Identities and empire

Local mythology and the self-representation of Aphrodisias

Bibliographic Data

ID20067670
AuthorsBahadir Yildirim, Bahadır Fatih Yıldırım (0000-0002-0475-741X, corresponding author)
Year2004
Pages23-52
Publication date2004-11-24
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenuePaideia (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/9783110204711.23
OpenAlexW2493982850
ISBN9783110204711
LanguageEN
Citations received3

Louis Robert's pioneering studies of cities of Asia Minor revealed the wide extent and complexity of the use of local mythology in the cultural production of these communities, particularly during the Roman imperial period. 1 His research laid the groundwork for later studies of this phenomenon, such as those of Peter Weiss on the coinage of these cities, which interpret depictions of local mythology as a form of self-representation and associate this prominent use of the past in daily life as a distinctive feature of the culture of the so-called Second Sophistic. 2 The glimpses of the self-image of communities of Asia Minor fashioned in the guise of myth on their local coinage coalesce into a remarkable portrait of a polis community in the Hellenic East at the dawn of the period of the Second Sophistic on a series of reliefs that decorated a Roman civil basilica at Aphrodisias in Caria. Based on an analysis of the iconography of the depictions of foundation legends and the 'self-representation' of the founders on the reliefs of the basilica, it will be argued that the reliefs functioned both as a form of diplomacy that claimed the preeminence of the peoples, cults and lands of Aphrodisias, and as a visual encomium that celebrated their membership in the wider Hellenic world of the Roman Empire and their unique identity within that world in the past and present

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Literature · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law

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