ROMAN THE IMPERIAL PERIOD

The Imperial period is a curious time in the history of Greece. Politically, the country now consisted only of Achaea, one province among many, ruled from Corinth by its Roman governor. For this reason, it is often called the Roman period. However, this term does wrongly suggest that Greece was then part of a general process of Romanization, and while from the point of view of the Empire’s internal organization it may have been worth no more than the Gaulish or African provinces — economically it was worth much less — it had a special place in literature and art.

This is hardly surprising if we think of the passion for all things Hellenic which affected the Romans after the middle of the Hellenistic period, their love of the Greek language and the writers and philosophers of Greece, and of its art. The evidence is the many pictures and statues that were taken to Rome, and the replicas that were made when originals were inaccessible. Under the Empire the tendency was by no means reversed; for an example, we have only to look at to see Hadrian still surrounding himself with Greek works in the second century AD. Consequently Greece, including the old Greek cities of Asia Minor, remained a pole of attraction both academic (for many young men came to study philosophy and rhetoric in Athens) and at the touristic level. Pausanias would not have written so detailed a Description of Greece in the second century AD if the great Sites and monuments had not seen plenty of visitors. There must even have been travel souvenirs on sale then; at least, St Paul tells us that miniature silver replicas of the temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, were for sale in Ephesus, an interesting piece of information for the archaeology of Greek sculpture, even though no such replicas have been preserved.

The items Pausanias describes as “worth seeing”, and conversely those he does not describe, tell us a good deal about what must have interested travellers, chiefly the art of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. But this great interest in Classicism did not mean that contemporary production was slowing down, and the history of Greek art cannot be brought to an end with the advent of the Roman Empire, though it is customary to do so.

There is a great deal of Greek sculpture of the Imperial period, and we should define its particular characteristics. Ignoring, from the stylistic point of view, the tentative appearance of exoticism with two statues in the Egyptian style from Marathon, the results of a persistent taste for the antique (such as the copy of a caryatid from the Erechtheion discovered in Corinth), and from the sociological point of view the role of commissions from emperors or weathy patrons such as the rhetorician Herodes Atticus, three main features remain.

Agrippa in Athens and the barbarian prisoners featured on a Corinthian façade. In relief, the “Tower of the Winds” in Athens, actually a water—clock set in a new kind of octagonal tower, owes its name to the eight personified winds carved on its upper area. Also in Athens, the Monument of Philopappos is a tomb, also of an unusual type, with its concave façade containing reliefs which curve with it. Chiefly in Asia Minor, pillars and door frames are decorated with profuse foliage sculpture, with small figures nestling in the spaces.

In theatres the stage, originally almost at ground level and then, in the Hellenistic period, supported on a colon-nade, now rested on a plinth which sometimes featured relief decoration, drawing principally on imagery associated with Dionysos, the patron of drama. In Athens, reliefs show the birth of the god, the sacrifice offered to him by Icarios, etc. Less well known are the reliefs of the theatre of Perge, a little to the north of Antalya, presenting a much larger Dionysiac ensemble: the childhood of the god — his birth, Hermes carrying him to the nymphs of Nysa, his first bath — and then the procession he leads, standing in a chariot drawn by panthers.

Still crowned by statues, and usually with reliefs on several of its surfaces, the triumphal arch provided plenty of opportunity for sculpture in the Imperial period, but it remained more common in the Latin west than in the Hellenized east. In Thessalonika, however, the arch of Galerius, built in 303, still preserves reliefs showing the victories of the Romans over the Persians.

The chest of the sarcophagus is decorated either on all sides, or more frequently only on some of them, with reliefs showing subjects less varied than in Italy. They usually depict heavy garlands hanging between the heads of oxen, sometimes held up by little Cupids. Mythological subjects such as Amazonomachies, the Calydonian Hunt, the stories of Hippolytos or Bellerophon, Erotes, and so on, arc much less common.

We are all of course at liberty to judge the strength or otherwise of Roman influence on Greek art in the Imperial period. Whatever our verdict, it is crucial to recognize that art, like language, institutions and other social factors, has a part to play in encounters between civilizations. It was mentioned above that the “barbarian” world of the fourth century BC had Hellenized itself artistically, and more particularly in sculpture, long before it was Hellenized politically and perhaps even linguistically. Here it is the other way round: the Romanization of the Greek provinces of the Empire was a political process. In art and language, Greece largely remained Greek. But whether art borrows from abroad or resists its influence, it is not solely there to be observed and admired, as is too often believed. Art itself is a political fact, among other things, and there can be no justification for divorcing the history of art from history as a whole.