be perceived as a metaphor for the political and cultural reality of Achaea during Hadrian’s reign and the 2nd century in general: Hellenism, in the form of the old, ruined temple, is protected by Rome, represented by the emperor and the new construction surrounding the old one. Built into the metaphor is the notion that at the very heart of Roman culture lies Hellenic culture. Incorporating the older sanctuary into a new structure was far from being the only such gesture on the part of Hadrian, who, as is evident in the chapters in this volume, promoted nearly every aspect of the Greek past both in the province of Achaea itself and in the Empire as a whole. Why were members of the Roman regime, who, by Pausanias’ lifetime in the 2nd century, had ruled this part of Greece for nearly four centuries, so adamant about preserving the Greek past, often valuing it above the Roman present? What was in it for them? And why was the province of Achaea, in particular, the focal point of their endeavors to preserve vestiges of a bygone era? Furthermore, how did the local populations of Achaea react to the embracing and promotion of the past in the 2nd century? The chapters in this volume grapple at length with these and other related questions and shed light on both elite and non-elite attitudes to the province’s venerable heritage. The 2nd century was the Golden Age of Roman Hellenism, promoted as much by philhellenic emperors and their agents as by the educated elites. It was an epoch which saw the culmination of centuries of Hellenism in the Roman Empire. But how did this affect the common people? How much of a say did they have in this promotion and dissemination of Greek culture and reverence for the past? Despite scant evidence for collective voices in 2nd century CE literature, the epigraphic, numismatic, and material record offers some valuable insights that permit a number of conclusions to be drawn. Local mints in Achaean cities enthusiastically used coins to promote mythological and historical personages associated with their poleis, as the case studies of three cities in the Argolid by David Weidgenannt illustrate. Ephebates in several cities acted as repositories of tradition and memory, typically accomplished by means of specific places and sets of actions serving as lieux de mémoire.2 As Nigel M. Kennell’s chapter shows, each city commemorated events of historical and mythological significance in order to inculcate loyalty and patriotism among the young. This was not limited to major urban centers with prestigious vestiges of the past like Athens and Sparta. Frank Daubner’s contribution to this volume suggests that even small, run-down poleis on the fringes of Achaea mined their myth-historical past and were keen to perpetuate whatever traces of it they could find in their – by then – desolate landscapes. In the 2nd century, the Greek past became a site of competition in which cities attempted to surpass each other for prestige and honors, both from imperial as well as local and supra-local elites. The foundation of the
Introduction 3 Panhellenion by Hadrian in the early 130s was instrumental in augmenting the preoccupation with the Greek past on a collective, civic level in Achaea and in other Greek provinces, a fixation which certain elite Romans also shared. So intertwined had Greek and Roman history and culture become by the 2nd century that, despite some dissenting voices, an attack on Hellenism would have been understood as a direct attack on Rome. By preserving Hellenic culture and encouraging historical nostalgia among the populations of Achaea and other Greek provinces, the Romans simultaneously legitimized their own appropriation of and incorporation into the Greek past. It was certainly not a coincidence that, precisely in the middle of the 2nd century, the small city of Pallantion in Arcadia – considered, in one version of mythology, to have been the mother city of Rome through its founding hero, Evander – was awarded freedom from taxation and other privileges by Antoninus Pius. Hellenism was, above all, promoted by the imperial power and its agents in order to consolidate acquiescence in Roman rule and legitimize Roman borrowings. Nevertheless, the average citizen of Achaea and other Greek provinces could, especially in the 2nd century, benefit from the privileges that this promotion afforded. The lower classes took their cues from the elites and mobilized to turn historical nostalgia from an exclusive into a collective phenomenon. Interestingly, even some non-Greek elements that had long been Hellenized found a place in Achaea’s Roman Hellenism, as is demonstrated by the popularity of the Isis cult in Greece, discussed in this volume by Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino. Extolling the virtues of the past and learning from great individuals who left their mark in history seems to have been an important element in the culture of many educated Romans. As it is human nature to generally denounce the present as a period of degradation, the yearning for a great heroic past – whether real or imagined – serves as a means to disengage from the realities of the present and the uncertainties of the future. Seneca, who lived in the 1st century CE, expressed these sentiments in On the Shortness of Life: cum rerum natura in consortium omnis aeui patiatur incedere, quidni ab hoc exiguo et caduco temporis transitu in illa toto nos demus animo, quae inmensa, quae aeterna sunt, quae cum melioribus communia? Since nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?3 This standpoint clearly indicates that nostalgia for a glorious past that harbored admired individuals permeated certain educated circles in Rome, but it was even more pronounced in the Greek provinces. The preoccupation that many Greeks and some Romans harbored for the glorious Hellenic past had its roots long before the 2nd century;4 however, it was during this century that it reached its zenith and found its most direct outward expression on a collective level. As Ewen Bowie argued in his seminal paper “Greeks and their Past
4 Anna Kouremenos in the Second Sophistic”, the flight to the past arose primarily as a reaction to the political dependence of the Greeks in the Roman present.5 Plutarch is instructive in this regard. His biographies knit ancient Greek and Roman figures to his own lifetime, and his moral essays are loaded with ancient exempla to guide his own contemporaries. For the populations of Achaea and other Greek provinces, the past was closely linked to identity – personal, collective, and civic. Importantly, it also served as cultural capital for disbursement in the Roman present. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. As a number of scholars have observed, the majority of the themes dealt with by the sophists of the 2nd century derived from the period before 326 BCE, with Alexander the Great taken to be the last illustrious individual of the Classical period. For writers like Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides, the period from the 3rd to the 1st century BCE was less known than the glorious past commemorated by Herodotus. Yet, as Sulochana R. Asirvatham stresses in her chapter on the reception by 2nd century CE Greek authors of the Battle of Chaeronea of 338 BCE, few lamented the fate of the Greek poleis at this battle, and some even saw it as an opportunity to exploit Macedonian military prowess as something Hellenic by which they can claim authority on military matters to Roman audiences. Hence, we can make a distinction between historical nostalgia for the Classical past and idealization of Greece’s continued relevance in the Roman present. And as Eliza Gettel argues in her chapter, this dichotomy was particularly evident in a major polis like Messene, whose post-Classical past retained, with few exceptions, a more important place in the history of 2nd century CE Messene than that of the Classical period which the Messenians spent under helotage. The polis’ memorializations of Philopoemen, one of the most famous generals of the Achaean League whom an unknown Roman termed “the last of the Greeks”,6 suggest that the various narratives about him evolved to suit the needs of the Roman present. Thus, although the Classical period clearly found primacy of place in 2nd century literature and visual culture, competing versions and regional narratives favoring the more recent past were not as uncommon as previously suggested by scholars. Instead of focusing entirely on the concept of memory to explain the preoccupation with the past, as many studies of Greece in the 2nd century have done until now, I would like to propose the usage of a more encompassing – and emotional – phenomenon. The ways people in 2nd century Achaea dealt with their past can best be described through the notion of collective historical nostalgia. Distinct from personal nostalgia, which deals mainly with subjective memories, historical nostalgia sees the individual enamored of bygone eras, periods of history that are far removed from his or her own lifetime.7 At its root, collective historical nostalgia not only serves to preserve group identity and cohesion but also betrays a dissatisfaction with the present. The past “haunts” the present, and it is continuously invented and reinvented, reconstituted and reconstructed.8 This notion then raises the question: why were Greeks and certain Romans in the 2nd century obsessed with the Hellenic
Introduction 5 past and dissatisfied with the Roman present in a century which was, if we follow the estimations of earlier historians like Edward Gibbon and Ferdinand Gregorovius,9 one of the happiest and most prosperous times in human history? Was it that, by emulating and propagating select versions of the past, the people of Achaea and other Greek provinces were, in fact, fostering their exclusivity vis-à-vis other peoples within the Empire? What did they hope to accomplish by seeking refuge in a past that was, in many cases, more than 500 years old? The general difference between nostalgia and memory was defined by Christopher Lasch in the early 1990s: Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer. It sees past, present, and future as continuous. It is less concerned with loss than with our continuing indebtedness to a past the formative influence of which lives on in our patterns of speech, our gestures, our standards of honor, our expectations, our basic disposition toward the world around us.10 Moreover, historical nostalgia as an emotion has a more prominent role to play in the fashioning and refashioning of the present than memory. David Lowenthal has rightly pointed out that the past as we understand it is partly a product of the present, for we continually reshape memory, rewrite history, and refashion relics.11 A past too well-ordered or understood loses some of its appeal.12 In the 2nd century, historical memory of watershed events like the Persian Wars had undergone various shifts and refashionings through multiple generations; by focusing on select parts of these retellings, and generally marginalizing other historical themes that would be deemed unsuitable and/or uncomfortable for discussion (e.g., the Macedonian wars; the conquest of Greece by the Romans), learned individuals of the 2nd century could rework the past as instructive for the present. But historical nostalgia in this case does not refer to the memory of actual events; rather, it is more of a yearning for an idealized past, a wistful retrospection. One of the advantages of encouraging collective historical nostalgia in a given population is that it can serve as a source of creativity and social cohesion. By employing images and ideas from the deep past, one is able to re-interpret and appropriate them according to the values of the present. Hence, representations of imperial and elite individuals as Classical heroes – as in the case of Hadrian and other elite individuals depicted in heroic nudity in public statues, discussed in this volume by Panagiotis Konstantinidis – allowed artists and sculptors to embed the past into the present according to
6 Anna Kouremenos the desires of their patrons or communities. That past was understood and re-shaped for a contemporary 2nd-century audience, much like monuments of the 2nd century in contemporary Athens meet specific needs of the 21st century, as I argue in my chapter on Hadrian’s Arch. In the case of the latter, accretive continuity has blurred the original function and intended meaning of the monument over a period of twenty centuries. Nevertheless, a sizable percentage of the population tends to be aware that such antique monuments can serve as useful resources for the present in both a historical, cultural, and economic sense. As already emphasized, the Romans promoted Hellenic culture in order to legitimize their own appropriations. But how was this promotion achieved and maintained, and what was the point of harkening back to an idealized past? Jan Assmann surmised that cultural memory always has its specialists;13 these carriers of memory are known under a rich assortment of names, such as shamans, bards, priests, teachers, scholars, rabbis, and mullahs. In other words, social and religious groups require interpreters of the past, individuals they revere as being more knowledgeable than other members of the group, or at least better equipped to interpret the past. Intellectuals as well as emperors, especially those with a deep knowledge of Greek culture like Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, could serve as specialists and transmitters of cultural memory. Indeed, the former, especially, even seems to have encouraged this perception of himself. Hadrian, who, significantly, ascended the Roman imperial throne as an Athenian citizen,14 is the most visible and systematic proponent of historical nostalgia: this is due partly to his many sojourns in Achaea, but also to his personal and outward expression of historical nostalgia. He elevated Hellenism into a state policy, and even attempted to champion it in regions outside the Greek world, for example in his native Hispania, as Juan Manuel Cortés Copete’s chapter reveals. This was in direct contrast to his predecessor and kinsman, Trajan, who, although generally supportive of Greek intellectuals and ideals, was more interested in the Roman present and in expanding the borders of the Empire than in directly promoting the past – let alone the Hellenic past – as a matter of imperial policy. Among Hadrian’s successors, Antoninus Pius did not visit Achaea as emperor and was not as concerned with outwardly promoting the province’s heritage himself, despite his generosity toward many Greek cities and upkeep of the Panhellenion. Marcus Aurelius continued the pro-Hellenic policies of his two predecessors, but was clearly more interested in promoting the philosophical past of Achaea than leaving tangible proof of his presence there. In any case, his adherence to Stoicism would not have allowed him to value the past over the present, even if his Meditations are full of references to a philosophical past that was simultaneously both Greek and Roman. His funding of the Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist, and Aristotelian schools of Athens reveals not only his dedication to Greek philosophy but also his desire to make the city a philosophical capital once again. The reign of his son Commodus was too erratic, eventually spiraling into violence, for this emperor to be concerned with the province’s
Introduction 7 heritage, despite him holding citizenship and the eponymous archonship of Athens (in absentia), and the many honors conferred on him by his subjects in Achaea. This brings us back to the most enthusiastic and visible proponent of Hellenism in the 2nd century. Hadrian displayed historical nostalgia for the Greek past in various ways; the most evident of these were his restorations of older buildings, his deliberations on the membership of cities that applied to join the Panhellenion, and his public veneration for the historical personages and mythological heroes of Achaea or, significantly, of individuals from “old Greece” who were buried abroad. Our extant literary sources record that he restored and venerated the tombs of Epaminondas in Mantineia, Archilochus on Paros, Ajax at Troy, and Alcibiades at Melissa in Phrygia. It is likely that he carried out many other similar actions that have not come down to us, and Pausanias states that his benefactions – many of which would have been in the form of restorations – to Greek and “barbarian” cities were inscribed in the temple to all the gods (Pantheon) in Athens. The emperor’s manner of public veneration included performing rituals and sacrifices at the gravesites of famous personages from “old Greece” and, in the cases of all but Alcibiades, composing epigrams for them. In a passage conveyed through the narration of a fictitious vinedresser, Philostratus writes that Hadrian honored the grave of Ajax in the Troad, and, after kissing and re-burying the hero’s huge bones (or what he was told were the hero’s bones), he added his own epigram to the restored tomb.15 The epigram itself has not been transmitted, but it is likely that the emperor praised the Achaean hero’s valor. Another source informs us that on the same site – a major lieu de mémoire in antiquity – he also honored the presumed tomb of Hector, on which he wrote an epigram informing the Trojan hero that Achilles and the Myrmidons had perished and all of Thessaly was now ruled by the progeny of Aeneas.16 The message of this imperial undertaking is clear: Hadrian, as both a Roman and an Athenian citizen, is honoring the heroes of both peoples, encouraging a shared collective historical nostalgia through his personal example of public veneration, but also subtly communicating a message about his status as a specialist in or carrier of memory. Furthermore, by honoring these mythological and historical figures in Troy, he was also including himself among an exclusive group of illustrious men – Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Augustus – of the Graeco-Roman past who had also venerated their tombs in person. Thus, the traditional burial sites of heroes of the Trojan War served as a form of accretive continuity and a common reference point between the Greek past and the Roman present. Hadrian remained a powerful symbolic figure in Achaea long after his death. Pausanias, writing in the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, clearly venerates him above the emperors of his own time. He served, in many ways, as a role model for his successors, as Giorgos Mitropoulos elucidates in his chapter. It was not by coincidence that the cult of Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios lasted well into the 3rd century in “old Greece”, as Francesco Camia’s contribution to this volume illustrates.
8 Anna Kouremenos But while imperial enthusiasm and support were paramount in the veneration of the Greek past, local elites – often from eastern provinces but sometimes descended from Italian families – were also instrumental in promoting it, with several men and some women serving as designated carriers of memory. Epigraphic documents, for example, make it clear that non-elite citizens participated in the various dramatic and agonistic festivals that took place in Achaea as well as across the Greek world, as Mali Skotheim’s chapter demonstrates. Many of these festivals revived older dramatic traditions, but they also introduced new ones, allowing local benefactors to invest in them and present themselves as upholders of past customs. Herodes Atticus of Marathon is the most visible of these elite benefactors in Achaea. In her contribution to this volume, Estelle Strazdins argues that he viewed himself as a mediator between Roman imperial power and the older traditions of Greece by utilizing sacred spaces to celebrate his Graeco-Roman dynasty. Yet, through the promotion of the past, elite Greeks with Roman citizenship were simultaneously doing the bidding of the Roman authorities, using their exclusive knowledge to make a mark on their cities and the wider Empire. Herodes and other provincials championed the continuing vibrancy of “old Greece” and strove to reconfigure its past in order to create a present capable of diverse interpretation, as the chapter by Stylianos E. Katakis also emphasizes. The 2nd century was as far removed from the Classical period as we are from the Elizabethan Era. Similarly, today many envision Periclean Athens as the glory days of Greece, while generally depreciating other periods, including the present. Many Athenians living in the Age of Pericles longed for a more glorious era, perhaps that of Solon and Cleisthenes, or even harkening further back, to the reign of the legendary Theseus. For the common people in 2nd century Achaea and the Hellenic provinces in general, seeing their ancestral culture appropriated and promoted by Roman elites, including emperors, would have brought about a sense of pride and exclusivity; after all, the Romans were not appropriating Gallic, Thracian, or – as was done in the 3rd century by Elagabalus – Syrian culture. The populations of Achaea and other Hellenic provinces, particularly the upper classes, were beneficiaries of the Roman appropriation of the Greek past. In return, this endorsement would earn the Romans the approbation and gratitude of a sizable portion of the common people in Achaea and other Hellenic provinces. The veneration and promotion of Hellenism came about as a result of a symbiotic relationship between ruler and ruled; by encouraging a Hellenic revival on a collective level, the Romans could insert themselves into the narrative of the Greek past and claim to be its custodian. Despite the plethora of literary and material evidence, our understanding of the ways Achaea’s past was promoted in the Roman period remains incomplete due to the absence of many now-intangible facets that have not survived the passage of time. How much richer would our insight of this period be had, for example, some of the many buildings and statues made of wood that Pausanias describes survived? Additionally, what about other
Introduction 9 intangible aspects of the past, like musical compositions,17 dances, religious rituals, dress styles and embroidery patterns, and cuisine? Were these features as much imbued with a reverence for the past as those vestiges that have survived the passage of time suggest? Added to this incomplete understanding is the unevenness of the archaeological record; some cities and areas in the province of Achaea are much better excavated and studied than others. I have made every effort not to over-represent Athens in this volume, which, due to its status as the cultural center of the province and the abundance of surviving material that dates to the 2nd century, has dominated studies of “old Greece” and its reception. However, it is a particular loss that in most studies of Achaea, including this volume, the large island of Euboea is absent, as are many of the smaller islands that were part of the province. These omissions partly reflect the uneven attention paid to material of the Roman period in these areas of Greece, but our extant literary sources also do not reveal much about life on these islands. Rather by coincidence than by design, then, the themes of the papers in this volume follow the route of Pausanias’ Description of Greece. Given these limitations and the current state of research, it is evident that with the available literary, archaeological, numismatic, and epigraphic evidence, we are only scratching the surface of discerning how Achaea’s past operated in the Roman Empire. All the same, enough material has survived to permit a number of compelling observations and conclusions to be drawn. It is my hope that the chapters in this volume will serve as catalysts for future studies on Achaea and its past in the 2nd century CE.
Notes 1 Paus. 8.10.2. Translated by W.H.S. Jones. 2 This concept, first conceived by Pierre Nora, is defined as “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.” See Nora 1989, 7. 3 Sen. Brev. Vit. 14. Translated by J.W. Basore. 4 On this, see especially Spawforth 2011. 5 Bowie 1970. 6 Plut. Phil. 1.4. 7 Lowenthal 2015. 8 Assmann 2011. 9 Gibbon 1896–1900, I, 78: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”; Gregorovius 1898, 3: “It (i.e. the period beginning with Hadrian and ending with Marcus Aurelius) has been extolled as the happiest period of the Roman Empire, if not of the world. It shines more brightly from the union of Greek and Roman culture, which it defused throughout the peaceful Empire, and from the contrast it presents to the dark shadows that surround it.” 10 Lasch 1991, 82–83.
10 Anna Kouremenos 1 1 12 13 14
Lowenthal 2015, 69. Lowenthal 2015, 128. Assmann 2011, 20. On the significance of Hadrian’s Athenian citizenship in his imperial policies, see Kouremenos forthcoming. 15 Philostr. Her. 8.2. 6 Anth. Pal. 9.387. 1 17 Some of the few surviving annotated musical compositions from antiquity date to the 2nd century and were composed by Mesomedes of Crete, Hadrian’s freedman. See also Bowie’s Afterword with bibliography.
Bibliography Primary sources Pausanias. (1918) Description of Greece. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 93. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Philostratus. (2014) Heroicus. Gymnasticus. Discourses 1 and 2. Edited and translated by J. Rusten and J. König. Loeb Classical Library 521. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seneca. (1932) On the shortness of life. Translated by J. W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann. The Greek Anthology, Volume III: Book 9: The Declamatory Epigrams. (1917) Translated by W. R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library 84. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Secondary sources Assmann, J. (2011) Communicative and cultural memory. In P. Meusburger, M. Heffernan, and E. Wunder (eds.) Cultural Memories. Knowledge and Space (Klaus Tschira Symposia), vol 4. Dordrecht: Springer, 15–27. Bowie, E. L. (1970) Greeks and their past in the second sophistic. Past and Present, (46), 3–41. Gibbon, E. (1896–1900) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. New York: Everyman’s Library. Gregorovius, F. (1898) The Emperor Hadrian: A Picture of the Graeco-Roman World in his Time. Macmillan & Company. Kouremenos, A. (forthcoming) The Roman Past of Greece. Routledge. Lasch, C. (1991) The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Lowenthal, D. (2015) The Past is a Foreign Country: Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nora, P. (1989) Between history and memory: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26(9), 7–24. Spawforth, A. J. (2011) Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Part I
Social and Literary Approaches to Achaea’s Past in the 2nd Century CE
2 Memory and identity among the ephebes of 2nd-century Achaea Nigel M. Kennell
The Greek ephebate was un lieu de mémoire, “a location for memory.” The concept of lieu de mémoire plays an important role in the theory of social or cultural memory, which holds that societies remember in ways similar to individuals.1 While the analogy has shortcomings, in that a society has no physical neural networks, the theory does usefully characterize the process by which institutions and groups preserve knowledge of certain events or persons, while others sink into oblivion. The things remembered, and the way in which they are remembered, form a sort of (myth-)historical canon, to be recalled, lived out, and celebrated through festivals, monuments, and other formalized sequences of actions that provide stimuli for memory.2 The places where these actions are performed are often specially designed or adapted for this specific purpose – a cenotaph, for example, or an official parade route, which memory theorists term lieux de mémoire. But a “location for memory” can also be conceptual, in that a set of actions itself can provide the space for remembrance and participation in collective cultural memory. What is commemorated need not be historically accurate but is still felt to represent the essence of a group’s distinctive identity and, as such, is often believed to be unchanging through time. The meaning of an occurrence in such constructed histories and, very often, its commonly accepted details are the collective creations of societies rather than objective fact. As an integral part of a collective identity, this history becomes an artifact, to be manipulated and deployed as necessary. Perhaps its most important use is to inculcate loyalty and patriotism among the young through education, a role that remains one of its most important and contested aspects even today. Although we hear nothing of similar debates in Greco-Roman antiquity, Greek citizen training systems from the time they began provided a conceptual arena for the development and exploitation of cultural memory. They consequently provide a useful lens through which to assess the ways in which civic elites in the 2nd-century CE employed memory of Classical-period panhellenic and local histories to justify their positions by emphasizing the antiquity, and hence legitimacy, of ephebic practices and their roles in them. Three cities – Athens, Sparta, and Messene – are particularly susceptible to this kind of analysis, as the surviving evidence DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-3
14 Nigel M. Kennell reveals some common features in the deployment of elements of their ephebates as well as certain aspects that are unique to each polis.
Athens: remembering the hoplite The first ephebate, founded in Athens in the 4th-century BCE, served as a rough model for similar systems later established all over the Greek world. Ephebates provided young citizens-in-training aged eighteen to twenty a combination of athletic and military training, with varying admixtures of philosophy, history, and ethical/religious instruction, which prepared them for their adult lives as loyal and courageous citizen warriors. The content of ephebic training varied according to geography and chronology, but enough evidence survives scattered through a great number of ephebates to indicate that civic history played an active role in acclimatizing ephebes to their expected role. From the first, Athenian ephebes were integrated into the web of Athenian history. The stele erected in the later 4th-century that contains the traditional oath of the ephebes also bears the text of what purports to be an oath sworn by the Athenians before the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE. In addition, the relief crowning the top of the stone depicts the clothing and weaponry of the young ephebe and adult hoplite soldier. The entire stele thus reflects the emerging ethos of the Athenian ephebe: the spurious Plataean oath complemented the ephebic oath above it and implied that the ephebes were themselves heirs of the warriors who fought for Greece’s freedom over a century before.3 This created an influential ideological template for ephebic training that survived well into the Roman period and long past the decline of hoplite tactics on the battlefield. In the Hellenistic period, Athenian ephebes continued to participate in activities evoking the city’s past military achievements: presenting a display under arms and crowning the polyandreion in the Kerameikos during the Epitaphia festival, traveling annually to Marathon to honor the fallen; journeying to Oropos, now in Boeotian hands, to assert Athens’ historical claims to the territory.4 Outside Athens, the cities of mainland Greece have yielded hardly any evidence for their Hellenistic ephebates, let alone their ideological frameworks. But the extant testimony, though paltry, does indicate that memory of the past, both historical and mythical, constituted an important element in the training of young citizens everywhere. For example, Argive ephebes trained beside the grave of Kylarabes, the city’s first king, in a gymnasium named after him, while at Epidauros the ephebic gymnasium was the Lykeion, its Apolline connotations intrinsic to a city protected by Asklepios, and mythic history was evoked at Troezen through the Hippolyteion gymnasium, whose youthful associations were appropriate to young citizens-in-training.5 The complex eddies and currents in the development of these cities’ individual ephebic ideologies are impossible to trace, but what survives from the betterattested 2nd-century CE, mostly thanks to the periegete Pausanias, suggests that it took a form similar to that of Athens.
Memory and identity among the ephebes 15 As ever, Athens provides the richest, most detailed trove of evidence for a Roman-period ephebate in Greece, particularly during its reflorescence under Hadrian and the Antonine emperors. Athens’ prominence as a center and symbol of Hellenism had long attracted the interested generosity of Roman officials and members of the imperial household; their new buildings, the Odeion of Agrippa in particular, represented physical manifestations of a new, classicizing Greco-Roman culture, to a large extent fashioned after an idealized image of 5th- and 4th-century Athens.6 The ephebate constituted part of this project. From the later 2nd-century BCE, when Athens first accepted non-Athenian youths as ephebes, its citizen training system had proved an effective means of projecting the city’s soft power among the Empire’s elite.7 The ensuing version of Athenian history and heritage conveyed through ephebic activities and their environment would have influenced attitudes towards the city throughout the Empire. Central to Athenians’ identity, as for most other Greeks, was their role in the Persian Wars. In the 2nd-century CE the first ephebic event of the year was a run, en masse, from the city out to nearby Agrai, on the east bank of the Ilissos river, site of the famous temple and venue for the festival of Artemis Agrotera.8 The festival was held in the first month of the ephebic year Boedromion, which also became the first month of the Athenian civic year after Hadrian’s calendrical reform, and was when the city celebrated its victory at Marathon.9 In the Hellenistic period, this month was when ephebes had been charged with bringing the aristeia, probably sacrificial victims, to the temple of Artemis Agrotera, to fulfill a vow made before the battle in 490 BCE.10 The later group-run is the only unambiguous act of remembrance known for Imperial-period Athens of the time when that city stood almost alone against an autocratic aggressor. This state of affairs stands in contrast with the later Hellenistic period, when the Epitaphia festival honoring Athenian war dead involved ephebes marching out to the polyandreion at Marathon to perform sacrifices for “those who died in the war for freedom.”11 The sort of patriotic sentiments these actions had stimulated would at the very least have been problematic in 2nd-century Achaea, a Roman province perhaps not entirely free from social tension.12 The Athenians’ victory at Salamis conformed better to the cultural and political policy of panhellenism promoted by the Romans. Ephebes had marked the battle since the 3rd-century BCE with regattas and athletic events on Salamis at the festivals of Artemis Mounichia, held on Mounichion 6, the date of the battle, and the Aianteia immediately following, in honor of the hero Ajax.13 By the 2nd-century CE, the Hellenistic regattas (hamillai) had been replaced by an event called the “naval battle” (naumachia), which had become so important that ephebic catalogues, now erected by individual ephebic officials rather than the state, sometimes bore elaborate relief sculptures of the winning crew in their boat.14 Although the question of whether the naumachia was a mock battle or simply the boat race under a more evocative name has been a matter of debate, the triremes, complete with rams, depicted on several stelai indicate the contest’s combative character.15
16 Nigel M. Kennell The naumachia’s elevated status in these reliefs shows how the Battle of Salamis had been completely incorporated into the canon of Athenian ephebic memory, despite the training system’s markedly hoplite ideology.16 The great struggle between the Greek allies and the forces of Xerxes played so integral a part in the formation of Greek identity as a whole that its memorialization could not have been confined to a few ephebic contests or festivals at Athens. In fact, various manifestations of themes relating to the Persian Wars are found throughout Greek cities of the Roman Empire.17 This was certainly true of the decisive Battle of Plataea, fought near the Boeotian town of that name in 479 BCE. Equipped with the requisite 5th-century charter, the panhellenic Eleutheria festival at Plataea, under the direction of a koinon of Greeks, had commemorated the Greek victory every four years from at least the 3rd-century BCE. Starting in the Hellenistic period, at a ceremony held in the second year after the festival, orators representing Athens and Sparta contended rhetorically over the propompeia, the right to lead the procession and, as has been conjectured, to assume the responsibility of subsidizing the festival’s expenses.18 A set of catalogues from the later 2nd-century CE shows that Athens then regularly dispatched every fourth year’s cohort of ephebes to witness the contest and, presumably, to encourage their speaker.19 The lucky survival of an inscribed text of one of these speeches, though fragmentary and from the 2nd-century BCE, provides a flavor of what the audience would have heard.20 Held in Maimakterion, at the end of the ephebic year and, for most of the 2ndcentury CE, the end of the civic year as well, the dialogos, as the contest was called, provided an opportunity for ephebes to attend a panhellenic festival outside Athens that commemorated the final defeat of the Persians on Greek soil.21 In the 2nd-century, the trio of festivals connected with the Persian Wars formed a chronologically coherent program. It began with the low-key commemoration of Marathon at the festival of Artemis in Boedromion at the beginning of the year. Then, seven months later, Athens’ part in defeating Xerxes’ fleet was the reason for the naumachia held in Mounichion. Finally, the dialogos at Plataea in Maimakterion afforded some ephebes in the last month of their service the opportunity to witness a rhetorical display of their city’s virtues and right to lead the celebrations. The ephebes commemorated no other set of events in Athens’ Classical history. The reasons are not hard to find. The Athenian Empire was a short period of time that produced incomparable buildings redounding to the glory of the democratic system, but its celebration was hardly compatible with Athens’ position as an oligarchic polis within the Roman world empire; the Peloponnesian War ended in disaster for the city, while the fractious politics of the 4th-century merely led to the domination of Macedon. Memory of these decades would have been mediated through historians and orators like Thucydides, Demosthenes, and Isocrates, who were part of the literary component of the rhetorical curriculum that was universal in the Greek East, and whose works were viewed more as material for rhetorical exercises, such as
Memory and identity among the ephebes 17 the ephebic displays Plutarch mentions being held before the hoplite general Ammonius.22 Although Athenian military history apart from the Persian Wars appears not to have been commemorated in the Roman period, Graindor long ago suggested that an event in a lengthy, detailed list from the late 2nd-century CE, “the torch race for the heroes” was possibly connected with the Epitaphia, the festival honoring the city’s war dead.23 But the connection is tenuous at best. On the other hand, the ephebate was itself an artifact from the Classical past. Enrolling as an ephebe placed a young Athenian into a centuries-long tradition of training designed to produce patriotic citizen soldiers. Ephebic lists in the Imperial period may no longer have explicitly recorded the names of instructors in the javelin, archery, or the catapult, but arms training still continued.24 A hoplomachos taught ephebes a stylized form of weapons handling, along with some technical instruction in tactics and the marshalling of troops.25 A kestrophulax presumably provided instruction in how to wield the kestros, a fearsome slingshot-like weapon that had replaced the catapult as the heaviest ephebic weapon.26 Athenians ensured their training system preserved its military identity. Ephebic lists were occasionally inscribed onto stones shaped to resemble the classical round shield (hoplon), a phenomenon which not only recalled the ephebate’s hoplite origins, but also alluded to the practice of awarding inscribed shields to prominent champions.27 When ephebes were divided into small groups in the 2nd-century, probably to relieve the financial burden on the kosmetes, who administered the ephebate annually, they assumed the title sustremmata (brigades).28 On one occasion, an ephebe named Apollophanes styled himself with the classical military rank of polemarchos at the head of a list of the sustremma of his fellow ephebes that he erected at his own, or rather his father’s, expense.29 A decree from the early 3rd-century that revived the Classical practice of the ephebes providing an escort for the procession of sacred objects to Eleusis for the Mysteries required the kosmetes to lead all the ephebes under arms as “the accompanying army” (ἡ παραπέμπουσα στρατιά) for the procession so that the objects might be conveyed under “very strong guard” (μετὰ φρουρᾶ[ς ἰσχυρο]|τέρας) to Eleusis.30 Pictorial imagery was also employed. On the top of a stele bearing a list from the reign of Antoninus Pius, a relief depicts the year’s bearded kosmetes crowned and in full Roman-style military dress, complete with cingulum militare, carrying a sheathed sword and holding a spear. To the left stands a naked ephebe with a chlamys over his right shoulder holding a round hoplon on his left arm. To the right is another ephebe, clad in armor like the kosmetes but carrying a libation vessel.31 The relief conveys two messages. The first is obvious, that ephebes combined physical excellence, military prowess, and respect for the gods. The second uses the weaponry of the kosmetes and the ephebes to affirm that the ephebate’s classically-inspired hoplite training still contributed to the practical military needs of the city and of the Empire.32 Living embodiments of classical heritage, the ephebes acted in a conceptual space where elements central to Athenian cultural memory such as
18 Nigel M. Kennell military skill could be performed. In essence, the ephebate acted as a repository of tradition and memory. Reforms in the reign of Hadrian and soon after reinforced this image. Ephebic lists, which during the 1st-century CE had listed ephebes in random order, with or without demotics, began again to order them according to tribe, as in the original lists.33 Tribal allegiance was also the basis for the reappearance, after several centuries, of the sophronistai, officials who in the Classical-period ephebate had been charged with disciplining the ephebes in their tribes, though their number was reduced from twelve to six.34 The central totemic figure for the ephebes, who provided the youths of the Roman era with a link to their ancient origins, was Theseus. The development of his major festival, the Theseia, reveals how his role evolved. Founded to commemorate the recovery of the hero’s bones from Skyros in 476/475 BCE, the Theseia had grown, by the 2nd-century BCE, to include an elaborate agonistic festival of twenty-three events that was open to both Athenians – minors, ephebes, and adult males – and foreigners.35 By the 2nd-century CE, however, it had been completely incorporated into the ephebic calendar, with a more limited set of events that matched those of the other ephebic festivals.36 In addition to the usual athletic events, the 2nd-century saw the inclusion of two literary competitions in the ephebic festivals, the poiema (poem) and the enkomion, a speech of praise, a rhetorical genre that came to the fore in the Roman period.37 The enkomion at the Theseia no doubt praised the hero, but he might figure in other rhetorical contexts as well – speeches at the Haloa and the exhortatory speeches (logoi protreptikoi) to the contestants that were delivered before contests began.38 By a lucky accident, fragments of one of these exhortatory speeches survive from the later 2nd-century.39 Unsurprisingly, the speaker, Isochrysos the ephebic agonothetes of the peri alkes contest, encouraged ephebes to emulate Theseus, slayer of Procrustes and liberator of Athenian boys and girls from Crete, to the best of their ability in their contests and combats even though they did not fight fierce beasts, and “what ephebe could imitate him, when his deeds were such?”40 Theseus, the founder of Athens, anchored 2nd-century ephebes in a historical tradition that stretched back centuries before the ephebate was established to the city’s early history.41 Some ephebes – twenty-two in 191/192 CE – formed teams of Theseidai and Heracleidai, probably to contend against each other in the mysterious contest peri alkes (“about strength”), before which Isochrysos had on another occasion delivered his logos protreptikos.42 Zahra Newby has convincingly shown that the peri alkes, first attested in 143/144 CE, was held at Eleusis and involved physical combat between members of the two teams.43 Membership was evidently an honor reserved for the more distinguished ephebes, as all the Theseidai and those Heracleidai whose names are preserved elsewhere on the stone were either ephebic agonothetai, victors, or both.44 Since the teams took their names from Theseus, the inventor of scientific wrestling, and Heracles, the founder of the pankration, they can reasonably be assumed to have engaged in violent hand-to-hand combat,
Memory and identity among the ephebes 19 much in the style of Sparta’s contemporary contest at the Platanistas grove, of which more below.45 In asserting young Athenians’ connection to the history of their polis, ephebic officials delved deep beyond even the age of Theseus. In the late 2ndcentury under the patronage of Commodus, the kosmetes “revived” the Athenaia festival, which according to myth had been founded by Erichthonios and was later transformed by Theseus into the Panathenaia.46 Under Septimius Severus, myth was again mined, this time with perhaps a more pointed aim, at the appearance of the Amphiareia festival commemorating the hero whose earth-shaking end at Oropos bolstered Athenian claims to the territory surrounding the Amphiareion sanctuary.47 Athenians may have thought it prudent to advertise the relationship again in light of the emperor’s hostility to the city.48
Sparta: the customs of Lycurgus Embodying the other pole of Hellenic culture in the Empire was Sparta, where physical and martial prowess were purportedly prized more highly than the intellectual pursuits associated with Athens. The relative abundance of inscriptions attests that Spartan efforts to assert unique civic and social identities through a variety of resuscitated or invented traditions produced so archaistic an environment for its training system, the agoge, that its function as a lieu de mémoire remained unparalleled among contemporary Greek cities. Writers such as Plutarch and Pausanias, who both visited the city, accepted that the Spartans of their own time had preserved the ancient traditions of their ancestors unchanged. Philostratus credited the sage Apollonius of Tyana with rousing the Spartans to a vigorous revival of the discipline of Lycurgus, the city’s legendary lawgiver, under Nero, even though Spartan archaism is first attested several decades later, during the reign of Hadrian.49 Hadrian was instrumental in returning Sparta to her former position as the second city of Greece. He planned on giving the city a seat on the Delphic Amphictyony, though it actually found a place as one of the leading members of the supra-provincial Panhellenion. He encouraged the Cyrenaeans to train their youth in Laconian virtue, visited Sparta twice as emperor, in 124 and 128/129 CE, and held the eponymous magistracy of Roman Sparta as patronomos probably in 127/128 CE.50 The Emperor’s gesture was heavy with symbolism. The patronomate, a magistracy introduced by the reformer king Cleomenes III as part of his attempt to revive Spartan power in the later 3rdcentury BCE, was responsible in the Roman period for the agoge’s administration and probably performed at least some of its associated public ceremonies.51 One incumbent was praised for his “presidency of the Lycurgan customs,” as the agoge was often called at the time – an appellation that stressed its central role in preserving the memory of Spartan uniqueness.52 Despite this allusion to the earliest days of the city’s history, the agoge of the Roman period was quite different from the Spartan training system at the city’s zenith. The agoge had undergone two lengthy periods of desuetude and
20 Nigel M. Kennell revival by the 2nd-century CE. The first lasted from ca. 255 BCE at the latest until 227 BCE, when Cleomenes III instituted his version of the training system, while the second occurred during the period of the city’s forced incorporation into the Achaian League, 188 to 146 BCE, when it was revived under Roman patronage.53 The agoge of Hadrian’s time had developed since its rebirth three centuries before into a repository of Spartan tradition, an efficient machine for remembering. The later agoge’s role in preserving “heritage” is most apparent in the case of the ball-playing contest held to mark the passage from ephebe to adult citizen. Ephebes competed in teams of sphaireis (“ball-players”) named after the five ancient obai, the geographical districts of the city, which in the Roman period appear only in the inscriptions related to ephebic or athletic activity.54 Unlike much of the later agoge, the sphaireis game had a wellattested Classical origin. In his Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, Xenophon reports that one of the handicaps visited upon the notorious “tremblers” (tresantes), men who showed cowardice in battle, was often being without a place when ball-playing teams were chosen.55 In his time, then, the sphaireis game was a source of prestige for adult Spartiates, whereas by the Roman period it had become an exclusively ephebic competition, in the same manner as the Theseia at Athens. One of Sparta’s best-known festivals, the Gymnopaideia, developed along similar lines. In the Classical period, choruses of youths and of men performed, famously continuing uninterrupted when news of the staggering defeat at Leuctra in 371 BCE reached the city.56 Only nude ephebes and boys (paides), however, appear in the extant Roman-period sources dancing and hymning Apollo.57 Thus, the Gymnopaideia also seems to have become exclusively associated with Sparta’s youth, who conveyed this aspect of social memory through their formal actions in the festival. The agoge’s very structure helped to create an environment of archaism for Spartan ephebes. The names of the five age grades (reduced to two later in the 2nd-century) spanning ages sixteen to twenty were, at first hearing, redolent of antiquity – mikichizomenos, pratopampais, hatropampais, melleiren, eiren – but are unattested before the Hellenistic period.58 An anachronistic pastiche of the old Laconian dialect was the agoge’s official language, appearing on victory inscriptions and probably employed in the singing competitions, whose names also carried the message of the training system’s antique authenticity.59 Its most famous competition, known throughout the Empire, was the contest of endurance, during which youths lined up naked beside the altar of Artemis Orthia, the agoge’s patron deity, to be whipped until they collapsed; the last youth standing won renown as “altar victor” (bomonikes) and was awarded the right to erect a statue in the goddess’s sanctuary. Pausanias was told that Lycurgus himself was behind the contest in its later, bloody form, but Plutarch earlier had linked it to an incident during the Battle of Plataea during the Persian Wars.60 Whatever the later aetiologies, its Classical predecessor as described by Xenophon (although he did credit the lawgiver with its invention) was quite different, however: it took the form of
Memory and identity among the ephebes 21 a contest in which one team wielded whips to ward off the other from snatching cheeses placed on the altar of Artemis.61 Outside the sanctuary of Artemis, another violent contest conveyed a similar message, that the practices here had survived in their ancient form. In an area called the Platanistas (“Plane Tree Grove”) two teams of ephebes trooped over two different bridges, each overlooked by a statue, one of Heracles, the iconic ancestor of the kings who had once reigned in Sparta, the other of Lycurgus, onto an artificial island to bash the living daylights out of one another. The aim was to push members of the opposing team into the surrounding water by any means available – pushing, shoving, biting, and even eye-gouging.62 A spectator at these or another such event of the Spartan agoge under the Empire would thus have seen old Sparta in the full vigor of its youth, competing in age-old contests and speaking the language of Lycurgus and Leonidas – a living, tangible corollary to Cicero’s astonishing description of the Spartans of his own time as “the only people in the whole world who have lived now for more than seven hundred years with one and the same set of customs and unchanging laws.”63 According to both Spartan belief and ancient scholarship, the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus had introduced almost all those customs and laws that shaped the city’s supposedly unique society. By the 2nd-century CE, though, Sparta had become an unexceptional, prosperous regional center whose public institutions, apart from a few – such as the ephors and gerousia – that preserved their Classical titles, functioned little differently from those of other provincial towns, its streets lined with the requisite baths, colonnades, and villas with elaborate mosaics, and its acropolis boasting a marble-revetted theater. This was the city whose agoge functioned as the sole vehicle for the performance and transmission of essential aspects of the definition of Spartan identity: adherence to ancient tradition, and endurance of physical hardship.64 Lycurgus was not the only totemic figure for Sparta’s ephebes.65 Heracles, under whose name one of the teams fought at the Platanistas, also had a special meaning beyond his panhellenic association with the gymnasium. Before the fight at the Plane Tree Grove, each team sacrificed puppies to the war god Enyalios at the Phoibaion in Therapne, an act that probably echoed the killing, by the hero’s cousin Oionos, of a dog belonging to the sons of Hippokoön, the king of Sparta, who murdered him in turn, thus provoking Heracles to homicidal revenge, killing all his enemies and taking possession of the land. This myth justified the Heraclid and Spartan claim to Laconia and even Messenia, independent since 370/69 BCE.66 This pair of memory figures, Lycurgus and Heracles, thus represented Sparta’s venerable constitution and the city’s hegemony over adjacent regions.67 After his victory, Heracles founded heroa for his slain adversaries, all in regions of the city associated with ephebic activity. Four of Hippokoön’s sons received cultic honors at locations in the vicinity of the Platanistas, where the ephebic battle may have prompted comparisons to the struggle against the Hippokoöntidai.68 Another was honored near a statue of Heracles to whom
22 Nigel M. Kennell the Sphaireis sacrificed, probably as individuals, and a sixth tomb was at the ephebic exercise ground known as the Dromos (“Racecourse”).69 Inscriptions of the 2nd-century refer to priests of a divinity, Karneios, who Pausanias claims was venerated at Sparta before the arrival of the Heraclids, and one of whose epithets was Dromaios (“of the Racecourse”).70 That so many elements of the agoge harkened back to the origins of the Spartan state without any explicit reference to the city’s Classical history, especially its resounding victory over Athens and the short-lived but extensive Spartan empire that resulted, is not fortuitous. A similar bias is evident even in the city’s monumental landscape. Pausanias describes only a few memorials of Sparta’s great victory over Athens, compared to the temples, shrines, buildings, statues, and altars honoring figures or marking events from myth and legend. Brasidas had a cenotaph between the theater and the agora; Lysander was remembered through a temple to Ammon, which prompted Pausanias to recount the story of his dream during the siege of Thracian Aphyta, and two golden eagles he dedicated on the acropolis to celebrate his victory at Aigospotamoi.71 The Spartan army’s seer on that occasion received the honor of a statue in the agora, next to which the altar of Augustus was later erected, but Lysander himself, who could claim to have been the city’s most successful general, enjoyed no such recognition.72 The defeat of Athens may have established Sparta as the hegemon of the Greek world, but the Peloponnesian War did not fit the narrative of panhellenic unity in the face of an eastern threat that had been cultivated to conform with Roman policy since the time of Augustus and was especially prevalent at the apogee of the Second Sophistic in the 2nd-century CE.73 In consequence, that Roman Sparta’s memory of the Archaic period through to the end of the Persian Wars was crystal clear but became rather fuzzier in the following decades consequently comes as no surprise. Several locations around the city evoked remembrance of the Spartans’ role in facing down Greece’s earliest existential threat. On occasion, these lieux de mémoire drew parallels between the Persian Wars and the panhellenic campaign against Troy, another eastern enemy. At the southern end of Sparta’s main road, the Aphetaïs, was an area called the Hellenion, where Achaeans were said to have met to strategize their vengeance against Paris for his adultery with Helen.74 Pausanias also reports the Spartan claim that, centuries later, representatives of Greek states assembled there to plan resistance against the Persians, even though Herodotus recorded this assembly as taking place at the Isthmus of Corinth.75 The periegete finds another correspondence between the two wars in Agamemnon’s herald, Talthybios, commemorated with a statue in the vicinity, who had visited his anger on both Athenians and Spartans because of their abusive treatment of the Persian envoys sent to demand earth and water.76 In the agora stood the famed Persian Stoa, built from booty seized from the Persians and remodeled over the years into an impressive building with white marble representations of prominent figures on the enemy side.77 The regent Pausanias, victor of Plataea, had two bronze statues on the acropolis near the temple
Memory and identity among the ephebes 23 of Athena Chalkioikos, where he was starved to death, while his tomb was located near the theater, close to that of Leonidas, leader of the Spartiates at Thermopylae.78 The Leonideia festival in honor of Leonidas, Pausanias, “and the rest of the heroes” was the closest Sparta came to the Athenians’ array of ephebic activities associated with the Persian Wars.79 The surviving portions of several inscriptions record its revival in the late 1st-century CE, thanks to a generous donation by one Agesilaus that doubled the prize money.80 Although not formally an ephebic contest, the Leonideia was open only to Spartan citizens, which meant young Spartans enrolled in the agoge would qualify to participate in one of the athletic categories for underage competitors. Along with their elders, they would have been among the audience in the theater listening to the speeches delivered over the two tombs, no doubt praising Leonidas and Pausanias as exemplary Spartan warriors. Spartan ephebes were probably also present at Plataea in the Roman period to witness the exchange of speeches between Spartan and Athenian ephebes to win the right to lead the procession (propompeia) at the subsequent games, the Eleutheria, that commemorated Greece’s victory in 479 BCE. While these speeches date back well into the Hellenistic period, ephebes’ presence here is thought to have begun much later.81 Attendance at these enkomia of their cities’ accomplishments fighting off the might of the Persian Empire in what might be considered the founding act of Hellenism would have been a desirable, if not indeed essential, element in the ephebic curricula of both Athens and Sparta, particularly considering the Romans’ policy of equating the Persian Wars with their long-standing conflict with the Parthians.82 The archaistic framing of the hostility between Romans and Parthians had an effect even beyond festivals and ephebic activity. Some young Spartans, having recently left the agoge, joined imperial campaigns under Lucius Verus and Caracalla as allies against the “Persians.” In the latter instance, the Spartans formed a contingent called the lochos of Pitane, whereby the emperor not only solved the centuries-old dispute over the existence of a Spartan military unit with this name but also surpassed Alexander the Great by including Spartans in his panhellenic Eastern campaign.83
Messene: Ephebes and the construction of civic identity Both Athenians and Spartans could make choices about their canons of remembering that drew upon deep wells of myth and history believed to stretch back a millennium or more. The Messenians operated under greater constraint. Their city, originally called Ithome, had been founded only in the 4th-century BCE as a result of Thebes’ resounding defeat of Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BCE, followed two years later by Epaminondas’ invasion of Laconia and liberation of Messenia. The archaeological site of Messene, magnificently located on the slopes of Mt. Ithome, has yielded a wealth of architectural, sculptural, and epigraphic remains. Though much is yet to be fully published, this abundant evidence enables us to discern how a recently
24 Nigel M. Kennell established polis forged a civic identity from pre-existing traditions, institutions, and fabrications designed to affirm the city’s antiquity and legitimize its inhabitants’ claim to the land. The epic narrative of ill-starred resistance against the Spartan invasion in the Messenian Wars, distilled from the works of the poet Rhianus of Crete and the historian Myron of Priene, which opens Pausanias’ account of Messenia, presents what had surely become the “official” version of the city’s 8th- and 7th-century history, introducing as it does the second archaic war’s great national hero Aristomenes, who was conspicuously present in the lives of the Messenian ephebes of Pausanias’ time. 84 According to tradition, local residents and Messenians returning from their scattered places of exile settled in the new city, though the actual population appears to have been more heterogeneous, requiring some effort to unite the disparate groups into a single community of “Messenians,” for which the figure of Aristomenes had particular relevance. Philip II’s financial diplomacy brought Messenia over to his side in 345 BCE so that it did not join the Greek allies at Chaeronea in 338.85 Apart from its aberrant and disastrous participation in the anti-Macedonian alliance during the Lamian War, much of the city’s Hellenistic history was colored by its relations with Macedonia, upon whose influence several prominent families depended for their positions. Some realignment occurred in the middle of the 3rd-century, when Messene allied with the Aetolian League, while in 191 BCE Titus Flamininus compelled the Messenians to join the powerful Achaean League.86 After less than a decade, the unhappy Messenians attempted to revolt, capturing and killing the Achaean general Philopoemen in the process, for which act the victorious Achaeans stripped Messene of all its territory in the wider region. After Rome’s victory over the League in 146, the city may have regained control over some surrounding territory, in addition to the contentious Dentheliatis on the border with Sparta.87 The Messenians may have supported Pompey against Caesar, but certainly allied with Antony against Octavian, prompted no doubt by Spartan support for Caesar’s heir. As a result, the city once again lost territory, this time to Sparta and the newly minted League of Free Laconians.88 The layers of Messene’s history were visible in the city’s physical infrastructure. The years of Spartan domination left traces in the central shrine of Artemis Orthia and the cult of the Dioscuri. Messenians also celebrated games dedicated to Orthia in her other guise as Artemis Limnatis, whose shrine lay in the Dentheliatis plain.89 Less Spartan-flavored elements included the temple of Asclepius, whose sculptural decoration emphasized the god’s Messenian origins, and a monumental fountain named after Arsinoe. Her genealogy linked Messenian and Spartan mythological traditions, since local memory held Arsinoe, one of the daughters of Leucippus worshipped at Sparta, to be the mother of Messene’s patron deity Asclepius.90 Tombs with decidedly Macedonian styling reflected their occupants’ relations with the ruling dynasties of the long-term hegemonic power.91 The requisite smattering of local hero shrines completes the picture.
Memory and identity among the ephebes 25 As the venue for festivals in honor of Zeus Ithomatas and Asclepius as well as for ephebic training, the Gymnasium had a leading role in the long- standing process of acclimatization to an assertive civic identity that laid claim to ancient authenticity. The largest single structure uncovered in the city to date, the massive Gymnasium-Stadium complex dominates the city’s southern part.92 By the 2nd-century the Gymnasium, originally built in the later 3rd-century BCE, had undergone renovation, remodeling, and repair. The West Stoa had been transformed in the early Imperial period with the addition of several rooms containing honorific statues to its west and a new entrance through an impressive Doric propylon at the Gymnasium’s northwest corner. Its columns covered with lists, more or less official, of ephebes and the graffiti scratched onto the bases of many statues attest to the West Stoa’s role as the center of ephebic activity. In contrast, the East Stoa apparently housed no honorific statues nor provided any surface for ephebic catalogues or graffiti. Restored in the Roman period by the priest of Zeus Ithomatas, the Stoa stood in stark, somewhat dignified contrast to its western neighbor. Its lack of additional adornment was partly owed to its function: the East Stoa served as a covered running track (xystos) where athletes and ephebes might practice the stadion and other races in inclement weather. But this Stoa also represented and conveyed essential elements of Messenian identity to young would-be citizens. Aristomenes, hero of Messenia’s unwavering resistance to the Spartan invasion, personifying an era central to Messenian self-definition as the eternal enemy of Sparta, was an immediate presence in the area in front of the East Stoa. Pausanias reports that the hero’s tomb was in the Gymnasium and that he was told of an oracular ritual involving a bull being tied to a column on his tomb.93 No heroon has been found inside the Gymnasium, though the excavator tentatively identified it with a structure just outside the northwest entrance.94 But an impressive Doric column now re-erected outside the East Stoa would fit the periegete’s description of the monument that figured in the oracular ritual.95 Standing on a stepped base, the tall column has cuttings on its capital for a bronze statue that, according to the excavator, would have represented Aristomenes. A limestone base in the form of a cube was located nearby; its sides bore shields in relief similar to the shield-covered base for the tropaion that the Thebans erected at Leuctra to commemorate Sparta’s historic defeat.96 This monument undoubtedly referred to a victory, though where and when remain unknown. The third element of the highly charged group in front of the East Stoa was a stele erected in the 3rd-century BCE to record the names of those who had died “at Makistos,” a town in Triphylia, northwest of Messenia. The excavator has argued that this monument marked another Spartan defeat, this time at the hands of the Messenians themselves in the 3rd-century.97 These monuments were situated together, in a location where statues and memorials were commonly placed for conspicuous effect, at the end of the practice track (paradromis) that ran alongside the covered racing track (xystos) which at Messene was in fact the East Stoa, as mentioned above.98 By the time of Pausanias’ visit in the mid-2nd-century CE,
26 Nigel M. Kennell when all these evocative elements were still in place, athletes and ephebes would have run toward memorials of Messenian military prowess during their regular practices, beneath the feet of Aristomenes himself. The role of both the Gymnasium and Aristomenes in promoting memory was not confined to a single area in its northeast, however. The North, West, and East Stoas surrounded a stadium whose axis aligned with the peak of Mt. Ithome, the city’s acropolis and the most evocative site in Messenia. This mountain was the location of Zeus Ithomatas’ shrine, whose priest was the city’s eponymous magistrate.99 Ithome was also famous as the place where the rebellious Messenian helots held out against the Spartans after the revolt of 465/4 BCE. 100 On its peak, Aristomenes himself, with Zeus’ aid, had supposedly buried a bronze urn containing secret instructions for the Andanian mysteries of the Great Gods which an Argive general in Epaminondas’ army conveniently discovered in 369 BCE. 101 Messenians of the Roman period appear to have associated Aristomenes even more directly with the circumstances of the “rebirth” of their city-state, for Pausanias reports (immediately after describing the ritual at the column in the Gymnasium) a Messenian story that the spirit of Aristomenes appeared in the Battle of Leuctra to aid the Thebans against the Spartans.102 Aristomenes and his legend suffused the Gymnasium, forming the foundation upon which Messenians fashioned an identity to be transmitted to their youth that stressed their ancestors’ heroism and unrelenting enmity to the Spartans, even though relations had perforce improved under the confining strictures of Roman rule.103 The Gymnasium’s environment, imbued with symbols redolent of the city’s primordial past and allusions to its later military successes, contributed to creating in the ephebes training there an appreciation of the bonds between the Hellenistic city and its putative predecessor before the Spartan conquest. Vital to this project from the start were Messene’s five civic tribes, created in the 4th-century. They proclaimed Messenians’ descent from Heraclids and Dorians – Hyllis, Kleolaia, Aristomachis, Kresphontis, and Daiphontis.104 The five tribal names formed a subtly articulated complex of associations with their Dorian identity and the territory’s aboriginal inhabitants, traced through Heracles’ lineage, reflecting what was held to be the situation at the time when the Heraclid leaders apportioned the Peloponnese amongst themselves.105 Upon entering the ephebate, young Messenians would have had their first experience of this system of memory when they participated as representatives of their own family’s tribe. Recording the ephebes’ tribal membership evidently gained in importance in the Roman period, as catalogues of yearly cohorts with the ephebes divided by tribe first appear under Augustus.106 For about a century, until the reign of Trajan, non-Messenians also appeared, listed variously under the rubrics “Foreigners and Romans” or “Foreigners.” 107 These categories disappear in the late 1st-century CE, when those ephebes were apparently incorporated into the five tribes, which would reflect their being considered Messenians too. Ephebes from other cities in Messenia also appear in a few lists, probably
Memory and identity among the ephebes 27 from the later 1st-century BCE, which may reflect either a period of domination by Messene or simply a transient sense of shared ethnic identity on the part of some individuals.108 Apart from certain tribal names, the Dorian element of their identity is revealed most in the word Messenians used for their ephebes – triteirenes/ trietirenes – attested in Roman-era lists and at Hellenistic Thouria.109 The word, which means “eiren for three years,” is derived from the name for the eldest age grade in Sparta’s later agoge, documented in Roman-era inscriptions.110 When developing their ephebate in the 3rd-century BCE, probably about the same time the Gymnasium was first built, the Messenians evidently adopted an informal Spartan age category and adapted it for their own purposes before it was formalized in the revived agoge.111 As in the case of the cults of Artemis and the Dioskouroi, that Messenians claimed their use of the term was more authentic than that of their eastern neighbors is not inconceivable.112 When Pausanias walked around Messene’s Gymnasium-Stadium complex, local traditions had developed into a rich setting for the important monuments and activities there. Compared to other cities, though, and to the theme of this volume, one component they shared is missing – the 5th- century. The obvious explanation is that Messenians had no Classical history to draw upon. The cultural memories that bound them into a community centered rather on an imagined history prior to and in opposition to the Spartan domination prevailing for centuries. To this repertory of remembrance were added some monuments to military victories against Sparta after their new city’s foundation. Despite their historical and cultural differences, these three cities shared certain identifiable characteristics in their ephebic ideologies. Figures from earliest history – the mythical Theseus for Athens, legendary Lycurgus for Sparta, and pseudo-historical Aristomenes for Messene – were of paramount importance for educating young would-be citizens about the legitimacy of their polis’ foundation and its control over the surrounding territory. The ephebates’ military focus also required military history to be strongly represented in the acculturation of ephebes, manifested through commemoration of certain carefully selected events. Ephebic activity at Athens and Sparta concentrated on the panhellenic struggle against the foreign, eastern threat posed by the Persians, practices that aligned perfectly with Roman policy as regards the perceived threat posed by the Parthians.113 The rest of Classicalperiod history, on the other hand, especially that of Sparta and Athens, held many pitfalls for members of the elite in the Greek East. An internecine war, two short-lived Empires, and a failed attempt to halt the expansion of a power seen as the Roman Empire’s forerunner offered models far from suitable for ephebes to emulate. By contrast, the Messenians’ Classical history was unproblematic, for the brutal reason that their polis did not exist under the Spartan occupation. Strangely, their part in the defeat of the Spartans at Sphakteria in 425 BCE, which inspired the most famous Messenian monument, the Nike of Paionios
28 Nigel M. Kennell at Olympia, seems to have left no mark on the Messenian ephebate, despite the impression it made on the periegete Pausanias.114 This may have been because it took place during the problematic Peloponnesian War, despite the Messenians’ using the Nike’s base to advertise their besting of Sparta in a territorial dispute arbitrated by the Milesians in 138 BCE.115 Here too, however, early history offered the uncompromised, heroic figure of Aristomenes, the paradigmatic fighter against Spartan aggression, whose spiritual descendants were honored by the Makistos monument in the Gymnasium. As these case studies show, early history and mythology were exploited to inspire ephebes to a far greater degree than the events of the 5th and 4th centuries, despite the predominance of the latter in literature and the visual arts. Events on the cusp between myth and history were temporally distant enough to be safe to remember in the circumstances of the 2nd-century CE. The seemingly anomalous role of Hellenistic history in Messene’s ephebate instead represents an attempt at cultivating continuity between the new city, much threatened by a resentful Sparta, and its supposed status as a fully-fledged polis with many allies before its subjugation in the Archaic period.116 In all three cities – Athens, Sparta, and Messene – the ephebate functioned as a lieu de mémoire, where significant events endowed with canonical status might be remembered and acted out as expressions of particular civic identities.
Notes 1 Assmann 2011, 4–5, 26. Maurice Halbwachs (1950) first coined the sociological concept of collective or cultural memory, into which Pierre Nora (1984–1992) introduced the idea of lieux de mémoire in a famous series of edited volumes on aspects of French historical memory. Jan Assmann later showed how this theory could be applied to archaeology and ancient history. 2 Assmann 2008, 100–102. 3 Oath of Plataea: Habicht 1961, 12–15; Robert 1938; Daux 1965; Kellogg 2013. 4 Epitaphia: IG II2 1028, lines 19–20; 1006, line 22. Marathon: IG II2 1006, lines 26–27. Oropos: IG II2 1006, lines 27–28. 5 The Gymnasium of Kylarabes at Argos: Livy 34.26.2; Paus. 2.27.9; cf. Plut. Cleom. 17.2, 26.2. The Lykeion at Epidauros: IG IV.1 1467; SEG 35 (1985) 307; cf. Paus. 2.19.1. The Hippolyteion at Troizen: IG IV.1 754 and probably 753 (see Delorme 1960, 68). 6 Spawforth 2012, 60–63. 7 On foreign ephebes in the Hellenistic period, see Perrin-Saminadayar 2007, 468–475. 8 IG II2 2119, lines 127–129. 9 Plut. Moralia 349E, 862a; Simon 1983, 83; Shear 2012, 159, 170. The date of Artemis’ festival became identified with the date of the battle itself: Jung 2006, 55. 10 IG II2 1011, line 8; 1006, line 58; 1028, line 8; 1029, line 6; X. Anab. 3.2.13. 11 IG II2 1006, lines 26–27. The Epitaphia is not attested after 17/16 BCE (IG II2 2997). On the place of Marathon in the ephebic curriculum of the Hellenistic period, see Jung 2006, 176–181.
Memory and identity among the ephebes 29 12 A rebellion in Achaea under Antoninus Pius is mentioned in HA Ant Pius. 5. Marathon’s increasing prominence in 2nd-century literature is another story; see Bowie 2013, esp. 251–253. 13 Newby 2017, 86–87. 14 E.g. IG II2 2087, 2106, 2119, 2130. 15 IG II2 2208, 2245, 22087, 2130. Newby 2005, 179–190, provides an extensive discussion of naumachiai in the Roman period. 16 On the place of Salamis in the ephebic calendar from the Hellenistic to the Roman period, see Newby 2017. 17 Spawforth 1994. 18 Robertson 1986. 19 Follet 1978, 225; IG II2 2113, lines 142–151; 2130, lines 37–47; 2086, line 33–35. 20 IG II2 2788, dated to the end of the 2nd-century BCE. In it the speaker assumes the role of Athens itself; see Robertson 1986, 97–99. 21 Robertson 1986, 90. 22 Plut. QC 9.11 (736D); Cribiore 2001, 137–147. On the importance of these texts in ephebic education, see Wiemer 2011, 514. 23 IG II2 2119, lines 226–228: [τὸν] | ἐπὶ τοῖς ἥρωσι λαμ[παδίαν? — —]|δωρος. Graindor 1922, 214. 24 E.g., IG II2 1009, lines 20–22; 1028, lines 51–53 (Hellenistic period); 1970, lines 7–8; 2022, lines 7–10 (Roman period). 25 X. Mem. 3.1; Theoc. 24.126–129; Galen 6.153–154 (Kühn). Hoplomachos in ephebic lists: IG II2 2068, line 64; 2086, lines 28–29; 2203, lines 32–33. 26 The kestrophulax is attested in lists from about 80 CE (IG II2 1993, line 14) to 267/8 CE (Oliver 1942, no. 37). In IG II2 2024, line 130, the kestrophulax is listed among the paideutai (instructors). 27 Wallace-Hadrill 1981, 306 n. 42. 28 E.g. IG II2 2047, line 7. On sustremma, Ael. Tact. 16.3.9. 29 IG II2 2055, 4–6. 30 IG II2 1078. 31 IG II2 2050 (143/4 CE); for the relief, see Wiemer 2011, 492–494. 32 On military training of ephebes in preparation for their role in domestic security, see Kennell 2009a, 332–334; Kennell 2013, 217–220; Kennell 2015, 173–175, 179–180. 33 No tribes: e.g. IG II2 1967 (36 CE); 1973 (40/41–53/4 CE). Tribes: e.g. IG II2 2044 (139/40 CE); 2049 (142/3 CE). 34 Sophronistai first reappear in IG II2 2044 (143/4 CE); Perrin-Saminadayar 2004, 102. 35 Plut. Thes. 36.1–2; Cim. 8.3–6; Bugh 1990; Kennell 1999a. 36 As in the detailed list of festivals incorporated into the ephebic catalogue IG II2 2119 (191/2 CE). 37 Pernot 1993, 55–66. 38 Newby 2005, 176–177. 39 IG II2 2291a. IG II2 2291b seems to be an encomium of the city of Athens. 40 IG II2 2291a, lines 48–51. 41 Wiemer 2011, 513. 42 IG II2 2119, lines 237–266; 2291a, lines 4–6; in a new inscription from 175/6 CE, at least twenty-two names appear under the rubric Θησεῖδαι: Sourlas 2015, 301. 43 Newby 2005, 195–200; IG II2 2050. 44 Sourlas 2015, 308–309, comes to almost the same conclusion.
30 Nigel M. Kennell 45 Theseus: Hyg. 38; Paus. 1.39.3. Heracles: Bacchyl. 13.44–66. 46 IG II2 2116, lines 18–21. On the origin: Ister FGrHist 334 F4. This festival should be distinguished from the Athenaia known from several Hellenistic inscriptions (e.g., IG II2 2239), an alternative name for the Chalkeia, which was celebrated by artisans, both Athenian and foreign: Mommsen 1898, 342–343. 47 IG II2 2203, 2197, 2237. 48 Oliver 1981, 422. 49 Philos. VA 4.27. 50 Amphictyony and Panhellenion: FdD 3.4, 302 col. 2 lines 5–6; Spawforth and Walker 1986, 96. Cyrene: Reynolds 1978, 113, 118; SEG 28 (1978) 1566. Hadrian: Halfmann 1990, 192. Hadrian’s patronomate: Bradford 1986. 51 Kennell 1995, 44–45. 52 IG V.1 543, 544. Cf. Kennell 1995, 184 n.97. 53 Kennell 1995, 7–14. 54 IG V.1 674–688; Kennell 1995, 40, 59–63. 55 X. LC 2.2: πολλάκις δ’ὁ τοιοῦτος καὶ διαιρουμένων τοὺς ἀντισφαιριοῦντας ἀχώριστος περιγίγνεται. 56 X. HG 6.4.16; Plut. Ages. 29.3. 57 Paus. 3.11.9; Athen. 24.631 b–c. 58 Kennell 1995, 38–39, 92–93. 59 Kennell 1995, 87–93. 60 Paus. 3.16.9–11; Plut. Arist. 17.10. 61 X. LC 2.9. 62 Paus. 3.14.8–10; Luc. Anach. 38; Kennell 1995, 55–59. 63 Cicero, In Flaccum 63. On the agoge in the Roman period, Kennell 1995, 50–97. 64 Kennell 2018, 648. 65 Lycurgus and the agoge: Kennell 2018, 649. 66 Paus. 3.14.9; Gengler 2005, 318–319. 67 Kennell 2018, 648–650. 68 Kennell 2018, 650. 69 Paus. 3.15.1–5; Kennell 2018, 649–650. 70 IG V.1 497, 598, 608. 71 Paus. 3.14.1, 3. 72 Paus. 3.11.5. 73 On Augustan cultural policy and its influence on Greece, see Spawforth 2012, 103–141, esp. 117–130 (Sparta). 74 Paus. 3.12.6. 75 Hdt. 7.172.1. 76 Hdt. 7.133; Paus. 3.12.7; Kennell 2018, 651–652. 77 Paus. 3.11.3. 78 Paus. 3.14.1. 79 Paus. 3.14.1; IG V.1 660 honors Kleon son of Sokrates for ἀγωνισάμενον | τὸν ἐπιτάφι[ον Λεωνίδα] | καὶ Παυσαν[ία καὶ τῶν λοι]|πῶν ἡρώω[ν]. 80 IG V.1 18–20; Gengler 2005. 81 Robertson 1986. 82 For the Roman use of images and rhetoric alluding to the Persian Wars, especially in Greek cities, see Spawforth 2012, 103–140. 83 Kennell 2009b, 285–288. 84 Paus. 4.14.6–24.3; Luraghi 2008, 85–101. For the legend of Aristomenes, see Ogden 2004.
Memory and identity among the ephebes 31
85 86 87 88
Luraghi 2008, 254. Luraghi 2008, 262. Luraghi 2008, 264. Luraghi 2008, 266. On the Eleutherolaconian League, see Kennell 1999b, especially 204–205. 89 IG V.1 1375–1376; Luraghi 2008, 18–24. 90 On the Arsinoe fountain, see Themelis 2010, 115–120; Luraghi 2008, 269–270. 91 Macedonian-style tombs: Müth 2007, 114–117; Ito 2002, 8–13 (Tomb K1); Themelis 2002, 241–243; 2019, 175 (circular structure with relief sculpture in the Macedonian style). 92 No detailed plan of the entire gymnasium has been published. Partial plans of the northwest and southwest side are available in Müth 2007, 98, fig. 39; 104, fig. 43. There is a rich series of photographs in Themelis 2010, 224–245. 93 Paus. 4.32.3. 94 Themelis 2001, 202–203. Unfortunately, no decisive evidence exists to support this hypothesis. 95 Themelis 2007, 46. 96 Themelis 2001, 201. 97 Themelis 2001, 199–201; Luraghi 2008, 257. 98 Kazakidi 2011, 254–256. 99 Paus. 4.33.1–2. 100 Thuc. 1.101.1–103. 4. 101 Paus. 4.20.3–4, 26.6–8. On the mysteries at Andania, see Gawlinski 2012. 102 Paus. 4.32.4. 103 Relations between the two states evidently passed through a short period of amity in the Hellenistic period: Themelis 1997, 110. In the Roman period, a gift of 10,000 denarii for oil and sacrifices to the emperor by a member of the Euryclid family recorded on the Gymnasium’s propylon has been seen as a sign of that notorious Spartan dynasty’s increased influence at Messene: Themelis 2000, 62–63; Luraghi 2008, 22 n. 30. On the other hand, the Dentheliatis territory continued to be a point of contention: Tac. 4.43.4. 104 Jones 1987, 146–148. 105 Luraghi 2008, 230–233. 106 Themelis 1996, 158. 107 Themelis 1996, 157–158; 2015, 111 (ξένοι καὶ Ῥωμαῖοι); Themelis 1992, 75; 2000, 90–91 (ξένοι). 108 Ephebes from other Messenian cities: Themelis 1996, 157–158, who provides no texts. On the obscure relationship between these cities and Messene in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Luraghi 2008, 27–43, 286–291, 323–324. 109 Messene: Themelis 1992, 71; 1996, 157; 2000, 90–91; 2015, 111. Thouria: IG V.1 1386. 110 IG V.1 279; Plut. Lyc. 17.3. 111 On the revival of Spartan citizen training, see Kennell 1995, 9–13. 112 On Artemis and the Dioskouroi, see Luraghi 2008, 235–238. 113 Spawforth 2012, 103–141. 114 Paus. 5.261. 115 I. Oly. 52. 116 For an ambitious attempt to recover the process by which the image of an earlier Messenian “polis” during the Messenian Wars was constructed in the 4th-century BCE, see Zingg 2016.
32 Nigel M. Kennell
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3 Pausanias book X A detour to the fringes of “classical” Greece Frank Daubner
“How do you define Greece?” Philip V of Macedon (Polybius 18, 5, 7)
Pausanias and “all things Greek” There is little consensus on the voluminous work of Pausanias; scholars do not even agree on whether it is about the past or the present. Important in itself, the question becomes crucial in the context of a volume on the past and present in the province of Achaea, on the assumed collective historical nostalgia of 2nd-century-CE Greeks, and the continuing process of negotiation that determined the position of Greece and the Greeks in a world dominated politically and militarily by western barbarians for three centuries. Greek intellectuals, by working intensively on the past, managed to convince the Roman ruling classes of the Greeks’ cultural superiority; emperors, such as the Athenian citizen Hadrian in particular, created a second Golden Age in Greece with their commitment to the Hellenic past as well as the Roman present, and the great cities of the past flourished once again. The bulky work of Pausanias, however, opposes such an unambiguous narrative. It seems to insist on the past glory of Greece and to describe a depressed present that is, at first sight, incompatible with the magnificent present that the so-called Second Sophistic evokes. Opinions about the basic character of the work differ widely; while Hutton points to Pausanias’ “desire to present an accurate portrayal of the present-day state of the antiquities of Greece”,1 Alcock interprets his work as a nostalgic reminder of old-fashioned political organizations and realities.2 Elsner, in his influential article on Pausanias as pilgrim, even argues that in looking for the past, Pausanias was avoiding the present.3 How such opinions are formed is obvious. The perplexity in the face of the fact that conspicuous and unmissable monuments of the Roman period are not mentioned has often been discussed.4 Instead, Pausanias describes in detail not only outstanding Classical monuments, but also half-ruined, roofless mud-brick temples and deserted hamlets. The impression might arise that he wishes to suggest that everything was better in the past. However, Pausanias clearly states his intention of representation. On the Athenian Acropolis, he commences one of his famous digressions but interrupts DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-4
36 Frank Daubner it immediately with the sentence: “But I must proceed, for I have to describe all things Greek.”5 What is πάντα τὰ Ἑλληνικά? In his ten books, he describes the landscapes of “Old Greece”, starting from the autochthonous Athenians (1, 2, 6) and ending with the autochthonous Western Locrians (10, 38, 3). The contrast between these two groups could not be greater. It is obvious that the books do not form an itinerary but are composed in a deliberately designed geographical sequence according to a plan.6 If we take Pausanias seriously – as we should – then the plan is to provide “one hegemonic version of Greek history, with one individual defining the memories of many.”7 This is not to say, of course, that the hegemonic version of Greek history that Pausanias presents is inconsistent with the view that commonly prevailed among the intellectuals of his time. Without meaning to speculate about the extensive ignoring of Rome by the authors of the Second Sophistic, it seems clear that Rome and things Roman do not belong to the Greek things.8 That the destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE plays a central role in Pausanias’ historical account has already been emphasized in scholarship.9 That his attitude toward Roman rule is ambivalent is also clear, even if it is certainly evaluated as better than the foreign rule of the Persians or the Macedonians.10 Consequently, Pausanias does not consider the contemporary inhabitants of the Roman colonia of Corinth to be Greeks – in contrast to his contemporary, the culturally Greek Gaul Favorinus.11 Greece is not a cultural concept for Pausanias (as it is for Favorinus and obviously for some Romans), nor one determined by bloodline (as for Polemo of Laodicea); it could better be explained as a historical concept.12 For Pausanias, Greek is what was part of Greek history, what was part of the struggle for freedom and independence of Greece. Accordingly, a great part of the work deals with the history of Classical and even more so Hellenistic Greece,13 “Old Greece” in fact (except for the islands), united in the province of Achaea for the first time in history. This unity of all things Greek was pursued by the best of the Greeks from Homer to Hadrian – so it becomes understandable why Epaminondas or Philopoemen would rank higher than Pericles for Pausanias, although he assigns a predominant position to the city of Athens.14 Hadrian looms large in Pausanias’ work; in fact, he is the only Roman who is prominently and positively portrayed.15 His buildings that are described are almost the only ones dated to the Roman period and they form part of the “Greek things” which are the focus of the Periegesis. Hadrian as Athenian citizen and as preserver of the old, or rather of the Greek past – his buildings always took into account what was already there and were extensions, modernizations, or restorations – fits perfectly into Pausanias’ concept of describing all things Greek.16 It is not even necessary to see Hadrian as a Roman, and his buildings were, for the most part, not new constructions.17 Thus, despite being a Roman emperor, Hadrian is part of Greek history as depicted by Pausanias – and this is how the emperor would have wanted to depict himself.18 Is Pausanias’ book about destruction and decline? Interestingly, this question is heavily debated by contemporary scholars. It is quite obvious that
Pausanias book X 37 Pausanias describes destruction and decline as shattered architecture appears copiously throughout his narrative.19 Several abandoned cities are noted meticulously. However, what does all this mean in the context of Pausanias’ desire to describe all things Greek? One could read the descriptions as a dry inventory of a country destroyed by war and foreign rule. This would lead one to assume that Roman Greece was largely desolate in the 2nd century CE. One could read these descriptions as metaphors or assume that the local informants liked to develop and perhaps even embellish their stories, especially at destroyed cities or temples. The descriptions also appear to have held a special meaning for the local population, especially in the case of Arcadia.20 However, one could also take the position that destruction and decay were ubiquitous in the ancient world anyway, so that the conditions Pausanias describes in many places are not specific to the 2nd century CE.21 For most Greek poleis, what Thür has described as their basic conditions is likely to be valid throughout their history: Most Greek city-states were humble village settlements, sad boroughs struggling for daily bread … often enough resettled from one day to the next in times of war, dividing in famines and sending away oikists … if they had not abandoned in time the surplus children born. Each village was a sovereign Greek state, taught its youths Homer (in addition to military discipline), dreamt of an Olympic winner from their own ranks, worshipped at home the Panhellenic gods as best they could, and longed for a temple of stone instead of the shabby wooden house.22 If a public building fell into disrepair in a town, one had to wait until a citizen of financial means was able and willing to pay for the repair. This is evident in the speeches of Dio of Prusa and in the letters of Pliny the Younger.23 Decaying buildings, construction sites, and empty lots seem to have been normal features of ancient cities. Here it is not necessary to refer to such centuries-long, large-scale construction sites like the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. A lesser, more “normal” example is given by an Antonine inscription from Thera:24 the stoa in the agora had lost its roof, walls and annexes had fallen down, and the rest of the structure was in danger of collapsing as well. This long-standing problem, which caused much clamor (καταβοήσεις) in the demos, could only be remedied when T. Flavius Kleitosthenes Claudianus paid for the reconstruction out of his own purse. Where such a rich benefactor was missing, these circumstances could not be helped. From the Hellenistic period onward, Greek communities tended to become oligarchic for a variety of reasons, with only one family holding sway in the smaller poleis.25 This trend continued in the Roman period, with a strong tendency toward dynasty formation.26 These local politicians, who had no interest in a Roman career,27 were also the target audience of Plutarch’s essay Precepts of Statecraft, by which he provided them with a manual for ruling a smaller polis.28 Hadrian, in particular, was responsible
38 Frank Daubner for remedying many of the problems in several places, as Pausanias emphasizes when he writes that Megara was the only city in Greece that Hadrian could not make prosperous again.29 He explains this by invoking the presence of an old curse that weighs on the Megarians; thus, it should not necessarily be assumed that his observations on the spot caused him to make this statement. We must also consider the commonly held discourse of decay in order to classify Pausanias’ remarks. This view stems from the perception of the cultural superiority of Greece, negotiated between the Roman rulers and the Greek elites,30 which now had to be preserved as much as possible. One of the key texts for this view is Dio Chrysostom’s Olympic Oration from 97–105 CE, which closes with words put into the mouth of Zeus, quoting Homer: Τάδε μὲν οὕτως, 'Ηλεῖοί καὶ ἡ σύμπασα Ἑλλάς, καλῶς καὶ προσηκόντως ἐπιτελεῖς, θυσίας τε θύουσα ἐκ τῶν παρόντων μεγαλοπρεπεῖς καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸν εὐκλεέστατον ἀγῶνα τιθεῖσα ὡς ἀπ ᾽ ἀρχῆς εὐεξίας καὶ ῥώμης καὶ τάχους, ὅσα τε ἑορτῶν καὶ μυστηρίων ἔθη λαβοῦσα διαφυλάττεις. ἀλλὰ ἐκεῖνο φροντίζων σκοπῶ, ὅτι αὐτήν σ᾽ οὐκ ἀγαθὴ κομιδὴ ἔχει, ἀλλ ᾽ ἅμα γῆρας λυγρὸν ἔχεις αὐχμεῖς τε κακῶς καὶ ἀεικέα ἕσσαι. All this rite, you Eleans and all Hellas, you are carrying out, as one may see, very beautifully and fittingly, by offering sacrifices of a magnificence in keeping with your means, and, above all, by holding as from the beginning this most renowned contest of physical condition, strength, and speed, and lastly, because you are preserving in regard to festive occasions and secret rites all the customs which you have inherited. But with deep concern I observe that ‘Yourself untended seem, and wretched age / With mean attire and squalor is your lot.’31 Dio has Zeus utter to Greece the words that the returned Odysseus utters to his father Laertes, shocked by the latter’s ageing. Greece has lost its former splendor, which, as the biological metaphor suggests, cannot be regained, just as Laertes cannot become young again. Only within the bounds of what is possible are efforts made to keep up the pretense, to continue old and glorious customs, which in reality are abandoned to decay. From here, a direct path leads to the view, long prevalent in modern scholarship, that the province of Achaea was depopulated and impoverished. Exemplary for this is Rostovtzeff’s statement in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire: On the social and economic conditions which prevailed in Greece (the province of Achaea) in the imperial period it is unnecessary to dwell at length. The general picture is familiar. It is a picture of poverty and gradual depopulation … The explanation of these conditions is clear. The industry and the commerce of Greece were gone. As an agricultural country Greece is probably the poorest land in the Mediterranean area. It
Pausanias book X 39 is not surprising that the Greeks, most of them clever and educated men, emigrated in masses to countries which offered better opportunities.32 This line of discourse must be kept in mind if one intends to get closer to the diagnostic value of Pausanias’ writing for the 2nd century CE.33 A second basic fact that is helpful for understanding Pausanias’ “all things Greek” is the incongruence of the terms Greeks and Romans, which is in principle selfevident but rarely considered. “Roman” is a juridical category and, to that extent, easy to define. What a Greek is, on the other hand, is something about which opinions can differ. In any case, it is not a juridical category, but one that in the 2nd century can generally be considered cultural, to which should be added, however, the essential characteristic not only for Pausanias that the Greek is a citizen of a polis – the Greeks’ “political or social identity … rested exclusively upon citizenship.”34 Hadrian attempted to alter this, as his correspondence with Plotina, Trajan’s widow, on the Epicurean succession shows.35 This complex point cannot be discussed in detail here. However, it should be noted that the term Romans usually denoted representatives of the imperial power, while Greeks were citizens of a polis with a specific history and place in Hellenic history, not representatives of the imperial power. The viability and validity of this definition for Pausanias remains to be proven, for the difficulties the Greeks faced in finding a common denominator before the 2nd century CE are evident.36
Greece of the poleis and Greece of the ethne: why book X? Pausanias is not consistent in his use of the term Hellas. He has been to Thessaly and Macedonia (9, 30, 7–9), but he does not describe these lands in his work on “all things Greek”. However, a list of what he does not describe would hardly be helpful, since it is quite clear that everything presented in his work is in the province of Achaea. This could resonate with the view, widespread in the 2nd century, that Hellas was identical with the province of Achaea.37 It is not a futile question to ask how one defines “his” Greece. When more than three centuries before Pausanias T. Quinctius Flamininus ordered Philip V of Macedon to withdraw from Greece, the king asked what the Romans understood by Greece, and whether supposed non-Greeks such as the Aitolians, the Amphilochians, and others should also be included.38 For the entirety of Greek history, there was a deep gap between the world of the southern, “classical” polis Greeks and the northern and northwestern ethnos Greeks. Even the Hellenicity of the northerners was not an established fact.39 So Pausanias, if he wants to describe all things Greek, has to take a position on this question. He does not make his position explicit, but his tour of mainland Greece, which includes all the landscapes of polis Greece, ends in a border region between this “Classical” Greece and the Greece of the ethne. For Pausanias, as well as for Philip V, Aitolia is no longer part of what can in good conscience be called Hellas, except for the Aitolian new settlers
40 Frank Daubner in Amphissa, who are embarrassed to be thought of as “smelly” Locrians (10, 38, 4). One could, of course, argue that the detour to the fringes of “Classical” Greece, to Phocis and Western Locris, was necessary in order to include Delphi, one of the most prominent and most Greek places in Pausanias’ work. But Delphi had long been an enclave of “civilized” Greece, open to the Corinthian Gulf; there was no need to bother with travel through Phocis for a trip to Delphi.40 So what should one do with Book X? Scholarship is largely at a loss, for in this book, with the exception of Delphi, whose description takes up two-thirds of it, there seems to be nothing of what Pausanias finds interesting about Greece. One imagines oneself in another world, which at best only peripherally deals with the “real” Greece. The land seems impoverished and there are no great buildings and works of art to describe, while the people go about strange activities like picking aphids; that the sporadic settlements are real poleis does not seem at all certain. It has been suggested that Book X was very hastily and superficially worked on.41 The extensive perplexity of scholarship is shared by the last book of Pausanias with Dio’s Euboean speech,42 and it is surely no accident that both works seem to reveal more about the conditions of rural Greece in the 2nd century than the other nine books of Pausanias and most other works of the Second Sophistic. More interesting are the attempts to assume a kind of ring composition of the complete work and to work out parallels between Books I and X.43 Nonetheless, I think it is easier to find a compelling reason for Pausanias’ trip to the land of the ethne: the Phocians are an essential part of Greek history and are relevant for 2nd-century intellectuals. They took part in the Trojan War, fought against the Thessalians, and – after changing sides – also fought against the Persians. Thus, they cannot be neglected.44 A similar argument can be made for the western Locrians: they were autochthonous, and Naupaktos was a mythologically and historically relevant place. From here, the Heraclids returned to the Peloponnese, and from here too, the Messenians returned to the Peloponnese.45 Thus, I think that for Pausanias this transition zone between polis- and ethnos-Greece was part of his “all things Greek” concept, since the Phocians and the Ozolian Locrians were an inseparable part of Greek history. Much about these areas irritated the normative expectations of the polis citizen, and this irritation, which Pausanias does not hide but essentially displays, accounts for no small part of the appeal of the extra-Delphic chapters of Book X. In his perplexity as to what to do with what he found there, since it did not fit his scheme, Pausanias provides the most valuable insights into the life of his contemporaries, the ordinary Greek people of the Hadrianic-Antonine period. They are – for Pausanias – undisputedly part of the Greek things; Sidebottom even claims that Book X is the culmination of the whole work, of the reader’s impression of the essentially unchanged Greekness of Greece, and brings together the central themes of Pausanias’ interests.46 Of course, he thinks mainly of Delphi. But context matters. Thus, we have to follow Pausanias to Phocis47 and “Stinky” Locris48 in order to see what matters there in terms of past and present.
Pausanias book X 41
The 2nd-century experience in the fringes of “Classical Greece” (Figure 3.1) After the usual mythological and historical introduction to the book, Pausanias enters the world of the ethne from Boeotian Chaeronea.49 He mentions a frontier zone,50 and lets us share in his astonishment at what was on the other side: Στάδια δὲ ἐκ Χαιρωνείας εἴκοσιν ἐς Πανοπέας ἐστὶ πόλιν Φωκέων, εἴγε ὀνομάσαι τις πόλιν καὶ τούτους οἷς γε οὐκ ἀρχεῖα οὐ γυμνάσιόν ἐστιν, οὐ θέατρον οὐκ ἀγορὰν ἔχουσιν, οὐχ ὕδωρ κατερχόμενον ἐς κρήνην, ἀλλὰ ἐν στέγαις κοίλαις κατὰ τὰς καλύβας μάλιστα τὰς ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν, ἐνταῦθα οἰκοῦσιν ἐπὶ χαράδρᾳ. ὅμως δὲ ὅροι γε τῆς χώρας εἰσὶν αὐτοῖς ἐς τοὺς ὁμόρους, καὶ ἐς τὸν σύλλογον συνέδρους καὶ οὗτοι πέμπουσι τὸν Φωκικόν. It is twenty furlongs from Chaeronea to Panopeus, a polis of Phocis, if polis it can be called that has no government offices, no gymnasium, no theater, no market-place, no water conducted to a fountain, and where the people live in hovels, just like highland shanties, perched on the edge
Figure 3.1 Pausanias’ routes through Phocis. Source: (modified from Hutton 2005, 87, fig. 4.1).
42 Frank Daubner of a ravine. Yet its territory is marked off by boundaries from that of its neighbors, and it even sends members to the Phocian assembly. (10, 4, 1)
This is certainly one of the most commented on passages of Pausanias in scholarly literature.51 In fact, it is one of the few passages in ancient literature on the question of what actually constitutes a polis. I do not intend to go into great detail on this question here. But before considering the main points, we should understand what Pausanias actually expected when he crossed the border to the west. The Phocians only came into the light of history when they were involved in wars. This decisively shaped their image in ancient literature,52 and after the Roman conquest in the Third Macedonian War, the Phocians, like the Locrians and the Aitolians, are hardly ever mentioned. Since the ordinary Greek encountered these people only when they came down from their mountains, stiff with weapons, the Phocians and Locrians, together with the Aitolians, their neighbors to the west, figure prominently in the ancient lists of examples of plundering cultures (piracy and livestock raiding), as they did in the late-19th century according to Philippson’s account of his 1890 journey.53 Pausanias provides two examples that portray the Phocians as somewhat of a backward people. In 9, 17, 4–6, the inhabitants of Tithoreia attempted to steal some soil from the tumulus of Zethos and Amphion in Thebes in order to bring it to the tomb of Antiope and Phocos, because then the land of the Tithoreians would bear fruit, but that of the Thebans would not – “a sort of covert pilgrimage”, as Rutherford puts it.54 The other example (9, 40, 11 f.) is a typical story of the moronic neighbor: the most sacred object possessed by the Chaeroneans was the scepter of Zeus made by Hephaestus. It was found right on the border between Chaeronea and Panopeus together with gold; the not very intelligent Phocian neighbors chose the gold as their share of the find. However, it would be an exaggeration to assume that Pausanias had a generally negative opinion of the Phocians because they had raided and plundered Delphi.55 Necessity had driven them to it, because they could not raise a penalty sum imposed on them by the Amphictyons (10, 2, 2). The story is similar to the one told by Pausanias about the Athenians who had to raid and plunder Oropos by necessity, which he finds quite excusable (7, 11, 4 f.). So Pausanias will surely not have expected to encounter a band of robbers, as Polybius might have done, who accused the Phocians of faithlessness and cowardice (38, 3, 8). He rather gives his readers the impression of an expected and progressive backwardness as he makes his way across the border. Of course, Pausanias was not naive, and the Periegesis is not a diary, but a work carefully composed over many years, based on several journeys. Thus, we must assume that Pausanias intended to convey precisely this image, pretending to be naive and perplexed by what he found in northwest Achaea. Therefore, I would also argue for attributing the impression that he was “rushed for some reasons” to his overall intent. After all, it is not true that in Book X he spends “less time
Pausanias book X 43 for the full consideration of even small towns and less famous monuments”;56 all this is evident, but perhaps there was nothing else? The path he walks between Chaeronea and Panopeus is not just any path – it is the most important land route from Attica and Thebes to Delphi. Panopeus is the first Phocian city the traveler to Delphi encounters when he crosses the Phocian border. Pausanias depicts this transitional world, which must be crossed to reach Delphi by land, as exotic. Panopeus, with its spectacular mural ring,57 which he mentions only briefly, represents this otherness. The otherness is deeply rooted in history – Homer mentions Panopeus, but there are older, stranger things to see such as a small mud-brick temple of Prometheus. In the nearby gorge, Pausanias reports a most curious survival from antiquity (10, 4, 4): Λίθοι κεῖνταί σφισιν ἐπὶ τῇ χαράδρᾳ, μέγεθος μὲν ἑκάτερος ὡς φόρτον ἀποχρῶντα ἁμάξης εἶναι, χρῶμα δέ ἐστι πηλοῦ σφισιν, οὐ γεώδους ἀλλ ᾽ οἷος ἂν χαράδρας γένοιτο ἢ χειμάρρου ψαμμώδους, παρέχονται δὲ καὶ ὀσμὴν ἐγγύτατα χρωτὶ ἀνθρώπου: ταῦτα ἔτι λείπεσθαι τοῦ πηλοῦ λέγουσιν ἐξ οὗ καὶ ἅπαν ὑπὸ τοῦ Προμηθέως τὸ γένος πλασθῆναι τῶν ἀνθρώπων. At the edge of the ravine lie two stones, each big enough to load a cart. Their color is that of clay, not an earthy clay, but such as you would find in a ravine or a sandy torrent and they smell very like the flesh of a man. They say that these stones are remains of the clay out of which the whole race of man was molded by Prometheus.58 Gell claimed to have found those stones in 1819 – he mentions “a species of stone very different from the limestone of the country, and which on rubbing emits an odor. The story of Pyrrha and Deucalion refers to this.”59 Thus, this story has survived among the locals with slight modifications for another two millennia. What is curious about Pausanias’ Panopeus chapter, however, is that he highlights as noteworthy things that were true of many of the petty poleis of Greece and of nearly all of the Phocian poleis: theaters are exceptionally rare, public buildings were absent, and none of these cities ran organized contests that had any external impact.60 After passing Daulis, Pausanias leads us to the heart of Phocis: the Phocicon, the place where the federal assembly of the Phocians met (10, 5, 1).61 This reference to a federal political system is unique to the work, although Pausanias traveled through other federally organized areas. The 2nd-centuryCE Greek world is a world full of koina, thus the Phocian k oinon can by no means be called anachronistic, as McInerney has argued.62 For many Greek regions, federal organizations had served as defining units of identity for centuries, and in Roman times, the trend toward the formation of koina strengthened, not least due to Hadrian’s initiatives. This process of k oinon formation in the Imperial period is only rudimentarily studied,63 and, curiously, Pausanias nowhere mentions Hadrian’s Panhellenion.64 However, the fact that he exemplifies the organizational form of the federal state in Book X,
44 Frank Daubner using the example of the backward and archaic Phocians, may indicate that this new organizational form of the Greek part of the Empire is familiar and important to him, so that he sees it as particularly ancient and as a constituent part of “all things Greek.” Thus, at this point in his book, he highlights it especially when he goes to the fringes of the Greek world, where man was created by Prometheus and where the Phocians, clad in leather,65 live in a world that shows primordial Greece, not yet polluted by cultural achievements like theaters, games, and civic politics, but administered by a koinon that included villages of some 70 inhabitants like Ledon (10, 33, 1 f.). After describing the major Phocian hub of Delphi at length, he returns to the smaller poleis and provides valuable insights into their current socioeconomic state. His extensive description of Tithoreia (10, 32, 8–19) has been much discussed.66 It is depicted as no more ruined than other cities, such as Hyampolis; the theater and agora do not seem to be in the best condition, the water is fetched from the river, but there is a temple of Athena and a tomb of heroes, as there should be. A sanctuary of Serapis, which is epigraphically attested, is not mentioned by Pausanias.67 In the chora, the sanctuary of Asclepius is well-maintained, and then there is the sanctuary of Isis, “the holiest of all the sanctuaries built by Greeks for the Egyptian goddess”.68 Pausanias describes in detail the festivals that take place there twice a year in honor of Isis. The details of the cult have nothing particularly exotic about them, and Pausanias seems to push this quite deliberately into the background.69 The festivals are connected with markets – not with small-scale rural markets where one would purchase cabbage and beets, but markets where slaves, livestock, and precious metals are traded.70 Thus, it was a market for the better-off peasants and citydwellers. These types of markets, in most cases, were connected with panegyreis in the great sanctuaries. They served as places of contact, hubs in the network of the regions, selling expensive products along with the daily needs. The countryside produced oil that was better than the Iberian and Istrian: “they make all sorts of unguents out of it and send the oil to the Emperor” (10, 32, 19). Pausanias also reports that one generation before him the fortune of Tithoreia declined. These two pieces of information suggest that an imperial domain was created in this part of the province of Achaea by depriving the leading family of the town of its land. The most prominent example of an estate that passes into the hands of the Imperial government is that of the confiscated lands of Hipparchus, the grandfather of Herodes Atticus.71 The evidence for imperial domains in Greece is scarce and contradictory,72 but in this case, we know of the disappearance of the leading family of Tithoreia: the Soklaroi, who were friends of Plutarch, ran the affairs of the Phocian polis for some generations.73 Kahrstedt assumes, with good reason, that the confiscation had taken place under Hadrian, with whom the family had probably fallen into disfavor. Thus, Pausanias cannot write this directly but has to disguise the fact that Hadrian, the great benefactor of Hellas, brought misfortune to a large family of Phocis.
Pausanias book X 45 After Tithoreia, Pausanias takes us further through the fertile Cephissus valley. In this region of Phocis, there seems to be some prosperity and the otherness recedes into the background. Since the valley formed the main communication route from the north of Greece to the south, it lacks the remoteness that had produced the archaic features in the mountainous parts of Phocis. Hadrian is mentioned again; he built a modest temple in Abae and a stoa in Hyampolis. Both cities contained a theater, an agora, and several sanctuaries, even if they might have lain partially in ruins. The famous sanctuary of Abae seems to have suffered a certain neglect in the early Roman period, but with Hadrian’s rule it experienced a new flowering.74 The Hadrianic monuments were once again closely integrated with the antique ones: his new temple in Abae (10, 35, 4), built alongside the older temple, contained ancient statues; the stoa in Hyampolis stood next to the remains of the ancient agora (10, 35, 6).75 Pausanias returns to the wild and ill-explored regions of Phocis by taking the rough and mostly mountainous road from Chaeronea to Stiris (10, 35, 8–10). In Stiris we arrive in a region for which Pausanias is remarkably informative on contemporary economic issues. The Stirites, who held to the tradition that they were originally Athenians, lived on a rocky outcrop poor in water; the epigraphically attested water conduit probably dates to a later period. 76 Pausanias records a sanctuary of Demeter with a mud-brick temple and two statues. In the 2nd century BC, Stiris had managed to get access to the Corinthian Gulf by a sympoliteia treaty with Medeon.77 Wine was cultivated between Stiris and Ambryssos, while around the latter the population grew kokkos, the kermes oak, to harvest scarlet dye. The city itself appears to have been largely abandoned; a few remnants of marble statues lie in the agora. This supports the impression gained of Tithoreia and perhaps also of Hyampolis. Next, Pausanias takes the road down to Antikyra (10, 36, 5–10). Here we also find a very specialized form of economy: the population made their living from the harvesting and processing of hellebore, combined with an apparently considerable health resort business.78 Like the other places in the region, Antikyra was oriented toward the sea but the communication routes up to the land were arduous and poor. However, the city also seems to have been the preferred port for inland Phocian and western Boeotian cities. We know that Plutarch’s grandfather Nicarchus had to carry a sack of wheat from Chaeronea to Antikyra for Marcus Antonius,79 and it is quite possible that Chaeronea still used Antikyra for shipping its famous ointments made from lilies, roses, daffodils and irises (9, 41, 7). Pausanias does not refer to Antikyra as a port or to the local spa industry in the area. One may assume that he was hostile to this “Roman” way of bathing, as it becomes quite clear in his derogatory description of the thermal baths of Methana (2, 34, 1). There seems to be a certain irony in the description of Antikyra, culminating in the rather disproportionate description of a roofed well at the agora.80 He finally reaches Boulis, obviously by sea or from Thisbe in Boeotia since he remarks that he does not know if there is a route on land from Antikyra to Boulis (10, 37, 1 f.).81 The latter was a difficult port; winds blowing down
46 Frank Daubner from Helicon made it dangerous and whales were sometimes stranded in the bay. Plutarch reports that a rotting whale carcass once caused an epidemic in the city.82 Here, too, the economy was specialized: more than half of the people worked in the purple-dye industry.83 There is not much more to say on Boulis, and Pausanias, after a brief return to Kirrha and Delphi, crosses the border to Ozolian Locris for the short final section of his work. The Locrians, an ethnos held together above all by constantly expiating the crime of their basileus Ajax and reconciling the Athena of Ilion, do not keep him there long (10, 38). He does not even mention Physkeis, the seat of the koinon of the western Locrians. Instead, he dwells on philological problems concerning Naupactus and wraps up his book with the strange, iamata-like story about the poetess Anyte and the eye-sick Naupactian Phalysius. The end is not abrupt, but brings a Herodotean logos, which, according to C. Frateantonio, refers to the meaning of the entire work, which lies in the fact that the reader must decode encoded city praise and criticism.84
Pausanias, Phocis, and the presence of the past If we assume that Pausanias is intellectually capable of more than identifying places and building remains in Greece with his book at hand, we can possibly see in Book X the book in which the author most directly demonstrates the immutability of “things Greek”. He takes us to the strangest and most remote of all the places he describes, where the “first humans” were created, and shows us how they lived in his time. The common reading of Book X as describing poverty and decay under Roman rule does not correspond to the reality on the ground, in my opinion. If my interpretation is correct, then it also explains the neglect of Ozolian Locris in the Periegesis: compared to the Classical and Hellenistic periods, this area was indeed heavily modified by the resettlement measures after the foundation of Nicopolis and by the fact that large parts of the country had been added to the territory of the colonia Patras. The past is hardly recognizable here in Pausanias’ present.85 What makes Phocis a much more interesting test case for Pausanias, apart from the lived past, is the small-scale nature of the landscape, which can be interpreted as primordial. In fact, Phocis is the most marked small-scale landscape of Roman Greece. Of the 22 poleis of Classical and Hellenistic times, 17 survived into the 2nd century CE; of the remaining 5, 2 were abandoned and 3 became secondary settlements. This represents one of the highest polis survival rates in Greece.86 Pausanias’ particular interest in the current economic situation of the Phocian cities has led to his descriptions in Book X being read as paradigmatic of the changes that the Greek countryside endured under Roman rule. Kahrstedt, in particular, has explained the seeming decline of the urban centers, despite flourishing rural life, with the eradication of the urban ruling classes and the influence of foreign capital, that is, the emergence of domains.87 Already in contemporary reviews, Kahrstedt’s interpretation as a process valid for all of Greece was vehemently criticized, and it
Pausanias book X 47 seems that there were “in the remoter parts of Greece, many small communities where the land was unattractive to the rich investor and modest families of squires lived on undisturbed as they have always done.”88 For large parts of Greece, Kahrstedt’s theory has meanwhile proven to be correct, thanks to a better source base.89 But the Phocian evidence can be read in a completely different way. The new realities of the Imperial period – land ownership without regard to polis borders, large infrastructural constructions, rural exodus in favor of some cities90 – had not yet reached this remote area, except for an increase in border regulations. However, these can also be seen as signs of the poleis’ persistence and their struggle for territorial integrity and autonomy. On the contrary, the small poleis of Phocis might have taken advantage of the situation by adapting to the new demands and networks, specializing in desirable products for which they found buyers. The production of unique agricultural surplus products is not necessarily an indicator of wealthy absentee landowners.91 With the possible exception of Tithoreia, we find no evidence in Pausanias or in the epigraphic record of supra-civic landowners displacing the traditional ruling class. The fact that small towns did not decide to be poor self-sufficient hamlets, but rather adapted their economies to new circumstances, proves precisely their resilience and economic drive.92 The question remains where the surpluses from the “chemical industry” in the Corinthian Gulf and from the other specialized poleis went.93 In the case of Tithoreia, Pausanias indicates that the oil went to the emperor. A new honorary inscription from Antikyra confirms the existence of dekaprotoi there.94 This office, very rarely attested in Greece, designates those citizens of a polis who were responsible for the collection of the tax going to Rome and were liable with their property.95 If there was a dekaprotos in Antikyra (and probably one in Stiris),96 we must necessarily assume that the cities were directly taxed and that there were wealthy citizens in them who could be held liable for the tax revenue of their communities. How did Pausanias try to convince his metropolitan readers of the 2nd century CE that Book X is a worthy conclusion of his work? He first had to clarify that a settlement like Panopeus was indeed a polis. Furthermore, he had to show that the federal state in Phocian form was genuinely Greek. Once this was clarified, he was able to show that in Phocis, and more so in the remote part around Mount Parnassus than in the transit region of the Cephissus valley, an important part of what constitutes Greece had survived the passage of time: the small polis that had produced mythological heroes and participated in Panhellenic wars, that guarded its borders, maintained its cults, longed for a temple of stone, and that was unchangingly Greek.
Notes 1 Hutton 2005, 76. 2 Alcock 1993, 119; 152; Alcock 1995, 335 f. 3 Elsner 1992, 17. Against the pilgrim theory, Frateantonio 2009, 25–30.
48 Frank Daubner 4 E. g. Frey 2008, 67. Arafat 1996, 1–52 makes a strong case against overemphasizing it. 5 Paus. 1, 26, 4; transl. here and always after J. G. Frazer. 6 Pretzler 2004. 7 Alcock 1995, 328 f. 8 On the ignorance of things Roman by the authors of the Second Sophistic, see Pretzler 2005a, 156. For the debate on the meaning of πάντα τὰ Ἑλληνικά, see Muñiz Grijalvo 2015, 33 f. n. 28; Hutton 2005, 12–20; 55–68. 9 Lafond 1996; Frateantonio 2009, 277–282. 10 Bowie 1996; Hutton 2005, 47–53. 11 Ursin 2019, 54, on Paus. II 1, 2. 12 On the question of what was Greek in the 2nd century CE, see Romeo 2002. 13 On Pausaniasʼ strong interest in Hellenistic history, see Ameling 1996. On his most extensive historical digressions – on the fate of the Achaean League and on Messenian history – see Langerwerf 2017. 14 On the reception of Philopoemen, see Gettel in this volume. 15 Antoninus Pius is portrayed very favorably as well, but does not play a prominent role. 16 Langerwerf 2017 on Pausanias’ concept and its position in the intellectual trends of the Hadrianic-Antonine period. See also Kouremenos’ introduction in this volume. 17 Bowie 1996, 221–230. 18 See Konstantinidis in this volume. 19 Schreyer 2019. 20 On destroyed cities in Arcadia, see Roy 1968; Pretzler 2005b, 341; Baleriaux 2017. A slightly different view is presented in Hartog 2001, 133–150. On deserted poleis, see also Rubinstein 1995, 218 f. 21 See Frateantonio 2009, 25–30. 22 Thür 1992, 123. For a modern perspective on Mediterranean poverty, see Woolf 2005, 128. 23 Dio, or. 40; 45; 47 f.; Plin. epist. 81 f. 24 IG 12, 3, 325; see Schreyer 2019, 152–156, with German translation. 25 Scholz 2008; Müller 2018. 26 See Nollé 1994. 27 On the disinterest in Roman citizenship and Roman careers, see Heller 2019. On the spread of Roman citizenship, see Lavan 2019. 28 On this key source for Greek politics under the conditions of Roman rule, see Lehmann 2020. 29 Paus. 1, 36, 3; see Kahrstedt 1954, 121–125. 30 See Daubner 2020, 202. 31 Dio, or. 12, 85, translated by J. W. Cohoon. The quote is Hom. Od. 24, 249 f. 32 Rostovtzeff 1957, 253 f. 33 More detailed in Daubner 2020, 183–188. 34 Dihle 2011, 57. 35 IG 22 109 = Oliver 1989, no. 73 f. See also Lavan 2020, 43 f. 36 On these difficulties, see Schmitz and Wiater 2011. Rubinstein 1995 argues against the view that citizenship matters for Pausanias. 37 As suggested by Hutton 2005, 61 f. 38 Pol. 18, 5, 6 f. 39 See Daubner 2018, 132–135.
Pausanias book X 49 0 Rousset 2012, 1689. 4 41 E. g. Pretzler 2007, 8. 42 An illuminating research overview on Dio’s Euboean speech is provided by Engster 2012. 43 Ameling 1996, 146 f.; Hutton 2005, 79. 44 There is, of course, a certain weakness in this argument because of the neglected Eastern Locrians. 45 On the importance of Naupactus for Pausanias, see Langerwerf 2017, 86–89. 46 Sidebottom 2002, 497 f. 47 On Phocis, see Schober 1924; Gehrke 1986, 161–163; McInerney 1999; McInerney 2015. 48 On Western Locris, see Daverio Rocchi 2015; Petrochilos 2019. 49 On Pausanias’ “routes” in Phocis, see Hutton 2005, 86–88. On current archaeological fieldwork in Phocis, see Sporn 2018. 50 Pausanias and borders: Fachard 2018. 51 Some important examples: Woolf 2020, 304–307; Rzepka 2010; Pretzler 2007, 91–93; Hutton 2005, 129–131; Alcock 1995, 326 f.; Rubinstein 1995, 215 f.; Osborne 1987, 118. 52 Frateantonio 2009, 19 even goes so far as to claim that Pausanias X is a book about war. 53 Philippson 1890, 404: “Die äußerst geringzählige Bevölkerung … sind (!) in ganz Griechenland wegen ihrer Faulheit berüchtigt. Anstatt sich durch ihrer Hände Arbeit zu ernähren, streifen sie lieber mit der Flinte durch die Berge und neigen zu Raub, Mord und Diebstahl.” 54 Rutherford 2001, 50. On Phokos and his many doppelgänger, see Franchi 2017. 55 Thus Arafat 2009, 587 f. 56 Both quotes from Pretzler 2007, 8. 57 On Panopeus and its wall, see Gose and Schober 2016/2017, 351–360; Rousset, Camp and Minon 2015; Kirsten 1949. 58 On this episode, see Akujärvi 2005, 73. 59 Gell 1819, 201. 60 Rousset 2008, 327 f.; Rousset 2012, 1686 f. 61 On the Phocicon, see Rousset 2012, 1675; McInerney 1997; French 1984; French and Vanderpool 1963. 62 McInerney 1999, 255 f. 63 E.g. Edelmann-Singer 2015; Hallmannsecker 2020. 64 On this intriguing omission, see also Camia and Asirvatham in this volume. 65 An invention of Pelasgos: 8, 1, 5. Pausanias tells us that poor people in Euboea and Phocis still wear clothes made of leather, and he considers that the autochthonous Western Locrians were called the “smelly ones” because of their leather clothes: 10, 38, 3. 66 On Tithorea, see Gose and Schober 2016/2017, 328–338; Sporn and Laufer 2019. 67 Rousset 2012, 1680–1682. 68 See Maikidou-Poutrino in this volume. 69 Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2005, 273 f. On the context of the cult, see also Chandezon 2011. 70 On the Tithoreia market, see De Ligt 1993, 67 f.; 148. On the type of the rural panegyris market, see Bresson 2019, 267; Mackil 2013, 274–284. 71 Philostr. v. s. 2, 1, 1; IG2 2, 1100; Larsen 1939, 460 f.; Camia and Rizakis 2013, 75 f. 72 Collected by Camia and Rizakis 2013. 73 Kahrstedt 1954, 12–14; new evidence: Rousset 2012, 1681.
50 Frank Daubner 74 On Hadrianic Abae/Kalapodi and the temple, see Sporn 2016/2017, 270. On the identification of the sites, see Prignitz 2014. See also Kahrstedt 1954, 22 f. 75 Emphasized in Bowie 1996, 222. 76 IG 9, 1, 47. 77 Errington 2020, no. 653. See Schuler and Walser 2015, 252–254; Freitag 2005, 143–146. 78 Freitag 2005, 137–141. 79 Plut. Ant. 68. For other examples of Antikyra as a maritime hub for upland cities, see Freitag 2005, 140 f. 80 However, this observation must be followed up elsewhere. 81 The absence of a path, however, was no obstacle for the Spartan army: Xen. hell. 6, 4, 3. 82 Plut. mor. 981A–B. On Boulis and its harbor, see Freitag 2005, 147 f. 83 On the Greek purple-dye industry, see Larsen 1939, 485. 84 Frateantonio 2009, 7. On the composition of Pausanias’ final logos, see also Nörenberg 1973; Sidebottom 2002. 85 On the impact of the foundation of Nicopolis, see Strauch 1996, 58–62; on the complex status of Western Locris, see Karambinis 2018, 279. 86 Karambinis 2018, 279 and 292 fig. 8. In total, there are 25 fortified settlements in Phocis: Sporn 2018, 18. 87 Kahrstedt 1954, esp. 11–37. 88 Jones 1956, 54. 89 Bintliff 2012, 313; Karambinis 2018 passim; see also Strauch 1996, 108–124. 90 As exemplified by Doukellis and Zoumbaki 1995, 217–228. 91 Rizakis 2013; Zarmakoupi 2013. 92 On small town economy in ancient Greece, see Chandezon 2013. 93 Kahrstedt 1954, 17. 94 SEG 62, 310 = Rousset 2012, 1673 f. 95 On the office of the dekaprotoi, see Samitz 2013; Nigdelis and Arvanitaki 2012. 96 SEG 53, 494 = Samitz 2013 no. 16.
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Pausanias book X 53 Lehmann, G. A. ed., 2020. Bürger-Ethos, politisches Engagement und die Bewahrung des Status Quo. Plutarch, Politische Ratschläge, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag. Mackil, E. 2013. Creating a Common Polity. Religion, Economy and Politics in the Making of the Greek koinon, Berkeley: University of California Press. McInerney, J. 1997. “The Phokikon and the Hero Archegetes.” Hesperia 66: 193–207. ——— 1999. The Folds of Parnassos. Land and Ethnicity in Ancient Phokis, Austin: University of Texas Press. ——— 2015. “Phokis.” In Federalism in Greek Antiquity, edited by H. Beck and P. Funke, 199–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, C. 2018. “Oligarchy and the Hellenistic City.” In The Polis in the Hellenistic World, edited by H. Börm and N. Luraghi, 27–52. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Muñiz Grijalvo, E. 2015. “Greek Religion as a Feature of Greek Identity.” In Ruling the Greek World. Approaches to the Roman Empire in the East, edited by J. M. Cortés Copete, E. Muñiz Grijalvo and F. Lozano Goméz, 27–42. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Nigdelis, P. and A. Arvanitaki. 2012. “Direct Taxation in Roman Macedonia: A New Votive Inscription of a δεκάπρωτος in an Unknown City of Western Pieria.” Chiron 42: 271–286. Nollé, J. 1994. “Frauen wie Omphale? Überlegungen zu ‘politischen’ Ämtern von Frauen im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien.” In Reine Männersache? Frauen in Männerdomänen der antiken Welt, edited by M. H. Dettenhofer, 229–259. Cologne: Böhlau. Nörenberg, H. -W. 1973. “Untersuchungen zum Schluß der Περιήγησις τῆς Ἑλλάδος des Pausanias.” Hermes 101: 235–252. Oliver, J. H. 1989. Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Osborne, R. 1987. Classical Landscape with Figures. The Ancient Greek City and its Countryside, London: Cambridge University Press. Petrochilos, N. 2019. “The Archaeological and Epigraphic Testimonies for the ethnos of the Western Lokrians.” In Ethnos and Koinon. Studies in Ancient Greek Ethnicity and Federalism, edited by H. Beck, K. Buraselis and A. McAuley, 45–64. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Philippson, A. 1890. “Bericht über eine Reise durch Nord- und Mittel-Griechenland.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 25: 331–406. Pretzler, M. 2004. “Turning Travel into Text: Pausanias at Work.” Greece & Rome 51: 199–216. ——— 2005a. “Comparing Strabo with Pausanias: Greece in Context vs. Greece in Depth.” In Strabo’s Cultural Geography. The Making of a Kolossourgia, edited by D. Dueck, H. Lindsay and S. Pothecary, 144–160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 2005b. “Pausanias and Oral Tradition.” The Classical Quarterly 55: 235–249. ——— 2007. Pausanias. Travel Writing in Ancient Greece, Bristol: Duckworth. Prignitz, S. 2014. “Zur Identifizierung des Heiligtums von Kalapodi.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189: 133–146. Rizakis, A. 2013. “Rural Structures and Agrarian Strategies in Greece under the Roman Empire.” In Villae Rusticae. Family and Market-Oriented Farms in Greece under Roman Rule, edited by A. D. Rizakis and I. P. Touratsoglou, 20–51. Athens: De Boccard. Romeo, I. 2002. “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” The Classical Quarterly 97: 21–40.
54 Frank Daubner Rostovtzeff, M. I. 1957. The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rousset, D. 2008. “The City and its Territory in the Province of Achaea and ‘Roman Greece’.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 104: 303–337. ——— 2012. “Les Inscriptions Antiques de Phocide et de Doride.” Comptes Rendus Des Seances De L Academie Des Inscriptions & Belles-lettres 156: 1659–1689. Rousset, D., J. Camp and S. Minon. 2015. “The Phokian City of Panopeus/Phanoteus, Three New Rupestral Inscriptions, and the Cippus of the Labyadai of Delphi.” American Journal of Archaeology 119: 441–463. Roy, J. 1968. “The Sons of Lykaon in Pausanias’ Arcadian King-List.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 63: 287–292. Rubinstein, L. 1995. “Pausanias as a Source for the Classical Greek Polis.” In Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis, edited by M. H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub, 211–219. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Rutherford, I. 2001. “Tourism and the Sacred. Pausanias and the Traditions of Greek Pilgrimage.” In Pausanias. Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry and J. Elsner, 40–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rzepka, J. 2010. “Hadrian and Pausanias’ Definition of Greek Polis.” In Donum Centenarium. Księga pamiątkowa ku czci profesora Józefa Wolskiego w setną rocznicę urodzin, edited by E. Dąbrowa et al., 1–8. Krakow. Samitz, C. 2013. “Die Einführung der Dekaproten und Eikosaproten in den Städten Kleinasiens und Griechenlands.” Chiron 43: 1–61. Schmitz, T. A. and N. Wiater. 2011. “Introduction: Approaching Greek Identity.” In The Struggle for Identity. Greeks and their Past in the First Century BCE, edited by T. A. Schmitz and N. Wiater, 15–45. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Schober, F. 1924. Phokis, Jena. Scholz, P. 2008. “Die ‘Macht der Wenigen’ in den hellenistischen Städten.” In: Die Macht der Wenigen. Aristokratische Herrschaftspraxis, Kommunikation und ‘edler’ Lebensstil in Antike und Früher Neuzeit, edited by H. Beck, P. Scholz and U. Walter, 71–99. Munich: De Gruyter. Schreyer, J. 2019. Zerstörte Architektur bei Pausanias. Phänomenologie, Funktionen und Verhältnis zum zeitgenössischen Ruinendiskurs, Turnhout: Brepols. Schuler, C. and A. V. Walser. 2015. “Sympolitien und Synoikismen. Gesellschaftliche und urbanistische Implikationen von Konzentrationsprozessen in hellenistischer Zeit.” In Urbane Strukturen und bürgerliche Identität im Hellenismus, edited by A. Matthaei and M. Zimmermann, 350–359. Heidelberg: Verlag Antike. Sidebottom, H. 2002. “Pausanias: Past, Present, and Closure.” The Classical Quarterly 52: 494–499. Sporn, K. 2016/2017. “Forschungen zur Anlage, Infrastruktur und Ausdehnung des Heiligtums von Kalapodi. Die Kampagnen 2014–2016.” AM 132/132: 193–278. ——— 2018. “Ancient Phokis: Perspectives on the Study of its Settlements, Fortifications, and Sanctuaries.” AAIA Bulletin 14: 18–25. Sporn, K. and E. Laufer. 2019. “Tithorea, Griechenland. Topographische Untersuchungen im Stadtgebiet. Die Arbeiten der Jahre 2016 und 2017.” e-Forschungsberichte des DAI 99–105. https://publications.dainst.org/journals/efb/2184/6597 Strauch, D. 1996. Römische Politik und griechische Tradition. Die Umgestaltung Nordwest-Griechenlands unter römischer Herrschaft, Munich: Klio. Thür, G. 1992. “Armut. Gedanken zu Ehegüterrecht und Familienvermögen in den griechischen Poleis.” In Eherecht und Familiengut in Antike und Mittelalter, edited by D. Siemon, 121–132. Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag.
Pausanias book X 55 Ursin, F. 2019. Freiheit, Herrschaft, Widerstand. Griechische Erinnerungskultur in der Hohen Kaiserzeit (1.–3. Jahrhundert n. Chr.), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Woolf, G. 2005. “A Sea of Faith?” In Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity, edited by I. Malkin, 126–143. Oxford: Routledge. ——— 2020. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities. A Natural History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zarmakoupi, M. 2013. “The Villa Culture of Roman Greece.” In Villae Rusticae. Family and Market-Oriented Farms in Greece under Roman Rule, edited by A. D. Rizakis and I. P. Touratsoglou, 752–761. Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, Institute of Historical Research.
4 Hadrian and the dramatic festivals of Achaea Mali Skotheim
Hadrian’s interest in Greek poetic culture is manifested not only in his own compositions, which he published and left at various sites and sanctuaries, but also in his support for Greek agonistic festivals, many of which included competitions in poetry, music, and drama.1 Cassius Dio claims that the emperor established festivals and built theaters wherever he traveled.2 According to the Historia Augusta, Hadrian sponsored games and shows in many cities of the Empire, and at Rome, sprinkled exotic spices over the theater-seats and “presented plays of all kinds” in Greek and Latin.3 The number of games in the Empire seem to have increased during the 2nd century CE, and many festivals were established in Hadrian’s honor, such as the Hadrianeia at Athens, which Camia discusses in this volume.4 The exchange of letters between Hadrian and the Athenian Technitai of Dionysus, as well as Technitai from other areas of the Empire, demonstrate the emperor’s special interest in supporting Greek musical and dramatic performance, and an attention to the practical details of the festivals which may have made his interventions more durable than those of other philhellenic, artisticallyminded emperors such as Nero.5 As in so many areas of the emperor’s activities, when it came to the festivals, the center of Hadrian’s focus was Athens. He had a special presence in the theater even before he became emperor, as the Athenians erected his statue in the Theater of Dionysus after electing him archon in 112/3 CE.6 Kouremenos suggests that this early phase of Hadrian’s involvement with Athens, during which time he also became an Athenian citizen, must be taken into account in his life-long promotion of the city.7 Karivieri argues that Hadrian renovated the Theater of Dionysus by erecting a new scaenae frons with the life of Dionysus as part of a broader strategy to associate himself with the deity, but also with Zeus and Theseus.8 During his first visit to Athens as emperor in 124/5 CE, Hadrian was inducted into the Eleusinian mysteries, and served as agonothetes (festival organizer) of the Dionysia, arrayed in Greek costume.9 In response, each of the twelve tribes of Athens erected a statue of the emperor in the theater.10 Hadrian’s most significant impact on the Athenian theater was not in its physical space, however, but in the major events which shaped the civic festival calendar. He concentrated the number of festivals of the highest status, DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-5
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 57 the panhellenic festivals of the periodos, in Athens, by upgrading one contest and founding three new ones. Early in his reign, in 119/20 CE, Hadrian upgraded the Greater Panathenaia to sacred status.11 A decade later, in 131/2 CE, he founded the Panhellenion, centered on Athens, and soon after founded three panhellenic festivals in the city, the Panhellenia, the Olympia, and the Hadrianeia.12 This expanded again the number of games on the circuit, while re-centering it on Athens.13 No other city in the Empire, not even Rome, had multiple games on the periodos. This brought competitors to Athens on a yearly basis. In order to understand the significance of these circuit expansions under Hadrian, it is important to comprehend the history of the periodos in the earlier Roman imperial period. In the time of Augustus, two festivals had been elevated to the status of the periodos games, the Actia at Nicopolis and the Sebasta at Naples.14 Domitian’s foundation of the Capitolia in 86 CE put Rome on the Greek festival circuit for the first time, continuing the westward expansion of the periodos begun with the Sebasta.15 Like the Sebasta, the Capitolia had both musical and athletic competitions, and was isolympic.16 In his activities as festival founder, Hadrian referenced Augustus’ (re-)foundation of the Actia at Nicopolis. Compared with his predecessors, however, Hadrian was unusual in focusing so strongly on the Eastern provinces, and in the scope of his interventions. This Athenocentrism was both classicizing and anachronistic, evoking the perceived importance of Athens in the history of drama in particular, while at the same time creating a place of prominence for the Athenian festivals in the wider Greek world that they had never before held. Even the Athenian Dionysia, one of the most renowned dramatic festivals in the Greek world, did not occupy the highest status in terms of the categories of games.17 This classicizing impulse at the Athenian festivals can be traced earlier in the imperial period to the renewal of the choregia in the 1st century CE, which Wilson attributes to the influence of the philhellenic Roman elite.18 As Alcock has argued, elite classicizing tendencies were a creative way of negotiating new networks of power in the Roman world.19 The festivals were a part of the culture of paideia, not only because they provided opportunities for literary performances (including the poetry of the past), but also because elite benefactors could demonstrate their knowledge of past customs by supporting such events.20 Hadrian was particularly closely involved with the Athenian Technitai. Several fragmentary letters between the emperor and the Technitai survive, which Geagan has interpreted as evidence for the revival of the Technitai in Athens.21 One inscription records the correspondence between Hadrian, a priest of Dionysus Choreios, and the Athenian Technitai.22 The seven letters of face A are from Hadrian to the Technitai of Dionysus Choreios, and concern some crown-bearing, musical contests.23 The letters of face B, inscribed after the death of Hadrian, in the reign of Antoninus Pius (138– 161 CE), are between the priest of Dionysus Choreios, Attalus Andragathos of Sphettos, and the Technitai, and concern the financing of the festival.24
58 Mali Skotheim A matter of payment is also mentioned, perhaps for the Technitai contracted to perform.25 Attalus’ address to the musical Technitai suggests that his correspondence may not have concerned the dramatic artists.26 These letters demonstrate several important facets of the festival culture of Hadrianic Athens. The emperor was personally involved, through correspondence, with the Technitai, whose cooperation was essential to the implementation and future success of Hadrian’s vision of Athens as a festival center. During and after Hadrian’s lifetime, the success of these festivals also relied on local elites, who held the priesthood of Dionysus Choreios, as well as those who served as agonothetai. These agents participated in the management of financial and logistical details, as shown in these letters. The Technitai also promoted themselves in connection to the emperor, reciprocating Hadrian’s attentions by honoring him as the “new Dionysus” in two Athenian inscriptions.27 The Athenian Technitai continued to be involved with the preservation of Hadrian’s memory through the festivals, as they competed at the Hadrianeia, which was established in Athens during Hadrian’s lifetime, and continued to be celebrated after his death.28 In an inscription dated after 138 CE, an emperor (whose name is not preserved) greets the Athenian Technitai who have won events in the Hadrianeia.29 In the surviving victory lists, only gymnastic and musical competitions appear, and it is unknown whether the Hadrianeia included dramatic competitions.30 Hadrian also organized the Greek festivals on a grand scale. An inscription from Alexandria Troas contains three letters from Hadrian to the world synod of Technitai dated to the year 134 CE, in response to at least nine letters and embassies of the synod.31 Filtering individual complaints through the emperor led to standardization across the Empire, as he responded with decrees that had ramifications for many cities. Hadrian’s calendar laid out when festivals would be celebrated, how long they were to last, and the interval of time thus allowed for the Technitai to travel between the contests.32 This was in the best interests of the Technitai because it maximized their ability to win as many prizes as possible, but it also benefited the cities hosting festivals as they needed competitors to show up in order to have a successful agon. There was a clear expectation that the contestants following the circuit would also be competing at local contests, revealing the impact of the expanded periodos in the imperial period not only on the travel demands placed on competitors, but also on the prospect of even lower-level contests attracting star performers on their way between the highest-status festivals. The letters contain several details which concern the festivals of Achaea. The emperor mentions that the accounts for the festivals of Corinth should be sent to the proconsul, and that victors should receive two-thirds or half of their awards, suggesting some financial trouble at Corinth.33 This was part of a larger strategy to ensure the financial health of the festivals, as Hadrian also put measures in place to prevent corruption and misuse of festival endowments. He forbade cities from using funds set aside for festivals from being diverted to other uses, such as building projects, and from inviting competitors to a contest and then not celebrating it fully; in other words, trying to
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 59 save money by eliminating some contests so as not to offer prizes in those categories, citing Miletus and Chios as examples of this practice.34 Despite the hint of financial difficulty at Corinth, according to Hadrian’s calendar the Technitai spent a significant amount of time in the province of Achaea. During the first year of the cycle, immediately after the Olympia, the Isthmia provided opportunities for musical and dramatic competitors. According to the calendar, the Hadrianeia in Athens began on 1 Maimakterion (mid-November) and lasted 40 days. While the time between the Isthmia (August) and the Hadrianeia was unaccounted for, it is likely that the Technitai remained in Greece to compete at other, lower-status contests, putting them in the region for approximately six months of that year, before departing for Tarentum. In the second year of the cycle, they returned to Greece to compete at the Actia in Nicopolis in September (nine days before the kalends of October), and continued to the contest at Patras “during the passage,” and the Nemea and Heraia at Argos, from the kalends of November to the kalends of January. The next entry in the calendar was the Panathenaia at the beginning of the third year of the cycle, with its procession on 28 Hekatombeion.35 In the intervening time, some may have stayed in Greece for local and regional contests and some may have left again for Asia. This put the Technitai in Greece for a minimum of three months in year two, from mid-September through December, and a maximum of nine months. From the Athenian Panathenaia, the Technitai departed for Asia, where they spent most of the year, before returning to Greece for the Pythia at Delphi in April/May. In the fourth year of the cycle, the Isthmia at Corinth took place in August, followed by the joint festival of the Achaeans and Arcadians at Mantinea in September. In January, the Technitai returned to Asia for the Hadrianeia at Smyrna and the Olympia and Balbilleia at Ephesus, and ended back in Athens for the Panhellenia in May/June. 36 Their total time in Greece, then, in year four is a minimum of four months (July–September and May/June). This rough calculation of time spent in Greece suggests that Hadrian expected the Technitai to return to Greece every year, and to spend a substantial part of the year there. By contrast, the Technitai only visited Italy in the first and second years of the cycle and were only definitely in Asia in the third and fourth years, although many surely did compete at the Asian festivals at other times, such as the contest of Callicrates at Aphrodisias, scheduled immediately before the Capitolia in Rome (year one of the Olympiad).37 The Olympiads provided a panhellenic calendar, in relation to which all other contests were scheduled. In addition, Hadrian used Roman reckoning systems within months (e.g. the Heraia and the Nemea were to be held from the kalends of November to the kalends of January), as well as the Athenian calendar. Feeney has argued that the synchronization of Greek and Roman time was part of the project of Roman Hellenization.38 Hadrian’s standardization of the Greek festival calendar was part of a larger imperial interest in synchronizing Greek and Roman time, but also shows careful attention to the relationship between local and trans-regional cycles. Hadrian’s use of the Athenian calendar alongside the Olympiads and the Roman calendar, furthermore,
60 Mali Skotheim contributed to his project of making Athens the center of the Greek festival network, and therefore, the cultural center of the Greek world. Many of the decisions of Hadrian in the Alexandria Troas letters concern the administration of Greek festivals generally, suggesting an impulse towards standardization on the part of the emperor. For example, Hadrian addressed a complaint made by the Technitai concerning shortages in the payments of prize money. He laid out a procedure to address this problem, in which the festival organizer would hand over the prize money to a Roman official, whether the provincial governor, proconsul, quaestor, or legate, in order to ensure that the correct amount of money was given to each victor. This effectively blocked the festival organizer from complete financial control of the endowment, in order to prevent corruption. That Roman officials were to serve as the middlemen between festival organizers and victors implies an attitude that the Roman officials were impartial and less prone to corruption than the (likely Greek) festival organizers. Hadrian’s concern about establishing order at the festivals extended to the competitors, as he also established that whip-bearers should be designated in case contestants needed to be whipped for breaking the rules. Moreover, he wrote that the contest rules should be displayed at every festival, revealing a similar commitment to standardization and order.39 Unlike Nero, Hadrian did not institute changes to the timing of festivals without first seeking permission from the cities in question. This helps to explain why Hadrian’s re-organization of the Greek festival calendar did not appear in sources of the time as a disturbing change, despite it being more far-reaching than Nero’s disruption of the periodos in 66/7 CE.40 For example, in the second letter, Hadrian referenced his request to change the date of a contest in Nicomedia; the Nicomedians refused, and Hadrian respected their refusal, affirming that they could celebrate their contest whenever they wished. The emperor situated all changes to the Greek festivals, regarding scheduling, the length of time of each festival, and the limitations placed on spending, in terms of responses to specific problems raised by the Technitai.41 Where possible, he spoke of change in the language of restoration of past customs. In the first letter, in response to the complaint from the Technitai that Chios and Miletus had cut contests, Hadrian ordered these cities to restore their festivals to the way they had been celebrated in the past. Repeatedly, he made it seem as if he was merely resolving difficulties and restoring past practices, masking the fact that an intervention by the imperial administration in the Greek festival network on this scale was entirely unprecedented. It is also possible to reconstruct the dramatic festivals of Roman Achaea from victory lists and inscriptions detailing the careers of individual performers. With the exception of the Olympia, the contests of the periodos in Roman Achaea (the Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea, as well as the Actia at Nicopolis, the Heraia and Aspis at Argos, and the four contests in Athens) included musical and dramatic competitions. For example, an actor of comedy (komoidos) who may have won at the Actia voted on a decree of the Technitai in Ancyra in 128 CE.42 In the second half of the 2nd century CE,
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 61 Gaius Julius Bassus of Miletus won as an actor of old tragedy (tragoidos) at the Nemea and Aspis at Argos.43 Expressing his own classicizing impulse, Plutarch lamented the addition of tragedy to the Pythian games.44 This is confirmed by the attestation of dramatic victors at the Pythia: the actor Daidouchos Krat, a victor at the Pythia, was honored with citizenship by the Delphians in the mid-2nd century CE.45 In Athens, the Panathenaia contained dramatic competitions in the imperial period, including old and new tragedy. An Athenian inscription from the 1st century CE honors an individual (whose name is lost) for “having directed a new (i.e. newly-written) tragedy at the Great Panathenaia” ([κα]ὶ τραγῳδίαν Παναθήναια τ[ὰ]/[μεγά]λα καινὴν διδ[ά]ξας).46 Gaius Julius Bassus, whose victory at Argos was mentioned above, also won at the Panathenaia. He was an actor of tragedy and comedy (tragoidos and komoidos), and a herald.47 Additionally, in Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Plato, Diogenes cites Thrasyllus referring to tragedy at the Panathenaia. Θράσυλλος δέ φησι καὶ κατὰ τὴν τραγικὴν τετραλογίαν ἐκδοῦναι αὐτὸν τοὺς διαλόγους, οἷον ἐκεῖνοι τέτρασι δράμασιν ἠγωνίζοντο—Διονυσίοις, Ληναίοις, Παναθηναίοις, Χύτροις—ὧν τὸ τέταρτον ἦν Σατυρικόν· τὰ δὲ τέτταρα δράματα ἐκαλεῖτο τετραλογία. Thrasyllus says that he [Plato] published his dialogues in tetralogies, like those of the tragic poets. Thus they contended with four plays at the Dionysia, the Lenaea, the Panathenaea and the festival of Chytri. Of the four plays the last was a satyric drama; and the four together were called a tetralogy.48 Thrasyllus (d. 36 CE) seems to have anachronistically assumed that drama was performed at the Panathenaia in the 4th century BCE, mapping the practice during his own time onto the time of Plato. The Panathenaia originally included musical, poetic, equestrian, and gymnastic competitions, but not drama.49 That Athens remained a center for the acting profession after Hadrian is clear from the dominance of Athenian performers in Boeotian victory lists. The records of the festivals of Boeotia in the 1st century CE are deficient, but in the surviving inscriptions, Athenian dramatists do not appear. However, at the Mouseia in Thespiae from 150–160 CE, Athenian dramatists re-emerge: Agathemeros son of Pythocles, an actor of new tragedy, Antiphon, a poet and actor of new comedy, and Artemon son of Artemon, a poet of new tragedy. In victory lists dated to 150–170 CE, the Athenians Metrobios son of Metrobios and Philemon, actors of old tragedy, won at the Mouseia, and in 161–180 CE, Publius Aelius Amphichares, a poet of new tragedy and new comedy. The last attested Athenian victor at the Mouseia is Marcus Eutychianos, an actor of comedy, after 212 CE.50 Outside of Boeotia, four Athenian actors of comedy are attested, Titus Aelius Auphelius Apollonius, of Athens and Tarsus, who appeared at Olympia 138–161 CE, two by the name of Quintus Marcius Straton, and one Quintus Marcius Titianus.51
62 Mali Skotheim If Geagan is correct in seeing a revival of the Athenian Technitai under Hadrian, the evidence from Boeotia suggests an interesting possibility regarding the longer-term impact of this. A stronger organization in Athens may have resulted in increased availability of musical and dramatic competitors for neighboring regions, in other words, those able to make the short trip to festivals in Boeotia. Hadrian’s interventions in the Athenian festivals, then, may have had more inter-regional effects than have been recognized. The festivals of Boeotia were not of the highest status (i.e. not on the periodos) and yet they are attested remarkably well epigraphically. This provides a unique opportunity to compare the festivals of another region of Achaea in the 2nd century with those of Hadrianic Athens. Without any direct imperial involvement, the festivals of localities with strong Roman connections (such as Thespiae) fared relatively well, probably due to investment by elite benefactors who sought to represent themselves as the upholders of past traditions, while forging political relationships within the contemporary frame of Roman Greece. The Charitesia at Orchomenos, a musical and dramatic contest, is attested into the 1st century BCE.52 At Thebes, one victory list from the imperial period includes an actor of old tragedy (tragoidos), but the name of the contest is not preserved.53 The festival may have been the Romaia, the Agrionia, or the Dionysia Herakleia. It is at Thespiae, however, that we find the clearest picture of the continuation of dramatic competitions in Roman-era Boeotia. The first definite attestation of drama at Thespiae occurs in the mid-3rd century BCE.54 The association of Dionysus with the cult of the Muses in the 4th century BCE may indicate that drama was introduced to the festival even earlier.55 The participation of competitors from as far away as Asia Minor, and from several branches of the Technitai, suggests that the festival was well-known throughout the Greek world, although the Mouseia was not on the periodos.56 In the early imperial period, close connections to Rome were already apparent at the Mouseia. A festival of the imperial cult was appended to the Mouseia in the 1st century CE, which became the Mouseia Sebastea, and under Tiberius, an encomiographer for Julia Augusta (i.e. the empress Livia) Mnemosyne appeared at the festival.57 Strabo claims that in his day, the only surviving cities in Boeotia were Thespiae and Tanagra, all others being left in ruins.58 While he may have exaggerated somewhat, the favor shown to Thespiae in the imperial period is clear. Roman negotiatores were present at Thespiae even in the pre-Augustan period, a trend which continued into the imperial era.59 Dedications left by Greek and Roman visitors to the sanctuary of the Muses at Thespiae suggest that it was a site of tourism, not only due to the famous statue of Eros by Praxiteles, and after its removal, Menodoros’ copy, but also because of the association of Mt. Helicon with the Muses, and the Greek literary tradition, especially Hesiod.60 The sanctuary became a place where elite visitors could show off their literary talents as well, by leaving dedicatory epigrams, as Hadrian did during his visit.61 Bowie speculates that
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 63 Hadrian’s visit to Thespiae in 124/5 CE, during his stay in Athens, may have been during the Erotidea or Mouseia festival, and reads the dedication of the hide of a Mysian bear to Eros as an allusion to his relationship with Antinoos, whom he may have met in Bithynia the year before.62 In the mid-2nd century CE, the victory lists of the Mouseia indicate some experimentation with the order of events (Table 4.1). Whereas in the 1st century BCE, auletic competitions were grouped together, as were kitharists and kitharodes, in the mid-2nd century CE, the program was reorganized, splitting the auletic and kitharistic/kitharoidic competitions, such that the Pythian aulete and kitharist preceded the dramatic competitions, and the choral aulete and kitharode followed.63 By 161–9 CE or 176–80 CE, the competition in old tragedy had migrated up in the program, framed by the kitharist and Pythian aulete, while the competitions in newly written tragedy and comedy remained together.64 No komoidos is mentioned. This could be because there was no competition in this category in this particular year, or because it had disappeared from the program. However, I suspect that if we had the rest of the victory list, we would find the komoidos nested between the choral aulete and kitharode, echoing the nesting of the tragoidos between the kitharist and Table 4.1 Competitions at the Mouseia in Thespiae in the 2nd century CE Victory list, 150–160 CE.68
Victory list, 150–160 CE or after 169 CE.69
Victory list, 161–9 or 176–80 CE.70
poet of the processional ode herald trumpeter writer of encomium for the emperor encomium for the Muses poet for the emperor poem for the Muses rhapsode Pythian aulete kitharist actor of old comedy tragoidos of old tragedy poet of new comedy actor of new comedy poet of new tragedy actor of new tragedy choral aulete kitharode poet of satyr–play dia panton
poet of prosodion
prosodion
herald trumpeter writer of encomium for the emperor encomium for the Muses poet for the emperor poet for the Muses rhapsode Pythian aulete kitharist komoidos of old comedy tragoidos of old tragedy poet of new comedy actor of new comedy poet of new tragedy actor of new tragedy kitharode choral aulete writer of satyr-play dia panton
trumpeter herald encomium for the emperors encomium for the Muses poem for the emperors poem for the Muses kitharist tragoidos Pythian aulete poet of new tragedy actor of new tragedy poet of new comedy
64 Mali Skotheim Pythian aulete. These innovations in the festival program suggest that the continuation of dramatic and musical agones at Thespiae was not merely a matter of celebrating contests as they had been in the past, evoking the past glory of the Thespian festivals, but rather of creative re-interpretation of past custom. As in all other periods, local elites who provided financial support and organizational assistance continued to be honored for their services to the festival. One Avidius Archestratos, agonothetes of the Mouseia, was honored by his daughter,65 and the Thespians voted a statue of a choregos, Philinos, be erected.66 In the 3rd century CE, the contests were reorganized into the Megala Caesarea Sebastea Mouseia, and the program was reduced, eliminating competitions in newly-written tragedy and comedy, as well as the various encomia, which were used to expand the program in the 2nd century CE.67 As at Thespiae, victory lists for the Isthmia and Ceasarea allow us to trace changes made over the course of the imperial period. In 3 CE, the thymelic contests at the Isthmia Caesarea were limited, including only a trumpeter, herald, poet, writer of encomium, aulete, kitharist, and kitharode.71 Just as at Thespiae, the 2nd century CE saw an expansion to the festival program, particularly with the addition of imperial encomia. The inscription relating to the Caesarea during the reign of Claudius includes only the contests related to the imperial family (prose encomium for the emperor, prose encomium for Tiberius, poem for Livia Augusta).72 By 127 CE, however, there were significant changes to the festival.73 The thymelic contests were much enlarged, both by expanding categories which previously existed, and by adding new categories. There were three poetry competitions and two encomium competitions in 127 CE versus one each in 3 CE. The musical contests were expanded, with the addition of the choral kitharist, aulete, and child kitharode, and drama was added to the program. Interestingly, the Corinthians display a preference for comedy at this festival as there was a competition for a poet of comedy but not a poet of tragedy, and for a child komoidos but not a child tragoidos. Re-performed comedy and tragedy were both represented by the komoidos and tragoidos. The festival is last attested in the late 2nd century CE. 74 This last victory list is missing most of the lines relating to the thymelic competitions, but the presence of the kitharode (the final thymelic competition on the earlier programs) suggests that the thymelic program did continue to this point. The specialties of one victor at the Isthmia suggest the increasingly hybrid nature of performances in the imperial period. Gaius Aelius Themison won at the Isthmia, Nemea, and koinon Asias for his musical performances of Euripides, Sophocles, and Timotheus. Honors given by the Milesians to Themison at the Isthmia were recorded at Isthmia in the first half of the 2nd century CE.75 ἡ βουλὴ καὶ ὁ δῆμος Μειλησίων Γ. Αἴλιον Θεμίσωνα Θεοδότου υ(ἱὸν) νεικήσ̣αντα Ἴσθμια
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 65 5 Νέμεα κοινὸν Ἀσίας ε ʹ καὶ τοὺς λοιποὺς ἀγῶνας π̣θ̣ ʹ, μόνον καὶ πρῶτον Εὐρειπίδην Σοφοκλέα καὶ Τειμόθεον 10 ἑαυτῷ μελοποιήσαντα. ψ(ηφίσματι) β(ουλῆς). The council and the people of the Milesians (honor) Gaius Aelius Themison, son of Theodotus, who won the Isthmia, Nemea, koinon Asias 5 times, and the other contests 89 times, and was the first and only one to set Euripides and Sophocles and Timotheus to music for his own purpose (ἑαυτῷ). Decreed by the council. Power identifies Themison as a kitharode.76 Gaius Aelius Themison may have competed at the Isthmia at a time when tragoidoi were also competing, both kitharode and tragedians working from the same canon of classical drama. As with the mutability of festival programs, Themison’s adaptations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Timotheus of Miletus suggest a simultaneous looking to the past, particularly in connection to the classical Athenian Dionysia, and a creative reworking for the present. Sparta, too, laid claim to Greek literary and cultural heritage by introducing drama to her competitions in the 2nd century CE. A budget for a festival, including a competition in tragedy, survives on a bronze inscription found at the theater in Sparta.77 Dating from 143–8 CE (based on the inclusion of a victor, Aelius Granianus of Sicyon, known to have won at the Olympia in 145), Cartledge and Spawforth suggest the festival in question is the Urania or Eurycleia, and describe the program as “determinedly up-to-date agonistic entertainment.”78 Introducing dramatic competitions involved a significant outlay of resources, as the competitions in tragedy sometimes fetched the highest prizes at Greek festivals, although more often the highest sum went to kitharodes. At Sparta, the total amount of the prizes preserved on the inscription is 87,760 sesterces, with the tragic actor alone collecting a prize of 12,000 sesterces. The budget of 143–8 CE is the only evidence for drama at the festivals of Sparta, but the Spartans had been involved with dramatic festivals abroad before, as Augustus had granted supervision of the Actian games to them due to their support of his cause at the Battle of Actium.79 At home, a mix of imperial and local benefaction supported renovations to the theater and the foundation and celebration of the Urania, under Nerva, and Leonidea, under Trajan, which contributed to Sparta’s appeal as a tourist destination in the Roman world.80 The parallels between Thespiae and Sparta are telling. Both cities had particularly strong connections to Rome, not only economically but militarily. Both were known for enduring loyalty to Rome, and both supplied troops to
66 Mali Skotheim support Roman wars in the 160s/70s CE.81 In both cases, a concentration of wealth likely contributed to the ability to support expensive agonistic festivals. Even after the financial demands of this military support, the festivals of Sparta and Thespiae endured. Sparta received a new sacred contest, the Olympia Commodea, after 177 CE, and as shown above, the Mouseia at Thespiae persisted into at least the early 3rd century CE.82 Cartledge and Spawforth note that the only cities with more than ten imported Attic sarcophagi in Roman Achaea were Sparta, Thespiae, Corinth, and Patrae, suggesting relatively well-resourced populations in these places.83 All four were also sites of dramatic festivals in the Roman period. The evidence for dramatic festivals in Achaea in the 2nd century CE suggests that cities with particularly strong political and economic ties to Rome were more likely to retain and expand dramatic festivals at this time. Local elites who served as festival organizers contributed financial as well as logistical support and were rewarded with prominent front-row seats in the theater and other forms of social prestige. At Thespiae, the continuation of musical and dramatic contests into the Roman period evoked the deep history of associating this site with the Muses, while innovations to the program, including the incorporation of encomia, spoke to contemporary concerns. The festivals of Athens, on the other hand, suggest a level of personal engagement and interference on the part of Hadrian that drew on models of imperial and elite behavior, while also being rather unique. Hadrian may have had Augustus’ Actia in mind as a model for imperial festival foundations at the highest level, but he went much farther in manipulating the periodos to center so strongly on Athens. Serving as organizer of the Athenian Dionysia and wearing local costume, Hadrian played the role of local elite benefactor, but as emperor, his impact on the festival network at large was much wider, seeking not only to standardize the Greek festival calendar, but also to ensure a predictable and constant movement of competitors through Achaea, and thus the future flourishing of her festivals.
Notes 1 On Hadrian’s poetic compositions, see Bowie 2002. 2 Cass. Dio 69.10. Cf. Klose 2005, 128. On the funding of theater buildings by emperors, including Hadrian, see Sturgeon 2004, 412. 3 SHA 19.6; Nervegna 2007, 22. 4 See also Boatwright 2000, 94–104; Spawforth 1989. 5 Geagan 1972 collects the correspondence of Hadrian with the Athenian Technitai; cf. Petzl and Schwertheim 2006. Trajan also corresponded with the Technitai: Geagan 1975; Gordillo Hervás 2017. Plotina may have patronized the thymelic artists: Oliver 1975. 6 IG II2 2024. 7 See Kouremenos in this volume. 8 Karivieri 2002; cf. Galli 2008. 9 Cass. Dio 69.11 (Eleusinian mysteries); 69.16 (Dionysia). 10 Geagan 1979, 392.
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 67 1 Shear 2012, 160. 1 12 Foundation date of the Panhellenia festival: Wörrle 1992. On the Panhellenia and the worship of Hadrian, see Camia in this volume. 13 Foundation date of the Panhellenion: IG IV2 1.384 (Epidauros, 133/4 CE). On Hadrian and the Panhellenion, see Oliver 1951; Spawforth and Walker 1985, 1986; Willers 1990; Swain 1996, 75–6; Boatwright 2000; Romeo 2002; Doukellis 2007. 14 Actia at Nicopolis: Suet., Aug. 18; Strabo 7.7.6; Stat. Silv. 2.2.6–12. Sebastea at Naples: Geer 1935; Arnold 1960; Caldelli 1993, 28–37. Victory lists of the Sebastea: I.Napoli 56, 57, 60. New fragments from the 1st c. CE.: de Martino and Miranda 2007. 15 On the Capitolia, see Lana 1951; Robert 1970; Caldelli 1993; Jones 1998, 186. Cf. Suet., Dom. 4, Cass. Dio 67.1. On the Capitolia evoking Augustus’ Actia: Davies 2004, 149. 16 Weir 2004, 146. 17 On categories of games, see Remijsen 2011. 18 IG II2 3157 (1st c. CE), an honorific for a choregos who directed tragedy at the Panathenaia. See Wilson 2000, 276, and Shear 2013. 19 Alcock 2002, 41. See also Aneziri 2014, who demonstrates the centrality of festivals to elite and sub-elite Greek adaptation to the Roman world; on elite identity as a factor in these negotiations, see van Nijf 2010. 20 van Nijf 2008 discusses athletic festivals of the Roman era in relation to the culture of paideia. The knowledge of proper festival customs is one way in which Apollonius of Tyana demonstrates paideia in Philostratus’ VA: Skotheim 2019. 21 Geagan 1972, 151. 22 IG II2 1105 and IG II2 4795; Geagan 1972, 134–9. Line numbers reference the text as restored by Geagan. 23 The epithet Choreios is used of Dionysus elsewhere, e.g. Plut. Mor. 680b. 24 Geagan 1972, 152. 25 Geagan 1972, 152 face B, l. 19. 26 Geagan 1972, 152, face B, l. 13 27 SEG 47–222 (129/30 CE) and IG II2 1350 (135 CE). On the title “new Dionysus” as a claim to the personal protection of the emperor, see Hervás 2017, 88. 28 On the Hadrianeia, including its foundation date, see Camia in this volume. 29 IG II2 1348. 30 Victory lists for the Hadrianeia: IG II2 2087 (163/4 CE), IG II2 2119 (180/1 CE), IG II2 2114 (183/4 CE). Agonothetai of the Hadrianeia: IG II2 2050 (143/4 or 144/5 CE), IG II2 2086 (163/4 CE), SEG 26–246 (175/6 CE), IG II2 2130 (192/3 CE), IG II2 2199 (ca. 200 CE), IG II2 3015 (210–220 CE). 31 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006; SEG 56–1359; Jones 2007. Remijsen 2015, 211 discusses Hadrian’s reorganization of the calendar. 32 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006, l. 78–80. 33 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006, l. 32. 34 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006, l. 8–16. 35 On the date of the Panathenaia under Hadrian, see Shear 2012. Guow 2008 provides an alternate reconstruction of the third year of the cycle. 36 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006, l. 61–6. 37 Roueché 1993, no. 51. 38 Feeney 2007, 24.
68 Mali Skotheim 9 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006, l. 28–32 (whipping); l. 52–6 (publication). 3 40 Suetonius claims that the circuit festivals were all held in the same year to coincide with Nero’s visit: Suet., Ner. 23. For the schedule of the festival calendar during Nero’s trip to Greece, see Bradley 1978, 71–2. 41 The dissemination of policies by responding to letters from subjects was typical of Roman rule. See Millar 1977, 213–28. This level of personal engagement with local civic affairs is seen, for instance, in Hadrian’s correspondence with officials in Oinoanda, a small polis of northern Lycia, concerning the foundation of a new musical and dramatic festival, the Demostheneia. See Wörrle 1988. 42 Bosch 1967, 166 no. 130. 43 Vollgraf 1919, 258–60. 44 Plut. Mor. 674d–e. 45 FD III 4.86 (mid-2nd century CE). 46 IG II2 3157, l. 4–5. Cf. Csapo and Slater 1995, III.172 (English translation); Wilson 2000, 325 n. 152 and 383 n. 61. Wilson suggests that the choregos and director of this play was also the poet. 47 Vollgraf 1919, 258–60; date of the inscription: Moretti 1953, 74. 48 Diog. Laert. 3.56; Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 56. 49 For the earlier Panathenaia, see Neils 1996 and Shapiro 1992; Sourvinou-Inwood and Parker 2011; Palagia and Spetsieri-Choremi 2015; Shear 2020. 50 See note 67 below. 51 IG III 120 (Auphelius); IG II2 12664 (Straton, Straton, and Titianus). 52 Victory lists: IG VII 3195, 3196, 3197. Dedications by festival organizers: SEG 34–356 and SEG 42–417 = Manieri 2009, Orc. 26 and 27. Cf. Buckler 1984. 53 IG VII 2449 = Manieri 2009, Theb. 13. 54 Manieri 2009, Thes. 7 (265–55 BCE). 55 Schachter 1986, 2.158–9 discusses the artistic evidence. 56 Schachter 1986, 2.152. 57 I. Thespiai 358 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 40; I. Thespiai 174. 58 Strabo 9.2.25. 59 Müller 1996; SEG 32–499 and 500 (100 BCE); Alcock 2002, 45. 60 Menodoros’ copy of Praxiteles’ Eros: Paus. 9.27.4. On the movements of the Eros statue, see Alcock 1993, 178. 61 On Roman visitors to the sanctuary at Thespiae, see Jones 1970, 247; Robinson 2012. Herennia Procula was one such elite visitor, who left her mark in poetry: Gutzwiller 2004. For Hadrian’s visit to Thespiae: I. Thespiai 270, 433, 435. 62 Bowie 2002, 180–1. 63 IG VII 1773 = Manieri 2009 Thes. 42; I. Thespiai 177 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 43. 64 I. Thespiai 179 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 44. 65 IG VII 2519 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 45. 66 I. Thespiai 387 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 46. 67 IG VII 1774 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 47 and IG VII 1775 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 48 (before 212 CE); IG VII 1776 = Manieri 2009, Thes. 49 (after 212 CE). 68 IG VII 1773. 69 I. Thespiai 177. 70 I. Thespiai 179. 71 Corinth 8.1.14. 72 Corinth 8.1.19. Only the first 11 lines survive. 73 Biers and Geagan 1970. 74 Corinth 8.1.15.
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 69 5 7 76 77 78 79 80 81
Broneer 1953, 192–3 = SEG 11–52c. Power 2010, 344. SEG 11–838. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 188. Strabo 7.7.6. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 96. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 107 and 167–70. Cf. SEG 39–456 (levy of citizens of Thespiae for a war, 169–72 CE). 82 Olympia Commodea: Spawforth 1986. 3 Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 156. 8
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70 Mali Skotheim Geagan, Daniel J. (1972). “Hadrian and the Athenian Dionysiac Technitai.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 103, 133–60. ——— (1975). “A Letter of Trajan to a Synod at Isthmia.” Hesperia 44, no. 4, 396–401. ——— (1979). “Roman Athens: Some Aspects of Life and Culture I.” ANRW II 7, no. 1, 371–437. Geer, Russell Mortimer (1935). “The Greek Games at Naples.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 66, 208–221. Guow, Patrick (2008). “Hadrian and the Calendar of Greek Agonistic Festivals. A New Proposal for the Third Year of the Olympic Cycle.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 165, 96–104. Gutzwiller, Katharine (2004). “Gender and Inscribed Epigram: Herennia Procula and the Thespian Eros.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 134, 383–418. Hervás, Rocío Gordillo (2017). “Hadrian’s reorganization of the agonistic associations in Rome.” In Elena Muñiz Grijalvo, Juan Manuel Cortés Copete and Fernando Lozano Gómez eds., Empire and Religion: Religious Change in Greek Cities under Roman Rule, Leiden: Brill, 84–97. Jones, Christopher P. (1970). “A Leading Family of Roman Thespiae.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 74, 223–55. ——— (1998). “‘Joint Sacrifice’ at Iasus and Side.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 118, 183–6. ——— (2007). “Three New Letters of the Emperor Hadrian.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 161, 145–56. Karivieri, Arja (2002). “Just one of the boys: Hadrian in the company of Zeus, Dionysus, and Theseus.” In Erik Nis Ostenfeld ed., Greek Romans and Roman Greeks, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 40–54. Klose, Dietrich O. A. (2005). “Festivals and games in the cities of the East during the Roman Empire.” In Christopher Howgego, Volker Heuchert and Andrew Burnett eds., Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 125–33. Lana, Italo (1951). “I Ludi Capitolini di Domiziano.” Rivista 29, 145–60. Manieri, Alessandra (2009). Agoni Poetico-Musicali nella Grecia Antica, Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore. de Martino, Francesco, and Elena Miranda (2007). “Neapolis e gli imperatori. Nuovi dati dai cataloghi dei Sebastà.” Oebalus. Studi sulla Campania nell’antichità 2, 203–15. Millar, Fergus (1977). The Emperor in the Roman World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moretti, Luigi (1953). Iscrizioni Agonistiche Greche, Rome: A. Signorelli. Müller, Christel (1996). “Les nomina romana à Thespies du IIe s.a. à l’édit de Caracalla.” In A.D. Rizakis ed., Roman Onomastics in the Greek East. Social and Political Aspects. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Roman Onomastics, Athens, 7–9 September 1993, Athens, 157–166. Neils, Jenifer (1996). Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nervegna, Sebastiana (2007). “Staging Scenes or Plays? Theatrical Revivals of ‘Old’ Greek Drama in Antiquity.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 162, 14–42. van Nijf, Onno (2008). “Athletics and paideia: Festivals and physical education in the world of the Second Sophistic.” In Barbara E. Borg ed., Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, Berlin: De Gruyter, 203–28.
Hadrian and dramatic festivals of Achaea 71 ——— (2010). “Athletics, festivals, and Greek identity in the Roman East.” In Jason König ed., Greek Athletics, Edinburgh, 175–97. Oliver, James H. (1951). “New Evidence on the Attic Panhellenion.” Hesperia 20, no. 1, 31–3. ——— (1975). “The Empress Plotina and the Sacred Thymelic Synod.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 24, H. 1, 125–8. Palagia, Olga, and Alkestis Spetsieri-Choremi (2015). The Panathenaic Games: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at the University of Athens, 11–12 May, 2004, Oxford: Oxbow Books. Petzl, Georg, and Elmar Schwertheim (2006). Hadrian und die dionysischen Künstler: drei in Alexandria Troas neugefundene Briefe des Kaisers an die Künstler-Vereinigung, Bonn: Habelt. Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur (1968). The Dramatic Festivals of Athens 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Power, Timothy Conrad (2010). The Culture of Kitharôidia, Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Remijsen, Sofie (2011). “The So-Called ‘Crown Games’: Terminology and Historical Context of the Ancient Categories of Agones.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Bd. 177, 97–109. ——— (2015). The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robert, Louis (1970). “Deux concours grecs à Rome.” Comptes-rendus des Séances de L’année – Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 114, no. 1, 6–27. Robinson, Betsey A. (2012). “ Mount Helikon and the Valley of the Muses: The Production of a Sacred Space.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 25, 227–58. Romeo, Ilaria (2002). “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” Classical Philology 97, no. 1, 21–40. Roueché, Charlotte (1993). Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods, London: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. Shapiro, H.A. (1992). “Mousikoi agones: Music and poetry at the Panathenaia.” In Jenifer Neils ed., Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 53–76. Shear, Julia (2012). “Hadrian, the Panathenaia, and the Athenian Calendar.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 180, 159–72. ——— (2013). “Choruses and tripods: The politics of the Choregia in Roman Athens.” In Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson eds., Dithyramb in Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 389–408. ——— (2020). “An inconvenient past in Hellenistic Athens: The case of Phaidros of Sphettos.” In Christy Constantakopoulou and Maria Fragoulaki eds., Shaping Memory in Ancient Greece: Poetry, Historiography, and Epigraphy, Histos Supplement 11, 269–301. Skotheim, Mali (2019). “‘Naked Competitions’: Misreading Greek Festival Culture in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” Eranos 110, 61–78. Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane, and Robert Parker (2011). Athenian Myths and Festivals: Aglauros, Erechtheus, Plynteria, Panathenaia, Dionysia, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Pres. Spawforth, Antony J. (1986). “A Severan Statue Group and an Olympic Festival at Sparta.” Annual of the British School at Athens 81, 313–32. ——— (1989). “Agonistic Festivals in Roman Greece.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 55, 193–7.
72 Mali Skotheim Spawforth, Antony J., and Susan Walker (1985). “The World of the Panhellenion. I. Athens and Eleusis.” Journal of Roman Studies 75, 78–104. Spawforth, Antony J. (1986). “The World of the Panhellenion: II. Three Dorian Cities.” Journal of Roman Studies 76, 88–105. Sturgeon, Mary C. (2004). “Dedications of Roman Theaters.” Hesperia Supplements 33, 411–29. Swain, Simon (1996). Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250, Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. Weir, Robert George Alexander (2004). Roman Delphi and its Pythian Games, Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.. Willers, Dietrich (1990). Hadrians panhellenisches Programm: Archäologische Beiträge zur Neugestaltung Athens durch Hadrian, Basel: Vereinigung der Freunde Antiker Kunst. Wilson, Peter J. (2000). The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Wörrle, Michael (1988). Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien: Studien zu einer agonistischen Stiftung aus Oinoanda, Munich: C. H. Beck. ——— (1992). “Neue Inschriftenfunde aus Aizanoi I.” Chiron 22, 337–76.
5 The battle of Chaeronea nostalgia vs. idealism in 2nd-century Greek prose Sulochana R. Asirvatham
Introduction If we think of 2nd century Greek literature as largely “nostalgic” for the past of the independent poleis, the Battle of Chaeronea of 338 BCE, where Philip and Alexander won a decisive victory over a panhellenic alliance led by Athens and Thebes, seems an obvious inflection point. Our writers would have been exposed to such a perspective from a young age, as the historical strife between Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Philip, and the words of the Athenian orators themselves, provided the main scaffold for Greek rhetorical education.1 The noteworthiness of the battle for practicing sophists is evidenced by at least one extant rhetorical text from Hadrian’s reign, Hermogenes of Tarsus’s On Legal Questions, in which Philip and Demosthenes appear as the main characters in a “counterplea” regarding the fates of Greek prisoners after Chaeronea.2 That the battle could be presented as a locus of mourning is indicated by Philostratus, who in his Lives of the Sophists (Vitae Sophistorum, henceforth VS) cites two 2nd century orators, Aelius Dionysius (Dionysius of Miletus) and Polemo,3 for dirges they composed in the persona of Demosthenes denouncing himself to the Athenian boul ē in the wake of Chaeronea.4 Chaeronea-as-locus-of-mourning is also found in the oft-cited anecdote in which a distraught Isocrates starves himself to death at age 98 (or 99) after hearing about Chaeronea. This appears in at least two 2nd-/early-3rd-century biographical or quasi-biographical works (Lucian’s Macrobii and Philostratus’ VS; perhaps Ps-Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators can be included), as well as in Pausanias’ Periegesis.5 It is striking, then, how few 2nd century authors substantially mention Chaeronea at all. A TLG search of the name does not tell the entire story – for one thing, a writer can refer to the battle without mentioning Chaeronea – but, overall, what we moderns tend to see as a watershed moment in Greek history seems rather easy to downplay. Most of the extant 2nd century authors who mention the Battle of Chaeronea do so on only one or two occasions: Dio Chrysostom, Arrian, Lucian, Aelius Aristides, Athenaeus, Polyaenus, Hermogenes, and Aelianus Tacticus.6 Only two writers incorporate Chaeronea into their work in a significant way – Pausanias and Plutarch7 – the latter of whom, very significantly, is a Chaeronea native. Of these two, DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-6
74 Sulochana R. Asirvatham only Pausanias treats the Battle of Chaeronea as a strongly embedded “location of memory” for his Greek audience.8 Plutarch also registers the 338 BCE battle as a moment of resistance against a foreign enemy, but his treatment of Chaeronea changes according to context; he even uses the Macedonian defeat of Greece to bolster the image of his admired Alexander (contrast Pausanias, for whom Alexander, Philip, and the Macedonians in general, were negative entities).9 Furthermore, Plutarch pays much more attention to the battle between Sulla and Mithridates’ general Archelaus in 86 BCE than to the 450-year-old one between the Greek cities and Macedonians. Plutarch’s detailed description of the Battle of 86 in the Life of Sulla stands in stark contrast to his virtually detail-free treatment of the Battle of 338, but he is not unusual in this respect among imperial Greek authors. Aside from a few anecdotes found in Polyaenus, our main source for 338 remains that of the 1st century-BCE writer Diodorus Siculus (16.85–86),10 with additional details supplied by the Athenian orators. The battle is not, in other words, an event that any writer wishes to revisit in detail. This is true even of Pausanias, who nevertheless refers to it in terms seemingly designed to evoke a negative emotional response in his audience. The fact that Chaeronea could be used in the 2nd century to mourn the past but is rarely used this way suggests to me a distinction between authors who show nostalgia, which demonstrates a “homesickness” for the lost Greek past of the independent poleis and panhellenic activity that is decidedly “pastlooking”, and those who lean toward idealism, which glorifies Greek (or specifically Athenian) culture but, importantly, does not overtly view it as only a thing of the past. One can, of course, conceive of a situation in which a writer’s idealism is fully nostalgic: perhaps those Demosthenean “dirges” of Polemo and Dionysius of Miletus for Chaeronea emphasized Greece’s glorious past rather than its present. We will probably never know, but at any rate, no writer considered here (the main extant ones of the 2nd century who mention the Battle of 338) fully occupies the space of nostalgia combined with idealism. Only Pausanias has what we might call a “light” version of it. His 10-book Periegesis is, on the face of it, a work of Greek idealism: it foregrounds the remains of Greek buildings, monuments, and artworks that littered the landscape of nine regions of southern Greece11 while largely ignoring the Roman constructions that dominated it – with the very important exception of Hadrian’s buildings, especially those in Athens and Mantineia, a point to which we will return in the conclusion. Mentions of the Greek material spur on, in turn, historical (including mytho-historical) and geographical digressions,12 the subjects of which are always relevant to “Greece”, or at least to the rough geographical equivalent of Roman Achaea,13 even when they are dealing with Hellenistic kings and with Rome.14 The latter point is important, however, because what Pausanias sees in front of his eyes takes him far out of the world of Classical Greece. His latest monuments are not from 338 BCE or 323 BCE (the date of Alexander’s death), but from the mid-2nd century BCE, and he spends substantial time on the fate of the Greek city-states during the Wars of the Successors, starting with the very
The battle of Chaeronea 75 first story in Book 1 on Attica, which involves Ptolemy Philadelphus and Antigonus Gonatas. Furthermore, Pausanias is hardly idealistic about Greece’s history pre-Philip, which he shows throughout his Periegesis was one of constant inter-poleis strife.15 Nevertheless, as we shall see below, the Periegesis contains an undertone of active celebration and magnification of Athens’ role in historic panhellenic activity, including the Battle of Chaeronea, which I take as a form of “missing an idealized past” even as his positive emphasis on Athens’ present – as profoundly transformed by Hadrian – aligns him with other writers who celebrate the Greek present.16 Beyond Pausanias, whom I treat in the first section below, appearances of Chaeronea in 2nd- century literature suggest, collectively, a type of idealism that is decoupled from nostalgia. Because Greece remains “ideal” in the Roman present, there is no need to mourn the moment in which Greece collectively lost its freedom (a rhetoric that nevertheless remains current among our writers, as we shall see). In the second section, I will show how Plutarch’s references to Chaeronea sometimes take on a panhellenic tinge; on the whole, however, he does not seem particularly concerned to draw a line between Greece pre-Philip and Greece post-Philip. In the third section, I shall consider Chaeronea in the context of present-focused Greek idealism. The idea that Athens (as representative of the Greek ideal) is perfect and eternal emerges most clearly in Aelius Aristides’s Panathenaic Oration; in this scheme, there is no reason to overemphasize the significance of Chaeronea. Another group of writers, mostly military-minded, variously treat Philip, Alexander, and the Macedonian soldiery at Chaeronea positively (or neutrally) as quasiHellenic militarists. The conclusion considers how the study of Chaeronea complicates what it means to say that 2nd century Greek writers “look to the past”, and what its use (or lack thereof) tells us about a writer’s stance toward Roman power. To the degree that the Macedonians could be seen as a precursor to Roman power – something about which both Pausanias and Aelius Aristides are explicit – 17 Rome necessarily looms right outside the picture.
Pausanias’ Chaeronea: Panhellenism’s last gasp and Athenian heroism Among 2nd century writers, Pausanias most consistently uses strong language for the Battle of Chaeronea, calling it some variety of “disaster” for the Greeks on four separate occasions using three different terms: ἀτύχημα, συμφορὰ, and πταῖσμα. That he wishes to emphasize the panhellenic nature of the effort to beat back the Macedonians is suggested by the repetition of “Hellas” in all of these references, regardless of how local the context is. The first instance occurs a bit more than halfway into Book 1 on Attica: For the disaster (τὸ … ἀτύχημα) at Chaeronea was the beginning of ill for all the Greeks (ἅπασι τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἦρξε κακοῦ); not least did it enslave (δούλους ἐποίησε) those who overlooked the danger and fought on the side of the Macedonians. (1.25.3)
76 Sulochana R. Asirvatham In 9.6.5, Pausanias alludes to his earlier claim: “I said in my book on Attica that the failure (τὸ σφάλμα) at Chaeronea was a disaster for all the Greeks (συμφορὰν … τοῖς πᾶσιν Ἕλλησι)”, and notes that the situation was worse for Thebes than for anyone else, as they acquired a Macedonian garrison. He refers again to the Greek disaster (τὸ πταῖσμα τὸ Ἑλληνικόν) at Chaeronea in 9.29.8, in a discussion of Philip’s unburying the bones of the singer Linus from their Theban grave and bringing them to Macedonia. And in 10.3.3, Pausanias notes that it was after the disaster at Chaeronea for the Greeks (τὸ ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ … πταῖσμα Ἕλλησι) that Athens and Thebes restored Phocis.18 It seems relevant that these mentions mark the first and final two books of the Periegesis, as it brings the theme of the Greek effort against a foreign enemy full circle. But Pausanias also catalogues, throughout his work, the particular stances various states – namely, the Messenians, Eleans, Achaeans, Arcadians and Phocians – took in the conflict, and in most of those instances uses similarly panhellenic language.19 Furthermore, Pausanias rarely refers to the Battle of Chaeronea without reference to other conflicts.20 Chaeronea is typically the first element in the final movement of what Hutton has called the “canon of cooperative Greek activities”21 in which the Greeks partook before they became permanently subsumed by foreign powers: i.e. Chaeronea, the Lamian War with Antipater (323–322 BCE), and the war against the invading Gauls at Thermopylae in 279 BCE. 22 In other words, Chaeronea is (except in the case of the Achaeans) the beginning of the last gasp of panhellenism for Greece.23 It is true that, as we shall see, similar language for the “disaster” at Chaeronea is used by both Plutarch (ἀτυχία) and Arrian (συμφορὰ), which suggests that it is a long-standing rhetorical trope. It nevertheless seems possible to read the Chaeronean disaster as part of Pausanias’s larger discourse on panhellenism, which I believe demonstrates a type of Athenocentrism that goes beyond the merely cultural.24 It is not only a celebration of what still exists in the Athenian landscape but also includes past panhellenic heroics, and thus shows a type of nostalgic idealism for Athens, even if the entire work does not quite lament the political world of Greece before Philip.25 Pausanias’ first mention of the disaster at Chaeronea cited above is part of a longer excursus (1.25.3–1.26.3) that begins and ends with an Athenian hero, Olympiodorus, who is represented in a statue on the Athenian Acropolis and whose achievements against the Macedonians, Pausanias tells us, should offer encouragement (φρόνημα) to the hopeless. After Antipater took over from Arrhidaeus, the Athenians, finding the situation intolerable, gathered Peloponnesian fighting forces against him at Lamia (for which Pausanias gives a catalogue at 1.25.4).26 The Athenian Leosthenes became supreme leader; he did a kindness to all of Greece (πρὸς πάντας εὐεργεσία τοὺς Ἕλληνας: 1.25.5) by bringing home Darius’ Greek mercenaries, but his death produced a despondency that was the main cause of the Lamian defeat (παρέσχεν ἀποθανὼν ἀθυμῆσαι πᾶσι καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὐχ ἥκιστα σφαλῆναι). After a long series of machinations by the Macedonians,27 Athens fell under Demetrius Poliorcetes’ rule, but then “the memory of their
The battle of Chaeronea 77 ancestors came to some men” (ἄνδρας ἐσῆλθεν οὐ πολλοὺς … μνήμη … προγόνων: 1.26.1), prompting the Athenians to repel the Macedonians. They chose Olympiodorus as general: he beat the Macedonians in battle and set Athens free, assisted by the bravery of Leocritus (1.26.2). 1.26.3 sets out Olympiodorus’ other acts of defiance against the Macedonians and a concomitant list of his public honors. The theme of Athenian panhellenic heroism, in fact, begins much earlier in Book 1, where we first meet the above-mentioned Leosthenes (1.1.3), and where a painting of Callipus at the Athenian bouleterion prompts a story of the Athenians being willing to meet a new enemy, the Gauls, despite their exhaustion from war with the Macedonians (1.4.2). Pausanias’ definitive assessment of the accomplishment of the Athenians at Thermopylae runs thusly: “As I have already said, they saved Greece” (1.4.4).28 The presence of the Gallic invasion here is interesting, because Pausanias describes this battle in rich detail in Perieg. 10.20–23 (with a postscript on the celebration of its heroes at Delphi in 10.24.1), and even there highlights Athens’ leadership role, beginning with a reference to Callipus’ command (10.20.5).29 This is not the place for a complete review of Athenian panhellenism in Pausanias (which would naturally also involve the Persians).30 The point is that recurrent praise of panhellenic action as embodied by Athens – beginning in Book 1 and coming full circle in Book 10 – prompts us to read his recurrent references to Chaeronea as a “disaster” as something more than a convenient piece of rhetoric retrieved from the schoolbooks. We should see it instead as part of a panhellenic discourse centering on an Athens that has, from time to time, risen above Greece’s history of inter-poleis conflict to take the lead against foreign intruders.31 In the conclusion, we will consider how the same Athenian panhellenism may function as a quiet resistance to the last of those intruders: Rome.
Plutarch of (Roman) Chaeronea In contrast to Pausanias, Plutarch’s primary interest in Chaeronea, it seems, is as a place of the present rather than of the past – or at least not of the past that predates the “Roman story”. Plutarch’s identity as a Chaeronean local emerges in his use of the town as a distance marker,32 in geographical digressions,33 and in a comment on local custom.34 While he alludes to numerous episodes in the long history of his town (including two other historical interpoleis battles from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE),35 he is clearly most interested in its role in the story of Rome’s rise. He does not glamorize Chaeronea’s past – i.e. is not nostalgic for it – as he describes it as decrepit and impoverished at the time of the Mithridatic War (Cim. 1.1). What he is interested in is marking Chaeronea’s importance to Roman history. Plutarch mentions not only two monuments from the battle of 86 BCE (Sull. 19.9–10),36 but also a statue to Lucullus, who he says had saved the town from destruction and whose favor has thus come down to his day (Cim. 1.1–2). (Pausanias does not
78 Sulochana R. Asirvatham neglect to mention the Sulla monuments, but he also cites the lion monument for the Theban dead from 338 BCE;37 Plutarch must have seen the latter as well, but chooses not to mention them.) The highly dramatic circumstances behind Lucullus’s actions, which involve a spurned Roman would-be lover of a murderous young Chaeronean named Damon as well as strife between Chaeronea and its neighbor Orchomenus,38 do not require elucidation here. What is important is that Plutarch takes the opportunity to make clear his obligation to this Roman benefactor, even if he portrayed him less-thanfavorably in the eponymous Lucullus.39 More evidence that Plutarch wished to present Chaeronea as an important player in Roman history is witnessed in the sustained narrative of the Battle of 86 BCE (Sul. 15–19, framed by Sul. 11 and reflected upon briefly in Sul. 21–23) – a narrative that is, in fact, our best extant source for the battle.40 This background helps us interpret Plutarch’s references to the Battle of 338 BCE. While Plutarch, like Pausanias, presents Chaeronea as an emblem of panhellenic unity against the Macedonians, its appearances are largely anecdotal and are opportunistically sprinkled throughout his corpus. That they do not uniformly speak to nostalgia for a lost past diminishes the sense that they are meant to be taken as a statement of Plutarch’s sentimentality toward the independent Greek past.41 Nor are his references particularly Athenocentric (as we shall see, the one Greek singled out for heroism belongs to the Theban Sacred Band),42 despite the substantial amount of time he spent in Athens.43 It is true that the two Athenians in Plutarch’s corpus who oppose Philip – Phocion “the Good” and Demosthenes – receive some degree of ennoblement.44 In Phocion 16.8.2, our protagonist, a moderate and a realist, chides the Athenians for celebrating Philip’s death, making a quip that anticipates the continued power of the Macedonians after Philip’s death: “the force that had been arrayed against them at Chaeronea was only less by a single person.”45 Chaeronea has a somewhat more impactful presence in the Life of Demosthenes, where its aftermath is addressed in 19–21 with language that is reminiscent of Pausanias. Plutarch begins by citing “some divine misfortune” (τύχη τις δαιμόνιος) – compare Pausanias’s “disaster at Chaeronea” (τὸ…ἀτύχημα τὸ ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ) in 1.25.3 – 46 that put an end to Greek freedom (συμπεραίνουσα τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τῆς Ἑλλάδος) (19.1) and recites the words of a Sibylline oracle that foretold the Greek defeat at “the battle on the Thermodon [i.e. Chaeronea]”, which he then follows by a digression on the river’s name (19.2). The portrait of Demosthenes’ behavior that follows is ambivalent, but ends on a heroic note. Inspired by the enthusiasm of his fellow-soldiers to fight (20.1), Demosthenes was brave in his words; his actions, however, did not match his words, and he gave up his shield on the battlefield and ran away (20.2). But Philip, after he sobered up from his postvictory revelry,47 became awestruck by Demosthenes’ reputation (20.3), as did the Persians (20.4–5). After the Greek disaster (ἀτυχία),48 Demosthenes was attacked by other orators, but the people still honored him by allowing him to deliver a eulogy over the dead (21.2). The section ends with the comment that Philip only survived success for a short time (21.4).
The battle of Chaeronea 79 It is worth noting that in the above examples, bravery (or the lack of it) and other moral qualities belong to individuals, not states – befitting Plutarch’s penchant for biography and his belief that a person’s character is revealed by what he or she does and says.49 As I have argued elsewhere, Plutarch often presents Philip as a foil to Alexander, who was one of his most admired figures.50 Plutarch’s references to Chaeronea show this pattern: the battle that makes Philip the enemy of Greece is the same one that makes Alexander a hero. Plutarch offers a couple of “one-off ” anecdotes involving Philip and assorted Greeks in the aftermath of Chaeronea; the slant of each relates to the work in which it appears;51 a third reference, however, perfectly illustrates Plutarch’s differential treatment of Philip and Alexander, as it manages to combine a hint of nostalgia for what the Greeks lost at Chaeronea with praise of Alexander.52 The story (Alex. 12.5) involves a noble Theban woman named Timoclea who killed a Thracian commander who raped her during Alexander’s destruction of Thebes.53 When Timoclea was brought to Alexander for punishment and he asked her who she was, she replied that she was “a sister of Theagenes [a member of the Sacred Band of Thebes], who drew up the forces against Philip on behalf of the freedom of the Greeks (ὑπὲρ τῆς τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐλευθερίας) and fell at Chaeronea in command”.54 Amazed (θαυμάσας), Alexander gave her and her children their freedom. The story posits Alexander as a friend of the Greeks and a supporter of their freedom (Timoclea being a clear proxy for her brother’s cause) while simultaneously presenting Philip as the enemy of Greek freedom at Chaeronea. Not surprisingly, the only other mention of Chaeronea in the Life of Alexander tells us that he was the first to break ranks of the Theban Sacred Band (Alex. 9.2). Thus, Chaeronea represents twin poles upon which Plutarch’s admiration of Alexander rests: his war prowess (seen in his breaking of the Sacred Band), and his Hellenic character (here displayed as philanthropia towards Timoclea). These anecdotes show very clearly that, despite the occasional use of the language of lament over Chaeronea, there is nothing in Plutarch resembling Pausanias’ lament, which is woven into a larger commentary in the Periegesis of the loss of the possibility of panhellenic unity. It seems that for Plutarch, Chaeronea “is”, most importantly, what it represents in the Roman present: a Greek place that enjoys prestige among the Roman elite.
Chaeronea and Greek idealism The preference for idealization over nostalgia is seen most clearly in Aelius Aristides, who is our most avidly Atticist writer in terms of both linguistic imitation and the foregrounding of Athens, especially as a champion of panhellenism. The latter is embodied by the Panathenaic Oration (= 1 LenzBehr), which was modeled on, among other works, the Panathenaic of the panhellenist orator Isocrates and Thucydides’ Funeral Oration – no dirge, as Oliver points out55 – and includes a dose of Platonism, as it imagines a joint rule of the universe by a divinely chosen Athens and the Roman emperors. For Aristides, the history of Athens proves that the city is the panhellenic
80 Sulochana R. Asirvatham ideal (especially in contrast to Sparta). Most of the oration deals with Athenian heroics against the Persian barbarians as well as on behalf of allies against Greek cities, but Philip appears briefly toward the end. Aristides cites the conflict between Philip and the Greeks as proof that battling Hellas always inevitably meant facing Athens from the start, because, of all the poleis, only Athens resisted tyranny, wealth, and other vices, “as if she had been born to live for all” (ὥσπερ ἅπασι πεφυκυῖα ζῆν: Or. 13.222). Then in Or. 13.232, we learn Chaeronea has affected Thebes but not Athens, which even Philip recognized for her inherent nobility:56 Φίλιππός τε γὰρ εὐτυχήσας τῇ περὶ Χαιρώνειαν μάχῃ τὴν μὲν Θηβαίων πόλιν εὐθὺς φρουρᾷ κατέλαβε, τὴν δὲ τῶν Ἀθηναίων οὐδ’ ἰδεῖν ὑπέμεινεν, ἀλλ’ ἔστη κατὰ χώραν αἰδοῖ τοῦ κρείττονος. (Or. 13.232) For Philip, having been lucky at the Battle of Chaeronea, right away put the city of the Thebans under guard. He did not dare look at the Athenians’ city, however, but remained in the country out of awe towards something superior. We may note the contrast with the language of “bad luck” seen in Pausanias and to a lesser degree in Plutarch: for Aristides, Chaeronea was not a disaster for the Greeks, but merely a stroke of luck for Philip. Aristides continues with a praeteritio, citing Alexander’s continuously deferential demeanor toward the city: καὶ σιωπῶ τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον, ὡς ἀεὶ πρὸς αὐτὴν ἔσχε θεραπευτικῶς (“And I say nothing about Alexander, as he was always obsequiously disposed towards her”: 232) – a statement that contains some exaggerated truth (see on Arrian below) but generally minimizes Alexander’s historical role. The lines that immediately follow supply the rationale for the comment, as Aristides similarly praises the Romans (whom he simply calls “the present empire of land and sea, which I hope lasts forever” (ἥ … νῦν ἀρχὴ γῆς τε καὶ θαλάττης, εἴη … ἀθάνατος: 232) for their recognition of Athenian superiority. In short, Aristides’ positioning of Chaeronea all the way at the end of this long praise of Athens – perhaps on the verge of bypassing it altogether – shows that the idealization of the Greek past does not necessarily imply nostalgia, and in fact implies the opposite when the past and present are seen as a smooth continuum of success, as is the case in Aristides’s Panathenaic Oration. Also unnostalgic for the Greece that existed before 338 BCE, but nevertheless idealistic about Hellenic culture – as each separately defines it – are a few writers who mention Chaeronea in contexts that were neutral toward the Macedonians or in some sense “pro-Macedonian”. Like Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, in one of the orations he ostensibly delivered to Trajan using Alexander as a stand-in for the emperor,57 imbues Alexander with philosophical Hellenic virtue while underplaying Philip’s achievements,58 and introduces a dialogue between the father and son with a remarkable claim that gives
The battle of Chaeronea 81 Alexander all the credit for Chaeronea: “They say that [Alexander] brought about the battle and the victory at Chaeronea when his father shrank away from danger” (τῆς ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ μάχης τε καὶ νίκης φασὶν αὐτὸν αἴτιον γενέσθαι, τοῦ πατρὸς ὀκνοῦντος τὸν κίνδυνον: Or. 2.2).59 In his Anabasis Alexandri, which presents Alexander as a new Achilles, Arrian uses one of the same words Pausanias used, συμφορὰ, to describe what happened at Chaeronea (ἡ τε ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ ξυμφορά: Anab. 1.10.5), but the tone is not particularly sympathetic toward the Athenians. In the wake of Alexander’s destruction of Thebes in summer of 335, the Athenians sent an embassy to gain his goodwill. Alexander accepted it with kindness, but at the same time demanded the surrender of the Athenian orators for the “disaster at Chaeronea” and for the wrongs later committed against himself and his father. Alexander eventually relented on the matter of the orators: unlike Aristides, however, Arrian is noncommittal on whether Alexander did so out of reverence for Athens or for the practical reason of getting his Asian campaign moving without alienating Greece (Anab. 1.10.6). Then we have Polyaenus and Aelianus Tacticus, who write overtly military-themed texts that celebrate the Macedonians. In his Strategemata, Polyaenus, the self-described “Macedonian” who heroizes another Homeric figure, Odysseus, offers two anecdotes in his section on Philip in which Macedonian military superiority over the Athenians at Chaeronea is asserted (Strat. 4.2.2; 4.2.7).60 Aelianus Tacticus, in his work on the “Greek art of organizing an army” (ἡ παρὰ τοῖς Ἕλλησι τακτικὴ), which is in fact about the Macedonian phalanx, notes Philip’s defeat of the Greeks at Chaeronea and Alexander’s conquest of Asia in a purely matter-of-fact way in the context of countermarches (33). Whereas Dio imbues Alexander with philosophy as a sort of ideal (and sometimes cautionary) model for Trajan, for Arrian, Polyaenus and Aelianus Tacticus, Hellenism is something that Macedonian militarism offers. It is no mistake that these Macedonian-positive writers also maintain an authorial stance of positivity toward Rome. Arrian is a native Nicomedian, a friend of Hadrian, a provincial military commander, and a Roman senator; Polyaenus and Aelianus dedicate their works as “military lessons” to emperors (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, and Trajan, respectively). With Macedonian brilliance conflated with Hellenism and foregrounded as an analogy to Rome – and thus made relevant to the present day – the sad fate of the Greeks at Chaeronea is barely an afterthought.
Conclusion This chapter dealt with a diverse range of writers, a number of whom have been subject to intensive study in the last few decades. This is particularly true of Pausanias, who, like Appian, Cassius Dio, and Herodian, had until recently been mined as a historical “source” but was underappreciated for his historiographical and literary value.61 There is always the risk of missing the forest for the trees when examining one word in a single complex text, let alone in an entire series of them (or, alternatively, of misinterpreting the forest).
82 Sulochana R. Asirvatham But given the stereotypical view of imperial Greek literature as nostalgic for the lost past of the independent Greek poleis, Pausanias’s use of nostalgic language around Chaeronea makes it irresistible to ask: How should we interpret this in the wider context of the Periegesis? How is it used by other writers? How widespread is its appearance? In answer to these questions, I have argued that Pausanias’s language concerning Chaeronea is part of a nostalgic and semi-idealistic Athenocentric undercurrent in what is an otherwise historically realistic work. We do not find a similar intensity in other writers – even in Plutarch, who at times speaks of the battle in similar terms. Perhaps most surprising is that Chaeronea is presented as a moment of triumph by several writers (including Plutarch) who favor Alexander or wish to offer a simple proof of Macedonian military might. We may not have many references to Chaeronea beyond Pausanias and Plutarch, but not even counting the purely anecdotal references of Lucian (cited above, on Isocrates’ age at his suicide in the wake of Chaeronea: Macr. 23) and Athenaeus (as a time marker to introduce the subject of Philip’s drinking: Ath. 10.435B), we see that a good handful of extant 2nd century authors choose to mention it. That most of those (Dio, Plutarch, Arrian, Polyaenus, and Aelianus Tacticus) celebrate Alexander and/or Philip and the Macedonians reminds us just how diversely Hellenism was defined and celebrated in the empire. Hellenism, for one thing, is not strictly anti-Macedonian. There is at least one other common notion that this study complicates: that Hellenism is always Athenocentric (our study verifies such a description only for Pausanias and Aristides), and that Athenocentrism and Atticism imply one another. In fact, Aristides stands alone as Athenocentric and Atticist. Pausanias is Athenocentric, but not Atticist. Dio, Arrian, Polyaenus, and Aelianus Tacticus write in Attic but are not Athenocentric. This latter point is important because it helps us distinguish between idealism as “Attic purism” and idealism as an assessment of Athens’ (or, for a non-Athenocentric writer, Greece’s) place in history. And this brings us back to the theme of nostalgia vs. idealism. If an Atticizing writer like Aristides can use Chaeronea as a means to burnish Athens’ image as an eternal ideal all the way into the Roman Empire (and presumably beyond), and Dio, Arrian, Polyaenus, and Aelianus Tacticus can use Chaeronea to idealize Macedonian military prowess and thus demonstrate Hellenic authority on military matters to Roman audiences real or imagined, it shows that several types of Greek idealism can go handin-hand with a projected authorial stance of more-or-less-happy acceptance of Roman reality. What they all have in common is a celebration of the lasting cultural dominance of Greece (again, however that is defined) in the empire, rather than a lament over its lost ancient democracies. The exception is Pausanias, whose limited idealism looks to the past. It is worth considering how Pausanias’ treatment of Chaeronea may relate to the much-discussed question of his stance toward Rome. Just as the unwavering Greek idealism we have witnessed in many of our 2nd century authors seems to depend on a belief that Greek culture is not only relevant to the Roman Empire but essential to it (something implied by Pausanias himself in his larger project, which
The battle of Chaeronea 83 foregrounds the Greek landscape and its monuments), perhaps we can see, in a slight inverse, Pausanias’s strand of panhellenic nostalgia as revelatory of a certain “ambivalence” toward Roman domination.62 This possibility becomes somewhat more acute when we take into consideration Pausanias’s reticence on Hadrian’s Panhellenion (established in 131/2 CE). Pausanias does mention in 1.18.9 that “Hadrian also built other buildings for the Athenians: a temple of Hera and Zeus Panhellenios, and a sanctuary common to all the gods” (Ἀδριανὸς δὲ κατεσκευάσατο μὲν καὶ ἄλλα Ἀθηναίοις, ναὸν Ἥρας καὶ Διὸς Πανελληνίου καὶ θεοῖς τοῖς πᾶσιν ἱερὸν κοινόν),63 but if this is a reference to the Panhellenion it is subtle enough to be the subject of considerable debate.64 Arafat, in his essential study on Pausanias’ treatment of the Romans, may come closest to arguing that the reference to the temple of Hera and Zeus Panhellenios is meant to imply the Panhellenion; what remains unanswered, however, is the question of why Pausanias – who is interested both in recalling panhellenic moments in history and who very frequently mentions Hadrianic monuments – would not make the identification between this temple and Hadrian’s politically most significant institution for the Greek world explicit.65 This lack of explicit reference is quite striking when we consider Pausanias’s general treatment of Hadrian, especially in Book 1 on Athens, where he refers to the emperor in glowing terms twice at the beginning – Hadrian is “one who has shown beneficence to all of his subjects and especially to the city of the Athenians” (ἐς ἄλλους τε ὧν ἦρχεν εὐεργεσίας καὶ ἐς τὴν πόλιν μάλιστα ἀποδειξάμενος τὴν Ἀθηναίων: 1.3.2) and “contributed a lot to the happiness of each of his subjects” (τῶν ἀρχομένων ἐς εὐδαιμονίαν τὰ μέγιστα ἑκάστοις παρασχομένου: 1.5.5) – and takes pains to catalogue his monuments.66 If Pausanias had wanted to fully credit Hadrian with the restoration of panhellenism, he might have done so. Instead, he has chosen real Greek heroes from the ancient past to represent the panhellenic ideal. It is perhaps no accident that Zeus Panhellenios appears at the very end of the Attica book, outside of the context of Hadrian (1.44.9).
Notes 1 Cribiore 2001, 235. 2 Hermog. Stas. 5.67–72: μετὰ Χαιρώνειαν ἔπεμψε Φίλιππος διδοὺς αἵρεσιν ἢ τοὺς δισχιλίους αἰχμαλώτους λαμβάνειν ἢ τοὺς χιλίους νεκρούς, ἔπεισε Δημοσθένης τοὺς χιλίους ἑλέσθαι νεκροὺς καὶ ἀποκτείναντος Φιλίππου τοὺς αἰχμαλώτους δημοσίων ἀδικημάτων φεύγει. (“After Chaeronea, Philip sends a message offering the choice to recover either two thousand live prisoners or one thousand battle-dead. Demosthenes argues for the release of the one thousand dead. After Philip put to death the prisoners, Demosthenes is charged with wrongdoing to the public.” (All translations are my own.) Kohl (1915, 74) suggests that these numbers (one thousand prisoners and two thousand dead) may have been repurposed by Hermogenes from Lycurgus’ historical prosecution of Lysicles (fr. 77 Blass = Diod. Sic. 16.88; cf. Diod. Sic. 16.86). The same numbers appear in Paus. 7.10.5. 3 Both men were associated with Hadrian. Philostratus (V S Olearius 531) reports that Polemo was able to sway the emperor to give Smyrna 10 million drachmas,
84 Sulochana R. Asirvatham and this is verified by an inscription that refers to what the city gained “from master Hadrian through Antonius Polemon” (παρὰ τοῦ κυρίου Καίσαρος Ἁδριανοῦ διὰ Ἀντωνίου Πολέμωνος: IGR 4.1431, l. 33; see Bowersock 1969, 45 n. 2). We have a mixed picture of Hadrian and Polemo. Philostratus speaks of the honors Hadrian gave Dionysius in Ephseus and Egypt (V S 524), but according to Cassius Dio (69.4.3, reconstructed from Xiphilinus and the Excerpta), out of intellectual jealousy, Hadrian caused the downfall of Dionysius as well as of Favorinus by elevating their inferior rivals. 4 Philostratus calls Dionysius’ work a Dirge for Chaeronea (ὁ ἐπὶ Χαιρωνείᾳ θρήνος) (V S Olearius 522); see VS Olearius 542 for Polemo. According to Philostratus, Dionysius was a student of Isaeus and as such displayed a naturalistic style, employing sweet effects only sparingly, as was seen above all (μάλιστα) in his Dirge for Chaeronea. 5 [Plut.] X orat. 837E, 838B; Lucian, Macr. 23; Philostr. VS Olearius 506; Paus. 1.18.8. 6 Mentioned above are Hermogenes’ single reference to the Battle of Chaeronea in a rhetorical treatise, and Lucian’s single reference in the context of Isocrates’s suicide. For Athenaeus, see note 55. Dio Chrysostom, Arrian, Polyaenus, and Aelianus Tacticus appear in the section on “Chaeronea and Greek idealism” below. 7 Pausanias mentions Chaeronea directly 26 times, 15 of those in context of the Battle of 338 BCE; Plutarch mentions the town 38 times, 11 of those alluding to 338 BCE. 8 See Kennell in this volume. 9 See, e. g. Akujärvi (2005, 232 n. 1) on Pausanias’ presentation of the Macedonians as an antithesis to the Greeks, as were the Persians and Romans as well. 10 For background on the battle and citations from the orators, see most recently Heinrichs 2020. 11 Book 1: Attica; 2: Corinth and the Argolid; 3: Laconia; 4: Messenia; 5–6: Eleia; 7: Achaea; 8: Arcadia; 9: Boeotia; 10: Phocis. 12 Pausanias’ stories reach back to the time of Deucalion’s flood (1.17–18; 1.40; 5.1; 5.8; 10.6–8; 10.38). 13 See Hutton 2005, esp. Ch. 3, on the ambiguous boundaries of Pausanias’ Greece. 14 Contrast someone like Appian, who writes from an Alexandrian point of view, but for whom everything ties back to the subject of Rome’s rise. Incidentally, he is one of our major extant 2nd century writers, but his only references to Chaeronea are to the Sullan battle: Mith. 114; 161; 175. 15 And betrayal: see Pretzler 2007, 28 and 162 n. 81 for a list of figures discussed in Pausanias’ excurses on Greek traitors in Paus. 7.10–7.16. 16 Arafat 1996, 215: “It is striking indeed that Pausanias sees the peak of Greece’s fortunes as occurring in his own lifetime; no clearer answer to charges of archaism, of idealizing the past, could be given.” 17 Paus. 7.8.2: προεωρῶντο δὲ καὶ ὡς ἀντὶ Φιλίππου καὶ Μακεδόνων Ῥωμαῖοι σφίσι τε ἥκοιεν καὶ τῷ Ἑλληνικῷ δεσπόται προστάττειν. (“[The Achaeans] also foresaw that the Romans were coming to establish their dominance over the Achaeans and the rest of Greece, taking the place of Philip and the Macedonians.”) For Aristides, see below on Aristid. 13.232. 18 Paus. 10.3.3: Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ καὶ Θηβαῖοι σφᾶς ἦσαν οἱ κατάγοντες, πρὶν ἢ τὸ ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ συμβῆναι πταῖσμα Ἕλλησι. 19 The Messenians did not participate with the Greek forces, but they were “of course” (μὴν) unwilling to set arms “against their fellow Greeks” (τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐναντία)
The battle of Chaeronea 85 (Paus. 4.28.2). The Eleans assisted Philip in attacking Laconia but could not stand to fight on the anti-Greek side at Chaeronea (μαχεσθῆναι … οὐχ ὑπέμειναν τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐναντία ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ) (Paus. 5.4.9). The Achaeans took part in the war against the Macedonians under Philip (Paus. 7.6.3). The Phocians fought at Chaeronea (Paus. 10.3.4). Pausanias claims that “justice of the Greek gods” (ἐκ θεῶν δίκη τῶν Ἑλληνικῶν) came upon the Arcadians for having deserted the Greek allies against the Macedonians and Philip: they were slaughtered by the Romans there on that very spot (ἔνθα … ἐν χωρίῳ τῷ αὐτῷ). 20 The four exceptions: Paus. 1.1.8.8: Isocrates commits suicide after the battle; Paus. 5.20.9–10: Philip builds the Philippeum after the fall of Greece at Chaeronea (μετὰ τὸ ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ τὴν Ἑλλάδα ὀλισθεῖν); Paus. 9.1.8: after the victory at Chaeronea, Philip became the second to try to overthrow Thebes (after their defeat by the Spartans at Leuctra in 371 BCE; and Paus. 9.29.8, cited above: after the Greek disaster at Chaeronea (μετὰ τὸ πταῖσμα τὸ ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν) a dream instructed Philip to take Linus’ bones from their burial spot at Thebes and bring them to Macedonia. 21 Hutton 2005, 63. 22 See in the extended versions of above-mentioned passages on the Messenians (4.28.2–4), Eleans (5.4.9), Achaeans (7.6.5), Arcadians (8.6.2) and Phocians (10.3.4). 23 Paus. 7.6.3–5 covers the Achaeans’ roles in all the panhellenic conflicts, from Troy to the Persian Wars through the conflicts with Macedon and the Gauls. 24 Pausanias’ cultural Athenocentrism is writ large in his placement of Attic monuments at the head of the Periegesis (Book 1), but less so in his choice of language, which is not strictly Atticist (Hutton 2005, 181–190). Frateantonio (2009, 124) notes that Pausanias’ choice of regions is the same as Strabo’s, which he explicitly modeled on Homer (Strab. 8.1.1) but organized in his own hierarchical order (Strab. 8.1.3: Elis, Messenia, Laconia, Argolis, Achaia, Attica, Arcadia, Boeotia, Phocis). For more on the “special role of Athens” in Pausanias, see Frateantonio 2009, 122–133. 25 According to Pausanias, Athens was the only state that made a success out of democracy (4.35.5.) 26 Argos, Epidaurus, Sicyon, Troezen, Eleia, Phliasia and Messenia and the Locrians, Phocians, Thessalians, Carystus and the Acarnanians of the Aetolian League— all but the Boeotians, who Pausanias says held Thebes (now destroyed) and were fearful of Athens’ potential plans to recolonize the city, so joined the Macedonians. 27 Paus. 1.25.6: τὰ … ἐς Ἀθηναίους ἐπέξεισί μοι μόνα ὁ λόγος. The machinations include Olympias’ murder of Arrhideus, her ousting by Cassander, the latter’s installation of the Athenian Demetrius of Phanastratus as dictator, Demetrius son of Antigonus’s ousting of Phanastratus, and Cassander’s subsequent replacement of him by the Athenian Lachares (“of all the tyrants we know of, he was the cruelest toward men and most heedless of the gods”: τυράννων ὧν ἴσμεν τά τε ἐς ἀνθρώπους μάλιστα ἀνήμερον καὶ ἐς τὸ θεῖον ἀφειδέστατον, Paus. 1.25.7), who was also brought down by Demetrius, who then took control of the Piraeus and put a garrison on the “Museum” on the Acropolis. 28 Paus. 1.4.4: οὗτοι μὲν δὴ τοὺς Ἕλληνας τρόπον τὸν εἰρημένον ἔσωζον. 29 Paus. 10.20.5: Ἀθηναίων δὲ στρατηγὸς μὲν Κάλλιππος ἦν ὁ Μοιροκλέους, καθὰ ἐδήλωσα καὶ ἐν τοῖς προτέροις τοῦ λόγου, δύναμις δὲ τριήρεις τε πλώιμοι πᾶσαι, πεντακόσιοι δὲ ἐς τὸ ἱππικόν, χίλιοι δὲ ἐτάσσοντο ἐν τοῖς πεζοῖς· καὶ ἡγεμονίαν οὗτοι κατ’ ἀξίωμα εἶχον τὸ ἀρχαῖον. (“The Athenians’ general was
86 Sulochana R. Asirvatham Callippus son of Moerocles, as I mentioned in an earlier part of the book: their forces included all of their seaworthy triremes, five hundred horsemen, and one thousand infantry. And due to the ancient reputation they enjoyed, the Athenians held the chief command.”). It appears that Pausanias is exaggerating Athens’ role in this conflict (Habicht 1985, 108 and n. 42, citing Nachtergael 1977, 144–145), so the fact that he bookends the Periegesis with a similar remark in Book 10 on Phocis and makes a crossreference there to his mention of Callipus’ leadership in Book 1 speaks strongly to the idealization of Athenian heroism during panhellenic conflicts. 30 E.g. Paus. 4.25.5: They recalled the achievement of the Athenians at Marathon, how thirty myriad Persians had been destroyed by men not numbering ten thousand. 31 For a particularly strong (and pro-Athenian) statement, see Paus. 8.52.3: τοὺς δὲ ἐπὶ τοῦ Πελοποννησιακοῦ πρὸς Ἀθηναίους πολέμου, καὶ μάλιστα αὐτῶν τοὺς εὐδοκιμήσαντας, φαίη τις ἂν αὐτόχειρας καὶ ὅτι ἐγγύτατα καταποντιστὰς εἶναι σφᾶς τῆς Ἑλλάδος. (“But as for those who were involved in the Peloponnesian war against Athens, especially the most well-reputed of them, someone might say that they were murderers, and practically even destroyers, of Greece.”) 32 On the road to Delphi is a monument to Lysander (Plut. Lys. 29.3); Chaeronea is on the way to the oracle of Tegyrae (De def. or. 412). 33 Plut. Dem. 19.2 on the Thermadon, at which the Battle of Chaeronea was fought; Alex. 10. 3 on the “Alexander oak” by the Cephisus, near where the Macedonians were buried. See below. 34 Slaves are forbidden to enter temples according to local Chaeronean custom (Quaest. Graec. 267). 35 Plutarch makes passing references to the prehistoric expulsion of the barbarians by the Thessalians (Cim. 1.1); Theseus’ defeat of the Amazons, who were buried on site (Thes. 27.8); the Boeotian (Theban–Spartan) War of 378 BCE (Ages. 17.2); and the Aetolian defeat of the Boeotians in 245 BCE (Arat. 16.1). See Bowie forthcoming for a more detailed exploration of Plutarch’s allusions to local history. 36 Plutarch also mentions the trophies in De fort. Rom. 318. 37 Paus. 9.40.7 (Sullan monuments) and Paus. 9.40.10 (the lion monument for the Theban dead). Pausanias’ subject matter is monuments, but Plutarch also mentions a statue of Lucullus, a Roman “savior” of Chaeronea; he is not uninterested in monuments at Chaeronea. The remains of a trophy base with an inscription closely matching the one given by Plutarch has been found on a hill which, if Plutarch’s information is secure, can now be identified as Mt. Thourion at Chaeronea (Camp, Ierardi, McInerney, Morgan, & Umholtz 1992). See also Ma 2008. 38 For the historical context, see MacKay 2000, who argues that this personal “love story” was designed to cover for the political motives behind Chaeronea’s changing alliegiances during the Mithridatic War. 39 The Lucullus “represents the literary monument Plutarch is writing to discharge the debt of gratitude he thinks the Chaeroneans owe Lucullus even now in his own time” (Beck 2007, 58). 40 Hammond 1938, 188. 41 As Lintott (2013, 66) observes, Plutarch “does not dwell … on the calamity that befell the Greeks on his own home territory.” 42 This observation on Athenocentrism lines up with something that Podlecki (1988) has noted: Plutarch is generally not as Athenocentric or -philic as one might
The battle of Chaeronea 87
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expect based on stereotypes of imperial Greek literature, on his preference for Athenian individuals in his Lives, or on his Platonism. See Bowie forthcoming. On Plutarch’s Phocion, see Trittle 1988, 1–35. Phoc. 16.8.2: τὴν ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ παραταξαμένην πρὸς αὐτοὺς δύναμιν ἑνὶ σώματι μόνον ἐλάττω γενέσθαι. This is preceded in the same passage by a panhellenic sentiment: the Athenians joined Philip against Phocion’s advice and are now balking at the king’s demand for triremes and horsemen; Phocion soothes them by pointing to their role in saving themselves and Greece whether they are on conquerors or conquered. A similar idea appears in Plutarch’s Cam. (19.8), in a list of bad things that happened in the month of Metageitnon for Greeks, including their defeat by Philip at Chaeronea and by Antipater at Crannon. The motif of a drunken Philip at Chaeronea who regains his senses is presented as well in Quaes. conv. 7.10 and is the context for Athenaeus’ single reference to Chaeronea in 10.435B. Dem. 21.1: Plutarch’s phrasing is even closer to Pausanias’ ἀτύχημα in Paus. 1.25.3 than τύχη τις δαιμόνιος in Dem. 20.1. Plutarch famously declares in the beginning of the Life of Alexander that virtue or vice can sometimes be better revealed in some phrase or joke (καὶ ῥῆμα καὶ παιδιά τις: Alex. 1.2) than in feats; in the Demetrius, however, he also suggests that examining vices (i.e. actions) in tandem with virtues can provide a cautionary learning experience for the reader (Demetr. 1.1–7). Asirvatham 2010, 200–202. Pausanias is even more direct in his disdain for Philip, asserting that “no thinking person would call [Philip] a good general, because he always broke oaths to the gods and violated treaties on each occasion and acted in bad faith—more than any other person” (8.7.5: στρατηγὸν … ἀγαθὸν οὐκ ἄν τις φρονῶν ὀρθὰ καλέσειεν αὐτόν, ὅς γε καὶ ὅρκους θεῶν κατεπάτησεν ἀεὶ καὶ σπονδὰς ἐπὶ παντὶ ἐψεύσατο πίστιν τε ἠτίμασε μάλιστα ἀνθρώπων). (For more negativity on Philip, see also Paus. 4.28.4; 5.4.9 and 5.23.2.) Pausanias does not, however, show the same contrasting admiration for Alexander as Plutarch does, mentioning, for example, the Macedonian king’s destruction of Thebes in five passages, twice in books other than Book 9 on Achaea (4.27.10, 7.6.9; 9.7.1; 9.23.5; 9.25.10). In the Sayings of Kings, in which Philip is the main figure, he mocks the Athenian prisoners for making demands after Chaeronea (Regum, Stephanus 177); in the Sayings of Spartans, he is a foil to a Spartan who tells him after Chaeronea that his shadow is no bigger than it was before (Ap. Apoph. Stephanus 218). What is more, this occurs during Alexander’s destruction of Thebes in 335 BCE, for which Plutarch tacitly blames the Macedonians and the Greek cities that hated Thebes. Alex. 11. For a version that ennobles the Thebans against the murderous Macedonians, see Diod. Sic. 17.11.1–14.1. Similarly Plut. De mul. vir. Stephanos 259–260; cf. Polyaenus, Strat. 8.40.1 (see below). Alex. 12.5: Θεαγένους ἀδελφὴ … τοῦ παραταξαμένου πρὸς Φίλιππον ὑπὲρ τῆς τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐλευθερίας καὶ πεσόντος ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ στρατηγοῦντος. Oliver 1968, 10. Pausanias (9.6.5) similarly notes that the Thebans were most adversely affected by Chaeronea, as they were put under guard by Philip. On Dio’s first four “Kingship Orations”, see Moles 1990. Whitmarsh 2002, 325–7 argues that the performative context of “addressing the emperor” is probably fictive, noting, for two things, the lack of external evidence and the possibility that
88 Sulochana R. Asirvatham the grouping of the four orations together may have originated as late as the 5th century CE. 58 See Asirvatham 2010. 59 A second reference to Chaeronea appears as a time-marker in a rhetorical example found in Or. 15 (“On Slavery and Freedom II”); it has no particular ideological significance in this context. 60 Polyaenus, Strat. 4.2.2: Φίλιππος εἰπὼν ‘οὐκ ἐπίστανται νικᾶν Ἀθηναῖοι’ … εὐρώστως ἐμβάλλει τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις καὶ λαμπρῶς ἀγωνισάμενος ἐνίκησεν (“Philip, saying ‘The Athenians do not know how to win ‘ … strongly attacked the Athenians and, fighting brilliantly, conquered them”); Strat. 4.27: Φίλιππος ἐν Χαιρωνείᾳ γιγνώσκων τοὺς μὲν Ἀθηναίους ὀξεῖς καὶ ἀγυμνάστους, τοὺς δὲ Μακεδόνας ἠσκηκότας καὶ γεγυμνασμένους, ἐπὶ πολὺ τὴν παράταξινἐκτείνας ταχέως παρέλυσε τοὺς Ἀθηναίους καὶ εὐχειρώτους ἐποίησε (“At Chaeronea, Philip recognized that the Athenians were excitable and out-of-shape, but the Macedonians were disciplined and in peak physical condition, so he stretched out the battle line long and quickly de-energized the Athenians and made them easy to overcome.”) The attack on Amphissa described in Strat. 4.2.8 was a prelude to Chaeronea (see Heinrichs 2020, 155). 61 In addition to the already-cited Habicht 1985 (1998), Hutton 2005, Akujärvi 2005, Pretzler 2007 and Frateantonio 2009, we have, e.g. Bowie 1996, Alcock et al. 2001, and Arafat 2004. Pausanias’ focus on the sacred throughout his travels has attracted special attention from scholars of religion: see, e.g., Pirenne-Delforge 2008 and Juul 2010 as well as Frateantonio 2009. 62 Ameling puts this is in somewhat stronger terms, suggesting that Pausanias’ contrast between the panhellenic effort against the Gauls and the much smaller effort of a band of Elateians, against the invading Costoboci, toward the end of the Periegesis (10.34.5) is swipe at the “false unity” the Romans created by freeing the Greeks, including Elateia (10.34.4) (Ameling 1996, 157); see also Habicht 1985, 121. Other scholars see somewhat less resentment over Roman rule. As Arafat and Bowie have noticed, while Pausanias registers moments of great cruelty from individual Romans, especially by Sulla and Mummius, toward the Greeks, he does not condemn the Romans as a whole (Arafat 1996, 80–105; Bowie 1996, 216–18). So also 8.27.1, where Pausanias refers to population movements in Greece “resulting from the disaster of Roman rule” (κατὰ συμφορὰν ἀρχῆς τῆς Ῥωμαίων: 8.27.1), using one of the words we noted above was used of Chaeronea. As Hutton has (to my mind, persuasively) pointed out, συμφοραι “occur as part of the natural order of things”, and indeed sometimes even the divine is involved (2008, 634–5); the phrase, therefore, does not necessarily reflect in some uniquely negative way on the Romans. 63 Our only unambiguous description from antiquity is Cass. Dio 69.16.1–2, calling it a shrine he allowed the Greeks to build in his honor. On the Panhellenion, see, e.g., Spawforth and Walker 1985; 1986; Alcock 1993; 167; Jones 1996; Spawforth 1999; Romeo 2002; Doukellis 2007; and Gordillo Hervás 2012. 64 See also Camia in this volume. 65 Arafat 1996, 175: “The Panhellenion is not referred to by Pausanias, although his mention of the temple of Hera Panhellenia and Zeus Panhellenios … may be taken as a specific reference. At the very least, the use of the epithet ‘Panhellenios’ emphasizes Hadrian ‘s Panhellenic programme.” 66 For full discussion of Hadrian’s presence in Pausanias, see Arafat 1996, 159–188. For Hadrian’s role in making Sparta the “second city” of Greece, see Kennell in this volume.
The battle of Chaeronea 89 For the emperor’s close relationship with Athens, see Kouremenos in this volume, and Kouremenos forthcoming on Hadrian’s self-stylization as an Athenian and self-promotion as the successor of earlier panhellenists, especially Pericles and Philip II.
Bibliography Akujärvi, J. (2005). Researcher, Traveller, Narrator: Studies in Pausanias’ Periegesis. Studia Graeca et Latina Lundensia 12, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Alcock. S. (1993). Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alcock, S., Cherry, J., Elsner, J. (eds.) (2001). Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ameling, W. (1996). “Pausanias und die hellenistische Geschichte.” In J. Bingen, ed., Pausanias Historien (Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique XLI), Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 117–160. Arafat, K. (1996). Pausanias’ Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2004). Pausanias’ Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Asirvatham, S. (2010). “His Son’s Father? Philip II in the Second Sophistic.” In D. Ogden and E. Carney, eds., Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son, Lives and Afterlives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 193–204. Beck. M. (2007). “The Story of Damon and the Ideology of Euergetism in the ‘Lives of Cimon and Lucullus’.” Hermathena 182, 53–69. Bowersock, G. (1969). Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bowie, E. L. (2022). “Plutarch’s Chaeronea.” In L. Athanassaki and F. B. Titchener, eds., Plutarch’s Cities, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 19–46. Bowie, E. (1996). “Past and Present in Pausanias.” In J. Bingen, ed., Pausanias Historien (Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique XLI), Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 207–230. Camp, J., Ierardi, M., McInerney, J., Morgan, K. and Umholtz, G. (1992). “A Trophy from the Battle of Chaironeia of 86 B. C.” American Journal of Archaeology 96, 443–455. Cribiore, R. (2001). Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Doukellis, P. (2007). “Hadrian’s Panhellenion: A Networkof Cities?” Mediterranean Historical Review 22.2, 291–304. Frateantonio, C. (2009). Religion und Städtekonkurrenz, Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. Gordillo Hervás, R. (2012.) La construcción religiosa de la Hélade imperial: el Panhelenion, Florence: Firenze University Press. Habicht, C. (1985). Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hammond, N. (1938). “The Two Battles of Chaeronea (338 B.C. and 86 B.C.).” Klio 31, 186–218. Heinrichs, J. (2020). “Chaironeia, battle of.” In W. Heckel, J. Heinrichs, S. Müller, and F. Pownall, eds., Lexicon of Argead Makedonia, Berlin: Frank & Timme, 154–155. Hutton, W. (2005). Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2008). “The Disaster of Roman Rule: Pausanias 8.27.1.” Classical Quarterly 58, 622–637.
90 Sulochana R. Asirvatham Jones, C. (1996). “The Panhellenion.” Chiron 26, 29–56. Juul, L. (2010). Oracular Tales in Pausanias, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Kohl, R. (1915). De scholasticarum declamationum argumentis ex historia petitis. PhD Diss. Paderborn. Kouremenos, A. (forthcoming). The Roman Past of Greece, London: Routledge. Lintott, A. (2013). Plutarch: Demosthenes and Cicero, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ma, John (2008). “Chaironeia 338: Topographies of Commemoration.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 128, 72–91. MacKay, C. (2000). “Damon of Chaeronea: The Loyalties of a Boeotian Town during the First Mithridatic War.” Klio 82.1, 91–106. Moles, J. (1990). “The Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom.” Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 6, 297–375. Nachtergael, G. (1977). Les Galates en Grèce et les Sôtéria de Delphes, Brussels: Palais des Académies. Oliver, J. (1968). “The Civilizing Power. A Study of the Panathenaic Discourse of Aelius Aristides against the Background of and Cultural Conflict.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. 58.1, 1–223. Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2008). Retour à la Source. Pausanias et la Religion Grecque. Kernos Suppléments 20, Liège: Centre International d'Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique. Podlecki, A. (1988). “Plutarch and Athens.” Illinois Classical Studies 13.2, 231–43. Pretzler, M. (2007). Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece. Classical Literature and Society, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Romeo, I. (2002). “The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece.” Classical Philology 97.1, 21–40. Spawforth, A. (1999). “The Panhellenion Again.” Chiron 29, 339–352. Spawforth, A. and Walker, S. (1985). “The World of the Panhellenion. I. Athens and Eleusis.” Journal of Roman Studies 75, 78–104. Spawforth, A. (1986)“The World of the Panhellenion: II. Three Dorian Cities.” Journal of Roman Studies 76, 88–105. Trittle. L. (1988). Phocion the Good, London: Taylor & Francis. Whitmarsh, T. (2002). Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Part II
The Greek Past in the Roman Present: Politics and Religion
6 Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios Worshipping Hadrian in Athens Francesco Camia
Introduction In the multitude of testimonies pertaining to the cults and honors for Hadrian that can be connected to the physical presence of the “restless emperor”,1 the case of Greece is rather anomalous if one compares the sheer number and importance of cultic (and honorific) attestations for him with the relative scarcity of the evidence on imperial cult in the province of Achaea.2 In this chapter, I shall argue that the abundance of evidence that “old Greece” provides for the worship of Hadrian can be linked to the philhellenic emperor’s personal inclination toward this region, which he visited several times during his lifetime. This chapter will concentrate primarily on the ways Hadrian’s proverbial philhellenism is reflected in the worship that he received in Greece. I will focus on Athens, not only because this city has yielded most of the evidence on the cult of Hadrian in the province of Achaea, but also because one can argue that his worship in Athens reveals a direct expression of the emperor’s privileged link with the city. Indeed, the sheer number and types of testimonies of the cult of Hadrian in Athens may be seen as a direct reflection of the latter’s pivotal role in the emperor’s Panhellenic program. The city’s connection with its glorious past and its ongoing cultural primacy in Roman Greece and the Empire in general played a central role in the realization of the new imperial policy. After presenting an overview of the available evidence from cult places, festivals, and priesthoods, I shall attempt to sketch the main features of this imperial cult against the background of key concepts of Hadrian’s relationship with the Greek world.
Worshipping Hadrian in Athens: an overview of the evidence Hadrian stands out strikingly among the Roman emperors who received cultic honors in Athens. If Augustus, the founder of the Principate and, as such, the natural recipient of many (and new) forms of worship by the subjects of the Empire, may have functioned, to a certain extent, as a model for the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-8
94 Francesco Camia worship of Hadrian,3 honors for the latter are unprecedented in both their number and character. These can be divided into three main categories:4 1) Specific buildings existed in Athens for the cult of Hadrian, namely the Temple of Olympian Zeus (Olympieion), the sanctuary of Zeus Panhellenios, and, perhaps, the so-called Library of Hadrian and the Pantheon. 2) A mass ceremony involving sacrifices to Hadrian was held at least on one occasion, most likely in connection with the dedication of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the inauguration of the Panhellenion in 131/2 CE, as is attested by more than one hundred altars dedicated to Hadrian Olympios that have been found in Athens. It is likely that the day of the dedication entered the festive calendar of Athens so that such rituals may have been performed periodically, at least during Hadrian’s lifetime. Moreover, a festival named the Hadrianeia was created specifically in his honor, perhaps with the encouragement of the emperor himself. 3) Specific priests for the cult of Hadrian are attested in Athens, namely the hiereus of Hadrian Panhellenios, and perhaps a hiereus of Hadrian Eleuthereus, at a time when the imperial cult in the city was, since the middle of the 1st century, managed by a “collective” priest of the Sebastoi. Thus, all three of the main features of a cult (sacred places, rituals, priests) are attested with reference to the worship of Hadrian. Moreover, through the creation of the Panhellenion, Hadrian fostered his own cult, as he was worshipped in association with Zeus Panhellenios with a dedicated cult place (the temple of Zeus Panhellenios), a festival (Hadrianeia), and a priest of the reigning emperor (hiereus of (theos) Hadrian Panhellenios).
Cult places, festivals, and priests for Hadrian The massive Temple of Olympian Zeus, which had been initiated by Peisistratus in the 6th century BCE, was finally completed by Hadrian and was dedicated most likely in the first months of 132 CE, coinciding with the inauguration of the Panhellenion.5A passage in Cassius Dio indicates that Hadrian was worshipped in the sanctuary dedicated to Zeus Olympios,6 apparently together with the king of the gods. More than twenty statue bases from the Temple of Olympian Zeus are preserved; these were dedicated by the Greek cities of the eastern part of the Empire to Hadrian Olympios.7 In addition to mentioning these statues in the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Pausanias adds that the Athenians dedicated “behind the naos” a colossal statue (kolossos) of the emperor.8 This statue may have been close to the ara for the cult of Hadrian that is mentioned in the Historia Augusta and may have served either as the temple altar or as a specific altar for the worship of Hadrian.9 Be that as it may, the multitude of statues of the emperor in the precinct of the temple, the presence among them of the colossal statue dedicated by the Athenians, and the divine epithet Olympios assigned to the emperor are all elements that strengthen Dio’s statement, thus demonstrating
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 95
Figure 6.1 Altar dedication to Hadrian Soter from Ermou Street, Athens. Source: (after AD 1961–1962, Chron., tav. 31 γ).
that Hadrian shared the sanctuary and the cult with the chief Olympian deity. That Hadrian received sacrifices in Athens in connection with Zeus Olympios is confirmed by the aforementioned altars that were dedicated to him under the title of Olympios, as well as, in some cases, soter and/or ktistes (Figure 6.1).10 These public dedications for the emperor may have originally been set up during the consecration ceremony of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. At least some of these altars will have been used by the Athenians to sacrifice in front of their houses at the passage of the imperial procession,11 and such ritual practices may have been integrated into the Athenian festive calendar. Hadrian was also worshipped, together with Zeus, in the cult center of the Panhellenion. In this case, Dio is even more explicit as he reports that the emperor “permitted the Greeks (scil. the member cities of the league) to build a sanctuary for him, the so-called Panhellenion”.12 Uncertainties still remain about the exact location of this new sanctuary; Travlos’ suggestion that it should be identified with the ruins of a rectangular building south of the Temple of Olympian Zeus remains questionable (Figure 6.2).13 The cultic function of the sanctuary is also a matter of debate since the sekos referenced by Dio may perhaps be identified with the naos of Hera and Zeus Panhellenios that is mentioned in Pausanias.14 Despite these uncertainties, it is clear that Hadrian was worshipped in the new sanctuary since there was a hiereus of Hadrian Panhellenios, which I discuss in more detail below. It has been suggested that the so-called Library of Hadrian may have functioned as a Hadrianeion.15 It is highly probable that this large, multifunctional building hosted some form of worship for Hadrian. This assertion is supported by the similarities that can be observed between the building complex’s form and certain rectangular halls (“Kaisersäle” or “marble halls”) that are usually connected with the imperial cult.16 Furthermore, a cultic function has been suggested for the so-called Pantheon, i.e. the “common sanctuary of (all) the gods”, in which, according to Pausanias, stelae registered Hadrian’s
96 Francesco Camia
Figure 6.2 Plan of the area of the Temple of Olympian Zeus with the so-called Panhellenion south of it. Athens. Source: (reworked after E. Greco et alii, Topografia di Atene).
benefactions toward Greek and “barbarian” cities.17 Although the cult of the ruler is attested in other panthea in the Greco-Roman world, there is no direct evidence for a cult of Hadrian (or of emperors in general) in this building, not to mention the fact that even its existence is debatable.18 A festival named after Hadrian (Hadrianeia) was established in Athens, perhaps in 131/2 CE.19 With the exception of the ephebic festivals20 and the 1st century Sebasta, which may have been created after Augustus’ death,21 the Hadrianeia are the only Athenian festival named after a reigning emperor, and one of few imperial festivals named after a specific emperor attested in the province of Achaea. Hadrian was also celebrated (together with Zeus) in the framework of two other agonistic festivals. The Olympia, an ancient festival probably founded by Peisistratos, were restored on the initiative of Hadrian, probably in 131/2 CE to coincide with the consecration of the
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 97
Figure 6.3 Athenian coin bearing the legend AΔPIANEIA on the reverse. Source: (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, M 5922). [https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b85652147]).
Temple of Olympian Zeus.22 The aforementioned Panhellenia were created in connection with the Panhellenic League, even though the first celebration did not take place before 137.23 Both festivals lasted well into the 3rd century, and Athenian coins bearing the name of the three festivals have been excavated (Figure 6.3).24 The cult of Hadrian in the sanctuary of Zeus Panhellenios, closely associated with Zeus, was served by a specific priest. Epigraphic and iconographic evidence suggests that, after Hadrian’s death in July 138, this cult included the Sebastoi, i.e. the reigning emperor and other members of the imperial family, both living and deceased. Although this priest’s titulature evolved from the original title “hiereus of Hadrian Panhellenios”25 to “hiereus of theos Hadrianos Panhellenios”,26 the crowns decorated with imperial busts that were worn by the Panhellenes indicate that the cult was not limited to the divinized Hadrian.27 Additionally, an inscription on a seat in the Theater of Dionysus may attest to the presence of a priest of Hadrian in connection with Dionysus Eleuthereus (i.e. of the deme Eleutherai), the deity worshipped in the sanctuary next to the theatre (Figure 6.4).28
Figure 6.4 Seat of the Theatre of Dionysus for the hiereus of Hadrian. Athens. Source: (after Maas 1972, tab. IX).
98 Francesco Camia
Hadrian (Zeus) Olympios The worship of Hadrian in Athens reflects his close relationship with Greece and its cultural (and religious) traditions through the principal role played by Zeus Olympios in this cult. Generally speaking, it is not remarkable that Hadrian was worshipped in combination with traditional Greek gods, since this was one of the most characteristic features of emperor worship in the Greek world.29 Furthermore, the connection between emperors and the most illustrious of the Olympian gods was certainly not new. Indeed, the very idea that imperial power was based on Zeus/Iuppiter was especially developed during the reign of Trajan, who in 114 officially assumed the epithet Optimus, which he shared with Iuppiter Capitolinus.30 What is remarkable in Hadrian’s case is the privileged association with the chief god of the Greek pantheon; in the province of Achaea, no emperor either before or after Hadrian was so overtly and explicitly worshipped together with Zeus Olympios, nor more generally with Zeus.31 The special link with this god is revealed by the epithet Olympios, which occurs both in honorary inscriptions and dedications to Hadrian in the Greek world.32 Athens seems to have been the center of its diffusion, as this title appears on innumerable Athenian statue bases and altars dedicated to him.33 The consecration of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which, as already mentioned, also functioned as a cult place for Hadrian,34 must have fostered the diffusion of the epithet Olympios in the Greek East. It would be methodologically incorrect, however, to argue for a direct (causeand-effect) relationship between the final dedication of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian’s assumption of the epithet Olympios, as this relationship, although often affirmed or implied,35 cannot be proven by reference to any ancient source. The consecration of the temple cannot have occurred before the early months of 132.36 The earliest-known attestation of the epithet Olympios next to Hadrian’s name is found in an Ephesian inscription, usually dated to 128/9,37 and implies that the rationale for the title was rather different. For this reason, I maintain that it was Hadrian’s willingness to link his person to the chief Greek god that led him to complete the Athenian temple more than six centuries after its inception under Peisistratus.38 The epithet Olympios, conferred on Hadrian by his Greek subjects, represented the mere recognition of his personal and privileged relationship with Zeus, one that he must have personally sought and encouraged in order to express his Greekness.39 The consecration of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in 132, in which delegates from various Greek cities took part, was the final act of that process: it imbued the special relationship between the emperor and his Hellenic subjects with an official and Panhellenic echo, as is demonstrated by the statue dedications in the precinct, whether these were or were not from members (or would-be members) of the Panhellenion.40 Hadrian’s direct involvement in the building and financing of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, as well as the strong ideological value of his association with Zeus Olympios, make it plausible that the emperor himself promoted
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 99 this cultic association.41 On the part of the Greeks, the worship of Hadrian was favored by the emperor’s euergetic attitude towards the Athenians, being modeled on the cults of benefactor rulers,42 and on cults that Greek cities dedicated to outstanding individuals (either post mortem or, starting from the late 5th century BCE, during their lifetimes). In Greek cities, cults were traditionally reserved for gods or mortals that had made a significant impact in people’s lives. Exaggerated as it may seem to us, Pausanias’ statement that Hadrian was the ruler who most contributed to the happiness (eudaimonia) of his subjects is justified.43 Dio mentions “large sums of money (χρήματα πολλά), an annual dole of grain (σῖτον ἐτήσιον), and the whole of Cephallenia” as gifts the emperor conferred upon Athens.44 Thus, it is not surprising that the Athenians worshipped Hadrian since he acted as a great benefactor toward them, as the emperor himself did not fail to remind them in a letter from 131/2 addressed to the Areopagus, the boule and the assembly; in the letter, Hadrian states that “any pretext is good for me to benefit both publicly the polis and privately some of the Athenians”.45 Furthermore, Hadrian was an Athenian citizen, thus in a sense the Athenians may have thought of him as “one of them”. It was also quite natural that some of the Hadrianic erga, i.e. the monumental representation of Hadrian’s benefactions, functioned as cult places for the emperor, either alone or in combination with other gods.46 Among them, the Temple of Olympian Zeus acted as a focal point for the worship of Hadrian since it best reflected the emperor’s Panhellenic vision; its grandiose size and its location in an area that hosted some of the most ancient Athenian cults were also highly suitable for such activities.
Philhellenism and classicism Hadrian’s love for the Greek world was such that the expression “philhellene emperor” has been consecrated as another way of referring to him.47 Even his nickname Graeculus,48 despite its pejorative connotation, is an indirect demonstration of this attitude, which is also reflected in the very image of Hadrian; he was the first Roman emperor to be systematically represented with a beard.49 Although the Greek connotation of Hadrian’s beard has been questioned by a few scholars,50 there is enough evidence to substantiate Hadrian’s special relationship with “old Greece” beyond any literary topos. Hadrian visited the province of Achaea at least three times during his reign, more than any other province of the Empire. Even before becoming emperor, in 112 CE he spent a minimum of a year in Athens and was honored by assuming the office of eponymous archon (112/3). This office is evidenced by an inscription incised on an honorary statue that was erected in the Theater of Dionysus.51 Hadrian’s Hellenism was reflected in (and fueled by) what Greece represented culturally, as demonstrated by the emperor’s close relationship with the Greek (and in particular Athenian) intellectual and artistic milieu. A series of letters attest to his relationship with the Athenian
100 Francesco Camia synod of Dionysiac artists (technitai mousikoi), worshippers of Dionysus Choreios. This epigraphic dossier may even hint at a reform of this guild by Hadrian himself;52 indeed, the emperor is perhaps to be recognized behind the anonymous recipient styled as neos Dionysos of an altar erected by the Athenian technitai.53 In 125, during his first official visit to Athens, Hadrian presided over the celebration of the Dionysia festival. It was probably during this year that he was honored by the twelve Athenian tribes, each erecting a statue in his honor in the cunei of the Theatre of Dionysus, for whose remodeling Hadrian himself was responsible.54 His link with the patron god of the theatre is further attested by the presence of a hiereus of Hadrian Eleuthereus, assuming that the epithet in the seat inscription that I referenced above does indeed refer to the emperor.55 As already noted, Hadrian promoted the revival of the archaic Athenian festival for Zeus Olympios, and may have created the Hadrianeia in addition to the Panhellenia.56 At a more general level, his interest and concern for the agonistic (both athletic and theatrical) scene has been recently confirmed by the publication of three letters found in Alexandria Troas which the emperor addressed to the international association of Dionysiac technitai; these letters concerned the calendar of the main agonistic festivals, which he re-organized, as well as the prizes and material conditions of both athletes and artists. In this regard, the emperor emulated the Hellenistic kings, especially the Lagids and Attalids, who had supported cultural life and offered protection to the artists’ guilds.57 For Hadrian, philhellenism also meant a close connection with the Greek past. This is particularly manifest in Athens, where Hadrian presented himself – and was regarded by his subjects – as a new founder. The double inscription on Hadrian’s Arch next to the Temple of Olympian Zeus presents the emperor as a new Theseus, linking the mythic and historical past of Athens with the Roman present. The arch may have also functioned, albeit symbolically, as the entrance point to the “new Athens” created by Hadrian that is mentioned in the sources.58 Indeed, the epithet ktistes that occurs on the altars dedicated to Hadrian Olympios suggests this characterization in addition to his role as the founder of the Panhellenion. Furthermore, the emperor was also responsible for reforming the Athenian constitution, basing it on Draco and Solon’s laws.59 We know from the sources that it was the Athenians who asked Hadrian to reform their nomoi. One cannot help but assume that Hadrian would not have failed to grasp this opportunity to connect himself to the Greek past through such celebrated figures, thus presenting his legislative re-organization “as a recovery of the traditional laws of a free Greek city”,60 and himself as a true heir of these famous Athenian politicians. Hadrian’s Hellenism fostered a revival of cultural features from the Classical and, to a lesser extent, Hellenistic periods in the arts, both in literature/rhetoric and in sculpture (Neo-Attic style).61 The emperor’s persistent connection with the past is evident even in (apparently) superficial aspects, such as the “archaizing” inscriptions dated to his reign.62 The link with “old Greece” and its past was expressed prominently in the religious realm,63 with
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 101 the Eleusinian sanctuary serving as a prime example. Hadrian contributed to the renaissance of the most celebrated Mysteries of antiquity, to which he was initiated perhaps already in 112 CE during his sojourn in Athens as a privatus,64 as well as the Eleusinian sanctuary itself.65 Above all, the emperor assigned Eleusis and its Mysteries a pivotal role within the Panhellenion. Like the other Greek koina, the new league had a strong religious connotation, with member cities brought together by the common cult of Zeus Panhellenios, to which Hadrian and his successors were also associated. Among the main tasks of this league was the organization of the penteteric Panhellenia festival and, in general, of imperial worship.66 The league’s Panhellenic scope and religious character are perfectly reflected in the central role of Eleusis within Greek religious experience,67 as well as in its importance as a major center of the imperial cult.68 A decree of the Lydian city of Thyatira, which succeeded in gaining admission into the Panhellenion, mentions Hadrian’s benefactions to the city and his role in gathering all the Greeks into the Panhellenion at Athens, the benefactress (euergetis), which donates to everyone the fruit of the Mysteries.69 Eleusis’ centrality in the (pan)hellenic religious experience was therefore re-affirmed and promoted by Hadrian through the Panhellenion. Indeed, the institution seems to have been involved in the administration of the sanctuary, in which the emperor himself was most likely worshipped (Figure 6.5).70 It has even been suggested that the location of the sanctuary of Zeus Panhellenios (and/or the meetings of the panhellenes) was in the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, although I find this unlikely.71
Figure 6.5 Statue base of the god Hadrianos Panhellenios. Eleusis. Source: (Photo: Willers 1990).
102 Francesco Camia All this is in accordance with the Panhellenic character of the god (Zeus Olympios) with which Hadrian was identified so ardently that its epiclesis became part of his own titulature as another imperial epithet.
Between Panhellenism and Athenocentrism Zeus Olympios acted as a unifier in a polytheistic religious system thanks to the force of his epithet, which defined him as the king of the Greek gods and, as such, the god of all Hellenes. The Panhellenic character of the worship of Hadrian’s in combination with Zeus Olympios perfectly matched the worship that he received in association with Zeus Panhellenios, the patron god of the “universal” Greek league that was conceived by the emperor himself and represented the peak of his Panhellenic vision. The cult of Zeus Panhellenios should be viewed as a transposition on a Panhellenic level of the cult of Hadrian in the Athenian Temple of Olympian Zeus. It was clearly not a coincidence that in the temple’s temenos the cities of the Greek-speaking provinces of the Empire dedicated statues of Hadrian.72 Hadrian’s Panhellenic aspirations fostered a strong link with the Greek past. Behind the emperor’s drive toward the unification of the Greeks, it is possible to see a more or less conscious retrieval of those ideas fueled by the rise of Macedonian kingship that were fully developed during the Hellenistic period.73 In Hadrian’s ideal of an ecumenical Greco-Roman Empire, Athens occupied a strategic position: the city of Cecrops was chosen as the capital of the new league and seat of its common sanctuary dedicated to Zeus Panhellenios due to its glorious past and persisting cultural pre-eminence.74 It is possible to see a reference to the notion of Athens as the “school of Hellas” that had its most famous formulation in Pericles’ epitaphios logos, but remained active on a cultural level well after the end of the Athenian Empire.75 Athens played a key role in the Classical revival promoted and financially supported by Hadrian in the intellectual and cultural life of the Roman Empire. The emperor favored the emergence of Athens as the preeminent center of the Second Sophistic movement, some distinguished exponents of which were from (or were active in) this city.76 In addition to providing the Athenians with a gymnasium, a building connected with both athletic and intellectual activities,77 he donated to the Epicurean school (diadoche) a seat for its philosophical activity, which he also supported through monetary contributions, as is evident from a letter to his friend Heliodorus, head of the Athenian Epicureans.78 Athens’ cultural superiority explains why this polis emerged as the central place of Hadrian’s cult in the province of Achaea. This was not the result of chance but of a deliberate choice by the emperor himself, which was clearly fostered by the Athenians. Looking at the glorious past that the Athenians took pride in and that the other Greeks also regarded to some extent as a model, and fostering its revival, Hadrian re-affirmed Athens’ primacy and sustained what remained of it, albeit not on a political level. At the same time, by associating himself with the supreme Panhellenic deity, Hadrian affirmed both his own Greekness and his importance in the most evident way.
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 103 Ultimately, the worship of Hadrian in Greece was the fruitful result of a convergence of interests between the emperor and his subjects, which was played around the strength of Achaea’s (and especially Athens’) past.
Epilogue If the Villa Adriana is the architectural representation of Hadrian’s Hellenism,79 the Athenian Temple of Olympian Zeus can be considered as the religious representation of Hadrian’s bond with “old Greece” and Athens in particular. The key concepts of Hadrian’s attitude – Panhellenism, a link with and revitalization of Greek traditions, Athenocentrism – found direct expression in imperial worship in association with Zeus Olympios. This explains the wealth and outstanding nature of cult manifestations for Hadrian in Achaea, a province that has not yielded much evidence of imperial worship in general, especially in connection with specific emperors. Within “old Greece”, Athens is where Hadrian’s Panhellenic vision was fully expressed on a religious level through his association with the greatest divinity of the Greek pantheon. Pausanias states that Hadrian’s benefactions to Greeks and “barbarians” were registered in the Athenian Pantheon, a statement that might bring to mind Augustus’ Res Gestae.80 Indeed, Augustus’ cultural policy of promoting an ideological concept of “old Greece” centered on Athens and Sparta may have acted, to some extent, as a model for Hadrian’s accomplishments.81 Yet, there are important differences, especially with regard to imperial worship. As is well known, Augustus’s relationship with Athens was initially rather strained,82 even if numerous altars found mainly in the area of the Agora reveal that sacrifices were performed for him. Moreover, the founder of the Principate was worshipped on the Acropolis in the so-called Temple of Roma and Augustus, which remained, until the reign of Hadrian, the only edifice specifically created in Athens for the imperial cult. A comparison between this cult place and the Temple of Olympian Zeus, however, reflects a different approach on both sides (i.e. on that of the emperors and that of the Athenians) toward the imperial cult: while the monopteros closely follows the rule specified by Augustus himself for the cult of his person on the provincial level together with the goddess Roma, the Temple of Olympian Zeus conforms to one of the most characteristic features of imperial worship in Greece, namely the association with traditional and local gods.83 Another point should be considered. Beginning in the mid-1st century CE, the imperial cult in Greece crystallized in the form of a collective cult addressed to the Sebastoi. The most evident sign of this evolution was the institution of a new imperial priesthood, the high priest (archiereus) of the Sebastoi, which spread all over Greece.84 This remained unchanged for almost a century, and the figure of Hadrian emerged in all its disruptive significance, arriving to temporarily unhinge a system that had left little space for individual figures: two temples (of Olympian Zeus and of Zeus Panhellenios) were created for the cult of Hadrian, albeit in association with a Greek god;
104 Francesco Camia a new imperial festival named after him (Hadrianeia) was instituted; and a priest of the emperor (hiereus of Hadrianos Panhellenios) was appointed. Those aspects of Hadrian’s attitude that I have delineated above (love for Greece – especially Athens – and its past; Panhellenic inspiration; euergetic activities) played a decisive role in this turning point in imperial worship. It was not difficult for the Greeks to worship Hadrian as a god since his disposition and physical presence recalled earlier Classical and Hellenistic traditions. Ultimately, the worship of Hadrian in “old Greece” may be viewed as a “meeting point” between Hadrian’s Hellenism and the collective historical nostalgia fostered by the Greeks in the 2nd century CE.
Notes 1 Birley 1997. Given the overwhelming bibliography on Hadrian, references in the following notes are limited to ancient sources and to the most important and recent studies. For a concise bibliography on Hadrian’s relationship with Athens and Greece in general, see recently Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018. 2 Most of the evidence from Greece on imperial worship is generic (i.e. not referring to a specific imperial figure). On the imperial cult in “old Greece”, see Kantirea 2007; Camia 2011a, 2016; Lozano 2010 and forthcoming. Among emperors, Augustus is well-represented, yet this partly derives from the early imperial chronology of many testimonies on the imperial cult, which was introduced in that very period; see, for example, the Kaisareia/Sebasta festivals attested in several poleis in Greece that continued to be celebrated far beyond the early imperial period. 3 Cf. Spawforth 2012, 243. See infra (last paragraph) for some reflections on this parallelism. 4 For bibliographical references, see infra. 5 For this synchronism, the testimony offered by the Epidaurian inscription IG IV 384 (= Oliver 1970, no. 38) is fundamental. Paus. 1.18.6; Dio Cass. 69.16.1; Hist. Aug.Hadr. 13.6; Philostr. VS 533; cf. Birley 1997, 265 (“it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the dedication of the Olympieion (Temple of Olympian Zeus) and the launching of the Panhellenic organisation were one and the same occasion”) and, most recently, Cortés Copete 2018. For the temple and the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, see Santaniello 2011; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 122– 125 (D. Anelli) and 258 (further bibliography). On the Panhellenion, see most recently Gordillo Hervas 2012. 6 This must be the sense of Dio’s expression ἐν ᾧ (scil. the Olympieion) καὶ αὐτὸς (scil. Hadrian) ἵδρυται (Dio Cass. 69.16.1). 7 IG II/III2 3290–3307, 3309–3310; CIL III 7281–7283; cf. Camia, Corcella, and Monaco 2018. The epithets soter, ktistes, and euergetes also occur in some of these dedications. 8 Paus. 1.18.6 (ὄπισθε τοῦ ναοῦ). 9 HA, Hadr. 13.1: Denique cum post Africam Romam redisset, statim ad Orientem profectus per Athenas iter fecit atque opera, quae apud Athenienses coeperat, dedicavit, ut Iovis Olympii aedem et aram sibi (…). Cf. Price 1984, 147; Mitchell 1992, 721; Camia 2011a, 41–42 (and n. 111). 10 IG II/III2 3228, 3324–3379; Oliver 1935, 60, no. 24; Oliver 1941, 249–252, nos. 49–52; SEG 12, 147–148; 14, 123–125; 21, 705–730; 44, 167; 49, 208; cf. Benjamin 1963;
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 105 Camia 2011a, 36–39. The altars were discovered in different parts of the city. No dedicator is indicated, while the epithet Olympios is always present. For the same epithet on statue bases for Hadrian from Athens, see IG II/III2 2041, 3288, 3290– 3307, 3309–3311, 3313–3320, 3381–3383; CIL III 7281–7283. Cf. LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 140–141 (G. Fadelli). 11 For Hellenistic precedents, see Robert 1966 (esp. 186–187, 190–191). 12 Dio Cass. 69.16.2: τόν τε σηκὸν τὸν ἑαυτοῦ, τὸ Πανελλήνιον ὠνομασμένον, οἰκοδομήσασθαι τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐπέτρεψε. Although the Panhellenion was inaugurated in 131/2, the sanctuary of Zeus Panhellenios was probably dedicated a few years later (Spawforth 1999, 346: 135/136 CE?). 13 Travlos 1971, 429–431; cf. Camia 2011b; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 126 (E. Brombin). Several alternative locations have been suggested both for the Panhellenion and/or the seat of the periodical meetings of the Panhellenes, either in Athens (Temple of Olympian Zeus; Library; Hadrianic building in Odos Adrianou, usually identified with the so-called Pantheon; Acropolis) or at Eleusis; cf. Corcella, Monaco, and Nuzzo 2013 (esp. 130–133); Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018,142–143 (S. Antonello) and 258 (further bibliography). 14 Paus. 1.18.9. 15 Étienne 2004, 202, who notes that the functions of ‘library’ – also in the sense of archives repository – and imperial cult are found together in some contexts such as the forum Traianum in Rome or the Asklepieion at Pergamum; cf. Corcella, Monaco, and Nuzzo 2013; see also Malacrino 2014b; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 110–114 (G. Sarcone) and 257 (further bibliography). The definition “library” derives from Pausanias 1.18.9. 16 Yegül 1982; Wohlmayer 2004. 17 Paus. 1.5.5. Pausanias 1.18.9 lists this building among the Hadrianic erga. 18 The Athenian Pantheon was traditionally identified with the remains preserved east of the Library and the Roman agora in Odos Adrianou: cf. Kokkou 1970, 159–161; Travlos 1971, 439–443; Willers 1990, 21–26, 60–62; contra Spawforth and Walker 1985, 97–98 (building for the meetings of the Panhellenes); Lippolis 1995 (gymnasium of Ptolemy). Based on a civic decree of Thyatira in Lydia, Follet and Delmousou 1997 (esp. 306–308) have suggested that the Pantheon should be identified with the sanctuary of the hero Pandion on the Acropolis. Cf. Leone 2014; Malacrino 2014a; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 114– 115 (R. Di Cesare), 143–144 (Th. Messina), and 257–259 (further bibliography). 19 Follet 1976, 109 (and n. 7), 114 (and n. 1), 348; contra Gordillo 2018, 193 (124/5 CE). Eusebius’ Chronicle states that, in the 16th year of his reign, Hadrian created a festival in Athens (Fotheringham 1923, 280–282): this festival may have been the Hadrianeia or the Panhellenia (see Gordillo 2018, 198, n. 109). An ecumenical festival bearing Hadrian’s name could be referred to in a fragmentary passage of a letter from Delphi to the emperor (F.Delphes III 4, 308, l. 10: [οἰκουμεν?]ικὸν ἐπώ̣ν[̣ υμ]ον, σοῦ, Ἁδριανέ, [- - -]). On festivals for Hadrian in the Greek East, see most recently Gordillo Hervas 2018 (esp. 193–199 for Athens). 20 Graindor 1922, 165–228; Follet 1976, 317 ff.; Camia 2011a, 99–102. The ephebic catalogue IG II/III2 2086 mentions a special teacher of the hymns for Hadrian (l. 30: διδάσκαλος ἐφήβων τῶν ᾀσμάτων θεοῦ Ἁδριανοῦ). 21 The earliest attestation of the Athenian Sebasta dates to 41 CE (IG II–III 3270, ll. 4–5). Cf. Follet 2004, 148; Kantirea 2007, 177; Follet 2004–2009, 59–61; Schmalz 2009, 16–17, no. 7. 22 F.Delphes III 1, 547 (ll. 9–11); cf. Cortés Copete 2018, 224, n. 55.
106 Francesco Camia 23 Dio Cass. 69.16.1–2. Cf. Follet 1976, 343–345; Wörrle 1992, esp. 342–345; Knoepfler 2006, 29–30. 24 Shear 1936, 319–321 and fig. 26, nos 2–14; Kroll 1993, 123 (note 53), 162 no. 395. On the Hadrianic coinage in Greece and Macedonia, see most recently Papageorgiadou 2018. 25 Corinth VIII.1 80, ll. 4–5: Cn. Cornelius Pulcher was the first holder of Hadrian’s priesthood and possibly the first archon of the Panhellenion as well; see Roman Peloponnese I, 2001, 118; Camia 2011a, 178–179. The priesthood of Hadrian Panhellenios was often held together with the agonothesia of the Panhellenia and the office of archon of the Panhellenion. 26 See e.g. Oliver 1970, no. 28, ll. 1–2 (T. Flavius Cyllus, also archon of the Panhellenion and agonothetes of the Panhellenia); cf. Camia 2011a, 45, n. 125. 27 Wörrle 1992, 349–368; Riccardi 2007. 28 IG II–III3 4.3, 1929; cf. Maas 1972, 116–117 (Hadrian’s name was erased). 29 See most recently Camia 2018. 30 Kienast 1996, 123. The connection between Zeus and imperial power is also expressed by Dio Chrysostom in the first logos of the Peri basileias. In the East, Trajan was identified with Zeus (at Pergamon, for example, he was worshipped as synnaos of Zeus Philios (= Iuppiter amicalis); see Price 1984, 137 and 252, no. 20; Raeck 1993; Burrell 2004, 22–28). Cf. Beaujeu 1955, 72–73; Bowersock 1973, 192–193; Fears 1981, 80–85. See also Anthologia Graeca 9.224 (= ed. Gow-Page 23), a poem by Krinagoras of Mytilene in which Augustus is said to be not inferior to the Aegis-bearer (i.e. Zeus). 31 Starting in the early Principate, emperors were worshiped together with Zeus Eleutherios in the annex behind the stoa in the Athenian Agora (Thompson 1966; cf. Baldassarri 1998, 142–152; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2008, 26. Paus. 1.3.2 reports that a statue of Hadrian stood near the stoa next to the statue of the god), yet in this case a cult which was created under Augustus or Tiberius perhaps in combination with the goddess Roma most likely included the emperors, thus becoming a collective cult of the Sebastoi; see also IG II/III2 3312 + 3321 + 3322 (honorary inscription for Hadrian in which his predecessor is identified with Zeus Eleutherios); IG II/III2 1996, ll. 1–3 (Domitian identified with Zeus Eleutherios in the prescript of an ephebic catalogue). At Akraiphia in Boeotia the altar in the sanctuary of Zeus Soter was re-consecrated to Nero, identified with Zeus Eleutherios; the historical context, following Nero’s proclamation of the eleutheria of Greece in 67 CE, and the epithet Eleutherios (instead of Soter) next to the emperor’s name hint at an ideological rationale behind this identification; in fact, an archiereus of Nero and Zeus Eleutherios is attested within the koinon of the Hellenes, who still celebrated the victory of the Greeks over the Persians at Plataea (IG II/III2 1990, ll. 3–4; Schachter 1981–1994, III, 125–143; Jung 2006, 344–383). Mutatis mutandis, an analogous pattern accounts, perhaps, for the identification of Antoninus Pius with Zeus Eleutherios on some forty altars in Sparta (IG V 1, 403 and 407–445; SEG 11, 766–768; 36, 359; 41, 316; 44, 359; 47, 360–361; 49, 402–404; cf. Cortés Copete 2017): a cult of Zeus Eleutherios is not attested with certainty in Sparta, which Antoninus never visited as emperor, while the presence of similar altars dedicated to Hadrian Soter may indicate that the altars for his successor represent the mere prosecution of an adventus principis ritual first performed on occasion of Hadrian’s first or second official visits to Sparta (Hupfloher 2000, 172–173). If this holds true, the dedication IG V 1, 445, in which the epithet Olympios is added to Antoninus’ name, may indicate some form of
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 107 cultic association between Hadrian and Zeus at Sparta. Trajan had been identified with Zeus Embaterios in an honorary inscription from the Peloponnesian city of Hermione (IG IV 701; cf. Richards 1988). 32 Often in several examples from the same city (see e.g. the altars from Miletus: Milet I.2, 21–23; I.7, 290–297, 301; VI.3, 1324–1349; I.Didyma 119; cf. I.Milet VI.3, pp. 200–201). Cf. Benjamin 1963. In some cases, Hadrian is identified tout court with Zeus Olympios (see e.g. I.Ephesos 3410; Metropolis). It is worth noting that Zeus is called simply Olympios in epic poetry (see e.g. Il.18.79; 22.130; Hes. Op. 474). The same epithet next to the name of the emperor also occurs on coins; see, for example, the coins from Dion in Macedonia with Zeus on the reverse (RPC III, 613–615; cf. Kremydi-Sicilianou 1996, 48–51, 279). 33 For the epigraphic references, see supra, note 10 and Camia 2011a, 272. 34 See supra, n. 5. 35 Since Weber 1907, 208–209. 36 See supra, n. 7. 37 I.Ephesos 274. This lost inscription is traditionally dated to the 13th tribunicia potestas of Hadrian’s reign (128/9) following Dittenberger’s (SIG 389) correction Γ (= “thirteenth”) of the numeral Γ (= “third”) which appears in Cyriacus’ manuscript but is not consistent with the title pater patriae that Hadrian officially adopted in 128; cf. Cortés Copete 2018, 222–224. For the possibility that the Nicopolitan altars for Hadrian Olympios date before Hadrian’s second visit to Athens, see Cabanes 1987, 167. 38 A previously unknown 4th century building phase has been revealed by Korres 1999. A statue of Hadrian dedicated by the Achaean koinon stood in the pronaos of the temple of Zeus at Olympia (Paus. 5.12.6). In the same passage, Pausanias also states that in the pronaos there was a statue of Trajan as well, which was dedicated by “all the Hellenes”. 39 By the time of the Temple of Olympian Zeus’ consecration, Hadrian was an “habitué” of the Athenian scene; see Kouremenos forthcoming. Works on the temple will have certainly lasted for some time. Indeed, the magnificent structure belongs to a series of buildings financed by the emperor (and the Roman state) and donated to the Athenians: the so-called Hadrianic erga (Kokkou 1970), be they or not part of a comprehensive building programme, will have been conceived by the emperor perhaps already from his first official visit to the city in 124/5, when the implementation of the constitutional reform may have also taken place; cf. Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 40–41 (E. Papi). On Roman architecture in Athens during Hadrian’s reign, see now Ghisetti Giavarina 2020. 40 Philostr. VS 533 (τὸ δὲ Ἀθήνησιν Ὀλύμπιον δι᾽ ἑξήκοντα καὶ πεντακοσίων ἐτῶν ἀποτελεσθὲν καθιερώσας ὁ αὐτοκράτωρ); Cortés Copete 2018. See Gordillo 2013 for the identification of the dedicant cities with the members of the Panhellenion (cf. Spawforth 1999). 41 This does not exclude the active participation of the Athenian demos and/or elite members in the construction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the other Hadrianic erga. 42 It is worth noting that Hadrian’s euergetism served as a model for one of the greatest private benefactors of imperial Greece, Herodes Atticus; cf. Mitropoulos 2020, 318–319; Strazdins in this volume. 43 Paus. 1.5.5. In the Eleusinian dedicatory epigram for the hierophantis who initiated Hadrian, the emperor is said to have caused great wealth to flow into every polis (I.Eleusis 454, l. 11: ἄσπετον ὃς πάσαις πλοῦτον κατέχευε πόλεσσιν).
108 Francesco Camia 44 Dio Cass. 69.16.2. The grant of Cephallenia most likely consisted in the awarding to Athens of taxes due by the island to the Roman state; cf. the similar provision in favor of Sparta, which received from Hadrian the harbor of Korone and the island of Caudos, south of Crete (Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 99 ff.). Pausanias mentions Hadrian’s benefactions (euergesiai) to all of his subjects and especially to Athens, stating that the city flourished anew during Hadrian’s reign (Paus. 1.3.2; 1.20.7). See also HA, Hadr. 13.1 (many favors bestowed on the Athenians);19.3 (hunt of a thousand wild beasts); Hier. chron.ab Abr 2140, 16, and cf. LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 46–48 (E. Papi). 45 IG II/III2 1102, ll. 10–11: ἴστε ὡς πάσαις χρῶμαι προφάσεσιν τοῦ εὐ ποιεῖν καὶ δημοσίᾳ τὴν πόλιν καὶ ἰδίᾳ Ἀθηναίων τινάς. 46 The Roman agora, which was completed with Augustan funds and may have hosted cult rituals for the emperor and other members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, may have acted as a model. 47 Kritsotakis 2008, 38 defines Hadrian as an “erastes of Greece”. 48 HA, Hadr. 1.5; Epit. de Caes. 14. 49 Dio Cass. 68.15.5; HA, Hadr. 26.1. 50 Vout 2006, 2010 argues that Hadrian’s most characteristic figurative representation is that of the general with cuirass (e.g. Hierapytna type); contra Kouremenos forthcoming. For a synthetic overview on this issue (with further bibliography), see most recently Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 69 (R. Di Cesare); Mitropoulos 2020, 368–370. 51 IG II/III2 3286; cf. IG II/III2 2024 (ll. 3–6); Phleg. FGrHist 257 F 36; Dio Cass. 69.16.1; HA Hadr. 19.1. At Sparta, Hadrian assumed the charge of patronomos in 127/8 CE (Bradford 1986; Spawforth 2012, 244); on the assumption of civic magistracies by Roman emperors, see Edmondson 2015, 715. For Hadrian’s visits to Greece, see Halfmann 1986, 184 ff.; Birley 1997, 58–65, 175–188, 215–278; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 32 (M.R. Luberto). 52 Geagan 1972; Skotheim in this volume. 53 IG II/III2 3323. Cf. the honorary inscription for Hadrian neos Dionysos set up by the ecumenical synod of the technitai (SEG 47, 222). By Hadrian’s reign the name of the reigning emperor is regularly mentioned next to that of Dionysus in the official denomination of the ‘international’ association of the artists; cf. Pleket 1965, 335–336; Geagan 1972, 147; Le Guen 2010, 236 and n. 92. 54 Dionysia: Dio Cassius 69.16.1; HA, Hadr. 13.1. Four statue bases are preserved: IG II/III2 3287A-D; cf. Di Napoli 2013, 215. The central cuneus was occupied by the already mentioned statue set up in 112 CE (IG II/III2 3286; vd. supra, n. 51). Athen. (3.115B) defines Hadrian as μουσικώτατος βασιλεύς. Cf. LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 128–129 (C. De Domenico). 55 See supra, n. 28. 56 See supra, n. 19 and 22–23. 57 Letters from Alexandria Troas: Petzl and Schwertheim 2006 (SEG 56, 1359). As noted by Le Guen 2010, 237–238 with reference to these letters, through the organization of the agonistic festivals, the ‘international’ association “était devenue une pièce maîtresse de la politique religieuse de l’Empire et du culte impérial en particulier”. See also Skotheim in this volume. 58 CIL III 549, l. 3 (in novis Athenis); Phleg. FGrHist 257 F 19 (νέας Ἀθήνας Ἀδριανάς); HA Hadr. 20.4 (Hadrianopolis appellavit… Athenarum partem); cf. Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 117 (R. Di Cesare). See also Camia
Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios 109 and Marchiandi 2011; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 118–120 (E. Brombin); Kouremenos in this volume. 59 Euseb. Chron., ed. A. Schöne II, p. 166; Hieron. Chron. ab Abr. 2130, 6; Syncellus, Chronographia 1.659.9; see Graindor 1934, 30; Follet 1976, 116–125 and, most recently, Cortés Copete 2019 (esp. 110–115). Hadrian was assigned the title nomothetes in various cities, including Cyrene (SEG 17, 809; cf. Spawforth 2012, 244 and n. 53), Megara (IG VII 70–72), and Sparta (Petrocheilos 1988). 60 Cortés Copete 2019, 113. A statue of Hadrian was added to the monument of the eponymous heroes in the Agora following the creation of the new tribe Hadrianis; see Shear 1970, 202–203. 61 The chryselephantine cult statue of Zeus in the Temple of Olympian Zeus (Paus. 1.18.6) was reminiscent of the cult statue of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, a work of Phidias that was celebrated by the Second Sophistic author Dio Chrysostom in his Olympic Oration (D.Chr. Or. 12). The statue that likely stood inside the Temple of Zeus Panhellenios may have been inspired by a Phidian prototype, the so-called Zeus of Dresden. Cf. Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 59–63 (R. Di Cesare). 62 Lazzarini 1986; Aleshire 1999; Lasagni 2020; see also Lambert 2021, 91, n. 4. For the use of Laconizing forms in Spartan inscriptions associated with the agoge dating approximately from the mid-2nd century to the mid-3rd century CE, see Kennell 1995, 87–93. 63 Hadrian was responsible for changes and a re-organization both at the administrative and cultic level in the Asklepieion of Epidaurus; see Melfi 2010, 331–334. 64 HA, Hadr. 13.1; cf. Follet 1976, 108–116; Halfmann 1986, 201–209; Birley 1997, 175–177, 215, 262–263. Based on an honorary inscription for the altar priest L. Memmius of Thorikos (I.Eleusis 503), it can be inferred that by the time of his first official visit to Athens, Hadrian had already been initiated into the Mysteries (Clinton 1989a, 1516–1518; Clinton 1989b, 56–57); cf. Camia 2017a, 46–47. Hadrian instituted in the Capitolium a cult modeled on the Eleusinian Mysteries (Aur. Vict. 14.4). 65 Some building activity in the sanctuary can be assigned to Hadrian’s initiative and (financial) support. See Clinton 1989b; Lippolis 2013 (esp. 250–254); Camia 2017a, 47–49. According to Geagan 1967, 122–123, the Athenian law code of Hadrian might have also covered the Mysteries. 66 According to Jones 1996, 43, the Panhellenion was “devoted above all to the cult of Hadrian and later emperors”. 67 Aristid. Eleus. 2 calls Eleusis “a sort of common temenos of the earth”. The Eleusinian Mysteries were the “gifts” that Athens had donated to all Greeks (Isoc. Paneg. 28–29); cf. Clinton 1994. 68 This has been stressed by Clinton 1999, 94: “Eleusis was a major center of imperial cult at Athens, and the Eleusinian clans which supervised the Mysteries, viz. the Eumolpidai and the Kerykes, were largely responsible for the establishment of the imperial cult at Athens.” 69 IG II/III2 1088, with Follet and Delmousou 1997, 296, ll. 13–16 (AE 1999, no. 1479); cf. Spawforth 2012, 249–252. 70 A statue of the divinized Hadrian stood on each of the two so-called arches of the Panhellenes, which were dedicated in the Eleusinian sanctuary to the two goddesses (Demeter and Kore) and, probably, to Hadrian (I.Eleusis 448 and 453); Konstantinidis in this volume. According to Clinton 1999, 99, the Panhellenion “was in charge of the financial administration of the Eleusinian sanctuary”.
110 Francesco Camia 1 Jones 1996, 36; Spawforth 1999, 347. 7 72 Paus. 1.18.6; cf. Benjamin 1963, 59–60; see most recently Cortés Copete 2018. There is a link between these two cults (and sanctuaries); the sanctuary of Zeus Panhellenios has even been identified with the Temple of Olympian Zeus (Willers 1990, 54–67; cf. Mitchell 1992, 720; contra Boatwright 1994, 427–428; Étienne 2004, 194). According to a local Athenian tradition, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was founded by Deucalion (Paus. 1.18.8; cf. Voutiras 2006, 336 and n. 26). 73 In particular, for Hadrian’s connection with Philip II of Macedon, see Kouremenos forthcoming. 74 As already noted, the centrality of Athens, the panhellenic vision, and imperial worship are found together in the Eleusinian sanctuary. 75 Thuc. 2.41.1. According to Plato, Protagoras had defined Athens as “Greece’s prytaneion of wisdom” (Prot. 337d). For Hadrian as a new Pericles, see Kouremenos forthcoming. 76 The sophist Polemo of Laodicea (also known as Polemo of Smyrna), a friend of the emperor, delivered the inaugural speech for the Panhellenion in 132 (Philostr. VS 533). 77 Paus. 1.18.9; IG II/III2 1102 (ll. 11–12) with Oliver 1989; cf. LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 142 (C. De Domenico). 78 HA, Hadr. 16.10; Follet 1994 (SEG 43, 24). As we learn from the bilingual epigraphic dossier of 121 CE, IG II/III2 1099 (= Oliver 1989, no. 73), upon a request by the head of the Epicurean school of Athens, Popilius Theotimus, that was ‘channelled’ through Trajan’s widow Plotina, Hadrian allowed the Athenian Epicureans to also appoint as successors (diadochoi) at the head of the school individuals who did not possess Roman citizenship; in Plotina’s letter to the Epicureans informing them of the good news, she designates the emperor as the “patron (kosmetes) of all culture (paideia)” (l. 21). In Rome, Hadrian founded a liberal arts university on the Greek model, the Athenaeum (Aur. Vict. Epit. 14.2–3; cf. Serlorenzi and Egidi 2013; Galli 2017) and procured 100.000 sesterces for the professors of rhetoric (García Sánchez 2014). 79 See most recently Calandra and Adembri 2014. 80 Paus. 1.5.5. Cooley 2009, 18. 81 Spawforth 2012; cf. Lambert 2021, 101: “the self-conscious Rome-pleasing archaism identified by Spawforth as characteristic of Athens’ response to Augustus”. 82 See Schmalz 1996. 83 It is worth noting that Augustus laid the foundations of the imperial cult and acted according to the Roman mores and religious tradition. 84 Camia 2017b.
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7 Remembering Philopoemen Achaean pasts and presents of Messene under Rome Eliza Gettel
In 182 BCE, the famous Achaean leader Philopoemen died. Supposedly, he was murdered at Messene during the course of a local revolt. Over 300 years later, Greek and Roman writers still recounted the death of this popular Hellene at Messene. Among others, Plutarch, a neighbor from Boeotia to the north, narrated the event in his biography of Philopoemen. However, by the early 2nd century CE, around the time that Plutarch and others wrote about the murder, Messene had become a major polis of the koinon of the Achaeans. The polis’ well-known antagonism toward the Achaeans was dissonant with present priorities and realities. Therefore, how did different groups reconcile the past with Messene’s new prominence within the koinon? In this chapter I seek answers to this question by exploring how different groups may have remembered Philopoemen after Messene became more fully integrated into the Achaean community. In doing so, this contribution builds on previous studies that have explored Messene’s relationship with its past. The Messenians are famous among scholars for refashioning their past to serve contemporary circumstances.1 After their liberation from Spartan dominance in 369 BCE, they engaged in a process of ethnogenesis. Previous studies have set out in detail Messenians’ creativity in doing so, especially as they could not draw on a deep past like their neighbors. Most notably, Nino Luraghi has examined at length transformations to Messenian identity over time, including within the Roman Empire.2 At several points, he notes the dissonance between Messene’s anti-Achaean 2nd century BCE and proAchaean 2nd century CE. He highlights how Achaean historical figures from other poleis, such as Polybius, became part of the more customary mythological ancestries through which inhabitants of Messene negotiated the local past and their social status, despite the historic antagonism between the polis and koinon.3 Like Polybius, Philopoemen could be a historical touchstone for Achaeans to make the past present. However, he was a problematic figure to remember at Messene, given his policies and widely circulating accounts of his death. Nevertheless, we have evidence for memory of him at Messene under Roman authority. Therefore, in this chapter, I examine and complicate how Philopoemen may have been remembered within imperial Messene. DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-9
118 Eliza Gettel Philopoemen was not only a figure tied to Achaean pride and admired by Hellenes and Romans alike.4 He could also embody anti-Roman and antiSpartan sentiment. In these regards, he was a complex historical figure whose memory could be contested and negotiated in creative, possibly even competing, ideological ways. In order to draw out the complexities of possible memories of Philopoemen at Messene, this chapter situates his reception within shifting regional power relationships, especially within the koinon of the Achaeans. The first section explores how the relationship between Messene and the koinon changed between the death of Philopoemen and the 2nd century CE. Messene was an important Achaean polis by the 2nd century CE, but this position was not incontestable. The past may have entered into power negotiations within the koinon. Therefore, the second section examines retellings of the death of Philopoemen that may have circulated within the imperial Greek mainland, and it contextualizes them within the contemporary relationship between Messene and the koinon of the Achaeans. The extant narratives of Livy, Plutarch, and Pausanias point to evolving interpretations of Messene’s past in the Roman imperial period. Intriguingly, dynamics of these later accounts of Philopoemen’s death seem to have suited Messene’s new Achaean prominence. The chapter then visits the agora of Messene to think about how visible the memory of Philopoemen was in the physical landscape of the polis itself. Fortunately, the site of ancient Messene has remained relatively free of modern development, and so excavations by the Greek Archaeological Service have unearthed much of the city center. Our knowledge of the polis is due in large part to extensive ongoing excavations led by Petros Themelis and his annual reports about the campaign’s findings.5 I draw on these reports in order to explore engagement with the Achaean past in the monumental landscape of Roman Messene. A particular building – a possible lieu de mémoire – will be of special interest: the so-called ‘Treasury’ where Philopoemen supposedly died. Ultimately, this structure will help us to reflect on the various ways that the historical figure of Philopoemen may have been remembered within an imperial Messene that was also embedded within the greater Achaean and Roman communities.
Situating Messene within the koinon of the Achaeans Philopoemen was a prominent strategos (general) of the koinon of the Achaeans and therefore closely associated with this community. Memories of him at Messene ought to be contextualized within the evolving relationship between the polis and koinon. Messene and the Achaeans had a very different relationship when Philopoemen died than they did later under Roman authority. The history of this relationship helps to explain the events of Philopoemen’s death, as well as factors that may have shaped how he was remembered within the imperial polis. This section therefore revolves around two moments: the “past” is the early 2nd century BCE, when Philopoemen
Remembering Philopoemen 119 was assassinated at Messene, while the “present” is the 2nd century CE, by when individuals associated with Messene were major players in the koinon.
The past: 2nd century BCE Messene had a complicated relationship with the koinon of the Achaeans in the 2nd century BCE. The koinon of the Achaeans was a community of poleis centered in the Peloponnese. The poleis gave up some autonomy to participate in shared or ‘federal’ governance and to benefit from cooperation in military, economic, and religious matters, among others. Achaean federalism emerged by the mid-5th century BCE, but it was initially focused in the northwestern Peloponnese. Over the course of the next three centuries, its membership expanded. By the early 2nd century BCE, much of the Peloponnese took part in the shared ‘federal’ institutions of the koinon. New members sometimes joined the koinon voluntarily; other times, the Achaeans incorporated them against their will. For the most part, Messenian poleis were not members of the koinon by the late 3rd century BCE. The Messenians may have had their own federal institutions after the liberation of the region from Lacedaemon (Sparta) in 369 BCE. Messene itself may have exerted control over the region through these institutions, as Thebes tended to do through the Boeotian federal state.6 This Messenian grouping, regardless of how centralized it was, tended to have closer relationships with its Aetolian neighbors, rather than the Achaeans, until rising tensions between these two regional powers began to affect Messene directly. In the 220s BCE, when the Aetolians began raiding Messene in order to keep its ally in line, the polis turned to the Achaeans for help. Meanwhile, starting around 230 BCE, other Messenian poleis had increasingly joined the koinon of the Achaeans. Pylos, the mythological home of Nestor, became an Achaean member relatively early in this process and was a site of contention between Messenians, Aetolians, and Achaeans. Other poleis of the region followed.7 Although allied with the Achaeans sporadically in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BCE, Messene itself resisted becoming a member of the koinon of the Achaeans. The Achaeans, however, increasingly capitalized on conflicts taking place around them. The Peloponnese had become a theater of war between Macedonians and Romans, along with their respective allies (First and Second Macedonian Wars). After several victories, Roman forces withdrew, since they believed that they had broken Macedonian hegemony and had stabilized the region. Famously, the Roman general Flamininus declared the freedom of the Greeks in Isthmia (196 BCE). A few years later, however, the Seleucid king Antiochus III arrived on the scene in an attempt to take control of the region. He failed. In 191 BCE, in the wake of Seleucid withdrawal, the Achaeans attempted to annex Messene by force. When the polis refused to join the koinon, the Achaeans besieged it. Messene appealed to Flamininus for help against the Achaeans. Although the Roman general chastised the Achaean commander, he ordered the rebelling Messenians to
120 Eliza Gettel join the koinon.8 According to Polybius, who was likely a boy when these events occurred, the Messenian poleis joined individually. This detail suggests that the Messenians had to disband any existing federal institutions before their incorporation into the koinon of the Achaeans.9 It was not a happy merger. Luraghi has surmised that Messene disliked losing control over other poleis of the region.10 Within a decade, Messene revolted under the leadership of Deinocrates and attempted to take back Messenian cities. In the course of the Achaean response, Philopoemen, the eight-time strategos of the koinon and regional hero, was ambushed and taken captive. In his extant Histories, Polybius simply says that Philopoemen died in captivity from poisoning (182 BCE). Subsequently, the Achaean general Lycortas, the father of the historian Polybius, suppressed the revolt. In retaliation for Philopoemen’s murder, Achaean forces ravaged Messene, recovered Philopoemen’s body, and punished those who were considered responsible for his death.11 Polybius seems to have been uncomfortable with how harsh the Achaean response to Philopoemen’s assassination was. Nevertheless, Messene, as well as the smaller cities possibly under its control, were again enveloped separately within the koinon of the Achaeans. Although previously having chosen to stay out of the conflict, Rome forbade the import of weaponry or grain to Messene from Italy. Messene faded into the background of the federal Achaean state until its defeat at Roman hands in 146 BCE.12 The present: 2nd century CE The koinon of the Achaeans, although disbanded briefly around 146 BCE at the end of the Achaean War, continued to exist through at least the mid-3rd century CE.13 Like most koina that existed within the Roman Empire, it is especially visible in the historical record during the 2nd century CE. By then, the koinon of the Achaeans appears to have involved Hellenes from across the Peloponnese, as it did in the 190s BCE.14 However, the surviving koinon was not static. The landscape of power within the koinon seems to have shifted toward poleis that had not played as large of a role in the Hellenistic koinon. Messene was one of these poleis. We have epigraphic evidence that it cooperated with the koinon under Roman authority: it erected a statue for Sabina, Hadrian’s wife, in accordance with a vote of the koinon.15 However, Messene did not just act in accordance with decrees of the koinon; members of the polis led it. By the 2nd century, individuals from Messene frequently held top Achaean positions. The position that Philopoemen had held – strategos – was still an important one, although its responsibilities had shifted away from military affairs. Two men from Messene, Titus Flavius Polybius and Tiberius Claudius Calligenes, served as Achaean strategos in the mid to late 2nd century. A third can likely be added to this list.16 Moreover, new leadership positions also appeared within the koinon under Roman authority. By the mid-1st century CE, inscriptions refer to an archiereus or ‘high-priest,’ probably in conjunction with imperial cult activities. Although men connected with
Remembering Philopoemen 121 Corinth dominated the position in the 1st century, two from the same family of Messene likely held the post in the 2nd century.17 Furthermore, starting in the early 2nd century, many of the attested ‘high-priests’ also held another prominent title, which likely was tied to representative and religious responsibilities: Helladarch. Of twelve attested Helladarchs from the koinon of the Achaeans during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, at least four can be associated with Messene.18 This grouping is the largest identifiable group of Achaean Helladarchs from a single polis. Clearly, by the 2nd century, individuals from Messene were major players in the koinon. The increasing involvement of people from Messene within the koinon may have been related to the polis’ importance within the Achaean community generally. An inscription on a statue base, found at Olympia and dated to the 2nd century CE, deserves a closer look. It honors a man from Messene for his leadership in the koinon, likely as Helladarch.19 In doing so, it refers to Messene as a metropolis:20 1 τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν Τιβ(έριον) Κλ(αύδιον) Καλλιγένην, τὸν ἀπὸ τῆς μητροπό5 λεως Μεσσήνης στρατηγόν, ἀσυνκρίτως ἄρξαντα τῆς Ἑλλάδος συνεπιψηφισαμένης καὶ τῆς κρατίσ10 της Ἠλείων βουλῆς. The koinon of the Achaeans: Tiberius Claudius Calligenes, strategos from the metropolis Messene and who led Hellas without parallel, with the most excellent boule of the Eleians voting as well. The term metropolis is rare in inscriptions of the Roman Peloponnese.21 The precise meaning of this term in the Roman imperial period has been a subject of discussion. Previous studies have proposed that it reflects the residence of Roman magistrates in the polis or a more general importance of the polis within the region (albeit one less tied to Roman officials).22 More specifically, however, the term could be tied to Messene’s newfound status within the koinon of the Achaeans. Notably, the inscription employs the word metropolis within an honorary decree approved by the koinon in partnership with the boule of Elis. It also grammatically associates the term with the title of strategos. Therefore, metropolis may have meaning within the structure of the koinon. Comparative evidence from other regions of the eastern Mediterranean suggests this sort of meaning. A famous inscription regarding Philadelphia in Lydia from
122 Eliza Gettel c. 255 CE states that some cities had to pay a synteleia (“contribution”) to a metropolis to help fund magistracies of the local koinon (in that case, Asiarchs) and common festivals.23 The term metropolis in the inscription for Calligenes could therefore indicate that an Achaean tax district of sorts centered around Messene in the 2nd century CE. An inscription from Messene, which has recently attracted attention, seems to provide evidence for the city being involved in a synteleia with Megalopolis during the reign of Augustus.24 This synteleia or a rearrangement of it could have continued to exist in the 2nd century with Messene as its metropolis. Regardless of the particulars, the term metropolis generally attributes importance to Messene and suggests that it was an important city within the region. Taken together with the number of men from Messene who served in Achaean positions, we can perceive a shift in the political and economic landscape of the koinon between the early 2nd century BCE and mid-2nd century CE. Messene had stepped into a position of prominence. This shift is not surprising, given the general flourishing of Messene under Roman authority after the lifting of the Achaean embargo and restoration of its border territories.25 Pausanias’ account of the Peloponnese generally stresses the relative decline of nearby poleis like Megalopolis as compared to the rise of Messene.26 Pausanias’ observations may not precisely reflect reality on the ground, but his account arguably presents a perception that existed at the time. Such a perception could be marshaled to support Messene’s position within the Peloponnese generally and within the koinon more specifically. We should not assume that Messene’s newfound prominence was secure and incontestable. While the koinon had lost much of its autonomy in foreign affairs and economic policy to Roman authorities, its institutions remained important for structuring local power hierarchies between poleis and individuals. Competition for honors had largely replaced outright warfare.27 Therefore, we should consider the precarity of Messene’s newfound prominence within this greater realm of competition between poleis and individuals. With this view, the epigraphic evidence, such as the monument for Calligenes, might not just reflect Messene’s new position but also attempts at legitimizing and justifying a certain power constellation against other possibilities. Local histories often became involved in civic and individual competitions for honors, especially in the context of the 2nd century CE, when such histories were an important cultural currency. Conceivably, other poleis and their citizens could have drawn on Messene’s past antagonism toward the koinon to challenge the place of Messene and its citizens in the new Achaean hierarchy. Helladarchs and other Achaean leaders, such as Calligenes, may have needed to negotiate Messene’s Achaean past in the present.
Retelling the death of Philopoemen Indeed, Messene’s complicated Achaean past had not been forgotten. At the same time that people associated with Messene were holding top leadership roles within the koinon, retellings of the death of Philopoemen at Messene
Remembering Philopoemen 123 were circulating in Greek and Latin literature. The narrative of Philopoemen’s death recounted in the section above about the “the past” draws on the version of events recorded by Polybius. However, other sources of the late 1st century BCE to 2nd century CE offer more details about the assassination. Strikingly, accounts of Livy, Plutarch, and Pausanias largely absolve the populace of Messene from responsibility for Philopoemen’s murder. Their retellings downplay widespread discontent with the koinon of the Achaeans among the people of Messene. In this regard, the later accounts were not crafting details out of thin air. They drew on Polybius as a source, and the foundations for their perspective can be perceived in his account. He recounts a divide among certain groups of Messene after Philopoemen’s death and Lycortas’ defeat of the Messenians. He also reports that the majority of the polis no longer supported Deinocrates and his followers. Instead, they advocated making peace with the Achaeans and atoning for their errors, which included their antagonism toward the Achaeans and the poisoning of the general. Furthermore, he notes that some had long been against those responsible for the war.28 The later authors may have been inspired by these details. Moreover, we also cannot know to what extent they drew on another text which is lost to us today: a biography of Philopoemen by Polybius.29 This lost biography may have inspired some of the further details provided in the later accounts and the refashionings at which they might hint. Notably, the later accounts expand upon a divide within Messene. Writing about a century later, Livy elaborates on the rift among members of the polis.30 Whereas Polybius’ account (as it stands) largely situates the rift within Messene after the city’s defeat, Livy’s account builds in dissent earlier.31 From the outset, Livy repeatedly highlights the reverence that many people from Messene had for the general. He says that the soldiers who captured Philopoemen treated him as if he were their own leader.32 In his account, the people did not believe that the famous general was a captive and so they assembled in the theater of Messene and called for him to be brought there. Those in authority feared that the people would have too much respect and pity for the general, and Deinocrates quickly made excuses to move him to what Livy calls the curia (likely a translation for a bouleuterion or similar building). When night fell, the leaders of the polis debated what to do with Philopoemen and then settled on depositing him in the underground chamber of a public treasury (thesaurus publicus), which could be sealed with a large stone. The next morning, the multitude (multitudo), remembering Philopoemen’s past deeds, were in favor of letting him live and resolving the current conflict. However, those who were leading the revolt and were in charge of the polis held a secret meeting and decided to kill him. The group that wanted the execution to proceed immediately got its way. Someone took a cup of poison to Philopoemen (ostensibly still in the public treasury), who downed the poison with poise. Livy adds that his funeral was widely attended by Achaeans, and they granted him divine honors. Livy’s narrative thus shifts the blame for Philopoemen’s death to a small subset of the polis: the same group that brought about the revolt from the
124 Eliza Gettel koinon of the Achaeans. In his narrative, the majority of those living at Messene – the multitude – are fairly blameless. We can perceive a similar perspective in Plutarch’s biography of Philopoemen.33 Like Livy, he also drew on Polybius as a source.34 Plutarch also possibly could have found inspiration in Livy’s version of events, given that his writing seems to have been influenced by the Roman exemplary tradition.35 However, Plutarch’s version departs from earlier ones in notable ways and aligns the story with his own purposes for writing. Befitting his biographical approach and emphasis on individuals as moral exempla, Plutarch shifts blame for the revolt and poisoning toward one man: Deinocrates. Plutarch gives a personal feud between Deinocrates and Philopoemen as the true reason why the former convinced Messene to revolt against the koinon. Plutarch gives more details than the others about the encounter between Philopoemen’s troops and those of Messene that led to the Achaean general’s capture. Whereas Livy reported that the soldiers who captured Philopoemen treated him with respect, Plutarch recounts that he suffered disrespect and attributes this behavior to Deinocrates. In contrast, he says that people of Messene cried when they saw Philopoemen being dragged into the city. While Livy’s account included the council debating Philopoemen’s fate, Plutarch’s version has only a few seeking to curry favor with Deinocrates and therefore calling for the Achaean general’s death. These few carry Philopoemen into the underground chamber of the treasury (θησαυρός). That night, after most people of Messene return home, Deinocrates personally orders an official to administer the poison to Philopoemen. In recounting the aftermath, Plutarch adds that the young Polybius accompanied the ashes back to Megalopolis for interment. Similarly, Pausanias’ narrative firmly places blame on Deinocrates and other wealthy members of the polis. He claims that members of the demos argued in the assembly to save Philopoemen’s life.36 In his account, Deinocrates again sends the poison to Philopoemen against the wishes of the populace. However, Pausanias also seems to attribute responsibility for the revolt to the Achaeans. He says that the Achaeans had an issue with the Messenians and that Philopoemen sent troops to devastate Messenia, which responded accordingly. It is tempting (but stretching the available evidence) to see a local refashioning of the supposed revolt reflected in Pausanias’ retelling, given that he often relied on local histories and guides.37 More generally, however, these narratives could have reflected and/or shaped local memory of the events. R. M. Errington has previously noted how these accounts could reflect a possible refashioning of the past to suit local concerns. His analysis focused on how the emphasis on disagreement within the polis could reflect anxieties of the mid-2nd century BCE, shortly after the events transpired. Within this narrative, the people of Messene, who once again found themselves members of the koinon of the Achaeans after Philopoemen’s death, could distance themselves from the revolt and the strategos’ death.38 This theory seems plausible to me, and Polybius’ lost biography of Philopoemen may situate the beginnings of this refashioning during this period.
Remembering Philopoemen 125 Yet most of the extant narratives that evidence the refashioning date centuries later. The general version of events sketched above seems to have been popular (and even to have evolved) in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, when the works of Livy, Plutarch, and Pausanias would have been circulating. Therefore, I propose that we should also contextualize these narratives within the later history of the koinon of the Achaeans, delineated in the previous section. While the refashioning may have begun to suit circumstances of the 2nd century BCE, the rationale for its origins, proposed by Errington, still applied three centuries later. As we have seen, Messene and some of its citizens were toward the top of Achaean hierarchies of the 2nd century CE. A need to integrate Messene into the koinon of the Achaeans and to account for past antagonisms was still relevant. Of course, the later retellings of the death of Philopoemen are all shaped by the various authors’ overarching projects. For instance, Livy’s investment in tension between the populace and aristocracy of Messene ties into a greater interest that he has in such historical dynamics.39 It is likely this greater interest, as well as general Roman admiration for Philopoemen, that drew him to this facet of Polybius’ narrative, not a desire to account for Messene’s Achaean involvement. When he was writing, Messene had not yet risen to the Achaean heights that it would reach in the 2nd century CE. Nevertheless, Livy expanded upon an aspect of Polybius’ narrative, possibly shaped by local political realities, and later authors took up a similar stance. For instance, while Plutarch may have been interested in the potential of Philopoemen and Deinocrates as moral exempla, he also told a version of the story that could absolve the populace of Messene for the death of Philopoemen. Therefore, these accounts cannot speak directly to local memory at Messene, but they do not need to do so. They still provide a glimpse into how others in the Greek mainland and wider Mediterranean world received Messene’s past. In doing so, they reflect and illuminate the broader context in which the populace of Messene may have remembered local history. The later accounts of Philopoemen’s death suggest ways in which recollection of the past could have been reconciled with Messene’s newfound prominence within Achaean power structures. Such versions of events, which largely acquitted the populace of Messene from responsibility for the death of a famous Achaean general, may have helped to create space within the competitive context of the koinon to negotiate the past. They may have helped citizens of Messene to dispel fault for the murder and to stress the long-time Achaean-ness of the polis. Conceivably, in doing so, Helladarchs and other Achaean leaders from Messene could legitimize and solidify their elevated position within the present hierarchies of the koinon.
Memorializing Philopoemen in an Achaean metropolis Memories of Philopoemen’s death at Messene lived on into the 2nd century CE. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, we have extensive evidence for people of Messene knowledgeably and creatively engaging with aspects
126 Eliza Gettel of their past. Do we have any evidence for memory of the Achaean hero within the polis of Messene itself ? This section investigates two possible memories of Philopoemen within imperial Messene: names of local ephebes and the area of the treasury building associated with his death. Historical reception is rarely (if ever) straightforward and uncontested. Thus, this section pays particular attention to the possibility of various, even competing, receptions of Philopoemen at Messene. While the ancient evidence is limited and often elicits more questions than answers, it reveals intriguing, potential threads of memory. Arguably, following the threads and contextualizing them within the broader historical and literary context can lead to a more nuanced, multi-dimensional understanding of Philopoemen’s afterlife within imperial Messene.
Naming a new Philopoemen Epigraphic evidence demonstrates that the memory of Philopoemen was generally alive at Messene 250 years after his death: young men taking part in the ephebeia at Messene were named Philopoemen by 57 CE.40 The use of the name at Messene seems surprising, at least at first. Philopoemen historically had strong ties to his native Megalopolis, and we have seen how contemporary narratives situated his death at Messene. Why might a family choose this name in imperial Messene? One simple answer could be that these young men were not from the area; the institution involved young men from outside of Messene in the imperial period.41 However, at least one Philopoemen occurs in a list that distinguishes between Messenians and “foreigners and Romans,” and he appears in the column of Messenians. Therefore, it would seem that at least one family at Messene felt justified in using the name. Perhaps they did not see a dissonance in using the name in contemporary Messene. Factors of Philopoemen’s memory, besides his demise at Messene, may have been more pertinent to the choice. Part of the reason for the use of the name may have been significant Roman interest in Philopoemen. Livy’s writings evidence his popularity, and Plutarch states that Romans honored Philopoemen as the “last of the Greeks”.42 Philopoemen’s name would have carried a significant amount of cultural capital within the Roman Empire by the mid-1st century CE. Notably, other families of imperial Messene took up names that seem similarly surprising given the history of the polis but that also would have had cultural capital. We have evidence for a Titus Flavius Polybius from Messene, who served as strategos of the Achaeans and held other prominent regional positions in the 2nd century CE. Apparently, he claimed the historian Polybius as a role model and even ancestor. Indeed, intermarriage within the Achaean community, namely between families of Megalopolis and Messene, could have resulted in descendants of Polybius (and Philopoemen) living at Messene.43 Nevertheless, the choice of name is a striking one in the context of Messene. Polybius and his family were closely tied to Megalopolis, and, as we have seen, Polybius’ father Lycortas dealt with Messene harshly during its
Remembering Philopoemen 127 revolt from the koinon. Furthermore, if Plutarch’s relatively local version of events holds, Polybius himself carried Philopoemen’s ashes back to Megalopolis. Nevertheless, the present resonances of the name may have outweighed its dissonances with the past. As Luraghi has pointed out, Polybius could be an ideal example for a local official of the Roman imperial period: he modeled the role of a statesman negotiating between local interests, especially of the Achaeans, and Rome. Celebration of Polybius could also potentially distract from Messene’s problematic Achaean past.44 Some families of Messene were so entrenched in the koinon that they may have considered themselves the heirs of its major figures, such as Philopoemen and Polybius, even without the possibility of traceable descent. If Messene was the metropolis of a synteleia involving Megalopolis (at least in the early imperial period), then these families may have considered famous leaders of Megalopolis as part of a wider regional heritage. Use of their names could solidify and promote connections between the families and the Achaean community. The Achaean past, or a broader common past of the Hellenes, may have mattered more than Messene’s past to families that operated in a supra-civic context.45 After all, the phenomenon of using names of individuals associated with a historic enemy was not limited to Messene; we have evidence for a Pericles at Sparta and a Lysander at Athens. Moreover, Pausanias states that some great Greeks of the past were benefactors of all Hellas, not just their home polis or ethnos, and he specifies that Philopoemen was the last of these shared Hellenic figures. The contemporary Achaean community stressed a shared Hellenism, likely as a way to cohere fragmented regional groupings.46 In this context, the historical figure of Philopoemen may have been a linchpin for the Achaean community, and memory of him may have been an important unifier for all Achaeans, even those of Messene. Local versions of past events that absolved the populace of Messene from much of the guilt for Philopoemen’s murder may have helped smooth the way for local families to integrate into the Achaean community and to adopt the name Philopoemen. As we have seen, in some contemporary and later retellings of the past, the people of Messene had honored the Achaean leader and sought to preserve his life. These retellings may have drawn on earlier narratives of Polybius or local oral traditions. If so, families adopting the name might not have perceived a dissonance in naming a son after Philopoemen. Messene’s newfound Achaean prominence may have superseded past antagonism. However, families who adopted names like Philopoemen did not necessarily need to overlook Messene’s past in doing so. Those remembering Philopoemen at Messene could have celebrated him for his achievements against other Greeks. Notably, Philopoemen had helped to liberate Messene from control by Sparta under Nabis. Records of this event circulated in major narratives, alongside the story of the Achaean general’s death, around the time that the new, young Philopoemen was taking part in the ephebeia.47 As Nigel Kennell has demonstrated in this volume, memory of Messene’s antiSpartan past was alive and well, even in the 2nd century CE. Perhaps memory
128 Eliza Gettel and celebration of Philopoemen in imperial Messene sometimes related more to his anti-Spartan achievements rather than to his broader Achaean ones. Given how creatively groups of Messene drew on the past, it may be too simplistic to view memories of Philopoemen as straightforward celebrations of the historical figure and the new Achaean prominence of the polis. The possible interpretations outlined above tend to view the people of Messene as a cohesive group. It is worth considering whether or not memory of Philopoemen could have related to politics within the polis, as well as beyond it. Notably, contemporary versions of Philopoemen’s death, outlined in the previous section, fracture the polis into competing groups. While the Roman imperial context broadened spheres of political activity, it did not necessarily erase more local political tensions within the polis. Perhaps we can perceive a certain positioning by families aligning themselves with the Achaean hero within the imperial polis. These families may have situated themselves as the descendants of the subset of the polis that spoke out against killing Philopoemen. This positioning may have been broadly open to families. Those involved in the murder of Philopoemen seem to have been exiled or killed by the Achaeans during the aftermath. Therefore, their direct descendants may not have been physically present within the polis. Notably, in the narratives of Philopoemen’s death that were circulating, the subset of Messene against killing the general was the more popular, democratic element of the city, aligned against a more aristocratic, plutocratic one. Within the imperial polis, it was this latter element which was most likely to hold important positions within the contemporary koinon of the Achaeans. While the direct descendants of this group may not have been present, perhaps general tensions between the demos and aristocrats invested in the broader Achaean community were sometimes reframed within the narrative of Philopoemen’s death. Conceivably, the past could have offered opportunities for contesting present tensions over the primacy of the polis versus the koinon. Of course, the available evidence only allows hypotheses, rather than firm conclusions. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that Philopoemen’s local reception could be politicized.
Visiting the treasury In this regard, a particular sector of Messene’s agora is also of interest. The building identified as the treasury, the supposed location of Philopoemen’s death, offers a potential lieu de mémoire for thinking about possible receptions of Philopoemen within imperial Messene. The accounts that Livy and Plutarch provide regarding the death of Philopoemen very much play out in the urban fabric of Messene. They recount the events as transpiring in civic buildings, such as the theater and bouleuterion. Most notably, Philopoemen is poisoned in a treasury building. Of course, some modern historians doubt the veracity of Philopoemen being poisoned in a treasury;48 however, for our purposes here, whether or not Philopoemen was actually poisoned in one is not as important as the fact that later writers claimed that he was and that
Remembering Philopoemen 129 these narratives circulated in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. Given contemporary connections between Philopoemen’s death and civic buildings of Messene, do we have any evidence of the event being memorialized in Messene’s agora? If so, can we perceive any possible refashionings of the past through this memorialization? Archaeologists have identified a structure with the treasury, mentioned in Livy and Plutarch’s accounts as the location of Philopoemen’s death. Today, a visitor to Messene walking through the agora passes a rectangular set of blocks labeled as the “Treasury”. A modern sign records that the Messenian general Deinocrates and “fanatic members of the anti-Achaean party” poisoned the Achaean general Philopoemen there.49 This structure lies in the agora, north of the gymnasium discussed by Kennell in this volume (Figure 7.1).50 Themelis and his team identified it based on symmetries between its construction and the description in Plutarch’s biography of Philopoemen. It also has parallels with other treasuries and treasury-receptables at other sites of the Peloponnese and Greek islands.51 Notably, the structure has a subterranean chamber that seems to have been large enough to fit a grown man and to have been sealable (Figures 7.2 and 7.3). I would add that the location makes sense with the references to civic buildings in Livy’s account (possibly influenced by Polybius’ lost biography). It is nearby to both the theater and bouleuterion, other locations associated with the general’s death.52 Excavation of the structure has offered possible evidence for memory of Philopoemen’s assassination. Excavators found two lead tablets in the fill of the chamber. Given usual associations of lead tablets, Themelis has extrapolated that the Treasury fell out of use after the death of Philopoemen and became a location of superstition and magic due to guilt for the murder.53 If this interpretation holds, then Philopoemen’s death was remembered within
Figure 7.1 Map of Messene’s agora: (A) Theater; (B) Bouleuterion; (C) Temple of Messene; (D) Treasury. Source: (Map Data: © 2021 CNES / Airbus, Maxar Technologies).
130 Eliza Gettel
Figure 7.2 The structure identified as the Treasury in Messene’s agora. Source: (Photo: P. Themelis, Society of Messenian Archaeological Studies. Reproduced with permission).
Figure 7.3 The structure identified as the Treasury in Messene’s agora. Source: (Photo: P. Themelis, Society of Messenian Archaeological Studies. Reproduced with permission).
the civic landscape of Messene as something for which later Messenians needed to atone. Retellings of the events, such as those by Livy, Plutarch, and Pausanias, which distanced the average person of Messene from responsibility for the murder, may have created space for people of Messene to feel more than guilt. Perhaps the area was more generally a location of hero worship for a past leader to whom the Achaeans had granted divine honors.54 However, as is commonly the case, we cannot be completely confident that this structure is the infamous Treasury. The lead tablets are not yet firm proof that this structure was identified as such by people living at Messene.
Remembering Philopoemen 131 The dating of at least one of these tablets is not clear, and its content does not clearly connect to Philopoemen.55 Unfortunately, the detail about the Treasury does not figure in Pausanias’ account, which we might expect to mention the structure, if it was associated with the story in antiquity. While Pausanias refers to the death of Philopoemen in his long introduction to Messenia and attributes responsibility to at least some Messenians, he saves more detailed discussion of Philopoemen’s death for his visit to Tegea, where he views a statue of the Achaean leader.56 Given the attention he pays to the incident, we might expect him to mention the Treasury, if the association existed. Therefore, while other authors recount the events of Philopoemen’s death playing out in the civic landscape, the event may not have been visibly memorialized within it. However, Pausanias’ narrative choices might reflect other concerns, such as highlighting Arcadian claims to Philopoemen and closing out his narrative of the Peloponnese with one of the last “true Greeks”. Intriguingly, however, the Treasury lies in part of the agora which saw much activity from members of the Messenian elite under Roman authority. By the mid to late 2nd century CE, the area immediately north of the structure identified today as the Treasury became a staging ground for a prominent local family, the Saethidae, to fund honorary statues for the Roman imperial family.57 Statue bases honoring Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Faustina the Younger, among others, have been found in this area.58 Previous study of the placement of these statues has focused on their Roman imperial dimension and their location near the Temple of Messene.59 The temple was dedicated to the eponymous, mythological Messene – the daughter of the Argive king Triopas and the wife of Messenia’s first king, Polykaon. The temple was constructed as early as the 4th century BCE, and apparently it was still standing intact in the 2nd century CE when Pausanias visited the region.60 Historically, the cult of Messene was an important regional one that helped to center the polis of Messene within a discourse of regional identity.61 When we associate the statues of the Saethidae with the temple, the impression that emerges from this sector of the agora, shaped heavily by a prominent local family, is of a regionally significant polis legitimizing Roman political and religious structures. In this regard, these monuments for the Roman imperial family may have helped to negotiate Messene’s tricky past within present realities. Although eventually Messene presented itself as firmly behind Augustus, the polis had sided with Antony versus (then) Octavian during their civil wars. This choice was still remembered in the 2nd century, as evidenced by Pausanias.62 The statues for the imperial family, here and elsewhere in the agora, may have contributed to demonstrating how committed Messene and its prominent citizens were to Augustus’ successors over a hundred years later. A Saethidae, Tiberius Claudius Frontinus, would even have a Roman senatorial career.63 However, in addition to honoring the Roman emperors, some statues also promoted connections between the Saethidae and the contemporary koinon of the Achaeans. The inscription gracing the base of the statue for Antoninus Pius explicitly references the koinon of the Achaeans. It is similar to another
132 Eliza Gettel statue base for Marcus Aurelius from Messene, but with a less secure findspot. Both refer to positions that Tiberius Claudius Saithidas Caelianus held in the koinon. Moreover, although he funded and proposed the statues, a group called the Hellenes approved them. These Hellenes may have been the members of the koinon of the Achaeans or a broader community that encompassed them.64 Another monument currently viewable near the Temple for Messene and set up by the priests of Zeus Ithome also references Caelianus’ Helladarchy and the koinon.65 It is noteworthy that these three inscriptions are in Greek, while others set up by the Saethidae for Faustina and Marcus Aurelius are in Latin and do not mention the koinon. The monuments with Greek inscriptions therefore appear to promote the connections of the Saethidae family not just to Roman authority but also to the Achaean community, and they expressed this connection in the native language, arguably for a local audience. As previously mentioned, statues involving the Saethidae were not just adjacent to the Temple of Messene: they were between it and the structure identified as the treasury where Philopoemen died. The visibility of this family and the Achaean present immediately next to this building is therefore striking. What if archaeologists’ identification of the so-called Treasury is correct and visitors to the agora of Messene did associate it with the death of Philopoemen? Then, perhaps, this sector of the agora can offer clues to how some members of the polis, at least a certain local family, remembered and negotiated the Achaean past, as well as its present. Particular strands in the narratives of Philopoemen’s accomplishments may have selectively enabled them to do so. As strategos of the Achaeans, Philopoemen seems to have protected the koinon of the Achaeans against Roman interests. Indeed, Philopoemen was a complicated figure to remember under Roman authority, even beyond Messene. Famously, the Achaeans had an anti-Roman past. They engaged the Romans in the Achaean War, which ended with the sack of Corinth in 146 BCE. The anti-Roman orientation of the koinon was sometimes embodied in the figure of Philopoemen. The faction that carried on his politics at Megalopolis after his death was eventually those people, including Polybius, forcibly taken to Rome after the Battle of Pydna on charges of siding with Perseus of Macedon against Rome. In a fascinating passage after his account of Philopoemen’s death, Plutarch touches on the general’s anti-Roman associations.66 He recounts how a Roman tried to have honorary statues for Philopoemen removed after the Achaean loss in 146 BCE. The reasoning was that the Achaean general had been an enemy of the Romans. The matter was debated before the Roman general Mummius and the commission tasked with dealing with Achaea after the war. Polybius spoke in favor of Philopoemen’s memory, and the commission decided to let the honors for Philopoemen remain standing. Polybius likely focused on Philopoemen’s victories against Macedonian monarchs and sidestepped his conflicts with Rome.67 The treasury, therefore, had strong ties to a famous Achaean individual, but one who was not necessarily pro-Roman. In fact, Rome had initially
Remembering Philopoemen 133 declined to intervene on the Achaeans’ behalf when the Messenians revolted in 183 BCE. According to Polybius, they had made it known that they would not sanction rebelling poleis and force them back into the koinon.68 Therefore, the Achaean action during which Philopoemen died, was not one backed by Roman authority. Moreover, several decades after Philopoemen’s death, Messene did not send troops to fight with the Achaeans against Rome during the Achaean War.69 In these regards, the past offered strands for Achaean leaders from Messene, such as the Saethidae, to distance themselves from the past version of the koinon, which resisted Roman imperium. The possibility therefore exists that the polis – or perhaps more specifically the Saethidae family – sought to refigure Messene’s complicated past with the Achaeans through the area around the treasury. The statues for the Roman imperial family may have situated the Saethidae in relation to the more proRoman contingent of the polis and Achaean community. This positioning would relate well to other ways that the family may have refashioned the local past: possibly presenting the Macedonians, rather than the Romans, as the enders of Messene’s freedom.70 In such ways, prominent citizens of Messene, such as the Saethidae, may have drawn on selective strands of the past to present themselves as the rightful and proper heirs of the koinon within its new context under Roman hegemony. In this view, Messene could be the logical and rightful metropolis of the now pro-Roman Achaean community, and the Saethidae, among others, could legitimize their positions at the head of the koinon.
Conclusion: remembering Philopoemen under the Roman boot Philopoemen was one of the most-remembered and celebrated Hellenes of the 2nd century CE. Pausanias states as much.71 However, his memory likely was not monolithic. Philopoemen was a complicated historical figure to remember within the Greek mainland under Roman rule, especially at Messene. He could be a pro-Achaean liberator of Messene from Spartan dominance with whom some people sought to align themselves. He could also be an anti-Roman figure who represented an out-of-date version of the koinon of the Achaeans against whom regional leaders from Messene with Roman citizenship positioned themselves. Memorialization of Philopoemen at Messene could have drawn on such various, even competing, facets of his memory. Indeed, ancient individuals were aware of how models from the past could be used in unstable and contradictory ways. Plutarch called out his contemporaries for celebrating past historical models that did not suit the present context of living under Roman rule, even ones enjoyed by the Romans. In his Precepts of Statecraft, he makes the following comment: … οἱ δ’ ἄρχοντες ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν ἀνοήτως τὰ τῶν προγόνων ἔργα καὶ φρονήματα καὶ πράξεις ἀσυμμέτρους τοῖς παροῦσι καιροῖς καὶ πράγμασιν οὔσας μιμεῖσθαι κελεύοντες ἐξαίρουσι τὰ πλήθη, γέλωτά τε ποιοῦντες
134 Eliza Gettel οὐκέτι γέλωτος ἄξια πάσχουσιν, ἂν μὴ πάνυ καταφρονηθῶσι … καὶ ὅσα τῶν παραδειγμάτων οἰδεῖν ποιεῖ καὶ φρυάττεσθαι διακενῆς τοὺς πολλούς, ἀπολιπόντας ἐν ταῖς σχολαῖς τῶν σοφιστῶν. … but the officials in the cities, when they foolishly urge the people to imitate the deeds, ideals, and actions of their ancestors, however unsuitable they may be to the present times and conditions, stir up the common folk and, though what they do is laughable, what is done to them is no laughing matter, unless they are merely treated with utter contempt … all the other examples which make the common folk vainly to swell with pride and kick up their heels, should be left to the schools of the sophists.72 By this reasoning, he puts forward the reconciliation agreement after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants as more worthy of emulation and celebration than the Battle of Marathon. Given this perspective, what might Plutarch have thought about the use of Philopoemen as an exemplum for those living at Messene under Roman authority? While Plutarch celebrated the leadership of Philopoemen in his biography, how he generally felt about the Achaean leader as a model to be celebrated by Hellenes living within the Roman Empire is not entirely clear.73 Notably, he paired his biography of Philopoemen with that of the Roman general Flamininus. A major connecting theme between the two figures is “freedom” but from very different perspectives: while Flamininus pursued “Greek freedom” from a position of Roman interest, Philopoemen pursued “freedom” for the Greeks despite and even against Rome. In this guise, was Philopoemen a suitable model for the populace to celebrate? Or would the champion of the Achaeans cause those living under Roman control to “swell with pride” and entertain dangerous notions of freedom? Plutarch may have shaken his head at certain versions of Philopoemen being promoted by civic and regional leaders of Messene operating under the Roman boot, especially those that lauded Philopoemen’s associations with the popular element of the polis and his anti-Roman policies. However, he may have been okay with more measured versions of Philopoemen that were less antagonistic toward Roman authority. Usually, Plutarch is not interested in his moral exempla offering readers’ straightforward answers, and therefore we should probably embrace open-ended answers to these questions.74 Whether or not Plutarch would have approved, ultimately, his complaints highlight that Greek historical figures such as Philopoemen could become controversial and contested exempla within the politics of Greek poleis under Roman authority. In this context, the competing ways in which different groups of Messene may have drawn on Philopoemen do not have to fit together neatly. Moreover, the same person did not always have to refer to the past consistently. Perhaps we should imagine an Achaean Helladarch from Messene promoting a particular Philopoemen in the assembly of Messene one day and then evoking a different Philopoemen in a meeting of the koinon
Remembering Philopoemen 135 of the Achaeans the next day. As we have seen, the various facets of Philopoemen could make him an ideological touchstone for negotiating relationships within the polis, as well as relationships between Messene and the greater Achaean and Roman imperial communities. In these situations, those making claims on Philopoemen seem to have done so in a more intimate and genealogical way, as compared to how we usually refer to historical figures today. In the passage above, Plutarch refers not to the past broadly but to the “deeds, ideal, and actions of the ancestors” (progonoi). Naming practices and other ways of remembering Philopoemen within Messene suggest a similar personal, even familial, connection. Thus, through figures such as Philopoemen, Messene’s Achaean past was not a distant, “foreign country”, but a familiar yet contestable ancestry.
Acknowledgements I am indebted to many individuals for insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. They include Emma Dench, Scott DiGiulio, Evan Jewell, Nigel Kennell, Anna Kouremenos, and Dominic Machado. I am also grateful to Christopher P. Jones and Petros Themelis for sharing relevant information about inscriptions of Messene. The origins of this project lie in research that was conducted in Greece with the support of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
Notes 1 For the sake of clarity, I avoid using the ethnic Messenians to refer to inhabitants of the polis of Messene. Instead, I use it to refer to the regional grouping. 2 The most comprehensive account is Luraghi 2008. See also Alcock 1999; Alcock 2002, 132–75 (although knowledge of the archaeology of Messene has improved much since this publication); Luraghi and Alcock 2003; Lafond 2006; Luraghi 2009; Spawforth 2012, 179–86 and 211–17; Hawes 2018; Kennell in this volume. 3 See especially Luraghi 2008, 305 and 316–17 regarding memory of Polybius within imperial Messene. 4 Plut., Aratus, 24.2; Paus. 8.52.1. 5 Petros Themelis has admirably released annual reports throughout the excavations. See reports in Praktika tēs en Athēnais Archaiologikēs Hetaireias (PAE or PAAH). Themelis has also posted most of the reports on his academia.edu page. 6 I. Magnesia 43 refers to a koinon of the Messenians around 208 BCE, although this inscription may reflect a Magnesian view more than a Messenian one (see Luraghi 2015, 293). On federalism in Messenia, see Martin 1975, 417–27; Hansen and Nielson 2004, 562; Luraghi 2008, 266–9; and Luraghi 2015. 7 Polyb. 4.25.4; Liv. 27.30.13; Luraghi 2008, 257–260; and 2015, 293. 8 On this series of events, see Liv. 36.31.1–10. For a modern account, see Luraghi 2008, 261–2. 9 Polyb. 23.17.2; Luraghi 2008, 263–4. 10 Luraghi 2008, 262.
136 Eliza Gettel 11 This section largely follows Polyb. 23.9.12–15, 23.12.1–9, 23.16.1–17.4, and 24.9.12–13. Other ancient accounts include Liv. 39.49.1–50.11; Plut., Philopoemen, 18–21; and Paus. 8.51.5–8. They are discussed at length in the next section. For narratives of Messene’s revolt from the koinon of the Achaeans in modern scholarship, see Roebuck 1941, 97–102; Errington 1969, 185–194; Gruen 1984, 493–6; Luraghi 2008, 261–4; Eckstein 2012, 351–2; and Mackil 2013, 133 and 368. 12 Polyb. 23.15–17.4; Eckstein 2012, 352; and Mackil 2013, 368. Luraghi 2008, 264 points out that the Messenians are not very visible in Achaean federal institutions during this period. 13 146 BCE: Paus. 7.16.9–10. IG V.1, 1398 refers to the koinon and has been dated to 246 CE. Select bibliography about the koinon in the Roman imperial period: Oliver 1976; Puech 1983; Spawforth 1994; Hupfloher 2007; Camia and Kantiréa 2010; Lozano Gomez 2010, 133–8; Zoumbaki 2010; Ajootian 2014; and Gettel 2021. I am also currently preparing a monograph on the koina of the imperial Greek mainland. 14 On its extent, see Kahrstedt 1950, 73; and Camia and Kantiréa 2010, 398. Membership of the colonia is debated. For instance, on Corinth, see Oliver 1978, 186 n. 6, 191; and Spawforth 1994. 15 SEG 51:476. 16 IvO 450 and 458. IvO 459 also refers to Publius Aelius Ariston, a Messenian, having “στρατηγήσαντα τῶν Ἑλλήνων” (lines 7–8). Luraghi 2008, 303 reads this line as indicating that he held the position of Achaean strategos. 17 For a list of men known to have held the post of archiereus, see Camia and Kantiréa 2010, 400–402. On the position more broadly, see Puech 1983. 18 Probable or known Helladarchs from Messene: Tiberius Claudius Saethidas Caelianus (I), IG V.1, 1455; Tiberius Claudius Saethidas Caelianus (II), IG V.1, 1451; Tiberius Claudius Calligenes, IvO 458; and Tiberius Claudius Crispianus, IvO 448. 19 The phrase “ἄρξαντα τῆς Ἑλλάδος” may point to Calligenes having held the position of Helladarch. Notes on the inscription in IvO recognize that the phrase could either imply the Helladarchy or simply refer to the duties of the strategos. Oliver 1976, 2 understood the phrase as indicating that Calligenes also carried out the Helladarchy as strategos. Puech 1983 includes Calligenes in her study of Achaean Helladarchs. 20 IvO 458. The precise dating of the inscription within the 2nd century CE is debated. Previous studies dated it either to the early-mid 2nd century CE (Hadrianic/Antonine) based on letter forms and language or to the late 2nd century CE based on prosopography. The debate hinges on the question of whether or not the Calligenes of this inscription is the same one mentioned in NIO 60 = SEG 31:372. Schwertfeger 1981, 250 argues they are different individuals and that this Calligenes may be the grandfather of the other. RP EL 146–147 and NIO 60 accept this reasoning. However, Puech 1983, 30–1 contends the inscriptions honor the same man of the late 2nd century CE. Luraghi 2008, 304 n. 45 follows Puech. I generally side with Puech and Luraghi based on patterns in the careers of other Achaean officials. However, while it would be convenient to narrow the timeframe, a general date in the 2nd century CE suffices for our purposes here. On Calligenes’ positions and honors, see also Oliver 1976, 2; and Marcovich 1982. 21 I am aware of one other instance of the term being used in the Greek mainland during the imperial period: Corinth VIII 3.269, where the term seems to refer back to Corinth’s historic role as the metropolis that colonized Apollonia.
Remembering Philopoemen 137 22 Kahrstedt 1950, 73 did not think the term indicated that Messene was the capital city of the koinon. More recently, see Haensch 1997; Heller 2006, 283–341; and Puech 2004 on the complicated and fuzzy meaning of the term. Haensch 1997, 251 connects the term to a political seat of the province, but he also demonstrates that it sometimes indicates more generally an important city of a region. In the case of Messene, Haensch (pp. 326–7) cannot place a proconsul there, but he does provide evidence for Messene possibly being a seat of a quaestor. 23 SEG 17:528 = Oliver 1989, 285, lines 5–7. On these lines of the inscription, see Puech 2004, 390. On its meaning as “contribution” in the context of a koinon and its subdistricts across periods, see Millar 1977, 390; Mackil and van Alfen 2006, 224–5; and Mackil 2013, 295–7. 24 Jones 2018, Inscription C (p. 34) with discussion of the term synteleia in the context of the Peloponnese on p. 35. Previously, the inscription was published in Themelis 2013, 75–77 = SEG 63:290. I will address this synteleia in more depth in future publications. 25 See Themelis 2010b on the economy of Messene between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE. 26 Paus. 8.33.1. See also Roy et al. 1989, 146–7; Hutton 2010, 445–6; Roy 2010; and Hawes 2018, 171. Messenia may be an exception to the general decline in rural settlement in the Greek mainland in the early Roman period (Alcock 1993, 48). 27 Edelmann-Singer 2015 highlights the importance of koina and concilia for the internal power structures of provinces within the Roman Empire. However, it largely passes over the koina of the province of Achaea. 28 Polyb. 23.16.3–8. 29 On this biography and its use as a source, see Errington 1969, 232–40; and Swain 1988, 337. 30 Liv. 39.49.1–50.11. Livy notes elsewhere (e.g., 33.10.10) that he follows Polybius’ history. 31 Polybius’ reference to Philopoemen’s poisoning is rather brief but seemingly complete: 23.12.3. 32 Liv. 39.49.5: “quam ducem suum.” 33 Plut., Philopoemen, 18–21. 34 Plutarch cites Polybius in his biography (e.g., Philopoemen 16.3). 35 Langlands 2020. 36 Paus. 4.29.11–12 and 8.51.5–8. Generally, on Pausanias’ version of Messenian history, see Alcock 2001. 37 On Pausanias’ guides, see Jones 2001. 38 Errington 1969, 191–4. 39 Levene 2010 (especially chapter 5); and Vasaly 2015 (especially chapter 6). 40 One Philopoemen is named in Themelis 2015, 111–13 and Figure 11 (line 18). Themelis 2010a, 123 refers to another list of ephebes from 70 CE including the name Philopoemen. At the time he wrote, the inscription was unpublished. 41 See Kennell in this volume. 42 Plut., Aratus, 24.2. Pausanias makes a similar statement at 8.52.1. 43 On Titus Flavius Polybius, see especially IvO 449 and 450; Heller 2011, 287–312; and Edelmann-Singer 2015, 177–8. On the possibility of intermarriage in this case, see Heller 2011, 293. 44 Luraghi 2008, 304–5. 45 On a supra-civic elite in the Roman imperial Peloponnese and its connections to koina, see Heller 2012.
138 Eliza Gettel 46 Pericles at Sparta: IG V.1 69 (line 34) and 71 (line 37); a Lysander as archon of Athens in the 1st century BCE: Vanderpool 1945, 147–8 no. 19. See Paus. 8.52.1 on Philopoemen as the last of the Hellenes. See Gettel 2021 on the shared Hellenism of the imperial Achaean community. 47 Plut., Philopoemen, 12 and Precepts of Statecraft, 23. 48 Errington 1969, 192–3. Luraghi 2008, 263 n. 55 refers to Errington’s doubts as “reasonable.” 49 This quote is based on a personal photo of the sign taken in July 2016. 50 Both buildings can be seen in Themelis 2010a, Tafel 51.1. 51 Themelis 2010a, 122–3 (see Tafel 53.4 for a photo of the chamber); and 2010b, 92. Themelis identifies parallels at Kos, Gortyna, and possibly Megalopolis. For other treasury-like features in sanctuaries of the Peloponnese, see the treasury with round opening in a temple of Thouria (Petrakos 2011, 22–23; and Archibald et al. 2010–2011, 59) and the lidded stone chests with bronze tablets from a sanctuary at Argos (Whitley 2003–2004, 19–20). 52 The building identified as a bouleion or bouleuterion is near to the Temple of Messene and therefore near the so-called Treasury. The identification is based on epigraphic evidence. See Themelis 2012, 46; and Dickenson 2017b, 94 on the identification and location. 53 Themelis 2010a, 123. 54 On the granting of divine honors to Philopoemen after his death, see Liv. 39.50.9. 55 For publication of one of the lead tablets, see Themelis 2009, 92–3. See also SEG 59:427. 56 Messene: Paus. 4.29.11–12. Tegea: Paus. 8.51.5–8. 57 Regarding this family, see RP II MES 155–7; Baldassarra 2007, 36–42; and Luraghi 2008, 306–18. Paus. 4.32.2 seems to refer to a member of this family. 58 Themelis 2002, 44–46 and 2012, 46; Dickenson 2017a, 139. Antoninus Pius and Faustina: SEG 52:405. Marcus Aurelius: IG V.1, 1451. Given the ongoing nature of excavation and publication, the findspots of the statue bases are sometimes confused. For example, the statue for Antoninus Pius was found just to the south of the foundations for this temple. The SEG entry (52,405) reports, however, that the statue base was found along the south side of the temple of Zeus. This note seems to be a misinterpretation of the excavation report in PAE/PAAH, because the inscription is noted in the section pertaining to fragments of the temple of Zeus Soter. However, the report states that the inscription was found to the south of temple foundations found in the agora, and no foundations for the temple of Zeus have been discovered as of yet. Instead, Themelis (2012, 45–6) later identified the foundations as the temple of Messene due to epigraphic evidence. The author saw these statue bases to the south of this temple and just north of the so-called treasury in July 2016 and October 2017. See also Themelis 2010a, Tafel 53.1. 59 Dickenson 2017a, 139. 60 Paus. 4.31.11–12. On the temple, see Luraghi 2015, 290. Previously, see also Luraghi 2008, 269–76, although Luraghi seems to have become more confident of a 4th century BCE date since then. 61 Luraghi 2008, 276. On the landscape of the city and Messenian shared memories in the Hellenistic period and earlier, see Alcock 2002, 132–75. 62 On Messene’s later support for Augustus, see Jones 2018, 43. On the civil wars, see Paus. 4.31.1 and Luraghi 2008, 266. 63 On this individual, see RP II MES 142.
Remembering Philopoemen 139 64 SEG 52:405 = Themelis 2002, 44–5 (Antoninus Pius) and IG V.1 1451 (Marcus Aurelius). On these inscriptions, see Spawforth 1994, 222; and Luraghi 2008, 308. On the debate surrounding identification of the Hellenes, see Lozano Gomez 2018. 65 Themelis 2016, 103. 66 Plut., Philopoemen, 21.5–6. 67 Swain 1988, 338. 68 Polyb. 23.9.12–14. 69 Polyb. 38.16.3; Roebuck 1941, 106. 70 Luraghi 2008, 317–8. 71 Paus. 8.49.1. He makes this statement when noting a statue of the general at Tegea. The epigraph is provided at 8.52.6. 72 Plut., Precepts of Statecraft, 17 (814A-C). The Greek text and translation by Harold North Fowler are from the Loeb edition (1936). 73 Plut., Precepts of Statecraft, 15 (812E) seems to suggest that Philopoemen could be a problematic example. 74 Duff 2011, 70; Langlands 2020, 82.
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Remembering Philopoemen 141 Empire, 96–235: Cross-Cultural Interactions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 75–94. Levene, D. (2010). Livy on the Hannibalic War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lozano Gomez, F. (2010). Un Dios Entre Los Hombres: La adoración a los emperadores Romanos en Grecia, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. ——— (2018). “A provincial priest for the province of Achaia? A reconsideration and an up-date based on several recently found inscriptions.” In V. Di Napoli, F. Camia, V. Evangelidis, D. Grigoropoulos, D. Rogers, and S. Vlizos, eds., What’s New in Roman Greece?, Meletēmata 80, Athens: Research Institute for Greek and Roman Antiquity, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 467–476. Luraghi, N. (2008). The Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2009). “Messenian Ethnicity and the Free Messenians.” In P. Funke and N. Luraghi, eds., The Politics of Ethnicity and the Crisis of the Peloponnesian League, Hellenic Studies Series 32, Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. ——— (2015). “Traces of Federalism in Messenia.” In H. Beck and P. Funke, eds., Federalism in Greek Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 285–296. Luraghi, N. and S. E. Alcock, eds. (2003). Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, Structures. Hellenic Studies Series 4. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Mackil, E. (2013). Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon, Berkeley: University of California Press. Mackil, E. and P. van Alfen (2006). “Cooperative Coinage,” In P. van Alfen, ed., Agoranomia: Studies in Money and Exchange Presented to John H. Kroll, New York: The American Numismatic Society, 201–246. Marcovich, M. (1982). “Zur Inschrift des Tiberius Claudius Calligenes,” ZPE 46, 175–176. Martin, D. (1975). Greek Leagues in the Later 2nd and 1st centuries BC. PhD dissertation, Princeton University. Millar, F. (1977). The Emperor in the Roman World, 31 BC–AD 337, London: Duckworth. Oliver, J. (1976). “The Helladarch,” Rivista Storica dell’Antichità 8, 1–6. ——— (1978). “Panachaeans and Panhellenes,” Hesperia 47.2, 185–191. ——— (1989). Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 178, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Petrakos, V. (2011) Το Έργον της Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας 2010, vol. 57, Athens: Archaeological Society of Athens. Puech, B. (1983). “Grands-prêtres et helladarques d’Achaïe,” Revue des Études Anciennes 85.1, 15–43. ——— (2004). “Des cités-mères aux métropoles.” In S. Follet, ed., L’hellénisme d’époque romaine. Nouveaux documents, Nouvelles approches (Ier s. a.C.-IIIe s. p.C.). Actes du colloque international à la mémoire de Louis Robert, Paris, 7–8 juillet 2000, Paris: Boccard, 357–404. Roebuck, C. (1941) A History of Messenia from 369 to 146 B.C. PhD dissertation, The University of Chicago. Roy, J. (2010). “Roman Arkadia.” In Rizakis, A. D. and Lepenioti, C., eds., Roman Peloponnese III: Society, Economy, and Culture under the Roman Empire: Continuity and Innovation, Meletēmata 63, Athens: Research Institute for Greek and Roman Antiquity, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 59–74. Roy, J., J. Lloyd, and E. Owens. (1989). “Megalopolis under the Roman Empire.” In S. Walker and A. Cameron, eds., The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire:
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8 Politics of the past Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in Achaea Giorgos Mitropoulos
The 2nd century CE, especially the period of the “adoptive emperors”, has been considered the Golden Age of the Roman Empire since the muchquoted passage of Edward Gibbon.1 By and large, this traditional view still prevails.2 The province of Achaea is no exception: under Hadrian and the Antonines, it enjoyed renewed imperial interest and favor.3 This period also co-incided with the efflorescence of the so-called “Second Sophistic” in which prominent and educated men sought to revive the intellectual atmosphere of the Classical past, especially of the late-5th and 4th centuries BCE.4 When we think of an emperor who interacted greatly with the Greek past, naturally Hadrian is the first who comes to mind. His personality dominated 2nd century Achaea, and the various ways in which he approached the province and its past are studied until today.5 After Nero’s limited and self-serving “philhellenism”, when the glorious past of “old Greece” served more as a background for the actor-emperor’s megalomania and its great athletic and artistic contests as coveted stages for his performances,6 Hadrian was the first emperor who systematically promoted Achaea and its rich past.7 But the role of the emperors after Hadrian in connection with the past of the province should not be underestimated, and one cannot but notice the absence of recent contributions on the activities of the Antonine emperors in Achaea. More specifically, the conduct of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus towards “old Greece” has not been fully explored. Certain political choices of these emperors, such as the Athenian offices held by Commodus, should be re-assessed. This chapter aims to examine some aspects of the attitudes of the last Antonine emperors, namely Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus, to Achaea’s illustrious past. Epigraphic and literary testimonies from the province of Achaea (especially from Athens, Eleusis, and Sparta) will be assembled in order to assess the political behavior of these emperors in relation to the past of the province. Several questions will be addressed; first, what did the Greek past mean for these emperors and how did they choose to interact with it? In addition, did the emperors have certain role models in mind concerning their promotion of the Greek past, and, if so, who were they? For example, how did Hadrian influence the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, and he that of his son, Commodus?8 Finally, what was the impact of imperial actions DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-10
144 Giorgos Mitropoulos on the provincial elites of the Graeco-Roman East? The answers to these questions will illustrate the power of the local and imperial past in 2nd century “old Greece”. I shall also argue that the promotion of the past in the cities of Achaea was not only something to be expected in an age of collective historical nostalgia but also a response to the actions of contemporary, pepaideumenoi emperors, who were conceived of as exempla.
The philosopher emperor and the past of Achaea Marcus Aurelius was predestined for the succession by Hadrian at an early age.9 Together with Lucius Verus, the other imperial successor, young Marcus immersed himself in Greek culture, and one of the most renowned sophists of the time, Herodes Atticus, was among their teachers of oratory, presumably from 141 to 146 (Figure 8.1).10 Due to his lessons with Herodes and his overall education in rhetoric and philosophy, the future emperor became thoroughly familiar with the Classical past and literary tradition of Greece, including, of course, that of the city of Athens (Figure 8.2).11 However, both Herodes and Hadrian are curiously absent from Book 1 of the “Meditations” in which Marcus cited all his relations to whom he owed gratitude.12 It has even been surmised that, through the praise of Antoninus Pius in the “Meditations”, Marcus implicitly criticized various aspects of Hadrian’s rule, such as his
Figure 8.1 Portrait of Herodes Atticus from Kephisia. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 4810. Source: (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund).
Politics of the past 145
Figure 8.2 Portrait of Marcus Aurelius from Athens. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 572. Source: (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund).
travels and expensive building programmes.13 Whatever his personal estimate of those “intellectual predecessors”, when Marcus dealt with “old Greece”, did he look to Hadrian’s actions and Herodes’ counsel for guidance? Let us begin our examination from the most renowned city of the province of Achaea, Athens.14 One of the most characteristic activities of Marcus Aurelius in relation to the distant past of Achaea is his attempt to regulate the admission to the Athenian Areopagus by promoting the revival of old laws.15 The well-studied inscription from the Roman agora of the city, a letter of Marcus to the Athenians, explains that the emperor attempted to restore the Athenian custom, which supposedly demanded that only candidates of free birth for at least three generations could be admitted to the Areopagus.16 This requirement is named by Marcus Aurelius as trigonia.17 The emperor explains the motives for his regulations: ὅσην εἰσφέρομαι σπουδὴν ὑπὲρ τῆς δόξης τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, ὡς τῆς παλαιᾶς αὐτὴ[ν ἐ] | πικρατεῖν σεμνό̣τ̣ητος, ἱκανῶς δεδηλωκέναι νομίζω, καὶ ἡνίκα τὸ παρ’ αὐτοῖς ἔκκριτον συνέδριο̣[ν] | ἐπαναγαγεῖν ἐπειράθην πρὸς τὸ παλαιὸν ἔθος, καθ’ ὃ τούτους μόνους εἰς Ἄρειον Πάγον εἰσεδέχον[το] | τοὺς ἀπὸ τῆς τριγονίας ἐξετασθέντας.18 Marcus believes that the Areopagus should be “purged” of unworthy members of low social origins. He is motivated by the wish to preserve the glory of Athens, so that the city could maintain its ancient dignity (παλαιᾶς … σεμνότητος). This is made possible by the imperial (re-)assertion of the ancient custom (παλαιὸν ἔθος), the rule of trigonia for those admitted to the Areopagus.
146 Giorgos Mitropoulos However, the Athenians of the Classical age did not ask for a three-generation requirement.19 In this way, Marcus invoked a purported ancient custom in order to justify his actions as a return to the glorious past of the city. How can we explain the strong interest of Marcus Aurelius in the preservation of the “παλαιὸν ἔθος” of Athens and the purity and prestige of the Areopagus? Oliver noted that Marcus was not influenced in these actions by the works of Greek intellectuals of the Classical period or of his own on eugeneia;20 the emperor acted not as a philosopher, but as a Roman official who followed the example of previous principes. Indeed, Augustus had cleansed the Roman Senate of unworthy members, as Marcus did for the Areopagus. Even the phrase ἐπαναγαγεῖν ἐπειράθην πρὸς τὸ παλαιὸν ἔθος recalls Augustus’ motives as noted by Suetonius.21 The language and alleged motives of Marcus recall also those of Agrippa in his epistle to the gerousia of Argos.22 Moreover, the restoration of an ancient civic institution to its former glory is a common topos among emperors. Hadrian had revised local laws in Athens and his legal and constitutional reforms were interpreted as a restoration of the city’s traditional laws.23 Likewise, Marcus acted as a legislator who venerated the laws and traditions of old.24 The emperor would surely have understood the positive resonance of Hadrian in the Greek world and especially in Athens. Thus, his actions were influenced by both Augustan and the Hadrianic examples.25 What interests us here is that the emperor contemplated both the imperial exempla of Augustus and Hadrian and the glorious past of Athens when formulating his own interventions. In addition, certain phrases the emperor employs seem to be inspired by passages of Isocrates describing King Philip of Macedon as protector and conciliator. Marcus may have wished to be viewed by the contemporary, educated Athenian elite as adopting the same role the Athenian Isocrates attributed to Philip.26 Both the imperial, as well as the ancient Greek past, prevalent in the 2nd century CE, were present behind the words and the regulations of the emperor. A few years after this imperial intervention Marcus, together with his son Commodus, visited Athens in autumn of 176. The failed revolt of Avidius Cassius in the East had occurred only in the previous year. Despite Syria and Egypt backing the usurper, Achaea seems to have supported Marcus and, according to Philostratus, Herodes wrote a letter to Avidius Cassius containing merely one word: ἐμάνης (“You have gone mad”). In this way, his former teacher vividly declared his allegiance to the legitimate emperor.27 Marcus must have been thrilled to visit the intellectual center of the Roman Empire and birthplace of Stoicism.28 During their stay, father and son were initiated into the Mysteries of Eleusis, following the recent lead of Hadrian (the first emperor to be initiated after Augustus) and Lucius Verus (Figure 8.3).29 Indeed, a sense of continuity was provided by the fortunate occurrence that the aged altar-priest L. Memmius had also initiated Lucius Verus fourteen years earlier and performed the Mysteries in the presence of Hadrian in 124.30 Another connection with the imperial past is found in the text of the statue base of the hierophantis Isidote. This prominent woman,
Politics of the past 147
Figure 8.3 Portrait of Lucius Verus from Athens. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 3740. Source: (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund).
who led the ceremonies in 176 and crowned the emperors as initiates, identified herself in the first lines of the text as the granddaughter of the sophist Isaeus, Hadrian’s teacher of rhetoric.31 Thus, this inscription illustrates proudly that a single family was connected with three different emperors of the 2nd century CE. All these threads represented Marcus and Commodus in an unbroken line with the previous principes. Marcus understood the importance of connecting himself and Commodus with the most illustrious Mysteries of the Greek world and following the imperial line of initiations after Hadrian and Lucius Verus. At the same time, certain individuals and families who served in cultic offices at the Mysteries acquired great social prestige through their association with the Antonine dynasty. When the shrine of the Mysteries was damaged during the invasion of the Costoboci in 170, Marcus restored it to its former glory.32 He repaired the Telesterion and completed the Greater Propylaia, the construction of which began under Hadrian.33 The imperial initiation and constructions demonstrated the ruling house’s support for Eleusis, which played an important role within Hadrian’s Panhellenion. In this way, the emperor followed his adoptive grandfather, Hadrian, in his benefactions and veneration of the Greek past and was simultaneously connected with the most venerated Mysteries (imitatio Hadriani). During his sojourn in Achaea, the classically-educated emperor established four chairs of philosophy and one of rhetoric in Athens funded by the fiscus, thus reinforcing further the place of the city as a center of Greek culture.34
148 Giorgos Mitropoulos This initiative owed much to Antoninus Pius, who provided for the first time a salary and tax exemptions for all teachers of philosophy and oratory in the provinces, including Athens.35 Under his reign, a chair of rhetoric was founded at Athens, controlled and funded by the city, while that instituted by Marcus Aurelius was administered and financed by the emperor himself.36 Marcus thus continued and regularized Antoninus’ measures, although at the same time, a striking innovation was the control of the chairs directly by the emperor. Apparently, this decision served also as another sign of his personal σπουδὴ ὑπὲρ τῆς δόξης τῶν Ἀθηνῶν. Indeed, Marcus himself chose the teacher of rhetoric, while he asked his former teacher, Herodes Atticus, to select those of philosophy.37 The exemplum of his adoptive father as well as the figure and influence of Herodes are obvious in Marcus’ initiative. The activities of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in Athens include their intense occupation with issues of the organization of the newly-founded gerousia, for whose creation they may have been responsible.38 The continued imperial interest in the Athenian gerousia is confirmed by a series of letters to Athens dating between 177 and 184.39 These testimonies demonstrate the favorable stance of the emperors, which was in accordance with imperial policies that had promoted this civic institution since the time of Augustus.40 Sparta, the second-most-renowned ancient Greek city, presents an interesting history of revival and re-invention of the glorious past. Some lines of Marcus’ letter to the Athenians testify that Sparta was recognized as a free city, outside the jurisdiction of the provincial governor. 41 One reason for this favorable treatment was surely Roman and imperial respect for the city’s past, which did not abate in the reign of Marcus. Under the co-emperors, Spartans were mobilized for the campaigns against the Parthians (163–166), who were viewed as Persians at that time. Lucius Verus, the emperor and former student of Herodes Atticus who nominally conducted the campaign, seems to have made an antiquarian gesture by recruiting Spartans for the war.42 A few years later, some mysterious innovations are attested in two inscribed careers from Sparta and may be interpreted as a reference to a stasis, provoked by the city’s economic troubles under Marcus.43 This serves as a harsh reminder of the fact that Marcus Aurelius’ Achaea was not the same as Hadrian’s. The province suffered not only from the invasion of the Costoboci and the Antonine plague, but also from internal quarrels. Quite independently from the Spartan νεωτερισμοί, Herodes Atticus was involved in a strife with the Athenians.44 In this way these cities’ past provided ample opportunities for the emperor to demonstrate further his personal interest and attention to Athens and Sparta and, simultaneously, to promote himself as a pepaideumenos who followed imperial precedents.45
Like father, like son? Commodus and Achaea Commodus has a bad reputation in popular culture as a princeps malus. He is mostly remembered for his gladiatorial performances in Rome and the notorious association with Hercules. Τhis view owes much to pro-senatorial
Politics of the past 149 sources, such as the Vita Commodi, in which he is presented as an example of how not to rule the Empire.46 But what do the sources reveal about his behavior towards “old Greece”?47 Did Commodus follow the steps of his father and those of Hadrian in his relations with the cities of Achaea and their past? Unsurprisingly for a man of his rank, Commodus received a proper education in Greek literature.48 He undoubtedly became accustomed to the classicizing climate of the period after his studies and especially during the sojourn at Athens with his father in 176. Through his initiation in the Mysteries and his support of the newly instituted gerousia, Commodus created a personal and enduring link with the city, which was notably strengthened in the last years of his reign (Figure 8.4).49 Indeed, as we will see below, it seems that he sought to personalize his power in Athens as he increasingly did in Rome in the very last years of his rule.50 During his residence as a citizen and eponymous archon of Athens, Hadrian chose to be enrolled in the deme of Besa, whose members included his friend and guide in the city, Gaius Iulius Antiochus Philopappus.51 The local magnate may have influenced Hadrian in his decision to accept Athenian citizenship. Likewise, Commodus enrolled in the deme of Besa, which was included in the new tribe of Hadrianis, created in honor of Hadrian.52 Oliver remarked how astonishing it is to find an emperor accepting Athenian citizenship,53 as Hadrian was only a senator when he received it in 111.54 In this way, Commodus not only followed, but also surpassed Hadrian by being the first emperor already in power to become an Athenian citizen. A precedent was
Figure 8.4 Portrait of Commodus from Athens. National Archaeological Museum, n. inv. 488. Source: (Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund).
150 Giorgos Mitropoulos established, according to which Philopappus provided the model for the privatus Hadrian, and Hadrian for Commodus, who chose to be enrolled in Besa. Accordingly, Severus Alexander chose to be enrolled in the tribe of Hadrianis and presumably the deme of Besa, following the example of Hadrian and Commodus, whom he regarded as his adoptive relatives.55 Hadrian served as archon at Athens in 112.56 Similarly, Commodus was eponymous archon, albeit in absentia, in 188/9.57 His connection with Athens is strengthened if we take into account that Commodus is not known to have held high office in any other provincial city, except perhaps at Ephesus.58 It is also characteristic that Athens proudly refers to Commodus as Βησαιεὺς in public documents, in a way not preserved in extant documents for Hadrian.59 Athenian citizenship and archonship were perhaps viewed by some emperors, at least symbolically, as a hereditary distinction.60 For Commodus, Hadrian’s adoptive great-grandson on both sides of his family (through both Marcus and Faustina), Athenian citizenship and the eponymous archonship could have been interpreted as a right by ancestry.61 The same considerations of ancestry could have led Severus Alexander to become an Athenian citizen. The adlection of Commodus and perhaps Marcus into the Eumolpidae after that of Lucius Verus (see below) can be interpreted in the same light. Even Gallienus, apparently influenced by Commodus’ model, became eponymous archon at Athens in 264/5 and perhaps accepted Athenian citizenship while emperor.62 He may have also been initiated into the Mysteries.63 All these emperors advertised themselves as aristocrats who exemplified the cultural ideals prevalent in the period,64 namely as pepaideumenoi integrated into Greek culture. The possession of Athenian citizenship was the most explicit demonstration of a close connection with the glorious past of the home city of Plato, Demosthenes, Isocrates and many other illustrious individuals. In this regard, it is interesting that the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius did not feel the need to boast of the possession of Athenian citizenship, but his son did. It is also striking that Commodus accepted the office of archon of the Eumolpidae (sometime between 183–190), a genos closely connected with the Mysteries, as the hierophants were selected from among them.65 As already mentioned, the initiations of Marcus and Commodus in the Mysteries were modelled on those of Hadrian and Lucius Verus. Nevertheless, in this respect Commodus surpassed Lucius Verus, who was simply a member of the same genos, as perhaps was his father.66 His reasons for the assumption of the office are stated in his letter to the genos: ὡς τά τε ἀπόρρητα τῆς κατὰ τὰ | μυστήρια τελετῆς ἐνδοξ̣ό|τερόν τε καὶ σεμνότερον […] τοῖν Θεοῖν ἀποδοθεί|η (ll. 16–21).67 At the end of this letter, Commodus acknowledges the duty he had to fulfill in return for the honor of being a member of the Eumolpidae (ll. 21–28). Furthermore, the emperor served as panegyriarches in the Mysteries (c. 191), an expensive duty, as it meant that he had to provide funds for the panegyris.68 Thus, the unprecedented assumption of these offices by the emperor increased the fame and prestige of the Mysteries.69
Politics of the past 151 Other aspects of Commodus’ actions in Athens follow more closely the model of his father, as for example the continued imperial favor to the city’s gerousia. In a letter, he allowed the council to confer Athenian citizenship on distinguished orators of praise-speeches, perhaps in the context of the Panathenaea. Indeed, Commodus seems to have recognized that these types of contests and the bestowal of privileges to their victors were an already established tradition in the political life of Athens.70 In addition, he maintained the imperial control of the chairs, appointing the sophist Iulius Pollux as a teacher of rhetoric.71 The imperial example played a great part in Commodus’ approach toward Athens. The emperor surpassed previous imperial exempla twice by serving as archon of the Eumolpidae and of the city of Athens while already an Athenian citizen. The assumption of these offices, together with that of panegyriarches, were actions without precedent, although in accordance with the tradition of Hadrian and the Antonines, of close and personal association with Athens. Surpassing one’s predecessors was a conspicuous imperial practice already since the time of Augustus,72 and Commodus did not fail to connect himself with various Athenian and Eleusinian offices in a way no emperor had done before, thus “personalizing” his position there.73 Consequently, Commodus, characterized as an emperor “at the crossroads”,74 was indeed at a crossroad between tradition and innovation through emulation in his political activities at Athens. Let us now turn our attention to Sparta. During his joint rule with Commodus, Marcus Aurelius resolved an old territorial dispute between the city and Messenian Pherae in favor of the former through the return of the ager Denthaliatis to the Spartans (177/178). This imperial favor helps us understand the notable Spartan honors for Commodus, who was depicted on Sparta’s coinage when still only Caesar (166–177) and honored with the institution of the new agonistic and musical festival of Κομόδεια, including presumably sacrifices for the emperor’s safety (around 180). The benefaction of Marcus was driven possibly by Sparta’s military aid to Rome in this period.75 However, the imperial benefaction can also be interpreted as a tribute to the glorious past of Sparta over the claims of the small community of Pherae.76 The imperial present interacted with the Greek past, including not only its glorious aspects, but also its endless conflicts over some disputed territories. The Hadrianic precedent is also worth stressing, as Hadrian had provided Sparta with gifts of territory: the islands of Cythera and Gaudos, and Messenian Coronea.77 It is characteristic that Athens and Thebes, the other two cities which fought for supremacy in the Classical period, also venerated the emperor through the institution of Kommodeia. Athens created games for epheboi named after Commodus.78 These were the last in a line of ephebic games in honor of heroes of the past (Θησεῖα), more recent heroes (Ἀντινόεια), and emperors (Γερμανίκεια, Ἁδριάνεια, Ἀντώνεια, Φιλαδέλφεια, and now Κομμόδεια).79 In this way, the city incorporated Commodus in its agonistic culture. The Athenian Kommodeia continued to be celebrated (with an
152 Giorgos Mitropoulos interval during the period of the emperor’s damnatio memoriae) until the reign of Caracalla, a sign of the good reputation of Commodus in Athens that should also be connected to Septimius Severus’ restoration of the good name of his “brother”.80 In addition, Thebes celebrated Κομμόδεια by combining them with the revived ancient local festivals of Διονύσεια and Ἡράκλεια.81 The cities which played the leading role in the wars of Classical Greece were now “united” in the celebration of Commodus. It cannot be excluded that these celebrations resulted from cities attempting to emulate each other in honoring the emperor through the institution of Κομμόδεια.
The leading provincials between the Second Sophistic and imperial reality Hadrian, Lucius Verus, Commodus, Severus Alexander, and Gallienus are merely the most prominent examples of Roman aristocrats who created bonds with “old Greece” by, for example, accepting Athenian citizenship and holding ancient illustrious offices at Athens. Leading men also strove to follow suit in an age when the re-discovery of the past was an expression of cultural capital. The assumption of ancient offices in venerated cities, such as Athens, served as a mark of distinction for such men, who were promoted as pepaideumenoi. Arrian of Nicomedia, consul (in the late 120s) and governor of Cappadocia under Hadrian, became a citizen of Athens and took up the office of eponymous archon (148/149).82 The example of his imperial patron and friend Hadrian may have played a role in his considerations. Indeed, another instructive case is that of Quintus Trebellius Rufus, a high priest of the imperial cult in Gallia Narbonensis, who was eponymous archon at Athens in 91/92, shortly after Domitian (87/88). In so doing Rufus could have followed the imperial model, presumably as Arrian and perhaps others also did.83 The example of Hadrian, who visited Sparta twice as emperor and held in absentia the eponymous office of patronomos (127/128),84 led to the assumption of the same office by leading foreigners for the generation after 127/128. The duties of this office were closely connected with Sparta’s revived Lycurgan customs and the famous training of the ephebes.85 By holding the office, Hadrian himself demonstrated the imperial respect for Spartan military tradition and the ancient disciplina/agoge of the city.86 In this way, some leading foreigners sought to connect themselves with “old Greece”, following in the footsteps of the emperor and undoubtedly influenced by the collective historical nostalgia of their time, manifestly expressed in the institution of the Panhellenion. The earliest example of a foreign patronomos, dated in the 130s, was the prominent Athenian consular, Tiberius Claudius Atticus, who had close ties with Sparta since he took part in the Spartan ephebate, as his son Herodes also did. Under Antoninus Pius, the Ephesian senator C. Claudius Demostratus Titianus, the consular A. Claudius Charax from Pergamon, and the Cyrenaean D. Cascellius Aristoteles all served as foreign patronomoi.87 These prominent and cultured Greeks, like the historian Claudius Charax,
Politics of the past 153 undoubtedly found the office prestigious.88 In addition, an indirect connection between Hadrian and the Cyrenaean Aristoteles through the office of patronomos is indicated by the fact that the emperor had already promoted the Spartan discipline (ἄσκησις) as a model for Cyrene when the city was reorganizing its ephebic training after the Jewish unrest.89 Therefore, it is clear that even after his death, the exemplum of Hadrian influenced both illustrious provincials as well as future emperors themselves in their assumption of ancient leading offices in the two leading cities of “old Greece”.90 Hadrian’s known favoring of Athens and Sparta encouraged provincials who sought imperial patronage to follow his example. But most of the aforementioned cases are dated to the reign of Antoninus Pius. Thus, these men, closely connected with the Roman regime, responded to the climate of collective historical nostalgia of their time, cultivated further by the Antonine emperors.91 The fact that the emperors continued to promote the historical past of Greece provided the many illustrious provincials with an additional, yet crucial, motive for undertaking old and distinguished offices in the same cities, thus “renewing” them. Personal predilections in conjunction with the climate of the classical revival and imperial examples created a field for claiming glory and social prestige.92 It is also noteworthy that after the imperial admissions to the Eumolpidae, important men of non-Athenian origin were also adlected into this genos. A few years after Lucius Verus, Marcus Iulius Apellas of Mylasa in the province of Asia became archon of the genos.93 Furthermore, Marcus Gavius Gallicanus, consul (between 180 and 185) and proconsul of Asia, became a member of the Eumolpidae in 200.94 It is possible that Gallicanus was influenced by the example of Commodus, but he did not become archon of the genos, perhaps in order to avoid potentially dangerous comparisons with the deceased emperor, “brother” of Septimius Severus. Clearly, the connection of Apellas and Gallicanus with the imperial precedent is indirect, as there is no mention of the emperors in the texts of the inscriptions themselves. Still, it is remarkable that these men were adlected into the Eumolpidae shortly after the imperial admissions. It seems that this membership held exceptional prestige which enhanced greatly the social reputation of the honorand, especially after the imperial connection with the genos.95 Undoubtedly, the close association of Eleusis with the Panhellenion was also a crucial factor for the political calculations of these foreigners.
Conclusions: politics of the past in Antonine Achaea Both Marcus Aurelius and Commodus took pains to connect themselves with “old Greece” in a systematic way in order to cultivate their images as Roman principes who revered the glorious Hellenic past, especially that of the most distinguished cities, Athens and Sparta, and the most sacred Mysteries in the Greek world. Athens stands out, although the continuing imperial favor toward Sparta is also evidenced through the return of the ager Denthaliatis to the city. In general, Hadrian’s self-promoted Athenian-ness
154 Giorgos Mitropoulos and gifts of territory to Sparta, the measures of Antoninus Pius in favor of the teachers of philosophy and rhetoric, and Lucius Verus’ initiation and adlection to the Eumolpidae were events that determined the political behavior of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. One should also take into account the influence of Herodes Atticus’ teachings and personality upon Marcus. Father and son were acutely aware of the politics of the Hellenic past and sought to promote that past, often to the benefit of the imperial present, as Hadrian most manifestly did. While it is expected that imperial actions in Athens and Sparta would be strongly influenced by Hadrian’s example, it is more surprising that some prominent provincials followed suit under the Antonines. Indeed, one could state that many elite provincials acted in Hadrian’s shadow by following his example when connecting themselves with the past of Roman Achaea.96 Through their actions, they continued the renewal of the classical Greek world, which he had so enthusiastically pursued.97 Hadrian’s model maintained its allure for both his successors and leading provincials because it reflected the enduring climate of collective historical nostalgia which he promoted. The Antonine emperors upheld and continued his Panhellenic policy, thus cultivating further the bonds of Roman imperial power with historic cities – symbols of the glorious Hellenic past in a period of foreign invasions (Costoboci), internal strife (the νεωτερισμοί in Sparta and Herodes’ quarrel with the Athenians), the turbulence caused by the revolt of Avidius Cassius, and the Antonine plague. At the same time, some of the imperial actions, such as Marcus’ regard for the Athenian Areopagus, promoted as aiming at the restoration of the παλαιὸν ἔθος, the organization of the new gerousia, as well as the institution and imperial control of the chairs of philosophy and rhetoric, constituted new ways of interaction with the Hellenic past, real or imaginary. Commodus went a step further, as he sought to surpass his imperial ancestors by personalizing his power in the intellectual center of the Empire, among others through the unprecedented assumption of two archonships of a different character in Athens. Surely, the city and the genos of the Eumolpidae themselves invited him, as the symbolic and financial benefits of an emperor/Athenian citizen as archon were obvious. But it was Commodus who voluntarily accepted both offices and later that of panegyriarches, thus incorporating himself deeper in a dialogue between the Athenian past and the imperial present. His assumption of the Athenian archonship and the office of panegyriarches also coincide with the period of his growing personalization of power in Rome itself. The Roman emperors had been connected with Athenian offices, institutions, and cult (the Mysteries) ever since Augustus, aiming to publicly demonstrate their esteem for the city’s past and its gods. However, from Hadrian onwards, they were involved systematically and personally in Athenian political life, either through becoming Athenian citizens and taking up ancient offices or by being enrolled in the genos of the Eumolpidae. These political choices highlight the power of the past in 2nd and 3rd century “old Greece”
Politics of the past 155 and the importance of following ancestral imperial examples. Provincial elites, sharing in the same spirit of collective historical nostalgia, encouraged the opening of new ways of interaction between the emperors and the Greek past. Prominent Athenians, such as L. Memmius and Isidote, pointed out their continuous connection with the emperors, while the city as a whole proudly proclaimed its association with Marcus Aurelius and Commodus as benefactors, initiates, and organizers of the new Gerousia; in the case of Commodus, the features of Athenian citizen and official were also added. In this regard, the identical action of the three cities which once competed for primacy in Greece – Athens, Sparta, and Thebes – through the celebrations of Κομμόδεια in honor of the emperor is also of great symbolism.
Notes 1 “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”: Gibbon 1896–1900, I, 78 (= ch. 3). I thank Anna Kouremenos, Kostas Buraselis, and the anonymous reviewer for their invaluable remarks on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 See e.g. the title of chapter 19 in Buraselis 2017: “The Apogee of the Empire: The Period of the Adoptive Emperors” (my translation). 3 Alcock 1993, 17; Bintliff 2012, 351. 4 On the so-called Second Sophistic and the antiquarian climate of this period, see selectively: Bowie 1970; Arafat 1996; Schmitz 1997; Goldhill 2001; Whitmarsh 2001; Borg 2004; Konstan and Saïd 2006; Spawforth 2012, 233–270; Kemezis 2014. 5 See recently, Banou and Moschonissioti 2017; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018. Hadrian is characterized as the “restless philhellene” in Buraselis 2017, 303 (taking the epithet “restless” from the title of Birley 1997). 6 See Champlin 2003, 54. Nero is a peculiar case. As is well known, he did not visit Athens or Sparta during his peregrinatio Achaica; Champlin 2003, 54–55. 7 On Hadrian’s Athenianness, see Kouremenos forthcoming, whom I would like to thank for making her manuscript available to me. It is a most welcome development in modern bibliography that Roman Achaea and themes such as the importance of the Greek past in this province are the subjects of several recent publications. See Dijkstra, Kuin, Moser, and Weidgenannt 2017; di Napoli et al. 2018. 8 Hekster 2015 addresses the continuous role that imperial ancestry played for the emperors, who based their public representations and legitimacy on those of older principes: i.e.. established exempla greatly influenced the behavior of subsequent emperors. 9 Birley 1997, 3, 196, 201, 290, 295–296; 2000, 31, 36, 38–42, 48. 10 Papalas 1981, 177; Tobin 1997, 30; Birley 2000, 62, 65; 2012, 144–145. According to Spawforth 2012, 265–267, Marcus’ appointment of the “Atticising” Cornelianus as ab epistulis Graecis was owed to the influence of Herodes, who was a fan of the archaizing “Attic” dialect of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. 11 On Marcus’ teachers of Greek literature and oratory: HA, Marc. 2.3–4. On his education: Birley 2000, 35–40, 61–88; 2012, 140–141, 144–152.
156 Giorgos Mitropoulos 12 Papalas 1981, 177; Birley 1997, 303; 2000, 65, 162; McLynn 2009, 55, 398. Instead, some of his Greek teachers, such as Apollonius of Chalcedon, Sextus of Chaeronea, and Alexander of Cotiaeum, found a place in the Meditations, 1.8–10. Despite the scandals Herodes was involved in, especially the accusations of murdering his wife, Marcus protected him on more than one occasion and supported his return to Athens in the last years of his life; Oliver 184 (dated in 174/5). Marcus’ expressions of love for Herodes: Fronto, Ad Marcum Caesarem 3.2; Oliver 184, ll. 87–94, cf. Papalas 1981, 177; Eck 2012, 99. 13 E.g. M. Aur. Med. 1.16.2, 10.8, cf. McLynn 2009, 44. As the epistles of Fronto to Marcus reveal, Hadrian had a notoriously dominating personality that may have repelled Marcus. See Fronto, Ad Marcum Caesarem 2.4; on Fronto and Marcus, see Richlin 2006. Antoninus Pius as a model for Marcus: M. Aur. Med. 1.16, 6.30.2, cf. Birley 2000, 58–59; 2012, 146; de Blois 2012, 173–174; Eck 2012, 96, 99. The portraits of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus were based on those of Antoninus Pius. See Hekster 2015, 81. 14 A statue had already been dedicated to Marcus as προστάτης (patronus) while he was still Caesar, an indication that the city wished to promote ties with the future emperor, IG II2 3410, cf. Camia 2011, 80–81. Perhaps Herodes Atticus had let the city know of the young Caesar’s appreciation of rhetoric and philosophy. On a dedication of Athens to Marcus through Herodes, see IG II2 3409, cf. Camia 2011, 80. Moreover, the ephebic games called Ἀντώνεια seem to have taken place in honor of the Caesar Marcus Aurelius (155/6), Camia 2011, 101–102. 15 Cf. Oliver 1970, 1. 16 See Oliver 1970, 1–42. These resolutions of Marcus are dated in 174/5 CE, Oliver 1970, 19, 34–35. On the interest of Marcus Aurelius to the administration of justice, see HA, Marc. 10. 17 Oliver 1970, 19–20. 18 Ll. 57–60: “How much interest I take in protecting the reputation of Athens, so that she remain in possession of her ancient dignity, has been made sufficiently clear, I think, and particularly so when I tried to lead the city’s own select synedrion back to the ancient custom, according to which they received into the Areopagus only those tested by the three-generation rule” (translations from Oliver 1970). On the connection of Marcus’ regulations in this letter with Herodes Atticus and his freedmen, see Kennell 1997; Harter-Uibopuu 2008. See also Strazdins in this volume. 19 The Areopagus of the Classical period was composed of former archons. In turn, it was enough for the archons-to-be to display descent from two Athenian citizen parents. See Rhodes 1985, 617 (comment on Arist., [Ath. Pol.] 55.3); Wallace 1989, 94–95; Kapparis 1991, 348–349; Blok 2009, 168; 2017, 124, 178. 20 Oliver 1970, 21–22. 21 Senatorum affluentem numerum deformi et incondita turba […] ad modum pristinum et splendorem redegit duabus lectionibus, Suet., Aug. 35, cf. Oliver 1970, 19. Moreover, Augustus had prohibited the sale of Athenian citizenship, a decision aiming to preserve the dignity of the city’s citizen body, Cass. Dio 52.42.1–3 (29 BCE), 54.13–14 (19/8 BCE), cf. Oliver 1970, 21–22, 48. 22 Agrippa declares that he knows his responsibility for providing for the continuance of the gerousia and the safeguarding of its ancient prestige (φυλάξαι τὸ παλαιόν ἀξίωμα), RDGE 63, ll. 4–7. The phrase παλαιόν ἀξίωμα can be compared with Marcus’ παλαιὸν ἔθος (l. 59, cf. παλαιᾶς σεμνό̣τ̣ητος in ll. 57–58). On the
Politics of the past 157 practical considerations of the Augustan regime that lie behind its restoration of eastern gerousiai, see Spawforth 2012, 169–174. 23 At the same time, Hadrian adapted these laws to the principles of the Empire. See Spawforth 2012, 247; Cortés Copete 2019. Hadrian also revised local laws in Megara and Sparta. See Oliver 1981, 419; Spawforth 2012, 244 with n. 50. 24 It is also important that the emperor asserts in other parts of the text that the testimonies of Athenian citizenship should be controlled strictly according to the local laws and the ancestral customs, ll. 30–35, cf. Oliver 1970, 40. The imperial care for the observance of the ancient Athenian laws is also formulated in regards to the suit of Valerius Mamertinus, who passed illegally from the genos of the Eumolpidae to that of the Ceryces. The elections for the office of sacred herald, traditionally reserved for Ceryces, should be repeated κατὰ [τοὺ]ς νόμους το[ὺς] Ἀθηναίων (Oliver 1970, ll. 11–13, “in accord with the laws of the Athenians”). The emperor asserts that his decision should not disturb the traditional procedures (τὰ παραφυλαττόμενα, ll. 14–15). His resolution does not allow for the establishment of a dangerous precedent which would be contrary to the ancient laws and traditions of the Eleusinian cult, cf. Clinton 1989a, 1532, n. 175. In a case regarding elections to the council of the Panhellenes, Marcus decided against the defendant, as he violated the laws of Hadrian (ll. 15–20). See also HA, Marc. 11.10. 25 Marcus had to relax the three-generation rule after the Athenian plea. On the compromise of the emperor, see ll. 63–66, cf. Oliver 1970, 20, 59–60, 91. He considers it necessary, as there is no abundance of the traditional prominent families in Athens (l. 60, ἐνδόξων γενῶν) and notes that many other cities were in need of assistance (l. 62, cf. Oliver 1970, 54). The compromise and observations of the emperor were undoubtedly connected with the harsh consequences of the Antonine Plague in Athens. See Harter-Uibopuu 2008, 235 with n. 69, 242–243. Practical necessities were more important than ancient models. 26 Oliver 1970, 27. Oliver compares the phrase δι’ ἣν οὐδὲ ἐμοῦ διαλλακτοῦ δέονται (l. 91, “for which they do not at all need me as a reconciler”) of Marcus with the passage and words διαλλάξειεν, διαλλάξαι in Isocrates’ Philippus 38, 41, cf. καὶ οὐδὲν ἐμοῦ προσδεῖσθε μάρτυρος in Demosthenes, Philippic 3, 9.41 (“and you need no evidence of mine”, translation from Loeb, J. H. Vince). Oliver 1970, 138 believes that Isocrates’ Areopagiticus 37–38, which promoted the educational role of the Areopagus in Athens, influenced Marcus in his expectations of the council. 27 Philostr., VS 563, cf. Buraselis 1991, 25, n. 5; Tobin 1997, 46–47; Hekster 2002, 34–35. In this regard, one may also add that Philostratus’ account elsewhere that there were rumors that Herodes plotted with Lucius Verus against Marcus has been questioned (VS 560). See Kuhn 2012, 438, n. 90 with bibliography. 28 Birley 2000, 194. 29 Cass. Dio 72.31.3; HA, Marc. 27.1; Philostr., VS 562–563, 588; IEleusis 483, 502 (ll. 18–20), 503, 516 (l. 7), cf. Oliver 1970, 33; Follet 1976, 136–141; Halfmann 1986, 117, n. 429, 213; Clinton 1989a, 1529–1534; Birley 2000, 194; Hekster 2002, 38; Spawforth 2012, 273; Camia 2017, 49. Before them, Lucius Verus had been initiated in 162, IEleusis 483 (ll. 23–25), 503 (l. 13), cf. Barnes 1967, 71; Clinton 1989a, 1529; Birley 2000, 126. 30 IEleusis 503, cf. Birley 2000, 194; Camia 2017, 47, 55. The prominent Memmius was also ambassador of Athens to the emperors concerning matters related to the
158 Giorgos Mitropoulos newly-founded gerousia of the city, IG II2 3620 (176–180 CE), cf. IEleusis II, pp. 376–377; Giannakopoulos 2008, 46–47, 53–54. Thus, he appears again as a “liaison” between Athens and the imperial center. The hierophant T. Flavius also promoted proudly his personal connection with the Antonine emperors: He received the insignia of his office from Antoninus Pius in Rome, initiated Lucius Verus in the Mysteries, and presided over his adlection into the Eumolpidae, IEleusis 483, ll. 22–26, cf. Camia 2017, 55. 31 IEleusis 502, ll. 18–20, cf. IEleusis 659, ll. 6–8 and Oliver 1949, 248–250, n. 1; Birley 1997, 46. Isaeus is praised in the text for providing Hadrian with the good teaching of the Muses (IEleusis 502, ll. 7–9), the “patronesses of the Second Sophistic”, as Oliver 1949, 250 calls them. 32 Schol. Aristid. Panath. 183, 2–3 (ed. Dindorf, III, 308–309), cf. Clinton 1989a, 1530; Birley 2000, 164–165; Camia 2017, 49. 33 See Palinkas 2008, 261–268; Spawforth 2012, 246–247. The most recent bibliography attributes the Greater Propylaia’s completion (Clinton 1989b, 1997, 175; Ziro 1991) or even construction (Palinkas 2008, 249–261) to Marcus Aurelius. Nevertheless, it is probable that the monument was completed only after Marcus’ death, see Camia 2017, 48. On a series of statue bases dedicated to Marcus’ family in Eleusis, see IG II2 3397–3398, 3400–3402, cf. Højte 2005, 558 (Marcus Aurelius 191); Palinkas 2008, 229–232. 34 Philostr., VS 566–567; Cass. Dio 72.31.3. Cf. Oliver 1970, 80–83; Birley 2000, 195; Caruso 2013, 123–124; 2018, 303, 311. 35 HA, Ant. Pius 11.3, cf. Walden 1909, 86–87; Caruso 2013, 123 with n. 28. 36 Avotins 1975; Caruso 2013, 123, n. 28. I thank A. Caruso for our discussions on this matter. 37 Philostr., VS 566; Aristid., Prolegomena 739 (in which Herodes is also described as a teacher himself), cf. Tobin 1997, 58; Caruso 2013, 152; 2018, 311. Marcus was by then reconciled with Herodes after the renowned trial at Sirmium. Caruso 2018, 311–312 identifies the odeion of Herodes Atticus as the locus for intellectual activities in the context of the ‘university’ Marcus Aurelius founded at Athens. On Herodes’ monumental self-representation in Roman Achaea via the Greek past, see Strazdins in this volume. 38 On the Athenian gerousia, see the classical monograph of Oliver 1941 (who supports that Marcus Aurelius instituted it during his visit); Giannakopoulos 2008, 44–54. The institution of a new gerousia in the Lycian Sidyma by the civic authorities is attested a bit later under Commodus, TAM II, 175. 39 Oliver 193–203, cf. Giannakopoulos 2008, 49; Kovács 2012, 79. 40 Giannakopoulos 2008. 41 Oliver 1970, ll. 86–87, cf. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 149–150. 42 Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 115. 43 IG V 1, 44 = SEG 11, 486, ll. 9–10; SEG 11, 501, l. 7 (dated to 168–172), cf. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 116 with n. 19; Spawforth 2012, 263. 44 See indicatively, Kennell 1997; Kuhn 2012, 447–449, cf. above, n. 12. 45 See also below, p. 151 on Marcus Aurelius and Commodus’ resolutions in Sparta concerning the ager Denthaliatis. 46 Hekster 2002, 7. 47 On Commodus’ positive judgements in the East because of his attention to this area and his emphasis on games, see Hekster 2002, 168–177; von Saldern 2003, 265–300. On the impact of Commodus’ damnatio memoriae on the epigraphic material from Achaea, see Camia 2011, 82–83.
Politics of the past 159 8 HA, Comm. 1.6. 4 49 The period of Commodus’ closer association with Athens coincides largely with the high position of the imperial favorite, Cleander, in Rome, though Commodus never lost control. On Cleander, see Hekster 2002, 67–75. 50 In Rome: Hekster 2002, 76, 86, 198. 51 On Philopappus, see PIR2 1.151, cf. recently Facella 2006, 338–358, with nn. 167–168 on the previous bibliography. 52 IG II2 1764, ll. 63–65 (Hadrian) and IG II2 1792, 1832; Agora XV, 416, 418, 419; Oliver 1942, 58–63 (Commodus); cf. Raubitschek 1949; Oliver 1951. 53 Oliver 1951, 348; 1981, 418–419. 54 Oliver 1951, 348; Hekster 2002, 38, 173; von Saldern 2003, 271. Of course, Lucius Verus was adlected into the genos of the Eumolpidae and Domitian had served as archon in absentia (perhaps in 87/8 CE, see Byrne 2003, 507), but an emperor being a citizen of Athens was completely different, Oliver 1951, 348; Hekster 2002, 173. See also Clinton 1989a, 1529–1530 on Lucius Verus, and above, n. 29 on the initiations of Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius in the Mysteries. We may assume that Marcus also became a member of the Eumolpidae, thus Clinton 1989a, 1531, 1534, n. 181; Camia 2017, 49. Indeed, if Lucius Verus and Commodus were members, it is difficult to imagine that Marcus would have been excluded. However, we lack direct evidence confirming this connection. 55 IG II2 1832, ll. 6–8 (catalogue of Hadrianis naming Hadrian, Commodus, and Severus Alexander), cf. Oliver 1951, 348–349; 1981, 419–420, 422; Hekster 2002, 173. As is well-known, the Severans inserted themselves into the Antonine gens and Septimius Severus presented himself as a son of Marcus Aurelius and brother of Commodus, Hekster 2015, 209–218. 56 Spawforth 2012, 244; Camia 2017, 47; Kouremenos forthcoming. 57 IG II2 1832, l. 8, cf. Oliver 1981, 422 with nn. 22–23; Hekster 2002, 173. The assumption of local offices was a much older imperial practice. For example, Titus, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius were archons at Delphi and Domitian at Athens. Titus: Syll.3, 817, Antoninus Pius: Syll.3, 848, Domitian and Hadrian: See n. 54 and 56 respectively, cf. Boatwright 2000, 64, n. 29; Edmondson 2015, 714. However, as will be evident immediately below, the example of Hadrian was surely closer to Commodus, his adoptive great-grandson, rather than that of Domitian. Von Saldern 2003, especially 272, 275, 277 (Athens and Eleusis), 299–300 rightly connects Commodus’ actions in the East with Hadrian’s philhellenism. 58 For Commodus as archon (of the synodos?) at Ephesos, see IEph. 1106A, cf. Hekster 2002, 173, n. 58. Commodus as duumvir at Puteoli: CIL X, 1648. In contrast, Hadrian while emperor took up many high offices in provincial cities, including Sparta and Delphi. See Edmondson 2015, 714. 59 IEleusis 514; Agora XV 416, 418, 419. Hadrian’s demotic is known only from the inscription Agora XV 334, in which he is posthumously listed among the Βησαιεῖς (141/2). 60 I thank A. Kouremenos for pointing this out to me. After all, there are several examples of men in the eponymous archons’ list whose sons held the same office in order to enhance the family prestige, including Herodes Atticus and his son, Atticus Bradua. For the archons of this period, see the list in Byrne 2003, 501–510. 61 Similarly, the change of Commodus’ first gentile name from Aurelius to Aelius in 191, three years after his Athenian archonship, is interpreted by von Saldern 2003,
160 Giorgos Mitropoulos 299–300 as a sign of his orientation to Hadrian’s model. However, not all researchers read the change in the same way; see indicatively Hekster 2002, 106. 62 HA, Gallienus 11.3–5, cf. Oliver 1951, 349; 1981, 423; Hekster 2002, 173. 63 Camia 2017, 49–50. 64 Cf. Oliver 1951, 349. 65 IEleusis 513 (letter of Commodus to the genos), cf. Raubitschek 1949, 285 (186– 189 CE); Oliver 1967, 334–335 (186 CE); Camia 2017, 49. It is clear from the text that Commodus was firstly adlected to the Eumolpidae and was later made their archon (ll. 10–15, 24–25), cf. IEleusis II, p. 379. 66 See above, n. 54. 67 “in order that the secrets of the ceremony of the Mysteries may be rendered to the Goddesses in an even more splendid and solemn manner” (translation by F. Schuddeboom, “Attic Inscriptions Online”). 68 IEleusis 514, l.3, cf. Raubitschek 1949, 283–285; Oliver 1981, 422 with n. 22–23; Clinton 1989a, 1534; Hekster 2002, 38; Camia 2017, 49 with n. 28. It is also probable that he played a role in the completion of the Greater Propylaia, see n. 33. 69 Boatwright 2000, 71 asserts that in this way Commodus promoted himself as an example. 70 Oliver 201, l. 117 (τὰ πά[τρι]α τῆς πόλεως), cf. Giannakopoulos 2008, 463–470 (dated in 183 or 184). 71 Philostr., VS 594, cf. Birley 2000, 206; von Saldern 2003, 269–271. 72 Cooley 2009, 37–38, cf. Galinsky 2011, 11 on Augustus’ assertion in the Res Gestae that he surpassed all predecessors or made an achievement for the first time. 73 This distinctly personal character of Commodus’ actions in Athens is also illustrated by the impressive use of ἐγὼ in the letter accepting the office of archon of the Eumolpidae, IEleusis 513, l. 4, cf. above, n. 65. In this way, the emperor pointed out the personal honor he felt and gave in his response an intimate tone, IEleusis II, p. 379. Moreover, on the basis of IG II2 2116, ll. 18–21, Follet 1976, 319–320 suggests that Commodus was agonothetes of the revived Ἀθήναια (in 189/90), cf. also Camia 2011, 99, n. 383, 102, n. 396; Kennell in this volume (revival of the festival under the patronage of Commodus). If Commodus revived the Ἀθήναια and was even agonothetes of the festival, the emperor’s bond with Athens would have been further strengthened, and his personal and multifaceted involvement in the city’s public life would have been even more impressive. 74 Hekster 2002. 75 IG V, 1 1361, cf. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 117, 139, 187; Camia and Kantirea 2010, 383–384; Camia 2011, 118; 2016, 264. On the epigraphic testimonies of the festival: Miranda 1992/93, 83. On the date: Camia and Kantiréa 2010, 383. 76 Under the Severans, the games were reorganized as Ὀλύμπια Κομόδεια on the basis of the renowned Olympics, like many other agonistic festivals of the imperial age, Spawforth 1986; Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 117, 187; Camia and Kantiréa 2010, 384; Camia 2011, 118 contra Miranda 1992/93, 83 that this had already happened under Commodus, cf. Hekster 2002, 176, n. 74. See also Skotheim in this volume. 77 The reasons are unknown. Hadrian probably wished to increase the revenues of the city in order to cover the expenses of the disciplina or to maintain new civic constructions; see Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 108–109; Spawforth 2012, 244, n. 52. 78 In 180 or 177, when Commodus became emperor: Camia 2011, 102. Celebrating the imperial visit in 176: Miranda 1992/93, 70–73; Hekster 2002, 175 with n. 69.
Politics of the past 161 79 IG II2, 2119, cf. Giannakopoulos 2008, 466; Camia 2011, 99–102. On memory and identity among the ephebes of 2nd century Achaea, see Kennell in this volume. 80 Hekster 2002, 176–177; Camia 2011, 83, 102. 81 IEph. 2070–2071: Κομμόδεια Διονύσεια Ἡράκλεια (a tribute to the emperor’s famous association with Hercules). See Miranda 1992/93, 85; Camia 2011, 126– 127; 2016, 262. On Heracles/Hercules and the Second Sophistic, see Harrison in this volume. 82 Koulakiotis 2019, 87. Arrian chose to be enrolled in the deme of Paiania because of its association with the Eleusinian cult. See Koulakiotis 2019, 97, who notes the close connection of Arrian with this cult and interpreted it in the broader context of Hadrian’s policy. 83 On the dates, see Byrne 2003, 453–454 (Trebellius 1), cf. 507 (Domitian). Oliver 1981, 418 refers to some Roman citizens who acquired Athenian citizenship, possibly encouraged by the archonship of Domitian. On the enhanced importance of civic offices after the emperor himself had held them, see Edmondson 2015, 715. 84 Hadrian was the last emperor who visited the city and the only one to have served as patronomos; Spawforth 2012, 244. 85 Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 113, 208. The patronomos as the “supreme overseer of the Spartan disciplina”: Spawforth 2012, 263, cf. 91, 244. It is characteristic that the patronomoi in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries were publicly honored for “protecting the Lycurgan customs”, IG V, 1, 543–544, cf. Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 202; Spawforth 2012, 244. 86 Spawforth 2012, 244. 87 Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 113, 208. 88 Cartledge and Spawforth 2002, 208. 89 Hadrian’s recommendation: Oliver 122, ll. 42–43, cf. Spawforth 2012, 91, 244. 90 Spawforth 2012, 262, 273 who refers to imitation of Hadrian. 91 See also Spawforth and Walker 1985, 91–92; 1986, 93 on more cases of provincials from Asia Minor, associated with Athens and Plataea. 92 It is also characteristic that education through exempla and the latter’s imitation was increasingly promoted in the literature of Roman Greece, see Whitmarsh 2001, 92–93. 93 IEleusis 490 (c. 170 CE?), cf. Oliver 1949, opp. p. 248. 94 IEleusis 625. 95 Indeed, the adlection of Romans into this genos seems to have been a rare privilege; see Oliver 1949, opp. p. 248 for a list of known cases, cf. IEleusis II, p. 372, 400. Clinton proposes some personal motives for the interest of Apellas and Gallicanus in the Mysteries which in turn caused their adlection, IEleusis II, p. 372 and 400 respectively. 96 See also Kouremenos forthcoming on Hadrian’s Hellenism. 97 On Hadrian’s renewal, see indicatively Boatwright 2000, chapter 7.
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Politics of the past 163 Champlin, E. (2003). Nero. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Clinton, K. (1989a). “The Eleusinian Mysteries: Roman Initiates and Benefactors, Second Century B.C. to A.D. 267.” ANRW II 18.2, 1499–1539. ——— (1989b). “Hadrian’s Contribution to the Renaissance of Eleusis.” In S. Walker, A. Cameron (eds.), The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire. BICS Suppl. 55. London: Institute of Classical Studies, 56–68. ——— (1997). “Eleusis and the Romans: Late Republic to Marcus Aurelius.” Ιn M.C. Hoff, S.I. Rotroff (eds.), The Romanization of Athens. Proceedings of an International Conference held at Lincoln, Nebraska, April 1996. Oxford, 161–181. Cooley, A.E. (2009). Res gestae divi Augusti: Text, Τranslation, and Commentary. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Cortés Copete, J.M. (2019). “Koinoi Nomoi: Hadrian and the Harmonization of Local Laws.” In O. Hekster, K. Verboven (eds.), The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire. Gent, 21–24 June 2017. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 105–121. De Blois, L. (2012). “The Relation of Politics and Philosophy under Marcus Aurelius.” In M. van Ackeren (ed.), A Companion to Marcus Aurelius. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 171–182. Di Napoli, V., Camia, F., Evangelidis, V., Grigopoulos, D., Rogers, D., Vlizos, S. (eds.) (2018). What’s New in Roman Greece? Recent Work on the Greek Mainland and the Islands in the Roman Period. Proceedings of a Conference held at Athens, 8–10 October 2015. Athens: Ινστιτούτο Ελληνικής & Ρωμαϊκής Αρχαιότητος. Dijkstra, T., Kuin, I., Moser, M., Weidgenannt, D. (eds.) (2017). Strategies of Remembering in Greece under Rome (100 BC–100 AD). Leiden: Sidestone Press. Eck, W. (2012). “The Political State of the Roman Empire.” In M. van Ackeren (ed.), A Companion to Marcus Aurelius. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 95–109. Edmondson, J. (2015). “The Roman Emperor and the Local Communities of the Roman Empire.” In J.-L. Ferrary, J. Scheid (eds.), Il princeps romano: autocrate o magistrato? Fattori giuridici e fattori sociali del potere imperiale da Augusto a Commodo. Pavia: IUSS Press, 701–729. Facella, M. (2006). La dinastia degli Orontidi nella Commagene ellenistico-romana. Pisa: Giardini. Follet, S. (1976). Athènes au IIe et au IIIe siècle. Études chronologiques et prosopographiques. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Galinsky, K. (2011). “The Cult of the Roman Emperor: Uniter or Divider?” In J. Brodd, J.L. Reed (eds.), Rome and Religion: A Cross-disciplinary Dialogue on the Imperial Cult. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1–21. Giannakopoulos, Ν. (2008). Ο θεσμός της Γερουσίας των ελληνικών πόλεων κατά τους ρωμαϊκούς χρόνους. Οργάνωση και λειτουργίες. Θεσσαλονίκη (Thessaloniki): Vanias. Gibbon, E. (1896–1900). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. E. Bury (ed.). London, I. Goldhill, S. (ed.) (2001). Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halfmann, H. (1986). Itinera principum; Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen im römischen Reich. Stuttgart: Steiner. Harter-Uibopuu, K. (2008). “Die Anlassverfahren für die Appellationen an Mark Aurel (Athen, EM 13366).” ZRG 125, 214–250. Hekster, O. (2002). Commodus: An Emperor at the Crossroads. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben.
164 Giorgos Mitropoulos ——— (2015). Emperors and Αncestors: Roman Rulers and the Constraints of Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Højte, J.M. (2005). Roman Imperial Statue Bases: From Augustus to Commodus. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Kapparis, K. (1991). Demosthenes 59, Against Neaira: Introduction and Commentary. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, Glasgow. Kemezis, A.M. (2014). “Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic.” In J. McLnerney (ed.), A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean. Chichester, West Sussex : John Wiley & Sons Inc, MA, 390–404. Kennell, N. (1997). “Herodes Atticus and the Rhetoric of Tyranny.” CPhil. 92, 346–362. Konstan, D., Saïd, S. (eds.) (2006). Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society. Koulakiotis, E. (2019). “Arrian the Priest: Provincial Cultural Identity and Roman Imperial Policy.” Ιn E. Koulakiotis, C. Dunn (eds.), Political Religions in the Greco– Roman World: Discourses, Practices and Images. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 87–108. Kouremenos, A. (forthcoming). The Roman Past of Greece. Routledge. Kovács, P. (2012). “Epigraphic Records.” In M. van Ackeren (ed.), A Companion to Marcus Aurelius. Chichester: Wiley, 77–91. Kuhn, A. (2012). “Herodes Atticus and the Quintilii of Alexandria Troas: Elite Competition and Status Relation in the Graeco–Roman East.” Chiron 42, 421–458. Lagogianni-Georgakarakos, M., Papi, E. (eds.) (2018). Hadrianus – Αδριανός. Ο Αδριανός, η Αθήνα και τα Γυμνάσια. Adriano, Atene e i Ginnasi. Hadrian, Athens and the Gymnasia. Αθήνα: SAIA, Scuola Archeologica di Atene. McLynn, F. (2009). Marcus Aurelius: A Life. London: Hachette Books. Miranda, E. (1992/93). “Testimonianze sui Kommodeia.” Scienze dell’Antichità 6–7, 69–88. Oliver, J.H. (1941). The Sacred Gerusia. Athens: American School of Classical Studies. ——— (1942). “Greek Inscriptions.” Hesperia 11, 29–90. ——— (1949). “Two Athenian Poets.” Hesperia Suppl. 8, Commemorative Studies in Honor of Theodore Leslie Shear. Baltimore, 243–258. ——— (1951). “Athenian Citizenship of Roman Emperors.” Hesperia 20, 346–349. ——— (1967). “The Sacred Gerusia and the Emperor’s consilium.” Hesperia 36, 329–335. ——— (1970). Marcus Aurelius. Aspects of Civic and Cultural Policy in the East. Hesperia Suppl. 13. Princeton. ——— (1981). “Roman Emperors and Athens.” Historia 30, 412–423. Palinkas, J.L. (2008). Eleusinian Gateways: Entrances to the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis and the City Eleusinion in Athens. PhD thesis, Emory University. Papalas, A.J. (1981). “Herodes Atticus: An Essay on Education in the Antonine Age.” History of Education Quarterly 21, 171–188. Raubitschek, A.E. (1949). “Commodus and Athens.” Hesperia Suppl. 8, Commemorative Studies in Honor of Theodore Leslie Shear. Baltimore, 279–290, 464–466. Rhodes, P.J. (1985). A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richlin, A. (2006). Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Letters of Marcus and Fronto. Illinois: University of Chicago Press. von Saldern, F. (2003). Studien zur Politik des Commodus. Rahden/Westf: M. Leidorf.
Politics of the past 165 Schmitz, T. (1997). Bildung und Macht. Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. München: Verlag C.H. Beck. Spawforth, A.J.S. (1986). “A Severan Statue Group and an Olympic Festival at Sparta.” ABSA 81, 313–332. ——— (2012). Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Spawforth, A.J.S., Walker, S. (1985). “The World of the Panhellenion. I. Athens and Eleusis.” JRS 75, 78–104. ——— (1986). “The World of the Panhellenion. ΙΙ. Three Dorian Cities.” JRS 76, 88–105. Tobin, J. (1997). Herodes Attikos and the City of Athens. Patronage and Conflict under the Antonines. Amsterdam:Gieben. Walden, J.W.H. (1909). The Universities of Ancient Greece. New York: Books for Libraries Press. Wallace, R. (1989). The Areopagos Council, to 307 B.C. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitmarsh, T. (2001). Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ziro, D. (1991). Η κυρία είσοδος του ιερού της Ελευσίνος. Αθήνα: Athēnais Archaiologikē Hetaireia.
9 Herodes Atticus and the sanctuaries of Achaea Reinterpreting the Roman present via the Greek past Estelle Strazdins The keen interest of Roman-era Greek literature in the Classical past is well known, particularly in the context of the so-called Second Sophistic, but this is also a feature of contemporary material culture in Roman Greece and is utilized in similar ways to promote cultural, social, and political identities and roles with powerful historical resonance. This chapter examines how the Athenian magnate Herodes Atticus (c.101–c.177 CE) used the past to shape his and his family’s role in Roman Achaea through dedications and benefactions to its many important sanctuaries.1 I argue that Herodes employed his monumental vision to discourse on culture, identity, and their relationship to power, and that perceptions of the Greek past are central to his project. The precise character of Herodes’ dedications varies depending on whether they are made at religious sites of Panhellenic significance, such as Olympia, Delphi, and Isthmia, or at local Attic shrines with rich religious and cultural traditions, such as Eleusis, Brauron, and Rhamnous. In both contexts, however, he creates a complex and consistent self-image. In what follows, I will explore the significance of this image and examine the kinds of stories created by Herodes in stone, in particular through sculptural programs and inscriptions, to promote a broader narrative of his centrality to the mediation of power in Roman Greece.
Herodes and Panhellenic sanctuaries Herodes Atticus’ public benefactions graced sites of Greek cultural and historical importance such as the Panhellenic sanctuaries of Olympia, Isthmia, and Delphi, the provincial capital of Corinth, the cultural capital of Athens, and the memory-laden regions around Marathon, Thermopylae, and Alexandria Troas, so close to the site of Troy. These locations were not only places of collective historical and cultural memory for Greeks but also crucial to Herodes’ own self-fashioning as a new Theseus and his monumental engagement with Hadrian and the Antonine emperors.2 Herodes thus engages in an intentional program of public identity-construction that uses the Greek past to speak meaningfully both to the Roman present and to a hypothetical future.3 In this section, I will examine Herodes’ sculptural dedications at Olympia, Delphi, and Isthmia to establish how he shaped his image in DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-11
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 167 Panhellenic space. In particular, I will consider the sculptural program on the nymphaeum dedicated by Herodes’ wife, Regilla, at Olympia, the chryselephantine group dedicated by Herodes in the temple of Poseidon at Isthmia, and the exedra with statues of Herodes’ family set up in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The fountain house at Olympia was constructed within the Altis by 153 and was, along with the Philippeion and the honorific monument of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II, the only dedication of such magnitude celebrating mortals within the sacred precinct.4 Remains of the nymphaeum on site reveal two basins, one semi-circular on a tier above a larger rectangular basin, and bases of a pair of matching circular monopteroi at the extremities. A number of statues, statue fragments, and bases from the decorative program also survive and are displayed or stored in the on-site museum. Renate Bol’s reconstruction of the façade places two offset rows of eleven rectangular niches above the basins that are filled by twenty-four statues (Figure 9.1).5 The lower row housed images of four generations of the imperial family and the upper row statues of four generations of Herodes’, with a statue of Zeus at the center of each row. To Zeus’ right (from the perspective of a spectator) on the lower row stood Hadrian, his wife Sabina, Marcus Aurelius, Faustina the Younger, and Lucilla; to Zeus’ left, Antoninus Pius, his wife Faustina the Elder, Lucius Verus, Domitia Faustina, and two children sharing a base (probably Annia Faustina and T. Aelius Antoninus).6 On the upper row, Herodes, his father, his mother, his eldest surviving son Atticus Bradua, and his daughter Athenais sharing a base with her younger brother Regillus stood to Zeus’ right;
Figure 9.1 Reconstruction of the Nymphaeum at Olympia by Renate Bol. Source: (Bol 1984, pl. 5).
168 Estelle Strazdins to his left were placed Regilla, her father, mother, grandfather, and her and Herodes’ daughter Elpinice. The statues of the imperial family are slightly taller than those of Herodes’ and have been reconstructed as occupying the lower row for this reason. The monopteroi at either end of the lower basin replace original fountains with a statue of Marcus Aurelius in the eastern and of Herodes in the western monopteros. The most likely scenario for the addition of these statues is to counteract any perception of fission between Herodes and the emperor after Herodes returned to Greece from his trial for tyranny over Athens before Marcus Aurelius in Sirmium in 174.7 The fountain was both a private and a public dedication. As a whole, it was dedicated to Zeus by Regilla, when she was priestess of the local cult of Demeter Chamyne.8 A life-sized bull, which Bol places at the division between the upper and lower basins, is inscribed with “Regilla, Priestess of Demeter, [dedicated] the water and the things around the water to Zeus” (Figure 9.2).9 The inscriptions on the bases of the statues of Herodes’ family, however, state that they were dedicated by the city of Elis and those of the imperial family by Herodes himself.10 Regilla, Herodes, and Elis are therefore all responsible to different degrees and in different ways for the monument. Bulls were, of course, the sacrificial animal par excellence at the Olympic Games, and the dedicatory statue signifies a permanent commemoration of an ephemeral offering. It thus reveals the piety of Herodes and Regilla, their immersion in Greek religious traditions, and their awareness of the significance of this particular sanctuary. Bulls were also associated with water and
Figure 9.2 Marble statue of a bull with an inscription identifying Regilla as the dedicator on its flank, from the Nymphaion at Olympia. Now in the Olympia Museum (Inv. 373). Source: (Image: D-DAI-ATH-1979/467, Gösta Hellner. By permission of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development).
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 169 with Zeus through, for example, the rape of Europa; the bull recalls Athens’ legendary king, Theseus, who tamed and subsequently sacrificed the Marathonian bull and who killed the Minotaur.11 The multivalence of the marble bull’s symbolism serves Herodes’ broader monumental program, in that he regularly made deliberate monumental choices both to align himself with Theseus in order to promote and naturalize his dominance over the city of Athens and to stress a close connection to the deme of Marathon and its association with Greek freedom via the Athenian victory over the invading Persians in 490 BCE. At his likely tomb above the Panathenaic stadium, an altar nods to this connection by labelling him “the hero of Marathon,” even though the dedicant (who can only be Herodes) and dedicator have been deliberately erased in what must be a form of memory sanction.12 As Jennifer Tobin has shown, the four parallel generations of Herodes’ and the imperial family represent continuity and stability, both in imperial rule and in euergetism and patronage of sacred Greek sites and, by extension, Greece more broadly.13 Herodes’ prominent position in Athens and his parallelism with Hadrian on the nymphaeum would also prompt the viewer to think of Hadrian’s Panhellenion and reinforce the symbolic centrality of Athens to Greece’s relationship with Rome and imperial power.14 The grouping ostensibly stresses the friendship shared between Herodes and the emperors and implies a partnership, or indeed equivalence, between both families. The offsetting of the portrait rows and slight difference in statue size complicate this impression to project a more ambiguous message: is Herodes’ line a lesser adjunct to the imperial family or rather a higher power behind or even overseeing its actions? This visual ambiguity opens the door to understanding the monument as signaling that Rome’s capacity to rule in Greece is created and maintained by men like Herodes Atticus, a leading member of the paideia-wielding Greek elite. This impression is enhanced by the fact that the imperial males on the monument all wear cuirasses, a choice that announces their imperium in the sense of their right to rule and the basis of that right being Roman military might, and that Herodes’ father Atticus, as well as Regilla’s male relatives, wear the toga as Roman citizen civilians.15 To complete this picture, Herodes – the great Athenian – and his sons wear Greek dress. The cultural difference in Atticus’ and Herodes’ costumes parallels similar iconography on other Roman-era Greek monuments, such as that of Philopappus, on which the ancestor who secured Roman citizenship wore a toga, but Philopappus himself wore the himation to stress his Greekness.16 This arrangement is equally fitting for Herodes, who can convey both affiliations whilst promoting his self-appointed personal role as the great 2nd-century purveyor of Greek culture in Olympia, the sacred heart of Greece.17 Similarly, the prominent role on the nymphaeum of Regilla and her patrician family, who counted Aeneas as an ancestor, underscores the Roman dimension of this bicultural Athenian family.18 The monument thus presents Herodes’ family as mediators between the seat of Roman power and the people and sacred traditions of Greece. The mediating role is emphasized by the Eleians dedicating the statues of
170 Estelle Strazdins Herodes’ family and Herodes himself dedicating the imperial statues. This chain of dedication places Herodes in the position of representing the Eleians (and, by extension, Greece) in interacting with and giving honor to the emperors. Equally, it is the Eleians who bestow this prestige upon him, conveying the impression that Greece has chosen this role for him rather than him creating it himself.19 The addition of the monopteroi with additional statues of Marcus Aurelius and Herodes after Herodes’ acquittal at the Sirmium trial for tyranny in 174 restates this pre-eminence. It also re-aligns the monument to place stress on the relationship between Herodes and Marcus in particular, implying both intimacy and equality. The representations of the emperors, moreover, appear to replicate well-known iconography. The cuirassed image of Hadrian, for instance, is one of his most common depictions, with twenty complete or fragmentary examples surviving from the eastern Empire, Egypt, and North Africa.20 The monument thus situates itself in a broader provincial framework and maximizes its ability to communicate with diverse audiences. The importance of Herodes’ family is enhanced by contextualization with the monuments of the philadelphoi and the family of Philip II, including Alexander the Great. The nymphaeum must aspire to form the same quasidivine, autocratic, and dynastic associations as those of these Hellenistic monarchs. This, combined with the form of the nymphaeum being modelled on imperial precursors, such as Hadrian’s nymphaeum in the Athenian agora,21 elevates the family of Herodes Atticus conceptually to the level of rulers. The two central statues of Zeus in the visual program, moreover, convey divine approval of this complex set of monumental messages. Herodes and Regilla thus use the sacred precinct of the Altis and all its associations with Greek religion, history, and culture, well-known imperial images, and the presence of earlier dynastic Hellenic monuments claiming dominion and power to create a carefully curated, yet ambivalent identity. This is not simple alignment with imperial power but rather assertion of control over how that power is experienced by the local population and the Panhellenic community more broadly. There is an implication that Roman rule in Greece depends on Greek elites like Herodes Atticus and, through the dynastic familial spread, that it has for a long time and will still for generations to come. The continuity stressed with Classical and Hellenistic Greece, moreover, might be interpreted as advertising Herodes’ family as a potential alternative to Roman rule, especially given Herodes’ assimilation to Theseus, the legendary king of Athens, on so many of his monuments. Rome’s dominion in this case is not cast as set and discrete but as a new phase in existing Greek traditions that depends on the acquiescence of Herodes’ line. Herodes thus integrates a new, culturally expansive monument, modeled on existing monarchic expressions, into an ancient sacred Hellenic landscape in order to make an immediate political and cultural impact and shape his and his family’s image for posterity. This monumental association of emperors and gods with private citizens is reflected in many other substantial benefactions across the Greek East, such
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 171 as Plancia Magna’s rebuilding of the main city gate at Perge in 121.22 Herodes’ nymphaeum is significant, however, for its occupation of sacred Panhellenic rather than civic space, matching Herodes’ broader attempts to tap into sites of cultural and historical significance to Greeks. The dynastic quality of the Olympia nymphaeum is also reflected in the exedra at Delphi, which held statues of Herodes, Regilla, Elpinice, Regillus, and Athenais that were dedicated by the city of Delphi but funded by Herodes.23 This exedra, modest by Herodes’ standards, was positioned between the Athenian treasury and the Polygonal wall, behind the Bouleuterion. It was thus in a region of Delphi’s sacred precinct bounded by two Athenian monuments – the treasury that Pausanias writes was built from the spoils of Marathon and the stoa that displayed naval spoils from the campaign against Xerxes – and which was a space utilized for honorific commemorative display as well as for many Delphic festivals and processions.24 Despite Herodes’ grander benefactions to the sanctuary, such as his upgrading of the stadium, it remained essential to him to make a dynastic statement in this prominent, strongly Athenian, and anti-Persian sector of the sacred way. This once more asserts continuity with the past, and with the Athenian past in particular, and with Athens’ role as leaders of resistance to foreign powers: it places Herodes and his family as the inheritors of this tradition, again within a Panhellenic context. Herodes’ dedications to the temple of Poseidon at Isthmia, on the other hand, appropriate Greek traditions to enhance his own prestige more directly. Herodes’ efforts to construct himself monumentally as a new Theseus elsewhere are especially linked to Athens and Attica and are expressed in both public and private space.25 An example of the former is his refurbishment of the Panathenaic stadium when he held the liturgy of presiding over and financing the Panathenaia. This act linked him to Theseus as the traditional founder of the festival and, because of this link, Hadrian’s own connection to Theseus and the fact that the emperor had recently raised the festival to sacred iselastic status, both “piggybacked” on Hadrian’s reputation for euergetism in Athens and asserted rivalry with the emperor.26 Privately, the arch celebrating his marriage to Regilla on his Marathonian estate with its paired inscriptions proclaiming “Eternal Concord” and defining Herodes’ and Regilla’s space respectively intertexted both with Theseus’ pillar at the Isthmus that divided the Peloponnese from Ionia and with Hadrian’s arch at Athens that created a temporal, spatial, and cultural division of that city.27 Like Athens, Isthmia provided the perfect arena for Herodes to strengthen and exploit his connection to Theseus. In Isthmia, Herodes once more created a dynastic monument, albeit of a very different nature to those at Olympia and Delphi. Instead of shaping his living family in stone, Herodes rather donated chryselephantine statues of Poseidon, Amphitrite, and Melicertes/Palaemon to the temple of Poseidon.28 This elaborate dedication was made approximately twenty years after a new colossal marble complex, which constituted the cult statues, had been set up.29 Herodes’ group must have functioned as supplementary cult statues or, at least, were designed to give the impression of being cult statues and as
172 Estelle Strazdins examples of Herodes’ desire to represent himself monumentally as a “new Theseus”.30 Theseus was not only the son of Poseidon (in one version of his myth),31 but he was also credited with having transformed the Isthmian games from funeral contests for Melicertes into an event in honor of his father Poseidon.32 Herodes, via his self-constructed affinity with Theseus, must have hoped his dedication of the statues would also be interpreted as a filial act. A bath complex at Isthmia with a large mosaic floor featuring Poseidon and Amphitrite has also been identified as a donation of Herodes that would have reinforced his association with this divine family.33 Herodes here replicates the messaging of his Panathenaic renovations by assuming Theseus’ role in traditional religion, and his dynastic statement in this context is enhanced by an association with divinity.34 In Panhellenic sacred space, then, Herodes focuses on celebrating his dynasty – his Greek ancestors, his Roman wife’s ancestors, and their own descendants – to establish a continuity of pre-eminence and influence stretching both into the past and into the future. Importantly, his dynasty is regularly paired and contrasted with the imperial family in a way that shouts mediation between the seat of imperial power and the people of Roman Achaea, and simultaneously whispers rivalry, dependence, and potential substitution. The sense of family-based imperial rivalry is enhanced by Herodes’ self-association with Theseus, and it is legitimated via its construction in culturally and historically significant sacred space. Via these monuments, Herodes and Regilla use the past to create a narrative of cultural initiatives, religious piety, and political power, so that it becomes difficult as a Greek to view one of Herodes’ Panhellenic monuments without parsing the implications for Roman power in the province of Achaea, or without concluding that Athens is central to the Greek-speaking East’s relationship with Rome. I turn now to how Herodes builds on these associations through his image construction in Attic sacred spaces.
“Herodes’ space”: Attic sanctuaries and numinous landscapes Herodes’ dynastic shaping of Panhellenic space is contrasted with more personal constructions in Attica itself, where he makes himself rather than his family as a whole the center of attention. They still play a role, as do emperors, but their presence is regularly expressed through Herodes’ experiences, so that in this more localized monumentalization the focus is squarely on Herodes’ function in historically and culturally important landscapes. It is here that the concept of Herodes as a ‘new Theseus’ is exploited most powerfully, so that when the emperors do appear, their foreignness becomes more pronounced and their legitimacy more questionable. In this section, I will analyze how Herodes creates a web of individual dominance via his benefactions to local sanctuaries, such as Brauron, Rhamnous, and Eleusis, and through his personal claiming of Marathonian space. The paired inscriptions celebrating Herodes and Regilla’s marriage on the keystone of the Gate of Eternal Concord (Figure 9.3) on Herodes’ Marathon
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 173
Figure 9.3 Restored elevation of Herodes’ Gate of Eternal Concord, Oinoe, Attica. Source: (Mallwitz 1964, taf. 3).
estate define space belonging to him in contrast to space belonging to his wife, Regilla. Her space is that within the enclosure to which the gate provides entry:35 ὁμονοίας ἀθανάτου πύλη Ρηγίλλης ὁ χῶρος εἰς ὃν εἰσέρχει Eternal Concord’s Gate; Regilla’s is the space which you are entering. Herodes’ space is that entered when passing from the enclosure to the regions beyond (Figure 9.4):36 ὁμονοίας ἀθανάτου πύλη Ἡρώδου ὁ χῶρος εἰς [ὃν εἰσέ]ρχε[ι] Eternal Concord’s Gate; Herodes’ is the space which you are entering.
174 Estelle Strazdins
Figure 9.4 Keystone from the Gate of Eternal Concord, Oinoe, Attica, bearing an inscription relating to Herodes’ “space”. Now in the Marathon Museum, Vrana (IG II2 5189). Source: (Image: D-DAI-ATH-Attika-479, Gösta Hellner. By permission of Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica / Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports).
The extent of Herodes’ space – that external to the enclosure – is purposefully undefined. One interpretation is that Herodes’ space is his Marathon estate, itself apparently vast, minus the enclosure that belongs to Regilla.37 Without a definite external border, however, Herodes’ space can be conceptualized as extending over all of Marathon, Attica, Roman Achaea, the Empire, or even the oikoumene. Herodes’ space is thus defined less by physical boundaries and more by the extent of his ambition. If we strip Maud Gleason’s nuanced characterization of biculturality in this monument to its most basic and designate Regilla as representative of Rome and Herodes of Greece,38 then the central concentration of Rome’s power is here contrasted to the ubiquitous influence of Greece in the Empire: Ἑλλὰς πάντα indeed.39 Herodes’ sense of ownership of Marathon, its surrounds, and Attica more broadly, comes through powerfully in further examples of his local monumentalization, such as the many portrait herms and reliefs he established on his private lands dedicated to his favorite deceased foster-sons and inscribed with curses against anyone who might damage or move them.40 The herms acted as markers of territory, as localized shrines, and as commemorative monuments, whose dedicatory inscriptions invested the space they occupied with Herodes’ memories of the boys and his grief over their loss (Figure 9.5).41 In this way, Herodes tried to redefine the existing memory attached to these Attic landscapes – places such as the plain of Marathon, which Pausanias claimed was haunted by the ghosts of the battle in 490 BCE – to focus on himself and his emotions.42 The curses function to pre-empt and prevent any subsequent attempts to redefine the landscape again, and the hermaic form
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 175
Figure 9.5 Curse-inscribed herm of Achilles. Now in the Epigraphic Museum, Athens (EM 12466; IG II2 13195). Source: (Image: Epigraphic Museum, Athens. By permission of Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports).
gives the memorials and the land they mark a sacred quality due to the regular use of herms as objects of cult in Attic tradition.43 Almost all of these herms and reliefs have been found on Herodes’ private estates, but one subsequently lost herm and one relief (without a curse; Figure 9.6) were discovered at the sanctuary of Nemesis at Rhamnous and the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron respectively.44 Herodes’ material footprint at Rhamnous is extensive and Jennifer Tobin has plausibly suggested that the ectopic herm signals Herodes’ sense of command over the sanctuary, as though he conceived of this sacred space as an adjunct to his Marathon holdings.45 In the case of Brauron, she considers the relief to indicate either “antiquarian” sentiment or Brauron to be one of the places where Herodes and his foster-sons hunted, since Philostratus writes that it was in such places that Herodes established commemorative statuary for the boys.46 The difference in interpretation comes from the fact that Rhamnous was still functioning as a sanctuary but Brauron was abandoned in Roman times, and indeed as early as the 3rd century BCE.47
176 Estelle Strazdins
Figure 9.6 Heroic relief of Polydeukion found at the Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron. Now in storage at the Brauron Museum (Inv. 1181). Source: (Image: E. Strazdins. By permission of Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica / Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports).
Herodes would certainly have been attracted to Brauron because of its importance to Classical Athenian religion and Artemis’ association with rituals of transition for children and youths.48 The dedication, however, is consistent with Herodes’ personal claim over the Attic littoral stretching from Rhamnous to Brauron. Central to this claim is the context of the Classical past, but also Herodes’ long view of Greek history, in which the Greek past and Roman present are continuous, but the precise interpretation of the present is contested through Herodes’ self-promotion in his re-definition of sacred landscapes. The dedication of a heroic relief of a youth prematurely dead amongst the many Classical statues of children from the site becomes an unsurprising act within the context of Herodes’ attempts to establish his dominance over such spaces. That no one frequents the sanctuary in the present is of no consequence because Brauron was too important to Classical Athenian religion for Herodes to neglect, given his target audience is meant to understand him as the inheritor, propagator, and re-interpreter of Athenian ritual tradition in general. That the sanctuary is abandoned at the time of the dedication implies that Herodes considers an audience capable of understanding its purpose may well lie in a future in which Rome’s role in the region and contemporary changes in religious focus might be diminished. Despite a paucity of evidence, we cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that Herodes led some form of ritual revival here that brought large numbers of adherents to the sanctuary who would have acted as audiences for Herodes’ dedications and validators of his role in the revitalization of Athenian religious traditions. Nevertheless, if the
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 177 dedication is for purely private reasons, it is at least denying the reality of the changed religious landscape, essentially transporting the present into the past, rather than vice versa. The narcissistic quality to Herodes’ private monumentalization, in that it can only be interpreted through his experience and emotions, drew criticism from the Quintilii brothers when they were proconsuls of Achaea, according to Philostratus,49 and even Philostratus himself gently mocks Herodes’ extravagance in replicating his foster-sons in stone: “and he set up statues (εἰκόνας) of them hunting (θηρώντων), having hunted (τεθηρακότων), and about to hunt (θηρασόντων).”50 Part of the Quintiliis’ concern, however, must be that this narcissism is also typically imperialistic in its attempts to dominate and redefine the spaces and landscapes of Greek memory and religion in Attica and beyond so that they can only be seen through Herodes’ eyes. At Rhamnous, Herodes’ lithic discourse on Roman rule is again prominent. As well as creating a local shrine with the curse-inscribed herm and raising a separate statue of his foster-son Polydeukion to commemorate their joint worship there, Herodes also established a trio of busts of himself, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus.51 His father had previously erected a statue of Hadrian before the temple, and this statue should be associated and was most probably displayed with a recently identified portrait of Antinous.52 As on the Olympia nymphaeum, the emperors all wore cuirasses – the Roman military dress contrasting with Herodes’ own portrait that, as R.R.R. Smith has shown, drew on Classical orator-politician models, including Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lysias.53 The combination thus exploited Herodes’ earlier role as imperial tutor to riff on the well-established literary paradigm of the Greek philosopher who speaks truth to power by wisely advising a foreign king, such as the famous encounter of Solon with Croesus, the king of Lydia, in Herodotus.54 The grouping of busts in isolation creates a similar message, then, to that of the Olympia nymphaeum: Herodes mediates between the emperors and locals and has the power to shape imperial policy. In combination with Atticus’ dedications of Hadrian and Antinous, however, it once more asserts a message of dynastic influence, as Herodes takes up his father’s efforts to promote the imperial family in Attica.55 These two groups – the trio of busts and the statues of Hadrian and Antinous – moreover, stress Roman imperial reliance on purveyors or symbols of Greek culture, as Herodes and Antinous respectively were. The setting of these sculptural works in the sanctuary of Nemesis, however, intensifies the potential to read dissonance into the groupings that is merely hinted at in the offsetting of statues on the Olympia nymphaeum. Rhamnous was so intimately connected with the Battle of Marathon in Athenian thought that, although votive offerings date the sanctuary to at least the early 6th century BCE, a mistaken perception existed that it had been founded to thank Nemesis for her role in destroying the Persians.56 Pausanias records the story that Nemesis’ cult statue had been carved from marble brought by the Persians to Marathon for the purpose of a victory monument.57 Her statue, therefore, stood as a sacred object and a memorial
178 Estelle Strazdins to both Athenian victory and Persian hubris. Herodes’ intensely Athenian identity and his alignment with Theseus, who was thought to have charged against the Persians at the front of the Athenian hoplites,58 highlights the foreignness of the Roman emperors to subtly realign them more closely to the invading Persians than the Greek defenders of freedom. Here, moreover, there is a clear generational divide between Herodes’ and Atticus’ sculptural posturing in relation to the emperors. Atticus, like many other members of the Greek elite (e.g., Marcus Antonius Polemon, who issued Antinous coins at Smyrna),59 celebrates Hadrian’s intervention in the religious landscape of the Empire by propagating the image of his lover and new god. Herodes, on the other hand, brings the legitimacy of Roman rule into question and probably also intends once more to directly rival Hadrian’s own links to Theseus in Athens, as he does via his Marathonian arched gateway and his renovation of the Panathenaic Stadium, discussed above. This redirection of imperial interaction correlates with Herodes’ refocusing of the family’s beneficence more broadly. Whereas Atticus was known primarily for financing public feasts and festivals, Herodes continued this patronage at the same time as promoting his own spatial and temporal dominance via monuments. Indeed, the annual allowance for each citizen Atticus included in his will was circumvented by Herodes after his death and used to finance the renovations of the Panathenaic stadium.60 The juxtaposition of Hadrian and Antinous with Herodes, Marcus, and Lucius would also prompt comparisons focusing on the type of educational relationship between the older and younger individuals. In a Greek context, if Hadrian is erastes to Antinous’ eromenos, would a viewer not be inspired to think similarly about Herodes’ relationship to the joint emperors? The adult, bearded iconography of Herodes, Marcus, and Lucius, however, rather stress the philosophic-advisor paradigm mentioned above. This grouping thus promotes this model of Greek and Roman interaction, in which the Greek is the wise educator, over the more subversive example of an erastes Roman emperor, in which the correct power relationship between cultures would be reversed. Importantly, Lindsey Mazurek has argued that a portrait bust of Polydeukion from Herodes’ nearby Sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods at Brexiza at the southern extreme of the Marathon plain should be associated with the trio of Herodes, Marcus, and Lucius there.61 If a lost portrait of Herodes’ foster-son was also associated with the busts at Rhamnous, as well as further emphasizing Herodes’ educator/advisor role, Polydeukion could here be seen as the natural successor of the next generation, groomed to rule by Herodes just as Marcus and Lucius had been. Once more, then, the message is broadcast that the emperors rule at Herodes’ pleasure and there is another story to be told about the continuity between classical Marathon, Herodes’ Marathon, and his inheritance of the Marathonomachoi’s legacy that largely undermines the fixedness of Roman dominance. The citation of Demosthenes and Aeschines by Herodes’ portrait asks the viewer to choose the kind of Herodes they want to see and
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 179 invest in: is he a figure of resistance to foreign rule as Demosthenes was toward Philip II of Macedon or is he an acquiescent mediator like Aeschines?62 This ambiguity thus injects Herodes’ monumental constructions of ownership over Marathon and its surrounds with an implied threat that Rome rules only with the compliance and assistance of men like Herodes Atticus. At Eleusis, Herodes’ material footprint is also substantial, though many of his dedications are usual for a contemporary elite Athenian, including statues of his family. Fragmentary inscriptions indicate that he also funded statues of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (φιλαδέλφων αὐτοκρατόρων),63 but the meanings attached to the Rhamnous busts do not apply in this case because he does not include an image of himself, the city is involved in the dedication, and Eleusis does not carry the same connotations as Rhamnous.64 Three other inscriptions, however, again demonstrate Herodes’ tendency to conceive of Attic sanctuaries and religious traditions as arenas and media in which to promote his cultural and political pre-eminence. One inscription connects Herodes closely to Lucius Verus. Although very fragmentary, the inscription preserves remnants of a poem, most probably in elegiacs, that recalls an enjoyable interaction (τερπέσθην) between Herodes and Lucius before the latter left for war.65 Its temporal context should thus be situated during Lucius’ involvement in the Parthian campaign in 162–165, prior to which Lucius was initiated into the Mysteries and stayed with Herodes in Athens.66 In a letter cited by Philostratus sent from Marcus to Herodes, when the emperor was attempting to repair their relationship postSirmium, Marcus also requests that Herodes initiate him into the Mysteries in his role as priest of Eleusis.67 Here again, Herodes mediates between imperial power and Greek religious traditions, his intimacy with the emperors is stressed, and he asserts close ties to and influence over Eleusis, especially given that other such inscribed poems that have Herodes as their protagonist have been found on his Marathon estate.68 Another inscription at Eleusis from 165/6 describes a prominent Herodean intervention in the ritual landscape of Athens, in his funding of the replacement of the ephebes’ black cloaks with white ones. The inscription is set up at Eleusis because the change in cloak color is associated with the procession of the ephebes to Eleusis:69 [ἠρώτη]σεν ὁ πρόεδρος, ὅτῳ δοκεῖ λευκο[φορῆσαι τοὺς ἐφήβους τῆς] ἡμέρας ἐν ᾗ πρὸς τὴν Ἐλευσῖνα ἡ σ[τρατιὰ πορεύεται, ὅτῳ δὲ] μὴ. οὐδεὶς ἐπῆρεν. Ἡρώδης εἶπεν· ὦ [ἔφηβοι, ἐμοῦ παρόντος χλαμύ]δων λευκῶν οὐκ ἀπορήσετε. The president asked, “who agrees that the ephebes should wear white on the day when the band marches to Eleusis, and who does not?” No one rose in objection. Herodes said, “Ephebes, while I’m around, you won’t lack white cloaks.”
180 Estelle Strazdins The reason for the change is not made explicit, but the black cloaks were most regularly associated with mourning for the murdered herald Copreus and Herodes was a prominent member of the genos Kerykes.70 Herodes’ intervention might therefore have symbolized his purification of the ephebes for the murder.71 Herodes himself, however, gives a different explanation in another inscribed elegiac poem found in the village of Bey, near Marathon (Figure 9.7):72 παῖδας Ἀθηναίων χαλκῷ γανάοντας ἐφήβους, τοὺς αὐτός, λήθην πατρὸς ἀκειόμενος Αἰγείδεω, λώβης δοφοείμονος ἔσχεθε κούρο[υς] ἀργυφέαις χλαίναις οἴκοθεν ἀμφιέσας, δωρηθεὶς γ’ ἐνετῇσι κατωμαδὸν ἠλέκτροιο. sons of the Athenians, the ephebes, bright in their bronze, youths whom he himself, making amends for Theseus’ forgetfulness of his father Aegeus, sundered from the dark shame, by clothing them in silver-white cloaks from his own resources, he bestowed on them clasps of amber at the shoulder. In Herodes’ version, the cloaks rectify Theseus’ failure to switch the black sails of his ship to white on his return to Athens from Crete, a disremembering that led to his father’s suicide. Again, Herodes positions himself as a
Figure 9.7 Marble inscribed stele from the village of Bey, near Marathon. Now in the Marathon Museum, Vrana (Inv. 22; IG II2 3606). Source: (Image: Ephorate of the Antiquities of East Attica. By permission of Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica / Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports.
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 181 “new Theseus” capable of fixing that hero’s mistakes. Thus he is not only a new Theseus but also a better Theseus, and he once more embeds this specific characterization within the sacred landscape of Attica. The connection between the Bey inscription and Eleusis is deeper than simply the explanation for the change of cloaks. It records Herodes’ return after his acquittal for tyranny at the trial in Sirmium, and it describes the Athenians meeting Herodes at Eleusis and then escorting him in a procession into the city and, perhaps, ultimately to Marathon, since it is Marathon to whom the poem is addressed:73 ὄλβιος, ὦ Μαραθών, νῦν ἔπλεο, καὶ μελεδαντός ἀνδράσιν ἠὲ πάρος, φαίδιμον Ἀλκαΐδην νοστήσαντ’ ἐσορῶν ἀβίων ἀπὸ Σαυροματάων γαίης ἐκ νεάτης. Blessed are you now, O Marathon, and a concern for men more than before, as the radiant descendent of Heracles you beheld returning from the Sarmatian nomads from the outermost edge of the earth. This procession reverses the Eleusinian procession to make Herodes and his reinstallation in Athens and at Marathon its goal. Athenian ritual is here reconfigured to serve Herodes’ self-glorifying purposes. The procession also parallels the triumphal processions and apantêsis ceremonies for Hellenistic kings, Roman governors, or even the adventus ritual for the arrival of an emperor.74 Herodes thus elevates himself once more to the level of emperors or kings. More importantly, he also raises the Marathon of now above Classical Marathon, and this elevation depends on Herodes’ return. Marathon only finds its true significance, then, when Herodes abides there. This picture of an empty or neglected Marathon prior to Herodes’ advent is replicated also in another poetic inscription from Herodes’ estate that details its extent and Herodes’ agricultural interventions which transform the barren fields inherited from his father into lands famous for their olive trees, vines, grains, and hunting.75 The poem from Bey with its reverse Eleusinian procession, then, constructs a sacred network between Eleusis, Athens, and Marathon, while Herodes’ other monumentalizing has already built connections between Marathon, Brauron, and Rhamnous. A tie between Eleusis and Brauron is also established by Herodes dedicating Regilla’s clothing at Eleusis after her death in premature childbirth, the fault for which was rumored to have lain with Herodes himself.76 In Classical times, such dedications were made to Artemis at Brauron, but since that sanctuary was no longer functional, Herodes again innovates in religious tradition and dedicates them rather to Demeter. The motivation for this might partially lie in a desire to connect his activities at Eleusis with the nymphaeum at Olympia and Regilla’s role as priestess of Demeter there, just as Regilla is made the first priestess of Tyche in Athens and is also honored as Tyche in Corinth.77 The association of Regilla with
182 Estelle Strazdins Demeter (and Faustina the Elder as “New Demeter”) is also stressed in a poem by Marcellus of Side inscribed within a heroon to Herodes’ wife on his estate on the Via Appia outside Rome.78 These linkages are a way of expanding the web between sacred sites in Attica to other regions of Roman Achaea and beyond. The Bey poem, moreover, links Herodes once more to Marathon and the Marathonomachoi through the phrase γαίης ἐκ νεάτης (‘outermost edge of the earth’), used to describe Sirmium – the place from which Herodes returns triumphant. These words may well be an intentional reminiscence of the phrase ἔσσχατα γαίε̄ς (“ends of the earth”) that describes the extent of the reach of the Marathonomachoi’s fame in the epigram on the stele for the fallen of the Erechtheis tribe in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE.79 This stele was found in 2000 in Herodes’ villa at Loukou in Arcadia but was moved there by him (probably along with the other nine stelai) from a memorial that had stood on the soros at Marathon, an act that demonstrates his sense of ownership of Marathon and its past like no other.80 More than this, however, the allusion in the Bey inscription co-opts the Marathonomachoi’s glory – the context of Marathon’s past is thus necessary to understand Herodes’ significance in the present, but Herodes’ construction of Marathon concurrently overwrites and supersedes Classical Marathon and its symbolic value, realigning it for the present and the future.
Implications and conclusions Herodes uses the collective historical nostalgia attached to the sacred and numinous spaces of Attica and Roman Achaea more broadly to construct a self-image that places him and his family at the center of the province’s experience of imperial power and to assert a comparable status to that of the imperial family. In Panhellenic space, his focus is especially on his dynasty and its parallelism with the Antonines that can be interpreted as emphasizing the mediation, control, or even potential displacement of imperial power. His efforts at Panhellenic sanctuaries, moreover, point to the centrality of Athens in the process of negotiating Roman power. Herodes’ monumental self- fashioning in Attica, in contrast, powerfully stakes personal claims to the legacy of the Marathonomachoi and to the identity of a new Theseus. Both these paradigms use the past to subvert expressions of Roman imperial power in different ways. As Antony Spawforth has clearly shown, the Persian Wars were used by emperors from Augustus onward to construct a sense of collective imperial belonging in contrast to threats beyond the Empire’s borders, particularly to the east.81 Additionally, Roman encouragement of investment in the values and identities of unique and diverse classical poleis, something a focus on the Persian Wars also promoted, was used as a way of dispersing and neutralizing any potential unified Greek political resistance to Roman rule.82 In this interpretation, imperial Greek fascination with the past becomes a form of
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 183 Roman political control. Nevertheless, the association of the Persian Wars with Greek freedom meant that, especially in Attica, the Romans could just as easily be identified as the foreign invaders whom the Greeks should band together to resist. Greek investment in the classical past in this scenario is instead a rallying cry to rebel. This double-edged symbolism of the Persian Wars allowed Herodes to use imperial messaging to instead assert his own authority and dominance over Roman Attica through his powerful ancestral and monumentally constructed association with Marathon and its legacy. The “new Theseus” identity works in a similar way. Although Hadrian too had aligned himself with Athens’ legendary king, Herodes works to displace him.83 Once more Herodes’ connection to Theseus is based on ancestral claims, on Theseus’ role at the Battle of Marathon, which Herodes uses to adopt the styling of “hero of Marathon”, and on Herodes’ regular monumental construction of himself as a Thesean figure. A kingly ring can therefore be discerned when he claims an ill-defined region radiating from his estate at Marathon as “Herodes’ space” on his Gate of Eternal Concord. There is a hint of the potential to rival imperial power here and a claim to rightful rule of Athens. There is, moreover, a blurring of private personal land and sacred public space, so that the web of meaning and authority Herodes creates in Attica can only be read to its full effect by visiting both Athens’ important sanctuaries and Herodes’ estates. At the same time, Herodes’ activities merge the temporal layers of Attica to create a multitemporal landscape in which the past penetrates the present to invest space with culturally specific meaning but, at the same time, the present is privileged over that past and used to reshape its meaning for the future. “Herodes’ space” makes the past work for Herodes’ own reputation and ongoing commemoration. Crucially, Spawforth’s elaboration of Rome’s efforts to encourage Greek fascination with the past reveals a genuine Roman concern existed over the potential for Greek elites to disrupt imperial harmony in the kind of ways Herodes’ monuments threaten. It is a message that may well have reached Marcus Aurelius at least, who chose to acquit Herodes of tyranny over Athens at the Sirmium trial and focus instead on limiting the social mobility and influence of his freedmen.84 This solution placed a check on Herodes’ dominance over Athens but kept his prestige intact. Herodes’ attempts to use the sacred spaces of Attica to shape his dominance over the region were also not well received by many of his contemporaries, as demonstrated by the vandalism to the “hero of Marathon” altar and his trial for tyranny at the behest of “the Athenians.”85 Although Herodes sets himself up as the champion of Athens and Greece more broadly, his redefinition of space and time fails to have real impact in the present. Despite this, Herodes persists in casting himself as a new Theseus, as the hero of Marathon, as a mediator, enabler, and potential rival to the emperors, and as the inheritor, propagator, and re-interpreter of Athenian ritual tradition and cultural history. His monumental vision, therefore, champions the continuing vibrancy of a Greek culture which is not stuck in the
184 Estelle Strazdins past, but which strives to reconfigure that past to create a present capable of diverse interpretation. It is trained as much on a future that is still up for grabs as it is on the Roman present.
Notes 1 See Mitropoulos (Figure 8.1) in this volume for Herodes’ portrait. Thank you to Michael Loy for providing me with information I was unable to access during COVID-19 lockdowns and to both the anonymous peer reviewer and Anna Kouremenos for their insightful comments on this chapter. 2 On Herodes and Theseus, see Strazdins 2019; on Herodes and Hadrian, see Tobin 1997. 3 On this notion, see Strazdins In press-a. 4 On the date, see Bol 1984, 98–100; Tobin 1997, 321. On other nymphaea constructed in the 2nd century in civic centers in Greece, see Dickenson 2017, 363– 370. On Roman-era Greek nymphaea more broadly, see Aristodemou 2018. This section draws on arguments in Strazdins In press-a. 5 Bol 1984 corrects the reconstruction of Adler 1892. See Bol 1984, 1–12, for the excavation and early reconstructions. Tobin (1997, 314–322) presents a summary of the architectural design along with alterations and repairs made after its completion. Also see the discussion of Herodes as benefactor via the nymphaeum in Galli 2002, 222–227. 6 See Bol 1984, 50–58, and insert 4. 7 See Tobin 1997, 321. 8 Tobin 1997, 321. 9 I. Olympia, no. 610: Ῥήγιλλα, ἱέρεια (vine leaf) | Δήμητρος, τὸ ὕδωρ | καὶ τὰ περὶ τὸ ὕδωρ τῷ Διί. 10 See Bol 1984, 113–141. 11 Paus. 1.27.10; Plut. Thes. 15.1. 12 IG II2 6791: ⟦Ἑ̣…⟧ | ἕρωϊ | τῶι | Μαραθωνίωι | ⟦…⟧. See further, Rife 2008; Strazdins In press-a. 13 Tobin 1997, 317. On the interpretation of the monument’s sculptural program, see also Smith 1998, 75–77; Galli 2002, 225. 14 On the Panhellenion, see Spawforth and Walker 1985; Jones 1996; Spawforth 1999; Romeo 2002; Riccardi 2007; Doukellis 2007. 15 For descriptions of the individual statues, see Bol 1984, 151–196. Note that Bol reconstructs one headless togaed statue as Herodes, but Smith (1998, 77) more convincingly assigns it to Herodes’ father. 16 Smith 1998, 77. 17 Galli (2002, 226) also stresses the monument has both a religious and rhetorical dimension. 18 Tobin 1997, 76. On the biculturality of Herodes and Regilla’s marriage, see Gleason 2010, 130–135; Smith 1998, 77. 19 Cf. Ma 2013, 223–225 on the significance of extravagant family dedications at Delphi by Aetolians during the period the sanctuary was under their control, and 226–228 on Olympia. 20 See Gergel 2004; Karanastasi 2012. 21 See Longfellow 2011, 107–162. 22 For a detailed discussion of Plancia Magna’s gate and her euergetism, see Boatwright 1993, 189–207. For other parallels to Herodes’ nymphaion, see Bol 1984, 83–95.
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 185 3 See Tobin 1997, 304–306; Galli 2002, 218–222. 2 24 See Paus. 10.11; Grzesik 2018, 29. 25 For Herodes and Theseus, see Strazdins 2019, In press-a. 26 Spawforth and Walker 1985, 90–91; Boatwright 2000, 100; see also Muñiz Grijalvo 2005, 264. 27 On the latter, see Kouremenos in this volume. Herodes’ arch inscription: IG II2 5189 and 5189a. Hadrian’s arch inscription: IG II2 5185. Theseus’ pillar: Strabo 3.5.5; 9.1.6–7; Plut. Thes. 25.4. See Tobin 1997, 243–244, 314–322; Gleason 2010, 135–138, on the intertextual nature of the inscriptions. See also Ameling 1983, 118–120 nos. 97 and 98. 28 Philostr. VS 2.1.551; Paus. 2.1.8. 29 See Sturgeon 1987, 4, 76–113 (on the cult statue group); 4, 8, 84–85, 91–94 (on the relationship between the colossal marble group and Herodes’ group). Sturgeon does not consider Herodes’ statues cult statues, but Pausanias’ description and their material indicates they serve this purpose (Paus. 2.1.7–8; cf. VS 2.1.551). Broneer (1971, 88–90) does interpret them as cult statues. 30 See Tobin 1997, 312–314 for all of Herodes’ monumental efforts at the Isthmus. See also Schowalter 2014, 171. 31 Bacchyl. 17. 32 Plut. Thes. 25.4. 33 Reinhard 2005, 36–69, 250. 34 On the broader implications of this statue group and Herodes’ interaction with the Isthmus of Corinth, see Strazdins 2019, 239–242; In press-a. 35 IG II2 5189a. 36 IG II2 5189. 37 Cf. Steinhauer 2009, 278 on the Gate inscription suggesting Herodes owned large portions of Marathon. Petrakos 2002 (cf. Papaioannou 2018, 340, 342) published an inscription (c. 138–43 CE; SEG 53.220) composed by Herodes that claims his estate, named “Attikos” after his father, stretched to east and west of Mt Kotroni, south over the plains of Avlona and vast tracts of Marathon. See also Bowie 2013, 251–253. 38 Gleason 2010, 135–142. 39 Philostr. VA 1.35. 40 On the curses, see Tobin 1997, 113–143; on the reliefs, see Goette 2001. 41 See Strazdins In press-a, In press-c. 42 Paus. 1.32.4. On the continuing importance of the Persian Wars to Athenian memory and identity, see Kennell in this volume. 43 Wrede 1986, 55–58 on classical-period herms receiving offerings as localized shrines. 44 Lost inscription: IG II2 13208. 45 Tobin 1997, 138, 279. 46 Philostr. VS 2.1.558–589; Tobin 1997, 282. On the relief, see Datsoulis-Stavridis 1977, esp. 143, fig. 21; Daux 1962, 679–681 fig. 21; 1963, 710 fig. 17; Meyer 1985, 398 no. 14; Jansen 2006, 160–161. 47 Tobin 1997, 282; Papadimitriou 1963; Travlos 1988, 55–79. 48 Note that, although Brauron is particularly associated with the Arkteia and female rites of passage, there were also many dedications of statues of male children to Artemis found in the sanctuary. 49 VS 2.1.559. 50 VS 2.1.558–589.
186 Estelle Strazdins 51 I discuss these portraits in detail in Strazdins In press-a; In press-b. The portraits from Rhamnous are fragmentary, but almost intact copies come from Brexiza; see Petrakos 1999a, 291–293, with figs. 204 and 205; Mazurek 2018, 620–621. The portraits of Herodes (Inv. NIII 2536; Ma 1164) and Marcus (Inv. NIII 2535; Ma 1161) are in the Louvre, and the portrait of Lucius (AN1947.277) is in the Ashmolean. 52 The statue of Hadrian is epigraphically attested as a dedication of Atticus; see Petrakos 1999b, 126 no. 158. On the portrait of Antinous (Inv. no. 158) and its probable dedication at the time of the Hadrian statue, see Karanastasi 2019, who dates it stylistically and in relation to the portrait of Hadrian. Note that the accurate dating of portraits of Antinous is notoriously difficult. The fragmentary nature of the head, moreover, rules out any certainty over whether it was a bust or a statue. If, however, it was dedicated with the statue of Hadrian, it was more likely to have been a statue. Karanastasi (2019, 295–296) notes parallels with a similar dedication of Hadrian and Antinous at Isthmia that, she plausibly argues, was quite possibly also made by Atticus. 53 Smith 1998, 78–79. For Demosthenes’ portrait, see Richter 1965, 215–223, figs. 1397–1510; Ma 2006, 326–329; for Aeschines, Richter 1965, 212–215, figs. 1369– 1390; for Lysias, Richter 1965, 207–208, figs. 1340–1345. 54 Hdt. 1.29–33. 55 On this reading, see Karanastasi 2019. 56 On the sanctuary’s founding date, see Petrakos 1999a, 190–197. 57 Paus. 1.33.2–3. 58 Plut. Thes. 35.8; Paus. 1.15.3. 59 Opper 2008, 186–190. 60 VS 2.1.548–549. Note also that, although the temple of Nemesis was rededicated to Livia in 45/6 CE, Greek sources from the 1st to 3rd centuries, including Herodes’ own inscriptions (e.g. SEG 49.209), continue to refer only to Nemesis. See also Petrakos 1999a, 288–91; 1999b, 123–124 no. 156, 126–127 no. 159, 130 no. 163; Paus. 1.33. 61 Mazurek 2018, 620–621. 62 On how someone might view the allusion to the portrait of Demosthenes, see Ma 2006, 326–329. 63 IG II2 4779. 64 Tobin 1997, 204–205. 65 Clinton 2005–2008, no. 484; Peek 1942, 154–157, no. 330; Ameling 1983, no. 186; Tobin 1997, 205–206. 66 See IG II2 3592 and 3620. 67 VS 2.1.562–563. For more on Marcus’ actual initiation, see Mitropoulos in this volume. 68 The inscription at Eleusis is too fragmentary to ascertain the meter, but the extant poetic inscriptions that appear to have been composed by Herodes himself – the secondary inscription on the Arch of Eternal Concord (SEG 23.121) and the Bey inscription (IG II2 3606) – are in elegiacs, not hexameter. Marcellus of Side’s poem in commemoration of Regilla (IG XIV 1389) on Herodes’ estate off the Via Appia in Rome, on the other hand, is unusually in hexameter. Another poem from Herodes’ estate describing its extent and his agricultural interventions is in iambic trimeter (Petrakos 2002). 69 IG II2 2090, ll. 7–11; Ameling 1983, no. 92. The inscription is dated by the archonship of Sextus of Phaleron and the lack of the title “Medikoi” for the emperors, which they adopted in 166. On the ephebate in the 2nd century, see Kennell in this volume.
Herodes Atticus and sanctuaries of Achaea 187 0 Philostr. VS 2.1.550 and Hom. Il. 15.639. 7 71 Graindor 1912, 88; see also Tobin 1997, 204. 72 IG II2 3606, ll. 19–23; Ameling 1983, 205–211, no. 190; Tobin 1997, 272–275; Skenteri 2005, 86–110; Bowie 2019, 146–147. 73 IG II2 3606, ll. 1–4. 74 See Polyb. 30.25–26; Ath. 5.196a–203e; cf. Plut. Dem. 9–13; Ath. 6.253d–f. Skenteri 2005, 95–103, on the text and procession of Herodes’ poem. See also Robert 1987, 470–474; Rife 2008, 101–102 and 101 n. 60. 75 SEG 53.220. Commentary in Petrakos 2002; see also Papaioannou 2018, 340–341. 76 Philostr. VS 2.1.556. See Ameling 1986 on the pattern of pregnant-wife-killing tyrants (Nero, Kambyses, Periander, and Herodes). Cf. Pomeroy 2007, 121–123, and see 119–136 for a speculative discussion of the murder and trial. 77 Regilla as Tyche in Athens: IG II2 3607; Regilla as Tyche in Corinth: SEG 13.226; Kent 1966, no. 128. 78 IG XIV 1389. See Ameling 1983, 156; Tobin 1997, 356–357; Davies and Pomeroy, 2012. 79 For the best version of the epigram, see Tentori Montalto 2014. For its date, see Keesling 2012; Petrovic 2013; Olson 2016, 47–50. 80 For the discovery of the stele, see Spyropoulos 2009. 81 Spawforth 1994. See also Kennell in this volume on the continuing importance of the Persian Wars to Athenian and Greek identity. 82 See Spawforth 2012. 83 See Karivieri 2002 on Hadrian as a Thesean figure. 84 See the inscribed letter from Marcus to Athens (EM 13366; SEG 29.127) that details measures taken against the freedmen and urges the Athenians to welcome Herodes back: “When their care has been worked out in all matters, is it not possible for the Athenians to love my – and their very own – Herodes (τὸν ἐμὸν καὶ τὸν ἴδ[ι]ον αὐτῶν Ἡρώιδην στέργειν), since no other major conflict (με[γάλου] | ἀντικρούοντος) still hinders their goodwill (εὐνοίαι)?” (EM 13366, ll. 92–94). Translation adapted from Kennell 1997, 361, and Oliver 1970, 32. On this inscription, see Oliver 1970, 1–40; Jones 1971; Follet 1979; Ameling 1983, 182–205 no. 189; Kennell 1997; Tobin 1997, 41–47. See also Mitropoulos in this volume. 85 Philostr. VS 2.1.559.
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Part III
Past and Present in the Visual Culture of “Old Greece”
10 Remembering classical Greece Hadrianic and Antonine imperial portrait sculpture Panagiotis Konstantinidis
Introduction The 2nd century CE saw the development of the so-called Second Sophistic in the Greek East. This literary and ideological phenomenon focused, for the most part, on the revival of the Greek past of the Classical period, with Athens playing a central role as a means of promoting Hellenic cohesion against the political supremacy of Rome.1 The reasons for this inclination to focus on a “return to the past” were more cultural than political, aiming to strengthen – among Greeks – ethnic self-consciousness and pride in the notion of Hellenism, the core of the Empire's wider Greco-Roman cultural identity.2 Chronologically, the Second Sophistic’s floruit spans the period from the later 1st century to the 3rd century CE. It is during this time that we also observe its influence in the visual arts,3 especially in the field of portraiture. Research has shown that official imperial portraiture interacted with broader social trends, serving not only as a decisive model of fashion and self-representation for private citizens, but also as a means of picking up trends in fashion and self-representation – i.e. hairstyles, dress, and posture, together with the presence or absence of beards in portraits of male figures – that prevailed in society. Regardless of their origins, officially adopted fashion trends functioned as models of socially desired uniformity (“period-face” or “Zeitgeschicht”); but, as they were never obligatory, they did not constitute the only option for self-fashioning.4 In the Greek East, in the cultural climate of the mid-2nd century, older fashion trends, which were never entirely abandoned,5 became once again equally popular. The Classical fashion of wearing a full beard, which continued to exist alongside other, more dominant, trends throughout the Hellenistic period, had, by the 2nd century, re-appeared dynamically in various cities of the Greek East, reinforced by official imperial models starting with Hadrian.6 Apart from the full beard, the main iconographic themes used for male official imperial portraiture remained unchanged, continuing the traditional types of the cuirassed general, the Roman citizen wearing the toga, and the nude or semi-nude male in the guise of a god or a hero.7 Surprisingly for the period of the Second Sophistic, no representation, official or otherwise, of an DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-13
194 Panagiotis Konstantinidis emperor in the Greek himation (the Roman pallium) is attested either in ancient sources or in surviving sculptural examples.8 In the case of female portraiture, Classical and Hellenistic Greek statuary types such as the so-called “Aphrodite/Olympias”, “Hera Borghese”, “Capua Venus”, or the “Large Herculaneum Woman” and the “Pudicitia”, were used for official representations of empresses and other female members of the imperial family, even in the western part of the Empire.9 As we will see below, the latter, especially, were much more easily incorporated into the tradition of Greek civic honorific portraiture than their male counterparts. Assimilation to local deities was also common, especially in imperial cult contexts,10 as was the idealized so-called “non-portrait” head type in the Greek classical tradition.11 Τhe tendency to allude to the Classical Greek past in the eastern provinces in the 2nd century was expressed in the field of official imperial portraiture through the choice and adjustment of statuary types, or the overall iconographic theme of a commission in order to suit local traditional cults. This was a common phenomenon in the context of the imperial cult, which was administered by local elites. The Classical past was also stressed through the correlation of iconography and official political ideology in representations of the emperor as (a) a mythological hero (heroic nudity), and (b) a victorious general wearing a cuirass which depicted a specific theme with political connotations and symbolism. The choice of statuary types, motifs, and iconography seems to have originated with the artist, closely guided by the sponsor, or with the emperor himself in the case of a newly created theme reflecting a specific political program. Nonetheless, the artist still retained some degree of creative freedom, adapting each commission to local contexts and idiosyncrasies. The present survey depends on published material and – for the sake of brevity – will focus almost exclusively on selected examples of full-length, free-standing male and female official portraits from the province of Achaea, dated to the principates of Hadrian and the Antonines (117–192). This selection will reveal specific themes and particularities pertinent to the region.12
Hadrian As is well known, Hadrian developed a love of Greece and Greek culture in his youth, which earned him the nickname “Graeculus”.13 After his ascension to the imperial throne, he visited Greece on three occasions (124/5, 128/9, and 131/2 CE),14 and embellished Athens by means of an extensive architectural program,15 which included a new district to the northeast demarcated by a monumental arch erected by the Athenians in his honor.16 He also constructed a multifunctional building (the so-called Library of Hadrian), which was based in form on Vespasian’s Templum Pacis in Rome,17 and completed the temple of Olympian Zeus, which was originally begun in the 6th century BCE.18 The founding of the Panhellenion, along with the inauguration of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in 131/132, are known mainly
Remembering classical Greece 195 via epigraphic sources to adhere directly to his political program, as will be discussed below.19 Contrary to expectations, Hadrian’s strong philhellenism is only subtly reflected in his official portraiture. Although ancient sources mention his predilection for the Greek himation over the Roman toga,20 no portrait statue of him in a himation survives.21 The innovation of wearing a full beard in his official portraiture, the first emperor to do so, has traditionally been attributed to his philhellenism, although one ancient source mentions the rumor that he grew a beard in an effort to hide his poor complexion.22 Be that as it may, the beard has been interpreted as a Greek affectation, equivalent to the wearing of the Greek himation. In the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the full beard was indeed the traditional fashion for adult Greek men, including intellectuals and statesmen.23 Nevertheless, recent research has also documented a similar trend (cropped beard) among representations of younger Roman men and soldiers before Hadrian’s principate,24 and, thus, the possibility of Hadrian following an already existing fashion in the city of Rome cannot be excluded. Whatever the true reason,25 from the time of its adoption by Hadrian, the full beard became significantly more popular and set a trend widely imitated by his contemporaries in all parts of the Empire (“Zeitgesicht”), and, more importantly, exerted a lasting influence on his successors.26 The central role attributed to Hellenism as a unifying political and cultural factor for the Empire is reflected in a group of cuirassed portrait statues of the emperor best known from examples found mainly in the eastern part of the Empire.27 Hadrian’s political program is represented in the symbolic decoration of the cuirass, created by, probably, an Athenian workshop (although several variants exist), and conceived in close contact with the emperor.28 The scheme was also reproduced in posthumous cuirassed representations of the emperor in the Antonine period (Nymphaeum at Olympia, theater at Amman),29 as an allusion to dynastic-political continuity. The so-called “Eastern type” is best exemplified in “Old Greece” in two examples from Attica, one erected in the agora of Athens (Figure 10.1),30 and the other found, presumably awaiting export, in the emporion area of Piraeus (Figure 10.2).31 The scene depicted on the cuirass consists of two ancient symbols, the Roman she-wolf with twins (symbol of the aeternitas of Rome and the Roman Empire) supporting an archaistic figure of Athena, in the Promachos type, being crowned by two Nikes descending from either side. Two additional symbols appear in the composition: the snake (associated with Ericthonius) and the owl, symbolizing the Greek world as embodied by its main representative, Athens. In some examples of the group, Athena is replaced by Virtus, while in others the emperor is depicted as a victorious general with one foot raised, trampling on a defeated barbarian prisoner (the calcatio motif; Figure 10.2).32 According to more traditional interpretations,33 the she-wolf with the twins refers to Romulus, but also, through the Palladion, to Aeneas, and implies that Hadrian is honored as conditor/κτίστης, in the broadest sense.
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Figure 10.1 Cuirassed Portrait Statue of Hadrian, Athens, Agora Museum inv. S 166. Source: (American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens).
Figure 10.2 Cuirassed Portrait Statue of Hadrian, Piraeus Archaeological Museum inv. 8097. (Photo: P. Konstantinidis; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and Islands).
Remembering classical Greece 197 However, the addition of the two Athenian symbols (the owl and the snake, although not present in all surviving examples) imbues the Palladium with a more “Athenocentric” connotation as alongside that of universality. The general meaning of the entire composition, then, alludes to the triumph of Graeco-Roman civilization over the barbarian world beyond Hadrian's Wall and the borders of the Empire in general, extended by Trajan and consolidated by Hadrian. The founding of the Panhellenion in 131/2 CE is thought to be the catalyst for the emergence of this type. According to a more recent interpretation,34 the type and, in particular, its principal variant with the defeated opponent (the calcatio motif), allude to a specific historical event which was also the motive for the type’s overall i nception – the rebellion of the Jews of the diaspora that broke out under Trajan in 115–117 CE and was put down by Hadrian early in his principate. The revolt had far-reaching consequences for large parts of the eastern Empire in which the Greeks traditionally formed the elite, and thus an allusion to it also refers to the political role of Hellenism as a major factor in maintaining the sociopolitical status quo of the Empire. In this light, it has also been suggested35 that Hadrian’s philhellenic politics and the founding of the Panhellenion in 131/2 CE were not simply the result of a romantic vision, but the immediate consequence of the events at the beginning of Hadrian’s principate, which dictated – in a case of pragmatic politics – the creation of a political program with Panhellenism at its core. Another form of allusion to the Greek past is the representation of the emperor in heroic nudity as a visual expression of specific imperial virtues. Although several examples from Italy and the western provinces survive, Romans were generally reluctant to fully embrace heroic nudity for the emperor,36 with the exception of the semi-nude “hip-mantle” type.37 In general, cuirassed and toga-wearing portrait statues were the favored types. In Rome, representations of emperors in heroic nudity are rare, and surviving examples in private portraiture are confined to Roman generals of the late Republic, influenced by Greek norms of representation of heroes and Hellenistic rulers,38 and individual statues or spousal statue groups in mythological guise (often in funerary contexts – sometimes termed consecratio in formam deorum).39 Conversely, in the eastern part of the Empire, such representations were common, usually linked with the local imperial cult (see below). In some cases, they had a purely honorific purpose, accentuating imperial virtues and following official dynastic propaganda (i.e. adopting official norms of godassimilation). The number of gods or heroes chosen was rather limited and included Zeus/Iuppiter, Hermes, Ares, and Heracles/Hercules. Equally limited is the number of statuary types, usually following, or at least alluding to, those of gods and heroes of the Classical period who had previously been used for similar representations of Alexander and other Hellenistic rulers.40 In some cases, iconographic schemes prove to be Roman-inspired creations in the Greek tradition.41
198 Panagiotis Konstantinidis From 2nd century CE Achaea, several examples of portraits of emperors in heroic nudity survive, such as the portrait of an unidentified emperor in the guise of Zeus wearing the aigis (Hadrian?) from Aigion in the northwestern Peloponnese,42 dated to the late Hadrianic-early Antonine period, and the portrait of a mid-2nd century CE emperor, probably Hadrian, in the guise of Ares (the Borghese type) from ancient Koroneia in Boeotia (Figure 10.3).43 A third, over-life-size example comes from the Nymphaeum at the Criterion Hill (Larissa suburb) in Argos, which was sponsored by Hadrian and completed by 124/5 CE, in time for his visit to the city. This is most probably an idealistic representation of the emperor in heroic nudity (Figure 10.4).44 Hadrian is depicted standing, with the right arm raised and probably holding a sword in the left.45 The head was crowned with the corona civica (the ends of the tainia survive on the shoulders), while the paludamentum is wrapped around the left forearm and bundled over the left shoulder. As argued elsewhere, the statuary type is not a variant of the “Diomedes” of Kresilas, identified in replicas of the “Cyme-Munich” type, as suggested by Maderna,46 but a more generic creation in heroic nudity of Hadrianic date, based on earlier Hellenistic models of “heroic portraiture”.47 This statuary type probably carried specific connotations during Hadrian’s principate, and, judging from the existence of other similar statues of Hadrianic date, probably drew upon a contemporary prototype made for a specific occasion.48 The latter may have been a portrait statue of Hadrian commemorating or alluding to his visit to Ilium (Troy) in 124, a city which boasted a glorious role in the Greek past and
Figure 10.3 Portrait Statue of Hadrian in Heroic Nudity from Koroneia, Thebes Archaeological Museum inv. 167. Source: (Photo: © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia).
Remembering classical Greece 199
Figure 10.4 Portrait Statue of Hadrian in Heroic Nudity from the Nymphaeum at the Criterion Hill (Larissa suburb) of Argos, Argos Archaeological Museum inv. 90. Source: (EFA/Ph. Collet; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of the Argolid).
was considered the mother city of Rome. The emperor’s visit occurred in the same year that he reformed the Athenian constitution and festival calendar (leading to the institution of the Hadrianis tribe) and, immediately after, set out for a tour of the Peloponnese.49 In Ilium, Hadrian had restored Ajax’s tomb, a local seaside landmark.50 Ancient sources also mention the existence of a colossal statue at the hero’s tumulus; the statue represented him as a warrior so handsome that Mark Antony carried it off to Alexandria, only for it to be repatriated later by Augustus.51 In this case, the emperor would have been represented in the known Hadrianic prototype in the guise of a nude, heroic warrior with the paludamentum and armed with a sword. This configuration possibly drew on the famous statue of Ajax’s tomb,52 and the city of Argos could have employed this type in anticipation of the emperor’s visit to the city in 124, or shortly following his departure.53 A case of god-assimilation in the Classical tradition from the province of Achaea can be seen in the iconography of Hadrian’s favorite, Antinous, a youth who probably shared his vision of a unifying Greco–Roman culture, eventually becoming a political and religious symbol in the Greek and Hellenized East. Indicative of this is an – until now – unique cuirassed bust of the emperor found in Herodes Atticus’ villa at Loukou in the region of Arcadia.54 The bust depicts the winged head of Antinous – in the guise of Hermes,55 or, alternatively, Perseus56 – in the middle of the chest, replacing
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Figure 10.5 Cuirassed Portrait Bust of Hadrian, Astros Archaeological Museum. Source: (after Smith and Melfi 2018, fig. 32; with kind permission of G. Spyropoulos).
the usual apotropaic Gorgoneion (Figure 10.5). In this example, the youth has not only become the emperor’s protective emblem, but also an overall symbol of his cultural and political ideology. Antinous was born in c. 110,57 and, together with empress Sabina, accompanied Hadrian on his extensive travels, including a fateful trip up the Nile in late 130. Ancient sources suggest all sorts of rumors that surrounded his death; some claimed that he committed suicide, others that he gave his life to save Hadrian’s.58 Whatever the case, he was deeply mourned by the emperor and before long deified. Hadrian also founded the city of Antinoopolis in his memory,59 and commissioned numerous statues to be used in his cult.60 Statuary types in various guises and divine attributes (but with only one head-type) 61 underscore the devotion of the eastern part of the Empire to the cult,62 where its acceptance in each region depended on local traditions and was not imposed as a result of official directives.63 In Achaea, Antinous – with the exception of three surviving Egyptianizing portraits in the guise of Osiris, directly alluding to his death in the Nile64 – is assimilated to Asclepius (Eleusis),65 Apollo (Delphi, Corinth),66 and Dionysus (Lerna,67 Mantineia,68 Loukou [?]).69 But, above all, Antinous was the eternal youth, the hero of the gymnasium par excellence.70 It is well known that the cult of Antinous was propagated in the Greek world through the institution of the ephebeia, a fact not surprising in the ideological climate of the Second Sophistic.71 Indicative of this is the attested presence of the cult of Antinous in gymnasia in Athens and Mantineia (Antinous’ ancestral hometown).72
Remembering classical Greece 201
Figure 10.6 Statue of Antinous, Delphi Archaeological Museum inv. 1718. Source: (Photo: P. Konstantinidis; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Phocis).
One of the finest surviving examples of a statue of Antinous from “Old Greece” was found in Delphi and depicts the youth, as expected, in the guise of Apollo (Figure 10.6).73 Antinous is portrayed frontal, with a slight tilt of the shoulders and torso, and with both feet flat on the ground. He wears a sculpted wreath, to which bronze laurel leaves were attached. The statue is a product of an Aphrodisian workshop, crafted in Göktepe marble from the province of Asia.74 This is not surprising since the so-called “School of Aphrodisias” flourished in Caria during the Hadrianic and Antonine periods, and Aphrodisian sculptors are also documented to have been active in Italy under Hadrian.75 Antonianus of Aphrodisias, a sculptor working in Rome in the late Hadrianic period, signed one of his works, a marble relief portrait of Antinous in the guise of the Roman god of the forests, Silvanus,76 while works by the Aphrodisian sculptors Aristeas and Papias were displayed in Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.77 Evers also argues in favor of the presence of Aphrodisian sculptors in the workshops commissioned to create Hadrian’s official portraits in the city of Rome.78
202 Panagiotis Konstantinidis In terms of iconography, the Delphi statue presents an eclectic mix of elements, widely based on severe-style models, such as the so-called “Tiber Apollo” in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome (inv. 608), shown recently to be not a Greek prototype but a copy of a classicizing Roman work, likely dating to the early Imperial period.79 Lastly, the statue’s original function cannot be determined as it was not found in its original setting, but rather in an early Christian residence built to the west of the temple of Apollo, probably serving as an antique and part of the overall decoration of the building.80 It is reasonable to assume that the Delphic sanctuary hosted more than one statue of Hadrian’s companion, reciprocating earlier benefactions conferred by the emperor.81
The Antonines (138–192 CE) The influence of the Second Sophistic continued under the Antonines and their successors, although official imperial portraiture reflected a notion of Hellenism and the glorious Greek past more as a continuation of Hadrian’s legacy, alluding to legitimate dynastic and political succession, rather than being an instrument of political pragmatism. From this point of view, traditional schemes of imperial self-representation remained unaltered, although surviving material from Greece, especially from the province of Achaea, is scarce. With the exception of the portrait gallery of the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus at Olympia, no full-length, securely identified, official Antonine portrait statue from “Old Greece” survives.82 Although the old Roman tradition enjoyed a place of honor under Antoninus Pius (138–161), Lucius Verus (161–169), and Marcus Aurelius (161–180), Hellenism still retained a privileged position.83 In the eyes of their contemporaries,84 Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were, as their deified predecessor, philhellenic emperors, even if, as in the case of Antoninus Pius, they never left Italy. They followed Hadrian’s example, from adopting the full beard to completing his building projects, as well as taking care of the Panhellenion and the sanctuary of Eleusis.85 More specifically, Marcus Aurelius, as Hadrian before him, had a special relationship with Athens, being initiated, together with his son Commodus, into the Eleusinian Mysteries in 176,86 and on the occasion of the event, instituting four chairs of philosophy.87 Probably in the same year, he also created the sacred gerousia, a council whose role was to administer the cult of Athena and of the emperor during the Panathenaia.88 Lastly, in 185/189, Commodus became eponymous archon of Athens,89 and at the beginning of his principate (180–182), two family portrait groups of his father were erected on the partitioned sections of each one of the two monumental arches, already built in the outer court of the sanctuary of Eleusis by the Athenians in honor of Hadrian.90 The statues, of which only some of the bases survive, stood next to two posthumous portrait statues of Hadrian Panhellenios (one on each arch; Figures 6.5; 10.7–10.8).91 According to Clinton,92 female members of the family of Marcus Aurelius could have
Remembering classical Greece 203
Figure 10.7 The main entrance of the sanctuary of Eleusis, c. the middle of the 2nd century CE; plaster model reconstruction by J. Travlos. Source: (after J. Travlos, “Γύψινα προπλάσματα αναπαραστάσεως του ιερού της Ελευσίνος,” Prakt. 1973, pl. 234; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society).
Figure 10.8 The western arch of the main entrance of the sanctuary of Eleusis, a copy of the Hadrian's Arch in Athens; drawing by D. Giraud. Source: (after Giraud 1991, fig. 49; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society).
204 Panagiotis Konstantinidis been represented in the guise of Kore or Demeter, holding the cult’s characteristic ceremonial torches. By analogy, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus could have equally been represented capite velato as initiates. As already stated, female portraits were much more open to “Hellenization”, with the use of various statuary types of the Classical or Hellenistic traditions for their representation. No monument exemplifies this trend more eloquently than the Nymphaeum sponsored by Herodes Atticus in Olympia.93 The twostory monument was built in c. 149–153 at the north end of the Altis, in memory of the sponsor’s wife, Regilla, who came from the Roman aristocracy and was related to the empress Faustina.94 Herodes was a wealthy Greek sophist, with personal ties to Antoninus Pius, and the overall sculptural program of the monument was meant to be perceived by contemporaries as a “visual representation” of his prominent social status. Close ties to the imperial house were accentuated by placing an imperial family statue group next to his own. It is indicative that the statues of the imperial family were dedicated by Herodes Atticus, while those of Herodes’ family were dedications by the city of Elis, emphasizing the family’s prestigious social status in Greece. The careful choice of statuary types is indicative, especially in its tendency to integrate members of the imperial house in the local (Greek) tradition. The statue of Faustina I (Figure 10.9) clearly stands in the tradition of Greek civic honorific portraits.95 It is in the “Large Herculaneum Woman” statue type that was far more popular in the Greek East than in the rest of the Empire and was rarely used for portraits of imperial women. In fact, the
Figure 10.9 Portrait Statue of Agrippina I from the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus, Olympia Museum inv. Λ155. Source: (D-DAI-ATH-1979/416: G. Hellner).
Remembering classical Greece 205 Olympia statue is the only surviving, securely identified imperial portrait of this type from Greece.96 The intended correlation between women of the provincial nobility and empresses (and, thus, of the two families) may well have been accentuated through the further use of the type – according to Bol’s reconstruction – for a posthumous representation of Sabina, and for these of Regilla, Herodes’ wife, and Vibulia Alcia Agrippina, his mother,97 although identifications of all headless female statues in roughly the same scale are, in essence, conjectural.98 I shall conclude with a case of imperial god-assimilation to a local deity, closely related to the exercise of the imperial cult by provincial elites.99 The over-life-sized female statue in Argive peplos displayed today next to the entrance of the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis (Figure 10.10)100 was excavated inside the courtyard of a rectangular colonnade building, immediately outside of the southwest tower of the precinct of the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore (Figures 10.11–10.12).101 Although the excavation was never completed, its partially uncovered plan is reminiscent of that of a gymnasium or agora, and indeed a similar function was suggested at first for it. As Clinton indicates, its plan is akin to a Sebasteion and shrines of the imperial cult, or else dynastic family portrait group monuments are common in agorai or gymnasia.102 The presence of either an independent Sebasteion or one housed in the local agora or gymnasium complex seems to be corroborated
Figure 10.10 Peplophoros Portrait Statue, Eleusis Archaeological Museum. Source: (Photo: P. Konstantinidis; © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports – Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development, Ephorate of Antiquities of Western Attica).
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Figure 10.11 Plan of the southwest corner of the sanctuary of Eleusis, c. the end of the 3rd century CE; plan by D. Giraud. Source: (after Giraud 1991, fig. 137; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society).
by the discovery of a portrait statue of Nero in a toga, together with the peplophoros statue.103 A toga portrait statue of Claudius,104 of unknown findspot but of the same statuary type (both togati capite velato as priests imitating Augustus),105 scale, and weathering, was probably also originally set up inside the court, forming a group.106 The peplophoros statue cannot have belonged to the same group as Nero, as it is clearly Antonine in date (c. 150–160).107 However, based on its size, findspot, dating, and statuary type, it can be identified as a representation of an empress in the guise of Demeter, the sanctuary’s patron deity (the peplophoros statuary type is typically used for representations of Demeter as attested in classical votive reliefs found in Eleusis).108 A closer identification of the person represented has proven difficult; a posthumous representation of Hadrian’s wife Sabina cannot be excluded, as the empress is documented to have been worshipped as a “New Demeter” in Eleusis and neighboring Megara.109 Hadrian’s initiation into the Mysteries and beneficence toward the sanctuary are well-known,110 and the same is true for Marcus Aurelius, making his wife Faustina II a possible candidate.111 Lastly, equally possible is the case for Antoninus Pius’ wife, Faustina I, for whom the consecration of a temple in the sanctuary has also been suggested by some scholars.112 Whatever the case may be, the statue is an indicative example of god-assimilation in the Greek tradition in the local context of the imperial cult.
Remembering classical Greece 207
Figure 10.12 The southwest corner of the sanctuary of Eleusis, c. the middle of the 2nd century CE; plaster model reconstruction by J. Travlos. Source: (after J. Travlos, “Γύψινα προπλάσματα αναπαραστάσεως του ιερού της Ελευσίνος,” Prakt. 1973, pl. 235; with kind permission of the Athens Archaeological Society).
Conclusions Τhe tendency to return to the Classical Greek past, spearheaded by the ideological movement of the Second Sophistic, influenced the arts of the eastern provinces, especially private portraiture and, to a lesser degree, official imperial portraiture. The influence exercised on the latter, in the case of male portraits, does not take into account the wider traditional schemes of imperial representation, already created in the Augustan period (toga, armor, heroic nudity, god-assimilation), but rather the attribution of subtle shades of Hellenic connotations to the above schemes, alluding to specific circumstances (i.e., a specific event, a visit, a political program or individual ideology, the relationship with a local cult). Representations of Hadrian in the nude, as a mythical Greek warrior, or in armor with his political program displayed on the cuirass, are indicative examples of allusions to Hellenism as a unifying cultural force. Representations of women of the imperial house in the 2nd century CE Greek East were much more open to Greek influence,
208 Panagiotis Konstantinidis with Classical and Hellenistic Greek or Greek-inspired statuary types (in the context of god-assimilation or not) being the norm. The practice of enriching traditional schemes of imperial representation with subtle allusions to Hellenism continued under the Antonines, although with less vigor. In the post-Hadrianic period, such tendencies functioned more as symbols of a smooth political transfer of power and dynastic continuity than full-on displays of philhellenism. In that respect, the bearded portraits of the Antonines constitute the more obvious example of continuity with Hadrianic legacy. Based on current evidence, the province of Achaea did not differ from other Greek provinces regarding official sculptural representations of emperors in the climate of the Second Sophistic. Iconographic schemes remained traditional, infused with local connotations, as in any other province of the Empire. Nevertheless, under Hadrian, local Athenian symbolism (Athenocentrism) was incorporated into a wider state ideology, that, via certain Athenian artistic creations, was propagated amongst both Greeks (Hadrian/Zeus Olympios/Panhellenios), and the rest of the Empire (Athena Promachos/shewolf cuirassed portrait).113 In this respect, Hadrian’s principate remains the high-point of Roman admiration and endorsement of the Greek past.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Anna Kouremenos for her kind invitation to contribute to the present volume, as well as the Ephorates of Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports (as stated in the image credit lines) for granting permission to illustrate antiquities under their jurisdiction.
Notes
1 Kyrkos 1976; Graham 1993; Borg 2004; Richter and Johnson 2017. 2 Ael. Arist., To Rome, 60; Woolf 1994; Pernot 2008; Jones 2013; Miles 2014, 805. 3 Cordovana and Galli 2007. 4 For an exemplary presentation of the various issues concerning scholarly research on imperial period portraiture (official and private), see Fittschen 2010; Fittschen 2015. Also note 6. 5 Palagia 2005, 291–293. 6 Smith 1998; Schröder 2011; Schröder 2012 (such models served as distinctive references to older Greek archetypes in varying degrees during the period c. 130–240 CE). During the Hellenistic period – especially from the 2nd century BCE onwards – the common fashion for ordinary Greek citizens was a clean-shaven look, imitating Alexander and his successors (cf. Couilloud 1974; Pfuhl and Möbius 1977–1979; Zanker 1995). In the 1st century CE, however, the so-called “period face” was the conventional form of representation throughout the Greek East, while – regarding male costume – the combination of the chiton and the himation in the “arm-sling” type and its variants remained the norm (cf. e.g. Von Moock 1998; on the “arm-sling” type: Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2009, 357–359). 7 Karanastasi 1995; Cadario 2011. 8 See note 21.
Remembering classical Greece 209 9 Alexandridis 2004; Konstantinidis forthcoming. 10 Mikocki 1995; Alexandridis 2004, 2–3, 82–92; Konstantinidis forthcoming (Greece). 11 Dillon 2010, 135–163. 12 Cf. Whitmarsh 2010. 13 Calandra 1996, 169; Birley 1997, 14–15, 16–17; Vout 2003, 442; Cortés Copete in this volume. 14 Geagan 1987; Syme 1988; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 32. 15 Kokkou 1970; Spawforth and Walker 1985, 92–100; Willers 1990; LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018. 16 Greco 2011, 449–451 (F. Camia, D. Marchiandi); Kouremenos in this volume. 17 Greco 2014, 780–788 (C.G. Malacrino); Monaco 2014; Camia in this volume. 18 The sanctuary is related to the epithet Olympios, assumed by Hadrian during his stay in Athens in 128/9 (Fittschen 2008, 178). On the issue of the dating of the temple’s dedication (128/9 or 131 CE) see Camia et al. 2018, 477; Camia in this volume; Kouremenos in this volume, note 17. A surviving example of a colossal statue of Hadrian Olympios erected in the sanctuary is the portrait head NAM 3729 (“Imperatori 32” portrait type; on the dating of the type, see Evers 1994, 252–259): Kaltsas 2002, cat. no. 720; contra Camia et al. 2018, 480 (probably not from the Temple of Olympian Zeus, but erected close by). A group of cuirassed busts, products of Attic workshops, representing Hadrian (again in the “Imperatori 32” head-type), with the symbol of Zeus carved on the shoulderstraps, have been connected to the title (Fittschen 2008). It has also been suggested that the same Athenian workshops had designed the prototype for a series of nude busts of Antinous (Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2014–2015). In this case, the two images of Hadrian and Antinous would have been conceived as a pair or, later, placed together as pendants. 19 Panhellenion (an association of Greek cities selected on the basis of impeccable credentials of Greek descent, centered in Athens and organized around the imperial cult [Hera and Zeus Panhellenios], and the festival of the Panhellenia): Spawforth and Walker 1985; Spawforth and Walker 1986; Willers 1990, 54–67; Greco 2011, 470–471 (F. Camia); Karanastasi 2012–2013, 349–350. On the location of the Panhellenion, see Greco 2011, 473–474 (D. Marchiandi); LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 52. Temple of Olympian Zeus: Greco 2011, 458–463 (E. Santaniello); Galli 2008, 73–77; Tsalkanis, Kanellopoulos and Tsatsaroni 2019. The founding of the Panhellenion and the consecration of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, where Hadrian was worshipped together with Zeus, led to the god’s cult acquiring a special significance during his principate (see note 18). Hadrian’s overall connection with the cult of Olympian Zeus symbolized the political unification of the Greek world under his rule (Zeus Panhellenios). See also Camia in this volume. 20 HA, Hadr., 22.4. 21 The well-known portrait statue from the sanctuary of Apollo in Cyrene (London British Museum, 1861, 1127.23: Evers 1994, cat. no. 57), thought to be the only surviving portrait of the emperor in the Greek mantle (pallium), has now been proven not to be a portrait of Hadrian after all (Opper 2008, cat. no. 34 [the insert head does not belong to the body]; Fejfer 2008, 395, fig. 316). Contra: Fittschen 2014–2015. 22 HA., Hadr. 25.1. 23 See notes 5–6.
210 Panagiotis Konstantinidis 24 Bonanno 1988; Smith 1998, 75, 89; Fittschen 2010, 239–240; Fittschen 2015, 67. 25 On the issue of whether he was following contemporary Roman elite predilections or traditional Greek models, enhanced by the glorified aura of the Greek intellectual past, or even both, see Smith 1998, 90–91 (“a styled civilian image of urbane sophistication”, emphasizing “culture, elegance, and civilian care of the self ”); Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 69 with bibliography (R. Di Cesare); Camia in this volume. 26 The tendency to emphasize similarities in physiognomy and overall modes of self-representation for purposes of political/dynastic propaganda (even between spouses) is well-known in official portraiture. See Smith 1985, 214–215; D’Ambra 2013, 523. 27 Full catalogue and discussion in Karanastasi 2012–2013, with previous literature. 28 Hadrian as amateur architect and sculptor: Evers 1994, 347–348. 29 Karanastasi 2012–2013, cat. nos. 8 (149–153 CE; Evers 1994, 139, cat. no. 75) and 20 (early Antonine) respectively. 30 Athens, Agora Museum inv. S166: Harrison 1953, 71–74, cat. no. 56, pls. 36–37; Karanastasi 2012–2013, cat. no. 1, pl. 1.1–3. Mentioned by Pausanias (1.3.2) as standing in front of the Stoa Basileios. 31 Piraeus Museum inv. 8097: Karanastasi 2012–2013, cat. no. 4, pls. 2.4–7. Emporion (the part of the Kantharos port, reserved for commercial activity and the mooring of merchant ships): Von Eickstedt 1991, 62–68; Steinhauer 2000, 79–91. 32 Karanastasi 2012–2013, 325–336. 33 Harrison 1953, 71–74; Karanastasi 2012–2013, 336–338. 34 Karanastasi 2012–2013, 339–357. See also Kouremenos forthcoming, who reads the entire composition as “an allusion to his combined Roman and Athenian identity, but also a visual testament to his role as an imperial protector and ‘nourisher of his own Hellas’”. 35 Kienast 1993, 209–222; Spawforth 1999, 339–352; Karanastasi 2012–2013, 349. 36 On “role-playing” in official imperial portraiture, see Maderna 1988; Hallett 2005; Fejfer 2008, 400–401; Papazapheiriou 2004. 37 Post 2004. 38 Hallett 2005, 102–158; Fejfer 2008, 200–207; Cadario 2010, 121–123; Ewald 2019, 235–239. 39 In essence, stock types of male and female figures with attributes as visualizations of male and female virtues: Kleiner 1981; Kleiner 1992, 177–179, 280–283, 349–350; Hallett 2005, 259–264. Consecratio in formam deorum: Wrede 1981; ThesCRA II (2004), 203–204, s.v. “Heroisierung/Apotheose” (P. Karanastasi). For the trend in the eastern part of the Empire, see Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2009, 364–372. 40 Stewart 1993, 380–383; Papazapheiriou 2004, 18–25. 41 Pausanias (2.17.3) mentions a portrait of Orestes in the Argive Heraion, retitled as Augustus (Hölscher 1990; as Orestes revenged his father’s murder, the same is implied for the murder of Caesar, revenged by Augustus). See also the Argos Hadrian below. 42 Aigion museum: Karanastasi 1995, 225; LIMC VIII (1997) s.v. Zeus, 351, no. 288 (P. Karanastasi); Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2012, 283, with notes 68–69. 43 Thebes Museum inv. 167: Karouzos 1934, 48–49, cat. no. 167, fig. 43; Aravantinos 2010, 340; Nogales 2011, 34–35, cat. no 8, pl. 7.1 (“Diomedes” type); BonnanoAravantinou 2012, 237 with bibliography. Several inscriptions related to Hadrian were found together with the statue (Fossey 1979, 568–570; Birley 1997, 186); the city honored Hadrian and Antoninus Pius because of the special care taken
Remembering classical Greece 211
during their principates to control flooding of the neighboring lake Kopais. For the city, see Hansen-Nielsen 2004, 444–445, s.v. Koroneia. For the use of the Ares Borghese statuary type in official imperial portraiture, see Papazapheiriou 2004, 139–144. Recently, a (probably) late Antonine statue of an emperor in heroic nudity, wearing the corona civica, from the Roman colony of Patras was exhibited in the local Museum (inv. 38: Kolonas and Stavropoulou-Gatsi 2017, 118–119, fig. 126). It was discovered in a large Roman building in the city, at the junction of 205 Maizonos and Trion Nauarchon streets (Serapeion[?]; Petropoulos 2009, 63), and follows the Argos Hadrian statuary type (see below, notes 46–47). 44 Argos Museum inv. 90: Karanastasi 1995, 212–213, 226, pl. 57α; Aristodemou 2012, 178, 253, cat. no 9, pl.2.3; Nogales 2011, cat. no. 14, pl. 11 (Trajan Divus); Vitti 2018, 291, figs. 16–17 with bibliography (with his right hand he crowned himself with the corona civica). For the Argos Nymphaeum, see also Aristodemou 2012, 70; 252–253; 287. For Hadrian’s visit to the city, a member of the Panhellenion, his benefactions toward it, and the local celebration of the Antinoeia: Karanastasi 1995, note 23; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, note 48. 45 A marble scabbard in the same scale was found together with the statue, almost certainly belonging to it (l. 0,57m., w. 0,10m.). 46 Maderna 1988, 56–80, pls. 18–25 (Diomedes, king of Argos; idem 196–215 for the type). 47 Karanastasi 1995, 212; Papazapheiriou 2004, 127–138 (generic “naked-ruler” type – second group); Nogales 2011, 110–125, cat. nos. 9–16 (“Herrscher” type, identified as Trajan Divus/Optimus princeps; all examples Hadrianic in date). See also Hallett 2005, 159–222 (heroic nudity as a symbol of courage, military prowess, and civic virtue; idem for representations of Hadrian). 48 Karanastasi 1995, 213. Another example comes from the scaenae frons of the theatre of Corinth (Sturgeon 2004, 103–106, cat. no. 14, pls. 27–28), while a fragment of the torso of a colossal nude statue found in the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens has also been tentatively identified as another representation of the emperor in heroic nudity (Camia et al. 2018, 480, fig. 4). 49 Hadrian’s first visit as emperor to the province of Achaea in 124 constituted the starting point of a new dating system (“new age”): Katakis 2002, note 561 with further bibliography. Revision of the Athenian constitution and festival calendar: Follet 1976, 355; Palagia 2008, 228; Skotheim in this volume. In the same year, after the emperor presided at the festival of the Great Dionysia, the twelve citizen tribes of Athens dedicated statues to him in the theatre (Evers 1994, 31, 42, 48). On the Hadrianis tribe: Notopoulos 1946 (creation in 126/7 and inauguration in the 127/8 tribal cycle); Birley 1997, 177 (124 CE); LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 32 [M.R. Luberto], 72 [F. Camia], 100 [D. Russo]. Ajax was already an Athenian eponymous hero. On Hadrian’s visit to the Peloponnese in 124/5: Birley 1997, 178–179; Ajootian 2014; Lo Monaco 2014; Destephen 2019. 50 Philostratus, On Heroes, 8.1; Birley 1997, 164 (following Alexander’s footsteps); Rose 2014, 247–248, 254. See also Kouremenos forthcoming. 51 Strabo 13.1.30; Rose 2014, 248. 52 Cf. LIMC I (1981), s.v. Aias I, 314 (Ajax as a model of imperial virtue; cf. Vout 2003, 451–452, 457 [Diomedes as a paradigm for the emperor]). A close variant of the type was used for a portrait of Trajan, of Hadrianic date, in Italica, Trajan’s and Hadrian’s hometown (Karanastasi 1995, note 26; Papazapheiriou
212 Panagiotis Konstantinidis
2004, 134, 282–283, cat. no. ΓΗ12; Nogales 2011, cat. no. 9). The use of the type for portraits of Antoninus Pius (Maderna 1988, 79, 183, 214, 216, cat. no. UD2, 243; Papazapheiriou 2004, 134, 279, cat. no. ΓΗ7) must be linked to the 900th anniversary of Rome’s foundation in 147 (note 2), which put emphasis on the legendary history of the city and led to renewed interest in the city of Ilium (Rose 2014, 254–255). 53 For the importance of heroic cults in the Second Sophistic, see Galli 2012b. 54 Tripoli Museum, 130–138: Spyropoulos 2006, 106, fig. 16; Calandra and Adembri 2014, 152–153, cat. no. 18 (G. Spyropoulos); Spyropoulos forthcoming. 55 Smith and Melfi 2018, 65, fig. 32. 56 Antinous-Perseus (the Medusa killer): Galli 2012b, 528–529, fig. 3. In this case, we must assume the existence of a helmet, otherwise concealed by the youth’s hair. 57 Kienast 1996, 133· Smith and Melfi 2018, 11. 58 HA., Hadr. 14.5–7; Dio Cass., 69.11.3–4; Birley 1997, 235–258. 59 Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, 93, note 54. Antinous was buried in Antinoopolis (Epiphan., Ancyr., 106c), while it has been suggested that after the return of Hadrian to Rome in 133/134 his mummy was transported to Italy, where a monumental shrine (mausoleum?) was built in his honor in Hadrian’s private villa at Tivoli (Mari and Sgalambro 2007; Mari 2012); contra Renberg 2010; Calandra 2018, 254. 60 Meyer 1991, 251–260; Birley 1997, 253; Galli 2012a. In Athens and Eleusis, his cult is attested until 255/256 (Meyer 1991, 243 with note 5). 61 Antinous portraiture: Meyer 1991 (review: Goette 1998); Vout 2005 (review: Fittschen 2010, 244–246); Söldner 2010; Cadario 2012; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2014–2015. 62 The cult’s popularity in the eastern part of the Empire is also exemplified by several surviving private portraits in the guise of Antinous: Fittschen 1999, 80ff, nos. 1–13, pls. 130–133; also Goette 2001 (Aidepsos; contra: Smith and Melfi 2018, fig. 17; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2019, 306 [Antinous]). 63 Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, 92–93. 64 Dekoulakou 2011 (two portraits from the sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods in Herodes Atticus’ estate in Marathon); Tobin 1997, 345, no. 1 (from Herodes Atticus’ villa in Loukou, Arcadia). 65 Meyer 1991, 39–42, no. Ι17, pls. 16, 24.17; Galli 2001, 66–67, pls. 10.1.4; Lippolis 2006, 254, 273, 276. On Hadrian’s and Antinous’ initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries and the posthumous festival of the Antinoeia in Eleusis: Clinton 1989b, 1516–1518, 1523; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, 95; Camia in this volume. 66 Sturgeon 2004, 128–131, cat. no. 25, pls. 40–41 (scaenae frons of the theater). 67 Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018. 68 Paus. 8.9.8; also note 72. 69 Galli 2012b, 526 with notes 22–23, 528 (seated cult-statue from the villa’s Antinoeion, a Greek parallel for Hadrian’s Antinoeion in his private villa at Tivoli – see note 59; for Herodes’ villa, see also Spyropoulos 2006; Palagia 2010, 433, 435, 440; note 64). 70 Meyer 1991, 204f, 251; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2014–2015, 208–209. 71 See notes 53 and note 72; Kennell in this volume. 72 Athens: Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018, 142 (C. De Domenico), 146–165 (Hadrian and the Athens Gymnasia). Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2019 (statuette of Antinous [130–138CE] as the representative of the ephebes, the patron
Remembering classical Greece 213
hero of the gymnasium, from probably an “antiquities gallery” of a private residence of the 3rd century CE, excavated at 31 Ermou Street, Athens). Mantineia (the local cult was founded by Hadrian): Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2014–2015, 91, note 39, 208, 209; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, 92, with note 41. 73 Delphi Museum, inv. 1718, 130–138 CE: Meyer 1991, 36–38, cat. no. I15, pls. 13–15; see also Galli 2012a. 74 Aurigny et al. 2015–2016, 794 (Göktepe marble); see also note 78. 75 On the School and its floruit under Hadrian: Floriani Squarciapino 1943; Kleiner 1992, 16; 246; 261; 265. 76 Rome, Banca Nazionale Romana (permanent loan to the Capitoline Museums): Meyer 1991, 96–98, cat. no. I75. 77 I.e. the statues of the two centaurs signed by the artists (possibly copies of Hellenistic originals), Rome, Musei Capitolini, inv. nos. MC0656 and MC0658: LIMC VIII (1997) s.v. Kentauroi - Kentaurides, 697, no. 303 and 719, no. 483 (Th. Sengelin); Morawietz 2005. 78 Evers 1994, 348. See also Bruno et al. 2013 (use of Aphrodisian marbles at Tivoli). 79 Landwehr 2000, 1–12, cat. no. 67 (the Roman prototype is dated to the period of Tiberius or Claudius); for convincing arguments against considering the type as the model for a proposed single archetype or Ur-Antinous, see StephanidouTiveriou 2014–2015, 206–207 with notes 48–49; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, 89–90. 80 Petridis 2005, 195–196, 204; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2018, 91, note 40. On late antique “galleries”: Konstantinidis 2019, 282–283; Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2019, 307–308 (see note 73). For representations of Antinous on local bronze coins as heros propylaios, see RPC III, nos. 442–444. 81 Swain 1991, esp. 322–324; Birley 1997, 186–187, 192; Galli 2008, 84–85. 82 One more possible example comes from the sculptural decoration of the Corinth theater (Sturgeon 2004, 180–182, cat. no. 68, pl. 62a–b; mantle portrait statue of an emperor or donor). 83 Beaujeu 1955, 298–299; Pernot 2008 with further bibliography; LagogianniGeorgakarakos and Papi 2018, 91–92 (M. Chiara Monaco). 84 Paus. 8.43; see also Mitropoulos in this volume. 85 Oliver 1970, 92–138; Spawforth and Walker 1985, 98–103; Miles 2014; Mitropoulos in this volume; also note 43. The emperors’ special interest in Athens as a continuation of Hadrianic tradition is best exemplified by the use for their representation of the bust type with the Zeus figures on the shoulder straps created by Athenian workshops for Hadrian (note 18; also Strocka 2012–2013 [the male figures with lower extremities in serpentine form are interpreted here as representations of Cecrops, the mythical first king of Athens]; Smith and Melfi 2018, 94 [Tritons]; see also Stephanidou-Tiveriou 2002, 315–316 – idem for the use of the type also for Septimius Severus). 86 Clinton 1989b, 1531. A portrait of the emperor appears in the central medallion of the “Great Propylaia” of the Sanctuary (Giraud 1991, 132; Strocka 2012– 2013, 292B). In 162, Lucius Verus was also initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries as a guest of Herodes Atticus (Follet 1976, 135; Clinton 1989b, 1529–1530). 87 Graindor 1930, 137–177; Mitropoulos in this volume. As is well known, he used the Greek language for his philosophical writings. 88 Camia 2011, 81; Mitropoulos in this volume. It is also possible that the adoption of the feature of the anastole in Marcus’ fourth portrait-type (“Imperatori 38”:
214 Panagiotis Konstantinidis Albertson 2004 with bibliography [Iuppiter triumphator]) alluded to Alexander’s military victories in the East, the occasion for the type’s creation being – as suggested – his triumph over the Parthians, celebrated in October 166. 89 Follet 1976, 138. 90 Clinton 1989a, 58–63; Clinton 1989b, 1519–1520, 1533; Willers 1996, 184–189, 190–191; Fittschen 1999, 122–125 (170–182 CE); Clinton 2005–2008, cat. nos. 505–510; Konstantinidis forthcoming. Also Giraud 1991, 127, fig. 49 (western Arch). 91 Only the base of the portrait from the eastern monumental arch survives; see Camia in this volume, fig. 5, with note 70 (IG II2, 3386 = Clinton 2005–2008, no. 453). 92 Clinton 2005–2008, nos. 506, 510. 93 Bol 1984; Hitzl and Kropp 2013, 65–85; Alexandridis 2016, 739–740; Gkikaki 2016, 137–139. 94 Tobin 1997; Galli 2002. 95 Olympia Museum inv. Λ155: Bol 1984, 173–175, cat. no. 37, pls. 35–37; Alexandridis 2004, 188–189, cat. no. 192, pl. 40.2; Konstantinidis forthcoming. 96 On the type: Alexandridis 2004, 238–243; Daehner 2007, esp. 90–91; Dillon 2010, 82–86; Trimble 2011. On statuary types used for official female imperial portraiture in Greece: Konstantinidis forthcoming. 97 Bol 1984, cat. nos. 36, 38–39. 98 Portraits Bol 1984, cat. nos. 36, 38, 40, 42 and, possibly, 39 and 41 of different statuary types and essentially in the same scale are interchangeable. See also Alexandridis 2004, 215, 216, 239 no. 27, 241 no. 88, 260 no. 13; Hitzl and Kropp 2013, 69–70, 71, 77; Konstantinidis forthcoming. 99 The imperial cult was essentially an ideological tool of political significance aiming to facilitate the acceptance of the imperial authority by its subjects and, thus, to enhance the cohesion of the Empire. Benefiting from the already evolved traditions of the Hellenistic world for dynastic cult, the emperor was considered a god among people, worthy of worship in life (deus/theos) and after death (divus/ theos). On the meaning and function of the imperial cult in general: Clauss 1999; ThesCRA II (2004) 192–193 s.v. “3d. III. B. Roman Apotheosis 2.b.i. Emperors and their Family” (I. Gradel). On its importance for provincial civic elites and its incorporation into local panthea, see the contributions of F. Camia, M. Galli, F. Kirbihler and M. Kantiréa in Rizakis and Camia 2008; Camia 2016. 100 Without inv. no.: Kourouniotes 1936, 95–96; Clinton 1997, 170 (Livia[?]; the author’s view is repeated without discussion in Camia 2011, 201; see also Lo Monaco 2008, 56); Papaggeli 2002, 231, 217 (figures). 101 Kourouniotes 1936, 68, 95–96; Mylonas 1961, 183 (L32); Clinton 1997, 170, 172, fig. 3; Lo Monaco 2008, 56; Camia 2011, 201–202; Konstantinidis forthcoming. 102 See examples in Tüchelt 1981; Price 1984, 133–169; also Lo Monaco 2008, 56–62; Evangelidis 2008. 103 Eleusis Museum, inv. 5268 (late[?] principate of Claudius): Goette 1990: 38–39, 125, cat. no. 248, pl. 11.1; Havé Nikolaus 1998, 98–106, cat. no. 10, pl. 8.2. 104 Eleusis Museum inv. 5086 (late principate of Caligula/ early[?] principate of Claudius): Goette 1990, 34, note 147i, 38–39, 125, pl. 11.2 (portrait statue of Caligula remodeled as Claudius); Havé Nikolaus 1998, 94–98, cat. no. 9, pl. 8.1. 105 Cf. Goette 1990, 115, cat. no. Ba 32, pl. 6.3, 94.1 (Augustus from the Via Labicana in Rome); Boschung 1993, 176–177, cat. no. 165, pls. 80, 148.8, 214.1. 106 Contra: Boschung 2002, 111.
Remembering classical Greece 215 107 Cf. the female portrait statue from the Nyphaeum at Olympia, Bol 1984, cat. no. 41 (149–153 CE); Katakis in this volume, Figure 12.9 and the rendering of the folds at the back of the male mantle statue from the Athenian Agora, Harrison 1953, cat. no. 57 (Antonine period), very similar to the V folds of the peplos on the right of the Eleusis statue. More detailed stylistic analysis in Konstantinidis forthcoming. 108 Comella 2002, nos. Eleusi 1–2, Eleusi 4–7, Eleusi 13, Eleusi 19. 109 IG II2, 3585 (neotera; Hadrianic); contra: Clinton 1989b, 1523 with note 118; Camia 2011, 63–65; but no alternative identification is proposed for an almost certain case of imperial god-assimilation. In favor of the identification of the sanctuary’s so-called “temple F” as a temple of the deified Sabina: Kourouniotes and Travlos 1933–1935, 72–75, 98–99, 101, 114, with fig. 10; Mylonas 1961, 175–177. Contra: Lindner 1982, 395–396 (after 170 CE); Clinton 1989b, 1523 with note 118 (treasury); Cosmopoulos 2015, 150–151 (conjectural identification). For Sabina’s posthumous portrait type which follows generic iconographical models of Greek goddesses: Fittschen and Zanker 1983, cat. no. 10, with replica catalogue (K. Fittschen). On the “Ceres” statue type, popular for representations of Sabina in the West, see Alexandridis 2004, 229–231. See also Brennan 2018. 110 Clinton 1989a; Clinton 1989b, 1516–1525; Giraud 1991, 115–129; Birley 1997, 175–176, 215–216; Galli 2013, 277–286; Lippolis 2013, 248–264; also Evers 1994, 273–277 (Hadrian Renatus); note 65. 111 On Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and Eleusis: Clinton 1989b, 1530–1534; Mitropoulos in this volume; see also note 86. 112 “Temple L10”: Kourouniotes and Travlos 1933–1935, 66, 67–71, figs. 3, 5–9; Mylonas 1961, 177–181; Giraud 1991, 280; Lippolis 2006, 199–205 (post 170 CE). Cf. also the representation of Faustina I as Ceres/Demeter following Eleusinian iconography (as attested, again, in Greek Classical votive reliefs) – and not in the “Ceres type” – on the obverse of the aureus Beckmann 2012, 58–61, figs. 48–49 (141 C.E.). 113 The same is probably true for at least one of the variants of Antinous’ only head-type.
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Remembering classical Greece 221 Post, A. (2004). Römische Hüftmantelstatuen. Studien zur Kopistentätigkeit um die Zeitenwende. Münster. Price, S.R.F. (1984). Rituals and Power. The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge and New York. Renberg, G.H. (2010). “Hadrian and the Oracles of Antinous (SHA Hadr. 14.7); with an Appendix on the So-Called Antinoeion at Hadrian’s Villa and Rome’s Monte Pincio Obelisk”, MAAR 55, 159–198. Richter, D.S., and Johnson, W.A. (2017). The Oxford Ηandbook of the Second Sophistic. New York. Rizakis, A.D., and Camia, F. eds. (2008). Pathways to Power: Civic Elites in the Eastern Part of the Roman Empire. Proceedings of the International Workshop Held at Athens, Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, 19 December 2005. Athens. Rose, C.B. 2014. The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy. New York. RPC III = Amandry, M., Burnett, A., and Mairat, J. eds. 2015. Roman Provincial Coinage III. Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96–138), London and Paris. Schröder, T. (2011). “Portratstiliseirungen der lokalen Eliten in Athen im 2. Und 3. H. Kontinuitat oder Umbruch in severischer Zeit? Mit einem Beitrag zur kaiselichen Selbstdarstellung des Jahres 193.” In S. Faust, and F. Leitmeir eds., Reprasen tationsformen in severischer Zeit, Berlin, 34–76. ——— (2012). “Im Angesichte Roms. Uberlegungen zu kaiserzeitlichen mannlichen Portrats aus Athen, Thessaloniki und Korinth.” In Th. Stephanidou-Tiveriou, P. Karanastasi, and D. Damaskos eds., Κλασική παράδοση και νεωτερικά στοιχεία στην πλαστική της Ρωμαϊκής Ελλάδας. Πρακτικά Διεθνούς Συνεδρίου Θεσσαλονίκη, 7–9 Μαΐου 2009. Thessaloniki, 497–511. Smith, R.R.R. (1985). “Roman Portraits: Honours, Empresses, and Late Emperors,” JRS 75, 209–221. ——— (1998). “Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century AD,” JRS 88, 56–93. Smith, R.R.R., and Melfi, M. eds., (2018). Antinous: Boy Made God (Exhibition Catalogue), Oxford. Söldner, M. (2010). “Die Bildhauerkunst während der Regierungszeit des Hadrian (117–138 n. Chr.).” In P.C. Bol ed., Die Geschichte der antiken Bildhauerkunst IV. Plastik der römischen Kaiserzeit bis zum Tode Kaiser Hadrians. Mainz, 215–236. Spawforth, A.J. (1999). “The Panhellenion Again,” Chiron 29, 339–352. Spawforth, A.J., and Walker, S. (1985). “The World of the Panhellenion. I. Athens and Eleusis,” JRS 75, 78–104. ——— (1986). “The World of the Panhellenion. 2. Three Dorian Cities,” JRS 76, 88–105. Spyropoulos, G. (2006). Η Έπαυλη του Ηρώδη Αττικού στην Εύα/Λουκού Κυνουρίας, Athens. ——— (forthcoming). Appropriation and Synthesis in the Villa of Herodes at Eva (Loukou), Greece, Los Angeles (Egypt–Greece–Rome: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Antiquity). Steinhauer, G. (2000). “O αρχαίος Πειραιάς. Η πόλη του Θεμιστοκλή και του Ιπποδάμου.” In Πειραιάς. Κέντρο ναυτιλίας και πολιτισμού. Athens, 9–123. Stephanidou-Tiveriou, Th. (2002). “Septimius Severus, divi Marci Pii filius. Eine Büste in Thessaloniki,” AM 117, 299–320. ——— (2009). “Les héros de Palatiano. Une nouvelle proposition de restitution et d’interprétation du groupe statuaire,” BCH 133, 345–387.
222 Panagiotis Konstantinidis ——— (2012). “Τα λατρευτικά αγάλματα του ναού του Διός και της Ρώμης στη Θεσσαλονίκη.” In Th. Stephanidou-Tiveriou, P. Karanastasi, and D. Damaskos eds., Κλασική παράδοση και νεωτερικά στοιχεία στην πλαστική της Ρωμαϊκής Ελλάδας. Πρακτικά Διεθνούς Συνεδρίου Θεσσαλονίκη, 7–9 Μαΐου 2009. Thessaloniki, 273–286. ——— (2014–2015). “Die griechischen Büsten des Antinoos. Zum Beitrag der griechischen Werkstätten zur offiziellen römischen Ikonographie,” AM 129–130, 197–216. ——— (2018). “Antinous and the Lerna Mysteries. A marble statue from the sanctuary of Demeter Prosymna and Dionysos at Lerna/Argolis.” In M. Fuchs ed., Ahoros Gedenkschrift für Hugo Meyer von Weggefährten, Kollegen und Freunden, Sonderdruck. Wien, 87–105. ——— (2019). “Αντίνοος ἔφηβος. Το αγαλμάτιο από την Αθήνα, οδός Ερμού 31, και τα συνευρήματά του.” In H.R. Goette, and I. Leventi eds., Αριστεία. Μελέλτες προς τιμήν της Όλγας Παλαγγιά. Rahden, 301–315. Stewart, A. (1993). Faces of Power. Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics. Berkeley. Strocka, V.M. (2012–2013). “Hadrian and Cecrops,” AM 127–128, 289–305. Sturgeon, M.C. (2004). Sculpture: The Assemblage from the Theatre. Corinth. Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens IX.3. Princeton. Swain, S. (1991). “Plutarch, Hadrian, and Delphi,” Historia 40, 318–330. Syme, R. (1988). “Journeys of Hadrian,” ZPE 73, 159–170. Tobin, J. (1997). Herodes Attikos and the City of Athens. Patronage and Conflict under the Antonines. Amsterdam. Trimble, C.J. (2011). Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture. Cambridge. Tsalkanis, D., Kanellopoulos, C., and Tsatsaroni, L. (2019). “Εικονική περιήγηση στον χώρο του Ολυμπιείου,” Θέματα Αρχαιολογίας 3 (2), 174–193. Tüchelt, K. (1981). “Zum Problem ‘Kaisareion–Sebasteion’,” ΑΜ 31, 167–186. Vitti, P. (2018). “Il ninfeo adrianeo di Argo,” ASAtene 96, 275–299. Von Eickstedt, K.V. (1991). Beitrage zur Topographie des antiken Piräus, Athens. Von Moock, D.W. (1998). Die figürlichen Grabstelen Attikas in der Kaiserzeit. Studien zur Verbeitung, Chronologie, Typologie und Ikonographie. Mainz. Vout, C. (2003). “A Revision of Hadrian’s Portraiture.” In L. de Blos et al. eds., The Representation and Reception of Roman Imperial Power. Proceedings of the Third Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Roman Empire c. 200 B.C.– A.D. 476). Netherlands Institute in Rome, March 20–23, 2002. Amsterdam, 442–457. ——— (2005). “Antinous. Archaeology and History,” JRS 95, 80–96. Whitmarsh, T. ed. (2010). Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. Cambridge. Willers, D. (1990). Hadrians panhellenistisches Programm, Basel. ——— (1996). “Der Vorplatz des Heiligtums von Eleusis. Überlegungen zur Neugestaltung im 2. Jahrhundert n.Chr.” In M. Flashar, H.J. Gehrke, and E. Heinrich eds., Retrospektive: Konzepte von Vergangenheit in der griechisch-römischen Antike. Munich, 179–225. Woolf, G. (1994). “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” PCPS 40, 116–143. Wrede, H. (1981). Consecratio in formam deorum. Vergöttliche Privatpersonen in der römischen Kaiserzeit. Mainz. Zanker, P. (1995). “Brüche im Bürgerbild? Zur bürgerlichen Selbstdarstellung in den hellenistischen Städten.” In M. Wörrle, and P. Zanker eds., Stadtbild und Bürgerbild im Hellenismus: Kolloquium, München, 24. bis 26. Juni 1993. Munich, 251–273.
11 Between the local past and a global phenomenon Isiaca in 2nd-century Achaea Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino
Introduction The sacred landscape of Roman Achaea was created through a variety of human interactions including, among others, Greeks, Romans, merchants arriving at various ports, and soldiers crossing the land. These groups adopted a religious behavior that highlighted traditions of the past, but also introduced new cultic elements. Specific sites, rituals, and artifacts served as lieux de mémoire and formed part of the religious expression of individuals active in 2nd century Achaea.1 This paper examines the religious experience, practices, and material remains – architectural and sculptural forms, styles, iconographic attributes – as reflected in the Isiac deities in 2nd century Achaea. These reveal features that were employed by individuals and groups for communication with these specific divinities.2 The term Isiac describes aspects that concern the cult of a dozen divine figures belonging to the same mythological circle; among them are Anubis, Harpocrates, Horus, Isis, Osiris, and Serapis. These deities originated in the Nile valley and are found outside Egypt from the 4th century BCE onwards.3 They first appeared in Greece in 333 BCE in the port of Piraeus,4 where merchants from Citium in Cyprus were permitted to build a temple of Aphrodite as the Egyptians had already built a temple of Isis. By the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods, the Isiac deities proliferated not only in Attica but also in the Greek mainland and the Aegean.5 The available evidence suggests that the largest number of artifacts relevant to the cult of Isis date to the 2nd century CE.6 The spread of the Isiac cult (Figure 11.1) may have originated from trade,7 but it benefited from the characterization of Isis as a myrionymus goddess: she was a wife, mother, and protector of agriculture and navigation. Over time, in addition to Isis, other divinities of the same circle acquired features and common characteristics attributed to local deities. Thus, they gradually became part of the local pantheon of each city. In the Greek landscape, in general, connections to Demeter, Aphrodite, Eileithyia, and Asclepius were common. This chapter focuses on the connections between Isiac deities and their devotees, often including in their relationship local divinities as well. The main question that will be addressed – and that pertains to the theme of DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-14
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Figure 11.1 Isiac presence in Roman Achaea. Source: (D. Maikidou-Poutrino).
the relationship between the Roman present and the past in the province of Achaea – is how the incorporation of the Egyptian Isiac deities in the local religious system was perceived by individuals and groups in Roman Achaea. In what follows, I present a few cases that demonstrate the influence of the past in the engagement of individuals with the Isiac cults in 2nd century Achaea. I focus on rituals, material culture, and archaeological remains as memory objects. The first case study explores the sanctuary of the Egyptian gods in Marathon and the iconographic choices of its patron, Herodes Atticus, a Roman citizen of Greek origin who included the Isiac cults in his estates. Hadrian is also a figure that is worth mentioning, mainly because he served as a role model for Herodes, but also as a Roman emperor who made a great effort to revive Greek art and culture and also funded buildings with Egyptian influence. The second case study examines the Isiac rituals at Tithorea in Phocis. I shed light on the archaeological investigations in the area as well as on the rituals described by Pausanias. His accounts provide valuable information about the Isiac cult sites and practices in the middle of the 2nd century, but also offer glimpses into the co-existence of Egyptiac
Between local past and a global phenomenon 225 deities with local ones. These case studies lead to a general discussion on how the sacred past affected the formation of the religious present. In the 2nd century, Egyptian and Greek deities co-existed under Roman rule; as a result, the collective historical nostalgia that characterized this century led to the inclusion of aspects of foreign cults in the local religious past. Finally, I consider how Isiaca were understood and incorporated as part of this social memory in a century during which populations in the Greek provinces were preoccupied with their pre-Hellenistic past.8
Herodes Atticus and the Sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods in Marathon In order to understand the reasons behind the foundation of the sanctuary of the Egyptian gods in Marathon, it is important to discern who Herodes, its patron, was. Philostratus, in his Lives of the Sophists, states that he was born between 101 and 103 CE and was educated in Athens, tutored by some of the best philosophical minds of the day. He became a leading intellectual of the mid-2nd century and tutored the future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.9 Although he lived in the Roman period and was not opposed to the realities of the Roman present, he was deeply concerned about main taining the Greek past, displaying what has been described as “a predilection for antiquity and archaism, and this predilection extended from East to West, dominating the literary activity of Greeks and Romans”.10 Three of the sites he inhabited – Eva-Loukou, Kephisia, and Marathon – are attested archaeologically today.11 I shall focus mainly on Marathon since Herodes had a particularly strong connection to the area: he was born there, his family claimed descent from the Athenian general Miltiades, and his will reflected his decision to be buried there, probably due to his admiration for the classical past of his ancestors.12 At the same site, he commissioned the building of the sanctuary of the Egyptian deities in the mid-2nd century which, according to Philostratus, facilitated his teaching and philosophical activities. In one account, he promises to meet a new pupil, Agathion, at the Temple of Canopus in Marathon.13 Other indications of his teaching activity are found in a fragment of the correspondence of Marcus Aurelius, which mentions that Herodes lived in his Attic villas of Marathon and Kephisia, where he invited young men to hear his orations.14 The sanctuary has the form of a precinct and consists of two connected courtyards built in a marshy area with manmade canals (Figure 11.2).15 The devotees would enter from the east court, which had direct access to the sea. Its south portico contained three rooms; the middle room had ritual and dining facilities and included benches along the walls and an exedra decorated with sculptures.16 The second court consisted of the temple enclosed by an almost quadrilateral peribolos. In the middle of each side, oriented to the four cardinal points, there was an entrance in the form of an Egyptian pylon. Each doorway was framed by four statues – two male and two female – on high bases. This combination of male and female created an arrangement that emphasized the
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Figure 11.2 Plan of the sanctuary. Source: (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica).
Egyptian origins of the cult, reminiscent of the reliefs in the pylons of Egyptian temples. These entrances led through a paved walkway to the central construction of the sanctuary, a terrace with a cryptoporticus and an upper structure which, perhaps, alluded to the formation of an Egyptian landscape.17 Each of the four staircases leading to the terrace was flanked by small rooms. Although there are features that allude to Egypt, there is no parallel for this architectural complex among sanctuaries dedicated to Egyptian deities.18 The four statues decorated each entrance pylon, two internally and two externally, one male and one female. From a total of sixteen statues found on the site, only three female (from the interior north,19 south, and west pylons) and five male survive.20 All the statues are made of marble, joined to the pillar at their back, and are represented in monumental dimensions in a hieratic pose, with the left leg advancing and the arms down, stretched and attached to the body. The female statues represented the goddess Isis wearing a long
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Figure 11.3 Statue of Isis, south pylon. Source: (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica).
chiton and a single-pieced, long-sleeved narrow garment. Her hairstyle consists of wavy locks of hair parted in the middle, kept in place with a fillet.21 Except for these common features, each statue is unique.22 At the south pylon, Isis (Figure 11.3) wears a basileion;23 her forehead is decorated with a uraeus with a twisted tail, and she holds ears of wheat in her hands.24 The latter constitute a global symbol of Isis as such representations are prevalent in various parts of the Roman Empire.25 She is identified as a goddess responsible for the rebirth of nature and the protection of agricultural activities, which in Egypt emanated from the floods of the Nile. In Greece, the deity associated with such activities was Demeter. The identification between these two divine figures had already been expressed by Herodotus.26 Herodes’ devotion to Demeter is evident in his involvement in the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis, while his wife Regilla served as priestess of Demeter Chamyne at Olympia in 153.27 Furthermore, Herodes’ role as agonothetes (an office associated with the Panhellenion) would have brought him into direct contact with Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, continuing his family’s tradition of involvement with the sanctuary.28 In addition, votive lamps from the sanctuary reflect a ritual for honoring the goddess as mistress of nature, and are generally associated with the mystic character of the cult.29 At the west pylon (Figure 11.4), Isis wears a kalathos and holds three roses in each hand. This flower was highly symbolic in the cultic practices of the deity. In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, Lucius eats roses during the procession at Cenchreae, regaining his human form as a rite of passage in order to become a member of the Isiac cult.30 Other representations of the Egyptian
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Figure 11.4 Statue of Isis, west pylon. Source: (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica).
goddess holding roses in her hands have not been identified, but elsewhere Isis is represented wearing garlands of flowers, such as in examples from Messene,31 Corinth,32 Gortyn,33 and Athens.34 In antiquity, roses were mainly associated with Aphrodite, thus suggesting an identification between the two goddesses.35 A fourth statue of Isis from this sanctuary was discovered in the southwest room of the cryptoporticus (Figure 11.5). The depiction of the goddess follows the posture of the other sculptures even though differences are evident in her clothes. She is portrayed in the characteristic fringed himation tied up with the Isiac knot.36 In a unique iconographical representation, her left hand holds and lifts the himation at the height of her chest, while her right hand grips a folded ribbon falling unequally on each side.37 The statues of Isis have been described by the excavator as “eclectic works of art that combine archaistic and classicistic elements”, as opposed to the Egyptianizing elements of the sanctuary.38 The frontal pose, the arms attached to the body, the left leg that advances one step forward, the features of the face with its smile, and the hairstyle are all characteristics shared by the korai of the Late Archaic Period. Yet there are aspects of the Classical style as well, such as the transparent drapery over the navel. Furthermore, stylistic traits associated with portraiture of the Antonine period are evident in the contrast between the luxuriant hairstyle and the smooth characteristics of the face.39 The male statues standing in front of the pylons of the sanctuary have been interpreted as depictions of Osiris and also share common iconographic features; only one of them wears a kalathos, differentiating it from the others (Figure 11.6). Their common features consist of the shendyt, the Egyptian
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Figure 11.5 Statue of Isis, room of the lamps. Source: (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica).
Figure 11.6 Male statue. Source: (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica).
230 Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino wig, the uraeus on the forehead, and the similar cylindrical objects held in their hands.40 These statues also employ an archaistic style, establishing the relationship of the god with the past, but also emphasize their sacredness to visitors,41 thus creating a balance between the female and male sculptures. Nonetheless, a comparison between the statues of Isis and Osiris suggests that the male statues aggregate more Egyptian features, while the female ones are closer to Archaic templates.42 Other Aegyptiaca found in the sanctuary are a sphinx and four statues of Horus as a falcon.43 The sphinx is represented seated, with the front legs outstretched, wearing an Egyptian headdress with a uraeus above the forehead. Sphinxes of this type would likely have framed the processional corridors leading to the temple,44 as in the Serapeion C at Delos. Herodes Atticus chose this motif for the decoration of his villa at Eva-Loukou in Arcadia.45 Since sphinxes were an easily recognizable motif, they often decorated cultic and private spaces related to Egypt around the Mediterranean. They were one of the most common Roman-created Aegyptiaca and were included in wall paintings, gemstones, sculpture in the round, and in various other artifacts.46 The artifacts mentioned above may be understood as material representations of the intellectual ideas of the Second Sophistic that Herodes had in mind. Orators would skillfully use ambiguity and equivocation in order to make relevant to the present a topic belonging to the Greek past of the 5th and 4th century BCE.47 The sanctuary allows us to consider how text, image, religion, and philosophy intersected in Roman Greece. The literary and rhetorical archaism of the Second Sophistic could not be isolated from other fields of cultural activity, such as art and architecture.48 Archaic forms were thought to possess a special religious aura and were considered holy and hieratic.49 Herodes chose to use these forms and also incorporated Egyptian deities. The result would manipulate the experience of the visitors; when entering the sanctuary, they “travelled” from the 2nd century CE to the realm of myth-history.50 Furthermore, the funding of public buildings in locations with a deep past like Olympia and the Acropolis of Athens demonstrates the value that these places held in Herodes’ world. Marathon, his birthplace, was a site highly charged with memory. Additionally, he played a strong role in the reactivation of the memory of the Persian Wars. The presence of a stela belonging to the Polyandreion of Marathon, found in his villa in Eva-Loukou, underlines this activity. Furthermore, only a short distance north of the tumulus known as the monument of the Athenians in Marathon, a portrait of Herodes was found alongside portraits of Polydeuces, his foster-son, and the empress Faustina the Younger. It is likely that these sculptures were part of a monumental context related to the monument of the battle.51 It is safe to assume that he used this site that held significance for the past in service to the present perception of Greece. Despite the Egyptian origin of the statues, their style was an attempt to bring the foreign deities closer to the Greek past and, at the same time, to syncretize features of the local deities and Isis. Material culture and architecture would be the chosen visual means
Between local past and a global phenomenon 231 used to bridge the features of the present with the Greek past, as in other cases, the same aim would be achieved through literature, coins, or burial practices. Despite the Egyptian origin of the cult, the representation of these deities was altered according to local customs and beliefs. Herodes understood the Egyptian deities through a different prism, connecting Isis with Hellenic goddesses in order to create an allusion with the archaic and classical world whose revival he espoused.52 Focusing on the philosophical dimension of this creation, Plutarch and his work De Iside et Osiride should be taken into account. Herodes’ sanctuary and the work of Plutarch express similar philosophical ideas; the latter employed Egyptian mythology as an allegory in order to approach philosophical themes on metaphors for the unified nature of divinity. This concept was applied frequently by intellectuals in the Graeco-Roman period. Thus, it can be argued that Herodes used the Sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods as a space for the examination of this theology that represented Isis as the female principle in nature.53 As Mazurek notes, the sanctuary visualized a henotheistic theology of Isis and Osiris focusing on unity, multiplicity, and knowability. The architecture of the complex, with its unusual format, would encourage the viewer to see the sanctuary and its images as an exploration of Middle Platonic theology and the global nature of the Isiac cult. The sanctuary’s symmetrical organization would not be lost on individuals who stood in it, and the Isiac statues would highlight the ability of the divine to take multiple forms, all aspects of Middle Platonic theology.54 The sanctuary at Marathon is not the only one of Herodes’ estates where his interest in Isiaca is evident. His villa in Eva-Loukou has yielded Egyptianizing statues of fluvial deities, probably identified with the Nile, situated in a monumental space called Serapeion by the excavator due to the architectural resemblance to the Hadrianic construction at Tivoli, and the presence of fragments of a statue of Isis, an Egyptianizing statue of Osiris (perhaps an Osiris-Antinous), and a headless sphinx.55 Although the source of interest for these facets of Egyptian culture remains unclear, the reasons for such choices should be sought in Hadrian’s influence on the public behavior of Herodes.56 As a result, both the sanctuary at Marathon and the villa in Eva-Loukou closely parallel Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli in terms of water display and structural forms.57 The imperial villa was a complex of buildings whose erection derived from Hadrian’s aim to recreate select landscapes and monuments that he had seen during his travels around the Empire.58 Among these buildings, the Canopus was evocative of the ancient city of Canopus in Egypt and its canal that led to Alexandria. The manmade canals of the sanctuary of Marathon were reminiscent of the canals in the Canopus of Hadrian’s villa. The cult of Serapis was important in Egyptian Canopus, and it is highlighted both in Hadrian’s villa and in the sanctuary of Marathon, where one of the few inscriptions discovered on its premises mentions the god.59 At Tivoli, statues representing gods from the Osirian and Memphitic mythical circle were
232 Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino purportedly located symmetrically in the Canopus,60 while a colossal bust of a female goddess has been identified as Isis-Sothis Demeter.61 This suggests crossovers between Egyptian and Graeco-Roman art and architecture where, in some cases, an archetypical iconography of Egypt was followed, while in others a more synthetic approach was favored.62 This model prevailed in the sanctuary of Marathon as well. Different stylistic approaches are detected: the male statues imitated the Osiris statues from Tivoli, Isis acquired distinguishing features, and the architecture differed from analogous sanctuaries. All these features resulted in the blending of the Egyptian with the local, and the present with the past.
Pausanias and the sanctuary of Tithorea Pausanias, the Greek travel writer who wrote his Description of Greece in the middle of the 2nd century CE, included in his narrative historical and mythological backgrounds as well as local customs and traditions. He often draws attention to cultic activities and religion, especially when they shed light on the history and identity of a city.63 Although Pausanias was simply an outside observer of the Isiac cult and not an initiate, by the time he wandered through Greece, the Isiac cults had already become part of local culture. Nevertheless, when referring to the Isiac deities, Pausanias is not always reliable.64 Below, I focus on how the Isiac cult was perceived by the traveler and how he related these cultic activities to the Greek past. Even though Pausanias devotes his attention primarily to the cults of the traditional Greek gods and heroes, he does not ignore the Isiac deities and references a total of seventeen sites where he witnessed sanctuaries or statues of these divinities (Figure 11.7). He recorded the presence of most of these sites without providing further information, while being selective in what he chose to record.65 The fact that these deities were mentioned more frequently in his earlier books has been taken to reflect a decrease of interest in those deities over the course of his travels.66 However, this is not the case for Tithorea; Pausanias not only provides the location of the sanctuary of Isis,67 but also describes the festivities that took place there in one of the most detailed descriptions that survive from a festival dedicated to the Egyptian deities in the province of Achaea.68 The exact location of the sanctuary is unknown, but some remarks in Pausanias highlight aspects of its topography. It was located in an area that was uninhabited and near the sanctuary of Asclepius. It needed enough space for the ἄδυτον and its precinct, and it had to be situated near the river, both because of the river reeds used for the construction of the stalls for the festival,69 and for its importance in the Isiac cult.70 For this reason, as well as due to the presence of two wells investigated during the 1940s and 1960s, it has been proposed that the sanctuary may have been situated in the area known as Paleapheba next to the river Kephisos.71 Pausanias visited the site in autumn. He probably witnessed the Inventio Osiridis, held between the end of October and the beginning of November, as
Between local past and a global phenomenon 233
Figure 11.7 Isiac sites mentioned by Pausanias. Source: (D. Maikidou-Poutrino).
he mentions the myth of Isis in search of the body of Osiris whose tears caused the flood of the Nile.72 He states that the festivities took place twice a year, in spring and autumn, including the spring festival of Navigium Isidis. Pausanias explains the daily activities during these three festive days,73 which included sacrifices and trade fairs. On the first day, initiates would enter the temple for purification. The remains from the previous sacrifices were carried out and then buried elsewhere, always at the same place. The ἄδυτον was accessible only to those who had been summoned by Isis in a dream, while death was the sentence for those who entered without permission, reminiscent of the rites of other well-known initiations in pre-Roman Greece.74 On the following day, traders would set up their booths for the fair that was to be held during the last day. The third and final day was the day of the fair, when slaves, livestock, and cloth would be sold, while the hours from midday onwards were reserved for sacrificing.75 These accounts have been the subject of much discussion among scholars. The burial of the sacrificed animals is a custom not attested in other sites; Bommas proposed that it may have alluded to the exotic origins of the cult, perhaps a unique interpretation of the ancient Egyptian rites. It is also possible that the custom was fabricated by Pausanias, linking it to the ancient Egyptian worship of animals, which, however, were never sacrificed in Egypt.76 Nevertheless, both periods of investigation in 1943 and 1965 revealed
234 Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino animal bones belonging to bovines and poultry, discovered in two wells in the fields of Paleapheba.77 Therefore, if the suggestion made by Papadimitriou is correct and this is indeed the site of the ancient sanctuary, Pausanias provided an accurate description of the burial of sacrificed animals. The sacrifices that were offered included cattle, stags, geese, and poultry, and are criticized as Pausanias probably recollected various accounts about Egyptian rites.78 Geese were a common offering to the Isiac deities in the Graeco-Roman world.79 At Delos zooarchaeological research in Serapeum C brought to light a hearth altar in which 93% of the material is composed of fowl bones.80 This is clearly a Pharaonic tradition; according to Herodotus, geese were preferred by the Egyptian priests and later, in the Greco-Roman world, they were replaced by fowls.81 Thus, it appears that these festivities were amalgamations of elements originating from earlier festivals and were later adapted to suit the new deities. According to Chandezon, it was a local ritual to sacrifice stags not only in Tithorea but also in other cities in its vicinity, such as Chaeronea and Orchomenus, which hosted the cult of the Isiac deities since the 3rd century BCE. This local tradition was perhaps influenced by the offerings to the sanctuary of Artemis in Hyampolis and through the assimilation of both Isis and Artemis with Eileithyia.82 Furthermore, even though pigs, sheep, and goats were not sacrificed in Egyptian rites, they were common offerings in other Greek mystery religions, such as in the sanctuary of the Great Goddess in Messene.83 Despite the above, a socio-economic aspect is highlighted by Pausanias,84 as poultry was more readily available to poorer devotees while larger animals, such as oxen and stags, were sacrificed by wealthier families. Thus, citizens would make offerings according to their economic status. Other animals are not mentioned in this passage, but Plutarch asserts that priests were not allowed to consume pork and mutton.85 The description of the periegete contains other contested claims. The wrapping of the animals using linen strips is an allusion to mummification and Egyptian rites. Nonetheless, it was not related to scarification.86 Consequently, it seems that Pausanias misinterpreted some Egyptian traditions. In addition, many characteristic features of the Isiac rituals are missing; for example, one would expect a reference to the priests with linen clothes and shaved heads, the presence of zoomorphic figures, or even the sound of the sistra,87 but none of these are mentioned. At the same time, animal worship, mummification processes, and the burning of offerings were factors that were related to ancient Egypt but were embedded in a 2nd century Greek context. It is unlikely that purely Egyptian traditions were witnessed by the locals of Tithorea. As a result, these incoming traditions underwent an interpretatio Graeca.88 Even though Pausanias’ main interest lay in places associated with Achaea’s past, he also shed some light on contemporary religious developments. He included the Isiac cults as part of Greek culture and contributed to the description of this religious phenomenon. Moreover, it has been noted that Pausanias paid more attention to less familiar periods than the Classical, pursuing stories that were not
Between local past and a global phenomenon 235 common knowledge yet.89 Thus, while he invited his readers to investigate and remember the Greek past using religious expressions and rituals that functioned as promoters and stabilizers of memory, he was, at the same time, not opposed to the presence of new elements. Through the example of Tithorea, Pausanias reveals how society in 2nd century Greece renewed local cultural memory.90 Works of art and material remains of the past shaped local choices, self-definition and interpretations. It is evident that Pausanias had a clear predilection toward what he wanted to see and document. He presented a view that highlighted the past in opposition to the period in which he lived. In his first book, he declared his intention to discuss πάντα τὰ ἑλληνικά,91 often even by re-interpreting or highlighting certain aspects of a site in order to emphasize its connections to pre-Roman Greece and ancient traditions.92 It is the viewer’s identity itself which leads to specific interpretations when gazing at an artifact or a monument.93 The religious gaze is oriented toward the ritual function and dimension of material culture and its artifacts; it is applied each time a viewer engages with a material object – whether a sanctuary or a statue – that offers religious and mythological reflection. We encounter this in the case of Pausanias as he is driven by his desire to engage with the present of the sites he visits through the mythical and divine landscape of the past. This desire is reflected in the way he sees the material objects, thus, on his religious gaze.94 Greece, as described through the eyes of Pausanias, consists of an idealized past, of myths and monuments that express not only his nostalgia but also the collective nostalgia of the locals.95 Through his experience, his readers could imagine and re-create the rituals described and read the stories of the past on the monuments. But in this memory of Greece, how were the Egyptian deities perceived by Pausanias? It is probable that the artefacts and the traditions taking place at the sanctuary experienced a shift in meaning, becoming part of a dynamic process.96 The Isiac deities would be sometimes perceived as exotic, with rituals reminiscent of mummification and presence of textiles that would also allude to the clothes of the priests or the participants. Nonetheless, they were not so incongruous as they shared common cultic practices with other local deities, such as Artemis, or followed practices of initiation that were already known from other important sanctuaries of the Greek world, such as Eleusis. Even though it has been suggested – erroneously – that Pausanias did not concern himself with non-Greek deities, the Isiac deities were venerated not only by common people, but also by the elites, as demonstrated in the case of Herodes Atticus. Therefore, ignoring them would seem completely out of place.97 The rituals were reconstructed in order to fit to the past of 2nd century Tithorea. Intellectuals of the Second Sophistic played their part in this case as well, as orators and writers discussing the subject were free to decide what to highlight, whether it be a local tradition or a particular version of a myth.98 Zooming out from Tithorea and putting these festivities in the bigger picture of cultic practices in the Roman Empire, it is evident that such expressions of religious practice were not uncommon. The 2nd century was a time
236 Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino when an assemblage of diverse economic, cultural, and social influences prevailed. Within this frame rose the religious interactions between deities that had been incorporated into Greek religious practices in earlier centuries.
Conclusion: between the local past and a global phenomenon The two case studies discussed in this chapter represent two different approaches to Isiac deities in 2nd century Achaea. Both cases reveal that, in order to create cultural memory, the past is not always a “historical fact”, but an important cultural element created by social groups in specific locations and occasions in order to make meaningful statements about the present. The agents (individuals or groups) analysed religious practices and constructed their personal vision of Egypt. These people appropriated, instrumentalized, and even invented religious aspects, either by avoiding certain themes or by drawing upon what they knew or imagined as Egyptian behavior.99 Thus, they had the ability to choose what to remember and forget.100 Isis encompassed many of the major female deities of the Classical Greek world. She was a “product” of the time, but she also reflected the virtues that female deities possessed in the Greek past. In Tithorea, she shared common ritual practices with Artemis. In Marathon, her image incorporated iconographic features of Demeter and Aphrodite. A good example of such an amalgamation of many entities in one are the words used by Apuleius in the last book of the Metamorphoses where he mentions the various names that were used to refer to Isis in each region of the Mediterranean basin.101 In addition, some examples depict Isis as exotic while others show her as completely Hellenized. This dichotomy between local and foreign representations was even expressed in the same city or region. Within Attica, for instance, an individual could pay a visit to the sanctuary of Marathon with its impressive pylons reminiscent of the entrances to the temple of Philae, or to the small temple in antis close to the Asclepeion at the foothills of the Acropolis.102 In Athens, Isis was worshiped alongside Aphrodite,103 or, on different occasions, Isis and Serapis would be more closely associated with Anatolian deities, such as Men.104 In the same city, Isis was portrayed in the typical Hellenized representation of Tyche, with a cornucopia and a rudder (Figure 11.8),105 or was associated with exotic symbols such as the crocodile (Figure 11.9).106 This syncretic iconography reflects a flexibility of memories that played an important role in the construction of a religious landscape.107 The same plasticity is read into monuments and sanctuaries which enabled the dissemination of information and ideas that gradually became knowledge through the interaction of human and material agency.108 Specific myths and memories could be incorporated side by side with more all-encompassing ones. Furthermore, memory is often spatially contextualized,109 as has been demonstrated in the case of Herodes’ use of Isiac and Egyptian iconography in Marathon. Herodes did not choose a traditional religion in an established religious setting, but related the statues of Isis to standard Greek deities which were at the heart of the expression of paideia espoused by the sophists.110 The ears of
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Figure 11.8 Isis Tyche © Acropolis Museum 2016. Source: (Photo: V. Tsiamis).
Figure 11.9 Isis Panthea © Acropolis Museum. Source: 2016 (Photo: V. Tsiamis).
238 Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino wheat and the roses were symbols that alluded to the Greek religious past, specifically to Demeter and Aphrodite. The style of the statues was reminiscent of archaizing prototypes. On the other hand, the Osirian statues, the Horus falcons, the sphinxes, and the architectural decoration were heavily influenced by Egyptian prototypes.111 As a result, the creation of the sanctuary in Marathon is a product of circumstances that prevailed in the Roman present and corresponds both to the multiculturalism of the Roman era as well as to the Archaic and Classical features of style. The erection and dedication of statues in temples was a way for local people to imprint the memory of the site or the city. Collectively, deities made up the “divine heritage of the city” and, thus, the local identity of the cults in question was defined by the other divinities that surrounded them. In the aforementioned temple of Isis at the foothills of the Acropolis, for instance, Asclepius co-existed with the Isiac deities.112 Regarding architecture, unlike temples dedicated to Greek gods, the sanctuaries of the Egyptian deities in Roman Greece could not lay claim directly to the past of Achaea or Attica, but architectonic structures are, nonetheless, a “cultural system” formed through collective processes.113 Artistic images and monuments embody a history that affirms both their past and their present and are a visual affirmation of the relationship between the people and their past.114 In 2nd-century Achaea, individuals were required to re-assess their own preconceived notions as they engaged with new forms of representation. The sanctuary of Marathon demonstrates that, instead of seeing the statues as passive material commissioned by Herodes, we should reconsider them as key actors in the development of intellectual discourses.115 As Elsner notes, “people relate to works of art in different ways, depending upon different contexts and at different times.”116 Thus, each product of the Isiac cult produced different processes of interpretation; the same object could evoke different meanings, from realistic to symbolic ones.117 According to Alcock, “people derive identity from shared remembrance – from social memory – which in turn provides them with an image of their past and a design for their future”.118 Nevertheless, identity is multiple, fluid, and situational as its particular cultural context depends on its people and communities. It is not simply a matter of self-identification, but also of recognition by others.119 In the first case, memory was structured around the visualization of the beliefs of Herodes. In the sanctuary of Tithorea, memory was created through collective rituals that combined both local and exotic elements. In both cases, religious experiences played an important role in the understanding and recreation of the past, as they produced an interpretative and cognitive value system which derived from the past but had an impact on the present.120 The Roman Empire was marked by a form of cosmopolitanism and globalization, in which political power, either emanating from Rome or the local elites, dominated local features. A dynamic interrelationship between heterogeneity and homogeneity was created. Local identity was promoted, often enthusiastically, while new identities were built on top of the old ones as a strategy for asserting status within a new political reality.121 Through these mechanisms,
Between local past and a global phenomenon 239 globalization was expressed at a local level.122 In the religious field, globalization operated within a battery of ritual and mythological forms which were, for the most part, understood and accepted all over the Empire. Different combinations of rituals and deities created distinct local profiles and identities.123 Under these terms, the sanctuaries of both Marathon and Tithorea were part of a globalized network of relations. Using the terms “local”, “universal”, or “global” determines the contextualization of the Greek religious beliefs and practices as religious culture was flexible and consisted of a concept in which multiple religious identities overlapped and communicated with each other.124 Thus, when identifying themselves through their past, communities in 2nd century Achaea could incorporate into their local rituals and traditions material that originated in stories told by and about other communities. The cult of Isis was not unfamiliar to most of the Greeks as, by the 2nd century, the worship of the Isiac deities had become a common feature of the civic religious landscape. Nonetheless, Isis was not of Greek origin, nor was she related to the Greek histories and myths. She had arrived as a foreign deity, first worshiped by the Egyptian merchants, and then gradually incorporated into the local pantheon. In 2nd century CE Achaea and other Greek provinces, individuals who looked back to the past generally looked to Classical Greece, where Isis was not to be found. As a result, they needed to find creative ways to incorporate her into the Hellenic past. The way this was accomplished was through the incorporation of the Isiac deities into some of the rituals of Greek deities, through parallel stories in their myths, and the presence of common iconographic attributes. The objects of this cult fulfilled a binary purpose of an exotic and a local nature, but at the same time reflected the different combinations of material culture and practices that came into being in this specific time and place.
Notes 1 On the lieu de mémoire as pylons that brought communities together, see Assmann 2006; Kennell in this volume. On memory, see Price 2012, 17. 2 On human–divine communication and Lived Ancient Religion, see Rüpke 2018; Albrecht et al. 2018, 6. 3 Malaise 2005, 29. 4 Bricault 2005, 101/0101. 5 Bricault 2019, 197. Of the most prominent sites, the sanctuaries of Athens, Eretria, Amphipolis, Thessalonica, and Delos deserve special mention. 6 This collection of evidence constitutes a major part of my ongoing PhD research, which covers mainly mainland Greece during the Roman period. 7 Dunand 1973, 5. 8 Bowie 1996, 208. Nonetheless, creating strong memories for the past is something that was happening since more ancient times, as illustrated in the examples given by Grigoropoulos et al. 2017, 22–24. In general, the question that has been posed by a plethora of scholars and is summarized in the introduction of Strategies of Remembering is how imperial Greeks viewed their past, how they interacted with it, and how they structured their relations with “others”. On that see Grigoropoulos et al. 2017, 22.
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9 10 11 12
See also Mitropoulos in this volume. Bowersock 1969, 15–16. Tobin 1997, 22–25; Mazurek 2018, 613. ἀποθανόντος δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ Μαραθῶνι καὶ ἐπισκήψαντος τοῖς ἀπελευθέροις ἐκεῖ θάπτειν; Philostr., V.S. 565. 13 καὶ ὁ Ἀγαθίων ‘αὔριον’ ἔφη ‘ἀφίξομαί σοι κατὰ μεσημβρίαν ἐς τὸ τοῦ Κανώβου ἱερόν; Philostr., V.S. 554. 14 Mazurek 2018, 615. 15 On the history of the excavations, see Mazurek 2018, 617; Maikidou-Poutrino 2020, 79. 16 In general, these kinds of rooms are common among the Isiac sanctuaries. See, for example, the sanctuary of Philippi in Collart 1929, 75. 17 It has been suggested that it had the shape of a pyramid, which raises new questions regarding the reasons behind this choice of construction. Nevertheless, the structure has sustained significant damage and it is difficult to conclude whether this proposition is correct and to reconstruct its original appearance. In addition, it lacks comparanda. See Mazurek 2018, 628. 18 Dekoulakou 2011b, 26–28. 19 This statue survives only from the hips down. Thus, defining the characteristic features of Isis has proven difficult. 20 On the discovery of the male statues, see Siskou 2011, 79. 21 Maikidou-Poutrino 2020, 81. On the Isis locks, see in general Schwentzel 2000. 22 Dekoulakou 2010, 111–115. 23 On the basileion, see Malaise 2009. 24 Dekoulakou 2011b, 31. 25 See, for example, a marble statue in the museum of Fine Arts in Boston, 1970.242 and a terracotta figurine from Egypt, now in the Allard Pierson Museum, APM07226. 26 Ἶσις δὲ ἐστὶ κατὰ τὴν Ἑλλήνων γλῶσσαν Δημήτηρ; Hdt., Hist. 2.59.2. 27 Tobin 1997, 77 and 201. 28 On the association between the Panhellenion and Eleusis, see Camia 2017, 51–53, summarizing the research. On Herodes Atticus and his family in Eleusis, see Tobin 1997, 200–209. 29 Fotiadi 2011. 30 Apul. Met. 11.13. On this, see also Fick 1971, 339–343. 31 Themelis 2011, 100. 32 Podvin and Veymiers 2008, 63–64. 33 Pace 1914, 380. 34 Walters 1988, 27. 35 Dekoulakou 2011a, 29. 36 On the Isiac knot, see Walters 1988, 5–6. 37 Dekoulakou 2010, 116; Dekoulakou 2011b, 32–33. 38 Dekoulakou 2010, 117. For definitions and discussions on the terms eclectic, classical, archaistic, see Fullerton 1998, 71–72; Elsner 2006, 271; Hallet 2012, 71. Especially on the usage of the Archaistic style by the Romans, see Hallet 2012, 86–94. 39 Maikidou-Poutrino 2020, 82–83. Compare also with Isis from Pompeii in Swetnam-Burland 2007, 117. 40 Dekoulakou 2011a, 27; Siskou 2011, 80. The only differentiation on the headwear is a kalathos worn by the statue of the north pylon. See Siskou 2011, 88. 41 Mazurek 2018, 625. On the relation between the archaistic and the sacred, see also Elsner 2017, 498–499.
Between local past and a global phenomenon 241 42 Maikidou-Poutrino 2020, 84. 43 Dekoulakou 2011a, 32. Such a find is rare in Greece, known only from a few places like the Iseum of Rhodes. On this see Fantaoutsaki 2011, 47–63. 44 Dekoulakou 2011a, 32. 45 Karusu 1969, 253–265; Spyropoulos 2006, 19. 46 On sphinxes in the Italian peninsula, see Swetnam-Burland 2007, 121. 47 Anderson 1993, 17; Cordovana 2007, 16; Galli 2004, 348; Tobin 1997, 48. 48 Anderson 1993, 101; Alcock 2002, 38–39. 49 Zanker 1988, 243–244. On an archaic statue of Heracles characterized as having something ἔνθεον, see Paus., Descr. 2.4.5. 50 Mazurek 2018, 612 and 640–641. 51 Galli 2014, 290–291. On the stelae, see Spyropoylos 2009. See also Strazdins in this volume. 52 Maikidou-Poutrino 2020, 85–86. 53 ἡ γὰρ Ἶσίς ἐστι μὲν τὸ τῆς φύσεως θῆλυ, καὶ δεκτικὸν ἁπάσης: γενέσεως; Plut., De Iside. 372F. De Simone 2016, 106; Mazurek 2018, 612–614. 54 Mazurek 2018, 638. 55 Spyropoulos 2006, 154–158; Tobin 1997, 254. 56 Tobin 1997, 162 and 264. 57 Rogers 2021, 108. 58 Egypt contributed to the construction of religious and political power when Hadrian undertook the journey to that land. He was accompanied by his wife, Sabina, his sister Paulina, Antinoos, and the imperial court. See Spier, Potts and Cole 2018, 283–285. 59 Dekoulakou 2011a, 36. 60 Giuliani 2000, 45 and 55; Grenier 1989, 955; Grenier 2000, 73. 61 Grenier 2000, 74. On other sculptures, see Grenier 2000. 62 Spier, Potts and Cole 2018, 285. 63 Alcock 1996, 246; Bommas 2011, 79. 64 Elsner 2001, 19. 65 This is stated clearly by him when saying τοσαῦτα κατὰ γνώμην τὴν ἐμὴν Ἀθηναίοις γνωριμώτατα ἦν ἔν τε λόγοις καὶ θεωρήμασιν, ἀπέκρινε δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν πολλῶν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ὁ λόγος μοι τὰ ἐς συγγραφὴν ἀνήκοντα. Paus., Descr.1.39.3. On that see Alcock 1996, 245. 66 Hutton 2005, 297. 67 τοῦ δὲ Ἀσκληπιοῦ περὶ τεσσαράκοντα ἀπέχει σταδίους περίβολος καὶ ἄδυτον ἱερὸν Ἴσιδος. Paus., Descr. 10.32.13. It should be kept in mind that this is not the only evidence of Isiac cults in the city. A large number of manumissions mentioning Serapis have been found, suggesting the presence of a second cultic center in the city. On these inscriptions, see mainly Bricault 2005, 106/0401–106/0413. 68 Paus, Descr. 10.32.13–19. See also Daubner in this volume. 69 ταύτῃ μὲν δὴ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τοσαῦτα περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν δρῶσι, τῇ δὲ ἐπιούσῃ σκηνὰς οἱ καπηλεύοντες ποιοῦνται καλάμου τε καὶ ἄλλης ὕλης αὐτοσχεδίου Paus., Descr. 10.32.15. 70 On this, see Wild 1981. 71 Papadimitriou 1978, 137–143. 72 Bommas 2011, 85. See ἄγειν τῇ Ἴσιδι Αἰγυπτίους τὴν ἑορτήν, ὅτε αὐτὴν τὸν Ὄσιριν πενθεῖν λέγουσι: τηνικαῦτα δὲ καὶ ὁ Νεῖλος ἀναβαίνειν σφίσιν ἄρχεται, καὶ τῶν ἐπιχωρίων πολλοῖς ἐστιν εἰρημένα ὡς τὰ αὔξοντα τὸν ποταμὸν καὶ ἄρδειν τὰς ἀρούρας ποιοῦντα δάκρυά ἐστι τῆς Ἴσιδος. Paus., Descr. 10.32.18. For commentary on this passage, see Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2005, 265.
242 Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino 73 Paus., Descr. 10.32.13–16. 74 This is a mystic character of the cult that Pausanias mentions also in the city of Phlius, where only the priest was allowed to see the statue of Isis: ἔστι δὲ καὶ Ἀπόλλωνος καὶ ἄλλο Ἴσιδος. τὸ μὲν δὴ ἄγαλμα τοῦ Διονύσου δῆλον πᾶσιν, ὡσαύτως δὲ καὶ τὸ τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος: τὸ δὲ τῆς Ἴσιδος τοῖς ἱερεῦσι θεάσασθαι μόνον ἔστι. Paus., Descr. 2.13.6. 75 Dunand 1973, 176. 76 Bommas 2011, 87. 77 Papadimitriou 1978, 140. 78 θύουσι δὲ καὶ βοῦς καὶ ἐλάφους οἱ εὐδαιμονέστεροι, ὅσοι δὲ εἰσιν ἀποδέοντες πλούτῳ, καὶ χῆνας καὶ ὄρνιθας τὰς μελεαγρίδας, Paus., Descr. 10.32.16. See Schachter 2007, 384. On critiques, see Bommas 2011, 87–88. 79 Veymiers 2018, 53. On traditions and myths related to these animals, see also Chandezon 2011, 172–176. 80 Brun and Leguilloux 2013, 171. 81 καὶ κρεῶν βοέων καὶ χηνέων πλῆθός τι ἑκάστῳ γίνεται πολλὸν ἡμέρης ἑκάστης. Hdt., Hist. 2.37.4. Brun and Leguilloux 2013, 177. 82 Chandezon 2011, 162–171. Especially in these cities, birth deities seem to have a strong presence in the cultic activities. An inscription from Hyampolis attests to a celebration honoring Bubastis. See Bricault 2005, 106/0303. 83 Graf 2003, 244. 84 See note 78. 85 οἱ δ ᾽ ἱερεῖς οὕτω δυσχεραίνουσι τὴν τῶν περιττωμάτων φύσιν, ὥστε μὴ μόνον παραιτεῖσθαι τῶν ὀσπρίων τὰ πολλὰ καὶ τῶν κρεῶν τὰ μήλεια καὶ ὕεια, πολλὴν ποιοῦντα περίττωσιν; Plut. De Iside, 352f. 86 καθελίξαι δεῖ σφᾶς τὰ ἱερεῖα λίνου τελαμῶσιν ἢ βύσσου: τρόπος δὲ τῆς σκευασίας ἐστὶν ὁ Αἰγύπτιος; Paus., Descr. 10.32.16. See Bommas 2011, 88. 87 Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2005, 260. 88 Bommas 2011, 92–94. 89 Hutton 2017, 361. 90 Bommas 2011, 101. 91 Elsner 1995, 126–128. Paus. 1.26.4. See also Daubner in this volume. 92 Hutton 2005, 303. This has been noticed also outside Isiac examples. See, for instance, the case of Corinth described by Hutton 2005, 304–305. 93 Elsner 1995, 143. 94 Kindt 2012, 40. See also Elsner 1995, 88–158. 95 Elsner 2001, 18. 96 Bommas 2011, 92. 97 Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2005, 261. 98 Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2005, 273. 99 Albrecht et al. 2018, 12; Rüpke 2018, 62. 100 Alcock 2001, 325. 101 Inde primigenii Phryges Pessinuntiam deum Matrem, hinc autochthones Attici Cecropeiam Minervam, illinc fluctuantes Cyprii Paphiam Venerem, Cretes sagittiferi Dictynnam Dianam, Siculi trilingues Stygiam Proserpinam, Eleusini vetustam deam Cererem, Iunonem alii, Bellonam alii, Hecatam isti, Rhamnusiam illi, et qui nascentis dei solis inchoantibus illustrantur radiis Aethiopes utrique priscaque doctrina pollentes Aegyptii, caerimoniis me propriis percolentes, appellant vero nomine reginam Isidem; Apul. Met. 11.5. 102 Walker 1979. 103 Bricault 2005, 101/0221. 104 Bricault 2005, 101/0229.
Between local past and a global phenomenon 243 105 Pologiorgi 2008, 134–147. 106 Eleutheratou 2008, 67. 107 Alcock 2002, 87. 108 Woolf 2015, 213. 109 Alcock 2001, 326 and 345. 110 Galli 2004, 314–316. 111 On the usage and meaning of the terms Roman, Egyptian, and Greek, see Versluys, 2013, 241. 112 Bricault 2005, 101/0222. 113 Elsner 1995, 49. 114 Elsner 1995, 125. 115 Mazurek 2018, 612–613. 116 Elsner 1995, 1. 117 Elsner 1995, 2. 118 Alcock 2002, 1. 119 Revell 2009, 7. On internal definition and external categorization of identity, see Eshleman 2012, 67. 120 Galli 2004, 348. 121 Witcher 2017, 646. 122 Mazurek 2020, 182. 123 Gilhus 2004, 93–94 and 97. 124 Kindt 2012, 123–125.
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12 Sculpture for “ordinary” people in 2nd-century Achaea1 Stylianos E. Katakis
Introduction The 2nd century CE was the period of the Roman Empire’s greatest prosperity, reaching, under Trajan (98–117), its maximum territorial extent. Trajan also took an interest in the sound administration of the provinces, as his correspondence with Pliny the Elder, appointed by him governor of the province of Bithynia, confirms.2 As is well known, his successor, Hadrian, spent most of his principate on the road, visiting almost all of the provinces of the Empire, investing in their infrastructure, and re-organizing local cults. The province of Achaea was at the core of these activities.3 The so-called “Pax Romana” and the abolition of internal borders in the Empire led to unprecedented economic development and the unobstructed movement of artists and materials across the Empire. Soon, however, the first signs of a bleaker future appeared. Under Marcus Aurelius (161–180), epidemics brought by Roman troops from the East spread throughout the Empire, including Greece, and in c. 170 the first wave of barbarian invasions from the north, led by the Costoboci, caused destruction as far south as Eleusis.4 Achaea lay at the center of the Empire, far from regions whose security was a major concern of imperial authority. It was also far from the main roads of the Empire, such as the Via Egnatia, which crossed the provinces of Macedonia and Thrace, boosting local economic activity. Pausanias’ Travels in Greece reveals that Achaea was, with few exceptions, a province in economic decline.5 The study of contemporary sculpture related to “ordinary” people is a valuable tool for understanding the sociopolitical realities in the province. In this chapter, the term “ordinary people” is used in a broad sense, as a synonym for “private”, referring to personages who were not members of the imperial family. Individuals such as C. Julius Antiochus Philopappus and Herodes Atticus fall into this category, although they were otherwise far from “ordinary” men. Moreover, we must bear in mind that surviving material reflects sociopolitical realities of middle and upper-class citizens, as it was
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-15
248 Stylianos E. Katakis they who had the financial means to commission sculpture, and they who were typically honored by their communities for their benefactions. With the exception of inscribed bases, surviving material is scarce, as the majority of statues were made of bronze.6 Bronze was always considered valuable, as it was easily melted and recycled, while, in later periods, the same was true for marble statues, which were broken to smaller pieces and turned into lime in special kilns.7 Furthermore, the reuse of statues with the simple replacement of the portrait heads was also a common practice. This practice is evident in three 2nd century himation-clad male statues unearthed in the agora of Athens,8 and in the headless male and female statues displayed in the courtyard of the Archaeological Museum of Corinth.9 The same practice is best exemplified in the published material from the sanctuary of Apollo Maleatas and Asclepius in Epidaurus.10 Although the sanctuary witnessed its greatest prosperity in the 2nd century, most of the portrait statues found in it date to the 1st century. Similarly, the reuse of material in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods is particularly evident in inscribed bases, which were used more than once, each time honoring a different individual.11 Representations of “ordinary” people can be divided into two broad categories: honorary and funerary sculptures. In order to understand better the choice of sculptural types, we must first examine the portrait heads of the statues.12
Portraits Portrait heads are especially pertinent as they often display individual physiognomic traits. A statue of Athenais, younger daughter of Herodes Atticus, is in the background. The trend from the principate of Augustus onward is that of the so-called Zeitgesicht (or “period face”),13 that is, the imitation mostly of the fashion and forms of self-representation displayed in official portraiture of the emperor and his wife by men and women across the Empire. Hairstyles are usually the main feature more or less faithfully replicated. In cases of “complete assimilation”, even experts find it challenging to determine whether a certain portrait is of an otherwise unknown person or of a member of the imperial family. A case in point is the bust of a man, often identified as Hadrian, found during levelling works in Vasilissis Olgas Avenue, north of the precinct of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens (Figure 12.1).14 From the reign of Hadrian to the 3rd century, a different trend emerged in a large number of male – mainly Attic – portraits. Under the influence of the Second Sophistic, the “period face” was, to a certain degree, abandoned, and portraits drew upon earlier models, mainly from representations of prominent men of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. It should be emphasized that the reasons for these choices, part of a widespread inclination to “return to the past” (i.e. collective historical nostalgia), were mainly cultural, and
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Figure 12.1 Bust of a man from the area north of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, c. 130–140 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 249. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund).
those who made these choices did not aim to overturn contemporary political realities; the sovereignty of Rome was not in question.15 Both the “period face” and the tendency to retrospect are best exemplified in the group of 33 portraits of the so-called kosmetai, found incorporated into the post-Herulian wall of Athens, in the area where the alleged “Gymnasium of Diogenes” would have probably been located.16 The group consists of high-quality portraits in the form of herms, several of which are inscribed, thus providing invaluable information on the individuals represented. The kosmetai were office-holders of the gymnasium, entrusted with the education of the ephebes, which included physical exercise, military training, but, most importantly, courses on rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, and other disciplines. It was through paideia that the teachings of the so-called Second Sophistic were instilled into young men.17 The portraits of the kosmetai, especially those dated to the 2nd century and the first half of the 3rd century, have been studied thoroughly by others, so this chapter will focus on selected examples. Sosistratos (Figure 12.2), a kosmetes in 141/142, follows, for the most part, the “Zeitgesicht” trend;18 in his portrait, he is depicted wearing a cropped beard and a tousled hairstyle, reminiscent of official portraits of Aelius Caesar, Hadrian’s adoptive son who died in 138, some months before the emperor.19 Conversely, a few years earlier but still in the late Hadrianic period,
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Figure 12.2 Herm of the kosmetes Sosistratos, c. 141/142 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 385. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund).
the portrait of Onasos uses elements from representations of 4th and 3rd century BCE intellectuals (Figure 12.3).20 The kosmetai also honored their pupils by inscribed marble stelai, crowned with reliefs depicting a kosmetes flanked by two (or more) ephebes, as can be observed in the stele illustrated in Figure 12.4, dated to the Hadrianic period.21 Typically, kosmetai are depicted in the so-called “arm-sling” variant of the himatiophoros type, which, as will be discussed below, was the characteristic iconographic type for educated adult citizens. In general, portraits from Achaea in the 2nd century follow contemporary style and techniques. This is also evident in the portraits of the most famous personality of the time, the immensely wealthy sophist,22 orator, and politician, Herodes Atticus (c. 101/2–177/8, Figure 12.5). Herodes had personal ties with the imperial family, in particular with Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus, and was one of the tutors of the latter two
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Figure 12.3 Herm of the kosmetes Onasos, c. 141/142 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 387. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund).
emperors.23 In his portraits, the iris and pupil of the eyes are engraved, a technical feature widely used by the late Hadrianic period,24 while in contemporary Roman portraits the use of the drill is lacking. In addition, the surface of the marble is left roughly smoothed,25 as was common in Attic portraits. The same technical characteristics are evident in the numerous portraits of Herodes’ student, Polydeukion (Figure 12.6), dated to the third quarter of the 2nd century.26 The retrospective trend exemplified in the portraits of the kosmetai continued in the late 2nd–early 3rd century, as is evident in another group of late Antonine – early Severan portraits with long hair. The portrait of a young man from Athens (Figure 12.7) wearing a cropped beard is characteristic.27 Although portraits of this type were originally thought to represent nonGreeks (“barbarians”), current research has recognized their affinity to the official portraiture of Alexander the Great.28
252 Stylianos E. Katakis
Figure 12.4 Honorific stele for the ephebes, Hadrianic, 117–138 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 1468. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
The retrospective trend was not confined to Attic male portraits, but was prevalent all over the Empire in the 2nd century.29 Conversely, it seems that in female portraiture the “period-face” trend remained dominant, as exemplified by the bust of an Athenian matron (Figure 12.8), dated to the principate of Trajan.30 Later, from the reign of Hadrian onwards, more “classical” hairstyles became dominant, as they were more pertinent to the cultural climate of the period.
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Figure 12.5 Bust of Herodes Atticus from Kephisia, 3rd quarter of the 2nd century CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 4810. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
Figure 12.6 Bust of Polydeukion from Kephisia, 3rd quarter of the 2nd c. CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 4811. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
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Figure 12.7 Portrait of a young man from Athens, 4th quarter of the 2nd c.–beginning of the 3d c. CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 361. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
Figure 12.8 Bust of a woman from Athens, Trajanic 98–117 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 3550. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund).
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Honorific statues Members of local elites, city notables, and benefactors, often with personal ties to the imperial family in Rome, were typically honored with public statues, commissioned by relatives, fellow citizens, and/or the archons of the cities in which they lived. Honorific statues were considered the highest recognition possible for a citizen’s benefactions to his city.31 Indicative of the transition from the 1st to the 2nd century are the portrait statues of elite women from Elis, erected in the pronaos of the temple of Hera in Olympia. An example of these is the statue of Antonia Cleodice, dated to the early Trajanic period,32 whom the city of Elis and the Olympic Boule honored for her virtue and piety towards Olympian Zeus. The head of the statue depicts a mature woman wearing a characteristic contemporary hairstyle, while the body (the work of the Athenian sculptor Aulus Sextius Eraton) is in the so-called “Large Herculaneum Woman” sculptural type. This type was originally created in c. 330 BCE and was commonly used for the representation of women throughout the imperial period, including for portraits of members of the imperial family.33 In the example from Olympia, its selection is not surprising as the image of a matron in elegant, enveloping drapery and composed stance represented feminine virtues of beauty, grace, and decorum. Olympia has yielded the largest number of honorary statues from 2nd century Achaea. The best-known group in the sanctuary comes from the Nymphaeum sponsored by Herodes Atticus and dates to 149–153.34 The statues were set up in niches, in two tiers. As documented by the inscribed bases, the statues of the imperial family were dedicated by Herodes and probably stood in the upper tier; the ones of his family, dedicated by the city of Elis, filled the lower tier.35 The careful choice of statuary types is particularly interesting. Regarding the female figures, the “Large Herculaneum Woman” type was used for the empresses Sabina and Faustina I, as well as for Herodes’ wife Regilla, whose statue was recently shown to occupy the central niche of the lower tier.36 Different sculptural types were chosen for the other female members of Herodes’ family. His youngest daughter, Athenais, was depicted in the very popular “Small Herculaneum woman” type,37 his eldest daughter, Elpinice, holding a patera, in the so-called “Kore” type (Figure 12.9),38 while for his mother, Vibullia Alcia Agrippina, a variant of a type usually combined with the so-called “Formiae” type was selected. The latter type was also used for Faustina ΙΙ.39 Interestingly enough, the last two statue types were created in the early imperial period, echoing 4th century BCE creations, and are otherwise quite rare in 2nd century Achaea.40 Apparently, due to the large number of female figures in the group, less common iconographic types were also included. Overall, the statuary types in the Nymphaeum are more or less reminiscent of classical prototypes, while those deriving from Hellenistic creations associated with Asia Minor, such as the so-called “Demeter/Ceres” type, are absent from Roman Achaea.41 In the case of male figures, variety in sculptural types is lacking. Herodes’ father, as well as his Roman father-in-law and grandfather, are represented
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Figure 12.9 Statue of Elpinike, daughter of Herodes Atticus, from Olympia, 149–153 CE. A statue of Athenais, younger daughter of Herodes Atticus, is in the background. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. Λ 165. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute, Neg. no. D-DAI-ATH-1979-0436: G. Hellner).
wearing the toga.42 For Herodes himself, who is probably depicted twice, a more generic himation-clad type echoing Hellenistic models was selected (Figure 12.10),43 while inside the two small monopteros temples flanking the lower water basin stood a statue of Herodes wearing the toga (Figure 12.11), and a cuirassed statue of Marcus Aurelius respectively.44 The choice of the togatus iconographic type for members of Regilla’s family is not surprising as it highlights their status as Roman citizens. More revealing is the fact that although Herodes himself was represented both in himation and toga, in his busts (Figure 12.5) he chose to be depicted as a Greek philosopher, wearing the himation, as does his favorite pupil, Polydeukion (Figure 12.6). In support of the identifications proposed above, we now turn our attention to a funerary monument, the mausoleum of Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus in Athens, built in 114–116 on a prominent location facing the Acropolis, the top of the Hill of the Muses. Philopappus, hailing
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Figure 12.10 Statue of Herodes Atticus (?) in himation from Olympia, 149–153 CE. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. Λ 152. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute, Neg. no. D-DAI-ATH-1979-0444: G. Hellner).
from the royal family of Commagene, is depicted in the center of the upper register of the north side of the monument as a Greek, a citizen (he was registered in the Attic deme of Besa) and eponymous archon of Athens, wearing only the himation wrapped around the lower part of his body. He is represented again in the more impressive frieze on the lower register wearing the Roman toga and riding a chariot, accompanied by twelve lictors, symbolizing his consulship in Rome in 109.45 Even his ancestor Antiochus, in the left niche, was depicted as a Roman citizen, wearing a toga. I suggest, therefore, that Philopappus in his grave monument wanted to promote his Roman and not his Athenian identity, just like Herodes Atticus in his Nymphaeum. Overall, portrait statues of men in the Roman toga are not common in the province of Achaea,46 apart from a few examples that represent emperors.47 The garment was the symbol of Roman citizenship par excellence; thus,
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Figure 12.11 Statue of Herodes Atticus in toga from Olympia, 149–153 CE. Olympia, Archaeological Museum, inv. no. Λ 154. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute, Neg. no. D-DAI-ATH-1979-0440: G. Hellner).
all statues wearing it must be identified as portraits of Roman citizens living in Achaea. It is also evident that the number of togate statues diminished in the 2nd century, although the number of Greeks who acquired Roman citizenship increased.48 The characteristic iconographic type for adult men was the himatiophoros (or palliatus, from the Latin term pallium), i.e. the himation-clad man, especially of the so-called “arm-sling” variant. The characteristic pose of the type has the right arm bent up across the chest and held close to the body by the tightly wrapped himation, which is draped over the right shoulder and supports the arm as if in a sling, while the hand emerges from and rests on the himation’s top edge. The prototype can be traced back to the portrait of Sophocles, erected in c. 335 BCE in the eastern parodos of the theater of Dionysus in Athens, and to the portrait of the orator Aeschines, erected in
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Figure 12.12 Statue of a man in the “Aeschines” type, from Epidaurus, late 2nd c. CE. Epidaurus, Museum, inv. no 13. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund: K.V. von Eickstedt).
c. 310 BCE. From the Hellenistic period onwards, a variant of the “armsling” type emerged, with the left arm lowered close to the body.49 Interestingly, most copies of the Aeschines prototype have been found in Corinth and Epidaurus, with the latest example (late 2nd century) coming from the sanctuary of Asclepius (Figure 12.12).50 The sculptural type illustrates the exemplary public image of the active and educated citizen, often symbolized by the support in the form of a scrinium, a cylindrical or square container for papyri scrolls, or by the book roll itself, held by the figure in his left hand.51 The same type, although with the weight placed on the left foot, was adopted for the portrait of Τi. Claudius Frontinus, son of Saethidas Caelianus, in the central niche of the lower storey of the scaenae frons of the theatre of Messene, renovated in the principate of Hadrian. The sculptural decoration of the latter also included a cuirassed statue of Frontinus’ father and benefactor, T. Claudius Saethidas Caelianus, along with a portrait of his mother, Claudia Frontina, in the “Large Herculaneum Woman” type, as well as a cuirassed statue of – most probably – Hadrian.52 Based on the inscription on the base of Caelianus’ statue, five portraits of him, in total, were displayed at the scaenae frons of the theater.53 As already discussed above, each of his
260 Stylianos E. Katakis portraits is probably of a different sculptural type and was meant to accentuate different qualities and virtues of his character.
Funerary monuments As honorary portrait sculpture typically reflects fashion and self-representation amongst wealthy upper-class citizens, I shall now turn to funerary sculpture, a category that is much more representative of the trends popular amongst wider sections of society. Here, too, we can find large-scale monuments, erected by wealthy citizens as family mausolea; the aforementioned monumental tomb of Philopappus in Athens is a well-known example, and other similar monuments survive, although usually without their original sculptural decoration.54 Examples include the so-called “Bloom heroon” in Delphi, with the marble sarcophagi of the deceased still in situ in the basement of the temple-like monument;55 the underground funerary monument in Kephisia with six sarcophagi, tentatively attributed to the family of Herodes Atticus;56 and the temple-like heroon of the Saethidas family in the stadium of Messene, with a male cuirassed bust in imago clipeata carved at the center of the pediment of the façade (2nd century).57 Examples of portrait statues as part of large-scale funerary monuments are scarce, although this picture is probably due to the accidents of survival.58 Surviving examples in this category include an over-life-size female statue in the common “Large Herculaneum Woman” type from the NE cemetery of Athens, dated to the Hadrianic period (Figure 12.13).59
Figure 12.13 Statue in the style of the “great Herculaneum woman”, from Athens, Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 3606. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archaeological Resources Fund).
Sculpture for “ordinary” people 261 The production of grave stelai continued unabated throughout the 2nd century. In Attica, where more than 600 examples survive, a typical stele depicts one, two, or at the most three standing figures placed in a simple architectural frame that is, in most cases, crowned by a pediment (Figures 12.14 and 12.15).60 Stelai vary widely in size and quality of workmanship, thus revealing their use by wider sections of society. Regarding iconography, men are invariably depicted standing, in the "arm-sling” type, the typical sculptural type for educated citizens active in the public sphere; they often hold a book roll, like Epigonus (Figure 12.14),61 usually accompanied by the scrinium.62 In this way, the himation-clad man is contrasted to the togatus, who is typically not represented on funerary stelai after 212 when the right to Roman citizenship was expanded to all free adult men in the Empire.63 Ephebes and young men are usually represented in heroic nudity, with the himation wrapped around their waists (the so-called “Hüftmanteltypus”) or with the chlamys folded over the left shoulders, iconographic allusions to life in the gymnasium.64 Both iconographic types probably drew upon specific prototypes, although no specific creation has yet been identified as their model. Contrary to their presence on certain grave reliefs, there are no free-standing statues with symbols of a specific profession exercised by the deceased.65
Figure 12.14 Stele of Epigonos, Elate, and Ision, from Athens, Hadrianic, Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1308. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
262 Stylianos E. Katakis
Figure 12.15 Stele of Nike, from Athens, Antonine Period. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1303. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
It should also be noted that in only one instance is a deceased depicted in action; in his grave stele dated to the Antonine period, Artemidorus is depicted in a boar-hunting scene, probably under the influence of contemporary painting, and not of mythical hunt scenes on sarcophagi.66 The representations of women on Attic grave stelai of the 2nd century follow a similar standardization to that found in the case of men.67 Unlike examples from the 1st century BCE–1st century CE, seated figures shown in profile were abandoned, and standing figures became the norm. Sculptural types such as the “Large” and, especially, the “Small Herculaneum Woman”, were commonly used, as on the stele of Nike (Figure 12.15),68 while under the influence of the cult of Isis, popular in Achaea and throughout the Mediterranean,69 representations of women in the guise of the goddess also proliferated (Figures 12.14 and 12.16).70 Representations in the guise of Isis, wearing the characteristic “himation of Isis” and holding the seistron and the situla, were typically reserved for younger women in Attica from the period of Augustus until the middle of the 3rd century.71 The large number of such representations does not support their identification as priestesses, a fact corroborated by the absence of any indicative inscriptions. Women represented in this type should therefore be identified as initiates or worshippers;72 this interpretation explains the fact that no sculptural type drawing from the classical Greek past was selected for their representation. Women represented in the “Isis type” came from all social classes, including the upper ones, as
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Figure 12.16 Stele of Alexandra, from Athens, 2nd quarter of the 2nd century, Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1193. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund: Y. Patrikianos).
exemplified by the high-quality, life-size stele of Alexandra dated to the second quarter of the 2nd century (Figure 12.16).73 Outside Attica, the use of grave reliefs was limited. A small number of stelai survive in Corinth,74 while those from Sparta are generally of low quality, indicating that they were destined for lower-income citizens.75 Lastly, in Boeotia, due to its proximity to Attica, imports of Athenian stelai, or even stelai made by Athenians working in Boeotia, were common, while Attic influence on local production is also evident.76 Sarcophagi are the most characteristic funerary monuments of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Their popularity was first established in Rome during the principate of Trajan, and their use gradually expanded throughout the Empire. Following this trend, Athenian workshops began their production a bit later, in the Hadrianic period, and it lasted until well into the middle of the 3rd century.77 It seems that the proliferation of the use of sarcophagi
264 Stylianos E. Katakis during the second half of the 2nd century, and their high cost,78 led to a decline in the quality (though not the quantity) of contemporary grave stelai,79 as they were by then almost exclusively used by low-income citizens. Attic-style sarcophagi were carved exclusively in Pentelic marble and have distinct rectangular chests divided into three zones on all four sides: the base, the decorated frieze, and the moulded cornice (Figures 12.17–12.19). Although their lids were initially in the shape of a pitched gabled roof, at around 160 this feature was replaced by kline lids on which the figures of the deceased couple recline. The latter form of the lid dominated production in the 3rd century.80 The frieze of the chest was initially decorated with a motif of garlands supported by Erotes and bulls’ heads, like the small sarcophagus in Figure 12.17,81 but gradually a komos of Erotes or other eclectic themes, including scenes of sacrifice or play, became the norm for the front and mostly one of the narrow sides of the chest,82 as on the classicizing sarcophagus in Figure 12.18.83 The middle of the century (the so-called “experimental phase” of Attic production) saw also the introduction of mythological scenes, leading to an abundance of decoration themes used simultaneously, although most of them would not survive the second and third quarters of the century.84 At the end of the 2nd century, decorative themes were confined to scenes of the Dionysiac cycle, myths of popular heroes such as Achilles, Hippolytus, or Meleager (Figure 12.19),85 as well as to mythical battles, such as the Amazonomachy and the naval battles of Troy or Marathon.86 Even in cases where influences from contemporary production in Rome and Asia Minor can be discerned in local production, sculptors of Athenian sarcophagi retained an unparalleled level of sophistication and
Figure 12.17 Small sarcophagus with garlands, from Athens, ca. 140–150 CE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1191. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute D-DAI-ATH-1974/58: G. Hellner).
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Figure 12.18 Sarcophagus with Erotes, from Patras, Late Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1187. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute D-DAI-ATH-1974/69: G. Hellner).
Figure 12.19 Sarcophagus with the Caledonian Hunt, from Patras, Late Hadrianic. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 1187. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund / German Archaeological Institute D-DAI-ATH-1974/69: G. Hellner).
266 Stylianos E. Katakis ingenuity in their work.87 Contrary to Roman88 and Asia Minor89 sarcophagi, in Athenian examples, the deceased is always depicted reclining on the kline-lid, and never as part of the theme on the chest frieze, whether the latter was mythological or not.90 Similarly, the deceased is never depicted in scenes of everyday or public life, especially popular in Roman sarcophagi (vita privata, vita romana). Certain trends in Attic sarcophagi production, such as the emphasis on symbols of education and allusions to the Greek past, as well as on the heroization of the deceased via the selection of certain iconographic themes and the combination of certain elements, are linked to the influence of the so-called Second Sophistic. As B.C. Ewald noted, If one now attempts to locate the specific thematic amalgam of Attic sarcophagi, at least in its broadest contours, within the larger context of Greek art, one quickly comes to the realisation that several (if not all) of these themes were already well established in the context of the funerary commemoration and heroisation of late Classical and Hellenistic rulers and local dynasts.91 Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that Attic sarcophagi were primarily destined for export; indeed, most of them have been found outside Attica in almost all provinces of the Empire.92 Keeping this fact in mind, interpretations of decorative themes must take into account customer preferences that could have played a significant role in their selection.93 What themes did Athenians and other inhabitants of the province of Achaea prefer? To answer this question, we turn to the sarcophagi in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.94 In the 2nd century decorative themes such as garlands, Erotes, and Dionysian imagery dominated Attic production, while mythological scenes were relatively limited. One must take into account the fact that garland decorations were much more easily accepted by Christians than mythological scenes, and, thus, could more easily survive the destruction. Several sarcophagi were later used as water basins.95 Moreover, judging from the available material, the number of 2nd century sarcophagi decorated with mythological scenes from the province of Achaea is limited compared to the number of surviving examples of the first half of the 3rd century.96 The prestige of Athenian sarcophagi workshops and the growing demand for their products led to the gradual emergence of local workshops, probably established by itinerant Athenian artists. These workshops imitated Attic production, but as they worked in local stone, their products were more affordable, making prestigious “atticizing” products accessible to an evergrowing clientele of lower-income citizens.97 In the province of Achaea, such workshops have been identified in Boeotia,98 Arcadia, Laconia,99 and Messene.100 It appears that some of the largest cities, including the Roman colonies of Corinth and Patras, hosted the most important workshops, although not all surviving material is available for research yet.101
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Figure 12.20 Portrait statuette of a woman from Aetolia, middle of the 2nd century, Athens, National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 4019. Source: (Photo courtesy of Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund).
Concluding this brief overview, it is worth noting that representations in the guise of a god or goddess, although common in Rome and Macedonia in funerary contexts, were not popular in the province of Achaea.102 Indicative is the case of an under-life-size statue of a woman in the guise of Artemis (in the early Hellenistic so-called “Colonna type”) from Aetolia (Figure 12.20), dated to the middle of the 2nd century based on her hairstyle which draws upon the official portraiture of Faustina II.103 Although its exact findspot is unknown, its function was most probably funerary, as suggested by its small size. To sum up, research on sculptural self-representation of ordinary citizens in 2nd century Achaea has demonstrated that, in individual cases, the most illustrious members of the upper classes chose to accentuate their ties with Rome; the cases of Philopappus in Athens and of Herodes Atticus in the Nymphaeum at Olympia are indicative. The same is true for a large number of private portraits following the “period face” (“Zeitgesicht”) trend, closely imitating official imperial portraiture. At the same time, however, numerous busts of Herodes Atticus and a large number of portraits of intellectuals such as those of the kosmetai refer to the Classical Greek past. Similarly, depictions of mythological scenes on marble sarcophagi, the use of which spreads amongst upper-class citizens around the middle of the 2nd century, reveal a sense of nostalgia for the age of heroes and cultural excellence. After all,
268 Stylianos E. Katakis cultural renaissance was the main goal of the ideological movement of the Second Sophistic, as many of the chapters in this volume highlight. Moreover, iconographic themes represented on funerary stelai used by wider sections of society indicate that, despite the increasing numbers of Greeks acquiring Roman citizenship, they remained faithful to traditional iconographic types used continuously from the Hellenistic through the late Roman periods.
Notes 1 I am indebted to A. Kouremenos for inviting me to contribute to this volume as well as to P. Konstantinidis for the initial translation of the Greek text. I would also like to thank the National Archaeological Museum of Athens (A. Karapanagiotou and A. Klonizaki), the Ephorates of Antiquities of the Argolid (A. Papadimitriou), of Elis (E. Kollia and C. Liagkouras), and the German Archaeological Institute at Athens (K. Sporn and J.M. Henke) for providing me with photos and permission to publish them. All dates are CE, unless otherwise stated. Additional abbreviations: ArchM = Archaeological Museum, NAM = National Archaeological Museum of Athens 2 Sherwin-White 1985. 3 See the aqueducts of Argos (Vitti 2018), Corinth (Lolos 2010; Lolos 2018), and Athens, even though the latter was completed by Antoninus Pius (Chiotis 2018). The widening of the Megara–Corinth road at the “Scironic Rocks” (Pausanias 1. 44. 6; Papachatzis 1974, 516–517 n. 1), and the management of the infrastructure work that resulted from the flooding of lake Kopais in Boeotia are attributed to Hadrian (Halfmann 1986, 192). 4 Giraud 1991, 269–270. 5 Hoët van Cauwenberghe 2011, 306–319; Sartre 2012, 175–212; on Phocis and Locris, see Daubner in this volume. 6 It is well known that marble statues were more expensive than bronze ones; on this subject, see especially Tuchelt 1979, 70–90. 7 See Tsivikis 2020, 42–3 and n. 23, 25 fig. 7–8, with bibliography on lime kilns. 8 Harrison 1953, 74–8 cat. 57–62, pl. 38–40. 9 Johnson 1931, 19–21 nos. 9–10; 94–97 nos. 191–202 with ill. Unfortunately, the portrait statues from Corinth have not been fully published; the dissertation of C. De Grazia (Columbia University 1973) is not easily accessible (in her article, De Grazia-Vanderpool 2003 discusses imperial portrait statues briefly). 10 Katakis 2002, 326; Katakis forthcoming. 11 Leypold et al. 2014, and especially Griesbach 2014, 55–66, pl. 8–12 on the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus. 12 The term “portrait” is used here only for the heads of the statues, while the fulllength sculpture is referred to as a “portrait-statue”. 13 The term was proposed by Zanker 1982, 310, and since then it has been commonly used in portrait studies; see Zanker 1995, 206, 213–219, 234; Smith 1998, 59–61 and passim; Fittschen 2010, 236–241; Fittschen 2015, 65–67, who discusses the various factors, apart from the imitation of official portraits that shaped the so-called “period face”. See also Konstantinidis in this volume. 14 NAM inv. 249: Smith 1998, 58, pl. III, 4 (private portrait); Kaltsas 2002, 339, no. 718, with ill. (Hadrian); Schröder 2012, 503 and n. 61 (private portrait). Despite the high quality of the workmanship, the large size, and its findspot, when
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juxtaposed with certain portraits of Hadrian, it becomes quite evident that the bust is not a portrait of the emperor, but of a private individual. For the findspot, see Archaiologikon Deltion 1888, 73; a large building complex, probably a villa, was also found in the same area (Greco et al. 2011, 441–443 fig. 238 [F. Longo]); the bust may have been part of its decoration. For sculptures found north of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, see Di Napoli 2008. 15 For the so-called Second Sophistic and its influence on Roman society, see especially Galli 2002, 1–4; Borg 2004. See also Karanastasi 2012–2013, 338–349 on Hadrian’s political motives behind his decision to approach the Greeks of the eastern part of the Empire in his effort to suppress the Jewish revolt. 16 For the “Gymnasium of Diogenes” and its location on the north slope of the Acropolis, see Greco et al. 2014, 745–753 (R. di Cesare) with bibliography; Vlachogianni 2018, 162. For the Post-Herulian wall: Greco et al. 2014, 1138– 1140 (R. di Cesare and D. Marchiandi). 17 From an extensive bibliography on the kosmetai portraits, see especially Krumeich 2004; D’Ambra 2005; Schröder 2011 (with an emphasis on the Severan period); Vlachogianni 2018, with an overall summary of research conclusions. It should be noted that not all of the 33 portraits belong to kosmetai; they must also represent other individuals involved in the education of the ephebes (Vlachogianni 2018, 162–163). On ephebic training in general, see Kennell in this volume. 18 NAM inv. 385: Smith 1998, 80, pl. IX.1, who characterizes men following the “period face” as philokaisares; Kaltsas 2002, 328 no. 688 with ill.; Goette 2003a, 554 fig. 9–10 (affinities with M. Aurelius portraits); Krumeich 2004, 140 fig. 5; Vlachogianni 2018, 209 no. 27 with ills. 19 Krumeich 2004, 140 and n. 46 (bibliography on the portraiture of Aelius Caesar), fig. 6. 20 NAM inv. 387: Kaltsas 2002, 327–327 no. 685 with ill.; Krumeich 2004, 141–142 fig. 2, 7, who compares this portrait with the so-called Aeschylus Farnese (n. 52, fig. 8); D’Ambra 2005, 209–210, fig. 17.4; see also Schröder 2012, 503–504, fig. 1, who believes that the portrait draws upon representations of Epicurus (504 n. 67, fig. 4); Vlachogianni 2018, 208 no. 26 with ills. 21 NAM inv. 1468: Kaltsas 2002, 336–337 no. 711 with ill.; Vlachogianni 2018, 237 no. 55 with ill. The inscription may have been accentuated with paint; the ship with seven oarsmen and a helmsman at the bottom refers to a naval battle contest. For these stelai inscribed with lists of ephebes and found together with the portraits of the kosmetai, see Krumeich 2004, 135–138; Vlachogianni 2018, 160–161. 22 As Voutiras 2008, 209, n. 2 notes, “at least since the 4th century, and possibly even earlier, the term σοφιστής was regularly applied to outstanding rhetoricians who taught the craft of oratory and made public displays”. For Herodes Atticus, see also Strazdins in this volume. 23 For the iconography of Herodes Atticus and his circle, see Goette 2019, with earlier bibliography (see especially Voutiras 2008). For the bust of Fig. 5, found in Kephisia, NAM inv. 4810: Kaltsas 2002, 346 no. 734 with ill; Goette 2019, 226, 251 no. 5 fig. 9.2,4,6,8. See also Mitropoulos in this volume. 24 Cf. Fittschen 2006. 25 Technical details of Herodes’ portraits are described in Goette 2019, 232–233. For the surfaces smoothed-out with the rasp, see also Schröder 2012, 500–501, fig. 2. 26 For the portraits of Polydeukion in the context of 2nd century portraiture, see Goette 2003; Goette 2019, 239–246 fig. 9.20–31. Especially for the portrait
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in Fig. 6, found together with that of Herodes in Kephisia, NAM inv. 4811, see Kaltsas 2002, 346–347 no. 735 with ill.; Galli 2002, 164–165 pl. 12.3-4; Goette 2003, 553 n. 18, fig. 2, 4; Goette 2019, 253 no. 11 fig. 9.26. 27 NAM inv. 361: Datsouli-Stavridi 1985, 83–84 no. 361, pl. 117 (Gallienic); Fittschen 1989, 110 fig. 28 (Antonine); Zanker 1995, 235 fig. 137 (Antonine); Schröder 2011, 50 n. 109 (Severan). 28 Fittschen 1989, who first noted the portrait of Alexander as the model of this group of portraits; Zanker 1995, 234–236, who assigns the lοng hair to heroes; Schröder 2011, 50–51 with n. 107. 29 See Zanker 1995, 191–251; Chioti 2018 on Greek portraits of the Antonine period. 30 NAM inv. 3550: Kaltsas 2002, 338 no. 715 with ill. The peculiar crescent-shaped locks of the hair above the forehead are reminiscent of a portrait of Plotina from Ostia (Rome, Museo Nationale Romano, Palazzo Massimo inv. 339: Sinn 2010, 159, 328, fig. 248a-b). 31 Smith 1998, 63–64. 32 Olympia, ArchM inv. Λ 145 (head), Λ 139 (body), 193 (base): Bol 2008, 149–156 fig. 1–7, who attributed the head to the body. For two other statues signed by the Athenians Eros and Eleusinios and set up in the pronaos in the second half of the 1st century, see Krumeich 2008, 84–85 fig. 4–5, pl. 16.4–6; Trimble 2011, 363–364 no. 4. As Krumeich 2008, 85, points out, the temple of Hera was a prominent place for setting up honorific statues in the sanctuary, at least until c. 100. Also, Sporn 2014, 127, note 69. A parallel case can be found in the temple of Artemis in Aulis, where statues of private individuals were also set up, although statues discovered in the cella could have been transported there at a later time (see Sporn 2014, 127, note 68 with bibliography). 33 On the types of the “Large” and “Small Herculaneum Women”, see Daehner 2007 and especially Vorster 2007, 113–139, who dates the original creations to c. 330–320 BCE, and a bit later, toward the end of the 4th century BCE, respectively; she also argues against the attribution of both works to the same artist. Fundamental for the use of the type during the Hellenistic and Roman periods is the study of Trimble 2011. See also infra on the Herodes Atticus Nympaeum in Olympia and the funerary monuments, Figures 12.13–12.15. 34 Bol 1984 (see also the review by H.R. Goette, in Gnomon 57, 1985, 551–554); the identifications of R. Bol (although not all certain) are followed here. See also Strazdins in this volume. 35 Hitzl and Kropp 2013, 72–79, have convincingly shown that imperial statues could not have been placed at the lower register, below those of Herodes’ family, as argued by Bol 1984, 50–58 Beil. 4. 36 Olympia, ArchM inv. 156: Bol 1984, 171–173 no. 36, pl. 32–33; Trimble 2011, 237–244, fig. 5.11; 365–367 nos. 5–7 (mainly for the type and its use in the Nymphaeum); Hitzl and Kropp 2013, 73, 76–79, who place the statue of Regilla at the center of Herode’s family group, arguing that the second statue of Zeus, in the “Dresden” type, should be excluded from the group (Olympia ArchM inv. Λ 108: Bol 1984, 290–193 no. 49, pl. 62–63). Galli 2002, 223-227, pl. 30.2-3, and 2008, 95, suggests that the statue in the “Dresden” type represents the Pergamene god Zeus-Asclepius, alluding to his sanctuary in Pergamum, which received benefactions from Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. 37 Olympia, ArchM inv. Λ 159: Bol 1984, 180–182 no. 43, pl. 48–50. On the type, see supra note 33. 38 Olympia, ArchM inv. Λ 165: Bol 1984, 177–178 no. 41, pl. 44–45. On the type, see mainly Filges 1997, who surprisingly does not mention this statue, but only
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that of Domitia Faustina or Lucilla (inv. Λ 169+161α: Bol 1984, 184 no. 45 pl. 54–55; Filges 1997, 274 no. 153 [“Argos/Salamis” type]). 39 Olympia, ArchM inv. Λ 157 (Vibullia Alcia Agrippina) and Λ 158 (Faustina the Υounger): Bol 1984, 176, 179–180 nos. 39, 42, pl. 39–41, 46–47. 40 These types and their variants have not been studied thoroughly yet; see Kazakidi 2012, 206 with n. 44–47 and bibliography; Murer 2017, 84–85 with n. 633; 192– 193 no. 22 pl. 4a; 230 no. A73; cat. A80; Tuccinardi 2017, 61 with n. 86. 41 Alexandridis 2004, 229–231, 294. 42 Olympia, ArchM Inv. Λ 153; fragments + Λ 135 (portrait); Λ 154; Berlin, Pergamonmuseum, inv. Ol.3: Bol 1984, 164–169, 193–194 nos. 32–34, 50 fig. 73 pl. 24–29, 64–65; Goette 1990, 136 nos. Bb 106–108, 121, pl. 22.4–6; 94.10; Havé-Nikolaus 1998, 138–140 nos. 25–27, pl. 16–17. 43 Olympia, ArchM inv. Λ 152: Bol 1984, 169–171 no. 35 pl. 30–31; Smith 1998, 77; Goette 2019, 229 with n. 15, who also believes that the statue represents Herodes; the type is known from Hellenistic portrait statues from Kos (Bol 1984, 170; Kabus-Preisshofen 1989, 130–136, 207–213, 215–218 nos. 33–34 [of the 2nd century BCE], 36–37 [of the 1st century), pl. 44–47; Lewerentz 1993, 58–79 fig. 16–18 [type II]) and Aphrodisias, where four 2nd century statues found in the Bouleuterion and the Theatre depict men making libations as in Olympia (Geyre, ArchM: Smith 1998, 65, 86, pl. V.3-4; Smith 2006, 162–166, 177–180 no. 44–45, 50–51, pl. 34–37, 44–47). 44 Olympia, ArchM inv. Λ 154 and Λ 149: Bol 1984, 193–195 cat. 50, 51, pl. 64–65 and 66–67, who dates the statues to c. 170; however, Hitzl and Kropp 2013, 80–81 argue that the toga and cuirassed statues attributed to the monopteroi should be dated to the Trajanic period. This interpretation is based on the statues’ identification as Herodes’ grandfather, Ti. Claudius Hipparchus, and Trajan, respectively. I think that these statues must be re-examined; the togate statue is more likely to represent Herodes himself; in this case, he, and not his father, is depicted wearing a chiton and himation among the other members of his family. 45 Kleiner 1983, 81–90 pl. XIV–XVII; Smith 1998, 71–72 fig. 3; Flämig 2007, 124– 125, pl. 4.1, 6.1–2. 46 For the toga and its symbolism, see Goette 1990, with a systematic typology and a long catalogue of all known statues; especially for the togati in Greece, see HavéNikolaus 1998, and Papagianni 2019 for the emergence of the type in Greece. 47 See Konstantinidis in this volume. 48 Smith 1998, 65; Di Napoli 1997, 421, who notes that the toga was preferred over the himation in the 1st century, a time when Roman citizenship was still not widespread and thus deserved to be proudly displayed by means of a distinct costume. 49 Pfuhl and Möbius 1977, 61–62; Lewerentz 1993, 18–19 with n. 692; 28–57, fig. 1–11 (Type I); von Moock 1998, 58–59; Filges 2000. 50 Epidaurus Museum inv. 13: Katakis 2002, 119–112 no. 116, pl. 148–149; 172– 173 nos. I–IV; ibid. forthcoming, for two more examples from the city of Epidaurus [as yet unpublished] and one from Messene. The two replicas from Corinth are dated to the 2nd century, i.e. earlier than the statue from Epidaurus (Corinth, ArchM inv. S 61, S 308: Johnson 1931, 94 no. 191–192; Katakis 2002, 173 no. II, IV). 51 See Voutiras 1989, 355–360; Smith 2006, 156–157. 52 For the statues set up at the scenae frons of the theatre of Messene, see Di Napoli 2017, 398–404, fig. 16.1 (“palliatus”), 16.2 (“Large Herculanaeum Woman”), 16.3 (male portrait) and 16.4 (togate statue) with earlier bibliography.
272 Stylianos E. Katakis 53 Di Napoli 2017, 399, 402. The representation of Caelianus in armor is one of few examples of a non-member of the imperial family in this type (Di Napoli 2017, 399, 402, 424). It should be noted that in the Nymphaeum of Herodes in Olympia, male members of the imperial family are represented in cuirass (Bol 1984, 151–164 nos. 28–31, 51 fig. 71–72 pl. 15–23, 66–67). This type was generally reserved for the emperor, the leader of the army. 54 Flämig 2007, passim; Vitti 2016, 143–170 (Troezen), 262–268 (Patras), 300–307 (Korone). For the sculptural decoration of the mausolea in Patras (unfortunately still unpublished), see Flämig 2007, 185–212, nos. 91–176; Dekoulakou 2009; on such monuments in Athens in the Kerameikos cemetery (of which only a few remains survive), see Stroszek 2008, 291–297, 300–305, Abb. 1–5, 7–16, 20–26. 55 Flämig 2007, 138–139, no. 14, pl. 21–24 (first third of the 2nd century). 56 Galli 2002, 151–154, fig. 63–65, pl. 19–24; Flämig 2007, 133–135, no. 10, pl. 12.5, 15–19. 57 Themelis 2000, 102, fig. 86–94 (in use in the 1st and 2nd century); Flämig 2007, 175–176 no. 76, pl. 82–86 (eadem, 176–181 nos. 77–81, pl. 87–91, for other mausolea in the city, located close to the Arcadian Gate). 58 See the two unpublished female statues found in the east cemetery of ancient Patras (Filges 1997, 162 n. 640, nos. 9–10) or the two togati reused in the foundations of a bridge near Patras, but originally from a neighboring cemetery (Petropoulos 2001–2002, 400–401, fig. 3–7). 59 NAM inv. 3622: Goette 1988, 253–254, pl. 36-37; J. Daehner, “The Statue Types in the Roman World”, in Daehner 2007, 93 with n. 21, fig. 4.3; Trimble 2011, 361–362 no. 1. For the Northeastern Necropolis of Athens, in the area of the former Royal Stables, see Katakis 2018a, 20–21. A fragmentary statue in the same type was found in the necropolis of Kerameikos (Museum of Kerameikos inv. P184, P207, P255: Trimble 2011, 362–363, no. 3). 60 See von Moock 1998, the fundamental study on Attic stelai of the Roman period, which includes 574 examples; Karapanagiotou 2013, mainly on female representations. 61 NAM 1308: von Moock 1998, 135 no. 266, pl. 41b (Hadrianic). 62 Representations of men dressed in a himation arranged diagonally over the right thigh or horizontally at the torso are scarce (von Moock 1998, 58–59). Repre sentations of children wrapped tightly in a himation, interpreted as a symbol of infantile modesty, should also be noted, although all surviving examples date to the Julio-Claudian period (von Moock 1998, 69 with n. 822). 63 The publication of new material (mainly from the cities of Patras and Sparta) may alter this picture. Only one small-sized grave stele stored in the Epidaurus Museum is, to my knowledge, the only exception; see Katakis forthcoming. 64 Von Moock 1998, 69–75, particularly from the 2nd century, no. 229, pl. 30a–b; no. 276, pl. 42c–d; no. 278, pl. 43a; no. 495, pl. 63c; no. 499, pl. 64c, etc. 65 Von Moock 1998, 60–62, passim, pl. 28b, 34b, 45a; in these cases, men are depicted mainly as farmers, suggesting that they owned large areas of land. Farmers were usually able to afford the commission of a high-quality grave stele. It is also worth noting that when a farmer is accompanied by his wife, the latter is usually depicted in the “Large Herculaneum Woman” type and not in the guise of a countrywoman (cf. pl. 28b and 45c). In the case of the stele of Aurelia Sambatis from Keratea, even though an inscription informs us that she was honored by her husband because she was also a good farmer, she was depicted in the so-called “Kore type”, holding wheat (NAM 3368: von Moock 1998, 66, 149 no.
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332; Karapanagiotou 2013, 120, 166 no. 164, pl. 34, dated to the third quarter of the 2nd century). 66 NAM inv. 1192: von Moock 1998, 121 no. 205, pl. 25d, 26a–b; Katakis 2015, 135, fig. 19. 67 The principal study on the subject is Karapanagiotou 2013, who emphasises women’s place in society during this period. On female iconographic types, see pp. 51–70, and in particular the stelai dated to the 2nd century on pp. 86–91. 68 NAM 1303: von Moock 1998, 134 no. 262, pl. 40b–d (Antonine); Kaltsas 2002, 354 no. 749 with ill. (Hadrianic). 69 Maikidou-Poutrino in this volume. 70 Dunand 1973. For the cult of Isis in Roman Athens, see Walters 1988, 52–57; Trianti 2008, 400–403. See also Maikidou-Poutrino in this volume. A statuette of a peculiar representation of Isis Panthea is identified as a cult statue of the goddess in her small temple on the south slope of the Acropolis, but the argument is not convincing (Trianti 2008, 396–403, fig. 9–15; Karapanagiotou 2013, 58). 71 Walters 1988; Eingartner 1991, 71–73 pl. LXIII-LXXVII; Karapanagiotou 2013, 57–58, pl. 36–37, 65–66, 75. On the hairstyle of these women, see von Moock 1998, 38–40. 72 See Walters 1988, 52–57; Eingartner 1991, 81, 90; Karapanagiotou 2013, 57. 73 NAM inv. 1193, from Kerameikos: von Moock 1998, 121–122 no. 206, pl. 26c–d; Karapanagiotou 2013, 87–88, 203 no. 326, pl. 65); its workmanship recalls highquality late Hadrianic and early Antonine free-standing sculpture. The commissioner preferred a stele to a sarcophagus, even though from that period onward sarcophagi were considered the appropriate funerary monuments for the upper classes throughout the Empire. For her family, see Karapanagiotou 2013, 74 with n. 468. 74 Johnson 1931, 120–126 nos. 245–262; some examples are also included in Ajootian 2014, who suggests that they belong to a series of Hadrianic reliefs representing members of the Achaean koinon, probably part of the decoration of the Lechaion Road Basilica. 75 Papaefthymiou 1992, fig. 1–34, who also mentions two 2nd century stelai imported from Asia Minor (74–84 fig. 36a–b) and Attica (85–87 fig. 37). 76 Bonanno Aravantinos 2012a, 242–245; see especially the stele of Tycharo from Tanagra, where influence from Attic models is obvious (Schimatari, ArchM inv. 19, pp. 243–244 with note 86, fig. 8). A group of funerary altars with low-quality relief decoration dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries (o.c. 241–242 fig. 5–6) are products of local workshops. 77 Koch-Sichtermann 1982 remains fundamental. For an overview of recent research conclusions, see Koch 2012, 2015a and 2015b. 78 Koch 2015a, 8 with n. 7. 79 See Karapanagiotou 2013, 88, who also notes the increasing production of grave stelai in that period. 80 Stefanidou-Tiveriou 2007, 265–269; Koch 2012, 38; Koch 2015a, 8, 9. 81 NAM 1191: Papagianni 2016, 137–138, no. 6, pl. 34.1–4; Katakis 2018a, 36–38, no. 2 pl. 3 (ca. 140–150). 82 Papagianni 2016; Katakis 2018a. 83 NAM inv. 1187, from Patras: Papagianni 2016, 136 no. 60, pl. 1, 52.2; Katakis 2018a, 68–69 no. 61, pl. 20–21 (130–140). 84 Koch-Sichtermann 1982, 436; Koch 2012, 54 with n. 99; Koch 2015a, 18, who mentions the existence of approximately 100 iconographic themes (a different
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account is given by Ewald 2004, 236). It should be noted that artists also experimented with secondary decorative motifs, such as the unique moldings crowning the fragmentary sarcophagus NAM inv. 2031+2032; the representation of Erotes on the front side of the same monument is also unique (Katakis 2018a, 107–109, no. 109, pl. 40). 85 NAM inv. 1186 from Patras: Kaltsas 2002, 350 no. 740 with ill. (150–170); Papagianni 2014, 495 with n. 13; 497–505 fig. 3, 7 (160–170). 86 Matz 1968 (Dionysiac); Koch 1976 (Meleager); Rogge 1995 (Achilles and Hippolytus); Kintrup 2016 (battles). For less frequently represented myths, see Oakley 2011. 87 Koch 2012, 53–54; Koch 2015a, 18 with bibliography. 88 Huskinson 1998; Newby 2011. 89 See the 3rd-century sarcophagi from Aphrodisias, where portraits were left unfinished (Smith 2008, 350; see also Ogus 2018, 17–18, 25–29, 104 who interprets the iconographic types chosen for men and women and the scrolls they commonly hold as allusions to their paideia and the ideological movement of the Second Sophistic). 90 An exception to the rule may come from the short side of the sarcophagus with Erotes of the funerary monument in Kephisia, where an unfinished bust in imago clipeata, stemming from a flower calyx, is tentatively identified as a representation of the deceased, while the same may be true for the rough-worked bearded rider in a boar-hunt scene on another short side of a sarcophagus in the location of “Plato’s Academy” in Athens (Katakis 2018b, 90 n. 36–37, fig. 11–12, with further discussion). 91 Ewald 2018, 245. For the interpretation of mythological scenes on Attic sarcophagi, see especially Ewald 2004 on the influence of the Second Sophistic, and Ewald 2018 on the heroization of the deceased. 92 Koch 2015a, 14 fig. 8–9, who notes than more than 65% of Attic production was exported. 93 Ewald 2018, 212, 217–221, 225, 246, 253. The wider issue of the impact of the customer’s taste on the repertoire of Attic sarcophagi requires further study. 94 See Katakis 2007, 2018a. The second volume of the corpus is in preparation. See also the newly published fragments from the Kerameikos, the most prominent cemetery of Athens (Stroszek 2016). The study of Attic sarcophagi – unlike that of Roman ones – has not yet focused on this issue. See Zanker and Ewald 2012, especially for the depiction of myths. 95 See the chest of a sarcophagus with garlands now in the Roman Agora of Athens (Papagianni 2016, 129 pl. no. 42, pl. 35), with holes opened at the mouth of the lionheads above the garlands for the outflow of water. 96 It is indicative that out of 270 surviving sarcophagi decorated with scenes of mythological battles or hunts (Amazonomachy, fight near the ships in Troy, and others), 49 examples date to the 2nd century and 18 of them come from the province of Achaea (Kintrup 2016, nos. 33, 35, 39, 46, 53, 54, 64, 85 [from Athens], 60, 153, 202, 204, 206, 208–209, 214–215 [Sparta], 117, 120 [Corinth], 138 [Messene]). 97 See Koch and Sichtermann 1982, 358–362, and recently Koch 2015a, 16–17; Koch 2015b, 152–154. The in-depth study of local workshops is at the core of current sarcophagi research, with seminal publications such as the monograph on local production in Nicopolis, Epirus, and on Attic imports in the area; Stefanidou-Tiveriou and Papagianni 2015.
Sculpture for “ordinary” people 275 98 Bonnano-Aravantinos 2012a, 245–248, fig. 9–10; 2012b, 168–171, pl. 76–79.1, 81.5. 99 See Koch 1993, especially 348, where it is mentioned that Laconia is the region where the greatest number of copies of Attic sarcophagi, products of local workshops, have been found; Karapanagiotou 2009; Koch 2012, 48, 50; Koch 2015a, 17, who argues in favor of the settlement of Athenian artists in the area in ca. 160; Koch 2015b, 154; Tsouli 2020, specially 615, n. 44–45. 100 Ciliberto 2007; Ciliberto 2009, 231–234, figs. 2–5. 101 For sarcophagi from Corinth, see Johnson 1931, 111–120, nos. 238–244, as well as the studies mentioned above (notes 86, note 96). For sarcophagi from Patras, see Koch and Sichtermann 1982, 360–361, pl. 397–398 (they are now considered products of local workshops; see Papagianni 2016, 107, pl. 59.1–2); Koch 2015b, 154, who expresses surprise at the small number of sarcophagi from the Roman colony of Patras compared to the number of surviving examples from Laconia. 102 See Wrede 1981; Stefanidou-Tiveriou 2014, 77–81. 103 ΝΑΜ inv. 4019: Kaltsas 2002, 250 no. 519 with ill.; Chioti 2012, 515 and n. 15, fig. 3, who examines the sixth type of Faustina II portraiture and its influence in Greece. For the “Colonna” type, see LIMC II (1984) 638–639 s.v. Artemis nos. 163–168 (L. Kahil: early Hellenistic); 801 s.v. Artemis/Diana no. 15a-l (E. Simon: early 3rd century BCE); On the contrary, Linfert 1990, 282–283, 611–615 nos. 137–141, dates the type to the first half of the 4th century BCE, and attributes it to the “School of Polykleitus”.
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278 Stylianos E. Katakis Heiligtümern. Tagung am Archäologischen Institut der Universität Zürich, 21./22. Januar 2011, Zürcher Archäologische Forschungen 2, Rahden/Westf: Marie Leidorf, 55–70. Halfmann, H. (1986). Itinera principium. Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen im römischen Reich, Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden. Harrison, E. (1953). Portrait Sculpture. Agora I, Princeton: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Huskinson J. (1998). “’Unfinished Portrait Heads’ on Later Roman Sarcophagi: Some New Perspectives.” PBSR 66, 129–158. Havé-Nikolaus, F. (1998). Untersuchungen zu den kaiserzeitlichen Togastatuen griechischer Provenienz. Kaiserliche und private Togati der Provinzen Achaia, Creta (et Cyrene) und Teilen der Provinz Macedonia, Trierer Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 4, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern. Hitzl, K. and Kropp, A. J. M. (2013). “Das Heiligtum von Olympia im 2. Jh. n. Chr. – Alte und neue Impressionen.” Boreas 36, 53–89. Hoët van Cauwenberghe, C. (2011). ‘Rome et la liberté des Grecs sous les Antonins et les Sévères en Achaie romaine, ou l’art d’administrer les Grecs avec délicatesse.’ In S. Benoist et al, eds., Pouvoirs et identités dans le monde romain impérial (IIe s. av. n. è. – VIe s. ap. n. è.). Contributions au séminaire international d’histoire romaine organisé à l’automne 2008 à la Maison de la Recherche de l’Université Charles-deGaulle-Lille 3, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 287–319. Johnson, F. P. (1931). Sculpture 1896-1923, Corinth IX, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kabus-Preisshofen, R. (1989). Die hellenistische Plastik der Insel Kos, AM Beih. 14, Berlin: Mann. Kaltsas, N. (2002). Sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Karapanagiotou, A.W. (2009). “Kaiserzeitliche Sarkophage aus Arkadien (Peloponnes).” In V. Gaggadis-Robin, A. Hermary, M. Reddé, and C. Sintes, eds., Les ateliers de sculpture régionaux: techniques, styles et iconographie, Actes du Xe colloque international sur l’art provincial roman, Arles et Aix-en-Provence, 21–23 May 2007, Arles: Musée départemental Arles antique, Centre Camille Julian, 239–249. ——— (2013). Γυναίκα και κοινωνική προβολή στην Αθήνα. Η μαρτυρία των επιτυμβίων αναγλύφων της ύστερης ελληνιστικής και της αυτοκρατορικής περιόδου, Volos: Ministry of Culpture, Archaeological Institute of Thessalian Studies. Karanastasi, P. (2012–2013). “Hadrian im Panzer. Kaiserstatuen zwischen Realpolitik und Philhellenismus.” JdI 127–128, 323–391. Katakis, S. E. (2002). Επίδαυρος. Τα γλυπτά των ρωμαϊκών χρόνων από το Ιερό του Απόλλωνος Μαλεάτα και του Ασκληπιού, Athens: The Archaeological Society in Athens. ——— (2007). “Die Bearbeitung der Sarkophage des Athener Nationalmuseums im Rahmen des Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani.” In G. Koch, ed., Αkten des Symposiums des Sarkophag-Corpus, Marburg, 2–7 Juli 2001, Sarkophag-Studien 3, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern, 143–149. ——— (2015). “Landschaftsdarstellungen auf attischen Sarkophagen.” In B. Porod and G. Koiner, eds., Römische Sarkophage. Akten des Internationalen Werkstattgesprächs, 11–13 Oktober 2012 (Graz), Schild von Steier, Beih. 5, Graz: Universalmuseum Joanneum GmbH, 126–143. ——— (2018a). Athens, National Archaeological Museum, I. Attic Sarcophagi with Garlands, Erotes and Dionysiac Themes, CSIR Greece I, 2, Athens: Academy of Athens.
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280 Stylianos E. Katakis ——— (2008). “Vom Haus der Gottheit zum Museum? Zu Ausstattung und Funktion des Heraion von Olympia und des Athenatempels von Lindos.” AntK 51, 73–95. Leypold, C., Mohr, M. and Russeberger, C. eds. (2014). Weiter- und Wiederverwendungen von Weihestatuen in griechischen Heiligtümern. Tagung am Archäologischen Institut der Universität Zürich 21./22. Januar 2011, Zürcher Archäologische Forschungen 2, Rahden/Westf: Marie Leidorf. Lewerentz, A. (1993). Stehende männliche Gewandstatuen im Hellenismus. Ein Beitrag zur Stilgeschichte und Ikonographie hellenistischer Plastik, Hamburg: Kovač. Linfert, A. (1990). “Die Schule des Polyklets.” In H. Beck, P.C. Bol, and M. Bückling, eds., Polyklet. Der Bildhauer der griechischen Klassik, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern. Lolos, Y. (2010). ‘Ὕδωρ βασιλεὺς Ἁδριανὸς ἐσήγαγεν ἐκ Στυμφήλου. Το Αδριάνειο υδραγωγείο της Κορίνθου και η μεταφορά του νερού στα ρωμαϊκά χρόνια, Athens: Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation. ——— (2018). “The Hadrianic aqueduct in Corinth.” In G.A. Aristodemou and T.P. Tassios, eds., Great Waterworks in Roman Greece, Archaeopress Roman Archaeology 35, Oxford: Archaeopress, 98–108. Matz, F. (1968). Die dionysischen Sarkophage, ASR IV.1, Berlin: Mann. Murer, C. (2017). Stadtraum und Bürgerin: Aufstellungsorte kaiserzeitlicher Ehren statuen in Italien und Nordafrika, Boston: de Gruyter. Newby, Z. (2011). “In the Guise of Gods and Heroes: Portrait Heads on Roman Mythological Sarcophagi.” In J. Elsner and J. Huskinson, eds., Life, Death, and Representation. Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi, Berlin: de Gruyter, 189–227. Oakley, J. H. (2011). Die attischen Sarkophage. Andere Mythen, ASR IX.1.3, Berlin: Mann. Ogus, E. (2018). Columnar Sarcophagi from Aphrodisias, Aphrodisias IX, Wiesbaden: Reichert. Papachatzis, N. D. (1974). Παυσανίου Ελλάδος Περιήγησις. Αττικά, Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon. Papaefthymiou, W. (1992). Grabreliefs späthellenistischer und römischer Zeit aus Sparta und Lakonien, Munich: Tuduv. Papagianni, E. (2014). “Το κυνήγι του Καλυδωνίoυ κάπρου: η αναβίωση ενός εικονογραφικού θέματος της κλασικής παράδοσης στα εργαστήρια γλυπτικής της αυτοκρατορικής εποχής.” In P. Valavanis and E. Manakidou, eds., ‘Εγραφσεν και εποίεσεν. Essays on Greek Potter and Iconography in Honour of Prof. M. Tiverios, Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 493–509. ——— (2016). Attische Sarkophage mit Eroten und Girlanden, Sarkophag-Studien 9, Ruhpolding: Franz Philipp Rutzen. ——— (2019), “Men in Roman Costume: unknown togate images from Greece.” In V. Gaggadis-Robin and N. de Larquier, eds., La sculpture et ses remplois. Actes des IIes rencontres autour de la sculpture romaine, Bordeaux: Ausonius Éditions, 245–258. Petropoulos, M. (2001–2002). “Η αρχαία Μεσάτις της Πάτρας.” In Actes of the 6th International Congress of Peloponnesian Studies, Tripolis 24–29 September 2000, vol. Β΄, Peloponnesiaka, Supplement 24, Athens: Society of Peloponnesian Studies, 399–420. Pfuhl, E. and Möbius H. (1977). Die ostgriechischen Grabreliefs I, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern. Rogge, S. (1995). Die attischen Sarkophage. Achill und Hippolytos, ASR IX 1,1, Berlin: Mann. Sartre, M. (2012). Ρωμαϊκή αυτοκρατορία. Οι ανατολικές επαρχίες από τον Αύγουστο μέχρι τους Σεβήρους (translated by K.Meidani) Athens: Institut of Book, A. Kardamitsa.
Sculpture for “ordinary” people 281 (Prototype: Haut-Empire romain. Les provinces de Méditerranée orientale d’Auguste aux Sévères, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1997). Schröder, T. (2011). “Porträtstilisierung der lokalen Eliten in Athen im 2. Und 3. Jh. Kontinuität oder Umbruch in severischer Zeit? Mit einem Beitrag zur kaiserlichen Selbstdarstellung des jahres 193.” In S. Faust and F. Leitmeir, eds., Repräsen tationsformen in severischer Zeit, Berlin: Verlag Antike, 34–66. ——— (2012). “Im Angesichts Roms. Überlegungen zu kaiserzeitlichen männlichen Porträts aus Athen, Thessaloniki und Korinth”. In Th. Stefanidou-Tiveriou, P. Karanastasi, and D. Damaskos, eds., Κλασική παράδοση και νεωτερικά στοιχεία στην πλαστική της ρωμαϊκής Ελλάδας, Proceedings of an International Conference Thessaloniki, 7–9 May 2009, Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 497–511. Sherwin-White, A., 1985, The Letters of Pliny. A Historical and Social Commentary, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sinn F. (2010). “Die Bildhauerkunst während der Regierungszeit des Nerva und des Traian (96–117 n.Chr.).” In P.C. Bol, ed., Die Geschichte der antiken Bildhauerkunst, IV. Plastik der römischen Kaiserzeit bis zum Tode Hadrians, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern, 149–213. Smith, R. R. R. (1998). “Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century A.D.”, JRS 88, 56–93. ——— (2006). Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias, Aphrodisias II, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern. ——— (2008). “Sarcophagi and Roman Citizenship.” In R.R.R. Smith and C. Ratté, eds., Aphrodisias Paper 4. New Research on the City and its Monuments, JRA Suppl. 70, Portsmouth/RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 347–394. Sporn, K. (2014). “Individuum und Gott – Privatbildinsse in griechischen Tempeln”, in J. Griesbach, ed., Polis und Porträt. Standbilder als Medien der öffentlichen Repräsentation im hellenistischen Osten, Studien zur antiken Stadt 13, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 117–129. Stefanidou-Tiveriou, Th. (2014). Die lokalen Sarkophage aus Thessaloniki, SarkophagStudien 7, Ruhpolding and Mainz: Franz Philipp Rutzen. Stefanidou-Tiveriou, Th. and Papagianni E. (2015). Ανασκαφή Νικοπόλεως. Σαρκοφάγοι αττικής και τοπικής παραγωγής, Athens: The Archaeological Society in Athens. Stroszek, J. (2008). “Römische Gräber und Grabbauten vor dem Dipylon.” In S. Vlizos, ed., Athens during the Roman Period. Recent Discoveries, New Evidence, Mouseio Benaki, 4th Supplement, Athens: Benaki Museum, 291–309. ——— (2016). “Fragmente kaiserzeitliche Sarkophage im Athener Kerameikos.” In G. Koch, ed., Akten des Symposiums Römische Sarkophage, Marburg, 2–8 Juli 2006, Marburger Beiträge zur Archäologie 3, Marburg: Eigenverlag des Archäologischen Seminars der Philipps-Universität, 177–131. Themelis, P. G. (2000). Ήρωες και ηρώα στη Μεσσήνη, Athens: The Archaeological Society in Athens. Trianti, I. (2008). “Ανατολικές θεότητες στη νότια κλιτύ της Ακρόπολης.” In S. Vlizos, ed., Athens during the Roman Period. Recent Discoveries, New Evidence, Mouseio Benaki, 4th Supplement, Athens: Benaki Museum, 391–409. Trimble, J. (2011). Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsivikis, N. (2020). “Messene and the Changing Urban Life and Material Culture of an Early Byzantine City in the Western Peloponnese (4th–7th Century).” In B. Böhlendorf-Arslan and R. Schick, eds., Transformations of City and Countryside in the Byzantine Period, Byzans zwischen Orient und Okzident 22, Heidelberg: Propylaeum, 39–53.
282 Stylianos E. Katakis Tsouli, M. (2020). “Ομάδα αττικών σαρκοφάγων και επιφανή ταφικά μνημεία από την ευρύτερη περιοχή της Σπάρτης.” In G. Doulfis and K. Kopanias, eds., Τέχνης εμπειρία. Τιμητικός τόμος για την Καθηγήτρια Γ. Κοκκορού-Αλευρά, Athens: Institut of Book – Kardamitsa, 607–623. Tuccinardi, S. (2017). “Sculture romane da Formia. Una proposta di lettura in contest.” In C. Capaldi and C. Gasparro, eds., Complessi monumentali e arredo scultoreo nella Regio I Latium et Campania: nuove scoperte e proposte di lettura in contesto: atti del Convegno internazionale, Napoli, 5 e 6 dicembre 2013, Naples: Naus, 49–68. Tuchelt, K. (1979). Frühe Denkmäler Roms in Kleinasien: Beiträge zur archäologischen Überlieferung aus der Zeit der Republik und des Augustus. I. Roma und Promagistrate. IstMitt Beih. 23, Tübingen: Wasmuth. Vitti, P. (2016). Building Roman Greece. Innovation in vaulted Construction in the Peloponnese, Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider. ——— (2018). “Il ninfeo adrianeo di Argo.” ASAtene 96, 275–299. Vlachogianni, E. (2018). “Kosmetai and Ephebes” and “The ‘Diogeneion’ and the Herms of the Kosmetai.” In M. Lagogianni-Geograkarakos and E. Papi, eds., HADRIANUS – ΑΔΡΙΑΝΟΣ. Hadrian, Athens and the Gymnasia, Athens: National Archaeological Museum – Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, 158–165, 203–241. Vorster, C. (2007). “Greek Origins: the Herculaneum women in the Pre-Roman World.” In Daehmer 2007, 113–139. von Moock, D. W. (1998). Die figürlichen Grabstelen Attikas in der Kaiserzeit. Studien zur Verbreitung, Chronologie und Ikonographie, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern. Voutiras, E. (1989). “Libelli … Persephonae maxima dona.” In H.-U. Cain, H. Gabelmann, and D. Saltzmann, eds., Beiträge zur Ikonographie und Hermeneutik, Festschrift fur N. Himmelmann, BJb Beih. 47, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern, 355–360. ——— (2008). “Representing the “Intellectual” or the Active Politician? The Portrait of Herodes Atticus.” In A.D. Rizakis and F. Camia, eds., Pathways to Power. Civic Elites in the Eastern Part of the Roman Empire. Proceedings of the International Workshop held at Athens Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, 19 december 2005. Tripodes 6, Athens: Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, 209–219. Walters, E. J. (1988). Attic Grave Reliefs that Represent Women in the Dress of Isis, Hesperia, Supplement 22, Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Wrede, H. (1981). Consecratio in formam deorum: vergöttliche Privatpersonen in der römischen Kaiserzeit, Mainz: Ph. von Zabern. Zanker, P. (1982). “Herrscherbild und Zeitgesicht,” in Römisches Porträt. Wissenschaftliche Konferenz Berlin (Ost) 1981, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humbolt Universität zu Berlin, Reihe Gesellschaftswissenschaften 31, Berlin, 307–312. ——— (1995). Die Maske des Sokrates. Das Bild des Intellektuellen in der antiken Kunst, Munich: C. H. Beck. Zanker, P. and Ewald B. C. (2012). Living with Myths,The Imagery of Roman Sarcophagi (translated by J. Slater), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
13 The past in the round Roman provincial coinage in the Argolid David Weidgenannt
Introduction In the last thirty years interest in Roman provincial coinage has surged. The variety of images preserved on these coins makes them especially valuable as a source not only for various local histories,1 but also for studies of identity.2 For Greece proper, reference to local matters on coins makes them the perfect companion to Pausanias’ Periegesis, as they often provide us with visual evidence for subjects mentioned in the text. This complementary reading of text and coins is in itself remarkable, attesting to the popularity of certain themes expressed both in written and visual sources in the 2nd century CE. Pausanias’ interest in things past is, in many cases, matched by the images on the coins, although this does not mean that their imagery was only concerned with such issues.3 The coins were certainly more than just “a numismatic commentary on Pausanias”.4 In this chapter I will focus on coins minted in the Argolid, where production of coinage resumed in the 2nd century after a longer hiatus. The issues produced there cover a great variety of topics, not all of them referring to a more distant past, and certainly not all of them will be covered here.5 I will instead focus on selected coin types minted at Argos, Epidaurus, and Troezen in order to show how they were embedded in 2nd-century discourses about the Hellenic past and how, in some cases, the coins presented a very particular reading of this past. In doing so, they provided not only specific visualizations of these discourses, but were an active claim to their veracity and resonated with other, non-numismatic representations of the past.6 I will confine myself to the time before the Severans, during which an increasing number of poleis started minting coins.7 I shall begin with a short overview of the minting activity in Argos, Epidaurus, and Troezen, and discuss the quantity of coins produced in these cities as well as where these coins were found. Although the evidence is patchy at best, it can also be assumed that the coins were known outside their places of origin. I will then focus on individual coin types minted by these cities and discuss how the themes depicted on the coins interacted on different levels with larger discourses in the Roman Empire. DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-16
284 David Weidgenannt
Production and circulation The coins minted by these three poleis in the Argolid are not uniform in every respect. In the Imperial period before the Severans, Troezen started minting coins in the reign of Commodus and continued under the Severans; Epidaurus minted under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius; and Argos only minted from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. These issues do not indicate that the poleis minted continuously. We must assume that coins were minted intermittently and that moments of minting are separated by periods of inactivity, even if we cannot take this to mean that minting could not have happened at different points of time during the reign of an emperor. The coins of Argos from the time of Hadrian perhaps date between 130 and 138, as suggested by Flament and Marchetti,8 or may even fall into the short period between 132 and 134, as proposed by Amandry and Burnett,9 whereas the coins minted under Antoninus Pius cover a wider span between 138 and 161.10 The minting in Epidaurus was probably linked to Hadrian’s visit in 124,11 although a later date is also possible. The die linkage suggests that the coins were struck within a short period. The Troezenian coins were minted at some point during the reign of Commodus. The minting pattern in the Argolid is thus erratic. The inception of minting in one place did not necessarily set off the coin production in another, and different reasons could have led to the issuing of coins. It is also fairly certain that the coins were produced in different quantities. While reliable data are lacking for Troezen, we can glean some insights from the estimated number of obverse dies used in Epidaurus and Argos (Table 13.1). In Argos, coin production started under Hadrian and utilized between 13 and 18 obverse dies. Under Antoninus Pius, production reached a peak with around 19 to 23 in use, while in the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus only 11 to 13 dies should be assumed. In Epidaurus, 3 to 12 dies were used under Hadrian, and 7 to 13 under Antoninus Pius. Argos not only produced more coins in total, minting under Marcus Aurelius as well, but also used more dies under every individual emperor. Quantitative differences are not restricted to the obverse dies alone. While certain reverse designs or subjects are attested by single dies only, others were minted with two or more dies. Thus, not all the known reverse types were produced in equal quantity.13 While this unquestionably resulted in the predominance of certain images, it should not obscure the fact that topics known from individual dies were consciously chosen to be depicted on coins. The coins clearly had a local character, which was underlined by the use of the city ethnic. But this does not necessarily mean that they were the only coins in use or that they were known only where they originated.14 A recent study of the numismatic landscape of Athens and Corinth from the Late Republic to the High Empire highlighted that foreign provincial and imperial coinages circulated in these cities as well, albeit in different quantities and at different times.15 We are less well informed about the situation in the Argolid, let alone the whole of Achaea, where the circulation of Roman provincial coinage has
Table 13.1 Estimated number of OV-dies for Argos and Epidaurus using the method described in Esty 201112 Hadrian
Argos Epidaurus
Antoninus Pius
n
d
n/d
dies est.
min
max
84 7
13 3
6,46 2,33
15 5
13 3
18 12
Marcus Aurelius/Lucius Verus
n
d
n/d
dies est.
min
max
138 26
18 7
7,67 3,71
21 10
19 7
23 13
n
d
n/d
150
11
13,64
dies est.
min
max
12
11
13
The past in the round 285
286 David Weidgenannt Table 13.2 Coin finds in Greece of coins minted in the 2nd century CE in the Argolid Hadrian
Antoninus Pius
Marcus Commodus Aurelius/ Lucius Verus
Argos
Epidaurus
Argos
4
21
8
9
1 25 1
14 2
2
12 4
Argos Athens17 Corinth18 Isthmia19 Kenchreai20 Argos21 Nemea22 Epidaurus23 Megalopolis24 Lousoi25 Olympia26 Messene27
Epidaurus
1
1
1 1 1
1
Troezen 1 3 4
1 1
not yet been studied in detail. The numismatic finds from sites in Corinth, Argos, and Olympia still await publication, as do the finds from smaller locations like the Epidaurian Asclepieion, Troezen,16 and many others. A very cursory survey of finds listing coins minted in Argos, Epidaurus, and Troezen is provided in Table 13.2. Apart from Corinth and Argos, the absolute number of coins found at different sites is rather small, but clearly shows that at least the coins from Argos were found at a number of other sites outside the Argolid. In Corinth and Argos, coins from all of the three mints are represented and it seems possible that in these two cities they were used alongside each other.28 Consequently, this may suggest that the images on the coins co-existed in the two cities and that their visual impact was perhaps not restricted to their place of origin alone.29 In addition, we should not underestimate the number of foreigners that could have been in contact with these local coinages. Although their numbers cannot readily be quantified, it is safe to assume that places like the Asclepieion of Epidaurus attracted large numbers of visitors from various parts of the Roman Empire who would have come in contact with the local coins and the images on them. In addition, the coins certainly could have attracted special attention when they entered circulation for the first time, being unworn from use and therefore easily distinguishable from older coins.
Argos Perseus the Gorgon-Slayer The mythical stories revolving around Perseus were frequently appropriated throughout the ancient world. But it was the Argolid that could claim first and foremost to be “the cradle of Perseus”.30 There, Acrisius, after having
The past in the round 287 received an oracle that the son of his daughter Danae would one day kill him, constructed a chamber and isolated her in it so that no man could impregnate her. Although kept under strict guard, Zeus entered the chamber in the form of a golden shower and impregnated her. After discovering that his daughter had given birth to Perseus, Acrisius put Danae and the infant in a chest and threw it in the sea. After landing in Seriphus, Perseus at a later stage set forth to procure the head of the Gorgon Medusa, pressured by Polydectes, king of Seriphus and brother of Dictys. After his victory over the Gorgon, he freed the princess Andromeda on his way back to the island where Polydectes was then turned to stone by gazing at Medusa’s head. Soon after Perseus went to Larissa, where his grandfather had withdrawn and urged him to return to Argos. There, during a contest, Perseus fulfilled the prophecy of the oracle by accidentally killing his grandfather with a discus and becoming his successor as king of Argos.31 Coins minted under Hadrian allude to Perseus’ divine and Argive origin (Figure 13.1).32 The coins show a female figure seated to the left on a klismos in three-quarter view. Her right hand spreads out her garment, while her left arm is bent; the depiction is that of Danae in expectation of Zeus’ arrival. The scene not only alludes to the impregnation of Danae, which had received ample attention by ancient writers,33 but also evokes Argos’ mythical topography. In Pausanias’ time, a subterranean structure could supposedly still be seen, in which the bronze chamber built by Acrisius had once been installed.34 Although the chamber itself had been demolished by the tyrant Perilaus and thus did not survive to Pausanias’ time, the underground structure served as a visible reminder of the story and, at the same time, as evidence for its credibility. But it was not only Perseus’ conception that appeared on Argive coins; his heroic deeds also influenced the imagery of the city’s numismatic production. Coins from the reign of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Lucius Verus also refer to the Argive hero (Figure 13.2). The coins minted under Hadrian and Lucius Verus show him nude and in frontal view, his head turned right. In his right hand he is holding the head of Medusa while his left hand holds the harpa.
Figure 13.1 Hadrianic coin with Danae on the reverse (LHS-Numismatics 2006, 282 no. 1186.3 (AE, 7,78 g, 24 mm, 11 h).
288 David Weidgenannt
Figure 13.2 Coins depicting Perseus, minted under Hadrian (left), Antoninus Pius (middle), and Lucius Verus (right) (left: LHS-Numismatics 2006, 282 no. 1186.2 (AE, 12,34 g, 26 mm, 10 h); middle: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, Pl. I, 21 (AE, 22 mm); right: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 142 (AE, 7,83 g, 24 mm, 9 h)).
A chlamys falls over his left arm.35 Coins minted under Antoninus Pius show only his head with a winged cap. In the foreground there is either a snake or a harpa.36 The images on these coins clearly center on Perseus’ most famous deed, the decapitation of the Gorgon Medusa. Although this did not occur in Argos, it was an Argive hero who had defeated the monster. While Perseus himself did not have a heroon in Argos, several lieux de mémoire in the city were associated with him. A stone head of Medusa, purportedly made by the Cyclopes, could be seen near the sanctuary of Kephisus.37 In the marketplace of Argos, a mound of earth was said to contain Medusa’s head.38 Nearby, Perseus’ daughter, Gorgophone, had her grave.39 Thus, the slaying of Medusa had a very physical embodiment in Argos itself. But it was not only in Argos that Perseus was present. To the north, in Mycenae, there was a fountain known by the name Perseia and a heroon on the way to Argos.40 While Mycenae in earlier times could claim to have been founded by Perseus,41 the city had fallen into decay by the time of Pausanias and thus could not compete with its neighbor for the hero’s prestige. Moreover, the hero was closely tied to another location in the realm of Argos. In the thirty-second year of Perseus’ reign, as Apollodorus of Athens has it, Dionysus attacked Argos with his maenads and, at least according to some versions, was defeated by the Argive hero.42 The graves of the fallen maenad Chorea, and of other women fighting on the side of Dionysus, were shown to Pausanias in Argos.43 The god himself, according to a scholiast on Homer, was thrown by Perseus into the Lernaean lake south of Argos.44 In turn, this event was linked to another ritual during which the Argives summoned Dionysus, called bougenes, with the sound of war trumpets from the lake and sacrificed a sheep by throwing it in the water.45 Perhaps the aition for this ritual was Perseus throwing Dionysus into the lake, as has been argued.46 The hero’s fight against Dionysus was thus not only evoked by the memorials in the city, but also in a ritualised form in its wider territory.47
The past in the round 289 While Perseus was tied to Argos’ bygone myth-historical past, he also served as a point of reference for the Argives in later times.48 In this way, Perseus appears in several Peloponnesian inscriptions, where he figures as a prominent genealogical reference.49 These inscriptions not only originate in Argos but were also set up in other places. An inscription of the first half of the 1st century CE from Epidaurus, set up by the Spartans in honour of Titus Statilius Lamprias, refers to numerous mythical predecessors, among them ἀπὸ δὲ Ἄργους τὸ Περσέως καὶ Φορωνέως.50 He also appears later in a 2nd century CE honorary inscription from Sparta for L. Volusenus Aristocrates, that can be traced back to the honorand’s Argive heritage: ἀπό]γονον Ἡρακ̣[λέους] καὶ Περσέο[ς].51 Likewise, in the 2nd century, the city of Argos honored another member of the same family, highlighting that he was Περσέος καί Διοσκούρων απόγονον.52 But Perseus’ function was not restricted to providing genealogical credentials alone. In Argos itself, we know of honors that could be bestowed in his name: τὰς Περσέος καὶ Ἡρακλέος τειμάς. Two 1st-century CE inscriptions from Argos refer to these honors, of which one is set up not by the Argives themselves but by the Ῥωμ[αῖ]οι οἱ ἐν Ἄργει κατοι[κ]οῦντ[ες],53 the latter apparently conferring the same honour as the Argives themselves did. Perseus’ pivotal role as an Argive hero was not limited to the Peloponnese alone. Among others, the Cilician city of Aegeae claimed to be of Argive heritage, referring to the hero’s journey that brought him to their land.54 A dossier containing three documents has been found in Argos; it includes a letter of Argos to Aegeae, an honorary decree for P. Anteios Antiochos which had also been sent to Argos, and a summary or part of the speech that Antiochos had given in Argos.55 The inscription reflects not only that Perseus’ Argive heritage mattered to the Aegeaeans, but also shows that this event and Antiochos’ account were worth being exhibited in public in Argos itself. Perseus certainly was of special importance to the Argives. His divine lineage was alluded to on the coins that showed the impregnation of his mother Danae, the location of this event allegedly still visible in the time of Pausanias. While this happened in Argos itself, Perseus’ most famous deed, the beheading of the Gorgon Medusa, occurred elsewhere. Nevertheless, this event was tied to Argos as well, having left tangible remnants in the city. While the coins referred to his successful labor, the hero’s impact was not restricted to the city of Argos alone. Perseus’ story was also linked to Mycenae in the north and the Lernaean Lake south of the city, both of which at some point had come under the sway of Argos. On the way from Mycenae to Argos there was a heroon for him, and the festival during which the Argives summoned Dionysus had perhaps an aition in Perseus throwing the god into the lake. In the 2nd century, it was certainly the Argives who could lay claim to the hero and monopolized for themselves his significance in other parts of the Argolid.56 But Perseus’ connection to Argos was restricted neither to the 2nd century, nor to the city alone. The epigraphical record clearly shows that, in the 1st century, the hero was already used as evidence for a heroic pedigree, and that honors in his name were awarded, thus adding to the honorand’s prestige.
290 David Weidgenannt The fact that inscriptions were set up not only in Argos but in Epidaurus and Sparta as well suggests that the hero’s significance was understood elsewhere too. In addition, he served as a point of reference for cities further away, thus granting the Argives the authority to confirm their connection to Perseus and, by extension, to the city of Argos itself.
Diomedes and the Palladion The Argives claimed to possess the Palladion, which was said to have been brought there by Diomedes; the commander of the Argive troops, together with Odysseus, took it from Troy,57 thus eventually causing the fall of this city.58 The Palladion, whose theft by Diomedes was already in the Classical period part of Argive coin imagery,59 appears on Argive coins of different types in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius.60 The coins minted under Hadrian (Figure 13.3) show Diomedes to the left on an altar.61 His left leg is stretched out while his right leg is folded beneath him. His right hand holds a sword, while his left holds the Palladion. This motive, sometimes showing Odysseus as well, became popular from Hellenistic times on and is well attested in other media, especially glyptics.62 It depicts Diomedes just seconds after taking possession of the Palladion in Troy.63 The coin types from the reign of Antoninus Pius (Figure 13.4) show the naked hero standing, head turned right. He has a harpa in his right hand, while his left holds the sacred statue.64 A similar type depicts a slightly varied iconography: Diomedes cradling the Palladion in his left arm.65 A further type shows the Palladion by itself in a tetrastyle temple structure situated on a hill.66 By depicting Diomedes and the Palladion on its coins, Argos joined a long list of places that claimed ownership over the relic.67 In this question of ownership, the Argives competed with closer neighbors like Sparta and Athens, which both likewise claimed it for themselves. The Spartans asserted that the original Palladion was kept in Odysseus’ heroon in their territory. This was not simply another claim of ownership; the Palladion in Sparta was allegedly
Figure 13.3 Coin minted under Hadrian showing Diomedes with the Palladion (Staatliche Münzsammlung, München, Photo: Sergio Castelli (AE, 11,9g, 27 mm, 7 h).
The past in the round 291
Figure 13.4 Coins minted under Antoninus Pius showing Diomedes holding the Palladion (left and middle); the Palladion in a temple (right) (left: Classical Numismatic Group Inc. 2009, no. 2873 (AE, 8,97 g, 24 mm, 3 h); middle: Auctiones A.G. 2003, no. 332 (AE, 9,54 g, 24 mm); right: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, Pl. K, 42 (AE, 9,43 g, 25 mm, 5 h)).
not brought there directly from Troy but was supposedly stolen from Argos.68 Athens made a similar claim, with her version of the relic’s provenance also directly linked to Argos: it was said that the Athenians had sent only a copy to Argos, or that the Argives, after having landed in Phaleron, had lost it and the Athenians recovered it.69 As is evident from these competing versions, the existence of the Palladion in Argos was not uncontested. But it was not only Sparta and Athens against which the Argives had to defend their claims; there was another, even more powerful contender. “For the Palladion, as it is called, was manifestly brought to Italy by Aeneas” writes Pausanias in the course of his Argive narrative.70 It was not only the Greeks that had a share in the story of the Trojan War but the Romans as well.71 Although Romans might not have cared whether the Argives claimed ownership of the Palladion,72 the latter, by putting images of the relic on their coins, took a stance on that matter.73 Additionally, the Palladion was not the only souvenir the Argives had kept, since there were additional visible and tangible reminders of their prominent role in the Trojan War. A cenotaph in Argos itself commemorated the soldiers that had died in Troy or on their way back home.74 The famous sanctuary of Hera, the Heraion, was also connected to the Trojan story: there, Agamemnon is said to have been chosen as the commander of the Greeks.75 This theme was also picked up in the temple’s decoration, which referred to the history of the Trojan War. The temple sculptures above the pillars could be read as scenes from the war showing the capture of Ilium and, in the pronaos, visitors could see the shield of the Trojan warrior Euphorbus, which had been taken from him by Menelaus.76 Cassandra and her brother Helenus were buried in Mycenae and Argos respectively, although, as Pausanias states, even the guides of the Argives were aware of a parallel story that placed Helenus in Epirus.77 This memorial competition is important, as it demonstrates that the stories recounted in Argos were contested and therefore permanently required re-affirmation. Interestingly, while the discourse centered around an inherently tangible relic, its exact location in Argos is
292 David Weidgenannt unknown and remains open to conjecture. Possible locations are the temple of Athena Oxyderkes, dedicated by Diomedes himself in recognition for her help during a battle in Troy,78 the temple of Athena on the Larissa, of which only the foundations still survive,79 or the sanctuary of Pallas Athene.80 The depiction of a hill on the coins from Argos could allude to the temple on the Larissa, although it is equally possible that it refers to the setting in Troy.81 Similarly, coins minted under Hadrian depicting Diomedes stealing the Palladion from the altar show the event in Troy. Therefore, it is uncertain whether our coin refers to a place in Argos. The question of where the Palladion was actually kept was perhaps less important than the repeated assertion of ownership that found its expression in coins.82 The coins showing Diomedes with the Palladion or the statue alone should be viewed as a direct reference to a myth-historical past. But, as we will see in the case of Theseus and his son Hippolytus in Troezen, this past was deeply embedded in the 2nd century CE present. A city could certainly claim credit for and derive prestige from a myth-historical hero and his deeds, but while Theseus and Hippolytus were deeply rooted in the history of both Troezen and Athens, the theft of the Palladion by Diomedes had further implications. Diomedes’ deed was considered by some to have been the necessary precondition for the fall of Troy that undoubtedly was part of the shared cultural memory of the Greeks. That this hero originated in Argos was already a valuable asset for the city’s cultural status. But it was not only Diomedes and his deeds that were important; the Argives also asserted their ownership of the Palladion. While Argos’ role as the hometown of the hero was undisputed, this was not the case with the Palladion. As already mentioned, Argos was not the only city with pretensions to it; Sparta and Athens both laid claim to the relic and their own versions of the story were closely linked to Argos and its hero. Nevertheless, the possession of the Palladion was not simply an intra-Greek matter. The Romans, too, asserted ownership and this perhaps necessitated even more of a reaction on the side of the Argives. That this was not only a matter of a distant past, but part of a 2nd-century discourse is reflected in Pausanias, who himself took a position in this matter. He did not believe in the existence of the Palladion in Argos, as it had been brought to Italy by Aeneas. That the Argives thought otherwise was not only expressed by the exegeta in Argos: the coins also asserted Argive ownership.
Troezen Father and son Theseus’ role as the Athenian polis hero par excellence is undisputed.83 Since the second quarter of the 6th century BCE, the deeds of the hero were an integral part of Athenian visual culture. For the painters of Attic pottery in particular, Theseus’ deeds provided inspiration for their work, but scenes from his life have been shown, as we will see, in other media as well. These depictions were not fixed and steady, but changed over time and varied in
The past in the round 293 different media, thereby highlighting individual facets of the hero and his deeds. Still, Theseus formed an essential part of Athens’ cultural memory, although the way he was portrayed varied greatly. While the city certainly could claim the hero and his deeds for itself, his commemoration was not restricted to Athens alone. Theseus is also depicted on two small series of coins from Troezen,84 which refer to two specific episodes in the hero’s life: the finding of the gnorismata and the slaying of the Minotaur. As will be shown, the commemoration of these two events on the part of the Troezenians was not accidental. It could be argued that they expressed their own claim to Theseus’ story, which was predominantly associated with the bigger city of Athens. Troezen did not produce coins on a regular basis. The city did not mint from the late 3rd century BCE onwards and resumed coin production only in the later years of the 2nd century CE, under the reign of Commodus. While the iconography of the earlier Classical and Hellenistic coins was centered on Athena and Poseidon, showing her head on the obverse and his trident on the reverse,85 the coins of the 2nd century employ a greater variety of images. While this iconographical change could readily be explained by the chronological hiatus of more than 300 years, it is evident that even in the 2nd century the iconography of older coinage was still known – at least to Pausanias – and could have served as the blueprint for newly minted coins.86 But such a nostalgic reproduction of older coin types was apparently not intended; rather, it is evident that the Troezenians chose different motifs and subjects for their coins. The reverse of the first coin type from Troezen (Figure 13.5) depicts a naked man to the right lifting a rock.87 One of his hands is placed on top of the stone, while the other pushes it from below. This scene was well known from the first third of the 5th century BCE onward and shows the hero Theseus lifting a rock under which his Athenian father Aegeus had hidden a sword and sandals – the gnorismata that eventually brought Theseus to Athens.88 His father came to Troezen after having received an ambiguous oracle in Delphi that should have prevented him from having intercourse with a woman before returning to Athens. Aegeus, unaware of
Figure 13.5 Coin minted under Commodus showing Theseus on the reverse lifting the stone to find the gnorismata (LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320-321 no. 1341.3 (AE, 8,85 g, 22 mm, 7 h)).
294 David Weidgenannt the full meaning of the oracle, came to Troezen where he impregnated Aethra, the daughter of king Pittheus. Aegeus then left his sword and sandals in the cavity of a rock and told Aethra to send Theseus to Athens should he, having grown to manhood, be able to lift the rock and find the gnorismata. Thus, the recovery of the gnorismata is not only connected to the conclusion of Theseus’ youth, but also a rite of passage that marks the starting point of the hero’s further journey.89 Interestingly, the discovery of the gnorismata is depicted not only on the coins of Troezen but also on Athenian examples. A number of coin types from Athens have been associated with Hadrian’s visits to the city and his involvement in its re-modelling, but they continued to be minted for some time after his death. Although these coins should probably be dated earlier than the reign of Commodus and need not necessarily serve as the model for the Troezenian coins, they both at least should be seen in the context of the same zeitgeist. On the Athenian coins (Figure 13.6) the hero is also shown to the right lifting the stone with two hands; this image was perhaps inspired by a group of statues on the Acropolis, although this contention remains uncertain.90 Still, the episode provides the hinge between the two cities without necessarily evoking the same facets of the story for every viewer. While for the Athenians the episode probably marked the beginning of the hero’s self- recognition as an Athenian, for the Troezenians it may have demonstrated that their city – no matter how small and unimportant it was compared to Athens – was the hero’s place of origin.91 In the 2nd century, Antoninus Pius conferred the status of civitas libera on the Arcadian village of Pallantion and bestowed upon its inhabitants freedom from taxation in addition to other rights.92 Pallantion was the birthplace of Evander who, with some of his fellow Arcadians, first settled by the river Tiber at a place whose name later became Palatine. Thus, in the heroic figure of Evander as well it is the place of birth that matters. A similar understanding can be gained from a more recently published letter of Hadrian to Naryca in Opuntian Locris,93 which was the home of Ajax the Lesser. In this letter,
Figure 13.6 Athenian coin of the 2nd century CE showing on the reverse Theseus lifting the stone to find the gnorismata (Classical Numismatic Group Inc. 1996, no. 375 (AE, 8,96 g, 23 mm).
The past in the round 295 Naryca’s status and rank as a polis is based on the city’s role as a starting point for heroes, among other criteria: “You [sc. the inhabitants of Naryca] have also been mentioned by certain of the most celebrated poets, both Roman and Greek, as ‘Narycians’, and they also name certain of the heroes as having started from your polis.”94 Although the letter is addressed to the Narycians by Hadrian, the emperor was most likely re-stating arguments that Narycian ambassadors had put forward.95 Both cases indicate that a city’s status as hometown of a well-known hero was important and formed part of its cultural capital. With the depiction of Theseus finding the gnorismata, the Troezenians expressed this notion visually on their coinage. This was more than mere antiquarian recollection; it was also a way for the Troezenians to convey their place in the broader mythhistorical horizon of the 2nd century and show that Theseus was not only an Athenian hero. The Athenians had placed a statue of the same scene on the Acropolis and minted coins of similar type. Troezen, despite being a much smaller and politically unimportant city, expressed through the coins its own claim to Theseus’ history.96 The finding of the gnorismata, after all, did not occur just anywhere, but rather in the vicinity of Troezen where the hero had been born. On the road from Troezen to Hermione, the gnorismata allegedly lay hidden under a stone that was called Rock of Theseus in Pausanias’ time, but in earlier times had been known as the altar of Zeus Sthenios.97 While Theseus’ deed had occurred in a distant past, in the 2nd century the location where he found the gnorismata was still the deictic proof for that event. Interestingly, there is a second depiction of Theseus on coins from Troezen (Figure 13.7, left).98 On these issues he is shown on the right, nude and holding a club(?) in his right hand and the horns of the Minotaur with his left hand.99 Again, a similar motif can be found on slightly earlier Athenian coins (Figure 13.7, right).100 Theseus’ victory over the Minotaur was not only a particularly popular subject in literary and visual arts, but it was also the mythical deed that eventually saved the Athenians and marked Theseus’ accession to power in the city. But it was not only in the Athenians’ collective
Figure 13.7 Coins of Troezen (left) and Athens (right) showing Theseus fighting the Minotaur in Crete (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 232 (AE, 9,81, 24 mm, 12 h); Classical Numismatic Group Inc., Electronic Auction 481, 2. Dec. 2020, no. 238 (AE, 6,89 g, 24 mm, 3 h).
296 David Weidgenannt memory that this event held a special place. After his return from Crete, Theseus supposedly dedicated a temple to Artemis Soteira in the marketplace of Troezen to commemorate his safe return from the island.101 Once again, the deed of Theseus memorialized on the coins is also linked to a physical space in Troezenian territory that symbolized the hero’s accomplishment. His alleged dedication of the temple in Troezen could also be seen as proof of his commitment to his hometown even after he had left for Athens. The interplay between the myth-historical past of Troezen and Athens is not only centered on Theseus alone, but also includes his son Hippolytus. Two, or perhaps three, coin types refer specifically to him (Figure 13.8). The first type (Figure 13.8, left) depicts Hippolytus standing to the left, holding a spear in his right hand; he is leaning on a tree stump which is covered by an animal skin or his garment. A dog is sitting to his left and turning his head toward him. Although the figure on the coin is unnamed, there are good reasons to identify it with Hippolytus.102 The legendary figure also appears on another type (Figure 13.8, middle) in which he wears a chlamys while holding the reigns of a horse with his right hand. A dog sits between him and the horse.103 A third type (Figure 13.8, right) may be added and is possibly also a representation of Hippolytus; it shows a standing male figure with a chlamys, holding a spear in his left hand.104 Hippolytus occupied an important position in Troezen; he had dedicated a temple to Artemis Lyceia,105 and himself had his own sacred precinct with a temple and a statue.106 A gymnasium was named after him, above which the temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia was located.107 From there, Phaedra could watch Hippolytus working out.108 Nearby was the site of Phaedra’s grave and a mnema for him.109 A statue made by Timotheus is interpreted by Pausanias as Asclepius, but the Troezenians thought it represented Hippolytus.110 His eminent position in the city, where he was venerated as a god,111 is further highlighted by the existence of annual sacrifices for him and a priest in his name.112
Figure 13.8 Two coin-types minted under Commodus for the Troezenians showing Hippolytus; the subject of the third coin on the right is possibly also Hippolytus (left: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, Pl. M, 8 (AE, 8,88 g, 23 mm, 12 h); middle: Oikonomidou 2003, 115 fig. 8, Athens, Numismatic Museum © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Numismatic Museum; right: LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320-321 no. 1341.2 (AE, 9,61 g, 21 mm, 9 h)).
The past in the round 297 As in the case of his father Theseus, Hippolytus was not solely a Troezenian legendary figure but also had ties to Athens. There a mnema for him existed on the south slope of the Acropolis, similar to the one in Troezen.113 A temple of Aphrodite was situated in its vicinity, from which one could look toward Troezen.114 The situation there is further mirrored by a sanctuary of Asclepius nearby.115 Although the Athenians did not mint coins relating to the legend of Hippolytus, the imagery of the coins from Troezen was more than a simply Troezenian affair. While the coins certainly would not have evoked Hippolytus’ story with all its intricate details for every viewer, they certainly reflect that Hippolytus was an integral part of Troezen’s myth-historical culture. They could thus recall this myth-historical past, which was simultaneously tied to the Troezenian present in the 2nd century. While Hippolytus’ deeds occurred in days long past, he still had his lieux de mémoire in the city’s territory. Furthermore, the annual sacrifices for him renewed the memory of his personage year after year and formed an integral part of the community’s cult calendar. The three coin-types discussed above not only engage with legendary stories about Hippolytus but are also a reflection of and an addition to Troezenian memorial culture in the 2nd century. Although Hippolytus was also anchored in the Athenian past, the Troezenians appropriated him in their own way; they not only identified a statue of Asclepius as him but also venerated him as a god and believed that he had been set among the stars after his death. While the coins’ imagery does not itself reflect the Troezenians’ parochial version of their Hippolytus, the ethnic Τροιζηνίων left no doubt as to whose Hippolytus was meant.
Epidaurus “In the country of the Epidaurians she bore a son…” During the Principate, Epidaurus did not mint coins until the reign of Hadrian. Thereafter, coins are known from the reign of Antoninus Pius and then again from Septimius Severus onward.116 The coins from Epidaurus are very much focused on Asclepius and his festival, the Asclepieia, although we do find depictions of a female figure, probably Hygieia or Epione, as well as Dionysus.117 The depictions of Asclepius are represented by three types. The first type (Figure 13.9, left) was minted under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and, although differing from each other in minor details,118 very likely shows the famous chryselephantine cult statue sculpted by Thrasymedes of Paros in the first third of the 4th century BCE.119 This was not the first time that this statue appeared on coins. As early as the 3rd century BCE, the Epidaurians had depicted it on their coinage, albeit slightly differently.120 It is not inconceivable that the earlier coins influenced the imagery of the later, although this conclusion is purely speculative. The statue is also central to the second type, where it is shown inside its temple (Figure 13.9, middle).121
298 David Weidgenannt
Figure 13.9 Three coin-types of Epidaurus minted under Antoninus Pius, depicting Asclepius (left: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 193 (AE, 6,28 g, 21 mm, 1 h); middle: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, 2012.3 (AE, 8,65 g); right: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, Fonds général 195 (AE, 22 mm, 1 h)).
A narrative scene can be observed on the third type (Figure 13.9, right), minted again under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius.122 A goat is shown to the left below a small figure. On the right, there is a shepherd turned to the left whose right arm is stretched forward, holding a pedum in his left hand. The scene is framed by two trees, a cypress to the left and a fir or pine to the right.123 It clearly alludes to the god’s childhood, so vividly described by Pausanias. The Thessalian Phlegyas came to the Peloponnese hoping to steal crops and cattle. He brought his daughter Coronis with him, who had been impregnated by Apollo. Pausanias recounts: In the country of the Epidaurians she bore a son and exposed him on the mountain called Nipple at the present day, but then named Myrtium. As the child lay exposed, he was given milk by one of the goats that pastured about the mountain and was guarded by the watchdog of the herd. And when Aresthanas (for this was the herdsman’s name) discovered that the tale of the goats was not full, and that the watchdog also was absent from the herd, he left, they say, no stone unturned, and on finding the child desired to take him up. As he drew near, he saw lightning that flashed from the child, and, thinking that it was something divine, as in fact it was, he turned away. Presently it was reported over every land and sea that Asclepius was discovering everything he wished to heal the sick, and that he was raising dead men to life.124 Pausanias’ account of Asclepius’ birth is, as we would expect, not the only one; several versions of his birth myth are known from such places as Thessaly, Messenia, Laconia, and Arcadia.125 While the Epidaurian version was indeed the most prominent, it was not uncontested in the 2nd century, as revealed by Pausanias’ references to other accounts.126 In the long term, however, none of these versions was as influential as the one from Epidaurus.
The past in the round 299 Asclepius’ Thessalian heritage was of little importance and Epidaurus could claim first and foremost to be the god’s homeland. This was not only propagated by the Epidaurians themselves,127 but also confirmed by the oracle from Delphi: “O Asclepius, born to bestow great joy upon mortals, pledge of the mutual love I enjoyed with Phlegyas’ daughter, lovely Coronis, who bare thee in rugged land Epidaurus.”128 Thus, the Epidaurians were not simply claiming Asclepius’ birthplace for themselves, but referring to an external authority confirming what they thought to be true. Being the birthplace of Asclepius cemented Epidaurus’ pivotal role among other Asclepieia in the 2nd century and made the sanctuary the nodal point in the larger web of sanctuaries that had spread throughout the ancient world and whose traditions often harked back to the Epidaurian sanctuary.129
Conclusion Before the time of the Severans, three poleis in the Argolid produced their own coins in the 2nd century: Argos, Troezen, and Epidaurus. This is remarkable, as every one of them had stopped minting in the 1st century BCE at the latest. But this coin production was not uniform and not all three cities minted under every emperor or with the same intensity. While Argos minted from Hadrian to the time of Marcus Aurelius, Epidaurus did so under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, and Troezen produced coins only under Commodus. From a quantitative point of view, Argos certainly minted more coins than Epidaurus and used more obverse dies under every emperor. Presumably this explains why Argive coins were more widespread than those from Epidaurus and Troezen. Although the number of coins found at different sites is not necessarily a reliable indicator of the quantity of coins produced, it is evident that Argive coins were present at different sites throughout the Peloponnese. But, as we have seen, the coinage from Epidaurus and Troezen was also in circulation and some coins have been found in Argos and Corinth. These coins most likely represent only a tiny fraction of the emissions that found their way to these two cities, indicating that in antiquity there were probably more coins of Epidaurus and Troezen in both places. This suggests that they, and, most importantly, the images they conveyed, were known outside their places of production, although their exact impact in Argos and Corinth is unknown and more coins from excavations need to be published to confirm this assumption. In addition, the coins also differ on an iconographical level. The topics that can be found on the reverses are not identical but cover very different themes. Unfortunately, we have very sparse information about who was responsible for their design and why certain images were chosen while others were not. Among the topics presented on the imperial coinage of Argos, Epidaurus, and Troezen, and certainly many other cities as well, the portrayal of their past was of no small importance. But it was not so much the historical past that played into these images, but rather the protagonists of myth-historical times.130 In many communities, they formed an integral part of their communal identity that was
300 David Weidgenannt not only promoted on coins but also in other media. At first glance, the images on the coins possessed a local character. The combination of image and city ethnic made it clear that the image and, by extension, its message, were tied to a specific community. On the other hand, the themes that have been covered in this chapter could also be put in the larger, and ever-changing, sphere of a Greek myth-historical past that served as a point of reference for large parts of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.131 However, this past was neither uniform nor stable as different versions of it co-existed and could be embedded in a variety of contexts. The imagery on the coins from the three cities in the Argolid were more than mere representations of the past. There were very different pasts of the same story and they were embedded in very different forms in these communities. What was depicted on the coins could be associated with different lieux de mémoire, so vividly described by Pausanias. These were not restricted to the city center alone, but also could be seen in the larger civic territory. As we have seen in the case of Perseus, this past was also the guarantor of a mythhistorical pedigree that could be invoked in other communities as well, and honors in his name could be conferred. That Perseus’ origin was not simply an Argive matter is reflected in the fact that outside communities turned to Argos to have their heroic pedigree confirmed and thereby urged the city to engage with this myth. This past could also be employed to refer to other communities. The depictions of Theseus and his son Hippolytus in Troezen could invoke the shared history between this small city in the Argolid and its larger neighbor, Athens. Not only can we find similarities in the cultic topography between these two places, but it is evident that the Troezenians used a very similar visual language deployed by the Athenians in the not-so-distant past. Nonetheless, it was not only common ties that could be evoked on coins. Competing versions of different myths existed that were claimed by different communities for different reasons. Among the places claiming to house the famous Palladion was the city of Argos, which asserted its ownership not only against other competitors in the closer vicinity but also against contestants further away. Most importantly, the depiction of Argive ownership of the Palladion was also a rejection of a similar claim from Rome itself, and it thereby confirmed that both cities were connected through the larger discourse around the relic. The Argives took a stance on that matter on their coinage and in other ways. But claims like this were not restricted to relics alone. Various places claimed to be the birthplace of Asclepius, among them Epidaurus. The sanctuary attracted visitors from numerous places and served as the source for many other sanctuaries in different parts of the ancient world. It therefore certainly mattered, not only for the Epidaurians but also for others, if the god had been born there. By putting their version of the god’s childhood on their coinage, the Epidaurians aimed to reinforce the veracity of their account. That the place of origin mattered can also be seen by the depiction of Danae in Argos waiting to be impregnated by Zeus, or by the depiction of Theseus finding the gnorismata, events that were firmly located in Argive and Troezenian territory. That different versions of myths
The past in the round 301 existed was indeed not new. But it was certainly novel seeing these discourses reflected on coins minted in the Argolid, as no coins had been produced there in the 1st century CE. Although we do not know how the three neighboring cities in the Argolid perceived one another’s coin imagery, we can see that, at least in the cases discussed in this chapter, coin images were embedded in larger discourses. The discovery of coinage from all three communities in Argos itself may suggest that the images on these coins were not restricted only to those places where they originated. How these coins were perceived on an individual level is nearly impossible to ascertain. However, it is certain that the past could hold a variety of readings that were embedded in the coin imagery. Certainly not every viewer, including modern ones, immediately grasps the full hermeneutic spectrum these coins have to offer.132 Nonetheless, at the very least, they are not simply a reflection of these readings, and instead can also be understood as an active voice in the entangled discourses about different versions of the past.
Notes 1 Cf. e.g. Mattingly 1960, 197: “These reverse types [sc. of Roman provincial coinage] are a treasure-house of information about the religious and social life of the Empire; and the scholar who really commanded this subject would be in a favourable position to understand what local life in the first three centuries of our era was really like.” I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer, Anna Kouremenos, Christian Rollinger, and Fleur Kemmers for valuable remarks and discussions. All remaining errors are my own. 2 E.g. Howgego, Heuchert, and Burnett 2005; Haymann 2014; Filges 2015. 3 Howgego 2005 has provided a list of categories that play a role in the design of Roman provincial coinage: religion, monumentality, the past, time, geography, language, and “Romanness”. Many of these categories overlap. 4 The title of the still extremely useful collection of articles by Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner: Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887. 5 So far, only the coins from Argos have received extensive treatment: Flament and Marchetti 2011. For the Hadrianic coinage of Epidaurus, see Amandry 1993 and Amandry and Burnett 2015, 53–54; for Troezen, Oikonomidou 2003. 6 Interestingly, coins play a marginal, if any, role in more recent books that discuss Greece in the 2nd century CE: Alcock 1993; Alcock 2002; Lafond 2006; Frateantonio 2009; Spawforth 2012. 7 For which see e.g. Touratsoglou 2010, 243–245. 8 Flament and Marchetti 2011, 14–15. 9 Amandry and Burnett 2015, 49. 10 Flament and Marchetti 2011, 20–22. 11 Amandry and Burnett 2015, 53. 12 The numbers for Argos are taken from Flament and Marchetti 2011, while die counts for Epidaurus have been provided by Amandry 1993 and Amandry and Burnett 2015. For the calculation of dies used I rely on Esty 2011. 13 Cf. e.g. the depiction of a figure of Hera on 10 out of 46 reverse dies known under Antoninus Pius in Argos: Flament and Marchetti 2011, 16–19 nos. 7, 18, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 37, 45.
302 David Weidgenannt 14 Cf. in general for the circulation viz. distribution of Roman provincial coinage: Jones 1963, esp. 313–324; Howgego 1985, 32–50; Knapp and Mac Isaac 2005, 36–49; Watson 2019, 163–168. 15 Kremydi and Iakovidou 2015. Cf. also Touratsoglou 2010, esp. 243. 16 Coin finds from Troezen are known, but only superficially described: e.g. Oikonomidou 1993, 7, which is again referred to in Pariente 1995, 847. 17 Kroll 1993, 245 no. 800. 18 The numbers for Argos follow Flament and Marchetti 2011, 124. Epidaurus: Edwards 1933, 66 no. 422 (Corinth Coin: 1927 155), 423 (Corinth Coin: 1927 156: Antoninus Pius not Septimius Severus); Corinth Coin: 1934 371 and 1937 25; Harris 1941, 150; Bookidis and Fisher 1972, 321. 329 no. 80; Mac Isaac 1987, 113 no. 176 and likely 177; Troezen: Edwards 1933, 66 no. 426; Corinth Coin: 1933 2058; Williams and Zervos 1985, 87 no. 48(?). The coins identified by their inventory numbers can be found in http://corinth.ascsa.net. 19 N.N. 1955, 211. 20 Hohlfelder 1978, 26 no. 268. 21 I follow here Flament and Marchetti 2011, 125. 22 Knapp and Mac Isaac 2005, 157–158 nos. 1811–1815. 23 Proskynitopoulou 2011, 258 nos. P138–139. 24 Milne 1949, 91. 25 Oeconomides-Caramessini and Mitsopoulos-Leon 2017, 182 no. 92. 26 Cf. Flament and Marchetti 2011, 124. 27 Karamessini-Oikonomidou 1972, 10; Themelis 1991, 126 no. 97–98. 28 Flament and Marchetti 2011, 113. 29 It can only be speculated if and how the images on the coins were received together. In most cases, it is unknown when the coins entered circulation in another place and therefore detailed assumptions about the impact of their imagery must remain speculative. 30 Ogden 2008, 100. 31 The literary sources are collected in Catterall 1937, 978–980 and surveyed in Roccos 1994, 332. See also Ogden 2008. 32 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 41 no. 25; Flament and Marchetti 2011, 11 no. R 20. 65; Amandry and Burnett 2015, 50 nos. 340. 351. Cf. also Maffre 1986, 330 no. 36, who deems the image as a possible depiction of Danae; for a similar iconographical type cf. his nos. 15 and 19. Another coin presumably depicts Danae with Perseus (cf. Flament and Marchetti 2011, 11 no. R 13. 65), although the image is more likely a depiction of Isis suckling Horus: cf. Amandry and Burnett 2015, 51 no. 363. All coins are shown in 2:1. 33 Collected in Catterall 1937, 982–983. 34 Paus. 2.23.7: κατάγαιον οἰκοδόμημα, ἐπ ᾽ αὐτῷ δὲ ἦν ὁ χαλκοῦς θάλαμος, ὃν Ἀκρίσιός ποτε ἐπὶ φρουρᾷ τῆς θυγατρὸς ἐποίησε: Περίλαος δὲ καθεῖλεν αὐτὸν τυραννήσας. ἐπ ᾽ αὐτῷ is interpreted quite differently by translators of Pausanias: “an underground building over which was the bronze chamber which Acrisius once made to guard his daughter.” (James/Ormerod, Loeb; all other passages follow this translation as well); “so ein unterirdisches Bauwerk, und daran war der bronzene Raum, den einst Akrisios zur Bewachung seiner Tochter anfertigen ließ” (Meyer). 35 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 38 no. 8. Pl. I, 17–18 (Hadrian/Lucius Verus); Flament and Marchetti 2011, 11 no. R 28 (Hadrian). 23 no. R 11 and 22
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(Lucius Verus); Amandry and Burnett 2015, 50 no. 339 (Hadrian); RPC IV.1 Online 4635 and 5257 (Lucius Verus). 36 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 35 no. 8. Pl. I, 21; Flament and Marchetti 2011, 16 no. R. 2 and 8; RPC IV.1 Online 5252. 37 Paus. 2.20.7. For potential archaeological remains, see Vollgraff 1958, 527 n. 6. 38 Paus. 2.21.5. 39 Paus. 2.21.7. 40 Paus. 2.16.6 and 2.18.1. 41 Paus. 2.16.3. A short fragment of Hecataeus (BNJ 1 F 22) probably belongs in the same context. 42 See Ogden 2008, 28–32; the sources are collected in Catterall 1937, 987. For Apollodorus of Athens, see BNJ 244 F87. 43 Paus. 2.20.4 (Chorea); 2.22.1 (grave of the women coming from the Aegean islands to help Dionysus). 44 Schol. Hom. Il. 14.319 (Erbse): τινὲς δέ φασι πλείονα ‘Ηρακλέους αυτὸν εἰργασμένον οὐ τυχεῖν δόξης, ότι Διόνυσον ἀνεῖλεν είς τὴν Λερναίαν ἐμβαλὼν λίμνην. 45 Plut. De Isid. 35 = BNJ 310 F 2. 46 Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 2005, 191–192; Ogden 2008, 29. 47 Further coin types are associated even more directly with Lerna: cf. Flament and Marchetti 2011, 72–81. 48 See especially Piérart 1992 for Perseus’ importance in Argos. 49 For which see Quaß 1993, 56–76; Lafond 2006, 208–217; Luraghi 2008, 200–201; Jones 2010; Spawforth 2012, 40–41. 50 IG IV2 1, 86, ll. 12–13 = Peek 1969, no. 36, ll. 6–7. For the person, see Rizakis, Zoumbaki, and Kantirea 2001, 230–231 no. 245 (ARG). 51 IG V,1 477, ll. 4–6. For the Argive heritage, see Spawforth 1985, esp. 219–221. Ogden 2008, 107–108 does not mention the Argive background of the inscription. The person is also known from other inscriptions: cf. Rizakis, Zoumbaki, and Lepenioti 2004, 471–473 no. 730 (LAC). 52 IG IV 590. For the person, see Rizakis, Zoumbaki, and Kantirea 2001, 254–255 no. 254 (ARG). 53 IG IV 586, ll. 5–6: for the person honored, see Rizakis, Zoumbaki, and Kantirea 2001, 226 no. 233 (ARG); IG IV 606, ll. 15–16: for the person, see Rizakis, Zoumbaki, and Kantirea 2001, 176–177 no. 88 (ARG), for the “Greek” manner of the text, see Zoumbaki 2017, 259–260. 54 Cf. Robert 1977, 96–132 also using the numismatic evidence. 55 Vollgraff 1904, 421–424 no. 6; Robert 1977, esp. 120–129; Spawforth and Walker 1986, 103–104 (connecting the inscription with the “milieu of the Panhellenion” (104)); Chaniotis 1988, 85–86 (T20). 322–324 (E28); Graf 2015, esp. 210–214. Although the inscription has been set up in Argos, it has been mainly discussed from the Aegaeian point of view. Cf. also Price 2005, 121–122 using the inscription to show how inter-city relationships were formed. He also points out that the role of the Panhellenion informing these relationships should not be overestimated. For the coins of Aegae that show Perseus, see Haymann 2014, esp. 186–192. 56 This in turn does not mean that Argos alone had authority over Perseus’ myth; it was well-known in other parts of the ancient world as well. See Ogden 2008, 100–127. 57 Cf. Procl. Chrest. 206 and P. Rylands 22 = Bernabé 74–75 nos. 1–2; Apollod. Epit. 5.13; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.69.
304 David Weidgenannt 58 Paus. 2.23.5; Plut. Quest. Gr. 48. The Palladion (or another statue of Athena?) was part of a ritual cleansing ceremony in Argos, that is described in Callimachus’ 5th hymn to Athena: cf. Billot 1997–1998, esp. 11–17. 59 Cf. e.g. a series of drachms from Argos: Gardner 1887, 139 nos. 44–46; Babelon 1914, 459–462 nos. 625–627; LHS-Numismatics 2006, 261–262 nos. 1059–1060. 264 nos. 1067–1068. 60 For which see Voegtli 1977, 120–123. 61 Amandry and Burnett 2015, 51 no. 365. I find it less likely that no. 362 depicts Diomedes with the Palladion as well. The reference to die R.30 of Antoninus Pius in Flament and Marchetti 2011 is not necessarily convincing. On no. 362 the left arm of the figure is certainly depicted tight to the body, whereas in R. 30 it is wrapped around the Palladion. It rather looks like the figure on no. 362 holds something different in his hand on the level of his thighs. 62 Cf. Henig 1974, 178 with n. 10. 63 See Boardman and Vafopoulou-Richardson 1986, 408–409. 64 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 39–40 no. 22. Pl. K, 44; Flament and Marchetti 2011, 16, R. 13. 65 Flament and Marchetti 2011, 16, R. 30. 66 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 39–40 no. 22. Pl. K, 42; Flament and Marchetti 2011, 16, R. 14. 83. The identification of the Palladion is not accepted by all: cf. Flament and Marchetti 2011, 83 where the figure inside the temple is interpreted as Athena Promachos. The depiction of the right arm stretched out, the position of the shield close to the body and the stylised depiction of the legs speak in favor of the Palladion: cf. Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 39 no. 22; Billot 1997–1998, 23; Grigorova 1999, 83. 67 A lengthy list is provided by Ziehen and Lippold 1965, 172–185. Cf. also Frateantonio 2009, 62–65, who leaves out the numismatic evidence from her discussion but mentions the coins in passing on 221. Remarkably, Flament and Marchetti 2011, 84 in their discussion of the Palladion on the coins of Argos do not mention the Argives’ claim to the relic. 68 Plut. Quaest. Gr. 48. 69 For the copy sent to Argos cf. Polyaen. 1.5. The incident at Phaleron is attested in Suda ε 2505 (Adler) and Eust. Ad. Od. 1419, 53–59 (Cullhed), both going back to the lost 2nd century CE lexicographer Pausanias, who in turn used the 4th century BCE Atthidographer Phanodemos (cf. BNJ 325 F 16). 70 Paus. 2.23.5. 71 See e.g. Erskine 2001 (for Argos esp. 116–118); Spawforth 2012, 199–204. 72 Different Billot 1997–1998, 11. 73 Cf. also Ziehen and Lippold 1965, 184: “Der Anspruch Roms auf den Besitz des echten troianischen P. wird nicht ohne Widerspruch griechischerseits geblieben sein […].” 74 Paus. 2.20.6. 75 See Dictys Cretensis in his Ephemeris belli Troiani 1.16. 76 Paus. 2.17.3. Pace Erskine 2001, 118, Pausanias says nothing about Menelaus visiting the sanctuary himself. 77 Paus. 2.23.5–6. 78 Paus. 2.24.2. Although the temple has been identified with the architectural remains of a tholos (cf. Roux 1957, 484 and Grigorova 1999, 84), the attribution must remain uncertain (Seiler 1986, 158 no. 4). 79 Paus. 2.24.3. See Vollgraff 1928, pl. 7. For the attribution to Athena cf. Vollgraff 1928, 319 and see Billot 1997–1998, 19.
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80 For which see SEG 5432. 81 Cf. Lacroix 1949, 114–115. 82 Cf. Ziehen and Lippold 1965, 175–176. 83 Von den Hoff 2014, 69. For depictions of Theseus, see Neils 1994 (with older bibliography), cf. also von den Hoff 2010, with bibliography in n. 1. 84 For the Roman provincial coinage of Troezen, see Gardner 1887, 167–168; Head 1911, 443–444; Meyer 1939, 651–652; Oikonomidou 2003; LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320–321 nos. 1340–1345 and the relevant entries in the RPC database. 85 For the earlier Troezenian coinage, see Head 1911, 443; Babelon 1914, 493–504; Gardner 1887, 165–166 nos. 1–18; LHS-Numismatics 2006, 317–319 nos. 1333–1339. 86 Paus. 2.30.6: καὶ δὴ καὶ νόμισμα αὐτοῖς τὸ ἀρχαῖον ἐπίσημα ἔχει τρίαιναν καὶ Ἀθηνᾶς πρόσωπον. – “And moreover their old coins have as device a trident and a face of Athena.” 87 For this type see RPC IV.1 Online 4641 (coin no. 1 = Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 49 no. 11. pl. M, 11) and 10979. Further specimens: Williams and Zervos 1985, 87 no. 48(?); Kroll 1993, 245 no. 800; LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320 no. 1341.3; CNG, Mail Bid Sale 81 no. 2890. For Theseus’ deeds on Roman provincial coins, see also Voegtli 1977, 90–99. 88 For this scene, see Sourvinou-Inwood 1971; Ekroth 2010, esp. 155–159. Another tradition has Poseidon as the father of Theseus, for which see now Turner 2015. 89 The literary sources are collected in Herter 1973 and Neils 1994. 90 Paus. 1.27.8. Cf. Voegtli 1977, 93–94 and Kroll 1993, 122. 130 no. 181. 91 This motive served already in the 2nd century BCE as an iconographic marker for the connection between Troezen and Athens. On a stele found at the south slope of the Acropolis, an honorary decree for a certain Telesias from Troezen reaffirms his Athenian citizenship that was granted to his family in the late 4th century (IG II2 971). The stone is crowned by a depiction of Theseus lifting the stone, using the same motif that is also found on our coins; for this relief and its meaning, see Ekroth 2010, 157 (with extensive bibliography). 92 Paus. 8.43.1. 93 IG IX 12, 5, 2018. Earlier bibliography in Jones 2006, 151 n. 1; further detailed discussions in Knoepfler 2006 (text, translation, commentary); Rzepka 2010; Taeuber 2012, 287–288 (German translation); Domínguez Monedero 2013 (text, translation, commentary). I would like to thank A. Kouremenos for discussing this text further with me. 94 IG IX 12, 5, 2018, ll. 16–20. I follow the translation of Jones 2006, 152. 95 For this see Chaniotis 2009, 269. 96 That the Troezenians themselves promoted this story is perhaps reflected in Pausanias. His description of the statue in Athens showing the finding of the gnorismata in 1.27.8 is introduced with a specific reference to the Troezenian version of the story: ὅδε μὲν τῶν λόγων πρῶτος ἐς αὐτόν ἐστι Τροιζηνίοις: ὁ δὲ ἐπὶ τούτῳ, κρηπῖδας Αἰγέα ὑπὸ πέτρᾳ καὶ ξίφος θεῖναι γνωρίσματα εἶναι τῷ παιδὶ καὶ τὸν μὲν ἐς Ἀθήνας ἀποπλεῖν, Θησέα δέ, ὡς ἕκτον καὶ δέκατον ἔτος ἐγεγόνει, τὴν πέτραν ἀνώσαντα οἴχεσθαι καὶ τὴν παρακαταθήκην τὴν Αἰγέως φέροντα. τούτου δὲ εἰκὼν ἐν ἀκροπόλει πεποίηται τοῦ λόγου, χαλκοῦ πάντα ὁμοίως πλὴν τῆς πέτρας. – “This is the first Troezenian legend about Theseus. The next is that Aigeus placed boots and a sword under a rock as tokens for the child, and then sailed away to Athens; Theseus, when sixteen years old, pushed the rock away and departed, taking what Aigeus had deposited. There is a representation of this legend on the Acropolis, everything in bronze except the rock.”
306 David Weidgenannt 97 Paus. 2.32.7; 2.34.6. For this road, see Tausend 2006, 181–182, who leaves the location of Theseus’ stone open; Pharaklas 1972, 41 identifies the modern rock of Agios Dimitrios as the place where the gnorismata were hidden, similarly to Legrand 1905, 315. 98 RPC IV.1 Online 7943 and 9666. 99 At least on the specimen in Paris: P 232 = RPC IV.1 Online 7943; depicted here as fig. 13.7 (left). 100 The coins from Athens depict Theseus and the Minotaur in different arrangements (cf. Kroll 1993, 131–133 nos. 189, 201, 144 nos. 274 and 276 and the late issue 158 no. 372). While on the earlier coins the scene is oriented to the left (Kroll 1993, 131–132 no. 189: Period VB: ca. 120s–140s CE or later), the later coins also show Theseus and the Minotaur to the right (Kroll 1993, 144 no. 276: Period 5C: 140’s or 150’s–ca. 175 CE). It is also on the later coins that Theseus stretches out his left arm, grabbing the Minotaur’s horns while his right hand holds a club. The coins from Athens and Troezen differ slightly: the cloak is only visible on the coins from Troezen, where Theseus’ right arm is outstretched, whereas on the coins from Athens it is slightly bent, holding the club upright. On the coins from Troezen the head of the Minotaur is turned towards Theseus, whereas on the coins from Athens he turns his head away from the hero. 101 Paus. 2.31.1. 102 RPC IV.1 Online 10978. His attributes (dog, spear) characterize the figure as a hunter and this makes the attribution to Hippolytus very likely: cf. in general de Bellefonds 1990. The figure has often been identified as Hippolytus: Gebhard 1843, 150 no. 29 (Gebhard identifies the figure as Theseus, but he also mistakes the tree stump for two smaller figures that he connects with the hero); Bergk 1847, 138–139; Leake 1856, Addenda, European Greece, 165 (Hippolytus?); Fox 1856, 25 no. 100 (Hippolytus?); Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 48; Head 1911, 444; de Bellefonds 1990, 446 no. 5; Oikonomidou 2003, fig. 7. The entry in RPC online assumes that the depicted figure may be Dionysus and that the dog is a panther (cf. already Bernhart 1949, 99 no. 678). This interpretation is far from certain, as we would expect Dionysus to hold grapes or a cantharus in one hand and a thyrsus in the other, the guise in which the god is actually depicted on another type from Troezen (RPC 9665). Additionally, the panther on the coins from Corinth and Nicopolis in Epirus (cf. RPC 4645 and 4214) is standing, while seated panthers most often have one of their paws raised (cf. e.g. Augé and de Bellefonds 1986, 516 nos. 4–6). 103 Not in RPC IV.1 Online. The type is depicted in Arigoni 1744, pl. 18, 228 and attributed to Commodus, then described in Mionnet 1829, 268 no. 196 and mentioned in Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 48 no. 7 and de Bellefonds 1990, 446 no. 7. An example of this type is depicted in Oikonomidou 2003, 115 fig. 8 (here as fig. 13.8, middle). 104 LHS-Numismatics 2006, 320 no. 1341.2 = Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 162 no. 7 (from the collection of Rhousopoulos). 105 Paus. 2.31.4. For speculations about the temple’s location, see Legrand 1905, 286. 106 Paus. 2.32.1–4. Several different locations have been proposed for the temple of Hippolytus. It was probably located in a temenos on a hill south of Palaia Episkopi, where a small temple with an altar has been found (for this identification see Saporiti 2003 and Riethmüller 2005b, 112–113). 107 The gymnasium is known from IG IV 754, ll. 3–6.
The past in the round 307 108 Cf. Paus. 2.32.3. For the temple cf. Welter 1941, 37–38. 109 Paus. 2.32.4. 110 Paus. 2.32.4. This need not necessarily mean (pace Saladino 2009, 447) that in Troezen Hippolytus was always identical to Asclepius. 111 D.S. 4.62. The special status Hippolytus enjoyed in Troezen can also be seen from the citizens’ claim that after his death he was transferred among the stars, although Pausanias does not believe them (Paus. 2.32.1). 112 Paus. 2.32.1. 113 Paus. 1.22.1: for its location see Judeich 1931, 289–290 with n. 15. 114 For the temple cf. Eur. Hipp. 30–32; Schol. V. Hom. Od. 11.321; Schol. Eur. Hipp. 29–33; Tz. ad Lyc. 1329; D.S. 4.62.2. See also IG I3 369, l. 66 and IG I3 383, ll. 233–234 where an “Aphrodite in the Hippolyteion” and an “Aphrodite near Hippolytus” are mentioned. 115 For this similarity, see Saladino 2009. 116 A coin said to have been minted in the reign of Marcus Aurelius is mentioned by Krause 1972, 254 fig. 54. The obverse that could verify this attribution is unfortunately not depicted. 117 Hygieia/Epione: RPC IV.1 Online: 7940. 9428. See also Svoronos 1901, 13 fig. 8–9 and a coin in Paris: P 2012.4; Dionysus: RPC IV.1 Online 11152. 118 Hadrian: Amandry and Burnett 2015, 54 no. 394. Antoninus Pius: RPC IV.1 Online 4638. 7939. The coins have been repeatedly discussed: Rauch 1870, 15 no. 9 (Hadrian); Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 44 no. 2; 161 no. 2; Pl. GG, VII (Antoninus); Hitzig and Bluemner 1899, 609. Pl. 17, 2 (Antoninus); Svoronos 1901, 11. 11 fig. 1 (Hadrian), fig. 5 (Antoninus); Lacroix 1949, 301 with n. 2; Krause 1972, 248 with n. 13 and 14. 253–254, fig. 35–42 (Antoninus). 254, fig. 43 (Hadrian); Amandry 1993, 330, fig. 1 (Hadrian). 331–332. Cf. the garment, the throne or stool and the dog, which is not depicted on every die. 119 For Thrasymedes, see now Kansteiner, Lehmann, and Prignitz 2014. For the sculpture, see Krause 1972; Riethmüller 2005a, 306–308. 120 Gardner 1887, 156 no. 7; Babelon 1914, 485–488 nos. 679–681 with pl. 217, 15–18; LHS-Numismatics 2006, 294–296 nos. 1235. 1236. 1240. 121 As we would expect, the architecture is not an exact depiction of the temple, for which see Riethmüller 2005a, 295–313. The original temple has, for example, a three-stepped krepis and a peristasis of 6x11. For the wide middle intercolumnium as a pictorial device on coins, see Price and Trell 1977, 192–193. 122 Hadrian: Amandry and Burnett 2015, 54 no. 397. Antoninus Pius: RPC IV.1 Online: 5262–5263. The coins minted under Antoninus have been cited frequently: Panofka 1846, 10. Pl. 1,2; Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1887, 42–43 no. 1; Hitzig and Bluemner 1899, 604–605. Pl. 17, 3; Svoronos 1908, 108 with fig. 2; Bernhard 1926, 12. Pl. 2, 25; Holtzmann 1984, 868 no. 4; Baumann 2000, 68. 69 fig. 167; Riethmüller 2005a, 43. Pl. 1, 1. 123 The two are hardly distinguishable in coin iconography: cf. Baumann 2000, 63 fig. 153 (fir) and 47 fig. 109 (pine). For the interpretation as an olive tree, cf. Holtzmann 1984, 868 no. 4 and Riethmüller 2005a, 43. 124 Paus. 2.26.4–5. 125 For which see Thraemer 1896; Edelstein and Edelstein 1945, 67–74; Riethmüller 2005a, 37–46; Nutton 2013, 105–106. 126 Cf. Paus. 2.26.6–7; Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 35–36. 127 For the active promotion of a cult and deity, see Davies 2007, 62; for Epidaurus in particular, see van der Ploeg 2018, 46–82.
308 David Weidgenannt 128 Paus. 2.26.7. 129 For which see Riethmüller 2005a, 230–240; Melfi 2007, 507–513; Renberg 2016, 178–182; van der Ploeg 2018, esp. 52–53. The sanctuary saw major building activity in the 2nd century (for which see e.g. Melfi 2007, 90–125 and 535–536), financed by the senator Sextus Iulius Maior Antoninus Pythodoros. Any possible connection between the coins and the building activity is speculative. 130 This does not mean that both spheres are necessarily separated: cf. e.g. Price 2005, 115. 131 The constantly changing nature of myth-historical narratives has now been treated aptly by Zgoll 2019, esp. 53–86. 132 Cf. for this problem e.g. Howgego 2005, 17. For the reception of images on coins in general, see the important contributions by Wolters 1999, 308–320 and Filges 2015, 18–22.
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The past in the round 313 ——— 2005. Hylas, the Nymphs, Dionysos and Others. Myth, Ritual, Ethnicity. Martin P. Nilsson Lecture on Greek Religion, delivered 1997 at the Swedish Institute at Athens. Vol. 19 Acta Instituti Atheniensis Regni Sueciae. Stockholm: Åström. Spawforth, A. J. 1985. “Families at Roman Sparta and Epidaurus. Some prosopographical notes.” BSA 80: 191–258. ——— 2012. Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spawforth, A. J., and S. Walker. 1986. “The World of the Panhellenion II. Three Dorian Cities.” The Journal of Roman Studies 76: 88–105. Svoronos, I. 1901. “Die polykletische “Tholos” in Epidauros.” Journal International D’Archéologie Numismatique 4: 5–34. ——— 1908. “Νέαι έρμηνεϊαι ανάγλυφων έκ τοΰ Ασκληπιείου των Αθηνών.” AEphem: 103–134. Taeuber, H. 2012. “Identität und Transformation. Reaktionen griechischer Poleis auf veränderte Rahmenbedingungen.” In Identitätsbildung und Identitätsstiftung in griechischen Gesellschaften, edited by M. Offenmüller, 285–296. Graz. Tausend, K. 2006. Verkehrswege der Argolis. Rekonstruktion und historische Bedeutung. Vol. 23 Geographica Historica. Stuttgart: Steiner. Themelis, P. 1991. “Ανασκαφή Μεσσήνης.” Prakt 146: 85–128. Thraemer, E. 1896. “Asklepios 2.” RE 2.2: 1642–1697. Touratsoglou, I. 2010. “Coin Production and Coin Circulation in the Roman Peloponnese.” In Roman Peloponnese III. Society, Economy and Culture under the Roman Empire: Continuity and Innovation, edited by A. D. Rizakis, C. E. Lepenioti, In Meletemata, 235–251. Athens: De Boccard. Turner, S. 2015. “Who’s the Daddy? Contesting and Constructing Theseus’ Paternity in Fifth Century Athens.” In Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies. Dialogues and Discourses, edited by N. Mac Sweeney, 71–102. Philadelphia. Voegtli, H. 1977. Bilder der Heldenepen in der kaiserzeitlichen griechischen Münzprägung. Aesch. Vollgraff, W. 1904. “Inscriptions d’Argos.” BCH 28: 420–429. Vollgraff, F. 1928. “Arx Argorum.” Mnemosyne 56: 315–328. ——— 1958. “Fouilles et sondages sur le flanc oriental de la Larissa à Argos.” BCH 82: 516–570. Watson, G. C. 2019. Connections, Communities, and Coinage. The System of Coin Production in Southern Asia Minor, AD 218–276. Vol. 39 Numismatic Studies. New York: The American Numismatic Society. Welter, G. 1941. Troizen und Kalaureia. Berlin. Williams, C. K., and O. H. Zervos. 1985. “Corinth, 1984: East of the Theater.” Hesperia 54: 55–96. Wolters, R. 1999. Nummi Signati. Untersuchungen zur römischen Münzprägung und Geldwirtschaft. Vol. 49 Vestigia. Munich: C.H. Beck. Zgoll, C. 2019. Tractatus Mythologicus. Theorie und Methodik zur Erforschung von Mythen als Grundlegung einer allgemeinen, transmedialen und komparatistischen Stoffwissenschaft. Vol. 1 Mythological Studies. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ziehen, L., and G. Lippold. 1965. “Palladion.” RE 18.3: 171–201. Zoumbaki, S. 2017. “Romans in the poleis of Greek Mainland and Adjacent Islands: The Evolution of Their Relations in the Light of Honorific Texts.” In The Politics of Honour in the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire, edited by A. Heller and O. M. van Nijf, 245–271. Leiden: Brill.
Part IV
Beyond Spatial and Temporal Boundaries: Hadrian and The Reception of Achaea’s Past
14 Hispania Graeca Hadrian as a champion of Hellenic culture in the West Juan Manuel Cortés Copete
Introduction In 1948, Antonio García Bellido, one of the founding scholars of classical archaeology in Spain, published a seminal study on the Greek presence in the Iberian peninsula. The title of my chapter derives from his book, Hispania Graeca, as a mark of gratitude. Given the cultural environment and academic tradition in which the book was published, García Bellido foregrounded the most distant phases of the Greek presence in Hispania, focusing particularly on Archaism and the beginnings of Greek Classicism. Fifty years later, Fernando Gascó drew attention to the importance that the Greek influence and presence in Hispania gained under Roman rule. He paved the way for a new and fruitful field of research on the Hellenization of Hispania, to which the topic of this paper is indebted.1 The Roman Empire was a great arena for cultural exchange. The construction of a political unit covering all the coastal lands of the Mediterranean and beyond created unprecedented conditions for the movement of people, artifacts, and ideas. The Hellenization of Hispania intensified under the Roman Empire. Obviously, large regional differences existed regarding the penetration of Greek culture into the Iberian peninsula; inland regions that had been conquered more recently and were less urbanized were largely removed from Hellenic influence. But the Greek world, although not necessarily the Greek language, exercised a significant influence in the coastal Mediterranean regions and in cities where the Roman presence was ancient and intense. The early decades of the 2nd century CE were a time of Greek cultural splendor in Iberia. Unlike in earlier periods, the reasons for this surge did not result solely from the movement of—often anonymous – individuals, who brought with them the novelties of Hellenism. The rise of Hellenization in Hispania during that century was driven by a political promoter, the emperor Hadrian. Although his father’s family, the Aelii, were from Italica, a municipium founded by Julius Caesar in Hispania, Hadrian, as is well known, was an ardent devotee of Greek culture. He was even nicknamed Graeculus, certainly a form of mild mockery. The emperor was a lover of Greece from childhood and, once he ascended to the imperial throne, became DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-18
318 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete a champion of Hellenism in the West. We could say that he helped create a true Hispania Graeca. The core argument of this chapter is that a fertile and reciprocal relationship existed between Hispania Graeca and the Graeculus emperor. As I argue, some of the seeds of Hadrian’s love for Greece are to be found in Hispania. Furthermore, once in power, he accelerated the cultural integration of the Empire’s regions thanks to the strengthening of Greek culture. While Greek influence on private lives may be visible in Tarraco, it is especially in Italica that the effects of the emperor’s active Hellenism are highly noticeable. Consequently, I highlight an important point: using modes and forms proper to the Second Sophistic, Hadrian portrayed himself as a somewhat universalizing emperor. After an arduous investigation into his family origins Hadrian presented himself as Hispanic and Italic, but also as Greek. The past became a means for him to portray himself as a living synthesis of the Empire he ruled.
Gades: searching for the emperor’s roots Modern biographers of Hadrian, with an eye on the European oligarchy between the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, have deemed it necessary to dedicate some pages to his formative period. Since Hadrian was so active in the cultural sphere during his reign and ancient sources included colorful stories of his upbringing, addressing the subject was called for. According to most historians, from Gregorovius and Henderson to Syme and Birley, Hadrian’s upbringing was that of a child of the ordo senatorius who lived in Rome, the core of the Empire.2 Far removed from any influence of his homeland in Hispania, Hadrian, as a boy and young man, would have been educated in Rome by instructors who instilled in him, among other elements, a love of Greek culture.3 Nonetheless, while Hadrian’s philhellenism originated indubitably in the meticulous education he received, proper to the most sophisticated members of the Roman elite, the imperial biography reminds us that this interest was also the result of “his natural tastes”, ingenio eius. It is not possible to undertake here a psychological analysis of Hadrian, nor would it be appropriate. But I think that the emperor’s deep-seated love for Greece also had profound Hispanic roots, which flourished thanks to the studies he pursued during his youth. The Historia Augusta mentions Gades as the town of origin of the emperor’s mother, Domitia Paulina.4 She remains somewhat of a mysterious figure, but despite an attempt to link her to the famous “Testamentum Dasumii”,5 no reason has emerged until now to doubt that she was from Gades. Maternal influence may have been decisive in Hadrian’s inclination toward Greek culture. In antiquity, children lived under their mother’s care during their early years. Later, they were transferred to the direct control of the father and began preparing for public life. During that first stage, and, naturally thereafter, Hadrian would have listened to his mother and others around him talk
Hispania Graeca 319 about Gades, its temple of Hercules, the wonders of Oceanus, and the city’s close ties with Greece. Such claims may appear to belong more to a literary re-creation of a child’s upbringing than to historical interpretation. However, Gades clearly had a place in Hadrian’s heart. During his rule, a series of aurei bearing the image of Hercules Gaditanus on the reverse were minted for the first time in the history of the Empire.6 Gades was the oldest city in the West, founded by the Phoenicians in c. 1100 BCE.7 A temple that looked more Phoenician than Roman was represented on those coins, together with a personification of Oceanus. Naturally, I am not suggesting that those coins were part of the emperor’s childhood memories, but rather that Gades, as the origin of Domitia Paulina, allows us to identify one of the avenues through which certain realities, proper to an immensely varied and rich Empire, seeped into imperial Roman culture. Maternal affiliation would have allowed Hadrian to discover the value of the city in the Empire.8 Greek culture was deeply rooted in the city of Gades. Apollonius of Tyana, the famous sage and theios aner, visited the city during Nero’s reign,9 attracted by its natural phenomena – the ocean tides, the prestige of its Hercules sanctuary, which was originally dedicated to Melkart by the Phoenicians, and by the vitality of its Hellenism: καὶ μὴν καὶ Ἑλληνικοὺς εἶναί φασι τὰ Γάδειρα καὶ παιδεύεσθαι τὸν ἡμεδαπὸν τρόπον, “they say, moreover, that there is a Hellenic culture at Gades, and that they educate themselves in our own fashion.”10 Indeed, in the middle of the 1st century CE, Moderatus, a Pythagorean philosopher, taught on the island, and his fame drew students from all over the Mediterranean.11 Philostratus insists that Gades nurtured particularly close ties with Athens. In Gades, sacrifices were offered to Menestheus, the legendary king of Athens, and Themistocles, who had a statue in the city, was particularly admired. The Hellenic experience of Gades was probably even more extensive than that recounted by Philostratus; the inclination of the city toward Athens fit well with the way Rome re-interpreted Greek culture. Under Augustus, a Roman narrative of Hellenism emerged based on an ideological inclination toward Classical Greece and the Athenian tradition.12 Undeniably, in later Hellenic history, only Alexander the Great enjoyed the favor of Rome, who looked down on his successors as incapable kings. The temple of Hercules at Gades also housed a statue of Alexander in front of which Julius Caesar wept.13 The city was located in the limits of the known world that had opened up to Greek culture, which was strengthened thanks to Roman rule. In Aelius Aristides’ words:14 δοκεῖν δέ μοι καὶ τὴν ἔξω θάλατταν πρὸς τὴν εἴσω πρῶτος ὡρίσατο, προμνώμενος τοῖς Ἕλλησιν πάντα τοῦτον τὸν τόπον ὡς οἰκεῖον οἰκίζειν, καὶ τῶν στηλῶν τοῦτ’ εἶναι τὸ βούλημα, ἃς ἔτι νῦν Ἡρακλέους ὀνομάζομεν. I think that Heracles even was the first to mark the boundary between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, wooing all this region for the Greeks as being fit to settle and that this is the meaning of the pillars, which we still now call “of Heracles”.
320 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete Hadrian’s fascination with Greece, instilled in his earliest childhood thanks to his mother’s influence, was further strengthened by the education he received in Rome. Under Domitian’s rule, the capital of the Empire had become a metropolis of Greek culture.15 The father of the future emperor, however, was to contribute little to his son’s upbringing. P. Aelius Hadrianus Afer died prematurely when Hadrian was in his tenth year, and the boy’s education became the direct responsibility of his two guardians. Little is known of one of them, Acilius Attianus, a Roman knight from Italica. His other guardian was M. Ulpius Traianus (Trajan), the future emperor.16 The latter’s influence and authority over Hadrian were decisive, as was his affection for Greece. Trajan’s inclination toward the Greek world was rather peculiar. Compared to the learned, refined, and decidedly philhellenic Hadrian, he seemed somewhat rough, a man formed in the barracks and oblivious to the intellectual delights of school.17 Nevertheless, he was not without literary inclinations and, like Caesar, is credited with comments on the conquest of Dacia.18 An anecdote recounted by Philostratus suggests that Trajan’s attitude toward Greek culture was favorable even if he himself was not a pepaideumenos. During the celebration of the Dacian triumph, Trajan took Dio of Prusa in his triumphal chariot. The philosopher, seizing the opportunity, spoke incessantly to the emperor, perhaps offering him advice on how to manage his victory. The sophist’s tireless eloquence did not exasperate the emperor, who prudently told him: τί μὲν λέγεις, οὐκ οἶδα, φιλῶ δέ σε ὡς ἐμαυτόν, “I do not understand what you are saying, but I love you as I love myself.” Philostratus, referring to Dio of Prusa’s ability, declared, “and indeed the persuasive charm of the man was such as to captivate even men who were not versed in Greek letters.”19 If Trajan was one of those men unversed in Greek letters, τοὺς μὴ τὰ Ἑλλήνων ἀκριβοῦντας, he certainly discovered the significance of the Greek world for the Empire, which was especially useful in his campaign against Parthia. For this reason, among others, Trajan chose Athens as the site in which to inform the ambassadors of the Parthian king that there would be war, a war fought in the name of Hellenism. It was surely not a coincidence that Hadrian had been living in Athens during 112–113, holding the office of eponymous archon, and that Trajan went to fetch him there to undertake the conquest of the East. Once in Syria, Hadrian climbed Mt. Cassius to offer Zeus the spoils of the Dacian War, seeking to obtain divine favor in the new war against the Achaemenids.20 Nonetheless, Hadrian owed Trajan not only his Hellenic education but also his direct knowledge of the Greek and Eastern world. Few of Rome’s elite could have had as deep a knowledge of the East as Trajan, even before he became emperor. His father, M. Ulpius Traianus, was among the major agents of the Flavian dynasty in those regions of the Empire; he commanded the Legio X Fretensis with Vespasian and Titus during the Jewish War and later served as governor of Syria, eventually becoming proconsul of Asia in 79–80.21 His son, Trajan, accompanied him to Syria as a young military tribune. Father and son were then likely to have met the sons of
Hispania Graeca 321 Antiochus IV of Commagene, who had fled to Parthia when their small kingdom was annexed by Rome.22 Antiochus IV’s grandson, Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus, ended up living in Athens as a prominent citizen.23 Philopappus became a Roman senator and was suffect consul in the year 109. He was a close friend of Hadrian, who was younger than him by one generation, and introduced him to many aspects of Greek culture, especially Athenian civic life and cults.24 Thus, M. Ulpius Traianus and his son Trajan had created a network of contacts and knowledge in the province of Achaea and other Greek provinces that eventually fed young Hadrian’s philhellenism. There is a further account about Hadrian’s upbringing relating to Trajan. As a teenager, Hadrian was sent at the age of fifteen to his family home in Italica. The Historia Augusta adds two important details: that the purpose of Hadrian’s stay in the city was to begin his military training, and that, while in Italica, he developed a taste for hunting which would stay with him for the rest of his life.25 An examination of Italica’s monuments gives us one more key to understanding Hadrian’s fascination with “old Greece” in particular. A Roman inscription found in the city, dating back to Hadrian’s time, seems to be a copy of an older monument. It is the only titulus Mummianus to have been preserved in a provincial city. Lucius Mummius, the destroyer of Corinth in 146 BCE, distributed the loot among the cities of origin of the soldiers with whom he conquered the East.26 Surprisingly, Italica also received its share. It is not known what the donation consisted of, but it is likely to have been one of the bronze objects produced in the Greek city. Italica retained that donation until at least the 2nd century CE. During his sojourn in the Baetican city, Hadrian must have seen that monument, which he later restored during his reign. The old commemorative inscription was re-issued for this purpose. We can surmise that this object, brought to Hispania after the capture of Corinth, might have made an impression on a young man who was already an aficionado of Greece.27 A piece of that beloved Hellas, though small, had long been laying within his family cradle. His return as an emperor would be an opportunity to strengthen the ties between East and West.
Travel, liberality, philhellenism The Hispanic roots of Hadrian’s philhellenism corroborate, at least in part, the deep connection that existed between the Empire’s regions. Such links resulted mainly from Roman domination. The Empire had created a network of inter-provincial ties which provide a key to understanding Hadrian’s reign, as well as some of its most distinctive features. His rule was marked by three major lines of action that broke with the government dynamics of his predecessors: communication with his subjects, liberality toward them, and the promotion of Greek culture. Imperial travel was an essential act of government.28 Hadrian travelled through the provinces during ten of the nearly twenty-one years of his reign.29 The reasons for these systematic trips across the various regions of the
322 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete Empire went beyond the military needs that had mobilized his predecessors. For Hadrian, such constant touring constituted an essential instrument of governance because it allowed him to take initiatives in the context of his relationships with the inhabitants of the provinces, whether they were Roman citizens or not.30 The second pillar of the emperor’s reign was his liberality with the subjects in the provinces.31 Until then, the city of Rome had held the position of absolute beneficiary of the Empire. Emperors had not needed any justification to use the wealth of the Empire to extend and beautify the capital. Consequently, the majesty of Rome was in the interest of the ruling emperor, who thus saw his legitimacy confirmed.32 However, Hadrian began to share this privilege of the Urbs with cities of the provinces. Rome’s primacy was, naturally, upheld,33 but the other cities of the Empire came to be regarded as natural beneficiaries of the prosperity offered by the imperial government, and not only in cases of emergency or necessity.34 A third element completes the emperor’s triangle of attitudes toward provincial subjects and their cities. This molded the other two; it was Hadrian’s philhellenism.35 For him, Greek culture was, in many ways, a code that shaped his actions in the provinces. The belief that life deserves to be lived in conditions that allow the full development of the human being to flourish was one of the fundamental principles of Greek paideia. Since the time of Cicero, this paideia had been translated into Latin by the term humanitas.36 Firmly convinced of this equation between a full life and the benefits of Greek culture, Hadrian’s imperial generosity and visits were also designed to promote paideia throughout the Empire. Greek culture, after all, was becoming one of the most notable pillars of Roman domination.37 The emperor’s journeys through the provinces began in the spring of 121, when he set out toward the German frontier to arrange operational improvements of the army (Figure 14.1). This journey continued to Britain, where concerns regarding the defense of the Empire prevailed, leading to the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. However, as he passed through Gaul, the emperor had the chance to express the purpose of his future travels: Post haec profectus in Gallias omnes eas uariis liberalitatibus subleuauit, “after this he travelled to the provinces of Gaul and came to the relief of all the cities with various acts of generosity.”38 The journey continued to Hispania, with Tarraco as the main destination. The old Roman city was the capital of the Empire’s largest military province, but also the seat of one of the ancient temples dedicated to Augustus.39
Imperial influence on the private lives of some Hispanics: Tarraco Hadrian’s sojourn in Tarraco did not only have consequences for the Empire’s governorship; the influence of his philhellenism made an impact in the private sphere in the province. The princeps’ love for Greek culture spread to his
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Figure 14.1 Statue of Antinous from a Roman villa at Els Munds. 2nd century CE. National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona (MNAT 45406).
network of social relations, which strengthened and expanded during his stay in the province. Some Hispani were eager to emulate the emperor. These attitudes, though of an individual and private nature, had a profound political significance. After all, aligning oneself to the emperor’s interests and tastes was also a sign of loyalty. An elite family that was closely related to the emperor probably originated from the city of Barcino (modern Barcelona). L. Minicius Natalis began his military career as an equestrian military tribune. In 83, he was promoted to the ordo senatorius, eventually attaining the pro-consulate of Africa. His son, who bore the same names, began his political and military career under Hadrian’s patronage. Like the latter, Natalis the younger was also enraptured
324 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete by Hellenic culture. A Greek inscription presents him as the winner of the four-horse race of the 227th Olympiad, a race in which he participated having already held the position of praetor.40 He erected the monument in Olympia at the end of his political career, when he had already been consul and governor of Africa, like his father. By then, Hadrian had passed away, but Natalis wished it to be remembered that he, a Hispanus from Barcino, had won the oldest and most prestigious Greek games.41 Interest in Greek agonistic culture spread intensively in the West as cultural relations with the East became consolidated.42 During this process, the emperor’s presence and actions were decisive. A good illustration of this is the case of the villa of Els Munts near the town of Tarraco.43 In the middle of the 2nd century, the villa was completely re-modelled in order to expand its outbuildings. The name of its owner was C. Valerius Avitus and he was originally from Augustobriga, a Roman municipium in the province of Lusitania, but was made a citizen of Tarraco as a favor to him by Antoninus Pius.44 The villa’s extension was accompanied by the development of a complete iconographic program that incorporated images of numerous Greek gods – Asclepius, Hygieia, Hermes Dionysophorus, Eros, and Tyche, among others. Hadrian’s influence on this site is well-attested; these traditional Greek gods also accompanied the youngest of them all, Antinous.45 Hadrian, as Cassius Dio states, “set up statues, or rather sacred images of Antinous, practically all over the world”.46 The statue of Els Munts is the only image of the emperor’s favorite discovered in Hispania to date (Figure 14.2). In the aforementioned villa, the names of major Greek games were painted on a stucco wall. The Nemean games have been securely identified, but another name – AKΘEIA – is more difficult to interpret.47 Alföldy suggested that the inscription referred to Theia, one of the twelve Titans, and that the first two letters should be read as L and K, but without leading to a clear meaning.48 Kritzas, however, interpreted it correctly as AKΘEIA, with the aspirated dental consonant, instead of AKTEIA. The Greek games established after Octavian’s victory at Actium were known as Ἄκτια ἐν Νικοπόλει.49 Thus, the most famous Greek games were represented on the villa’s walls, both those of the ancient periods and those established by the Romans.
Italica and Hadrian’s ideal city Hadrian’s tour of Hispania between the years 122 and 123 is not well understood. The Historia Augusta only discusses his presence in Tarraco and does not provide further details regarding the imperial retinue’s subsequent itinerary. Cassius Dio, for his part, does not mention Tarraco, but he does recall the emperor’s homeland, Italica.50 However, his account of Italica has led to a misunderstanding according to which Hadrian scorned his homeland.51 The Greek text, as it has been preserved, may seem somewhat odd, yet we must remember that it is not the historian’s original text but an epitome from the Byzantine period. It claims that τὴν δὲ πατρίδα καίπερ μεγάλα τιμήσας καὶ
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Figure 14.2 Map of the western Roman provinces showing Hadrian’s journey in the early years of his principate. Source: (J.M. Cortés Copete).
πολλὰ καὶ ὑπερήφανα αὐτῇ δούς, ὅμως οὐκ εἶδε. Cary translated the passage as, “and yet he did not see his native land, though he showed it great honor and bestowed many splendid gifts upon it.”52 This interpretation of the passage implies that Hadrian rejected, or at least avoided, visiting Italica during his stay in Hispania. In my opinion, however, this is not the correct interpretation of what Cassius Dio wrote. I think the key in this is ὅμως οὐκ εἶδε.
326 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete Considering the tenses in the sentence – two concessive aorist participles and a main verb, also aorist – the meaning changes slightly.53 Italica did not receive the imperial visit after and despite the fact that Hadrian “had shown it great honor and had bestowed many splendid gifts upon it.” Thus, although the brief passage in Cassius Dio does not explicitly state that Hadrian visited Italica, it seems to imply that the emperor did, in fact, visit the city at some point. After a first visit in which the honors and gifts were awarded, a second stay may have been envisaged for the inauguration of the new buildings and monuments. Bearing in mind Hadrian’s attitude toward Athens, this option is entirely plausible. He is known to have visited Attica as emperor three times. During his first visit, between 124 and 125, he granted honors and gifts; in his second visit in 128, he supervised various building projects; and during his final stay in 131–132, he inaugurated the new buildings, consecrated the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and established the Panhellenion.54 A similar plan may have been devised for Italica but was apparently not carried out. It is possible that the Bar Kokhba revolt impeded that final trip to the West. Be that as it may, Italica was profoundly transformed by his liberality and generosity, and both Cassius Dio and the Historia Augusta agree that Hadrian showed great largesse to many of the cities he visited. Although the emperor bestowed gifts on many cities across the Empire, only a few received multiple honors. Together with Athens in the province of Achaea, Italica in Baetica was one of these, as was Cyrene in the province of Creta et Cyrenaica, and some cities in the province Asia, including Smyrna and Ephesus.55 The Roman municipium of Italica,56 which Hadrian had inhabited briefly as an adolescent, was a large blank canvas on which he could design and build a new city, conceived in a unitary and coherent way.57 This is undeniably the most distinctive feature of Hadrianic Italica: a new city design, envisioned not only according to Roman political practice but also, significantly, in line with the models of Hellenic culture. For the sake of reasoning, we must briefly come back to Athens and other Greek cities. In Athens, the emperor funded the building of new public works that completely altered the face of Achaea’s most prestigious city. The nature of this transformation is visible in Hadrian’s Arch;58 on one side of the monument was the ancient city of Theseus, while on the other, Hadrian’s new city. This new city, on the banks of the Ilisos, was dominated by the majestic Temple of Olympian Zeus, completed more than six hundred years after its initial construction. Other installations were added at this time.59 A new gymnasium for the paides is attested in Hadrian’s letter in which he ordered its construction, and some archaeological remains have been identified as belonging to it.60 The urban development that Herodes Atticus pursued after the emperor’s death, with the construction of the new stadium, illuminates the overall meaning of the Hadrianic town.61 Thus, temple(s), gymnasium, and entertainment buildings made up the heart of Hadrian’s city. A number of documents from the imperial chancery confirm the centrality of these installations in the urban centers that were restored, renovated, or
Hispania Graeca 327 enlarged by Hadrian. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, a large stele in the city of Cyrene collected a series of imperial documents related to its inclusion in the Panhellenion, its primacy over the other cities of the region, and also the city’s restoration after the Jewish revolt of 115–117. In one of these documents, perhaps an edict or a public speech, Hadrian insisted on the gymnasium’s importance and gave instructions to rebuild and extend it. For the emperor, the rebirth of Cyrene was linked to the birth of children and especially to their receiving an authentic Greek education.62 In the last years of his reign, Hadrian wrote a letter to the city of Pergamum rejecting their recent petition to him.63 Despite the imperial refusal, however, Pergamum deemed it an honor of some kind and turned it into a public monument. The people of Pergamum had asked him for the permission to build a new temple of imperial cult, consecrated to Hadrian himself; the emperor refused to grant them permission, claiming that he was concerned about the equilibrium between the cities in the region, and was mindful of avoiding rivalry between them. Pergamum, Hadrian stated in his letter, already had two great temples of imperial cult, one consecrated to Augustus and the other to Zeus Philios and Trajan, temples that he described as, δύο τε γὰρ ναοὺς [παμμεγ]εθεστ[άτους] καὶ ἐνδοξοτ[άτους ἒ]χετε, “of great magnificence and dignity”. Added to these temples, the city enjoyed two Greek festivals, and two periods of fiscal immunity that supported the flourishing of markets during the festivities, κα[ὶ ἀγῶ]νας δύο καὶ ἀ[τελεία]ς δύο. The emperor concluded by saying that these conditions were sufficient for the city, ἱκα]νὰ δὲ καὶ τὰ π[αρόντα] τῇ πόλ[ει, and that he therefore refused to allow the construction of a new temple, despite the city wishing to dedicate it to the emperor himself. A third document corroborates the centrality of the gymnasium, the temple of the imperial cult, and the accompanying games in the model city that Hadrian fostered. This document was not issued by the imperial chencellery, although it is closely linked to it. It is a long inscription from Smyrna, today in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and it collects a list of donors who contributed to the construction and beautification of its second public gymnasium. The inscription’s header has been lost,64 but the document shows a succession of the gymnasium’s benefactors, whether individuals or associations, who contributed everything from money to materials. Last on the long list is the sophist Antonius Polemo, Hadrian’s friend and advisor. Polemo, however, did not donate resources for the construction of the gymnasium; his gift was to convince Hadrian to be generous toward the city and to contribute funds for the construction of the gymnasium. Philostratus, in the Lives of the Sophists, also reports the mediation of Polemo,65 as confirmed in the inscription (ll. 34–42): καὶ ὅσα ἐπετύ|χομεν παρὰ τοῦ κυρίου Καίσαρος | Ἀδριανοῦ διὰ Ἀντωνίου Πολέμω|νος· δεύτερον δόγμα συνκλήτου, | καθ’ ὃ δὶς νεωκόροι γεγόναμεν· | ἀγῶνα ἱερόν, ἀτέλειαν, θεολόγους, | ὑμνῳδούς, μυριάδας ἑκατὸν | πεντήκοντα, κείονας εἰς τὸ | ἀλειπτήριον Συνναδίους οβ’, | Νουμεδικοὺς κ’, πορφυρείτας Ҕ’.
328 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete And the amounts received from our Lord Caesar Hadrian through Antonius Polemo: a second senatus consultum making us a neokoros for the second time; sacred games, a period of fiscal immunity, theologoi, hymnodoi, 1.500.000 drachmas, 72 columns of marble from Synnada for the alipterion, 20 of Numidian marble, and 6 porphyry columns. The list of imperial donations is impressive. In addition to a tremendous sum of money (six million sestertii), the emperor contributed ninety-eight marble columns from various imperial quarries in Africa, Egypt, and Asia. The number of columns is close to the hundred columns referenced by Pausanias in his description of Hadrian’s Library in Athens, as well as the emperor’s new gymnasium.66 I would like to highlight the consistency between Hadrian’s letter to Pergamum and the list of imperial donations in Smyrna. The conversion of the people of Smyrna into neokoros for the second time meant that the city was given permission to erect a second temple of imperial worship.67 The first had been granted during Tiberius’ reign. This new temple, like the temples in Pergamum, was accompanied by games and the corresponding tax immunity. In addition, Smyrna received financial and material resources from Hadrian to construct a gymnasium that was closely associated with the authorisation for a new temple. This was also the case in Pergamum. The promoter of Trajan’s temple, Aulus Julius Quadratus, was also responsible for the embellishing of the acropolis gymnasium. Through him, the gymnasium’s young people’s association, the synnodos of the Neoi, received the title of Sebasté, and maintained a close bond with the emperor.68 The imperial temple, gymnasium, and games formed an essential triad for an ideal and realistic city model, in which the emperor and his subjects were united by mutual relationships of loyalty and generosity. Thus, temple, gymnasium, and games were major components of Hellenism in the 2nd century.
Italica, a Greek-style city in the West When we examine the buildings and design of the new Italica built under the aegis of Hadrian, the same components that we observed in Athens, Pergamum, and Smyrna become apparent (Figure 14.3). In the center of the new city stood a magnificent temple. Unfortunately, the sparse and highly fragmented epigraphy from Italica does not clearly attest to whom the sanctuary was dedicated. León, who discovered and excavated the temple, suggested that it was a Traianeum.69 Inspired by the name given by German archaeologists to the temple of Pergamum, her denomination was a way of suggesting that Hadrian had consecrated the temple to his adoptive father and predecessor, Trajan. However, no evidence has emerged to support this claim. It is clear that Hadrian was the promoter of the temple of Trajan in Rome, in which Plotina was also worshipped.70 But no testimony for the construction of any other posthumous temple to Trajan throughout the Empire has reached us.71 Quite the opposite in fact; all the new temples of imperial cult
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Figure 14.3 Map of Italica in the 2nd century CE. Source: (J.M. Rodríguez Hidalgo, A. Jíménez, M.A. Pérez, M. de Alba, J.M. Cortés Copete).
erected during Hadrian’s reign were dedicated to him, whether exclusively, or in the company of other gods.72 A number of indications, however, point to the inspiration for the temple in Italica being the Pergamene temple. The first clue is the promulgation of a senatus consultum De Italicensibus, promoted by an oratio principis.73 It is known that the senatus consultum gained new legal rights under the rule of Hadrian, provided they were prompted by the emperor himself. The auctoritas principis gave them the force of law.74 Based on the account given by Aulus Gellius of the imperial speech on Italica, the purpose of the senatus consultum has been interpreted as conferring colonial status upon the city,75 but this is unlikely. The right to establish a colony – regardless of whether it was in Italy, in a public province such as Baetica, or in an imperial province – belonged exclusively to the princeps, who did not need the senate’s collaboration.76 In my opinion, the reason for De Italicensibus was the granting of permission to build an imperial cult temple in Italica. This is precisely what had occurred in the case of Smyrna and what the people of Pergamum intended with their rejected request.77 Thus, the temple built in Italica suggests that this interpretation of the s enatus consultum is correct.
330 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete The comparison of the measurements of the Hadrianeum in Rome with those of the remains of the temple in Italica has led to the conclusion that the two structures were similar,78 and that the latter was replicated in Rome as a posthumous temple of Hadrian. This decision to reproduce the temple of Italica in Rome is not surprising. It is likely that Hadrian was worshiped in Italica while still alive, and after his death, his divinity was extensively acknowledged despite the displeasure of some senators. The second element of the triad, the gymnasium, also features in Italica’s Hadrianic enlargement. A large installation of thermal baths was identified in the city during the first years of excavation in the mid-20th century and was given the name of Termas Mayores. These baths differed from other smaller examples located in the old part of the city.79 However, a geomagnetic survey conducted in the city during the 1990s revealed that a large building in the shape of a porticoed square was adjoined to the large baths.80 A gymnasium palaestra is easily recognisable in that square. The shape of that portico was very similar to Hadrian’s Library in Athens, and inevitably evokes the hundredcolumned gymnasium referenced by Pausanias.81 Both closely resemble the gymnasium of Smyrna, which was endowed with ninety-eight columns by the emperor. During the High Empire, a new type of gymnasium had been developed in Asia, combining baths and a palaestra in major buildings.82 The importing of this type of structure, which only recently has begun to undergo systematic excavation, can be recognized in Italica. While waiting for archaeological results to be published, it is possible to discern an iconographic programme in accordance with the educational project of a Greek gymnasium. Hadrian’s vision for Italica not only consisted of designing and building a new city, but also of embellishing it. Gymnasia had to incorporate elements that would disseminate the values of Greek education.83 Paintings, mosaics, and sculptures were a preferred means for fulfilling this mission. The imperial letter by which the emperor ordered the construction of the new Athenian gymnasium, probably the same as the one referred to by Pausanias, included the following words: τοῖς παισὶν ὑμῶν τοίς [τε νέοις τὸ γυμνάσι]ιον δίδωμι πρὸς τῷ κόσμ[ῳ], “I offer your children and young people the gymnasium as well as the ornamentation …” 84 A compelling parallel comes from Cyrene, which wished to thank Hadrian in the last months of his reign for all the favors it had received from him. The new gymnasium, which he had mentioned in his edict or speech quoted earlier, was already in operation, and the city was regaining its former splendor during his reign. To this end, the authorities of Cyrene erected a sculptural ensemble in the temple, usually termed Capitolium. The Greek inscription on its base has been preserved and reveals that Hadrian, accompanied by Antoninus, was proclaimed savior and founder of the city. The inscription ends by saying ἡ Κυρηναίων πόλις κοσμηθεῖσα ὑπ’αὐτοῦ καὶ τοῖς ἀγάλμασιν, “the city of Cyrene that was embellished with statues also by him”.85 Some of these statues have been preserved and show a remarkable narrative coherence: Zeus, bearer of the aegis, Aphrodite Anadyomene, and Alexander the Great. Statues were also a key component of Hadrian’s Italica, where some
Hispania Graeca 331 of these images from Cyrene are repeated. But before delving into Italica’s iconographic programme, I shall briefly explain how the emperor was able to carry out his plan. Hadrian set up an administrative structure to optimize the management of the personnel necessary to execute his urban projects in the provinces. Trajan, when requested by Pliny to send engineers to Bithynia, had to acknowledge that he did not have enough workers to meet his own needs in Rome and in the army.86 Hadrian, however, never referred to such difficulties, possibly thanks to his organizational reforms. The coordination of cohorts of engineers, architects, and other professionals necessary for the construction of cities and their ornamentation made it possible for the Hadrianic style to proliferate throughout the Empire,87 including in Italica. Two inscriptions found in the city inform us of the existence of a statio serrariorum Augustorum, a marble cutter workshop of the Augusti.88 The inscription must date back to a period when two Augusti reigned, although it is possible that the statio had been created during the time of the city’s expansion. After all, imperial marble was used on a massive scale in Hadrian’s Italica. Imperial generosity also brought Greek sculptors to Italica. They created a new iconographic programme, following artistic styles previously unknown in Hispania. The hand of the school of Aphrodisias is easily recognisable;89 its influence would leave a profound mark on other cities in Baetica, including Corduba and Astigi.90 The most representative monument of the influence of this school of Aphrodisias is the Aphrodite Anadyomene of Italica (Figure 14.4). 91 This sculpture is likely to have decorated a nymphaeum rather than a gymnasium. Nevertheless, the images of Hadrian’s time that belonged to the gymnasium are easily recognizable. Hermes Dionysophorus (Figure 14.5) was one of two main gods of the gymnasium, along with Heracles/Hercules as god of education who guided the youth. A statue of the Diadumenos athlete – unfortunately mutilated, although similar to the copy from Vaison la Romaine that is now in the British Museum – is also from the Hadrianic period and must have stood in the gymnasium (Figure 14.6). It is worth noting that the Epitome de Caesaribus draws attention to the fact that Hadrian himself sculpted in a style similar to that of Polycleitus, who conceived the original model for this athlete. Several torsos of Meleager may also have formed part of this collection, to which the ephebe preserved today in the Hispanic Society of New York undoubtedly also belonged.92 All of them express the gymnasium’s educational programme, from the guidance of young people to the educational value of sport and competition.93 The presence of these images in the city suggests that Greek paideia was also exported to Italica, regardless of whether the Greek or Latin language was used. We should perhaps add to the above sculptures the emperor’s bust (Figure 14.7), which was also included in the sculptural adorning of many gymnasiums.94 In this way, Hadrian appeared inextricably linked to the education of the young he had so strongly supported during his reign with the construction of new and improved gymnasia.
332 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete
Figure 14.4 Statue of Aphrodite Anadyomene. Parian marble, 2nd century CE. From Italica. Archaeological Museum of Seville. Source: (CE05396. © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: M. García).
Games in Italica: the amphitheatre The firm establishment of Hellenic education in Italica must have been linked to the promotion of Greek agones. However, there is no evidence for the existence of Greek games in Italica, as in the case of Nemausus, nor even of the participation of people from Italica in Greek competitions, as in the case of Tarraco. But this does not mean that the agonal world, a key component of the relationship between the provincial cities and the emperor, was nonexistent. Its presence in Italica, however, did not adopt a Greek form but rather a Roman one. The most impressive building in the city’s ruins is undoubtedly the amphitheater.95 In the ranking of the Roman world’s largest amphitheaters, it usually comes third or fourth. However, this order, which would naturally place Italica after the Flavian amphitheater as well as the amphitheaters of Capua, Puteoli, and perhaps El Jem,96 overlooks the major factor of time. When the amphitheater of Italica was constructed, it was the second largest in the Empire, coming after only the Roman amphitheater. In Italica’s amphitheater, the construction techniques of the Flavian amphitheater were used for
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Figure 14.5 Statue of Hermes Dionysophorus. From Italica, 2nd century CE. Archaeological Museum of Seville. Source: (CE00108. © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: M. García).
Figure 14.6 Statue of the Diadumenos. From Italica, 2nd century CE. Archaeological Museum of Seville. Source: (CE00101. © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: M. Camacho).
334 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete
Figure 14.7 Bust of Hadrian. From Italica, 2nd century CE. Archaeological Museum of Seville. Source: (CE00151. © Junta de Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura y Patrimonio y Histórico (Photo: G. Mendo).
the first time in a province, effectively proving that it was also designed and built by the architects and engineers called upon by the emperor.97 This amphitheater was intended for gladiatorial games and shows associated with imperial worship, which were linked to the temple that dominated the design of the new city of Italica. The aes Italicensium, an epigraphic copy of the first senator’s response to the oration given by Marcus Aurelius and Commodus to promote a senatus consultum on the organization of gladiatorial games, clearly established the relationship between provincial priests and amphitheater spectacles.98 Recently, thanks to a comprehensive view of the archaeological remains, a proposal has been made to define Italica as an agonal city.99 This characterization is correct, even though Greek-style competitions have not been documented in Italica. However, the city’s amphitheater was able to supplement the absence of these games to complete the triad of elements that are easily recognisable in the East: the temple of imperial cult, the gymnasium – the Major Baths and the palaestra – and the agon. These three elements were the pillars of the Empire’s city model and allowed the flourishing of individuals through education, the empowerment of the civic community via the gymnasium, and the linking of the Empire’s ecumenical community through imperial worship. Hadrian undeniably established new regulations for the Greek competitions in the Empire and created a unified calendar for the entire
Hispania Graeca 335 Roman world, thus also turning them into a component of imperial cohesion.100 Similarly, amphitheater games should also be considered as a unifying factor of the Empire. Only in this way can we properly understand the expansion of the agonal movement in the West and the popularity of gladiatorial games in the East. The Historia Augusta states that Hadrian funded a venatio of a thousand beasts in Athens. Since the city lacked an amphitheater, some gladiatorial fighting may have been held in the Theatre of Dionysus.101 Nevertheless, Hadrian preferred to celebrate the beast hunts in the stadium. The ancient stadium of Athens was located in the Ilisos district and was the one that Herodes Atticus promised to enlarge and embellish upon Hadrian’s death. Thus, the venatio held in Athens by the emperor in 132 would also have been part of this model for a new city: a town organized around Greek education, the civic community, and loyalty and devotion to the emperor.
A Sophistic past for Italica and the emperor Italica had not been left out of the Empire’s literary landscape before Hadrian. It is true that none of the narrators of the conquest of Hispania during the Republic, that is, Polybius and Livy, refer to Italica. But some individuals from the city played a prominent role in the Corpus Caesarianum, especially in the Bellum Alexandrinum. The city backed Caesar initially and was therefore rewarded with the status of municipium. However, some citizens of Italica led an uprising against Caesar and sided with Pompey’s sons until the final defeat in Munda.102 From that moment on, the city lost all historical prominence. This situation is briefly alluded to by Strabo and Pliny, who mention the name of the city as only one among many others in the province.103 However, in the middle of the 2nd century CE, Italica began to stand out. Appian gave it an eminent position by turning it into a foundation of Publius Cornelius Scipio, the future Africanus. The city was established after his victory over the Carthaginians in Hispania in the Second Punic War:104 Καὶ αὐτοῖς ὁ Σκιπιών ὀλίγην στρατιὰν ὡς ἐπὶ εἰρήνῃ καταλιπών, συνῴκισε τοὺς τραυματίας ἐς πόλιν, ἥν ἀπὸ τῆς Ἰταλίας Ἰταλικὴν ἐκάλεσε· καὶ πατρίς ἐστι Τραιανοῦ τε καὶ Ἀδριανοῦ τῶν ὕστερον Ῥωμαίοις ἀρξάντων τὴν αὐτοκράτορα ἀρχήν. He left them a small force suitable for a peace establishment and settled his sick and wounded soldiers in a town which he named Italica after Italy, and this is the native place of Trajan and Hadrian who afterwards became emperors of Rome. Appian’s passage was obviously linked to the arrival of Trajan and Hadrian to the imperial throne. However, given the absence of the city from the literary sources up to that point, it is difficult to discern Appian’s sources. Such
336 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete difficulties have even led to doubts about the veracity of the founding of Italica by Scipio, which could be regarded as an invention intended to ennoble the emperors’ homeland. It is possible that the source of Appian’s passage was the writings of Hadrian himself. According to the Historia Augusta, the emperor included the story of the founding of Italica by Scipio in his autobiography:105 Origo imperatoris Hadriani uetustior a Picentibus, posterior ab Hispanien sibus manat, si quidem Hadria ortos maiores suos apud Italicam Scipionum temporibus resedisse in libris uitae suae Hadrianus ipse commemoret. The original home of the family of the Emperor Hadrian was Picenum, the later, Spain; for Hadrian himself relates in his autobiography that his forefathers came from Hadria but settled at Italica in the time of the Scipios. Few sources of information could have had more authority than this. Added to the emperor’s political authority was his literary authority. By incorporating this ancient narrative of his family’s origin, Hadrian was acting like the sophists of his time, many of whom were personal friends of the emperor. Suffice it to recall that Herodes Atticus claimed descent from the Aeacides, with Miltiades and Cimon as his ancestors.106 Nonetheless, we should not draw the hasty conclusion that Hadrian’s account of his origins was a mere literary invention. The relationship between Scipio and Italica could have been part of local Italican tradition. If the city’s name is any proof of the veracity of its ancient foundation, it may also explain the silence of other historical sources, especially Polybius and Livy. Italica’s first settlers would have mainly been Italic allies, hence the name; therefore, they would not have interested historians who focused essentially on events in which Roman citizens were protagonists.107 Hadrian’s construction of his family’s origins brought to light the establishment of Italica and introduced it into the Empire’s literary panorama. However, this family account also played another role: Hadrian claimed that his closest paternal ancestors came from Italica but that his more distant ones were linked to Hadria in Picenum. The narrative is consistent, even though the overly obvious relationship between the anthroponym and the place name raises suspicions. Hadrian may indeed have descended from some of the Italic auxilia who settled in Hispania, in the city of Italica. However, the reference to Hadria helped to broaden his geographical, genetic, and cultural origins in another way. Phlegon of Tralles was among the emperor’s freedmen and one of the great literati of the time. The Historia Augusta claims that Hadrian used him as a literary alter ego, instructing him to sign works of his own authorship.108 Unfortunately, Phlegon’s work has only been preserved in fragments in Byzantine collections and encyclopedias. A reference to Hadria has been preserved in one of them, the Etymologicum Magnum, which quotes the work of Phlegon:109
Hispania Graeca 337 Ἀδρίας· τὸ πέλαγος. Διονύσιος Σικελίας τύραννος, ὃς πρότερον ἐπὶ τῆι * Ὀλυμπιάδι πόλιν ἔκτισεν Ἀδρίαν ἐν τῶι Ἰονικῶι κόλπωι, ἀφ ἧς καὶ τὸ πέλαγος Ἀδρίας καλεῖται. Hadria: the sea. Dionysus, the tyrant of Sicily, who first, during the * Olympics, founded the city of Hadria in the Ionian Gulf, from which the Hadriatic Sea takes its name. For Hadrian and his circle, Hadria in Picenum had been a Greek colony, founded by Dionysius I of Syracuse. The political consequences of this report should not be overlooked. After all, before he became emperor, Hadrian had received Athenian citizenship and was enrolled in the deme of Besa, like his friend Philopappus. Thus, the emperor could claim a triple origin. He came from Italica in Hispania, from a city founded by Scipio Africanus, a major contributor to the greatness of Rome. His most distant origins were to be found, however, on the Italian peninsula. Hadrian’s ancestors came from Italy, the core of the Roman Empire. But the sophistic preoccupation with lineages and genealogy led to yet a further step back in time. The emperor’s remote origins were Greek, since Hadria had been founded as a colony of Syracuse, which was itself a colony of Corinth in “old Greece”. Thus, the emperor’s three worlds – Hispania, Italy, and Greece – were united in his own genealogy.
Epilogue: the re-discovery of Italica Hadrian’s Italica was not a fortunate city. Directly born out of the emperor’s drive, who conceived, designed, financed, and executed it, it was somehow neglected after his death. The crisis of the 3rd century had a profoundly negative impact. Hellenism dwindled rapidly in the West, rendering some of its cultural achievements meaningless. Over half of the new city’s surface area was dismantled and abandoned, and the Greek gymnasium ceased to exist. The portico walls of the great imperial temple were incorporated into the city’s walls.110 The town gradually deteriorated, while its materials, especially its precious marbles, were reused elsewhere. The flourishing city of Hispalis, of late and Visigothic antiquity, gained what Italica had lost. The Muslim invasion accelerated Italica’s decline, which survived as a small agricultural village under the name of Talca. Following the Castilian conquest in the 14th century, the settlement was deserted. It was at this time that the faint thread of memory that linked those ruins to the colonia Aelia Augusta Italicensium created by Hadrian snapped once and for all. The new Sevillian oligarchy was soon caught up by the influx of nascent humanism.111 Noble families found deposits of precious materials in Italica that they used to adorn their newly built palaces. The prestige of antiquity was necessary for Seville, which had turned into a major world capital thanks to the discovery of America. Yet, no one remembered that the grand quarry and magnificent amphitheater, whose ruins were still visible, had been Hadrian’s Italica. They simply called the place “Sevilla la Vieja”, that is, “Old Hispalis”.
338 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete The name of Italica was recovered in different stages. In the mid-16th century, Ambrosio de Morales, the chronicler of Philip II, recuperated the name of Italica for the Roman ruins near Seville.112 He did so based on the information provided by the Antonine Itinerary. However, the decisive step forward was taken by Rodrigo Caro in 1634. A Sevillian humanist and devotee of Classical antiquity, he had an advantage over his predecessors: the availability of Appian’s text.113 In the mid-15th century, Pope Nicholas V had supported the editing and translation of the great historians of antiquity whose texts had survived. These also included Appian’s Roman History. However, two books were missing in that first edition, one dedicated to the conquest of Hispania, and the other to Hannibal’s War. These books were not edited until 1551, the Greek text of which was accompanied by the Latin translation of the famous humanist Secondo Curione. Nine years later, Beraldus published a second, improved Latin translation that was more respectful of the original Greek text. Both versions fell into the hands of Rodrigo Caro, who established a definite link between the city of Trajan and Hadrian, mentioned by Appian, and the ruins near Seville. The famed city of Italica was thus re-discovered.114 This re-discovery, important as it is, had a perverse effect on Italica’s civic personality. Rodrigo Caro, together with the succession of later studies until the 21st century, considered that Italica’s significance was that of having been the first Roman city in the West. Little did they know that this concept of Italica was part of the narrative that Hadrian had created for his homeland under the fertile influence of Hellenism. That Hispania Graeca, included within the universalizing Empire fostered by Hadrian, had been overshadowed by the prestige of Rome, of Italy, and by the noble desire to be connected to the oldest and most reputable ancestors.
Notes 1 García Bellido 1948; Gascó 1996a, 1996b; Hoz and Mora 2013. 2 HA, Hadr. 1, 4-5; C.D. 69.3.1; Aur. Vic. 14.1; Epitome de Caesaribus 14.2; Eutr. 8.7.2. Gregorovius 1898, 1–5; Henderson 1923, 13–19; Syme 1965; Birley 1997, 10–20. 3 The grammarian Quintus Terentius Scaurus: Plin. Ep. 5.12; HA, V.Veri, 2.5; Gell. NA 11.15.3. The sophist Isaeus: Plin. Ep. 2.3; Juv. 3.73–80; Philostr. VS 1.513–514; IG II2 3632, ll. 7–9: τοῦ σοφίας ὑπάτου, | ὃς δὴ καὶ βασιλῆος ἀμύμονος Ἁδριανοῖο | μουσάων ἀγαθὴν εἶχε διδασκαλίην. Oliver 1949, 248–250: “Granddaughter of Isaeus surpassing all in wisdom who to the blameless emperor Hadrian brought the good teaching of the Muses”. 4 HA, Hadr. 1.2: mater Domitia Paulina Gadibus orta. 5 CIL 6. 10229; Di Vita-Evrard 2000. 6 RIC 56, 57, 125. 7 Aubet 2019. 8 Hadrian granted financial privileges to the temple: Ulp. 22.6.; see also Blázquez 2001. 9 Elsner 1997. 10 Philostr., VA 5.1–8; Miles 2009, 140–143. 11 Dillon 1977, 344–351.
Hispania Graeca 339
12 Spawforth 2011; Asirvatham 2008. 13 Suet. Caes 7.1; Plut. Caes 11.3; C.D. 37.52. 14 Aristid. 40.9 (transl. C. Behr). 15 Birley 1997, 10–20. 16 HA, Hadr. 1.4. 17 Plin. Pan. 14.1; C.D. 68.7.4; Aur. Vic. 13.8. 18 Cornell 2013, 587–589; Bardon 1940, 357–389. 19 Philostr. (transl. W.C. Wright). VS 488. 20 C.D. 68.17.2–3; Spawforth 1994; Anth. Pal. VI 332. 21 Alföldy 1998; Des Boscs-Plateaux 2005, 470–473. 22 Dabrowa 1994. 23 Bennett 1997, 21–24. 24 Kleiner 1983. 25 HA, Hadr. 2.1. 26 Ziolkowski 1988; Cic. Off. 2.76; Liv. Per. 53. 27 CIL I 630 = CIL II 1119; Moralejo 2011. 28 Coriat 1997, 178–184. 29 Birley 2003. 30 Cortés Copete 2017a. 31 Liberalitas on Hadrian’s coins: Levi 1993, 54. 32 De Kleijn 2003. 33 Boatwright 1987. 34 Boatwright 2000. 35 Calandra 1996. 36 Schadewaldt 1973. 37 Borg 2004. 38 HA, Hadr. 10.1. 39 HA, Hadr. 12.3–4; Birley 1997, 113–141. 40 Des Boscs-Plateaux 2005, 538–540; 585–587. 41 IvO 236 (=SIG3 840); Paus. 5.20.8; Krieckhaus 2003. 42 Caldelli 1997. 43 Tarrats, Macias, Ramón, and Remolá 2000. 44 Ruiz de Arbulo 2014. 45 Koppel 2000. 46 C.D. 69.11.2–4. 47 Hoz 2014, 235–236. 48 Alföldy 2011, 16. 49 Kritzas 2012. 50 HA, Hadr. 12.3–4; C.D. 69.10.1; Birley 1997, 142–150. 51 Syme 1964. 52 Cary 1925, 443. 53 Goodwin 1879, 34 § 24; 216–218, §109. 54 Follet 1976, 107–135. 55 Boatwright 2000, 144–171. 56 Caballos and León 2010. 57 García Bellido 1960. 58 Kouremenos in this volume. 59 Carandini and Papi 2019, 267–318. 60 IG II2 1102; Oliver 1989, 85; Greco 2011, 503–506. 61 Philostr., VS 2.550; Greco 2011, 495–497. 62 Reynolds 1978; Oliver 1989, 122; Jones 1998; Kennell in this volume.
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63 Müller 2009; SEG 59, 1424. 64 ISmyrna 697; Bowie 2012. 65 Philostr., VS 531. 66 Paus. 1.18.9. 67 Burrell 2004, 42–48. 68 Halfmann 2004, 67–76; IPergamon 440. 69 León 1988. 70 HA, Hadr. 19.9; CIL VI 966; Baldasarri 2013; Claridge 2013. 71 Archaeological remains that have been interpreted as a temple of Trajan in Selinus (Cilicia) correspond to the ustrinum where his body was burned in 117. The ashes were moved to Rome and deposited in the base of the Column of Trajan. See especially Hoff 2016. 72 HA, Hadr. 13.6; Cortés Copete 2017b. 73 Gell., NA 16.13; Coles 2020, 72–74. 74 Magdelain 1947, 77–110. 75 Galsterer 1997. 76 Dig. 50.15.8.5–7; Millar 1992, 394–410; Coles 2020, 71–77. 77 The relation between the emperor, the senate, and the provincial cities was fixated on the imperial cult: Filippini 2019. 78 D’Alessio 2015. 79 Gómez Araujo 2013. 80 Rodríguez Hidalgo, Keay, Jordan, and Creighton 1999. 81 Paus. 1.18.9; Carandini and Papi 2019, 305–316. 82 Yegül 2010, 154–180. 83 Delorme 1960, 362–373. 84 IG II2 1102; Oliver 1989, n° 85, l. 12. 85 SEG IX 136, ll. 7–8; Reynolds 1978, 118. 86 Plin. Ep. 10.17b, 18. 87 Epitome de Caesaribus 14. 5; Brunt 1980, 83. 88 CIL II 1131. 89 Toynbee 1934, xii–xxxi. Smith 2006. See also Konstantinidis in this volume, with bibliography. 90 Márquez 2000. 91 León 1995, 38. 92 León 1995, 32 (Hermes), 37 (Diadumenos), 34–36 (Meleager), 30 (ephebe); see also Epitome de Caesaribus 14.2. 93 van Nijf 2004; Newby 2005. 94 León 1995, 22. 95 Jiménez 2015. 96 Bomgardner 2000, 61–120. 97 Jiménez 2018. 98 CIL II 6278, ll. 59–60; Gómez-Pantoja 2009, 44–66. 99 Lozano and Alarcon forthcoming. 100 Petzl and Schwertheim 2006. 101 HA, Hadr. 19.3; D.Chr. 31.121. 102 Caes. B.C. 2.20; [Caes.] B.H. 25.4; [Caes.] B.A. 52–58. 103 Str. 3.2.2; Plin. NH 3.11. 104 App. Hisp. 38. 105 HA, Hadr. 1.1 (transl. D. Magie); Cortés Copete 2016. 106 Swain 1996, 43–64; Philostr. VS II, 546–547. On Herodes Atticus, see also Strazdins in this volume.
Hispania Graeca 341 107 The first account of a Roman settlement in Hispania is the colony of Carteia, founded in 171 for the children of Roman soldiers and indigenous women: Liv. 43.3. 108 HA, Hadr. 16.1; Fein 1994, 193–199. 109 Etymologicum Magnum 18.54 (Jacoby 257 F23). 110 Rodríguez Hidalgo, Keay, Jordan, and Creighton 1999, 93–95. 111 Lleó Cañal 2001. 112 De Morales 1575, 30. 113 Caro 1635, 101–103. 114 Cortés Copete 2018.
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344 Juan Manuel Cortés Copete Magdelain, A. (1947). Auctoritas principis. Paris, Les Belles Lettres. Márquez, C. (2000). “Talleres imperiales en la provincia Baetica. El caso de Colonia Patricia e Itálica”. In: Regianni, A. M. (ed.). Atti del Convegno Villa Adriana. Paesaggio antico e ambiente moderno. Roma, Electa, 169–180. Miles, G. (2009). “Reforming the Eyes: interpreters and Interpretation in the Vita Apolloni”. In: Demoen, K. & Praet, D. (eds.). Theios Sophistes. Essays on Flavius Philostratus’ Vita Apolloni. Leiden-Boston, Brill, 129–160. Millar, F. (1992). The Emperor in the Roman World, London, Bloomsbury. Moralejo, J.L. (2011). “Mumio vuelve a Itálica (de nuevo sobre CIL I2 630, II 1119)”. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 177, 289–297. Müller, H. (2009). “Hadrian an die Pergamener: eine Fallstudie”. In: Haencsh, R. (Hrsg.). Selbstdarstellung und Kommunikation: Die Veröffentlichung staatlicher Urkunden auf Stein und Bronze in der römischen Welt. Berichte Kolloquium, München, 2006, Vestigia 61. München, Steiner Verlag, 367–406. Newby, Z. (2005). Greek Athletics in the Roman World. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Oliver, J.H. (1949). “Two Athenian poets”. Hesperia Supplement VIII 8, 243–258. ——— (1989). Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri. Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society. Petzl, G. & Schwertheim, E. (2006). Hadrian und die dionysischen Künstler: drei in Alexandria Troas neugefundene Briefe des Kaisers an die Künstler-Vereinigung. Bonn, Habelt. Reynolds, J.M. (1978). “Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and the Cyrenaican cities”. The Journal of Roman Studies 68, 111–121. Rodríguez Hidalgo, J.M., Keay, S.J., Jordan, D. & Creighton, J. (1999). “La Itálica de Adriano. Resultados de las prospecciones arqueológicas de 1991 y 1993”. AEspA 72, 73–97. Ruiz de Arbulo, J. (2014). “El signaculum de Caius Valerius Avitus, duoviro de Tarraco y propietario de la villa de Els Munts (Altafulla)”. Pyrenae 45, 125–151. Schadewaldt, W. (1973). “Humanitas Romana”. ANRW I, Berlin-New York, 43–62. Smith, R.R.R. (2006). Aphrodisias II: Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias (with S. Dillon, C. H. Hallett, J. Lenaghan and J. Van Voorhis). Mainz. Spawforth, A.J.S. (1994). “Symbol of unity? The Persian-wars tradition in the Roman Empire”. In: Hornblower, S. (ed.). Greek Historiography. Oxford, Oxford Clarendon Press, 233–247. ——— (2011). Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Swain, S. (1996). Hellenism and Empire. Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World AD 50–250. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Syme, R. (1964). “Hadrian and Italica”. The Journal of Roman Studies 54, 142–149. ——— (1965). “Hadrian the intellectual”. In: Piganiol A. & Terrasse, M. (eds.). Les empereurs romains d’Espagne. París, Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 244–253. Tarrats, F., Macias, J.M., Ramón, E. & Remolá, J.A. (2000). “Nuevas actuaciones en el área residencial de la Villa de ‘Els Munts’ (Altafulla, Ager Tarraconensis)”. Madrider Mitteilungen 41, 358–379. Toynbee, J. (1934). The Hadrianic School. A Chapter in the History of Greek Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Van Nijf, O. (2004). “Athletics and paideia: Festivals and physical education in the world to the Second Sophistic”. In: Borg, B.E. (ed.). Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Berlin, de Gruyter, 203–227. Yegül, F. (2010). Bathing in the Roman World. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ziolkowski, A. (1988). “Mummius’s temple of Hercules Victor and the round temple on the Tiber”. Phoenix 42, 309–333.
15 “The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” A cultural history of Hadrian’s Arch Anna Kouremenos
Monuments are human landmarks which men have created as symbols for their ideals, for their aims, and for their actions. They are intended to outlive the period which originated them and constitute a heritage for future generations. As such, they form a link between the past and the future. (Sert, Léger, and Giedion 1943)
Introduction Few monuments in Athens are as iconic as Hadrian’s Arch, located on Vasilissis Amalias Avenue in the center of the city (Figure 15.1). Known locally as Η Πύλη του Αδριανού, or, less frequently, Η Αψίδα του Αδριανού, at first glance it may not appear as imposing as some of the other ancient monuments of Athens, particularly when compared to its nearby neighbor, the magnificent ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Given its locality, it is perhaps the most accessible of all the ancient monuments in the Greek capital as well as one of the few that can be visited free of charge at all times of the day. The 2nd century CE landmark is not a canonical Roman triumphal arch but an honorary one dedicated to the emperor Hadrian by the citizens of Athens.1 Of particular importance are two inscriptions engraved on the architrave above the apsidal opening on either side of the arch;2 the west side facing the Acropolis proclaims, ΑΙΔ’ ΕΙΣΙΝ ΑΘΗΝΑΙ ΘΗΣΕΩΣ Η ΠΡΙΝ ΠΟΛΙΣ (This is Athens the former city of Theseus),3 while the east side facing the Temple of Olympian Zeus declares, ΑΙΔ’ ΕΙΣ’ ΑΔΡΙΑΝΟΥ ΚΟΥΧΙ ΘΗΣΕΩΣ ΠΟΛΙΣ (This is the city of Hadrian and not of Theseus). Paradoxically, if we alter a single letter in the official nomenclature of the monument through a small slip of the tongue, Η Πύλη του Αδριανού becomes Η Πόλη του Αδριανού (the city of Hadrian), echoing the message of the latter inscription. My objective in this chapter is not to present a detailed architectural study of the arch – other scholars have done a much better job than I could.4 Rather, my aim is: (a) to situate it among the wider antique monumental space in the Greek capital and explore the various interventions that resulted in the monument we see today; (b) to shed light on Hadrian’s ideology of promoting the Hellenic past during his reign and to discern the reactions of the Athenians and other Greeks to his endeavors; and (c) to explore the DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-19
346 Anna Kouremenos
Figure 15.1 The east side of Hadrian’s Arch with Lysicratous Street in the background. Source: (Photo: M. Gianni).
cultural history of the arch and its status as an iconic landmark in a major European capital, merging longevity and continuity. To that end, I present a diachronic study of the monument and its reception by both Greeks and non-Greeks, from its dedication in the 2nd century until the present. The arch has featured in such varied contexts as illustrations, paintings, poems, musical compositions, and, more recently, has served as a symbolic space for generating awareness for various social causes. Yet an enduring mystery that has puzzled scholars until the present is why it has survived in such good condition through twenty centuries. A survey of its cultural trajectory and erstwhile utilitarian functions will provide some answers.
The emperor and the arch: Hadrian as a new Theseus? Modern Greeks have long felt uneasy about their country’s Roman past and have harbored a particular dislike for Roman rulers, but there is an exception to the latter: they are generally fond of Hadrian and the surviving monuments bearing his name or built during his reign, especially those located in Athens, namely the ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, his eponymous
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 347 library, the remains of an aqueduct that supplied the city with water until the middle of the 20th century,5 and, of course, Hadrian’s Arch. As many ancient ruins are located in the center of the city, these Roman-period markers blend in with other well-known antique monuments of Athens. It is, therefore, not surprising that if one were to conduct an informal survey on the streets of the capital today and ask people to name the period in which the aforementioned monuments were built – and the epoch in which Hadrian lived – the answers would almost always be the Classical or Hellenistic period, or, less likely, the Byzantine. This is an ironic turn in collective historical perception since the emperor himself was, in many ways, striving to live like a Hellene of the Classical period and endeavored to promote an ideal type of Hellenism based on Classical prototypes during his reign (117–138) (Figure 15.2).6 No other city benefited more from his reverence and promotion of the Greek past than Athens. Today Hadrian is regarded as the great philhellenic emperor in Greece and elsewhere, but, as I have argued elsewhere,7 scholars tend to bypass the significance of the fact that he was an Athenian citizen and eponymous archon of the city before he became emperor in 117.8 Granted citizenship in c. 111 (or perhaps earlier) and enrolled in the southern Attic deme of Besa,9 he did
Figure 15.2 Fragmentary portrait of Hadrian from the agora of Athens. Thasian marble, c. 130–138 CE. National Archaeological Museum, Sculpture Collection, inv. no. Γ 632. Source: (Photo: C. Raddato. With kind permission of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Archeological Resources Fund).
348 Anna Kouremenos not relinquish his rights as an Athenian after ascending the throne. Thus, Athenianness became part of his avowed identity as emperor and drove many of his imperial policies, including his building program. By the time the arch was dedicated, he had been a citizen of the Greek polis for two decades. This factor raises an important question in discerning the motivation behind the inscriptions on the arch: were the Athenians who dedicated it in his honor exalting him as a fellow Athenian or as a Roman? As an Athenian and a Roman? Since the west inscription mentions only his cognomen in Greek (ΑΔΡΙΑΝΟΥ) without his praenomen, nomen, and titles, the dedicators were probably first and foremost honoring their own citizen and benefactor rather than Hadrian the Roman emperor. The location of the arch and the setting of the inscription above the apsidal opening overlooking directly at the Acropolis cannot have been chosen arbitrarily since they implicitly link the emperor to two of the most important sites of the city. Pausanias relates that he saw a statue of Hadrian next to Athena’s inside the Parthenon,10 an extraordinary honor for a mortal and one that testifies to the reverence of the Athenians for him as well as to his close connection with the goddess, whom, as I have argued, he adopted as one of his patron deities.11 Furthermore, the ancient road that led to the arch from the west (modern Lysicratous Street) has been identified as the probable location of the prytaneion,12 said to have been founded by Theseus and also to have served as the official residence of the Athenian archons;13 the structure would have been fully visible from the eastern side of the archway, the side mentioning the emperor. Thus, when the setting of the arch and its inscriptions are considered against the wider monumental space and the emperor’s citizenship status, it follows that Hadrian was viewed by the citizens as a new founder of Athens and honored first and foremost as an Athenian who was also the Roman emperor. The arch, made entirely of Pentelic marble, measures 18 meters in height, 13.5 meters in width, and has a depth of 2.3 meters. It contains two distinct parts that make its design unique among extant Roman arches: a lower segment resembling a canonical Roman triumphal arch, and an upper part, known as the attic, that features three partitioned sections with the middle one in the form of an aedicula. The capitals of the columns are in the Corinthian order which was the most common type for Roman arches across the Empire. Since the marble appears to be of lower quality and contains many inclusions, it has been surmised that, perhaps, there was a rush to complete the monument before Hadrian’s arrival in c. 131.14 The architect of the monument is unknown, but given its location, it is likely that he was either an Athenian or a resident alien. Originally the attic would have been decorated, with the three sections containing either paintings or painted reliefs depicting Theseus and Hadrian. The presence of statues, or perhaps of painted reliefs in combination with statues, is also a possibility given the parallels with the likely sculptural decoration of the attics of the two arches at Eleusis.15 Since older illustrations of the arch depict the two inscriptions above the apsidal opening as darker than they appear today due to the effects of weathering and pollution, it is likely that the letters were originally painted in a dark
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 349
Figure 15.3 Traces of orange-brown paint on the attic of Hadrian’s Arch. Source: (Photo: www.wandertoes.com).
color or even gilded with metal, perhaps bronze, as was the case with Hadrian’s Gate in Antalya. Traces of orange-brown paint on the attic suggest that at least a portion of it was painted red ochre (Figure 15.3),16 a color that symbolized victory and fortitude in antiquity. Whether these remnants of paint reflect the original Hadrianic-period color scheme or later repainting in the Byzantine period (see below) is difficult to ascertain. Unfortunately, since the monument is situated in one of the busiest avenues of the city, it has accumulated a great deal of pollution and has been cleaned and restored on more than one occasion;17 therefore, future attempts at conducting analysis via UV-VIS spectrometry – a non-destructive method of pigment e xamination – or other means to verify its color scheme will prove rather difficult. The exact date of the dedication of the arch is unknown as references to it from antiquity are lacking. Given its location near the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the linking of Hadrian to Theseus in the second inscription, it is likely that it was built sometime before the later months of c. 131, when the emperor arrived in Athens to inaugurate the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Panhellenion.18 Honorary arches were constructed when emperors were reigning and rarely posthumously;19 this was surely the case with two other surviving arches (or gates) dedicated to Hadrian in the eastern part of the Empire, namely those at Antalya and Jerash,20 which seem to have been roughly contemporaneous with the one in Athens. Earlier suggestions that the emperor commissioned the arch for himself must be rejected since his biographer in the Historia Augusta states that, with a single exception, he did not put his name on the monuments he built.21 Nonetheless, it is obvious that
350 Anna Kouremenos the Athenians intended Hadrian to see the arch and its inscriptions during his visit, so a post-Hadrianic (posthumous) date for its construction must be ruled out. Comparisons with the two arches of similar design erected at Eleusis and dedicated to “the two goddesses and the emperor” – probably Hadrian – by the Panhellenes,22 have led some scholars to assume that the arch in Athens was dedicated by this same group, but if that were indeed the case, why is the group’s name omitted from the inscriptions on the monument? I think that the absence of a dedicator makes the case for the citizens of Athens being the dedicators of the arch convincing. The Historia Augusta asserts that the emperor named a part of Athens Hadrianopolis.23 However, Hadrian’s direct involvement in the naming is questionable. In his entry on the Olympieion (Temple of Olympian Zeus), Stephanus of Byzantium references a passage from Olympiads, written by the emperor’s freedman Phlegon of Tralles, who stated that the Athenians built the temple with funds provided by Hadrian and called the area νέας Ἀθήνας Ἀδριανάς (the new Athens of Hadrian).24 Thus, the impetus for the new nomenclature of part of the city originated with the citizens and not the emperor even if he may have indirectly encouraged the venture. Consequently, some earlier scholars surmised that the inscriptions on the arch were carved in such a way as to reflect the boundary between old Athens and this new Athens of Hadrian. Significantly enough, parallels to the orientation of the inscriptions may be drawn from the Greek past. A passage in Plutarch’s Life of Theseus states that the legendary king set up a pillar on the Isthmus containing two inscriptions that delineated the boundaries between Athenian and Peloponnesian territory; the east side of the pillar stated “This is not Peloponnesus but Ionia”, and on the west was written “Here is the Peloponnesus, not Ionia”.25 Might the dedicators of the arch have intended to link Hadrian with Theseus by emulating the phrasing of the inscriptions on the aforementioned pillar and naming both the emperor and the legendary king on the monument? Since the part of Athens east of the arch already contained built quarters, and many of the other Hadrianic-period monuments are technically located within the older city of Theseus, this theory has been questioned by some scholars,26 but it is worth re-examining it. Excavations around the Temple of Olympian Zeus since the 19th century have brought to light the remains of houses, baths, and other structures of the 2nd century CE,27 indicating that this area was augmented in the time of Hadrian.28 Furthermore, based on the omission of ΑΘΗΝΑΙ in the east inscription of the arch, one could presuppose that the reference to the “city of Hadrian” implies that the city (or at least a part of it) was now known as Hadrianopolis. Nevertheless, the positioning of this inscription suggests that the former city of Theseus – which it overlooks – now also belongs to Hadrian,29 a notion which is strengthened by some additional evidence. Both Pausanias and archaeological discoveries testify to the great number of statues of the emperor that abounded in various parts of the city, including in the agora, theatre of Dionysus, Kerameikos, and other locations.30 The Athenians named an unprecedented thirteenth tribe of their polis Hadrianis.31 It seems
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 351 that since the inauguration of the Panhellenion in c. 131 CE, the city had become a “theme park” for the worship of Hadrianos Olympios Panhellenios.32 Interestingly, Pausanias makes no reference to an area of the city termed Hadrianopolis, although he describes a district known as “the Gardens” which seems to have been located to the east of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.33 This suggests, therefore, that the inscriptions on the arch do not ultimately designate it as a strictly physical boundary between an ancient and a newer, Roman quarter of Athens (Hadrianopolis), even if there was indeed an area of the city known by the emperor’s name. Rather, the arch celebrates Hadrian the Athenian citizen as a founder and ruler who equaled or even surpassed the legendary Theseus. Pausanias mentions several other Hadrianic monuments in Athens, including a magnificent library, a gymnasium, a temple to all the gods (Pantheon), and a temple of Zeus and Hera.34 However, he is curiously silent about the arch itself. One would at least expect a passing reference to it in the passage where he describes the entrance to the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the contents within the precinct: Πρὶν δὲ ἐς τὸ ἱερὸν ἰέναι τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ Ὀλυμπίου, ἐνταῦθα εἰκόνες Ἀδριανοῦ δύο μέν εἰσι Θασίου λίθου, δύο δὲ Αἰγυπτίου· χαλκαῖ δὲ ἑστᾶσι πρὸ τῶν κιόνων ἃς Ἀθηναῖοι καλοῦσιν ἀποίκους πόλεις. ὁ μὲν δὴ πᾶς περίβολος σταδίων μάλιστα τεσσάρων ἐστίν, ἀνδριάντων δὲ πλήρης· (…) Ἀπὸ γὰρ πόλεως ἑκάστης εἰκὼν Ἀδριανοῦ βασιλέως ἀνάκειται, καὶ σφᾶς ὑπερεβάλοντο Ἀθηναῖοι τὸν κολοσσὸν ἀναθέντες ὄπισθε τοῦ ναοῦ θέας ἄξιον. Before the entrance to the Temple of Olympian Zeus stand statues of Hadrian, two of Thasian stone, two of Egyptian. Before the columns stand bronze statues which the Athenians call “colonies.” The whole circumference of the precinct is about four stades, and they are full of statues; for every city has dedicated a likeness of the emperor Hadrian, and the Athenians have surpassed them in dedicating, behind the temple, the remarkable colossus. Clearly, Pausanias describes the precinct in some detail, drawing attention to the great number of statues of the emperor, but why has the arch seemingly gone unnoticed by him? It is fairly reasonable to assume that Pausanias omits any reference to it because it was strictly a monument of the Roman period, much like the temple of Augustus and Roma on the Acropolis which he also conveniently overlooks, and his book is concerned with highlighting the ancient Greek monuments of Athens. However, one could argue that the Library of Hadrian and the aforementioned structures were also monuments of the Roman period and the periegete mentions them all. I suggest that the omission of a reference to the arch may be explained by the fact that, given its location in front of a magnificent temple with hundreds of statues and antiquities and probably serving as some type of passage to the gate of the precinct, it failed to impress Pausanias enough to single it out for referencing.
352 Anna Kouremenos He also did not have to remind the reader that Hadrian was considered the new founder of Athens since he implies this in several passages throughout his book on Attica. Consequently, since Pausanias admired the multitude of statues and discusses the magnificent temple in detail, the arch may have been the least impressive of the monuments in this area and simply an extension of the precinct, thus not warranting a mention. In the 1960s, Travlos noticed that the arch lines up with an ancient road onto which modern Lysicratous Street was built, ending at the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (Figure 15.4).35 Therefore, individuals walking in the direction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus would have observed the inscription ΑΙΔ’ ΕΙΣΙΝ ΑΘΗΝΑΙ ΘΗΣΕΩΣ Η ΠΡΙΝ ΠΟΛΙΣ with the probable image(s) of Theseus on the attic, which beckoned them to read the back as well since the statement seems to leave the thought sequence incomplete. The questions on the individuals’ minds would have probably been “What about now? Whose city is it”? Furthermore, the west inscription’s setting on the architrave above the apse as well as the symmetry of the arch itself would presuppose that there would be another inscription on the back. Therefore, the two inscriptions were composed in such a way as to be read as a pair, and when done so, it becomes clear that the citizens of Athens are honoring
Figure 15.4 Hypothetical reconstruction of the east side of the arch with a painting depicting Hadrian in the central section of the attic. The Parthenon and the road onto which modern Lysicratous Street was built are visible through the archway. Source: (Reconstruction by D. Tsalkanis, C. Kanellopoulos, and L. Tsatsaroni; reproduced with permission from www.AncientAthens3d.com and the authors).
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 353
Figure 15.5 Hypothetical reconstruction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus from the northeast, with the colossus of Hadrian behind the temple and Hadrian’s Arch on the right. Source: (D. Tsalkanis, C. Kanellopoulos, and L. Tsatsaroni 2019, 175; reproduced with permission from the authors).
Hadrian, who has joined Theseus as the founder/ruler of the city. This assertion is strengthened further by the fact that the visitor heading to the temple from the west side of the arch would have been confronted with a view of the colossus of Hadrian towering over the precinct’s wall in the back of the temple, as noted by Pausanias, and as can be witnessed in a recent hypothetical reconstruction of the temple and its surrounding area (Figure 15.5). Thus, the overall message becomes evident when the arch is considered against the backdrop of its built environment and the periegete’s testimony.
From antiquity to the 19th century: Hadrian’s Arch in the Byzantine and Ottoman periods The cultural history of the arch from antiquity to modernity begins with its dedication in c. 131 and especially after the death of Hadrian in July 138. Unlike many other antique buildings in Athens, the arch survived the Herulian sack in 267 intact,36 while the nearby Temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian’s Library were damaged extensively.37 The monument is not mentioned in the extant writings of the later Roman period, but there is a curious scholium of unknown date in a manuscript of Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaicos which seems to refer to the monument and its two inscriptions:38
354 Anna Kouremenos διὸ καὶ ὁ Ἀδριανὸς ἐλθὼν, καὶ μείζονα ποιήσας τὸν περίβολον, ἔνθα μὲν ἦν πρὸ τείχους τὸ πεζὸν, ἔγραψε· τοῦτο ὁ Θησεὺς ἔκτισε, καὶ οὐκ Ἀδριανός· ἔνθα δὲ αὐτὸς ἔκτισεν, ἔγραψε· τοῦτο Ἀδριανὸς, καὶ οὐ Θησεὺς, ᾠκοδόμησεν. accordingly Hadrian too came, and enlarged the city walls, and where the people walked in front of the wall he wrote: “this Theseus founded, and not Hadrian” – and where he himself has founded (a city) he wrote: “this Hadrian built, and not Theseus”. If the scholium does indeed refer to the inscriptions on the arch, it appears to be a non-verbatim reading and it is uncertain whether the scholiast was writing from having personally observed them, or if he never visited Athens and is simply conveying the transcription of an earlier writer. Be that as it may, this statement has been understood to refer to the arch’s function as a gate to an ancient city wall, a hypothesis that was disproven in the 20th century when excavations did not produce any evidence for such a structure.39 Given the absence of references to the arch until the late Middle Ages, one wonders why it was not torn down if it was otherwise considered unimportant. One of the reasons for its survival may be related to the general attitude toward the emperor and his buildings. Intellectuals and politicians in the eastern part of the Empire generally regarded Hadrian as a benevolent pagan ruler whose treatment of the Christians during his reign was rather lenient compared to other pagan emperors.40 These factors, along with his literary output in the Greek language, may have served to endear the monuments he built to the authorities and intellectuals of cities in the Byzantine Empire. There is, however, some convincing evidence which suggests that the arch possessed a religious function at some unspecified point in the Middle Ages that may ultimately explain its survival into the present. In the mid-20th century, Orlandos, following references in earlier works,41 noticed traces of religious paintings, crosses, and graffiti on the monument,42 and further remnants were discovered by conservators during its cleaning and restoration between 2002 and 2004.43 Unfortunately, a comprehensive study of these did not follow. While it is difficult to ascertain the exact nature and function of these religious vestiges given their very fragmentary and now-invisible state, it follows that at some point in the Byzantine period the arch may have been incorporated into – or closely associated with – a monumental structure. Orlandos notes that in 1578, Symeon Kavasilas, a Byzantine travel writer, wrote an epistle to Martinus Crusius, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Tübingen, in which he mentioned the west inscription of the arch but not the east one.44 Given this information, it has been suggested that the east inscription was covered because the east side of the arch may have formed the interior part of a church or monastery,45 although traces of such a structure have not been found in subsequent excavations, making this hypothesis questionable. With the remains of the hagiographies on the attic in mind as well as the monument’s symmetrical shape, I think that a more likely function of the arch in the later Middle Ages was that of a free-standing bell tower to a
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 355 church or monastery that would have been built close to it. A letter from Pope Innocent III to the Catholic archbishop of Athens dating from February 13, 1209 refers to “beati Nicolai de Columnis”.46 Although this church has been identified by Travlos in the ruins of a building assumed to have been a basilica located about 110 meters to the east of the arch,47 it is likely that this structure or one of its building extensions was closely linked to it. Since the shape of the arch bears some resemblance to bell towers of the later Byzantine period, and the sections of the attic preserve deep grooves about a meter from the top that could have supported wooden or metal rods (observe one such groove in Figure 15.3), it is likely, in my opinion, that at some point in the Byzantine period the attic of the monument held semantra or bells,48 thus serving as the bell tower to the aforementioned basilica complex or another unidentified religious structure. Consequently, any painted or sculptural decoration from the Hadrianic period would have been removed and replaced with religious art long before the 13th century. Evidently, four columns on the lower part of the arch and another four on the attic were robbed sometime between Late Antiquity and the later Byzantine period, presumably to be used as spolia elsewhere, perhaps even for a building within the vicinity of the monument. The earliest confirmed non-Greek reference to the arch and its two inscriptions is in Cyriac of Ancona’s Commentaria,49 who mentions it briefly.50 By the Ottoman period – if not earlier – any decoration on the arch of a religious nature seems to have been removed and covered over. This may explain the omission of references to the arch’s religious function in the so-called Vienna Anonymous, dated by most scholars to the years shortly following the Ottoman conquest of Athens in 1456. The author of this Greek text states: “[…] there is a very big and beautiful arch bearing the names of Hadrian and Theseus. Inside […] was a royal residence supported from below by very many columns […].”51 That the monument is termed an arch at this date indicates that it was free-standing and that both inscriptions were clearly visible. The reference to a “royal residence” with many columns cannot refer to any other structure but the Temple of Olympian Zeus nearby. Several extant illustrations from the 17th and 18th centuries reveal that two of the three sections of the attic were covered with strips of stone arranged horizontally and vertically and that the monument was completely devoid of decoration. These illustrations also reveal that the base of the arch lay underground up to two meters and that vegetation was growing rampant throughout the entire monument. In one of the best-rendered of these, we see the arch marked as “Portail du Palais d’Hadrian” behind the “Restes du Palais d’Hadrian” in the foreground (Figure 15.6),52 but neither building is drawn to scale; in the legend of the same map, the monument is labeled as “portail de la ville neuve d’Hadrian”.53 At this time, the local population seems to have referred to the Temple of Olympian Zeus as the “Palace of Hadrian” as it was common to link various monuments around the city – often erroneously – with illustrious individuals from antiquity; the Library of Hadrian, for example, was known locally as the “Palace of Themistocles”, Hadrian’s aqueduct as the
356 Anna Kouremenos
Figure 15.6 View of Athens published by Jacob Spon in 1674. Source: (Laborde 1854).
“School of Aristotle”, while the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates was termed the “Lantern of Diogenes”. The inscriptions on the arch seem to have produced some confusion regarding its true nomenclature; an illustration by Le Roy drawn in the 1750s asserts that it was known colloquially as the “Arch of Theseus” rather than the “gate to the palace of Hadrian” (Figure 15.7). How did the monument, then, receive its present and correct appellation when until the 18th century it was known under various names? In the 1750s, when Stuart and Revett visited Athens and subsequently returned to England to publish illustrations of the ancient ruins they had seen in their travels in their Antiquities of Athens, the arch became one of the most recognized monuments of the city. They were the first to identify it correctly under its current name, but they erroneously suggested that the arch functioned as a gate to an ancient city wall surrounding the precinct, and that Hadrian may have rebuilt an earlier “Arch of Aegeus” (the father of Theseus),54 clearly misrepresenting the overall message of the two inscriptions. Nevertheless, their drawings brought the arch to the attention of foreign intellectuals and artists; most of these individuals had never visited Greece and were thus dependent on paintings and engravings as well as the writings of learned travelers for descriptions of the city’s ancient ruins. The prominence of Hadrian’s Arch among the antique monuments of Athens is evident in several of the illustrations in Stuart and Revett’s
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 357
Figure 15.7 Illustration depicting Hadrian’s Arch, known colloquially at that time as the Arch of Theseus. Source: (Le Roy 1770, 16).
publication. Perhaps the most striking of these depicts local residents grazing their sheep and cattle and using the arch as a passageway (Figure 15.8). While the scene reflects an idealized vision of a rather bucolic Athens, what is evident from this and other illustrations is that the area around the arch lacked extensive occupation at this time, which allowed residents and their animals to roam freely around it. Along with other Athenian antiquities, the arch must have made quite an impression in England since, shortly after the publication of Stuart and Revett’s book, a full-sized copy of it was commissioned for the gardens of the Shugborough estate of the Anson family in Staffordshire (Figure 15.9).55 Built entirely out of local sandstone in the 1760s, the embellished copy of Hadrian’s Arch features stone medallions with naval scenes on either side of the apsidal opening. The left and right sections of the attic are decorated with stone sarcophagi topped with busts of the Admiral Anson and his wife, while the central section displays a naval trophy.56 Fortunately, the original Greek inscriptions were not reproduced in this copy of the arch or even arrogated and altered to reflect the estate’s owners as “founders”. Moreover, this is an unambiguous example of cultural appropriation of an ancient monument repurposed for the present (the 18th century in this case), a strategy which the Romans also employed frequently when they copied many of the Greek monuments and sculptures and altered them to fit their own contemporary vision. By the late 1770s, Hadrian’s Arch was incorporated into the newly- constructed Wall of Hadji Ali Haseki, built by the Ottoman governor of Athens
358 Anna Kouremenos
Figure 15.8 Shepherds and their flocks passing through Hadrian’s Arch. Source: (Stuart and Revett 1762, Chapter II, pl. 16).
allegedly to keep Albanian attackers at bay.57 At around this time, in Friedrich Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland (1797 and 1799), the gate featured prominently as a reminder of the good old days before its integration into the city wall:58 am meisten aber ergriff mich das alte Tor, wodurch man ehmals aus der alten Stadt zur neuen herauskam, wo gewiß einst tausend schöne Menschen an Einem Tage sich grüßten. Jetzt kömmt man weder in die alte noch in die neue Stadt durch dieses Tor, und stumm und öde stehet es da, wie ein vertrockneter Brunnen, aus dessen Röhren einst mit freundlichem Geplätscher das klare frische Wasser sprang. But most of all, I was struck by the ancient gate, through which once you could leave the old town and enter the new one, where back then certainly a thousand beautiful people greeted each other in one day. Now you can enter neither the old nor the new city through this gate, and it stands there mute and desolate, like a dried-up well from whose pipes the clear fresh water once flowed with a friendly splash. Illustrations and testimonies from this period indicate that the wall contained a total of seven gates, of which Hadrian’s Arch, known locally as Πόρτα της Βασιλοπούλας (Princess Gate) or Kαμαρόπορτα (Archway), served as one. The gate incorporated an opening about halfway down the archway which is clearly visible in illustrations from the late 18th and early 19th century, including a composition by J.M.W. Turner from c. 1830 that became the cover of Byron’s Life and Works (Figure 15.10).59 The
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Figure 15.9 “Hadrian’s Arch” at Shugborough, Staffordshire, England. Tixall sandstone. Built in the 1760s. Source: (Photo: S. Craven).
illustration is entitled “The Gate of Theseus, Athens” and depicts the arch in the center with the Acropolis in the background covered in a plume of smoke. The foreground displays fallen columns and fragments of metopes from the Parthenon while a seated woman on the right contemplates the environment around her. The presence in the composition of a man leading a two mule-drawn carriage toward the exit confirms the arch’s function as a passageway in the early 19th century. The subject of the illustration is meant to evoke the atmosphere of Athens in Byron’s time, a city steeped in ancient ruins whose population is suffering under foreign occupation. That Hadrian’s name has been omitted from the title of the painting and replaced with that of Theseus – even if the view is from the east – may have been deliberate, as many European intellectuals of this period disliked the Roman past of Greece and seem to have regarded the emperor as simply another foreign conqueror and oppressor. Interestingly, Byron mentions the arch in his poetry along with other antique monuments of Athens, and also produced one of the most well-known translations of Hadrian’s famous “deathbed poem”.60 Furthermore, the sculpted monument to
360 Anna Kouremenos
Figure 15.10 J.M.W. Turner. The Gate of Theseus, Athens. c. 1830. Watercolor over pencil. Private collection, UK. Source: (Photo: www.clayton-payne.com/artworks/9428/).
Byron bearing the title “Η Ελλάς τον Βύρωνα” was erected in the late 19th century less than one hundred meters away from Hadrian’s Arch, perhaps not coincidently.
Modern reception After the formation of the Modern Greek state in 1830, a “purification” program was established to purge the country of non-Greek cultural and linguistic remnants of the past.61 While the vast majority of buildings of the Ottoman, Venetian, and Frankish periods were torn down, the vestiges of the Roman period did not suffer the same fate and were incorporated into the fabric of the newly independent city. By 1835, the Wall of Haseki was demolished and Hadrian’s Arch became free-standing once again.62 Legend has it that after its “freedom” from the wall, some of the heroes of the revolution, along with King Otto and other renowned individuals, were the first to walk through the archway,63 thus giving it a prominent position among the
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 361 monuments of central Athens. Queen Amalia ordered the removal of the remaining pieces of stone in the two sections of the attic as she felt that they diminished the aesthetic appeal of the monument, thus imparting its present appearance. Excavations were carried out shortly after the demolition of the Ottoman wall to reveal the base of the arch, and by the late 19th century the precinct of the Temple of Olympian Zeus was cleared of architectural remnants of the Ottoman period, including a cemetery and a mosque.64 The area around the arch and the ruins of the temple became the heart of the city in the later 19th century, where Athenians took their strolls and celebrated holidays like the carnival and Easter.65 Two small cafés operated within the precinct, affording their customers ample views of the arch and the Acropolis in the background. In 1938, the arch served as the site of the burning of books written by intellectuals who were believed to be communist sympathizers; one contemporary scholar observed that it was ironic that Hadrian’s Arch was chosen as the site for such a destructive activity since the emperor was a wellknown patron of letters.66 Throughout the 20th century the elegant monument served as an inspiration for various artists. Two of the most evocative representations of the arch in art can be observed in the paintings of Greek artists active in the early decades of the 20th century. The earliest of the two is by Pavlos Mathiopoulos (Figure 15.11), whose paintings are notable for depictions of people strolling through rainy cityscapes and the usage of a soft color palette in the style of the Belle Époque. One of his paintings, Hadrian’s Gate, recalls a Parisian street scene where the Roman-period arch seems almost as imposing as the Arc de Triomphe.
Figure 15.11 Pavlos Mathiopoulos. Hadrian’s Gate. c. 1915. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Source: (Photo: www.elniplex.com).
362 Anna Kouremenos
Figure 15.12 Konstantinos Parthenis. The Walk of the Caryatid. 1938. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Source: (Photo: Sotheby’s The Greek Sale Catalogue).
Influenced by Cubism and Art Nouveau, Konstantinos Parthenis painted The Walk of the Caryatid in 1938, where the antique figure is depicted in the urban environment of downtown Athens (Figure 15.12).67 The Caryatid “departed” her ancient abode in the Erechtheion and went to explore the city with its juxtaposition of ancient ruins, modern buildings, and technological innovations like the tram and electric poles and power lines. The overall message of the painting is that ancient sculptures and monuments are as much part of the urban fabric of Athens as the non-descript modern buildings in the background. In a painting by Giorgos Bakirtzis (a former student of Parthenis) completed in 1977 (Figure 15.13), the arch appears as a majestic monument in a celebration of freedom. The shape of the painting was clearly chosen deliberately to imitate the arch’s apsidal opening.68 The scene takes place at night and is teeming with symbolism: five figures, four of which recall individuals from antiquity, have climbed to the attic and decorate each of the sections. The revelers below come from all walks of life and surround the arch on all sides. Bakirtzis attempted to evoke the atmosphere of a real historical event, when thousands of Greeks lined Vasilissis Amalias Avenue to celebrate the end of the German occupation of Athens in World War II. The artist featured the monument in a second painting of a similar genre entitled A Quarter to Four, but in that work the central section of the attic features a large clock marking the time of the event. Both paintings emphasize the significance of the arch as a monument of the past integrated into the urban fabric of present-day Athens and, given that the two artworks were painted three decades after the actual event, they evoke a feeling of continuity and collective historical nostalgia. Only a year after Bakirtzis completed his painting featuring the arch, Manos Hatzidakis composed the music to the song “At Hadrian’s Gate”, set
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Figure 15.13 Giorgos Bakirtzis. The Freedom of the Greeks, 1944-1945.1977. Mixed media on canvas. National Gallery, Athens. Source: (Photo: T. Kimbari).
to the lyrics of Michalis Bourboulis.69 It is worth examining the words briefly in order to discern the importance of the landmark in the song: Στην πύλη τ’ Αδριανού Στην πύλη τ’ Αδριανού κοντά στου Μακρυγιάννη τα πρώτα τριαντάφυλλα σου φόρεσα στεφάνι. Κι όταν σου πήρα το φιλί κάτω από τις κολώνες χτυπούσε η σάλπιγγα βραχνά μέσ’ τους παλιούς στρατώνες. Έγιν’ η νύχτα πυρκαγιά η αγάπη ανατριχίλα και μεις αρπάξαμε φωτιά
364 Anna Kouremenos σαν τα ξερά τα φύλλα. Στην πύλη τ’ Αδριανού κοντά στου Μακρυγιάννη μέσ’ τις φωτιές μας ρίξανε μια νύχτα τ’ ’Αϊ Γιάννη. Σαν ήρθε το πρωί χειμώνας κι είχε κρύο σαν τα πουλιά σκορπίσαμε μακριά από το Θησείο. At Hadrian’s Gate At Hadrian’s Gate near Makryianni I put the first blooming roses on your head as a crown. And when I stole a kiss from you under the columns the bugle rang hoarsely in the old barracks. The night turned to fire love into horror and we caught fire like the dry leaves. At Hadrian’s Gate near Makriyanni they threw us into the fires on the night of St. John’s feast day. Once morning arrived in winter when it was cold we scattered like the birds away from Thiseio. (Translated by A. Kouremenos) This wistful song implies that Hadrian’s Arch served as a meeting location for two lovers in the middle of January, on St. John’s Feast Day. Once again, we perceive the significance of the importance of the monument’s setting in the city’s center, near some of the most popular neighborhoods (Makryianni, Thiseio), exemplified by its function as a rendezvous spot for the lovers who kiss under the columns – presumably not those of the arch itself but of the nearby Temple of Olympian Zeus. The enigmatic lyrics imply that the two lovers were caught in the act and used the arch and its surroundings to consummate their union, but opposition ensued, forcing them to leave the area in the early morning. In the 21st century, particularly after Athens hosted the Olympic Games in 2004, the arch took on an even greater function as a rendezvous spot whilst the number of tourists visiting the capital exploded. The catchphrase “Let’s
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 365 meet at Hadrian’s Gate” is a common expression that both locals and tourists utter to establish a suitable – and identifiable – location for meeting with others and exploring the city from there. In recent years, the landmark has been illuminated on various days of the year in vibrant colors in order to generate awareness for various causes, including pink for breast cancer and blue for autism. On March 16 and 17, 2020, for the first time ever, the capital chose to illuminate an ancient monument – Hadrian’s Arch – green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.70 The central location and size of the arch thus make it an ideal landmark for bringing awareness to important local and international causes through annual light shows which attract the attention of many pedestrians and vehicles that line the avenue on which the monument stands.
Conclusion: Hadrian’s Arch between past and present Ancient ruins are as much vestiges of the ancient heritage of Athens as a part of its present. Being tangible relics of the past, they add visceral immediacy to individuals and groups that have inhabited or visited the city since antiquity. Despite its incomplete state, Hadrian’s Arch is a true survivor, a representative of accretive continuity,71 linking the Roman past with the Modern Greek present and illuminating the values of previous generations that chose to alter or conserve it in order to suit the needs of their own times. But unlike the neighboring Temple of Olympian Zeus, whose site, according to Pausanias, could lay claim to much greater antiquity,72 the arch is strictly a monument of the Roman period. Nonetheless, the references to Theseus on it were inscribed deliberately in order to connect the legendary king to the emperor, to link the Greek past to the Roman present. Significantly, the cultural history of the arch shows that the survival and utilization of ancient monuments reveals more about the needs of successive “presents” than the intentions of its originators. At certain periods in history, the meaning and value of such monuments is lost entirely due to ideological differences and/or individual apathy, and they may succumb to a mere utilitarian function, as the arch did during part of the Byzantine and Ottoman periods. But although they are proverbial survivors from the ravages of time, environmental disasters, and human activities, their value may still be appreciated by future generations who see the past not as static but rather as a dynamic embodiment of the present. Moreover, although ancient monuments usually serve as a source of revenue for Greece, Hadrian’s Arch is one of the few antiquities in Athens that is both iconic and easily accessible yet free to all who desire to take a closer look at it, a consequence of its location on a busy avenue. It is safe to state that since its dedication in the 2nd century CE, generations of people living in Athens generally regarded the arch positively. For the Athenians of the 2nd century, the arch commemorated a beloved emperor, benefactor, and citizen of their polis who exceeded the kleos of the legendary Theseus. In the Byzantine period, the arch may have been seen as a relic of the Roman period but one that could be repurposed to suit a religious function. From the Ottoman period until the 19th century, European travelers also saw it as a nostalgic remnant of a bygone era but were, curiously, slow to recognize
366 Anna Kouremenos that the arch commemorated Hadrian; it was not until the 18th century that its correct identification was conferred by Stuart and Revett. In the late 1700s, the Ottoman governor incorporated it into a city wall, a relatively short-lived venture since less than fifty years later Athens became independent, the wall was torn down, and the arch was “freed” once again. By that time, the landmark – like most of the antiquities of Athens – had acquired a more majestic meaning, aided by the Classicizing movement in the West which helped to raise its profile among the city’s antique ruins. The appearance of the arch in many paintings and photographs helped cement its status as Athens’ much older equivalent to the Arc de Triomphe, and references to it in literature, poetry, and songs enhanced its significance as a landmark in the center of the city. At the turn of the millennium, the arch had become one of the most recognizable monuments of Athens, thus securing a place on the itineraries of nearly every tourist and visitor to the capital. Today, Hadrian’s Arch is viewed as an antiquity and part of Athens’ ancient heritage, even if the average citizen is not aware of the exact era of its dedication and is likely to assume that, like other antiquities in the city’s center, it dates to the Classical period. Nonetheless, the monument enriches presentday experience vis-à-vis its past, and more specifically its Roman past, since traces of post-Roman re-use are barely visible and known only to a few specialists. For this reason, tourist guides and educational material focus on the arch as a strictly Roman monument, rarely mentioning its later phases. Nonetheless, despite the temporal distance of twenty centuries, the landmark is a living link between the 2nd century and the present. And just as references to Hadrian and Theseus on the two inscriptions emphasized the links of the Roman present to the deep Greek past, so the monument today serves the needs of the Modern Greek present by way of establishing a visceral continuity with the Roman past of Athens, denoting that it is not a closed chapter of history but very much alive and part of the capital’s contemporary cityscape.
Acknowledgements This chapter has benefited from discussions with colleagues who read and commented on earlier drafts and came to my aid with the interpretation of inscriptions and translations. I extend my thanks to Ewen Bowie, Frank Daubner, Stephanie Roussou, Jody Michael Gordon, George W.M. Harrison, and David Capps. I also thank Dimitris Tsalkanis, Chrysanthos Kanellopoulos, and Lina Tsatsaroni for their permission to reproduce Figures 15.4 and 15.5 in this chapter. Last, but not least, my gratitude goes to the National Archaeological Museum and the National Gallery for granting me permission to reproduce material in their collections.
Notes 1 For an overview of Roman arches in the Mediterranean, the most comprehensive study is still Kähler 1939, who, interestingly, does not mention Hadrian’s Arch; see also Kleiner 1989.
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 367 2 IG II2 5185. 3 Note that Η ΠΡΙΝ ΠΟΛΙΣ has been variously translated as “the ancient city”, “once the city”, and “the former city”. I prefer the latter translation. 4 See especially Stuart and Revett 1762; Tsalkanis, Kanellopoulos, and Tsatsaroni 2019; Le Roy 1758; Kokkou 1970; Travlos 1971; Adams 1989. 5 The aqueduct transported water from the foot of Mt. Parnitha to a reservoir on the hill of Lycabettus in the center of the city; the Latin inscription on the epistyle that mentions Hadrian is now located in the National Gardens. See Kordellas, Aggelopoulos, and Protopapadakis 1899; Kokkou 1970, 169–171; Travlos 1971, 242–243; Leigh 1998; Tsouli 2018; Koutsogiannis 2018; Chiotis 2018. 6 HA, Hadr., 1.5; Epit. de Caes., Hadr., 2.6. For his promotion of Hellenism in the West, see especially Birley 1997; Boatwright 2000; Calandra and Adembri 2014; Seebacher 2020; Cortés Copete in this volume. 7 Kouremenos forthcoming. 8 Kapetanopoulos 1992–1998, 217–218 argues on good grounds that Hadrian was probably eponymous archon of Athens for a second time in 124–125. Holding the archonship for more than one year was extremely rare before the 3rd century, and the Athenians may have justified a second archonship on grounds that Hadrian held it as a private citizen in 112–113 and as emperor in 124–125. 9 IG II2 1764 and 1832. 10 Paus 1.24.7. 11 Kouremenos forthcoming. 12 Although several buildings would have likely served as the prytaneion at different times in antiquity, Paus. 1.18.3 places its location near the Temple of Olympian Zeus. For its probable setting on modern Lysicratous Street, see Schmalz 2006. Note also that HA, Hadr., 26.5 states that Hadrian named one of the areas of his villa at Tibur prytaneum after the Athenian structure. 13 Arist., Ath. Pol., 3.5; Thuc., 2.15. 14 Adams 1989, 15. 15 Clinton 1989; see also Konstantinidis in this volume. 16 On architectural polychromy in antiquity, see especially Zink 2014; Siotto et al. 2015. 17 The most recent cleaning and restoration of the arch took place over a period of twenty months between 2002 and 2004. See below. 18 Hadrian completed the Temple of Olympian Zeus after the original, begun by Peisistratus in the 6th century BCE, was left unfinished. See Cass. Dio 69.6.1; HA, Hadr., 13.6. Although most scholars agree that the temple was consecrated in c. 131, a minority argue for its consecration taking place during the emperor’s visit in c. 128 based mainly on the sequence of events described in the HA. However, an inscription from Epidaurus (IG IV2, 1 384) makes it clear that the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Panhellenion were inaugurated in the same year (ἔτους γ τῆς καθιερώσεος τοῦ Διὸ[ς] τοῦ ̓Ολυμπίου καὶ τῆς κτίσεος τοῦ Πανελληνίου). The Panhellenion was a federation of cities of purported Greek origin founded by Hadrian, with currently attested member cities deriving from at least seven provinces; it is certain that more cities will be added to the list as additional information comes to light. By c. 131, Hadrian had assumed the titles Olympios and Panhellenios among others. See especially Spawforth and Walker 1985; 1986; Jones 1996; Romeo 2002; Doukellis 2007; Kouremenos forthcoming. 19 Cassibry 2018. 20 On the gate at Antalya: Kähler 1939; Akurgal 2011; Akyol and Kadioglu 2013; Jerash: Stinespring 1934; Detwelier 1938; Browning 1982.
368 Anna Kouremenos 21 The sole exception to this was the temple of the deified Trajan in Rome; see HA, Hadr., 19.9. Wallace-Hadrill 1990, 146 argues that inscriptions on Roman arches in general point to non-imperial agents as the dedicators of such monuments. 22 Mylonas 1961, 166–167; Clinton 1989; Willers 1996; Konstantinidis in this volume. 23 HA, Hadr., 20.4. 24 Steph. Byz., Ethn. (edited by August Meineike 1849): https://topostext.org/ work/241. Accessed April 13, 2021. See also Zahrnt 1979 and Fuchs 2016 for commentary. 25 Plut., Thes., 25.3. 26 See e.g., Zahrnt 1979; Adams 1989; Willers 1996, 15; Fuchs 2016. 27 For a concise list of the structures uncovered in this area, see Karvonis 2016, 151–154 with bibliography. See also Greco et al. 2011. 28 This includes the part of the city around Zappeion, the National Gardens, and Syntagma. See Graindor 1934; Travlos 1971; Lagogianni-Georgakarakos and Papi 2018; Worthington 2020. 29 Adams 1989; Karivieri 2002. 30 Paus. 1.3.2; 1.5.15. 31 Graindor 1934, 19–21; Notopoulos 1946; Boatwright 2000, 144–145. 32 For the worship of Hadrian in Achaea in general, see Camia 2016 and in this volume; Cortés Copete 2017. 33 Paus. 1.19.2. 34 Paus. 1.18.9. See also Neville 2015. 35 Travlos 1971. 36 Extant ancient sources on the Herulian sack include HA, Gallienus, 13.8; Zos., Historia Nova, I.39; Sync., Extract of Chronography, 381–382; Zonar., Epitome Historiarum, ΧΙΙ.26. 37 Thompson 1981; Frantz 1988; Willers 1990; Karivieri 1994; Castrén 1994; Eleftheratou 2008; Monaco 2014. 38 IG II2 5185; see Dindorf 1829 for the critical edition of Aristides’ text. 39 Travlos 1971; Adams 1989; Fuchs 2016. 40 For a list of Byzantine sources discussing Hadrian, see especially Rizzi 2010; Destephen 2019. 41 Chandler 1776; Pittakis 1835. 42 Οrlandos 1968 claims to have seen remnants of four paintings in the attic, the largest of which depicted a figure with a halo, probably representing the archangel Michael. 43 Papastamatiou 2005. 44 Martinus Crusius 1584, 461; Οrlandos 1968. 45 Chandler 1776, 74; Pittakis 1835, 173; Breton 1862, 263. 46 Migne 1560–1561; Οrlandos 1968. 47 Travlos 1949, 43; Οrlandos 1968. 48 For the usage of bells and semantra in Byzantium, see Miljković 2018. 49 The work was published in 1436 in six volumes but was later destroyed; abridged copies of it have survived mostly in libraries in Germany and Italy. 50 Bodnar 1960; Adams 1989. 51 Di Branco 2005, 114–115; Di Branco 2006, 237; Tanoulas 2019, 52. 52 For another rendering from the late-17th century, see Coronelli 1688; see also Tsouli 2018, 168–169 for commentary. 53 Spon 1678; the name also appears in Wheeler 1682 as “Gate of Hadrian”.
“The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus” 369 4 Stuart and Revett 1762, 22. 5 55 Other Athenian monuments that were copied on the estate were the Tower of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. See Roscoe 1987. 56 Roscoe 1987. 57 Tsouli 2018, 169. For the history of the wall, see especially Miller 1921; Skouzes 1948; Travlos 1981; Vryonis 2002; Stathi 2014. 58 See Hölderlin, repr. 1997. 59 Finden and Brockedon, 1832. 60 For the so-called “deathbed poem”, see HA, Hadr, 25.9; see also Bowie 2002, 184–185 who questions Hadrian’s authorship of the poem, contra Cameron 1980 and Birley 1994. For Byron’s translation, see Poole and Maule 1995, 509. 61 See especially Travlos 1981; Hamilakis 2007; Kouremenos 2019; Albani 2019. 62 Biris 1966; Travlos 1981, 394; Kominis 2008. 63 https://www.mixanitouxronou.gr/se-pious-simantikous-ellines-epetrapi-na-perasounkato-apo-tin-pili-tou-adrianou-to-emvlimatiko-ergo-pou-ikodomisan-i-athineigia-na-timisoun-ton-filellina-aftokratora-pou-anikodomise-tin-poli/. Accessed April 20, 2021. 64 For the presence of a Muslim cemetery and mosque within the precinct, see especially Sayer 1759. For the excavations of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, see Travlos 1971, 1981; Cohen 2018. 65 For examples of engravings and paintings depicting celebrations around the ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian’s Arch, see e.g., https://www. taathinaika.gr/i-kathara-deftera-tou-1844-stous-stylous-olympiou-dios/; http://www. nhmuseum.gr/el/fakelos-syllogon/antikeimena/11976_el/. Accessed April 30, 2021. 66 Panourgiá 2009. 67 Lydakis 1976, 27 and 53. 68 It should be noted that the artist painted a few other canvases in apsidal shape whose subjects feature apsidal buildings other than Hadrian’s Arch. 69 Since the late 1970s the song has had many renditions. Perhaps the finest of these is from the 1980s in the album Alexandra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXU 0nFAZbCs&list=RDiXU0nFAZbCs&start_radio=1. Accessed March 21, 2021. 70 https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/greece/news-and-events/latestnews/st-patricksday-greening-in-athens---hadrians-arch.html. The arch was lit green again in March 2021, together with the Panathenaic stadium. Accessed May 20, 2021. 71 For the meaning of accretive continuity and its application to antique monuments, see Lowenthal 2015. 72 Paus. 1.18.8.
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Afterword Ewen Bowie
Many of the issues suggested by this volume’s title have been explored in its wide-ranging chapters. That of Sulochana R. Asirvatham has opened up the question of how much of Roman Greeks’ construction of their past should be termed nostalgia,1 how much rather (and more productively) idealism. Francesco Camia has offered an up-to-date and authoritative account of the worship of Hadrian in Achaea, focusing especially on Athens, and relating the imperial cult persuasively to Hadrian’s extensive building activity there. Mali Skotheim has brought together the substantial epigraphic and occasional literary testimonies to Hadrian’s addition to the number of agonistic festivals in Achaea qualifying for membership of the periodos, again notably those held in Athens, and has assessed the impact of his reorganization of the festival calendar as now known from his responses to the Dionysiac technitai preserved on stone from Alexandria Troas. As in some of Hadrian’s architectural initiatives (see Anna Kouremenos’ introduction), innovation builds upon but does not eliminate survivals from the Classical period. Other chapters have presented illuminating perspectives on many other key elements in the construction and exploitation of the Hellenic past by individuals and institutions in the Roman province of Achaea. The interventions of Herodes Atticus rank second only to those of Hadrian. Estelle Strazdins has shown how Herodes’ sculptural programmes present him as a mediator between Roman power and the Greek world, while Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino has made a case for seeing his construction of a sanctuary of the Egyptian gods as related to his broader agenda of recuperating the Greek Classical past in his villas as in his stylistic preferences and teaching methods. The place of the past in the interventions of Marcus Aurelius himself, and of his son Commodus, has been rewardingly explored by Giorgos Mitropoulos. Alongside the widely-felt impact of these powerful individuals, variations on the marriage of past and present have been teased out by Nigel M. Kennell discussing Athenian and Spartan ephebates, by David Weidgenannt discussing unidentifiable choosers of coin types for Argos, Epidaurus, and Troezen, by Panagiotis Konstantinidis discussing portrait sculptures of the imperial family, and by Stylianos E. Katakis discussing portraits of non-imperial – but inevitably elite – 2nd century individuals. The traditions still alive in the southern fringe of Achaea, in Messenia, have been fruitfully analysed by DOI: 10.4324/9781003178828-20
376 Ewen Bowie Eliza Gettel, and for understanding Pausanias’ concept of a traditional Greek polis the importance of his periegesis of Phocis in his culminating 10th book has been artfully demonstrated by Frank Daubner. The spatial and temporal reach of Hadrian’s vision of Athens and Achaea has been illustrated by Juan Manuel Cortés Copete’s assessment of his plans for the transformation of his Spanish origo Italica into an (almost) Greek city with agonistic festivals, and by Anna Kouremenos’ exploration of the longue durée of Hadrian’s Arch. That still-striking arch had a more symbolic and less substantive function than Hadrian’s additions to Athens’ festival calendar already mentioned, additions which ensured that athletes, musicians, poets, and middle-ranking rhetores would spend more time in Athens, offering a wide spectrum of cultural entertainment for residents and attracting visitors. Similarly, Herodes’ upgrading of the stadium with marble cladding and his later construction of the magnificent odeion added to existing venues for such entertainments and for epideictic performances by local and visiting sophists. The role of Athens as a hub of sophistic training and display was promoted by Herodes’ own activity as a teacher of rhetoric, and by the establishment under Antoninus Pius of a θρόνος, “chair”, of rhetoric (Greek rhetoric, of course) whose annual salary of 6000 drachmas was funded by the city. All these initiatives enhanced the claims of Athens to be a prime location of sophistic culture. It, and more broadly “old Greece”, Pausanias’ “Hellas”, had a dominant role in imperial Greeks’ fashioning and refashioning of their 5th and 4th century BCE past. But when Trajan became emperor in 98 CE, the city’s ranking in the nascent cultural phenomenon that Philostratus momentously labelled “the Second Sophistic” was perceptibly lower than that of the richer and ultra-competitive cities of provincia Asia, especially Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum, but perhaps even of lesser players like Miletus or Laodicea ad Lycum.2 Of the “new” sophists registered by Philostratus in Book 1 of his Lives, i.e. those active down to around 140, the first and only Athenian is the relatively obscure Secundus, perhaps placed at the end of Book 1 to give a sequence of three Athenians there and at the beginning of Book 2. Book 2 opens with the longest life, that of Herodes Atticus, thus flanked by those of Secundus (1.26), his teacher, and of Theodotus (2.2), his pupil.3 Surprisingly, few of the later sophists in Book 2 are Athenian by birth,4 although many visited, held a chair of rhetoric or simply established themselves as teachers in Athens. What the Lives of imperial sophists in Book 1 that precede that of Secundus do show is that the development of Athens into a city which attracted eminent sophists and to which they, in turn, attracted pupils was already beginning by the turn of the century. Nicetes of Smyrna, credited by Philostratus with reviving languishing rhetoric (VS 1.19.511), has left no literary or epigraphic traces in Athens, although in Rome he was heard in the first decade of the 2nd century by the younger Pliny (Ep. 6.6). The Lives’ next sophist, however, Isaeus, from an unknown Syrian city, as well as probably teaching in Asia and certainly visiting Rome,5 seems to have had at least a base in
Afterword 377 Athens, and that his son and grand-daughter figure among the elite of Eleusis shows he established himself in Attica. It is in Athens that he probably taught Hadrian, presumably around the year 100, as claimed by an honorific text from Eleusis dated to the last quarter of the 2nd century.6 Philostratus’ next sophist, Scopelianus of Clazomenae,7 who made Smyrna his base, likewise visited Athens, and Philostratus’ anecdote of the very favorable impression he made on father Ti. Claudius Atticus Herodes and his young son Herodes during an Athenian visit (perhaps around 115) reveals that Atticus was among the many who admired classical Attic orators: on hearing Scopelianus declaim in his house, however, he demanded that these orators’ portrait busts or herms be stoned because they had corrupted his son (VS 1.21.521). This is one of many indications of the seductive appeal of the contemporary Asianic style of rhetoric whose sentence structures and rhythms were very different from those of the classical Attic oratory that was soon to be preferred by the mature Herodes. In Scopelianus’ dazzling performance, the style of the present surely coruscated, but in the end the past prevailed in the adult Herodes’ stylistic choices. Asianic too was clearly the style of Philostratus’ next exhibit, T. Claudius Flavianus Dionysius of Miletus. He was famed for his Dirge over Chaeronea, whose conclusion cannot have pleased Plutarch: “ὦ Χαιρώνεια πονηρὸν χωρίον”, καὶ πάλιν “ὦ αὐτομολήσασα πρὸς τοὺς βαρβάρους Βοιωτία. στενάξατε οἱ κατὰ γῆς ἥρωες, ἐγγὺς Πλαταιῶν νενικήμεθα” (“O Chaeronea, wicked place!”, and again “O Boeotia which has deserted to the barbarians! Wail, you heroes beneath the earth! We have been defeated near Plataea!”, VS 1.22.522). But although he must have travelled8 – and indeed was appointed procurator “of peoples not without distinction” by Hadrian,9 – nothing suggests he spent any time in Athens. It is thus only with the appointment to the Athenian civic chair of the Ephesian P. Hordeonius Lollianus, its first holder (VS 1.23.526), that we begin to see the establishment of a pattern where distinguished sophists from Asia and beyond visit Athens, perform, and in some cases seek election to its chair. Having arrived, Lollianus stayed, held local office, was buried in Athens, and was honored with two statues.10 His arrival cannot be dated exactly, but the early years of Antoninus Pius look likely. By the 140s, then, Athens was not simply a museum densely populated with monuments of the glorious Greek past and a city buzzing with recurrent visits by competitors and spectators for its many agonistic festivals: a place that in the 1st century could claim distinction in high culture only for its schools of philosophy and for its philosophers – like Plutarch’s teacher, the Platonist Ammonius – was once more a centre of wider literary paideia. Did this creation of a cultural hothouse indeed result in an efflorescence of local literary talent? The answer is largely negative, as a search for literary production by men and women originating in 2nd century Achaea reveals. The 2nd century Greek world produced many poets who achieved fame in their lifetime and some of whose oeuvre survived them, but none is from Achaea.11 In erotic epigram Rufinus, from near Ephesus, and Strato, from
378 Ewen Bowie Sardis, eventually reached the Greek Anthology;12 so too the scoptic epigrammatist Ammianus, whose bête noire Antonius Polemo may locate him in Smyrna.13 Hadrian’s favorite was the citharode Mesomedes, from Crete, some of whose short songs survive in a direct manuscript tradition with musical notation. A hymn to Antinous inscribed at the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion in Cyprus is very probably by him.14 He was famous enough for his imperial salary’s halving by Antoninus Pius to pass into history. Marcellus of Side’s 42-book work on medicines was admitted by Hadrian and Antoninus Pius to Rome’s libraries, and after Regilla’s death Herodes commissioned from him two poems totalling 98 hexameters which were inscribed in a sanctuary on an estate she had owned on the Via Appia.15 None of these poems has any documented connection with Achaea: their subject matter concerned the present, but traditional Greek heroines and divine epithets16 figure in the hexameters from the via Appia, and a Callimachean color can be detected.17 That color is also strong, alongside exploitation of Aratus and Apollonius, in the Periegesis of the World of Dionysius of Alexandria, whose 1186 hexameters (dated by an acrostic to 130–138) were widely read from late antiquity to early modern Europe.18 Dionysius’ world too is prima facie a contemporary world, with Rome dominating its vast Empire and its river Tiber picked out for one of Dionysius’ emotional epanaphorae.19 But mythical Troy is highlighted too,20 and Dionysius’ world does not stop at the Euphrates but stretches to China and India, whose triumphal visit by the poet’s god Dionysus receives starring treatment near the poem’s conclusion (1152–65): Alexander, not named, nevertheless hovers between the lines. Finally I mention Oppian of Cilicia, whose five-book Halieutica, dedicated to Marcus and Commodus in 177–180, survives complete and uses his fishy theme to meditate on the nature of imperial power.21 All these poets have the present in their sights much more than the past, and none seems to have spent time or performed in Achaea. One can only guess whether any of their poetry would have handled the Greek past differently had they done so. Prose writers from Achaea in the first two centuries are less invisible, not surprisingly given the volume of Greek prose produced in this period. Sophistic rhetoric is, of course, a special case, and here Achaean contributors are few, as has been noticed above: Secundus, probably Claudius Atticus, Herodes, Theodotus, and thereafter no sophist given a Philostratean Life until Apollonius of Athens; then finally Philostratus himself in the last decade of the 2nd century.22 Of these few it is only Philostratus who seems to have exploited his sophistic expertise to create a range of innovative works over several different genres, whereas some non-Athenian sophists in his Lives are credited with poetry or historiography.23 When we turn to non-sophistic writing, Plutarch stands head and shoulders above any competition. Philosophical lecturing, teaching, and writing were his core activities, and these were focused on timeless philosophical truths or on moral improvement in the present. In his excursions into the past, above all his Parallel Lives, Plutarch explored and assessed the actions
Afterword 379 of Greek 5th and 4th century statesmen – and some earlier and later – not from the perspective of a historian but from that of a moral philosopher.24 A full account of the nuances of his relation of the Greek (and Roman) past to the world in which he lived would require far more space than is available in this context. Little other 1st or 2nd century prose has survived that can be confidently attributed to somebody originating or even domiciled in Achaea.25 One interesting exception is Pamphila of Epidaurus. Under Nero, according to Photius, Pamphila compiled a Varia historia (the Suda specifies thirty-three books), of which only ten fragments survive. Eight books were available to Photius, who reports that Pamphila claimed to be Egyptian and to base her collection on things heard from her scholarly husband during thirteen years of marriage and from visitors drawn to their house by his learning, as well as on books she had read. 26 The Suda, registering other works, names her father as Soteridas, a g rammaticus, and her husband Socratidas.27 That eight of the fragments, from books stretching from two to thirty-two, concern well-known figures from Pittacus in the 7th century to Theophrastus and Menander in the 4th, and that two others, not attributed to a numbered book, feature Thales of Miletus and Cleobulus of Lindos, hints that Pamphila sidelined the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Photius’ remark that her own writing (by contrast with her quotations or paraphrases) was in a simple (ἀφελής) style perhaps supports his Neronian date. Pamphila’s account of men visiting her learned husband in Epidaurus may be set alongside the involvement in Corinth’s administration of the Epidaurian Cn. Cornelius Pulcher, a friend of Plutarch and archon (perhaps the first) of Hadrian’s Panhellenion,28 and alongside the evidence of Hadrianic and later coinage discussed by Weidgenannt in this volume, to confirm that this important cult center of Asclepius was a significant lieu de mémoire from Nero to the Severans. A much better-known example of enduring prose written by a foreign resident in Achaea is that of Arrian, a citizen of Bithynian Nicomedia, who attended lectures of Epictetus in Nicopolis around 107/108. He had a successful Roman career that included the governorship of Baetica, a suffect consulate in (probably) 129, and six years as legatus Augusti governing Cappadocia, years during which he had to cope with the threat of an Alan invasion and early in which he sent to Hadrian a report in Greek of his tour around the Black Sea. Here was a man whom one might suppose to be embedded firmly in the Graeco-Roman present. But in a spirit of Xenophontic mimesis his many writings probably began with reports on Epictetus’ lectures that evoked Xenophon’s Ἀπομνημονεύματα Σωκράτους, “Recollections of Socrates”, and they included (whether early or late) both the work that has more than all made him famous, the Anabasis of Alexander, evoking Xenophon’s Anabasis. There were also, however, Affairs after Alexander (ten books) and Parthian Affairs (seventeen books), some of this drawing on Arrian’s personal experience in Trajan’s Parthian wars.29 Despite writing an eight-book Bithynian History which he flagged as a tribute to his native province,30 and in which Photius found evidence that there he held a priesthood of Demeter and Kore, Arrian seems to
380 Ewen Bowie have treated Athens as his main residence after his last Roman post, holding the eponymous archonship in 145/146, as later did his son. Here perhaps is a man whose personality and writings may have been affected by the support – perhaps even the friendship, but that is a guess – of Hadrian and by the initiatives of Herodes. His writings straddle past and present, and his interest in the former does not stop with the death of Alexander. That he valued comparably both his Roman career and his holding of Greek city offices is epitomised by modern scholars’ disagreement as to which of these careers he refers in asserting his distinction at Anabasis 1.12.5. Whichever it is, the claim advanced there that his primacy in writing, λόγοι, matched Alexander’s in military achievements leaves a question mark over his evaluation of Roman military successes. We cannot tell if he approved of Hadrian’s withdrawal from Trajanic conquests, far less guess whether, had he been voted an honorific statue, he would have preferred to be represented in a toga or a himation, or might have dreamed of a cuirassed statue such as only emperors were accorded. And some degree of unhappiness with whichever reign the Anabasis was written under is betrayed by a vehement, en passant condemnation of flatterers as an ever-present threat to monarchs.31 Nor can we tell if his presentation of himself as Xenophon in a minor work (Order of Battle against the Alani, 10) meant that at symposia he liked friends to call him Xenophon, though epigraphy seems to exclude that ever having been part of his formal nomenclature. His Xenophon-mimesis suggests he might have spent his later years in Athens even if Hadrian’s and Herodes’ architectural embellishments had not happened, and as a Stoic he might have had no interest in the entertainments of the augmented festival calendar. A very different set of writings emanated from another non-Athenian who seems likely to have spent some time in Athens, Lucian from Commagenian Samosata.32 But “seems” must be emphasized. The persona often adopted by Lucian is that of a resident of Athens (e.g. in the Nigrinus), and the mise-enscène of some works (e.g. Dialogues of the Gods, Zeus Tragified, Dialogues of Courtesans) is Athenian. But when we can pin down Lucian’s activity it is in Ionia (Twice Accused 27, Paintings 2), Thracian Philippopolis (Runaway Slaves), Gaul (Apology 15), or Egypt (Apology 12). A rarity of actual appearances in Athens might be proposed as one of the reasons why he does not figure in Lives of the Sophists, even for dismissal. The works of Lucian, then, attest the great prominence of Athens in the imaginaire of the Greek past and (in the Nigrinus) of its present; but they do not help us decide whether the brave new world of Hadrianic and Herodian Athens left its mark. A third foreigner who certainly became a resident is Pollux of Naucratis. His known activity as a lexicographer, attested by his surviving Onomasticon dedicated to Commodus, built a lexical bridge between classical writers of the past and would-be writers and orators in the present.33 Unlike near- contemporary Atticist lexicographers, Moeris and Phrynichus, whose domicile is uncertain, Pollux is inclusive rather than exclusive, rarely condemning a usage, though he does pick out a few dozen terms as “Attic”, and on one occasion marks a locution as that of “ancient Athenians”.34 Though his
Afterword 381 arrangement by categories is less helpful than the alphabetical order of Phrynichus’ Preparation for Sophistic, it is much more useful than the latter’s mysteriously unordered Selection (Ecloga) addressed to Commodus’ ab epistulis Cornelianus. Pollux’s chief sources (which he chooses to name only occasionally) are the Attic dramatic poets and orators, although in Book 10 he refers (apparently as an eyewitness, and with ostentatious use of the archaising dual τὼ θεῶ, “the two gods”) to contemporary stelai at Eleusis recording possessions of people who had committed impieties that were sold off publicly.35 His list of distinguished festivals, of course, includes the Panathenaia, Olympia, and Eleusinia, but none of those established in Achaea or elsewhere in the Roman period. He registers the term νεωκόρος (1.14), “temple warden”, as one applicable to individuals, but says nothing of its use (widespread by his time) to describe cities boasting a temple of the imperial cult. Only in the prefaces to each of his ten books is an emperor mentioned, nowhere any contemporary person other than himself, Ἰούλιος Πολυδεύκης. That nomen Ἰούλιος in his prefaces is the only hint that Pollux does not belong to a world thoroughly Greek, ἀκριβῶς Ἑλληνικόν. Brief mention may be made of Aelius Aristides’ only speech given (or so it purports) in Athens, his Panathenaic Oration (1 Lenz-Behr). Whether or not we explain this by its genre, its focus is wholly on the past. As in Pollux’s Onomasticon, no recent festivals and no Roman individuals are mentioned. If speaking in the 150s Aristides had no opportunity to mention Herodes’ odeion, not yet built; but the Agrippeion and Hadrian’s library, both places where he might have delivered the speech, are also absent. The province of Achaea in the 2nd century undoubtedly displayed many symptoms of collective historical nostalgia, whether or not one of its facets was Hellenic idealism. It could vaunt a much prouder record of its battles for ἐλευθερία, “freedom”, in the Classical period than the cities of Ionia that had mostly been under Persian control, and many of its sanctuaries and other public buildings could claim continuity with the glory days. Some members of its elites could claim descent from 5th century politicians or even Homeric heroes. Already from the principate of Augustus it suited Roman emperors to encourage Greeks’ contemplation and exaltation of their past, and many elite Romans maintained the late republican tradition of acquiring a Greek education, whether from grammatici, rhetores and philosophers in Achaea or from one of the many pepaideumenoi who came to Rome precisely to offer paideia. But one version of recreating the past in Achaea’s present involved minimizing Latin-speaking westerners’ presence or over-emphasizing their assimilation to the Hellenophone world. The thought-worlds of Spartan or Athenian ephebes, of Herodes’ or Theodotus’ pupils, of established declamatory sophists (often from provinces east of the Aegean) were firmly anchored in the 5th and 4th century past of Pausanias’ Hellas. It was by his buildings and his augmentation of festivals in Athens, more than any other Greek city, that Hadrian sought to perform and immortalize his Hellenism, and it was in the lieux de mémoire of Athens, Marathon, Isthmia, and Olympia that Herodes too made a play for immortality. That spectators can walk ten
382 Ewen Bowie minutes east from Hadrian’s Arch to watch events in the stadium that Herodes clad in marble, brought back to life for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, or west to his Odeion to attend such opera’s as Pavlos Carrer’s MarathonSalamis, composed 1886–8 but first performed only in 2004, is continuing proof of Herodes’ success.
Notes 1 In twice invoking “nostalgia” Bowie 1970 oversimplified. 2 Cf. Bowie 2004b. 3 Cf. the base of a statue or herm erected by Herodes honoring his teacher (καθηγητής), identified by Raubitschek 1966, 248–9 as Secundus, and a possible descendant at Eleusis, Atticus Secundus of Sphettos, IG II2 3658–9. 4 Apollonius of Athens, VS 2.20.600. Philostratus mentions Nicagoras of Athens but does not give him a Life, 2.33.628. 5 He taught Dionysius of Miletus (VS 1.20.513), presumably in Asia, and like Nicetes was heard by Pliny in Rome (Ep. 2.3). 6 See Mitropoulos in this volume n. 31. 7 Where he declined to stay, comparing the prospect to that of a caged nightingale whereas Smyrna was an alsos (VS 1.21.516). Philostratus highlights his successful embassy to Domitian concerning a prospective ban on viticulture in provincia Asia (VS 1.21.520). 8 He heard and admired Polemo at Sardis (VS 1.22.524–5) and received honorific burial in Ephesus (VS 1.22.526, I Eph. 426). 9 VS 1.22.523, cf. I Eph. 3047. 10 VS 1.23.527, cf. Puech 2002. 11 For 2nd century Greek literature Reardon 1971 remains fundamental despite 50 years of increasingly voluminous scholarship and is important in systematically distinguishing “le nouveau” from the traditional genres of the past. 12 For Rufinus, see Höschele 2006; for Strato, Floridi 2007. 13 For Ammianus, see Nisbet 2003. 14 For Mesomedes, see Bowie 1990; Whitmarsh 2004; Regenauer 2016; Pöhlmann 2020. 15 IGUR III 1155 = IG XIV 1359. 16 Iphigeneia 53, Herse 54, Alcmene 59; Ἰοχέαιρα 53. 17 On Marcellus, see Bowie 1990, 2019; Davies and Pomeroy 2012. 18 For Dionysius of Alexandria, see Bowie 1990, 2004a; Lightfoot 2014. 19 D.P. 352–5. 20 D.P. 815–8. 21 Kneebone 2020. 22 For the geographical distribution of sophistic writing, see Bowie 2004b; Janiszewski, Stebnicka, and Szabat 2015. 23 For Philostratus’ range, see Bowie and Elsner 2009; for sophists as poets, Bowie 1989; as historians, Bowie 2010. 24 Of the vast bibliography on Plutarch, much addressing his relation to the contemporary world of Rome and his handling of the Greek as well as the Roman past, see esp. Jones 1971; Swain 1996; Stadter 2014; Geiger 2017; Georgiadou and Oikonomopoulou 2017. For the moral focus of the Lives, see especially Duff 1999. 25 For the decade 107–117, see Bowie 2002. 26 Phot. Bibl. Codex 175, pp. 119b16–120a4 Bekker.
Afterword 383 27 Suda π 139: “Pamphila, of Epidaurus; a clever woman; daughter of Soteridas, who is said to have been the author of her collections, as Dionysius [says] in Book 30 of his Musical History, but others write that her husband Socratidas was the author. [She wrote] Historical Commentaries in 33 books, an Epitome of Ctesias in 3 books, a very large number of epitomes of histories and other books, On Disputes, On Sex, and many other works.” Suda’s entry on Soteridas makes him her husband, probably mistakenly. 28 Pulcher is the dedicatee of Plutarch’s De capienda ex inimicis utilitate; for his Greek and Roman careers, see Jones 1971; Puech 1992, 4843. 29 On Arrian, see Bosworth 1972; Brunt 1977; Stadter 1980; Vidal-Naquet 1984; Syme 1982; Lalanne and Hostein 2014; Bowie 2016. 30 Phot. Bibl. Codex 93, 73a32–b2. 31 οἷοι δὴ ἄνδρες διέφθειράν τε ἀεὶ καὶ οὔποτε παύσονται ἐπιτρίβοντες τὰ τῶν ἀεὶ βασιλέων πράγματα, “the sort of men who have always corrupted and will never cease destabilising monarchic regimes”, Arr. An. 4.8.3. 32 For Lucian’s reworking of traditional material, see Anderson 1976 and Bracht Branham 1989; for a different approach with good bibliography, see Ní Mheallaigh 2014. 33 On Pollux, see Bearzot, Landucci and Zecchini 2007; Strobel 2011. 34 οἱ ἀρχαῖοι Ἀττικοί, 9.89. 35 Pollux 10.97.
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384 Ewen Bowie Bowie, E. L. and Elsner, J. (eds.) 2009. Philostratus. Cambridge, CUP. Bracht Branham, R. 1989. Unruly eloquence: Lucian and the comedy of traditions. Cambridge MA, Harvard UP. Brunt, P. A. 1977. ‘From Epictetus to Arrian’, Athenaeum 55: 19–48. Davies, M. and Pomeroy, S. B. 2012. ‘Marcellus of Side’s epitaph on Regilla (IG XIV 1389): an historical and literary commentary’, Prometheus 38: 3–34. Duff, T. 1999. Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice. Oxford, OUP. Floridi, L. 2007. Stratone di Sardi; introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e commento; foreword di Kathryn Gutzwiller. Alessandria a Edizioni dell’ Orso. Geiger, J. 2017. ‘Greeks and the Roman Past in the Second Sophistic: The Case of Plutarch’, in A. Georgiadou and K. Oikonomopoulou (eds.), book: Space, Time and Language in Plutarch. Berlin, de Gruyter: 119–126. Georgiadou, A. and Oikonomopoulou, K. eds. 2017. Space, Time and Language in Plutarch. Berlin, de Gruyter. Höschele, R. 2006. Verrückt nach Frauen: der Epigrammatiker Rufin. Tübingen Gunter Narr. Janiszewski, P., Stebnicka, K. and Szabat, E. 2015. Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire. Oxford, OUP. Jones, C. P. 1971. Plutarch and Rome. Oxford, OUP. Kneebone, E. 2020. Oppian’s Halieutica: Charting a Didactic Epic. Cambridge, CUP. Lalanne, S. and A. Hostein (eds.) 2014. Le monde d’Arrien de Nicomédie, Ktèma 39. Lightfoot, J. L. 2014. Dionysius Periegetes, Description of the Known World. With Introduction, text, translation, and commentary. Oxford: OUP. Ní Mheallaigh, K. 2014. Reading fiction with Lucian: fakes, freaks and hyperreality. Cambridge, CUP. Nisbet, G. 2003. Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire. Martial’s Forgotten Rivals. Oxford, OUP. Pöhlmann, E. 2020 ‘The Hymn of Mesomedes on Antinous (Inscriptions of Courion, Mitford No. 104)’, GRMS 7: 128–139. Puech, B. 1992. ‘Prosopographie des amis de Plutarque’, ANRW II 33.6: 4831–4892. ——— 2002. Orateurs et Sophistes Grecs dans les Inscriptions d’Époque Impériale. Paris, Vrin. Raubitschek, A. E. 1966. ‘Greek inscriptions 10. A Statue of the Sophist Secundus’, Hesperia 20: 241–251. Reardon, B. P. 1971. Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C. Paris, Les Belles Lettres. Regenauer, J. 2016. Mesomedes: Übersetzung und Kommentar. Frankfurt, Studien zur klassischen Philologie. Stadter, P. A. 1980. Arrian of Nicomedia. Chapel Hill, UNC Press. ——— 2014. Plutarch and his Roman Readers. Oxford, OUP. Strobel, C. 2011. Studies in Atticistic lexica of the second and third centuries AD. Oxford DPhil. thesis. Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire. Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250. Oxford, OUP. Syme, R. 1982. ‘The career of Arrian’, HSP 86: 181–211. Vidal-Naquet, P. 1984. ‘Flavius Arrien entre deux mondes’, in Pierre Savinel & Pierre Vidal-Naquet (eds.), Arrien, Histoire d’Alexandre: l’Anabase d’Alexandre le Grand et l’Inde, traduit par Pierre Savinel. Paris, Éditions de Minuit: 309–394. Whitmarsh, T. 2004, ‘The Cretan lyre paradox: Mesomedes, Hadrian and the poetics of patronage’, in B. Borg (ed.), Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic. Berlin, New York, De Gruyter: 377–402.
Index
Abae 45, 50 Acarnanians 85 Achaean League 4, 24, 48 Achaemenids 320 Achilles 29, 81, 175, 264, 274 Acropolis 32, 76, 85, 103, 105, 230, 236, 237, 238, 256, 269, 273, 294, 295, 297, 305, 328, 345, 348, 351, 359, 361 Actium 87, 324 Aegeae 289 Aegean (region) 223, 303 Aelianus 73, 103, 104, 106 Aelii (of Italica) 317 Aelius Aristides 4, 73, 75, 79, 319, 353, 381 Aelius Caesar 249, 269 Aeschines 73, 177, 178, 179, 186, 258, 259 Aetolia 267 Aetolian League 24, 85 Africa, Roman province 170, 323, 324 Agamemnon 291 agoge 19–23, 27, 30, 109, 152, 291 Agrippa 15, 146, 156 Ajax 7, 15, 29, 46, 199, 211, 294 Alcibiades 7 Alexander the Great 7, 23, 73–75, 79–81, 86, 87, 170, 197, 208, 251, 270, 319, 370, 378–380 Alexandria 199, 231, 378, 382 Alexandria Troas 58, 60, 100, 108, 166, 378, 382 Altis 167, 170, 204 Antalya 349, 367 Antikyra 45, 47, 50 Antinoopolis 200, 212 Antinous 177, 178, 186, 199, 201, 209, 212, 213, 215, 231, 323, 324, 378 Antiochus III, 119, 257, 321 Antipater 76, 87 Antonines 143, 151, 154, 182, 194, 202, 208
Antoninus Pius 3, 6, 7, 17, 29, 48, 57, 106, 131, 138, 139, 144, 148, 152–154, 156, 158, 159, 167, 202, 204, 206, 210, 212, 250, 268, 270, 284, 285–288, 290, 291, 294, 297–299, 301, 302, 304, 307, 308, 324, 327, 376–378 Anubis 223 Aphrodisias 59, 201, 271, 274, 331 Aphrodite 194, 223, 228, 236, 238, 296, 297, 307, 330–332 Apollo 20, 167, 194, 200–202, 209, 248, 298, 378 Apollonius of Tyana 19, 67, 319 Appian 81, 84, 331, 338 Appian Way (via Appia) 182, 186, 378 Apuleius 227, 236 Arcadia 1, 3, 37, 48, 84, 85, 182, 199, 212, 230, 266, 298 Archaic (period) 22, 28, 44, 100, 228, 230 Archilochus 7 archon (title) 56, 99, 106, 138, 149–154, 159–160, 202, 257, 320, 347, 367, 379 Areopagus 99, 121, 145–146, 154, 157 Argolid 2, 84, 283–284, 286, 289, 299–301 Argos 28, 59–61, 85, 138, 146, 198–199, 210, 268, 271, 283–292, 299–304, 375 Aristomenes 24–28, 30 Aristotle 356 army 17, 26, 50, 81, 272, 322, 331 Arrian 73, 76, 80–82, 84, 152, 161, 379, 383 Artemis 15–16, 20–21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 175–176, 181, 185, 234–236, 267, 270, 275, 296 Asclepius 24–25, 44, 200, 223, 232, 238, 248, 259, 268, 270, 296–300, 307, 308, 324, 379 Asia, Roman province 59, 153, 320, 326, 328, 330, 376–377, 382
386 Index Athena 23, 26, 44, 46, 195, 202, 208, 292–293, 304–305 Athenaeus 73, 82, 84, 87 Athenocentric, Athenocentrism 57, 197, 76, 78, 82, 85–86, 102–103 Attalids 100 Attica 43, 75–76, 83–85, 171–174, 176–177, 180–183, 195, 205, 223, 226–229, 236, 238, 261–263, 266, 273, 326, 352, 377 Atticus Bradua 159, 167 Atticus, T. Claudius 152, 169, 177–178, 186, 377–378 Augustus (Octavian) 7, 22, 26, 57, 65–67, 95–96, 103, 106, 110, 122, 131, 138, 146, 148, 151, 154, 156, 160, 182, 206, 210, 214, 248, 262, 282, 319, 322, 327, 351, 381 Aulus Gellius 329 Avidius Cassius 146, 154 Baetica, Roman province 326, 329, 331, 379 Barcino 323, 324 Bar-Kokhba 326 battlefield 14, 78 Besa 149, 150, 256, 337, 347 Bithynia, Roman province 63, 247, 331 Boeotia, Boeotian 14, 16, 41, 45, 61–62, 84, 106, 117, 198, 263, 266, 268, 377 boule 99, 121, 255 bouleuterion 123, 128–129, 138, 271 Brauron 166, 172, 175–176, 181, 185 bull(s) 25, 168–169, 171 Byzantine (period) 325, 336, 347, 349, 353–355, 365, 368 Byron, Lord 359 Caesar, Julius 7, 24, 151, 156, 210, 269, 217, 319–320, 335 Caligula 214 Calligenes, T. Claudius 120–122, 136 Canopus 225, 231–232 Cappadocia 152, 379 Caria, Carian 201 Caracalla 23, 152 Carthage, Carthaginians 335 Cassandra 291 Cassius Dio 56, 81, 84, 94, 324–326 Cassius, Mt. 320 Cecrops 102, 213 Cephallenia 99, 108 Ceres 215, 255 Chaeronaea 4, 24, 41–45, 73–89, 156, 234, 377
Chios 59–60 Christian(s) 60, 202, 266, 301 church, churches 354 Cicero 30, 322 Cilicia 289, 339, 378 Cimon 336 Claudius (emperor) 64, 206, 213–214 Cleisthenes 8 Commagene 257, 321 Commodus 6, 9, 19, 143, 146–160, 286, 293–294, 296, 299, 306, 334, 375, 378, 380 Corinth 22, 36, 58–59, 66, 84, 106, 121, 132, 136, 166, 182, 185, 187, 200, 211, 213, 228, 242, 248, 259, 263, 266, 268, 271, 284, 286, 299, 302, 306, 321, 337 Corinthian Gulf 40, 45, 47 Costoboci 88, 147–148, 154, 247 Crete 10, 18, 24, 47, 108, 180, 295–296, 378 Croesus 177 Cyprus, Roman province 223, 278 Cyrenaica 326 Cyrene 30, 109, 153, 209, 326–327, 330–331 Cythera 151 Dacia (Roman province) 320 Danae 287, 289, 300, 302 Darius 76 Deinocrates 120, 123–125, 129 Delos 230, 234 Delphi 260, 293, 299, 40–44, 46, 59, 77, 86, 105, 159, 166, 171, 184, 200 Demeter 45, 101, 109, 168, 181–182, 204–206, 215, 223, 227, 232, 236–237, 255, 279 Demosthenes 16, 73, 78, 83, 150, 157, 177–179, 186 Dio Chrysostom (Dio of Prusa) 37, 320 Diomedes 198, 210, 220, 290–293, 302 Dionysus 56–58, 62, 67, 97, 99–100, 108, 189, 200, 258, 288–289, 297, 303, 306–307, 335, 337, 350, 378 Domitia Paulina 318–319, 338 Domitian 9, 106, 152, 155, 159, 161, 338, 382 Dorian(s) 26–27 Draco 100 Egypt 84, 146, 170, 223, 226–227, 230, 232–236, 240–243, 328, 380 Elagabalus 8 Eleusis 17–18, 101, 105, 107, 109, 143, 146–147, 153, 158–159, 166, 172, 179,
Index 387 181, 186, 200, 202–203, 205–207, 214–215, 227, 235, 240, 247, 348–349, 377, 381–382 Elis 85, 121, 168, 204, 255 Elpinice 168, 171, 255 Els Munds 323 England 356–357, 359 Epaminondas 7, 23, 26, 36 ephebes 13–31, 126, 137, 152, 161, 178–180, 212, 249–252, 261, 269, 381 Ephesus 59, 150, 326, 376, 377, 382 Epicurus, Epicurean 6, 39, 102, 110, 269 Epidaurus 85, 109, 248, 259, 268, 271–272, 283–286, 289, 290, 297–302, 307, 367, 375, 379, 382 Epirus 274, 291, 306 eponymous archon (Athenian political office) 99, 149–150, 152, 202, 257, 320, 347, 367, 382 Eretria 239 Eros, Erotes 62–63, 68, 270, 323, 382 ethnogenesis 117 Euboea 9, 49, 110 euergetism 107, 169, 171, 184, 382 Eumolpidae 150–154, 157–160, 382 Eurycles, Euryclids 31 Eva-Loukou 182, 199–200, 212, 225, 230–231, 382 Evander 3, 294 exemplum, exempla 4, 124–125, 134, 134, 148, 153 Faustina the Younger 131–132, 138, 150, 167, 182, 204, 206, 215, 230, 255, 267, 271, 275 Favorinus of Arelate 36, 84 federalism 84, 119, 135 Flamininus, T. Quinctius 24, 39, 51, 84, 119, 134 Flavian (period) 84, 320, 334 Fronto 84, 156 Gades 84, 318–319 Gallienus 150, 152, 160 Gaul, Roman province 36, 84, 322 genos 84, 150, 153–154, 157, 159, 160, 180 gerousia 21, 146, 148–149, 151, 154–156, 158, 202 gnorismata 293–295, 300, 305–306 Gorgon 286–289 Gortyn 228 Graeculus 99, 194, 228, 317–318 Gymnopaideia 20, 228
Hadria (city) 336–337 Hadrianeia 56–59, 67, 94, 96, 100, 104 Hadrianopolis 180, 350–351 Harpocrates 223 Hector 7 Helladarch(s) 7, 121, 134, 136 Hellenism 2, 3, 6, 7–8, 15, 23, 81–82, 100–104, 127, 138, 161, 193, 195, 197, 202, 207–208, 317–320, 328, 337, 347, 367, 381 Hellenistic (period) 14–16, 20, 23–26, 28–31, 36–37, 46, 74, 100, 102, 104–105, 120, 138, 170, 181, 193, 197, 198, 204, 213, 223, 225, 244, 248, 255–259, 266–271, 275, 290, 293, 309, 347, 379 Hellenization 59, 204, 317 Hephaestus 42 Hera 83, 88, 95, 115, 194, 209, 255, 270, 291, 301, 351 Heracles (also Hercules) 18, 21, 26, 30, 161, 181, 197, 241, 319, 331 Hermes 197, 199, 323, 331–332, 340 Hermione 107, 295 Hermogenes 73, 83–84 Herodotus 4, 22, 177, 227, 234 heroon 25, 182, 260, 288–290 Heruli, Herulian 249, 269, 253, 268 Hesiod 62 hiereus 94–97, 100, 104 Hippolytus 264, 274, 292, 296–297, 300, 306–307 Hispania 6, 317–341 Homer 36–38, 43, 85, 288 hoplite(s) 14, 16–17 Horus 223, 230, 238, 302 hunting 177, 181, 262, 321 Hyampolis 44–45, 234, 242 Iberia(n) 44, 317 imperial cult 62, 93–95, 101, 103–105, 109, 120, 152, 194, 197, 205–206, 209, 214, 327–329, 334, 340, 375, 381 Ionia 171, 350, 380–381 Isaeus 84, 147, 158, 338, 376 Isis 3, 44, 223, 226–242, 262, 273, 302 Isocrates 16, 73, 79, 82, 85, 146, 150, 157 Isthmia 64–65, 166–167, 171–172, 186, 188, 381 Italica 211, 317–338, 376 Italy, Italian 8, 59, 120, 197, 201, 202, 212, 291–292, 329, 335, 337–338, 368 Jerash 249, 267 Jewish, Jews 153, 197, 269, 320, 327
388 Index Kephisia 144, 225, 253, 260, 269, 274 Kerameikos 14, 272, 273, 350, 108 Kore 101, 108–109, 204, 255, 272, 309, 379 kosmetes, kosmetai 17, 19, 110, 249–251 Larissa 287, 292 Latin 56, 123, 132, 258, 322, 332, 338, 366, 381 lawgiver 20–21, 62 Leonidas 21, 23 Leuctra, Battle of 20, 25, 85 lieux de mémoire 2, 13, 22, 28, 223, 288, 297, 300 Livia 62, 64, 186, 214 Livy 28, 118, 123–126, 128–130, 137, 335–336 Locrian(s) 36, 40, 42, 46, 49, 85 Locris 40, 46, 49, 268, 294, 310 Lollianus 377 Lucian 380 Lucilla 167, 271 Lucius Verus 23, 81, 144, 146–148, 150, 152–159, 167, 177, 179, 202, 213, 225, 250, 284–288, 302 Lucullus 77–78, 86 Lusitania, Roman province 323 Lycortas 120, 123, 126 Lycurgus 19–21, 83, 121 Lydia, Lydian 105, 121, 177 Lysander 22, 86, 127, 138 Macedonia, Roman province 24, 39, 76, 85, 106–107, 218, 247, 267 Macedonian(s) 36, 74–78, 80–88, 119, 133 Mantineia 1, 7, 74, 200, 213 Marathon 8, 14–16, 28, 86, 134, 166, 169, 171–185, 224–225, 230–232, 236, 238–239, 264, 281 Marcus Aurelius 6–7, 9, 33, 81, 131–132, 138–139, 143–159, 167–168, 170, 179, 183, 202, 204, 206, 215, 225, 247, 250, 256, 284–286, 307, 334, 375 Medusa 212, 271, 287–289 Megalopolis 122, 124, 126–127, 132, 138, 141 Megara 38, 109, 157, 206, 268 Melissa, city in Phrygia 7 Menelaus 291, 304 Messenia 21, 23–26, 85, 124, 131, 135, 137, 298, 375 Messene 4, 13, 38, 31, 117–138, 228, 234, 246, 259, 260, 266, 271, 274 Mesomedes 10, 378, 382
metropolis 107, 121–122, 125, 133, 136, 320 Miletus 59–61, 65, 73–74, 107, 376–379, 382 Miltiades 225, 336 Minerva 242 Minotaur 169, 293, 295, 306 Moderatus 319 Mummius, Lucius 88, 132, 321 Muses 62–66, 66, 158, 256 Mycenae, Mycenaean 289, 291 Nabis 127 Naples 57, 67 Naryca 294–295 Natalis, L. Minicius 323–324 Naupactus 46, 49 Nemea 65 Nero 19, 51, 56, 60, 106, 155, 163, 187, 206, 379 Nerva 65 Nestor 119 Nicomedia 60, 152, 379, 384 Nicopolis 46, 50, 57, 59–60, 67, 306, 379 Nike 27, 262 Nile, river 200, 223, 227, 231, 233 nostalgia 1, 3–7, 35, 73–75, 78–80, 82–83, 104, 144, 152–155, 182, 225, 235, 248, 267, 375, 381–382 nymphaeum 167, 169–171, 177, 181, 184, 195, 198–199, 202, 204, 211, 255, 257, 267, 270, 272 Oceanus 319 Odysseus 38, 81, 290 Olympia 28, 57, 59, 61, 65–66, 69, 107, 109, 121, 142, 166–172, 177, 181, 184, 202, 204–205, 215, 227, 230, 255–258, 270–272, 278, 286, 323, 381 Olympian Zeus 37, 94–110, 194, 209, 211, 248–249, 255, 269, 326, 346, 349–353, 355, 361, 364, 367, 369 Olympios 7, 93–109, 208–209, 350, 367 Orchomenus 78, 234 Osiris 200, 223, 228, 230–234 Ottoman (period) 353, 355, 358, 360–361, 365 paideia 57, 67, 110, 169, 249, 274, 276, 322, 332, 381 Pallantion 3, 294 Pamphila 379, 383 Panathenaic stadium 169, 171, 178, 369 Panhellenion 3, 6–7, 19, 30, 43, 57, 67, 83, 88, 94–96, 98, 100–101, 104–109,
Index 389 147, 152–153, 169, 184, 194, 197, 202, 209, 211, 227, 240, 303, 326–327, 349, 351, 367 Panhellenios (title given to Hadrian) 7, 83, 88, 93–99, 101–109, 202, 208–209, 351, 367 Panopeus 41–43, 47, 49 Parnassus, Mount 47 Paros 7, 297 Parthenon 348, 352, 359 Parthia, Parthian(s) 23, 27, 148, 320–321 Patras 46, 59, 211, 265–266, 272–275 patronomos 19, 108, 152–153, 161 Peisistratus 94, 98, 367 Peloponnesian War 16, 22, 28, 86 Pergamum 105, 270, 327–329, 376 Perge 171 Pericles 8, 36, 89, 102, 110, 127, 138 periegete 14, 22, 28, 234, 351 Perseus 132, 212, 286–290, 300, 302–303 Persia, Persian 5, 15–17, 20, 22–23, 30, 171, 178, 182–187, 230, 381 Phaedra 296 Philip II of Macedon 89, 110, 170, 179, 338 philhellenism, philhellenic 93, 99–100, 143, 159, 195, 208, 321–322 Philopappus 149–150, 159, 169, 247, 256–257, 260, 267, 321, 337 Philopoemen 4, 24, 36, 48, 117–139 Philostratus 6, 14, 81, 144, 147–148, 154, 156, 202, 230, 249, 296, 377 Phlegon of Tralles 336, 360 Phocian(s) 78, 87 Phocicon 43, 49 Phocis 40–50, 76, 84–86, 268, 376 Phoenician, Phoenicians 319 Phrygia 7 Picenum 336–337 Plataea 14, 16, 20, 22–23, 28, 106, 161, 377 Plato 61, 110, 150 Pliny the Elder 247 Pliny the Younger 37, 331, 376, 382 Plotina 39, 66, 71, 270, 328 Plutarch 4, 17, 19–20, 44, 46, 61, 74, 76–87, 117–118, 123–126, 128, 130, 132–137, 231, 234, 377–379, 382 poetry 56–57, 64, 68, 107, 359, 366, 378 Polemo, M. Antonius (of Laodicea and Smyrna) 36, 73–74, 83–84, 110, 327–328, 378, 382 Polyaenus 73–74, 81–82, 84, 87–88 Polybius 34, 42, 117, 120, 123–127, 129, 132–133, 135, 137, 335–336
Polydeukion 176–178, 251, 256, 258, 269 Poseidon 1, 2, 171–172, 293, 305 principate 93, 103, 106, 195, 197–198, 202, 208, 214, 247–248, 252, 259, 263, 297, 325, 343, 381 prytaneion 110, 348, 367, 373 Ptolemy, Ptolemies 75, 105, 167 Punic 335 Puteoli 159, 332 Pydna, Battle of 132 Pylos 119 Quintilii 177 Regilla, Appia Annia 167–174, 177, 181, 186–187, 204–205, 227, 255, 270 Rhamnous 166, 172, 175–181, 186 rhetoric 30, 77, 100, 144, 147–148, 151, 154, 156, 161, 249, 354, 376–378 Rhodes 156, 241 Roma (goddess) 103, 106, 156, 351 rose(s) 179, 211–212, 236 Sabina, Vibia 120, 167, 200, 205–206, 215, 241, 255 Saethidae 131–133 Salamis 15, 16, 29, 271, 382 sarcophagus, sarcophagi 264–265, 273–274 Scipio, P. Cornelius 335–337 Second Sophistic 4, 22, 35–36, 40, 48, 102, 143, 152, 155, 158, 161–164, 166, 193, 200, 202, 207, 208, 212, 230, 235, 248, 266, 268–269, 274, 318, 376 seistron 262 senate 146, 340 senator 81, 149, 152, 308, 321 Seneca 3 Septimius Severus 19, 152–153, 159, 213, 297, 302 Serapis 44, 223, 231, 236, 241 Seriphus 287 Severans 251, 269, 270 Severus Alexander 150, 152, 159 Seville 337–338 Sicily 337 Sicyon 65, 85 Side (city) 182 Sirmium 158, 168, 170, 179, 181–183 situla 262 Smyrna 59, 83, 110, 178, 326–330, 376–378, 382 Spain 317, 336
390 Index Sparta 2, 13, 16, 19–30, 65–66, 80, 88, 103, 106–109, 119, 127, 138, 143, 148, 151–159, 263, 272, 274, 289, 290–292 Solon 8, 177 sophist(s) 110, 147, 151, 204, 250, 327, 338, 376–378 stadium, stadia 25–26, 169, 171, 178, 260, 326, 335, 369, 376, 382 Stiris 45, 47 Stoic(s) 6, 380 strategos 118, 120–121, 124, 126, 132, 136 Sulla 74, 78, 88, 113 Syracuse, Syracusan 337 Syria, Roman province 146, 320 Tanagra 62, 273 Tarentum 59 Tarraco 318, 322, 324, 332, 341 Tarsus 61 technitai 56–62, 66, 100, 108, 113, 375 Thebes 23, 42–43, 62, 73, 76, 79–81, 85, 87, 119, 151–152, 155, 198, 212 Themistocles 319, 355 Thespiae 61–69 Thessalonica 239 Thessaly 7, 39, 298 Theseus 8, 18–19, 27, 30, 56, 86, 100, 166, 169–172, 178, 180, 180–185, 292–300, 305–307, 326, 345–357, 359, 360, 361, 363, 365–369 Thrace 247 Thracian 8, 22, 79, 380 Thucydides 16, 79 Tiber 202, 294, 344, 378 Tiberius 62, 64, 106, 120–121, 131, 213, 328 Tibur (Tivoli) 201, 212, 216, 231–232, 367 Timoclea 79
Tithorea 49, 224, 232, 234–236, 238–239 Thrace, Roman province 247 Thracian(s) 8, 22, 79, 247 toga 169, 193, 195, 197, 206–207, 256–258, 271, 368 tomb(s) 7, 22–23, 25, 42, 44, 169, 199, 260 treasury 118, 123–124, 126–133, 138, 171, 215 Trajan 6, 26, 65, 80–81, 98, 106–107, 197, 211, 247, 252, 263, 271, 308, 320–321, 328, 331, 335, 338, 340, 368, 376, 383 Tralles 336, 350 Troezen 14, 85, 272, 283–286, 292–296, 299–307 Trojan War 7, 40, 291 Troy 7, 22, 85, 166, 198, 264, 274, 290–292, 378 Tyche 181–182, 187, 236–237 venatio 334 Venus 194 Vespasian 320 Vibullia Alcia Agrippina 255, 271 villa, villae 182, 199, 201, 212, 230–231, 323, 367 wine 45 Xenophon 20, 171, 380 Xerxes 16, 171 Zeus 25–26, 36–37, 42, 56, 83, 88, 94–109, 132, 138, 167–170, 194, 197–198, 208–213, 248–249, 255, 269–270, 287, 295, 300, 320, 326–327, 330, 345–346, 349–353, 355, 361, 364–365, 367, 369, 380