Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period

A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by S.L. James & S. Dillon (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 19 Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period Sheila Dillon Open most books on Greek art of the Hellenistic period and you will find a chapter devoted to portraiture. Indeed, individualized portraiture is widely considered to be one of the signature achievements of Hellenistic sculpture. The bronze portrait statues of the Athenian orator Demosthenes and the New Comedy poet Menander, set up in Athens in the early third century BCE and preserved in multiple marble versions of the Roman period, are well-known and well-studied examples of the genre, recognized as brilliant and penetrating visual analyses of their subjects. The roughly contemporary marble portrait statue of the priestess Aristonoe from Rhamnous (Figure 19.1), on the other hand, is absent from these studies, although it is one of the most fully documented, original portrait statues of the Hellenistic period. We know, for example, where this statue was set up, and we know who dedicated it and why; and the three crucial components of a portrait statue monument—the head, the body, and the inscribed base—are in this case all preserved. The lack of interest, on the part of portrait specialists, in this statue in particular and in Greek female portraiture in general is surely owed to the fact that these images are strongly idealizing constructions, with very little physiognomic individuality. While the inscription on the base of Aristonoe’s statue clearly tells us that the image represents a particular woman, the portrait’s face seems to contradict these claims to individuality. What the faces of female portraits show us is that physiognomic specificity and differentiation were not requirements of Hellenistic portraiture; the status of an image as a portrait did not necessitate an actual visual correspondence between subject and statue. The imposition on the ancient material of modern expectations that a portrait resemble its subject—and the more faithfully the better—has effectively erased the female portrait from the history of Greek art. The aim of this essay, then, is to reintegrate the female portrait into the art of the Hellenistic period and to provide an overview of the historical phenomenon of the commemoration of women in portrait statues. I explore how one might identify examples of female portrait statues among the material remains, consider who might have dedicated portrait statues of women and where these statues might have been displayed, and offer A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, First Edition. Edited by Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon.
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 264 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods Figure 19.1 Portrait statue of Aristonoe from Rhamnous. Athens, National Museum inv. 232. Statue H. 1.62 meters. Photo: Meletzis, DAI Athens neg. NM 5211. case studies of four female portrait statues where the subject of the statue, the context of its display, and the approximate date of the dedication are known. My focus is on the portraits of non-royal women. Not only is there little evidence for the portraits of royal women outside of Ptolemaic Egypt, but also the portraits of the local elite do not appear to be dependent on or derive from royal models. Because of the difficulty in dating much of this material with precision, the importance of the earlier fourth century BCE in the history of the genre, and the continuation of the Hellenistic style of female portraiture well into the Roman period in the Greek East, this essay will necessarily stray somewhat beyond the confines of the Hellenistic period at both ends of its chronological boundaries. 1 Finding the Female Portrait in Greek Art It is clear from both the sculptural and the epigraphic remains that portrait statues of women in both bronze and marble were a major component of Greek sculptural Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 265 production, particularly in the Hellenistic period. There are, however, a number of methodological problems one faces in dealing with this rich body of material. First and foremost is the identification of female portrait statues among the many, mostly fragmentary, sculptural remains. By this I do not mean identifying the subject of the portrait— that is, the name of the individual who is represented by the statue—but simply being able to tell whether a particular statue or statue fragment is from a portrait. For, unlike the portrait statue of Aristonoe, the head, the body, and the inscribed base (on which the portrait statue stood and that named the subject of the image) are only very rarely found together. Instead, we have many marble female statue bodies that survive without their portrait heads, and heads that are found without their statue bodies. Most of these statue fragments tend not to be found anywhere near where they were originally displayed, having been rebuilt into later walls or buildings, so they cannot be associated with particular inscribed statue bases. How then do we know that this female body or that female head, or even statues that preserve both body and head, originally came from a portrait statue monument? For draped female statue bodies, costume, pose, and the scale of the figure can be helpful in determining whether the subject of a statue is either mortal or divine. Both the Small and Large Herculaneum statue formats, for example, are very modestly draped in thin tunic and thick mantle, standard dress for many mortal women on Greek grave reliefs. Both are posed as if arranging or manipulating their clothing, a mundane gesture with which real women must have been very familiar and through which the signification of an image as that of a mortal woman could have been communicated (Zanker 1993); goddesses, that is, would not fuss with their clothes. Some statues have a more modern, transparent “drapery-through-drapery” style of costume, which was new in the Hellenistic period. These statues wear a thin mantle probably meant to evoke the fashionable silk of Kos (Weber 1969–70) or fine Egyptian linen, wrapped tightly over a long tunic made of thicker fabric. The skill with which the different textures and weights of these fabrics were rendered by Hellenistic sculptors represents a striking technical innovation in Greek sculpture and shows the importance of this new fashion as a symbol of luxury and affluence. A few of these statues, like the Kleopatra from Delos (Figure 19.2), also have a fringed edge along the left side of the silky transparent mantle, a detail that adds richness and visual interest to the clothing, and significant expense to the carving of the statue. Such garments were expensive sartorial status symbols that were clearly worn by elite women in real life; otherwise, the carefully detailed representation of this clothing in these statues would have made little sense. Statues of mortal women might also wear the same kind of costume one finds worn by images of goddesses. Such divine costume was perhaps meant to identify these women as priestesses, dressed in special clothing for ritual occasions (Connelly 2007). In the Hellenistic period, the peplos probably had special sacred or ritual connotations; by this time it would certainly have appeared decidedly old-fashioned, if not antique. Even the mid-fourth-century marble portrait statue of Queen Eurydice, mother of Philip II, looks very conservative and venerable, dressed in tunic, mantle, and peplos (Schultz 2007). Found in the sanctuary of Eucleia at Vergina, this votive statue was dedicated to the goddess in what was clearly a ritual context. The peplos is also worn by a series of eight marble statues of young women that were set up beginning in the later Hellenistic period in the sanctuary of Artemis in Messene; three of the statues are identified as priestesses of Artemis and five represent young initiates of the goddess (Connelly 2007; Dillon 2010). This divine imitation in dress can of course make it even harder to identify a statue as either 266 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods Figure 19.2 Statues of Kleopatra and Dioscurides, from the House of Kleopatra and Dioscurides on Delos. Delos Museum inv. A 7763, A 7799, A 7997a. Statue H. 1.48 meters. Photo: G. Hellner, DAI Athens neg. 1970/886. a portrait of a priestess or an image of the goddess herself. While the scale of a statue may be suggestive, without additional external evidence, such as provenance or attributes, it is very difficult to determine with certainty whether such an image is mortal or divine. Heads are even more problematic. A disembodied and fragmentary female head is very difficult to identify as a portrait of a mortal woman, rather than as an image of a goddess, based on appearance alone; women and goddesses in fact looked very much the same in Greek art. This is a problem one rarely encounters when dealing with male heads; statues of gods and men were carefully differentiated from one another and are now easy to tell apart, even in a fragmentary state. As with statue bodies, scale can help in determining whether a female head is mortal or divine. Heads that are well over life-size are more likely to represent a goddess, whereas a head that is life-size is more likely to come from the statue of a mortal woman, although the fact that portraits of Hellenistic queens were sometimes well over life-size adds an additional layer of complexity to the categorization of this material (Stewart 1998; cf. Palagia 2007). Life-size heads that are also veiled can probably be safely categorized as images of mortal women; mature women on Greek grave reliefs are frequently represented as veiled. While female portrait heads of the Hellenistic period have a mostly “ideal” or generic-looking appearance, as do images of goddesses, some heads do incorporate subtly individualizing traits, such as naso-labial lines or a slight double chin, which help to inflect these heads with “portraitness.” For the most part, the spectrum of variation in female portrait faces occurs around a narrowly defined set of repeated design elements, similar to the variation that one can see in the heads of women on Attic gravestones (Bergemann 1997). Female hairstyles are also limited, and, unlike Roman Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 267 fashion hairstyles, they do not change much over time. Mature women tend to wear a simple coiffure; their hair is parted at the middle, arranged in graceful waves on either side of the face, and drawn up into a bun at the back. Younger, perhaps unmarried, women might wear their long hair in a ponytail, or arranged in the so-called “melon” coiffure, named after the wedge-shaped sections into which the hair is divided, which are then gathered together in a bun at the back of the head. A few heads sport a more unusual hairstyle that I have nicknamed the “peak” coiffure, a style in which the hair is drawn up into a tall peak of waves over the middle of the forehead, adding extra height to the face and emphasizing the graceful triangle shape of the forehead. This hairstyle may have been a modified version of the “little torch” coiffure (lampadion) worn by courtesans. Both the melon and peak hairstyles are worn by women on Attic grave reliefs from about the middle of the fourth century and by the terracotta Tanagra figurines (Dillon 2010; Jeammet 2010). Indeed, because women are represented on Classical grave reliefs (beginning in the second half of the fifth century) well before they appear in portrait statues (by about the middle of the fourth century), the principal conventions for the representation of mortal women in sculpture were probably first worked out in funerary art. The basic model for a female portrait statue was therefore not the subject of the portrait but another image, with the precise identity of the subject given by the name inscribed on the statue’s base. Inscribed statue bases provide crucial evidence for the historical practice of dedicating portrait statues of women, particularly for the beginning of the practice in the fourth century, from which very little sculptural evidence is preserved. Identifying the bases that once supported portrait statues of women is straightforward as long as the inscriptions use the nominative-accusative honorific formula, which names the dedicator of the statue in the nominative case and the subject of the statue, the person honored, in the accusative case. The nominative-accusative pairing, which was first developed in the early fourth century for the very prestigious public honorific portrait statue, became the canonical form also for privately dedicated votive portrait statues in the Hellenistic period (Ma 2007). So, for example, we have the full public honorific formula used for the statue of Philotera dedicated by the demos of Pergamon, probably in the mid second century BCE (Dillon 2010: 38): Ὁ δῆμoς ἐτίμησεν Fiλωτέραν Λiμναίoυ δiά τε τὰς Λiμναίoυ τoῦ πατρὸς αὐτῆς πρὸς τὸν δῆμoν εὐεργεσίας καὶ δiὰ τὴν Κυνίσκoυ τoῦ ἀνδρὸς αὐτῆς ἀρετὴν καὶ πρὸς τὸν δῆμoν εὔνoiαν καὶ δiὰ τὴν αὐτῆς τῆς Fiλωτέρας πρóς τε qεoὺς εὐσέβεiαν καὶ τὴν πρὸς Κυνίσκoν τὸν ἄνδρα καὶ πρὸς τὰ τέκνα φiλoστoργίαν. The demos has honored Philotera, daughter of Limnaios, on account of the benefactions of her father Limnaios towards the demos, and on account of the moral excellence [aret
e ] of her husband Kyniskos and his good will [eunoia] towards the demos, and on account of the piety [eusebeia] of Philotera herself towards the gods, and her affection towards her husband Kyniskos and towards her children. Inscriptions on privately dedicated votive portrait statues of women tended to be somewhat less loquacious, while typically also giving priority to the person who set up 268 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods the statue. The late fourth century inscription on a base from Priene for the statue of Niko is typical in its economy (Dillon 2010: 42): [Μ]ενέδημoς Εὐμένoυ[ς] Νiκoῦν τῆν qυγατέρα [ἱ]ερησαμένην Ἀqηνᾶi Poλiάδi. Menedemos son of Eumenes (dedicated) Niko his daughter having been priestess of Athena Polias. Some portrait statues of the Hellenistic period, however, continue to use the more oldfashioned votive formula of “X (name in the nominative) dedicated to Y,” well known from the Archaic period; such examples did not explicitly name the subject of the statue. Such nominative name labels were used for some honorific statues in the fourth and early third centuries, particularly in Athens; the statue of Menander that stood in the Theater of Dionysos is a well-known example of this practice (IG II2 3777). The nominative name label, according to John Ma, “allows the subject of the statue to exist in the absolute, as an autonomous actor” (2007: 207). While no one has questioned the portrait status of the statue of Menander, there has been some disagreement about the status of monuments for women that use the nominative name label formula. Ridgway, for example, has questioned whether the statue of Nikeso from Priene (Figure 19.3) represents Nikeso herself or the goddess Demeter (Ridgway 1990: 210–11). The marble statue that stood on this base is preserved, and is discussed in more detail below as one of the case studies. The inscription on Nikeso’s monument (IPriene no. 173) reads simply: Νi[κ]ησὼ Ἱππoσqένoυς Ε. ὐκρίτoυ δὲ .γυνή, ἱερῆ Dήμητρoς καὶ Κόρης. Nikeso (daughter of) Hipposthenes wife of Eukritos, priestess of Demeter and Kore. Since we know that nominative name labels were used for portrait statues of men, it seems reasonable to assume that the same formula could also have been used for portrait statues of women. Indeed, a second female portrait statue from Priene for a priestess named Timonassa also uses the nominative name label (IPriene no. 172) on its base, which perhaps suggests a local preference for this old-fashioned formula. The empty footprints on the top of the base show that the statue of Timonassa was made of bronze, the preferred medium for public honorific portrait statues in the Hellenistic period. A good number of bases for female portraits preserve the cuttings for the attachment of a bronze statue. There are also a small number of female portrait statues in bronze actually preserved, for example the spectacular draped bronze woman found recently off the coast of Kalymnos, now on display in the local museum, and the more fragmentary bronze statue known as the Lady of the Sea in Izmir. The vast majority of female portrait statues that are preserved, however, are made of marble. Marble was clearly the material of choice for most Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 269 Figure 19.3 Cast of the portrait statue of Nikeso from Priene on its base. Statue H. 1.73 meters. Photo: Akademisches Kunstmuseum Bonn. funerary statuary and for many votive portraits of women, particularly it would seem in the later Hellenistic and early Imperial periods, to which many of the extant marble statues of draped women have been dated. The use of marble for votive statuary has, of course, a long history—in fact, the earliest surviving monumental votive marble statue was dedicated by a woman sometime in the second half of the seventh century BCE: Nikandre’s statue set up in the Sanctuary of Apollo on the island of Delos. Indeed, marble statues of standing draped women were extremely popular as votives in the Archaic period—the korai from the Athenian Acropolis are undoubtedly the best-known examples of this genre. With the introduction in the fifth century of bronze as the prestige material for largescale votives, marble seems to have fallen briefly out of favor; it came back into use in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods for large-scale prestige statuary of all kinds, including votive portraits of women. There is, for example, the marble portrait statue of a woman that was set up in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi with the so-called Delphi Philosopher (Dillon 2007: 73). Marble was also used for the many votive portraits of women that crowded the Artemision of Messene (Themelis 2003: 74–6). Marble portraits of priestesses stood inside the Temple of Artemis at Aulis (Connelly 2007: 157–61), and the 270 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods marble statue of the priestess Aristonoe was found in the so-called Little Temple at Rhamnous near the statue of the goddess Themis (Petrakos 1991: 20–3). In such cases, marble may have been chosen because it could impart something of a sacral character to a votive portrait, particularly when the portrait was set up near the marble statue of a divinity. The use of marble for both votive priestess portraits and images of goddesses could express materially the profoundly intimate relationship between the deity and her sacred servants, while imparting a strong visual coherence to the accumulated images, which in most cases would have been assembled over a long period of time. There may also have been something about the qualities of marble that made it especially desirable for female portrait statues. Perhaps it was its whiteness and luminosity, the way in which it could be carved so as to resemble flesh, and its ability to be colored that made it so attractive for statues of women; only with marble could a sculptor realize the full effect of pale flesh against the kind of colorful clothing that elite women were known to have worn and that was such an important part of a woman’s public self-presentation. A marble statue would probably also have been less expensive than one of bronze, a factor that may also have played a part in the choice of material. That economics sometimes played a role in statue honors is suggested by an example from Erythrae: when the people of Erythrae honored both Maussollos and Artemisia with statues and crowns, they gave Maussollos a bronze statue set up in the agora and Artemisia a marble one set up in a shrine of Athena. In addition, the crown awarded to Maussollos was worth almost twice as much as the one given to Artemisia (Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 266–7). In addition to inside temples or shrines, where else might one have found female portrait statues? Sanctuaries, perhaps unsurprisingly, seem to have been the main context for votive portrait statues of women, set up either as single figures or as part of family groups. Statues of women might be found in other locations, such as agorai, theaters, and private houses, but the archaeological and epigraphic evidence for statues in these display contexts comes mainly from the later Hellenistic and early Imperial periods. Female portrait statues were also primarily private family dedications set up by the women’s closest male relatives: their husbands, fathers, and sons. Although less frequently attested, women could also dedicate statues to family members: the statue of Archippe, for example, was set up by her mother, who commissioned the great sculptor Praxiteles to make the portrait (Agora I 4568; Dillon 2010: 47), and a woman named Demokrite set up bronze statues of her father and her son in the sanctuary of Amphiarion at Oropos (Petrakos 1997, nos. 424–5; Dillon 2010: 49). Women were only very infrequently honored with statues by public civic bodies such as the demos and/or the boule, particularly before the Imperial period. The extraordinary statue honors given to the female benefactress Archippe of Kyme in the second century BCE, which included a bronze portrait statue set up in the agora and a gilded statue set on a column, while well known and much discussed (van Bremen 1996: 13–19; see also Bielman, this volume, Chapter 17) were not at all typical. Much more usual were the statue honors accorded to Nikeso from Priene, Aristonoe from Rhamnous, Kleopatra from Delos, and Flavia Vibia Sabina from Thasos, which are the focus of the following case studies. 2 Case Studies The following case studies focus on female portrait statue monuments for which the inscribed base, the statue, and the context of the monument’s display are all preserved. Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 271 The statues are broadly spaced both geographically and chronologically, come from a range of contexts, and were set up for a variety of reasons. These examples also show us the variety of options available for statue formats and portrait costumes. The four monuments highlighted here are highly representative of the larger phenomenon of female portrait statue honors in Greece and the Greek East from the Hellenistic to the Roman period. Nikeso from Priene The marble statue of Nikeso (Figure 19.3) stood in a prominent location near the entrance to the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Priene (Eule 2001: 43–4; Connelly 2007: 137–8). The statue, which is usually dated to the first half of the third century and is now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, is the earliest surviving female portrait statue found together with its base. The inscription tells us that Nikeso was the daughter of Hipposthenes and the wife of Eukritos, and that she was a priestess of Demeter and Kore. While the dedicator(s) of the monument is not explicitly named, the mention of both her father and husband suggests that these two male relatives may have been responsible for setting up the statue. The figure wears the usual costume of tunic and mantle, but the mantle has been very carefully and finely textured to indicate the special quality of the fabric from which it is made. The finely engraved vertical texture lines, which make the mantle look like a pleated silk Fortuny dress, are combined with horizontal and diagonal fold lines that animate the surface of the statue and give interest to the statue’s somewhat static frontal pose. The folded edge at the top of the garment indicates that the entire mantle was doubled, an arrangement reinforced by the double line engraved along the mantle’s bottom hem. The unusual texturing of the mantle indicates that it was made of special— indeed exotic—material; the ample amount of cloth, together with the arrangement and rendering of the drapery, imparts a tactile richness and sumptuousness to this portrait statue that make it stand out among preserved examples. In addition to Nikeso’s elaborate costume, the attribute that was held in the statue’s now-missing right hand must have communicated information about the subject’s sacral status. Some have argued that the statue may have carried a hydria on its head, and terracotta figurines from Priene do depict such hydriaphoroi, who had a special connection to the cult of Demeter and Kore (Mantes 1990: 98–9). Others have suggested that the statue held a large torch, like the images of priestesses of Demeter one finds on Hellenistic grave reliefs as well as in figurines from Priene (Kron 1996: 148). Fragments of large Pentelic marble torches were indeed found during the excavation of the City Eleusinion in the Athenian agora, in which stood portrait statues of women dedicated to Demeter and Kore. If Nikeso held a torch, this might explain the depression in the upper surface on the right side of the base on which the statue of Nikeso stood: to accept the end of this large marble torch. Nikeso’s hairstyle is also unusual among female portrait statues of women. Although the head of the statue is missing, there are preserved three long locks of hair in front of either shoulder, and a long length of hair made up of nine or ten thick locks hanging down the statue’s back. Recalling as it does the hairstyles of the Acropolis korai, such an arrangement looks distinctly old-fashioned and indeed archaizing. Such shoulder locks seem not to have been worn by the mortal women depicted on Greek gravestones; neither is long, unbound hair hanging down the back a hairstyle that is typically associated with married women, as we know Nikeso to have been from the inscription on the statue’s base. Perhaps Nikeso’s unusual coiffure is meant to evoke the hairstyle worn by the goddess she 272 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods serves, a counterpart to the sartorial strategy of dressing in “divine” costume that we sometimes find employed, for example, by priestesses of Demeter and Isis on Hellenistic grave reliefs. What we may have here is an early example of the adoption of a divine hairstyle—better known from Roman portraiture—in the portrait of a mortal woman, perhaps as part of the special costuming she wore as a priestess. Aristonoe from Rhamnous The marble portrait of Aristonoe (Figure 19.1), a private votive statue dedicated by her son Hierokles to the goddesses Nemesis and Themis, stood in the cella of the so-called Little Temple in Rhamnous, near a marble statue of the goddess Themis dedicated by Megakles and made by the local sculptor Chairestratos (Petrakos 1991: 20–3). The costume of Aristonoe’s statue clearly shows the continued use of late Classical drapery styles for female portraits into the Hellenistic period. Indeed, although the statue has been dated on the basis of its style to the third century BCE, a recent analysis of the inscription places the monument in the mid-second century (Tracy 1990: 165). The statue of Aristonoe, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, clearly demonstrates the difficulty of dating female portraits based on sculptural style; both the style of the portrait head and the drapery are closely related to representations of women on late Classical Attic grave reliefs. Female portraits in general tend not to change all that much over time; there was, in fact, a great deal of stylistic continuity in female representation from the late Classical to the Hellenistic periods, and in fact even into the Roman period. The portrait of Aristonoe depicts a mature and dignified female subject. The face of the statue is oval in shape, broader at the chin and narrowing to a point above the middle of the forehead. The forehead is smooth and unlined, forming a graceful triangle framed by center-parted hair. The waved strands of hair form a sort of halo or crown around the face, as if they have been brought up and over and then tucked behind the wide, flat band worn around the head that is clearly visible at the hair’s central parting. The forehead swells slightly above the eyebrows, which curve directly into the long nose. There is a subtle break in the profile at the root of the nose. The large eyes have subtle but distinct “bags” beneath and there are shallow naso-labial lines that modulate the soft, smooth flesh of the cheeks; these traits inflect the facial features with some indications of age and “portraitness.” The mouth is small, with full lips that are gently parted. Soft creases mark the outer corners of the mouth. The chin is rounded and prominent, which is especially visible in profile, where one can also detect a slight double chin. The neck is long and graceful, the flesh marked by two obvious “Venus” rings. The head, which was worked separately from the body and then inserted into a cavity in the statue’s neck, is turned slightly to the right. The statue stands with the weight on the right leg, the left lightly bent at the knee. Both arms are bent at the elbows and held out in front of the body in a ritual gesture. Originally the statue held a phiale in the right hand; the separately attached right forearm, hand, and phiale are, however, now missing. The more open, active gesture of this statue is characteristic of many priestess portraits and was surely meant to call to mind publicly performed religious duties. Participation in cultic rituals provided one of the few sanctioned opportunities for women to present themselves in public, and, in some circumstances, at least probably gave them a degree of independent agency. Indeed, it is because of their role as priestesses that women first receive votive portrait statue monuments. Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 273 Kleopatra from Delos The statue of Kleopatra from the island of Delos (Figure 19.2) was set up in a very different context and for a very different reason than the statues of Nikeso and Aristonoe. The statue, which stood on a large base next to a portrait of her husband Dioscurides, was set up after 138/7 BCE in the courtyard of their house in the Theater Quarter (Dillon 2010: 49–50). In the inscription on the base (IDelos 1987), Kleopatra is named as the dedicator of the statue of her husband, set up in honor of his dedication of two silver tripods in the Temple of Apollo. Interestingly, there is no indication in the inscription that Kleopatra herself is represented, but that is of course self-evident to anyone viewing the monument. Although clearly a private dedication in the fullest sense of the word—the monument was not set up in public space—the inscription itself commemorates a public dedication made by Dioscurides and borrows language from the public sphere in its reference to an Athenian archon for the dedication’s date. The statue of Kleopatra is in the so-called Pudicitia format, which was one of the most popular statue types for female portraits in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The Pudicitia is characterized by the pose of the arms in front of the body, with the right held tightly across the body at the waist and the left bent at 90 degrees with the hand held close to the face. The gesture is one of restraint and modesty (hence the name), but it also has an air of elegance and charm. The portrait costume favored for statues in this format comprises a very long tunic of thick fabric over which is worn a large mantle made of thin, transparent material. This mantle, which in Kleopatra’s statue is augmented by a lovely fringed selvage, is pulled so tightly around the body that the vertical folds of the tunic worn beneath it are clearly visible; this “drapery-through-drapery” effect is a hallmark of the best Hellenistic sculpture. While the body-covering gesture of the arms suggests modest comportment, the silky transparency of the tightly wrapped mantle reveals the softly rounded feminine shape of the body. Indeed, the format’s modest pose and enveloping drapery well express the somewhat contradictory desired feminine ideals of restraint and propriety on the one hand and beauty and desirability on the other. The visual contrast between the statues of Kleopatra and Dioscurides illustrates clearly the standout quality of female portrait statuary. Diocurides’ body is almost completely obscured by the thick himation he wears, which falls in a series of straight, simple folds on both the front and back. Kleopatra’s statue, conversely, is so tightly wrapped by the mantle that the swelling forms of the body are lovingly revealed; her hourglass shape is particularly visible at the back. The tunic falls in deep pleats around her lower legs, and consists of so much fabric that the hem of the dress piles up on top of the plinth. Add to this richness of detail the lively polychromy of the original statue and the overall effect must have been electric; in order to understand the difference in the visual impact of these two statues, we need to mentally reconstruct for Kleopatra a gown of bright blue, pink, or yellow with gilded edges, as we see in the Tanagra figurines, and imagine Dioscurides dressed perhaps in white or brown. This difference was surely carried over to the now missing portrait heads. Dioscurides’ portrait face was undoubtedly quite distinct and individualized, perhaps like the so-called Worried Man, a beautifully detailed bronze portrait head found in the Granite Palaestra and dated to the second half of the second century (Queyrel in Marcade 1996: no. 100). The portrait face of Kleopatra was surely just as beautifully indistinct; in fact, it probably did not look all that different from the face of Aristonoe. Indeed, female portrait identity seems to have been expressed visually through the individuality and particularity of the draped statue bodies, which show an elaborate and 274 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods complex variety of poses and drapery patterns. With her beautifully detailed (and colorful) drapery, the portrait statue of Kleopatra is exemplary of this emphasis on the body as the marker of identity in female portraiture. Flavia Vibia Sabina from Thasos The statue of Flavia Vibia Sabina (Figure 19.4), now in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, clearly demonstrates how little the appearance of female portraits might change over the course of the approximately 350 years that separate this statue from the one, for example, of Aristonoe. Indeed, had this statue not been found directly in front of a base with an inscription of the early third century CE, the statue itself would likely have been dated based on its style to a much earlier period, as in fact it has been by a number of scholars (Eule 2001: 191). The report of the original discovery of the statue, however, makes clear that the statue indeed stood on this base (Dillon 2010: 147–8); while it is of Figure 19.4 Statue of Flavia Vibia Sabina, from in front of the Arch of Caracalla, Thasos. Istanbul Archaeological Museum inv. 375. Statue H. 2.11 meters. Photo: W. Schiele, DAI Istanbul neg. 78/291. Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 275 course possible that the statue was reused in this context, there is no archaeological evidence to suggest that this was the case. The statue of Flavia Vibia Sabina is a version made in local Thasian marble of the well-known and popular “Arm-Sling” format, named after the characteristic way in which the right arm is bent up across the chest and held close to the body, supported by the folds of the mantle. The male equivalent of the format, from which the female version was surely derived, was the most common statue type for male portrait statues in the Hellenistic period (Lewerentz 1993: 18–57), including the statue of Dioscurides discussed above. Developed in the later fourth century BCE, the format continued to be used for both male and female portrait statues into the Roman period; its simplicity and elegance were obviously felt to be an extremely satisfying solution for statuary self-representation (Smith 1998: 65–6). The face of Flavia Vibia Sabina also shows the continued use of the idealized, “non-portrait” style for the portraits of women even after a more distinctly Roman style of portraiture, with its emphasis on individualized physiognomy and fashion hairstyles, became an available option for images of women in the Greek East beginning in the late Hellenistic period. Both the base and its inscription, however, show what is new in female portraiture of this period. The statue and base are each about 2.10 meters in height; the combined height of Flavia Sabina’s monument would have been a very impressive 4.2 meters (almost 14 feet), with the statue towering above its viewers. Portrait statues of the Hellenistic period tended to inhabit much the same space as the viewer, with bases averaging around thirty to seventy-five centimeters and statues typically a bit less than two meters in height. The statue of Flavia Sabina also stood in a very prominent public location: in front of the Arch of Caracalla on the side that faced the agora. In the Roman period, female portrait statue monuments could be found inhabiting the same public spaces as male portrait statues. This is a public statue also in the sense that it was dedicated by the Council of Elders or Gerousia, rather than by Flavia’s family members. In fact, in the inscription (IG XII 8, 389; van Bremen 1996: 115 n. 3, Appendix 3 no. 3, 349) she is praised as “most noteworthy high priestess” (archiereia) and is said to share “in the same honors as the gerousiastai as first and only.” Her family is only referred to in the most general terms—she is Mother of the Gerousia apo progonon—so Flavia Sabina was not, as were so many women before her, defined by her relationships to specific named male family members. What is also distinctly Roman about the statue itself is that it is nearly identical both in appearance and in detail to another portrait statue from Thasos, found in the Sanctuary of Artemis Polo (Dillon 2010: 142–4). Although many Hellenistic female portraits share the same statue format and follow the same basic design, there is usually a wide range of creative variation in the details of the drapery and fold patterns. The strict stereotyping of female statue bodies—that is, the use of a limited number of carefully replicated statue types, as exemplified by these two statues from Thasos—is a phenomenon primarily of the Roman Imperial period. While her portrait statue may look much like the statues of other women, the inscription on the statue’s base claims for Flavia Vibia Sabina great distinction and indeed astonishing singularity. 3 The Female Portrait Statue in the Hellenistic Period: A Brief History A survey of the epigraphic and archaeological evidence for female portrait statues shows that sculpted images of women occupied a prominent place within the population of votive 276 Women in a Cosmopolitan World: The Hellenistic and Late Republican Periods statues on display in Greek sanctuaries. According to the available evidence, the practice of setting up votive portrait statues of women is first attested in Athens in the fourth century BCE; in the Hellenistic period, female portrait statues could be found in sanctuaries throughout the Aegean. The number of women so honored with portraits gradually increased over this long period, so that by the later Hellenistic period female portrait statues were a common type of votive dedication. This increase in the number of portrait statues of women suggests an increased interest on the part of families in commemorating publicly and permanently the roles their female members performed on behalf of the family, whether as priestesses or as mothers, wives, and daughters. The revolution in public honors in the fourth century made the portrait statue the most prestigious award a city could bestow on a civic benefactor. Since only a small number of individuals ever received such prestigious public honors, the increase in the number of privately funded portrait monuments constituted attempts by the families to share in this prestige. The successful completion of religious duties provided one handy occasion for such a dedication; in fact, it had been customary for a priest or priestess to dedicate an anathema to the deity at this time (van Bremen 1996: 176–9). The portrait statue became the most prestigious of anathemata. Family group monuments, which also began in the fourth century, also had a dedicatory function. These votives, an ostentatious display of religious piety and familial pride, need not have been associated with the fulfillment of specific religious duties: they were first and foremost gifts to the gods (L€ ohr 2000). Female portrait statues were often set up as part of these larger family groups, their statues standing together with the images of other family members. The inscriptions show us that even those women who received individual statue monuments were honored as representatives of their families; the statues were usually set up by their closest male relatives, whose own names would typically come first in the text on the statue’s base. The inscriptions for those female statues that were part of family groups were also usually much briefer than those for the statues of their male relatives, and there were usually fewer female statues than male. However, even if they might have taken second place in terms of numbers and length of text, female portrait statues must have stood out visually among this forest of male figures in their variety, the richness of their surface details, and—when made in marble—the vivid color of their clothing. Votive portrait statues were ornaments—beautiful decorations for the sanctuary (van Straten 2000: 211–12). Indeed, physical beauty was an important criterion for the selection of female cult agents, and the statues that represented these women were themselves beautifully crafted objects. Made in both bronze and marble, these expensive ornaments, created by some of the best sculptors of the day, demonstrated a family’s wealth and status, as well as their religious accomplishments and civic engagement. This emphasis on collective values is visualized as well in the appearance of female portraiture. During the course of the fourth century, the faces of male portraits become increasingly more differentiated and individualized, giving the impression that they represent the subject’s real appearance, whereas female portrait faces are much more uniform in appearance and change little over time. Indeed, the conventions of female portraiture established during the late Classical and Hellenistic periods continued to be used for hundreds of years. The bodies of these statues, however, present a different story. Whereas the male portrait body is highly standardized and formulaic right from the start, the female portrait body is the site of tremendous artistic creativity. The sophisticated surface treatment of the drapery-through-drapery style of female dress is one of the great sculptural innovations of Female Portraiture in the Hellenistic Period 277 the Hellenistic period, as distinctive an achievement as physiognomic realism and just as important for the convincing representation of the appearance of the portrait subject. Although some female portrait statues employ costumes that could also have been worn by images of goddesses, many in the Hellenistic period wear this modern style of female dress; this would have set these images sharply apart from those of the divine realm and tied the portrait statue more closely to the contemporary world. The statue bases name names—they tell us who the statue represents, who set the monument up, and why. The bases also made these portrait statues monuments: by elevating the statues from their immediate surroundings, the bases contributed significantly to the statues’ visual impact. The statues themselves depict their female subjects as self-confident, poised, and elegantly dressed in colorful clothing, with beautifully smooth and ageless faces. The subtle variation in these faces was probably more than enough to convey something of the subject’s individuality and personal identity, concepts that were never the most important qualities expressed by female portraits in the Greek world. While these portraits may not reveal to us the faces of real women, these statues do show the important and very visible role that women played in the monument landscapes of ancient Greek cities. RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING The portrait statues of women in Greece and the Greek East have been the focus of a number of recent studies, including Linfert (1976), Eule (2001), Connelly (2007), and Dillon (2007, 2010); all include extensive bibliographies of earlier sources. Ajootian (2007) is particularly good for the evidence for portraiture in the fourth century BCE. L€ ohr (2000) gathers the archaeological and epigraphic evidence for family group monuments, an important display context for female portrait statues. Eule (2002) surveys the epigraphic evidence for female portrait statues in Athens. See also the brief sections on women in portrait sculpture in Smith (1991) (Hellenistic period) and Smith (1998) (Roman Imperial period). Studies of individual statue monuments include Kreeb (1985) (on the Kleopatra from Delos) and Vanderpool (2005) (on the portrait of Plancia Magna from Perge, which utilizes the non-portrait face style). Particular statue types are the focus of Filges (1997) (the statue format used for Aristonoe), Daehner (2007), and Trimble (2011) (Large and Small Herculaneum statues). Kron (1996) and van Bremen (1996) are particularly important for the epigraphic evidence of women’s civic and religious activity, for which women would have received portrait statue monuments.