Rhetoric and Innovation in Hellenistic Art

Hellenistic artworks are celebrated for innovations such as narrative, characterization, and description. The most striking examples are works associated with the Hellenistic courts. Their revolutionary appearance is usually attributed to Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near East, the start of the Hellenistic kingdoms, and Greek-Eastern interactions. In Rhetoric and Innovation in Hellenistic Art, Kristen Seaman offers a new approach to Hellenistic art by investigating an internal development in Greek cultural production, notably, advances in rhetoric. Rhetorical education taught kings, artists, and courtiers how to be Greek, giving them a common intellectual and cultural background from which they approached art. Seaman explores how rhetorical techniques helped artists and their royal patrons construct Hellenism through their innovative art in the scholarly atmospheres of Pergamon and Alexandria. Drawing upon artistic, literary, and historical evidence, this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to students and scholars in art and archaeology, Classics, and ancient history.

1. Rhetoric, innovation, and the courts; 2. Narrative in the Telephos Frieze; 3. Personification in the Archelos Relief; 4. Ekphrasis in Soso's Unswept Room mosaic; 5. Conclusion.

Kristen Seaman is Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. She is the co-editor of Artists and Artistic Production in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2017) and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities