Museum Archetypes and
Collecting in the Ancient World
Edited by
Maia Wellington Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Maia Wellington Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano Abbreviations viii
List of Illustrations and Photo Credits ix
Notes on the Contributors xi
Museum Archetypes and Collecting: An Overview of the Public, Private, and Virtual Collections of the Ancient
World 1
Maia Wellington Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano
1 Towards the Museum: Perceiving the Art of “Others” in the Ancient Near East 19
Massimiliano Franci
2 Greek Temple Treasures and the Invention of Collecting 24
Josephine Shaya
3 Collecting the Past, Creating the Future: Art Displays in the Hellenistic Mediterranean 33
Margaret M. Miles
4 Hellenistic Court Collecting from Alexandros to the Attalids 45
Ann Kuttner
5 Poetic Depictions of Ancient Dactyliothecae 54
Évelyne Prioux
6 The Culture of Collecting in Roma: Between Politics and Administration 72
Paolo Liverani
7 Archetypes of Collecting in the Roman World: Antiquarianism, Gift Exchange, Identity and Time-Space as
Parameters of Value 78
Alexandra Bounia
8 Verres, Cicero and Other Collectors in Late Republican Roma 91
Alessandra Lazzeretti
9 Collectables, Antiques and Sumptuary Trends in Ancient Roma: A Look around the Dining Halls of the Late
Republic and Early Empire 102
Ida Gilda Mastrorosa
10 Private Art Galleries in Roma: Literary and Archaeological Evidence 109
Francesca Ghedini and Giulia Salvo
11 Temple Inventory and Fictive Picture Gallery: Ancient Painting between Votive Offfering and Artwork 118
Nathaniel Jones
12 Collecting Culture: Statues and Fragments in Roman Gardens 129
Richard Neudecker
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vi
Contents
13 The Opportunistic Collector: Sources of Statuary Décor and the Nature of Late Antique Collecting 137
Lea Stirling
14 Collecting and the Creation of History 146
Sarah Bassett
Afterword. Framing Knowledge: Collecting Objects, Collecting Texts 156
Jaś Elsner
Bibliography Ancient Sources 163
Modern Works 166
Indices
Index A. Ancient Texts Cited or Mentioned 193
Index B. Place Names 202
Index C. Personal Names 206
Index D. Notable Greek, Latin and Egyptian Words 216
Index E. General Subjects 219
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Afterword. Framing Knowledge: Collecting Objects, Collecting Texts
Jaś Elsner
It is a commonplace that we know antiquity through our
collections – from the Renaissance via the Grand Tour to
the imperial excavations and appropriations of the 19th
century. Less obvious is the fact that so much of what
modernity has collected was itself the product of varieties
of collections in antiquity, which packaged the past and
the present for its own needs, much as modern museums
do now. Among the most famous Sumerian sculptures
are the efffijigies of Gudea, Prince of Lagash, made (well
before the period mainly under discussion in this book) in
the impressive and hard black stone called diorite towards
the end of the third millennium bce. These were excavated by the French at the Mesopotamian site of Telloh
after the 1870s and most are in the Louvre. What is less
well known is that Telloh became a Hellenistic palace in
the 2nd century bce, where the local ruler, Adad-nadinahhe, a subject of the Seleucid king, excavated the Gudea
statues (which were already 2000 years old by his time).
He made a collection of his fijindings, had his scholars
read and identify the ancient Sumerian script and re-displayed the Gudea material in his own palace on the site.
Preserving and copying the clay bricks with inscriptions
from Gudea’s time, Adad-nadin-ahhe added his own brick
with an inscription in Greek and Aramaic proclaiming
his place in an invented tradition of continuity between
himself and Gudea, which his collection had established
(Bahrani, 2014: 217–33). Some of our prime prehistoric
monuments from the dawn of art history turn out to have
been items in a Greco-Babylonian collection.
As the essays in this book prove – alongside a rich recent
spate of publication on ancient collecting, well attested in
this volume’s bibliographies – the practice of collecting
in Greek and Roman antiquity was a fundamental aspect
of cultural life among the ancient elite. Collecting is an
activity known in prehistoric times, as attested by the
assemblages of ancient and foreign objects in elite tombs
from the 10th century bce and after (Duplouy, 2006: 151–
83). But it is particularly marked by developments in the
Hellenistic and Roman period. Alongside the collection
of original works from earlier cultures and contexts (not
only archaic, Classical Greek and Hellenistic art, but also
Egyptian and Middle Eastern works), went a rich process
of copying and emulation that created many new objects
in a variety of distinct old styles and forms, particularly
during the Roman Empire. The focus in this volume is on
material culture and especially on portable works of art.
But at the heart of the collecting of objects at any time
is an instinct to value certain items of the present or the
past, from one’s own culture or from another’s, as well as
to select and display them in contexts to which such exhibition adds lustre. That impetus to select, put together,
display and curate – with all its signifijicance for social
memory, for creating identity in relation to a chosen set of
pasts, for framing the conceptual environment of modernity at any given time – is broader than simply the collection of objects.
In this brief Afterword to the book, I wish to make two
moves beyond the traditional history of collecting artefacts in antiquity. First, I shall place that process alongside
the collection of texts, as part of the same impulse within
both the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. The collecting
of objects is the material instantiation of processes of
thought and classifijication, as well as the variety of ideological moves such processes determine, that are equally
demonstrated (if in somewhat diffferent ways perhaps) by
the compilation and selecting of texts. Second, I shall suggest that in addition to being a signifijicant engine for social
and cultural self-defijinition within antiquity, the processes
and methods of ancient collecting form a fundamental
frame for our own understanding of the ancient world.
I shall argue that collecting is not merely an important
ontological fact of how antiquity was, but a vital epistemological frame for how we grasp antiquity today.
The nexus of selection, classifijication, display and aesthetic value which our evidence for ancient collecting
reveals – with all the ideological freighting that these procedures carry – is no less true of texts (poems, histories,
natural histories) and epigraphic documents. These too
were collected, copied, selected, classifijied and anthologized for display in papyrus rolls and later codices, in
ways parallel to the collecting of objects, by elite collectors within the same social sphere as those who focused
on works of material culture. Efffectively, one may argue
that one of the ways that the ancient world functioned
was by a constant re-appropriation of the panoply of its
pasts (literary and material) made canonical, replicated,
taxonomised, reinvented throughout the Hellenistic and
Roman eras. The numerous florilegia, anthologies, collections of table-talk – in efffect, the disparate antiquarianism of Hellenistic and Roman literary culture in both
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AFTERWORD. FRAMING KNOWLEDGE: COLLECTING OBJECTS, COLLECTING TEXTS
Greek and Latin – are the textual correlate of the collections of objects. Moreover, texts in antiquity are no less
material-cultural than other forms of object, since they
had to be painstakingly selected, epitomized and copied on papyrus rolls just as earlier works of art were collected and copied in paint, mosaic, marble or bronze.
They came, as rolls and later as codices, to sit in those very
specifijic collections known as libraries, some (like that
in the House of the Papyri at Herculaneum) belonging
to private individuals but many with a more public role
(König, Oikonomopoulou & Woolf, 2013). Indeed, libraries in antiquity were prime sites for the display of art
(Pergamon: Conqueugniot, 2013; Roma: Petrain, 2013).
Ancient Collections and the Ordering of
Knowledge
Collections, as a series of material embodiments of the
past, selected, set out in a particular order, labelled, rearranged over the years, form a lived-conceptual frame in
three-dimensions for the people whom they surround. In
this sense they instantiate the orders of knowledge that at
given times dominate and structure the attitudes and concerns of a population. Much work has been done in recent
years on ancient knowledge – its relations with power, its
forms of classifijication, its structuring of social thought
(e.g. Barton, 1994; König & Whitmarsh, 2007). Notably,
the models for structuring thought in a large polity like
the Roman Empire have both global and local varieties,
which diffferent emphases and diffferent gestures of ancestralism (empire-wide knowledge: Murphy, 2004: 49–73;
local knowledge: Whitmarsh, 2010). Signifijicantly, the different pressures on the ordering of knowledge in cosmopolitan and local contexts, with diffferent centripetal and
centrifugal drives, gave rise to a culture of scholarly and
commentarial writing, of florilegia and anthologies, of
dictionaries and encyclopaedias from the establishment
of the Mouseion in Alexandria through to the middle ages
and beyond (encyclopaedism: König & Woolf, 2013). The
modern scholarship on this process has not sufffijiciently
seen material culture, and in particular the history of
collecting, as the three-dimensional equivalent of the
same patterns of taxonomy and classifijication, governed
within the royal, oligarchic and imperial contexts of the
Hellenistic and Roman worlds, by the same drives and
desires. Yet it is the case not only that public collecting
and display operated under closely parallel conceptual
constraints such that public libraries and public space for
viewing art are parallel models of artistic munifijicence in
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the late Republic and early Empire (Nicholls, 2013), but
that its reach and dissemination to the populace went
way beyond that of texts in a culture of limited literacy.
A good example of a collection functioning within Roman
antiquity as a tool-kit for the creation of new replicas and
versions, is the clear evidence of the imperial Mint in
Roma possessing a collection of Republican coins which
were closely copied in the imperial period (Gallia, 2012:
222–4). One of the things ancient collections taught, simply through the experience of living among them, was a
paradigm of how thinking itself was structured.
The range of agendas to which collecting could be put
was as large as the range of ideological drives that governed the ancient world. These include the fabrication
of false memories (such as the link between Gudea and
Adad-nadin-ahhe) and the servicing of parochial claims
(for instance, those of every Classical and Hellenistic
polis) – both of these models in potential resistance to the
pressures of a larger centralizing hegemonic power. The
selective strategies of the centre itself were no less varied.
The great Greek foundation of Alexandria displayed prime
Egyptian antiquities from Pharaonic times in a collection
arranged around the famous lighthouse (e.g. McKenzie,
2007: 43–5), making a claim that was simultaneously
about multiculturalism in a kingdom that looked both
to Greek and to ancient Egyptian culture, and about the
dominance of old Egypt by the Makedonian Ptolemaioi.
The Roman state’s extraordinary emphasis on the display
of Greek and to some extent Egyptian art in its capital city,
as well as remarkable quantities of high-quality imitations
of these styles and forms, went alongside what appears to
be a systematic reluctance to collect or display Iberian,
Punic, Gallic or Germanic objects. The absence stresses
fijirmly where cultural priorities lay within the empire.
Collecting not only preserved and invented memory
within specifijic contexts (from an individual’s collection
to those of cities and capitals), but also allowed experiments in hybridity and assimilation – for instance in the
arts of Hellenistic Kommagene in Asia Minor which not
only look East to Persia and West to a world fast becoming dominated by the Roman Empire, but announce this
mingling in an intriguing inscription of Antiokhos I,
which orders statues and reliefs to be made ‘according to
the ancient logos of Greeks and Persians – blessed roots
of my clan’ (Dittenberger, 1903: vol. 1, 597, no. 383, line 30).
In texts, multilingualism (for instance the inscriptions on
the Rosetta stone, see e.g. Parkinson, 2005) and translation
(such as the rendering of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek
Septuagint, see Rajak, 2009) are parallel models for this
kind of hybridizing transmission.
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Within the cultural life of the Hellenistic and Roman
worlds, the ancient urban was efffectively an agglutination
of collections. The vast corpus of ancient epigraphy (of
which the Lindian list discussed in J. Shaya’s chapter 2 is
just the most famous example to deal specifijically with a
collection of votive objects) is itself a series of selective
cullings of laws, decrees, honorifijic pronouncements and
the like, copied and exhibited for public display across
the civic and sacred spaces of the Greek and Roman
worlds. The mass of honorifijic statues which packed
the ancient city, and some of whose bases still survive,
formed – over time – a collection of honoured dignitaries whose civic contributions could be read as a history of
the city, arranged across its porticoes and public spaces
(see Stewart, 2003; Ma, 2013). In the urban topographies of
the ancient world, these collections of monumental writing and statuary created an ideological frame, a sense of
ancestral and historical identity, a competitive challenge
to the elites of the present to match their forebears in public generosity. One of the ways Hellenistic cities in particular, from about 260 bce to the Roman takeover, declared
and advertised the sacred inviolability of their temple
sanctuaries was to make collections of decrees (both their
own and ones solicited from other polities) and to inscribe
them on prime sites. The largest surviving such archive is
from the perimeter wall of the agora of Magnesia on the
Maiandros in Asia Minor by the Temple of Artemis, dating to about 208. The collection includes documents from
many other cities (including ancient poleis like Athenai
and Argos, and new foundations like Antiokheia), from
groupings such as the Boiotian or Akhaian leagues, and
from such monarchs as Antiokhos iii, Ptolemaios iv and
Attalos i (Rigsby, 1996: 179–279).
In this sense, public collecting of inscriptions and of
statues by a civic polity (a collective operating over many
lifetimes, not a single patron or individual), alongside
such attendant practices as the replication, framing, juxtaposition of culled objects as well as their display, was
a fundamental agent of social integration and hence of
imperial control through the competitive self-regulation
of elites. This was true of the major capitals like Roma,
Antiokheia, Alexandria and ultimately Constantinopolis,
and in less cosmopolitan but still proud provincial cities (like Magnesia) across the breadth of the Hellenistic
kingdoms and later the Roman Empire. It allowed a claim
to, and the celebration of, a universal, shared culture (all
those statues of roughly the same formal types, all those
papyrus rolls in the city library). But this was combined
with an insistence both on personal distinction (especially
in the use of individualized portraiture in the Hellenistic
and Roman periods as well as of dedicatory inscriptions)
and on localism, in which precious items from the past or
elsewhere became identifijied with a given place of storage
and display, and the majority of inscriptions and images
celebrated local notables.
Within this urban space – an open-air theme park of
local identity within the larger culture – more temporary
collections, such as the display of items in a Roman triumph (Miles, 2008: 55–60 and Östenberg, 2009: 19–127,
189–98) or the selection of statues carried in a sacred
procession (Rogers, 1991: 80–126 on Ephesos), varied the
process with something analogous to modern exhibitions
within a museum’s permanent displays. In other words,
the manipulation of varieties of juxtapositions of display
objects – at diffferent times and in specifijic contexts –
created a sophisticated structure offfering multiple levels
of signifijication through the temporary disposition of displays. On an individual scale, lavish collecting by elite
aristocrats in private villas (although access to these may
have been less restricted than the modern terminology
of ‘private’ implies) was the counterpart to the culture of
civic collection. The Roman aspects of this theme are well
discussed in chapter 7 by Alessandra Lazzerretti for the
late Republic and Lea Stirling for Late Antiquity in chapter 13. But it is worth stressing, in relation to the remarkable collection of statues found in the villa at Chiragan in
Gallia, the longevity of some of these villa displays. Apart
from its spectacular Late Antique mythological sculpture,
tondi and copies after Greek masterpieces, Chiragan possessed a series of imperial portraits from Augustus to the
late emperors, many of which must have been collected in
the early and middle Empire, and some of which appear
to have been restored in antiquity. Just as civic collections
rearranged and looked after their older works (which
included some recycling and demolition), so the villa collections in the hands of families did much the same with
their heirlooms (Bergmann, 1999: 26–44, 68–70).
Collecting and the Constraints of Empirical
Knowledge
Alongside what may be described as an engine for social
cohesion and change within antiquity, ancient collecting
was one of the key mechanisms that created the body of
empirical data, which has come down to us as students
of the past. That is, our knowledge of antiquity – of the
archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique
worlds within antiquity – is in large part the result of that
process of collecting within the ancient world itself. What
was selected and excluded, preserved and destroyed by
deliberate ideological choice as well as by the fallibilities
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AFTERWORD. FRAMING KNOWLEDGE: COLLECTING OBJECTS, COLLECTING TEXTS
of temporal happenstance, among both texts and material
objects, is the basis on which we form both our knowledge
and our arguments about the Greek and Roman past. It
is key of course that this form of knowledge (what one
might call the ancient selection) is supplemented by some
evidence for what the ancients did not select (such as the
wide range of objects and texts preserved in the lava of
Vesuvius) or actively discarded (such as the remarkable
range of texts of all kinds found in the rubbish dumps of
Oxyrhynkhos or reused as mummy cartonage).
The diverse elements of the ancient collections that did
survive into the Middle Ages were then subject to radically diffferent forms of transmission and preservation in
the post-antique period, with survivals and losses often
dependent on pure whimsy or chance, but also on the
very diffferent criteria brought to the ancient past by such
various recipients of the ancient collections as Western
monks; Byzantine collectors, librarians and churchmen;
Syriac, Armenian and Abbasid translators. My argument
here will be that – alongside the great signifijicance of collecting within antiquity as a social and cultural process,
so well illuminated by the many and very diffferent discussions in this volume – the phenomenon of especially
Hellenistic and Roman collecting as an ideological selection and a classifijicatory system for creating a variety of
canons, what we might call a process of Classicism (Elsner,
2006), is a fundamental empirical and epistemological
constraint for us as modern students of the past, as we try
to understand the ancient world.
Let us take a few key cases. First, the proposition has
been advanced that the whole city of Roma came to
function as a living museum for its populace throughout
antiquity. Its collections demonstrated imperial dominion (from the spoils of war to the donations of subjects),
their orchestration mapping social identity and the
(innovative, at any rate in Augustan and Iulio-Claudian
times) ideological narrative of an empire ruled by its
principate (Rutledge, 2012). That argument was founded
on an extraordinary gathering of objects (old and new,
especially from the East of the empire as well as from the
deep past) and of buildings – temples, fora, porticus – in
which to display them, constructed by a long litany of
Republican grandees followed by generations of emperors whose grandiose projects in architecture, display and
urban planning were in competition with both their contemporaries and their predecessors. A good example, both
in its attempt to surpass the past and as a cardinal model
for posterity in demanding to be surpassed in its own
right, was the Forum of Augustus. This was magnifijicent
celebration of the victorious revenge for Iulius Caesar, in
the Temple of Mars Ultor, which offfered a radical ideo-
159
logical narrative of the dynastic house of Caesar, as well
as the earlier summi viri of Roma, through its made-toorder collection of marble statues, with their inscribed
tituli (Zanker, 1968 and Geiger, 2008). These statues
entered the structure of daily life for the urban populace,
becoming markers for assignations and meetings, familiar landmarks in the lived environment. We know from
legal documents found in Herculaneum and Pompeii, for
example, that lawyers and bankers used specifijic statues
in the Forum of Augustus as meeting points at given
times on given days, with the statue’s inscription functioning as if it were a room number (Neudecker, 2010:
166–9). While the Forum of Augustus used statues to stake
its claims to history, later versions of imperial panegyric,
added as monumental adornments to the urban collection, embellished their argument with a still greater range
of visual means. The columns of Traianus and Marcus,
for instance, are not only exceptional statue bases (which
an elite citizen could climb with permission) but also
complex visual narratives extolling the military glory of
both the ruler – standing resplendent at the top – and his
state.
Alongside these kinds of material-cultural developments of ideological claims, coupled with visual
encomium, established in marble and bronze by such
developments as the Imperial Fora, went what may be
called a series of textual catalogues. We know, for instance,
that in the early Hellenistic period Krateros of Makedonia
wrote down the early decrees of Athenai (Carawan, 2014,
with bibliography). His text does not survive but its contents (or decrees derived from it) were frequently cited in
the imperial period and later – by such as Ploutarkhos,
Pollux and the scholiasts of Aristophanes. Whether
Krateros’ book consisted of a direct transcriptions of the
decrees as they were epigraphically preserved, or a version
of what he found in an archive that itself included material commemorated in inscriptions, or a selective collection from these sources, it was a Hellenistic compendium
of what had originally been a material-cultural collection that came to frame the empirical access of posterity
to the history of archaic and Classical Athenai. Likewise,
the Republican antiquarian Lucius Cincius wrote down a
(now lost) account of monuments and notably old inscriptions on the Capitol, which would serve as the basis for
later accounts of ancient Roman realien for authors such
as Livius (Wiseman, 1979: 45–6; Gallia, 2012: 62–3). Clearly,
to turn to a surviving source conceived on a much grander
scale, Plinius’ naturalis historia – inflected of course by a
powerful Flavian (which is also an anti-Neronian) agenda –
casts nature as a whole within a taxonomy of empire
centred on Roma, so that the history of art, for instance,
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becomes a theme largely presentable through the Roman
collections (Murphy, 2004: 194–216 on monuments; Carey,
2003 and Bounia, 2004: 173–220 on art).1 Many of the texts
(especially the poetry) produced in the city of Roma and
for the consumption of its inhabitants are obsessed with
the range and richness of its material culture and with
how to interpret and to view it (Jenkyns, 2013, with earlier
bibliography). As far as Greece is concerned, the extraordinary description in 10 books by Pausanias, written in
the mid-2nd century ce – self-consciously antiquarian
and selective, deliberately focused on religious sanctuaries and works of art in a myth-historical topography set
in the pre-Roman past – has proved modernity’s most
important access-point not only to the material and
spatial world of ancient Greece but to its anthropology,
archaeology, religion and art (see the papers in Elsner,
2010, with references). An early and poetic example of
this kind of textual record, reserved for the less public
context of a Hellenistic royal court, is Poseidippos’ series
of epigrams on gems discussed here by Evelyne Prioux in
chapter 5.
From the epistemological point of view, what matters is
that this material construction and its embedding in the
textual pattern of responses to the monuments – as well as
the parallel process of selecting a chosen canon of poetic,
philosophical, rhetorical and historical texts – underlie
both our archaeological and our literary-historical frames
for thinking about the ancient world in modernity. While
the means and processes of selection were not the same –
for instance, whole objects were collected (though statues
not always with their bases) but often excerpts from texts
rather than whole books, with diffferent patterns of copying in relation to material culture and writing, the cultural
drive to defijine the present through a canonizing classifijication of the past is key, and became the prism through
which our own experience of antiquity is made possible.
Roma, for instance, was a series of self-made cultural constructs (as empire, as city, as a civilization) whose taxonomy of choices about what to exclude from and include
within its collection of ideologically sanctioned objects
and texts (vitiated from our standpoint of course always
by the whimsy of survivals and losses) determined a series
1 Ancient collecting was of course only partially inflected by imperial
ordering; it also reflected other cultural drives not necessarily due
to empire, such as an interest in man-made and natural wonders,
the predisposition to give canonical authority to certain chosen
ancient cultures (notably Greece and Egypt) in preference to others, the civic urge to localist ancestralism in both history and myth.
of claims mounted by material and literary culture which
were always apologetic or panegyrical in relation to the
current regime and often polemical against its precursor.
It is these ideological claims (much more than facts or
truths about the past) that our empirical evidence allows
us to study. That evidence is by no means even or equal at
diffferent points in the chronological trajectory. In part, the
‘3rd-century crisis’ is a crisis in the amount of empirical
data (both material-cultural and textual) that has come
down to us. This lack of data may equate to a blight in creativity and production, which may indicate economic or
social crisis (as has frequently been assumed), or it may
be little more than an unfortunate blip, the result of the
happenstance of survival, whose efffects we can too easily exaggerate, or it may be the result of a cultural shift
in forms of commemoration which transformed patterns
of dedication and construction (see Borg, 2013: 1–6 and
Borg, 2014).
But when the collection, its displays and its representations, come to change – for instance, notably in late antiquity and again in the upsurge of excavation during and
after the Renaissance – scholarship has tended to mark
signifijicant moments within the traditional historical narrative. That is, we tend to read history out of the emblems
of material culture that antiquity itself mustered to bolster its ideological claims. Thus, for instance, a measure
of Roma’s decline in Late Antiquity can be taken from
the account in Prokopios’ book on the Gothic Wars, completed in the 550s, of the sack of Roma by the Vandal King
Geiseric in 455 (e.g. Rutledge, 2012: 211; on Roma as a monumental museum through Late Antiquity, see Behrwald,
2009). The Vandals ‘spared neither bronze nor anything
else whatsoever in the palace . . . [and] plundered also the
Temple of Iuppiter Capitolinus, and tore offf half the roof’
(Prokopios, hyper ton polemon lagoi [peri ton gotthikon
polemon] iii.5,3–5). This may be true. But it may be no
more than a rhetorical trope, produced at the flourish of
a pen 100 years after the event, that reverses the long narrative of fijilling Roma up with the booty of conquered cities so as to make the rhetorical point of the city’s decline,
a necessary preparation for the return of a triumphant
Roman emperor in the form of Prokopios’ own patron,
Iustinianus I. It certainly carries the elegant frisson that
the new barbarians are Christians sacking the pagan temples! If it is the case that the Vandals did denude Roma,
then the impetus will have been to adorn their own
capital of Carthago according to a trope borrowed from
Constantinus’ establishment of Constantinopolis and
ultimately from the practices which had turned Roma
itself into a museum.
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AFTERWORD. FRAMING KNOWLEDGE: COLLECTING OBJECTS, COLLECTING TEXTS
Late Antiquity: Ancient Collecting and the
Longue Durée
The coming of a new Christian dispensation to the Roman
Empire in late antiquity – which went along with the shift
of capital to Constantinopolis – brought a fundamental
revision of collecting strategies. The pragmatic need to
pack the new city with worthy monuments was coupled
with a decisive ideological impetus, borrowed from earlier Roman depredations of sacred images but on a much
greater scale, that deprived cult statues or ancient votives
of any religious signifijicance and replaced this with antiquarian or aesthetic value (on ancient restitutions of
stolen sacred images, see Lapatin, 2010; on aesthetics
and collecting as well as religion in the ancient temple,
see Platt, 2010). The result was a new model of both spoliation (on a grand scale) and collecting, the integrated
reuse of earlier fragments in new contexts, the demolition or destructive intervention in old artistic schemes
and groups too redolent of ancient religion with its tinctures of what came to be identifijied as idolatry or demonic
possession. The processes of collecting, preserving and
displaying antiquities – now largely pagan antiquities,
but also the material mnemonic of the glorious past of
the empire – took varieties of sometimes contradictory
forms in diffferent Christian contexts. In many cases –
not least the Athenian Parthenon (Kaldellis, 2009) or the
ancient monuments of Hierapolis in Phrygia during the
Byzantine period (Thonemann, 2012) – remarkable levels of antiquarian appreciation and care were taken with
the remains of the past. But equally there are numerous
instances of destruction, some conducted with great
care in relation to specifijic elements (such as genitals and
frontal ‘idols’) by Christians largely keen to preserve the
bulk of a prestigious monument (e.g. Smith, 2012 on the
Sebasteion at Aphrodisias) and some wholesale. The fates
of the ancient collections, reinvented and recalibrated
as Late Antique collections in a Christian dispensation,
were thus very diverse in diffferent parts of the old empire,
between East and West and between former centres and
provinces in these areas. That range of diffferent efffects
reflects the variety and conflict of responses to the pagan
ancestral past within Christendom from celebration to
vituperative assault.
Among the changes in collecting practice, as noted by
Sarah Bassett’s essay, is a move to a status of very high
esteem for relics from the later 4th century. It would not
be true to say that there was no culture of relics in preChristian antiquity, but metonymic mementos of heroes
and great men had no specially privileged status by com-
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parison with other kinds of votives and dedications (preChristian relic-culture: Pfijister, 1909 and 1912; Hartmann,
2010; Neri, 2010; Osborne, 2010). What happened in late
antiquity is wonderfully emblematized by the shift from
Constantinus being commemorated among the relief
sculptures celebrating his imperial predecessors on his
Arch in Roma to his burial among the relics of Christian
saints in his Mausoleum in Constantinopolis (Elsner,
2000). The shift is less about a new kind of antiquity,
unknown in the past, than about a transformation in the
order of knowledge where the tangible remains of holy
men and women in a sacred tradition of no signifijicance
in the pagan world came to occupy as much importance
as miracle-working xoana or cult images in antiquity, and
to be valued (through immensely expensive golden, ivory
and jewelled containers) at a level at least as grand as the
most sumptuous imperial votive dedications of earlier
times. Yet the fact remains that – no less than the shrines of
ancient polytheism, packed as they were with votives and
precious objects – the major sacred centres of Christianity
and, later, of early Islam would be equally crammed with
sacred dedications and valuable offferings from across the
known world (Islam: Aga-Oglu, 1954: 180–90).
Alongside the changes in the collection of, and esteem
for, material culture went a parallel systematic process of
re-evaluating and re-anthologizing the ancient literary
texts (Wilson, 1983; Reynolds and Wilson, 1991: 44–121).
For instance, what survives of ancient Greek history is
what interested the Byzantines – resulting in the preservation of a strong corpus of Classical and Roman history
with a focus on regime change, and the corresponding loss
of almost all local or antiquarian history-writing, as well
as much of the historiography of the Hellenistic world
(Kaldellis, 2012). The signifijicant epistemological point,
for us, is that what we have received as the ancient canon
is the product of a Byzantine re-evaluation, preservation and binning exercise on the inherited pre-Christian
collections of historical texts made for the libraries and
school rooms of Hellenistic and Roman antiquity. The
re-classifijication, as itself a new collecting exercise, of the
ancient collection is what has fundamentally determined
the surviving canon that has come down to us. Precisely
the same may be said of the transmission of philosophy
(for instance the survival of Platon and Plotinos, but the
loss of all Aristoteles’ fijinished dialogues), the selection of
drama – not only the specifijic plays by the three canonical
tragedians but the oblivion of all plays by anyone else, and
the vanishing of the whole corpus of new comedy, including the works of such famed masters as Menandros, of the
preservation of poetry (which in general proved a disaster
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162
elsner
for Hellenistic poets but better for Classical ones, successful for the Homeric epics, dreadful for the Theban cycle)
and so on. In all these cases, and others, the canonical collections of pre-Byzantine antiquity (such as those made
by Krateros and Cincius, Plinius and Pausanias) proved
themselves the base for the further selection, which has
determined our knowledge of Classics.
The shifts in both the collecting of objects and the
selection of texts in relation to the antique past within the
Christian dispensation, are themselves a small element of
a much bigger process in late antiquity, which may itself
be described in part in terms of collections. It has recently
been argued that the towering textual monuments of the
fijirst millennium ce were the great scriptural compendia –
the Christian Bible (including the Old Testament) and the
Qur’an – alongside the monumental legal collections such
as the Talmud or Iustinianus I’s Corpus of civil law (Fowden,
2013: 166–97). If one wished to reach further afijield, one
might add that within this period and as an exactly parallel process are the compilations of other major textual
religious canons (notably by the Zoroastrians under
Islamic rule, and by the adherents of the Indian religions –
Buddhists, Jains, Hindus). Collecting in this sense, now
focused especially on the establishment of what have
come to be regarded as the world religions (in part because
they possess canonical compilations of written scriptures,
alongside the complex of commentary and exegesis that
goes with scripture), is one of the prime achievements
of late antiquity and the early middle ages, seen in more
global perspective than only the inheritance of the old
Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Our antiquity – both the
texts and the material fragments which survive from the
cull and the florilegium conducted by the Middle Ages – is
not only the result of that process but can only be dimly
glimpsed through the many conceptual veils constructed
by the medieval collection.
My thanks to Maia Wellington Gahtan, and – for their
comments on an earlier draft – to Anthony Kaldellis, John
Ma, Tim Whitmarsh and Greg Woolf.
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