The political context for the creation of portraits and the way they were handled affected their appearance in different ways. The book deals with varying facets of this topic for ancient Greece from the Archaic to the end of the Hellenistic period.
The competitive behavior of the aristocratic elites in the 6th century BC is seen as an essential stimulus for the preparation of the individual portrait. The standardized portraits of the conformist high classical polis of the 5th century BC then raise a question that concerns a central problem for portraiture of all times, that of the relationship between beauty and truth or ideality and individuality. In the political milieu of the High Classical period, this means: is the 'own face' frowned upon or tolerated, is it considered more desirable than the standardized ideal face, and is this perhaps context-dependent?
The dichotomy alluded to continued in the Hellenistic period in the design of realistic portraits of citizens and portraits of rulers that tended to be idealized and exaggerated, whereby the proportions between the two modes of representation varied greatly.
With the increasing Roman presence and dominance in the eastern Mediterranean, the previously practiced conventions of representation appear to have partially dissolved. Another important question for historically oriented portrait research is the recognizability of politically or ideologically defined social groups in portraits. It is raised here on the basis of a long-discussed problem, the question of the distinctiveness of Greek and Roman portraits and the recognizability of "Roman friends" in the portraiture of the Greek East.
Finally, the controversies between the Athenian opinion leaders Aeschines and Demosthenes in the 4th century BC, which have been handed down in writing and visualized in sculptures, provide a concrete insight into the contemporary view of the appearance of politicians in public and their counterparts in portrait sculpture.
The portraits dealt with in this book and the attempts to explain them have mostly only been discussed in excerpts. By inserting them into a longer historical process, new perspectives arise for our understanding of ancient portraits in their respective political and social contexts. The book combines the presentation of the basics of ancient portrait research with the discussion of partial aspects and is therefore aimed at both the specialist audience in the narrower and broader sense, not least at students and other interested parties from the neighbouring disciplines of classical archaeology.