Artifact & Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian
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Artifact & Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian
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| ISBN-13: | 9780226080963 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 278 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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Artifact and Artifice
Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian
By Jonathan M. Hall
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-09698-8
CHAPTER 1
Classical Archaeology: The "Handmaid of History"?
Can the geology and geochemistry of the Delphi region offer clues to why the oracle of Apollo was so highly regarded in the ancient world? Should the proposed redating of a single temple cause us to revise the chronology we assign to Classical art? Why did the Athenians wait so long before repairing their temples after the Persian invasion of 480–479 BCE? Can we trace the footprints of the historical Sokrates in the Athenian agora? Are the human remains discovered in a Macedonian tomb at Vergina those of Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great? Was there a historical individual named Romulus and did he found Rome in 753 BCE? Are the literary accounts of the fall of the Roman monarchy and the establishment of the Republic reflected in the construction of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus? Have we discovered the Palatine residence of the emperor Augustus? And is the tomb beneath the High Altar of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican that of the apostle Peter?
These are the questions that are examined over the course of the next nine chapters. They are all cases that continue to generate scholarly disagreement, and many of them have also attracted recent attention in the popular media—not infrequently because of the political issues that are involved. To the degree that they tend to revolve around specific individuals or events, they are, of course, only a subset of the sorts of questions that ancient historians and classical archaeologists ask. Since the late 1950s, many historians have increasingly eschewed traditional political or military narratives for more social, economic, or cultural approaches to the past, and "idealist" histories, centred around "great men," have yielded in many quarters to more materialist analyses. The last few decades have, for example, witnessed detailed studies of topics such as the ancient economy, social organization and class, literacy, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, or religion, even if much of this has been conducted on the basis of epigraphy or papyrology, rather than archaeology, or through comparisons with better-documented societies. Conversely, many classical archaeologists have turned to more processual readings of the past that display little or no dependence upon literary texts to illuminate themes such as trade and interaction, urbanization, settlement patterns, and the exploitation of the landscape or technology. A new battery of scientific techniques now allows us to answer questions about the organization of production, food preparation and dietary habits, demography, and pathology which we would never have guessed from literary sources alone.
Above all else, however, the choice of these specific case studies has been guided by the fact that they should be relatively familiar to the reader because, ultimately, this is a book about historical method—that is, how the practitioner evaluates archaeological evidence against the textual documents that have traditionally dominated the field of ancient history. It thus subscribes to the view that history is not simply a matter of memorizing and synthesizing an immense amount of disparate, but seemingly self- evident, data—a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that we often use the word "history" as a synonym for "the past." Rather, history is an active, forensic practice, which involves engaging with, testing and interrogating the fragmentary clues that have survived from the past. There are no hard and fast "rules" for how one undertakes this practice—which is why I generally avoid offering definitive resolutions to the cautionary tales that follow, preferring to leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. But there are, I believe, "more" and "less" methodologically sound ways to proceed, and this ultimately depends on the degree of self-critical awareness we bring to the project. In this sense, the route that we take is just as important and rewarding as the destination to which we are headed, since, in confronting our own assumptions and value judgements, we inevitably have to engage in a profoundly humanistic project of self-knowledge.
In some of the cases that follow, archaeologists have turned to literary texts for help in interpreting material remains. More commonly, however, ancient historians have turned to the archaeological record for confirmation or refutation of information furnished by ancient authors. In both cases, there is an assumption—latent or otherwise—that the two types of evidence represent two sides of the same coin. The assumption is not necessarily flawed, but today it is probably accepted more by ancient historians than it is by classical archaeologists, many of whom react, perhaps correctly, against the characterization of archaeology as "the handmaid of history"—ironically, a phrase that seems to have been coined not by a historian but by the president of the Archaeological Institute of America. The relationship between history and archaeology will be explored further in chapter 11, but, for now, it may be worth tracing very briefly how classical archaeology arrived at its presumptively ancillary role.
The Rediscovery of the Past
Anthony Snodgrass has argued that there are four competing—though not necessarily mutually exclusive—views of classical archaeology as it is practised today. According to the first, classical archaeology is a branch of archaeology and therefore amenable to the sorts of methods employed in archaeology at large. The second regards classical archaeology as a branch of classics that employs material evidence to shed light on other—largely textual—testimony. The third view sees classical archaeology as a branch of art history. The fourth considers it to be an autonomous field with aims that are significantly different from those of other disciplines, including other fields within both classics and archaeology. The first and last of these are largely developments of the nineteenth and, especially, twentieth centuries, and we shall return to them shortly. The second and third, by contrast, are inherent in the very origins of classical archaeology, which emerged by means of a triangulation process between, on the one hand, art history and connoisseurship and, on the other, interests that were more philological or literary.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the expurgation of "pagan" rites and culture that accompanied the triumph of Christianity, the monuments of the ancient world were transformed into vestiges of an obsolete past. Some were allowed to fall into decay, subject to looting or serving as sources for building materials. Others were appropriated by the new order and endowed with a Christian significance in order to obliterate their heretical pedigree: thus, the Parthenon in Athens was converted into the church of the Parthenos Theotokos (Maiden Mother of God) in the 480s CE, while the Pantheon in Rome was handed over to Pope Boniface IV by the Byzantine emperor Phocas and consecrated as a church to St. Mary of the Martyrs in 609 CE. It is not that the denizens of medieval cities were entirely indifferent to the traces of antiquity that were everywhere visible: in 1162, the Senate of Rome decreed that anybody caught damaging or vandalizing Trajan's Column was liable to execution and confiscation of property. By and large, however, a true enthusiasm for the classical past had to wait until the Renaissance.
For the humanists of the Renaissance, antiquity—and especially Roman antiquity—presented an exemplary, if ultimately unattainable, model to be followed. Most, such as Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) who first discovered Cicero's letters to Atticus, were guided by newly discovered manuscripts of ancient authors. But Petrarch was also a fervent supporter of the self-proclaimed consul of Rome, Cola di Rienzo, whose collection of antique inscriptions bolstered his aspirations to establish a popular government along the lines of the ancient Roman Republic—ultimately leading to his violent assassination in 1354. Typical of the Renaissance spirit was the series of volumes on the historical topography of Rome and its monuments, written in the 1440s and 1450s by Flavio Biondo, who believed that the Eternal City could serve as a "speculum, exemplar, imago omnis virtutis" (mirror, paradigm and image of all virtue). At about the same time, Ciriaco (Cyriac) dei Pizzicolli, a merchant from Ancona who had been sent to the Aegean to win back markets for the west ahead of a possible renewed crusade against the Turks, described, drew, and measured a number of Greek monuments, including the Parthenon and the temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. Unusually for his time, Cyriac had learnt both Greek and Latin but was of the opinion that monuments and inscriptions possessed more faith (fides) than texts. With the capture of Constantinople in May 1453 and the annexation of much of the former Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Turks, Cyriac would be one of the last westerners to visit Greece for at least a couple of centuries: the German scholar Martin Kraus, writing in 1554, described Greece as a "terra incognita."
By the end of the sixteenth century, artists and architects were flocking to Italy to seek inspiration for their designs. Inigo Jones, often credited with having introduced renaissance architecture to Britain, made his first visit to Rome in 1598, while, in 1666, Louis XIV founded the Académie de France à Rome to allow artists to work in the presence of classical masterpieces. There was, however, another side to this. The instructional value that the humanists invested in the vestiges of the past was inevitably converted into a pecuniary value whereby ancient objects were appreciated in their own right rather than for the information they could yield about the past or the lessons they could teach for the future. By the early seventeenth century, Rome and Italy had become the prime destinations for aristocrats embarking on the Grand Tour. This exposure to the sites and antiquities of Italy had profound consequences for the appreciation of classical culture in Western Europe but it also fostered a mania for collecting. On Jones's second visit to Rome in 1613–14, he was accompanied by Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, who used his position as a foreign envoy of Charles I to build up a collection of ancient sculpture, mostly from Italy, for his townhouse just off the Strand in London. The tendency to furnish stately homes with objets d'art acquired abroad picked up pace in the eighteenth century. On his return from Rome in 1718, Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, brought with him a large assemblage of manuscripts and sculpture which formed the kernel of the collection that he installed at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Two years later, Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke, acquired 1,300 pieces from the vast collection of paintings and statues that had been assembled in Rome by Vincenzo and Benedetto Giustiniani, while the group of marbles, bronzes, and terracottas acquired by Charles Townley in the 1770s now forms the core of the British Museum's collection of Greek and Roman sculpture.
The realization that excavation might satisfy the growing demand for antiquities on the part of collectors probably arose in 1560, with Pirro Ligorio's topographical study of Hadrian's Villa near Tivoli, ahead of the construction of a new villa for his patron, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este. In 1711, Charles VII, king of the Two Sicilies and heir to the Spanish throne, appropriated a plot of land at Resina, on the Bay of Naples, in the expectation of finding objets d'art to adorn the new royal palace he was constructing at nearby Portici. A year or two earlier, digging at the site had revealed the remains of the theatre of ancient Herculaneum, a Roman town buried under a pyroclastic flow when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Under the direction of a Spanish military engineer, Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre, a series of subterranean tunnels was constructed to explore the remains that had been buried beneath some 20 metres of volcanic debris. When Karl Jakob Weber, Alcubierre's Swiss assistant, proposed a reorientation of the tunnels to understand better the urban fabric of the town, he was severely reprimanded by Alcubierre for concentrating more on streets than on antiquities. In 1748, attention shifted to another site near Torre Annunziata, to the southeast of Herculaneum, where excavations brought to light ancient Pompeii—a victim of the same volcanic eruption though buried beneath a thinner level of ash, thus allowing for an open excavation by which sculpture and paintings might be retrieved more easily.
The Opening Up of Greece
The Ottoman conquest of Crete in 1669 led to a more stable environment for travel in the Aegean, and some antiquarians and collectors were quick to exploit it. In 1674, Charles- François Olier, marquis de Nointel, was dispatched as French ambassador to Constantinople with the express purpose of acquiring antiquities for the collections of Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin. In his company was the young painter Jacques Carrey, whose detailed drawings of the sculptures on the Parthenon were to prove invaluable when, thirteen years later, the central part of the structure was blown out by a Venetian cannonball, causing considerable damage to the sculptural decoration. In 1676, the French antiquarian Jacob Spon and the English botanist George Wheler began their own tour of Greece, publishing detailed descriptive accounts and engravings of the monuments that they saw, including the temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian acropolis, the Tower of the Winds (a hydraulic clock) in the Roman agora, and the choregic monument of Lysikrates in the Street of the Tripods. At this stage, Italy continued to attract more visitors than Ottoman-controlled Greece: the earliest studies in English of Greek architecture were actually based on the ruins of temples in southern Italy and Sicily. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the Society of Dilettanti, founded in London by Grand Tour alumni in 1734 to promote the study of Greek and Roman culture, extended its interest to Greece and sponsored the visits between 1751 and 1753 of the painter James Stuart and the architect Nicholas Revett. The Antiquities of Athens, which appeared in three volumes between 1762 and 1794, contained detailed descriptions, measurements, and drawings of Athenian monuments and was to prove immensely influential in inspiring Greek Revival architecture such as William Wilkins's design for Downing College, Cambridge, and Thomas Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, often credited as the founding father of Greek archaeology, never visited Greece, but, in his capacity as prefect of antiquities for Pope Clement XIII, he had access to hundreds of pieces of Greek art in the vast collections of the Vatican. In his monumental Geschichte der Kunst der Alterthums (History of Ancient Art), first published in 1764, Winckelmann set out—for the first time—a stylistically based, four-part chronological scheme for the development of Greek art which still, with various modifications, forms the basis of stylistic dating today. The first phase was termed "Archaic" and is roughly equivalent to what is now termed the "severe style" of the early fifth century. The second, "Sublime," phase, which, for Winckelmann, signalled the apogee of Greek sculpture, was associated with the sculptor Pheidias and his successors in the later fifth and early fourth centuries. This was followed in turn by a "Beautiful" phase (from Praxiteles to Lysippos in the second half of the fourth century) and, finally, a "Decadent" phase (the art of the later Hellenistic and Roman periods). This schema was actually based on Joseph Justus Scaliger's four-age model for the development of Greek poetry, published in 1608, but—unlike Scaliger—Winckelmann was more interested in universal truths than in historical particularities. His aim was to uncover the "essence" of art (das Wesen der Kunst), and, in line with contemporary Enlightenment thought, he entertained a unitary conception of culture as a transnational march towards rationality and perfection in which all human societies participated, albeit at different paces. If the Greeks had arrived at that goal early on, it was because their defeat of the Persians in 479 BCE had ushered in a "freedom which gave birth to great events, political changes, and jealousy ... [and] planted, as it were in the very production of these effects, the germ of noble and elevated sentiments."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Artifact and Artifice by Jonathan M. Hall. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Preface
1. Classical Archaeology: The “Handmaid of History”?
The Rediscovery of the Past
The Opening Up of Greece
Philological Archaeology
The Birth of Prehistory
Theory Wars
2. Delphic Vapours
The Triumph of Science?
The Delphic Oracle
The Geology of the Site
Inspired Mantic or Fraudulent Puppet?
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 2
3. The Persian Destruction of Eretria
A Tale of Two Temples
Yet Another Temple?
Unmooring “Fixed Points”
Science to the Rescue?
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 3
4. Eleusis, the Oath of Plataia, and the Peace of Kallias
The Archaios Neos at Eleusis
The Oath of Plataia
The Peace of Kallias
Restoring the Sanctuaries of Attica
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 4
5. Sokrates in the Athenian Agora
The House of Simon
The State Prison
Sokrates on Death Row
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 5
6. The Tombs at Vergina
The Discovery of the Tombs
The Political Dimension
Aigeai and Vergina
The Occupants of Tomb II
The Tomb and Its Contents
A Third Possibility
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 6
7. The City of Romulus
Untangling the Foundation Myths of Rome
Romulus and Remus
The Early Kings Materialized?
State Formation and Urbanization
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 7
8. The Birth of the Roman Republic
The Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus
The Fall of a Tyrant
The Nature of the Kingship
The Origins of the Consulship
“Etruscan” Rome
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 8
9. Imperial Austerity: The House of Augustus
The House Unearthed
From Dux to Princeps
Reconciling the Evidence
Conclusion
Documents for Chapter 9
10. The Bones of St. Peter
The Discovery of the Tomb
Beneath St. Peter’s
Peter in Rome
Peter on the Appian Way
Peter in Jerusalem
Conclusion
Postscript: The Tomb of St. Philip
Documents for Chapter 10
11. Conclusion: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian
Navigating between Textual and Material Evidence
Words and Things
Bridging the “Great Divide”?
List of Ancient Authors
Glossary
BibliographyIndex