Various Works in the Pergamene Style

The chief object of this paper is to record and classify the various monuments which on the ground of subject-matter or style may claim to be connected with Pergamene work. It may be well also to notice by way of introduction what we can gather from ancient testimony.Of most of the existing works that I shall mention I have had personal knowledge, and where I have had to rely merely on published representations of them, I can only bring them forward for the purpose of suggesting to those who have direct acquaintance with them to consider them from this point of view. The theory which I wish to work out—a theory already suggested by others—is that certain fields of Greco-Roman and late Roman art have received a deep and abiding impress from Pergamon. That this should be a priori probable does not need elaborate proof; Rome was the heir of the Pergamene kingdom, and had always friendly intimacy with it, and we hear of many Pergamene works being transferred to Rome by Nero (Dio Chrys. 644 R.): between certain Roman and certain Pergamene myths there was a close analogy, which coloured the artistic representation of them: the struggle of the Pergamene kingdom with the Gauls, or—to speak perhaps more correctly—with Antiochus Hierax supported by Gallic mercenaries, was the most recent counterpart to the struggle of Rome with the barbarians: it was the Pergamene school—as Professor Brunn was the first to demonstrate—who idealized and fixed for artistic representation the type of the northern barbarian and really created historic sculpture, and I think that it can be shown that their rendering of this type became conventionalized and remained traditional throughout many centuries.