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THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 1 Few Works THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 1 Few works of ancient Greek art hold the same poignancy for the modern viewer as the Archaic grave kore, Phrasikleia (fig. 1), whose inscription, “I shall be called kore forever, because I won this name from the gods instead of marriage,”1 reminds us that the person immortalized in stone was once a real girl, probably living in eager anticipation of the day she would become a wife, but cheated out of experiencing a full life by her early death. Her story would have aroused even more sympathy in the ancient Greeks, who considered marriage the main object in the life of any woman,2 and the failure to complete it a true cause for grief.3 By dying before marriage, Phrasikleia missed out on what the Greeks considered the most important transition in the female life: that from girl to woman. Hence, she must always be called Kore or girl, since her role in life must forever remain unfulfilled. Marriage as the Fulfillment of the Female Role “There are two days on which a woman is most pleasing—when someone marries her and when he carries out her dead body.”4 So wrote the sixth-century BC poet Hipponax. Although more than faintly misogynistic in tone, this line nonetheless reflects the ancient Greek thought that wedding day of any woman was, at the same time, the most wonderful and the most crucial day of her life. Becoming a wife was indeed the fulfillment of the female role. In fact, women in ancient Greek literature are often defined by their role as wives: Penelope, for example, emerges as the ideal woman because she remains loyal to her husband for twenty years, patiently awaiting his return 1 Funerary kore inscription, cited in Dillon and Garland 401 2 Just 40 3 Sophocles Antigone 810-816 4 Hipponax 68, cited in Dillon and Garland 398 THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 2 and keeping hordes of eager suitors at bay, while Medea, on the other hand, certainly ranks among the worst, thanks to of her failure as a wife and vengeful, unwomanly murder of her own children. This literary prioritization of the female role in marriage is confirmed by archeological evidence as well. Ancient Athenian graves are filled with painted vessels, decorated with wedding scenes and placed there either for the marriage of a dead maiden to Hades, or as a reminder of the most glorious day in the life of a deceased matron. These vessels provide us with images of a wide variety of bridal activities, including preparations, processions, and the arrival of the bride at her new home. This prevalence of the wedding theme on vases, then, combined with references in literature and grave monuments like that of Phrasikleia, is a testament to the vital importance of marriage and the wedding in the lives of women. My Interest in Nike on Wedding Vessels Since, in my career at Franklin and Marshall, I had already devoted hours upon hours to the study of women in antiquity, I was naturally drawn to the event that was considered the key moment of the female existence. When I decided to concentrate my independent study on the ancient Athenian wedding, I knew that I would have to narrow my interests to a specific topic. Still, I began by reading The Wedding in Ancient Athens, by John Oakley, a detailed overview of the ritual itself, for background information. Oakley, who reconstructed the stages of the Athenian wedding by supplementing information from ancient literary sources with details from vase-painting imagery, often mentions the two main vessels associated with weddings: the loutrophoros and the lebes gamikos. As a student of classical archaeology, I knew that I wanted to work primarily THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 3 with some form of Greek art. I also knew that I preferred to analyze vase-painting to sculpture or other forms of art because pottery was a mass-produced commodity, used and owned by ordinary people, and therefore more of an indicator of issues of everyday life. The loutrophoros and lebes gamikos, the two primary vase shapes from the nuptial context, then, became my focus. I set to work searching for images of these shapes. Oakley, although he mentions them often, provides few pictures of these vessels, the decorative scenes of which do not often depict the wedding procession itself, so I turned to the Beazley Archive, an internet database of Greek pottery that allows the user to search by vase shape. While perusing the Beazley Archive results for loutrophoroi and lebetes gamikoi, I noticed that many of their figural scenes included representations of Nike, the goddess of victory. I was surprised find that a deity whom I had always associated with athletic feats and battle victory was also linked with weddings. I was excited by opportunity to explore such an apparent contradiction: how could Nike possibly be linked with marriage? Surveying a large body of secondary scholarship on wedding imagery, I realized that no one had addressed this subject in detail. Sabetai notes the presence of Nikai on lebetes gamikoi, but dismisses the figures as little more than generic space fillers.5 Roberts calls them messengers from the netherworld.6 But neither of these two address Nike in her identity as the goddess of victory, and the more examples of Nike in the wedding context I discovered, the more dissatisfied I became with these interpretations. Therefore, in the following study, it is my intent, by concentrating on Nike as the goddess of victory, to determine through which associations she came to be associated with marriage in fifth-century Athenian vase painting. 5 Sabetai, Washing Painter 88 6 Roberts 183 THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 4 Methods I next sought out Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, by J. D. Beazley, the largest available listing of vases in the red-figure technique. This three-volume work, which provides information on the period, painter, museum number, provenance, and publication, as well as a description of the figural scene, for a vast body of red-figure vases, became the center of my research. ARV has a useful mythological index, which cites every vase with representations of any given mythological character, including Nike. Using this index, I then began to format a Microsoft Excel table, listing vessels with depictions of Nike by their page number in ARV, and including information about their museum number, provenance, shape, painter, period, and figural scenes. At first, I collected only loutrophoroi and lebetes gamikoi with pictures of Nike, thinking that I could determine her link to weddings through analysis of these vessels, but I realized that, although they were my primary focus of study, wedding vessels alone would not provide a sufficient view of the associations of Nike. I needed a more complete picture of Nike in red-figure imagery. Thus, since it was my intention to discover a link that associated Nike with weddings, I began to catalog every appearance of Nike in ARV, so that I could examine all the contexts in which she played a part.7 Microsoft Excel also allowed me to re-sort my list of vases by shape, which proved to be even more useful. Looking over the different shapes with representations of Nike, I found that they fit neatly into three distinct categories: sympotic ware, vessels used by men for the consumption of wine in the symposium; items from the female toilette, such as cosmetic and perfume containers; and wedding-specific vessels, shapes that are primarily seen in wedding contexts. I also 7 Appendix I THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 5 formatted three tables according to these categories.8 Then, assuming that an appearance of Nike with another character implies a victory for her companion, I set out to analyze each scene in light of its context of use to determine for whom Nike most often signified victory, and considering the types of victories she represented, to explain how she may have come to signify victory in the sphere of the wedding. Structure In my analysis of the connection between Nike and fifth-century wedding imagery, I will begin by discussing the types of primary evidence that are vital to the reconstruction of the ancient Athenian wedding, stressing the importance of scenes on painted pottery in its study. Then, I will provide an overview of the rituals of the wedding ceremony, to aid in the contextualization of the scenes I will later analyze. Next, I will discuss the associations between weddings and death in ancient Greek ritual and thought, an important concept in any study of the ancient Athenian wedding. After this information about the wedding ritual itself, I will provide information about the other subject of this study, Nike, drawing information from literary sources and iconography, including a discussion of her popularity in Athens and consequent ubiquity on the Athenian Acropolis. Then I will summarize the information in my tables drawn from ARV, describing what kind of characters Nike accompanies on each type of pot and considering each shape in the broader context of the three spheres of use: the symposium, the female toilette, and the wedding. Following that, I will analyze this data to determine for whom Nike signifies victory, considering men and gods, who often 8 Appendices II-IV THE VICTORIOUS BRIDE 6 appeared on sympotic ware; women, whose primary appearances are on items from the female toilette; and, since I will argue that there are cases in which women can be victorious, brides, who are the focus of most wedding scenes. I will then argue that Nike signifies that the bride has achieved a victory in her marriage.
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