NEW YORK: To add context to an exhibition of Hellenistic art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has reproduced a copy of the famous ‘Alexander Mosaic’, which once enlivened the floor of an elite house in Pompeii. It’s a helpful way of inserting Alexander himself into the drama of a stunning show, “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World”.

Dominating the galleries like he once dominated the world, Alexander is seen on horseback, a cynosure of power and elegance amid the clamour of battle, which he surveys with one eye unnaturally large and wide open. His hair, thick with sweat and dust, flows wildly from the top of his head to the nape of his neck, and he is seen from the side, looking intently forward into the fray.

The downside of using a reproduction in an exhibition of authentic objects is that it can make you suspicious of the real thing. I passed by a genuine, and rare, ‘emblema’ — a highly detailed mosaic made of tiny tiles — and thought at first it was a colour print of a painting. It shows four itinerant musicians playing their instruments, standing in a shallow space and casting shadows on the floor and wall behind them.

Everything is meticulously rendered: the folds of the gowns they wear, the caricature of the masks that cover their faces, even the shadows gathered low to the ground on the wall behind them. If you give this miraculous work just a passing glance, it seems almost photographic, an illusion heightened by the “digital” quality of its delicate tesserae or tiles.

The exhibition is full of small, and sometimes very large, marvels like this one. The Hellenistic bronze exhibition at the National Gallery of Art earlier this year surveyed one type of art from the period between the age of Alexander, and the final domination of Rome over the territories he conquered.

This exhibition draws out from that focus, and includes sculpture in bronze, stone and terracotta, mosaics, glassware, cameos, coins and jewellery. Although some of its most powerful pieces are from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which is closed for renovation, the exhibition isn’t exclusively focused on that city, one of the most artistically productive of the several Greek kingdoms that formed after Alexander’s short-lived empire broke apart.

Much of what is on display is from Rome, copies made after Greek originals, and if the exhibition has an argument, it is to dissolve any clear boundaries between what was Hellenistic and what we think of as Roman. The Hellenistic kingdoms that included Pergamon spanned the ancient world, from the Ptolemaic dynasty in what is now Egypt and Northern Africa to the Seleucids who ruled over Syria, much of the Middle East and all the way to what is now Pakistan.

For a while, the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon controlled much of Asia Minor, but its larger claim to lasting fame was its capital city, for centuries the envy of the world.

Dominating the city was the magnificent Great Altar, a colonnaded structure set on an imposing base covered with a spectacular frieze. The altar has been partially reconstructed in Berlin to create a setting for the remains of emotionally charged and visually dynamic relief carving.

Those works obviously can’t travel, but other statues set onto the altar terrace or its roof can. Several of those are included in this exhibition, including a headless statue of Athena, which once served as an acroterion, or roof embellishment, and seems to show the goddess striding forward with great urgency.

Several pieces from the National Gallery exhibition, which was also seen in Los Angeles and Florence, are included in the Met’s overview. A small bronze statue of an exhausted Hercules, slouched over his club, makes another appearance, as does the statue of an aristocratic boy and the sleeping Eros (both from the Met’s collection). But there are extraordinary bronzes in the New York show that weren’t part of the earlier one, including one of the most touching portraits from the ancient world, a bust of Juba II as a young man.

Juba’s life encapsulates the complexity of the political and cultural forces at play in this period. His father committed suicide after losing a critical battle to Julius Caesar in 46BC The son was taken to Rome and raised by the imperial family, given an excellent education and Roman citizenship. He was returned to his father’s throne, ruled as king of Mauretania and was a widely admired and entirely loyal vassal of Rome. He married the daughter of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra. The portrait bust shows a moody young man, handsome, with downcast eyes and thick, expressive lips.

The image seems to prefigure his reputation as one of the most scholarly of kings, an author of books on history, natural science and geography. After his death, his son Ptolemy of Mauretania — also represented in the exhibition by a bronze likeness — inherited the kingdom and visited Rome — where he was murdered, on orders from Caligula.

The busts of Juba and his ill-fated son come late in the exhibition, as Rome was becoming a much more ominous force in the ancient world. It was no longer an aspiring republic, but an omnivorous empire, ruling much of what Alexander conquered, and even more that he didn’t. But the expressivity of the Juba bust, and some of its visual details, recalls depictions of Alexander himself. You have a powerful sense of aesthetic continuity spanning almost three centuries.

You may also be left with a slightly bewildering sense of geography. Mauretania was on the far western reaches of the Roman empire, which taken together with Alexander’s empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian subcontinent. So it makes little sense to think of centres and peripheries, at least not in an any visual or artistic sense. Art circulates thoroughly throughout this vast swathe of territory, with works of exceptional quality made in the great capitals and the hinterlands alike, with copies cropping up at what might seem an impossible distance from any likely encounter with an original or basic prototype.

And so this exhibition, like others devoted to this period, dissolves any simple sense of Hellenistic culture rooted in a particular place or tied to a particular dynasty. It may leave you less certain of what the term Hellenistic actually means, even as it overwhelms with individual masterpieces of representation that wouldn’t be equalled by Western artists for almost 1,500 years.

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, June 21th, 2016