THE ANCIENT WORLD

When we think of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Etruscans today, popular characters such as Hercules, or images of aqueducts come to mind. Yet the ancient Greeks, Romans and Etruscans have influenced our lives in many more important ways. Our language, literature and mythology, our political and social structures, all derive from this heritage.

Over the last centuries we have absorbed the images of the lives of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Etruscans as our own cultural heritage. In this exhibition of objects from the collections of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden we see some of the objects that affected Renaissance interpretation of the past, as well as glimpsing the way people in the ancient world saw themselves.

Any Greek or Roman travelling through the Mediterranean in Roman Imperial times between 27 BC and AD 395, confronted a cultural mosaic composing elements from many different periods. Famous statues and monuments from various periods were erected in cities throughout the Empire. Libraries overflowed with scrolls containing all the Greek and Latin literary writings. Famous fifth century BC Greek tragedies continued to be performed in theatres, as were the Latin comedies by Plautus and Terence, and contemporary mimes and farces. Statues of philosophers, poets and statesmen were so well-known that copies were ordered, produced and distributed throughout the Roman Empire to its most distant borders.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity as the state religion, libraries were burnt and statues pulled down and pulverised. Fragments of this pre-Christian Greek, Etruscan and Roman cultural mosaic are now spread throughout the world.

The exhibition ANCIENT LIVES presents a glimpse of this cultural mosaic, and explores aspects of the lives of ancient Greeks, Romans and Etruscans. The objects, dating from the seventh century BC to the fourth century AD, from the time of Homer and his epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, to the end of the Roman Empire, represent universal concerns, such as the gods, ancient societies and aspects of everyday life. In this Introduction you can see examples of objects which tell the story of these universal concerns.

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