A comprehensive examination of the art and culture of the ancient Greek kingdoms of the great Hellenistic period
The Hellenistic Age spanned the three momentous centuries from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the crowning of Emperor Augustus and the establishment of the Roman Empire. This splendidly illustrated volume examines the rich diversity of art forms—including sculpture in marble, bronze, and terracotta; gold jewelry; engraved gems; and coins—throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms of ancient Greece, and especially in the great city of Pergamon (in present-day Turkey). Featuring more than 250 objects from major museums around the world, including the renowned collection from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and essays by an international team of specialists, this book describes the historical context in which these sumptuous works of art were created, and provides a new understanding of this period of masterful artistic accomplishment.
When Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenid Persian Empire and hauled off the treasures of its royal capitals, he unleashed perhaps the greatest economic stimulus package of all time. The city of Persepolis alone, taken by the Macedonian Army in 331 B.C., yielded enough gold and silver to fill the saddlebags of twenty thousand mules and five thousand camels, according to an account by Plutarch. This tidal wave of wealth sloshed all around the eastern Mediterranean during the three centuries that followed, the era known today as the Hellenistic Age. It soaked the shores of the half-dozen new kingdoms carved out of Alexander’s conquests. Those who styled themselves Alexander’s Successors, the generals who served under him and founded the monarchies that carried his legacy forward, or those rulers who sought to proclaim, as Alexander had done, that their power was tempered by justice and reason, used the riches to finance extravagant building projects or amass glittering collections of statues, many copied from famous originals in Athens, the epicenter of Hellenic enlightenment.
A large chunk of this windfall ended up stored in a hilltop fortress called Pergamon, in what is today western Turkey, in the charge of a cunning Army officer named Philetaerus. Though he served Lysimachus, a Successor who had become King of Thrace, Philetaerus deserted his master and struck out on his own, using the wealth and strategic position of Pergamon to establish an autonomous rump state. Philetaerus was a soldier’s soldier, a strongman who relied on the support of loyal (and well-paid) troops for his authority. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” exhibition includes a marble bust that portrays him with vivid realism: his fleshy neck, thick brow, and chlamys, or military cloak, reveal a man of force and action, not a sage or statesman. The same thuggish visage would appear on Pergamene coins for more than a century, as successive rulers honored the founder of their dynasty.
The bust is one of dozens brought together by the Met for this exhibition, along with a vast trove of other objects, rich enough to impress any Alexandrian dynast. The assemblage of marbles and bronzes, accented by smaller works in gold, silver, terracotta, and glass, attests in its amplitude to the wealth, power, and cultural aspirations of the Successors. The exhibition’s scale and scope are colossal; indeed, it even contains something of a colossus, a ten-foot-high marble image of Athena, which once stood in a temple enclosure in Pergamon—a copy, at one-third scale, of the sculptor Phidias’ lost Athena Parthenos, once the glory of the Acropolis at Athens.
The great age of Pergamon began in the late third century B.C. One of Philetaerus’ successors, Attalus I, defeated an army of marauding Galatians (sometimes called Gauls), in part by adopting the new “heavy” weapon that Alexander had begun using, the Indian war elephant. (A terracotta statuette in the Met show portrays a Galatian getting trampled by one of them.) Attalus had himself crowned king, and he and his successors set about building a magnificent marble complex on the city’s acropolis, designed to evoke the iconic Acropolis at Athens. In some instances, they merely copied existing monuments, but in others they innovated grandly, creating, for example, a Great Altar of Zeus—a low-slung, three-sided structure atop a sloping staircase, wrapped round by a frieze showing a battle of gods and giants. (That altar, and other buildings of the Pergamene Acropolis, were excavated by German archeologists in the late nineteenth century, removed to Berlin, and displayed there in what became known as the Pergamon Museum. The anticipated closing of that museum’s altar hall led to a hugely successful Pergamon show at Berlin’s Staatliche Museen, in 2011, a precursor to the current Met exhibition.)
The Attalids, the Pergamene dynasty begun by Philetaerus, wanted a masterpiece to rival the Parthenon at Athens and, to judge by the samples collected in the central room of the Met exhibition, and by the frieze’s photographic reproduction, which covers three of the room’s walls, they got what they paid for. The amplitude of the crowded frieze, and the elaborate details of every architectural element, proclaim a regime that could afford to employ squadrons of expert Greek artists. And yet the Met has made them merely the central node of a much larger project. The whole span of the Hellenistic world is sampled in the exhibition—from Alexander the Great to Octavian (whose victory at Actium brought the last independent Hellenistic kingdom under Roman control, and led to his becoming the Emperor Augustus), from the Indus River Valley to the Adriatic. The show’s grand sweep gives a sense of the interconnectedness of this age, in which ease of travel and trade, and rising levels of wealth, created a market for fine art and luxury goods across large stretches of three continents. Beloved sculptures were copied and recopied; a sleeping hermaphrodite shown here is one of at least ten versions of the same figure, and no doubt several have perished for every one that survives. Thanks to new tools and techniques, the glories of Hellenism could be commodified and commercialized.
All this gives point to the timing of “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms,” which coincides with the New York State Presidential primary. Ancient Greek had no phrase precisely equivalent to “income inequality,” nor was there ever an Occupy the Acropolis movement. But the wealth that Alexander’s campaigns unlocked largely went into the hands of an international élite, who used it to project power and create displays of their Hellenic values. It’s their world that’s on show here, whether in the grand public displays of the Pergamene rulers or in quieter, more domestic objets d’art. A set of silver cups recovered from a buried hoard in Sicily reveals the exquisite elegance with which a western Greek family sat down to dine, while, across half the Mediterranean, a clan of warrior-kings, enriched by heaps of plundered gold and silver, transformed the rocky crag of Pergamon into a shining city on a hill.
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