Periklean Athens and Its Legacy

Contents

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Note on Abbreviations

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pp. xi-xii

Jerome Jordan Pollitt: a Bibliography

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pp. xiii-xiv

Introduction

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pp. xv-xix

Jerome Jordan Pollitt earned his B.A. from Yale College in 1957 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1963 under the direction of Otto Brendel. He returned to Yale to begin his teaching career and spent the next thirty-six years instructing undergraduate and graduate students in Classical and Hellenistic Greek art and Rising through the ranks at Yale, he was promoted to full professor in 1973 and ...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xxi-

The editors wish to thank each other and the contributors for their efforts and goodwill. We also wish to express our gratitude to Jim Burr, of the University of Texas Press, for his consideration, guidance, and patience; Carolyn Cates Wylie, who oversaw the editorial process; and Nancy Moore, for her careful and ...

I. Perikles as General

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pp. 1-9

It is a great privilege to participate in honoring my colleague of more than three decades, Jerry Pollitt. As teacher, scholar, university citizen, and colleague, he has been a model and an inspiration. His intelligence, high standards, common sense, and good humor have brought him outstanding success in all his undertakings and the admiration of the many who have benefited from them. I have been among them ...

THE ART OF CLASSICAL AND PERIKLEAN ATHENS

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2. Bail Oinochoai

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pp. 13-21

Fifth-century Athens witnessed a striking series of changes in funerary customs. Not long after the start of the century, large-scale sculpted stone monuments stopped decorating private graves, a change usually attributed to the so-called post aliquanto funerary decree mentioned by Cicero (Leg. 2.25–26) limiting the size, cost, and manner of decorating the graves. At the same time, the number of children’s graves increased dramatically, and burials were no longer allowed...

3. A Farewell with Arms: Departing Warriors on Athenian Vases

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pp. 23-35

Art and Experience in Classical Greece was my first introduction to J. J. Pollitt’s work, long before I was introduced to the author himself. Since that first encounter, which opened for me a new way of looking at Greek art, the humanist philosophy....

4. The Girl in the Pithos: Hesiod’s Elpis

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pp. 37-45

Writing a century ago in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, the British classicist Jane Ellen Harrison corrected a widespread misconception regarding the myth of Pandora. She wrote: “No myth is more familiar than that of Pandora, none perhaps has been so completely misunderstood. Pandora is the first woman, the beautiful mischief: she opens the forbidden box, out comes every evil that flesh is heir to; hope ...

5. The Judgment of Helen in Athenian Art

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pp. 47-62

Near the end of Book 3 of Homer’s Iliad, Helen and Paris find themselves together in their bedchamber in the palace of Priam, brought together there by the goddess Aphrodite. Paris professes his ardor, now stronger than ever:...

6. Composition and Content on Classical Murals and Vases

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pp. 63-72

It is a commonplace of our studies to hold that vase scenes with figures set on different levels in the field (up/down, as I shall call them) are influenced by or may even copy mural compositions of the Early Classical period, notably those that we associate with the name of Polygnotos and that we know from Pausanias’ description of his work at Delphi. We are led to judge that these were typical of his work, and of the work of his contemporary, Mikon of Athens, and seem to be justified in this by ...

7. The Painting Program in the Stoa Poikile

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pp. 73-87

The fame of the Stoa Poikile is due in part to the group of philosophers who taught there, and became known as the Stoics, and to the suite of paintings found on wooden panels on its walls. Representing the battle of Marathon, the battle of the Amazons and Athenians, and the assembly of the Greek leaders following the sack of Troy, these works as well as some others are frequently mentioned in surviving ...

8. Feminizing the Barbarian and Barbarizing the Feminine: Amazons, Trojans, and Persians in the Stoa Poikile

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pp. 89-102

Classical Athens, whose history and culture J. J. Pollitt’s work has done so much to illuminate, has left us many of the greatest works of Greek literature and visual art. Indeed, the form and aspect of Athens’ artistic monuments remain so impressive today that they have almost come to epitomize ancient Greek society. About these much has been written. The fifth-century Athenian monument I would like ...

9. Notes on the Subject of the Ilissos Temple Frieze

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pp. 103-110

Little remains of the small Ionic temple that once stood on the banks of the Ilissos river on the outskirts of Athens. It is a frustrating and tantalizing loss, especially since the temple very nearly survived into the present day. Converted for use as an Orthodox church, it was preserved essentially intact for more than two thousand years, only to be abandoned and dismantled in the late eighteenth century. All that ...

10. “Periklean” Cult Images and Their Media

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pp. 111-118

I cannot possibly hope to tell Jerry Pollitt anything new about Periklean Athens, a subject in which he is far better versed than I. But in my wish to participate in a volume in his honor, I shall make bold to present a few comments on a minor topic that, if not new, has at least not been sufficiently investigated from this specific angle: the appropriateness of media for cult images in fifth-century Athens in the ...

11. Athena at Pallene and in the Agora of Athens

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pp. 119-131

Jerome J. Pollitt has bravely defended the right of classical sculptors to be known in Art History by their own names and characterized according to perceivable qualities of their works. It may not be inappropriate in a volume in his honor to identify, however conjecturally, a work of Lokros of Paros, who is otherwise known to us ...

THE PERIKLEAN AKROPOLIS

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12. The Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia

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pp. 135-145

Whenever the precursors of the Periklean Parthenon (447–432 B.C.) are discussed, attention focuses, as it well should, upon the Older Parthenon, that very late Archaic marble temple begun after Marathon (490) upon a massive limestone foundation that extended and leveled the southern part of the Akropolis summit. The Parthenon not only stands upon the podium built for its aborted predecessor (the ...

13. The Parthenon Frieze and Perikles’ Cavalry of a Thousand

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pp. 147-161

The enduring idea of the Parthenon frieze is that it represents the procession of the Panathenaic festival, but even those who fully accept this interpretation have had to question the role of the horsemen who feature so prominently. No direct literary evidence records that horsemen actually took part in the procession, whereas hoplites, who are reported as having marched in it, are omitted from the frieze. On

14. Alkamenes’ Prokne and Itys in Context

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pp. 163-176

The statue group of Prokne and Itys (Athens, Akropolis Museum 1358) initially caught my attention in my fi rst semester of graduate school at Yale University, when I wrote a paper about the sculptor Alkamenes for my advisor, Jerry Pollitt. This graduate student effort was devoted to sorting out Alkamenes’ oeuvre using written and stylistic evidence. As my studies progressed, I became more interested ...

15. Interpretations of Two Athenian Friezes: The Temple on the Ilissos and the Temple of Athena Nike

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pp. 177-192

The small Ionic temple that once stood on the hill above the banks of the Ilissos River was a virtual twin of the Athena Nike temple on the Akropolis: both were built of Pentelic marble and are attributed to the same architect, Kallikrates. Their friezes are here considered together, even though created by different sculptors: they were both designed to be viewed close to eye level, and the elucidation of their ...

THE LEGACY OF PERIKLEAN ATHENS

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16. Alpheos to the Orontes: An Unusual Echo of the Pheidian Zeus at the Syrian Port of Seleukia Pieria

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pp. 195-216

The theme of this essay is to show how the Zeus of Pheidias, created around 430 b.c., and a similar, standing Zeus at Athens, Delphi, or a contiguous Greek sacral area in the first golden age of Greek sculpture could develop into an unusual divinity in the Hellenistic East. From Pamphylia (the Artemis of Perge) to Emesa in Syria (the conical stone of Bal), gods and goddesses took on forms very unusual ...

17. A Rhetorical Perikles

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pp. 217-232

Periklean Athens appealed as a subject of study at Yale University for the last thirty years in part because the imperial democracy of Athens refracted the anxieties and ambitions of an elite American youth about its own imperial democracy. In particular, study of Periklean Athens thrived for reason of the excellent teaching of J. J. Pollitt with his masterly proposal of an integrated study of a brilliant culture. ...

18. On Some Motives Supposed Present in Self-Portraits of Pheidias and Others

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pp. 233-236

The starting point of this small query is far from the Akropolis, in the general phenomenon of the self-portrait. In the twentieth century, it has been a familiar category of works of art; one need only recall Picasso or Warhol. Looking at them, we are induced to speculate about the artist’s personality and his own attitude about it. Is the self-portrait a boast to the viewer, a confession, a self-analysis, a mere ...

20. Early Photography and the Reception of Classical Antiquity: The Case of the Temple of Athena Nike

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pp. 237-252

The astronomer Johann Heinrich Mädler coined the term photography in 1839, the very moment the modern Greek nation was uncovering and restoring the monumental evidence for its classical past. Mädler combined the Greek words for light and painting or writing to describe the new process by which light and chemical substances produce an image of seeming reality fairly true to the original—a goal shared, if by different means, by modern archaeology and restoration. Although

THE LEGACY OF JEROME J. POLLITT

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21. Greek Art and Culture Since: Art and Experience in Classical Greece

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pp. 255-276

The study of Greek art in the context of Greek culture is now accepted and established, tenured and cosseted in the universities, as comfortable and complacent as a sherry-sipping vicar in Trollope. But once it was young and unbeneficed, bold and heretical, dangerous and brave. One of the enduring monuments of that exciting time is J. J. Pollitt’s Art and Experience in Classical Greece (1972), a rare book of ideas ...

Works Cited

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pp. 277-295

About the Contributors

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pp. 297-299

Index

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pp. 301-306