Contemporary popular culture regularly presents ancient Greece as an exceptional place—from movies like Disney’s Hercules and Clash of the Titans, to video games like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and God of War, and books like the Percy Jackson series. These movies, artworks, and novels depict the mythological exploits of heroes and gods against a background of shining white marble sculpture and architecture or present Greece as a utopian society that celebrated art, philosophy, and democracy. It is a vision of Greece that has been filtered through renaissance, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century European ideals, and the reality rarely fits within these preconceived notions. Art was an important part of Greek culture. Yet, Greece was not the site of an isolated artistic miracle, but rather part of a larger Mediterranean world and heavily influenced by their neighboring societies. Greek sculptures were originally brightly painted in color. And the majority of Greek states limited the rights and freedoms of all except their male citizens.
Who were the ancient Greeks? In this study of the art of the ancient Greek world, we look beyond the borders of the modern nation state of Greece. People who identified as Greek thousands of years ago lived in a much broader region, producing art in Greek styles and with Greek subjects. Being Greek was not a nationality, but rather a multifaceted identity that, in this period, was defined by a combination of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural factors. Notably you were Greek if you spoke Greek (non-Greek speakers were known as barbarians, since the Greeks described them as speaking bar-bar, or nonsense), if your ancestors were Greek, you worshiped the Greek gods, and had common cultural touchstones (such as a knowledge of Homer), and a shared ethical system. Cities in mainland Greece, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E., established colonies across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, notably in South Italy and Sicily and Anatolia (today, Turkey). For instance, some of the best-preserved Greek temples are in Italy, such as the temples at Paestum, where they were built by Greek colonists and their descendants.
The polis
Most of Greece in the period under discussion was divided into city-states known as poleis (polis singular)—such as Athens or Sparta. Each polis was independent, with its own government, military, and economic system, and a Greek’s nationality was defined by their polis. The majority of the poleis were either oligarchies or tyrannies, with some monarchies and democracies. There were resultant cultural differences, with variations in language, gender roles, and social organization across the poleis. Most poleis controlled both the urban center and the surrounding rural space, and their populations were made up of citizens, non-citizens, and slaves. The male citizens were usually eligible to take part in civic government, while female citizens were not. Non-citizens were more restricted in their rights and participation in public life, and slaves were given few or no rights or autonomy.
Situating Greece within the Wider Mediterranean
Greece was part of a wider ancient world, connected to other civilizations in the Mediterranean and West Asia through diplomatic and economic ties, notably through trade routes that facilitated the exchange of physical goods and people as well as ideas. Art from Egypt, West Asia (the Near East), and Etruria in the Italic Peninsula was brought to Greece, and Greek art was exported. The art of ancient Greece was heavily influenced by that of their neighboring societies. The seventh century B.C.E. is frequently referred to as the Orientalizing period, due to the influence of Egyptian and Near Eastern art on the style and subject matter of Greek art in the period, such as the Eleusis Amphora.
Etruria
Before the small village of Rome became “Rome” with a capital R (to paraphrase the author D. H. Lawrence), a brilliant civilization once controlled almost the entire peninsula we now call Italy. This was the Etruscan civilization, a vanished culture whose achievements set the stage not only for the development of ancient Roman art and culture but for the Italian Renaissance as well.
Though you may not have heard of them, the Etruscans were the first “superpower” of the Western Mediterranean who, alongside the Greeks, developed the earliest true cities in Europe. They were so successful, in fact, that the most important cities in modern Tuscany (Florence, Pisa, and Siena, to name a few) were first established by the Etruscans and have been continuously inhabited since then.
Yet the labels “mysterious” or “enigmatic” are often attached to the Etruscans since none of their own histories or literature survives. This is particularly ironic as it was the Etruscans who were responsible for teaching the Romans the alphabet and for spreading literacy throughout the Italian peninsula.
The influence on ancient Rome
Etruscan influence on ancient Roman culture was profound. It was from the Etruscans that the Romans inherited many of their own cultural and artistic traditions, from the spectacle of gladiatorial combat, to hydraulic engineering, temple design, and religious ritual, among many other things. In fact, hundreds of years after the Etruscans had been conquered by the Romans and absorbed into their empire, the Romans still maintained an Etruscan priesthood in Rome (which they thought necessary to consult when under attack from invading “barbarians”).
Phersu and his victim, Tomb of the Augurs, late 6th century B.C.E., Tarquinia
We even derive our very common word “person’” from the Etruscan mythological figure Phersu—the frightful, masked figure you see in this Early Etruscan tomb painting who would engage his victims in a dreadful “game” of blood letting in order to appease the soul of the deceased (the original gladiatorial games, according to the Romans!).
Etruscan art and the afterlife
Early on the Etruscans developed a vibrant artistic and architectural culture, one that was often in dialogue with other Mediterranean civilizations. Trading of the many natural mineral resources found in Tuscany, the center of ancient Etruria, caused them to bump up against Greeks, Phoenicians, and Egyptians in the Mediterranean. With these other Mediterranean cultures, they exchanged goods, ideas, and, often, a shared artistic vocabulary.
Unlike the Greeks, however, the majority of our knowledge about Etruscan art comes largely from their burials. (Since most Etruscan cities are still inhabited, they hide their Etruscan art and architecture under Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance layers.) Fortunately, though, the Etruscans cared very much about equipping their dead with everything necessary for the afterlife—from lively tomb paintings to sculpture to pottery that they could use in the next world.
From their extensive cemeteries, we can look at the “world of the dead” and begin to understand some about the “world of the living.” During the early phases of the Etruscan civilization, they conceived of the afterlife in terms of life as they knew it. When someone died, he or she would be cremated and provided with another “home” for the afterlife.
Hut urn, Etruscan, 8th century B.C.E., ceramics, 22 x 23 x 28 cm (The Walters Art Museum)
This type of hut urn, made of an unrefined clay known as impasto, would be used to house the cremated remains of the deceased. Not coincidentally, it shows us in miniature form what a typical Etruscan house would have looked like in Iron Age Etruria—oval with a timber roof and a smoke hole for an internal hearth.
Later on, houses for the dead became much more elaborate. During the Orientalizing period, when the Etruscans began to trade their natural resources with other Mediterranean cultures and became staggeringly wealthy as a result, their tombs became more and more opulent.
The well-known Regolini-Galassi tomb from the city of Cerveteri shows how this new wealth transformed the modest hut to an extravagant house for the dead. Built for a woman clearly of high rank, the massive stone tomb contains a long corridor with lateral, oval rooms leading to a main chamber.
Five lions (detail), Large Parade Fibula, Cerveteri, Regolini-Galassi Tomb, from the main tomb in the lower chamber, 675-650 B.C., gold: embossed, punched, cut and granulated (Gregorian Etruscan Museum of the Vatican Museums; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A stroll through the Etruscan rooms in the Vatican Museum where the tomb artifacts are now housed presents a mind-boggling view of the enormous wealth of the period. Found near the woman were objects of various precious materials intended for personal adornment in the afterlife—a gold pectoral, gold bracelets, a gold brooch (or fibula) of outsized proportions, among other objects—as well as silver and bronze vessels, and numerous other grave goods and furniture.
Of course, this important woman might also need her four-wheeled bronze-sheathed carriage in the afterlife as well as an incense burner, jewelry of amber and ivory, and, touchingly, her bronze bed around which thirty-three figurines, all in various gestures of mourning, were arranged.
Bronze bed and carriage, Regolini-Galassi Tomb, (c. 650 B.C.E.), Cerveteri (Vatican Museums)
Mourners in Bucchero, Cerveteri, Regolini-Galassi Tomb, 675–650 B.C.E., Bucchero, 9.5–10.8 x 2.7–3.8 cm (Vatican Museums)
Though later periods in Etruscan history are not characterized by such wealth, the Etruscans were, nevertheless, extremely powerful and influential and left a lasting imprint on the city of Rome and other parts of Italy.
Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 B.C.E. by Romulus, its first king. In 509 B.C.E. Rome became a republic ruled by the Senate (wealthy landowners and elders) and the Roman people. During the 450 years of the Republic, Rome conquered the rest of Italy and then expanded into France, Spain, Turkey, North Africa, and Greece.
Capitoline Wolf, 5th century B.C.E. or medieval, bronze, 75 cm (Capitoline Museums, Rome)
The Capitoline She-wolf (Italian: Lupa capitolina) takes its name from its location—the statue is housed in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The She-wolf statue is a fully worked bronze composition that is intended for 360 degree viewing. In other words the viewer can get an equally good view from all directions: there is no “correct” point of view. The She-wolf is depicted standing in a stationary pose. The body is out of proportion, because its neck is much too long for its face and flanks. The incised details of the neck show thick, s-curled fur which ends with unnatural beads around the face and behind the forelegs. The wolf’s body is leaner in front than in the rear: its ribs are visible, as are the muscles of its forelegs, while in the back the musculature is less detailed, suggesting less tone. Its head curves in towards its tail; the ears curve back. The children themselves have a more dynamic posture: one sits with his feet splaying to either side, while the other kneels beside him. Both face upwards. They, too, are lean, with no trace of baby fat. The children represent Romulus and Remus, the twin children, raised by the She-wolf, per the Etruscan myth, who grew up to build a city of the Palatine Hill. The brothers feuded over who would rule the city and, in an altercation, Romulus killed his brother Remus to become and sole ruler and founder of Rome.
Rome became very Greek-influenced or “Hellenized,” and the city was filled with Greek architecture, literature, statues, wall-paintings, mosaics, pottery, and glass. But with Greek culture came Greek gold, and generals and senators fought over this new wealth. The Republic collapsed in civil war and the Roman empire began.
In 31 B.C.E. Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony at Actium. This brought the last civil war of the Republic to an end. Although it was hoped by many that the Republic could be restored, it soon became clear that a new political system was forming: the emperor became the focus of the empire and its people. Although, in theory, Augustus (as Octavian became known) was only the first citizen and ruled by consent of the Senate, he was in fact the empire’s supreme authority. As emperor he could pass his powers to the heir he decreed and was a king in all but name.
The empire, as it could now be called, enjoyed unparalleled prosperity as the network of cities boomed, and goods, people, and ideas moved freely by land and sea. Many of the masterpieces associated with Roman art, such as the mosaics and wall paintings of Pompeii, gold and silver tableware, and glass, including the Portland Vase, were created in this period. The empire ushered in an economic and social revolution that changed the face of the Roman world: service to the empire and the emperor, not just birth and social status, became the key to advancement.
Successive emperors, such as Tiberius and Claudius, expanded Rome’s territory. By the time of the emperor Trajan, in the late first century C.E., the Roman empire, with about fifty million inhabitants, encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean, Britain, much of northern and central Europe, and the Near East.
Schematic map showing the territorial expansion of Rome from the Middle Republic to the death of the Emperor Trajan (map: Varana, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Starting with Augustus in 27 B.C.E., the emperors ruled for five hundred years. They expanded Rome’s territory and by about 200 C.E., their vast empire stretched from Syria to Spain and from Britain to Egypt. Networks of roads connected rich and vibrant cities, filled with beautiful public buildings. A shared Greco-Roman culture linked people, goods and ideas.
The imperial system of the Roman Empire depended heavily on the personality and standing of the emperor himself. The reigns of weak or unpopular emperors often ended in bloodshed at Rome and chaos throughout the empire as a whole. In the third century C.E. the very existence of the empire was threatened by a combination of economic crisis, weak and short-lived emperors and usurpers (and the violent civil wars between their rival supporting armies), and massive barbarian penetration into Roman territory.
Relative stability was re-established in the fourth century C.E., through the emperor Diocletian’s division of the empire. The empire was divided into eastern and western halves and then into more easily administered units. Although some later emperors such as Constantine ruled the whole empire, the division between east and west became more marked as time passed. Financial pressures, urban decline, underpaid troops, and consequently overstretched frontiers—all of these finally caused the collapse of the western empire under waves of barbarian incursions in the early fifth century C.E. The last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 476 C.E., though the empire in the east, centered on Byzantium (Constantinople), continued until the fifteenth century.
Greek religion was polytheistic and firmly embedded in the polis system. Temples were often paid for by the government, and statues of and dedications to the gods were regularly made in civic buildings. Religious festivals were the major holidays in a city’s calendar, and it was expected that all citizens, both male and female, participated in public religious events. Temples served as houses for the gods, with cult statues placed inside which the spirits of the gods could inhabit. In most temples, there was not room for large congregational gatherings inside. Most religious rituals happened outside of the temple. Major festivals would involve public prayers, music, and ritualized movement in processions. The culminating event of the rituals was the sacrifice of animals, which took place on altars, usually placed in front of the entrance of the temple. As the gods received the fat and the bones through burnt offerings on the altars, the meat was left for the worshippers, and feasting would follow sacrifices.
Temples were usually the largest buildings in a city, made of stone—many domestic and civic structures were made of mud brick or timber—and frequently decorated with sculpture and colorful paint. The temples usually followed similar plans and were built using similar designs on their exteriors, like the temples at Paestum.
In addition to civic temples, Greeks also worshiped at sites known as panhellenic sanctuaries. These sanctuaries did not belong to a single polis but to all Greeks (the term “panhellenic” means all Greeks), and provided spaces for Greeks to interact with other Greeks in neutral territory. One such sanctuary was that of Apollo at Delphi. The sanctuary was oracular and people from across the Greek world came to Delphi to ask questions of the priests and priestess (known as the pythia) at the oracle who interpreted the infallible prophecies of Apollo.
In addition to the oracle, there were regular festivals that worshiped Apollo and involved prayers, feasting, and athletic games. Athletes who won at Delphi, like the patron of the Charioteer, dedicated statues in the sanctuary to advertise their win to all future visitors to the sanctuary.
This spirit of competition spread beyond the athletic games, and both individuals and poleis used the sanctuaries to their advertise civic wealth and status to other poleis through dedications of art and architecture. One such example at Delphi is the elaborate Siphnian Treasury, which housed the dedications from the island of Siphnos to Apollo. Panhellenic sanctuaries subsequently became one of the most important spaces for the displays of art and centers for artistic production.
Copyright: Dr. Amanda Herring, “Pottery, the body, and the gods in ancient Greece, c. 800–490 B.C.E.,” in Reframing Art History, Smarthistory, July 21, 2022,
The Pantheon
While the Pantheon’s importance is undeniable, there is a lot that is unknown. With new evidence and fresh interpretations coming to light in recent years, questions once thought settled have been reopened. Most textbooks and websites confidently date the building to Emperor Hadrian’s reign and describe its purpose as a temple to all the gods (from the Greek, pan = all, theos = gods), but some scholars now argue that these details are wrong and that our knowledge of other aspects of the building’s origin, construction, and meaning is less certain than we had thought.
The Pantheon, Rome, c. 125 (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
It is an open question whether the building was ever a temple to all the gods, as its traditional name has long suggested to interpreters. Pantheon, or Pantheum in Latin, was more of a nickname than a formal title. One of the major written sources about the building’s origin is the Roman History by Cassius Dio, a late second- to early third-century historian who was twice Roman consul. His account, written a century after the Pantheon was completed, must be taken skeptically. However, he provides important evidence about the building’s purpose. He wrote,
He [Agrippa] completed the building called the Pantheon. It has this name, perhaps because it received among the images which decorated it the statues of many gods, including Mars and Venus; but my own opinion of the name is that, because of its vaulted roof, it resembles the heavens. Agrippa, for his part, wished to place a statue of Augustus there also and to bestow upon him the honor of having the structure named after him; but when Augustus wouldn’t accept either honor, he [Agrippa] placed in the temple itself a statue of the former [Julius] Caesar and in the ante-room statues of Augustus and himself. This was done not out of any rivalry or ambition on Agrippa’s part to make himself equal to Augustus, but from his hearty loyalty to him and his constant zeal for the public good.
A number of scholars have now suggested that the original Pantheon was not a temple in the usual sense of a god’s dwelling place. Instead, it may have been intended as a dynastic sanctuary, part of a ruler cult emerging around Augustus, with the original dedication being to Julius Caesar, the progenitor of the family line of Augustus and Agrippa and a revered ancestor who had been the first Roman deified by the Senate. Adding to the plausibility of this view is the fact that the site had sacred associations—tradition stating that it was the location of the apotheosis, or raising up to the heavens, of Romulus. Even more, the Pantheon was also aligned on axis, across a long stretch of open fields called the Campus Martius, with Augustus’ mausoleum, completed just a few years before the Pantheon. Agrippa’s building, then, was redolent with suggestions of the alliance of the gods and the rulers of Rome during a time when new religious ideas about ruler cults were taking shape.
By the fourth century C.E., when the historian Ammianus Marcellinus mentioned the Pantheon in his history of imperial Rome, statues of the Roman emperors occupied the rotunda’s niches. In Agrippa’s Pantheon, these spaces had been filled by statues of the gods. We also know that Hadrian held court in the Pantheon. Whatever its original purposes, the Pantheon by the time of Trajan and Hadrian was primarily associated with the power of the emperors and their divine authority.
Pantheon dome (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The symbolism of the great dome adds weight to this interpretation. The dome’s coffers (inset panels) are divided into 28 sections, equaling the number of large columns below. 28 is a “perfect number,” a whole number whose summed factors equal it (thus, 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28). Only four perfect numbers were known in antiquity (6, 28, 496, and 8128) and they were sometimes held—for instance, by Pythagoras and his followers—to have mystical, religious meaning in connection with the cosmos. Additionally, the oculus (open window) at the top of the dome was the interior’s only source of direct light. The sunbeam streaming through the oculus traced an ever-changing daily path across the wall and floor of the rotunda. Perhaps, then, the sunbeam marked solar and lunar events, or simply time. The idea fits nicely with Dio’s understanding of the dome as the canopy of the heavens and, by extension, of the rotunda itself as a microcosm of the Roman world beneath the starry heavens, with the emperor presiding over it all, ensuring the right order of the world.
Greek Philosophy
Socrates and Plato
As Socrates never wrote anything, he is remembered today because thinkers like Plato featured him in their writings. Plato deliberately dramatized the life of his teacher Socrates. One of the key questions of Plato’s scholarship is exactly how many liberties he took in depicting the life of his teacher. Scholars generally agree that the dialogues that Plato wrote early in his career are more faithful to the life of Socrates than later ones. His writings are usually divided into three periods: early, middle, and late.
The early dialogues feature a skeptical Socrates who refuses to advance any doctrines of his own. Instead, he questions his interlocutors until they despair of finding the truth at all. These early dialogues tend to be somewhat short with a simpler composition. One of the dialogues features a young man named Meno who is the pupil of a prominent Sophist. The dialogue focuses on the nature of virtue and whether virtue can be taught. At one point in the dialogue, Meno famously compares Socrates to a torpedofish, a fish similar to a stingray that paralyzes its prey. Socrates does this to his dialogue partners: they begin the discussion believing that they know something and over the course of the dialogue begin to question whether they know anything at all.
Gradually, Plato has Socrates give voice to more positive doctrines. These include what comes to be known as the theory of the forms, a metaphysical doctrine that holds that every particular thing that exists participates in an immaterial form or essence that gives this thing its identity. The invisible realm of the forms differs fundamentally from the changing realm we experience in this world. The invisible realm is eternal, unchanging, and perfect. The material things themselves change, but the immaterial forms remain the same. Consider, for example, the form of a rectangle: four adjacent straight sides that meet at 90-degree angles. You can draw a rectangle, but it is an imperfect representation. The desk or table you are sitting at might be rectangular, but are its edges perfectly straight? How perfect was the instrument that cut the sides? If you nick the edge of a table, then it changes and becomes less like the form of a rectangle. With the doctrine of forms, Plato may be said to combine the metaphysics of Parmenides with that of Heraclitus into a metaphysical dualism.
The philosopher’s task is to access the immaterial realm of the forms and try to convince others of its truth. Plato further believed that if we understand the true nature of virtues like wisdom, justice, and courage, we cannot avoid acting in accordance with them. Hence, rulers of states should be philosopher-kings who have the clearest understanding of forms. Yet philosopher-kings never have perfect knowledge because our understanding is based on a material realm that is always changing. True knowledge is only possible in the abstract realms, such as math and ethics.
In the dialogues, Socrates claims that he was divinely inspired to question prominent citizens of Athens to determine whether their claims to know could be verified. These citizens grow annoyed with Socrates after some years of this treatment, eventually bringing charges against him for corrupting the youth and making the weaker argument appear the stronger. The proceedings of the resulting trial were immortalized in Plato’s Apologia, where Socrates presents his defense of his life’s work as a philosopher. The dialogue’s name derives from the Greek apologia, meaning “defense”—Socrates never apologizes for anything! He is found guilty and sentenced to death. Socrates becomes a martyr to philosophy, put to death by the democratic government of Athens.
Read and English translation of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic, Book VII, 514a-521d)
Aristotle
During the Middle Ages, people referred to Plato’s most famous pupil Aristotle as simply “the Philosopher.” This nickname is a testament to his enduring fame, as well as to the fact that he was driven by philosophical curiosity to try to understand everything under the sun. The first sentence of his famous work Metaphysics states, “Philosophy begins in wonder.” He exemplified this claim in his writing. His works ranged widely across all the main areas of philosophy, including logic, metaphysics, and ethics. In addition, he investigated natural philosophy, the fields of study that eventually gave rise to science. Aristotle also researched topics that would today be classified as biology and physics. Stylistically, his work was very different from that of his teacher. While Plato’s work was literary and even dramatic, Aristotle’s writings are presented as lecture.
Plato and his successors were prone to mysticism. It was easy to translate the philosophical theory of the forms into a mystical doctrine in which the forms were known by the mind of God. Aristotle resisted this trend. At the center of Aristotle’s work was his doctrine of the four causes. He believed that the nature of any single thing could be understood by answering four basic questions: “What’s it made of?” (material cause), “What shape does it have?” (formal cause), “What agent gave it this form?” (efficient cause), and, finally, “What is its end goal?” (final cause). Not only can we explain the nature of anything by answering these four basic questions, we can also understand the nature of the universe. Aristotle’s universe is a closed system that is comprehensible to humanity because it is composed of these four causes. Each cause leads to another, until we get to the first cause or prime mover at the head of it all. Somewhat obscurely, Aristotle claims that this first cause is “thought thinking itself.”
In addition to the doctrine of the four causes, it is important to understand Aristotle’s account of the soul. Unlike Plato, who held that the soul is an eternal substance that is reborn in various bodies, Aristotle has a functional conception of the soul. He defined the soul based upon what the soul does. In Aristotle’s understanding, all living things have souls. Plants have a vegetative soul that promotes growth and the exchange of nutrients. The animal soul, in addition to taking in nutrients and growing, experiences the world, desires things, and can move of its own volition. Added to these various functions in humans is the ability to reason.
With the four causes and the functional conception of the soul, we can begin to understand Aristotle’s ethics. Aristotle systematized Plato’s conception of ethics based upon his conception of the self and his four causes. Since everything that exists has a purpose, one of the basic questions for ethics is “What is the purpose of the human being?” After considering such candidates as pleasure and power, Aristotle settles on the answer “happiness” or, more accurately, “eudaimonia.” Rather than a fleeting emotional state, eudaimonia is better understood as “flourishing.” So the question at the heart of Aristotle’s ethics is “How should humans best achieve happiness?” His basic answer is that we achieve eudaimonia by cultivating the virtues. Virtues are habits of character that help us to decide what action is preferable in a particular moment. Cultivating these virtues will helps us to lead a fulfilling life.
It is generally true to say that Plato tended to be more focused on the transcendental world of the forms while Aristotle and his followers were more focused on this worldly existence. They shared a belief that the universe was comprehensible and that reason should serve as a guide to ordering our lives.
Epicureans
In the wake of the giants of Greek philosophy—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—some philosophers turned away from Plato’s ideal forms and toward materialism. In this, they can be seen as furthering a trend already present in the thinking of Aristotle. For Aristotle, there can be no immaterial forms—everything that exists has some material basis, though he allows an exception for his first cause, the unmoved mover.
The Epicureans steadfastly rejected the existence of immaterial forms, unmoved movers, and immaterial souls. The Epicureans, like Aristotle, embraced empiricism, which means that they believed that all knowledge was derived from sense experience. This view was the basis of the revival of empiricism in 18th-century British thought and scientific practice. They espoused an ethical naturalism that held that in order to live a good life we must properly understand human nature. The ultimate goal of life is to pursue pleasure. Despite their disagreements with Plato and, to a lesser extent, Aristotle, the Epicureans agreed with their predecessors that human existence ought to be guided by reason.
The two principal Greek Epicureans were Epicurus himself (341–270 BCE) and his Roman disciple Lucretius (c. 99–55 BCE). Although Epicurus’s views are characterized as hedonistic, this does not mean that he believed that we ought to be indiscriminate pleasure-seekers. Instead, he proposed that people could achieve fulfilling lives if they were self-sufficient and lived free from pain and fear. Of course, complete self-sufficiency is just as impossible as a life utterly free from pain and fear, but Epicurus believed that we should strive to minimize our dependence upon others while limiting the pain in our lives. Epicureans thought that the best way to do this was to retire from society into philosophical communities far from the hustle and bustle of the crowd. Epicurus and Lucretius saw the fear of death as our most debilitating fear, and they argued that we must overcome this fear if we were going to live happy lives.
Lucretius developed Epicurean philosophy in a poem called De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things). This poem discusses ethical ideas, but physics provides its focus. Lucretius adopts a material atomism that holds that things are composed of atoms in motion. Rejecting religious explanations, he argues that the universe is governed by chance and exemplified by these atoms in motion. Although the Epicurean philosophers were critically responding to the work of Plato and Aristotle, it should be evident that they also have antecedents in Presocratic thought. We can see this in their atomism and their religious skepticism, which hearkens back to Xenophanes.
Roman Philosophy
Just as Hellenistic philosophy developed in the long shadows cast by Plato and Aristotle, Roman philosophy also used these two giants of Greek philosophy as reference points. While Roman philosophical traditions were built upon their Greek forebearers, they developed in a Roman cultural context. Rome began as a republic before becoming an empire, and Roman philosophy was affected by this political transformation. Still, Roman philosophical schools were thoroughly grounded in Greek philosophy, with many Roman philosophers even choosing to write in Greek rather than Latin, since Greek was viewed as the language of scholarship.
Rhetoric and Persuasion in Politics
Recall that Plato defined philosophy in opposition to sophistry. Whereas the philosopher sought the truth in a dispassionate way using reason as a guide, the Sophist addressing a crowd was indifferent to truth, seeking power and influence by appealing to the audience’s emotions. This harsh critique of rhetoric, which can be defined as the art of spoken persuasion, softened with subsequent philosophers. Indeed, Aristotle wrote a text called Rhetoric in which he sought to analyze rhetoric as the counterpart to philosophy. The tension never disappears entirely, however, and the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric and, more generally, the relationship between philosophy and politics remains a perennial question.
Despite the fact that his ideal statesman was a philosopher, Plato generally sought to keep philosophy distinct from the grubbiness of real politics and was concerned about the messiness of democratic politics in particular. In the Roman political context, this ambivalence becomes less apparent. Examples of philosophers who were also statesmen include Cicero (106–43 BCE) and Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE). Marcus Aurelius even served as emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 CE. However, as the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire, philosophers shifted inward by focusing on things that were in their control.
Stoicism
Aristotle held that eudaimonia is worthwhile at least in part because it helps us to better deal with various inevitable misfortunes. The Roman Stoics further developed this idea, proposing four core virtues: courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. The Stoics were wary of the type of false judgments that might arise from the emotions. They were also uneasy with the loss of control associated with strong emotions, observing that some people can become enslaved to their passions. The Stoics prized rational self-control above everything else. This constant work at maintaining inner freedom epitomizes the Stoic conception of philosophy (Hadot 2002).
The Stoics were systematic philosophers whose writings focused on ethics, physics, logic, rhetoric, and grammar. For the Stoics, the world consists of material bodies in motion, causally affecting each other. Real entities are those capable of causally affecting one another. The Stoic god is a material entity who exists in nature and meticulously manages it, the material first cause of the universe, Aristotle’s unmoved mover incarnated as a material entity. In other words, God is an animating reason that gives life to the universe. Unlike the Christian God who transcends the universe, the Stoic god is found within it, a force immanent to the universe who combines and recombines the four elements into things we can experience because they act upon us and we upon them. Stoicism developed at a time when politics in the Roman world was increasingly seen as something outside individuals’ power to change. So Stoics let politics go. While turning away from politics may indeed promote a tranquil life, it also promotes passivity. Thus, Stoicism reached a conclusion similar to that reached by Daoism, as explored in the chapter on early philosophy.
Academic Skepticism
Academic Skepticism is another aspect of Roman philosophy that developed out of a tendency found in earlier Greek thought. Recall that Socrates questioned whether we could ever know anything at all. The Academic Skeptics opposed the Stoic claims that sense impressions could yield true knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is impossible. Instead of knowledge, Academic Skeptics articulated the idea of degrees of belief. Things are more or less believable based on various criteria, and this degree of believability is the basis for judgment and action. Disciples of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho (c. 360–270 BCE) held that we had to suspend judgment when it comes to knowledge claims, going so far as to say that we cannot even reliably claim that we cannot know anything. Rather than suspending all judgment, Academic Skeptics sought to demonstrate that knowledge claims lead us to paradoxical conclusions and that one can argue cogently both for and against the same proposition.
The philosopher, orator, and statesman Cicero (106–43 BCE) was the most prominent of the Academic Skeptics. His works provide much of the information we have about the school. He had a decisive influence on Latin style and grammar and was decisive in the introduction of Hellenistic philosophy into Rome. The rediscovery of his work in the 15th century ushered in the European Renaissance.
Neoplatonism
Plotinus (c. 204–270) led a revival of Plato’s thought in the late Roman Empire that lasted until Emperor Justinian closed Plato’s Academy in 529. Plotinus believed that he was simply an expositor of Plato’s work, but the philosophy he developed, known as Neoplatonism, expanded on Plato’s idea. Neoplatonism arose during a time of cultural ferment in the Roman Empire, incorporating ideas borrowed from sources such as Judaism and early Christianity. The key metaphysical problem in Neoplatonism was accounting for how a perfect God could create a universe that was manifestly imperfect. Plotinus solved this problem by applying ideas similar to Plato’s theory of forms. The perfect, unchanging realm is the one inhabited by God, but creation inhabits the changing realm, which only mirrors forms imperfectly. Plotinus claims that creation emanates from God, but the further one is from this source the less perfect things become.
LITERATURE
Homeric Epics
We know almost nothing about Homer; scholars debate whether one or more authors composed the epic poems attributed to him. It is possible that he was a Greek who lived on the coast of what is now Turkey, not far from the location of Troy. If so, his balanced depiction of the Greeks and the Trojans in the Iliad is noteworthy, since he would be a descendant of those Greeks who invaded the area approximately 400 years earlier, when the historical Troy was attacked and burned in around 1200 B.C.E. The Iliad encompasses a few weeks in the tenth year of the
Trojan War, focusing on one episode in the life of the Greek warrior Achilles, while the Odyssey explains why Odysseus spends twelve long years trying to go home. Homer’s grasp of Mediterranean geography is strong, as is evident when he traces the wandering route that Odysseus takes to return home to Ithaca after the war. Homer was not the first or the last to write about the Trojan War and its aftermath, but his version was the most famous, in part for his vivid descriptions (which would be imitated by other authors, including Virgil in his Aeneid, for centuries to come) For an audience that might not have witnessed a battle, Homer appeals to their senses through familiar sights and sounds; men hacking at each other with bronze weapons sound like a forest full of woodcutters hacking at trees. Homer’s version was also controversial; Greek writers such as Xenophanes criticized Homer for his impious depiction of the gods, who appear at times brutal, at times humorous. That criticism should remind us that Homer composed a literary version of events, rather than a strictly accurate view of his culture. What has never been controversial is Homer’s popularity, from his own time to the present day.
Written by Laura J. Getty in the Anthology for World Literature I: Beginnings to 1650, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Recognized worldwide, Stonehenge seems an impossible task: how, and why, did prehistoric people build it?
Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high (photo: Maedin Tureaud, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Stonehenge, on Salisbury plain in England, is one of the most recognizable monuments of the Neolithic world and one of the most popular, with over one million visitors a year. People come to see Stonehenge because it is so impossibly big and so impossibly old; some are searching for a connection with a prehistoric past; some come to witness the workings of a massive astrological observatory. The people living in the fourth millennium B.C.E. who began work on Stonehenge were contemporary with the first dynasties of Ancient Egypt, and their efforts predate the building of the Pyramids. What they created has endured millennia and still intrigues us today.
In fact, what we see today is the result of at least three phases of construction, although there is still a lot of controversy among archaeologists about exactly how and when these phases occurred. It is generally agreed that the first phase of construction at Stonehenge occurred around 3100 B.C.E., when a great circular ditch about six feet deep was dug with a bank of dirt within it about 360 feet in diameter, with a large entrance to the northeast and a smaller one to the south. This circular ditch and bank together is called a henge. Within the henge were dug 56 pits, each slightly more than three feet in diameter, called Aubrey holes, after John Aubrey, the 17th century English archaeologist who first found them. These holes, it is thought, were either originally filled with upright bluestones or upright wooden beams. If it was bluestones which filled the Aubrey holes, it involved quite a bit of effort as each weighed between 2 and 4 tons and were mined from the Preseli Hills, about 250 miles away in Wales.
Aerial view, 2014, Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high (photo: timeyres, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The second phase of work at Stonehenge occurred approximately 100–200 years later and involved the setting up of upright wooden posts (possibly of a roofed structure) in the center of the henge, as well as more upright posts near the northeast and southern entrances. Surprisingly, it is also during this second phase at Stonehenge that it was used for burial. At least 25 of the Aubrey holes were emptied and reused to hold cremation burials and another 30 cremation burial pits were dug into the ditch of the henge and in the eastern portion within the henge enclosure.
The third phase of construction at Stonehenge happened approximately 400–500 years later and likely lasted a long time. In this phase the remaining blue stones or wooden beams which had been placed in the Aubrey holes were pulled and a circle 108 feet in diameter of 30 huge and very hard sarsen stones were erected within the henge; these were quarried from nearby Marlborough Downs. These upright sarsen stones were capped with 30 lintel stones (the horizontal stones).
Interior of the sarsen circle and bluestones in the foreground, Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons 24 feet high
Each standing stone was around 13 feet high, almost seven feet wide and weighed around 25 tons. This ring of stones enclosed five sarsen trilithons (a trilithon is a pair of upright stones with a lintel stone spanning their tops) set up in a horseshoe shape 45 feet across. These huge stones, ten uprights and five lintels, weigh up to 50 tons each. Bluestones, either reinstalled or freshly quarried, were erected in a circle, half in the outer sarsen circle and half within the sarsen horseshoe. At the end of the phase there is some rearrangement of the bluestones as well as the construction of a long processional avenue, consisting of parallel banks with exterior ditches approximately 34 meters across, leading from the northeast entrance to Stonehenge, dipping to the south and eventually to the banks of the Avon river.
Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high (photo: Stonehenge Stone Circle, CC BY 2.0)
All three phases of the construction of Stonehenge pose fascinating questions. The first phase of work required precise planning and a massive amount of labor. Who planned the henge and who organized whom to work together in its construction? Unfortunately, remains of Neolithic villages, which would provide information about who built Stonehenge, are few, possibly because so many lie underneath later Bronze Age, Roman, medieval, and modern cities. The few villages that have been explored show simple farming hamlets with very little evidence of widely differing social status. If there were leaders or a social class who convinced or forced people to work together to build the first phase of Stonehenge, we haven’t found them. It also probably means the first phase of Stonehenge’s construction was an egalitarian endeavor, highly unusual for the ancient world.
Who were the people buried at Stonehenge during its second phase? Recent analysis of these bones has revealed that nearly all the burials were of adult males, aged 25–40 years, in good health and with little sign of hard labor or disease. No doubt, to be interred at Stonehenge was a mark of elite status and these remains may well be those of some of the first political leaders of Great Britain, an island with a ruling tradition extending all the way to the House of Windsor. They also show us that in this era, some means of social distinction must have been desirable.
The work achieved in the long third phase of Stonehenge’s construction, however, is the one which is most remarkable and enduring. Like the first phase of Stonehenge, except on a much larger scale, the third phase involved tremendous planning and organization of labor. But, it also entailed an entirely new level of technical sophistication, specifically in the working of very hard stone. For instance, the horizontal lintel stones which topped the exterior ring of sarsen stones were fitted to them using a tongue and groove joint and then fitted to each other using a mortise and tenon joint, methods used in modern woodworking.
Each of the upright sarsens were dressed differently on each side, with the inward facing side more smoothly finished than the outer. Moreover, the stones of the outer ring of sarsens were subtly modified to accommodate the way the human eye observes the massive stones against the bright shades of the Salisbury plain: upright stones were gently widened toward the top which makes their mass constant when viewed from the ground.
The lintel stones also curve slightly to echo the circular outer henge. The stones in the horseshoe of trilithons are arranged by size; the smallest pair of trilithons are around 20 feet tall, the next pair a little higher and the largest, single trilithon in the south west corner would have been 24 feet tall. This effect creates a kind of pull inward to the monument, and dramatizes the outward Northeast facing of the horseshoe. Although there are many theories, it is still not known how or why these subtle refinements were made to Stonehenge, but their existence is sure proof of a sophisticated society with organized leadership and a lot of free time.
Of course the most famous aspect of Stonehenge is its relationship with the solar and lunar calendar. This idea was first proposed by scholars in the 18th century, who noted that the sunrise of the midsummer solstice is exactly framed by the end of the horseshoe of trilithons at the interior of the monument, and exactly opposite that point, at the center of the bend of the horseshoe, at the midwinter sunset, the sun is also aligned. These dates, the longest and shortest days of the year, are the turning point of the two great seasonal episodes of the annual calendar. Since this discovery, several other theories about astrological observation have been offered but few stand up to scrutiny together with the physical details of the monument.
The group of Neolithic monuments on Orkney consists of a large chambered tomb (Maes Howe), two ceremonial stone circles (the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar) and a settlement (Skara Brae), together with a number of unexcavated burial, ceremonial and settlement sites. The group constitutes a major prehistoric cultural landscape which gives a graphic depiction of life in this remote archipelago in the far north of Scotland some 5,000 years ago.
There aren’t many places in the world like Knossos. Situated 6km south of the sea, on the north central coast of Crete, several things make this archaeological site important: its great antiquity (it is 9,000 years old), many different cultural layers (Neolithic through Byzantine), its size (nearly 10 square Km) and its great popularity (the second most visited archaeological site in Greece after the Acropolis at Athens). Aside from these, however, Knossos is also exceptional because of its role in the writing of history. It is the type site for all of Minoan archaeology, was one of the first large-scale scientific excavations in Europe, and contains some of the most contentious restorations in the ancient Mediterranean. Because of all this, Knossos is a critical part of multiple discourses in the history and historiography of the ancient world. We can’t stop talking about Knossos.
Throne Room, Knossos (photo: Olaf Bausch, CC BY 3.0)
A palace?
Bronze Age Knossos is traditionally called a palace, a description used by its most famous excavator, Sir Arthur Evans. Indeed, when Evans, just three weeks after beginning his work at the site, discovered a grandly paved and painted room with a large stone chair set in the wall he believed he had found the throne of Minos and the kings of Crete. This royal interpretation of the site of Knossos stuck. Although it is now clear that the role of Knossos was at least as religious and economic as it was political, it is still just called a palace.
The archaeological site at Knossos, with restored rooms in the background, Crete (photo: Jebulon, public domain)
Early Knossos
The site of Knossos was first inhabited around 7000 B.C.E. and was one of the earliest Neolithic sites in the Mediterranean, settled at a time when pottery had yet to be invented. It continued to be a well-populated site for successive Neolithic eras, one literally building upon another, eventually creating one of the only tell sites of the Aegean, nearly 100 meters above sea level. Unfortunately, not a lot is known about Neolithic Knossos as the Bronze Age inhabitants entirely covered over its remains with their own structures. However, limited excavations show that it was one of the oldest farming villages in Europe which had connections to even earlier Mesolithic inhabitants elsewhere on the island.
The end of the 4th millennium B.C.E. is the beginning of the early Bronze Age at Knossos, a time when the inhabitants learned how to combine tin and copper to make bronze tools and weapons, far more durable than their stone predecessors. Although the palace structure is yet to come, already the buildings on the site have a north-south orientation, as the palace eventually will. Moreover, it appears that ceremonial activity was already common at this time, evidenced by so many specially made and decorated drinking cups. Approximately 1,000 years later, around the end of the 3rd millennium B.C.E., the first large-scale buildings were built at Knossos. The nature and shape of these structures are very difficult to ascertain because the later palace largely obscures them, but already the outline of the large (49 x 27m) rectangular open central court is established.
Standing in the central court today
Protopalatial or Old Palace Knossos
Approximately two hundred years later, at the start of the 2nd millennium (around 1950–1800 B.C.E.) the outline and dimensions of the palace of Knossos emerges and begins what is called the Protopalatial or Old Palace period. The two most distinctive features of this earliest version of Knossos are the long, monumental, cut ashlar stone of the palace’s west façade and the central court, now squared off in the corners and paved. This court functioned as a grand performance space. In this period, a wide paved road, which Evans named the Royal Road, is built. The road connects Knossos to the adjacent town to the west. An entrance system of raised walkways is also built at this time.
Kouloures, or circular stone-lined and plastered pits, Protopalatial Knossos (left photo: C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0; right photo: Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0)
It is clear that, like contemporary ancient Near Eastern temples, storage was an important aspect of Protopalatial Knossos. Long thin storage rooms to the west of the central court are built at this time. In addition, sunk into the open court to the west of the palace were large, deep, circular pits lined with plastered stone, called Kouloures, which archaeologist believe stored grain.
Protopalatial Knossos stored more that raw materials, it also produced finished goods. There is evidence of seal stone carving, weaving, and pottery production (especially Kamares Ware) and likely gold working as well. In this busy place, a written script, Cretan Hieroglyphic, was used to keep records, written on clay tablets and nodules which were attached to containers of goods. As of yet, the language this script recorded has not been translated.
South Propylaeum, Knossos (photo: Stegop, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Neopalatial or New Palace Knossos
Around 1700 B.C.E. major renovations are undertaken at Knossos, likely the result of a destructive event, possibly an earthquake. These renovations mark the beginning of the Neopalatial or New Palace period and result in the most characteristic elements of Knossos: the West Court is paved (made by filling in the Protopalatial Kouloures) to be used for public ceremonies, the monumental south entrance (or South Propylaeum) is added to impress visitors.
“Queen’s megaron,” East Wing, Knossos (photo: Andy Montgomery, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Throne Room with its lustral basin or light well is built to comfortably accommodate the leadership of the palace, and the elegant spaces of the East Wing or Domestic Quarter are constructed, where Evans believed the queen of Knossos passed her time.
Blue monkey frieze, c. 1580–1530 B.C.E, fresco, found in the House of the Frescoes, room D (today in the Heraklion, Archaeological Museum, Crete; photo: ArchaiOptix)
These new spaces were replete with innovative architectural details including colonnaded staircases, light wells, pier and door partitions, and wall and floor paintings. This was a grand era for painting at Knossos. There were beautiful scenes of the natural world, such as in the Blue Monkey or Partridge Frieze frescoes, as well as miniature scale works such as the Grandstand Fresco, which seems to represent group performances in the West Court.
Contemporary view of Knossos looking southwest from the Monumental North Entrance (photo: Theofanis Ampatzidis, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Raging bull, Monumental North Entrance, Knossos (photo: Hannes Hiller, CC BY 2.0)
The monumental North Entrance passage was rebuilt in the Neopalatial period and decorated with a relief wall painting of a raging bull, an image which becomes emblematic of Knossos and Minoan Crete. Pottery production reaches new heights, most famously in the delightful marine style, which some archaeologists believe is a reflection of a Minoan thalassocracy (sea power).
Innovation in the Neopalatial period extends to writing as well: a new script, in addition to Cretan Hieroglyphic, is used at Neopalatial Knossos, Linear A. Although this script also remains largely unreadable, it is clear that it was used for accounting and administration, noting the movement of materials and people between the palace and sites across the island. It also reflects the way in which Knossos and a number of other smaller sites which look very similar to Knossos, and are also called palaces (Malia, Phaistos, Zakros, Monastiraki, Petras, Chania and Galatas) were a focal point for much of the population and labour on Crete at the time. This palatial network not only connected Cretan communities but also maintained trading ties with the Eastern Mediterranean.
Throne Room with griffins in the frescos on the wall, Knossos (photo: Olaf Bausch, CC BY 3.0)
Postpalatial or Final Palatial Knossos
There are signs that the palace suffered a series of destructions around 1450 B.C.E., at the same time that there are widespread destructions and abandonment of Minoan sites all over Crete. These events begin what is called the Postpalatial or Final Palatial period, which lasts approximately 150 years. Knossos is rebuilt after these destructions but differently. For instance, no more lavish limestone ashlar masonry was cut for the exterior of the palace and new interior walls were erected to change the flow of movement, seemingly to cut off certain areas, such as the West magazines (storage areas), presumably for security. Most importantly, the Throne Room was redesigned in this era to include the griffins seen in the archaeological reconstruction and possibly for the installation of the throne itself.
Bull-leaping fresco from the east wing of the palace of Knossos (reconstructed), c. 1400 B.C.E., fresco, 78 cm high (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, photo: Jebulon, CC0)
Much of the palace interior was repainted in this Postpalatial era and this includes many of the most famous wall paintings from Knossos: the bull leaping or Toreador fresco, the Procession fresco, and the Camp Stool fresco. Pottery produced at Postpalatial Knossos is called Palace Style and is based on Neopalatial predecessors but with a quirky kind of stylization which renders subjects less naturalistic and more pattern-like. Some new pottery shapes are created which appear in imitation of mainland Mycenaean pieces.
Tablet with Linear B script (describes oil offered to deities and religious officials), c. 1375 B.C.E., Late Minoan IIIA, Knossos, Crete (The British Museum, photo: Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Postpalatial Knossos is still a place of very complex administration as is described by the hundreds of clay tablets discovered. However, the Linear A script is no longer used; it is replaced by Linear B, which can be read, and records a very early form of Classical Greek, the language of the contemporary Mycenaeans of mainland Greece. The social order described in these tablets is that of a Wanax as the leader of Knossos and a deep administration concerned with land tenure, religious activities, and a massive textile industry which employed over 700 shepherds harvesting between 50–75 tons of raw wool, woven by nearly 1,000 workers, men, women, and children, capable of producing some 20,000 individual textile pieces.Knossos was clearly a prosperous city in this period and this can also be seen through a new type of burial at the site: warrior graves. These, sometimes extravagantly constructed, tombs of men and women feature a range of fighting weapons such as swords and thrusting daggers, as well as valuable metal vessels and elegant pottery. These sorts of very rich, well-constructed graves are a tradition which is associated with the mainland of Greece.
Swords (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion; photo: Hyspaosines, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Cretan and mainland cultures
A lot about Postpalatial Knossos has a distinct Mycenaean flavor and this fact has led many archaeologists to conclude that the destructions at the beginning of the period were actually the Mycenaeans invading the island. However, many Minoan elements remain in Postpalatial culture, and obvious signs of warfare which would have resulted from a large-scale invasion have yet to be found. Therefore, we now like to think of the Postpalatial period at Knossos as one of a hybrid, between Cretan and Mainland cultures, likely created by a local elite who wished to maintain status in both spheres. As to who exactly these local elite were, we have some information. Those buried in warrior graves in the Postpalatial cemeteries around Knossos were born in the region, as recent analysis of skeletal materials has shown. The new Knossian elite did not come from the Mycenaean mainland.
Copyright: Dr. Senta German, “Knossos,” in Smarthistory, September 19, 2020, accessed April 4, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/knossos/.
Mycenean Citadel
The ancient citadel (fortified city) at Mycenae is located on top of an isolated hill and provides truly spectacular views of the surrounding area, making it an ideal location for a defensive stronghold. Mycenaean culture dominated southern Greece, but is perhaps best known for the site of Mycenae itself, which includes the citadel (with a palace), and is surrounded by different forms of tombs and other structures. Mycenaean culture firmly establishes itself in the late Bronze Age, specifically, around 1600 B.C.E.
The “Palace” and Grave Circle A, Mycenae, c. 1600–1100 B.C.E.
At around 1600 B.C.E.—seemingly out of nowhere—the shaft graves at the site of Mycenae are built. These are two circular walled plots containing graves, built some 50 years apart, close to the fortification wall of the citadel. Archaeologists named these “Grave Circle A” and “Grave Circle B.” Grave Circle B is earlier than A (but A was discovered first) and contained some 14 shaft graves with 24 burials; Grave Circle A held 6 shaft graves with 19 burials. These burials contained men, women, and children who were related to one another, recent DNA analysis has shown.
Plan of the Citadel of Mycenae
The focus sites of this era are Mycenaean palaces which all have several aspects in common: a central megaron or throne room with a large hearth which is adjacent to an open court, commanding views of an agricultural plane, colorful and often figural wall painting, and associations with grand burial structures such as tholoi (beehive tombs). These types of sites can be found not only at Mycenae but also at Tiryns, Iolkos, Orchomenos, Gla, Pylos, Thebes, and on the acropolis at Athens.
Mycenaean architects and engineers embraced a massive scale with huge hydraulic projects, far-flung road works, and defensive walls so gigantic they never succumb to burial, remaining largely intact and providing the inspiration for mythological explication until the modern era.
Approach to the Lion Gate, Mycenae, c. 1300–1250 B.C.E.
Around 1200 B.C.E. nearly all major Mycenaean sites experienced massive destruction, the cause of which is unclear. Many sites were quickly reinhabited, but the elite areas, such as the spaces where it is believed the Wanax ruled, were not rebuilt. For the next 50 to 75 years, pottery production and even wall painting continues but becomes less fine and increasingly regional, eventually ceasing all together. Burial practice changes as well, from shaft graves to small individual cist graves (small below-ground stone boxes) containing cremated remains.
Map of Mycenaean Greece 1400–1200 B.C.E. Palaces, main cities and other settlements.
By 1050 B.C.E., at the end of the Bronze Age, the Greek world (the Cycladic islands, Crete, and the Mainland), have only memories left of the once wealthy and far reaching polities which had ruled for nearly a millennium, an era soon to be beautifully enshrined in the oral epic tradition of Homer.
In 492–490 B.C.E., Athens played a central role in the defeat of the Persians. It is not surprising that ten years later when the Persians returned to Greece, they made for Athens; nor that, when they took the city, they sacked it with particular fervor. In the sack, they paid special attention to the Acropolis, Athens’s citadel. The Persians not only looted the rich sanctuaries at the summit, but also burned buildings, overturned statues, and smashed pots. When the Athenians returned to the ruins of their city, they faced the question of what to do with their desecrated sanctuaries. They had to consider not only how to commemorate the destruction they had suffered, but also how to celebrate, through the rebuilding, their eventual victory in the Persian Wars. The Athenians found no immediate solution to their challenge. Instead, for the next thirty years they experimented with a range of strategies to come to terms with their history. They left the temples themselves in ruins, despite the fact that the Acropolis continued to be a working sanctuary. They did, however, rebuild the walls of the citadel, incorporating within them some fire-damaged materials from the destroyed temples. They also created a new, more level surface on the Acropolis through terracing; in this fill, they buried all the sculptures damaged in the Persian sack. These actions, most likely initiated in the immediate aftermath of the destruction, were the only major interventions on the Acropolis for over thirty years.
In the mid-fifth century B.C.E., the Athenians decided, finally, to rebuild. On the site of the great marble temple burned by the Persians, they constructed a new one: the Parthenon we know today. They set it on the footprint of the earlier building, with only a few alterations; they also re-used in its construction every block from the Older Parthenon that had not been damaged by fire. In their recycling of materials, the Athenians saved time and expense, perhaps as much as one-quarter of the cost of construction.
The Parthenon we see today was not created ex novo. Instead, it was the final monument in a series, with perhaps as many as three Archaic predecessors. The penultimate work in this series was a marble building, almost identical in scale and on the same site as the later Parthenon, initiated in the aftermath of the First Persian War.
The Older Parthenon foundation is located below the newer construction (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
At the same time, their re-use had advantages beyond the purely pragmatic. As they rebuilt on the footprint of the damaged temple and re-used its blocks, the Athenians could imagine that the Older Parthenon was reborn—larger and more impressive, but still intimately connected to the earlier sanctuary.
Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, Parthenon Metopes, south flank, marble, c. 440 B.C.E., Classical Period (British Museum, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
While the architecture of the Parthenon referenced the past through re-use, the sculptures on the building did so more allusively, re-telling the history of the Persian Wars through myth. This re-telling is clearest on the metopes that decorated the exterior of the temple. These metopes had myths, for instance, the contest between men and centaurs, that recast the Persian Wars as a battle between good and evil, civilization and barbarism.
The metopes did not, however, depict this battle as one of effortless victory. Instead, they showed the forces of civilization challenged and sometimes overcome: men wounded, struggling, even crushed by the barbaric centaurs. In this way, the Parthenon sculptures allowed the Athenians to acknowledge both their initial defeat and their eventual victory in the Persian Wars, distancing and selectively transforming history through myth.
Thus even in what might commonly be understood as the moment of genesis for the Parthenon, we can see the beginning of its many lives, its shifting significance over time. Left in ruins from 480 to 447 B.C.E., it was a monument directly implicated in the devastating sack of the Acropolis at the onset of the Second Persian War. As the Parthenon was rebuilt over the course of the following fifteen years, it became one that celebrated the successful conclusion to that war, even while acknowledging its suffering. This transformation in meaning presaged others to come, more nuanced and then more radical.
Hellenistic and Roman adaptations
By the Hellenistic era if not before, the Parthenon had taken on a canonical status, appearing as an authoritative monument in a manner familiar to us today. It was not, however, untouchable. Instead, precisely because of its authoritative status, it was adapted, particularly by those who sought to present themselves as the inheritors of Athens’ mantle.
The Parthenon was altered by a series of aspiring monarchs, both Hellenistic and Roman. Their goal was to pull the monument, anchored in the canonical past, toward the contemporary. They did so above all by equating later victories with Athens’ now-legendary struggles against the Persians.
We can still see traces of the Persian shields from Alexander the Great that were at one point below the metopes. The blue circles indicate roughly were they would have been located (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The first of these aspiring monarchs was the Macedonian king Alexander the Great. As he sought to conquer the Achaemenid Empire—alleging, as one casus belli, the Persian destruction of Greek sanctuaries one hundred and fifty years earlier—Alexander made good propagandistic use of the Parthenon. After his first major victory over the Persians in 334 B.C.E., the Macedonian king sent to Athens three hundred suits of armor and weapons taken from his enemies. Likely with Alexander’s encouragement, the Athenians used them to adorn the Parthenon. There are still faint traces of the shields, once prominently placed just below the metopes on the temple’s exterior. Melted down long ago due to their valuable metal content, the shields must have been a highly visible memento of Alexander’s victory—and also of Athens’ subordination to his rule.
Wounded Gaul, from the Small Pergamene Votive Offering, Roman copy of the 2nd century C.E. from a Greek original of the 2nd century B.C.E. (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples)
Some two centuries later, another Hellenistic monarch set up a larger and more artistically ambitious dedication on the Acropolis. Erected just to the south of the Parthenon, the monument celebrated the Pergamene kings’ victory over the Gauls in 241 B.C.E. It also suggested that this recent success was equivalent to earlier mythological and historical victories, with monumental sculptures that juxtaposed Gallic battles with those of gods and giants, men and Amazons, and Greeks and Persians. Like the shield dedication of Alexander, the Pergamene monument made good use of its placement on the Acropolis. The dedication highlighted connections between the powerful new monarchs of the Hellenistic era and the revered city-state of Athens, paying homage to Athens’ history while appropriating it for new purposes.
Holes for bronze letters of an inscription honoring the Roman emperor Nero on the east façade of the Parthenon, created and then removed in the 60s C.E. (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A final royal intervention to the Parthenon came in the time of the Roman emperor Nero. This was an inscription on the east facade of the Parthenon, created with large bronze letters in between Alexander’s previously dedicated shields. The inscription recorded Athen’s vote in honor of the Roman ruler, and was likely put up in the early 60s C.E.; it was subsequently taken down following Nero’s assassination in 68. The inscription honored Nero by connecting him to Athens and to Alexander the Great, a model for the young philhellenic emperor. Its removal offered a different message. It was a deliberate and very public erasure of the controversial ruler from the historical record. In this, Nero’s inscription (and its removal) was perhaps the most striking rewriting of the Parthenon’s history—at least until Christian times.
Reviewing the Hellenistic and Roman adaptations of the Parthenon, it is easy to see them purely as desecrations: appropriations of a religious monument for political and propagandistic purposes. And the speedy removal of Nero’s inscription does support this reading, at least for the visually aggressive strategies of the Roman emperor. At the same time, the changes of the Hellenistic and Roman eras are also testimony to the continued vitality of the sanctuary. Due to the prestige of the Parthenon, formidable monarchs sought to stake their visual claims to power on what was by now a very old monument, over four centuries old by the time of Nero. By altering the temple and updating its meanings, they kept it young.
Copyright: Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Rachel Kousser, “The Parthenon, Athens,” in Smarthistory, December 14, 2015, accessed April 4, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-parthenon-athens/.
Temple of Athena Nike
Temple of Athena Nike, 421-05 B.C.E., marble, Acropolis, Athens
The temple of Athena Nike (Athena as a goddess of victory) is the smallest temple at the Acropolis in Athens, placed at its southwest corner, at the edge of a high cliff (see images above). Its construction was completed in the year 420 B.C.E., during the so called High Classical Period, according to the design of Kallikrates (the same architect who was responsible for the construction of the Parthenon). The temple by Kallikrates replaced an earlier small temple, which got completely destroyed during the Persian wars.
Reconstruction diagram of the Athenian Acropolis
The spot, highly vulnerable to attack but also well placed for defense, was very appropriate for the worship of the goddess of victory. There is some archaeological evidence, that the location was used for religious rituals already in Mycenaean age (Mycenaean was a period of early Greek history, roughly from 1600 to 1100 B.C.E.). Mycenaeans also raised the first defensive bastion on the spot; its fragments are preserved in the temple’s basement.
Temple of Athena Nike, 421-05 B.C.E., marble, Acropolis, Athens
An Ionic gem
The temple of Athena Nike, built in Ionic order of beautiful white Pentelic marble, has columns at the front and back but not on the sides of the cella; this kind of floor plan is called an amphiprostyle. Because of the small size of the structure, there are only four columns on each side. The columns are monolithic, which means that each one of them was made of a single block of stone (instead of horizontal drums, as it is in the case of the Parthenon).
Temple of Athena Nike, 421-05 B.C.E., marble, Acropolis, Athens
This small and elegant structure is sometimes called the pearl of the Acropolis, since it was designed and decorated with great care. For example, interestingly, its side columns have volutes both in the front and at the side, in order to create a pleasant view from any viewpoint. The Greeks considered their temples as a kind of monumental sculpture, which was supposed to be viewed from all sides and experienced in connection to its surroundings. The Romans later had a different concept—for them, the frontal view was most important (for example, the Roman Temple of Portunus).
Amphiprostyle plan of the Temple of Athena Nike
Another interesting detail is that the columns of the temple of Athena Nike are not as slender as those of many other Ionic buildings. Usually the proportions between the width and the height of an Ionic column was 1:9 or even 1:11. Here the proportion is 1:7—and the reason for that choice might have been the intention to create a harmonious whole with other buildings nearby. The temple of Athena Nike stands just next to the Propylaea (below), a heavy, monumental gateway to the Acropolis, built in the Doric order. To visually counteract this massive structure, the architect may have decided to widen the columns, otherwise the building might feel out of place, and too delicate in contrast to the neighboring architectural mass of the Propylaea. We know that the ancient Greeks were very aware of mathematical ratios while constructing architecture or creating statues, feeling that the key to beauty lies in correct proportion.
Mnesikles, The Propylaea, 437-32 B.C.E., marble, Acropolis, Athens
Victory
The temple of Athena Nike, as with all Greek temples, was considered a home of the deity, represented in its statue, and was not a place where regular people would enter. The believers would simply perform rituals in front of the temple, where a small altar was placed, and could take a glimpse of the sculpted figure of the goddess through the space between the columns. The privilege of entering the temple was reserved for the priestesses, who held a respected position in Greek society. As the name suggests, the temple housed the statue of Athena Nike, a symbol of victory. It probably had a connection to the victory of the Greeks against the Persians around half a century earlier. Nike usually had wings, but in this case we know that the statue had no wings, hence it was called Athena Apteros (without wings). The ancient Greek writer Pausanias later explained that the statue of Athena had no wings, so that she could never leave Athens.
Temple of Athena Nike, 421-05 B.C.E., marble, Acropolis, Athens
The history of this architectural monument has been quite tumultuous. In the 5th century C.E. the temple was converted into a Christian church, then in the 17th century it was completely dismantled by the Ottoman Turks who needed its material to build fortifications. The temple was later reconstructed after Greece regained independence in 1832. In the 1930s the building was restored again. Very recently, new concerns about the structure’s integrity prompted a new conservation project. First, a team of specialists completely dismantled the temple. Each of its parts was examined and mended, and eventually the entire building was reassembled using the original pieces, with some fill wherever it was needed. These additions can be easily recognized since they are of a lighter color than the original marble.
Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (detail), south side of the parapet of the Temple of Athena Nike, Acropolis, Athens, Greece, c. 410 B.C.E., marble, 3′ 6″ high (Acropolis Museum, Athens)
The temple of Athena Nike featured beautiful sculptural decoration, including a typical continuous Ionic frieze, which on the eastern side represented a gathering of gods. On the southern wall, the sculptor decided to show a battle between Greeks and Persians, and on the remaining sides, battles between Greeks and other warriors. Sculptures on the pediments, almost entirely lost, most probably depicted the Gigantomachy and Amazonomachy. Best known are reliefs from the outside of the stone parapet that surrounded the temple at the cliff’s edge. These represented Nike in different poses and could be admired by people climbing the stairs to the Acropolis. Most famous of these is the Nike Adjusting Her Sandal(above) which presents the goddess in a simple, everyday gesture, perhaps adjusting her sandal (or maybe taking it off) as she prepares to enter the sacred precinct. Whatever she is doing, the relief is still charming in its elegance and simplicity. Both Nike Adjusting Her Sandal and parts of the frieze can be admired today at the Acropolis Museum.
Copyright: Katarzyna Minollari, “Temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis,” in Smarthistory, September 11, 2016, accessed April 4, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/temple-nike/.
Erechtheion
Perched on a cliff high above Athens, this complex temple is very different from its neighbor, the Parthenon.
Copyright: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “The Erechtheion,” in Smarthistory, December 16, 2015, accessed April 5, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-erechtheion/.
The Greek Architectural Orders
The most recognizably “Greek” structure is the temple (even though the architecture of Greek temples is actually quite diverse). The Greeks referred to temples with the term ὁ ναός (ho naós), meaning “dwelling,” temple derives from the Latin term, templum. The earliest shrines were built to honor divinities and were made from materials such as wood and mud brick—materials that typically don’t survive very long. The basic form of the naos (the interior room that held the cult statue of the God or Gods) emerges as early as the tenth century B.C.E. as a simple, rectangular room with projecting walls (antae) that created a shallow porch. This basic form remained unchanged in its concept for centuries. In the eighth century B.C.E., Greek architecture begins to make the move from ephemeral materials (wood, mud brick, thatch) to permanent materials (namely, stone).
Greek Theaters
The Greek theater was a large, open-air structure used for dramatic performance. Theaters often took advantage of hillsides and naturally sloping terrain and, in general, utilized the panoramic landscape as the backdrop to the stage itself. The Greek theater is composed of the seating area (theatron), a circular space for the chorus to perform (orchestra), and the stage (skene). Tiered seats in the theatron provided space for spectators. Two side aisles (parados, pl. paradoi) provided access to the orchestra. The Greek theater inspired the Roman version of the theater directly, although the Romans introduced some modifications to the concept of theater architecture. In many cases, the Romans converted pre-existing Greek theaters to conform to their own architectural ideals, as is evident in the Theater of Dionysos on the slopes of the Athenian Acropolis. Since theatrical performances were often linked to sacred festivals, it is not uncommon to find theaters associated directly with sanctuaries.
Theater at the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, c. 350–300 B.C.E. (photo: Andreas Trepte, CC BY-SA 2.5)
Pont du Gard, Provence, France, late 1st century B.C.E. (photo: Tiberio Frascari, CC0)
A triple tier of arches rises 160 feet above the rushing river. Once, the top level of the structure carried its own flow of water, but now, the water channel remains dry. Today, the bridge transports only tourists and hikers from one side of the Gard River to the other as heavy arches soar high above their heads.
The Pont du Gard is one of the greatest public works projects spearheaded in the Augustan age. The French toponym Pont du Gard means “bridge of Gard” because it spans the Gard River near Nîmes, France.
Pont du Gard, Provence, France (photo: puffin11k, CC0)
History
Since the 4th century B.C.E, the ancient Romans constructed aqueducts, like the Pont du Gard, to carry water from further away sources, like mountains and springs, to provide sufficient clean water to urban populations. This first began in the city of Rome, but as Roman hegemony expanded, so, too, did the use of aqueducts in other cities and territories across the Mediterranean.
Gallia or Gaul (modern-day France) was conquered by Augustus’ adopted father Julius Caesar during the Roman-Gallic Wars of 58–50 B.C.E. After that time, many Roman military veterans began to settle in colonial cities like ancient Nemausus (modern day Nîmes), because they were given plots of land as thanks for their participation in the war. Within a few decades, the population of Nimes had boomed to around 30,000 people. Much of this population boom can also be credited to Augustus, who undertook a number of construction projects in the city. A large population requires a large amount of potable (drinkable) water, necessitating the construction of an aqueduct.
Maison Carrée, c. 4–7 C.E., Colonia Nemausus (modern Nîmes, France)
However, the aqueduct served a greater purpose than as just a water conduit; it was also a testament to the power and prosperity of the Augustan Age. Through structures like this, Augustus could emphasize the extent of his reach in all areas of the empire, united under his sole control, and garner widespread public favor. The Pax Augusta, or Peace of Augustus, was considered a golden age of Rome, one which brought peace to the empire after the turbulent end of the Roman Republic and which ushered in a new period of wealth, abundance, and civic pride. The Pont du Gard was one of many projects designed to enhance the lives of people throughout the empire, from aqueducts to a new public forum in the heart of Rome. Other buildings constructed in Nemausus during the Augustan age include a city wall with gates and bastions, the temple known today as the Maison Carrée, and a nymphaeum (grotto or shrine) erroneously labeled the Temple of Diana.
A Roman feat of engineering
Construction began in 20 B.C.E. under the guidance of Marcus Agrippa, a close ally and soon-to-be son-in-law of the emperor Augustus, who was also responsible for the construction of the Maison Carrée. Today, the Pont du Gard is only a portion of what was once a 31-mile long (50 km) aqueduct that carried fresh water from distant springs to the city of Nemausus (modern day Nîmes).
A true testament to the ingenuity and skill of Roman engineering, the water was predominantly carried that long distance by gravity. This meant that the architects and engineers needed to calculate how to very gradually lower the slope within the aqueduct water channel. In addition, they also needed to bridge areas where the terrain changed, like the river, and still keep the water channel at the appropriate height.
The limestone used at the Pont du Gard was extracted from a nearby quarry. In total, 50,400 tons of rock, individually numbered, were transported by boat down the river to the construction site to create the span. [1] Once complete, the aqueduct supplied enough water to provide all 30,000 residents of Nemausus with 100 gallons of water each per day and kept all bath complexes, fountains, and other structures throughout the city well supplied.
Pont du Gard, Provence, France (photo: Mike McBey, CC BY 2.0)
The Pont du Gard is constructed with three tiers of arches placed atop one another. The largest of the arches has a length of 82 feet. This particular arch bridges the river itself as none of the piers, or large supports, actually stand in the water. The bottom and middle tiers feature arches of equal widths, but the third tier, which holds the actual water channel, features a series of smaller arches that are each 15 feet wide. Together, the tiers are approximately 160 feet tall.
Pont du Gard, Provence, France (photo: Roberto Ferrari, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Constructing an arch
Although arch construction first developed in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. in Mesopotamia, it was the ancient Romans who refined and popularized it as a construction technique after they realized the true potential of arch construction—such as allowing for taller structures and wider spans.
To build a stone arch, first the Romans needed to construct a frame built out of wood in the shape of an arch connecting two piers. Then, wedge-shaped stones known as voussoirs would be placed over the frame. Due to the immense weight of these stones, the Romans used wooden cranes to lift them and set them into place.
The very last stone to be placed was the one in the center known as the keystone, which was quite literally the key to holding the arch together. Without the keystone, once the wooden frame was removed, the arch would fall apart. The keystone is essential to arch construction because the thrust of the weight of the stone construction moves from the keystone in the center outwards to the rest of the arch. This is what keeps the stones in place. In fact, this is such an effective construction method that no mortar was required between the stones. The weight of the stones would then be distributed downward into the piers on either side of the arch.
Maintaining the aqueduct
Roman aqueducts did require periodic maintenance. For this reason, water channels were usually around a height of 6 feet to allow someone to enter the channel and repair them. At the Pont du Gard, part of that maintenance included scraping away calcium carbonate deposits that would appear on the stone walls within the channel (the limestone used for the aqueduct had a large calcium carbonate concentration). Someone would also need to enter the channel if there were blockages or if vegetation started growing between the gaps in the stone. Stone blocks projecting from the otherwise flat surface of the aqueduct, which were used to support the wooden frames and scaffolding used during construction, were left in place to support scaffolding for future structural maintenance.
By the 4th century C.E., the power of the Roman empire declined, particularly in western Europe, and eventually, the aqueduct was no longer maintained and cleaned. Parts of it fell completely into disuse. Luckily, the Pont du Gard survived due to its dual purpose of also acting as a bridge across the river, even as other nearby ancient structures were quarried for their stone.
Today, the Pont du Gard is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, open for visitors to explore. Unfortunately, according to UNESCO, the Pont du Gard is tilting a few millimeters each year and may eventually collapse. [2]
Some of the oldest known representational imagery comes from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period (Paleolithic means old stone age). Archaeological discoveries across a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) include over two hundred caves with spectacular Aurignacian paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. Among the oldest of these is a 2.4-inch tall female figure carved out of mammoth ivory that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E.
The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira contain the best known examples of pre-historic painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction. Archaeologists that study Paleolithic era humans, believe that the paintings discovered in 1994, in the cave at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardéche valley in France, are more than 30,000 years old. The images found at Lascaux and Altamira are more recent, dating to approximately 15,000 B.C.E. The paintings at Pech Merle date to both 25,000 and 15,000 B.C.E. The world’s oldest known cave painting was found in Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2017 and was made at least 45,500 years ago.
Replica of the painting from the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France
The cave at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc is over 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers. Carbon samples date the charcoal used to depict the two head-to-head Rhinoceroses (see the image above, bottom right) to between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the samples were taken. The cave’s drawings depict other large animals including horses, mammoths, musk ox, ibex, reindeer, aurochs, megaceros deer, panther, and owl (scholars note that these animals were not then a normal part of people’s diet). Photographs show that the drawing at the top of this essay is very carefully rendered but may be misleading. We see a group of horses, rhinos, and bison and we see them as a group, overlapping and skewed in scale. But the photograph distorts the way these animal figures would have been originally seen. The bright electric lights used by the photographer create a broad flat scope of vision; how different to see each animal emerge from the dark under the flickering light cast by a flame.
The Venus of Willendorf is a perfect example of portable art, since it’s generally of a small-scale, a logical size given the nomadic nature of Paleolithic peoples. Despite their often diminutive size, the creation of these portable objects signifies a remarkable allocation of time and effort. As such, these figurines were significant enough to take along during the nomadic wanderings of their Paleolithic creators. Josef Szombathy, an Austro-Hungarian archaeologist, discovered this work in 1908 outside the small Austrian village of Willendorf. Although generally projected in art history classrooms to be several feet tall, this limestone figurine is petite in size. She measures just under 11.1 cm high, and could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. This small scale allowed whoever carved (or, perhaps owned) this figurine to carry it during their nearly daily nomadic travels in search of food.
Clearly, the Paleolithic sculptor who made this small figurine would never have named it the Venus of Willendorf. Venus was the name of the Roman goddess of love and ideal beauty. When discovered outside the Austrian village of Willendorf, scholars mistakenly assumed that this figure was likewise a goddess of love and beauty. There is absolutely no evidence though that the Venus of Willendorf shared a function similar to its classically inspired namesake. However incorrect the name may be, it has endured and tells us more about those who found her than those who made her.
In the absence of writing, art historians rely on the objects themselves to learn about ancient peoples. The form of the Venus of Willendorf—that is, what it looks like—may very well inform what it originally meant. The most conspicuous elements of her anatomy are those that deal with the process of reproduction and child rearing. The artist took particular care to emphasize her breasts, which some scholars suggest indicates that she is able to nurse a child. The artist also brought deliberate attention to her pubic region. Traces of a pigment—red ochre—can still be seen on parts of the figurine.
Detail, “Venus” (or Woman) of Willendorf,, c. 24,000–22,000 B.C.E., limestone 11.1 cm high (Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In contrast, the sculptor placed scant attention on the non-reproductive parts of her body. This is particularly noticeable in the figure’s limbs, where there is little emphasis placed on musculature or anatomical accuracy. We may infer from the small size of her feet that she was not meant to be free-standing and was either meant to be carried or placed lying down. The artist carved the figure’s upper arms along her upper torso, and her lower arms are only barely visible, resting upon the top of her breasts. As enigmatic as the lack of attention to her limbs is, the absence of attention to the face is even more striking. No eyes, nose, ears, or mouth remain visible. Instead, our attention is drawn to seven horizontal bands that wrap in concentric circles from the crown of her head. Some scholars have suggested her head is obscured by a knit cap pulled downward, others suggest that these forms may represent braided or beaded hair and that her face, perhaps once painted, is angled downward.
If the face was purposefully obscured, the Paleolithic sculptor may have created, not a portrait of a particular person, but rather a representation of the reproductive and child rearing aspects of a woman. In combination with the emphasis on the breasts and pubic area, it seems likely that the Venus of Willendorf had a function that related to fertility.
Without a doubt, we can learn much more from the Venus of Willendorf than its diminutive size might at first suggest. We learn about relative dating and stratification. We learn that these nomadic people living almost 25,000 years ago cared about making objects beautiful. And we can learn that these Paleolithic people had an awareness of the importance of women.
The Venus of Willendorf is only one example of dozens of Paleolithic figures that may have been associated with fertility. Nevertheless, it retains a place of prominence within the history of human art.
At the beginning of the Bronze Age (c. 3200 B.C.E.), the art made on the islands of the Cyclades was both unique and vastly more sophisticated than anything found on the Mainland of Greece or Crete. Elegant figurines and delicate vessels were made from sparkling white island marble. Best known and admired of this art are the figurines, and in this tradition the representation of women is crucially important. The overwhelming majority of Cycladic figurines represent women—nude, posed with their arms folded, toes pointed, facing ahead, rendered in a radically abstracted style. Despite the proliferation of female sculptures, a disproportionate amount of attention has been paid to the very few male examples of the type (presumably because they are often represented sitting or engaged in activity).
It is a remarkable fact that there has been so little discussion about the nearly all-female aspect of Cycladic sculpture. Admittedly, because of looting in response to the very high market value of Cycladic figurines, they are frustratingly without archaeological context. Despite this, however, it is rather clear that women—mortal or otherwise—were held in high esteem at the time.
Recent research on a subset of these female Cycladic figurines, those which are quite large (over 70cm high), argues that they were used in public veneration and processions, possibly associated with the earliest regional political network in the Aegean, a confederacy centered on the island of Keros. If this is the case, we see the sculptural representation of women in the Early Bronze Age as powerful political and social symbols, with no known male sculptural competitors.
Images of women proliferate again hundreds of years later on the island of Crete among the Minoans, as well as on the Greek Mainland among the Mycenaeans. Like their male counterparts they are represented with little variation, nearly always young, dark haired, with a tiny waist, large hips, exposed breasts, and dressed in a variety of long rich and colorful garments. In wall painting, they are central actors and often focal points in complex narratives (though we don’t know what the stories are!).
It has been said that the image of the Snake Goddess, discovered by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos on Crete, is one of the most frequently reproduced sculptures from antiquity. Whether or not this is true, it is certainly the case that she is a powerful and evocative image. What she meant to the Minoans who made her, however, is not very well understood. Evans found the sculpture of the Snake Goddess in a secondary exploration of the complex he called a “palace” at Knossos. After digging out the entire western wing, he decided to check under the paving stones. Most covered nothing but earth, but just south of the Throne Room, he discovered two stone-lined pits containing a wide variety of precious things, mostly broken: scraps of gold, ivory, faience (the largest deposit of faience on Crete), stone inlay, unworked horn, ceramic vessels, seal stones, sealings, shells, the vertebrae of large fish, and the broken pieces of at least three figurines, of which the Snake Goddess was one.
Because of the fragmentary nature of these valuable objects, Evans assumed what he had found were damaged pieces that had been cleaned out from a temple. He named the pits the “Temple Repositories” and immediately set upon the reconstruction of as much as he could, with special interest in the figurines, which he assumed were of goddesses. The Snake Goddess, as originally excavated, lacked a head and half of her left arm. The complete right arm held a short wavy striped stick, which Evans interpreted as a snake. This was, in some measure, to match the other nearly complete figurine found in the Temple Repositories, which clearly had snakes slithering up both of her arms. The restoration of the Snake Goddess was done by the Danish artist Halvor Bagge together with Evans. Their contribution to the figurine was the creation of a matching arm and stripy snake, the head of the goddess, and the placement of the hat and cat (separate faience pieces found in the Temple Repositories) on her head.
Two Snake Goddesses from the palace of Knossos, c. 1600 B.C.E., faience, 34.2 cm and 29.5 cm high (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, photo: Jill_Ion, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In her restored state, the Snake Goddess is 29.5 cm (about 11.5 inches) high, a youthful woman wearing a full skirt made of seven flounced layers of multicolored cloth. This is likely not a representation of striped cloth, but rather flounces made from multiple colorful bands of cloth, the weaving of which was a Minoan specialty. Over the skirt she wears a front and back apron decorated with a geometric diamond design. The top of the skirt and apron has a wide, vertically-striped band that wraps tightly around the figure’s waist. On top, she wears a short-sleeved, striped shirt tied with an elaborate knot at the waist, with a low-cut front that exposes her large, bare breasts. The Snake Goddess’s head, restored by Bagge and Evans, stares straight forward, topped by the spherical object that Bagge and Evans believed would make a good crown, and, finally, a small sitting cat. Her long black hair hangs down her back and curls down around her breasts.
The Snake Goddess is a provocative image, but its restoration and interpretation are problematic. The crown and cat have no parallel in any image of a Bronze Age woman, so these should be discounted. The interpretation of this figure as a goddess is also difficult, since there is no evidence of what a Minoan goddess might have looked like. Many images of elite Minoan women, perhaps priestesses, look very much like this figurine. If it is the action of snake-wrangling that makes her a goddess, this is also a problem. The image of a woman taming one or more snakes is entirely unique to the Temple Repositories. Therefore, If she is a snake goddess, she is not a particularly popular one.
Certainly, Evans was interested in finding a goddess at Knossos. Even before he excavated at the site, he had argued that there was a great mother goddess who was worshiped in the pre-Classical Greek world. With the Snake Goddess, Evans found—or fashioned—what he had anticipated. Its authenticity and meaning, however, leave many questions today.
The cave of Lascaux, France is one of almost 350 similar sites that are known to exist—most are isolated to a region of southern France and northern Spain. Both Neanderthals (named after the site in which their bones were first discovered—the Neander Valley in Germany) and Modern Humans (early Homo Sapiens Sapiens) coexisted in this region 30,000 years ago. Life was short and very difficult; resources were scarce and the climate was very cold.
After struggling through small openings and narrow passages to access the larger rooms beyond, prehistoric people discovered that the cave wall surfaces functioned as the perfect, blank “canvas” upon which to draw and paint. White calcite, roofed by nonporous rock, provides a uniquely dry place to feature art. To paint, these early artists used charcoal and ocher (a kind of pigmented, earthen material, that is soft and can be mixed with liquids, and comes in a range of colors like brown, red, yellow, and white). We find images of horses, deer, bison, elk, a few lions, a rhinoceros, and a bear—almost as an encyclopedia of the area’s large prehistoric wildlife. Among these images are abstract marks—dots and lines in a variety of configurations. In one image, a humanoid figure plays a mysterious role.
Detail of Hall of Bulls, Lascaux II (replica of the original cave, which is closed to the public), original cave: c. 16,000–14,000 B.C.E.
The animals are rendered in what has come to be called “twisted perspective,” in which their bodies are depicted in profile while we see the horns from a more frontal viewpoint. The images are sometimes entirely linear—line drawn to define the animal’s contour. In many other cases, the animals are described in solid and blended colors blown by mouth onto the wall. In other portions of the Lascaux cave, artists carved lines into the soft calcite surface. Some of these are infilled with color—others are not.
Given the large scale of many of the animal images, we can presume that the artists worked deliberately—carefully plotting out a particular form before completing outlines and adding color. Some researchers believe that “master” artists enlisted the help of assistants who mixed pigments and held animal fat lamps to illuminate the space. Alternatively, in the case of the “rooms” containing mostly engraved and overlapping forms, it seems that the pure process of drawing and repetitive re-drawing held serious (perhaps ritual) significance for the makers.
A bison, drawn in strong, black lines, bristles with energy, as the fur on the back of its neck stands up and the head is radically turned to face us. A form drawn under the bison’s abdomen is interpreted as internal organs, spilling out from a wound. A more crudely drawn form positioned below and to the left of the bison may represent a humanoid figure with the head of a bird. Nearby, a thin line is topped with another bird and there is also an arrow with barbs. Further below and to the far left the partial outline of a rhinoceros can be identified.
Interpreters of this image tend to agree that some sort of interaction has taken place among these animals and the bird-headed human figure—in which the bison has sustained injury either from a weapon or from the horn of the rhinoceros. Why the person in the image has the rudimentary head of a bird, and why a bird form sits atop a stick very close to him is a mystery. Some suggest that the person is a shaman—a kind of priest or healer with powers involving the ability to communicate with spirits of other worlds. Regardless, this riveting image appears to depict action and reaction, although many aspects of it are difficult to piece together.
Bull sports—including leaping over them, fighting them, running from them, or riding them—have been practiced all around the globe for millennia. Perhaps the best-loved ancient illustration of this, called the bull-leaping or Toreador fresco, comes from the site of Knossos on the island of Crete. The wall painting, as it is now reconstructed, shows three people leaping over a bull: one person at its front, another over its back, and a third at its rear.
The image is a composite of at least seven panels, each .78 meters (about 2.5 feet) high. Fragments of this extensive wall painting were found very badly damaged in the fill above the walls in the Court of the Stone Spout, on the east side of the Central Court at Knossos. The fact that the paintings were found in fill indicates that this wall painting was destroyed as part of a renovation. The pottery which was found together with the fragments gives us its date, likely LM II (around 1400 B.C.E.).
Bull-leaping fresco from the east wing of the palace of Knossos (reconstructed), c. 1400 B.C.E., fresco, 78 cm high (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, photo: Jebulon, CC0)
The most interesting question about the bull leaping paintings from Knossos is what they might mean. We cannot understand the whole bull-leaping cycle in detail as it is so fragmentary, but we know that it covered a lot of wall space and a considerable amount of resources must have been expended to create it.
As mentioned above, many cultures across space and time have engaged in bull sports, and they all have a few things in common. First, these sports are life-threatening. To race, dance with, leap over, or kill a bull might very well get you killed. Second, these activities are usually performed before a crowd: they are a civic event, publicly presented and recorded in memory. Third, those who participate in these bull activities are often youths at an age when they are passing from childhood into adulthood and the achievement of the bull sport contributes to that passage. Anthropologists refer this sort of activity as a “rite of passage,” which, when witnessed by one’s community, establishes the participant as an adult.
Therefore, we might surmise that the bull leaping scenes from Knossos refer to such a rite of passage ceremony. Many have identified the Central Court (Theatral area) just beyond the west façade of the palace at Knossos as locations where bull-leaping ceremonies might have taken place. We may never know the exact meaning of these paintings, but they continue to resonate with us today—not only because of their beauty and dynamism, but because they represent an activity that is still an important part of many cultures around the world.
Bull’s head rhyton from the palace at Knossos, c. 1550-1500 B.C.E., black steatite, jasper, and mother-of-pearl, 26 cm high (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, photo: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The rhyton dates to the original Neopalatial period (1600-1450 B.C.E.), when the building was constructed, and was likely purposefully broken before it was discarded. It is heavily damaged—the left side of the bull’s head and left ear, as well as its golden horns, were restored by Sir Arthur Evans.
This bull’s head rhyton was carved from a single block of black steatiteand is 26 cm (about 10 inches) in height, as restored. It is hollow, as a rhyton must be, with the hole at the top behind the bull’s horns and the hole at the bottom at its muzzle. The back of the rhyton is flat so that it could be laid down on a surface.
Bull’s head rhyton from the palace at Knossos, c. 1550-1500 B.C.E., black steatite, jasper, and mother-of-pearl, 26 cm high (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, photo: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The carving of the bull’s head is remarkable for its combination of vivid realism and stylization. For instance, the eyes of the bull were made of inlaid rock crystal lenses, painted on their flat back with a black iris and red pupil, surrounded in white. The rim of the eye was inlaid with red jasper, giving the bull a wild, frightening, bloodshot look. The bull is shaggy, with naturalistic locks hanging down its face, carved with very shallow incisions in the soft stone and filled with ground white stone (perhaps gypsum) for contrast against the black steatite. Also very realistically carved are the rolls of skin at the neck of the bull. However, other parts of the representation of the bull are rather stylized. For instance, the hair whorl at the center of the bull’s forehead looks more like a spiral than a swirled tuft of hair, and this is topped by a patch of stylized fur with curls arranged in rows. Lastly, the patch of white hair around the snout of the bull, rendered with shell inlay, looks graphic in its straight borders.
Copyright: Dr. Senta German, “Bull-leaping fresco from the palace of Knossos,” in Smarthistory, August 15, 2018, accessed April 4, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/bull-leaping-fresco/.
One of the most heavily traded artistic commodities in the ancient Mediterranean was pottery. For example, the Etruscans (in central Italy) were enthusiastic collectors of Athenian pottery in the sixth and fifth centuries, and many of the best-preserved pots, such as The Francois Vase, were found in Etruscan tombs.
While today Greek vases are housed in museums behind glass as fine art, in the ancient period, pots were primarily functional art, intended to be used rather than simply displayed. They were also cheaper than many other forms of art, like statuary, and were therefore available to a wider audience. They varied greatly in quality from plain ware with no painted decoration to large pots with elaborately painted scenes. Pots were thrown on a potter’s wheel, decorated with clay slip as paint, and fired in kilns.
In the eighth century in Athens, these everyday objects were monumentalized and used as grave markers. Pots like the Dipylon Amphora were large versions of smaller pots and decorated with geometric designs and funerary scenes, relating to their function.
In the seventh century, the city of Corinth became the center of pottery production in the Greek world, producing large numbers of vases with designs influenced by Near Eastern Art, such as the Macmillan Aryballos and pots in the so-called animal style. Many of these pots were mass produced for a wide market and feature repetitive designs. Corinth was a port city, and they set their pots out on the trading vessels that regularly moved through their harbors. Corinthian pots have been found at archaeological sites across the Mediterranean.
Attic pottery
In the sixth century, Athenian (or Attic) pottery eclipsed Corinthian pottery in popularity and a booming pottery industry developed in Athens. Potters and painters, who were usually separate people, began signing their higher quality artworks. Some of these signatures are from artists who came from across the Mediterranean to work in Athens. Artists were organized into workshops, which were usually owned by a potter, who employed painters and other workmen.
Potting was the more highly valued skill, as these vases were, above all, intended to be functional, and potters signed their work more frequently than painters. These signatures became similar to modern brand names, providing prestige for their owners, and there was competition between artists to be seen as the best at their craft. For example, the painter Euthymides signs one pot, “As never Euphronios (a fellow painter) could do.”
These Attic pots were painted with various subjects, including most commonly mythological and genre scenes, such as images of drinking parties, boys going to school, and women collecting water. While in the early and mid-sixth century, most of the painters, like Exekias, were using the black-figure technique to decorate their pots, the red-figure technique was invented towards the end of the sixth century in Athens, becoming the more popular style over the next few hundred years across the Greek world.
Developments in style in the fifth century towards more naturalistic and varied poses on pots like the Niobid Krater were primarily done in the red-figure style.
Copyright: Dr. Amanda Herring, “Pottery, the body, and the gods in ancient Greece, c. 800–490 B.C.E.,” in Reframing Art History, Smarthistory, July 21, 2022,
Greek Sculpture
One of the most common types of dedications in sanctuaries, both panhellenic and civic, were statues. Statues were commissioned by both states and private individuals for a number of different purposes. Many were votive dedications given to the gods as a form of worship, while other sculptures commemorated athletic or military victories or celebrated an individual and their accomplishments, such as in grave markers. Still other statues, including small, relatively inexpensive terracotta statues, served as decorations in homes.
Most of the statues seen in public spaces such as sanctuaries were made of either bronze or white marble quarried on the Greek islands or mainland. All of these statues were originally painted in bright colors, both their skin and clothing, and painted designs were frequently included on the sculpted fabric. Even the bronze statues were colorful, with different types of alloys or surface treatments used to distinguish between the color of hair, skin, eyes, and clothing.
Humans were the most popular subjects of Greek statuary, and Greek artists were greatly concerned with the representation of the human body, especially the male nude. Gods, heroes, and Greek citizens were regularly depicted in the nude in Greek art, while non-Greeks were not. Goddesses and Greek women were commonly clothed in this period except when the lack of clothes indicated their vulnerability, such as victims of sexual assault, or their lower status, notably as prostitutes. Men practiced limited public nudity, notably in athletics, in their daily lives, but men in Greek art are regularly depicted in the nude in circumstances, such as warfare, when they would, in fact, have been clothed in real life. The male body therefore communicated symbolic messages about perceived Greek masculine virtues and heroic status. The male nude became an identifier for Greek men, separating them from women and barbarians.
For Greeks, the highly regarded virtue of self-control over mind, body, and emotions was expressed in an idealized, beautiful body. In addition, it also reflected ideas about the beauty of the young male body and Greek sexuality. Most Greek men had sexual relationships with both men and women. These relationships were undertaken both with prostitutes and with fellow citizens. The most common sexual relationship between male citizens was between an older partner in his twenties and a younger partner in his teens, known as pederasty. These relationships had socially defined roles for each partner, with the older man acting as the pursuer and the youth as the beloved, more passive partner. They were public relationships and were seen as having sexual and emotional benefits for the participants, as well as benefits for society since the older partner helped guide the younger partner into adulthood as a contributing member of society with an established set of socially acceptable beliefs. The male nudes of archaic and classical art are not overtly sexualized, but they represent young men at an age when they were pursued by older men and viewed as at their most beautiful. Nude statues can be dated by their depiction of the male body, with an increasing emphasis on a naturalistic depiction of the nude body over the course of the seventh through sixth centuries.
Kouroi and korai
A comparison of kouroi (statues of young men) and korai (statues of young men), which were common votive dedications and grave markers in the sixth century, demonstrates the differences in how men and women were depicted differently in Greek art. The kouroi, like the Anavysos Kouros, depict an idealized, nude young man with aristocratic long, braided hair.
The korai, like Peplos Kore, depict young women in elaborate clothing that was originally brightly painted with elaborate designs and jewelry. Citizen women were expected to stay within the domestic sphere, caring for children and the home, and undertaking tasks such as weaving. In many Greek poleis, such as Athens, a Greek woman had a male guardian, usually her father or husband, her entire life, as women were not believed to be able to impose self-control and manage their own affairs or participate in government or civic life except for religious events. The kore reflects the ideal Greek woman, a symbol of beautiful fertility, overseeing a prosperous household as demonstrated by her elaborate adornment.
The ancient Greeks mastered the naturalistic representation of the human body, and the Renaissance revived it.
Copyright: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, “Contrapposto explained,” in Smarthistory, December 16, 2015, accessed April 4, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/contrapposto/.
For the ancient Greeks, the human body was perfect. Explore this example of the mathematical source of ideal beauty.
There is a large variation in what we identify as Hellenistic art, across the Hellenistic world and across the three centuries that we identify as the Hellenistic period. Yet, the Hellenistic world was intensely interconnected, with artistic ideas, trade, and people moving across huge swaths of territory. There were common cultural touchstones that connected these different areas, notably the spread of the common Greek language, the worship of Greek gods, and Greek artistic style and iconography. Yet, these were regularly re-interpreted on a local level by different populations, and the formation of art and identity was a constant negotiation that happened primarily on a local level.
As part of their establishment and maintenance of power, most Hellenistic rulers practiced cultural imperialism, promoting Greek language, culture, and religion in territories that previously did not identify as Greek. The period is now known as the Hellenistic period due to this spread of Greek (Hellenic) culture. Yet, this was not simply the imposition of Greek culture across passive, conquered peoples. These kings ruled over millions of people of different ethnicities who spoke numerous languages and worshiped various gods. The cultures, religions, and art of the conquered people influenced those of the conquerors in turn.
Aided by a more interconnected economic and political world, elites commissioned luxury goods like mosaics and metal wares that they displayed in their homes as signs of status. At the rulership level, art was used to advertise military victories, promote royal propaganda, and create new identities for their kingdoms and their people. Statues like the Nike of Samothrace were erected in panhellenic sanctuaries as statements of military power.
Reflecting the changing societies and cultures that emerged in the Hellenistic period, sculpture moved away from the idealism of the Classical period, embracing a wider variety of subjects and styles. Some Hellenistic statues, like the Nike of Samothrace, are dramatic and theatrical and require the viewer to engage with them physically by moving to different vantage points to view the artworks in their entirety.
Others, like the Seated Boxer, embrace realism. The boxer depicts, not a young, idealized athlete, but a beaten, middle-aged man, reflecting changes in the role of athletics in Hellenistic society and the growth of professional athletes. Yet, the Seated Boxer could depict a different version of victory. This could be not an image of defeat, but rather the veteran boxer, who even when he looks defeated, can stand back up and win a bout in the ring.
Other statues reflect on the contrast between power and vulnerability. Sleeping figures, like the Barberini Faun and the Eros Sleeping, became popular. The Eros statue shows the god, whose arrows of erotic love could fell even the most powerful god, as an adorable, sleeping toddler.
The Barberini Faun depicts the physically large and muscled form of a satyr, a part animal, part human creature, asleep and distinctly vulnerable. He is also overtly sexualized in a way that earlier male nudes, and even most Hellenistic male nudes, were not. This new depiction of the male form reflects changes in ideas of sexuality in the Hellenistic period. While sexual relationships between two men were common in the earlier periods (see earlier chapter), the roles that each lover played were strictly and socially defined, as the relationships were seen to benefit society. In the Hellenistic period, there were changes in how people saw themselves within society, and where they looked for happiness and identity. As citizens of large kingdoms, rather than small city-states, people were more connected to the rest of the world through trade and political networks, and those that lived in large, cosmopolitan cities regularly came into contact with people of different ethnicities and cultures. Yet, many felt disconnected from their distant monarchical rulers, and often did not feel a common identity with their closest neighbors. People now frequently looked to family and personal relationships for happiness and identity, rather than their place within a civic structure. Sexual relationships were seen as one way to pursue happiness, resulting in a subsequent relaxing in the strict definitions of sexual roles. The Barberini Faun is illustrative of this change, as a mature man could now be seen as an object of desire.
Head of a Roman Patrician from Otricoli, c. 75–50 BCE, marble (Palazzo Torlonia, Rome, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Seemingly wrinkled and toothless, with sagging jowls, the face of a Roman aristocrat stares at us across the ages. In the aesthetic parlance of the Late Roman Republic, the physical traits of this portrait image are meant to convey seriousness of mind (gravitas) and the virtue (virtus) of a public career by demonstrating the way in which the subject literally wears the marks of his endeavors. While this representational strategy might seem unusual in the post-modern world, in the waning days of the Roman Republic it was an effective means of competing in an ever more complex socio-political arena.
Head of a Roman Patrician from Otricoli, c. 75–50 BCE, marble (Palazzo Torlonia, Rome, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The portrait
This portrait head, now housed in the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome, Italy, comes from Otricoli (ancient Ocriculum) and dates to the middle of the first century B.C.E. The name of the individual depicted is now unknown, but the portrait is a powerful representation of a male aristocrat with a hooked nose and strong cheekbones. The figure is frontal without any hint of dynamism or emotion—this sets the portrait apart from some of its near contemporaries. The portrait head is characterized by deep wrinkles, a furrowed brow, and generally an appearance of sagging, sunken skin—all indicative of the veristic style of Roman portraiture.
Head of a Roman Patrician from Otricoli, c. 75–50 BCE, marble (Palazzo Torlonia, Rome, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Verism
Verism can be defined as a sort of hyperrealism in sculpture where the naturally occurring features of the subject are exaggerated, often to the point of absurdity. In the case of Roman Republican portraiture, middle age males adopt veristic tendencies in their portraiture to such an extent that they appear to be extremely aged and care worn. This stylistic tendency is influenced both by the tradition of ancestral imagines as well as a deep-seated respect for family, tradition, and ancestry. The imagines were essentially death masks of notable ancestors that were kept and displayed by the family. In the case of aristocratic families these wax masks were used at subsequent funerals so that an actor might portray the deceased ancestors in a sort of familial parade (Polybius History 6.53.54). The ancestor cult, in turn, influenced a deep connection to family. For Late Republican politicians without any famous ancestors (a group famously known as ‘new men’ or ‘homines novi’) the need was even more acute—and verism rode to the rescue. The adoption of such an austere and wizened visage was a tactic to lend familial gravitas to families who had none—and thus (hopefully) increase the chances of the aristocrat’s success in both politics and business. This jockeying for position very much characterized the scene at Rome in the waning days of the Roman Republic and the Otricoli head is a reminder that one’s public image played a major role in what was a turbulent time in Roman history.
Today, politicians think very carefully about how they will be photographed. Think about all the campaign commercials and print ads we are bombarded with every election season. These images tell us a lot about the candidate, including what they stand for and what agendas they are promoting. Similarly, Roman art was closely intertwined with politics and propaganda. This is especially true with portraits of Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire; Augustus invoked the power of imagery to communicate his ideology.
Augustus of Primaporta, 1st century C.E., marble, 2.03 meters high (Vatican Museums) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Augustus of Primaporta
One of Augustus’ most famous portraits is the so-called Augustus of Primaporta of 20 B.C.E. (the sculpture gets its name from the town in Italy where it was found in 1863). At first glance this statue might appear to simply resemble a portrait of Augustus as an orator and general, but this sculpture also communicates a good deal about the emperor’s power and ideology. In fact, in this portrait Augustus shows himself as a great military victor and a staunch supporter of Roman religion. The statue also foretells the 200 year period of peace that Augustus initiated, called the Pax Romana.
Detail, Augustus of Primaporta, 1st century C.E., marble, 2.03 meters high (Vatican Museums) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In this marble freestanding sculpture, Augustus stands in a contrapposto pose (a relaxed pose where one leg bears weight). The emperor wears military regalia and his right arm is outstretched, demonstrating that the emperor is addressing his troops. We immediately sense the emperor’s power as the leader of the army and a military conqueror.
Delving further into the composition of the Primaporta statue, a distinct resemblance to Polykleitos’ Doryphoros, a Classical Greek sculpture of the fifth century B.C.E., is apparent. Both have a similar contrapposto stance and both are idealized. That is to say that both Augustus and the Spear-Bearer are portrayed as youthful and flawless individuals: they are perfect. The Romans often modeled their art on Greek predecessors. This is significant because Augustus is essentially depicting himself with the perfect body of a Greek athlete: he is youthful and virile, despite the fact that he was middle-aged at the time of the sculpture’s commissioning. Furthermore, by modeling the Primaporta statue on such an iconic Greek sculpture created during the height of Athens’ influence and power, Augustus connects himself to the Golden Age of that previous civilization.
The cupid and dolphin
So far the message of the Augustus of Primaporta is clear: he is an excellent orator and military victor with the youthful and perfect body of a Greek athlete. Is that all there is to this sculpture? Definitely not! The sculpture contains even more symbolism. First, at Augustus’ right leg is cupid figure riding a dolphin. The dolphin became a symbol of Augustus’ great naval victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, a conquest that made Augustus the sole ruler of the Empire. The cupid astride the dolphin sends another message too: that Augustus is descended from the gods. Cupid is the son of Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Julius Caesar, the adoptive father of Augustus, claimed to be descended from Venus and therefore Augustus also shared this connection to the gods.
The breastplate
Finally, Augustus is wearing a cuirass, or breastplate, that is covered with figures that communicate additional propagandistic messages. Scholars debate over the identification over each of these figures, but the basic meaning is clear: Augustus has the gods on his side, he is an international military victor, and he is the bringer of the Pax Romana, a peace that encompasses all the lands of the Roman Empire.
Detail of the breastplate, Augustus of Primaporta, 1st century C.E., marble, 2.03 meters high (Vatican Museums) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In the central zone of the cuirass are two figures, a Roman and a Parthian. On the right, the enemy Parthian returns military standards. This is a direct reference to an international diplomatic victory of Augustus in 20 B.C.E., when these standards were finally returned to Rome after a previous battle.
Detail of Sol and Caelus on the breastplate, Augustus of Primaporta, 1st century C.E., marble, 2.03 meters high (Vatican Museums) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Surrounding this central zone are gods and personifications. At the top are Sol and Caelus, the sun and sky gods respectively. On the sides of the breastplate are female personifications of countries conquered by Augustus. These gods and personifications refer to the Pax Romana. The message is that the sun is going to shine on all regions of the Roman Empire, bringing peace and prosperity to all citizens. And of course, Augustus is the one who is responsible for this abundance throughout the Empire.
Detail of Tellus on the breastplate, Augustus of Primaporta, 1st century C.E., marble, 2.03 meters high (Vatican Museums) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Beneath the female personifications are Apollo and Diana, two major deities in the Roman pantheon; clearly Augustus is favored by these important deities and their appearance here demonstrates that the emperor supports traditional Roman religion. At the very bottom of the cuirass is Tellus, the earth goddess, who cradles two babies and holds a cornucopia. Tellus is an additional allusion to the Pax Romana as she is a symbol of fertility with her healthy babies and overflowing horn of plenty.
Not simply a portrait
The Augustus of Primaporta is one of the ways that the ancients used art for propagandistic purposes. Overall, this statue is not simply a portrait of the emperor, it expresses Augustus’ connection to the past, his role as a military victor, his connection to the gods, and his role as the bringer of the Roman Peace.