Ancient Greek World
Homer describes a more-than-natural light around the heads of heroes in battle, Depictions of Perseus in the act of slaying Medusa, with lines radiating from his head, appear on a white-ground toiletry box in the Louvre and on a slightly later red-figured vase in the style of Polygnotos, ca. 450-30 BC, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On painted wares from south Italy radiant lines or simple haloes appear on a range of mythic figures: Lyssa, a personification of madness; a sphinx, a sea demon, Thetis, the sea-nymph who was mother to Achilles, The Colossus of Rhodes, was a statue of the sun-god Helios and had his usual radiate crown (copied by the Statue of Liberty). Hellenistic rulers are often shown wearing radiate crowns that seem clearly to imitate this effect.
Further afield, Sumerian religious literature frequently speaks of melam (loaned into Akkadian as melammu), a "brilliant, visible glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes, sometimes by kings, and also by temples of great holiness and by gods' symbols and emblems."
Read more about this topic: Halo (religious Iconography)
Famous quotes containing the words ancient, greek and/or world:
“He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.... He needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“One ... aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)