Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian by J. M. Hall (review)
- Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian by J. M. Hall
Texts may lie. The spade cannot lie—it is mute. We make it speak for us through our imagination, based on what seem comparable but better understood cases, and through our knowledge of texts (history). Thus arises the question of whether a scholar should come to classical archaeology from textual study and ancient history rather than field archaeology and art history. Jonathan Hall confronts this question in nine case studies, Greek and Roman. Some concern the optimistic identification and history of buildings: was the Eretria temple destroyed by the Persians; could the great Vergina tomb really have been intended for Alexander; have we anything of the city of Romulus; can we really identify the House of Augustus or the Tomb of St. Peter? Other cases involve whether the Delphic oracle’s inspirational trance was induced by vapors, whether there really was an Oath of Plataea, the nature of Socrates’s “suicide,” and the birth of the Roman Republic. While the physical evidence on hand may be incomplete or misinterpreted and the literary evidence a matter of convenience or pure invention, Hall’s expertise with both is phenomenal, and he carefully dissects it all. He offers a serious, if tacit, warning to both archaeologists and historians that they will do well to heed.
Sir John Boardman is Lincoln Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology emeritus at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him the Kenyon Medal in 1995. Editor of the Oxford History of Classical Art, his other books include The Greeks in Asia; The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity; The Greeks Overseas; The Triumph of Dionysos; The History of Greek Vases; The Archaeology of Nostalgia; and The Relief Plaques of Eastern Eurasia and China: The “Ordos Bronzes,” Peter the Great’s Treasure, and Their Kin. He received the inaugural Onassis International Prize for Humanities in 2009.
