NEW YORK CITY — Antiquity is news. President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army — who are themselves responsible for the wholesale destruction of the heritage cities of Aleppo and Homs — retakes the ancient crossroads city of Palmyra, rescuing the Greek, Roman and Persian ruins from ruin at the hands, jackhammers and explosives of the self-styled Islamic State. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh — call it what you will — views any history not of its own writing as idolatry, through the blood red mesh of an ideology of violence. In other news, the United States Congress passes a law forbidding the importation of artifacts from Syria. Yet a December 4, 2015, New Yorker article, “The Real Value of the ISIS Antiquities Trade,” cites scholars in the field who contend that the assertion that there is a “billion-dollar market” in illicit antiquities is severely inflated, encouraging looters while aiming at legitimate trade.
Meanwhile, in London’s Trafalgar Square, a scale model replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph — built by Emperor Septimius Severus at the beginning of the Third Century CE to commemorate Rome’s victory over the Parthians and blown to shards by ISIS — is unveiled as a gesture of cultural solidarity. Italian robots carved the arch out of Egyptian marble from a 3D computer model compiled from hosts of photographs. The arch will travel to New York in the fall and elsewhere 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 of the people who made, used and owned the things we collect and cherish we generally see them through a golden haze, as figures out of simpler times. To approximate what the people of Palmyra or Aleppo are going through, imagine New York or Paris 2,000 years in the future, with the Empire State Building a crumbling but revered ruin and the Eiffel Tower a hologram. What will those things mean to the people who live there? What would they mean if those people found themselves in the middle of a civil war, beset and besieged and, ultimately, fleeing for their lives?
Who owns history? The winners write it, they say, in fact meaning that the winners 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 history belong? Into the hubbub comes the indispensable exhibition “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 17, a display made possible by the temporary closing of the 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 the Great in 323 BCE in Babylon — on his way back from conquering much of India — 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 themselves, 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, from the Danube to Egypt in a common visual language they called Koine. The term also names the hybridization that took place as Greek arts came into contact with indigenous cultures and shifted from divine, austere representation to a kind of baroque, humanistic realism.
Style aside, what immediately springs to mind in the exhibition is how many of the objects are Roman copies of lost Greek originals borne out of the Roman mania for all things Greek that created a wide-ranging market for sculptures and paintings and led to the concept of the museum. The influence of Greek arts and artistic practice on the Roman Republic and Empire as it grew and spread furnishes a good 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 works of the period.
Conquests. Alexander’s over Persia, Egypt and points east; the Successors’ over local kingdoms, city states and one another; Rome’s, ultimately, over all. Are all the great movements in art the product of — the celebration of? — conquests of one sort or another: people over people, nation over nation, idea over idea?
One of the great capitals of the Hellenistic world, Pergamon (now Bergama, Turkey), the center around which the Met exhibition revolves, rose on the south slope of a massif under the direction of Philetairos (circa 343–263 BCE), a commander in the cohort of Lysimachos — one of Alexander’s generals. Philetairos’s task was to create an all but impregnable citadel for a “treasure of war funds,” as the show’s companion catalog describes it. Philetairos jumped ship, vowing allegiance instead to Seleucus — another of Alexander’s generals, and founder of the powerful Seleucid Dynasty — just prior to Seleucus’s death. And though he himself was a eunuch, Philetairos left Pergamon to his nephews, who would found what has become known as the Attalid Dynasty, named for a number of its kings. Pergamon flourished until the death of Attalos III in 133 BCE. His will left the city and its adjacent lands, called Mysia, to “the people of Rome.”
Excavated almost continuously by German archaeologists and others since the 1870s, Pergamon is one of the most studied, best-preserved Hellenistic capitals. A fascinating 360-degree panorama painting by artist Yadegar Asisi shows a colorful bustling city as it would have appeared in the Second Century CE. In his depiction, as in fact, many of the statues are brightly painted, in diametric opposition to our notion of classicism, which rests on our misreading of the austere white columns and busts of antiquity. And it begs a question worth asking even if we have asked it before: what would the Western world look like if we had known about those vibrant reds and blues and other colors that coated ancient Greece and Rome?
Three buildings dominated Pergamon.
The Asklepieion, or healing sanctuary, was a center of ancient medicine. The caduceus of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, became the symbol of Pergamon and is featured on many coins minted in the city. The snake, renewing itself by shedding its skin, possessing healing powers in its deadly venom, seems to speak directly to the cycles of creation and destruction that mark and mar history and the history of art.
Pergamon’s Sanctuary of Athena held a library that is thought to have been exceeded only by the one at Alexandria.
The statue of Athena Parthenos, the single most imposing work in the exhibition, is a copy of the lost Athena, carved in the Fifth Century BCE by Pheidias, that stood in the Parthenon. Slabs from a large relief that once lined the walls of the sanctuary depict spoils of Pergamon’s successful wars against the Galatians (Gauls) and others. Taken together, these suggest a visual, and thereby cultural, continuity between Athens and Pergamon, between the past and present.
Most important of all was the Great Altar, whose structure and sculptural decoration was meant to evoke the palace of the gods at Olympus. The surviving fragments of the Gigantomachy frieze that surrounded the base of the altar attest to its status as a wonder of the ancient world. “The myth of the Gigantomachy tells the story of the earth mother, Gaia, who from the blood of the emasculated Uranos gives birth to the giants — a monstrous, aggressive race imbued with great strength — who then attempt to overthrow the reign of the Olympians and rule the world. An oracle predicts that the gods will be able to resist the giants only if a mortal can be persuaded to fight on their side. Not surprisingly, this role falls to the hero Herakles, whose figure in the Great Frieze (destroyed in antiquity) was next to that of Zeus, one of the most prominent positions in the entire composition,” writes Andreas Scholl.
But the Gigantomachy is not a war between nature and culture, rather, it is a war between chaos and order. Herakles (Hercules, to us) as the necessary, human ally of the gods, of order, signals an artistic shift — one that is apparent in the exhibition — from the divine to the human, from gods to individual rulers. Types of people — mimes and actors, the old, the sick — begin to appear. Then individual people: wives and husbands, children. The Hellenistic moves art from idealism to realism, even in the strange and resplendent Vienna Cameo’s side-by-side profiles of Ptolemy II (283–246 BCE) and his sister-spouse Arsinoe II.
Later, especially in the coins of the period, highly realistic portraits will become heroic and the rulers will be deified, as Alexander the Great was. But the notion of individual identity, once out in the open, would never disappear entirely. A stroll through the magnificent Roman bronzes that close the exhibition proves the point.
One work, a beautiful, humble bronze bust simply titled “Male Head Wearing a Kausia,” sums up the exhibition. The kausia is a broad hat of Macedonian origin found on many coins of the period, most notably on coins from Bactria (now Afghanistan, where they are still worn to this day). The kausia seems to appear on numismatic portraits of aging rulers, replacing the military helmet, as a sign, perhaps, that peace and culture has displaced war, or should. Just as it is impossible to envision any group like ISIS emerging victorious and creating a flourishing hybrid culture in the manner of the Hellenistic Age, it is hard to imagine human beings breaking the cycle of creation and destruction that seems etched in our genome. In the bronze portrait, this unidentified but thoroughly individual man, a man who has seen and weathered a great deal, seems, with his kausia tilted jauntily on his head, open to new ideas and possibilities. There is no golden haze between the man in the kausia and us. Antiquity is news. So is hope.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.
