Luxurious objects are celebrated for their exoticism, rarity and
style, but also disparaged as indulgent, extravagant and corrupt.
The ancient origins of these attitudes emerged at the boundary
between the imperial Persian and democratic Athenian Greek worlds.
Luxury was at the centre of the royal Persian court and behaviours
of ostentatious display rippled through the imperial provinces,
whose elite classes emulated luxury objects in lesser materials.
But luxury is contrastingly depicted through Athenian eyes –
within the philosophical context of early democratic codes and the
historical context of the Greco-Persian Wars, which suddenly and
spectacularly brought eastern luxuries into the imagination of the
Athenian populace for the first time. While Greek writers rejected
luxury as eastern, despotic and corrupt, the Athenian elite adopted
Persian luxuries in imaginative ways to signal status, distinction
and prestige. Under the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great
and its subsequent kingdoms, royal Achaemenid luxury culture would
later be adopted and displayed by the Macedonian and local elite
across the Greek and Middle Eastern worlds: behaviours of
ostentatious display were a means to seek advantage in the new
Hellenistic world order. Ultimately, this publication demonstrates
how competing political spins woven around 2,500 years ago still
continue to shape modern perceptions of luxury today.
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