Images in Mind

Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought

Deborah Tarn Steiner

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691218489
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.''
Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within.
By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.

CHAPTER ONE

Replacement and Replication

A MINIATURE love story frames the discovery that a certain Boutades, a Sikyonian potter at Corinth, once made: he manufactured the first portrait image on behalf of his daughter, “who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father, having pressed clay onto this, made a relief that he hardened by exposing it to fire along with the rest of his pottery” (Pliny HN 35.151).

Although doubtless fictional, the anecdote poses perhaps the most critical question that an ancient image asked of its viewers: should they perceive the manufactured object as a replacement for the missing original, or could it do no more than reproduce the model’s external appearance? Read one way, the terracotta functions as a substitute for the departing lover, and so belongs together with the many statues in Greek myth and history that serve as re-presentations of the absent and the dead, standing in for the lost party and maintaining communication between those separated by time and space. The efficacy of these kinds of images, I suggest, depends on a particular construction of the bond between the subject and the figurine, a bond that need not rest on any visible mimetic likeness, but on a notion of substitution, equivalence, or sympathy. In Pliny’s tale, the beloved and his image do not so much resemble one another as exist in a relation of metonymy, both formal and more loosely defined; here the face of the youth stands proxy for his entire person, but any portion of his person, any object associated with or belonging to him, could do as well.¹ The part assumed by the shadow in the episode confirms that contiguity, not similarity, plays the leading role; not an exact visible replica of the body, the umbra none-theless forms an intimate, though separable, element of the subject’s identity.²

But within Pliny’s story lies a second, and potentially less positive, account of the nature and function of images. The tale belongs to an exploration of the origins of similitudines, and Pliny caps the anecdote with a discussion of the properly historical Lysistratos of Sikyon (brother of Lysippos), who distinguished himself by creating more accurate and less idealizing representations of his models than his predecessors (35.153). An emphasis on exact imitation transforms the role of the plaque and grounds its consoling powers in its capacity to furnish a portrait likeness, a “photograph,” which reminds the maiden of the distant youth. Where contiguity and metonymy determined the link between the original and the representation that worked as a replacement device, now similarity and metaphor supply the necessary adhesives. The terracotta mimics the beloved, and the closer the visible resemblance, the more successful the antidote to Boutades’ daughter’s grief.

United in this episode, the two facets of the image show how their coexistence within a single object need not preclude a deep antinomy. If the representation can summon up the beloved through contiguity, then the shadow’s role in generating the terracotta does nothing to impair its efficacy. According to the many uses to which a man’s shadow may be put, it not only forms a part of himself, but also can serve as one of the most decisive expressions of his vitality:³ very much in the manner of the image, it, too, supplies a substitute or replacement for a missing party, and holds out to lovers a means of assuaging their longing for an absent object of desire.⁴ But if the figurine claims to offer a mirror likeness of its living subject, then Boutades’ choice to work after the umbra introduces an unwanted breach between the original and the copy.⁵ The portrait now stands as a flawed imitation, an image of an image, a fauxsemblant at two removes from the reality it claims to depict. Sharpening the distinctions between statues as metonymic and metaphoric accounts is the second defect the representation harbors. Boutades’ daughter captures no more than the outlines of the lover (lineis circumscripsit), and the potter fills the mold he makes with an interior of clay. The portrait image based on resemblance fails to house the inner essence of the subject, just as a shadow traces only the contours of the body. A variant on the story introduces yet another reason for the vacuity of the final typus: even as Boutades’ daughter takes the likeness, her beloved sleeps, his vital spirit absent from the body.⁶

Greek philosophers and rhetoricians of the late classical and post-classical period would develop terms for the two modes of viewing that this “first” portrait image puts into play. Where the depiction is perceived as linked to its source by virtue of an intrinsic property, where it shares with the signified an essential and enduring quality, it provides an eikōn, a stepping stone pointing to the original that gives the viewer access to a hidden or absent reality. To the realm of eidōla, imperfect, even deceptive versions of the truth, belong figures that depend on a purely visible resemblance, that limit themselves to external contours.⁷ But for the statues that populate the archaic and early classical sources, these polarizations fail to capture the scenarios that the texts describe. Whether authors cite real-world images familiar to their audiences or imagine fabulous creations that come from the hands of divine and legendary artisans, the figures they envision cohabit or oscillate between the “eiconic” and “eidolic” realms. The image’s relation to the original turns out to combine both metonymy and metaphor, and the manufactured work proves so handy a vehicle for poets, philosophers, and dramatists to work with precisely because it hosts the multiple and shifting positions that all representations—phantoms, words, an actor on the stage among them—occupy vis-à-vis the originals for which they stand in. That contemporary statue-makers fashion sculptures that stimulate, address, and respond to the issues posed in the texts will be the additional suggestion that this chapter makes.

REPLACING THE ABSENT

The Statue as Double

Archaeological evidence that long predates written accounts demonstrates the role of the statue as a replacement figurine that doubles for the dead.⁸ In a grave at Midea (modern Dendra) excavators discovered a Bronze Age burial chamber inhabited by two statue menhirs occupying the place of a missing corpse. A seventh-century grave in Thera, also without a human body, contained a pair of stone images interred together with the customary grave goods,⁹ and a fifth-century “potburial” unearthed in Italian Lokri yielded a clay bust of a woman, again an apparent substitute for the dead’s absent body.¹⁰ From the literary sources of the fifth century come several examples of characters of myth and history buried in effigy when their corpses could not be found. Herodotus records the Spartan custom of preparing an eidōlon of a king who had died abroad in battle (and whose body presumably went missing) and of bringing the statue home for burial with due honors (6.58.3). Euripides’ Helen has a similar stratagem to propose when she asks permission to conduct funeral rites for the supposedly drowned Menelaus according to the customs of her native land.¹¹ When a puzzled Theoklymenos asks the widow how she aims to bury a mere skia (Hel. 1240), Helen replies that she will fashion a cenotaph from the garments that would normally cover the corpse (1243). Perhaps the same logic of substitution lies behind the tale preserved in later sources of the death of Alkmene: first Hermes caused her body mysteriously to disappear, and then he placed a block of stone in the chest where the corpse previously lay.¹²

The impetus for making a substitute for the missing person and performing his or her symbolic (re)interment may have two sources: first, the belief that the psuchē of the dead cannot find its rest in Hades until the body has received appropriate burial (as Patroklos explains in Iliad 23.70–74); and second, the need to appease an unquiet soul, angry at the circumstances of its death and its deprivation of the customary honors and rites it could properly expect (the sentiment to which Orestes and Electra appeal when they attempt to rouse the ghost of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s Choephori). The Spartan general Pausanias joins this group of the wrathful dead. After he perished from starvation in the temple of Athena Chalchioikos, the Delphic oracle ordered the Spartans to escape from the pollution provoked by his end by reburying the general’s body at the very spot where he died, and by “giving back two sōmata to the Goddess in payment for one.” The city responded by dedicating two bronze statues to Athena “as a replacement for Pausanias” (Thuc. 1.134–35). Later, less sober accounts of the same event suggest that the images played a cardinal role in appeasing the anger of the general: both Plutarch and the anonymous author of the Letters of Themistocles introduce them as a device for exorcising the ghost of Pausanias that was haunting the temple entrance and terrifying people away.¹³

As the examples of Pausanias and others illustrate, the creation of a doubling image can correct the disturbance that certain forms of death generate. But the dead are not the sole constituents served by these replacement figures; such objects may also grant communities permanent access to the powers that certain individuals host in both life and death. In Herodotus’s account of the fate of Kleobis and Biton, the two exemplary sons no sooner lay down to sleep in a temple after performing their heroic service to their mother and the goddess Hera than they “never rose more.” No mention of the bodies of the youths, nor of their burial or grave site, follows; instead, the narrator rounds off his tale by noting that “the Argives made statues of them and dedicated them at Delphi, as of two men who were best of all” (1.31.5). On a second occasion, Herodotus encounters an individual whose uncanny appearances, disappearances, and death-that-is-no-death again conclude with the raising of a statue: Aristeas, or his corpse, twice vanishes from sight, and returns a third time in the form of a phasma that orders that an image be set up on the shamanlike man’s behalf (4.14–15).¹⁴ In both narratives, the signal feats that the characters perform during their lives indicate their possession of a talismanic force that sets them outside the limits that men regularly observe. In each instance, too, Herodotus invests the statue that takes the place of the mysteriously missing body (and some form of translation is what the different stories seem to imply¹⁵) with a quasi-sacred status,¹⁶ suggestive of its capacity to actualize the individuals’ power at the site and to make it continuously accessible to those who have erected the monument.

The motifs punctuating Herodotus’s two tales find an echo and clarification in a context where images still more clearly function as replacement figurines designed to preserve the talismanic properties that their originals host. Miraculous disappearances, revenants, unlikely deaths, and outstanding feats of strength are all the stuff of the legends surrounding a series of athletic victors, most clustering in the early fifth century, who were elevated to the rank of cult heroes,¹⁷ and in each instance the tale makes plain the intimate, near-symbiotic bond between the athlete and his image. Theagenes of Thasos, Olympic victor in 480 and 476, was honored with a bronze statue standing in the agora of his native city. Flogged by an enemy after the athlete’s death, the statue toppl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Replacement and Replication
• Chapter Two: Inside and Out
• Chapter Three: The Quick and the Dead
• Chapter Four: For Love of a Statue
• Chapter Five: The Image in the Text
• Epilogue: Lucian’s Retrospective
• Illustrations
• Bibliography
• Index of Passages Cited
• Subject Index