Athenian Identity and the Eastern Other from Kroisos to Xerxes
In the spring of 479 BC, the vast
Persian army of
Xerxes remained in Central
Greece, even after his navy’s resounding
defeat at
Salamis, and still threatened to
overwhelm the Greek cities.
[1] Herodotos imagines a three-way debate among
a Macedonian,
Alexander son of Amyntas,
bringing a request for surrender from the Persian commander
Mardonios; an anonymous representative of the
Athenians; and a Spartan envoy, worried that if
Athens should capitulate, a Persian invasion of the Peloponnese
would be inevitable (8.144.2–3). The major difference between the Athenian and
Spartan experiences up to this point is that, while Spartan territory has
remained unscathed, the Athenians had evacuated their city in the previous year
at the behest of
Themistokles, leaving it to
be burned and almost entirely destroyed by the Persians (Herodotos 8.52–53;
9.13).
The Athenian speaker begins by proclaiming that the Persians’ destruction of
statues and shrines of the gods (
theon ta agalmaton kai
ta oikemata ) has to be avenged. He then goes on to define Greek
identity in terms of four criteria: kinship of blood (
homaimon ); a common language (
homoglossan ); the holy structures and shared sacrifices to the
gods (
theon hidrumata te koina kai thysia );
and a common way of life (
ethea homotropa ). Many commentators have rightly seized on this famous passage as our earliest
concise and comprehensive statement of what it meant to be a Greek in the
Classical period.
[2] In
recent scholarship, it has sometimes been argued that this concept of Greek
identity was first forged in the crucible of the Persian Wars, that is, that
Greek identity was first constructed in deliberate opposition to the Persian
enemy, the “barbarian Other.”
[3] In this paper, I suggest that by looking at some visual
evidence from the generation before the Persian Wars, we will find that the
concept of Greek identity outlined in Herodotos pre-dates the invasions of 490 and 480 and may well have
originated in an earlier stage of the interaction between
Greece and the
Persian
Empire.
Ilioupersis and Ionian Revolt
In 1998, The J. Paul Getty Museum returned to the
Republic of Italy an Attic red-figure cup that
had been illegally excavated at
Cerveteri in
Etruria,
smuggled out of
Italy, and acquired by
the Getty in fragments between 1983
and 1985.
[4] The cup is extraordinarily large (diameter 46.5 cm.), placing it in a small
category of cups of the late
sixth and early fifth
century often known as “parade cups” because they were clearly
made for display rather than for ordinary use.
[5] It carries the signature of
Euphronios as potter and has been
attributed to
Onesimos. According to
Dyfri Williams, it is “the masterpiece of the painter’s early middle phase,
which he dates 500–490.
[6]
The imagery of the cup comprises one of the most detailed and elaborate
depictions of the Trojan War that has survived on a Greek vase. The interior
is devoted to a panoramic scene of the Sack of
Troy (Figure 1), while the pictures on both sides of the
exterior take us back to earlier phases of the war:
Achilles giving up his war booty, the girl
Briseis, to
Agamemnon (as told in Book 2 of the
Iliad ; Figure 2) and an episode that is too poorly preserved to
reconstruct with certainty but may have shown a duel of
Ajax and
Hektor (as told
in
Iliad Book 8), in the presence of gods including
Athena and
Apollo.
[7] Here I focus on the Sack of
Troy, as an early paradigm of Greek identity, one that the
Athenian speaker in
Herodotos would
recognize, and expressed in powerful visual terms.
The various episodes that comprise the Sack of
Troy on
Onesimos’s cup
have been carefully described by Williams in his exemplary publication and
analyzed by several other scholars in the context of other versions of the
story in same period, including the Vivenzio Hydria in
Naples, the masterpiece of the
Kleophrades Painter, and a well-known cup by
the
Brygos Painter.
[8] In particular, Michael Anderson has
observed many aspects of the vase’s design and architecture and how certain
themes line up along horizontal and vertical axes.
[9] While agreeing in principle with
earlier scholars, I believe we can usefully frame the entire program of the
cup in terms of
Herodotos’ criteria of
Greek identity and read the vase as a meditation on two opposing models:
Greeks behaving like true Greeks versus Greeks violating their codes of
behavior, in effect acting like barbarians.
The eye of the viewer immediately falls on the two most egregious examples of
Greeks behaving like barbarians. In the central medallion (Figure 3),
Neoptolemos, the son of
Achilles, murders both
Priam and his grandson
Astyanax, whose small, naked body he swings by one foot. The
woman in the background, with both hands raised to her head in a gesture of
distraught mourning, is labelled as
Polyxena. Since she herself is fated soon to be sacrificed
to appease the ghost of
Achilles, yet
another act of barbarity is alluded to in her presence. Directly above, in
the outer zone, the Lesser
Ajax prepares to
rape the nearly naked and defenseless Trojan princess
Kassandra as she clings to the statue of
Athena (Figure 4).
[10] The barbarism of these two brutal
acts derives not simply from the violence itself—in wartime, old men and
young children are always vulnerable, and women are always the victims of
rape—but from the fact that they take place in sacred space, in sanctuaries
of the gods.
Athena’s statue marks the
goddess’s domain, and the large bronze tripod alongside the statue is a
generalized symbol of dedications made in sanctuaries.
Priam’s death takes place at an altar, and, just to drive
home the point with bitter irony, this altar is labelled as that of
[Zeus] Herkeios, that is,
Zeus as the god who protects suppliants.
[11]
As we heard in the Athenian’s speech in
Herodotos, what most bothered his people about the Persian
invasion of their city was the disrespect for the sacred places, the statues
and shrines of the gods. This had to be avenged. Indeed, once the Persians
had been conclusively been defeated, the Greeks swore an oath, at the very
site of the final victory in mainland
Greece,
Plataia, not
to rebuild the shrines destroyed by the Persians, but to let them stand as
monuments to the impiety of the Barbarian and as reminders never to trust
such an enemy.
[12] In
the event, this high-minded principle was overtaken by more practical
concerns some three decades later, when
Perikles decided it was time to rebuild the temples on the
Akropolis in order better to
reflect
Athens’ new status as an
imperial capital.
[13] But the memory of that Persian impiety never left the collective memory of
the Athenians. Rather, it continued to be discussed and debated in terms of
a mythological analogue, the Greeks’ destruction of
Troy and defilement of its holy places in the final moments
of the war.
In 458,
Aischylos staged his Oresteia trilogy, taking up a story
that formed part of the epic Nostoi, the returns home of the Greek heroes at
Troy. Underneath the major plot of the
first play, Agamemnon ,
Klytaimnestra’s treacherous murder her husband, lurks a
meditation on the deeper issue of flouting the gods and its consequences. In
her triumphant report of the final Greek victory in
Troy (lines 338–347),
Klytemnestra warns darkly that all will be well if only the
Greeks have shown respect for the holy places (
theon hidrumata ) and have not let their desire for
destruction get out of hand. As if in direct answer to her fears, the
messenger in the next scene, having himself escaped a storm that destroyed
much of the Greek fleet, proudly proclaims that the destruction of
Troy has been absolute: the altars
gone, the
theon idrumata uprooted (527).
Aeschylus was acutely aware of the
parallel between the actions of the Greeks at
Troy and those of the Persians in
Athens. Fourteen years earlier, in his play on the events
of 480,
Persians , he had
used similar language to describe the Persians’ destruction of the sacred
altars in
Athens.
[14]
The epic tradition already knew of the punishment for impiety, for the two
chief perpetrators on the cup by
Onesimos both came to a bad end:
Neoptolemos struck down on the altar of
Apollo at
Delphi,
[15] and
Ajax condemned by
the Greeks themselves for his rape of
Kassandra and drowning in a storm sent by
Athena.
[16] But their deeds are juxtaposed on
the cup with those of other heroes who display the positive side of what it
meant to be a Greek. At nine o’clock in the outer zone, a white-haired old
woman reaches out her arms to two young warriors:
Aithra, the mother of
Theseus, rescued by her grandsons,
Akamas and
Demophon (cf. Figure 1). Through an unlikely sequence of events, Aithra had ended up in
Troy as a captive and handmaiden of
Helen (
Iliad
3.144). Her son,
Theseus, did not come to
Troy, because he belonged to an older
generation of heroes, but his two sons (who do not figure in the
Iliad ) arrived in time for the last days of the
war.
[17] Their
rescue of their grandmother is first depicted on vases on the 490’s,
[18] a period when the Athenians were
trying to compensate for the absence of a significant role for Athenian
heroes in the Homeric poems by promoting some minor episodes featuring the
family of their new national hero,
Theseus.
[19] In the larger context of
Onesimos’ cup, this family reunion embodies the first
criterion of Greek identity, blood and kinship (
homaimon ), and enunciates the principle of family loyalty and
pietas.
On the opposite side of the interior, at three o’clock, a woman performs a
similar gesture of reaching out her hands in supplication of a warrior (cf. Figure 1). She is
Theano, priestess of
Athena at
Troy and husband of
Antenor, who was also shown.
[20] This little-known episode from the
Sack of
Troy, which is not included on
other vases of this period, illustrates one of the most fundamental
principles of the Greek way of life, that of
xenia , or hospitality to strangers. Years earlier,
Odysseus had come to
Troy, along with
Menelaos, whose wife Helen had been carried off by
Paris, to try to negotiate
Helen’s safe return and thus head off a
war.
[21] That
embassy is depicted on a single surviving Greek vase, a Corinthian
krater of the early sixth century, where
Theano plays the key role in receiving the Greek
envoys (Figure 5).
[22]
The mission itself was a failure, of course, but the hospitality of
Theano and
Antenor was not forgotten, and here it is Odysseus, dressed
in a curious dappled animal skin, to whom
Theano turns for protection amid the tumult of the sack of
her city. He will oblige, ensuring that both
Antenor and his wife are spared. Perhaps it was in part this
noble deed that ensured that
Odysseus,
unlike the Lesser
Ajax and
Neoptolemos, would enjoy a successful (if very
belated) homecoming to
Ithaka.
Thus far we have seen that two of the criteria for Greek identity, blood and
shared customs (
homaima, ethea homotropa )
are illustrated by
Onesimos, juxtaposed
with negative exempla of respect for the gods. What of the other episodes on
this sadly fragmentary masterpiece? Just behind
Aithra, a Trojan woman uses a long pestle to try to defend
herself against a Greek soldier,
Sthenelos, armed with a
machaira , or long curved sword (cf. Figure 1). We can hardly
suppose that the painter or his audience condoned an attack by an armed male
warrior on an unarmed woman who in desperation wields a household implement. What the scene illustrates is that a woman of noble character is capable of
acts of heroism that transcend the limitations of her sex.On the
Brygos Painter’s cup and the Vivenzio hydria,
the woman wielding the pestle is
Andromache, the wife of
Hektor,
[23] who, ever since
Homer’s
Iliad had served as the model of the loyal,
loving, and devoted wife and mother. She is also the same
Andromache was would witness the brutal murder
of her son
Astyanax while facing a life
of servitude for herself, as her own husband had foreseen (
Iliad 6. 454–459) before his death at the hands of
Achilles. The nobility of
Andromache was remembered in later times, most
notably in
Euripides’ play named for
her, in which she is indeed a foreign captive, yet her dignity far outshines
the petulance and pettiness of the Greek
Hermione (daughter of
Helen) against whom she is pitted in the drama.
[24] This is
Euripides’ way of exploding the myth of the
enslaved Trojan barbarian versus the ‘noble’ Greek and of showing that
personal integrity wins out in the end.
At the bottom of the cup (six o’clock), we find depicted for the first time
in Greek art an episode that will have great resonance later in the
Classical period and beyond:
Menelaos
threatening to kill his wayward wife
Helen, but dropping his sword at the last moment, overcome
by her beauty (Figure 6).
[25] There was a romanticized version, popular in later
times, that
Menelaos lost his nerve at
the sight of
Helen’s beautiful bared
breast,
[26] but
Onesimos has a very different
perspective. Neither
Menelaos nor
Helen has any real agency, rather
they are playthings in the hands of the goddess
Aphrodite. The goddess herself may have appeared behind
Helen, tugging at her garment, which
would account for the awkward pose as she reaches out her hands in
supplication.
[27] Just to make sure,
Eros, as
Aphrodite’s deputy, hovers between
Helen and
Menelaos. He may even have been pouring a love-potion to
bewitch the enraged husband, as we see on a later vase.
[28] The vases of the Classical period
also make clear that this encounter took place at a sanctuary as well,
namely, that of
Athena, to which
Helen had fled for protection.
[29] But unlike
Kassandra and
Priam, she
does find the protection she seeks,
and
Menelaos—whether of his own accord
or not —does in the end respect the sanctity of the goddess’s shrine. In
return, like
Odysseus (and unlike the
impious
Neoptolemos and
Ajax son of
Oileus) he will be rewarded with a successful homecoming, to
Sparta. The domestic bliss that he
and
Helen enjoy in
Odyssey Book 3 implies that his momentary rage has long since
been forgotten. The dropped sword is a vivid reminder that, for all the
carnage going on elsewhere on
Onesimos’
cup, the gods reserve for themsleves the right to intervene when and where
they wish. This is part of Greek identity as well, the recognition that, in
the end, everything is in the hands of the Olympian gods.
A reading of
Onesimos’ cup within the
framework of Greek identity as outlined in Herodotos 8.144 implies that the
Trojans are not seen as foreigners or barbarians, but rather as sharing all
the criteria of identity with the Greeks.
[30] This is fully in keeping with the
world of the
Iliad , in which Trojans and Greeks
speak the same language, worship the same gods with the same rituals and
practises (e.g. the garments that the Trojan women offer to
Athena in
Iliad 6, or
the tripod dedicated in the goddess’s sanctuary on
Onesimos’ cup), and observe the same customs, such as
xenia .
[31] It was only in the wake of the
Persian Wars that the identification of the Trojans as foreigners, with
fundamentally different values, took hold in the Greek imagination.
[32] As an early
instance of this, one might think of
Klytemnestra’s “carpet speech” in the
Agamemnon of
Aischylos
(935–936), invoking an image of
Priam as an
oriental despot in the mold of
Darius or
Xerxes.
The only criterion of identity that does not seems at first to play a role on
the Onesimos cup is that of language, though here too the vase has a
surprise in store. One might observe that the painted inscriptions naming
most of the figures and even an object (the altar of
Zeus Herkeios) indicate that a basic level of
literacy must have been shared by most Greek speakers even in this early
period. But what of the non-Greek speakers into whose hands exported Attic
pottery often came? Here is the cup’s surprise, for the Etruscan owner
scratched on the under side of the foot a dedication in his own language
before offering it at a shrine of
Herkle
(the Etruscan Herakles) at ancient
Caere
(cf. Figure 2).
[33]
Since the cup by
Onesimos, on the
standard chronology of red-figure, pre-dates
Darius’s invasion of
Greece in 490 by several years,
it cannot have been inspired by that campaign. And in any case, that
invasion ended abruptly at
Marathon
and did not occasion any widespread destruction, such as the sack of
Athens in 480, that would have evoked the memory of the Sack of
Troy.
[34] But the events of 490 were the
culmination of a process that had begun almost a decade earlier, with the
outbreak of the Ionian Revolt against Persian rule in
Asia Minor in 499.
[35] In the chronicle of these years that we have preserved in Books 5 and 6 of
Herodotos, two decisive events stand out: the Greeks’ attack on
Sardis, the capital of the Persian satrapy that
encompassed this region, in 499/8, and the Persians’ retaliation in the destruction of
Miletos, most prosperous of the
Greek cities of
Ionia, in 494. The former attack was notable for the burning
of the Temple of Kybele at
Sardis
(Herodotos 5.102), a flagrant example of just the kind of sacrilege the
Greeks would later experience at the hands of the Persians, only here
perpetrated by Greeks.
[36]
When
Miletos was sacked a few years
later, it must have seemed to some that the Greeks had brought this
punishment on themselves by offending the goddess
Kybele at
Sardis. This
may also help explain the reaction in
Athens two years later, when the playwright
Phrynichos staged a dramatization of The Sack
of
Miletos and was fined 1,000 drachmas
for his trouble (Herodotos 6.21). The usual interpretation of this episode
is that the play had aroused powerful feelings of guilt in the Athenian
audience that they had not done more to help their Ionian kinsmen (though
Athens did, in fact, send twenty
ships to support the Ionian Revolt).
[37] Might the extreme response to the
play also be connected to its portrayal of the fate of
Miletos as a warning of the consequences of
offending the gods?
[38] This is, of course, precisely the message of the Ilioupersis vases, such
as the cup by
Onesimos, which suddenly
experience a spike in popularity and emotional force during the decade of
the Ionian Revolt. Thus, even though these vases pre-date the Persian
invasions of
Greece and the burning of
Athens, there was a powerful
association between the destruction of
Troy and the havoc wrought on
Sardis and
Miletos
that will have conditioned the Athenian painters and their clients to think
in terms of such analogies even as they awaited the inevitable arrival of
the armies of
Darius.
Kroisos of Lydia and the Greeks
Another masterpiece of Athenian vase-painting that has sometimes been
associated with the Ionian Revolt is the great amphora in the Louvre showing
Kroisos on the pyre (Figure 7).
[39] Although the
Lydian king had died approximately fifty years earlier, in 547/6, it was his
defeat at the hands of
Cyrus of Persia and the capture of his
capital at
Sardis that set in motion the
events that would culminate in the Ionian Revolt.
[40] The Lydian Empire had already
swallowed up all the Greek cities along the coast of
Asia Minor (though not the islands), so that
Cyrus’s conquest of
Lydia meant that his empire now stretched from
its Iranian homeland all the way to the
Aegean.
The figure of
Kroisos, however, raises
interesting questions about Greek identity in the Archaic period, for it is
not easy to know where to place him along the spectrum from the Greek to
Barbarian. On the one hand,
Kroisos
demonstrated his respect for the gods of the Greeks by making lavish
dedications at
Delphi and in other
panhellenic sanctuaries (Herodotos 1.92), and he enjoyed relations of
xenia with Greek nobles, such as the
Athenian
Alkmeonidai (Herodotos 6.125).
Herodotos (1.7) sums up the paradox:
Kroisos was the first of the
“
barbaroi ” who both subjected some of
the Greeks (in
Asia Minor) and
befriended others (notably the Spartans). For the historian writing ca. 430,
Kroisos’s downfall may be attributed to excessive pride in his
wealth and his reckless misinterpretation of oracles (1.55; 1.71). But for
the Greeks of the 490’s
Kroisos, as a victim of Persian
aggression, would rather have aroused feelings of kinship and compassion, as
is evident on
Myson’s amphora.
[41] The fabled wealth
of
Kroisos, so vividly depicted by
Herodotos in his encounters with two
different Athenians,
Solon and
Alkmaion (1.30–33; 6.125), clearly placed him
in the category of a foreign despot.
[42] At the same time,
Herodotos portrays
Kroisos as being rather ignorant about the Greeks of the
mainland, in a famous scene in which he inquires about the two leading
peoples, the Spartans and the Athenians, giving the historian a chance to
insert a sketchy account of both
poleis
(1.56).
By the time
Myson painted his great amphora,
a half-century after
Kroisos’ death, the
last king of
Lydia had become a
quasi-legendary figure in the Greek imagination, which partly explains why
this vase is a rare exception to the general avoidance of showing historical
figures and events in Greek art of this period.
[43] But if
Kroisos is here more as a legend and a symbol than a
historical character, then what does he represent?
Chronologically, the amphora falls between the subject’s lifetime and the
period in the mid-fifth century when a revisionist version of his death is
first attested in the poet
Bacchylides
and the historian
Herodotos.
[44] In this version,
Kroisos does not die on the pyre, but
is spared, either by the intervention of the gods or the clemency of
Cyrus. Did
Myson already have this version in mind? It was been rightly
pointed out that the scene makes no explicit reference to
Kroisos being spared: there are no rain clouds
on the horizon to put out the fire, and the slave has already set the
flaming torches to the wooden pyre.
[45] Kroisos is, to be sure, depicted with
tremendous dignity, but is it the heroic dignity of the ruler who goes to
his death with noble calm, or are we meant to infer that his dignity, his
faith in the gods, and his generous gifts to their sanctuaries will not go
unrewarded?
I believe there is a hint in the vessel he holds out, the
phiale with which he pours a last libation. The
phiale , a shallow bowl without
handles or foot, is a shape that originated in the Near East and was
imitated in
Greece from early in the
Archaic period.
[46]
On Attic black- and early red-figure vases of the sixth century, it is most often shown in the
hands of heroes, such as
Herakles
(Figure 8),
[47] and of
the Olympian gods, both as a drinking vessel and in its proper function, the
pouring of libations.
[48] A well-known cup made just a few years before
Myson’s amphora, for example, the masterpiece of
the
Sosias Painter (Figure 9), depicts a
gathering of the gods on
Mt. Olympos,
each of them holding a large
phiale to be
filled with ambrosia by
Hebe, daughter of
Hera.
[49]
The
phiale in
Kroisos’ hand thus, I suggest, carries a four-fold message. It alludes to the eastern origins of the vessel that had now been fully
assimilated by the Greeks in an act of cultural appropriation. The intricate
design of
Kroisos’
phiale suggests that it is a metal one,
probably gold, hence a reference to his legendary wealth. At the same time,
the gesture of libation as he tips the
phiale , no doubt accompanied by a prayer (cf. Herodotos 1.87
for
Kroisos’ prayer to
Apollo), marks him as a pious individual
who—despite his great wealth and power—could humble himself before the gods. And finally, the
phiale hints at
Kroisos’ heroization, not only spared
the fiery death threatened here, but, as in the legend as it was elaborated
by
Bacchylides, granted a kind of
superhuman status in the land of the Hyperboreans.
[50]
The Phiale Between East and West
It is against this background of the multivalent significance
of the
phiale as an intermediary between
East and West, between mortals and gods, that I would like to conclude with
a brief look at a small and extraordinary group of Attic vases. From the
years ca. 500–480 we have preserved
five
phialai made in clay, but on a very
large scale (ranging from 33 to 42 cm. in diameter), suggesting that they
were made as display pieces or as dedications. Remarkably, all have come to
light in recent decades and have added a new dimension to the contemporary
phenomenon of the “parade cups,” of which the one by
Onesimos discussed earlier is one of the best
examples.
[51] One
of these five
phiale , signed by the
painter
Douris, has, like the Onesimos
cup, been returned from the Getty Museum to
Italy, where it is now on view in the Villa Giulia (Figure
10), near the cup by
Onesimos.
[52]
Two others, without figural decoration but employing the unusual technique
known as coral red, are still in the
Getty.
[53] The fourth was found in an Etruscan sanctuary at
Pyrgi (Figs. 11–12), where it had
been placed as a dedication, just as
Onesimos’s cup was dedicated at
Cerveteri.
[54] In addition, the
phiale , after an initial attribution to the
Brygos Painter, has now been convincingly
attributed by Dyfri Williams to none other than
Onesimos himself.
[55]
We have seen how
Onesimos filled his huge
parade cup with a meditation on Hellenic identity and codes of behavior
placed in the setting of the Greek sack of
Troy and against the backdrop of hostilities between the
Persian Empire and the Greeks of
Ionia in the 490’s. I believe he did something similar on the
phiale from
Pyrgi., which may be dated slightly later than the cup,
ca. 490. Though the surface of this vessel has
been sadly ruined by its exposure to the soil of
Pyrgi, the excavator, Paola Baglione, was able to identify
the subject of the exterior scene as
Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitor in the twenty-second book
of
Homer’s
Odyssey
(Figure 12, nine o’clock). The decapitated head of the singer
Leiodes (22.328–329), here seen rolling under a
couch, clinches the interpretation. The interior scene shows a conventional
symposium of men reclining on the ground in an outdoor setting (Figure 11),
a popular motif on black-figure drinking-cups of the late sixth century, though starting to lose
popularity in the early years of
the fifth, when the
phiale was
made.
[56]
On his Ilioupersis cup, as we have seen,
Onesimos had singled out
xenia as a basic feature of Greek customs (
ta ethea homotropa , in
Herodotos’s terms) by showing both positive
and negative exempla of hospitality to foreigners and guests. On the
phiale , the symposium, another key
element of Greek society, is the subject of a similar reflection. The proper
symposium is the one on the interior, while the suitors’ banquet in the
palace of
Penelope is a corrupted
version, in which the notion of
xenia is
turned on its head as the suitors overstep the bounds and threaten to eat
the family of Odysseus out of house and home.
Odysseus’s brutal and merciless treatment of his victims is
treated in Homer as fully justified, because they have violated one of the
most fundamental codes of Greek behavior.
If we may make one last imaginative leap, is it possible that the story of
the unwanted suitors taking up residence in the home of
Odysseus, and of their barbaric behavior once
there, was seen an mythical analogy for the steady encroachment of the
Persians into the homeland of the Greeks? This was surely the message of a
wall-painting by
Polygnotos, showing
Odysseus after he has killed the
suitors, which was commissioned for the Temple of Athena Areia at
Plataia (Pausanias 9.4.1–2).
[57] That temple was
said to be a victory monument for the Battle of
Marathon, and it stood, of course, at the site of the last
great land victory over the Persians, in 479. The
phiale from
Pyrgi invites us to consider the possibility that, several
decades before
Polygnotos, the story of
the suitors was already understood in this light.Since the subject is not
attested in Greek art before the
phiale ,
and will not appear again on an Attic vase for about half a century,
[58] we cannot know
just when it re-entered the imagination of visual artists. But it is
tempting to think that, just as
Onesimos
drew on that part of the Epic Cycle that dealt with the fate of
Troy to decorate his parade cup (Figure 1), so he
turned slightly later to one of its sequels, the homecoming of
Odysseus. With both he proved that the
collective wisdom about what it means to be a Greek and to behave like a
Greek that is contained in the Homeric epics continued to form the basis of
the Greeks’ understanding of themsleves throughout the rest of
Antiquity.
Abbreviations:
ARV 2 :
Beazley, J. D. 1963.
Attic Red-Figure
Vase-Painters. 2nd ed. Oxford.
LIMC :
Lexicon
Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae . Zurich and Stuttgart:
1981–1997.
Bibliography
Allan, W.
2000. The Andromache and Euripidean
Tragedy. Oxford.
Anderson, M. J. 1995. “Onesimos and the Interpretation of Ilioupersis
Iconography.” JHS 115:130–135.
Anderson, M. J.
1997. The Fall of Troy in Early Greek
Poetry and Art. Oxford.
Baglione, M. P.
1988. “Quelques donneés sur les plus
récentes fouilles de Pyrgi.” Proceedings of
the Third Symposium on Ancient Greek and Related Pottery
(eds. J. Christiansen and T. Melander) 17–24.
Copenhagen.
Balcer, J. M. 1984. Sparta by the Bitter Sea. Chico, CA.
Beazley, J. D.
1958. “Helenes Apaitesis.” Proceedings of the British Academy 43:
233–244.
Boardman, J. 1976. “The
Kleophrades Painter at Troy.” AntK
19: 3–18.
Boardman, J. 1982. “Herakles, Theseus and Amazons.” The Eye of
Greece (eds. D. Kurtz and B. Sparkes) 1–28.
Oxford.
Boardman, J.
1985. “Image and Politics in Sixth-Century
Athens.” Ancient Greek and Related Pottery
(ed. H. Brijder) 239–247. Amsterdam.
Bothmer, D. von
1962. “A Gold Libation Bowl.”
BullMMA 21: 154–166.
Burn, A. R. 1984. Persia and the Greeks. 2nd ed. London.
Burkert, W. 1985. “Das
Ende des Kroisos: Vorstufen einer
herodoteischen Geschichstserzählung.” Catalepton. Festschrift für Bernhard Wyss zum 80.
Geburtstag (ed. C. Schäublin) 4–15.
Basel.
Cardon, C.
1978–1979. “Two Omphalos Phialai.” GettyMusJ 6–7:131–138.
Cohen, B. 1993. “The
Anatomy of Kassandra’s Rape: Female Nudity Comes of Age in Greek
Art.” Source 12.2:37–46.
Cohen, B.
2006 . The Colors of Clay .
Malibu.
Conacher, D. J. 1967. Euripidean Drama. Toronto.
Connelly, J. B.
1993. “Narrative and Image in Attic
Vase-Painting: Ajax and Kassandra at the Trojan Palladion.”
Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (ed.
P. Holliday) 88–129. Cambridge.
Davies, M. I.
1977. “The Reclamation of Helen.”
AntK 20:73–85.
Denniston, J. D. and Page, D. L.
1957. Aeschylus Agamemnon.
Oxford.
Ducrey, P. 1987. “Victoire et défaite: réflexion sur la représentation des vaincus
dans l’art grec.” Images et société en
Grèce ancienne (eds. C. Bérard et al.)
201–211. Lausanne.
Erskine, A. 2001. Troy
between Greece and Rome. Oxford.
Euphronios der Maler
1991. Exh. cat. Berlin.
Fraenkel, E. 1950. Aeschylus Agamemnon. Oxford.
Georges, P. 1994. Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience. Baltimore.
Giuliani, L. 2003. Bild
und Mythos. Munich.
Hall, E.
1989. Inventing the Barbarian.
Oxford.
Hall. J. 2002. Hellenicity.
Cambridge.
Hall, J. 2007. A
History of the Archaic Greek World. Malden, MA.
Halm-Tisserant, M.
1995. “Autour du supplis de Mélanthos: la
pénalite au chant XXII de l’Odyssée.” Ktema 20:287–295.
Harris, T.
2000. The Emptiness of Asia.
London.
Haspels, C. H. E. 1930. “Deux fragments d’une couple d’Euphronios.” BCH 54:422–451.
Hedreen, G. M. 1996. “Image, Text and Story in the Recovery of Helen,” ClAnt 15: 152–184.
Hedreen, G. M. 2002. Capturing Troy. Ann Arbor.
Hegyi, D. “The Historical Background
of the Ionian Revolt.” AAAH
14:285–302.
Hölscher, T. 1973. Griechische Historienbilder. Würzburg.
Hornblower, S. 2008. “Greek Identity in the Archaic and Classical Periods.” In
Zacharia 2008:37–58.
Jebb, R. C. 1905. Bacchylides: The Poems and Fragments. Cambridge.
Kaltsas, N. and Shapiro, A. eds. 2008.
Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical
Athens. New York.
Konstan, D. 2001. “To Hellenikon ethnos:
Ethnicity and the Construction of Ancient Greek Identity.”
In Malkin 2001:29–50.
Luschey, H. 1939. Die
Phiale. Bleicherode am Harz.
Malkin, I., ed. 2001. Perceptions of
Greek Ethnicity. Cambridge, MA.
Mangold, M. 2000. Kassandra in Athen. Berlin.
Martelli, M.
1991. “Dedica ceretana a Hercle.”
ArchClass 43: 613–621.
Meiggs, R. 1972. The
Athenian Empire. Oxford.
Millender, E. G.
1996. The Teacher of Hellas: Athenian
Democratic Ideology and the “Barbarization” of Sparta in
Fifth-Century Greek Thought. Diss. University of
Pennsylvania. Philadelphia.
Miller, M. C.
1997. Athens and Persia.
Cambridge.
Mitchell, L. 2007. Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical
Greece. Swansea.
Moretti Sgubini, A. M. 1999. Euphronios epoiesen: un dono d’eccezione ad Ercole
Cerite. Rome.
Muth, S.
2008. Gewalt im Bild.
Berlin.
Nostoi
2007. Capolavori ritrovati. Exh. cat. Rome.
Pelling, C.
2006. “Speech and Narrative in the
Histories.” Cambridge Companion to
Herodotus (eds. C. Dewald and J.
Marincola)103–121. Cambridge.
Redfield, J.
2003. The Locrian Maidens.
Princeton.
Reusser, C. 2002. Vasen
für Etrurien. Kilchberg.
Robertson, M. 1991. “A
Fragmentary Phiale by
Douris.” Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty
Museum 5:75–98.
Roller, L. E.
1999. In Search of God the Mother.
Berkeley.
Rosenbloom, D.
1993. “Shouting ‘Fire’ in a Crowded
Theater: Phrynichos’s Capture of Miletos and the Politics of Fear in
Early Attic Tragedy.” Philologus
137:159–196.
Saïd, S.
2001. “The Discourse of Identity in Greek
Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides.” In Malkin
2001:275–299.
Shapiro, H. A.
1994. Myth into Art. Poet and Painter in
Classical Greece. London.
Shapiro, H. A. Forthcoming. “Attic Heroes and the Invention of the Athenian Past in the
Fifth Century.” History without
Historians (ed. L. Llewellyn-Jones and J.
Marincola). Edinburgh.
Simon, E. and Hirmer, M. 1976. Die griechischen Vasen. Munich.
Simon, E. 2004. “Libation.” Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum
Antiquorum. Vol. I:237–253. Malibu.
Sparkes, B. A.
1985. “Aspects of Onesimos.”
Greek Art: Archaic into Classical (ed.
C. Boulter) 18–39. Leiden.
Thomas, R. 2001. “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus.” In
Malkin 2001:213-233.
Topper, K. 2009. “Primitive Life and the
Construction of the Sympotic Past in Athenian
Vase-Painting.” AJA 113:3-26.
Touchefeu-Meynier, O.
1968. Thèmes odysséens dans l’art
antique. Paris.
Tozzi, P. 1978. La
rivolta ionica. Pisa.
Tsingarida, A. 2009a. “Vases for Heroes and Gods: Early Red-figure Parade Cups and
Large-Scaled Phialai.”
Shapes and Uses of Greek Vases (ed.
A. Tsingarida) 185–201. Brussels.
Tsingarida, A.
2009b. “À la santé des dieux et des
hommes. La phiale: un vase à boire au banquet athénien?”
Métis N.S. 7, 91–109.
Williams, D.
1976. “The Ilioupersis Cup in Berlin and
the Vatican.” JbBerlMus
18:9–23.
Williams, D.
1991. “Onesimos and the Getty
Iliupersis.” Greek Vases in the J. Paul
Getty Museum 5:41–64.
Williams, D.
1993. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.
British Museum 9. London.
Zacharia, K., ed. 2008. Hellenisms. Aldershot.
Zacharia, K. 2008. “Herodotus’ Four Markers of Greek Identity.” In Zacharia
2008, 21–35.
Footnotes
Note 1
For the historical context see Burn 1984:488–496.
Note 2
Zacharias 2008; Saïd 2001:275; Thomas 2001:213–214; Pelling
2006:112–114.
Note 3
E. Hall 1989:1-2 and passim; J. Hall 2002:172–189; cf. Harrison 2000:21;
41–44; Hornblower 2008:38.
Note 4
Villa Giulia 121110 (formerly Getty 83. AE. 362); Moretti Sgubine 1999;
first fully published by Williams 1991.
Note 5
Haspels 1930; Tsingarida 2009a.
Note 6
Williams 1991:47.
Note 7
For Briseis: Williams 1991:56–59; Shapiro 1994:11–16; LIMC III 158–160,
s.v. Briseis [A. Kossatz-Deissmann] . For the other side of the exterior
see Williams 1991:59–60.
Note 8
Williams 1991:50–56; Mangold 2000:123–125; Hedreen 2002: Giuliani 2003:
211–216; Muth 2007:580–592. Vivenzio Hydria: Naples 2422; ARV2 189, 74;
Boardman 1976:10, Fig. 3. Cup by the Brygos Painter: Louvre G 152; ARV2
369, 1.
Note 9
Anderson 1995; Anderson 1997:234–245.
Note 10
On the iconography of this episode see Connelly 1993; Cohen 1993.
Note 11
Cf. Euripides, Trojan Women 17 for Priam’s
death at the altar of Zeus Herkeios, and Anderson 1997:195, who points
out the importance of altars of Zeus Herkeios in Athenian homes. A
second, now lost Ilioupersis cup by Onesimos labels the altar as that of
Zeus: Sparkes 1985:25, Fig. 2.
Note 12
On the Oath of Plataea see Meiggs 1972:504–507.
Note 13
Hurwit 1999:157–159.
Note 14
Persians 811. Some commentators have suspected
that Agamemnon 527 is an interpolation based on
the similar wording at Persians 811, e.g.
Fraenkel 1950:175; 266, but see Denniston and Page 1950:120–121 for a
defense of the line’s authenticity. Cf. Rosenbloom 1993:93 on the many
parallels between the Agamemnon of Aischylos’s play and prominent
Persian including Xerxes and Mardonios.
Note 15
For the different versions of the death of Neoptolemos see LIMC VI
774–775, s.v. Neoptolemos [O. Touchefeu-Meynier] . Pindar, Paian 6.
100–120, describes his death as Apollo’s punishment for the murder of
Priam.
Note 16
Redfield 2003:135–148 (145 on the death of Ajax). Polygnotos’ famous
painting of the Sack of Troy in the Stoa Poikile at Athens, of ca. 460,
featured a scene of the Greek heroes deliberating Ajax’s fate (Pausanias
1.15.2). In Polygnotos’ other version of the story, at Delphi, Ajax was
shown “before the altar taking the oath concerning his crime against
Kassandra” (Pausanias 10.26.3)—presumably protesting his innocence. See
also Ducrey 1987:206; 210.
Note 17
For the sources see Cingano 2007.
Note 18
LIMC I 426–427, s.v. Aithra I [U. Kron].
Note 19
I discuss this process in Shapiro, forthcoming.
Note 20
Williams 1991:55–56.
Note 21
Davies 1977.
Note 22
Vatican 35525; Beazley 1958; Kaltsas and Shapiro 2008:196–197 [M.
Sannibale] .
Note 23
Williams 1991:52. The Brygos Painter labels her as Andromache, while the
Kleophrades Painter does not.
Note 24
Conacher 1967:166–180; Allan 2000:93–95. On the gradual shift during the
fifth century away from Athenian stereotypes of the Eastern barbarian
and toward the stigmatizing of the Spartans with the same defects, see
Millender 1996.
Note 25
LIMC IV 522–524, s.v. Helene [L. Kahil]; Hedreen 1996.
Note 26
It is not clear whether this detail was already part of the epic
tradition or was invented later:see LIMC IV 499–500, s.v. Helene [L.
Kahil].
Note 27
Williams 1991:56.
Note 28
E.g. the pyxis in Brauron; ARV2 631, 42; LIMC IV 544, s.v. Helene no.
279.
Note 29
E.g. the oinochoe Vatican 16535; ARV 2 1173;
LIMC IV 543, s.v. Helene, no. 272bis. Other
sources report that Helen fled to the sanctuary of Apollo:Williams
1991:56.
Note 30
There are even Greeks and Trojans who share common descent (i.e.
blood):Konstan 2001:31.
Note 31
Konstan 2001:31–33.
Note 32
Erskine 2001:61–76.
Note 33
Martelli 1991. On the export of Attic vases to Etruria see Reusser
2002.
Note 34
One exception is Eretria, where the Persians did sack the city and burn
the Temple of Apollo on their way to Attika: Herodotos 6.101.
Note 35
For a full account of the Ionian Revolt see Tozzi 1978; Balcer
1984:227–281.
Note 36
On Kybele and her worship in Lydia, Phrygia and elsewhere see Roller
1999:esp. 45–46; 128–132 on Sardis.
Note 37
Rosenbloom 1993.
Note 38
See also Georges 1994:71–72; 279n20, who stresses that if the play is
dated to 493/2 (the archonship of Themistokles), it is quite possible
that the Persian armies were already marshalled on Greek soil and that
fear was running especially high in Athens.
Note 39
Louvre G 197; ARV 2 ; Simon and Hirmer 1976. For the association with
the Ionian Revolt see Hölscher 1973:233n63; Boardman 1982:15–16.
Note 40
Burn 1984:38–47; Balcer 1984:95–122.
Note 41
On the question of whether there was any sense of collective Greek
identity among the residents of Asia Minor under Persian rule see Hegyi
1966:285–286 (arguing there was not), and, on the related question of
the origins of panhellenism, see Mitchell 2007:xxi (suggesting that
panhellenism does pre-date the Persian Wars and finding evidence going
back to the mid-sixth century).
Note 42
It is, therefore, difficult to believe, with J. Hall 2007:261, that when
Sappho refers to Sardis, Ionia, and her own island of Lesbos in the same
poem (fr. 98), she sees no ethnic distinction between Lydians and
Greeks. Cf. Hornblower 2008, who concludes, “the Greek/Barbarian
distinction turns out to be extremely fluid” (40).
Note 43
Hölscher 1973:30–31.
Note 44
Bacchylides 3.23–62 (dated 468); Herodotos 1.86–88.
Note 45
Burkert 1985, who reviews the various traditions about the death of
Kroisos, including Near Eastern sources.
Note 46
Luschey 1939:31–37; Miller 1997:136–139; Bothmer 1962; Tsingarida
2009b.
Note 50
See the commentary of Jebb 1905:261, on line 59, who notes that the Land
of the Hyperboreans is for Bacckylides equalivalent to earlier notions
of the Elysian Fields in Homer or the Isles of the Blest in Hesiod and
Pindar, places to which a pious mortal may be transported at the end of
his life.
Note 51
See Tsingarida 2009a:for the red-figure phialai and for the big phialai and the parade cups as part of a single
phenomenon.
Note 52
Villa Giulia (no inv. no.); formerly Getty 81.AE.213; Nostoi 2007:110–111, no. 24; first published by Robertson
1991.
Note 56
See Topper 2009 for the motif.
Note 57
Touchefeu-Meynier 1968:263; 287, who notes that in both cases Athena
acts as protectress, of Odysseus and of the Athenians who fought the
Persians.
Note 58
Shapiro 1994–60–63; Halm-Tisserant 1995.