with tears; and with a father’s fears, his hands
began to tremble.
They take off, Daedalus leading the way, up over the Cyclades.
A fisherman, who with his pliant rod
was angling there below, caught sight of them;
and then a shepherd leaning on his staff
and, too, a peasant leaning on his plow
saw them and were dismayed: they thought that these
must surely be some gods, sky-voyaging.
Artists may be truly godlike in their effects, but Daedalus’s fears were well founded. Icarus, taking “delight / in his audacity” and “fascinated by the open sky, / flew higher.” The sun melted the wax and Icarus plunged into the Aegean. His horrified father—“though that word is hollow now”—buried “his dear son’s body” on the island now known as Icaria.
The reverberations down the millennia from this mythological cycle of Cretan stories are multiform, taking us from Le Morte d’Arthur of Thomas Malory (whose young King Arthur is partly modeled on Theseus) to the Ariadne auf Naxos of Richard Strauss, from Jean Racine to Eugene O’Neill (both dramatists wrote plays—Phèdre and Desire under the Elms—based on the complications of Theseus’s adulthood and the sexual tragedy of his second wife, Phaedra). In what is surely one of the most memorable reverberations, Daedalus, the archetypal artist who takes his chances even in the face of great risk, was used by James Joyce to create the figure of Stephen Dedalus, artist-hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who then goes on to serve as the more ambiguous figure of a yet-to-bloom Telemachus in Ulysses.
RHYMES, like those Agathon delivered at his symposium, were looked down on by entitled and educated Greeks of the classical period, not only because they gave off the odor of a monger in the market but because they suggested a lack of attention to one’s language. If you were serious about your Greek, you would eliminate the occurrence of such childish, jingly elements—which, because they can occur by accident, should not occur in the controlled speech of a serious person. Because, however, there are accidents of language—some words rhyme, while others are extremely similar in sound, and there’s nothing to be done about it—these linguistic phenomena beyond our control must Mean Something; they must be there as daimonia, signposts of divine intention, which the more profound of our fellows may be able to discern. This line of reasoning was what convinced the Pythagoreans that they had hit upon hidden depths of meaning by coming across certain rhymes that struck them as full of portent and by noting other close similarities of sounds between words. It may also be that the extraordinary richness of Greek made such verbal oddities seem more singular than they would have appeared in other ancient tongues.
Each human language has its strengths and weaknesses and, like a musical instrument, is better designed to express certain information, thoughts, and feelings than others. A violin and a trombone have little in common; and though each can be drafted to sound the same melody, the melody will have a different texture and make a quite different impression on the hearer, depending on the instrument employed. Ancient Hebrew is tense and terse, a desert language of spare muscularity, as tightly economical in its movements and effects as a desert nomad, who, because of the constant threat of dehydration, must always think before he moves and think before he speaks, who never uses two words when one will do, who never uses one word when silence can express his meaning. (Not a little of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is contained in its silences.) Ancient Latin is a language ideal for recordkeeping, simple maxims, and obvious subordinations, the perfect language for a tribe of parsimonious farmers who transformed themselves into land-grabbing real estate developers, then into colonial masters, and finally into imperialists who believed the whole world belonged to them by right. Only with immense exertions—by poets like Virgil, studiously imitating Homer—was Latin forged into an instrument fit for the emotional modulations of poetry and the subtleties of thought. With all that, no Latin dramatist ever came close to the Greek achievement; and the unoriginal Latin philosophers were all weak imitators of their Greek forebears.
Though ancient languages are notable for their modest vocabularies (the world still being young and the phenomena to be named far fewer than what we face today), Greek is an exception: the abundance of words in a dictionary of ancient Greek is staggering not only to the student but to the expert. The Spartans, the Achaeans, the Athenians, the Boeotians, the Aetolians, the Euboeans, the Thessalonians, the Macedonians, the Lydians, the Ionians, the speakers who hailed from the various Adriatic and Aegean islands, the colonists of Sicily, southern Italy, and the Black Sea—these and many more contributed their finely shaded regional vocabularies (not unlike their characteristic musical modes) to the whole language, which became like a vast orchestra of diverse instruments, able to produce modulations of extraordinary refinement. Unlike the Jews, the Greeks could never stop talking, and as is always the case with such people, their favorite subject was themselves.
The entire library of ancient Hebrew runs to a compact cabinet of twenty-four scrolls; the books of the Greek library are close to countless. Not only this, but Greek proceeds in a naturally discursive style, constantly turning this way and that in elegant riffs and delicate variations, like a spring river running to tributaries, curling into rivulets, bubbling into pools. Even when you are thinking or speaking another language altogether, Greek can scratch away impishly at the back of your brain. Neither as compressed as Hebrew, coiled and ready to spring, nor as mellifluous and tidy as Latin, it is, by contrast, a spiky language as full of sharp ups and downs as an economist’s graph. No wonder that when Virginia Woolf went mad, she heard the birds singing in ancient Greek, the language her father had taught her; and when she heard them, many years later, singing again in that same tongue, she knew it was time to depart and, filling her pockets with stones, walked into the Ouse.
WORSHIPING AT THE ALTAR of their own superiority, the Greeks refused to learn anyone else’s language, convinced as they were that all other languages were so deficient as to be a kind of baby talk. The barbarians prattled nonsense: “bar, bar bar,” equivalent to our “blah, blah, blah.” Had they bothered to learn other languages, the Pythagoreans might also have learned some lessons in cultural relativity and not been so convinced that accidental similarities of sounds between certain Greek words were celestial signposts. But abiding contempt for whatever was not Greek—the flip side of Greek superiority—limited Hellenic sensibility, confining to hellenikon to its own backyard, blocking the likelihood of cultural cross-pollination and stunting the ability of Greece to absorb outside influences.
One needn’t sail the wine-dark sea for long before realizing that the classical Greeks were classically classist, sexist, and racist. Nor does it take all that much perspicacity to understand that hidden behind the show of contempt lay irrational fears. (Does not our studied eloquence dispel all taint of barbarian prattle? Is not our lively democracy like a well-aired andron, revealing all other political systems to be stale contrivances? Surely, freemen are the only worthy associates of freemen—and why are slaves always such blundering dunderheads? Am I not, glossy from my workout, a paragon of hardened strength?—and how awful to be a woman, a weak, confined receptacle, as deficient in body and mind as is a barbarian tongue in sound and sense!) How often, I wonder, did these paragons of excellence hear a softly whispered question: But are not barbarians somewhat like you? Do you not share with slaves a common humanity? Are men and women so different that there is nothing feminine within you, nothing masculine within her? The fear of Otherness ran so deep that even Dionysus, almost certainly a homegrown Greek god going back to earliest times—but also the epitome of Otherness—was always spoken of as a foreigner, an intromission from the effete East. But in nothing did ambivalence toward the Other appear so starkly as in the twists and turns of Greek art.
Like Thales’s invention of geometry, Greek art and architecture had its origin in Egyptian measurement. There we
re of course other strands of influence on the arts of the Greeks; and many of the archaic statuettes and examples of pottery that have come down to us from the time of Homer and earlier could almost belong to the Phoenicians, the Mesopotamians, and even the sub-Saharan Africans, so closely imitative are they of artistic conventions far afield [see figure 10]. But in the seventh and sixth centuries—that is, in the time of the lyric poets and the Presocratic philosophers—Egypt provided Greece with fresh inspiration. Before that time, monumental building, whether of temples or of statuary, was unknown to the Greeks. Greek temples were small, almost temporary enclosures of mud brick, reinforced by timber. Apart from martial metalwork, the plastic arts were limited to geometric pottery and votive offerings in wood and clay, primitive representations no more than a few inches high of a god or human, designed to be left at the god’s little temple in thanksgiving or in hope of divine favor.
Increasing affluence, however, allowed some Greeks to travel, and northeast Africa proved more alluring—and provided a warmer welcome—than did the vast lands of the Persian enemy to the East. In the static, unchanging home of the pharaohs, these travelers admired the awesome architecture and imposing depictions in statuary of the pharaohs and their gods. To build such immensities, architect and artist would require precise plans based on exacting measurements, and these the Egyptians supplied to their Greek guests, as well as their methods of quarrying stone and dressing it. The result was a new building program in the principal Greek cities, which gave us in short order all the essential elements that would over time come to make up the visual ambience of the Western world.
Though the Greeks borrowed the idea of monumentality from the Egyptians, their actual work quickly took on characteristically Greek expressiveness. The new temples (and, soon thereafter, other public buildings) were now large and lasting, built of stone and set on hillsides, culminations of the human settlements from which they sprang. Unlike the looming Egyptian buildings—which, with their massive walls, their forbidding portals, and the granite pharaohs and impassive animal gods that served as great stone guardians, seemed to be imposed from above—the Greek temples did not bellow “Bow down and keep out!” Rather, like their humble predecessors of mud and wood, these new Greek buildings maintained a harmony with their surroundings, as if they had somehow grown from the landscape itself. Their walls could hardly be seen: what presented itself to the viewer was a gracefully stepped porch that rose in massive but slender columns to a mildly pitched roof. The colonnades that surrounded the temple served, in their airy openness, as invitations to mount the steps and enter the precinct. As one approached the building, one could see high up between the columns and the roof a decorative frieze running horizontally.
The startlingly various Greek landscape cooperated in this new architectural venture by providing some of the most dramatic backdrops the world has to offer. Stark and dizzying heights fall off in sudden and graceful valleys and, beyond the land, haloed swaths of sea, intersected by rugged peninsulas and shrouded islands, provide visual dramas all their own. For light, water, and vegetation combine to produce bays, vivid in pools of aquamarine near their shorelines, but, farther out, raddled in purple, as if Phoenician cloths lay trembling on the sea floor far below the shimmering surface of the wine-dark sea. Today, one may still climb the magnificent Acropolis at Athens, visit the sun-blinding Temple of Poseidon that towers above the blue Gulf of Sounion, ascend to the profoundly mysterious ruins of Delphi on the wild, exhilarating slopes of Mount Parnassus, and feel in one’s depths how much the ancient Greeks loved the look of their land—more than two-and-a-half millennia before humanity’s appreciation of landscape is thought to have developed.
Not all the architectural elements fell into place at once. It took some experimenting to render everything in optimal proportions; and the earliest attempts at monumental temple building look squat and earthbound [see figure 2] when compared with the soaring weightlessness of the later examples. But by trial and error the architects reached a feeling for the ideal relationships of mass and line—what the Latin poet Horace would term aurea mediocritas (the golden mean)—so that their later work, even when seen today in a ruinous state, has the power to lift the spirit [3, 4]. Much of this effect depends on the way in which they dealt with the proportions of the columns, solid at the base but seeming to taper toward the roof. In actuality, the columns incline ever so slightly inward and their seemingly straight lines are subtly curved to correct what would otherwise be the optical illusion that they fan outward. In time, the Greek architects learned many such refinements to enhance proportions and make their work more and more satisfying to the eye.
Within the cella, the walled chamber at the heart of the structure, one came into the presence of the god or goddess to whom the temple was dedicated—this in the form of a monumental statue, many meters high, of his or her presumed likeness, illuminated by lamps and often fronted by a shallow reflecting pool that cast additional light upon the image. This central statue was housed in a very un-Egyptian “inner sanctum,” no more off-limits than is the cella of the Lincoln Memorial. In addition to the statue of the god, the architects came to provide sculptors with additional occasions to display their art, especially in the frieze of the facade—the long horizontal band running between the cornice that supported the roof and the architrave that rested atop the columns and that gave sculptors the opportunity to tell a whole story in successive panels. The facade’s tympanum, the elongated triangular panel formed by the pitched roof and the cornice, offered a spectacular site for a tableau of figures [5].
But the sixth century also saw an explosion in monumental sculpture that went beyond the temple, as statues, life-size and larger, were erected in park and marketplace to commemorate battles, gods, and fallen heroes. In this novel assemblage [6] of temples and, a bit later, theaters [7] (as well as lesser public buildings, such as the stoa [8], the covered walkway that was the forerunner of our shopping mall) and open public spaces punctuated by monumental memorials, the look and even the experience of city life as we still know it was coming into being—bustling, diverse, essentially secular though serving many needs, and with pleasant alternative enclosures for retreat and stillness [9].
The monumental statuary of the archaic period (from the late seventh century to about 480 B.C.) betrayed its Egyptian origin in its stiff symmetry, based as it was on the traditional Egyptian grid that accounted for the ins and outs of human anatomy by a rigid apportioning of corporeal shapes into an abstract pattern [11, 12, 13]. The kouroi (youths, sons, scions), memorial statues to fallen heroes erected at widely dispersed sites, were the favored depiction of the human form in this period; and though the style of representation will change radically, the kouros—the adolescent on the cusp of manhood—will remain the central subject of Greek art. This image of the man-child, examples of which far outnumber all other visual realities, not only is expressive of the Greek ideal but ultimately calls attention to the underlying obsessions of Greek civilization.
In employing the Egyptian pattern, the Greek sculptor at first adhered scrupulously to the overall disposition of corporeal form: the spatial relationships between head and shoulders, between clavicle and chest, between torso and thighs, and so forth, remained exactly as received from Egypt. The arms remained rigidly at the sides, the fists clenched, the left foot striding forward. But there were, from the first, two Greek innovations: the figure was now plainly a youth, rather than the bearded adult of common Egyptian portrayals, and he was naked, his loins no longer skirted as was invariably the case in Egyptian statuary. The Greek propensity for male nudity, both in life and in art, was bothersome to surrounding societies, in which men, though hardly overmodest, thought of complete nudity (at least in public) as a form of humiliation. Slaves and the lower orders of workmen—such as fishermen and quarrymen—might sometimes appear naked in the course of their labors, but dignified social standing, dependent as it was on utter absolution from all forms of manual la
bor, necessarily implied clothing.
Why did the Greeks see this matter so differently—not only from surrounding societies but from other traditions throughout the history of art in which nudity, if allowed at all, has been occasional? Even the single outstanding exception among foreign traditions of art, Indian temple sculpture of the tenth century A.D., is indebted to Greek models. The Greek choice has become the choice of Western art—from earliest archaic Greece to the fall of Rome and then from the early Renaissance to the present (interrupted by the modest Middle Ages during which only Adam and Eve could provide the artist with an excuse for stripping his subjects to their bare essentials). But the artists of Rome, the Renaissance, and later were consciously imitating Greek models, to which we must turn for an answer to our question.
Scholars are not unanimous as to whether public nudity (in labor, in athletics, and at festive occasions such as symposia) was the precedent for the kouroi or whether the kouroi, displayed everywhere, precipitated public nudity; but the most sensible guess would seem to be that, in this case, art was imitating life rather than the other way around. At the same time, nudity certainly became more prevalent in art than in life, since all occasions in art became occasions for nudity. But no Greek soldier, almost invariably unclothed in art, would be so mad as to fight naked (all were heavily armed); no athlete left the gymnasium for a nude stroll through the agora; no inebriated symposiast, however much of a public spectacle he had made of himself the night before, was ever seen exposing himself in the light of day.
Was the society’s encouragement of nudity, especially among young males—whether in statuary or at the gymnasium—just a manifestation of another of its peculiar institutions, socially sanctioned pederasty? If this were so, we should expect to find more sexual content in the statues than we do. The kouroi are never sculpted in arousal. In fact, after the archaic period—as the artists achieve greater flexibility and control over their medium—the genitals of the kouroi, as well as the genitals of virtually all males depicted in Greek art, shrink to a size most modern males would find embarrassing. There are exceptions to this: slaves and foreigners, who are usually shown as ugly, are sometimes depicted with enormous schlongs, as are the Dionysiac satyrs, normally deformed and demented as well; and artists who portray sympotic orgies and bedroom encounters are not shy about showing us exactly what is going on. But all this sort of thing is found on pottery (slaves, foreigners, satyrs, and orgies) and the backs of mirrors (sequestered lovemaking), intended for private titillation, not for public display.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Page 18
