Reply To: Hellenistic Variety

[Allie Eby]

Hellenistic art, while being influenced by Greek art, comes in a broader form of mediums and styles. This can be seen in the sense that the statues, while realistically proportioned like earlier Greek statuary, show a wide range of subjects in an even wider range of situations and emotional states. Statues of gods such as Eros, a non-idealistic and childlike figure, were virtually nonexistent in Greek art. The presence of statues of people from other cultures such as the Gallic Trumpeter and Laocoön were also not seen in Greek art. All of these prior examples also show a much wider range of human emotion and circumstances, portraying new things such as exhaustion, peacefulness, and even active suffering. However, the biggest example of this to me is the existence of the Epidauros Theater. Theater is by nature a very diverse and individualistic medium, with living actors portraying stories in a way that is very engaging, requiring the presence, attention and interaction of a live audience. While a script can persist, a single stage play itself cannot be preserved for hundreds of years, it can only be enjoyed by the present individual viewers existing there in the moment. This contrasts much of Greek art, which is designed to last for centuries and generations, telling the same story the exact same way over and over again.