Introduction

There is a funerary stêlê on display at the Museum of Art and History of Geneva showing a certain Ptolemy the Geometer, as indicated on the ancient caption. When the late Raffaella Cribiore and I first came across this image when we overlapped on research stays at the Fondation Hardt in 2018, we thought it was fortuitous. Here unexpectedly was another representation of a classroom — the bearded geometry teacher Ptolemy seated on the chair typical of such representations — and what is more, a table of calculations on the wall, and — apparently — a student! Yet over the course of our Entretiens, it became clear that this image is much more ambiguous than originally thought. The huge table of calculations, in combination with the cithara, confirms that Ptolemy was a teacher, but it is not clear whether these are features of a classroom representation or merely representative symbols of the dead man’s career — his work as a teacher of geometry. Chairs are common elements of funerary iconography, and the boy on the bottom right is surely enslaved, given his short chitôn, lack of footwear, and marginal position on the image. Part of the issue with interpretation has to do with the material conditions of production: the figures here are likely copied from models in the workshop. On the other hand, suspended objects in Greek imagery usually serve to define space, and the seated Ptolemy points with his right hand, now partly lost, to the multiplication table, as though in the middle of a lesson. More generally, funerary stêlê commonly depict scenes from life, rather than some liminal space between life and death. The image is thus deeply ambiguous; it is hard to imagine a teaching scene where an enslaved boy is present and there is no student, but the representation nevertheless harks back to the teaching space in which Ptolemy spent his working life.