Introduction

Recent approaches to Greek and Roman art unanimously and emphatically stress the character of images as visual and material ‘constructions’ (Bažant 1985; von den Hoff and Schmidt 2001). This concept is held by the most advanced, thoughtful and serious voices of art history, and it is applied to all kinds of figurative representation, from individual figures to multi-figured scenes, through all genres and periods of ancient art. Thus, Richard Neer sees Archaic statues as ‘signs’ to which the concept of likeness to real persons is fundamentally alien (Neer 2012: 110–12). François Lissarrague interprets scenes of a warrior's departure on Athenian vases as non-realistic constellations of the Greek oikos (Lissarrague 1990: 35–53). Wolfgang Ehrhardt analyses the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii as a purely fictitious depiction of the historical battle between Alexander and Darius III (Ehrhardt 2008).

Of course, one can only agree with these approaches: they have led to important insights into the social meaning and cultural significance of Greek and Roman art. The following reflections are by no means meant to contradict such positions. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental problem. For the Greeks themselves conceived art as a practice of mimēsis, imitation (Pollitt 1974: 37–41, 46–8; for mimēsis in Greek art, see Stewart 1990: 73–85). Thus, the title of this chapter, quoting Socrates’ initial question in his discussion with the painter Parrhasios, as it is reported in Xenophon's Memorabilia, literally anticipates an obvious answer: yes, painting is a representation of visible things, that is, of their visible appearance (Xen. Mem. III, 10, 1; Preisshofen 1974). Therefore, the scope of this chapter is to reconcile the emic with the etic view, that is, our constructivist approach to ancient art with the definition of art in antiquity. It is with great admiration for Anthony Snodgrass and his pioneering work on early Greek art that I submit these considerations for his critical examination.

Of course, the Greeks were always aware of the fact that images were not identical doubles of ‘real’ beings or objects but artificial re-presentations, made in various materials, and they realised that this implied a specific ‘artistic’ activity, employing technical skill (the most penetrating analysis: Neer 2013: 1–19, to which I cannot do justice in this place).

Part of your early career, Anthony, and several of your subsequent writings, were devoted to the archaeology of Sicily. That was even before those Munro-bagging days when you tirelessly led your Edinburgh colleagues come rain or shine over the rugged Bens, Sgurrs, Stobs and Mealls of Scotland. And so in this contribution to your Festschrift it is to Sicily, and in particular its coinages, that I wish to return. Thucydides gave us the essentials of the settlement of Sicily in Archaic and Classical times (VI.2–5): in the interior of the island the Sicels and Sicani, themselves with a tradition of immigration; in the west two further immigrant groups, Elymians based principally on Segesta and Eryx, and Phoenicians from Carthage holding Motya, Panormus and Soloeis; finally, around other parts of the coasts, Greeks of varied origins who had settled from the second half of the eighth century BC. Most of these communities had produced coinage by 400 BC, some of it fairly plentiful. Coins are part of a culture and they should be able to provide significant information about the peoples who made and used them. The early coinages of Sicily provide an ideal field in which to pursue such wider questions, of the sort that have engaged you from the outset of your career: I mention just one example (Snodgrass 1994: 1), where you referred to the ‘robust independence’ of the new settlements, their ‘challenge [to] the attainments of the Aegean cities by a wide range of criteria’, their ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘degree of integration of indigenous and intrusive populations, and between intruders of different origins’.

The details of the chronology of early Greek coinage, from the first electrum coinages of western Asia Minor to the development of the new medium of exchange as a Mediterranean phenomenon, are still debated, but the speed of the spread of the idea of coining is not in dispute. The beginnings of coinage in Aegina on the one hand and in Italy and Sicily on the other seem to be separated by only a few decades around the middle of the sixth century.

Introduction

The territoriality of Attic demes has been a matter of dispute, but the evidence for the existence of territorial limits now seems overwhelming – regardless of how concretely they were marked on the ground. Some of the deme limits, perhaps contested ones, were fixed precisely by rupestral horoi. The majority of them, however – like most borders separating city-states – consisted of sight lines linking natural features such as summits, ridges and gullies. Locating more deme limits in the future is important for the progress of Attic topography. Deme boundaries are also valuable for assessing the potential agricultural catchment of demes, and for studying the rural economies of Attica at the level of individual demes and larger regions. But since looking for rupestral horoi is not a solution per se, other methods should be considered. In this chapter, I stress the utility of a computational method for modelling the territories of the 139 Cleisthenic demes using geographic information systems (GIS). The limits produced by this model represent approximations which can be used as working hypotheses, in combination with known horoi and other established delimitations, and can also serve as guidelines for future fieldwork and border studies. Most importantly, this model offers the possibility to view Attica as a mosaic of micro-regions and deme territories instead of the usual dots on a map.

It is an honour to offer this short piece to Anthony Snodgrass, a scholar who was among the first to recognise the importance of borders and borderlands in field survey archaeology and who encouraged me to pursue their study.

Attic demes as micro-territories

The development of settlements and territorial modules in Attica

The word demos defines ‘in the first place a certain type of community whose unity is conceived in relation to the territory it occupies’. The meaning of this old word can obviously vary from region to region, but it has a dual significance, geographic and human. When Cleisthenes conducted his reforms in Attica, at the end of the sixth century bc, demes (or, better, proto-demes) had already been in existence for a long time. In Attica, some 200 published ‘sites’ from 1100–500 bc are known, and close to seventy of them, outside Athens, were occupied in the sixth century.

My first encounter with Anthony was in 1973 and the circumstances of our friendship and subsequent collaboration were entirely in keeping with his delightfully unorthodox approach to life. He was Assistant Director on the Menelaion excavation; I was a PhD student cycling all over the Plain of Sparta to analyse its long-term settlement history against its physical geography. One day quite out of the blue he said to me: ‘I've always wanted to bathe naked in the River Eurotas like the Spartans, are you game?’ So in the siesta in mid-summer down we went, stripped off and entered the river. Actually it was hardly 6 inches deep so we had to lie flat even to get a mild feeling of actually being in the river, all the while trying to avoid a series of unpleasant-looking pieces of white paper flowing downstream from Sparta town. Soon a group of local women appeared and we beat a hasty retreat. And after this male-bonding event, not much later Anthony suggested we start our own project, somewhere rather free of competition yet with a rich prehistory and history. So 1978 with Annemarie as part of a trio, we toured Boeotia and visited almost all the known significant sites (Fig. 20.2).

The Boeotia Project (Fig. 20.3) was intended to be a ten-year enterprise, but in fact our joint fieldwork in surface survey only stopped in the mid-1990s, by which time we had surveyed the urban sites of Thespiai, Haliartos and Askra, as well as Hyettos and large areas of their dependent countrysides (Fig. 20.4). Since that time Anthony has been busy virtually every year assisting me with the study of the finds (Fig. 20.5) and with preparation for the final monographs of the project, and most recently (Fig. 20.6), as always with Annemarie, revisiting sites found by us long ago to evaluate their alteration with time and put them into a GPS-correct location. At the end of the 1990s I moved to Leiden and was obliged to train Classical Archaeology students in the field; this led to our adding the urban survey of Tanagra and Koroneia with parts of their countryside (Fig. 20.7) to our windows into Boeotian long-term settlement history.

The find

In the grave mound (kurgan) in the Ukraine known as Tolstaya Mogila there was found in 1971 a piece of gold jewellery that has entered the archaeological record as the pectoral of an unknown Scythian king (see Fig. 13.7 below). The collar or pectoral is made up of four torques, enclosing three decorative zones: the overall shape is that of an apotropaic lunula. The decoration is composed in relief, on a background of sheet gold in the middle zone, and as relief-like tableaux of free-standing figures in the upper and lower zones. The three thematically distinct friezes portray, respectively, the life of successful and happy Scythians and their livestock; the blossoming flora of Scythia; and the looming danger of death for all animal and plant life. This menace is embodied by six griffins, bearing down from above on the noble horses of the Scythians. Further motifs in this zone are animal combats with lions, panthers, a stag and boar, as well as hounds hunting hares. At the ends, four locusts reveal the true meaning behind the griffins’ deadly attack: they represent the swarms of locusts from the south (Locusta migratoria, Schistocerca gregaria) that menaced the land, and against which, just as with the mythical griffins, there were no means of defence.

Locusta migratoria

‘And the Lord said unto Moses, “Stretch out thine hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come up upon the land of Egypt”’ (Exodus 10:12). And so a black cloud of locusts descended on the mighty Egypt of the thirteenth century BC:

For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt. (Exodus 10: 15)

It is likely that, at this time, pharaonic Egypt fell victim to the African desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) (Fig. 13.1). Many plagues mentioned in antiquity can be linked to the swarms of this African species of locust, swept northwards by the south wind.

For Anthony, this excursion from familiar territory is offered in admiration and gratitude for your leadership and for being a wonderful colleague over twenty years.

Introduction

The World Heritage site at Loropéni is the best-preserved of about a dozen large quadrangular sites enclosed by stone walls in the southwest of modern Burkina Faso. They are located mostly in the modern Départment of Loropéni a short distance west of the Black Volta river in the Savannah region, roughly midway between the river Niger and the southern edge of the Sahara and the forest belt close to the Atlantic south coast of western Africa (Fig. 15.1). Historically this region is crossed by the major north–south trade routes, linking the trans-Saharan trade of North Africa with the coastal regions. The area close to the sites has been gold-producing, with the mineral extracted from sedimentary deposits mainly by small-scale workings (Kiéthega 1983; Perinbam 1988); and it supports a modest agriculture with millet, sorghum and cotton among its principal products. It is occupied by several ethnic groups, notably the Lobi and the Gan, who, at the start of the colonial period a century ago, and still partly today, could be described as having a village-based social organisation and practising traditional religion (Labouret 1931; Père 1988; 2004).

Although there is considerable knowledge about the large enclosures (summarised most recently with respect to Loropéni by Simporé 2011), the dating and the context in which they were built have not yet been securely established. The present study is intended as a contribution to that. I write as an outsider (my normal area is European and Mediterranean urban archaeology), aware of the disadvantages that brings, but hoping that there might also be some advantage in distance.

As an introduction to the question it may be helpful to quote the description of Loropéni in the Statement of Outstanding Universal Value when it was inscribed on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2009:

The dramatic and memorable Ruins of Loropéni consist of imposing, tall, laterite stone perimeter walls, up to six metres in height, surrounding a large abandoned settlement.

Introduction

At his weekly seminar, Jean-Pierre Vernant used to begin his answer to a friend's or a colleague's question with these words: ‘écoute voir’, which could be translated as: ‘listen to see’. Of course, in our century saturated by images of all kinds, this sounds just like a verbal tic, but nevertheless it is significant of a certain form of perception of reality. Indeed, in an aniconic world like that of the auditors of the Homeric poems, the recitation of the verses leads to a very different reception of the poetic images they convey. Although it is obvious that they help to give to the text its incomparable quality, these poetic images are the only means of visualisation of the theatre of the epics: the battlefield as well as the remembrance of the warriors’ faraway cities, the unleashed forces of nature – the raging sea, the furious winds, the devastating fire – or the peaceful life of the peasants and cattle farmers.

Homer may have been the bard of a mythical war, following the heroic deeds of his main characters one after another, as happens in most epics from the Greek world onwards. But the poet of the Iliad is a genius who does not content himself with the pleasant enumeration of the episodes of battle, even though they belong to a mythical context, previously transmitted orally and certainly already known to his auditors, at least in their broad outline. On the contrary, the Iliad is a coherent literary composition that gives rise to the evocation of an entire world, a book of images intentionally organised according to the development of the narration, in order to make the auditors see not only the succession of events, but also all the background of this very particular war – and all the while making reference to their contemporary society.

So what did the auditors see when they were listening to the Iliad?

Topography

The theatre of war is the first concern. The auditor must be at ease with the place where the deeds are performed, where the heroes do their fighting and in some cases dying. Let us begin with the plain of Troy.

I welcome this opportunity to offer a token of my great esteem to Anthony, with whom I have discussed questions of Greek prehistory, especially the end of the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age, on many occasions. I hope that this rather short, slightly informal and not entirely academic offering will interest him, for it relates to a theme that has always been at the centre of his work, the continuity of Greek society, and its focus is on an idea that has played a role in the traditional interpretation of the prehistory of Greece since the beginnings of the subject.

My title is deliberately chosen to reflect that of the comic account of British history 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman 1930), for the same reason that I entitled a previous paper ‘The Catalogue of Ships and All That’ (Dickinson 1999a). In both cases I used it to indicate how an idea has become so embedded in the general consciousness of the educated as to be readily accepted as ‘what everyone thinks’ – or rather ‘remembers’, since, as the authors of 1066 and All That point out in their Compulsory Preface, ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember’ (Sellar and Yeatman 1930: vii). This makes a serious point. Some explanatory models seem to have such appeal that they stick fast in the scholarly consciousness, to become what scholars ‘remember’, especially about matters that are not essential parts of their own branch of a discipline. So I suspect it is still widely ‘remembered’ among classicists, and quite a section of archaeologists too, that there was a ‘coming of the Greeks’, in the form of a population movement in the earlier Bronze Age which brought ancestors of the Classical Greeks into the Aegean, and that this movement has archaeological support in the form of significant changes in material culture.

I originally gave a paper with this title to the Oxford Greek Archaeology Group in April 2012.

Over the course of his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961–76), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976–2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent Classical linguists, historians and archaeologists.

In November 2014 a special conference took place in Magdelene College, Cambridge to celebrate Anthony's eightieth birthday. Out of this meeting two edited Festschrift volumes have been prepared. The first provides articles written for Anthony by his former students. That will appear under the editorship of Lisa Nevett and James Whitley as a monograph of the McDonald Institute at Cambridge: An Age of Experiment: Classical Archaeology Transformed (1976–2014).

In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement this second volume offers special papers contributed by friends and colleagues reflecting his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and archaeology, Classical art history, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and regional field survey.

The intellectual circle of a great senior academic is reflected in this collection of essays that bring fresh insights into the history, art and archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman Worlds.

The last time I wrote an essay for Anthony Snodgrass was in February 1980. He set the title: ‘Have we the Hermes of Praxiteles?’ – and, as I recall, gave no indication of what he himself thought was the ‘right’ answer to that question. My undergraduate partner for discussion of the topic would have been John Bennett (already showing signs of being more interested in the Aegean Bronze Age than in problems of Praxitelean authenticity). In the professorial office at the old Museum of Classical Archaeology (‘the Ark’) down Little St Mary's Lane, with Cambridge dusk descending, we sat semi-mesmerised as our mentor went through the many minor rites of cleaning, filling and eventually smoking his pipe. Between puffs came a limited range of responses: ‘Ah.’ ‘Interesting.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Hmmm …’ – and through the fumes, glimpses of a mysterious half-smile. It would be wrong to say that we left none the wiser. But I wondered if this was what it might have been like to consult a subdued version of the Delphic Oracle: aromatic smoke in the twilight; costive utterance to be pondered at length for its interpretation.

Almost four decades on, I feel I have come no further in being able to read the mind of Anthony Snodgrass. What he will think of my offering to this volume is pleasantly unpredictable. It aims, however, to add a complementary angle to what I think is his most forthright and unequivocal book, Homer and the Artists, and comes with abiding respect.

‘In the beginning, Homer was just a very good poet living in Ionia’ (Snodgrass 1998: 11). That premise is more controversial than perhaps it seems at first sight: if Homer appeared to his contemporaries an extraordinary genius, a poet uniquely privileged with divine inspiration, then one might indeed argue that he directly catalysed the coming of Greek literacy, and the development of figure scenes in early Greek art. But suppose, for present purposes, that the reputation of an eighth-century bc Homer was local to Ionia, and that the poet died (as one legend had it) poor and obscure. So his genius was only recognised/created/celebrated later; and so ‘a very good poet’ became Homer the great founding father of Classical literature.