Last week somebody sent a question to my blog: “Why are there no amphitheatres in Greece?” I’ve somehow managed to lose the question but in the hope that whoever asked it is reading – and because I find this an interesting subject – here’s an answer.
At the outset a disclaimer: there’s actually a very good article on this very subject by Katherine Welch*, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University and author of a book about Roman amphitheatres so much of what I’m going to say here is based on her work.
Leaving aside the thorny problem of “Romanisation” familiar to any student of ancient history, it pretty straightforward to see how the culture of northwest Europe was transformed when the area became part of the Roman Empire: an iron age tribal culture was transformed into one in which people lived in cities, used Roman coins to buy Roman goods and went to the baths. It’s always been more difficult to see what exactly changed when the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Mediterranean was conquered by Rome.
After all, the people had lived in cities for hundreds of years, worshipped (more or less) the same gods as the Romans and enjoyed a loosely similar form of political organisation and agrarian economy. Roman culture had of course itself been deeply transformed through contact with the Greek world – Rome had been “Hellenized”. So what did change in the Greek world? There are a few markers that scholars have tended to point to as evidence for a more Roman way of life: worship of the emperor (the Imperial Cult), Roman-style bathhouses and watching the bloody entertainments that have become synonymous with Rome in the modern imagination – gladiatorial games.
And there is, perhaps surprisingly, evidence enough that the Greeks did watch gladiator fights – inscriptions, grave stones and even – at Ephesos in Turkey – what is believed to have been a cemetery full of gladiator skeletons. The person who asked me the question was right, however, there is almost no evidence for the type of building that the Romans used for these fights in other parts of the Empire – the amphitheatre.
The Theatre of Dionysos at Athens – showing the Roman period barrier
Instead the Greeks tended to convert existing structures for that purpose. In Athens a barrier was erected in the orchestra of the Theatre of Dionysus to transform that building into an arena for Roman-style blood sports. I remember pointing the barrier out to a group of students when I was teaching the Roman part of the British School at Athens summer course and a friend of mine, responsible for teaching the Bronze Age component remarked that they must have been very short gladiators – the barrier is, it’s true, only waist high. But I don’t think the idea was to stop the gladiators from running away. We shouldn’t imagine that all gladiators were like Spartacus waiting to rise up and fight for their freedom. It was probably quite rare for gladiators to fight to the death – for one thing that would have been too expensive for their owners – so for slaves of a certain violent disposition being a gladiator was probably not too bad a life. No, I think that the idea of the barrier was more to make sure that no gladiators fell with their swords or tridetnts on the rich, important people who would have been seated in the good seats at the front.
It’s hard to be sure exactly when the barrier was added but we know the theatre was modified by a local elite sycophant at the time of Nero so it seems a reasonable guess that it was around then. That, at least is what Welch and others assume. We can be sure that the barrier was for this purpose and that the theatre was indeed being used for gladiator fights because a Greek author, Dio Chrysostom (the Golden Mouthed – named for his oratorical skills), expresses his disgust at the fact it in the late first century AD – he found it a travesty that this building where great works of tragedy and comedy had been performed and where the Athenian assembly had met to vote, a sanctuary of the god Dionysos – was now being used for this unseemly purpose.
The complaint is repeated in the 2nd century by Lucian and in the early 3rd century biography of a legendary contemporary of Dio Chrysostom, the miracle-working sage, Apollonius of Tyana, written by Philostratos. We shouldn’t imagine, however, that this distaste for gladiator fights was necessarily an anti-Roman sentiment. Some members of the Latin-speaking western elite are also known to have been critical of the games. Enough people in the Greek world must have enjoyed Gladiator fights or else there would have been nothing to complain about so their dislike was probably inspired part by genuine human compassion, part snobbery towards a popular form of lower class entertainment.
The theatre of Delphi with a piece of the barrier preserved to the left of the tourists
Other theatres in Greece were also fitted with barriers so as to accommodate gladiator fights. I know there’s also a barrier in Delphi and I’m sure I’ve seen one at some other theatre in Greece but I can’t remember where now (if anyone knows of any please let me know). I know that at Ephesos they assume gladiator fights were held in the theatre. There instead of having a barrier the cavea (seating area) was raised up above the orchestra. The main reason Greek cities didn’t build amphitheatres is therefore probably that it was simply more cost-effective to convert existing buildings.
The stadium at Messene converted into an arena with addition of late antique wallThe stadium of Aphrodisias – similarly converted into an amphitheatre
In a much later period at other cities it was the stadium, the arena for athletic competitions, that was converted to serve as an amphitheatre. At both Messene, in the southern Peloponnese and Aphrodisias, hundreds of miles away in western Turkey, probably in the 4th century AD, a makeshift curved wall was inserted into the running track to close off one end of the stadium to accommodate gladiatorial fights. At Aphrodisias small rooms were even added around the base of the seating area that were presumably used as cages from which to release animals for beast fights.
I said that there is almost no evidence for amphitheatres in the Greek world but – to come clean – there are actually a few cities that did have them, though not imposing stone buildings like the famous Colosseum. These tended to be cities where there was a particularly strong Roman influence – Gortyn and Knossos on Crete, the first the Roman provincial capital, the second an Augustan colony and, in Greece itself, Corinth, an old Greek city but one also re-founded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar. There isn’t all that much to see of the amphitheatre today and even in antiquity it was an earth-bank structure. Dio says that in his day the Corinthians watched gladiator fights in a ravine outside the city. In keeping with his negative attitude to this form of entertainment this might have been his sneering way of referring to the amphitheatre.
Finally, it is possible that at some cities gladiator fights might have been held in the agora. We know that in Roman culture gladiator fights were originally held on the Forum and at early Roman colonies in Italy post-holes have been found that may have been for grandstands for such spectacles. Writing in the age of Augustus the architect Vitruvius recommends that Roman fora should be rectangular, unlike Greek agoras that tended to be more square, because that shape was more suitable for spectators watching gladiator fights. For what it’s worth the Forum of Corinth follows his recommendation so maybe – although I’ve never heard of anyone else making the suggestion – that’s where the fights took place before the amphitheatre was built.
Artistic reconstruction of gladiator fights on the agora of Hierapolis
At Hierapolis in Asia Minor the excavators have also speculated that gladiator fights took place in the agora. An imposing stoa-basilica that lined one side of the square was decorated with reliefs depicting gladiatorial scenes. The outside colonnade of the building facing the square would have made a suitable grandstand and the unusual propylon (monumental entrance) at the centre of the colonnade might, at times of spectacles, have been where important local dignitaries would have sat. The capitals of the columns of the entrance are unusually decorated with sculpted lions attacking bulls which might have been intended to evoke the beast-fights that along with gladiatorial combats were a popular form of Roman entertainment, the two often being staged together. At the very least the presence of gladiator reliefs in this Greek speaking town in distant, land-locked Phrygia, attest to how deeply this Roman “sport” had become embedded in Greek culture. With the Roman conquest things certainly had changed.
“He’s much less powerful than he used to be” – that was Ed Miliband’s assessment of Rupert Murdoch when asked about press regulation in that Russell Brand interview. It was no secret that The Sun, Murdoch’s top selling UK tabloid paper, together with much of the right wing press were waging a drawn out and viciously personal campaign against the Labour leader. A week before the election The Sun urged its English readers to vote Conservative, its Scottish readers to vote SNP, a seemingly schizophrenic strategy considering that David Cameron was hammering on about the SNP being the biggest danger facing the UK while Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly told us how she wanted nothing more than to “lock the Tories out of Downing street”. But it was a strategy deliberately calculated to stop Labour from winning. I can’t help wondering how Miliband must feel about what he said to Brand now that his dreams of becoming prime minister have ended in an unplanned holiday to Ibiza and in Rupert Murdoch getting exactly the election result he was hoping for.
Still from Russell Brand’s Ed Milband Interview
It is hard to be sure how much influence the press had over the outcome of the election and I’d find it very depressing to think that it was Murdoch “wot won it” but the very fact that British newspapers – of all political persuasions – try so hard to steer their readers to vote a certain way should alert us to a fundamental reality of the nature of power in our democracy: to understand where power lies it is not enough to look merely at the workings of our political institutions. In the UK questions of power are not decided solely through elections, debates in the houses of commons or cabinet meetings; lobbying groups, personal connections, public opinion, public knowledge, the media and countless other factors all play an important role. Figures like Rupert Murdoch also remind us that it is often difficult to draw a distinction between “power” and “influence” and to decide where one begins or the other ends. These problems are not unique to Britain. They are surely a feature of any complex society and, as such, they are problems that any historian faces – ancient historians included – when they want to explore the workings of power in past societies.
Both the Greeks and Romans were well aware of the potential tension between “influence” and “power” and of the ways in which there could be a mismatch between the theoretical government of a state as expressed in its constitution and the political reality. In the 5th Century BC Thucydides, talking of the leadership of Athens by Perikles, said that the city was “a democracy in name but in reality the rule of one man”. The first Roman Emperor Augustus on the other hand could make the bold claim in his “Res Gestae” – an autobiographical text summing up his career and erected posthumously outside his mausoleum – “I exceeded all in influence, but I had no greater power than the others who were colleagues with me in each magistracy.” The question of what we are to make of these passages has, unsurprisingly, attracted considerable attention from modern scholars.
The Temple of Roma and Augustus in Ankara – the site of the most completely preserved copy of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti
Many historians have disagreed with Thucydides’ assessment of Perikles’ influence in 5th century Athens and have argued that the city really was a radical democracy where power for all the most important decisions was truly in the hands of the people; the citizens were, after all, free to vote against Perikles’ proposals in any of their regular assembly meetings and did, once in his career, chose not to re-elect him as one of the city’s ten “strategoi”, or military generals. On the other hand, it’s hard to get away from the fact that Perikles really does seem to have been the driving force behind Athenian policy for nearly three decades, which has led other scholars to argue that Thucydides words must contain a grain of truth.
Augustus’ statement on first consideration looks less problematic. Many of the institutions of the Republic had, officially been left in tact by Augustus, following his emergence as the victor in the last of a succession of civil wars, and his tremendous personal influence was certainly extremely important in ensuring that his will was enacted. Elections continued to be held for key magistracies, for example, but Augustus put forwards the candidates so that the people could obligingly vote for them. The powers bestowed by the individual magistracies that he held were also, one for one, little different to those bestowed on other men who held the same titles as colleagues at the same time.
A key difference, however, was that while magistracies were usually held individually and temporarily Augustus held several at the same time – or at least held the powers associated with certain magistracies – and held these powers in perpetuity. By monopolising control over the army – also achieved through institutional means – he was also able effectively to quell any dissent. What we see here then is a cunning subversion of pre-existing Republican institutions to bolster up the his one man rule. Still, disentangling Augustus’ powers from his influence (Latin: “auctoritas”) and deciding which played the greater role in making him the first Roman Emperor is still a tricky issue.
The Greeks and Romans were also no strangers to the idea of outsiders trying to exert influence over the internal workings of political constitutions. Throughout the Peloponnesian War, which pitted Greek against Greek as the coalitions led by Athens and Sparta struggled for pre-eminence in the Aegean, both of those powers attempted to detach cities from their enemy and win them over to their side by installing governments of citizens favourable to their rule: in full acknowledgement that this is a gross-simplifcation – Athens tended to favour democracies, Sparta oligarchies. Toward the end of that war the Athenian government was itself overthrown temporarily and replaced by an oligarchic government of 400 upper class men who had been promised by the Persian King that he would donate funds to their cause on the condition that they ended the democracy – an investment that I am sure many modern non-dom CEOs could relate to.
In the event Athenian democracy was restored and Sparta won the war, herself making use of Persian financial support, and an even narrower oligarchy was installed at Athens who became known as the Thiry Tyrants because of their brutal and violent oppression of their opponents. Understanding configurations of power at the local level, therefore, often requires taking account of complex outside influences, thereby complicating further the task of working out who was really in charge in a given state at a given moment in time.
For Roman Greece, assessing the balance of power and influence is arguably an even thornier problem because of the nature of the evidence, which mainly comes from inscriptions. Cities throughout the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire tended to describe themselves in their official documents as democracies yet it is clear enough that small cliques of elite families monopolised key political positions such as magistracies and seats on local councils and were honoured with statues and other rewards for using their wealth to bestow benefactions – of grain, festivals, buildings etc. – on their communities. The prominence of these elite benefactors has been enough to persuade many historians that these so-called “democracies” were, in actual fact, “oligarchies” run by, and for the benefit of, these elite families. Political assemblies of citizens might still have met but their business consisted mainly of finding ways to honour these benefactors instead of debating issues of real importance. And what important issues were left to debate now that these cities were under the control of an empire and no longer free to wage war on one another? This largely pessimistic vision was for a long time the consensus view regarding the Roman period polis.
An honorific statue base of a type common in Roman Greece – from the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens
Recently, however, the tide has begun to turn and certain historians have begun to challenge this vision arguing that the Roman period poleis has suffered unfairly by comparing it to Classical Athens. They have stressed that even in Classical times no polis had as radical a democracy as Athens, where all male citizens could meet regularly to debate the issues of the day and were chosen by lot to occupy key magistracies. Many cities even then had been ruled by oligarchies and Athens itself, as an imperial power, severely limited the political freedom of around 150 Greek cities that it effectively ruled over. In Roman times, such scholars argue, the business of honouring benefactors was an effective means of choosing the men most suited to governing the local city and that important business did still have to be decided upon locally – management of the food and water supply, organising the religious festivals that were the lifeblood of civic life and choosing ambassadors to send to Rome to secure imperial favour. Inscriptions honouring benefactors were not displays of sycophancy but rather a way of advertising the power of the polis to decide which men (and more rarely women) were deserving of such honours. Such scholars have also drawn on passages in key literary sources that describe civic assemblies to argue that the level of participation in political life on the part of ordinary citizens remained high and that such meetings were characterised by a lively level of debate.
One of the key problems to do with Roman Greece is, therefore, that using exactly the same evidence, scholars are able to argue for two very different visions about where power was concentrated and where the dividing line between power and influence lay in the poleis of that time. The reason for the problem is easy to appreciate – if it is hard working out where power lies in our own society it is extremely difficult when the evidence we have is extremely patchy and largely concerned with one facet of political behaviour. If only we had transcriptions of what was actually discussed at political assembly meetings or lists of attendance figures then our impression might be clearer. Sadly we don’t. Faced with the enormous ambiguity in the evidence the debate seems to have become deadlocked with both sides defending their position yet doing little to convince their opponents.
The debate above all illustrates that “democracy” is a relative concept. I’m not sure that I’ve really completely made up my mind about where power lay in the Roman period Greek polis but if I generally find myself more sympathetic to the optimistic view that these were “real democracies” it’s perhaps because I’m largely pessimistic as to the extent to which power in our modern democratic system really is in the hands of the people. “People power” is, after all, the literal translation of the ancient Greek word. Even if power effectively was in the hands of the oligarchs in these cities, however, their rule still depended on a level of interaction with the rest of the population, which I would argue is unparalleled in pre-modern times. That in itself makes the question of how power operated in the Roman period polis a question worth asking.
To consider how power operates in 21st century Britain we need to look beyond elections and political parties to take account of the role played by the media and advertising in shaping opinion and to account for the potential influence of public figures like Rupert Murdoch and even Russell Brand. The same is true for the Greek city of Roman times. The honorific monuments that the poleis set up could be seen everywhere in public spaces such as marketplaces, gymnasiums, theatres and bathhouses – they educated people into the political realties of their time in the same way that The Sun, the BBC News, or Twitter do today. Looking at the impact of these monuments on the urban landscape – as opposed to merely analysing what the inscriptions inscribed on their bases have to say, which is where the emphasis in previous research has been – is, I believe, a useful way to move beyond institutional politics and to think about where power and influence in these cities really lay
I’m on the home run of my Peloponnesian tour having got up early to drive from the southern most region, Messenia back to Corinth in the top right hand corner of the peninsula, near the so called Isthmus . In antiquity the Isthmus was a narrow strip of land where the Adriatic and Aegean seas very nearly met. Since the late 19th century construction of the Corinth canal ships can actually pass from one sea to the other here which I suppose, technically, should make the Peloponnese a proper island, connected to the rest of Greece by a bridge. This key intersection of both seas and land masses was a perfect site for a city to thrive, as Corinth did in Archaic and Classical times, earning itself the sobriquet “Wealthy Corinth”. Visitors to the site today, however, see few remains of this period and are confronted almost entirely by ruins of the Roman period.
In 146 BC the city of Corinth was sacked by the Roman general Mummius. It is still a matter of discussion among scholars what happened to the Greek inhabitants – it was very interesting to hear the views of Guy Sanders, director of the ongoing excavations at the site on that very subject today. It is certain, however, that the city was re-founded by the Romans, under Julius Caesar as a colony which led to a complete rebuilding of the main civic centre from the period from the 1st century BC to the late 2nd century AD. The Romanness of this city can be seen in features such as the podium-style temples erected along the west of the Forum, in the fact that this was the only city in Greece to have an amphitheatre for gladiatorial games (other Greek cities held them in their theatres) and in the fact that the language of administration, as seen on inscriptions at the site, was, up to the time of Hadrian, Latin not Greek.
Corinth – the Archaic Temple with Acrocorinth in the background
I’ve been to the site quite often and studied it for my PhD thesis so I think I understand it quite well but I’m sure it looks more than a bit bewildering to most visitors today. The colonists had created their forum – essentially the area accessible to visitors – be creating a series of level terraces in what had previously been a shallow valley. However, it’s very hard to discern these terraces today because when the site was excavated in the 19th and early 20th centuries the archaeologists dug down to different levels in different places creating a very uneven appearance. To compound the problem blocks from various buildings and monuments are piled up around the site. There are also few information boards and as yet no adequate guidebook. I know that someone was working on a one, which I am also sure will be very good, but I have no idea when it will be ready.
Architectural fragments piled up at the site of Corinth
One of the things that attracts visitors to Corinth is the city’s association with St. Paul who, of course wrote letters to the Christian community here and was hauled before the Roman governor when he fell out with the local Jewish population. At the centre of the forum is a bema, a speaker’s platform, which has recently been in part restored and which is where Paul may have faced the governor. That interpretation has been challenged recently by a scholar who thinks his interrogation was in one of the Forum’s three basilicas, but I like the idea and I’ve argued in my PhD thesis that the use of the bema on such an occasion was actually quite likely from what we know of the use of such platforms elsewhere.
Highlights of the site include the old Archaic Temple (probably to Apollo), which was one of the few pre-Roman buildings to be incorporated into the new city and the Peirene fountain, sadly inaccessible to tourists but you can get a good view of it from the hill of the temple. This was the spot where the hero Bellerophon was believed to have tamed the winged horse Pegasus, and it gets a mention in Euripides’ Medea, a play set at Corinth as a place where old men sat around playing dice. There was indeed a fountain at the spot already in Archaic times connected to an incredible labyrinthine network of tunnels, several kilometres long tapping the water of an underground natural spring. You can still hear the water gushing into the fountain’s reservoirs today. The fountain was in use throughout the Greek and Roman periods of the site and over the centuries became increasingly monumentalised, becoming fronted by an architectural façade and surrounded by a courtyard. There’s an excellent, and fairly recent, monograph exploring the various phases of the building by Betsey Robinson.
The Peirene Fountain at Corinth – note the openings in the facade
As I said, I’ve been to the site many times and today, although I had a stroll around it today I spent my time mainly in the museum studying the wonderful collection of sculpture. I’d of course been there before as well but I’d forgotten quite how many treasures are on display there. Here too most of the material dates from the Roman period. There are plenty of statues of Roman emperors, including a particularly well-known over-life-size group of Augustus and his two grandsons, Lucius and Gaius. Singled out by Augustus to be his successors, both died too young to bring his dynastic ambitions to fruition. At the opposite end of the gallery there are the colossal eastern barbarians that were part of an architectural façade that was erected across the front of one of the forum’s basilicas, the so-called Captive’s Façade. There are also plenty of heads and torsos of various other statues of gods and emperors and, in the museum’s courtyard and surrounding walkway as well as a whole group of headless togate statues that had presumably been erected to civic benefactors.
Headless togate statues in the courtyard of the Corinth museum
I had a good look at all of this material, taking plenty of photos of details that caught my eye and. All of these statues have been studied and published but because the Corinth excavations took place so long ago, a lot of this scholarship is open to reinterpretation in the light of advances in our knowledge. In fact there’s quite a bit of work being done at Corinth by archaeologists going through the old excavation notebooks and making use of improved understandings of the chronology of pottery – the fragments of which are so important for dating archaeological layers – to challenge old interpretations and arrive at new ones. Having studied the statues and pieces of sculpture firsthand I now need to go away and (re)read what has been written about where they were found, how they were dated, and what previous scholars have said about the details that caught my eye in order to think about the impact they might have made on ancient viewers in public space.
Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to Athens to spend a week in the libraries some of the museums there. On the way back, however, I’m planning to visit two more sites – Perachora and Isthmia. The first is an Archaic and Classical sanctuary, not particularly relevant to my research but one of those sites that every Greek archaeologists really should have seen and which I, to my shame, have never got around to visiting. The second is Isthmia, the major sanctuary of Poseidon and venue of the Isthmian games, one of the four big Panhellenic Games, alongside Olympia, Delphi and Nemea. I have been there before but the museum was closed for refurbishment. Now it should be open – fingers crossed – and there should be some interesting Roman period monuments among the treasures there.
As a closing note I have to say that I did a pretty good job of not getting lost today. The only time I strayed off the beaten track a bit was when I left the ancient site of Corinth and tried to head for the modern town. I could see the town in the distance near the sea and thought if I picked a road heading towards it I’d be fine. I soon found myself on a gravel road skirting the highway, which I really need to cross somehow and then suddenly the road turned off to the left, away from modern Corinth and back into farmland at the foot of Acrocorinth. Out of the corner of my eye up ahead I thought I saw something that looked like a scarecrow but then I recognised it as a strung up teddy bear. There were actually a few of them but I only had the nerve to stop and take a photo of one. When you find yourself in a place where they’ve been lynching teddy bears you know you’ve got to get out and I did – fast!
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 2nd 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 19th 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 1st 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 2nd 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 18th 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 2nd 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 2nd 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 5th 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 3rd 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 5th 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.
A few months ago when George Clooney was in the news for saying that he thought the so-called Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece it looked rather as though he had been unwittingly drawn into a quarrel he knew little about. He had simply given a frank and spontaneous answer to a question by a Greek reporter during an interview to promote his new film The Monuments Men, a film about soldiers working to return stolen Nazi art to its rightful owners at the end of the Second World War. Now that the new Mrs Clooney, human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, has begun advising the Greek government on their campaign the whole business is starting to look rather more orchestrated. It turns out that the firm Alamuddin works for had taken up the case three years ago in 2011. Was George really as surprised by the question about the marbles as he seemed to be?
Whatever the truth of the matter thanks to the Clooneys the Parthenon Marbles are back in the limelight and receiving considerable media attention. The debate surrounding the best place for the marbles has been going on ever since Lord Elgin removed them from the Parthenon, brought them back to Britain and sold them to the British museum in the early 19th Century. Recent opinion pieces in the British national press arguing both for and against the return of the sculptures to Greece retread familiar ground: the legality or otherwise of Elgin’s actions, the condition the building was in when he took the marbles, whether they would have been looked after by the Greeks, whether they have been looked after by the British Museum, whether the claims of a nation state to ancient cultural treasures made within what is now its territory should outweigh those of a supposedly universal museum, whether the sculptures would look better seen in the light of Greece.
One thing that both sides of the debate agree on, however, is the outstanding artistic beauty of the sculptures themselves. Reading some of the praise heaped upon the Parthenon sculptures I can’t help wondering whether the author is really giving their own opinion or simply repeating what everyone always says about them. The problem is that the Parthenon sculptures – like the Mona Lisa or Hamlet –are now so entrenched in their position at the pinnacle of the canon of western art that it is near impossible to approach them with an open mind. The sculptures are undoubtedly masterpieces but I am not so sure that they are really in a completely different league to all the other surviving pieces of sculpture from the ancient world, as is often suggested.
I believe we need to recognize the extent to which our attitude toward these sculptures has been shaped by their recent history and, most importantly, by the debate about where they belong, which encourages both sides to talk in superlatives. To challenge our preconceptions about the Parthenon marbles it is worth thinking about how they have been viewed and thought about in other periods in history. In this and my next blog piece I’d like to discuss what we know about how the Parthenon was thought of at the time of the Roman Empire.
The fullest ancient description we have of the Parthenon actually comes from a Roman period author called Pausanias. A Greek from Asia Minor, he made a sort of cultural pilgrimage to Greece in the mid 2nd Century and spent a couple of decades travelling around visiting the cities and sanctuaries and writing a description of the places he saw. His main interests were in buildings and monuments that were either already very old or were of great religious significance. As such, it is not surprising that he discusses the Parthenon, a temple that was by then already six hundred years old. What is possibly surprising to modern readers is what he decides to focus on. This is what he says:
“As you enter the temple that they name the Parthenon, all the sculptures you see on what is called the pediment refer to the birth of Athena, those on the rear pediment represent the contest for the land between Athena and Poseidon. The statue itself is made of ivory and gold. On the middle of her helmet is placed a likeness of the Sphinx—the tale of the Sphinx I will give when I come to my description of Boeotia—and on either side of the helmet are griffins in relief. These griffins, Aristeas of Proconnesus says in his poem, fight for the gold with the Arimaspi beyond the Issedones. The gold which the griffins guard, he says, comes out of the earth; the Arimaspi are men all born with one eye; griffins are beasts like lions, but with the beak and wings of an eagle. I will say no more about the griffins. The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Victory about four cubits (around 1.8 m –CD) high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonius. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora in relief. Hesiod and others have sung how this Pandora was the first woman; before Pandora was born there was as yet no womankind. The only portrait statue I remember seeing here is one of the emperor Hadrian, and at the entrance one of Iphicrates, who accomplished many remarkable achievements.” Pausanias (1.24.5-7)
It is clear that for Pausanias the Parthenon was mainly remarkable because it contained the colossal, twelve meters tall, chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Athena Parthenos (the virgin), from which it took its name. The statue had been made in the 5th Century BC when the Parthenon was built, by Pheidias, the same artist who made the statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. We know from other ancient sources that such statues could cost many times the amount it would have cost to build the temples in which they stood. Estimates have been made that more than 1000kg of gold would have been needed to have made the statue that stood in the Parthenon and that it would have cost twice as much to make as it did to build the Parthenon itself. The statue has long since disappeared. A slightly gaudy reconstruction, based on the description and on ancient small-scale replicas that do survive, can be seen in the reconstruction of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. It gives an impression of the imposing scale of the statue if possibly not the religious awe that it must have inspired.
The Nashville Athena Parthenos
Pausanias does mention the sculptures that decorated the building’s two pediments, or gables, but he is more interested in the stories they portray than in their quality as works of art. A lot of the pedimental sculpture was destroyed or lost long before Elgin ever arrived in Greece but most of the pieces that have survived are to be found among the other “Elgin Marbles” in the British museum. Pausanias’ description is important because it is actually our best guide to working out who the sculpted figures of various gods, most of them now headless, actually are. Pausanias strikingly says nothing of the metopes, the panels that decorated the outside of the temple, and depicted scenes of mythical battles, some of which are also in London. His most glaring omission for anyone familiar with the building or its sculptures, however, must be that he says nothing whatsoever about the famous ionic frieze that ran around the top of the cella, or main building. The frieze has often been claimed to be the high point of ancient, or even western art, and yet Pausanias remarkably appears not even to have noticed it. In fact no ancient author describes the frieze, which is one of the reasons that archaeologists and art historians have had such a hard time agreeing on what it depicts. It clearly shows a procession but which one? The procession of the four yearly Athenian festival, the Great Panathenaea? A particular Panathenaic procession? A mythical procession? A celebration of the Athenians killed at the Battle of Marathon? These and other suggestions have all been made.
Part of the Parthenon Frieze – in the British Museum
Seen in the British Museum at eye-level or reproduced in a book it is easy to forget that the frieze when mounted on the building was in fact rather difficult to see. It was high up on the outside of the cella wall so that viewing it from beginning to end would have meant either continual interruption by columns if standing outside the building or quite some neck craning if standing within the colonnade. The frieze would also have been permanently in shadow. It is hard to imagine that Pausanias or any ancient visitor could have gazed on it with quite the same leisurely awe as modern tourists. Its inaccessible position does not, of course, diminish its artistic quality. If anything it is all the more remarkable that the sculptors went to such great lengths to achieve such artistry for a frieze that could not easily be seen. The reason they did so must have been because the Parthenon was built to honour the city’s most important goddess. This also explains Pausanias’ response to the building. He saw it not as a magnificent architectural or artistic achievement but rather as a place of veneration.
Religion had not stood still in the half millennium since the Parthenon had been built and Rome had been responsible for important changes. Perhaps the biggest of these was the introduction of the Imperial Cult, the worship of the Emperor. The presence of Hadrian’s statue inside the Parthenon suggests that that particular emperor – famous for his love of Greek culture and a great benefactor to the city of Athens – might have been worshipped there. It was not uncommon in the Greek speaking half of the Empire for emperors to have their cult alongside that of one of the Olympian gods in the same temple. However, as Pausanias’ lavish description of Pheidias’ statue suggests, Athena was still the most important goddess in Roman Athens. She was the reason that the Parthenon remained a deeply sacred building.
Pausanias’ focus on the statue and his lack of interest in the metopes and frieze does not necessarily mean that he didn’t recognize them as great works of art. Historians are actually rather fond of drawing conclusions based on what Pausanias doesn’t tell us and I don’t want to go too far down that road. Pausanias also fails to mention the Caryatids, the six sculpted women who serve as architectural supports for the porch of the nearby Erechtheion, one of which was also brought back to Britain by Lord Elgin and it is very hard to imagine how these statues could not have caught his eye. He might have been impressed by the Parthenon sculptures but simply have chosen not to write about them for some reason. We also cannot assume that all Roman period viewers would have looked at the Parthenon in the same way as Pausanias. Even if he wasn’t too taken with them it is possible that they might have made a much bigger impression on other visitors. At the very least, however, Pausanias’ description of the Parthenon challenges our modern ideas about what was important about this building and suggest that in ancient times, and more particularly in the Roman period, priorities might have been rather different than our own. Pausanias’ description does not provide our only insight into the way in which the Parthenon sculptures were thought of in Roman Athens.
Next time I will consider some intriguing architectural sculptures from other buildings in Athens which were set up very close in time to Pausanias’ visit to Athens and which deliberately copy pieces from the Parthenon.
Monuments of Roman Greece 