Fifth-century Athens witnessed a striking series of changes in funerary customs. Not long after the start of the century, large-scale sculpted stone monuments stopped decorating private graves, a change usually attributed to the so-calledpost aliquantofunerary decree mentioned by Cicero (Leg. 2.25–26) limiting the size, cost, and manner of decorating the graves. At the same time, the number of children’s graves increased dramatically, and burials were no longer allowed in the city.¹ A decade or two later, Athenian men who had fallen on behalf of the city started to be interred in theDemosion Sema, a public burial...

Art and Experience in Classical Greecewas my first introduction to J. J. Pollitt’s work, long before I was introduced to the author himself. Since that first encounter, which opened for me a new way of looking at Greek art, the humanist philosophy ofArt and Experiencehas been an inspiration and its clarity a model. Its author has been a consistent and gratefully received influence on my work but an even more profound influence on my life.

Images of warriors taking leave of their families on the eve of battle can be heart-wrenching and inspiring to the sympathetic viewer...

Writing a century ago in theJournal of Hellenic Studies, the British classicist Jane Ellen Harrison corrected a widespread misconception regarding the myth of Pandora. She wrote: “No myth is more familiar than that of Pandora, none perhaps has been so completely misunderstood. Pandora is the first woman, the beautiful mischief: she opens the forbidden box, out comes every evil that flesh is heir to; hope only remains. The box of Pandora is proverbial, and that is the more remarkable as she never had a box at all.”¹ What she opened was—in the word used by Hesiod and all...

Near the end of Book 3 of Homer’sIliad, Helen and Paris find themselves together in their bedchamber in the palace of Priam, brought together there by the goddess Aphrodite. Paris professes his ardor, now stronger than ever:

Come, then, rather let us go to bed and turn to love-making. Never before as now has passion enmeshed my senses, not when I took you the first time from Lakedaimon the lovely and caught you up and carried you away in seafaring vessels, and lay with you in the bed of love on the island of Kranae, not even then, as...

It is a commonplace of our studies to hold that vase scenes with figures set on different levels in the field (up/down, as I shall call them) are influenced by or may even copy mural compositions of the Early Classical period, notably those that we associate with the name of Polygnotos and that we know from Pausanias’ description of his work at Delphi. We are led to judge that these were typical of his work, and of the work of his contemporary, Mikon of Athens, and seem to be justified in this by the vase scenes that, especially from the...

The fame of the Stoa Poikile is due in part to the group of philosophers who taught there, and became known as the Stoics, and to the suite of paintings found on wooden panels on its walls. Representing the battle of Marathon, the battle of the Amazons and Athenians, and the assembly of the Greek leaders following the sack of Troy, these works as well as some others are frequently mentioned in surviving literary sources.¹ While these testimonials give us a sense of the familiarity of the paintings to the citizens of Athens, they do not provide us with sufficient...

Classical Athens, whose history and culture J. J. Pollitt’s work has done so much to illuminate, has left us many of the greatest works of Greek literature and visual art. Indeed, the form and aspect of Athens’ artistic monuments remain so impressive today that they have almost come to epitomize ancient Greek society. About these much has been written. The fifth-century Athenian monument I would like to discuss here, however, no longer exists beyond its foundations and fragments of its architectural decoration: the Stoa Poikile or Painted Colonnade, which once stood on the north perimeter of the Athenian Agora. Unlike...

Little remains of the small Ionic temple that once stood on the banks of the Ilissos river on the outskirts of Athens. It is a frustrating and tantalizing loss, especially since the temple very nearly survived into the present day. Converted for use as an Orthodox church, it was preserved essentially intact for more than two thousand years, only to be abandoned and dismantled in the late eighteenth century. All that exists now in situ is a battered marble foundation tucked between a water main and a highway. Indeed, virtually all trace of the Ilissos temple would have vanished were...

I cannot possibly hope to tell Jerry Pollitt anything new about Periklean Athens, a subject in which he is far better versed than I. But in my wish to participate in a volume in his honor, I shall make bold to present a few comments on a minor topic that, if not new, has at least not been sufficiently investigated from this specific angle: the appropriateness of media for cult images in fifth-century Athens in the light of preceding and contemporary examples.

Even this brief statement of purpose raises the question, can we possibly say that certain materials—and not...

Jerome J. Pollitt has bravely defended the right of classical sculptors to be known in Art History by their own names and characterized according to perceivable qualities of their works. It may not be inappropriate in a volume in his honor to identify, however conjecturally, a work of Lokros of Paros, who is otherwise known to us only from Pausanias.

In this essay I shall propose that the Athena Giustiniani type, whose pose, drapery, and ethos have much in common with those of the Nemesis of Rhamnous, a securely identified work of Agorakritos of Paros, actually represents the Athena by...

Whenever the precursors of the Periklean Parthenon (447–432 b.c.) are discussed, attention focuses, as it well should, upon the Older Parthenon, that very late Archaic marble temple begun after Marathon (490) upon a massive limestone foundation that extended and leveled the southern part of the Akropolis summit. The Parthenon not only stands upon the podium built for its aborted predecessor (the Older Parthenon had not risen very high when it was destroyed in the Persian sack of 480), but, as many commentators have noted, the Periklean building is also in essence an expansion and widening of the Older Parthenon....

The enduring idea of the Parthenon frieze is that it represents the procession of the Panathenaic festival,¹ but even those who fully accept this interpretation have had to question the role of the horsemen who feature so prominently.² No direct literary evidence records that horsemen actually took part in the procession, whereas hoplites, who are reported as having marched in it, are omitted from the frieze.³ On the basis of circumstantial literary evidence, not least the role of horsemen in other contemporary festival parades, it is possible to make the case that they also participated in the Panathenaic festival.⁴ Yet,...

The statue group of Prokne and Itys (Athens, Akropolis Museum 1358) initially caught my attention in my first semester of graduate school at Yale University, when I wrote a paper about the sculptor Alkamenes for my advisor, Jerry Pollitt. This graduate student effort was devoted to sorting out Alkamenes’ oeuvre using written and stylistic evidence. As my studies progressed, I became more interested in iconography and iconology and less so in matters of connoisseurship. Here, many years later, I revisit Prokne in a contextual reading, a methodology pioneered by Jerry Pollitt and taught to his students with exemplary patience and...

The small Ionic temple that once stood on the hill above the banks of the Ilissos River was a virtual twin of the Athena Nike temple on the Akropolis: both were built of Pentelic marble and are attributed to the same architect, Kallikrates.¹ Their friezes are here considered together, even though created by different sculptors: they were both designed to be viewed close to eye level, and the elucidation of their subject matter was evidently dependent on the figures being named by painted inscriptions. The planners of the twin Ionic temples were clearly being innovative not only in their architectural...

The theme of this essay is to show how the Zeus of Pheidias, created around 430 b.c., and a similar, standing Zeus at Athens, Delphi, or a contiguous Greek sacral area in the first golden age of Greek sculpture could develop into an unusual divinity in the Hellenistic East. From Pamphylia (the Artemis of Perge) to Emesa in Syria (the conical stone of Bal), gods and goddesses took on forms very unusual in Olympian human terms.¹ The artistic legacy of Pheidias at the grand old cult centers of Greece was applied to turning these ancient Anatolian Hittite and Syrian Mesopotamian...

I dedicate this essay to Jerome Pollitt as a teacher and scholar whose work anticipated several tendencies of the “new” Archaeology and Classical Art History. Although he may be reluctant to take credit for some of the recent developments in the field, his insistence on the broad cultural horizon preceded current interest in “recontextualization” of works of art and material culture (and makes us reconsider how we conjure up context), and his curiosity about Roman art was rarely exhibited by scholars of Classical Greece who accepted conventional attitudes about Roman art being second-rate. Set against his independence of mind, his...

Periklean Athens appealed as a subject of study at Yale University for the last thirty years in part because the imperial democracy of Athens refracted the anxieties and ambitions of an elite American youth about its own imperial democracy. In particular, study of Periklean Athens thrived for reason of the excellent teaching of J. J. Pollitt with his masterly proposal of an integrated study of a brilliant culture. The allure of Athens involved, too, lament for the perceived loss of a confident, integrated American culture. Whether art and politics could have a relation that was not combative or not propagandistic...

The starting point of this small query is far from the Akropolis, in the general phenomenon of the self-portrait. In the twentieth century, it has been a familiar category of works of art; one need only recall Picasso or Warhol. Looking at them, we are induced to speculate about the artist’s personality and his own attitude about it. Is the self-portrait a boast to the viewer, a confession, a self-analysis, a mere convenience? Many more possibilities might be claimed. In any case, they give art historians a fine tool in their efforts to explain individual artistic personalities.

It was not...

The astronomer Johann Heinrich Mädler coined the termphotographyin 1839, the very moment the modern Greek nation was uncovering and restoring the monumental evidence for its classical past. Mädler combined the Greek words forlightandpaintingorwritingto describe the new process by which light and chemical substances produce an image of seeming reality fairly true to the original—a goal shared, if by different means, by modern archaeology and restoration. Although today photographs are taken for granted in archaeological and art historical studies—the authors in this collection use photographs to record or illustrate their diverse...

The study of Greek art in the context of Greek culture is now accepted and established, tenured and cosseted in the universities, as comfortable and complacent as a sherry-sipping vicar in Trollope. But once it was young and unbeneficed, bold and heretical, dangerous and brave. One of the enduring monuments of that exciting time is J. J. Pollitt’sArt and Experience in Classical Greece(1972), a rare book of ideas as influential among students as among scholars. For although neither handbook nor textbook,Art and Experiencebecame—and remains—a leading text in courses on Greek art at American universities....