by Oswyn Murray
How long the war lasted is uncertain, as is its outcome. The Chalcidians won one battle with Thessalian help, but the archaeological evidence from Eretria suggests that it suffered no major setback. Lefkandi was finally abandoned; but that is not surprising, for it stands half way between Chalcis and Eretria on the edge of the disputed Lelantine Plain, which geographically belongs to Chalcis. At Al Mina Euboean interest virtually disappears; after the break around 700, the pottery from the period 700–600 is largely Corinthian (perhaps carried by Aeginetans, who produced no pottery of their own) and east Greek, from such centres as Rhodes, Samos, Chios and (probably) Miletus. It seems that as usual neither protagonist in the war benefited: exhausted by the conflict, they were never again politically important. The rewards of their exploits overseas and the leadership in Greece passed to others; the old oracle was continued to fit a new generation:
….But better still than these are they who dwell between Tiryns and Arcadia rich in sheep, the linen-corseleted Argives, goads of war.
VI
The Orientalizing Period
CONTACT with the near east brought many changes to Greek society in the century from 750 to 650. Some of these were purely practical, such as the introduction of the domestic chicken: absent from Homer and Hesiod, as from the Old Testament, this bird first appears on proto-Corinthian pottery around 650; the earliest reference to the familiar sound of cockcrow heralding the dawn is in Theognis (864), and the cock was known as ‘the Persian bird’ from its supposed country of origin (which in fact was ultimately India); but by the age of Pindar it had become the symbol of domesticity (Olympians 12.20). In social customs there were other innovations, such as the practice of reclining on couches at banquets, rather than sitting as the Homeric heroes had done. This is mentioned as a north Palestinian custom by the prophet Amos (6.4); it spread throughout the Greek world in the course of the seventh century. The transformation of the Homeric warrior feast of merit into the aristocratic symposion with its elaborate drinking rituals, games, songs, poetic and verbal contests, dancing girls or male companions, and its suppressed or open sexuality, is one of the most significant changes in Greek aristocratic life: it produced a highly sophisticated and refined culture, centred on the pleasures and arts of the drinking party, not unlike the world of early China (ch. 12).
The intimacy of the contact between Greeks and Phoenicians is shown by the number of Semitic loan words in Greek, especially in the area of material culture – the shapes of pottery vessels, words for articles of clothing, and fishing or sailing terms. But the means by which this transmission occurred and the effect it had on the Greek recipients can best be studied in three main areas: art, religion and literacy.
The psychological roots of conventionalism in art have been explored by Sir Ernst Gombrich in his book Art and Illusion. In his responses, the artist is half consciously conditioned by a set of visual schemata derived from the artistic tradition, in relation to which he interprets his task, whether it be the creation of abstract designs or the representation of the internal or external world; even the modern artist, with all his emphasis on individuality and experiment, is as caught in such problems as the painter of Geometric pottery. Change takes place in accordance with social, technological or aesthetic pressures as much as in response to individual genius; and in a traditional society which emphasizes craftsmanship and skill above originality, such changes will normally be slow. In this situation it is the meeting of two different artistic traditions which is most likely to have a revolutionary impact, partly in substituting a new set of conventions for the old, but also by at least partially freeing men’s vision from the unconscious tyranny of inherited schemata, and so enabling them to see for themselves. The orientalizing period in Greek art is a model of such a change.
In the complex process of fusion, substitution and liberation, the mode of transmission of artistic skills is important. We can distinguish first the migration of artists from the migration of objects. The ambivalent position of the craftsman in Greek society, his role as a ‘public worker’ who might move from one community to another, undoubtedly offered the opportunity for immigration by foreign craftsmen; and despite the obvious cultural and linguistic barriers, occasional interchange of this type occurred. From the late ninth century Phoenician metal workers on Crete were producing beaten bronze objects for dedication, which have been found at the Idaean cave (refuge of the infant Zeus), Olympia, Dodona and in Etruria; in the same period Phoenician goldsmiths were working at Knossos and perhaps at Athens; and the origins of Athenian ivory carving suggest contact almost as close. Greek craftsmen themselves travelled to the centres of distribution, and set up workshops in trading posts, where they would have had easy access to eastern workers. Such migration of artists can be detected partly from the artefacts themselves; but it is chiefly presupposed in the transference to Greece of technical manufacturing skills which could only have been learned through personal contact. The working of gold filigree and granulation, the cutting of jewel stones, ivory carving, the use of the terra cotta mould, and the lost wax method of bronze casting, are all examples of such skills.
Despite the importance of these contacts, the migration of objects was both more common and in conceptual terms more significant for the history of western art. Here the nature of the evidence results in a curiously oblique picture. Pottery was not imported into Greece, for the Greeks were already capable of producing vessels superior to those of the east; the primary imported objects available to Greek artists were engraved or cast metalwork, and (probably most important of all) textiles: fragments of metal have survived, but not a trace of the fabrics. And the problem is complicated by the fact that our evidence for the reception of these influences is largely confined to the one medium not imported – painted pottery. In such a situation we need to look first at effects, before speculating on causes.
The Geometric style in pottery was comparatively homogeneous between different areas, though its most developed centre was at Athens. The dominant motifs are regular geometric patterns deployed in bands around the vase, and serving therefore to emphasize admirably its shape. The basic alternation of broad bands or narrow lines of glaze was painted by rotating the vase on the wheel: the multiple brush and compasses were also used. Other patterns such as chequer boards, swastikas, zigzags and meanders were painted freehand, until the surface of the vase was covered; it has been suggested that many of these patterns reveal the influence of basketwork. When natural figures were introduced, it was usually on the shoulder or neck of the vase as repeated stylized animals, or as scenes in a small panel; they were painted in black silhouette. The great Athenian funeral vases (plate 2a) which stood as markers and libation vessels over the graves of the dead show the limits of this style in narrative art. The mourning scene is generalized, each element presented separately – horses’ legs and chariot wheels side by side to the correct number, regardless of whether they are in fact visible; in the human body the triangle which represents the trunk is presumably frontal, while the legs are twisted to show the direction of motion: the ritual beating of the head demonstrates the nature of their activity. The body of the dead man is turned towards us and lifted from the bier; the checked shroud hangs over it in mid air. The occasion and the purpose of the vase are crystal clear, but individuality and emotion have to be imagined. Sometimes the trappings of a chariot race suggest magnificent funeral games; there are occasional scenes of sport and dancing, warfare and even a shipwreck (is the sailor astride the upturned boat Odysseus?): these perhaps represent a Homeric repertoire or the realities of life indifferently, for it is doubtful whether the two were distinguished.
The orientalizing style in pottery first appears in Corinth around 725 with proto-Corinthian; a little later (perhaps because of the greater sophistication and therefore greater resistance of Attic Geometric) the same tendencies appear in Athenian pottery. Other local orientalizing styles swiftly emerged, and within fifty years the transformation wa
s complete. The changes affected both techniques of drawing and the repertoire of motifs, in the same direction. The Geometric silhouette was replaced by a flexible combination of black figure silhouette with incised details (the Black Figure technique), which was combined with outline drawing and extra colour: the result was a style which, while relying on outline and lacking the concept of shading, could achieve a remarkable level of naturalism. This tendency is also reflected in the repertoire of motifs. The new freedom of line allowed many forms of curved patterns, spirals and curls; a whole range of eastern decorative motifs came in – volutes, rosettes, palmettes, lotus flowers and buds, and complex forms of the ‘tree of life’: although the Greeks can have seen few of these plants in real life, their renderings often show a recognition that they are plant forms, and not mere decorative devices. The same relative tendency towards naturalism is shown in the new love of animal drawing and animal friezes; yet again few if any of these animals were observed from real life. Horses and dogs, hares, cocks and deer may have been; but to a Greek, lions and panthers were as fabulous as sphinxes, sirens, gorgons, chimeras and other winged monsters: such composite beasts are clearly copied initially from another tradition, until they lead the artist into the realms of free fantasy. Curiously they had little impact outside the artistic sphere; only centaurs (probably a Greek invention) became seriously embedded in Greek mythology as a particular hybrid race with a specific character. The models of these animals can often be identified with precision: the lion for instance is first Hittite and later Assyrian in form.
The result of this orientalizing animal art was clearly not so much a closer look at the real world, as greater freedom for the imagination – naturalism not realism. In the human figure the Geometric proportions are bodied out to give a freedom of gesture and expression which encourages the portrayal of emotion and narrative. Mythology is liberated; the figures can be seen to tell complex epic stories, or to wear contemporary armour and perform contemporary actions. The supreme example of this tendency in proto-Corinthian pottery is the Chigi vase on the cover of this book (about 650), by a painter who has used his mastery of the new engraving and line drawing techniques to portray contemporary Greek scenes – a hoplite battle, a religious procession on horseback, and a hunting scene.
The sources of some of the new techniques are easily identified: the practice of incising details is foreign to the skills of the Greek painter, and must derive from the copying of engraved metal objects; this gives a clue to the source of the sudden freedom of line and the importance of outline. But the influence of fabrics remains elusive. Particular styles of decoration or motifs seem closer to embroidered, woven or printed cloth: the east Greek ‘wild goat style’ for instance has often suggested the techniques of tapestry. But such speculations must remain impressionistic until the evidence, both literary and artistic, for decorated fabrics in Greece and the near east has been collected and properly studied; this remains the most important gap in our understanding of the transmission of oriental motifs to Greece.
The orientalizing style lasted roughly a hundred years, until the Black Figure style gradually discarded its more exuberant manifestations. Its importance is often played down by art historians, who rightly point out that Greek art was never derivative from the east; the borrowings and adaptations were creative, partly perhaps because of the need to transfer them from one medium to another: Nevertheless it is I believe the fusion of Geometric narrative with eastern naturalism which gave to Greek art, and hence to western art, its distinctive directions – an interest in the portrayal of reality as it is, as opposed to style and decoration, its freedom in experimentation, and its particular concern with man and his works as the subject of art.
The transmission of religious ideas is never a simple matter: when an idea, a teaching or a ritual crosses a cultural frontier, it suffers a sea change which cannot always be detected beneath the surface continuities. Each foreign phenomenon is misunderstood or reinterpreted to fit into existing religious and social patterns, for it must be remembered that, to the believer, the origins of his beliefs are not important: what matter are their coherence and their relation to his life on earth. Nevertheless new ideas, however well assimilated, help to create a new religious order, and thereby influence the foundations of society.
The complexity of the process of transmission can be seen in a specific case – the cult of Adonis, which must have entered Greece during this period. Its origins lie in a typical near eastern fertility cult, the worship of a fertility goddess together with her paramour, Astarte and Baalat of the Phoenician town of Gebal (Byblos), which later developed into the centre of the Adonis cult (Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess 6). But the Greeks already possessed in Demeter their own somewhat different fertility goddess: the more sexual orientation of the Byblos cult (where ritual prostitution was practised) led them to identify Astarte with Aphrodite. It is as a consequence of this equivalence that Adonis entered Greece: he was never worshipped independently of Aphrodite, and the cult may well have spread by way of Cyprus, which was her island. The name of her lover in fact derives from a misunderstanding of the Phoenician ritual cry, Adon, ‘Lord’.
The myth of Adonis retains many elements related to his original role as a dying vegetation god; the Greeks were aware of this aspect, as is shown by the explicit connection with the myth of Demeter: her daughter Persephone in the underworld shares the favours of Adonis with Aphrodite above. But this does not mean that for the Greeks Adonis was a god connected with vegetation: the general interpretation of the Adonis myth is overtly sexual.
The rituals have been similarly transformed. The Greek cult of Adonis was in various ways opposed to indigenous fertility cults; unlike them it was private rather than public, practised primarily by women of all classes including foreigners and prostitutes, and regarded as a period of female disorder. ‘Gardens of Adonis’ were artificially grown in shallow vessels, exposed on the roof tops and then thrown into the sea; the practice is referred to in Isaiah (17.10) and relates to the death and renewal of vegetation. But in Greece, Plato and perhaps others interpreted the ritual as a sign of unnatural cultivation in opposition to normal modes (Phaedrus 176b). The chief feature of Greek cult was the ritual lamentation for the dead Adonis; but again this was no celebration of the death and rebirth of vegetation. The hymns sung by women mourn forbidden fruit – the fantasy lover that society has deprived them of, and those frontiers of desire which they will never know: it is this aspect of Adonis as the young lover which has entered the western mythology of love. Appropriately Sappho provides the earliest Greek evidence of his worship, in the cult of Aphrodite among the women of Lesbos:
Tender Adonis is dying, Cytherea (Aphrodite). What shall we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and tear your garments.
(Fragment 140 = 107D)
This ritual too is eastern: ‘Behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz.’ (Ezekiel 8.14)
It is in myth rather than ritual that the transformations effected by eastern influences can be traced most clearly. As Herodotus said (p. 65), Hesiod stands at the beginning of Greek thought about the gods; and it is Hesiod who shows that the systematization of Greek religion was inspired by eastern models. The central organizing principle of the Theogony is a ‘succession myth’, which both in its structure and in many details shows a close correspondence with eastern succession myths. Three of these are known in some detail. The first is the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, a ritual text recited annually at the Babylonian New Year festival, and preserved in several copies, the oldest of which is around 1000 BC; the language is Akkadian, but the mythological background is Sumerian, which suggests that much of it may go back to the oldest stratum of Mesopotamien mythology. The second succession myth is the myth of Kumarbi, found in the royal archives of the Hittite capital of Boghazkoy which was destroyed at the end of the thirteenth century BC; the myth is Hurrian in origin, a people who ruled south-east Asia Minor, northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia in th
e second millennium before their conquest by the Hittites. Finally a Greek work of the early second century AD by a certain Herennius Philo of Byblos, preserved only in excerpts, purported to be a translation of a Phoenician History by Sanchuniathon; the date of the original is unknown, but it is probably after 300 BC, when this genre of national history became popular. The Greek ‘translation’ was clearly written by someone who recognized the parallels between the Phoenician original and Hesiod: it is not therefore safe to use it for comparison with Hesiod. Nevertheless there are enough genuine Phoenician elements in the Greek version to prove the existence of a Phoenician succession myth of the same type as the Hurrian-Hittite myth; the two were presumably closely related.
Certain details in the Hesiodic myth find parallels in the Babylonian texts, but in general it is the Hurrian myth which is closest to Hesiod, as can be seen from this brief synopsis of each:
Kumarbi myth
Hesiod
Anu (the Babylonian sky-god)
Ouranos (the sky) prevents his children by Gaia (earth) from being born, by constant intercourse; he
fights with Kumarbi who bites off his genitals and swallows them. He becomes pregnant, begets three gods, spits out two,