Dimitris Plantzos

Hellenistic engraved gems

Engraved gems were used by the Greeks as seals and amulets, but were primarily valued as ornaments. Their iconography was drawn from a wide range of motifs and standard devices current in other art forms. In the Hellenistic period gem cutters remained faithful to the classical tradition, but were able to develop new subjects and styles. Portraits, especially of royalty, became the commonest subject in glyptic after Alexander, a practice that continued through the Roman period and was still popular with patrons and artists of the Renaissance and even later. This volume follows the development of gem engraving from Alexanders conquest of the East to the Augustan period. Hellenistic gems are studied in their archaeological and historical context: evidence on their use, significance, and value; questions of technique and style; and problems of chronology and distribution. Special sections have been devoted to patronage of gem-engravers and the relationship of gem-cutting with other miniaturist arts and coinage.

The kouros of Keratea: Constructing subaltern pasts in contemporary Greece

Classical antiquity has been deployed in contemporary Greece as an agent of national-identity forging, and images of archaeological artifacts often feature in the public discourse, used to support state ideologies and promote national culture at home and abroad. This article, however, deals with a number of recently circulated images, designed in the margins of modern society in order to convey a defiantly anti-state message. Such images are manipulated according to the strategies devised and repeatedly applied by nationalist rhetoric in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, though their outcome is markedly different: rather than promoting historical continuity and social cohesion they create a disturbing sense of rupture. These irreverent images are projected as ‘minority reports’ against hitherto established ideologies, challenging their hegemony by adopting their own technologies of normalization and assimilationism. As weapons against the supremacy of the state, these performative declarations of a peculiar anti-state nationalism seem to threaten the integrity of the nation state considerably more than other, external forces are feared to do.