Hellenistic Portraits, McFadden 1951George H. McFadden

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was early identified by the portraits on the coins as the founder of the dynasty of the Seleucids. It is one of the greatest portraits of a great, manly, and human ruler. The forehead is protuberant, and the eyebrows are highly curved. The left eye still has the ancient filling of smalt, and the right eye has been restored accordingly. From the eyes under their shadowing eyebrows we can conceive the fire of the spirit. The nose is only slightly curved. The upper lip is pouting. The chin is short and its underside is straight. Long folds, the sign of old age, furrow the cheeks. The bushy hair is arranged in irregular waves beginning at the vertex of the crown of the head. In front of the diadem heavy tufts of hair form an irregular and unsymmetrical crown. The execution is magnificent. The features are realistic, but the unessential has been subordinated to the significant.

The style is decidedly Lysippean, but this portrait cannot have been made by Lysippus, for according to the signs of age in the face the head must be dated about 290-280, when Seleucus was about seventy and Lysippus was dead. The artist may have been the otherwise unknown Aristodemus, but a portrait by Lysippus might have been the model for this later portrait.

Antiochus I built a tomb temple in Seleucia in Syria for his father, who now was named Nicator, the Victorious. Later both were venerated together in a chapel on the island of Lemnos. Statues of the deified founder of the dynasty certainly continued to be erected during the Hellenistic period. Even in the Roman period his memory was preserved. Trajan decorated the central niche in the scaenae frons of the theater of Antioch with a group of Seleucus Nicator and his son Antiochus Soter, crowning a replica of the Tyche of Antioch, and in a relief of the second century of the Christian era, at Dura-Europus, Seleucus Nicator crowns the Zeus-Baal of the city. 7