Persian, Greek and Hellenistic Luxuries

This British Museum exhibition is about ancient luxury, but its content shows a commendable frugality. Almost all of what is on show in Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece, in the three white-draped rooms of the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, can on a normal day be seen in the museum elsewhere. From the Oxus Treasure, painstakingly acquired by the museum’s pioneer curator, Sir Augustus Franks, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there is an exquisite miniature gold chariot, the fur of its rider and the make-up on his eyes still proving the art of its creator, from some 2,500 years ago. From the same Treasure, found on the banks of the River Oxus, in modern Tajikistan but once on the edges of the Persian empire, is a golden oil flask in the shape of a fish, its scales glistening as if fresh from the water. From the Duveen Gallery comes a section from the Parthenon Marbles showing Athenian women with what are probably Persian war trophies. The poster beast of the exhibition is a silver and gold winged griffin at the base of a drinking vessel, c.500-400BCE, another jewel in the collection of the British Museum (even without the lost jewels for its eyes) but, like the chariot, the fish and the marble from the Parthenon, not needing its own seat on a CO₂-spewing plane from Istanbul or Los Angeles.