Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frances B. Titchener is Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. Richard F. Moorton Jr. is Associate Professor of Classics at Connecticut College.

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The Eye Expanded: Life and the Arts in Greco-Roman Antiquity

University of California Press

Classicists are rightfully fascinated with the fruitful symbiosis of the Greco-Roman arts and the world in which they flourished. Works like Homer and Mycenae by Martin P. Nilsson, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy by Christian Meier, Catullus and his World by T. P. Wiseman, and The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus by Paul Zanker document the conviction of the modern scholar that in antiquity the world and the arts formed one another in profound and multifarious ways. This conviction has its roots in antiquity. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that the arts are mimetic creations of the human mind. Both also believed that the tragic art, for example, had the power to influence human society. In this they were representative of a widespread consensus in ancient culture. Herodotus asserted that Homer and Hesiod had given the Greeks their gods, in that the authority of their art had established a quasi-official version of the divinities and their doings. Athenian artists sought to order civic consciousness by the architecture, cult statues, and friezes of the Parthenon and other public buildings. In both his patronage of Vergil's Aeneid and his commissioning of the Ara Pacis Augustae, Augustus strove to control public perceptions of the relationship between national mythology and his own political accomplishments. Ancient culture, then, was both the parent and the product of its arts. Cultural and political impulses informed the fine arts, and these in their turn shaped—and often were intended to shape—the living world from which they sprang.

The task that this book undertakes is not only to find examples of this mutual influence of the arts and the world of antiquity—for this has been done many times—but also to survey this dynamic interaction from the time of archaic Greece right down to our own times in a series of studies focusing on the interplay of life and the arts in Greece, Hellenistic times, the

Roman world, and the modem age, which owes so much to Greco-Roman antiquity. We therefore seek to document in a single book ranging throughout antiquity and into modernity the interaction between human life and the literary and plastic arts that has served to make art more lively and life more artful. So far as we know, this aspiration is rare.

The first three essays in this book explore the theme of mimesis in the Greek world, beginning from the point at which history emerges from mythology in ancient Greece, bearing the traces of its birth. In "The 'Ominous' Birth of Peisistratos," the inaugural chapter in the volume, Frank J. Frost argues that the story in the first book of Herodotus telling of the omen of the miraculously boiling cauldron by which Hippokrates, the father of Peisistratos, was warned not to have a son was originally contrived by the Peisistratids themselves—and Frost shows how Hippokrates could personally have faked the miraculum —in imitation of the oracle by which Aegeus was warned not to have intercourse until he had returned from Delphi to Athens. Thus, Hippokrates made of the faked omen a prodigious announcement of the future greatness of his son, modeled on the oracle of Aegeus. In this interpretation, the mythology of Attica, as much an art form as any other, inspires dynastic connivers in the real world, who then themselves become part of the legends of Attica as enshrined by the mythologos Herodotus. In his study "Antigone Nodding, Unbowed," Alan Boegehold continues the exploration of the connection between life and art in Greece by looking to life in modem Greece to illuminate a generally misunderstood point in a great ancient text. Arguing from the body language of modern Greeks, Boegehold shows that when Sophocles' Antigone nods toward the ground in response to Creon's interrogation, she is proudly affirming her part in Polyneikes' burial ritual, not abjectly denying it. The power of the gestures and deeds of Greek life to animate drama is then explored in the world of Aristophanic comedy by Richard E Moorton, Jr. In his essay "Dionysus or Polemos? The Double Message of Aristophanes' Acharnians, " Moorton endeavors to show that Aristophanes' play pictures the Archidamian War as detrimental to Athens's economy, and for that reason urges the making of peace with Sparta through the rescinding of the Megarian Decree, unless the Spartans set conditions detrimental to the Athenian arche . On this reading, the play is not a disengaged comic fantasy but a comic thought experiment inspired by Aristophanes' understanding of the best economic interests of Athens in 425 B.C. and intended by the playwright to influence his fellow citizens on whether, and how far, to prosecute the war with Sparta. If this is correct, the Acharnians is also a civic act.

The next essay continues the exploration of the relationship between the civic ethos and Greek literature. Alan Samuel expands the analysis of the influence of economic and civic realities on the arts (and vice versa) with a more philosophical analysis of the socioeconomic system of ancient Greece

and the ways in which it influenced literary and philosophical discourse in antiquity. In the fourth essay, "Athenian Democracy and the Idea of Stability," he investigates the ways in which key pieces of Athenian literature reveal that Athenian democracy was led into some of its most characteristic behaviors, including imperialism and the political suppression of women, by its cultural preference for stability and fixed limits, rather than by anything comparable to the modern ideal of progress, especially in the form of economic growth. For Samuel, the egalitarian and inclusive tendencies of Athenian society created a need for increased resources that could not be filled by economic development because of the Greek reverence for stability and limit. In consequence, Athens widened the sphere of prosperity for its citizens through the exploitation of women, slaves, and the cities of the empire, an exploitation that has left its traces in tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy. Therefore both Moorton and Samuel see the political and economic convictions of the Greeks giving form to some of their most memorable literary art during the classical age of the Hellenes.

In the second section of this book, seven essays treat the theme of the arts and reality in the Hellenistic world. The first three essays deal with the impact on art of the life and legacy of Alexander of Macedon, the commanding figure whose brief but legendary career gave birth to the Hellenistic Age. In the first essay, Philip O. Spann focuses his paper on Alexander. In "Alexander at the Beas: Fox in a Lion's Skin," Spann argues that the episode in Arrian and other writers in which Alexander's officers and men refused to continue on in the famous confrontation with the conqueror at the Beas is based on a real episode, in which Alexander, realizing that the end of the world was not over the next hill, maneuvered his army into calling a halt to his potentially endless war of conquest, so that he himself might not be compelled to do so, to the great detriment of his legend. Spann's Alexander is at pains to shape his story for the chronicle of posterity in a way most flattering to his...