Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World
John Ma
Abstract
Why say thank you with a portrait statue? This book combines two different and quite specialised fields, archaeology and epigraphy, to explore the phenomenon of honorific portraits in ancient art within the historical and anthropological context of city-states honouring worthy individuals through erecting statues, and the development of families imitating this practice. This transaction tells us a lot about the history of these cities and how ancient art worked as a construction of relations during the Hellenistic period (c. 350 BC to c. AD 1), which is marked by a political culture of civic d ... More
Why say thank you with a portrait statue? This book combines two different and quite specialised fields, archaeology and epigraphy, to explore the phenomenon of honorific portraits in ancient art within the historical and anthropological context of city-states honouring worthy individuals through erecting statues, and the development of families imitating this practice. This transaction tells us a lot about the history of these cities and how ancient art worked as a construction of relations during the Hellenistic period (c. 350 BC to c. AD 1), which is marked by a political culture of civic devotion, common decision making, and publicness. As honorific statues were considered public art, the volume also investigates the workings of images, representations, memory, and the monumental public form of permanent inscription, to see what stories the Hellenistic city-states can reveal about themselves.
Keywords:
archaeology,
epigraphy,
honorific portraits,
city-states,
Hellenistic period,
civic devotion,
decision making,
publicness,
images,
honorific statues
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199668915 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199668915.001.0001 |
