What Do Statues Want? A Middle-Range Approach to Materiality and the Agency of Statues in Hellenistic Athens

Ditte Kvist Johnson is defending her doctoral thesis in the field of Classical Archaeology and Ancient history. What Do Statues Want? A Middle-Range Approach to Materiality and the Agency of Statues in Hellenistic Athens.

Examination committee:

• Professor Ann-Louise Schallin, Stockholms universitet
• Associate professor Marina Prusac Lindhagen, Kulturhistoriskmuseum/Universitetet i Oslo
• Docent Mikael Johansson, Göteborgs universitet

Substitute member of the examination committee in the event of absence: Docent Hedvig von Ehrenehim, Göteborgs universitet

Opponent: Professor Sheila Dillon, Duke University (Durham, North Carolina)

Chair: Professor Lena Larsson Lovén, Göteborgs universitet

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Statues were a defining feature of Hellenistic Athens. They were set up in large numbers across the public spaces of the city so that social life meant living with them. While the significance of statues in Athenian society has received considerable scholarly attention, no study has yet examined how statues actively participated in the construction of meaning and effect, or fully explored the reciprocal relationship between statues and viewers. Consequently, our understanding of statues and their role in the ancient world, as well as the social and cultural systems they helped sustain within Athenian society, remains limited.

The aim of this study is to understand the role of statues in shaping culture and society in Hellenistic Athens (323/2–87/6 bc) by analysing the dynamics between human and material agency. For this purpose, it examines a broad range of statues, including honorific statues, statues of athletes, deities, heroes, and mythological figures. Given that no statue from Hellenistic Athens survives intact, the study draws on a combination of archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence, primarily statue bases, decrees, and literary sources, which are analysed through visual and spatial methods, including 3D modelling. Conceptually, the dissertation develops its analysis through three theoretical frameworks: John Robb’s Middle Range Theory of Material Culture Studies, a combination of Hans Robert Jauss’s Historical Reception and Wolfgang Iser’s Reception Aesthetics, and Actor-Network Theory. Together, these approaches provide a means of analysing the relationship between statues and viewers and the forms of agency that emerged from it.

The results indicate that Athenian statues served as social agents, capable of shaping civic, religious, and social practices and behaviours. Their influence emerged through the interaction of design, spatial context, and human engagement. By combining schematism and naturalism, statues occupied a position between reality and assumed reality, allowing them to shape how viewers responded to them. Likewise, their placement within carefully constructed visual and spatial assemblages affected patterns of perception and engagement. These arrangements were governed by both public and private interests, although existing statues often directed the placement of new statues, as the statue landscape continued to respond to historical developments over time. Crucially, the study shows that agency was realised not by statues alone but through encounters with viewers, whose responses depended on their cultural knowledge, social background, and individual interpretations. Agency was activated in these encounters because the recognisable forms of statues, together with prevailing systems of belief, enabled viewers to accept them as representatives of the human and divine actors they depicted. As a consequence, statues exercised agency by demanding attention, eliciting responses, and positioning themselves simultaneously as images and social actors through wider networks of relationships. In doing so, they helped shape civic, religious, and social life, as well as sustaining the cultural norms and social structures that defined Athenian society during a period of continuity and great change.

Taken together, this challenges the traditional view of statues as passive objects, instead positioning them as active participants in cultural and social life, and, indeed, as objects with their own desires and demands. By foregrounding the agency of statues, the study demonstrates that their popularity and role in society derived not only from their inherited cultural values and symbolic meanings but also from their capacity to shape viewers and their surrounding urban landscapes, and, by extension, to negotiate and stabilise social, political, and religious systems.