Preface

Osborne, Robin

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Preface

Robin Osborne

The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece

~The pots painted in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC depict different scenes from those painted at the end of the sixth century and depict them in a different way. This fact is so well known to scholars that it is taken for granted. In this book, I look more closely at what changes, and in particular at the changes in the scenes depicted,...

Author

Robin Osborne

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23625

Preface

The pots painted in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC depict different scenes from those painted at the end of the sixth century and depict them in a different way. This fact is so well known to scholars that it is taken for granted. In this book, I look more closely at what changes, and in particular at the changes in the scenes depicted, and I argue that rather than taking the changes for granted we should see them as the best evidence we have for the moral, political, and aesthetic preferences that constituted and distinguished classical Greek culture. Athenian pottery, I shall claim, not only offers us an unparalleled window through which to view the transformation from archaic to classical Greece, but also an insight into why that transformation took place.

This book aspires to rewrite the history of classical Greek art by showing that the history of art—that is, the history of art of any period—needs to be a history that pays attention not only to an artist’s style but also to an artist’s choice of what to depict. It devotes its first chapter to establishing why, as a matter of theory, this is necessary and to showing what is problematic about the way in which the history of Greek art has been written until now.

More particularly, this book aspires to rewrite the history of Athenian red-figure pottery in the years between the invention of the red-figure technique circa 520 BC and the middle of the fifth century. As chapter 2 argues, red-figure pottery offers unique possibilities for the sort of rewriting of art history that I am advocating because of the quantities in which it survives and because of the range of subject it represents. Past scholarship has often concentrated on the artists, at the expense of the subject matter of their art, or, when analyzing subject matter, has ignored the fact that the choice of scene changes over time; by contrast this study takes diachronic change as its central problem.

Most ambitiously, this book aims to change the way in which we write Greek history. In a way that both complements and reinforces the arguments that I made in The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Osborne 2011), I argue that the changing representation of the world by painters of pottery offers a history of classical Athens that has the advantage of being quite independent of the categories, in particular the status categories, established and policed by literary texts.

In chapters 3–7 I look in turn at five subjects that attracted the attention of painters of red-figure pottery: athletics, warfare, sexual relations, relations with the gods, and the drinking party and its aftermath. My primary question in these chapters is how the choice of scenes relating to soldiers, athletes, courtship and sex, sacrifice and libation, the symposium and the komos changed over time. But to assess the significance of these changes I run them against what we know from other sources of the history of these activities in Athens. I demonstrate that the changes in the scenes represented correlate most strongly not with changes in those particular activities in life but with the changes that occur in the representation of all scenes of “everyday life.” That is, the history of images of warfare or of athletics or of sexual relations or of relations with the gods or of the symposium and komos is not determined by changes to fighting or what happened in the gymnasium, or to changes in how men and women or humans and gods related, or to changes in what happened in and after drinking parties, but rather by a changed view of the world that encompassed all of these activities. I then test this observation by looking at the representation of the imagined life of satyrs and show that the changes that occur in the way that satyrs are represented follow precisely the same pattern as the changes in representation of areas of human life.

In the three concluding chapters I discuss how we might understand the historical significance of the pattern that I have discerned. I note that the pattern is exactly paralleled in sculpture that is produced throughout the Greek world. I explore the moral and political implications of the changes in the selection of scenes represented and make the case for the impact of aesthetic factors on how people saw the world and considered their own relation to it. I then discuss in some detail the ways in which the history of sculpture does and does not parallel the history represented in painted pottery and argue that the history of sculpture enables us to see an alternative view of the world being briefly espoused and then rejected. In a concluding discussion, I urge the historical importance of the impact of considerations of beauty.

It will not be hard, I hope, for a reader to perceive why this book aspires to change the way the history of art is written. What artists choose to represent was long neglected, as if style existed separate from content. But what of the revolution that I hope to effect in the writing of (Greek) history? The texts that we study were almost all written not simply at a definitive moment but for a definitive purpose; this makes it hard to recognize from texts when the way they present the world is instrumental, a means to an end, and when the way they see the world reflects a view generally shared across the society in which the particular text was written. Pots were painted at a definitive moment but rarely for a definitive purpose beyond “to sell.” Painters wanted to attract buyers’ attention, and might do that by being thought provoking, but they did not seek to teach. Insofar as the market for pottery was a discriminating one, it was certainly not narrow in its discrimination. The patterns of choice of scene to depict on pottery therefore have a strong chance of reproducing the way in which painters saw the world, unconstrained by any need to persuade others or conform to others’ views. Pots therefore offer us a much better glimpse of the way Athenians, and I maintain Greeks more generally, viewed the world than any text can do. Images offer us virtually no help with histoire événementielle (but see 10.2–3), but it is with images that we should start in any discussion that concerns popular morality—and that means, among other things, every history of literature or history of philosophy. This is not simply because painted pottery offers a differently distorted and less distorting mirror, but because popular morality is so strongly shaped by how the world is seen, and how the world is seen is never not a matter of aesthetics.

This book originated in a project funded by a British Academy Readership in 1999–2001 to examine the changing iconography of Athenian pottery in the first half century or so of Athenian red-figure pottery production. The core research was carried out in those years in the Beazley Archive at Oxford, and without the hospitality and assistance of Donna Kurtz, Thomas Mannach, and the Beazley Archive team this work would not have been possible. I am grateful to the British Academy and to Oxford University and Corpus Christi College Oxford who allowed me relief from teaching and administrative duties to enjoy the Readership.

My original plan had been to execute the core research in 1999–2001, return to teaching in 2001–2, and then complete this project during sabbatical leave in 2002–3. However, instead I succumbed to an invitation to return to Cambridge, forfeited my sabbatical leave, and landed a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board for a research project on cultural change at Athens at the other end of the fifth century—a project that led to Rethinking Revolutions through Classical Greece (Cambridge, 2006) and Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2007). An invitation from John Robb led to my involvement in a Leverhulme-funded project, Changing Beliefs of the Human Body, and to my History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge, 2011; see also J. Robb and O. Harris, The Body in History: Europe from the Palaeolithic to the Future [Cambridge, 2013]). This further enriched my understanding of many issues discussed here, but further delayed this book.

I am very grateful to the Classics Department at Oberlin College for the invitation to give the Martin Classical Lectures in 2007, from which this book directly descends. I enjoyed a most stimulating week in Oberlin and warmly thank all the members of the department and of cognate departments (Elizabeth Colantoni, Todd Ganson, Susan Kane, Ben Lee, Tom van Nortwick, Kirk Ormand, Drew Wilburn) along with Jenifer Neils and the rest of the lively audience, for their hospitality and their engagement with my work.

I have tried out the ideas in chapters 3 and 4, in particular, on a wide variety of audiences, whose reactions have shaped the form in which I present those arguments here. I am particularly grateful to the University of Aberdeen for the invitation to be Geddes-Harrower Visiting Professor of Classical Archaeology in the autumn of 2008, which gave me an opportunity to develop the arguments further, and in particular to situate these arguments in classical art history. I explored versions of the story told here in giving the Dabis Lecture at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Stubbs Lecture, University of Toronto, in 2015 and in lectures at the Universities of Colorado, Boulder; Cardiff; Durham; and Exeter. I am grateful to all who discussed the lectures with me on those occasions.

Jaś Elsner kindly read drafts of most of the chapters and offered invaluable comments and encouragement, as did the two readers for Princeton University Press; I am most grateful to them. For reading and improving successive drafts of the whole book I am indebted to my wife, Caroline Vout, who has transformed this work, and my life, more than even she realizes.

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