Inventing Hellas

Dear God, I found the one academic paper I wrote since grad school. It was for Jean Marty’s class on Greek Archaeology, which I took as a lark. I guess I have a couple of credits toward the MLA, as it was then


David Hopes
Greek Art & Archaeology
Dr. Marty
December 5, 1993


Inventing Hellas:
Greek Archaeology and Romantic Aesthetics

I had the interesting experience of learning Greece three times. The first time my investigation was untutored, random, almost accidental; I simply pulled an intriguing looking book off the library shelf, and it happened to be Homer and Flaxman's Iliad. Having no preconceptions nor prior knowledge, my experience of the work was pure and direct. The impression it left was of a world of radiant force, unanswerable and unambivalent, power unchecked by the niceties which hedge about the Christian God, power heroic by virtue of remaining not quite absolute. As far as I was concerned the Olympian gods were real if presently de-emphasized by a world sunken under the weight of ambiguities. I didn't stop believing in the Sunday School Jesus, but I intuitively understood that Christ and Zeus represented Ultimate Power in cultures whose values were, if mutually intelligible, as at variance as it was possible to be.
The second introduction came when I made the electrifying discovery that ancient Greece had an existence outside poetry. The science of archaeology-- at least as presented in texts proper for a schoolboy--gave me an apparently contradictory view from that discernible in The Iliad, of a people of immaculate sentiments and flawless taste who built in gleaming white and carved in gleaming white and probably thought in gleaming white, set off for history by the darkness of things not Greek. The Periclean marble-carvers were clearly not the same people who produced envious Agamemnon, volatile Achilles, dottering Nestor. The Athena of the Acropolis could not possibly be the loudmouth bully of the Trojan War with her favorites and her machinations. I made the assumption-- not exactly untrue true but grossly amiss in the details-- that these peoples must be separated by tremendous gulfs of time, and that the Greeks of Athens must be more than a little embarrassed by the Achaeans of Mycanae.
The third learning of Greece began in college with a more systematic survey of original texts in conjunction with the revelations of archaeology. Gradually I began to see that, like all people, the Greeks were complicated, various, even contradictory, and that nothing I had learned of them from any source was completely outside the pattern of their plausible identity. I learned furthermore that an artifact-- a funeral urn, a ravaged temple-- reveals something altogether different from such deliberate witness as a poem or a contemporary history-- exactly as going through my garbage will tell you something about me that my letters leave unsaid.
When I began to read the literature of English Romantics, rich as it is with Classical echoes, I understood that they had undergone something of the same experience I had in my discovery of Greece. I recognized that their impression of antiquity (and thus their use of it in the construction of their own aesthetic idiom) could not have been exactly as it was any time before the development of archaeology. Their sense of the Ancients was not textual or historical, but visual and impressionistic. They found precedent and credence for their developing vision in a Greece conjured not out of its texts but out of its broken stones. Stones, after all, are dumb and can be made to say whatever lines are written for them. Is there a science more purely interpretive than archaeology? The Romantics had invented a Romantic Hellas in order to find a viable heritage-- an acceptable parent-- for their own maturing self-image. I had done the same, and understood something of how the enterprise worked.

Like many curious neophytes from the end of the eighteenth century onward, my introduction to the aesthetic feel of ancient Greece was through the illustrations of John Flaxman (1755-1820), the son of a maker of plaster casts and later a member of the circle of the visionary artist and poet William Blake. Flaxman's drawings for The Iliad and The Odyssey, commissioned by Mrs Hare Naylor and executed circa 1792-- six years before the epoch-making Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge-- are notable for the austerity and cleanness of line the public has come to associate with Classicism. They are, in fact, all line, without ambiguity, color, complication, or atmospheric blur, eschewing even the shading and crosshatching which are the usual techniques of book illustrators to give depth and modeling.
Flaxman had access to the large collection of Attic red-figured vases belonging to Sir William Hamilton (who acquired them while ambassador to Naples), and was clearly influenced by their linear spareness, narrative boldness, and elegant economy of line. Further cause of Flaxman's artistic dryness may be traced to his tenure as a designer for Josiah Wedgwood, the demands of whose industry could be expected to inspire simplicity. Vase painting style, however well adapted to its intended medium, is rather more assertive, rather more of an issue, when transferred to two dimensions. The austerity suited to terracotta becomes a deliberate idiosyncrasy on paper. Flaxman is not so much faithful to the Attic style as engaging in an attempted abstraction from and reinterpretation of the Attic style, based not on literary scholarship but on the remains of the ancient world then being revealed through the enthusiastic if unsystematic archaeological techniques of the time.
Here the artist struck the nerve of his age. The painter George Romney enthused that Flaxman's illustrations to the Iliad looked just like they had been done in Homer's age, which was at once course quite wrong and quite revealing.

. . . Greek statues were not seen as naturalistically modeled volumes as they had been in the past; now the emphasis was on the simplified element of contour, on the "noble simplicity and calm grandeur" which Winckelmann saw in the newly excavated statues bleached from their centuries in the earth. . . . John Flaxman. . . probably more than any other artist propagated that purified and reduced style. . . throughout Europe.

(Walker, p.13)

In drawing the Greek Way, Flaxman was given credit for drawing the right way, for drawing according to principles discovered by the Greeks and which could be trusted to form the parameters of excellence for the duration of human effort. Franciscus Junius, writing late in the seventeenth century with privileged access to the Arundel marbles, was able to assert that the superiority of the ancients lay in their impulse toward imitation, the recreation of the pure truth of things, which he contrasts to the art of design, by which the moderns deform their work with needless ornament and amplification. In Flaxman there was no amplification.
The ancients seem to have interpreted their own aesthetic somewhat differently. Pliny, though he has little to say in support of Winckelmann's supposition of Attic simplicity and grandeur, makes clear that color was highly prized in his time, and that gorgeousness rather than austerity was the goal of contemporary artistic production. He spends, for instance, four chapters charting the history and methods of extraction of the pigment cinnabar, and writes of the colors available to artisans of his time as though they are spirits or Intelligences furnished with innate virtue. In his commentaries there is no indication that the spareness unveiled by Winckelmann and popularized by Flaxman was very much prized by Rome:
. . . Pompey's third triumph was held on his own birthday, September 29. . .  In this triumph there was carried in procession a gaming-board complete with a set of pieces, the board being made of two precious minerals and measuring three feet broad and four feet long. . . there rested on this board a golden moon weighing 30 pounds. There were also displayed three golden dining couches; enough gold vessels inlaid with gems to fill nine display stands; three gold figures of Minerva, Mars, and Apollo respectively; thirty-three pearl crowns, a square mountain of gold with deer, lions, and every variety of fruit on it and a golden vine entwined around it. . . Furthermore, there was Pompey's portrait rendered in pearls.

Natural History (Pliny, Book XXXVII, p 173)

Pliny goes on to mock Pompey for extravagance, but in an age dominated by the successors of Pompey's rival Caesar, it could not have been prudent to do otherwise, whatever the writer's own aesthetic principles.
Flaxman's drawings establish the Classical Mediterranean as a place perpetually flooded with light, shadowless, above ambiguity either of vision or human motivation. The impression his pictures for The Iliad conveyed to the reader of eleven or twelve years is unforgettable. The heroes of Troy strode forth hard-edge and crystalline, animate sculpture wearing the severe expression of the Athenian Golden Age, perhaps a little sad (it was, after all, war), but certainly profoundly disinterested. They were the principals of heroic endeavors without really being affected by them. This visual sensation affected the quality of the intellectual experience to the degree that one assumed the actions of these beautiful heroes to be likewise spare and flawless. Elegant, is the word, but without the modern connotation of frivolity. When the heroes of Hellas were compelled to war, their reasons were good, their conflicts surely different from ours, clean-edged, without mud or sweat or malice or brutality. All was necessitated by the adventures of the gods and therefore holy. It wasn't immediately clear that the actual words of these heroes did not support this impression.
The other important illustrator available in library editions to a child interested in "the Classics" was Gustav Dore, whose thick, complicated, dark line in the service of material such as Paradise Lost or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" gave a permanent impression of mystery and soulful obscurity-- as though it were natural for Christian or Romantic works to be pictured blurry and evocative, for Classical works to be clear and precise. Another way of describing the difference is to note that though the Romantics felt sculpture-- the art of Form-- had reached a level of unsurpassable excellence in antiquity, that painting-- the art of Passion and Innuendo-- had been brought to a pinnacle by themselves. Frederich Schlegel observed that easel painting-- a Romantic forte-- is a soul and spirit capable of animating the perfect organic form of Classical sculpture. (Honour, p. 127).
The impression left by Flaxman's Neo-Classical Classicism was lasting and exhilarating, fully supported by my other favored readings-- the English Romantic poets-- and largely wrong. If "wrong" is too harsh, then let us say merely un-Classical. Much of European Romanticism was based on a deeply idiosyncratic vision of Classical Greece, one ingeniously derived from broken statues and scraps of pottery interpreted not purely from the evidence of the past but for the uses of the present. When Keats or Shelley or Blake or, to a lesser extent, Byron went into transports over Hellas, they were drawing their energy from an archaeological misunderstanding.

from "Hellas"

The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep

. . .
Another Athens shall arise
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.

When Percy Shelley wrote these words-- in the atmosphere of the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire which was fanned to white heat in 1821-- he surely had no textual reference in mind, for the classical texts exhibit the full weight of the ambiguity, the divisiveness, the occasional political squalor of Greece even in its prime. He was thinking of the Acropolis gleaming golden white under an Attic moon. He was thinking of archaeology, and how a poet might make those dead stones speak. Shelley knew the Greek texts (as most of the Romantics did not), and even so was not able to curb the desire to see Greece through the lens of Hanoverian London, focused then on a series of sensational private collections and public aquisitions of Classical artifacts. Though the Romantic era was not the first to be aware of the science of archaeology (which had commenced full force the century before with the rediscovery of Pompeii), it was the first to use it as a major exhibit or reference point in its literature. Frequently (and, to that point, almost uniquely) the Romantic poet intended to celebrate the wedding of Rapture and Order-- a fresh concept, and not a typical one for the Northern European imagination. They saw themselves completing the Classical formal gesture as Schlegel saw emotional painting completing the formal gesture of sculpture. The likely prototypes of formal perfection resided in the Elgin Marbles and other fragments of purloined antiquity. These objects were already judged to be unparalleled in artistic excellence, and came from a time already understood to be exemplary in all aspects of human genius, so if their own perceptions could be found in them or illustrated by them, the credibility of the Romantic impulse was assured.
To the Romantic even the ruinousness of Classical ruins was salutary:

Chateaubriand enthused over the lichens, mosses and creepers growing on the ruins of Greece and uniting art with nature. Enhanced by the passage of time, ruins spoke to the imagination. 'Modern buildings say nothing, but ruins speak,' wrote Benjamin Constant in 1808. Stendhal went further to declare that the Coliseum was more beautiful in his day than it had ever been. 'The fragments of wall darkened by time have on the soul the effect of the music of Cimarosa' he wrote.
(Honour, 154)

The remoteness of the Classical world was a necessary part of its charm, the relatively degenerate state of contemporary Greece-- more Turkish than Periclean-- being a frequent subject of moralizing in the Romantic era, even by as unlikely a moralist as Lord Byron, who mentions "fair Greece sad relic of departed worth" in the second canto of Childe Harold (1812). It is precisely the archaeology of Greece which attracts the Romantic, not its living self, not even the written witness of its ancient citizens, except in the legendary context of The Iliad or, for Shelley, the plays of Euripides in which he was able to find the sentiments of revolution.
I was not able to find in the writings of the major Romantic reference to the chryselephantine colossi of Phidias, or to the many-breasted Artemis of Epheseus, or to brazen griffins, or to homoerotic kraters (all of which were known at that time to exist), or to anything which may represent the dark or the superstitious or the ambiguous sides of human nature. For them all of Greece was an unwavering light, a gleam of white marble setting their own age in sorry contrast.
One does not prize a ruin over a living system unless one is indifferent to its original meaning and use. The use by the Romantics of Greece is less to understand than to prove a point. Gothic architecture is subjected to a similar disregard for original purpose, as in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," when that most brainy and symbolic of styles is made to evoke a wild Romantic ecstasy. This attitude is not a mistake on the part of the great Romantics, but an indication to their readers that they meant to use the past as grist for mills other than historical accuracy.
Flaxman did study and draw in Rome (1787-1794), where genuine Greek and Roman antiquities would have been available to him. But much lying about under dirt and ash gave these objects the one quality apparently left out by their original creators-- austerity. Flaxman's Classicism was-- like Broca's craniometries and Cuvier's culturally biased Anthropology-- a creation of its time, and by a process peculiar to that time-- which is to say, fairly honest (if very young) scientific practice strained through many filters of bias and preconception-- not all of it by any means unlovely.
It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of the acquisition in 1792 by the British Museum of Sir William Hamilton's collection of Greek vases, and the public display of the Elgin Marbles and the Townley marbles early in the 1800's. William Blake made figures from the Hamilton vases, and a generation later John Keats was so impressed by the figures glazed on terracotta that he made them the central image of one of the great poems of the century.
The one major voice raised against the idolization of ancient Greek art is the typically contentious one of William Blake, though his academic training included drawing from Classical models just like everyone else's. Blake's view is peculiar and not exactly scholarly, but he did see into an aspect of the usage of Classical art to which its formal perfection had blinded the eyes of his contemporaries. "We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations." (Blake, Complete Writings, p. 445)
Yet Blake's own figures are more "classical" than those of any of his contemporaries other than Flaxman, and more so even than Flaxman's if we take into account the twisting energy of the Hellenistic vision, present everywhere in Blake's agonized nudes and nowhere else among his contemporaries. Though Blake gave credit to Michaelangelo (a plausible influence) and Raphael (an almost incredible influence) for his style, there are few other English or European painters whose work so directly reflects Greek (particularly Hellenistic) notions of the energy of the body, the expression by the body of the tumult of the mind.
Blake's opposition to the deification of Greek art, though, is not merely the rejection of the father. It was the simple fact that the Greeks were idolized which irritated Blake, aside from any quality of their own accomplishment. "The Greek Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne, or Memory, and not of Inspiration or Imagination." (Blake, Complete Writings, p.473) This is Blake's way of saying that too great homage to an antique model kills the inspiration of the present. It is not necessarily helpful for a modern (of any time), to have to fight her way past the examples of Phidias or Homer. Canova, Chantrey, Thorvaldsen are essentially indistinguishable from (quite good) Hellenistic sculptors; were they really, then, the best expression of an age seventeen centuries later?
The poets of the early nineteenth century survived autocratic Hellenization because the great literature of the ancients had been around for centuries, and was not then being dug up in gleaming whiteness, a sensation at once on the street and in the academies.
If you are great enough, or young and fearless enough, you can take on the ancients and survive as yourself. John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was written in May of 1819; in March of 1819 Keats wrote to his brother George, "Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures in a greek vase-- a Man and two women who no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement." (Keats, Letters, p.314) This is a very brief comment in a very long letter, but already we see Keats's association of Greek art with the stasis of perfection, with the single instant in the history of a gesture to which all effort had been building, after which all further expenditure of energy will be futile diminishment. Keats would have thought the selection by a Greek sculptor or vase painter of his subject was a philosophical choice more than an aesthetic one, one likely to reflect Keats's own notion that there is a single moment of fulfillment in every life and in every major phase of life, before which all is preliminary, after which all is decay and disappointment.
  Interestingly, when Keats makes this comment he is talking about Indolence, the directionless ennui which is the only acceptable alternative in a sensitive mind to poetic ecstasy. This ennui he thinks he finds embodied to perfection on the vases of the Hamilton collection.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.

The idea that Greek artistic production was a sort of narcotic ecstasy mostly reflects Keats's own preferences, of course, but part of it surely derives from the marmoreal withdrawal of his models, the expressionless faces of the red figure vases, the inward, smirking gaze of the statues. Without their paint and jeweled eyes they do look half asleep--albeit a sleep of matchless beauty-- and Keats never saw them otherwise. In contrast, Percy Shelley, a literary scholar fluent in Greek, who seldom mentions specific works of visual art, derives an altogether different view of Greece from Euripides and what he imagines to be true of Sappho-- of a passionate land in love with liberty. I do not believe Greek democracy could have been deduced from any remnant of its visual art, even as the dazzling reasonableness the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found in its three dimensional art would be difficult to support from his epics or its drama.
Keats- who did not "think of venturing upon Greek" (Keats, Letters, p. 424)-- can scarcely pick up the pen without addressing himself to Classical subjects. When Milton contemplated the writing of epics, his mind turned to the mythology of his own island, to King Arthur, and then to the Christian legends of The Fall. But-- around not always successful detours into the Medieval world, the crowning attempts of which include "The Eve of Saint Agnes" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci-- Keats takes the Classical milieu as an obviously appropriate subject for epic-- first the tale of the shepherd Endymion, and then of the Titan Hyperion. I do not believe he would have dared these subjects without the excitement surrounding recent archaeological finds and acquisitions such as those mentioned above. Milton knew the languages of the Ancients; Keats knew their faces and their kitchenware. That there should be a difference in perspective between them can hardly cause surprise.
The impulse to beat Homer at his own game is an odd one unless one sees an opportunity to come at things from an angle Homer never anticipated. Keats believed he had found the true psychological source for the poetic ecstasy Homer assigned to the Muse. He sees on the unidentifiable urn (an amalgamation almost certainly inspired by the Hamilton collection) the vibrant balance between desire and fulfillment, between the ecstatic beauty of longing and the ambiguousness of fulfillment, which might be what we expected, but which might as well be a disappointment, and will in any case in this decaying world lend a momentary pleasure. Only the artifact is certain to outlive all such disappointment and inspire fresh desires in ages to come: "Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste/ Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st/"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-- that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Keats makes the Grecian urn speak the last epigrammatic words, among the most critically belabored and uncertain in the canon. What could they mean? What could the message of the remnants of Greek civilization be to the first decades of the nineteenth century? Perhaps that, knowledge being uncertain, the only thing to do is go forward on the testimony of the senses, which tell you that these things are beautiful, whatever they mean. Encompass them you cannot; use them you will.