Authority between Mask and Sign

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

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• The Royal Costume and Insignia of Alexander the Great

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• La Tryphé, philosophie royale ptolémaïque

  Julien Tondriau•Revue des Études Anciennes•1948

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• Bulletin épigraphique

  Jeanne Robert, Louis Robert•Revue des Études Grecques•1967

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• The Cyropaedia and Hellenistic Kingship

  J Joel Farber•The American Journal of Philology•1979

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  Open Access•Paul Pedech•Historiens compagnons d’Alexandre•1984

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• Faces of Power

  Alan E Samuel, Andrew Stewart et al.•Phoenix•1996

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• Theatricality Beyond the Theater. Staging Public Life in the Hellenistic World

  Open Access•Angelos Chaniotis•Pallas•1997

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• Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et politique

  Marcel Gauchet•Le Débat•1981

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