When writing a contribution to a Festschrift, the first thing to think of is of course a theme that relates to the honorand and her or his research. In the case of Anthony Snodgrass that is a surprisingly difficult task, because there are so many possibilities to choose from. As we all know, Anthony has produced seminal contributions to thinking about field survey, the Elgin marbles, Early Iron Age Greece, pottery styles, city planning, Archaic Greece, the origins of the polis, the (re-)birth of figurative art, demography, economy and many more subjects. To make things still harder for the Festschrift-writer, there is often not much to add to his interpretations and conclusions. It is therefore only with some hesitation that I here want to bring together and explore a set of Anthony's favourite hobby horses: the material side of the early development of the Greek city-state, as it can be seen from excavations of domestic sites and through field survey.

This is not an accidental choice: I came upon the subject when preparing my contribution to the publication of the results of the survey of the Boeotian city of Thespiae, on the pottery finds from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period. As often in Greek surveys, the early historic period is not well represented among the finds, with a total of around 200 sherds. However, the thin spread of these Early Iron Age to Archaic sherds over the whole site (Fig. 3.1) is actually not a bad score compared with many other projects (Stissi 2011: 149–50). But what does it represent? It is quite conceivable that the continuing habitation of the city has reduced the amount of early material in the top layers. Nevertheless a city of the density and size of Classical and Hellenistic Thespiae seems unlikely for the period before that. Yet apparently there was some human activity over a large area of Thespiae from the eighth to the sixth centuries bc. How should we envisage that?

We are here to honour a dear friend and a great mentor. Among many other things, he has taught us respect: respect for the world we are studying, for doubt, for friendship. We are therefore glad of this opportunity to dedicate to him this short synthesis of a study that has engrossed our team for many years now.

The archaeological context of the fictile tablets found at the archaeological site of Penteskouphia, along the Phliasian road at the rear of Acrocorinth, still resists attempts at interpretation. The special interest of this context lies in the fact that it provides lavish evidence for the work of potters. All stages of the work cycle are documented: the extraction of clay from the quarry, the shaping of the vase on the turning wheel, the work at the kiln, from fuelling to watching over the vases in the crucial stages of firing, the finishing and decoration of the vases in the workshop, the loading of the vases onto ships and their transportation by sea.

The complexity of this corpus and the variety of its style, which often stoops to depicting the physical degradation of the craftsman with extreme crudeness, have overshadowed issues related to the nature and characteristics of its archaeological context. When one skims the existing bibliography, one almost gets the impression that the communis opinio is that the tablets are a heterogeneous ensemble of images, in which no unified ‘programme’ can be discerned. We suspect that this impasse is due to the fact that the attention of scholars has been monopolised by the more captivating subject of the tablets themselves. Even scholars who have investigated other aspects of the corpus, whose complexity actually goes beyond the mere depiction of craftsmen, have focused only on individual subjects, as did Geagan (1970), who only examined mythological themes, without relating them to their context.

About the discovery of the pinakes in 1905, we only know that they were lying in two small ravines on the west slope of the Penteskouphia Hill; in this difficult situation, determined by the total lack of information on the structure of the ancient site, useful indications can be drawn from the fact that many pinakes are decorated on both faces with different themes, and that these sometimes combine to form a single image.

It is now a well-established fact in the human and social sciences that the study of the spatial distribution of social life, including religion, is one of the best accesses to the analysis and understanding of societies. But it has not always been so. For quite a long time, in Classical studies, the only approach to space was traditional ‘historical geography’, the scope of which was primarily to identify the places mentioned in the ancient sources or known through archaeological or epigraphic evidence. This was and remains an important contribution to the study of ancient societies. But in these works the study of topography does not sustain a general conception of space as such and as a fundamental aspect of social life; and in fact, space as a category of study was not formalised as such. In the field of religion, of special interest here, the study of cult and deities in the ancient classical world (Greece and Rome) has for long been unaware of the interest of spatial relationships. The location of sanctuaries in Classical antiquity was usually analysed in purely religious terms, according to the nature of the deity or peculiarities of the cult, for example, and perceived as a static reality, unaffected by historical change (political and/or social). The idea has been deeply rooted for quite a long time that the choice of cult places depended frequently on their supposed ‘natural features’, which would ‘naturally’ confer on them a sacred value (mountains, caves, woods, springs, etc.). According to this view (which has not completely disappeared), most religious behaviours were seen as deeply traditional and static. This is why it is interesting to note that, apart from sharing a strong fascination with the intriguing world of Geometric and Archaic Greece, Anthony Snodgrass and his students or the researchers whom he deeply influenced (including myself in this last category) played a decisive part in the ‘spatial turn’ of the 1970s and 1980s, and made of space a decisive concept in many different fields. May one speak of a ‘Cambridge school’ of archaeology? I would be inclined to do so. And I would like to make here a short and very general retrospective evocation of the research in this field before asking a few questions about the present situation.

Introduction

The text of the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, as well as other writings that stem from the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great, is based on the idea of an archetype. When I say archetype here, I have in mind a text that is meant as a model for other texts that serve as copies of this model. As we will see, the idea of such a model text does not necessarily match the reality of an original text that is copied.

What I just said seems at first to be self-evident, since the act of copying something does not require the copying of an original. What you are copying may already be a copy. But the very idea of an archetype is not self-evident. As I will argue, this idea goes beyond the reality of some text that someone copies for the first time in order to make another text, which can then be copied again to make still another text, and so on.

When I say idea here, I will try to keep in mind the Theory of Forms as expounded in Plato's Republic and elsewhere, since the original Greek word idea is the primary term used by Plato's Socrates for what we translate as Form. In terms of this theory, what is for us the real world is a mere copy of the ideal world of Forms, and, further, whatever we find in our world that we want to represent by way of picturing it in images or in words is a mere copy of a copy. So, if we applied Plato's Theory of Forms to the idea of an archetype, we would be speaking of an ideal text existing in an ideal world. And, in terms of my argument, the text of the Cyrus Cylinder was once upon a time considered to be such an ideal text, such an archetype. Or, to say it from an anthropological point of view, the text of the Cyrus Cylinder was considered to be an archetype because it was meant to be a cosmic model that was absolutised by its ritualised meaning, lending its ritual authority to all copies made and used by the enforcers of the Persian Empire in a wide variety of situations.

The term ruins (ereipia) in Greek derives from the verb ereipo, meaning to cut down,to cause to fall, as already documented by Homer. If the word appears in Herodotus, it is rarely found in the corpus of Greek tragedies and in Thucydides: ruins do not constitute a prominent theme before the Hellenistic period. It is not until Latin poetry that poetic nostalgia becomes a key element in sensitivity to the past. For Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, Troy is the setting of a massive and sudden destruction, a vast area of rubble devastated by pillage and fire; it is not yet a ruin. Things are different in the case of Latin poetry, which constructs a topos of the deserted and abandoned city from the image of the city's destruction. In order for the feeling of ruins to be expressed as a melancholy in the face of vestiges, which are nothing more than traces of a former flourishing life or of a splendid monument reduced to some blocks of stone, it is necessary for time to take its toll and for the poet to get to grips with the feeling of loss which ensues (Papini 2011).

To visualise the history of Rome it is necessary to give a historical dimension to the fall of Troy. It is necessary to accept that the destruction of the city becomes a parable of the cycles of nature. Propertius gives a good example of this; the poet sings of the beginnings of Roman history and the stages of its astonishing expansion (IV.10.27–30):

These verses mark a break; although they take their place in the tradition of the encomium of cities that have disappeared, they reflect a unique tonality. Nothing remains of the noble city governed by so many rich and powerful rulers; all has disappeared; in place of the forum, we see only fields frequented by shepherds and ploughmen.

Introduction

In his seminal 1998 book, Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art, Anthony Snodgrass makes no mention of the Imagines, or indeed of its author, the Elder Philostratus. As Anthony would no doubt remind us, one would need have a very late (probably Byzantine) view of ‘Greek art’ to conceive of Philostratus alongside the word ‘early’. Yet the Imagines, written at around the beginning of the third century ad, provides one of the most scintillating accounts of ancient painting to survive from pre-Christian antiquity; it probes the very categories of ‘text’ and ‘picture’ that defined Snodgrass’ project.

In this chapter, written in honour of a much-respected scholar by two students whose Classical archaeological education fell entirely within the orbit of Snodgrass’ Cambridge, we argue that Philostratus’ Imagines offers a series of reflections pertinent to Anthony's long-standing concern with pictorial (non-)mediations of Homer. As we shall see, Philostratus’ opening – and highly programmatic – tableau of Scamander (Imag. I.1) gives voice to a painting that draws its theme and inspiration from Homer. In doing so, the passage prefigures some of the interpretative quandaries with which Anthony would grapple over seventeen centuries later.

Before explaining what we mean here, perhaps we should begin with a brief word about the Elder Philostratus. Born around ad 170, and with an active literary career that spanned the first half of the third century (mainly in Athens, it seems, but perhaps after an earlier spell in Rome), Philostratus is one of the finest prose writers of the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’. His written Greek (especially in the Imagines) is not easy: he frequently uses rare or antiquarian words, often delighting in punning formulations; like other Second Sophistic authors, Philostratus also alludes to a range of earlier writings in verse and prose (a good deal of it no longer extant to us), and across a broad spectrum of poetic, historical and philosophical genres. Philostratus is the main historian of the sophistic movement (in his two-book Lives of the Sophists). But he was also a pioneering writer of pre-Christian hagiography (in his eight-book Life of Apollonius of Tyana).

Anthony served in the University of Edinburgh for fifteen years from 1961 to 1976. These were crucial years for his development as a scholar and as an archaeologist. What I have to say about the Edinburgh years is essentially in two parts, one more serious, the other more light-hearted, but I hope that both together will help to illuminate the man in Edinburgh.

In the 1960s and 1970s Classics at Edinburgh was organised in four separate departments, and I was in Greek, housed in the relatively new David Hume Tower on the eastern side of George Square. Anthony's department, Classical Archaeology, was some distance away, in older accommodation (built 1769–74) on the other side of the Square. There, in a shed in a small garden area behind the building, was kept a cast collection of ancient sculptures. You will be pleased to know, Anthony, that these casts have recently been rescued, cleaned and set up in pleasant surroundings to adorn the new and handsome accommodation for Classics in a building that once housed the Medical School of the University.

In the course of his first ten years in Edinburgh Anthony published Early Greek Armour and Weapons in 1964, and Arms and Armour of the Greeks in 1967. The Dark Age of Greecegreeted my arrival in 1971, and Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment was in preparation (it was published in 1980, after he went to Cambridge). The first and third of these volumes were handsomely crafted and published by the Edinburgh University Press, and you will no doubt remember, Anthony, the ebullient Secretary to the Press at that time, Archie Turnbull. You also acknowledged in your preface to The Dark Age the ‘patience, tact and trouble’ of the great editor Walter Cairns. Edinburgh University Press didn't just produce books, it produced works of art, and from a personal point of view I can say that this whole experience, both the inspiration of Anthony's intellectual achievements and also the insights into how one could transfer the results of one's researches onto the pages of a beautiful book, had a profound and lasting influence on me.

Three years with Anthony in Cambridge (1998–2001), at and beyond the Faculty of Classics, have left a profound impression on me. Remembering vivid debates with him I will here ride a hobby horse that both of us share. It concerns the multiple relationship and reading of image, text and context or, in other words, art, archaeology, philology and history. By tackling this, I will re-open an issue touched upon in my book Bunte Barbaren (1986: 115–25). My argument is twofold: one strand is the archaeology of the Basilica Paulli (for the name, see below), built on the Forum Romanum in Rome; the other is a misread passage in Pliny's Natural History (XXXVI.102) on this building. I will begin my study as an archaeologist and art historian who examines the architecture, sculpture and history of the Basilica Paulli. Next, I will become a philologist who analyses Pliny's passage within its textual tradition and reading of Classical scholarship. Then I will confront the outcome of both and discuss concurrences, differences and blind spots. Finally, I will sketch out a historical framework, which is based not on the deficient premise of the intentional reading, but on the practice of intentional readings within the wider context of ‘intentionaler Geschichte’ (Gehrke 2014: 9–36). Before I go on, however, I need to clarify a problem of terminology. Whenever I speak of statues of Asians and Asian dress, I refer not to all peoples of Asia but to those of Asia Minor and the Near East.

Archaeology and history

In the nineteenth century, remains on the north-eastern side of the Forum Romanum were identified as belonging to the Basilica Paulli (Chioffi 1996: 34–5; Fig. 17.18 below), which had been situated opposite the Basilica Iulia. This identification had been based on ancient texts which are, however, ambiguous in their reading. They attest in the Forum Romanum either a single Basilica Fulvia-Aemilia-Paulli (communis opinio) or two separate basilicas, namely an archaeologically unverified Basilica Aemilia and the verified Basilica Fulvia-Paulli. The latter is here called the Basilica Paulli and not the Basilica Aemilia, which is what, confusingly, most scholars have called it.

It is a privilege to be able to write this personal, very personal, appreciation of my long-term colleague Anthony Snodgrass. I met him first in Oxford in the early 1970s, when I was, as he had been before me, a doctoral pupil of John Boardman – then just plain ‘Mr’ Boardman, the University's Reader in Classical Archaeology. In 1979 we became direct academic colleagues within the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge, though divided (somewhat) by subdisciplinary affiliation – he being a member of the ‘D’ Caucus (Classical Art and Archaeology), I of the ‘C’ Caucus (Ancient History). In 1981 there began a different sort of academic-cum-social association when, thanks very significantly to Anthony, I was elected a Fellow of Clare College. That last association continues as strongly as ever in our now joint retirement from our University posts in the Faculty.

It was very largely the example of Anthony, which had already been followed by John Salmon (Corinth), another ‘crypto-archaeologist’ (Boardman's term), that determined me to enter in 1969 on the path of historical Classical archaeology, or Classical archaeo-history, for my Oxford doctorate. My special topic (early Sparta c. 950–650 BC) was of course ostensibly narrower in geographical and chronological scope than any of Anthony's enterprises, but we had in common at least a particular interest in armour and weapons, and in the historicity of Homer. His first three major books, Early Greek Armour and Weapons (1964), Arms and Armour of the Greeks (1967) and The Dark Age of Greece (1971), quickly became my boon reading companions as well as research inspirations. In fact, my interest in doing a doctorate at all, and the sort of doctorate I undertook, went back to the paper I took in Oxford Classical ‘Mods’ in 1967 on ‘Homeric Archaeology’ (wonderful title), which was taught by the inimitable D. H. F. ‘Dolly’ Gray of St Hugh's. And it was at a paper Anthony gave to the Oxford Philological Society raising the question of ‘An historical Homeric society?’ that I first met Anthony in person. (The talk was ultimately published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS) for 1974, under that title.

One of the most striking features of the ancient Greek lexicon is that numerous nouns in -εύς are attested both in personal names such as Ἀχιλλεύς or Ὀδυσσεύς and in common nouns like βασιλεύς ‘king’, ἱερεύς ‘priest’; the latter type denotes, in historical times, mostly humans in professional or habitual roles, and the nouns in -εύς are thus commonly classed as agent nouns. Attested from, as we now know, the Mycenaean period onwards, the history and prehistory of the formations in -εύς have occupied scholars’ minds ever since the inception of the systematic study of the history of the Greek language in the nineteenth century, and it can be said without exaggeration that the nouns in -εύς were and still are the cause célèbre of Greek word formation. This is due chiefly to the fact that while such nouns abound in Greek, cognates outside Greek are at best uncertain, and the origin of – from a Greek point of view – the nominal suffix -ευ- remains easily the most hotly contested topic in Greek word formation. In this chapter I shall attempt first of all to provide a very brief overview of the various positions, how they have been arrived at and what the problems are. The argumentation and criticism here will be kept short since a more detailed discussion of the problems will appear elsewhere. From there we shall proceed to examine the earliest – that is, Late Bronze Age – Greek evidence, which, taken in its archaeological context, can provide considerable arguments when it comes to assessing this problem.

1. The earliest attempts at explaining the suffix -ευ- are practically as old as the discipline of comparative Greek and Indo-European philology itself and are deeply steeped in the positive and constructive spirit of nineteenth-century German romanticism. These unfailingly attempt to find cognates in other Indo-European languages and therefore to project the existence of the suffix tout court back into the Indo-European parent language itself.