Kings

From the same time but quite separate are the portrait images of Alexander and the kings (figs. 5, 6). The kings created a quite new mode of portrait image, one that seems designed to express the essentials of their new style of kingship. We may examine its main components as follows: (l) external attributes, (2) the royal portrait head, (3) the royal body or figure.

A royal statue could wear and hold a variety of royal and divine at-

[13] Demosthenes (Copenhagen): Richter, POG , 219, no. 32, figs. 1398-1402.

[14] Richter, POG , 185, figs. 1071 and 1074 (under "Menippos," but unidentifiable).

tributes, but generally there is a striking lack of emphasis on regalia. This well reflects the minimal character of Hellenistic royal ceremonial. (There seems to have been very little royal ritual associated with Hellenistic kingship.) A regular attribute of the statue was probably a spear that the figure leans on and holds with an arm raised (fig. la).^[15] Originally it had simple military meaning but soon, in this pose, it became a symbol of royal power. It may allude directly to, or represent visually, the important justification of the Hellenistic kingdoms as "spear-won land."^[16]

The only invariable attribute of the kings was the diadem, a band of flat white cloth worn around the head. This was not a crown, not an Achaemenid insignia, but simply a Greek headband promoted to take particular royal meaning. Someone invented an etiology for it—that it had been borrowed from the conquering Dionysos and that it symbolized victory.^[17] This may represent the official view of its origins. (Dionysos was the most important divine model for Hellenistic kingship and victory its single most important legitimating feature.) The diadem soon became the single exclusive symbol of Hellenistic kingship, and, like many good symbols, it was in origin perhaps empty of precise meaning.

Divine attributes (like the aegis or animal horns) could be used to suggest more specifically godlike status. But they were employed only very sparingly; other, less obvious, less overt means were usually preferred. In the major portrait of Demetrios Poliorketes copied in the herm in Naples, the king wears small bull's horns which state an association with the god Dionysos (fig. 5b).^[18] Images of Dionysos himself, however, generally did not wear bull's horns. Demetrios and other kings took the well-known association of Dionysos with bulls and gave it a new kind of visual prominence associated primarily with themselves—that is, the horns refer as much to the king as to the god.^[19] The kings thus avoid a

[15] Bronze ruler statuette (Baltimore): D. G. Mitten and S. F. Doeringer, Master Bronzes from the Classical World (Mainz, 1967), no. 132; Smith, HRP , 154, no. 13.

[16] For a thorough examination of this concept, see A. Mehl, AncSoc 11/12 (1980/81): 173-212.

[17] This origin is recorded by Diodorus Siculus 4.4.4 and Pliny Naturalis historia 7.191. See more fully, Smith, HRP , 34-38.

[18] Smith, HRP , no. 4.

[19] It has often been thought that Demetrios' horns refer to Poseidon. The bull-horned and bull-formed nature of Dionysos was, however, much stronger in contemporary minds, especially after Euripides' Bacchae , than bull associations of Poseidon. Poseidon appears on the reverse of coins of Demetrios as a protecting deity of the admiral king, but this does not imply that the horns of the royal portrait on the obverse necessarily refer to Poseidon. In the light both of the powerful Dionysian associations of bulls and bull's horn and of the direct association of Demetrios with Dionysos in contemporary sources (for example, ap . Athenaeus 6.253d; Plutarch, Demetrios 2), a reference to Dionysos was surely the preferred meaning. For Dionysos and the bull, see esp. E. R. Dodds, Euripides: Bacchae , 2d ed. (Oxford, 1960), xi-xxv.

direct divine equation. The horns express not that the king is Dionysos but that he is like Dionysos, or has Dionysos-like powers.

The royal head was modeled broadly on a combination of Alexander and young gods and heroes. It was intended to have a Dionysian éclat: smooth, youthful, dynamic, godlike. The early Hellenistic royal portrait refers clearly to Alexander but is careful to define itself as recognizably different (fig. 5b). Alexander portraits have the longer hair of Greek heroes, like Achilles, and the distinctive anastole of hair over the forehead (fig. 5a).^[20] The early kings wear a thick wreath of hair, but it is not as long at the sides and back, and they carefully avoid the anastole , which was Alexander's personal sign.

The same can be seen in the physiognomy. The royal face draws on ideal heads of gods and heroes but is careful to avoid confusion with them, by formal adjustment or by introducing a (more or less slight) layer of individuality. The portraits define the king as like the gods but different. They forge a distinctive royal style.

Oriental influence on the Hellenistic royal image has sometimes been posited. The portraits we have, however, provide no real evidence for "interpenetration." There is little that cannot be explained in Greek terms— either in attributes or in style. For example, bulls horns are found on Mesopotamian images; but they are also used on pre-Hellenistic Greek images. Bull's horns played an important part in Greek terminology about Dionysos,^[21] and we should prefer this meaning. Greco-Egyptian royal portraits^[22] may seem to be good examples of stylistic interpenetration, but these images, as we can tell from their use of native hard stones and Pharaonic format, were for Egyptian consumption. The influence here is all one way: Alexandrian royal portraits may affect the traditional Pharaonic images of the king, but the reverse is hard to detect.^[23]

The third-century royal portrait head had a considerable range of variation, but with clearly definable limits. We may take two aspects: (1) apparent age and physiognomy, and (2) hairstyle.

The king usually looks young or ageless—that is, about twenty to

[20] V. Poulsen, Les portraits grecs (Copenhagen, 1954), no. 31—from or reflecting an Alexander statue of the early Hellenistic period. Most recently on Alexander portraits, see the full study by A. F. Stewart, Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (Berkeley, 1993).

[21] See Dodds, Euripides: Batchae , xviii.

[22] Full collection in H. Kyrieleis, Bildnisse der Ptolemäer (Berlin, 1975).

[23] Kyrieleis, Bildnisse der Ptolemäer , argues this case, but to this writer not convincingly.

thirty-five, not younger, rarely older. Some kings, especially in the first generation, who were in fact in their seventies or eighties, can use a more mature image but never one near their real age. This was the case, for example, with the two great dynasty founders, Ptolemy Soter and Seleukos Nikator (fig. 5c).^[24] In the Naples bronze, Seleukos has a wreath of hair and dynamic posture, signifying "king," and strong mature features, signifying "older king," but he is not near his real age (probably about sixty to seventy) at the time of this portrait.

The limiting case in the portrayal of real-looking features is provided by the nonroyal dynast Philetairos of Pergamon (fig. 5d).^[25] He has a dynamic posture but short, flat hair (no diadem, of course) and heavily jowled, "unroyal" features.

Hairstyle Was a highly expressive and important variable in royal portraits. This is especially well shown by the two versions of a head from Pergamon (fig. 6).^[26] The head was originally made when the sitter was still merely a prince or dynast, because (although this has not been noticed) it clearly wore no diadem in the first version. Later, a diadem and the thick wreath of hair were added separately, no doubt when he took the kingship. The circumstances well suit Attalos I in the 230s and support the traditional identification of the head as this ruler.

The adjustment dramatically alters the portrait's effect. In the second version it becomes a textbook royal portrait: smooth, ageless features; thick hair; dynamic posture. These express the Hellenistic king's unique status: like a god, like Alexander, but subtly different from both.

The same can be seen in the styling of the royal figure. There were no prerogatives in royal statue types. As far as we can tell the king's statue was most commonly naked, with or without a chlamys over the shoulder. Since both gods and athletes had been shown naked for a long time, this carried no special meaning for the kings. We have few examples, but it seems dear that the kings statue was set off subtly by distinctions of style and posture.

If we compare a high-quality ruler statue, like the Terme Ruler (fig. 1b),^[27] and an athlete of comparable quality (lake the Getty bronze),^[28] it is extraordinary that with no documentation and with so much in com-

[24] Seleukos (Naples): Smith, HRP , no. 21. Ptolemy: ibid., nos. 46-47.

[25] Philetairos (Naples): Smith, HRP , no. 22.

[26] Attalos I (Berlin): Smith, HRP , no. 28.

[27] Smith, HRP , no. 44. It does not really matter for this purpose whether one thinks the statue a Macedonian prince or a Republican dynast looking like one (so, most recently, P. Zanker, Augustus und die Macht der Bilder [Munich, 1987], 15, fig. 1). I am concerned only with the body type. There are other examples (e.g., fig. la, above), but none of such high quality.

[28] J. Frel, The Getty Bronze (Malibu, Cal., 1982).

mon—nudity and youth—it is still so easy to tell the ruler from the athlete. It is not simply due to differences in pose; this is a matter of body language. The ruler statue borrows the basic figural schemes of the athlete, but adjusts or intensifies their effect. It uses an exaggerated, athletic muscle style as a metaphor of power.

We may return and compare the city elders (figs. 2-4). The kings had, of course, to pay respect to the ideology of ethical kingship that was constantly recommended to them by the philosophers; but, for their portrait image, their visual identity, they had their own concerns: to be Alexander-like, charismatic, godlike. Morality made visual was very much secondary. It is still remarkable that there is a complete lack of significant overlap between portraits of kings and of civic leaders. Each uses exclusive defining elements in both external appearance and style. The kings are naked and godlike; they may wear a chlamys but never a himation; and they are clean shaven. The city leaders, on the other hand, are shown as mortal flesh and blood, seem always to wear at least a himation or chlamys, and have beards. Only four kings, out of well over fifty whose portraits we know, wore a beard.^[29]

Some cosmopolitan city-men no doubt shaved, and we have one or two examples, most notably Menander (fig. 3d);^[30] but there remains no stylistic overlap, no chance of taking Menander for a prince. We may suspect that many of the kings' adherents in the cities, the locally based Friends of the king (philoi ),^[31] would have adopted this manner of self-presentation, but we cannot prove it without sure identifications. We may say that in this respect Menander was clearly presenting himself as a man of the new age. Generally, as far as we can see, the external signs of being a court and royal person versus a city and nonroyal person seem to have been used in an exclusive way. This opposition was played out from head to body. The aging, diffident statue of Demosthenes makes a deliberate contrast with the ideal assertion of power in the naked Macedonian ruler figures (figs. la, b).