368 S. Rebecca Martin
On the statue’s base is a Greek inscription: “Dionysios, son of Zeno, son of Theodoros
of Berytos, benefactor, [dedicated this group] on behalf of himself and his children to
his ancestral gods [theois patrios]” (Havelock 1995: 57). The inscription is critical to
reading the work. It shows that the apparently humorous image was a votive, which,
although clearly referencing Praxiteles’sKnidia, was dedicated to the gods of the
patron’s homeland—Berytos (Beirut), Phoenicia. One of these “ancestral gods” was
almost certainly Astarte, Aphrodite’s popular Levantine counterpart and one precedent
for Aphrodite’s nudity in art (Bahrani 1996).
A conventional interpretation of this work, which takes the discussion to the topic
of ethnocultural contact and change, sees it as the result of intense interaction on the
island through which Greek artists learned how to accommodate the tastes of various
patrons (see Reger on the Middle Ground in this volume). Sometimes, the final result
seems awkward, as exemplified by the conventional name of Figure 24.9,Pseudo-Athlete,
a portrait of an unknown Italian dated from 100–88BCEand found in the House of the
Diadoumenos (Bruneau and Ducat 1983: 76, no. 61; Stewart 1990: 227–8, Figure 840).
Both works draw on Greek art’s own history, and both were produced through contact.
Yet, whereas theSlipper-Slapperseems to obscure Phoenician ethnic identity in favor
of a culturally expansive one, thePseudo-Athlete’s realistic head and heroic body use
style and iconography as way to forge a historically particular identity. There is no mis-
taking thePseudo-Athletefor a Greek or a Phoenician, as it is emphatically marked as
“Italian.”
Both images may be understood in terms of Hellenization. As a modern scholarly
concept, Hellenization is defined in theOxford Classical Dictionaryas, “the diffu-
sion of [Greek] culture, a process usually seen as active” and generally associated
with Alexander’s conquest of the East (Hornblower and Spawforth 2003, following
Droysen’s [1877] conception ofHellenismus). In this dictionary entry, “Hellenism” is
distinguished from “Hellenization,” the former being an ancient cultural entity and the
latter “reflecting modern forms of cultural domination.” Put another way, Hellenism
is “Greek culture,” and Hellenization is the process through which it spreads. As its
name implies, Hellenization assumes a basic core-to-periphery process. Contact occurs
especially through three routes: trade, the movement of people and craftsmen, and
political subjugation. Thus, Hellenization can result from export of goods and artists;
from merchants trading, settling, and inter-marrying abroad; and from Alexander’s
conquest and the establishment of the successor kingdoms in the East. The process is
understood as an evolution.
Hellenization raises the question of who the Hellenes are at the core of the process.
As popular readings of the Parthenon andEurymedon Vaseshow, the idea that Hellenic
self-awareness was forged through confrontation with Persia is deeply entrenched, even
among those who advocate passionately for Greek–Near Eastern connectivity in the
Iron Age. Walter Burkert (1992: 1), for example, argues that Greeks became “aware
of their own identity as separate from that of the ‘Orient’ when they succeeded in
repelling the attacks of the Persian empire” (cf. S. Morris 1992; Malkin 2001: 7–9).
The Greek/anti-Greek or “oppositional” approach to Greek identity (Hall 2002,
esp. 179–81) is sometimes challenged to allow for a more complex understanding of
attitudes toward all non-Hellenes, including Persians (Snodgrass 1980; see especially