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Newsstand Rate $2.00INDEXES ON

PAGES 36 & 37

May 27, 2016

Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

Statue of Athena Parthenos, Greek, Hellenistic period, circa 170 BCE; copy ofa mid-Fifth Century BCE chryselephantine cult statue of Athena Parthenos byPheidias. Marble, height (without base) 10 feet 2¼ inches by width 46 5 / 8 inches.

Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Diadem with Herakles knot (“The Loeb Di-adem”), Greek, Hellenistic period, 200–150BCE. Gold, garnet, carnelian and sardonyx;diameter 9 1 / 8 inches. Staatliche Antikensam-mlungen, Munich —Renate Kühling photo

PERGAMON AND THE HELLENISTIC KINGDOMS

OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Hair ornament with bust of Athena, Greek,Hellenistic period, Second Century BCE,found in Thessaly. Gold, red garnets and

blue enamel; diameter of roundel 4 3 / 8 inches. Benaki Museum, Athens

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B Y J AMES D. B ALESTRIERI

NEW YORK CITY — Antiquity is news. Presi-dent Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army — who arethemselves responsible for the wholesale de-struction of the heritage cities of Aleppo andHoms — retakes the ancient crossroads city ofPalmyra, rescuing the Greek, Roman and Persianruins from ruin at the hands, jackhammers and explosivesof the self-styled Islamic State. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh — call itwhat you will — views any history not of its own writingas idolatry, through the blood red mesh of an ideologyof violence. In other news, the United States Congresspasses a law forbidding the importation of artifacts fromSyria. Yet a December 4, 2015, New Yorker article, “TheReal Value of the ISIS Antiquities Trade,” cites scholarsin the eld who contend that the assertion that there isa “billion-dollar market” in illicit antiquities is severelyinated, encouraging looters while aiming at legitimatetrade.

Meanwhile, in London’s Trafalgar Square, a scalemodel replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph — builtby Emperor Septimius Severus at the beginning of theThird Century CE to commemorate Rome’s victory overthe Parthians and blown to shards by ISIS — is unveiled asa gesture of cultural solidarity. Italian robots carved the arch

out of Egyptian marble from a 3D computer model compiled fromhosts of photographs. The arch will travel to New York in the fall andelsewhere thereafter. And then there are the people for whom antiquity is, or was, home.The world of antiques and art is a world of objects. When we think

Calyx-crater (“The Borghese Krater”), Greek, Late Helle-nistic period, 40–30 BCE. Marble, height 67¾ inches.Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image ©RMN-Grand Palais/

Art Resource, NY

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10C — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — May 27, 2016

“Weary Herakles,” Greek, Hellenistic pe-riod, Third Century BCE, base early FirstCentury CE. Bronze and silver, height in-cluding base 15 3 / 8 by width 6 7 / 8 inches. Mu-seo Archeologico Nazionale d’Abruzzo VillaFrigerj

Statue of a Roman general (“The TivoliGeneral”), Roman, late period, circa 80–60BCE. Marble, height 74 inches. PalazzoTerme, Rome

Rhyton in the form of a centaur, Greek (Se-leucid), Hellenistic period, circa 160 BCE.Silver, partially gilt; height 8 5 / 8 inches. Dis-covered in Falerii Novi (Cività Castellana),Italy, 1810. Antikensammlung, Kunsthis-torisches Museum, Vienna

of the people who made, used and owned the things we collect and cherish we

generally see them through a golden haze, as gures out of simpler times. Toapproximate what the people of Palmyra or Aleppo are going through, imag-ine New York or Paris 2,000 years in the future, with the Empire State Build-ing a crumbling but revered ruin and the Eiffel Tower a hologram. What willthose things mean to the people who live there? What would they mean ifthose people found themselves in the middle of a civil war, beset and besiegedand, ultimately, eeing for their lives?

Who owns history? The winners write it, they say, in fact meaning that thewinners obliterate it, appropriate it, melt it down, take it as spoils, preserve it,absorb it, adopt it. But who owns it? Or, in other words, to whom does historybelong? Into the hubbub comes the indispensable exhibition “Pergamon andthe Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” at the Metropolitan Museumof Art through July 17, a display made possible by the temporary closing ofthe Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The objects on view, more than 250 of them,ask hard questions in myriad ways. The answers they offer are beautiful and,at times, unsettling.

The Hellenistic period spans the years between the death of Alexander theGreat in 323 BCE in Babylon — on his way back from conquering much ofIndia — to the death of Cleopatra after the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE. After

Alexander, his successors, known as the Diadochi, divided his empire, aligning

themselves with his invincible divinity even as they sparred among them-selves, jockeying for territory and preeminence.The term Hellenistic describes Greek art forms, imagery and iconography

as they spread from the banks of the Ganges to the Straits of Gibraltar, fromthe Danube to Egypt in a common visual language they called Koine . The

term also names the hybridization that took place as Greek arts came intocontact with indigenous cultures and shifted from divine, austere repre-sentation to a kind of baroque, humanistic realism.

Style aside, what immediately springs to mind in the exhibition is howmany of the objects are Roman copies of lost Greek originals borne outof the Roman mania for all things Greek that created a wide-ranging

market for sculptures and paintings and led to the concept of themuseum. The inuence of Greek arts and artistic practice on theRoman Republic and Empire as it grew and spread furnishes agood portion of what we know about the Hellenistic world. Copies— which swing us back to the new scale model of Palmyra’s Arch

of Triumph — are often the only insights we have into the worksof the period.Conquests. Alexander’s over Persia, Egypt and points east; the Suc-

cessors’ over local kingdoms, city states and one another; Rome’s, ul-

timately, over all. Are all the great movements in art the product of— the celebration of? — conquests of one sort or another: people overpeople, nation over nation, idea over idea?

One of the great capitals of the Hellenistic world, Pergamon (now Ber-gama, Turkey), the center around which the Met exhibition revolves, rose onthe south slope of a massif under the direction of Philetairos (circa 343–263BCE), a commander in the cohort of Lysimachos — one of Alexander’s gener-als. Philetairos’s task was to create an all but impregnable citadel for a “trea-sure of war funds,” as the show’s companion catalog describes it. Philetairos jumped ship, vowing allegiance instead to Seleucus — another of Alexander’sgenerals, and founder of the powerful Seleucid Dynasty — just prior to Seleu-cus’s death. And though he himself was a eunuch, Philetairos left Pergamon

to his nephews, who would found what has become known as the AttalidDynasty, named for a number of its kings. Pergamon ourished until

the death of Attalos III in 133 BCE. His will left the city and itsadjacent lands, called Mysia, to “the people of Rome.”

Excavated almost continuously by German archaeologists and

PERGAMON And The Hellenistic

Kingdoms Of The Ancient World

Small statue of Alexander the Great astride Bucephalus,Roman, Late Republican or Early Imperial period, secondhalf of the First Century BCE; copy of a Greek originalof circa 320–300 BCE. Bronze, height 19 1 / 8 by length 18½inches. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

Triton acroterion fromPergamon’s Great Altar,Greek, Hellenistic period,circa 160 BCE. Marble.Height with plinth 35 7 / 8 inches. Antikensammlung,Staatliche Museen zu Ber-lin —Johannes Lauren-

tius photo

Pair of armbands with tri-ton and tritoness, Greek,Hellenistic period, circa200 BCE. Gold and silver,height 9 7 / 8 and 10 3 / 8 inches.The Metropolitan Muse-um of Art, New York City

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