Clara’s Sabbatical Blog

Those ancient reporters…

We’re just back from a fun trip to Salisbury, where we got to see Stonehenge, various cathedrals, the Simpsons Movie, and Fishbourne Roman Palace.  Something for everyone.  Rob is doing a real blog about it right now, but I was so worn out by the whole thing that I have just spent a ridiculous amount of time reading random things on the internets, including this excellent 10-year-old (and quite long) article by James Fallows.  It is entitled “Why Americans Hate the Media” and is all about the way in which the press stubbornly turns all political reporting away from the substance of what politicians are proposing and towards horse-race style issues of “who’s ahead?” or “how did he handle that?” or “which party benefits?”  It was all really spot-on, and depressingly unchanged over the past decade.

What it reminded me of,  eccentrically, was Thucydides’ famous assessment of Pericles and his successors (2.65).  He contrasts Pericles, who was clearly the most powerful politician of his day, with the men who rose to prominence after his death, who “were more on a level with each other and each of whom aimed at occupying the first place…”  Thus they advocated policies which “when successful, only brought credit and advantage to individuals…” although when they failed they endangered both Athens and her allies.

In other words, Pericles had had the power to enact policies that were the best for the city.  But once he died, and there was nobody with that power any more, the many rivals for his position only thought about what would make them look good — who was ahead, and what political effect a given strategy would produce.

If James Fallows had been there in ancient Athens, would he have bemoaned Thucydides’ willingness to report everything as political maneuvering?  Or was Thucydides right in seeing everything as political maneuvering?  How can we possibly know the difference?

A blogging experiment

Yes, we’re still here. We have three more weeks in England, so I’m still clinging to the notion that I’m on sabbatical (although I think technically I’ve become department chair…). But the days are flying by and soon enough I’ll be back in the thick of life at Carleton. So I’ve been wondering what, if anything, to do with my blogging space.

What I’m thinking would be useful for me is using it as a place to note my thoughts on books and articles I’ve been reading. In the course of my research this year I’ve been using Endnote systematically for the first time in my life (!); this allows me to write notes on any given piece I read. But it’s harder to synthesize groups of articles on a given topic — there’s no place (I’ve found) to write about how several articles might work together. I can do this, of course, just in a journaling sort of way within Word, but I’m thinking that the “linkiness” (which Rob tells me is an actual word) of the blog environment would be useful in letting me cross-reference.

I originally intended this blog for my students, to let them know what I was doing while away, and I have no idea whether or not it’s been interesting to them or anyone else. This is likely to be even less interesting! So if you’ve been looking at this, feel free to stop. It’s really just for my own purposes. I won’t be offended! I’m likely to mess with the format, and have long silences when I don’t have time to read much stuff. But of course if anyone’s interested I don’t have any Cheney-like secrecy obsession, and if I did I wouldn’t be posting any of this on a blog to begin with.

So here’s my first attempt, on the topic of 5th-century ethnic identity!

Articles: John Alty, “Dorians and Ionians,” JHS 102 (1-14).

Vincent J. Rosivach, “Autochthony and the Athenians,” CQ 37.2 (294-306)

W. R. Connor, “The Ionian Era of Athenian Civic Identity,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137.2 (194-206)

All three of these articles start from the premise that ethnic identity (for ancient Greeks) had a degree of flexibility about it; in Connor’s terms, it was “constructed.” Nobody thinks the flexibility was absolute: Spartans couldn’t just start claiming to be Ionians, nor Athenians Dorians. But the for the 6th and 5th-century Athenians, the claim to be Ionian was one that could surface or be suppressed for reasons of political convenience.

Alty lays out a very solid case for believing in the real and effective existence of ethnic antipathy between Dorians and Ionians in the 5th century. Evidently at the time he was writing there was some opposition to this view, based on Thucydides’ narrative statements that self-interest rather than ethnic identity was the real motivating force in cities’ decisions to go to war (see, e.g. his account of the forces fighting on both sides in Sicily at 7.56-57). But Alty is persuasive that, Thucydides’ suspicion notwithstanding, there was a prevailing view (by the 5th century anyway) a) that Ionians and Dorians were naturally hostile to each other and b) that Dorians were, by virtue of being Dorian, superior in warfare to Ionians. The Dorians had invaded the Peloponnese along with the returning Heracleidae; they had displaced the Ionians through Athens to the Aegean islands and Asia Minor — thus they were the winners and the Ionians the Losers. Even the (sort of Ionian) Athenians seemed to have bought into this. This puts them into a tricky position. They want to use their kinship with Ionians to legitimize their leadership over the Ionian cities of the Aegean; but insofar as they claim Ionian identity they are acknowledging Peloponnesian military superiority. Who would want to go there?

One solution both Rosivach and Alty hint at is the turn to autochthony, especially in the 5th century. Rosivach goes so far as to suggest that this myth — that the Athenians were born from the earth itself — is as late as the 5th century in origin and that it is a fiction of democratic ideology (suggesting, as it does, equality of birth among all Athenians, just as use of the demotic over the patronymic emphasized ties to Attic geography rather than aristocratic families…). Rosivach also claims that in spite of Homeric mentions of Athenian “earth-born kings,” the term “autochthonous” initially meant only native or indigenous (as opposed to invading), and the tradition of those kings wasn’t extended to a general notion of Athenians born from the earth until later.

Connor adds to this the notion that Athenian association with Ionia could date back to the 8th-6th century aristocracy, when Ionia was a center of learning and elegance (and before their submission to Persian rule, contrasted with the mainland Greeks’, was an issue); he suggests that Athenian aristocrats eager to get in on this act were responsible for associating Athens with Ionia in various ways. One may have been introducing the Apaturia, a clearly Ionian festival that evidently entered the Athenian calendar too late to get a month named after it (as it does in other Ionian calendars). Thus when Cleisthenes rejects the Ionian tribal system in favor of a new “Attic” one, what Herodotus calls his “contempt for Ionians” would rather (or also) be a rejection of aristocratic (Ionian) values.

The whole set of articles is instructive insofar as it shows how much we don’t know about ethnic identity among the Greeks. Even with the Spartans, who are about as prototypical Dorians as you get, there are indications that ethnic affiliation could be shifted as convenient: Herodotus tells of a Spartan king being told that no Dorians were allowed on the acropolis, only to claim that he was Achaean, not Dorian. And while the speeches in Thucydides are filled with people assuming Dorian-Ionian antipathy, what about the cultural forms the terms are associated with? I’m not sure when the architectural styles came to use these names, or what sort, if any, significance there is to the mixture of Doric and Ionic elements in the Periclean building program — or even in the standard use of both Doric and Attic/Ionic dialect in tragedy. What sort of resonances did these elements have for the people of Athens?

Questions I can’t answer. But if I read any more about it I’ll post more.

Athens Part 5: The Kerameikos

My final site was the potter’s quarter and public burial ground, the Kerameikos, in the northwest corner of the ancient city. The site is in fact mostly outside the Themistoclean city walls, and contains remnants of the two most famous gates into the city: the Dipylon, a two-doored, towered gate, and the Sacred Gate, through which passed the Eridanos river and the Sacred Way heading for Eleusis.

The remarkable new thing I learned about the Kerameikos is that it is filled with tortoises. They’re everywhere! I took this picture of one, but then I realized you basically had to be careful not to trip over them. I wonder if they used to get crushed during the procession to Eleusis every year?!

A second road splits off to the left of the Sacred Way, which is now called the Street of the Tombs (although tombs lined all the roads heading out of Athens — you weren’t allowed to bury people within the city walls, and burying them along the road guaranteed that lots of folks would see your tomb and it would be easy to access for bringing offerings). I was quite excited to find a statue base here inscribed to HIPPARETE ALKIBIADOU SKAMBONIDOU. This is more likely to be Alcibiades’ daughter than wife, but still!

Here is the Sacred Way leading back into Athens via the Sacred Gate; what you would see on your way back home after your initiation. What’s left of the Eridanos flows along to the left, although you can’t really see it in this picture. It’s not much more than a trickle right now, anyway:

The Dipylon gate is just northeast of the Sacred Gate. The road that led out of that headed for the Academy, so this would have been the way they conducted the cult statue of Dionysus into town at the beginning of the Great Dionysia. The large square just in front of the Dipylon was also where they did the public burials of the war dead each year — where Pericles (and all the others) gave the funeral oration.

Once you got into the city through this gate, there was a fountain house where you could get a drink, which I must say I really wanted at this point!

The museum is small but very nice. It had many very beautiful archaic pieces that were found when they excavated for the metro line — these had been used as fill when the Athenians very rapidly re-built their walls after the Persian sack. The lion’s back haunch has damage because it was evidently exposed under the road, and people drove their carts across him.

What was labeled a “gaming table” had these four figures of women. I’d never seen an object like this, but the women’s arms are all doing gestures of ritual grieving — you see them like that in depictions of funeral processions and mourning at the corpse in vase paintings. So I thought this was very cool:

There was also one more funerary relief I couldn’t resist including. At the top is the woman’s name — Ampharete — with a two-line inscription that is in fact three lines of verse: an elegiac couplet followed by another hexameter line. I’ll put the translation below.

I hold here the beloved child of my daughter, which I held

on my knees when we were alive

and saw the light of the sun, and now, dead, I hold it, dead.

Athens Part 4: The Acropolis

I really almost hate to post pictures of the acropolis. They look just like all the other thousands of pictures of the acropolis I’ve seen all my life. But I was there taking them! So now they look different to me. They won’t look different to you until you’ve been there too.

I actually started (so as to maximize the athletic aspect of the day) by climbing back down the south side of the acropolis to see the Theater of Dionysus. It was about 8:45 a.m.; it had been light since 6:00. So I figure we might even have been on the second tragedy by now, or nearing the end of the first one. It’s clear that if you happened to be in a tribe with a wedge of seats facing east you would have had the sun in your eyes for the first part of the day! I’m not putting up a picture of it because it didn’t really show up in the smog, but it is clear that if you’re sitting high enough up the hill you can see the bay of Phalerum to the southwest. So, as you look at the stage, you have the sea on your right and the mountains on your left. There are conventions about this in the Roman theater, but I’ve never thought about what difference it would make to exits and entrances etc. in the Athenian one.

After a good scramble around the theater I climbed back up to the acropolis and went in. Standing on the Propyleia you can look back across at the Pnyx; I heard a Greek tour guide tell her group about how Cleisthenes invented democracy and Pericles was the first president. I didn’t interrupt, though.

I have to say the first glimpse of the Parthenon actually brought tears to my eyes, even if it is covered with scaffolding. I’m such a softie. Since it was still quite early I couldn’t really take that shot straight into the sun, but here is the standard one of the east side:

The Erechetheion was scaffolding-free and in many ways more interesting than the Parthenon. It has a very funky shape evidently because it had to observe various cult areas around it.

On the left you can see the “sacred olive tree” (I think it was planted in 1917). An excavator found an ancient pipe that he figured was directing water to something very precious, so he guessed that’s where it must have been.  The Persians burned the sacred olive tree when they sacked the acropolis in 480, but it sprouted again the next day!  The Erechtheion also was home to the sacred snake, which the Athenians fed on honey-cakes. Now there are mainly just stray dogs.

The museum was slightly disappointing because all of the rooms with Parthenon sculptures in them were closed (as of April 30 — I missed them by two weeks!). There was however this excellent Herm head:

I would love to tell you that the damage to his beard and nose were part of the “perikopto”-ing that happened when they mutilated the herms, but this one is a 1st century copy of a 5th century herm, and I don’t think the sculptor copied the mutilation. Never mind.

On my way out I did shoot the requisite picture of the west side of the Parthenon, and it turns out to have cuteness in the foreground as well, for Rob:

Athens Part 3: Agora, Areopagus, Pnyx

The last two days I’ve been wandering about, trying to make what I see make sense with the site maps I’ve been looking at for years and years. For instance, here is what I think of when you say “agora” (sorry it’s a little blurry; I took the picture out of my excellent Blue Guide to Athens):

So of course, that’s what I was expecting to see! I walked in on the north side, pretty much right above the Panathenaic Way, and was gobsmacked to find the place full of trees. Who put those there? Here’s what the whole thing looks like from up on the Areopagus, just south — you can see the Hephaisteion to the right, and the Stoa of Attalos (reconstructed) to the left:

But I did gradually get oriented: you can see the foundations of the Tholos and the various public buildings that ran along the west side just below the Hephaisteion. I tried to walk from there to the Pnyx, as if it were an assembly day, but of course the site is fenced in so you can’t. You do pass by the prison on the way, though, as well as the Street of the Marbleworkers and remains of several classical houses, cut into the rock.

I had a nice look round the Agora museum, which has lots of administrative stuff: part of an alotment machine, ballots, pinakia, and two cases of ostraka inscribed to get rid of Themistocles! I had no idea so many of these were round, rather than just fragments of pottery. Maybe they’re the bases of cups or something, and were likely to break off and end up in rubbish heaps. The coolest thing at the museum (as I’d seen pictures of all the voting stuff) was this shield, crudely inscribed ATHENAIOI LAKEDAIMONION EK PYLO — a trophy from the Spartans captured at Pylos. They sure carried big shields!

After the agora, I climbed up the Areopagus. I took this picture because I had read that Pausanias says the prosecutor and defendant at murder trials stood on unworked rocks called the “Stone of Injury” and “Stone of Ruthlessness” and I thought this looked pretty ruthless. However, the guidebook thinks that the actual court sat further down the hill, not right up here on the rocky crest.

Finally, I walked on up to the Pnyx. Like the agora, it’s a little disorienting, as the site was changed several times in antiquity and it’s hard to tell, looking at it, exactly what it was like in the fifth century. I really wanted to know if you could see the agora from there (in case you got bored listening to Nicias go on and on about how dangerous Sicily would be). Maybe you could — there are so many trees and buildings now it’s hard to tell. But you can just about see the Hephaisteion and Stoa of Attalos again:

I had nobody with me to experiment with how far off you could be and still hear someone, but in general the space seems small. They did call it “pnyx” for “squeezed” — but supposedly they needed 6000 (some say 5000) as a quorum, and it’s hard to see how many more than that would ever have fit up there. You do get a nice view of the acropolis, though:

I’m heading out again to see the Kerameikos; I’ll maybe get some pictures up of the acropolis and theater later tonight.

Athens Part 2: Pictures!

Another fabulous day.

First, I did go back to the museum yesterday afternoon and took many many pictures once I learned how to turn the flash off. Here are some of the things I mentioned yesterday: the lovely lady folding her laundry:

And here is the very beautiful room with the Spring Fresco from Acrotiri, which I think we need to reproduce in our department lounge:

Finally, another of the Antikythera bronzes: this one is interesting because he’s clearly holding something, but it’s not there anymore. (A fine visual metaphor for the classicist.) People seem to think it might be Perseus, with the Gorgon’s head — but then of course it would be odd for him to be looking at it. So the other guess is that it’s Paris with the Apple of Strife. What do you think?

I had a picture of my favorite funeral relief as well but for some reason I can’t get it to show up; maybe I’ll try again later. Update: here it is!

Today I spent wandering around the agora, scrambling up the Areopagus, and looking at the Pnyx. But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that installment…

Athens Part 1: National Archaeological Museum

Here I am in Athens, OMG!!!

I won’t have lots of beautiful pictures for you yet, as I have spent most of today at the National Archaeological Museum, as well as the Epigraphical Museum; they do let you take pictures, but not with a flash, and I am too dense to figure out how to make the digital camera not flash when it’s inside, no matter how much light it has. So, alas, the pictures have to stay in my head. Here’s the museum, though:

Like the British Museum, this has such a mind-boggling amount of material it’s hard to absorb it. I did a quick trip around, and then went back to focus on some particular things. I gave very short shrift to the very early stuff, although the Mycenean collection has some spectacular objects. Mainly though looking at that early material makes me happy I work on the Classical period. You’ll see, say, a charming little figurine of a bear sitting with a large bowl in its lap, and you’ll think “That’s cool! I wonder what the heck that was for!” And you’ll look at the label, and it will say “Seated bear with bowl. Unique.”

Most of the ground floor is sculpture, though, and there’s a huge amount of gorgeousness. There’s a very famous bronze of either Poseidon or Zeus hurling something, and a large votive relief sculpture from Eleusis, showing Demeter and Kore giving grain to Triptolemus, who will distribute them to humanity. I spent the most time on the funerary reliefs, which I find very moving even though they are clearly quite formulaic. The figures are frequently shaking hands in a farewell; sometimes looking intently at each other, sometimes gazing out into space.

Also on the ground floor is the collection of bronzes, many from the Antikythera shipwreck which was discovered in 1900. This collection contains the “Antikythera Mechanism” and a very cool reconstruction of it — described by some as the world’s first computer, it was evidently a machine to predict the motions of heavenly bodies, eclipses, etc. They x-rayed the remains in the seventies, and again in the nineties; evidently someone is currently working on a new reconstruction based on shinier new technology. I know I’ve read about this machine recently, but I can’t think why — if anyone knows, let me know!
UPDATE: I found the BBC article I had remembered. You can see it here. It describes the new technology used in work on a new reconstruction of the machine, which posits that it could predict the movements of the five known planets. Evidently there was a BBC Radio 4 show on it in December, which I missed. Anyway it’s very cool.

Upstairs are vases in frightening numbers. I was looking for herm scenes (I finally found one sweet little one) or Adonia scenes (women on ladders), but found none of those. Many interesting domestic scenes, though, including a woman folding laundry which I’ve never seen! Also an epinetron (designed for women to wear over their thighs while carding wool) showing Amazon fighters. I’d read a description of this but never seen it. What are the implications, do you suppose, of picturing crazy fighting women on a piece of pottery designed for a woman to do the most proto-typically domestic (and thus anti-Amazonian) thing possible? There was also an exhibit on the Anthesteria, which included a yo-yo. Did you know they had yo-yos in ancient Greece? I sure didn’t.

Also upstairs is an exhibit on Akrotiri, on the volcanic island of Thera. This is sort of like Pompeii, only the volcano exploded in the sixteenth century BCE. So you have much more daily-life type stuff preserved, which is refreshing after looking at monumental sculptures and grave offerings for so long. There are actual carbonized seeds, and cooking-pots, and casts of wooden furniture. But the frescoes are what is really famous, including the Spring Fresco, which was preserved in its own little room. It is just gorgeous, filled with Dr. Suessy lotus flowers and kissing swallows. And, as it is pretty much exactly the size of our department lounge, I think we need to reproduce it there. Steve Harris, where did you go? Here is a little picture I stole from this website of the swallows, because I couldn’t resist:

I also went around the corner for a quick visit to the Epigraphic Museum. I was the only one there, so the docents had to follow me around as I checked out the stones. No bits of the Attic Stelai were displayed; I think they would have let me look at them had I known their catalog numbers, but I’ve seen photographs and can’t imagine that looking at the bits would tell me anything. The Themistocles Decree is exciting to see (even though it’s a later copy). There were some choregic monuments, commemorating various victories in dithyrambic and tragic competitions. But I was most struck by a large stone, about my height and maybe a yard and a half wide, with five columns of names in tiny lettering. This was a casualty list from 413, with the names of some of those killed in the final disastrous battles in Sicily. They are grouped by tribe, but have only first names without patronymics or demotics — name after name.

On the way out of the Epigraphic Museum I spotted this sign; on the bottom, as you can see, it says “People of Athens” which is just what it said on the top of all the decrees carved in stone in the museum (”It was decided by the people of Athens…”)!

While I was writing this Rob has, over Skype, given me directions for turning off the digital flash, so now I can go take pictures at the museum!

Oratory

In the “things I like about England” category: because there are several national newspapers, they compete with each other by including various free things: often posters, or DVDs. The Guardian is currently including a series of little pamphlets containing “great speeches of the 20th century” — each one has a forward by some famous person, the speech, and then extracts from the Guardian’s own coverage of the speech at the time. So far we’ve had Churchill’s “we will fight on the beaches” speech (forward by Simon Schama), JFK’s “ask not” speech, Nelson Mandela’s speech at his trial in 1964, Harold McMillan’s (a British Prime Minister) address to the South African Parliament in 1960, and, today, FDR’s inaugural adress from March of 1933. There will be fourteen in all. What an idea! Can you imagine the Star Trib doing this, or even the New York Times? It has been extraordinary to read them, and wonder what from our own time will ever stand up to these texts.

The Romans in the North

Sorry I’ve been quiet for a while; I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff here, but also we had a wonderful trip up to Lincoln and Yorkshire for the boys’ Easter holidays. Lincoln is a lovely city with a spectacular cathedral at the top of a steep, jutting hill. It also turns out to have some good Roman remains, so we toured those along with the cathedral and the castle. The most spectacular is the Newport Arch, the only Roman arch in the country that actually functions as a gateway – traffic still flows through it. It looks kind of squat because the ground level when it was built was about nine feet lower.
It was built in about 200 CE and stood just as you see it until 1964, when a truck misjudged the space and bashed into it. So it’s been reconstructed, a little.

The main part of the Roman town has all been built over: there’s evidently one remaining column from the forum in someone’s basement, but you can’t see it. They helpfully put little brick circles in the road to show where some of the other columns were. Other than that there are bits and pieces of Roman stuff scattered about: you can see a tower base in someone’s back garden; a wall of the basilica got built into a hotel.
Built into the wall of the oldest standing church is a complete Roman tombstone (if you look hard you can see “Dis Manibus” – “for the spirits of the dead” – at the top).

There’s a pretty nice little museum with other artifacts from the area. The site is evidently where the ninth legion (Hispana) was quartered – and that was very likely one of the four legions that invaded Britain in 43 CE. There is a nice tombstone of one of the soldiers from the legion there in the museum. Can you read the inscription? It says: G(aius) Valerius G(ai) f(ilius) / Maec(ia tribu) mil(es) leg(ionis) / IX sign(ifer) c(enturiae) Hospitis / ann(orum) XXXV stip(endiorum) XIIII / t(estamento) p(oni) i(ussit) / h(ic) [s(itus) e(st)]: ‘Gaius Valerius, son of Gaius, of the Maecian voting tribe, soldier of the Ninth Legion, standard bearer of the century of Hospes, aged 35, of 14 years service, left instrutions in his will for this to be set up. Here he lies’ You can see more artifacts from the museum on their nice website, whence I stole that picture. The ninth legion evidently went on to York (Eboracum) whither we were soon to follow. The second legion (Adiutrix) replaced them in Lincoln – likely helping out from there in the bloody revolt of Boudicea which I wrote about earlier. When they left to fight on the northern edge of the province, the legionary camp became a colonia: a settlement of veterans. In fact the “coln” part of Lincoln is from colonia – only Lincoln and Colchester, in England, preserve their colonial histories in their names. Judging from the artifacts in the museum the colonia was a thriving place, and did a lively trade importing olive oil, nice pottery and other continental luxuries, and exporting slaves and hunting dogs!! Undoubtedly distant ancestors of our own Pippi.

York had fewer visible Roman remains, but there are some interesting things under the extraordinarily beautiful York Minster cathedral. In the 1960s the tower of the minster was in danger of collapse, and in the process of shoring it up they discovered the remains of the Roman military headquarters. If you belong to English Heritage (highly recommended) you can tour the Undercroft of the Minster for free and see the bits they excavated, including a beautifully preserved wall-painting and a still functioning culvert. Roman drains are the best. (Alert reader Bruce McMenomy tells me that when large volumes of water had to be hosed onto the burning roof of the south transept in 1984, this culvert successfully drained all the water into the nearby river Ouse and prevented damage to the excavated undercroft. Extraordinary.) Evidently this was the very spot (well, not the culvert, but the building adjacent) on which Constantine the Great was declared emperor on the death of his father there in York in 306 CE. There’s a quite sexy statue of Constantine outside the cathedral.

The other traces of the Romans we found on our holiday were the remains of signal forts they built much later, just before they left Britain in the fifth century. There was one of these at Scarborough and one about ten miles down the coast at Filey. The remains aren’t much to look at but the coast is gorgeous – although I’m sure that in bad weather it could seem pretty bleak to a Roman soldier looking out for Saxon pirates. We never made it down to Filey: I had to steal this picture off the internet.

British slang

OK, here is my favorite new British term of disapprobation: “pants” (as in, “The DVD player doesn’t work? That’s pants, Mom”). Here “pants” means “underwear” (you have to say “trousers” if you mean what you wear over your underwear). Somehow I can’t imagine “underwear” — or even “boxers” — filling the same function at home.