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Greek Art and Aesthetics in the Fourth Century B.C

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Greek Art and Aesthetics in the Fourth Century B.C © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 1 Introduction For general queries, contact [email protected] Childs_text 3rd.indd 1 1/22/18 10:26 AM © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Social unrest and even revolution, war, new foreign cults, exports and travel on a larger scale than ever before, prosperity in general and conspicuous wealth of a few—these de- scribe Greece in the fourth century B.C., and they are, coincidentally, not unfamiliar char- acteristics of the recent past of western European history. The appearance of a plethora of studies of Greece of the fourth century B.C. over the last few decades can only reflect our familiarity with and sympathy for the issues of that century, which not a hundred years ago, and sometimes still today, was considered to mark the beginning of the end of classi- cal Greek civilization, which had reached its apogee with the completion of the Parthenon in 432 B.C. Although such a value judgment may seem insensitive, the contemporary sympathy for the fourth century and the recent past’s condemnation of it may actually not be mutually exclusive. In 1943, Gerhard Rodenwaldt had already identified one of the principal difficulties in dealing with the art of the fourth century: it appears ambiguous and open to too great a range of subjective responses to fit neatly into the structures of modern scholarship.1 Rodenwaldt chronicled briefly the great swings between apprecia- tion and denigration of fourth-century sculpture from the late nineteenth century to his time. We can add that it is not only the art of the fourth century that has experienced such strong vicissitudes, but the fourth century in all its aspects—literature, politics, trade, war, even philosophy, for the word “sophistry” has become a modern term for erudite nonsense, and the fourth century B.C. is the century of the sophist. The negative cast of so much of modern interpretation is fostered by the Greeks of the fourth century them- selves. One can hardly read a text of the period that does not contrast the greatness of the fifth century with the dismal present,2 and Plato and Aristotle have nothing but contempt for their contemporary colleagues.3 The impression these observations give is misleading because each writer, particularly the orators speaking before a jury, had a particular axe to grind.4 Even a casual reading of the speeches gives the impression that the orators use the fifth century in a manner similar to Pindar’s use of heroic mythology in his epinician odes, which makes one wary of accepting the pessimistic rhetoric at face value.5 1 G. Rodenwaldt, Θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, AbhBerl 1943, no. 13 (Berlin 1943). L. Burn, The Meidias Painter (Oxford 1987) 1–3, describes the vicissitudes of Attic vase painting, particularly the condemnation by J. D. Beazley and others in the first half of the twentieth century of the flamboyant style of the Meidias Painter and his associates. See gener- ally J. de Romilly, La modernité d’Euripide (Paris 1986). 2 K. Jost, Das Beispiel und Vorbild der Vorfahren bei den attischen Rednern und Geschichtschreibern bis Demosthenes (Paderborn 1936); G. Schmitz-Kahlmann, Das Beispiel der Geschichte im politischen Denken des Isokrates, Philologus suppl. 31.4 (Leipzig 1939); M. Nouhaud, L’utilisation de l’histoire par les orateurs attiques (Paris 1982). 3 E.g., Plato, Politikos 299b: ἀδολέσχην τινὰ σοφιστὴν; Aristotle, Nikomachean Ethics 1.9.20. Plato, Gorgias 503b–c, 516d–e, has Kallikles denigrate contemporary politicians in favor of those of the fifth century, but Sokrates rejects his assessment of the past. 4 S. Todd, “The Use and Abuse of Attic Orators,” GaR 37 (1990) 158–78. 5 Aischines, On the Embassy (II) 74, even remarks on this use of the past by “popular” speakers to sway the Athenian demos. 2 Chapter 1 For general queries, contact [email protected] Childs_text 3rd.indd 2 1/22/18 10:26 AM © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Arnold von Salis, in his general study of Greek art, suggested that the Medusa Ron- danini might serve as an appropriate head-of-chapter vignette for his treatment of the late fifth and fourth centuries.6 This is particularly the case for my own inquiry, since a reasonable interpretation of the Medusa Rondanini is that it is a Roman classicistic work based on the development of the beautiful Medusa in the second half of the fifth century. As a possible Roman work, the Medusa reflects the fact that so many of the statues of the fourth century are known only in Roman copies, which are increasingly considered less and less to be copies, and more and more to be Roman ideal sculpture. The very idea of the beautiful Medusa is also symptomatic of the period because it runs contrary to the normal interpretation of the figure as a horrible, death-bringing monster. The impassive face, the little wings, and the luxuriant hair convey the extraordinary ambivalence of the art and culture of what I shall loosely term the Late Classical period, from roughly 420 to 300 B.C. There is, of course, definitely some truth to the impression of a crisis as the fourth century proceeds. After all, the conquest of Greece by Philip of Macedon and the eventual formation of the Hellenistic monarchies bring to an end the experiments with democ- racy.7 Yet the structure of the Greek city-state can be considered vastly less important than the achievements of perspective it had fostered, which endured. Indeed, I shall argue, along with many recent historians, that the fourth century does not represent a period of decline or a sharp break with the hallowed golden age of the fifth century;8 rather, the century develops earlier patterns into new configurations of importance. It is for that rea- son that the upper boundary of my study encompasses the last quarter of the fifth century and at times requires still earlier excursuses. It is also difficult to establish a terminal date; the patterns on which I focus led to a world defined by the eastern conquests of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic monarchies. Yet it is worth reflecting at the outset on the longstanding and intimate relations of the Greeks with their eastern neighbors. Greek cul- ture had developed out of the eastern cultures, and the two shared a basic matrix of values and perspectives in the Late Bronze Age and again from the ninth through the seventh century B.C. In the two hundred years between 600 and 400 B.C., the Greeks developed their own distinctive culture, which we generally call classical civilization. Contact with and fertilization from the East had, in fact, never ceased, neither in the Early Iron Age, from 1000 to 900 B.C., nor later in the Archaic and Classical periods, from 600 to 400. On initial view, what is most distinctive of the fourth century is the export to the east, and indeed throughout the Mediterranean, of a cultural perspective that is most clearly visible in the concrete representation of the human form in sculpture and painting, but is equally discernible in thought and politics. Although the city-state was the vehicle of this cultural revolution of the world, it could not have sustained it. This book does not attempt to document the eastern adventure of the fourth century, nor to present studies of all aspects of Greek culture in the period, though both play a 6 A. von Salis, Die Kunst der Griechen (Zurich 1953) 156–57. Munich, Glyptothek 252: B. Vierneisel-Schlörb, Glyptothek München, Katalog der Skulpturen, vol. 2, Klassische Skulpturen (Munich 1979) 62–67, no. 7, figs. 31–35; Boardman, GS-CP, fig. 241. 7 J. Pecˇ írka, “The Crisis of the Athenian Polis in the Fourth Century B.C.,” Eirene 9 (1976) 5–29. A. W. Gomme, “The End of the City-State,” in Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford 1937) 204–27, points out that the Greek city-state really lasted until Roman dominion. But this begs the point that the city-state had become a bit player in the shadow of the monarchies. See also R. L. Fox, “Aeschines and Athenian Democracy,” in Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis, ed. R. Osborne and S. Hornblower (Oxford 1994) 154–55. 8 Pecˇ írka, Eirene 9 (1976) 5–29, is perhaps the most lucid on the subject; see also P. J. Rhodes, in CAH2, vol. 6 (1994) 589–91; J. K. Davies, “The Fourth Century Crisis: What Crisis?” in Die athenische Demokratie im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr.: Vollendung oder Verfall einer Verfassungsform? Akten eines Symposiums, 3.–7. August 1992, Bellagio, ed. W. Eder (Stuttgart 1995) 29–36. Introduction 3 For general queries, contact [email protected] Childs_text 3rd.indd 3 1/22/18 10:26 AM © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. role to varying degrees almost throughout the period. The center of my focus is plastic form and the general principles to be derived from the study of sculpture and painting.
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