The Alexander Mosaic

by Ada Cohen

The Alexander Mosaic: Stories of Victory and Defeat focuses on one of the richest, most complex and visually stunning monuments of classical antiquity. Contributing to a vast tradition of scholarship, which dates back to the discovery of the Mosaic in 1831, Ada Cohen here engages with, but departs from, a core of positivist assumptions that characterize this literature. In this study, she examines the Mosaic as it may have functioned in two different contexts, first as a Greek painting of the fourth century B.C., and then as a Roman mosaic of ca. 100 B.C. A variety of interpretive issues regarding history and art history are thus foregrounded, which have broader implications for the study of ancient monuments.