A History of the World in 100 Objects (25 page)

The idea of the new style was to create a new equilibrium between the human body, human movement and the garments … The object was to achieve the perfect proportions of the human body. The key words for the new Classical style were harmony and balance – that is why the sculptures of the Parthenon are so timeless, because the figures they created are indeed timeless.

The sculptures were, however, made at a particular time and with a particular purpose. They sum up how this society thought about itself. The Parthenon was a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena Parthenos, meaning Athena the Virgin. It was built on the Acropolis – a rocky citadel at the heart of the city, with a central hall that housed a colossal statue of the goddess herself, made of gold and ivory. And everywhere there was sculpture.

Around all four sides of the building, above the columns and easily seen by everybody approaching it, was a series of ninety-two square relief carvings, known as metopes. Like all the other sculpture in the building, these would originally have been brightly coloured in red and blue and gold; it’s one of these metopes, now without its colour, that I have chosen as our object through which to think about Athens around 440
BC
.

The metopes are all about battles – battles between the Olympian gods and the Giants, between Athenians and Amazons, and, in the ones I want to focus on, between Lapiths and Centaurs. The figures are almost free-standing, and the human ones are rather more than a metre (about 4 feet) tall. Centaurs – half-horse, half-human – are attacking the Lapiths, who are a legendary Greek people. According to the story, the Lapiths made the mistake of giving the Centaurs wine at the marriage feast of their king. The Centaurs got horribly drunk and attempted to rape the women, while their leader tried to carry off the bride. A bitter general battle ensued, and the Lapiths – the Greeks – were ultimately victorious over their half-animal Centaur enemies.

This sculpture is particularly moving; there are only two figures – a Centaur rearing triumphantly over a fallen Lapith, who lies dying on the ground. As with so many of the Parthenon sculptures, this one is damaged, and we can no longer see the expression in the dying Lapith’s face, or the aggression in the eyes of the Centaur. Nonetheless, it remains a wonderful and moving piece of sculpture. But what does it mean? And how can it sum up, in itself, a view of the Athenian state?

We are fairly certain that these sculptures are using myths to present a heroic version of recent events. A generation before the sculptures were made, Athens was one of several fiercely competitive city-states, forced into a coalition with each other by the Persian invasion of the Greek mainland. So, in the metopes, when we see Greeks fighting Centaurs, these mythical battles stand proxy for the real-life struggle between Greeks and Persians. The classicist Mary Beard, from the University of Cambridge, explains what the sculptures would have meant to the people who first saw them:

Ancient Greece is a world which sees issues in terms of conflict, of winning, and losing. It’s a conflictual society, and one of the ways that Athenians thought about their position in the world, and their relationship to those they conquered, or abominated, was to see the ‘enemy’ or the ‘other’ in terms that were not, in a sense, human. So what you have on the Parthenon is different ways of understanding the ‘otherness’ of your enemy. The best interpretation of the metopes is that you see the heroic conflicts as necessary in order to ensure order. Part of that is a feeling that we can very easily empathize with. We don’t want to live in Centaur World. We want to live in Greek World, and Athenian World.

‘Centaur World’ for the Athenians would have meant not just the Persian Empire, but other competing Greek city-states, and above all Sparta, with whom Athens was frequently at war. The struggle against the Centaurs that we see on the metopes becomes an emblem of the perpetual battle that, for the Athenians, every civilized state has to fight. Rational man has to keep struggling against brute irrationality. Dehumanizing your enemy like this takes you down a dangerous path, but it’s a magnificent rallying call if you’re waging war. If chaos is to be kept at bay, so the message goes, reason will have to fight un-reason again and again.

I chose this particular sculpture because it gives us the bitter insight that, in the short term, reason does not always prevail. The defence of the rationally ordered state will cost some of its citizens their lives. And yet – and this is why this sculpture is such a supreme achievement – the dying human body is shown with such pathos, the fierce struggle depicted with such balance, that the victory goes not to the strutting half-beast, but to the Athenian artist who can turn conflict into beauty. In the long run, this sculpture seems to say, intellect and reason alone can create things that endure. The victory is not just political: it is artistic and intellectual.

This is the Athenian perspective; but how was the Parthenon perceived by people who came from one of the other Greek cities? You might expect that because the Parthenon is called a temple, it would have been a place of prayer and sacrifice; in fact, it became a treasury – a war-chest to finance the defence of Greece against the Persians. In time, though, this fighting fund became protection money, demanded by Athens from the other Greek cities when Athens placed itself at the head of them. It forced them into becoming satellites of the growing Athenian maritime empire. And a great chunk of that money was siphoned off by the Athenians to fund the Acropolis building programme. Mary Beard gives us the non-Athenian view of the Parthenon:

The Parthenon must have been the kind of building that you spat at and kicked if you could. You knew, if you were one of Athens’ subjects, that this was a statement of your own subordination. There was a clear and vociferous faction in Athens when the Parthenon was built, which said the money shouldn’t be spent that way. That this was, in the words of one, dressing Athens up like a ‘harlot’. That’s very odd for us to empathize with now, because the Parthenon sculptures seem so austerely beautiful. It’s hard to think of them in terms of prostitution. It’s very discomforting to think of our touchstone of good Classical taste as having appeared vulgar. But it clearly did, to some.

One of the many extraordinary things about the Parthenon is that it’s meant so many different things to different people at different times. Conceived as the Temple of the Virgin Athena, it was for centuries the Christian Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, and it later became a mosque. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was a neglected ruin in a diminished Athens ruled by the Turks. But in the 1820s and 1830s, the Greeks won independence, and they were given a German king by their European allies. The new state needed to define what kind of society it wanted to be. Olga Palagia takes up the story:

Greece was resurrected in about 1830. We had a German king who came to Greece from Bavaria, and the Germans decided they were going to resurrect the Athens of Pericles. This initiated, I think, the perennial identification of the new Greek nation with the Parthenon. So, we have been restoring it from 1834, and I’m sure that this will never end! It will be a constant attempt to restore and redefine the Parthenon as a symbol. So the seed the Germans sowed in 1834 has really become very big and important.

So this great building had, by the 1830s, acquired yet another meaning. Not as the self-image of one ancient city, but as the emblem of a new modern country. And it was an emblem familiar to all educated Europeans, through the sculptures in the British Museum, which had been on display since 1817.

One of the most striking things about recent European history is how countries wanting to define and strengthen their present identity look to particular moments in the past. In the last hundred years or so, more and more people in Ireland, Scotland and Wales have wanted to see themselves as the heirs of a people that flourished in northern Europe at the same time as the Athenians were building the Parthenon. And it’s those other Europeans of 2,500 years ago – Europeans dismissed by the Greeks as barbarians – that I’m going to focus on next.

There are no written records from the people of northern Europe of 2,500 years ago; they are mentioned briefly and disparagingly by the Greeks, but we don’t have their side of the story, and the only way we can really get to know these people – our close neighbours and, for some of us, our ancestors – is through the things they’ve left behind. Here, luckily, we’ve got a good deal to go on, including this spectacular pair of wine jugs, which are key objects in helping us understand the society of early northern Europe.

They were found in Lorraine, in north-eastern France, near the town of Basse-Yutz, and they’re always referred to as the Basse-Yutz Flagons. They’re bronze, elegant and elaborate. They are about the size of a large bottle of wine, a magnum, and they hold about the same amount of liquid, but they’re in the shape of large jugs, with handle, lid and very pointed spout. They’ve got a broad shoulder, which tapers to a narrow, rather unstable base. But what strikes you at once about these two flagons is the extraordinary decoration at the top, where animals and birds cluster together, and it must have been what everybody would have looked at as they were feasting with these amazing objects.

These richly decorated flagons were stumbled on in 1927 by workmen digging in Basse-Yutz. Nothing quite like them had ever been found in western Europe before, and the strangeness of their style and decoration led many experts to assume that they must be fakes. But the curators at the British Museum were convinced that they were genuinely ancient; that they represented a new, unknown chapter in European history. So the flagons were acquired for the then colossal sum of £5,000. Betting the bank on this kind of acquisition is a huge gamble on curatorial knowledge, but in this case it paid off, and research has since confirmed they were indeed made about 2,500 years ago, that is, at roughly the time that the Parthenon was being built in Greece, the Persian Empire was at its zenith and Confucius was teaching in China. The Basse-Yutz Flagons are now celebrated as two of the most important and earliest pieces of Celtic art anywhere.

In northern Europe at that time, around 450
BC
, there were no towns or cities, no states or empires, no writing or coinage. From the Russian Steppes to the Atlantic, there were merely small communities of farmer-warriors, connected across thousands of miles by trade, by exchange and frequently by war. It was a precarious existence for most, but life for those at the top of the pile, in the Iron Age Rhineland, could be very glamorous indeed. The smartest graves in the region where the flagons were found have wagons and chariots, hangings of silk, exotic hats, shoes and clothes – and, of course, all the equipment you needed for throwing parties. Mere death was not going to keep these northern Europeans from the good life, so the graves have lots of drinking vessels – bowls and cauldrons, drinking horns and flagons.

Many of these objects must have been traded over the Alps; there are Greek pots and vessels, and lots of flagons made in the Etruscan cities of northern Italy. A jaundiced, and misleading, way of describing the owners of the Basse-Yutz Flagons would be as the Iron Age ‘nouveaux riches’ – northerners looking to use Mediterranean design and taste to show off their own sophistication and aspirations. That view, first formulated by the Greek writers and rehearsed later by the Romans, has created the stereotype of an uncouth northern Europe in perpetual admiration of a cultured south. It is a stereotype that goes back more than 2,500 years, and it still shapes the way Mediterranean Europe thinks about the north – and even the way the north thinks about itself. Over the centuries this myth has, I think, done a great deal of damage.

The bronze, the design and the craftsmanship of the Basse-Yutz Flagons make a nonsense of the Greek myth of these northern Europeans as crude barbarians, and they tell us a great deal about the scope of their world. These people lived in small communities, but they were masters of complex metal technologies, and the materials from which our flagons are made make it clear that they had plenty of international contacts: the source materials for making this bronze are copper, from the Alps to the south, and tin, probably from Cornwall in the far west. Patterns on the base of the flagons are familiar from Brittany to the Balkans, while there are shapes inspired by palm fronds found in the art of ancient Egypt. And then the very idea of a flagon itself is foreign – it’s a popular shape created by people living in northern Italy. A feast with these flagons at the centre would leave the visitors to these new rulers in no doubt at all that the people they were visiting were international, cosmopolitan, rich and intensely sophisticated.