VI
Daedalus was Greece’s fabled artist, an Athenian architect and sculptor who may have lived in the late Bronze Age. He was hired by King Minos of Crete to design a tortuous maze, called the Labyrinth, in which to imprison the Minotaur, a powerful monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The Minotaur, insatiable for human blood, had to be regularly fed boys and girls, who were left in the Labyrinth, from whose confounding complex of corridors there could be no escape. In what seems the essential childhood nightmare, each child was hunted down and eaten by the Minotaur. At last, one boy, Theseus, was able to slay the monster and escape the Labyrinth, retracing his steps by means of a thread given him by Minos’s daughter, the princess Ariadne.
Theseus went on to serve as king of Athens, where his graciousness and courage became the stuff of legend. He gave asylum to the blind outcast Oedipus; and even after Theseus’s death, his spirit was thought to animate the Athenians in their wars. As late as the fifth century B.C. he was believed to be the ghostly giant seen fighting with the Athenians at the battle of Marathon. The Cretan Labyrinth appears repeatedly in Western art and literature—in expressions as diverse as the labyrinth laid out on the medieval floor ofChartres cathedral and Stephen King’s The Shining, in which a boy outwits a mad bull of a father by escaping from a modern labyrinth. Those who have seen the film version will have no trouble imagining Jack Nicholson as the Minotaur.
Daedalus in his old age was forced by Minos to remain on Crete, but he devised a novel means of escape: a pair of wings with which to fly away.
He lays out feathers—all in order, first
the shorter, then the longer (you’d have said
they’d grown along a slope); just like the kind
of pipes that country people used to fashion,
where from unequal reed to reed the rise
is gradual. And these he held together
with twine around the center; at the base
he fastened them with wax; and thus arranged—
he’d bent them slightly—they could imitate
the wings of true birds.
This is from Ovid’s retelling of the story of Daedalus, whose name means “cunning fabricator,” a man able “to work on unknown arts, to alter nature”—that is, to be an artist of unfathomable power. Daedalus made a smaller pair of wings for his beloved sonIcarus and warned him to “fly a middle course,” avoiding both the sea’s spray and the sun’s scorching heat.
The old man worked and warned; his cheeks grew damp
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, fromJean 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 were 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 labor, 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.
Sexual passion, as we have seen, is a god named Eros. To suffer sexual passion is, therefore, to be bested by a god. One must of course give in—there is no sense in trying to overcome a god—but the very idea of being bested by anyone was to a Greek sufficient humiliation as not to be a fit subject of high art. There is a difference between being realistic about sexual passion—admitting its existence, naming it openly, enjoying it blatantly—and giving it pride of place in the agora. An orgy could therefore be the very thing for a drinking goblet [34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39] or lovemaking be prized as an apt subject for a boudoir mirror [40, 41], but neither belonged in a public space, where only ideal dignity should reign. Better to draw and sculpt male genitals with a certain reticence—retracted against the groin as they might appear in combat or during a hard workout or emerging from what Joyce, parodying Homeric epithet, called the “scrotum-tightening sea.” Athletes were even known to tie up the foreskin as if it were sausage casing, so as to prevent the comedy of an involuntary erection in the course of exercise.
Because, however, theatrical comedy was the realm in which no portrayal could be considered too provocative, comic actors were the only class of Greeks to draw public attention to their sexual equipment. They wore enormous penises and testicles, flopping down almost to their knees—an effect hardly more erotic than a clown’s red mouth [42]. For productions of Lysistrata, however, in which the sex-starved male choristers appear with enormous erections, the genitalia were no doubt well stuffed, as was the case for actors playing satyrs, who always appeared with erect phalloi attached to loin harnesses. Hopeless sexual passion (of a mature woman—Phaedra, wife of Theseus—for her handsome stepson) is the subject of Euripides’s Hippolytus, which of course ends tragically. But this is an exception in the oeuvre of an exceptional playwright. Almost all direct references to sex in Greek art are brutish, comic, or intended for private use—which only serve to underscore the public chastity of the kouroi, whose bold existence still presents us with a conundrum.
Nakedness has signaled humiliation, not only to the neighbors of the Greeks, but throughout human history. We have only to think of the emaciated and naked victims being fed by the Nazis into the gas chambers of central Europe and thence into mass graves or the dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu to remind ourselves of the universal meaning of public nakedness. The Romans understood well that the shame of crucifixion lay not just in its hideous pain but in the fact that the victim died publicly naked, every corporeal quiver of his final agony a show for all to see.1 Nudity bespeaks defenselessness—and can, therefore, evoke pity and a sense of solidarity, not just with the naked victim but with all of defenseless humanity, as when Shakespeare’s Henry V, in the night before the battle of Agincourt, asks his troops to remember that “in his nakedness [the King] appears but a man.”
How, then, did this universal sign of shame—and, perhaps at a deeper level, of piteous solidarity—come to serve the Greeks (and the subsequent Western tradition) as symbolic of heroism? The kouros is the Greek in his idealized state, eternally young, eternally about to bud, eternally strong, but fixed for all time—not in process, not on his way from boyhood to manhood, but eternally achieved, eternally One. As the ultimate ideal, he must be naked, for no costume but his own skin could serve his eternality. But he is eternally absolved from all becoming, whether further growth, further sexual blossoming, or further decay. Forever beyond all development (which would necessarily imply disintegration in a later stage), he belongs to the World of the Forms. He is the Form of Man, the perfection, of which all beautiful and heroic men partake as partial examples, the man that all men would wish to be. And it is this wish, this impossible wish, that lends the kouros the pathos we attribute to it.
The kouros, then, is not merely the expression of a Greek idea but of a profoundly human longing that the Greeks were the first to uncover and that reverberates through art and literature ever after. It is the longing that breaks forth from John Keats, dying in his twenties, on beholding in the British Museum a “Grecian urn”2 on which a sylvan scene was shown:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting and forever young;
All breathing human passion far
above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and
cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a
parching tongue.
It is the sentiment expressed with shuddering resignation by W. B. Yeats, grown old, in “Sailing to Byzantium”:
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
The poet, now a golden bird, will sing from his golden bough—for, as in Keats’s poem, nature itself has been absolved from all becoming—and though the poet will take becoming as his theme (“what is past, or passing, or to come”), he himself will soar above all mortal change—far above, as Keats puts it, “all breathing human passion.”
Though both these examples (not surprisingly) make reference to Greece, the feeling, the wish to be absolved from becoming—from the “change and decay in all around I see”—is deeply human. And its expression in notes high and low, in measures quick and slow—whether in Homer’s lost utopias of Troy and Ithaca or in Sappho’s plangently expressed desire for youth and regret over age, whether in Socrates’s earnest aspiration to “shuffle off this mortal coil” and ascend to the World of the Forms or in the molded pathos of the kouroi—is Greece’s most complex and valuable gift to the Western tradition.
Not that this is all there is to say about nudity. The shards of obscene pottery remain, visual equivalents of Archilochus’s dirty jokes. And the figures of the herms remain, plinths without bodies except for head and phallus, not retracted but exceedingly erect [33]. But the pottery was as private as is most pornography, created for momentary enjoyment far beyond the bustling agora. The herms had an opposite function: set at boundary lines and, therefore, markedly public, they were apotropaic guardians of the polis itself, meant (not unlike the monumental pharaohs and animal gods of Egypt) to ward off evil and keep all enemies at bay by their primitive display of masculine power. The kouros, neither joke nor charm, gathers up all the divergent, nonstop Greek talk and speaks with one authoritative voice: “Here is our ideal, the best we have to offer.”
This is not unlike the message that NASA delivered to the kosmos when in 1972 it sent a probe into deep space in the hopes of greeting intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The spacecraft, now billions of miles into its journey, carries examples of Earth’s nature and culture (images, sounds, music, greetings in fifty-five languages) on a gold-plated copper disk. Bolted to the craft’s main frame is an anodized plaque carrying graphic messages: a star map, locating Earth, and alongside it the figures of a human male and a human female, both nude [69]. (After all, we wouldn’t want those extraterrestrials to think that our bodies grew clothing the way a turtle grows its shell.) Neither the man nor the woman, however, could serve as a median representative of humanity, since both are members of a minority race—that is, white—nor do they resemble average Americans, being a good deal leaner than Pickup Pete and Supermarket Sally. The oddest detail is that, though both are clearly meant to be adults, they have no hint of hair except on their heads. What NASA chose to project into the universe by way of greeting is a couple of well-muscled humans who, despite their twenty-year-old faces, are prepubescent. So the ideal of the Greek kouroi, somewhat modified by American tastes (no skanky pubic hair, please), is perhaps at this moment being examined by faraway aliens who are trying to figure out how human reproduction takes place on that inhabited planet in the third concentric circle from a certain Milky Way star. Scratching their little green heads, they can’t quite make it out.
If this American idealization is a somewhat debased version of its Greek predecessor and lacks the sheer dignity of the original, it nonetheless owes to the kouroi of the sixth century B.C. the idea of a transcendent visual ideal, absolved from time—surely a strange notion to send out, voyaging forever, through our space-time continuum. But then, we are what we have been, and the images we concoct do not float free like balloons but own deep historical roots—and, apparently, there’s nothing even NASA can do about the way human history has shaped human imagination.
THE STIFF SYMMETRY of the kouroi of the seventh and sixth centuries began, in the fifth, to give way to a revolutionary relaxation of Athenian models that rapidly brought all of Greek sculpture to its acme. The “Kritian boy” [14] from the Acropolis is patently akouros with the usual placid facial expression, his arms at his side, his left foot forward. But the sculptor’s eye and hand are no longer in thrall to tradition, and he—probably Kritios, because the work is so like others known to be his—is no longer merely making what has been made before. Instead of standing alert with weight equally distributed, as are all earlier kouroi, this boy stands as would any boy at leisure, his weight on his left leg, his looser right leg bent at the knee, which sends his whole body into a gentle curve, his hips and shoulders no longer placed in stark parallels but occupying subtly slanted rather than rigidly horizontal planes, the head no longer squarely set atop its neck but slightly, so very slightly, inclined forward and to his right. The tactile appreciation of human anatomy and the grace of the whole conception leave one amazed. Though the subject may remain as virginally chaste as its muscle-bound predecessors, there can be no doubt that the beholder is meant to respond erotically. Viewed against its predecessors, the “Kritian boy” is an astonishing work of genius, a genius of head and heart, for never before in the already long history of human artifacts had a human being so lovingly shaped a human body—the balance between straight and bent limbs, the tension between taut and slack muscles—that he seems to have penetrated to its soul. Here is an artisan who understands the body of a boy as if he were the creator not merely of a marble statue but of the boy himself. Henceforth, a Greek statue will be unified by the underlying structure of the human body, not by surface patterning [15].
This innovative softening of the body of the kouros precipitates further diversity. The “Kritian boy” is so obviously a boy—much more so than his superbodied archaic predecessors—that he clearly embodies boyishness rather than a more generalized maleness; and this suggested additional variations to the sculptors. Other depictions of idealized maleness—rougher, more mature, in different poses—are now possible; and soon enough one encounters sculpted ideal males of different kinds: archers in battle, horsemen on campaign, athletes submitting their bodies to various physical disciplines, revolutionary heroes, gods of fearful beauty [16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22]. But the new variety hides an underlying sameness, for all these portrayals, however different each may be from the other, are of male perfection. Greek art of the high classical period serves as a mirror in which the Greek male admires himself—his perfectly proportioned, remarkably adept self.
Of course, women are depicted too, though rarely, and always clothed [23, 24, 25]. The ideal woman, therefore, is the secluded virgin or the secluded matron. Unlike men, “Greek women have no prime,” writes the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, “only a season of unripe virginity followed by a season of overripe maturity, with the moment of defloration as the dividing line.” This describes only girls of good families, who begin as presexual beings, are tamed by conjugal penetration, and forthwith settle down to the work that is properly theirs—keeping the man’s house and raising his children. There is no true ideal for the Greek woman, no naked eternality, only the tasks of becoming: preparation, marriage, childbirth, childrearing, suffering society’s toleration if she survives past menopause, death. As the Berkeley art historian Andrew Stewart puts it, “whether parthenos [virgin], wife, or widow, since she is and always will be a creature of both excess and lack [that is, emotion rather than mind, receptacle rather than tool], heraretē is to recognize male supremacy and to do what her male guardian (father, brother, husband) thinks is right.” Stewart adds wryly, “Needless to say, this directive was no doubt often honored as much in the breach as in the observance.”
We know almost by instinct that Stewart must be right even though our evidence of female resistance lies in fragments. We can point to Sappho’s magisterial confidence, to the women revolutionaries of Aristophanes, to the unyielding Medea of Euripides and be certain that far more heat bubbled beneath the cool surface of Greek ideality than can be read in its public message. The Irish-English critic Terry Eagleton is particularly illuminating:
For a male-dominated society, man is the founding principle and woman the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such a distinction is held in place the system can function effectively.… Woman is the opposite, the “other” of man: She is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative role in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence.
Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but another intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man that he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien is also intimate—so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears.
But does this female other ever succeed in leaving behind private transgression, domestic tugs of war, and the fictional tropes of poetry and drama [26, 27, 28, 29]? Does she ever break into temple or agora as a subversive public statement, even as a sculpted ideal? One way of answering such questions is to ask these further ones: Does the woman ever lose her clothes in Greek art—and, if so, what does she look like?
She does—and she looks marvelous.
In the late fourth century, about 150 years after the carving of the “Kritian boy,” the incomparable Praxiteles dared to push into twice forbidden territory. His subject was Aphrodite, goddess of love, whom one might think on the face of it the ideal subject for female nudity. But the myth of Aphrodite showed her to be zealously protective of her belles choses. Should any male to whom she had not chosen to proffer her gifts come upon her in her nakedness, the penalty was immediate death. By the late fourth century we must imagine a certain waning of such taboos about the gods, but it remains true that uncovering a female figure was boldness enough. To name her Aphrodite was heartstopping. Praxiteles’s Aphrodite [30], fresh from her bath, stands in an elegantly languidS-curve, her left hand grasping drapery that conceals nothing (and serves to make her even more naked), her right hand tending—but not quite managing—to shield her private parts. Her sensational, touchable body owes nothing to the ruling Greek convention of depicting women as narrow-hipped boys with breasts—second-class males who lack penises. She is, to employ the inevitable cliché, all woman, an image so unafraid, so devoid of coyness, so shocking as to reduce any Greek male to silence, no small task. Has she just been startled by an intruder? Of course she has, for the intruder is her sculptor, who loved every inch of her with his chisel, as well as every male who down the subsequent centuries has dared to look with longing on the nakedness of the love goddess. Does her haughty face deplore my intrusion or beckon me on? Will she wrap the drapery around herself or let it fall to the ground? Will she kill me or welcome me? Who can say. She is Woman, fickle, unknowable, ineffably mysterious, obsessively desirable.
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.