The presence of Romans and other Italians in Greece became noticeable from the late third century BC onwards, as diplomats, soldiers, and businessmen. Their influence increased inexorably, so that actual annexation was the formalization of a process begun long before. But let us recall Horace’s quip cited in Chapter 13, that “captured Greece took its wild conqueror captive,” in at least the cultural sense. Like many upwardly-mobile societies rising to prominence through hard-nosed commerce and aggressive militarism, the Romans soon sought some cultural credentials. Their natural model was Greece, already influential on proto-historic Italian states from the eighth century BC. Taking on the mantle of cultural eminence could be obtained in two ways: the easiest, widely adopted, was carrying off by force or purchase as many Greek works of art as possible, to adorn the townhouses and rural villas of the Italian elite, as well as Italian public buildings and open spaces. The sack of rich ancient towns such as Corinth and Athens provided rich booty, whilst large-scale tomb-robbing increased the haul. A more creative response by culture-hungry Italians was to commission new works of art by Greek artists or in a Greek style. This process revolutionized art and architecture in Italy itself, but there are also many products of this initiative within the Roman Aegean.
The demand for varied decoration in rich houses and prestige buildings belonging to Italians or their Greek proteges in the Aegean further enhanced Hellenistic eclecticism. “Off-the-shelf” styles reflecting different periods or contexts of earlier Greek art could be selected for a particular room or temple fayade for aesthetic purposes, style becoming a timeless commodity On the other hand Italians had new needs for art, retaining sufficient sense of a separate identity to inspire a merger of the fine art traditions of Classical Greece with a self-perceived rugged individuality, proper to traditional Roman elites and nouveaux riches alike. Statues of implausibly ideal bodies topped with heads of a no-nonsense soldier or businessman (Figure 14.4) look rather absurd to us, but represented consumer choice by a new society aware of its position in history (Fullerton 2000). Nonetheless these are not quite realistic portrayals of pragmatic merchants, bankers, and generals: their serious, unflattering appearances express generic values which these patrons projected as personalities, just as their ideal bodies are hardly those of the person represented.
The Cycladic island of Delos was a major market for such works, but their Athenian sculptors were also active in Athens itself (Stewart 1979). Athens, with Roman encouragement, made the island its colony in 168 BC. As a free port, it became a magnet for a rising international trade, especially in slaves, attracting a large population of resident Italians. Their taste and purchasing power stimulated a boom in sculpture and other arts, in both eclectic and Classicizing-realist
Figure 14.4 A Roman entrepreneur from Delos, first century BC, in Classicizing physique, a “pseudo-athlete.”
© Erin Babnik/Alamy.
Styles, and they commissioned sculpture and a range of other artworks for their homes and to adorn public monuments gifted to Greek cities and sanctuaries. On Delos private houses of Italians and Athenians could possess portrait-busts or statues of their owners or patrons (Etienne et al. 2000).
The new semi-realist style was not confined to Italian patrons but spread wider into Athenian society (Stewart 1979). As noted earlier, from the second century BC, a social revolution occurred in Athens: a nouveau riche class, enriched by commerce on Delos, took over Athens’ government. Foreigners were incorporated into the citizen-body, women allowed greater freedoms, and an assertive middle - and even lower-class majority set the lifestyle and attitudes of the city. Replacing a pale imitation of the Classical style, a more open society favored sculptures projecting strong, self-made personalities.
Flourishing workshops produced cultural goods in marble, ivory, bronze, silver, and gold, symbolizing a highly materialistic consumer culture where styles had become disembedded from a particular era (Fullerton 2000). One class of luxury objects worth mentioning here is that of large marble vases and altars, for conspicuous consumption in house interiors, deliberately referencing Greek Classical and Hellenistic art, hence termed “Neo-Attic.” The success of this industry may, it now appears, have led to chronological confusions amongst previous generations of Classical art historians (Beard and Henderson 2001).
In the Roman Aegean leading families aimed to dominate the “city of images” through multiple statues and public monuments advertising their achievements and generosity. A spectacular example of dynastic propaganda comes from the city of Messene, where in the second century AD the Saithidai family restore the theater in Roman style with elevated scenery and a great number of statues to their dynasty, so that the audience must have felt it was in a monument to this clan (Luraghi 2008). These honorific statues are often influenced by propaganda images of the emperor and his family, although more private images make free use of stylistic eclecticism to express varied attributes of the sitter. The first Roman emperor, Augustus (reigned 27 BC—14 AD), had favored public images in a rather severe form of Athenian Classical imagery, alongside that of military virtue. In the second century AD several emperors cultivated a more Hellenistic, intellectual appearance, with the styled hair and beards of the “philosopher” persona (Smith 1998). Exceptionally they might also create art in Greece where they inserted their personal mythology into Greek traditions, as with Hadrian’s sculptural program in his restoration of the Theater of Dionysos in Athens.
In the Hellenistic era the showplaces for the great kings were primarily the Panhellenic sanctuaries and then certain cities significant for their diplomacy, but with the total domination of Rome every city competed to show enthusiasm for the imperial family and provincial officials. Pride of place was the essential construction of a temple with associated art for the cult of the emperor, in whose honor games and other festivals were organized by local notables wishing to affirm their loyalty to Rome. An inflation of value occurred, where civic power was so closely linked to a town’s notables and their contacts in the provincial administration of Rome, that even a modest contribution to a town’s finances was rewarded with a public statue (Hojte 2002). However in the early phase of Greece’s relations with Rome many cities had weak finances and we find older honorific statues to Hellenistic kings rededicated to influential Roman patrons.
Funerary art
A notable feature of the Hellenistic era is the widespread revival of the display of wealth and status in burials (Athens excepted, as noted earlier). Macedonian tombs were copied elsewhere in Greece, but other forms of grave monumentalization appear, while grave goods vary significantly in value. Whereas in hierarchical societies such as Macedonia these class distinctions had existed since the Iron Age, they became general with the rapid emergence in Hellenistic times of dominant elite families in Aegean towns. Messene favored its leading citizens exceptionally through a series of family tombs inside the town, including within the gymnasium, beginning in the third century BC, as if to provide role models for other citizens to admire and emulate (Frohlich 2008). In the Early Empire this reached its peak with the Heroon or monumental family tomb to the important local family the Saithidai, placed at one end of the intramural stadium and on the city wall (Luraghi 2008). In Roman times, cemeteries outside settlements usually had clearly defined statuses exhibited in their burials, reflecting the formal hierarchy of Roman society in general. Thus outside the town of Messene stone family mausolea with marble sarcophagi adjoin cist-graves and simple tile-graves for the non-elite classes (Themelis 2003).
Where genuine Roman settlers were brought into Greece, cultural importations are apparent. Burial monuments at Corinth and Patras show Italian styles such as street tombs, and altar or temple graves with urn niches (columbaria) (Flamig 2003). Nicopolis mixes alien and Greek burial traditions, as its hybrid population would suggest. In contrast, in remoter, more provincial Greece, local conservative “Classicizing” or Hellenistic traditions persist into the Early Roman era, although concessions are made to Roman dress and hair codes. For example at Palatiano (Macedonia), a leading family erected a “heroon” (ancestor cult shrine) in this hybrid style (Flamig 2003). At Knossos Hellenistic burials respect the location of older graves whilst the layout makes a spatial connection to earlier interments as a sign of continuity. When the city was refounded as a Roman colony, a punishment for resisting Rome, no such reverence was observed. The Italian colonists, emanating from Capua, are buried in a new part of the extramural landscape and show a great interest in robbing earlier burials for simple wealth but also for antiquities, much desired by Roman collectors (Grigoropoulos 2004).
Stylistic references to past days of Greek glory appear in funerary monuments of the flourishing “museum” city of Athens. The enforced disappearance of expensive grave reliefs due to overbearing Hellenistic monarchs and their lackeys, could be relaxed under a Roman rule which positively encouraged wealth creation and display, and significant social mobility. The most spectacular example occupies an eye-catching location on a hilltop opposite the Athenian Acropolis, the tomb of Philopappos, a Greek descendant of Hellenistic rulers, a Roman consul (109 AD) and honorary citizen of Athens. A new production of male and female grave reliefs arises, often reflecting a nostalgia for Athenian Classicism. Although it is tempting to read this as “cultural resistance” to Roman rule, Bergemann (2003) argues that it merely responds to the wider mood of the Early Empire, where Augustus had set the lead of reviving that Classical Athenian art style as appropriate to the peace and stability of the ordered, authoritarian state he inaugurated (Zanker 1988).
Indeed an important form of multiple identity formation occurred in Athens, but was known throughout the Eastern Provinces, still permeated (though much less so for Egypt) by Hellenistic Greek culture (Smith 1998). On the one hand, retrospective artistic references to the great centuries of Classical-Hellenistic Greece reveal a current awareness of Greek-speakers’ pride in tradition. On the other, Greeks are perfectly willing to seize the benefits available, by “buying in” to the administrative, economic, and social opportunities which have arisen through incorporation into the Roman world, and other forms of art show this clearly too. Thus in Athens some citizens advertise their “Roman-ness” by commissioning gravestones imitating current styles of honorary portraits of “the great and the good,” whilst at the same time occasional graves reject such urban modernity, preferring symbols of Attic rustic life (farmer’s dress, vinetrimming tools, ploughs) (Gray 2006). The latter are not actually based on Classical precursors, but form a material complement to contemporary texts which praise “the old ways of life,” the survival of a pure Attic dialect in the countryside, and a number of rural hero cults associated with a nostalgia for tradition. But for the bulk of the population, this mix of identities was unproblematic, as the popularity of gladiatorial games in cities such as Thessaloniki attests.
World History
