Between the Gods and the City: Portrait Statues as Votives (20 min)

Presenters

Elizabeth Baltes, Coastal Carolina University

Abstract

The language scholars use to talk about portrait statues set up outside official civic processes betrays the difficult time we have had in coming to terms with their function. Are they “commemorative,” “private,” “private honorific,” or even “votive”? In truth, Hellenistic portrait monuments resist classification; indeed, they illustrate that the strict separation between profane civic monuments and private votive offerings is a product of modern scholarship rather than of ancient practice. For example, in the agora of Kassopi, Pausanias, son of Nikomedes, set up bronze portrait statues of his two sons, his daughter, and his grandson on a long rectangular exedra (a statue base with an integrated bench). He explicitly dedicated this lavish family monument both to the gods and to the city. The inscription highlights the dual function of this monument––and of many such “private” portrait monuments set up in the Hellenistic period––conceptually positioned between religion and politics, piety and self-promotion, votive and honorific.

By the Hellenistic period, portrait statues seemed to have supplanted more traditional large-scale votive offerings in major sanctuaries. The widespread phenomenon of setting up “private” portrait statues of relatives and friends may have been spurred by the desire to emulate prestigious public awards, but in this paper, I argue that the roots of this habit lie in religious practice as much as in the development of civic honors. Rather than viewing the dedication of portrait statues in Greek sanctuaries as an empty religious gesture, or as a political statement couched in religious terms, this paper looks at portrait statues, their bases, and their inscriptions to consider the real work such statue monuments did as votives, mediating the relationship between people and their gods.

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