Authority between Mask and Sign

The Status of the Royal Body in Ancient Greece (Fourth to Second Centuries BCE)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5823949
AutoresPaul Cournarie (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen71
Número03
Páginas441-465
Fecha de publicación2016-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAnnales Histoire Sciences Sociales (English edition (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2268-3763 • E-ISSN: 2398-5682
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s2398568218000055
OpenAlexW2834665355
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas23

What kind of body was the body of a Hellenistic king? To consider kings in antiquity is to necessarily reach back beyond Ernst Kantorowicz's schema and explore the body before the concept of the "king's two bodies." An analysis of Xenophon's Cyropaedia sheds light on this configuration, in which the problem was not so much the (unachievable) conformation of a royal super-body as the obscure point at which the natural encountered the ceremonial, the latter absolutely essential to the former in the context of a sprawling empire, but nevertheless threatening to engulf it in the luxury with which the sovereign surrounded himself. Neither transparent nor opaque, at once a sign and a mask, this model was further honed by Alexander the Great. While his persona was bound up with the same alternative, the criticisms that he faced obliged Alexander to make a tactical distinction between his person and ceremonial luxury. This separation in no way implied a duality but rather depended on shifting boundaries, sometimes insisting on his naturally royal body, sometimes on the luxury reconfigured by the sovereign's extreme mastery. The Hellenistic kings inherited these questions, and alternated between a symbolization of their natural being and a naturalization of the symbolic in a constant interplay that resisted stabilization. Only the rise of Rome would bring an end to this vision of the royal body in a process of perpetual construction, as though the incarnation of royalty itself was inconceivable

Incarnation · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies