Traveling Objects and Objects as Mediators

In her 1989 book *Greek Gods and Figurines,* the scholar Brita Alroth coined the term “visiting gods” to describe the puzzling phenomenon where travelers to the most popular sanctuaries in the Greek world would dedicate a votive image of one god to another. Drawing on the work of materiality theorists, I argue that these votives can be understood as a means of expressing and instantiating spatial relationships in the ancient Greek landscape. For the ancient Greek pilgrim, “visiting god” votives may have been a way to articulate particular cosmological and mythological connections between the divine resident of the sanctuary and the home community of the human visitor. Complementing this approach, I aim to show that the polysemous iconicity of the image allowed the pilgrim to not only materially mediate the presence of the visiting god, but also their own presence before the residents of the sanctuary. 

The Letter of Aristeas is a diasporic Jewish work composed in Ptolemaic-era Egypt, likely during the second century BCE. In an under-examined section, Aristeas offers an elaborate ekphrasis of a set of ritual objects that Ptolemy II constructs and sends as gifts to the Jerusalem temple (§§ 51b-82). In this paper, I examine the ekphrastic presentation of ritual portabilia as a strategy aimed at cultivating Alexandrian Jewish identity through a focus on elite craftsmanship and benefaction. I argue that the work adapts the conventions of ekphrasis in order to guide its reader through a mode of "ritualized viewing" that parallels the visually-marked practices of how these objects were piously produced and ritually offered to the Jerusalem temple. The work thus elevates Ptolemy II as a model of elite devotion whose efforts bridge the Alexandrian present with a scriptural past.