The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Cities rewarded their representatives handsomely. Competitors in the great festivals were apt to be men of wealth who could afford the time to train and could pay their own way to the contests. Still, “amateur” citizen-athletes expected to be paid for the glory they brought to their hometown. Solon, the great Athenian legislator (c.590 B.C.), enacted a limit on victory grants—five hundred drachmas for the Olympics, one hundred drachmas (the year’s earnings of a workingman) for the others. Fringe benefits included free meals, front seats at festivals, and exemption from taxes. The winner was honored by a hymn of victory and celebrated in odes by the great lyric poets.

  The custom of erecting statues of the victors would prove fertile for the arts in the West. In the earliest times a city might erect a statue of the victorious athlete both at the scene of his victory and back home. The victor himself might offer a little votive statue in gratitude. By the sixth century it had become a custom to allow the victor to erect a life-size statue of himself. In 408, when Eubatus, a runner from Cyrene, came to compete at the Olympics, an oracle had already promised him success, so he arrived there with his own victory statue. An attractive as well as a self-confident man, he aroused the passions of the famous courtesan Lais, who tried to seduce him. He resisted her advances but brought home her portrait. When his wife saw the portrait of Lais, she was so impressed by his fidelity that she erected another statue of him in Cyrene.

  During the Panhellenic athletic festivals, thousands of victory statues were fashioned and erected at festival sites and the hometowns of the athletes. But of the life-size bronze victory figures only a few, like the charioteer from Delphi, remain.

  The statues of the great athletes were supposed to cure illness. One of the most popular cults surrounded Theogenes, the famous boxer from Thasos, an island in the north Aegean, whose athletic victories in mid-fifth century B.C. numbered more than thirteen hundred. Other athletes were so intimidated by Theogenes’ reputation as a heavyweight winner that sometimes they refused to confront him. And then the umpires conceded to him what the Greeks called a victory “without dust” (akoniti). Exploiting his name (Theogenes, “god-born”), he claimed that he was not simply the son of a priest but himself a son of a god, and so a demigod. In a rebellion supported by Theogenes in 465 B.C. Thasos revolted from the Delian League, and rejoined Athens only after a siege.

  But at his death Theogenes left a legacy of hatred. One night when an enemy crept out to flog his statue in the marketplace, the statue fell and killed him. Under a primitive principle of law (perpetuated in England as the law of deodand) an object that causes death is itself guilty and must be punished. This guilty statue of Theogenes was taken out to sea and dumped overboard. The next season the Thasos crops failed, bringing an unprecedented famine. When the city fathers consulted the oracle at Delphi, they were advised to recall their political exiles. Still the famine continued. The Delphic oracle next suggested they try reviving the memory of Theogenes. They fished up Theogenes’ statue from the sea bottom, replaced it on its original base and so ended the famine. This time the Thasians bound down the statue with chains. Five centuries after Theogenes’ death the boxer’s statue was still famous for its cures. On his travels Pausanias noted Theogenes cult statues across Greece, and even among the barbarians. The people of Thasos made a good thing of their athletic demigod. If anyone offered less than one obol to Theogenes’ memory, they proclaimed, “it will lie on his conscience” and not accomplish the desired effect.

  Concerned citizens, including Euripides, Plato, and Diogenes, warned against idolizing athletes. The sixth-century philosopher Xenophanes (born 576 B.C.) of Colophon, in Asia Minor, was troubled by the extravagant honors to a winning athlete in his home city. “Yet is he not so worthy as I, and my wisdom is better than the strength of men and horses. Nay this is a foolish custom nor is it right to honour strength more than excellent wisdom.” A century later Euripides was more vivid. “Of all the countless evils throughout Hellas none is worse than the race of athletes.… Slaves of their belly and their jaw they know not how to live well.… In youth they strut about in splendour, the idols of the city, but when bitter old age comes upon them they are cast aside like worn-out cloaks.” He asked, “Who ever helped his fatherland by winning a crown for wrestling, or for speed of foot, or hurling the diskos or striking a good blow on the jaw?” And, in the rising Roman Empire, Galen (A.D. c.130–c.200) himself was eloquent in his disgust:

  In the blessings of the mind athletes have no share. Beneath their mass of flesh and blood their souls are stifled as in a sea of mud. Nor do they enjoy the best blessings even of the body. Neglecting the old rule of health which prescribes moderation in all things they spend their lives in over-exercising, in over-eating, and over-sleeping like pigs. Hence they seldom live to old age and if they do they are crippled and liable to all sorts of diseases. They have not health nor have they beauty. Even those who are naturally well proportioned become fat and bloated: their faces are often shapeless and unsightly owing to the wounds received in boxing and pankration.

  (Translated by E. Norman Gardiner)

  Life in the open air in athletic Greece would change the sculptural image they inherited from claustrophilic Egypt. While the Egyptian figures wore a brief skirt, now the Greek kouroi were nude. Some are slimmer than others, perhaps reflecting the physical types in different parts of Greece. Still, with only minor variations, they all follow the canon of proportions revealed on the grids found on Egyptian figures. Complete or in part, more than two hundred of these authentic kouros statues survive.

  The kouroi were the Greek sculptor’s “laboratory.” And naturalism, like the nude, was to be a contribution of Greek sculpture to Western art. The nude, as Kenneth Clark reminds us, is an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C. They believed that unashamed nudity and their willingness to appear nude in the Games distinguished them from the barbarians. This had not always been so. In the funeral games for Patroclus, Homer recounts that when Euryalus wrapped his hands in cowhide thongs he put on his boxing trunks. Thucydides (471?–400? B.C.), too, observed that the earliest Greeks, like the barbarians of his own time, “even in the Olympic contests … wore belts across their middles; and it is but a few years since that the practice ceased.”

  When and why the Greek athletes first took off their shorts was a source of irreverent legend. Perhaps the new fashion was set when Orsippus of Megara, at the Olympics in 720 B.C., lost his shorts in the middle of his race. He won anyway, and others followed his example of nudity. Others recalled that, at one of the festival races at Athens, the leading runner’s shorts slipped down and tripped him before he could reach the finish line. To prevent such accidents in the future, an edict required contestants to be naked. King Agesilaus of Sparta (444–360 B.C.) who organized the defense against the Persians, though notorious for his own poor physique, once exhibited Persian prisoners of war naked to encourage his own men—by contrasting the flabby Persians with the trim and bronzed Spartans.

  The first nudes were only male, the kouroi. By the fifth century there were a few female nudes, but these did not become common till later centuries, and even then with some inhibition. Male gods were usually portrayed nude, while female goddesses were usually draped, with the conspicuous exception of Aphrodite. From time to time women had their athletic contests. Inscriptions do survive for statues of three women victors at Delphi, but they probably did not compete against men. Among statues of victors at Olympia, Pausanias (second century A.D.) did not find even one of a woman. He described the girls’ games at the Temple of Hera, sister and consort of Zeus, queen of heaven and protectress of marriage.

  Once every four years the women of the Committee of Sixteen weave a robe for the statue of Hera, and they also arrange the Heraean festival. This consists of races for unmarried girls. They are not all of the same age; the youngest run first, then those of the second age group and finally the oldest girls. This is how they compete: their hair hangs loos
e, and they wear a tunic reaching to a little above the knee, with the right shoulder bare as far as the breast. Like the men, they have the Olympic stadium reserved to them for these Games, but the stade is shortened for their races by about a sixth. To the victors they give olive wreaths and a share of the beef sacrificed to Hera, and they are allowed to erect statues of themselves with inscriptions.… As with the Olympic festival, they trace back these girls’ Games to antiquity.

  This girls’ costume was the familiar dress of the goddess Artemis (or Diana) as huntress.

  At Sparta, freer than Athens in such matters, by the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. women, in training to be fit mothers of Spartan soldiers, were competing naked before men. “Gymnastic,” the Greek word for athletics, meant literally “exercises performed naked.” During the most popular events, wrestling and pankration, it would have been hard to keep a decent cover. In Sparta, though not elsewhere, women did wrestle, but there is no record of women boxers anywhere in Greece. Salacious rumors reported girls wrestling with boys on the island of Chios in the third century A.D. Plato in his Laws required physical training for women. He rejected wrestling and pankration but favored racing and fencing provided girls over thirteen wore “appropriate dress.” At Olympia women were not admitted as spectators to men’s athletic meets. Pausanias records that any woman caught at the games would be thrown from the cliffs of Mount Typaeum. Pericles declared in his funeral speech that the greatest glory of a woman was to not be talked about by men, whether in praise or blame. It seems that women’s races were organized only for “virgins,” and marriage (usually at about eighteen) ended a woman’s athletic career.

  While athletic contests displayed ample models of the mature male body, there was not the same opportunity to observe the female body. Praxiteles (born c.390 B.C.) was called the “inventor” of the female nude for his Aphrodite of Cnidus (c.370 B.C., known only through copies), of legendary beauty. Before him the male ideal had shaped sculptors’ figures of the female. When Zeuxis (c.400 B.C.) set about painting a Helen for the Temple of Hera, for models he asked the people of Kroton to show him their most beautiful virgins. Instead they took him to the gymnasium, showed him the boys exercising there, and said he could surely imagine the beauty of their sisters. Earlier sculptors and painters seem not to have worked from models in a studio but from watching athletes at exercise. Not to be put off, Zeuxis insisted on a proper female model. The public council came to his aid. “He did not believe he could find in one body all the things he looked for in beauty,” Cicero later recounted, and so selected five maidens.

  The Egyptian contrast can remind us that naturalistic art was not inevitable. But art that aimed to copy nature would dominate Rome, the Renaissance, and modern Western Europe. In the tradition of Myron, Phidias, and Praxiteles, it expressed a new attitude, too, toward the artist himself. Still, as we shall see, copying “nature” was not the same as copying the distinctive features of one individual. The artist’s signature began to appear on works of sculpture. No longer a mere craftsman trying to do better what others had already done, he was in a competitive personal quest. The beauty of the natural living body was his unattainable ideal. Even before the subjects of Greek nudes were distinguished and their models identified, the artists began to be individualized.

  The Greeks of course had to imagine an “inventor” of the art of sculpture, and they called him Daedalus. The legendary craftsman (c.690 B.C.) had been born in Athens, but was plagued by a nephew who invented the saw and the potter’s wheel and threatened to excel him in skill. The jealous Daedalus threw him down to his death from the Acropolis, and was forced to leave the city. In Crete Daedalus’s ingenuity made him famous. To confine the Minotaur, he devised the Labyrinth, and then, to prevent his leaving Crete, King Minos used the Labyrinth to imprison Daedalus and his son Icarus. To escape, Daedalus made wings with wax and feathers that carried him all the way to Sicily, and so he became the first man to fly. But, in the familiar story, when Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax on his wings melted, and he drowned in the part of the Aegean that came to be called the Icarian Sea. After his escape, Daedalus continued his miraculous craftsmanship, becoming the inventor of sculpture.

  There probably was a sculptor named Daedalus (c.650 B.C.) who came from Crete. Wooden cult images, Pausanias reported, had been called dae-dala (“wonders of craftsmanship”), and the real Daedalus may have fashioned these into recognizable human forms. “Being the first to give them open eyes, and parted legs, and outstretched arms,” Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian of the first century B.C., recounted, “he justly won the admiration of men; for before his time statues were made with closed eyes and hands hanging down and cleaving to their sides.” Other archaic sculptors, disciples of Daedalus, came to be known as the Daedalids, who were said to be the first sculptors in marble.

  The progress toward a freer, more natural portrayal of the human body was unmistakable. But it was not matched by comparable progress in knowledge of human anatomy. The classic Greeks did not consider the study of anatomy a proper end in itself. They knew the human body from the outside, from gymnasiums and athletic festivals, but did not dissect. From the sixth century, the postures of kouroi became more natural and more accurate anatomically in an ever more vital portrayal of the living body in movement. And across this mountain-fractured land the development again was remarkably uniform. It is much easier to date the figures than to localize them. Sculptors, like architects, were much in demand across Greece, and signatures from all over intermingle, transcending politics in the community of art.

  The dominant Panhellenic theme is increasing naturalism. Comparing the kouroi from decade to decade shows the head becoming more rounded, arms more subtly shaped, buttocks acquiring their characteristic slight hollow, and legs more accurately curving. The ear ceases to be schematized on one plane, and instead is scrupulously modeled into its lobe, its tragus, and antitragus. Unfortunately the noses are usually missing today, but eyes gradually reveal the roundness of the eyeball, the recess at the inner corner, and finally the lachrymal caruncle, a small fleshy excrescence. A comparable increasing precision appears in the modeling of hair, mouth, collarbone, chest, abdomen, shoulder blades, and feet.

  The whole figure becomes more alive as stance becomes relaxed and the rigid symmetry of posture disappears. The heel is lifted, the arms raised, the head turned. Besides the familiar kouroi, there appear sculptured monuments in varied shapes and sizes. Designed to fit into pediments, metopes, and friezes of buildings are figures reclining and moving, striding, flying, running, falling. Greek sculpture in the great age must have been still more varied than what we can see today. Their favored sculptural material was bronze. In the early seventh century solid casting had been displaced by hollow casting. Bronze freed the sculptor to uplift limbs and tempted him to new postures. But in late antiquity, when marble statues were burned in lime-kilns, bronze statues were melted for their metal, leaving our picture of ancient sculpture sketchy and accidental.

  The quest of Greek sculptors reached a spectacular climax in the fifth century B.C., when the stiff Egyptian figure had been miraculously transformed. A new artistic freedom had come with the exhilarating Greek defeat of the Persians at Marathon (490 B.C.) and Salamis (480 B.C.). In philosophy, too, we see a new sense of flux and a search for ways of describing change. Heraclitus (flourished c.500 B.C.) was opposing Thales’ single imperishable substance with his notion of endless flux. Pythagoras saw flux in the transmigration of souls, and he envisaged rhythm and proportion everywhere. Parmenides and Zeno found new ways to separate Being from Becoming. The new interest in mechanics suggested a new internal relation among parts of the body in motion.

  Nudes now included females. A new subtlety came even into the rendering of drapery, which became a hallmark of Greek sculpture in the Great Age. The body took freer gestures and motions, illustrated in the familiar discus thrower of Myron (flourished c.460–440 B.C.). This was the age of Phidias
(500 B.C.), who sculpted three statues of Athena for the Acropolis, supervised the frieze of the Parthenon, and made the colossal ivory-and-gold Zeus at Olympia. From Praxiteles in the next century (born at Athens, c.390 B.C.) we luckily have one surviving original, the celebrated Hermes with the infant Dionysus (found at Olympia, 1877).

  Athletic victory statues were ideal types. While sculptors might distinguish between the physique of a runner and that of a boxer, they still would not portray the features of a particular victor. Interested in man in general, they did not leave us individualized portraits of the memorable figures. When gods were revered in ideal human form the same physical type represented man and gods equally. Athenians, fearing a “cult of personality,” ostracized (487–417 B.C.) individuals who threatened to become tyrants, even if they had only found ways to include their likeness in a public monument. Among the reasons for Phidias’s exile, we have seen, was the accusation that he had portrayed himself on the shield of Athena on the Acropolis.

  The mask, the hallmark of the Greek theater, expressed the classic preference for ideal types and the fear of personal uniqueness. Except for a few early experiments, masks plainly representing the features of specific individuals do not appear until the Great Age of Greek sculpture is past.