Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Here, for the first time in human history, the forbidden power and even the pathos of the female nude is revealed—not tentatively as one might have expected but with the breathtaking confidence of a genius who can picture publicly what before this has been confined to men’s dreams. No sculptor will again make such a revolution till Michelangelo brings the Middle Ages to a definitive end by unveiling his David to the people of Florence two millennia into the future. What is all the more astounding is that the Greeks, after their initial shock, permitted the public display of this new art and patronized artists who took their inspiration from Praxiteles. After all, artists were not writers like Aristophanes or Euripides. In the Greek class system, they were working-class blokes, people who made their livelihoods by using their hands. No one had to indulge these mere artisans. But they got away with it. Soon the naked goddess was everywhere, sometimes concealing her private parts with one hand; sometimes shielding her breasts with the other; sometimes crouching gracefully at her bath, the folds of her abdomen enveloped by her sculptor in an invisible caress; sometimes reclining and partially draped; sometimes brazenly bare for all to see [31, 32]—and it’s hard to imagine now what the history of Western art would have been, had Aphrodite never been undressed.

  WHAT ENABLED Praxiteles and his fellow sculptors to get away with it? By the late fourth century, Greece was changing, Athens especially. Not that the Greeks had ever allowed themselves to come to a cultural standstill, but by the time of Praxiteles Greek sensibility was evolving precipitately. For one thing, Hippocrates, born on the island of Cos about 460 B.C. and living to at least 370, had revolutionized medicine, establishing it solidly as a form of experimental science and detaching it forever from mystical folk remedies and general quackery. By Praxiteles’s day, Hippocrates’s extensive writings were being taken with high seriousness, particularly his studies of human anatomy, a rich resource for sculptors of the human body. Hippocrates’s no-nonsense anatomical treatises severed the study of the body from mythological imaginings and bade the student confine himself to careful observation and keep before him always the indissoluble link between cause and effect. In this way, Hippocratic medicine served as an indirect cause of the unveiling of Aphrodite and the freeing of Greek sculpture from its remaining taboos.

  Even more important perhaps was the damage Athens had done to its previously impregnable self-confidence. Athens, quintessential city of aretē, land of democracy, home of invincibly courageous freemen, had lost the Peloponnesian War—which was a little like the United States losing to North Korea: the paragon of political institutions had been bested by the most bizarre, the most retrograde polis in the Greek world. By the time Athens surrendered to Sparta in 404 B.C., the great city had become a dependent basket case, its walls in ruins, its population depleted, all its colonies lost, its famous fleet reduced to a dozen ships [1]. The defeat engendered in Athenians of the fourth century, like Praxiteles, a certain skepticism about the imperviously male ideals of the previous century.

  Though Athens recovered some of its wealth and dignity, it had not long to wait before it was assaulted once more, this time by Philip II of Macedon, who ruled over a quasi-Greek kingdom in the Balkans. How Greek the Macedonians were is still a matter of dispute; but the Greeks of the mainland, the islands, and the traditional colonies claimed that the “Greek” spoken by the Macedonians could not be Greek at all, since it was impossible to understand. (I imagine the situation was somewhat parallel to a Scottish movie needing to be distributed with subtitles even in the English-speaking world.) At all events, the Macedonians were surely Greek in their impressive martial abilities, which Philip, an inspired general, knew how to employ to the max. The much-reduced Athenians were no match for him and had finally to reach an unfavorable peace in 346.

  Though Athens remained technically a free city, it now fell under the long shadow cast by Philip, who was assassinated ten years later and succeeded by his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, soon to be the Great. Alexander’s plans were considerably grander than his father’s: he meant to conquer the whole world, and he very nearly succeeded. But before setting out on his first campaign—to capture the Persian empire—he made certain of his hold on Greece by cruelly razing the entire city of Thebes in retribution for its rebelliousness against him. The wholesale massacre of the Thebans kept Greece quiet through the whole of Alexander’s short life. His death in 323 brought to a close the classical or Hellenic period, initiating what we call the Hellenistic Age, a falling off (or so it is thought) from the cultural heights of the fifth century and the better part of the fourth. Certainly, Alexander’s successors were hardly less adept than he at putting Athens in its place. Alexander’s far-flung empire, however, had at length to submit to the growing power of Rome. In 146 all of Greece became a Roman “protectorate”; in 27 the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, made Greece a Roman province. As the Romans themselves would have said, “Sic transit gloria mundi.”3

  As Athens bowed its neck beneath this long series of catastrophes, serenity and confidence, still evident in the fourth-century works of Praxiteles, waned, and another spirit entirely came to the fore. The shift was already evident in the plays of Euripides, who died while the Peloponnesian War was raging and of whom it was said that he drew men not as the ideals “they ought to be” but “as they were.” All the sculpture we have seen so far presents us with idealized figures. Now in the wake of Athenian military losses, the realistic spirit of Euripides invades the minds of the sculptors. It is a general rule of culture that new ideas appear first in literature, only later in the visual arts. This is probably because ideas are so intimately linked to words, which are their primary vehicles, and because the tools of literature are so negligible and transportable, compared with what an artist must use.

  The invasion of realism into Athenian sculpture that, by degrees, paralleled invasions by Sparta, Macedon, and Rome may have got under way because of an increased desire to memorialize the recently deceased as they actually were in life rather than in idealized images that bore little or no relation to remembered faces and bodies. Such idealization made a certain sense in the case of Greek soldiers cut down in their prime, but what sense does it make to memorialize an old man by such means? The sculptors, having schooled themselves in close observation of human anatomy, were now primed to sculpt from life; and the initial result was bust portraits of men like ugly old Socrates [44] and broad-browed Plato [45], their aspects hardly Apollonian.

  Once the divide was crossed we begin to see portraits of all kinds: a defeated Demosthenes [46], the great orator who had tirelessly (and vainly) warned the complacent Athenians of the dangers of Philip of Macedon; an exceedingly preoccupied—and most unheroic—Chrysippus [47], a Stoic philosopher of the third century; a credibly handsome Alexander [48], whose clean-shaven countenance set a new style for the Greeks, who had previously considered the beard to be the sign of manhood, full citizenship, and patriarchal status (as it is still considered by the clergy of the Greek church). The new style lasted well into the Roman imperial period—and to it we still owe the preference of males in the clean-shaven West. (Few, however, could imitate Alexander’s head of carelessly thick curls.)

  The gods were still being sculpted, of course, but even they seemed to exhibit new individuality. Lysippus’s Heracles [49] leans against his club, bulging with inordinate muscles that set him far from the balanced physical ideal of former times—and his labors have plainly exhausted the old bench-presser. Apollo, on the other hand, in the anonymous treatment known as “the Belvedere” [50] is just a bit too slender, a mite too sweet, self-consciously posed, his legs tending toward the feminine, his hairdo straight from the beauty parlor. (What is this, a fashion shoot?) Both figures, however different from one another, have surely been brought to earth.

  If the gods are no longer quite so ideal as they had been, the Greek male as the acme of humanity has surely been called into question. The first non-Greeks to be portrayed heroically in
Greek art are the Celtic barbarians, whom the Greeks began to encounter in the early third century when Gaulish tribes, bent on conquering Greek cities, crossed into Asia Minor. The Celts looked much more like gods than did the Greeks—they were tall, slender, and white, in contrast to Greeks, who despite their idealization of themselves tended to be short, squat, and swarthy—and in their fathomless courage they elected to enter battle naked, except for the gold torques they wore around their necks. For the chinking, clanking Greeks, armed from head to foot [51], to see men enter battle as if they were idealized statuary was quite a surprise; and though the Celts looked very different from themselves in certain respects (they were clean-shaven except for their bushy mustaches, they wore lime in their hair to make the locks stand out), the Greeks declined to caricature them as they had all other barbarians. In the battle monument at Pergamon, the Celts have been defeated (of course)—but they are truly beautiful, heroic, and godlike in their defeat [52].

  Now, suffering—even the suffering of good men—can be depicted with new intensity. The Laocoön group [53], probably sculpted a decade or two after the monument at Pergamon, is an almost excessive tour de force on the suffering of a good man—in this case, Laocoön, priest of Troy during its siege by the Greeks. Two legends circle Laocoön: first, that he was killed by snakes for opposing the entry of the Wooden Horse; second, that he was a sensualist who had broken his vow of priestly celibacy, his two sons being the proof, and all three had to suffer divine retribution. Take your choice—but the face and torso of Laocoön, attempting with every ounce of his strength to free himself from the twisting, all-enveloping serpents, while knowing full well what the end will be, is a stark nightmare from the depths of the human psyche—a thing impossible to imagine the Greeks creating even a few years earlier.

  Scenes of heroic suffering now compete with scenes of daily life and its ordinary brutalities. Marsyas, a satyr who had challenged Apollo to a music contest, is strung up on a tree to be flayed alive [54], the punishment for his hubris, while Apollo’s Scythian slave [55]—a man of anxious (or cruelly expectant?) visage—crouches beneath the doomed Marsyas, sharpening the knife that will be used in the punishment. Unlike the athletes of old who always stood above us on pedestals, a battered boxer [56] looks up at us, his wounded face a palimpsest of suffering. A bent old woman [57], her body distorted by age and illness, her face disfigured by the effort of walking, hauls herself forward. She is on her way to market, as the dead fowl and basket of live chicks grasped in her left hand attest. But her head is garlanded, her old feet shod in elegant, thin-strapped sandals; and, in her effort, her right breast is about to escape her plunging neckline. Here is an old beauty that Rembrandt might have painted, a country girl come to town for a festival, perhaps her last, and wearing her best for the occasion. In a bronze statue of the second century, a small boy, ordinary and unheroic, sits on an outcrop of stone, carefully removing a thorn from his foot [58].

  The new sculptors are as versatile in pleasure as in pain. A sprawling satyr [59] has obviously had a little too much fun and is sleeping off his drunken revel. His body is heroic surely, but the pose, which calls attention to his now-slack genitals, is the polar opposite of the heroic chastity of the kouroi. This could have come from any gay magazine. Nor is the satyr, previously a type of ugliness, at all ugly. Here is down-to-earth, in-your-face, erotic realism, enticing, salacious, forbidden, available—and too good to be true, since nothing will wake the satyr. In a separate group that could almost be a reenactment of the sprawling satyr’s earlier revel, another fun-loving satyr [60]—a tautly muscled, handsome one, all satyrs now seeming to have shed their previous deformities—beats out time with a foot clapper and strikes his cymbals with gusto. He is the very figure of the young, involved musician, and his earthy smile leaves no doubt as to where his music will lead. The lovely young nymph [61] who responds so delightedly to his lusty invitation is herself far removed from the crazed bacchae of old, her open, happy face and firm breasts creating—for the first time in ancient art—an utterly innocent image of freely budding female sexuality. Seated on a rock but already rising toward her musician, she is removing her sandals in preparation for the wild dance to come. Of this extraordinary couple, John Boardman says they represent “the delightful carefree world of the Dionysian outdoors … a Hellenistic fête-champêtre.”

  Dionysus himself has been appearing in Greek art with increasing frequency. He seems always on the go. In an early appearance (of the late sixth century), he was already a voyager, shown on the exquisitely detailed interior of an Athenian drinking cup by the potter Exekias, sailing the wine-dark sea in his nicely curved craft [62]. Having turned the pirates who tried to kidnap him into dolphins, garlanded and bearded Dionysus blithely steers his little boat, which has sprouted a vine of large grapes that sway above sail and mast, as the dolphins circle helplessly. This magnificent idea from the tail end of the archaic period parallels Euripides’s conception of a Dionysus on pilgrimage, a magical being who arrives from nowhere. Unlike the calmly balanced Apollo, Dionysus precipitates growth and change, rather than ruling over sameness and stasis.

  In sculptures of the fourth century, he himself is seen to change and grow. In a work probably by Praxiteles, Dionysus is a baby in the arms of Hermes [63], god of roads and frontiers (in which guise his apotropaic image stood at Greek boundaries), of good luck and interpretation (thus hermeneutics). Hermes, when he was the newborn son of Zeus, made a fool of Apollo on the very day he was born, subsequently assuaging Apollo’s wrath with the gift of the lyre, which Baby Hermes had just invented. No wonder the adult Hermes should eye Baby Dionysus with amused affection, while Dionysus’s little index finger points to Hermes as if to say, “You’re my kind of guy.” In a contrasting study by Lysippus, Baby Dionysus, already grown much larger, is hugged against the chest of an aging satyr, who needs to lean against a tree trunk to support the infant’s weight [64]. The satyr, more rough-hewn and elemental than Hermes, studies the face of cuddly little Dionysus as if to say with admiration, “My day is nearly done—but, god, will you wreak havoc!”

  A splendid late-fourth-century floor of pebbled mosaic at Pella, the capital of Macedon, gives us Dionysus once more on the move, this time as a beardless adolescent, muscular but sensual, alert but relaxed, his left hand waving a beribboned thyrsus—the customary wand of the god and his devotees, wreathed in ivy and surmounted by a pine cone—his right hand pressing the throat of his leaping steed, a wildly magnificent panther, completely responsive to the god [65]. We can almost hear the bacchae send up their thrilling shriek: “Euoe, euoe! The god is coming, the god is coming! Dionysus is here!”

  “What fun we will have!” No doubt this is what is on the mind of the long-legged, elderly satyr who tackles the nubile nymph with such awkward vigor [66]. But the satyr, who has thus far viewed his resisting prey only from behind—and a singularly fetching behind it is—is about to be given a shock, as is the viewer. As one proceeds around the couple, it becomes evident that the soft, round nymph is a hermaphrodite with a prominent penis. Such a scherzo becomes more common as the Hellenistic Age runs its course, even as the laughter begins to ring more hollow. Small sculptures (and occasionally monumental studies) of priapic dwarves, hopeless drunks, and other people of the streets serve as measures of the crumbling of the classical ideal and the sudden plummeting of the age’s sensibility. A grotesquely deformed figure, seemingly a model for a larger sculpture, dances as he displays his enormous phallus, one hand in his mouth, the other up his ass [67]. A hideously crippled hunchback sits, presumably in public, masturbating his massive erection [68]. The idea behind the French phrase for orgasm, la petite mort, here devolves into death-in-life, life-as-death. And there is no pity, just routine comedy—jokes number 67 and 68. Ha, ha, ha.

  Apollo, the pristine figure who served as ultimate model for all the heroic statues of gods and men, has been bested, as have the Greeks themselves. He is seldom seen nowadays, and there are rumors
of his death. Dionysus has come, Dionysus has come, Dionysus of dark wine and inspiration, Dionysus of growth and change, Dionysus of passion and death. And Dionysus has stayed too long.

  1 Retributive punishment of individuals by a political power is not the only course in which nudity can appear shameful. As the director Stanley Donen, no show business virgin himself, exclaimed recently of Kathleen Turner’s nude turn in the Broadway production of The Graduate: “I never even went to see Kathleen Turner naked, because I knew what my reaction would be: ‘That’s how Kathleen Turner looks naked!’ I’d be embarrassed for her, and for all of us staring at her nakedness, and I’d be out the door.”

  2 Since no one has ever discovered the urn Keats describes, the suspicion has arisen that what he actually viewed were the so-called Elgin Marbles, plundered by Lord Elgin from the Athenian Parthenon and still harbored by the British Museum.

  3 “So passes worldly glory.” The ultimate source of this most famous of Latin tags has never been identified. It used to be spoken at the ritual of papal coronation but is in all likelihood older than Christianity. For a fuller exposition of the career of Alexander the Great, see Chapter 1 of Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Volume III of this series. Alexander—whatever his Greek may have sounded like—had been tutored by Aristotle and loved Greek literature, especially the Iliad, a copy of which he always kept under his pillow, along with a very sharp dagger. He is responsible for spreading the Greek language (in a simplified form) and Greek culture as far north as the Danube, as far south as North Africa, and as far east as India. This was the ancient Ecumene, which Rome would inherit and spread farther west—as far as the island of Britain.