Title: Hunters, heroes, kings
Description: The painted frieze on the façade of Tomb II from the ancient Macedonian capital of Aegae, the modern site of Vergina, is one of very few examples of ancient painting to survive from the Hellenic world. In the scene, ten men, along with their dogs, hunt a variety of dangerous and challenging prey--lion, boar, bear, and deer--in an extensive landscape, the detailed depiction of which is unparalleled in the Greek tradition. Previous interpretations of the painting have focused on the potential for the image to reflect a specific historical moment, in which members of the Macedonian royal house took part. My approach, in contrast to these interpretations, focuses on the traditions, literary and visual, out of which the theme of the group hunt emerges. I seek to remove the image from the politics of a specific historical moment, and resituate the hunt as an iconographic theme that has deeply-rooted meaning in the culture and long-standing traditions of the Macedonian court.

I offer a new interpretation of the Vergina hunting scene, in which I locate models for certain prominent aspects of the painting in Hellenic, northern Aegean, and Near Eastern traditions. I identify the group hunt as a certain kind of activity performed by the young heroes in Greek epic, and I connect the position of some hunters on horseback to a Macedonian iconographic tradition of the ideal king. The image, I argue, is a representation of a heroic hunt, which elevates its participants to the status of heroes. Even the landscape of the Vergina painting contributes to the heroic aura of the scene, and I propose that the sacred elements present in the landscape refer not to a specific locale, but, instead, to the exceptional nature of the heroic space in which this hunt takes place.