Rhetorical education – specifically, the advent of the progymnasmata, or preliminary rhetorical exercises – taught students how to be Greek, and it appears to have been the root of many Hellenistic innovations in both art and literature. The wealthy and elite backgrounds of some Greek artists enabled them to be well educated, and their intellectualism aided their adult pursuits in oratory, teaching, and scholarship, not to mention art. Kings and courtiers, too, received Greek rhetorical educations, which allowed them to appreciate the rhetorically informed art in the courts. The courts also played a role in Hellenistic artistic production by drawing Greek artists around the ancient Mediterranean. The result of all this seems to be a standardization of Greek art that is analogous to a linguistic koine.

When the modern spectator tries to work out the imagery on the Archelaos Relief (Fig. 3.1), she quickly realizes that it thwarts a straightforward interpretation. Consisting of a lower interior scene surmounted by an upper mountainous landscape, the Archelaos Relief produces a constructed space that looks quite different from most ancient representations of the real world. The relief’s directed composition, moreover, draws the spectator’s eye up and down through its many levels, zigzag or boustrophedon fashion. And, what is more, the relief explicitly announces its rhetorical technique. For not only does it name an artist, Archelaos of Priene, it also glosses the figures in its bottom scene: personifications of abstract concepts.