Poiesis is the simple title of the first book under review, and its front cover carries a view of that well-known Attic red-figure kylix in Berlin, ‘the Foundry Cup’, showing bronze sculptors at work.Footnote ¹ But librarians may wonder where exactly to classify Peter Acton's monograph on craftsmanship in classical Athens. The author himself is categorically unusual: a Classics graduate who became vice-president of a major global management consultancy firm before undertaking his doctoral dissertation, he clearly enjoys the transfer of intellectual property from academia to the world of commerce, and vice versa. ‘The ancient economy’ is probably where this belongs, though its most substantial case study is focused upon pottery production. Some of Acton's opening declarations are made over-confidently: that ‘craftsmen were well-regarded’ (7) is debatable, given the various literary instances of patent disregard for those engaged in ‘banausic’ activity (both concept and reality of the banausos are conspicuously avoided throughout). And there is carelessness in the presentation of details: the potter Cachrylion becomes ‘Cachsilion’ (281), for example, and the account of bronze and stone sculpture (215–25) is somewhat muddled. Nonetheless, Acton does well to insist upon a city of creators, not consumers. A famous passage in Plutarch concerning the multiple trades involved in building the Parthenon (Vit. Per. 12) implies as much, but our stereotypical image of Athens tends to exclude all workshop smoke and grime.

Andrew Stewart's Art in the Hellenistic World,Footnote ² pitched as a textbook, assimilates to certain pieces of Hellenistic art and literature – that is, inviting unusually juxtaposed adjectives such as ‘erudite and accessible’. Without targeting particular names, Stewart makes clear in his Preface how his approach differs from existing stalwarts on the undergraduate reading list – for example, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age (1979) by John Onians, or J. J. Pollitt's Art in the Hellenistic Age (1986): ‘I have avoided certain well-entrenched terms, such as “theatricality”, because they cannot be translated into Greek, have no equivalent in ancient critical writing, and are too vague and sweeping to be useful in the study of the subject as I understand it’ (xiii–xiv). The present reviewer has lodged elsewhere his own qualms about neo-Hegelian modes of characterizing the Hellenistic period by way of the Zeitgeist or ‘spirit-of-an-age’; a more efficient conceptual approach may be to start with the dominant institution of the court.Footnote ³ Stewart implicitly states as much by beginning with an analysis of the ‘Tazza Farnese’ in Naples, a sardonyx bowl done in cameo style: small in size, yet highly precious and potent – wonderfully wrought, cleverly allegorical, an object that can only be understood (inasmuch as we can understand it) by reference to ‘the entire world of the Ptolemies: their home, their inheritance, their wealth, and their hopes – literally a cameo kingdom’ (6). What follows is a succession of themed discussions – under one-word titles, such as ‘Power’, ‘Piety’, ‘Luxury’ – combined with special focus first upon the Pergamene Great Altar, then upon mosaics – and finally an extensive section of end matter, including appendices upon ‘The Artist’ as a Hellenistic phenomenon, and translated excerpts from Callixenus. The illustrations are excellent, the scholarship assured, the writing mood jaunty (e.g. ‘the drachma drops’; 179). As for occasional superfluities – for example, reserving a text box for two stanzas by Byron apostrophizing the Dying Gaul as a defeated gladiator (81) – even they seem in keeping with Alexandrian style.

Stewart also adds his authority to the catalogue of Power and Pathos, an extraordinary exhibition staged this year first at Florence and then at the Getty Museum.Footnote ⁴ ‘Extraordinary’ because it collects a number of works that one might have considered too temperamental to travel, the show leaves as souvenir a book that will be of lasting use to students of ancient bronze statuary. Thematic essays by Carol Mattusch, R. R. R. Smith, and others complement the individual entries for each piece; the perplexing question of how far bronze statues were painted is ably dealt with by Sophie Descamps-Lequime of the Louvre.

The demise of the Hellenistic kingdoms was a direct result of Rome's eastwards expansion. But while Rome might be synonymous with rhômê (‘force’), Roman policy in the East until the second century ad preferred not to impose direct rule (Egypt excepted). So it was that a number of lesser dynastic regimes flourished regionally: Commagene, Hasmonaean, and others. The historical vicissitudes of the Herodians in Judaea are well known, and in some cases the monumental evidence for these dynasties is still conspicuous: the colossal statuary of the Commagenes upon the hillside of Nemrut Dagh, for example, and the works of Herod the Great at Jerusalem, Masada, and Caesarea. But a wider survey of these ‘client kings’ reveals much more, as shown by Andreas Kropp's Images and Monuments of Near Eastern Dynasts.Footnote ⁵ Focusing upon half a dozen dynasties, Kropp empathizes productively with their difficulties of projecting an identity. How should a ruler such as Herod define himself as both a Roman citizen and ‘King of the Jews’ – and a conspicuous Philhellene too? Though coin issues were, of course, important elements of such definition, the evidence of portraits is patchy, and perhaps it is an over-simplification to assume that any veristic (‘unflattering’) ruler image implies closer allegiance to Rome. With the choice of designs for royal palaces and burial places, certainly, analysing the mix of local customs with external elements is a subtle task. The famously ornate Nabataean rock-cut tomb at Petra known as the Kazneh, for example, incorporates architectural features that can be related to Second-Style paintings at Pompeii; a common source may lie with palatial wonders at Alexandria. As for Herod's sponsorship of the Great Temple at Jerusalem, it was, so far as we can retrieve the details, a masterpiece of cultural–monumental reconciliation: in this part of the world, a rare accomplishment in any age.

The destruction of the Temple in ad 70 was a deliberate act of Roman policy. Was this part of some ‘grand strategy’ of Roman imperialism? At any rate, the event was acclaimed, in Rome, triumphally – and is inseparable from the life and eventual apotheosis of its chief perpetrator. We do not possess the text of a funerary peroration in which Titus Vespasian Augustus was saluted as victor in the Bellum Judaeum; but the structure and decoration of the Arch of Titus may effectively convey the same message, as argued in an introductory essay (by Jas Elsner) to Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture.Footnote ⁶ Elsner's co-editor, Michael Meyer, supplies a curious Preface to this collection of commissioned essays, beginning with the assertion that ‘Roman art has rarely been seen as specifically or exceptionally rhetorical by contrast with other kinds of art, such as Greek’ (xviii). I suspect the contributors to the volume would largely disassociate themselves from that particular sentiment: at any rate, they demonstrate that the verbal discipline of Latin rhetoric offers multiple possibilities for making silent objects speak – as it has done ever since the ‘Romanness’ of Roman art was recognized in the late nineteenth century. One option is to make explicit use of particular tropes and components identified by Cicero, Quintilian, et al. – so Edmund Thomas, in a broad-ranging consideration of ‘the Sublime in Architecture’, shows how the technical vocabulary of Longinus and Lucian translates into principles of tectonics and design. More generally, it may be sufficient to analyse the ‘persuasiveness’ of a given object – be it sarcophagus, wall-painting, statue, or miniature relief – by transferable reference to literary tricks and occasions. Or, as Caroline Vout argues in her subtle analysis of a late first-century ad funerary altar in the Lever Art Gallery, the very failure of a carved scene to ‘persuade’ in supplying consolation for a viewer schooled in rhetoric can become a sort of effective, and affective, evasion. Ut pictura poesis: while some art historians (and artists) would resent the ‘linguistic turn’ that converts or limits all visual experience into whatever we can express by words, let us equally grant images the power of being vacuous, irrelevant, or inadequate.