How to read (or over-read) an ancient monument

If you’ve read either of my last couple of pieces then you’ll know that just before I arrive at my place of work in Oxford each morning I pass by a building that copies aspects of the Hellenistic Tower of the Winds in Athens, the 18^th Century Radcliffe observatory. A couple of minutes before that I pass by another monument, far less imposing, which also makes a reference to the ancient world. It’s a fountain in the form of the merman Triton, the son of the sea god Poseidon. With bulging muscles he holds a shell above his head and is blowing a jet of water through a hole in the bottom. It stands in front of the old Radcliffe infirmary which now houses The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH for short), which I’m technically a part of though I’ve only been in the building once so far.

The Triton Fountain outside the Radcliffe Infirmary

I didn’t really pay the fountain too much attention in my first few weeks of being here. I usually get a ridiculously early bus into Oxford to avoid the journey time being doubled by the rush hour traffic and by the time I arrive at work the only thing on my mind is coffee. But I’ve now discovered that the fountain is actually very interesting for thinking about the way that different layers of meaning can be packed, concertina-like into the history of a single monument.

The 19th century Radcliffe Triton – now in storage

It turns out that the current statue was set up very recently in 2012, a copy of a mid 19^th century statue that had stood on the same spot. The original statue was set up in 1858 to enhance the appearance of the courtyard in front of the infirmary, which had been opened in 1770. This statue was made of terracotta and had become badly damaged as in winter water seeped into cracks and froze. That statue was itself a copy of the apparently famous Fontane del Tritone (though I’ll confess that I shamefully didn’t know it) that was set up in Rome by Pope Urban VIII, and created by the master sculptor of the baroque, Bernini.

Bernini’s Fontana del Tritone

Well, the Oxford fountain isn’t an exact copy of Bernini’s. For some reason the artist John Bell has substituted a flat, disc-like shell for Bernini’s conch, which does look rather less natural a thing for Triton to be blowing through. Bernini’s triton, raised aloft on the fanned out tailfins of four Dolphins is also far more grandiose and if it had stood outside the infirmary would no doubt have caught my eye even before I had my first shot of caffeine of the day. But, reducing the height of the Oxford fountain was definitely a good decision. The fountain embellishes the square without dominating the space.

The layers of meaning don’t stop with the fountain at Rome because Urban VIII in commissioning Bernini to sculpt his Triton was inspired by a verse in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Triton is described as blowing his shell as a trumpet to command the waves. Ovid in writing his masterpiece in the late first century BC was in turn heavily influenced by Greek mythology and earlier Greek poets and may therefore well have drawn on an even earlier source or sources for his description of the water god. So, the Radcliffe Triton is a brand new replica of a Victorian statue, modelled on a baroque masterpiece, inspired by a Roman reworking of a Greek myth!!

The reason I want to talk about the fountain here, however, is because it got me thinking about how we go about trying to read the meaning of ancient monuments. You might remember from my last two pieces that the figure of Triton also stood atop the Athenian Tower of the Winds where he functioned as a weather vane, whereas Oxford’s “Tower of the Winds”, the Radcliffe Infirmary is topped by statues of Atlas and Herakles supporting a celestial sphere. If the observatory and the Radcliffe Triton were ancient monuments, considering that they stand in very close proximity to one another, it would certainly be tempting to ask whether the Triton-connection between the two had any significance. To reflect on how historians and Classical archaeologists try to answer such questions for ancient public monuments I want to think about how we might try to “read” the connection between the fountain and the observatory if we were able to look back on these monuments from a vantage point some two thousand years into the future. Of course the evidence available to us would need to be just as patchy and fragmentary as we are faced with for an ancient city like Rome or Athens.

Let’s imagine that the Oxford statue of the Triton survives only in fragments – perhaps just a piece of the head and arm – just enough to be able to recognise that the statue is a copy of Bernini’s original which has itself long since been destroyed but is known from a couple of surviving photos. Perhaps there’s a record in a local archive in Oxford of the Radcliffe Triton being set up in the mid 19^th Century but the date troubles the sculpture experts who have studied the surviving fragments because they can see that techniques were used that weren’t developed until the late 20^th century.

The Radcliffe Observatory has been demolished to make way for office space but it is known from a 19^th century painting. For the intended meaning of the building and the significance of its artistic references to the Athenian Tower of the Winds all that we have is my blog piece from last time – written two and a half centuries after the building was erected, highly speculative and citing only one slightly earlier scholar and giving absolutely no references to any 18^th century sources. The Tower of the Winds miraculously does survive in tact. It is now four thousand years old and encased in a purpose built museum where it is surrounded daily by swarms of tourists who come from all around the world specially to visit it. Of course, for this exercise to work, we also have to imagine that the internet has disappeared, or perhaps that it has become so overloaded with information that it is impossible to find anything anymore. My blog survives in print form in a single surviving manuscript of a self-published collection of personal highlights.

Of course this is a bit of fun but the serious point I am trying to make is that this mishmash of scraps of information is pretty close to what we actually are faced with in reconstructing the monumental landscape of ancient cities……..if we are very lucky. Often the evidence is even worse. So what would an archaeologist or historian of the future be likely to make of this evidence?

Well, no doubt there would be considerable discussion about the mystery relating to when the Triton fountain was built. Was the 19^th century archive date wrong or were the so-called experts mistaken in their analysis? Given time somebody would no doubt come up with the theory that the original statue had been copied and replaced at some point. The ingenuity of the theory would be accepted by some, seen as contrived and implausible by others. The fact that the statue copied Bernini’s fountain in Rome would surely capture the scholarly imagination and be attributed great significance. And in trying to understand just why this fountain was copied reference would probably be made to the spatial setting of the Radcliffe fountain and its relationship to the observatory.

The Triton, present in the fountain would no doubt be seen as a deliberate reference to his missing counterpart on the roof of the observatory. This would allow all sorts of speculation about the statement that was being made here. Perhaps this was a deliberate turning away from the philhellenism that had led to the observatory being based on an old Greek building by looking to a Roman model for the Triton of the fountain. But which Rome was being referred to here? Was the fountain a statement of preference for the values of ancient Rome or for the Counter Reformation Rome of Bernini and Urban VIII – a statement about a preferred kind of classicism or of covert allegiance to Roman Catholicism? The fountain’s playfulness as a decorative ornament might also be contrasted with the function of the Tower of the Wind’s Triton as a weathervane, and with the observatory as a building of scientific observation. This new preference for ornamentation over functionality might be put forward as a symptom of cultural decadence, or even seen as a piece of ostentatious revelling in frivolity. The fact that the fountain was “deliberately” placed so as to be seen before the observatory by a visitor arriving at the Radcliffe quarter from the city centre would also be stressed as significant. In short, the jumble of assorted facts would provide ample scope for several learned papers, each presenting their “reading” of the relationship between the two monuments as self evident. But let’s now return to the present and ask whether such readings would be right? I believe they would not be.

I am convinced that it is useful to interpret the design of the Radcliffe Observatory in the context of its time as an expression of growing philhellenism and Enlightenment scientific curiosity, as I argued last time. I am also convinced that when the Triton fountain was set up before the Radcliffe Infirmary in the mid 19^th Century educated viewers were meant to recognise that Bernini’s fountain had served as the prototype, and perhaps even to think of Ovid’s verse. Looking for a Triton-connection between the two buildings, however, is I believe over-reading the evidence. The hypothetical readings I put forward for our historians of the future sound rather too farfetched and contrived. The basic problem here is that it is hard to believe that the figure of Triton, in either the 18^th or 19^th centuries was an important enough symbol for the connection to have been significant.

Looking at the ancient world we equally run the risk of over-reading the evidence and I have come across these kinds of arguments in scholarship on ancient Greece. I’ve probably even made these kinds of arguments myself. Because our source material is so fragmentary and so slight we have an understandable desire to want to squeeze every last drop of significance out of each piece of it. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible to reconstruct something of the meaning of ancient monuments. I fully believe it is. That’s exactly what I tried to do in my first three blog posts, and that is the heart of my research project. But we do need to be aware of the danger of assuming that each and every connection we can find between different pieces of evidence or between different monuments must have had a profound significance in ancient times. Sometimes two Tritons standing in the same part of a city might just be a coincidence.

The Radcliffe fountain also raises two other problems that are relevant for my research into ancient public monuments: firstly how the meaning of monuments can change over time and secondly the extent to which passersby really pay attention to the monuments in the midst. There must have been some public feeling in 21^st century Oxford that the old Victorian statue of Triton needed to be replaced – that the courtyard before the old infirmary wouldn’t look right without it. But how many of the hundreds of people who walk by it every day are now aware that it is a copy? How many know that it is based on Bernini’s statue, that Bernini drew on a poem by Ovid, or that it is a representation of an old Greek god? As I mentioned, I largely ignored it for several weeks and only paid it more attention because I happen to be interested in that kind of thing and was busy writing a blog in which the figure of Triton kept coming up. How many other people even notice the fountain? For my research the next question that the fountain gives rise to is whether the inhabitants of ancient cities paid more attention to their public monuments than we do today. Or did the fact that their public spaces were so cluttered with statues and other pieces of sculpture mean that they noticed them even less?

If accessing the intentions of those who set up ancient monuments is difficult, exploring the way that people responded to them in their daily lives often seems to be near impossible. I’m hopeful, however, that we can get closer to understanding both issues and that is precisely what I’m going to be trying to do over the next two and a half years.

But what do you think? How close can we come to knowing how people in historical times experienced their public monuments? To what extent do our own preconceptions get in the way of interpreting the evidence? Is there even enough evidence from Greek or Roman culture to answer these questions? If you’ve got any thoughts on the issue please do leave a comment.

Hellenistic Athens comes to 18th Century Oxford

Last time I was inspired by the Radcliff Observatory, which stands near my place of work in Oxford, to talk about the Hellenistic building that served as its inspiration, the Tower of the Winds in Athens. Now I’d like to pay some closer attention to the observatory itself and to the question of what it might have meant when it was built in the 18^th Century that it copied, in some of its details, this ancient monument. Reception studies, or looking at the way that later times and cultures have responded to Greek and Roman antiquity, has become a booming area of scholarship for classicists and ancient historians in recent years. I’d like to think of this blog piece as my first, cautious, engagement with this issue.

The architectural resemblance between the Tower of the Winds and the Radcliffe Observatory is actually rather slight. The Tower of the Winds is a 12m tall, octagonal tower with a single entrance and no windows. The Radcliffe Observatory is a much larger, three tiered, wedding-cake-like building. The ground floor is rectangular, the second storey loosely semi-circular, the third storey the tower itself. The tower has eight sides but it is not perfectly octagonal, having four long and four short sides. All eight faces are fitted with windows – large windows framed by neo-Classical porches on the large sides, two small windows, one above the other on the short sides.

Left: The Tower of the Winds. Right: The Radcliffe Observatory

The architectural order used for the observatory tower, Corinthian, (easy to recognise with its flowery column capitals) is the same as the Tower of the Winds but the ancient building only has two modest columns framing each of its two entrances, whereas the observatory has articulated columns and pilasters on each of the long sides of the tower. Pilasters with Ionic capitals are used to decorate the lower parts of the building. The Tower of the Winds is built of white Pentelic marble, the same stone as the Parthenon, while the observatory is built from a yellowish limestone. Both buildings are decorated around the edges of their roofs with spouts to carry off rainwater in the form of lions’ heads, which were fairly common in the ancient world. Where the observatory does copy the Tower of the Winds closely, however, as we saw last time, is in the series of relief representations of the eight directional winds that decorated each of its faces.

The decision to model the observatory on the Tower of the Winds was presumably made by the second architect to work on the building, James Wyatt (1746-1813), who took over the commission from the first architect Henry Keene when construction had already begun. (My knowledge of the construction history of the observatory is completely based on an article published by Geoffrey Tyack in an edited volume on the history of the building. It is worth noting that Tyack shows that the Wyatt did not take over the building after Keene died as Wikipedia claims but that those in charge of the building chose to change architects for some unknown reason). The artist who sculpted the winds was John Bacon (1740-1799).The observatory took nearly twenty years to complete though it went into use as soon as the ground floor was completed. It was finished in 1794 and the tower and its relief sculptures were naturally the last part to be built.

Reconstructed front elevation of the Tower of the Winds by Stuart and Revett

The Tower of the Winds with its reliefs had first become known in Britain just thirty years before that when James Stuart and Nicholas Revett published their truly seminal and exquisitely illustrated The Antiquities of Athens. The book has rightly earned a place as one of the founding publications of Greek archaeology and reproductions of its plates are still regularly used to illustrate textbooks and to provide insight into what the ancient remains of Athens looked like two and a half centuries ago. Often the drawings preserve details of buildings that have since disappeared, which makes them an invaluable resource for research into these monuments. Wyatt and Bacon may also have known the slightly earlier publication on the monuments of Greece by the Frenchman, Julien David le Roy although his illustrations of the Tower were rather more impressionistic than those of Stuart and Revett so that it is clear that the sculptures on the observatory were based on the latter.

 

The Tower of the Winds by Julien David le Roy

 

Three of Stewart and Revett’s drawings of the eight winds

The Athens of Stuart and Revett’s day was worlds away from the sprawling concrete metropolis the city has become, or even the elegant neoclassical city that it briefly was in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Their drawings show Athens as a modest and rather ramshackle provincial town with houses nestled in and among the surviving ruins of antiquity. Even the Acropolis was covered with buildings, which were all cleared away after Greece became independent and Athens was made the new capital, with the aim of restoring the sacred rock to something approaching its ancient splendour. The Tower of the Winds, as the Antiquities of Athens shows, had half disappeared beneath centuries of rising street levels and building work.

View of the Tower of the Winds in the 18th century by Stuart and Revett

Greece at this time was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, which had for centuries been largely inaccessible to foreigners and was only now relaxing its borders as its former power began to crumble. Italy, and especially Rome, by contrast had, for two centuries been the ultimate destination of the so-called “Grand Tour”, a jaunt around the continent by which the upper class young men (and ever so occasionally women) of northwest Europe completed their education. In the 18^th century the buildings and artworks from the heart of ancient Roman civilisation had become familiar in countries like Britain, at least among the well to do, whereas the antiquities of Greece were largely unknown. Stuart and Revett’s book signalled the beginning of a growing interest in Greece in Britain and elsewhere. This new philhellenism would inspire a so-called Greek revival in British architecture and in the early nineteenth century would exert a profound influence over the works of the second generation of Romantic Poets – think of Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn, Shelley’s Hellas and, above all, the many poems by Byron on Greek themes.

Increasing fascination with Greece also led to British interventions in Greek affairs, some welcome others less so. Between 1801 to 1812 Thomas Bruce, the 7^th of Earl of Elgin’s interest in ancient Greek art led him to remove substantial amounts of sculpture from the buildings on the Athenian Acropolis for shipment back to Britain. In 1832 Greece won a decade long war of independence against the Ottomans with significant help from British, French and Russian forces, all spurred on by philhellenic sentiment on the home front. Byron, of course, died in Greece having gone to fight for the cause. The creation of the Radcliffe Observatory, roughly halfway between Stuart and Revett’s publication and the birth of the modern Greek nation state must be set against this background. But the choice of the Tower of the Winds as a model for the building should probably be seen as more than merely an expression of philhellenism.

In the first place modelling the observatory on the Tower of the Winds must have had something to do with the ancient building’s function. The Tower of the Winds may not have been an observatory but it was a building that could plausibly be linked to scientific observation – not of the stars but of the elements; it was, as we saw last time, a monumental weather vane, sundial and water-clock. Geoffrey Tyack suggests that the water-clock could have played some role in the measurement of the stars. Although there is no ancient evidence for this, the device would certainly have allowed the measurement of time at night, when the sundials would not have worked. Whether or not the Tower of the Winds actually had anything to do with astronomy it is an intriguing suggestion that people in the 18^th century might at least have thought it did. The Tower of the Winds, more than any other building known from antiquity (then and arguably still now) could be thought to represent the pinnacle of ancient achievement in the sciences just as the new observatory was at the forefront of the 18^th century quest for knowledge.

The fact that the building was so clearly mentioned by Vitruvius, whose writings, ever since the Renaissance, had been seen as the cornerstone of western architecture, must also surely have added to its appeal. We need to remember that in the 18^th century a large part of a decent education still meant an education in the Classics. Even if they weren’t able to cite the relevant passage of Vitruvius verbatim, members of the aristocracy and gentry – and certainly the academic community of Oxford, which was for the most part made up of aristocracy and gentry – would have known enough of the Classics to feel some thrill of excitement that Stuart and Revett had brought back illustrated proof of the survival of a monument from ancient times that was referred to by one of those sources. We can be sure that the drawings must have been received with some excitement in Britain because several other buildings were built in the 18^th and 19^th century that were modelled on the Tower.* Stuart and Revett themselves both designed buildings in the UK that were loosely based on the building.

Two of the representations of the signs of the zodiac on the observatory

The decoration of the observatory included other references to antiquity beyond the relief decorations of the winds. The semi-circular second storey was decorated with relief representations of the signs of the zodiac, which were based on the designs shown on another surviving artefact from antiquity, the globe carried by the so-called Farnese Atlas – a presumably Roman period statue (possibly a copy of a Hellenistic original) of the mythical Titan holding up the celestial sphere. Vitruvius tells us that the Tower of the Winds had been topped by a weathervane in the form of the merman Triton, fancifully restored on Stuart and Revett’s drawing (see the first reconstructed elevation drawing above) even though it had long since disappeared by their day. The observatory was topped not by a Triton but, rather appropriately, by statues of Atlas and Herakles supporting an undecorated globe, a reference to one of Herakles’ labours in which he relieved Atlas temporarily of his task so that Atlas could retrieve the Apples of the Hysperides for him. An educated viewer of the observatory would no doubt have made the link between the reliefs of the zodiac, the Farnese Atlas and the sculpture on the roof. The north side of the observatory was also decorated with relief depictions of morning, noon and evening, personified as human figures in highly Classical style. The building as a whole was therefore designed to appeal to the sensibilities of an educated audience steeped in knowledge of ancient culture and art.

The Farnese Atlas

Atlas and Herakles on the roof of the observatory

In understanding the particular appeal of the Tower of the Winds as a model for an astronomical observatory we also need to think of the academic climate at the time it was built. In the 18^th century the first rifts between the humanities and the exact sciences – rifts that have widened by our own day, largely through the increasingly specialised knowledge required in the exact sciences, into a seemingly unbridgeable gulf – had yet to appear. This was the golden age of the amateur gentleman polymath who was able to stay abreast of, and actually understand, the latest advances in thinking across the full breadth of academic endeavour from philology to chemistry, from economics to biology. Travels to exotic foreign lands – as Greece at that time surely was – to seek out long lost antiquities and scanning the heavens to better understand the orbits of the planets and movements of the stars were both carried out in the same Enlightenment spirit of pushing back the boundaries of human understanding.

Stuart and Revett’s mission to Athens had been financed by the Society of the Dilettanti, a sort of gentlemen’s club founded early in the 18^th century to further the study of antiquity. The society still exists today. Strikingly many of the club’s early members were also actively engaged in research in the exact scientists and were also fellows of the Royal Society. In copying the Tower of the Winds the Radcliffe Observatory was arguably making a reference not just to the ancient building, but also to Stuart and Revett’s cutting edge research and groundbreaking publication. In other words, while we can now only see the Tower of the Winds as something very old, in the 18^th century it was possible to see it as something both ancient and invigoratingly new all at once. And the observatory as the first (nearly) octagonal building in Oxford would certainly have looked strikingly new at the time it was built.

Thinking about the creation of the Radcliffe Observatory shows that if we know something about the historical context in which a building was erected it is at least possible to make some educated guesses as to what it might have meant to the people at the time it was built. This discussion has strayed somewhat beyond the period I am concerned with in my research – Roman Greece – but the central issue that I’ve looked at here is close to the one I am exploring for the ancient world – the meaning of public monuments.

If you happen to have read my last piece you might have noticed that I didn’t actually do what I said I would do this time, which was to consider the observatory in connection to another monument that stands nearby – a fountain with a statue of Triton as its centrepiece. I had far too much fun talking about the observatory and realised that what I want to say about its relationship (or lack of one) to the fountain is really a completely different issue. I really will discuss this in my next piece where I want to use these two modern structures to think about the way we interpret ancient evidence for the meaning of monuments.

 

* Quite a few people contacted me after my last piece to tell me about buildings that copy the Tower of the Winds, including a few I’d not heard about before. If you know any more please do let me know. I will make a list.

The Two Towers (of the Winds)

In my last piece I considered what some pieces of Roman period architectural sculpture that copied sculpture from the Athenian Parthenon might tells us about how the Greeks living under the Empire thought about that Classical temple. For this, and my next piece, I’ve been inspired by an 18^th century building in Oxford that copies architectural sculpture from one of the most familiar monuments of Roman Athens.

The Radcliffe Observatory

Every day just before I arrive at my office – I usually write there in the morning and head to the library in the afternoon for new research – I pass by the Radcliffe Observatory, an elegant octagonal tower in neoclassical style that would probably have become more familiar as an Oxford landmark if it wasn’t located a good ten minute’s walk to the north of the city centre and away from most of the old colleges. It is now rather tucked away behind the swish new, glass-fronted maths building in the so-called Radcliffe observatory quarter, an area currently under redevelopment by the university. Some of you might recognize the building because it featured prominently in a recent episode of the detective series Lewis (or so I’ve been told. Don’t tell me who did it, I haven’t seen it yet!). For some reason the Gibson building, where I actually have my desk hasn’t yet featured in Morse or either of its spin offs.

The Gibson Building

The Radcliffe Observatory functioned as an observatory from its opening in 1773 to 1934, when it was taken over by the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research. It became a part of Green College in 1979. That college merged in 2007 with Templeton College to create Green-Templeton college to which the building now belongs. It now houses the dining room and common room of the college. I’m hoping to get the chance to see the building from the inside at some point.

The first glimpse I ever caught of the building was when I visited Oxford some years ago and went on a highly enjoyable open-top bus tour. I don’t remember the audio guide saying anything about the observatory but in the distance, above the rooftops, I recognized it immediately as a copy of one of my favourite of the surviving monuments of ancient Athens, the enigmatic Tower of the Winds.

The Tower of the Winds stands near the eastern entrance of the so-called Roman Agora and is one of the best preserved of all ancient buildings in Greece. The design of the building is, at least in terms of the buildings that survive from antiquity, unique – both in terms of its architecture and its function. The fact that there is nothing to compare it with means that it is very difficult to date on stylistic grounds. We also don’t know who paid for it though scholars sometimes assume it must have been a gift to the city by some Hellenistic king or wealthy Roman. We do, however, know that it was already standing by the mid 1^st century BC because it is mentioned briefly in a work written at that time by the Roman author Varro. The Augustan period architect Vitruvius (slightly later) also discusses the building. From these two literary references and from studying the building itself we do at least have a good idea what it was used for – it was a kind of public clock and weather station.

The Tower of the Winds

The ancient authors don’t actually call the building the “Tower of the Winds” – that name has been given to the building in modern times (there’s also no reason to assume that the term Varro uses to refer to the building, “horologium”, or “horologion” in Greek, must be what the Athenians knew it as, as some scholars do. The word describes what the building was, a timepiece, and isn’t necessarily an actual name for it). The reason for the modern name is that the tops of the eight faces of the building are decorated in high relief with representations of the eight directional winds, shown as flying men wearing clothing and carrying objects appropriate to where they come from. Boreas, the cold north wind, for example wears warm clothes and is blowing a horn to symbolize the ferocious gusts coming from that direction and Kaikias (“Badness”), the north-eastern wind, is carrying a shield full of hailstones. Now that I’ve seen the Radcliffe observatory up close it is clear that the building isn’t really a copy of the Tower of the Winds at all but it’s octagonal shape and its decoration with copies of the distinctive relief figures is enough to immediately evoke the Athenian building. But the issue of copying is one of the things I want to talk about next time. Here I’d like to focus more on the Tower of the Winds itself.

Apelliotes, the southeast wind, carrying fruit (left – Tower of the Winds, Athens; right – Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford)

The Tower of the Winds was equipped with sundials on all eight of its faces, the lines of which can still be seen today. There’s been some debate in the scholarly literature about whether these sundials belonged to the original building or were added later. Lines scratched on stone are sadly impossible to date scientifically but I’m inclined to accept they were part of the original building. Vitruvius tells us the name of the building’s architect – Andronikos of Kyrrhos (a place in Macedonia). Varro also says it was built by a man from Kyrrhos. This Andronikos doesn’t appear in any other literary sources but he must be the same Andronikos of Kyrrhos attested in an inscription from the island polis of Tenos as installing a sundial in that city. Considering that the only two facts we have about this man are that (a) he built a sundial somewhere and (b) he built the Tower of the Winds, it seems to me rather likely that the sundials on the Tower of the Winds were also part of his design and nowadays most scholars seem to accept that they were.

Sundial on the Tower of the Winds

The Tower was also equipped with a water clock, which would have allowed people to tell the time on a cloudy day. It would be going too far to say that water clocks were common in antiquity but they are known elsewhere. The simplest kind were those used back in Classical Athens for timing law court speeches and which simply consisted of vases with holes near the base that could contain enough water to time a particular type of speech. More complex public examples are known but the one in the Tower of the Winds seems to have been one of the most elaborate.

Water tank at the rear of the Tower of the Winds

A tank on the outside of the building was fed by water from a spring from the Acropolis. The tank then filled a basin within the building, probably using a system of valves to regulate the pressure and to ensure the inflow speed was constant. Cuttings on the floor of the inside of the building suggest there must have been some kind of mechanism of moving parts which was presumably activated by a float rising in the basin. Some scholars have suggested that there may even have been moving statues – there are some references to such things existing elsewhere in antiquity – but unfortunately we will never know for sure. It seems clear, however, that people would have been able to enter the building and somehow, from the position of the mechanism, know what time it was.

Although the Tower of the Winds is a fascinating structure in so many ways I have particular affection for the building because it featured in a particularly important argument in my PhD thesis, which was about the changing use of Greek agoras in Hellenistic and Roman times. The argument has to do with what the Tower suggests about the area in which it stood.

The general consensus among scholars is that the “Roman Agora”, constructed with funds donated to the city of Athens by Julius Caesar and the first Roman Emperor Augustus, in some way came to replace the old Classical Agora which lay some eighty meters to the west of it. The idea is that the creation of the new building, which was almost certainly a commercial market, meant that the old agora, which had been the heart of the city for over half a millennium, now lost its function as a marketplace. This is generally accepted as a sign of the lamentable decline of the old agora, the vibrant public square where people had gathered to discuss philosophy and politics, while buying their vegetables and fish, in the golden days of the 5^th Century democracy.

The Roman Agora at Athens with the Tower of the Winds in the background

This idea that the new complex took over some of the functions of the Classical Agora is reinforced by the very name “Roman Agora”. It suggests that the old square had been the agora in pre-Roman times, while the market of Caesar and Augustus was the agora in Roman times. In my time spent in Athens I’ve heard people, and not only tourists but also students and scholars, talk about the two squares in this way. In truth the two agoras continued to exist alongside each other and the Classical Agora remained the more important of the two. Although we can assume that there wasn’t much need for a food market in the old square, there isn’t even any direct evidence that all forms of trading there came to an end.

The reason the Tower of the Winds is relevant to this issue has to do with timing. The market building was probably opened in sometime between 10 and 2 BC but Varro mentions the Tower of the Winds around 50 BC. He doesn’t give any indication that it is a new building. Construction on the Roman Agora might have begun that early – it probably took a long time to complete because of the troubled time of the Roman Civil wars but the important point is that the Tower of the Winds clearly predates the market building and possibly by quite some time. A case has been made by Hermann Kienast – a strong case in my opinion, for reasons that I won’t go into here – that the Tower of the Winds was constructed in the mid second century BC which would mean that it was over a century older than the Roman Agora.

The presence of a monumental clock suggests that this area was already an area of public space before the Roman Agora was built. It is more than likely that there was already a marketplace here because a desire to regulate trading hours would explain the need for a public clock. Furthermore, the only food shops that have ever been excavated on the Classical Agora, were on the very southeast edge of the square alongside a road that stretched toward where the Roman Agora would later be built. Curiously the idea that there was a marketplace here before the Roman Agora was built has actually been fairly widely accepted – and even by the same scholars who also hold that the Roman Agora took trade away from the old square. That makes very little sense to me. My argument is that all the Roman Agora did was provide more splendid premises for an activity that was already taking place on the same spot. This means that we cannot simply point the finger at Caesar and Augustus and give Rome the blame for putting an end to the old agora functioning as a marketplace. This at least puts a dent in the interpretation that public life in the city of Athens must have declined under Roman rule and calls into question how easy it is to draw conclusions about civic vitality from looking at monumental building programmes.

But lets return to the Tower of the Winds itself. As I already mentioned, as well as being a clock Vitruvius and Varro both describe how it also functioned as a monumental weather vane. There was a pointer on the roof that turned in the direction that the winds were blowing so that the relief figures were not only decorative but also served a practical function. Varro says that somehow the direction of the wind was also indicated inside the building, though no appropriate hole in the roof has been found. The vane, presumably made of bronze and sadly long since lost, had the form, so Vitruvius tells us, of a Triton, the half-man/half fish, son of Poseidon, who we encountered last time serving as an architectural support on the Roman odeion on the Classical Agora. Was this perhaps one more connection that people were meant to make when they saw that building in the second century AD?

I’ll return to that question next time when I want to think a bit more about what it meant in our more recent history when buildings and monuments made references to antiquity. I also want to consider how the ways that we “read” such architecture today can help with, or perhaps even get in the way of, how we think about the changing meaning of monuments in ancient times. I’ll be looking at the Radcliffe Observatory in a bit more detail and I’ll also be considering another monument I pass every day on my way to work, a statue that stands (by chance or design?) within a stone’s throw of the observatory. A statue of – yes, you guessed it – the merman Triton.

The Parthenon and its Sculptures in Roman Times (Part Two)

Last time I discussed the fullest ancient description we have of the Athenian Parthenon, which was written by Pausanias, a Greek traveller from Asia Minor in the mid 2^nd C AD, the height of the Roman Empire. For Pausanias the main interest of the building was the giant gold and ivory statue of Athena that it housed, rather than its sculptural decoration – the so-called “Parthenon Marbles” – which have been universally praised in modern times and which are the source of the famous and ongoing feud between the Greek government and the British Museum, which has owned the bulk of them ever since the early 19^th Century. I suggested that Pausanias’ indifference to the sculptures might tell us something about Roman period attitudes toward the Parthenon. While we tend to see the building as an architectural masterpiece and praise it for its work of art, for the Roman period Greeks it was, above all, a deeply sacred place of worship.

Pausanias doesn’t provide our only insight into the way the building was thought about in Roman Athens. In this piece I’d like to consider some archaeological evidence that seems to tell a different story. That evidence comes not from the Parthenon itself but rather from a Roman period building that stood in the Athenian Agora, the main public square of the city.

At the beginning of the Imperial period (late 1^st C BC)| a huge theatre-like building or odeion was constructed in the middle of the agora. The building was probably paid for by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the star general, son-in-law and right-hand-man of the first Roman Emperor Augustus. A lot has been written about the impact this building had on the use of the agora but that is another story. For our purposes the building is interesting because of what happened to it in the middle of the 2^nd Century AD. Excavations have revealed that after over a century of use the roof gave way and collapsed. The disaster was attributed by the excavators to a design flaw. The original auditorium had been enormous – it could have seated around 1,000 people – and construction techniques of the time were not really suited to span so large a space.

When the building was rebuilt, with a lot of infilling which reduced the auditorium to half its original size, it was spruced up with a new porch on the northern, entrance side, which incorporated a row of sculpted figural supports that took the form of giants and tritons, three of each. Triton, in Greek mythology, was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite the god and goddess of the sea. He’s easy to recognize because he is shown as a sort of merman with the lower half of his body having the form of a fish. The other three figures have a more human form though their two legs end in snakes which curl back around the support against which they stand. They have been identified as giants, monsters who appear with snake-legs in other works of ancient art.

In late antiquity the odeion was destroyed and a large palatial complex built over its ruins. The statues were incorporated into the new building at roughly the spot where they had originally stood. Three have remained there ever since and can still be seen, surrounded by houses in paintings of Athens from before the agora was discovered and excavations began in the 1930s. These statues are what links the odeion to the Parthenon because the upper parts of the three tritons were deliberate and fairly accurate copies (two of them mirrored) of the figure of Poseidon, the god of the sea, from the Parthenon’s western pediment.

(Left) Triton from the odeion (Right) The Parthenon Poseidon

This copying was spotted by Homer Thompson, director of the Athenian Agora excavations from 1947-1968 and discussed in a detailed study of the odeion that he published in 1950. Thompson pointed out that the artists had clearly gone to great lengths to make the copied statues as accurate as possible because they even included an unnatural looking indention beneath the breastbone of the Poseidon on the new statues. Although the head of the Poseidon has been lost a drawing made in the 18^th Century does exist and looks similar enough to the two surviving Triton’s heads to be confident that it was the whole of the Poseidon’s upper half that was copied and not just the torso, which does survive and is one of the pieces of the Parthenon Marbles still in Athens.

When architectural supports in the form of sculpted figures are seen in Greek or Roman architecture they usually portray defeated enemies. Being forced to hold up a building for eternity is hardly a sign of respect. Vitruvius, the early Augustan architect believed that the famous female Caryatid figures on the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis were statues of the women-folk of an enemy defeated by the Athenians in some obscure early war (whether he was right is hard to say). The giants were a race of powerful beings who had warred against the Olympian gods and were eventually defeated. This powerful and important myth helped explain for the Greeks how the ordered kosmos had come into being and was a popular scene for decorating Greek temples. A gigantomachy (fight against the giants) was depicted on the shield of the chryselephantine statue of Athena inside the Parthenon and on the metopes on the eastern side of that building. The giants were therefore an extremely familiar image to the Roman period Greeks and suitable figures to be portrayed holding up the porch of a building.

Recognizing these figures and linking them to Greek mythology, however, only brings us so far in understanding their meaning. These statues raise a number of interesting questions: Why were these figures in particular chosen as suitable for decorating the odeion in its second phase? Is there any significance that Triton, one of the gods and usually shown fighting against the giants, has also been made into an architectural support? Are these figures purely decorative or does the fact that they show gods and monsters have some deeper, potentially religious significance? Would the meaning of these statues have been understood equally well by all segments of society or were they making a statement aimed at some particular group within the community? Lastly, and crucially important for present purposes, what does it suggest about Athenian attitudes toward the Parthenon that they wanted to copy its sculptures in this way?

These are difficult questions to answer because there are no written sources from the period that even mention the sculptures. The reconstruction of the odeion must have taken place shortly before Pausanias visited Athens and he does mention the building but says nothing of the statues that decorated the porch. However, what we know of the use of the building and the cultural climate of the period in which it was made do allow some tentative answers.

In the mid 2^nd Century AD, at the time the building was rebuilt, Greek culture – in particular Greek literary culture – was enjoying a revival which historians call the Second Sophistic. The Sophists, from which the movement takes its name, were highly skilled orators who could draw vast crowds to watch them deliver speeches, and could earn exorbitant sums teaching their skills to pupils. Throughout the Greek speaking eastern half of the Empire watching these orators declaim was a popular form of entertainment and actually participating in their activities was the hallmark of a cultivated elite lifestyle. The leading sophists were admitted to the inner circle of Roman Emperors, as teachers to their children or even as personal friends. The success of the movement probably owed much to interest that the emperors of the 2^nd C took in Greek culture, beginning with Hadrian a celebrated philhellene and the first Roman Emperor to wear a beard like a Greek.

A curious feature of this cultural revival is that it was in almost every respect an extremely backward looking movement. It took as its model, Classical Athens, which was already in Roman times seen as a golden period of Greek history. The orators strove to deliver their speeches in Greek that was as close to the pure Attic dialect spoken in the 5^th century BC as possible. The types of speeches they performed also often drew on episodes of Classical history, either recreating speeches from dramatic historical situations or else imagining themselves to be famous historical characters such as Demosthenes or Perikles placed in hypothetical situations. Second century Athens was able to exploit this fascination with its Classical past to become a major cultural center, drawing in tourists, philosophers, orators and students. Modern scholars sometimes describe it, perhaps slightly anachronistically, as becoming a “university town”.

Some of our best evidence for the activities of these sophists comes from a sort of group biography written by a man called Philostratos in the early 3^rd Century AD. It is from Philostratos that we get the phrase “Second Sophistic”, the “First Sophistic”, or first age of the great public orators, being the Classical period at Athens. Philostratos also gives us our only evidence for the use of the odeion on the Athenian Agora in this period. He describes it serving as the venue for a public performance by one of these sophists and this is that allows us to make some headway in understanding the meaning of the sculpted giants and tritons.

The sophists who were using the building were connoisseurs of the culture of 5^th Century Athens and it is therefore easy to imagine that it appealed to them to have a splendid new lecture hall decorated with Classical looking art. The grand porch with its sculpted supports was no doubt intended to impress the countless visitors to Athens. The level of detail that went into copying the Parthenon Poseidon for the three Tritons suggests, however, that this wasn’t merely a case of creating a Classical looking building. This was a deliberate sculptural quotation that those in the know were supposed to get. Whether everyone who came to Athens, or even everyone who lived in Athens, was expected to recognize the statues is difficult to say but I think we can be certain that the upper class educated sophists and their pupils would have done. The fact that the sculpture chosen came from the Parthenon surely suggests that the artwork of this building was particularly praised. Perhaps this suggests a more aesthetic appreciation of the Parthenon than seen in Pausanias’ description although it is worth stressing that the sculpture in question came from one of the building’s pediments, which Pausanias, as we saw last time, did describe.

This still doesn’t explain why Poseidon in particular was copied, or why Triton was chosen as a particularly suitable figure for decorating the new building. I believe that the choice must have been meaningful. We will probably never know for sure what that meaning was but at the risk of indulging in some wild speculation (and if a blog isn’t a good place for wild speculation that you couldn’t get away with in a peer reviewed journal then I don’t know where is) I do, however, have a theory.

The bases of the statues of giants and tritons were all decorated with the relief of an olive tree. This, as Homer Thompson already suggested, seems to be a reference to an important Athenian myth about a competition between Poseidon and Athena for who would become the patron deity of the city. Both gods offered the Athenians a gift – Posiedon, a salt spring, Athena, an olive tree. The Athenians chose the olive tree as the more useful gift and thereby chose Athena as their most important goddess. This struggle between Poseidon and Athena was the very myth that was depicted on the west pediment of the Parthenon, as we saw last time.

I believe, therefore, that when viewers saw these architectural supports they were supposed to think not so much of Triton but rather of Poseidon himself. Poseidon was associated with brute force and the wild powers of nature, while Athena was a goddess of wisdom and intellect. Making Poseidon serve as an architectural support, perhaps through his son as stand-in, would have been a good way of making a statement about the merits of learning and education – a highly suitable theme for a lecture hall.

Taking this line of thought a step further led me to wonder if the reason that the odeion needed to be rebuilt might not also be significant here. The original roof had, as already mentioned, stood for well over a century, which suggests that the design wasn’t quite as poor as modern scholars have tended to assume. A fairly common reason for buildings collapsing in ancient Greece was as the result of earthquakes. Poseidon as well as being the god of the sea was also believed to be responsible for seismic activity and was known as the “Earthshaker”. Might the building have collapsed as the result of an earthquake? Making Poseidon/Triton into an architectural support might then have been a way of making him do penance for the devastation, the type of joke that would have certainly appealed to some of those who were counted among the sophists (I’m thinking of someone like Lucian for those more familiar with the period). Alternatively, it might have been a way of trying to ward off future earthquakes by giving Poseidon’s son the job of holding the building up.

My earthquake theory is, of course, pure conjecture but there is something about the statues themselves that make such cultural readings possible. The very fact that there are three representations of the same figure from Greek mythology, Triton, makes it hard to interpret this as a mythological scene in the same way as the Parthenon’s pediments. Copying the Parthenon Poseidon and reproducing it threefold in a very different context than the original feels curiously modern (or perhaps post-modern?). A remarkably similar use of Classical sculptural quotations can be seen from around the same time as the odeion at at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli in Italy. There a series of caryatids, copying those from the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis, were set up surrounding an outdoor swimming pool. Unlike the reliefs and sculptural decorations of buildings from the Classical period both Hadrian’s caryatids and the odeion giants and tritons look like a much more decorative, playful use of art. Seen in this light the odeion sculptures hardly seem to suggest much reverence on the part of the Roman period Athenians toward the Parthenon or its sculptures. We might wonder if anyone who had seen the Tritons could ever take the Parthenon Poseidon quite so seriously again.

Caryatids (Left) Erechtheion at Athens (Right) Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli

There is, however, a danger here of going too far in imposing modern assumptions about art upon the Roman period Greeks. Even if there was something playful about the odeion sculptures does this mean that they couldn’t, at the same time, as representations of gods and mythical beings, evoke a religious feeling? It is worth noting that the only thing Pausanias says about the odeion is that there was a statue of the god Dionysos there that was worth seeing. This reminds us that religion was everywhere in the Roman period Greek city, as it had been in Classical times. This was not a temple but even a lecture hall could be a place to encounter the divine.

Last week I saw a lecture in Oxford in which Katherine Dunbabin, professor emerita at McMaster University, discussed some scenes of Dionysos from mosaics and paintings in Roman period Greek houses. She argued that if we try to decide whether these were merely cultural representations or whether they were expressions of religious belief we are creating a false opposition. Dionysiac scenes could be used to entertain guests in a banquet hall, while at the same time causing them to reflect on the myths and rites relating to one of their most important deities. The same is also possibly true of the odeion scultpures. While raising a smile they may also have reminded viewers of the importance of Poseidon and the story of his contest with Athena as one of the key origin myths of Athenian culture

(Left) Figures from the Parthenon West Pediment (Right) Figures from Temple F at Eleusis

There is another piece of evidence for copying of the Parthenon sculptures which does indeed suggest a more religious attitude. At Eleusis, a very important old sanctuary in Athenian territory, around the same time that the odeion was rebuilt a small temple or treasury was constructed, possibly in honour of Sabina, the wife of the emperor Hadrian. The pediment of that building was filled with a scaled down (1/3 the original size) replica of the scene from the Parthenon’s west pediment, the very same scene from which the odeion’s Triton was taken, depicting the competition between Athena and Poseidon. Once again, we can be certain that viewers were meant to recognize the sculptures and think of the Parthenon when they saw them. In this deeply sacred context, however, it is hard to question that these sculptures were meant to be taken seriously.

Looking at the evidence for attitudes toward the Parthenon in Roman times reminds us of the ways in which the meaning of monuments can change over time and that ways of looking at monuments and works of art in different times and cultures were not necessarily the same as our own. Accessing the meanings of ancient monuments is no easy matter, especially when we lack literary sources that might tell us what they mean. Looking at them in context – both the cultural context of their time and their spatial context – can however help us arrive at some answers and, just as importantly, to think about the sort of questions we should be asking.

Although I’m not only interested in architectural sculpture and my research doesn’t only focus on Athens, some of the issues that I’ve looked at here are issues that I’m going to be exploring further in the course of my project over the next two and a half years.