Alexander in the Tychaion: Ps.-Libanius on the Statues

Gibson offers a reappraisal of the identity and arrangement of statues in the Alexandrian Tychaion, a Hellenistic or Roman-era building whose interior decor is known only from a description now attributed to Ps.- Nicolaus, the author of a late-antique or Byzantine collection of progymnasmata. He argues that the statue usually identified as Ptolemy I Soter holding a cornucopia is instead Alexander the Great holding a thunderbolt and standing atop a decorated column capital. He also argue that this statue was at the focus of a semicircle of statues of six Olympian gods in individual niches, and that this group echoed a group standing directly across the room consisting of a statue of Charis standing at the focus of a semicircle of the other six Olympians.