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American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition examines the mythologizing of California as a Mediterranean haven recalling ancient Greece or Rome. It explores how Californians shaped their world using the rhetoric of classical antiquity, from the first Anglo settlers in the nineteenth century to the present. It looks at how Americans sought to establish an American Arcadia to contrast with the harsh winters, despoiled landscape, and dark industrial cities they left in the East and Midwest. Indeed, the classical metaphor proved so alluring that some individuals shaped their very physical and spiritual selves according to classical types. American Arcadia examines the evidence of material culture—painting, sculpture, photography, and especially architecture and landscape design—to explore these themes. More important, the book emphasizes the stories and people behind the works to understand how they came into being, what they meant to their makers, and how they affected contemporary and later observers. Although its primary focus is on Los Angeles, early promoters defined the Southland loosely, so it also covers a broad geographical scope. Furthermore, there are no other sustained examinations of the deployment and reception of classical metaphors in shaping California’s identity. The book provides a new appreciation for a way of seeing our history and ourselves, and for a mode that was once familiar—for a time even central—in America and that not only helps explain artworks from our past but also how our contemporary world developed.

This book makes an original contribution to the newly thriving field of ancient Greek and Roman performance and dance studies. It offers a better grasp of ancient perceptions and conceptualizations of dance through the lens of literary texts. It gives attention not only to the highly encoded genre of pantomime, which dominates the stages in the Roman Empire, but also to acrobatic, non-representational dances. It is distinctive in its juxtaposition of ancient theorizations of dance with literary depictions of dance scenes. Part I explores the contact zones of ancient dance discourse with other areas of cultural expression, especially language and poetry, rhetoric and art, and philosophy and religion. Part II discusses ekphraseis of dance performances in prose and poetry. The main bulk of the book focuses roughly on the second century CE (discussing Plutarch, Lucian of Samosata, Athenaeus, the apocryphal Acts of John, Longus, and Apuleius), with excursions to Xenophon and Nonnus. Dance is performative and dynamic, and its way to cognition and action is physical experience. This book argues that dance was understood as a practice in which human beings, whether as dancers or spectators, are confronted with the irreducible reality of their own physical existence, which is constantly changing.

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

Reconstructing the lost monuments of Antiquity became, after 1800, a complement to Europe's colonial imagination. Countless archaeologists and architects travelled to the East, excavated extinct cities, and shipped their finds to Europe for display in imperial museums. This book is a critical biography of Berlin's Pergamon Museum and its popular architectural displays: the Great Altar of Pergamon, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. The book argues that the museum has produced a modern décor, an iconic image, which has replaced the lost antique originals, rather than creating an explicitly hypothetical representation of Antiquity. Addressing the dilemmas raised by the continuing presence of these displays, which embody the distinctive traits of the artistic and ideological programs of the last two centuries, the book questions what the process of reproduction and authentication of Antiquity in the museum tells us about our changing perceptions of historic monuments. Documenting the process through which these imaginative reproductions of architecture were conceived, staged, and came to be perceived as authentic monuments, this volume offers an insight into the history of Berlin's Museum Island and the shifting regimes of the authentic in museum displays from the nineteenth century to the present.

This book argues that the institution of public burial for the war dead and images of the deceased in civic and sacred spaces fundamentally changed how people conceived of military casualties. In a period characterized by war and the threat of civil strife, the nascent democracy claimed the fallen for the city and commemorated them with rituals and images that shaped a civic ideology of struggle and self-sacrifice on behalf of a unified community. While most studies of Athenian public burial have focused on discrete aspects of the institution, such as the funeral oration, this book broadens the scope. It examines the presence of the war dead in cemeteries, civic and sacred spaces, the home, and the mind and underscores the role of material culture—from casualty lists to white-ground lekythoi—in mediating that presence. This approach reveals that public rites and monuments shaped memories of the war dead at the collective and individual levels, spurring private commemorations that both engaged with and critiqued the new ideals and the city’s claims to the body of the warrior. Faced with a collective notion of “the fallen,” families asserted the qualities, virtues, and family links of the individual deceased and sought to recover opportunities for private commemoration and personal remembrance.

The aim of this volume is to introduce a largely neglected area of existing interactions between Greco-Roman antiquity and media theory. It addresses the question of why interactions in this area matter, and how they might be developed further. The volume seeks to promote more media attentiveness among scholars of Greece and Rome. It also aims to create more awareness of the presence of the classics in media theory. It foregrounds the persistency of Greco-Roman paradigms across the different strands of media theory. And it calls for a closer consideration of the conceptual underpinnings of scholarly practices around the transformation of ancient Greece and Rome into ‘classical’ cultures.

This book provides an innovative, authoritative, and richly illustrated study of the myths relating to the Cyclopes from classical antiquity until the present day. It is the first such book-length study of the topic in any language. The first part, dealing with classical antiquity, is organized thematically: after discussing various competing scholarly approaches to the myths, Aguirre and Buxton analyse ancient accounts and images of the Cyclopes in relation to landscape, physique (especially eyes, monstrosity, and hairiness), lifestyle, gods, names, love, and song. While the man-eating Cyclops Polyphemus, famous already in the Odyssey, plays a major part, so also do the Cyclopes who did monumental building work, as well as those who toiled as blacksmiths. The second part of the book concentrates on the post-classical reception of the myths. Topics discussed include medieval allegory, Renaissance grottoes, Italian and Spanish poetry, Spanish drama, and the novels of Hugo, Joyce, and Ellison; in the visual arts, dozens of images are examined, beginning with the medieval and early modern periods, moving on to Surrealism and Abstract Impressionism, and ending with contemporary painting and sculpture. Movie Cyclopes also appear, as does a wonderful circus performance. The overall aim of the authors is to explore, not just the perennial appeal of the Cyclopes as fearsome monsters, but the depth and subtlety of their mythology, which raises complex issues of thought and emotion. All too often, a Cyclops is assumed to be nothing more than a gruesome one-eyed monster. This book seeks to demonstrate that there is far more to it than that—quite apart from the fact that Cyclopes are by no means always one-eyed!

Across the Roman Empire, ubiquitous archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence attests to the significance of bathing for Romans’ daily routines. Given the importance of bathing to the Roman style of living, imperial patrons enhanced their popular and political stature by endowing eight magnificent baths (the so-called imperial thermae) in the city of Rome between 25 B.C.E. and 315 C.E. This book presents a detailed analysis of the decoration of the best preserved of these bathing complexes, the Baths of Caracalla (inaugurated 216 C.E.). An interdisciplinary approach to the archaeological data, to the textual and visual sources, and to anthropological theories facilitates new understandings of the visual experience of the Baths of Caracalla for a diverse Roman audience and simultaneously elucidates the decoration’s critical role in advancing imperial agendas. This reassessment of one of the most sophisticated examples of architectural patronage in Classical antiquity examines the specific mechanisms through which an imperial patron could use architectural decoration to emphasize his sociopolitical position relative to the thousands of people who enjoyed his benefaction. The case studies addressed herein, ranging from architectural to freestanding sculpture and mosaic, demonstrate that sponsoring monumental baths was hardly an act of altruism. Rather, even while they provided recreation for elite and sub-altern Romans alike, such buildings were concerned primarily with dynastic legitimacy and imperial largess. The unified decorative program—and the messages of imperial power therein—adroitly articulated these themes.

This book is the first contextually oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery from Roman households. The author uses case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: domestic gardens. Through paintings and mosaics depicting the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a model “Nile,” and statuary depicting Egyptian gods, animals, and individuals, many gardens in Pompeii confronted ancient visitors with images of (a Roman vision of) Egypt. Simultaneously far away and familiar, these imagined landscapes transformed domestic space into a microcosm of empire. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman “Aegyptiaca” to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of “Egyptomania,” a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of “foreign” and “familiar,” “self” and “other.” Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as cosmopolitan, sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and “Romanizing” once-foreign images and objects. That which was once alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be “Roman.” Through participatory multimedia assemblages evoking landscapes both local and international, the houses examined in this book made the breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home.

The Akkadian kings (ca. 2334–2154 BCE) created the first territorial state in the ancient Near East and were remembered as model kings for more than two millennia thereafter. Exemplars of Kingship: Art, Tradition, and the Legacy of the Akkadians evaluates how later rulers engaged with Akkadian visual models and memories of Akkadian kingship in their own images. Through analyses of post-Akkadian victory monuments, votive statues, cylinder seals, and other works of art, the book explores the intersection of visual traditions and cultural memory in ancient Mesopotamia. Exemplars of Kingship also deconstructs the modern reception of Akkadian art to reveal its impact on our perception of ancient responses to Akkadian art and kingship.

Since their discovery in nineteenth-century Russia, Greco-Scythian artefacts have been interpreted as masterpieces by Greek craftsmen working according to the tastes of the Scythian nomads and creating realistic depictions of their barbarian patrons. Drawing on a broad array of evidence from archaeology, art history, and epigraphy to contextualise Greco-Scythian metalwork in ancient society, this volume confronts the deep confusion between ancient representation and historical reality in contemporary engagements with classical culture. It argues that the strikingly life-like figure scenes of Greco-Scythian art were integral to the strategies of a cosmopolitan elite who legitimated its economic dominance by asserting an intermediary cultural position between the steppe inland and the urban centres on the shores of the Black Sea. Investigating the reception of this ‘Eurasian’ self-image in tsarist Russia, the book unravels the complex relationship between ancient ideology and modern imperial visions, and its legacy in current conceptions of cultural interaction and identity.

This volume investigates how appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome and ancient Egypt through place-making, specifically through the requisition and redeployment of Classicizing and Egyptianizing tropes to create Neo-Antique sites of “dwelling” and place-making oriented toward private life (houses, hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens) in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The essays cover both European and American iterations of place-making, including the Hôtel de Beauharnais, Paris; Sir John Soane’s houses in London and Ealing; Charles Garnier’s L’Histoire de l’habitation humaine at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris; Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City; the Congress Hotel in Chicago; and the Getty Villa, Malibu. Collectively these essays consider all aspects of architectural reception regarding domestic space, from architectural facades to domestic interiors and landscaped exteriors (or greenscapes). Combining the textual analysis of reception studies with material evidence of art and archaeology, the volume advocates for a new way of thinking about the reception of ancient architecture: the Neo-Antique, rather than the Neoclassical and Neo-Egyptian. It provides a variety of critical interpretative frameworks that can apply to the study of architectural reception including “art as agency,” material culture, archaeological analysis, “aberrant decoding,” and hyperreality.

Nerva ruled from September AD 96 to January 98. His short reign provided little public building and monumental art, and study of Nerva has been the province of the historian, who often relies on textual sources written after his death. History has judged Nerva as an emperor who lacked the respect of the Praetorians and armed forces, and who was vulnerable to coercion. The most complete record of state-sanctioned art from Nerva’s reign is his imperial coinage, frequently studied with historical hindsight and thus characterized as “hopeful,” “apologetic,” or otherwise relating the anxiety of the period. But art operated independently of later and biased historical texts, always presenting the living emperor in a positive light. This book reexamines Nerva’s imperial coinage in positivistic terms and relates imagery to contemporary poetry and panegyric, which praised the emperor. While the audiences at which images were directed included the emperor, attention to hoards and finds also indicates what visual messages were most important in Nerva’s reign and at what other groups in the Roman Empire they were directed. The relationship between the imagery and the rhetoric used by Frontinus, Martial, Tacitus, and Pliny to characterize Nerva and his reign allows reinvestigation of debate about the agency behind the creation of images on imperial coinage. Those in charge of the mint were close to the emperor’s inner circle and thus walked alongside prominent senatorial politicians and equestrians who wrote praise directed at the emperor; those men were in a position to visualize that praise.

This book studies silver vessels from ancient Macedonia from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BC. These precious vessels formed part of dining sets owned by the royal family and the elite and have been discovered in the tombs of their owners. The book presents 171 artifacts in a study of form, decoration, inscriptions, and manufacturing techniques, set against contemporary comparanda in other media (clay, bronze, glass). It adopts an art historical and sociological approach to the archaeological evidence and demonstrates that the use of silver vessels as an expression of wealth and a status symbol is not only connected with the wealth spread in the empire after Alexander’s the Great expedition to the East, but constitutes a practice reflecting the opulence and appreciation for luxury at least in the Macedonian court from the reign of Philip II onwards.

The banded agate bowl known as the Tazza Farnese has, for much of its history, been one of the most admired objects from classical antiquity. Prized and coveted by the mightiest of rulers, it has in our time fallen into relative oblivion and is known only to specialists, and even then incompletely. This account of the “life” of this remarkable masterpiece takes readers on a fascinating trip through history that spans two millennia and journeys from the court of Cleopatra to the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, from Samarqand of Tamerlane to Renaissance Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici, from Baroque Rome to Enlightenment Naples. Along the way, readers encounter the illustrious as well as the shady figures who have come into contact with this extraordinary artifact, from emperors and conquerors, popes and princes, and artists like Botticelli and Raphael, to forgers, thieves, and a disgruntled museum guard who nearly destroyed the Tazza for all posterity. Through the prism of this precious bowl, Medusa’s Gaze makes history vividly and intimately alive.

The figure of Menelaus has remained notably overlooked in scholarship on the major heroes and heroines of Homeric epic. This book studies the Homeric character through a multidisciplinary approach to his depiction in archaic Greek poetry, art, and cult, providing a detailed analysis of ancient literary, visual, and material evidence. It first examines the portrayal of Menelaus in the Homeric poems as a unique ‘personality’ with an integral role to play in each narrative, as depicted through typical patterns of speech and action and through intertextual allusion. The book then explores his representation both in other poetry of the archaic period and also archaic art and local Sparta cult. Ultimately, Menelaus emerges as a unique and likeable character whose relationship with Helen was a popular theme in both epic poetry and vase painting, but one whose portrayal evinced a significant narrative range, with an array of continuities and differences in how he was represented by the Greeks, not only within the archaic period but also in comparison to classical Athens.

The ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes conceived of works of art having a dynamic effect on viewers, inspiring them to direct imitation of what they saw represented. This ‘mimetic contagion’ might operate alongside aesthetic or rational communication in art and was in some cases integral to how mimesis itself was conceptualized. This book explores mimetic contagion as a widespread discursive pattern across the ancient world, discernible in both popular and elevated cultural forms, but it also situates this phenomenon within a particular historical moment, mid-second century BCE Rome, to see which aspects of mimetic contagion emerge as most salient in the culture that produced the final flourishing of Roman comedy. Terence’s Eunuch provides a particularly vivid instance of mimetic contagion, one the reader is now in a position to recognize and appreciate both as an example of a very extensive pattern across antiquity and within its specific historical context. As with several other literary examples considered in this book, the instance of mimetic contagion in the Eunuch readily serves as a figure for mimetic representation within the work more generally. Thus the painting at the centre of the play becomes emblematic for a pattern that ramifies throughout the whole. The book expounds mimetic contagion as one available Greco-Roman strategy for understanding the power of art, and offers an extended reading of a single work of literature to show what closer attention to this strategy might mean for modern readers.

Ancient literature is full of people, gods, and animals in impressive motion. But while the importance of space has been realized recently, motion has had little attention, for all its prominence in literature, and its interest to ancient philosophy. Motion is bound up with decisions, emotions, character; its specific features are expressive. The book starts with motion in visual art: this leads to the characteristics of literary depiction. Literary works discussed are: Homer’s Iliad; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Tacitus’ Annals; Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus; Parmenides’ On Nature; Seneca’s Natural Questions. The two narrative poems here diverge rewardingly, as do philosophical poetry and prose; in the prose narrative, as in the philosophical poem, the absence of motion, and metaphorical motion, are important; the dramas scrutinize motion verbally and visually. Each discussion pursues the general roles of motion in a work, with detail on its language of motion; then passages are analysed closely, to show how much emerges when this aspect is scrutinized. A conclusion brings works and passages together. It considers the differences made by genre and by the time of writing. Among aspects of motion which emerge as important are speed, scale, shape of movement, motion and fixity, movement of one person and a group, motion willed and imposed, motion in images and unrealized possibilities. A companion website makes it easier to see passages and analyses together; it offers videos of readings to convey the vitality and subtlety with which motion is portrayed.

This book presents a study of the portrayal of nature in Byzantine art and literature. It shows how the Byzantines embraced terrestrial creation in the decoration of their churches during the fifth to seventh centuries, but then adopted a more cautious attitude toward the depiction of animals and plants in the middle ages, after the iconoclastic dispute of the eighth and ninth centuries. The book discusses the role of iconoclasm in affecting this fundamental change in Byzantine art. An important theme is the asymmetrical relationship between Byzantine art and literature with respect to the portrayal of nature. A series of vivid ekphraseis described seasons, landscapes, gardens (including those of paradise), animals and plants, but these were more sparingly illustrated in medieval art. Likewise, in Byzantine church literature a rich variety of nature-derived metaphors evoked the Virgin Mary, but these images were less frequently incorporated into art, and often in ways that would express the subordination of the terrestrial to the spiritual. The book concludes with a discussion of the abstraction of nature in the form of marble floors and revetments, where the variegated colors of the marbles contrasted with the golden pallor of the sacred icons, and with a consideration of the role of architectural backgrounds in medieval Byzantine art, which acted as a substitute symbolic language unassociated with the veneration of creation. Throughout the book, medieval Byzantine art is compared with that of Western Europe, where different conceptions of religious imagery allowed a closer engagement with nature.

Ever since its publication in 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s treatise Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry has shaped debates about aesthetic experience and the medial distinctions between words and images. Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon provides a reassessment of this seminal work on its 250th anniversary, examining Lessing’s interpretation of ancient art and poetry, the Enlightenment contexts of the treatise, and its subsequent legacy in the fields of aesthetic, semiotics, and philosophy. Lessing’s essay is focused on an ancient statue and its interpretation, revisiting Greek and Roman texts and images to think about the spatial and temporal ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of what Lessing calls ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’. Yet the text is also embedded within Enlightenment theories of art, perception, and historical interpretation—as well as within the nascent eighteenth-century study of classical antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon is concerned not just with Lessing’s reception of antiquity, but also with the reception of that reception up to the present day. It examines Lessing’s work from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, highlighting the importance of Lessing’s Laocoon not only to the Enlightenment, but more generally also within shifting attitudes to the classical past.