Homer and the Epics

please join me in welcoming Phoebe Segal [Applause] good morning it's good to be with you all the esteemed Athenian playwright Aeschylus is credited with saying tragedy is comprised of slices of the great banquet of Homer the roamer Roman writer quintillion remarked he is like his own conception of ocean which he describes as the source of every stream and River for he has given us a model and an inspiration for every area of eloquence and of the reverence the Greek poets had for him the Roman author alien wrote ptolemaeus Philopator having built a temple to homer erected a fair image of him and placed about the image those cities which contended for descent from homer gallatin the painter drew Homer vomiting and the rest of the poet's gathering it up such was the esteem in which the ancients held Homer his two creations the Iliad and the Odyssey had reached iconic status in Greece by the sixth century BC and retained it throughout antiquity and the Byzantine period in the West knowledge of ancient Greek was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire and we discovered only in the early 15th century but it wouldn't be long before homers epics would become essential reading for learning Renaissance humanists and would inspire poets and artists for centuries to come and I show you on the right oops excuse me the famous Rembrandt and the Metropolitan Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer writers and artists are still gobbling up the leftovers hope of Homer and doing it brilliantly most recently Cambridge Massachusetts based writer Madeline Miller's New York Times best-selling novel song of Achilles which tells the story of the closer a ship between Achilles and his best friend Patroclus through Patroclus eyes Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's breath Peterson's breathtaking one-man show and Iliad performed in Boston about two years ago and soon to be staged in Boston by arts Emerson the old man and the old moon a captivating and thrilling new adventure and storytelling that owes much to homer and his tradition this morning's lecture will consist consists of two parts I will spend the first part introducing you to what we know about Homer the world he lived in and in which he composed his two epics and to his method but for the bulk of the lecture I will concentrate on the ancient visual artists he inspired and the works they created and also on some high points in visual storytelling in Greek art from about 700 250 BC we know virtually nothing concrete about Homer's life the majority view holds that he lived at the end of the eighth century BC and his origins are attributed to Eastern Greece usually to the island of Chios off the western coast of Asia Minor or sometimes to the city of Smyrna on the Turkish mainland the Greeks had settled in these parts in the tenth or ninth century BC and the cities that grew up there Smyrna Meletis Ephesus to name a few situated as you see on this map at the gateway to Anatolia and the Near East were among the wealthiest and most cultivated Greek cities and homers day to understand Homer better it is important to sketch a brief brief background against which he lived and composed the Iliad and the Odyssey the structure of Mycenaean Greek society in which power was centralized in the hands of a few kings appears to have come undone in the 12th century literacy was lost completely in Greece and only rediscovered in Cyprus about 1000 BC and on the Greek mainland in the middle of the 8th century and that was just at the time the trade routes had opened up with the East and the Greeks came into contact in particular with the Phoenicians from whom they adopted their new alphabet evidence of an earlier period of grandeur lay in ruins all around the Greeks and in the aftermath of this bygone era of distinction the Greeks now poor but ambitious sought to regain their former glory and so it was in this milieu that the idea of a race of Heroes came to be a defining feature of the Greeks new mindset a cultural memory both based in reality and created by fabrication the creators of this story were of course the bards prominent elders in the community whose saying of the days when heroes ruled Greece and Homer was one of them the best one their world was born of but distinct from the palatial era that had preceded it the world to which Homer's heroes belonged today it is possible to visit the fortified Citadel of Mycenae which you see in an aerial view on the slide on the Left home of Agamemnon with its massive polygonal walls recognizable lion gate you see here on the right and extraordinary gold treasures now kept in the National Museum in Athens you can see how easy it was for Greeks living in the eighth century to believe that powerful people had once lived there troy also a fortified city on a hill lay hundred miles to the northwest in an area of Asia Minor known as the TRO ad and I'll just go back a few slides to my map and show you where Troy's our gold here so Mycenae excavations initiated in the middle of the 19th century by the German businessman turned pioneering archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed a Bronze Age settlement with massive fortifications and a destruction phase dateable - 1180 BC just a few years before power was to become decentralized in the eastern Mediterranean the Hittites controlled the vast majority of Asia Minor in the Bronze Age and their texts refer to a people known as ahuyama who lived to the west who are said to have lived to the west of Asia Minor in a place that could be reached by ship almost certainly the Achaeans another name for the Mycenaeans the texts mention a series of struggles between that occurred between the two peoples giving some validity to the historicity of a Trojan War had homer visited the site of Troy in the 8th century he would have found a settlement that was still inhabited but considerably more austere than before for several hundred years after the rediscovery of Homer in the West it was assumed that he composed his poems with the aid of writing during the 18th century people began to suspect that Homer had in fact been illiterate or at any rate had not written them down himself but it wasn't until the 20th century that a satisfactory alternative was proposed and this came from an American scholar named Millman Perry who was living in Paris at the time where he met scholars who had studied illiterate bards from Yugoslavia who were capable of composing elaborate epics as they performed them Perry drew attention to the manner in which epithets were employed to fit the meter of the poem dactylic hexameter and epithets are just an epithet is defined basically as an adjective or a descriptive phase that expresses the defining characteristic of an individual or a thing and so examples from Homer I list here on in this slide some that may be familiar to you gray eyed Athena's with Achilles rosy-fingered dawn and so on through careful study Perry detected an economical system of epithets and Homer more sophisticated than anyone had realized and reasoned that this system found the foundation formed the foundational building blocks on which the poet could depend in order to compose his poems by improvisation with his Perry's insight it was now possible to imagine that Homer actually composed them as I said as he was performing them rather than recited and memorized text which is what people had thought prior nowadays it is generally agreed that Homer was heir to a long tradition of oral poetry in a few months time time March 8th to be precise mark your calendars you could have the privilege to hear eminent Harvard professor Gregory Nagy the world expert on this topic lecture about this in this very auditorium after all the arguing and the date of Homer has been contentious among scholars for generations the most likely date for the composition of the Iliad is about 725 to 675 BC which in the gallery text we averaged out at 700 you have to do the question of when the poems were written down is again a matter of some debate some believe that it's possible that having composed the poem orally and brought it to near perfection Homer dictated it to ascribe trained in the new art of writing but no writing is dateable in Greece before the middle of the 8th century and it is difficult to believe that it had been developed to the level of sophistication required to transcribe 224 book epics the earliest example of alpha alphabetic I should say one of the earliest examples of alphabetic writing in Greece of any date of any length dates to the middle of the eighth century and survives on a drinking ball found in the new Greek colony of Pittacus I the island of Ischia in the gulf of naples the inscription which says Nestor's cup good to drink from whoever drinks this cup empty straightaway desire of the beautiful crown Aphrodite will seize is written in hexameter verse it is sophisticated in that it makes allusion to characters known from the Trojan War but it is just three lines scratched on a piece of pottery papyrus was not widely available in Greece until trade routes opened up with Egypt in the 6th century and thus it is unlikely that there was anything convenient to write a lengthy poem on before that time the most likely alternative to the theory that homer dictated his poems to ascribe is instead that they after having brought them to near perfection orally subsequent generations of bards memorized them before dictating them to scribes perhaps in the 7th century but probably by the sixth century BC so it seems that there was probably a fixed text that would forever be associated by home with Homer by the 6th and certainly by the 5th century Homeric epics were performed as part of the rituals of the greater Panathenaic an Athenian festival held every four years in honor of the patron goddess of the city and there is evidence to suggest that the descendants of homer from heõs helped or I should say people who a family from heõs that claim to be descended from homer helped to codify the text towards the end of the 6th century the epics would have as I said been written on papyrus scrolls and it has been suggested that the division of each epic into 24 books pertains to the original number of Scrolls required to write the entire poems down by the time of Aristotle in the 4th century the epics were foundational texts used in the education of Greek youths it is wise to remember that at the heart of the debate about when Homer lived how he composed the Iliad in the Odyssey and when they were written down is the issue of how much of the homer we know and admire was authored by Homer himself and how much may have been altered or added by other poets and scribes and it seems that there is a tendency at any rate to want to believe that we are reading the poems exactly as they came from Homer's mind and there's much evidence to suggest that at least by a certain point the ancients felt the same way the earliest portraits of Homer date to the 5th century BC and are among the first examples of portraiture in Greek art it is important to remind ourselves that a portrait is a representation of a specific individual who is usually living not always but the portraits of Homer were posthumous that is to say they were created hundreds of years after his death and without having to conform to any known physiognomic realities Greek artists had a blank slate against her to construct their ideal image of their most respected poet the MFA's portrait of Homer which is widely regarded as one of perhaps the best in the world is based on a blind type that became canonical in the Hellenistic period and was much admired and copied in Roman times most ancient authors agreed that Homer was blind even if they disagree about the cause some attributed it to illness others regarded as a consequence of seeing Achilles his gleaming armor which Homer sang of in book 18 of the Iliad or Helens Angoor is the result of Helens anger at his unfair portrayal of her in this masterful portrait he appears aged and venerable with deeply set and heavily lidded eyes densely curled hair and beard and wrinkled brow and forehead to underscore his wisdom and connection to the heroic past his banned which you see here there's this one little lock out of place folks those awarded as prizes in poetic contests an allusion to Homer's place as the Greek poet par excellence inserted into a life-size probably seated statue this bust must have been displayed as part of a gallery of famous poets playwrights and philosophers in a Roman library or garden alongside this tradition in portraiture emerged a less common but compelling tradition of representing Homer in the presence of his two creations personified posing a familial relationship akin to a father with his daughters a relief signed by arc allows of pry Eenie which was made in the late 3rd century BC in Ptolemaic Egypt and found in Italy depicts the deified bard being crowned by two figures identified by inscriptions as time in the inhabited world sorry those are these but which are actually just thinly veiled portraits of Ptolemy Philopator the fourth and his sister-wife are sent away the second who as we heard from alien earlier had erected a temple and honor of the poet and Alexandria Homer sits in a throne flanked by personifications of kneeling personifications of the Iliad and the Odyssey on either side of the altar in front here are numerous personifications of literary genres those were the genres that according to Aeschylus he he gave birth to myth history poetry tragedy a comedy and moral virtues excellence mindfulness trustworthiness and wisdom Zeus presides over the entire scene seated at the apex unmount Helicon the home of the nine muses and depicted here with their mother Mnemosyne ii and with apollo the relief which was likely awarded as a prize for a victorious poet seems to suggest allegorically that inspiration flows from zeus and through new Missoni and the muses her daughter's to homer the most inspired poet who ever lived two armed female statues dating to the reign of the second century AD Roman Emperor Hadrian represent also represent personifications of the Iliad and the Odyssey the statues were discovered in 1869 in the Athenian Agora near the stoah of a Dallas which is here and the reconstructed snow of a Dallas is where the Agora collections are now housed the statues were identified as such on the basis of the presence of skill ax Ellis and Polyphemus in the imagery that really in the relief imagery that decorates the kurios and the upper-left hats which you can't see of the kiosk of the Odyssey statue in 1953 and inscribed statue base with the words the Iliad I that was after Homer and before Homer have been set up alongside him who bore me in his youth was found in a nearby Byzantine wall its discovery which preserved a small section of the let the leg here confirmed what had been suspected for many years that originally a portrait of Homer accompanied the statues the statue group is believed to have originally stood in the library of pentane oz built around ad 100 but the Association has never been confirmed archaeologically so far as we know the Iliad and the Odyssey were the only ancient poems to have been animated in this way despite the fact that they were just to among several epics that together were known as the Trojan cycle because they told the story of the Trojan War from beginning to end those other epics the kibriya the Ethiopia's little Iliad Ilya Paris's and the nos toy whose subjects are listed on your handout are lost in their original form and known only through the writings of later Greek and Latin authors in particular through the summaries of a second century grammarian named pro class and it's probably the case that Pro Plus was just copying earlier summaries in fact for most of them the very best sources we have are the works of art created by ancient artists visual artists and that is the main topic of today's lecture since the lecture is meant to complement rather than to repeat what we've done in the new homra gallery on the second floor and there we have arranged objects not by date of manufacture but instead according to the narrative of the epics I thought it would be wise to chart a slightly different course this morning and to talk about the development of narrative and Greek art over the centuries with images of the Trojan War and it's aftermath as the focus in order to do that I need to say a few words about the relationship between text and image and Greek art or at least some ideas about that relationship which constitute an entire subfield in of study among ancient art historians the 19th century German scholar Karl Robert was the first to provide a rigorous and comparative study of myth and art in ancient Greece Bildad lead image and song in German in which he expressed a radical alternative to the then prevailing view that Greek artists visually transcribed that which the illustrative bard had sung Robert argued that in each myth has an unchanging core original core and proposed instead both that the verbal and visual traditions developed on parallel trajectories responding to that core and that the tradition so that as in language and individual arts influenced one another at various points so that is to say that each time a particular myth is rendered in art and poetry the act of creation helps to define for or worse the future of the entire tradition without going into any more detail I mentioned Robert because it is important to fight what I think is our perhaps natural tendency to treat ancient visual artists as passive illustrators and instead to encourage ourselves to recognize them as active interpreters of ancient myth and yet it is important to remind ourselves at the basics of the Trojan War story before going any further and parenthetically I'll just say that in the gallery we developed and some of you may have already been there we developed a touchscreen that utilizes our visas to tell this story in broad strokes so the story the war began with the quarrel among three goddesses Athena Hera and Aphrodite about which of them was the most beautiful and Zeus selected an impartial judge to arbitrate the dispute a Trojan Prince named Paris who was tending his flock on Mount Ida outside Troy each goddess offered him a bribe and he chose Aphrodite's Helen the most beautiful woman in Greece but Helen was already married to Menelaus the king of Sparta and when Paris took her off to Troy and will see this phase again later all the Greeks rallied to his saw a to Menelaus aside and went in pursuit of her the war raged on for ten years with the Greeks and camped outside Troy the gods took sides and battles of many many battles ensued these battles are vividly described by Homer it's the majority of the Iliad as the battles the duels and all the guts and the gore mhm the Iliad in which homer tells of the wrath of Achilles the Greeks best fighter takes place in the final year of the war and begins with an argument between Achilles and his general Agamemnon about the fact that Agamemnon has stolen his war booty the lovely his companion Perseus and Achilles proceeds to refuse to fight he storms off refuses to fight and proceeds to spend three quarters of the epic so looking in his tent the tide turns when his best friend Patroclus is slain in battle by Achilles his foe Hector son of King Priam of Troy and only then does Achilles rejoin the battle killing Hector and a decisive duel the Iliad concludes with the return of Hector's corpse to his parents for a proper burial but the war was far from over and raged on for some time before the Greeks came up with the crafty plan to smuggle themselves into Troy in a wooden horse once inside they pillaged raped and murdered their way through Troy burning it down before sailing for Greece it is a gruesome story all too familiar from today's headlines it is why they agreed that the earliest depictions of scenes from the Trojan War date to the end of the eighth century and these images just happen to be simultaneously the earliest representations of any known meth and Greek art you may be already asking yourselves how can we tell the difference between images that on the one hand represents something merely happening for example mourners lamenting the death of a loved one a warrior fighting a lion or men being tossed about in a shipwreck which are common themes in late geometric days painting and images that on the other hand depict a specific narrative drawn for myth this question has plagued historians of Greek art for generations and the best criterion proposed by Luca Giuliani who's one of the best scholars in this field seems to be that in Greek epic narratives our premise unnameable protagonists so that is to say that you have to be able to look at the image and say this is so-and-so brandishing his sword at so-and-so or this is so-and-so clinging to a raft and so on and sometimes there is more than one option and interpretations do abound but in general this rule of thumb applies with this in mind I show you the first representation of a scene from the Trojan War it is found been sized into a bronze clothespin which you see in reconstruction here on the top just a fragment data to 700 BC a luxury item found in the ancient Greek city of Thebes were it undoubtedly belonged to an a an elite a central rosette design is flanked by humans and animals and you can see some of these water birds here a favorite motif in pins of this kind and also you may see in the lower right hand corner a horse but this horse isn't just any horse upon close inspection we noticed that instead of hooves it has circular feet let's see so these are not feet but wheels right and also you'll notice that it's hard to see here but on the reconstructive drawing that on its belly there are four squares incised it is most certainly the Trojan horse known to us from the Odyssey and the Aeneid although the story of how the Greeks smuggled themselves back into Troy in the wooden horse after appearing to have sailed back to Greece was told in two Lost epics the little Iliad in the Ilya Persis we learn of the trick first in Odyssey book 8 when the bard Demodocus tells the story in the court of King Al canoas of Ephesians where Odysseus has washed up homer tells us stirred now by the muse the bard launched out in a final in a fine blaze of song starting at just the point where the main a key enforce setting their camps of fire had boarded the or swept ships and sailed for home but famed Odysseus's men already crouched in hiding in the heart of Troy's assembly dark in that horse the Trojans dragged themselves to the new to the city heights now it stood there looming and round its bulk the church and sat debating clashing days on end three plans but their ranks either to hack a in the hollow vault with ruthless bronze or haul it up to the highest Ridge and pitch it down the cliffs or let it stand a glorious offering me to pacify the gods and that that final plan was bound to win the day for Troy was fated to perish once the city lodged her inside her walls the monstrous wooden horse were the prime of our gyv power lay in wait with the death and slaughter bearing down on Troy we should not be surprised then that such a defining moment in the outcome of the Trojan War should have been the earliest depiction of the war in ancient art and yet it is worth noticing that far from presenting a narrative that unfolds before our eyes or even a specific moment within that larger story the Trojan horse here somewhat disembodied seems to symbolically refer to the entire event a storage jar used in a funerary context as a receptacle for human remains features another early representation of the Trojan horse it was made on the Greek island of Mykonos about 670 BC and is known as a relief amphora because the decoration is molded in relief once again we see a horse on wheels and that's you see here on the in a detail here which is also our name it was just from the neck we see a horse on wheels but this time Warriors are contained in the square boxes and warriors surround the device so you see just the heads here at the very top a warrior holds his helmet out in front of him and it looks as if he's throwing out below him other sections of the amphora depict other episodes from the siege of Troy a man takes a woman by the arm as he smashes a child into the ground recalling the brutal death of the young trojan a sty an axe at the hands of Achilles his son we have Thomas over the course of the seventh century Greek artists in particular vase painters would come to represent increasingly more specific moments from epic these scenes can be described as mono scenic they depict one moment and they more or less preserve unity of time and space one example is a group of visas from the seventh century that depict the blinding of Polyphemus the Cyclops who terrorized Odysseus and his men in Odyssey book nine Odysseus and his men had become trapped inside the monsters cave and after he began to eat them one by one the hero praised by Homer for his mate s his skill contrived a plan to ply Polyphemus with wine and disable him these two vases painted around 650 BC feature three men driving a large stake into the eye of a reclining bearded monster recalling the passage from Homer hoisting high that olives stake with its stabbing point straight into the monsters eye they rammed it hard I drove my weight on it from above and boarded home as a shipwright Bors his beam with a shipwrights drill that men below whipping the strap back and forth whirl and the drill keeps twisting faster never stopping so we seized our stake with its fiery tip and board it round and round and the Giants I until blood came boiling up around that smoking shaft and the hot blast singed his brow and eyelids round the core and the broiling eyeball burst it's really crucem notice that while the painter of the vase on the left has included a spatial whoops sorry spatial dimension including a pile of rocks so he's included some kind of landscape on the right the base painter has added something of a temporal dimension through the inclusion of a wine cup in Polyphemus hand and we'll come back to this later this is a reference to the wine he has just consumed at Odysseus as proffering the wine that he has consumed far too much of as his caused him to let down his defenses about a century later a vase painter working in Athens would take this narrative elaborate on it visually and pair it on a drinking cup with another episode from Odysseus as wanderings that had only recently been explored in Greek art for the first time his encounter with the witch seriously and actually that first example of a depiction of the encounter with Serie C in base painting is in our gallery on the second floor it's it's just below the display this one despite the fact that there is a big loss in the cup just in the middle of the action we can discern what is happening Polyphemus is crouching as you see him kneeling here with one knee down and a figure stands over him this missing figure so you just have the legs here has to be Odysseus and if you look closely you will see that he is holding a wine picture behind Odysseus is Athena and a male companion and behind Polyphemus are three companions of Odysseus's one of which is holding a large wine skin undoubtedly the one he brought along the beach he mentions in book nine to offer Polyphemus as a gift before he learned that the monster did not observe common rules of guests friendship he learns that lesson pretty quickly when he encounters him interestingly this representation has strayed some much somewhat from the strictly Homeric influence we saw in the mid 7th century phases Odysseus's men to the left of Polyphemus are brandishing swords so not altogether one spear and he alone attacks Polyphemus and although the invented name for the painter of this day is invented by scholars or by Beesley the mean scholar a big Greek vase painting of the 20th century the painter of the boss of Polyphemus that's the name of the painter derives from this side of the cup it is the scene with searcy on the other side that has received more attention from scholars as Odysseus tells the story after arriving on the island of Searcy he divided his into two groups and assigned his companion you really kiss as the other leader or as the leader of the other group you really kissed drew the first lot and led his group to the palace of the bewitching NIM when she invited them in all were enticed except for Uralic as' sceptical gorilla 'kiss who realized that this offer was just too good to be true she offered the men a potion cheese barley and pale honey mauled and preemie and wine and stirred in wicked drugs to wipe from their memories any thought of home upon consuming the mixture the men began to transform into pigs and with her maggot magic wand she drove them into their pigsty x' Uralic asst having stayed behind and spying from outside ran back to Odysseus to tell him what had happened or what was happening Odysseus immediately sprung into action picking up his sword and clambering his way to Circe's palace and he's intercepted by Hermes fortunately along the way who told him that he really did not stand a chance against this woman and gave him an antidote to Circe's potion with precise instructions on how to bed her and force her to swear an oath that she would never harm him and his men ever again here we see the vase painter present this episode in an innovative narrative technique scholars call synoptic because it condenses sequential elements of the story into a single view so there are five elements here the first is that CRC is ladling the the wine into the laced mixture into the cup the men are in the process of transforming so they still have the bodies of men but they have the heads of animals gorillas kiss on the right is leaving the scene to go get Odysseus and Odysseus is arriving holding his sword about to confront Serie C and then the last is that seer see it's hard to see it but she is depicted as nude here and it's believed that that is a reference to what is about to happen so sort of the fifth element of the story which is their sexual encounter in addition to the cup acting as a vehicle for storytelling it also speaks directly to its user notice that the cup into which Searcy ladles her potion mimics the cup the shape of the cup itself and the duplication of this cup shape is clearly meant to remind the user about the dangers of drinking wine excessively or improperly in this case another example of a vase in which the synoptic technique is employed to brilliant effect is the MFA's prized black figure hydrea depicting achilles defiling Hector's corpse as he drags him around the city of Troy here the final gruesome moments of the duel collapse into a single searing image Achilles the victor has lashed Hector's corpse by the ankles to his chariot at left Hector's parents look on in horror okay so this is Achilles he was getting on the chariot his charioteer is here Hector's parents are standing in their Palace his mother is mourning they're both lamenting him vengeful Achilles shoots a glance you see he's looking back at them and he on the right we see the spirit of Patroclus okay this is Porto Alyssa's tomb beehive tomb is emerging and iris who in the Iliad we learn will carry a message to to pry em from Zeus to ransom his son's body is rushing into the scene from the right and so all of these elements of the of the narrative are happening at once on the vase but which in fact unfold in the text to backtrack a few years the subject of the games held in honor of Patroclus and to which achilles as chariot makes a subtle illusion in the in the hid ria that we just saw was represented on a dinos a mixing bowl or a bowl for mixing wine and water around 580 BC though fragmentary it is one of the most important representations of an Illiad scene because it bears an inscription not only naming the figures and you'll see here Achilles is named here this is the large grandstand on which spectators watching the funeral games through a toklas or seated but he also names the episode Patroclus alla the games for Patroclus this self-conscious reference to the text may have been intended to refer specifically to homers version of the games held in honor of Patroclus as opposed to another version of the myth as I mentioned earlier Homer stood towards the end of the of a long tradition and oral poetry yet this inscription supports the view that by the early 6th century his version of the story was regarded as fixed and canonical by all accounts the most celebrated painter of the black figure technique that dominated Greek vase painting until the end of the 6th century is exact ia's known for his spare and sober compositions he focuses here on a calm moment anticipating a tragic event the suicide of the great hero ajax ii in fighting only to achilles ajax went mad after the greek generals denied him the honour of inheriting achilles as armor after achilles as death and instead they gave them to odysseus the hero slaughtered their livestock mistaking the animals for the generals and then turned his sword on himself and this subject was popular in the art of the Peloponnesus and also in a Turia in Italy and the gallery upstairs features a number of representations of of it but here and all those representations have Ajax pitching himself on his sword but here notice how Ajax readies the sword of placing it upright on his found the remainder of his armor placed to the side this is a different approach to narrative one that de-emphasizes action and focuses our attention on premeditation and purpose an episode not attested in any surviving literary source but in but existing in over a hundred and fifty representations in vase painting most famously by exact iasts in a vase housed in the Vatican is Achilles and Ajax playing peso a form of backgammon this is one of those cases where we could be merely ignorant of a an original poetic source or we may be witnessing a visual artist creating a new story by choosing to present an unexplored moment the two most fearsome Greek warriors at ease during a lull in fighting this jar eighths the scene twice one once each in black and red figure techniques vases like this one called bilingual because they employ the to introduce red figure painting alongside the already established black figure technique around 525 BC with its fluid expressive lines red figure would soon supplant black figure as the dominant base painting technique in Athens another example of this scene in the MFA's collection is found on this black figure oil flask here the goddess Athena is present but the heroes don't really pay much attention to her they're very focused on their game and vertical inscriptions alongside the figures tell us have here tetra and duo that Achilles has four and Ajax has two so Achilles is beating him another myth in which we can chart different attitudes towards the representation of narrative is the judgment of Paris the earliest depiction is preserved only in fragments and is on 7th century on a seventh century Corinthian jug known as the kitv's for the italian prince on whose estate it was discovered in 1881 the goddess's line up to be judged by paris and i don't show that here because it's a very fragmentary and difficult to see the goddess's line up to be judged by Paris in that phase labeled Alexandros his alternate name and here in this in earlier depictions on the kg vase the three goddesses are in undifferentiated and they were only understood through their inscriptions placing emphasis on the fact that it was not their beauty but their bribes that influenced Paris's decision by the end of the sixth century which we see here in this black figure water drug sorry wine jug jar we see the three vases on the left led by Hermes and identified by their characteristic attributes so Athena is the most recognizable in her armor Hera the most esteemed is leading the pack she has her scepter and Aphrodite is at this point the least differentiated here the painter has chosen to represent the moment just before the judgment as Hermes leads them up to Mount Ida Paris's decision is implied on the other side of the vase in a scene interpreted as mentally whoops as Menelaus retrieving Helen at the end of the war and leaning her back to Sparta a supremely talented vase painter named macron would take this pairing of before and after the war scenes two new pictorial heights about a decade into the 5th century I literally pinch myself every time I go by this that I would get to work right near the space Paris Prince of Troy grasps the hand of the wrist of Helen here in a gesture of both marriage and abduction with exceptionally fluid lines the painter draws our eyes to the very act set the Trojan War in motion at first Helen was reluctant to leave her home and family until Aphrodite seen in this video fixes Helens desire with the aid of arrows on Paris and so she's arranging her veil eros is fluttering between them pytho at the Aphrodite's daughter the the personification of persuasion they're all urging her to go at the end of the war in the chaos of the sack of Troy the vengeful Greek King Menelaus discovered his estranged wife here you see him entering the scene from the right he looks really really mad and it is only his his his elbows are up and his knees and he's really the tech stylist he's ready to kill her and it's Aphrodite again very important in this phase who fixes Helens gaze and you'll notice that Menelaus looks down and he he is disarmed in the text me her by her bare breasts but he remark on actually suggests that he's looking straight at her genitals this type of cut I should mention it was far too large to have been used as a as an ordinary drinking cup it's about so big and more likely it was actually you intended for display I can't resist showing another cup of the same type painted by one of macarons peers the British painter so named because he worked with a Potter who signed his name briga and they could have been one in the same this is a much bigger topic that I'll just skip over and this one depicts the white old white-haired King Priam begging Achilles to return his son Hector's corpse as Homer describes an Illiad book 24 the scene is full of rich detail an emotional tension as Prime brings these abundant treasures which you see he's eight by these attendants on the left to an Achilles who could not look less interested Hector's corpse defiled by Achilles as we saw before on the black figure hid Rhea lay beneath Achilles the sumptuous couch you see this beautifully decorated couch and he's laying here beneath a table or behind a table that is it Achilles is dining table which has strips of meat hanging from it so the visual artist is likening the Hector's body to being treated at least as a piece of meat and this is interesting because in the Iliad Achilles goes to create pains to avoid letting Prime see Hector's corpse and so the visual artist really is adding something new to the story here because so many events occurred on the final night of the siege of Troy the Ilia process which is just another name for the sack of Troy presented an interesting pictorial challenge to Greek artists one approach to the problem of representing multiple events taking place simultaneously that gained currency among vase painters in the early decades of the fifth century was to show these scenes in overlapping continuous freezes in the aftermath of the Persian invasion of Athens these images conflated events from the heroic past with historical events one of these earliest examples is found on the shoulder of a water jar in the Museo Nacional in Naples and I show it to you here in a drawing because it's very difficult to see this in the real thing in photographs and it's attributed to the clay of Friday's painter one of the great face painters at the end of the about the turn of the 5th century on the Left Aeneas please carrying his father and high-seas here casandra's clings to the to the cult statue of Athena begging Ajax in vain not to harm her and in the center prayin is seated on an altar holding the body of his dead acts on his on his lap and on the right a woman attempts to attack with a pestle also in vain it is a very bloody and gruesome scene a few years later at the biggest painter who we saw before would add to the chaos and urgency of this scene with even more dynamic and bloodied figures on a cup in the collection of the Louvre could see all these wounds here Boston is privileged to possess one of the most iconic depictions of the sack of Troy painted a decade or two after the two vases I've just shown and looking at it in comparison to them it's somewhat sanitized but still very poignant and with a lot of iconographic clarity cassandra kneeling at the cult statue of Athena and Priam in flowing robes seated on an altar reach out to one another across the vase and in crises looking forward sorry Aeneas looking forward and Anchises his father of the older generation looks back towards taking one last look at Troy the portrayal of the Greeks as brutal and the Trojans as victimized the opposite of what one of what one might expect invites the viewer to consider whether in the final moments of the war the Greeks went too far a suitable topic for discussion at the gatherings symposia which you'll hear more about from Christine for which wine both wine mixing bowls like this were often made trojan themes especially the fall of Troy were the subject of monumental painting and images in relief sculpture on major temples in 5th century Athens as the Athenians who are significantly not mentioned by Homer as having taken part in the war sought to expand their political and military might in the years following the Persian war so that is after 480 BC in that sense these monumental images can be seen as somewhat propagandistic most of these monuments we know of only three written sources principally the second century AD travel writer pals Aeneas he describes an arrangement of four paintings in a porch like building called the stowaway Keely the painted stoah in the Athenian Agora and lists their subjects to John sorry I just want to point out where the snow apoikia is over here so we saw the snow of AD Elizabeth for he describes an arrangement of four paintings two drawn from Athenian military history and two drawn from myth a battle between the Athenians and the Spartans the Battle of Marathon so those are the two historical events and the Athenians battling the Amazons and finally the Aliyah parsis painted by Pollock notice one of the most distinguished painters in 5th century Athens excavations in the Athenian Agora in revealed the foundations of the stove apoikia these were in the 20th century then pottery found there suggest sedate for its original construction a date not far off from the so the date of the construction was about 470 460 and that's not so different from the date of the the big crater with the Ilya Persis scenes which I just showed you and by the way which was me just a few blocks away from the stellar stoic pokey lay in the care of my curse of Athens which is roughly here so all these artists were working among among each other pals Aeneas tells us that the Ilya Persis was the subject of mural paintings in the less gay or clubhouse of the Canadiens in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi where the Greeks from cities all over came to honor the God compete in games and generally to show off in front of one another scholars have endeavor to reconstruct the arrangement of the scenes with one result shown here because the paintings are lost oh and sorry I just failed to point out that this is the club house that I was mentioning here scholars have endeavored to reconstruct the arrangement of the scenes with one result shown here because the paintings are lost reconstructions are unfortunately based almost solely on base paintings that are contemporary with the murals which are about 465 so the arguments become a little bit circular in terms of what everything looked like smaller scale paintings known as peanut case also by polygon autos and featuring Trojan subjects hung on the walls of the picture gallery located inside the Gateway to the Athenian Acropolis so this is the propylaia and here you see it in the photograph in the picture gallery was in here one of them again according to Paz Aeneas depicted Achilles departing the island of Skyros where his mother had sent him to hide among the daughters of King like with me days and thus avoid the trojan war that painting is likely to have inspired this red figure value crater painted about 450 attributed to the niobate painter in which we see achilles on the left saying farewell to his secret bride like a media's daughter a data may and on the on one side and their son me up Tala myths on the other side departing for Troy another Bey's data to the middle of the fifth century which seems to have been influenced by mural painting in its introduction of landscape elements is this to handle jar with Odysseus in the center ALPA nor and Hermes in Odyssey book 11 Homer sings of how Odysseus travelled to the underworld to seek advice on his journey and how he sacrificed two Rams as his entrance fee you see the Rams here there he met the shade of his companion Eleanor who perished when he fell off the roof of Searcy's palace according to homer a restless anguished eleanor begs odysseus for the appropriate funerary rites he says burn me in full armour all my harness keep my mound by the churning grey surf a man whose luck ran out so even men to come will learn of my story perform my rites and plant on my tomb that or I swung with mates when I rode among the living an Odysseus is said to respond all this my unlucky friend I will do for you I won't forget a thing this representation rare in Greek vase painting is remarkably similar similar to homers telling of the story but it expands on it in a number of significant ways first in its inclusion of Hermes depicted here with his travelers hat his wing at boots and his caduceus Hermes is not present in the Odyssey version but is appropriate here in his role as the escort of souls to the underworld second in its realization of the rocky marshy landscape of Hades which was once painted in white but is now no longer visible on the vessel to the naked eye but we have this wonderful drawing that was done in the earlier 20th century that shows us and and now we can elicit all this information through VI L but anyway this is just what I show here but you see this gorgeous marshy landscape so that open door is emerging from the water not just cut off at the knees as we see now and lastly in the plaintive expression on LP Norse faith you see here shown here in three-quarter view a rarity in Athenian Bay's painting things get really interesting in Greek art when stories begin to be told in three-dimensional sculpture in this development resulted at least in part from advances in bronze working techniques that made it possible in the fifth century to cast over life-sized statues and bronze far more elastic than marble the use of bronze enabled Greek sculptures sculptors to create more dynamic figures than before and so expand their narrative powers one prime example of this development is this marble head of Diomedes on the left which is an or gallery which originally belonged to a like statue the statue was made by his Broman sculptor between AD 100 and 150 and is based on a Greek bronze original dated to about 430 BC and tentatively attributed to the sculptor the famous sculptor chrysalis who you may be familiar with from his iconic portrait of Pericles which he may or may not have actually constructed Diomedes was the pugnacious son of the Greek King Tydeus of Argos and led the archive contingent to Troy the Iliad portrays him as one of the leading warriors even so bold as to harm a goddess Aphrodite as Homer tells us in book 5 notice here his swollen cauliflower ear so he has the ears of a true boxer Diomedes is greatest heroic accomplishment was his stealing along with Odysseus the Trojan cult statue of Athena called the Pilate on to satisfy a prophecy that Troy would not fall as long as it stood in its sanctuary the marble had once belonged to a life-size roman sculpture similar to the one illustrated on the right which is now in Munich and this statue you see that he's he's turning and looking over his left shoulder is believed to have originally represented him holding the Pilate on as he was leaving Troy so holding the Pilate on in his left hand and in his right hand holding up his sword which he has removed from its scabbard and preparing to defend himself against Odysseus who it is said in some later literary sources was about to kill Diomedes before they got back so that Diomedes wouldn't but before they got back to the Greek camp so the Diomedes wouldn't take credit alone for the for the their achievement and so that is what we believe is illustrated here people have even speculated that the dur if us the famous spear bearer attributed to what by Polly colitis was also dated in the mid which is also dated in the mid 50 was intended to represent Achilles holding his spear but many feel that if the differents Achilles even if it represents the Achilles to the extent that it shows an idealized male nude holding a spear and that in the Greek conception mindset Achilles was the idealized male nude holding and spear it lacks the narrative specificity to identify him by name which as we recall from earlier is one of the main criterion for for identifying images of myth this slight trend towards storytelling and 5th century ideal sculpture would become you could say an absolute craze in the Hellenistic period particularly among with sculptors who worked for the Pergamon Kings who were the successors to Alexander the Great in Asia Minor this style and sculpture often called the Hellenistic Baroque reached its zenith in the late 3rd and 2nd centuries BC and is known for its daringly theatrical and dramatic compositions one scholar notes that it is a style that quote gives priority to pathetic expression and restlessness of surface that's the great Jay Jay palette at Yale the multi figure compositions we were about to see and one of what you see already seemed to display an awareness of the viewer that in turn draws the viewer into the story and heightens his or her emotional response to it some of the very best examples of this style represent episodes and characters from the epic cycle and there seems to be in general a revival of interest in epic among pergamene artists the MFA's masterful portrait of homer after all is modeled on a type that was codified in Pergamon in the second century BC a much copy type and the Roman period is known as the pesky no group I show it here and depicts an older bearded warrior clutching a slumped corpse of a youthful warrior they are usually identified as Menelaus and Patroclus whom he carried off the battlefield as Homer tells us in book 17 note the pyramidal form of the group the dramatic turn of Menelaus is head and the patheticness of of Patroclus is hulking corpse with his heavy hanging head the MFA's beloved Polyphemus which is one of the highlights of the gallery upstairs probably once belonged to a large sculptural ensemble depicting the blinding of the Cyclops or it may have I'll get to that an episode we confronted earlier but the vertical position of the head as you see here so instead of him being reclining as we saw in the images on base painting he's strictly vertical and he has a somewhat contemplative rather than drunken look on his face and this is suggested to some that instead of being in the moment in the Odyssey that we heard that he that this Hellenistic conception of him is based on Hellenistic poetry particularly the idols of theocritus in which Polyphemus is gazing lovestruck at his at his at the scene of Galatea who is not who and this is an unrequited love the active treatment of the hair beard and face finds close parallels in the forget the sculptures working in Pergamon during the second century but it is still difficult to tell whether this is an original Hellenistic or Roman revival of that pergamene style and you'll notice that his one eye is perched between these two clenched eye sockets which is quite a different and much more humanized portrayal of him than what we see in the fifth century in these body terra cotta z' that were used in a sanctuary in near Thebes in which the eye is placed in the middle of the forehead the Polyphemus had probably once formed part of what was similar to a group found in an imperial dining grotto at spear longa on the coast of Latian south of Rome where fragments of a number of sculptural groups were discovered in 1957 the date of the villa and you see this the grotto here and has several chambers inside the date of the villa is probably Agustin and it features a natural cave into which a summer banqueting room was incorporated in antiquity the architects who created the space enhanced its natural features with built ones rounding off the natural pool into a neat circle paving the surrounding area and furnishing two sub grottoes with fountains it is a lovely spot literary sources indicated that the roman emperor Tiberius resided there and it was probably during his reign that the cave was lavishly adorned with sculptural groups enacting scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey and I showed just one here which is a reconstructed from all the pieces reconstruction of the blinding of Polyphemus who you see here in the center and but other other groups included the assault of the sea monsters gila on a distant ship the theft of the Trojan Pilate on and a version of the pesky no group with Menelaus intro class that we saw earlier the ship of the skilar group bears a 1st century AD inscription with the signatures of three sculptors from Rhodes Etha Norris haggis and rose the Polydorus known from the room and authored plenty the fragments of the Polyphemus group could be reconstructed using other versions of the subject and it was probably an eclectic creation drawing on earlier versions as I said constructed in Pergamon a sophisticated sculptural program for learn dinner conversation was appropriate to the setting Polyphemus lives in a cave and some of the DISA's adventures were said to take place in the region of southern Italy and also in Sicily the arrangement harmonizes so well with the environment of the grotto that it suggests it being created for the spot and suggest a first-century date the three Rodian sculptors mentioned in the inscribed base were also credited with Pliny Kutta did by plenty with creating a sculpture depicting the Trojan priest Leah Cohen and his sons being devoured by two giant serpents this story is familiar to us from Latin the Latin poet poet Virgil's telling in the Aeneid when the hero of that epic the trojan hero Aeneas who would go on to found the Roman race recounts the horrors of the Greek siege of Troy lay akka Juan had wisely counseled the Trojans against accepting the wooden horse as a gift for Athena trust me he said Virgil tells us either the Greeks are hiding shut inside those beans or the horse is a battle engine geared to breach our walls spy on our homes come down on our city overwhelm us or some other depiction deceptions lurking deep inside it Trojans never trust that horse whatever it is I fear the Greeks especially bearing gifts and this last line is probably the most famous line of all of Latin poetry Virgil describes an incredible detail have a pair of coiled serpents sent by Poseidon Neptune in in Latin seas lackawanna and his sons constricting them to their deaths as a punishment for desecrating the so called gift by trying to break it open they love the layout come on group was found in 1506 in an area of Rome that was once inhabited by Roman emperors and was received with much fanfare by early 16th century artists no less than Michelangelo is said to have been present when it was discovered with its vivid portrayal of liya Cohen's pain you can almost hear him screaming it would seem to epitomize the Hellenistic Baroque style yet it's date just as the data of the spare Luongo groups has been debated for decades and it is most likely that it was either a Roman copy or at least a variation on a Hellenistic model by way of conclusion I would like to discuss briefly a series of wall paintings discovered in 1848 in a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome the paintings date to about 50 to 40 BC and are known as The Odyssey landscape landscapes because they represent the adventures related by Odysseus in books 10 to 12 of the Odyssey the paintings are broken into sections by slender piers you can see these here so they go in a strip like that they are broken and they follow Homer's texts closely omitting scenes that may not have held much visual interest again an example of the artists filtering the palette is restricted to purplish pink and purple ish Brown blue dark reddish-brown violet and yellow and they constitute the first examples of mythological landscapes with tiny characters in vast in a vast setting of ocean trees and rocks in the sense of the overall landscape is preserved from one scene to the next while the main actors are repeated from scene to scene in a continuous narrative comprised of nine sections they depict the eland winds odysseus arrival at last ergo Nia and the peaceful environment he encountered there before they started to attack him his escape from master Gonia and his arrival in Searcy's palace sorry those are the in Searcy's palace is depicted down here the Roman architect Vitruvius mentions trojan battles or the wanderings of odysseus through landscape and the Esquiline landscapes are thought to have been a freely adapted copy again after a lost Hellenistic model whether that's the case or not these paintings enabled the viewers so the the and the guests of the of the house to enter the world of Odysseus more completely than any works of art we have seen well I have not attempted to be exhaustive this morning the very impossibility of giving a comprehensive lecture on this topic in ancient art is what excites me so much about it the sheer number and variety of artistic interpretations of the Trojan myths in such a wide range of media and by the way I have said nothing of coins jams in many other forms of ancient art is testament to the power of the story told by Homer and other epic poets and of course to the ingenuity of ancient artists who from the earliest beginnings of Greek art helped their audiences connect with stories of a bygone era in which heroes rolled Greece thank you [Applause] if anyone has any questions there's a mic on either side of the room yes uh-huh that um I always get that question there's a lot of there's a lot of speculation about what that reason represents an ancient art it comes to represent Sicily from the three the three points but it's its origins in Greek art or somewhat somewhat elusive to me I have to say they are human legs yeah in the vase with achilles dragging hector i recently by reading the text realized and i just want to confirm it that Achilles is shown twice when he's going to Hector I mean when he's going to prayin he's looking at them and irises behind him but is he also in another scene switching with the charioteer and in one in one event he is driving his chariot and in the other event it's a charity a charioteer doing it am I being clear I think what you're asking is whether Odysseus is no no I'm sorry Achilles rather sorry is whether Achilles is being is being duplicated in the image was out showing different scenes and in one scene he's standing in the other scene he well is driving the chariot but then in the reverse scene the charioteer well you said different events are known in one view okay so just to clarify in that image well first of all that pays only has one side the side that I showed and the idea is that the is that Achilles Achilles his chariot is going is dragging Hector around the city but in the image to the best of my knowledge Achilles has identified only as the figure that is that is climbing on to the chariot and he would have had a charioteer who was driving his chariot in other words the Greek warriors and Iliad don't they don't drive their own chariots they they get they get on them and get off them and then they fight is that a little bit clearer yeah I mean I can go back and but maybe it's something that we should just clarify in a few minutes come back to here any other questions yeah thank you for that presentation right here my my question has two parts the first part is you talked about telling the difference between reality and myths so I I missed your answer that's my first question and the second part of the question is I'm wondering if there really is a difference between reality and myths we see this repeating in different cultures as well and also the story being told over and over again I wonder if there's something real at least psychologically ok that's a very good question so for one thing there has been too much there has been too much made of a kind of division of reality and myth and recent scholars have tried to kind of bring that together and to suggest that images that don't resemble that aren't representing myth don't necessarily represent reality right they can still represent an ideal so that's what happens in in some of the examples of late geometric based painting is you have you know a warrior fighting a lion for instance now it's not an image from reality because lions didn't exist in Greece or they didn't exist in Athens which was pretty small and provincial in the 8th century so it's not like they had lots of contact with the north of Greece where there may have been a real lion and yet it's not a representation of a myth because and the way I define that which was I was working off with Luca Giuliani is that is that you have to be able to either by attributes or or some specific action identify the figure as a particular named person from myths like diabetes or or and and as I said there are disputes about which interpretation and there's a lot of gray area here but in general that is the difference between something that is just an representation of an ideal like an elite passing a sort of rite of passage right going through a rite of passage or you know by either through a boar hunt or some whatever elite activities you know aristocrats increased took part up and and saying you know that's Odysseus who is stabbing Polyphemus in the eye so is that a little bit clearer okay but you're sorry I just want to say that you're right to point out that it's not it's not so binary a relationship as has often been thought thank you for all this information and the thing is I'm doing a lot of research actually not exactly about Alma I'm doing the research on the silk the history of silk it's a long long has its long history and that's a lot of people think it's only from China but actually Homer it's actually in my research I find out way back in the Homans time he already indicated I have a copy of that it's way way back he say that okay Bobby I can navigate this oh because there's a lot of bits in the piece and so this is the Greece you know that was at the time at the time of the homer say there was Greece was what is that the a civilization was mainly on the agriculture for the oriya warriors then by the when they recognized there was a tree you know in the the along the Mediterranean the area there then the Greece start to improve Lea society I think I have I just put it short on this but I have a lot of the information a base on that and so which means we that's that this industry it's a lot more than just the Commerce it's our civilization and everything that we can this is at this time we can find a way to revive this industry for a clean energy purpose and I I think I abbreviate this but I have quite a you know a lot of information and I don't want to ok the the question is I'm sorry ok the question is is we can do a lot more research I can show you an area that and I would like to provide you information you know I do really I'd be very interested to talk to you after after the lecture but I think if we have any questions about the talk or the images that I've shown it be happy to answer those before we go on okay thank you one last question I never actually heard that one but it is true that there is a lot of you know the the the time that these epochs were coming together into the form that we know them so in the eighth century in the seventh century was just at the time that the Greeks were colonizing other areas of the Mediterranean and Sicily was one of them I mentioned I think in connection with spar longa that Odysseus had traveled by the Straits of Messina and and to Sicily and so it's believed that some of these stories that were floating about Greece about encounters with different peoples not maybe with one-eyed one-eyed monsters but that there was a kind of that this these new interactions and new lands gave rise to some of the fantastical stories that we hear so it could be I never heard the woolly mammoth one interesting that's very interesting that that would make sense why he didn't observe rules of guess kept friendship if he was with different species yes mm-hmm yep oh okay it was painted and white paint with white paint which is very we call it fugitive and in the field because it is easily lost it escapes and so it's just preserved only very faintly almost so faintly that you can't see with the with the naked eye but it was detected by the scholar who published by the scholars Cassie and Beasley who published the great three volumes on our vase collection and they did this reconstruction there it's it's um it's actually fairly common with white with that pigment so you see it actually sometimes on you know black figure phase vases that depict the skin of of women in white you know it's often just kind of a little bit it's splotchy and that's because there's fugitive awesome mm-hmm great thank you everyone Thanks [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 8,531

Keywords: homer, ancient greece, art, art history, course, lecture, fine art, museum

Id: A2krKHy464I

Length: 84min 40sec (5080 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020