Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Eirene.
The gallery
Eirene with the Infant Ploutos (Roman copy after Kephisodotos)
Roman copyist after Cephisodotus the Elder, 1st–2nd century AD copy of a Greek original of c. 370 BC
This life-size marble is the best-preserved Roman copy of the celebrated bronze group by Cephisodotus the Elder that stood in the Athenian Agora, the canonical 'Cephisodotus type' of Eirene (Εἰρήνη), the goddess of Peace. Heavily draped in a peplos and himation, the matronly goddess stands with maternal calm and cradles the naked infant Ploutos (Wealth) on her left arm, while her lost right hand once held a scepter; the child reaches up toward her, his presence proclaiming the truth that only in peacetime can prosperity be born and nursed. Erected after the Common Peace of 375/4 BC, the original embodied Athens' new state cult of Eirene. Now in the Glyptothek, Munich (inv. 219).
Eirene and Ploutos (plaster cast replica)
Cast after Cephisodotus the Elder (Pushkin Museum collection), cast of a Greek original of c. 370 BC
A full-length plaster cast in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, reproducing Cephisodotus's Eirene group and showing the tender exchange of gazes between the goddess of Peace and the child Wealth she carries. The casting preserves the gentle inclination of Eirene's head toward Ploutos and the soft fall of her drapery, the spring-bloom serenity for which the type was prized in antiquity. As a teaching cast of the lost Athenian bronze, it transmits the Hellenic image of Peace as nurse and mother of abundance — the personified Eirene who, with her sisters Eunomia (Good Order) and Dike (Justice), was numbered among the Horai, daughters of Zeus and Themis.
Relief of Pax / Tellus, east frieze of the Ara Pacis Augustae
Unknown (Augustan sculptors), 13–9 BC
This allegorical panel from the east front of the Altar of Peace in Rome shows a serene enthroned goddess amid a flowering landscape, twin infants at her lap and the fruits of the earth in her embrace, flanked by personifications of the breezes of land and sea. Commissioned by the Senate to consecrate the Pax Augusta, the relief gives Roman form to the same idea the Greeks crowned in Eirene: Peace as the source of fertility and plenty. The monument frames its goddess within the luxuriant acanthus scrollwork of its lower walls, and the figure has been read as Pax — the Latin counterpart of Eirene — her olive-wreath aspect and burgeoning abundance translating the Cephisodotus image of Peace-nursing-Wealth into the visual language of Augustan Rome. Ara Pacis Museum, Rome.