Les frises à guirlandes d’Aphrodisias de Carie

Heirs to the artistic centre of Pergamon, the sculptors of Carian Aphrodisias, working the local marble and iron ore during Imperial times, produced statues for export around the Mediterranean, but also architectural elements, reliefs and ornamented friezes epigraphically known as zôdia aphrodeisiaka. This publication analyses the 409 sculpted frieze-blocks found in the city from the Italian excavations of G. Jacopi in 1937 until those of Professor K. Erim in the theatre (30–27 BC), the poliad temple of Aphrodite (mid C1st AD), the civil Basilica (last third of C1st AD), the Agora (first quarter of C2nd AD), the Agora Gate (mid C2nd AD), and especially the South Agora, where the North Portico of Tiberius (AD 19–27) displays a 200 m-long garland-frieze with 226 human heads and theatrical masks unparalleled in the Graeco-Roman world. This frieze shows statuary heads reproducing the opera nobilia of classical Greek art from Polykleitos to Lysippos, masks belonging to the tradition of Greek tragedy, comedy and satyr plays, and also 42 portrait heads of Alexander and several Hellenistic dynasts and commanders. The iconographic programme is related to the ornamental theme of the gymnasia, since the South Agora could be recognized during the 1st century AD as a sports ground with a huge central pool and a covered running track or xystos, according to Vitruvius. The sequential restoration of the frieze enables us to understand how this collective work was apportioned among several teams of sculptors training apprentices in copying heads from the Greek statuary heritage. In this Hellenized Carian city, allied to Rome from Sulla’s time, the patronage of Aphrodite, identified as the mother of Aeneas, explains the omnipresence of the Ionic garland-friezes, emblems of the divinity who ensured the world’s cohesion and peace according to the ideology of the Augustan Principate. Its panegyric value attests to the harmony of the civic community within the pax romana. Therefore the garland-frieze spread in the architectural decoration of a number of Imperial cities in Asia Minor.