I see this conclusion less as reconciliation than as provocation. This is not to play devil’s advocate but to play historian, asking questions designed to bring this volume’s individual confrontations between literary and material culture together to speak to their specific contexts. Do this, and we find that reading spolia in Greece is very different from reading spolia in Rome, that the circumstances of acquisition make this difference inevitable. As a political power, Rome was a relative latecomer to the world stage. For all that cities everywhere benefitted from the booty they grabbed in war, Rome’s expansionist march into foreign terrain from the third century BCE, and its longstanding feelings of inferiority in the face of Greek culture in particular, meant that acquisition and the economic standing that came with it was not enough. It had to own it – give the definitive performance of what turning enemy territory into home turf looked like. And in some senses, it succeeded: for centuries, our understanding of Greek art depended on Roman ‘copies’.1
Ownership this urgent makes the ethical issues that accompany any kind of ‘appropriation’ of enemy objects louder, and Roman writers paranoid about when it was exactly that cultural contact became an encounter, and a life-changing one at that. There is arguably nothing this angst-ridden in the Classical Greek literary record. Back then, Greekness was not in doubt, at least not in the ways that Romanness would be in doubt – not in ways that threatened what culture is; that conferred culture no less. But then Athens was not an empire in the way that Rome was an empire with a ‘strong sense of foreignness between rulers and ruled’, but a cooperative league that became a centralised state, exploitative certainly, but smaller in area than many a Roman province, and with a comparatively homogenous population ethnically and culturally.2 And this sense of a comparatively rangey Rome imposing control over the Other is crucial. For all that there is ‘room for other perspectives on spolia than the military and the imperialistic ones’,3 there is also need to recognise that the nature of Roman imperium vis-à-vis Greek archê changes both how plundered objects are rehomed as well as how this rehoming is retrospectively, nervously turned into ‘anchoring’.4
This chapter cuts across the papers in this volume to explore how this works in practice, and over time. It begins by asking how innovating these imported objects really were in fifth-century Athens, on the ground and in the rhetoric, before taking us, in section two, into the Hellenistic period, when Demetrius of Phaleron was governing Athens as the puppet of Cassander of Macedon, when the Ptolemies were working on expanding their empire well beyond Egypt to include parts of Syria, Cyprus and coastal Libya, and when Rome’s power was in ascendance. Who owned Greek culture was up for grabs and a question of victory and dynasty. Section three looks at the complex processes of avowal and disavowal that come with Rome’s winning of the competition; how – less in the rite de passage that was the triumphal procession,5 than in the copying and connoisseurship that follow it – Greek artists working for wealthy Roman patrons turn the random fragments of another culture into the clauses of its own elite sentence structure. In doing this, it will also question whether Greek and Egyptian objects are similarly integrated and whether in this sense and others, ‘spolia’ is even a useful category for the processes this book is keen to understand. The concluding section, section four, pushes this scepticism to the limit by questioning whether any integration or ‘anchoring’ that results is best served by the term ‘appropriation’.
1 Not Counting Culture, but Making Culture Count6
I start, as the ‘Case Studies’ start, in the fifth century BCE with Herodotus’ account of the spoils at Plataea (479 BCE). Glittering this stuff (or
None of this is surprising. Dedicating a tenth of the spoils to the gods and then dividing the rest between participating states was what one did in Archaic and Classical Greece – and the only enemy objects routinely dedicated in a ‘raw’ state were armour, weapons and rams and beaks of captured ships, often as part of trophy monuments.11 A bronze helmet found at Olympia and inscribed ‘The Athenians took (this) from the Medes (and dedicated it) to Zeus’ is a case in point, its lettering asserting an appropriation that makes it a scalp, not an agent for change.12 Spoils not dedicated were regularly not bagged by the victors, but sold on the spot to swell state coffers.13
In Athens, where there is evidence of Persian daggers, folding chairs and corslets being collected in the Acropolis temples, the emphasis is again (at least in Thucydides) on the massing of expendable capital;14 however these objects were displayed, the Acropolis inventories ask visitors to see them not as a distinct or distinctly foreign group but as part of a bigger collateral, most of it unprovenanced. If any of the folding chairs, corslets or helmets listed are Persian spoils, no attempt is made to distinguish them, not even Masistius’ golden corslet or Mardonius’ dagger that are flagged in our literary sources.15
Were these displayed in the ‘Karyatid Temple’ because of their perceived historical, museological even, value, as van Rookhuijzen suggests? A comparison he offers is the Lindian Chronicle, where the dedications listed are rich in story, each with mini memoirs to show what it was that made them, like the epiphanies of Athena that it also records, worthy of wonder. But then this latter chronicle (dated to 99 BCE) is not an inventory of what is in the temple, but an archaeology of contents lost long ago, some of them in a fire in 392/1 BCE; it tells us nothing about how they were stored or seen in the fifth century; if it is a museum, it is a virtual one, explicitly mined from local histories, priests’ letters, and from Herodotus, to meet Hellenistic sensibilities.16 By this point in the Hellenistic period, Rome was on the rise, and Rhodes keener than ever to marshall its past to navigate the politics of the present. The Chronicle was designed to make all of history, the Trojan and Persian Wars included, not to mention Athena, theirs, and was arguably only possible in a world in which dynasties like the Attalids competed for power by competing to own Greek culture, collecting texts, statues and paintings in ways that created canons, experts, trained palates, new ways of seeing no less, that discerned art in accumulation and heritage in treasure. Back at Plataea, none of this discernment was in evidence, just bling – and (not to make this only about artefacts), Persian women, bakers, cooks, and beasts of burden.17 Even then, if it is spectacle we are after, it is the bones of the dead Persians, stripped of their flesh, that ‘shine forth’ (
Ask how transformative the objects are that come into van Rookhuijzen’s Athens by way of war, and one answer would be ‘not very’. On the one hand, ‘Perserie’ had infiltrated the upper echelons of Athenian society before Plataea: in the late sixth century already, Athenian elites owned Achaemenid metal vessels that influenced the forms of Attic black-gloss ware.19 On the other hand, when Cimon is on campaign to get the Persians out of Byzantium in 475 BCE, dividing the booty into prisoners of war in one lot and fine jewels and clothes in the other and letting the allies choose which they would prefer, it is the allies who get the worse deal by opting for the latter – or so the story goes.20 Far from having to settle for second best, it turns out that the Athenians are paid handsomely for the return of the captives, giving Cimon wages and food for his fleet with lots left over. Again, economics are more important than cultural capital; Athens had enough of that of its own, and considered itself the centre of civilization long before the collecting cultures of the Attalids and Romans cemented it as so. And Plataea was something of an anomaly in the spoils that it yielded at that stage: it was a land battle at the end of a second campaign season that had seen Xerxes’ army camped out in Greece for months (with the wealth of supplies that that demands), his royal tent supposedly retained for his deputy Mardonius even after Xerxes’ departure for Sardis.21 For all that Marathon, eleven years earlier, is also defined in the later literature by the silver and gold said to have been lying around in heaps and by ‘an indescribable number of other objects in the tents’,22 it is perhaps unsurprising that, back in the fifth century, Herodotus is comparatively silent about any captured booty:23 that Persian army had landed with what they could carry in their ships, and – crucially – without their king.
Another answer, however, would be to insist that the public ‘appropriation’ of Persian culture that came with the decisiveness of the Greek victory at Plataea and, immediately after, of Mycale, made all the difference to how transformative Achaemenid objects were. Pericles’ Odeion, supposedly modelled on an Achaemenid royal tent and using as its beams the masts and spars of Persian ships, is the most vocal expression of this, but so too, or so Margaret Miller has proposed, again in debt to Persian practice as attested in the Persepolis procession reliefs and the building inscriptions of Susa, the way in which Athens’ great festivals now required its ‘allies’ and colonists to participate.24 If she is right, then Persian imperial models were suddenly in service to an Athenian empire that crystalised with the move of the Delian league to Athens in 454 BCE. Yet for anyone attracted by Greek imperialism as a factor in these objects’ force for change, ‘spolia’ strains as a separable category: if it is military success and societal impact we are measuring, then the paraphernalia brought back from the battlefield ask to be brought into dialogue with the tribute of the cities of the empire that was said to be divided into talents and ceremonially displayed in the orchestra of the Dionysus-theatre during the Great Dionysia.25
2 The Importance of Empire
‘Spolia’ do not innovate in Classical Greece as they will in Republican or Imperial Rome. The bottom line is that the Romans sack cities, and, by and large, the Athenians don’t. Greek cities are invaded.26 But if the conveyor-belt of culture that is the Roman triumphal procession is as critical in ‘taming’ foreign objects as the contributors to this book believe, and the journey from beyond the pomerium to the Capitoline Hill the start of a process of the reinvention of these objects from alien to asset,27 then one might think that the series of processions that made up Ptolemy II’s grand pompe that took place in Alexandria most probably in the 270s BCE as part of the festival of the Ptolemaieia were also relevant.28 Celebrating several gods, this grand procession paraded before the city’s populace cart-loads of statues, some of them all the more marvellous for being mechanical, Delphic tripods, Panathenaic amphorae, gold Spartan mixing bowls, and finely dressed women representing cities of Ionia, and the Greek cities of Asia and the islands which had been subdued by the Persians,29 not to mention dogs, sheep, cattle, birds, infantrymen and cavalry, a giraffe and Ethiopian rhinoceros.
This menagerie looked forward to the Roman triumph with its parade not just of manmade objects, but of captives and biological specimens, and back to the Great Dionysia in Athens where Demetrius of Phaleron is reputed already in 309/8 BCE to have wowed with a giant, slime-producing mechanical snail.30 All of this foregrounds the ongoing importance of religion (something that this volume perhaps underestimates) and also the fundamental difference from what was happening in fifth-century Greece. Post Alexander, there is a marshalling of resources that brings us into Pliny the Elder’s territory,31 a cataloguing not only of culture, but of the world’s raw materials as empires vye with each other to ‘tame’ not only the things brought into them through war or trade (daggers, corslets, tripods, amphorae) but nature herself.
It is no accident that, Herodotus aside, the other literary sources discussed in this book date to the period of Rome’s expansion over other peoples. For it is then that ‘spolia’ becomes the category outlined in the book’s introduction. Unsurprisingly with conquest comes sustained and wide-spread debate about the moral principles of ownership.32 First up here, as Pieper carefully discusses, and in a category of its own, is Cicero’s account of Dionysius I of Syracuse (d. 367 BCE), tyrant extraordinaire, and his plundering of the gold cloak of Olympian Zeus, the gold beard of Asclepius at Epidaurus, as well as silver tables marked ‘property of the gods’, and the gold cups, crowns and victory figures from the outstretched hands of other cult images.33 Although in the first of these instances, he is taking back something that had been given to the statue by his predecessor, Gelon (something that crucially for us had resulted from the booty seized from the Carthaginians), he is here and elsewhere manically undoing all of the good work of giving to the gods, reducing their images from agalmata to an agglomeration of attributes and thereby robbing them of their agency.34 As with Herodotus’ helots, it’s precious metal he is after, which he then sells as soon as he is able.35 What is different are the expectations of the intended readership, a Republican readership for whom Rome’s own defeat of Carthage (146 BCE) and indeed Syracuse (211 BCE), weighed heavy. Also different is the violence of the vocabulary, all smash and grab and ‘sine dubitatione’, without hesitation, or respect36 – and that’s before we remember not only the former governor of Sicily, Verres, but also the quadruple triumph of Caesar the year before Cicero was writing, a performance that (if the later sources are to be believed) displeased the crowd for its excess and what that excess said about his political ambition.37
A year later, Caesar was dead, and on route to being deified, transformations that would underwrite Augustus’ right to rule and the establishment of the Principate. The jest that Dionysius makes as he denudes the statue of its cloak will resound in the echo-chamber of later rhetoric when Pheidias’ statue gets its own back and is said to laugh out loud at Caligula’s attempts to remove it to Rome.38 But this is not just about tyranny; with the benefit of hindsight, Romans everywhere understood the profound impact that booty had had on their surroundings: before this time, according to the Greek writer Plutarch, Rome ‘neither had nor knew about such elegant or exquisite productions’; ‘bloody spoils’ (
3 The Ethics of Ownership
‘When did it become a bad thing to have stuff’?41 When did the effeminizing potential of what is perceived as luxury goods become something that one didn’t just stick on the tyrants of this world, especially foreign tyrants such as Xerxes, but worried about back home; when is one defeated not despite one’s wealth, but because of it? And I am thinking here of Robert and Vanessa Gorman’s work on Corrupting Luxury in Ancient Greek Literature, which belies its title in including Latin and imperial Greek literature to situate the origins of the idea of ruinous luxury in the Roman tradition of moralistic historiography. More problematic still, how – archaeologically – do we know ‘luxury goods’ when we see them as opposed to goods that were viewed more unequivocally as objects of value?
The Polybius passage on the sack of Syracuse, written in around 150 BCE and unpacked in this volume by Allan, already highlights how far we have travelled since Herodotus. It is not only that here a decision is said to have been made to leave absolutely nothing behind, that this is a total evacuation or takeover.42 It is that beauty now explicitly enters the narrative (with objects that are
If only the Romans had remained this ‘rudis’, continues Velleius Paterculus philosophically. In reality, of course, as finds from Etruria and Magna Graecia remind us, Italy had long been in dialogue with Greek culture; and at least from Cato the Elder (and no doubt earlier had we the evidence), political actors in the Hellenistic superpower that was Rome positioned themselves in relation to the Greek world as much as to Italy.49 By the Augustan period when Velleius was writing, Romans were so keen to see this shared language evolve that they allowed it to shape their greatest works of art and literature (whether the Prima Porta statue or the Aeneid); they turned this language, arguably, into a universal language.50 But ‘keen’ is not the same as ‘compliant’. With the enfranchisement of the allies at the end of the Social War and the eventual inauguration of the Principate, Romans were perhaps more anxious than ever about their Romanness, were made more so by an emperor whose moral legislation and dress codes asserted control over their bodies.51 The transformative potential of the luxury that they were exposed to demanded that they were anxious about their Romanness. For all that Marcus Claudius Marcellus had supposedly taken only one globe from all of the spoils of Syracuse back to his house, dedicating the rest publicly as was only expected in porticos and temples,52 Greek statuary had seeped into the private sphere, building on Hellenistic cultures of collecting that had already put works by Polyclitus, Myron and Apelles at the top of the tree. Rome’s elites were enthusiasts, and the market saturated with fakes as well as adaptations and copies.
All of this makes the absence of detail in the descriptions of the Roman triumph seem, initially, so peculiar. Elusive are the artworks of Polyclitus, Myron and Apelles, which – like the daggers and corslets in the Acropolis inventories – are anonymously absorbed into the lists of
In Josephus’ account of Judaean objects entering Rome more than a century later, people clamour to get a closer look, as the
The tempo changes with the mention of the Law, golden table and lampstand from the Temple in Jerusalem, the last of these with seven branches like the seven hills of Rome, arranged ‘trident-fashion’, so as to conjure an aniconic aura akin to Neptune’s imagery.59 There has to be a change in tempo, if the steady stream of this material isn’t to become self-defeating: despite the massive military resources utilised in Judaea and the brutality of the conflict, no new territories had been acquired as they had been in the Republic. This material is put in Vespasian’s new Templum Pacis, not by itself, but with a statue of the Nile, and older Greek artworks by greats like Myron, Pheidas, Leochares, Polyclitus, Apelles, Timanthus, Praxiteles (or Pasiteles), Cephisodotus, and Parthenocles, much of this painting and sculpture commandeered from the private rooms of the Domus Aurea, where it had been ‘violently’ assembled by Nero.60 Together, it added up to a three-dimensional version of Pliny’s Natural History, a display of objects that one would otherwise ‘have once wandered over the whole world, eager to see’;61 Rome as universal museum (and realisation of the kind of curation that was only virtual at Rhodes). It is a different order of display from the Sicilian spoils at the Porta Capena62 – a redistribution of state resources or righting of wrongs after war with a Roman province. What doesn’t make the cut goes into the building of the Colosseum.
The presence of gods and personifications in the two sculptural reliefs of the triumph in the Arch of Titus’ central bay – jostling for attention not only with the emperor and his entourage but with the horses, the giant menorah and the other spolia – attests to the religiosity and transformativity of the occasion. Seizing cultic objects was as high risk as it always was: we think of the passage of Livy mentioned by Versluys,63 and its description of the youths selected from the army, who wash and dress in white before handling Veii’s statue of Juno. Some claimed that the statue had even nodded – an assent that stands in stark, and perhaps calculated, contrast to the Iliad’s statue of Athena, which is said to have given a negative response, again with a nod (
No, what is critical (at least as far as understanding the incorporation (or not) of these objects and their potential shift in status from foreign/outside to domestic/inside is concerned) is what happens next, after the triumph. Unquantifiable often is just how long any example of spolia was perceived as alien in Rome; and, once accepted, ‘anchored’ even, in its new cultural context, whether it was still seen as a fragment of the culture it came from. What we can say is that the answer is different depending on the object. Even if the Ludovisi ‘Aphrodite’(?) were not installed in Rome’s sanctuary of Venus Erycina, as van de Velde wants to believe, chances are that its acrolithic form, scale and archaising style made it as unmissable and exotic as the menorah – and this in stark contrast, say, to the pedimental sculpture from the temple of Apollo Sosianus on the Campus Martius, which was lifted from Greece, perhaps from Eretria, and which dates to later, in the fifth century BCE.67 Would anyone have thought that the latter’s classical style was anything other than Augustan? What is more, whatever its viewers thought of the origins of the acrolith, they were used to gods’ bodies being out of the ordinary (the classic case being Ephesian Artemis). If one is looking for a ‘translatio imperii’ to rival the impact of the Pergamum altar’s reinstallation in Berlin, or indeed the temporary transfer of Italian statues to Paris under Napoleon, each of them (the Apollo Belvedere, Laocoon, Medici Venus and so on) in a labelled crate, then we are on safer ground with Rome’s relocation of Egyptian obelisks.
The truth is that Greece’s statuary had outgrown the cities in which it had been made and displayed long before Gaius Sosius built his temple. It did not need Rome to hone it, and turn ‘the best of it’ from cultural production to art-historical canon; Myron, Praxiteles, Pheidias and Polyclitus are four of the five sculptors to make it onto the list of greats in the anonymous Laterculi Alexandrini on a Ptolemaic papyrus already;68 statues by them, or in imitation of them, were celebrated in Attalid Pergamum; their fame did not depend on being brought into Rome in triumph, but on a Mediterranean-wide discourse that relied as much on study in schoolrooms and libraries as it did on seeing sculpture in a public garden or temple-portico. There was more than one way to own it, and Rome obviously made a massive contribution to what we now consider ‘classical art’. But Greek sculpture arguably came with a baggage, and biography of owning and making that imported Egyptian artefacts, in contrast, would never manage.
How to own Greek culture without being owned by it? How to make it property of the Romans rather than property of their gods, without opening Romans up to the charge of being as grasping as Verres or Nero? This question would not readily go away – which is why, perhaps, when we do find genuine Classical Greek sculpture not in porticoes, palaces and grand horti, but in private Roman houses and gardens, it is often of a funerary variety, as though hoovering up grave stelai that had long ceased to have any immediate resonance in their local community was safer, not to mention cheaper. They were decommissioned goods almost. It might also explain why even the grandest of these private houses, Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri and Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, are filled not with Greek originals, but copies.
Collecting copies or ‘versions’, as we now prefer to call them, was not only a more realistic option; it was also more creative, and in being more creative, was better at domesticating and anchoring Greek culture, turning the sculptures in question from spectacles to source-texts and the viewers from worshippers to connoisseurs. As Walter Benjamin argued, the act of reproduction devalues the aura of an object and diminishes its cult value.69 We think about the stories that proliferate in the Roman period about a statue like the Knidian Aphrodite, stories that emphasise the promiscuity that comes of removing her from her shrine and commodifying her. As I have written elsewhere, ‘“copying” meant “bottling”’,70 enabling patrons to exert an agency and influence over the object rather than being simply in its thrall – so Hadrian’s copies of two of the Erechtheum maidens, cleverly positioned so as to stare at themselves in the water of his scenic canal, copies that may have already shored up Agrippa’s Pantheon in the heart of the city.71 Or the Villa of the Papyri’s Doryphorus, deprived of the corporeal symmetry for which it was famed (even in the neighbouring town of Pompeii, where a full-figure version was on show in the Samnite palaestra, and in Rome, where it was adopted as an official Roman body beneath the breastplate of the statue of Augustus from Prima Porta) to become a Roman portrait-herm.72 Experimentation with paint, materials and scale were a further part of a palette that had Greek works play to a new tune and their patrons perform their power as knowledge.
4 ‘Appropriation’ and Object Agency
But is this incorporation best served by the term ‘appropriation’ as Versluys maintains? Step outside Hahn’s theoretical framework for a moment, and ‘appropriation’ is a word that means to take something for one’s own use, typically without permission, and has, as Loar, MacDonald and Padilla Peralta maintain, to be better than a passive term like ‘borrowing’, which grants little agency to either the new owners or to the objects. ‘Influence’ too is jettisoned by these authors as an imprecise and insufficiently ‘agentive term’,73 though our analysis of Rome in particular benefits, as we have seen, from acknowledging a bit of Harold Bloom’s anxiety.74 This anxiety notwithstanding, how ‘outside’, ‘strange’ or ‘potentially dangerous’, to use Ter Keur’s vocabulary, were the spolia that were paraded in the Roman triumph? Less so perhaps than the Persian spoils that entered Athens – objects made in an empire which from the sixth century to its conquest by Alexander ‘was far more powerful than any Greek state or combination of states’,75 a precursor to Roman imperium and its princeps. Already known and loved, Polyclitus’ Doryphorus, Praxiteles’ Knidia and the like did not have to have their identities re-rehearsed in (largely retrospective) descriptions of the triumph. At the moment of entry, they were neither strange nor frightening. Any sense of ‘estrangement’ or ‘anxiety’ accrued over time, once connoisseurship and copying turned to a coveting (posturing even) that threatened Roman gravitas.76
Even in Classical Greece, permission to plunder did not come into it, any more than peace was the opposite of war. Take the famous passage that Xenophon attributes to King Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, already quoted in this volume’s introduction:
And let not one of you think that in having these things he has what does not belong to him; for it is a law established for all time among all men that when a city is taken in war, the persons and the property of the inhabitants thereof belong to the captors. It will, therefore, be no injustice for you to keep what you have, but if you let them keep anything, it will be only out of generosity that you do not take it away.77
Seen like this, the Romans are not plundering and ‘appropriating’ ‘new’ or ‘alien’ objects, so much as participating in a world in which objects and people were already deemed portable, just as art, especially foreign art, was seen as in service to luxury. I am not saying that there is no ‘transformation of meaning’ of the Knidia when she is moved, by virtue of copying, from her shrine in Asia Minor to an Italian villa, but that she had long been conceived of as world art (ante omnia est non solum Praxitelis, verum in toto orbe terrarum), a statue that Nicomedes, King of Bithynia had, back in the third or second century BCE, offered to buy in exchange for remitting Knidos of its debt.78 To do as this volume does and treat the transfer that comes of ‘spolia’ as a discrete category raises as many questions as it solves: ‘spolia’ must be seen as a prime example of a broader phenomenon. The power of the statue was always that everyone wanted to lay hands on her.
More than this, for all that moving statues of the gods was recognised by the Romans as riskier than moving other kinds of objects, and thus as an act in need of greater care or expiation, even these statues were but part of the picture as far as their innovating potential was concerned. The Greek culture which they exemplified was but one of the cultures that any individual Roman was juggling, none of these cultures in and of itself a discrete ‘system’. Acknowledging this makes sense of why Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s 2008 book focuses not on the active role of objects, but on people as political actors; not on Greece and Rome and the potential ‘fusion’ that results, but on ‘triangulation’, as a poet like Ennius already early in the second century BCE embraced the Greek ‘without fear’, wearing it as well as he did a Roman and a local Messapian identity.79 What is ‘innovating’ here is not Greek culture per se, but the ‘code-switching’ that comes of its incorporation as the Romans are not transformed by conquest, but use conquest to transform their society, economy and culture.80
Wallace-Hadrill’s perspective is a historian’s perspective, just as it is a historian’s perspective that has us ask whether any of the processes described, or the descriptions of processes, in his or this volume change over time. How does Polybius’ or Cicero’s standpoint differ from Livy’s, whose vision is shaped by the particularly eloquent order that Augustus brings, or from Plutarch’s, who is writing in a period so differently hellenising from even Neronian Rome, never mind Augustan Classicism? And how do the texts of Cicero and Livy, neither of whom – importantly, when it is identity and focalisation we are thinking about – is from Rome itself, differ from those written in Greek? These are questions beyond the scope of this volume. But ‘triangulation’ alone highlights how the ‘anchoring’ of any incoming object is not just about incorporating it into old Rome, but about having it (continue to) participate in a conversation with objects from other cultures, and not just spolia, but foreign gods like Asclepius and, more materially, Cybele, in the form of a black meteoric stone, which were introduced to the city by means other than war, never mind objects that were bought or gifted. Were they similarly ‘appropriated’? Can statues of the gods ever be ‘tamed’?
Another thing that Wallace-Hadrill highlights is that Greek identity and Roman identity were not ‘strictly parallel as types of cultural identity’, not least because only the first was defined by its language and culture, and the second by its political structures. He continues ‘[e]verything under Roman control may be taken as “Roman”, whereas within that control, the Greek may remain culturally distinctive’.81 And one might think that this alone made the processes that governed the influx of Greek, Macedonian or Sicilian objects into Rome different from, for example, Persian objects into Athens. The Judaean objects were different again – not objects like the ‘ancient masterpieces of both painting and sculpture’ that had been restored to the public from the privacy of Nero’s palace where they had become ‘part of the furniture’, but forever sacra or cultic objects that Josephus insists Vespasian ‘dedicated’ (
Acknowledgements
I thank the contributors to this volume for their stimulating chapters, and the editors and Robin Osborne for their comments on my contribution.
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Morris, I., ‘The Athenian Empire (487–404 BC)’, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (2005). Available online at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1426850 [last accessed 28 November 2022].
Noy, D., ‘Rabbi Aqiba Comes to Rome. A Jewish Pilgrimage in Reverse?’, in J. Elsner, I. Rutherford (eds.), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity. Seeing the Gods (Oxford 2005) 373–385.
Osborne, R., Vout C., ‘A Revolution in Roman History?’, JRS 100 (2010) 233–245.
Platt, V.J., ‘Art History in the Temple’, Arethusa 43 (2010) 197–213.
Pritchett, W.K., The Greek State at War. Part 1 (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1971).
Pritchett, W.K., The Greek State at War. Part 3: Religion (Berkeley-Los Angeles- London 1979).
Shaya, J., ‘The Greek Temple as Museum. The Case of the Legendary Treasure of Athena from Lindos’, AJA 109 (2005) 423–442.
Shaya, J., ‘Greek Temple Treasures and the Invention of Collecting’, in M.W. Gahtan, D. Pegazzano (eds.), Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (Leiden- Boston 2014) 24–32.
Snodgrass, A.M., Arms and Armour of the Greeks (London 1967).
Spawforth, A.J.S., Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution (Cambridge 2011).
Stephenson, P., The Serpent Column. A Cultural Biography (Oxford 2016).
Varner, E., ‘Nero’s Memory in Flavian Rome’, in S. Bartsch, K. Freudenburg, C. Littlewood (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero (Cambridge 2017) 237–258.
Vout, C., Classical Art. A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton 2018).
Vout, C., ‘Collecting like Caesar. The Pornography and Paideia of Amassing Artefacts in and after the Roman Empire’, in M.W. Gahtan, E.-M. Troelenberg (eds.), Collecting and Empires. An Historical and Global Perspective (Turnhout 2019) 68–85.
Vout, C., Exposed. The Greek and Roman Body (London 2022).
Wallace-Hadrill, A., Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge 2008).
Zanker, P., Augustus and die Macht der Bilder (Munich 1987).
For a long time, Rome’s gobbling up of Greek art was seen as stale imitation and slavishness. More recently, however, approaches have moved away from Kopienkritik to recognise the Roman agency involved in selecting and shaping Greek art. What was evidence of slavishness is now evidence of Rome’s power to own, imbibe, (re)write the script.
Morris 2005: 20 and passim.
De Jong and Versluys, this volume (p. 4).
Important here is Loar, MacDonald and Padilla Peralta 2018: 6: ‘The motor of Roman appropriation was the imperial project’.
See Versluys and Ter Keurs in this volume.
Vout 2018: 24.
Hdt. 9.80.1.
De Jong, this volume.
Hdt. 9.81.1.
In addition to our passage of Herodotus, Th. 1.132.2, Pseudo-Dem. 59.97–98, D.S. 11.33.2 and Paus. 10.13.9, and, for the Tripod’s afterlife, Madden 1992 and Stephenson 2016.
Pritchett 1971: 93–100 and 1979: 277–295 and now Jim 2014. Note, however (Snodgrass 1967: 89), the decline in such dedications in the fifth century BCE and the rise in ‘converted objects’ (i.e. dedications made expressly for the purpose, often from the proceeds of the spoils of war).
Olympia, B 5100 inscribed
Pritchett 1971: 77.
Th. 2.13.4.
For the inventories, see Harris 1995 and, for famed individual items, Dem. 24.129 and Paus. 1.27.1. The akinakai are an obvious exception, though none of them are identified in the inventories as Mardonius’ former property. In other words, they only remain Persian up to a point.
See Higbie 2003, Shaya 2005 and 2014 and Platt 2010.
Hdt. 9.81.2–9.82.1.
Hdt. 9.83.
Miller 2017: 52–55.
Plu. Cim. 9.2–4, citing Ion of Chios as his source.
Miller 1997: 34–37.
Plu. Arist. 5.5. Under Rome, Persia’s reputation for gold and pearls accrued: see Dalby 2000: 188–191.
See De Jong, this volume, for this passage and spectatorship.
Miller 2017: 55–62.
Isoc. De pace 82. See Goldhill 1987.
Fachard and Harris 2021.
On the difficulty today of establishing the route of the triumph, Beard 2007: 92–105.
See Strootman in this volume. Helpful also is Erskine 2013.
Athen. 5.201e, citing Callixeinus of Rhodes.
Plb. 12.13.9–12.
Excellent here is Carey 2003.
De Jong argues that there is a moral dimension in Herodotus already, but even then, it pertains, more narrowly, to the Spartan general’s ‘latent interest in tyranny’.
Cic. N.D. 3.34.
On the agency of Greek statues, Bremmer 2019 [2013], and, still important for initiating debate, Gordon 1979.
Cic. N.D. 3.34: to add insult to injury, he then demands that the buyers of these metal objects return them to their shrines.
Cicero’s ‘detrahere’ in this passage means to pull down and detract from, and is accompanied by jeering or mocking on Dionysius’ part. For all that the helots strip the bodies in Herodotus, it is more of a salvage operation: the general Pausanias’ command is to have them ‘gather up’ the spoils (
D.C. 43.42.1–2. Also Plu. Caes. 56.4.
Suet. Cal. 57.1.
Plu. Marc. 21.1–2 (trans. B. Perrin).
I owe the quote to Edgar Allan Poe’s Helen of 1845. Helpful here is Spawforth 2011.
Gorman and Gorman 2014: 1.
Plb. 9.10.2–3.
Plb. 9.10.5.
Plb. 9.10.7. The Herodotus passage (9.82) stops at ‘seeing’ (
Liv. 25.40.2. Putting this ‘ethics of ownership’ section into context is Vout 2018: chapter 3.
Liv. 39.6.7, discussed by Versluys, this volume and van Gils and Henzel, this volume.
Flor. Epit. 1.13 [1.18.27].
Vell. 1.13.4–5.
Crucial here is Wallace-Hadrill 2008.
This at least is what Zanker 1987 famously argues. Important here too is Hölscher’s book of the same year.
Vout 2022: 255–256. For the sumptuary aspects of Julian legislation, van Gils and Henzel, this volume.
Cic. Rep. 1.21–22. Also Pieper, this volume.
D.S. 31.8.9.
Although rivalling him is Aemilius himself who is described (Plu. Aem. 34.3) as ‘
Plu. Aem. 34.1 (trans. B. Perrin).
J. BJ 7.148.
J. BJ 7.132 (trans. H.St.J. Thackeray). Also 7.122 and 7.131.
On the epic nature of the description of multitude, see e.g. Hom. Il. 2.488–492, Od. 11.328–331, and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes 201–203. I thank Matthew Ward for these references.
J. BJ 7.149. For Neptune on the reverse of Flavian coinage, see e.g. https://www.forumancientcoins.com/moonmoth/coins/titus_003.html (last accessed 28 April 2022).
Plin. Nat. 34.84. This is arguably rendered more violent in the telling than much of the requisition and translocation of enemy spolia. See Varner 2017.
J. BJ 7.160 (trans. H.St.J. Thackeray): see Moormann’s chapter.
See van de Velde, this volume.
Versluys, this volume.
Hom. Il. 6.311.
Versluys, this volume.
Plu. Marc. 21.3–4.
Now displayed in the Centrale Montemartini, Rome. See La Rocca 1985 and 1988.
Fraser 1972: 456.
Benjamin 2008 [1935].
Vout 2018: 60.
Vout 2019.
National Archaeological Museum, Naples, inv. no. 4885.
Loar, MacDonald and Padilla Peralta 2018: 3.
Bloom 1973.
Eckstein 2005: 807.
See the Chapters by Pieper and Allan, this volume. A good ancient example of this posturing is Mart. 9.59.12.
X. Cyr. 7.5.73 (trans. W. Miller).
Plin. Nat. 36.20–21.
Wallace-Hadrill 2008: 41, and Osborne and Vout 2010.
Osborne and Vout 2010: 240. Wallace-Hadrill 2008: 356 himself puts this rather more passively.
Wallace-Hadrill 2008: 27.
J. BJ 7.161 (as opposed to
J. BJ 1.9 as discussed by Huitink, this volume.
Cameron 1966: 466.
Proc. Goth. 12.42. See Noy 2005: 383–384. Note that in the conflicting section of the Vand. (9.5), cited by Moormann, this volume, they are