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The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?

BAS Staff — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:00:42 +0000

Read “Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale as it originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2002. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in 2013.—Ed.

The world’s most famous (and powerful) oracle resided at Delphi, high up the slopes of Mount Parnassus in the Temple of Apollo. In ancient times, supplicants would wind up the mountainside, patiently hoping for words of wisdom from the priestess (called the Pythia) in the temple’s adyton (inner chamber). Corbis

Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand what went on there and what people experienced. Sometimes, however, there’s an exception to the rule.

Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, “the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession” (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers—a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist—has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually understand what happened at Delphi.

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When ancient Greeks and Romans had to make decisions, they consulted the gods—by drawing lots, casting dice, interpreting dreams and analyzing such signs as sneezes, thunderbolts and flying birds. But for matters of the utmost importance, they sought to hear the words of the gods in the mouths of oracles.^a

Pythias were virgins who dedicated their lives to prophesying on behalf of the god Apollo. The first Pythia is said to have been the goddess Themis, who is depicted on a fifth-century B.C. cup (shown here) sitting on a tripod and holding a bowl and a sprig of laurel (Apollo’s sacred tree). According to Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.) and other sources, the Pythia was inspired by mysterious vapors, though these accounts have been largely ignored by modern researchers. Now, however, a team of archaeologists and geologists have proved that the Temple of Apollo sat directly above fault lines that likely released intoxicating carbon-based gases into the adyton. Was this the oracle’s secret?

Paradoxically, in male-dominated classical Greece the most influential voice, the Delphic oracle, belonged to a woman. The oracular temple was perched on the south slope of Mount Parnassus, surrounded by high cliffs, about 75 miles west of Athens. Getting to Delphi required either a long trek across the mountains or a sea voyage to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. However difficult the journey, thousands of visitors sought guidance from the holy woman, called the Pythia,^b who spoke on behalf of the gods.

The Pythia dealt less in visions of the future than in right choices: where to locate a new colony, when to attack an enemy, how to lift a curse, whom to choose as leader, what offering to make to which god. No kingdom, city or private person could afford to make critical decisions without consulting the Pythia. Thanks to her prestige, Delphi became the richest and most famous Hellenic sanctuary. The Greeks called it the omphalos, or “navel of the world.”

How could a mere mortal command such respect? The answer lies in the belief that Apollo—the god of revelation and inspiration—used the Pythia as his mouthpiece, taking possession of her during oracular sessions. The Pythia would fall into a trance, and the words she spoke were supposedly those of Apollo, delivered in a voice very unlike her normal tones.

Most scholars believe the Delphic oracle was established around the eighth century B.C., when founders of new colonies would consult the Pythia before setting out for the western Mediterranean, North Africa, Asia Minor or the Black Sea. The origins of the oracle are recounted in a story about a goatherd named Koretas, who pastured his flock on the slope of Mount Parnassus. Koretas noticed that when the goats grazed near a certain fissure in the mountainside, they began to bleat strangely. Approaching the fissure, he was filled with a prophetic spirit. Eventually, a woman—the first Pythia—was appointed to sit on a tripod over the cleft and give prophecies. Before she could mount the tripod, however, a goat had to be sacrificed to ensure that the day was propitious.

Image: Frank Ippolito.

During the classical period, supplicants would line up at dawn to walk along the Sacred Way, a steep path snaking up through the sanctuary toward the Temple of Apollo. The priests and temple attendants determined the order of the queue, giving priority to state embassies and then working their way down through military commanders, athletes, poets and, last of all, mere heads of families concerned about a child or an investment. The supplicants filed past bronze statues, war monuments and treasure houses dedicated in the past by grateful visitors. It would have been late in the day by the time the ordinary men at the rear reached the terrace of the temple and viewed the famous inscriptions, “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”

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From here the way led up a ramp to a great colonnade of Doric columns, and then through a double door into the temple itself. Inside burned a constant pinewood fire tended by women of Delphi. The final approach to the oracle led downward into a sunken space below the level of the temple floor, where the visitor would be confronted by a gold statue of Apollo and the omphalos stone that marked the sacred spot. The Pythia sat in a recessed inner sanctum called the adyton, a Greek word meaning “not to be entered.” Standing outside the adyton, visitors would ask their questions and await the response.

Unlike itinerant prophets and omen-interpreters, the Pythia derived her power from the place—she could only prophesy while seated in the adyton within the Temple of Apollo. According to Strabo, the pneuma arose from a small opening (chasma ges) in the adyton: “Over the mouth [of the opening] a high tripod is set. Mounting this, the Pythia inhales the pneuma and then speaks prophecies in verse or in prose. The latter are versified by poets on duty in the temple” (Geography 9.3.5.).

Strabo was not the only ancient source to describe the adyton and the intoxicating gas. The second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias told of a spring in the temple’s adyton that made the Pythia prophetic. Also, in On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, the biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.), who served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, described an exhalation of vapor in the adyton that sent the Pythia into a trance.
Despite these testimonies, no serious scholar over the last 50 years has accepted the idea that the Pythia’s trance was caused by a gaseous emission.

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Modern investigations began in the 1890s, when French archaeologists began to excavate the sanctuary at Delphi. They first moved the modern village of Kastri, household by household, from above the ancient sanctuary to the town of Delphi, west of the sanctuary. The French archaeologists uncovered the boundary wall of the ancient sanctuary, an entry gate, and the lower stretches of the Sacred Way. By 1893 they had reached the terrace of the Temple of Apollo—where they found that scarcely a stone remained in place above the floor. The columns had toppled, and the statuary had been carried off or destroyed. In the lower chamber, where the oracle once spoke, no trace of the ancient structure remained. Even the archaeologists’ attempts to reach bedrock were frustrated as water filled the excavated areas.

While the French team was excavating the temple, a young English scholar named A.P. Oppé published a report based on his visit to the site. Oppé proposed that the ancient sources had confused the fissure with a nearby gorge, and that the vapor was simply a fiction that had been passed down from source to source.¹

In 1927, after a hiatus precipitated by World War I, a scholar named M.F. Courby published the French team’s final report of the temple excavations. He described the bedrock under the center of the temple as “fissured by the action of the waters”—suggesting that the ancient traditions of an opening in the rock may have been correct.² By then, however, Oppé’s theory that the ancients simply misconstrued the facts had taken too strong a hold among scholars for the issue to be reconsidered. The final blow came in 1950: Pierre Amandry of the École Française d’Athènes stated definitively—or so it was widely believed—that exhalations of intoxicating gas could never have existed at Delphi. Only volcanic activity could produce such gas, Amandry (incorrectly) noted, and Delphi does not lie in a volcanic area.³ For almost half a century, debates about the geological origins of the oracle virtually ceased.^c

The first step toward a modern reassessment of the evidence was made in the 1980s by geologist (and co-author) Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the senior member of our project in Delphi. De Boer was conducting surveys, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Greek government, to identify active fault lines. One area he studied was the south slope of Mount Parnassus, where he noted an exposed fault both east and west of the sanctuary of Apollo—though it could not be seen at the site of the temple, where it was covered by ancient construction and debris from rock slides. De Boer suspected that the fault did indeed run under the temple, but he gave the matter no more thought.

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It was not until the summer of 1995 that Zeilinga de Boer encountered an archaeologist, co-author John Hale of the University of Louisville, who assured him, first, that he could not possibly have seen any such feature at Delphi and, second (after Zeilinga de Boer described the fault in detail), that this might be a discovery of major importance. We decided to continue investigations at Delphi, eventually adding a chemist (Jeff Chanton of Florida State University and the U.S. Geological Survey Magnetic Laboratory) and a toxicologist (Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Poison Center) to the team.

In 1996, with the support of Rozina Kolonia, the director of the Delphi Museum, we conducted a survey of the site and found that the sections of exposed fault on either side of the sanctuary were indeed part of the same fault—an active fault extending about 13 miles east-west along the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. We named this fault the Delphi Fault.

This egg-shaped stone—the very stone described by the Greek writer Pausanias, who visited Delphi in the second century A.D.—represents the omphalos, or “navel of the world.” According to Greek legend, Delphi was fixed as the center of the world when Zeus released two eagles, one from the west and the other from the east, which met in the sky above Delphi. The original omphalos stone, now lost, was probably an archaic cult object that supplicants draped with wreaths, resembling the wreaths carved in relief on this stone. Erich Lessing

In subsequent seasons we identified a second fault, extending approximately southeast-northwest. This fault could be traced along a line of springs running through the center of the sanctuary. The highest spring, above the temple, is called the Kerna Spring; its water is currently channeled westward to modern Delphi. Further down the slope, though still above the temple, a mass of travertine (a kind of limestone) deposited by calcite-rich waters indicates another spring. There is also an elaborate channel for a spring built into the southern foundation wall of the temple itself. Although this spring is dry today, the early 20th-century French archaeologists found it difficult to reach bedrock within the sanctuary because their holes kept filling up with water. Down the slope below the temple, yet another spring emerges from a cleft in the bedrock near the Treasury of the Athenians.
We have named this southeast-northwest fault the Kerna Fault, after its highest spring. In de Boer’s opinion, the Kerna Fault intersects the Delphi Fault at or near the site of the temple.

What the ancient authors described as a fissure (chasma ges) in the rock over which the Pythia sat was probably a small fracture extending up from the intersection of these two faults. Very likely, this is also what M.F. Courby, in his 1927 publication of the French team’s excavations, was describing when he wrote that the bedrock was “fissured by the action of the waters.”

Greek geologists had already identified the limestone under the temple as bituminous (oil-bearing), with a petrochemical content as high as 20 percent. These petrochemicals appeared to be a possible source of gases. But how exactly could they be released from the rock into the atmosphere?

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The Delphi Fault is linked to one of Greece’s most geologically active features: the great rift, or graben, that today is filled by the waters of the Gulf of Corinth. This is a recent feature, geologically speaking, having formed roughly two million years ago. The rift continues to widen; as it does, motion occurs along faults and earthquakes are triggered. In 373 B.C., for example, earthquakes almost completely destroyed the Delphic temple on the north side of the gulf, as well as coastal towns on the south side.

As slippage occurs along the fault lines, adjacent rock masses are heated, vaporizing the lighter petrochemicals in the limestone and expelling gases upward along the face of the faults. Once faulting has opened such a pathway, gases continue to rise, although the volume would slowly decrease over time. We believe that this is exactly what happened at Delphi: The rock masses deep in the earth were heated, and they intermittently produced gases that rose up along the intersection of the two fault lines, eventually entering the adyton of the temple through one or more fissures over which the Pythia sat.

Read about the discovery in ancient Hierapolis of Pluto’s Gate, a site shrouded in misty poisonous vapors and considered sacred to the underworld deity Pluto.

Exhalations of gases from bituminous limestone have been observed by geologists studying underwater faults in the Gulf of Mexico. There light hydrocarbon gases—methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants—have been found bubbling up from the rock below. Closer to Delphi, similar exhalations were detected near the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as on the island of Zakynthos.

We decided to test the spring water at Delphi, along with samples of the travertine rock that the ancient springs had deposited on the retaining walls and slopes around the temple. If significant quantities of gases had been emitted with the spring water, traces of these gases might be found in the travertine deposits. The very presence of travertine rock, formed from dissolved calcites in warm spring water, is evidence that the springs along the Kerna Fault had their origin at deep levels.

The water and travertine from the sanctuary of Apollo, which were analyzed by Jeff Chanton, revealed traces of the light hydrocarbon gases found in the Isthmus of Corinth and on Zakynthos. Could this explain the Pythia’s state of intoxication in ancient times?

Apollo sits on a carved ompholos stone—perhaps even a representation of the stone shown in the previous photo—on a coin (shown here) minted in Antioch in 225–223 B.C. Clearly, the Delphic oracle and its association with Apollo were well known throughout the ancient world in Hellenistic times. By the first century A.D., however, the Pythia’s powers were failing, perhaps because the volume of gases flowing into the adyton had decreased—and by the fourth century, the demise of the oracle was complete. Photo: American Numismatic Society.

The ancient sources describe two distinct types of prophetic trance experienced by the Pythia. First, and more normally, she would lapse into benign semi-consciousness, during which she remained seated on the tripod, responding to questions—though in a strangely altered voice. According to Plutarch, once the Pythia recovered from this trance, she was in a composed and relaxed state, like a runner after a race. A second kind of trance involved a frenzied delirium characterized by wild movements of the limbs, harsh groaning and inarticulate cries. When the Pythia experienced this delirium, Plutarch reports, she died after only a few days—and a new Pythia took her place.

According to toxicologist Henry Spiller, both of these symptoms are associated with the inhalation of hydrocarbon gases. Spiller studies the effects of such inhalants on young people, known as “huffers,” who breathe in fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other substances because of their intoxicating properties. Perhaps the Pythia too was high on one of these hydrocarbon gases.

It may even be possible to identify the kind of gas. Plutarch—who, we recall, was a priest of Apollo at the Delphic sanctuary—noted that the intoxicating pneuma had a sweet smell, like expensive perfume. Of the hydrocarbon gases, only ethylene has a sweet smell—so ethylene was probably a component in the gaseous emission inhaled by the Pythia.

Now, there is a good deal of evidence concerning ethylene intoxication, particularly from the early 20th century. In laboratory tests involving human subjects, the pioneering anesthesiologist Isabella Herb and other scientists studied the effects of light doses of ethylene. Ethylene worked twice as fast as nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and achieved similar effects with only half the quantity. In high concentrations, ethylene produced complete unconsciousness; in low concentrations, it induced a trance state. Ultimately, ethylene’s use as a medical anesthetic was discontinued because of its combustibility: A spark from electrical equipment in the operating room could ignite the ethylene canister, causing it to explode.⁴

From the evidence of “huffers” and the experiments with ethylene, we know that subjects normally react to inhaling small quantities of these gases by entering a benign “out-of-body” trance. They can remain seated and answer questions, but their tone of voice and typical speech patterns are altered. Recovery takes place as soon as the subject is removed from exposure to the gas, and complete amnesia about the trance follows. In a minority of cases (about one in six) in the ethylene experiments, subjects experienced delirium, or a “bad trip.” Experimenters had to use restraints to hold down those undergoing this delirium, which was accompanied by groaning, shrieking and a thrashing of the arms and legs.

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Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the Pythia’s behavior survive from the golden age (seventh to fifth century B.C.) of the Delphic oracle. By the time Plutarch took office as priest of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle’s powers had significantly diminished. According to Plutarch, emissions of pneuma in the adyton were slight and unpredictable, leading to the decline of the oracle itself. He suggested that whatever produced the pneuma in the rock below the temple had become exhausted, or that the fissures in the rock had been blocked up in the 373 B.C. earthquake. The Delphic oracle never recovered its former prestige after this earthquake, even though the temple was rebuilt.

The diminished flow of gas may not have been the only reason for the decline of the institution. Plutarch opined that the pneuma was merely a trigger for the prophetic trance, and that the Pythia’s lifelong training and psychological preparation played the most important role in her spiritual possession. In a memorable simile, Plutarch compared Apollo to a musician, the Pythia to a lyre, and the pneuma to the musician’s uncanny ability to produce music by touching the instrument. Perhaps there were socio-cultural reasons for the decline of the institution, or perhaps, as the gaseous emissions became less powerful, devoting one’s life to the oracle became less attractive.

Whatever the reasons for the oracle’s demise, we can no longer dismiss ancient traditions concerning its origins and power. Strabo, Plutarch and the others have been rescued by science from a century of calumny.

Read the Bible History Daily feature Medicine in the Ancient World.

The House of Apollo: A History

The Delphic oracle appears often in Greek myth, even in the account of the repopulating of the earth after a great flood. The high god Zeus, distressed over mankind’s wickedness, sends a flood to cover the earth, but two pious human beings, Deucalion (Prometheus’s son) and Pyrrha (Prometheus’s niece), survive by climbing Mount Parnassus. With the ebbing of the flood, the two descend the mountain and come upon the Delphic temple site, where they hear a voice: “Veil your heads and cast behind you the bones of your mother!” Like many of the Delphic oracles, this one is initially enigmatic, but Deucalion and Pyrrha soon realize that the earth is their mother; so they throw rocks over their shoulders, and the rocks are transformed into men and women, saving humanity from perdition.

Photo: Erich Lessing.

Another famous, or infamous, visit to the oracle was made by the young Oedipus—who, having been adopted as a baby, wanted to know the identity of his parents. (The third-century A.D. marble relief above shows Oedipus [center] sacrificing to the Delphic oracle in front of a statue of Apollo [left].) However, the Delphic oracle informed the young man that he would murder his father and commit incest with his mother. To foil the prophecy, Oedipus left Corinth, which he (erroneously) believed to be his native land. On his journey he killed another chariot-driver in a fit of ancient road rage—but unknown to him, the other driver was his father Laius, King of Thebes.

The oracle at Delphi was also consulted by non-mythical figures. In the sixth century B.C., King Croesus of Lydia, in western Anatolia, inquired whether he should attack King Cyrus of Persia. “If you attack,” replied the Pythia, “you will destroy a great kingdom.” Croesus attacked the Persians, suffered total defeat, and saw his kingdom absorbed into the Persian Empire. Croesus had destroyed a great kingdom—his own.

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

More than a century later, the philosopher Socrates—shown above in a Hellenistic bust—reminded the Athenians at his trial in 399 B.C. that the oracle had declared him the wisest of men, a fact that did not save him from execution.

Photo: David Harris/Collection Israel Museum

After Greece was conquered by Rome, a number of Roman emperors posed questions to the oracle. Nero (54–68 A.D.) was warned to beware the 73rd year, and he was later assassinated by troops who made the 73-year-old Galba emperor in his place. Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), shown in the bronze statue above, ever the intellectual, wanted to know the birthplace of the poet Homer. (The Pythia’s answer: Homer was the grandson of Odysseus and born at Ithaca.) The oracle advised Diocletian (284–305 A.D.) to persecute Christians—which Christians avenged by destroying a number of oracle sites in the fourth century A.D. Finally, the envoys of the pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 A.D.) received word of the oracle’s demise from the Pythia: “Tell the king the fair-built hall has fallen; Apollo now has no house or oracular laurel or prophetic spring; the water is silent.”

Notes

a. The oracle at Delphi was not the only ancient oracle, though it was the most powerful. Other Greek oracles were located at Epidaurus and in Asia Minor at Colophon and Didyma. Italy’s most famous oracle was at Cumae (near Naples), where a sibyl, or priestess, prophesied in a cavern; originally, the sibyl’s utterances were inscribed on palm leaves.

b. “Pythia” derives from the original name of the site, Pytho. Homer, for instance, refers to Apollo’s “shrine in Pytho” (Odyssey 8.94). The name “Delphi” came later.

c. However, this was not so among such Greek scholars as Spyridon Marinatos (1901–1974), the excavator of ancient Thera (modern Santorini), which was buried in a volcanic eruption around 1638 B.C. Marinatos argued that Delphi’s active geological history made it difficult to know what changes might have occurred over the past two millennia. He also made a report on an anemotrypa (wind hole) in the modern town of Delphi—a small cleft in the rock that emitted gas with a sulfurous smell. Scholars outside Greece ignored these ideas.

1. A.P. Oppé, “The Chasm at Delphi,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 24 (1904), pp. 214–240.

2. M.F. Courby, Topographie et architecture: la terasse du Temple: Fouilles de Delphes (1927), vol. 11, pp. 65–66.

3. Pierre Amandry, La mantique apollinienne a Delphes: Boccard (Paris, 1950), pp. 215–230.

4. See Isabella Herb, “Ethylene: Notes Taken from the Clinical Records,” in Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1923), pp. 210, 231–232; Herb, “Further Clinical Experiments with Ethylene-Oxygen Anesthesia,” Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1927), pp. 258–262; A.B. Luckhardt and J.B. Carter, “Physiologic Effects of Ethylene: A New Gas Anesthetic,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 80 (January–June 1923), pp. 765–770.

“Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale appeared in the November/December 2002 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in May 2013.

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The Origins of Democracy

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:00:21 +0000

Origins: …And by the People

Democracy we associate with the modern West and ancient Athens, but little in between

By James Sickinger

Dave Clarke

Every four years millions of Americans, many of them united by little other than their shared citizenship, flock to schools, churches and other polling places to cast their ballots for our next president. On no other occasion do all Americans have the opportunity to vote for the same office, making presidential elections the most democratic feature of the American political system.

When we think of democracy, we usually think of the ancient Greeks, but identifying the exact origins of political practices can be tricky. Many of the city-states of the ancient Near East, for example, had popular assemblies in which citizens passed laws and elected officials (see Jacob Klein, “The Birth of Kingship: From Democracy to Monarchy in Sumer”). But these states are seldom labeled democracies, and our own institutions do not trace directly back to theirs.

In looking for the origins of democracy, in fact, we will not find an unbroken tradition linking the democracies of the ancient world to those of the modern age. Democratic ideals and values disappeared from western Europe during the Middle Ages, and when they resurfaced in the 17th and 18th centuries, they were very different from their ancient predecessors. The roots of modern democracies lie in more recent times.

Nonetheless, the idea that the people should rule themselves is not new. The word “democracy,” meaning “power of the people,” is, of course, Greek in origin. Kingship disappeared from most of the Greek world during the so-called Dark Age (11th to 9th century B.C.E.). The city-states, or poleis, that began to emerge in the eighth century B.C.E. were not the possessions of individual rulers or even a limited number of families. These states were conceived as the common possession of their citizens and had strong egalitarian tendencies.

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Just how democratic they were can be debated. The Greek city-states did not extend citizenship to all their inhabitants. Foreigners, women and slaves were excluded—a feature, however, that hardly distinguishes the ancient Greeks from other Western societies until modern times. Citizenship was limited to adult males—and not even to all of them, for full citizenship required ownership of land.

But land ownership was not restricted to an elite few, and what made many ancient Greek city-states democratic was their large number of small farmers: These farmers had a voice, however limited, in the affairs of government.

The setting sun illuminates Athens’s Acropolis. Photo: AP/Petros Giannakporis.

The numbers and influence of these middling landowners is evident in Greek warfare. By the seventh century B.C.E., Greek armies relied on heavily armed infantrymen called hoplites. Only citizens fought as hoplites, and each hoplite provided his own spear, shield, helmet and breastplate. The widespread use of hoplite warfare implies the existence of a substantial farming class that could supply its own armor in the early Greek poleis.

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Ironically, ancient Sparta—notorious for its militant authoritarianism—offers some of the earliest evidence for hoplites and their acquisition of democratic rights. Spartan citizens called themselves homoioi or “equals,” a name deriving from either the identical training all Spartans underwent or the equal plots of land they received (the sources are unclear). Early on these “equals” also enjoyed some power in government. The Greek biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 C.E.) preserves a document called the Great Rhetra, supposedly from the seventh century B.C.E., which outlines the branches of Spartan government. It mentions two kings, a council of 30 elders and a citizen assembly with final say in all decisions. The Spartan people were their own masters.

In ancient Athens, however, democracy advanced further. The Athenians extended the rights of citizenship to a far greater portion of their male inhabitants, including the poor and landless. How and why this development occurred at Athens are questions still hotly debated among historians,¹ but the general outline is clear. At the start of the sixth century B.C.E. the reformer Solon sought to limit aristocratic oppression of the poorest Athenians by abolishing debts and debt slavery; he also ended the aristocracy’s monopoly on public office and gave all citizens the right to appeal the decisions of judicial officials. In 508–507 B.C.E. Cleisthenes implemented further reforms that made Athenian government more representative. He reorganized the citizen body into ten tribes, each drawing citizens from different parts of Attica (the area of Greece that includes Athens), and created a new Council of 500, which consisted of 50 members from each tribe. These reforms helped guarantee that the political process represented all Athenians.

Democracy, however, achieved its most developed state around the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. This final step is generally associated with a man named Ephialtes. All we know of him is that in 462–461 B.C.E., he sponsored reforms that deprived the Areopagus, Athens’s ancient aristocratic council, of its “extra” powers and transferred them to the law courts, the Council of 500 and the assembly of adult male citizens. We do not know what powers the Areopagus had exercised previously, so we cannot say precisely what powers Ephialtes gave to the people. But from this time the popular organs of Athenian government—the Council of 500, the law courts and especially the assembly—exercised sovereign power. Subsequent years brought further advances. Eligibility for the archonship (the archon was Athens’s highest public office; nine archons were appointed every year) was extended to more citizens, and public officials began to be paid for their service—which meant that more citizens could afford to participate in official political affairs.

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Athenian democracy differed in many ways from our own, and we should not idealize it. The Athenians chose most of their state officials by lot (leaving the decision to chance), and most offices had a one-year term limit. These practices were designed to prevent corruption and ensured greater participation in government, but they could not have made government very efficient. The Athenians were also reluctant to extend democratic privileges to others: aliens residing in Athens had little hope of ever becoming naturalized Athenian citizens. During much of the fifth century B.C.E. the Athenians ruled over many other Greek city-states, including former allies; the tribute exacted from these cities helped to pay public officials in democratic Athens. It is no exaggeration to suggest (as many historians have before) that democracy and imperialism were quite closely connected.

Still, one Athenian practice may have contemporary relevance. At the end of the fifth century B.C.E., the Athenians began to pay citizens to attend meetings of the assembly. Originally the first 6,000 to show up for a meeting received the small amount of one obol (not even half a day’s wage), but by the middle of the fourth century B.C.E. that payment had grown six fold. Were the Athenians on to something? When voter turnout in American presidential elections hovers near 50 percent, this may be one lesson we wish to take from our Athenian ancestors.

“Origins: …And by the People” by James Sickinger was originally published in the January/February 2001 of Archaeology Odyssey. It was first republished in Bible History Daily on November 6, 2018.

James Sickinger is an Associate Professor of Classics at Florida State University.

Notes:

1. See Ian Morris and Kurt Raaflaub, eds., Democracy 2500: Questions and Challenges (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1998).

Ancient Combat Sports

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 04:00:32 +0000

Read Michael B. Poliakoff’s article “Ancient Combat Sports” as it originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2004.—Ed.

One of the three ancient Greek combat sports, wrestling was celebrated for its complexity, as it required not only strength but precise skills and cunning. Wrestlers like those depicted on this fourth-century B.C.E. silver coin probably knew of the legendary exploits of Homer’s Odysseus, who uses his wits to wrestle the massive Ajax to a draw in Book 23 of the Iliad.

“You know that the Olympic crown is olive, yet many have honored it above life,” wrote the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (c. 40-110 C.E.).¹ Indeed, the occasional philosopher or doctor may have condemned the brutality and danger of ancient athletics, but the Greek public nevertheless accepted a good deal of hazard, injury and death.²

This is particularly true of the three Greek combat events—wrestling, boxing and pancratium (a combination of boxing and wrestling that allowed such tactics as kicking and strangling). Their history at ancient Olympia is long and eventful: Wrestling entered the program in 708 B.C.E., boxing in 688 B.C.E. and pancratium in 648 B.C.E. These grueling sports reveal much about the aspirations and values of ancient Greece, about what was deemed honorable, fair and beautiful, both in the eyes of those of who competed and those who traveled to Olympia to watch.

Combat sports were designed to be as physically taxing and uncomfortable as possible. This meant no time limits, no rounds, no rest periods, no respite from the midsummer sun. According to some ancient authors, such as Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and Philostratus (third century C.E.), boxers could bear their opponents’ blows more readily than the unremitting heat.³ And the combat athlete might well have gone from one hard-earned and injurious victory straight into another round of competition.

His eyes fixed in an intense, burning glare, a wrestler controls his opponent in this 6-inch-tall bronze statue found in Alexandria, Egypt, dating to the second century B.C.E. Photo: Erich Lessing.

Nor were there weight classes, so the ambitious but undersized athlete simply took his chances against larger competitors. In the event of a mismatch, the superior athlete was unlikely to show mercy. Some athletes were so terrifying that their opponents simply defaulted, allowing them to win akoniti (dust-free), without having to get dirty. A late-second-century C.E. athlete named Marcus Aurelius Asclepiades—who won the pancratium at many festivals, including the games held at Olympia—boasted in an inscription that he “stopped all (potential) opponents after the first round.”⁴ An inscription honoring the wrestler Tiberius Claudius Marcianus recounts that at one festival, “when he undressed, all his opponents begged to be dismissed from the contest.”⁵

The ancient Olympic world adhered to values very different from our own (or what we ideally think of as our own). In a speech given in 1908, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, said: “The purpose of these Olympiads is less to win than to take part in them,”⁶ a sentiment later echoed by the sportswriter Grantland Rice:

For when the One Great Scorer comes
to mark against your name,
He writes—not that you won or lost—
but how you played the Game.

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

This second-century C.E. inscription from Olympia memorializes the 35-year-old boxer Agathos Daimon, whose nickname was “The Camel.” Agathos Daimon had triumphed at the Nemean Games but died while competing at Olympia, after having “prayed to Zeus for victory or death.” The inscription is a sobering reminder of the hazards involved in ancient combat sports. The Greeks weren’t ignorant of the safety precautions taken in modern boxing; they simply chose to ignore them. As another Greek inscription, from the first century B.C.E., makes clear: “A boxer’s victory is gained in blood.” Photo: Anthony Milavic.

The ancient Greeks did not view their Olympics in this way. A second-century C.E. inscription found at Olympia relates the ancient Olympic spirit with quiet dignity:

Agathos Daimon, nicknamed “the Camel” from Alexandria, a victor at Nemea. He died here, boxing in the stadium, having prayed to Zeus for victory or death. Age 35. Farewell.⁷

The chasm between ancient and modern widens further once we look more closely at the specific combat events contested at the panhellenic games.

The Association Internationale de Boxe Amateur, whose rules govern modern Olympic boxing, has precise requirements for boxing gloves—they must weigh 10 ounces, half of that weight consisting of padding, and they must be engineered to absorb, rather than transmit, shock. Association boxers must also wear headgear, mouth guards and ear protectors during their bouts; they must also use protection for the groin and lower abdomen. According to the guidelines of the Atlantic branch of the U.S. Amateur Boxing Association, “The main objective of Olympic-style boxing’s rules and the actions and decisions of the referee is the safety and protection of boxers.” What is remarkable about ancient Olympic boxing is that the Greeks recognized a number of ways to make the sport safer—and ignored all of them.

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“A boxer’s victory is gained in blood,” begins an inscription dating from the first century B.C.E., praising a tough and successful boxer.⁸ The Greeks celebrated the hazards of boxing and the damage it caused, and their art did nothing to sanitize this damage. Boxers in vase paintings bleed from the nose; sculpted statues show broken noses and cauliflower ears. A second-century C.E. manual on the interpretation of dreams, by the Greek soothsayer Artemidorus, observes that boxing dreams ominously foretell a deformed face and loss of blood.⁹

A muscled boxer pauses, perhaps following a bout, in this first-century B.C.E bronze sculpture now in Rome’s Museo Nazionale. Wrapped around his wrists are thin strips of oxhide, which protected the pugilist’s knuckles and lacerated his opponent’s face. In antiquity, boxing matches were brutal; there were no weight classes to protect smaller competitors (though men and boys fought separately), and bouts ended in submission, knockout or even death. Photo: Erich Lessing.

Until the fourth century B.C.E., Greek boxers bound their hands with thin strips of oxhide. These “soft thongs” (himantes meilichai), as the Greeks called them, did nothing to protect boxers against concussions or facial lacerations. On the contrary, they protected the boxer’s knuckles against fracture and the wrist against sprain: In effect, they simply encouraged more vigorous and damaging blows. The “sharp thongs” (himas oxus) that replaced them—consisting of a pad of leather, 1 to 2 inches thick, tied over the boxer’s knuckles—were even more damaging. Exactly when they became standard equipment is unclear, but a vase dated 336 B.C.E. shows a highly developed form of the thongs.

In Book 8 of the Laws, Plato says that during practice sessions boxers put on padded gloves called sphairai instead of thongs.¹⁰ These padded gloves, however, were never used in competition. Needless to say, modern attempts to protect a boxer’s eyes from injury—by mandating gloves that keep the thumb from being bound together with the fist—find no parallel in antiquity; ancient texts mention boxers whose eyes had been struck out.¹¹

The boxing rules enforced by the judges at Olympia were minimal. As in other sports, boys and men competed in separate events—though, as already noted, there were no weight divisions that protected the welterweight from the crushing blows of the heavyweight. Clinching (the act of holding onto your opponent’s body to slow a fight down) was forbidden, and we find depictions of judges using their sticks to punish such infractions. Technique mattered insofar as it led to submission or insensibility; the concept of winning by points or by judges’ decision is modern, not ancient. In the absence of a knockout (or worse), the vanquished pugilist could hold up a finger to signal submission, a moment often seen in Greek vase paintings.

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Preparing to fight, a boxer wraps his wrists with oxhide strips, in this red-figured amphora dating to the fifth century B.C.E. These so-called soft thongs, or himantes meilichai, were in use until the fourth century B.C.E., when they were replaced by the even more devastating sharp thongs (himas oxus), gloves of leather 1 to 2 inches thick. Photo: Erich Lessing.

Unlike boxing and pancratium, a wrestling match typically did not end with submission or incapacitation, but rather with one competitor achieving technical mastery over his opponent. The ancients admired wrestling for the level of skill and science it required. Homer’s Odysseus is the archetypal clever wrestler who deflects and neutralizes the massive strength of a far larger man (Ajax) in Book 23 of the Iliad. A statue honoring one Aristodamus of Elis for his victory at Olympia in 388 B.C.E. is inscribed with text reading, “I did not win by virtue of the size of my body, but by my technique.”¹² In the Laws, Plato praised wrestling as a form of exercise well suited for the training of Athens’s youth. Plutarch referred to the sport as “the most technical and the trickiest,” and a surviving section of a first- or second-century C.E. wrestling manual shows how well developed the drills for tactics and counter tactics were.¹³

To gain a fall, the Greek wrestler had to take his opponent down, making the man’s back or shoulders touch the ground or stretching him out prone. Three falls were necessary to win a contest. Not every fall was clear. Greek literature sometimes refers to disputes over whether a fall occurred.¹⁴ The tactics depicted in Greek art suggest that very forceful holds and throws were common. Vase paintings and sculpture show headlocks and hip throws, shoulder throws and body lifts, including the reverse body lift that the formidable Russian wrestler Aleksander Karelin has used with such devastating effect in recent Olympiads. If a fall did not result from a wrestler’s being thrown on his back, action would continue on the ground. Joints could be forced against their normal range of movement, and sculptures show a variety of arm bars and shoulder locks that would be illegal in modern Olympic wrestling.

Read more about the ancient Greeks in The Athenian Acropolis, The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?, and The Greeks Go to Washington in Bible History Daily.

A wrestler lifts his opponent off the ground, holding him firmly in his grasp, in this 6-inch-tall, second-century B.C.E. bronze statuette discovered in Alexandria, Egypt. The philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.E.) encouraged Athens’s youth to wrestle, and the historian Plutarch (c. 46-120 C.E.), in his Quaestiones conviviales, calls wrestling “the most technical and the trickiest” of sports. A Greek wrestling manual, dating to the first or second century C.E., confirms Plutarch’s view, illustrating the intricacy of drills the Greeks used to teach tactics and counter tactics. Photo: Erich Lessing.

The struggle was likely to be bitter and intense, however sophisticated the tactics. Greek sources are quite clear that choking an opponent into submission, though apparently uncommon, could result in a legitimate fall.¹⁵ The great British historian of ancient sport E.N. Gardiner (1864–1930) may have written that “Wrestling, at all events in the early days before it was corrupted by professionalism, was free from all suggestions of that brutality which has often brought discredit on one of the noblest of sports,”¹⁶ but the evidence proves otherwise. A recently discovered inscription from Olympia records a judges’ decree passed in the late sixth century B.C.E. forbidding wrestlers to break each other’s fingers and empowering the judges to flog athletes who disobeyed the rule.¹⁷ Nevertheless, Leontiskos of Messene won the Olympic crown in wrestling in both 456 and 452 B.C.E. by using this tactic.¹⁸

Aside from biting or gouging into the soft parts of an opponent, all means of unarmed combat were legal in pancratium. A Greek synonym for pancratium, pammachon (total fight), describes the sport well. In fact, pancratium differed from modern “extreme fighting” largely by virtue of its having been a central, rather than marginal, part of the athletic world of its day. Exhibiting the power and extension of the legs, kicking was an essential part of pancratium, almost to the point of being an emblem of the sport. Driving the knee into an opponent’s genitals was a particularly effective tactic. Pancratiasts also punched and applied strangle holds and locks on their opponents’ limbs and joints, all with the purpose of forcing their rivals to concede the contest. One famous pancratiast, Sostratos of Sikyon, won 12 crowns at Nemea and Corinth, two at Delphi and three at Olympia (in 364, 360 and 356 B.C.E.) by using Leontiskos of Messene’s trick of bending back an opponent’s fingers. Sostratos used the tactic so effectively that many potential opponents forfeited their matches rather than meet him in the stadium.¹⁹

In his Anacharsis, the second-century B.C.E. writer Lucian imagined a typical pancratium bout:

These folk standing up, who also have been coated with dust, punch and kick at each other in their attacks. And now this poor wretch looks like he is going to spit out even his teeth—his mouth is so full of blood and sand, having just taken a blow on the jaw.²⁰

Typically, pancratiasts fought bare-fisted, leaving the hands free for wrestling and strangling holds, but at least two vase paintings show that sometimes they preferred the lacerative potential of the thong.
Gouging and biting were punished as foul play, and one vase painting shows a trainer vigorously flogging two pancratiasts for digging into each other’s faces. Greek authors, including the physician Galen (c. 129-199 C.E.), observed that quite a lot of gouging and biting did take place nonetheless—which is not entirely surprising in a contest that permitted, and rewarded, snapping an opponent’s fingers and kicking his genitals.

This sixth-century B.C.E. drinking vessel, attributed to the so-called Heidelberg Painter, depicts a wrestler about to flip his opponent, as judges look carefully on. A variety of throws and holds were permitted in ancient Greek wrestling, such as headlocks, hip throws, body lifts and arm bars. Though tactics such as snapping an opponent’s fingers were not technically permitted, they were sometimes overlooked by judges. Leontiskos of Messene, for example, broke a finger or two on his way to claiming two Olympic wrestling victories in the fifth century B.C.E. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

It is hard to say how often contests turned lethal. Greek texts seem quite clear that boxing was regarded as more injurious and dangerous than pancratium. But pancratium’s hazards were very real, as is best evidenced by the extraordinary story of one Arrhichion.

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Arrhichion of Phigalia had twice won the pancratium event at Olympia. In 564 B.C.E., his third attempt to win an Olympic crown, he advanced to the finals. During the final bout, Arrhichion was standing up when his opponent, whose name is not recorded, jumped on his back, clamped a leg scissors around his waist and strangled him with a forearm against his throat. Realizing that he was suffocating, Arrhichion chose to exit Olympia in a blaze of glory. Catching his opponent’s right ankle in the crook of his right knee, he clamped his opponent’s left leg to his own body with his left arm, thus preventing his opponent from releasing the hold. As he lost consciousness, Arrhichion fell toward the left while straightening his right leg against his opponent’s ankle, wrenching it from its socket. His opponent, in agony, threw his hand in the air, signaling concession, not realizing, as he fell, that Arrhichion’s corpse lay beneath him.

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Just who participated in these grueling and often injurious ancient contests? The evidence is clear: everyone from blue bloods to men of modest means.²¹ Diagoras of Rhodes, who boasted of both royal and mythical lineage (he claimed to be descended from Herakles), won in boxing at the 464 B.C.E. Olympics. His three sons all won Olympic events in boxing or pancratium, and his two grandsons won Olympic crowns in boxing.²² In the first or second century C.E., Tiberius Claudius Rufus of Smyrna battled an opponent in the finals of the pancratium at Olympia until darkness and the bravery of the performers convinced the judges to award both men the Olympic crown; the inscription honoring Tiberius Claudius Rufus notes that he was a personal acquaintance of the Roman emperor, implying the significant wealth and prestige of his family.²³

Other than biting or eye-gouging, any form of unarmed combat was tolerated in the brutal sport of pancratium, a kind of extreme fighting that did, on occasion, result in death. Strangling, kneeing the genitals, kicking, punching, locking onto limbs and joints—all were legal means of gaining a submission. Pancratiasts usually fought bare-fisted, but in this black-figure Attic vessel by the Theseus Painter, dating to around 500 B.C.E., they wear oxhide thongs similar to those used by boxers. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1906.

Aristotle, on the other hand, tells of a fishmonger who won the boxing crown at Olympia (unfortunately, he provides no further details),²⁴ and the snobbish fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian general Alcibiades competed only in chariot racing, explaining that the other contests were populated by men of humble birth.²⁵ Indeed, one manifestation of the Greeks’ democratic brilliance is that at ancient Olympia, competitors—rich or poor, aristocrats or tradesmen—were simply athletes; stripped naked for competition, they sought to prove they were the best in the Greek world. Although the incentive of valuable prizes or money (which the victors received at all ancient games, including those at Olympia) might have been powerful, especially for those of slender means, it does not explain why wealthy aristocrats eagerly joined in contests of this nature.

The lure for all Greeks was kleos (fame), the perfect antidote to the grim, disembodied obscurity of death. The Homeric poems, which were for the Greeks what the Bible became for later Western society, are permeated with the deeds of heroes, for which they are rewarded with kleos. Hector, the eldest son of King Priam and the Trojans’ greatest warrior, speaks for all when he says that his heart did not know how to shrink back in battle, since the time “when [he] learned to be brave and always to fight in the front ranks of the Trojans, guarding [his] father’s honor and [his] own also” (Iliad 22.458–59).

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In time, however, phalanx warfare, with its highly organized ranks and files, eliminated the need for one-on-one combat, which figured centrally in the battles of an earlier age (as, perhaps, preserved in Homer). Greek city-states thus came to view their wartime victories as the achievements of the entire people, not of a heroic general, however brilliant or valorous he might have been.²⁶

Only in combat sports could the Greek man prove his mettle in fighting one-on-one. (Indeed, nowhere else in Greek civic life was aggression both tolerated and encouraged. We know from surviving court speeches that the Athenians severely punished even casual acts of assault and battery with sanctions including the death penalty.)²⁷ By placing combat sports in the context of warfare, we can understand the baffling paradoxes of what the Greeks considered fair play. Just as on the battlefield, no handicap was awarded to smaller or weaker opponents. There were no weight classes in the combat sports to prevent a stronger man from brutalizing a weaker or less-experienced fighter. Athletes in the combat sports could not avoid thirst, discomfort or the heat of the sun, and warfare allowed for no periods of rest. The great athletic festivals, then, were a surrogate for the world of heroic combat that had vanished from Greek reality but was alive in the Homeric poems.

To win in competition was to strive for the heroic, to enjoy unending kleos. As the Greek poet Pindar (c. 522–440 B.C.E.) wrote, “He who braves the contest’s struggle with success wins the fairest sense of inner peace for the remainder of his days.”²⁸ The modern world will rightly depart—and depart sharply—from the ancient world’s disregard for the safety of its competitors. Nevertheless, look this summer on the faces of those in Athens who brave a contest’s struggle and then prevail: Their hard-earned joy is one of the continuities between ancient and modern times.

“Ancient Combat Sports” by Michael B. Poliakoff originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2004. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily on August 16, 2017.

Drawing not only on his academic credentials but also his experience as a college wrestler, Michael B. Poliakoff is the author of Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (Yale Univ. Press, 1995).

Notes

1. Dio Chrysostom 31.110.
2. See Michael B. Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 89–91.
3. See Cicero, Brutus 69; Philostratos, Gymnastika 11, Heroikos 15 (147 K.); Pausanias 6.24.1.
4. See Inscriptiones Graecae 14.1102; Luigi Moretti, Iscrizioni agonistiche greche. Studi pubblicati dall’ Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica 12 (Rome: Angelo Signorelli, 1953), no. 79; and Poliakoff, Combat Sports, p. 106.
5. J.G.C. Anderson, Journal of Roman Studies 3 (1913), p. 287 n. 12.
6. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, “Les ‘Trustees’ de l’Idée Olympique,” Revue Olympique, July 1908.
7. J.G.M.G. Te Riele, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique 88 (1964), pp. 186–87.
8. G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca (Berlin, 1878), p. 942; and Moretti, Inscrizioni agonistiche greche, no. 55.
9. Artemidorus, Oneirocriticus 1.61–62.
10. Plato similarly recommended that soldiers engage in military exercises with weapons equipped with protective buttons on their tips. See Plato, Laws 830a–831a; see also Plutarch, Praecepta rei publicae gerendae 32 (Moralia 825e), with further discussion in Poliakoff, Combat Sports, p. 73.
11. Libanius 64.119 and Galen, Protrepticus 12 (1.32 K.)
12. Denys Page, Epigrammata Graeca, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975, LII, 283 ff; also see Joachim Ebert, Griechische Epigramme auf Sieger an gymnischen und hippischen Agonen. Abhandlungen der Saechsichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, philologisch-historische Klasse 63.2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972), no. 34.
13. Plato, Laws, 796b; Plutarch, Quaestiones conviviales 2.4 (Moralia 638d). For a translation of the wrestling manual, see Poliakoff, Combat Sports, pp. 52–53.
14. For further information on disputes over scoring a fall, see Ambrose, Commentary on Psalm 36.51, in Patrologia Latina 14.1038–39; see also Aristophanes, Knights, pp. 571–73.
15. Lucian, Anacharsis 1.8; Nonnus, Dionysiaka 37.602–9.
16. E.N. Gardiner, Journal of Hellenic Studies 25 (1905), p. 14–31.
17. Peter Siewert, “The Olympic Rules,” in Proceedings of an International Symposium on the Olympic Games, William Clulson and Helmut Kyrieleis, eds. (Athens, 1992), pp. 111–17.
18. Pausanias 6.4.3 tells of Leontiskos’s skill at breaking fingers.
19. Sostratos the pankratiast is known from Pausanias 6.4.1-2 and a surviving inscription: Moretti Iscrizioni agonistiche greche, no. 25; see also Ebert, Griechische Epigramme, no. 39.
20. Lucian, Anacharsis 3.
21. See H.W. Pleket, “Games, Prizes, and Ideology,” Stadion 1 (1976), pp. 49–89; and David C. Young, The Olympic Myth of Amateur Greek Athletics (Chicago: Ares, 1984).
22. The story of Diagoras and his family was often told in antiquity. See in particular Pausanias 6.7.1-7 and 4.24.1-3; Pindar praised Diagoras in a victory ode, Olympian 7, and Cicero tells the story, in Tusculan Disputations 1.46.111, of a spectator who saw Diagoras carried on the shoulders of his sons who had triumphed in boxing and pancratium on the same day at Olympia; the spectator remarked, “Die, Diagoras, for you cannot go up into heaven”—in other words, there is nothing greater that any mortal man could ever have.
23. Tiberius Claudius Rufus’s victory is commemorated on a surviving inscription, Inscriften von Olympia 54/55. For further discussion, see Reinhold Merkelbach, Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 15 (1974), pp. 99–104; and Walter Ameling, Epigraphica Anatolica 6 (1985), p. 30.
24. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1365a, 1367b; and Page, , pp. 238–239.
25. Isocrates, On the Team of Horses 16, pp. 2–35.
26. Note how the Athenians forbade the successful generals of the Persian wars to erect monuments to themselves; see Aeschines, Against Ktesiphon, pp. 183–186, with discussion in M. Detienne, “La Phalange,” in J.-P. Vernant, ed., Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Paris, 1968), pp. 127–28; also see Poliakoff, Combat Sports, 112 ff.
27. See Isocrates, Against Lochites 20.9–11 and Demosthenes, Against Meidias 21.45.
28. Pindar, Olympian Odes 1.

Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Thu, 30 May 2024 04:00:55 +0000

Read Theodore Feder’s article “Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” as it originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2008. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in October 2012.—Ed.

Is it possible that the earliest existing picture of a scene from the Bible also includes the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle as onlookers? It is not only possible; I believe that is the case.

The earliest depiction of a Biblical scene comes from a site that is perhaps better known to some for its erotic art than for its religious devotions: Pompeii. The city was buried in volcanic ash in 79 A.D. following the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius. It was a devastating tragedy for Pompeii’s residents but a boon to modern scholars and art historians.

In the building known as the House of the Physician, excavators found a wall painting clearly depicting King Solomon seated on a raised tribunal and flanked by two counselors. As described in the Bible, two women have come to the Israelite monarch, each claiming to be the mother of the same infant. When Solomon orders the baby to be divided in half, the real mother, shown at the foot of the dais, pleads with him to spare the child and announces her willingness to relinquish her claim. The other woman is shown standing by the butcher block on which the infant has been placed. As a soldier raises an axe to do the king’s bidding, she seizes what she believes will be her portion, saying, according to the Biblical text, “Let it be neither mine, nor thine, but divide it.” It is obvious who the real mother is. The child is given to her unharmed as soldiers and observers look on, marveling at Solomon’s wisdom (1 Kings 3:16–28).

Pleading for her baby’s life, a woman kneels at the feet of King Solomon and relinquishes her claim to the contested child, thus identifying herself as the real mother of the infant in 1 Kings 3:16–28. Nearby a soldier prepares to follow the king’s order to cut the baby in two, while another woman, also claiming to be the mother, stands ready to take her half. This Roman wall painting from the House of the Physician in Pompeii is the earliest known depiction of a Biblical scene—a surprising find in a city better known for its brothels and erotic art than its religious paintings. So who was the person that commissioned this painting: a Jew, a Christian or a gentile? Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The wall painting has now been removed and is on exhibit at the Museo Nazionale in Naples. While it is therefore well known to scholars, it has not previously been noted that this is the earliest depiction of a full-fledged Biblical scene known to us!

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Was the painting commissioned by a Jew, an early Christian, a so-called God-fearer (gentiles who adopted many Jewish customs and beliefs, but did not convert^a) or simply an educated Roman?

There is good evidence that Jews lived in Pompeii. Kosher brands of the locally popular fish sauces were packed there and appropriately labeled Kosher Garum and Kosher Muria (garum castum, muria casta).¹ A two-word inscription, Sodoma Gomora, also survives from a house front in Pompeii and may have been written by a Jew or, less likely, by an early Christian, either before the eruption of Vesuvius or by a digger soon afterwards. It is perhaps more affecting to imagine its having been hastily written in the midst of the eruption by someone who analogized the town’s impending fate with that of the two doomed Biblical cities.

Wondering at the wisdom of King Solomon’s decision, two onlookers in the lower left corner of the painting observe the proceedings. Author Theodore Feder believes these clearly depicted figures represent the great Greek philosophers Socrates and Aristotle. With the creation of the Septuagint in the third century B.C., the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. The presence of these men in a Biblical scene suggests that the owner of this house was a gentile who wanted to draw a parallel between the Classical Greek sages and the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

My own feeling, however, is that it is more likely that the painting of Solomon displaying his wisdom was commissioned by a non-Jew. True, the Second Commandment’s prohibition against depicting the human form was not always obeyed by Jews in the Roman era.² But the injunction was particularly strong in the years leading up to the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 A.D., when protests against graven and painted images received a strong political as well as religious impetus. On stylistic grounds, the painting can be dated from the period immediately preceding the Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D.

In any event, it is clear that the work reflects the influence of the Hebrew Bible. The Torah (the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses) was translated into Greek beginning in about 270 B.C., and the rest of the Bible was added in the immediately following centuries. According to one account, King Ptolmey II Philadelphus of Egypt wanted a copy of the Hebrew Bible for his great library in Alexandria.^b More likely, it was made by Jews for the Jews of Alexandria who did not know Hebrew. According to a traditional story, 70 scholars were isolated from each other on an island in Alexandria and instructed to prepare a Greek translation. When they were finished, all Greek copies were identical. Hence, this Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is still known as the Septuagint.^c The Greek translation became available not only to the many Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews of the Mediterranean world, but to non-Jews as well. This text served as both a literary and iconographic source-book for Jew and gentile alike. Although the owner of the House of the Physician could in theory have been either a Jew, a so-called God-fearer, an early Christian or a Roman gentile, he was most likely a gentile, based simply on demographic grounds. In short, gentiles were more numerous, more likely to attain wealth, and under no prohibition with regard to depicting the human form.

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The painting contains all the essential narrative elements in the Biblical story without omissions or adumbrations. What’s more, it appears to have sprung whole from the artist’s imagination, as there is no known precedent in the history of art. As noted above, present are Solomon, the two mothers, the butcher block, the baby, the soldier waiting to divide it, and the onlookers who will attest to Solomon’s wisdom. The story has not received a more telling and cogent depiction in the 2,000 years since the painting’s creation.

Socrates has long been considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. Museo Pio Clementino at the Vatican. Alinari/Art Resource, NY

Over the years, a bald head, beard and flat nose became iconic features for depicting Socrates. The similarity to the figure in the Pompeian painting is so striking that he must be Socrates. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples Scala/Art Resource, NY

Among the onlookers are two figures in the lower left corner of the composition who are more fully delineated than the very lightly sketched group of figures immediately behind them. The features and poses of these two witnesses reflect surprise, wonder and admiration.

I believe these two figures are stand-ins for Socrates and Aristotle, introduced as a way of associating the wisdom of Solomon with that of the Greek philosophers. Put another way, their presence in the composition attests to the respect Greek philosophy could accord to Hebrew wisdom. Such a juxtaposition in art of wise men from the two civilizations was unprecedented, has rarely been done since, and is of great cultural and historical significance.

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The standing figure on the left has the bald head, flattened nose, and beard that almost always characterizes depictions of Socrates.

The figure to the right stands with his right leg thrust forward; his chin rests on his unsupported right arm in a classic thinker’s pose. He would be more natural if he were pictured seated. His features, however, correspond to a prototype for Aristotle: a full head of curly hair, little or no beard in this case and a regular profile. It is likely that the painter modeled Aristotle on a seated prototype derived from a Greek original that was copied in Roman times. A surviving example is the seated Aristotle from the Galleria Spada in Rome. There the pose is almost identical to the standing Aristotle of the Pompeian wall painting; the left leg is thrust forward and the head rests on an upraised arm which is in turn supported by Aristotle’s bent knee.

The Pompeian painter likely modeled his portrayal of the great philosopher Aristotle on an existing statue like this one but modified it to a standing position as seen in the completed painting. Scala/Art Resource, NY

The association of Jews with Greek wisdom and philosophy, though rare, was not entirely unknown in Hellenistic literature. In one of the earliest Greek references to the Jews, Clearchus of Soli (c. 300 B.C.), a disciple of Aristotle, quotes Aristotle as saying that the Jews are descended from Indian philosophers.³ In a similar vein, Theophrastus (372–288 B.C.) remarks that “being a race of philosophers, they converse with each other about divinity, and during the night they view the stars, turning their eyes to them and invoking their God with prayers.”⁴ This could serve as a still-accurate portrayal of synagogues in the modern era, where evening prayers (Maariv in Hebrew) are traditionally begun at sundown with the appearance of the first stars.

Numenius of Apamaea (Syria), a second-century A.D. Platonist, praised the Jews for worshiping an incorporeal God and declared that Plato had been but “a Moses in Attic garb,” here, too, making an association between the great thinkers of both cultures.⁵

The owner of the House of the Physician approved the depiction of this scene and likely proposed the subject matter to the painter. In selecting an episode from the Hebrew Bible, the patron departed from the canon of classical religious subject matter and elevated one from the Scriptures of a people whose influence at the time was spreading throughout the empire and would one day, in its Christian formulation, pervade it.

Theodore Feder is president and founder of Art Resource, the world’s largest photo archive of fine art, as well as president of the Artists Rights Society. He is author of Great Treasures of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Abbeville Press) and numerous articles.

Notes

1. August Mau, Pompeii, Its Life and Art, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 16.

2. See Harold H. Ellens, “The Library of Alexandria: The West’s Most Important Repository of Learning,” Bible Review 13:01.

3. On Sleep, quoted by Josephus, Against Apion I, 176–182.

4. On Piety, cited by Poryphry, third century A.D., in On Abstinence, 2.26. Meyer Reinhold and Louis Feldman, Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), primary readings, p. 7.

5. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937), p. 157.

a. See Louis H. Feldman, “The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers”; Robert S. MacLennan and Thomas Kraabel, “The God-Fearers—A Literary and Theological Invention”; and Robert Tannenbaum, “Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite,” all in BAR, September/October 1986.

b. See Jacob Neusner, Symbol and Theology in Early Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 211, 216. Also, Erwin R Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953–1968).

c. Philo of Alexandria gives a full account of its composition in his “Life of Moses” (2.6: 31–37, 44) See also Leonard J. Greenspoon, “Mission to Alexandria: Truth and Legend About the Creation of the Septuagint, the First Bible Translation,” Bible Review 05:04.

“Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” by Theodore Feder originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2008.

Lay That Ghost: Necromancy in Ancient Greece and Rome

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Tue, 28 May 2024 04:00:18 +0000

Sleep and Death carry Sarpedon, who was killed while fighting for the Trojans in the Trojan War, on this early fifth-century B.C. amphora. The ancients associated sleep, dreams and death with the ability to predict the future, perhaps because they believed the future was hatched in the underworld. Metropolitian Museum of Art/Creative Commons Zero (CC0).

Pausanias, regent of Sparta, was one of Greece’s greatest heroes. He led the Greek forces in the decisive defeat of the massive Persian invasion at Plataea in 479 B.C. It was this splendid victory that ushered in what has become known as the Classical Age of Greek culture. Had it not been for Pausanias and his achievements, it could be argued, there would have been no Pericles, no Parthenon and no Plato.
But just a few years after his victory, Pausanias was found to be betraying Greece to the very Persians over whom he had triumphed. The Spartans devised a terrible punishment for him. They bricked him up inside one of their principal temples, the so-called Bronze House of Athena, and starved him to death. It is said that Pausanias’s own mother laid the first brick.

What happened in between his victory and his death is a sad story. In the years after his victory at Plataea, Pausanias and the Greek forces carried the battle to the Persians. Success soon went to his head. He fell into madness, and his behavior became erratic. Treachery aside, he acted like a tyrant in his treatment of the freedom-loving Greeks under his command. But his troubles really began when he fell in love while in Byzantium (modern Istanbul), at that time the base of his operations.

The object of his desires was the beautiful virgin Cleonice (her name, appropriately, means “glorious victory”). Pausanias meant to have his way with her and had her brought to his chamber at night. When she arrived, he was tossing and turning in a fitful, guilty sleep. Pausanias’s guards had extinguished the lamps around his bed out of respect for the girl’s modesty. As she felt her way towards him through the dark, she accidentally knocked over one of the lamps and sent it clanging to the ground. Pausanias, starting from his sleep, thought assassins had come for him, and he lashed out with the sword he kept by his side. The girl fell dead.

Necromancers (from the Greek words meaning death and divination) consulted ghosts, as shown in this fourth-century B.C. amphora by the Cumaean Painter, in which a seated female necromancer offers a libation to a shrouded spirit. Photo: Musée D’Art et D’Histoire, Geneva.

Cleonice’s ghost now harried him and drove him further into madness. Eventually he took ship and sailed along the southern shore of the Black Sea to the seat of an Oracle of the Dead. There he called up Cleonice’s ghost and asked her what he had to do to bring her (and himself!) peace. Her price, disingenuously innocuous, seemed to be a small one: All he had to do was return home to Sparta. But in fact his return home brought about his conviction for treachery and his being bricked up in the temple of Athena where he had sought refuge. So the recompense Cleonice demanded could not have been greater: Pausanias’s own life.

The story does not end here, however. Had he himself not been horribly murdered? His ghost would chase away the Spartans from the Temple of Athena, where he had been killed. The goddess was already angry at the Spartans for killing a man who had sought refuge in her house. But now her anger toward them only increased as, debarred from her temple, they had no opportunity to appease her through sacrifice.

As was often the case in times of religious crisis in ancient Greece, Apollo’s oracle at Delphi came to the rescue. The oracle advised the Spartans to bring in professional evocators (the Greek term for them is psuchagôgoi, which means “soul-conductors”) to rid themselves of Pausanias’s ghost. A team was brought in from Italy, and they succeeded in their task.

This tale, assembled from accounts preserved in Thucydides 1.34, Plutarch’s Cimon 6 and others, involves the most commonly sought secret in necromancy: What did a restless ghost need to achieve peace? Necromancy is now usually used to refer to “black” magic—any variety of magic involving ghosts or demons. But in its original Greek sense it referred specifically to learning secrets from the dead. In the case of Pausanias and Cleonice, it was a matter of negotiating compensation for the killing. In other cases it could be a matter of asking the ghost for the name of his or her undetected murderer, so that the killer could be brought to book. In Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, the Egyptian magician-priest Zatchlas calls up the ghost of the dead Thelyphron, who reveals to the assembled crowd that he had been poisoned by his supposedly meek wife and her lover. (In this, Apuleius presaged Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The uninvited ghost of Hamlet’s father reveals that he has been murdered by Hamlet’s mother and her lover.)

Ghosts could manifest themselves in two very different forms. They could appear as terrifying, attacking ghosts, with whom there could be no possibility of communication. Ghosts called up through the rites of necromancy, however, were more approachable, even if they had previously appeared as an attacking ghost. The emperor Nero was harried by the ghost of his mother, whom he had killed. Driven to distraction by her attacks, he asked his Persian magus to call up her ghost for him so that he could appease her.

Ghosts could also reveal other kinds of secrets. Sometimes it was just a matter of information that the dead person had carried to the grave. Herodotus tells, for example, how Periander the tyrant of Corinth called up the ghost of his dead wife to ask her where, in life, she had hidden some money. She does indeed tell him (but only after reminding him that he had had sex with her corpse and demanding that he sacrifice vast amounts of costly clothing to her—which he acquires by publicly stripping the good women of Corinth of their clothes).

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The dead could also be called up to reveal the future. In Lucan’s Pharsalia, the grotesque witch Erictho calls up the ghost of a dead soldier to predict the outcome of the Roman civil war to Sextus Pompey. Why did the Greeks and Romans believe the dead knew the future when they were so strongly associated with the past? We’re not really sure. One possibility is that some ancients believed the future was prepared in the realm of the dead. When Aeneas descends into the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid, he witnesses the marshaling of the souls of Rome’s future heroes, even though they had not yet been born. Another possibility: Many ancients, Plato among them, believed that a pure soul, one separated from the dull matter of the body, had great powers of perception and could understand the hidden processes of the universe.

Most ghostly consultations took place at the tomb—if the relevant ghost had one. Otherwise, one could call up a ghost—presumably any ghost—at a site visited by an Oracle of the Dead. Ancient sources tell us about four such sites in the Greco-Roman world. The best known are the Acherusian lake, part of the Acheron River in Thesprotia in northwest Greece, and Lake Avernus in Campania in Italy. Two other sites, less well known, are Heracleia Pontica on the south coast of the Black Sea (where Pausanias called up the ghost of Cleonice) and Cape Tainaron, the southernmost point of the Peloponnesus.

Those who sought omens and secret information (Who really killed Uncle Themisticles?) could also consult Oracles of the Dead, one of which was situated at the Acherusian lake in northwest Greece (shown here). The ancients recognized only four Oracles of the Dead, which were thought to be entrances to the underworld. Photo: Erich Lessing.

One common misconception is that these sites were all situated in caves, which were supposedly channels to and from the underworld. This does seem to have been true of Heracleia and Tainaron, where rudimentary archaeological remains survive. But the literary evidence concerning Acheron and Avernus strongly indicates that these oracle sites consisted of little more than precincts beside lakes.

A fragment of Aeschylus’s lost tragedy, Evocators, mentions such a lakeside precinct and speaks of the blood of a black sheep being poured directly into the lake for the nourishment of the ghosts. The ghosts were doubtless imagined to travel up from the underworld through the waters of the lake.

The belief that Oracles of the Dead were based in caves has led to some odd flights of fancy on the part of archaeologists. The Greek archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris mistakenly located the Acheron oracle in what we now know to be the cellar of a Hellenistic farmhouse. Dakaris imagined that ancient visitors to the oracle consumed hallucinogenic beans before being led through dark labyrinths and confronted with floating effigies of ghosts and underworld gods. These puppets were supposedly attached to elaborate mechanisms controlled from concealed cavities in the walls.

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Another bit of whimsy was proposed by the British archaeologist, Robert Paget, who located the Avernus oracle in what was actually a service tunnel for a Roman bathhouse. He speculated that visitors to the oracle were led through dark tunnels and across a hot, sulphurous spring that doubled as the River Styx. Priestly assistants, he suggested, used lamps and wooden shadow puppets to project ghostly figures onto a wall—in a kind of ancient version of a Disneyland haunted house!

The reality, alas, was less exciting. Plutarch relates the case of a father who wanted to inquire after the fate of his dead son. He went to an Oracle of the Dead, made the due sacrifices, went to sleep and in a dream encountered the ghosts of his son and of his own dead father. Apparently, Oracles of the Dead used the same technique to deliver their revelations as the healing oracles of Asclepius and Amphiaraus—a ritual sleeping-and-dreaming now known as incubation. The ancients often found themselves visited by ghosts in sleep. Indeed, they regarded the state of sleep as closely akin to that of death. In Greek myths, Sleep and Death were identical twin brothers, and they were often depicted as such. By going to sleep, one accommodated one’s own state to that of the ghost and, as it were, met the spirit halfway.

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“Elpenor, how did you come here beneath the fog and the darkness?” cries Odysseus (the central figure depicted on this fifth-century B.C. vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) as he encounters the ghost of his dead comrade rising from the reeds of the Acherusian lake, one of the four seats of the Oracle of the Dead. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In the Odyssey, Elpenor gets drunk at Circe’s palace and falls to his death from the high battlements. Briefly revivified by sipping blood from two sheep sacrificed by Odysseus, Elpenor is then escorted from the underworld by Hermes, the figure at far right on the vase. In Greco-Roman necromancy, blood sacrifices were believed to reanimate the dead. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The sacrifices that preceded the incubation are described in the Odyssey 11.23–36. They are also shown on what is perhaps the most striking illustration of necromancy to survive from antiquity: a fifth-century B.C. red-figured vase, now in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, by the “Lycaon” painter. (This anonymous painter is known by the subject of his best-known vase.) The vase depicts Homer’s Odysseus encountering the ghost of his dead comrade Elpenor (see the Odyssey 11:56).

In the foreground of this scene, lying at his feet, are the carcasses of two black sheep that Odysseus has just sacrificed. Their blood drains from the wounds in their necks into a small round offering pit. As the ghosts sip from this, they will briefly recover a little corporeal substance so as to be able to hold a conversation with the living. Odysseus continues to brandish his sword to ward off any unwelcome ghosts that might approach. True, the dead could hardly be killed a second time, but bronze and iron apparently inspire a talismanic fear in them.

On the right is the god Hermes, one of whose familiar duties was to escort the souls of the dead down to the underworld. Here, it seems, he performs the rarer task of bringing them back up again. At left, the ghost of Elpenor rises out of the water, the reeds of the Acherusian lake at his back. Rites such as these seem to have been basic to necromantic practice throughout antiquity.

The evocators who managed the Oracles of the Dead guided visitors through their consultations. These mysterious docents may themselves have cultivated a squalid, ghostlike appearance. They seem to have been expected to travel long distances for special consultancy work. As noted above, the evocators that laid to rest the ghost of Pausanias in Sparta are said to have come all the way from Italy to do the job.
A Byzantine source, the Suda,¹ preserves an account of evocators at work. To exorcise an area that has been subject to ghostly attacks, the evocators drag a live sheep by its forelegs around the place to find the spot at which the ghost’s body lies in the ground. When the sheep comes to the right place, it throws itself down. The evocators then sacrifice it, make circular movements around the site, and ask the ghost what is troubling it.

Although the witch Circe instructs Odysseus in the rites of necromancy in the Odyssey, it is only in the Latin literature of the Roman Empire that the necromantic witch becomes a recurring figure. In Horace’s Satires 1.8, for example, a dismal pair of witches, Canidia and Sagana, perform a series of rites among the bones of a paupers’ cemetery on the Esquiline that seem to blend necromancy with eroticism. The hags dig a pit with their bare hands and tear open the neck of a sheep with their nails. They then hold a twittering conversation with the ghosts they have summoned. But they also manipulate a pair of doll-like effigies used in the casting of seductive spells.

We also learn of some specialized forms of necromancy—for example, the reanimation of corpses to make them speak. Lucan’s Erictho achieves a reanimation by first summoning up the dead person’s soul and then reinserting it into its body. The rite also includes the pumping of fresh blood into the corpse along with a protracted list of bizarre magical ingredients (moon-juice, the foam of a rabid dog, the hump of a hyena, the bone marrow of a deer fed on snakes and a “ship-stopping” sea monster, among others) and the issuing of a terrible series of threats against the gods (Pharsalia 6.588–830).

This Roman reanimation is believed to have been the prototype for the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as for other characters appearing in modern Gothic horror stories. For example, before the reanimated corpse can speak, it must be made to stand upright in a gesture emblematic of its return to life—but it cannot climb to its feet in the normal way, as it is still stiff with rigor mortis, so it rises to its feet in a single magical leap. This recalls a striking sequence in F.W. Murnau’s classic silent movie Nosferatu, in which Count Orlok, the Dracula figure, similarly rises from his coffin directly onto his feet, his body remaining stiff and straight throughout.

Necromancy and reanimating the dead hold an enduring fascination for us moderns. Moviegoers are both appalled and enthralled by the sanguivorous Count Orlok, played by Max Shreck (shown here) in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu. Ancient ghosts were often portrayed with a rigidness similar to the count’s—as if still locked in the throes of rigor mortis. Photo: Kobal Collection.

We may wonder whether such fantastical rites were actually practiced in the ancient world. The best guess is that the practice of skull necromancy lurks behind them. In skull necromancy, magical rites are performed upon a human skull, whose owner might then visit the ritual-performer in his sleep to impart the desired information. Several recipes for such spells are found in The Great Magical Papyrus in Paris, a fourth-century A.D. Greek magical recipe book compiled in Egypt.

Skull necromancy perhaps had antecedents in the earlier Greek world. After the poet Orpheus was decapitated by the Thracian women, his head sailed across the sea, finally landing on the island of Lesbos. There it took up residence in a cave and uttered prophecies to those who consulted it. A fifth-century B.C. Attic vase now in Basel’s Antikenmuseum shows the scene clearly: A perky head of Orpheus surrounded by the Muses nestles between rocks at the bottom of its cave. A burly man seeking information has just climbed down into the cave using a rope, and rests his foot on a rock as he leans over to speak with Orpheus’s head.

When the poet Orpheus was decapitated by the Thracian women, his head traveled across the sea to the island of Lesbos, where it opened shop as a necromancer. In this fifth-century B.C. Attic vase, from Basel’s Antikenmuseum, a client climbs down a rope to consult the skull, which is attended by the muses (Orpheus’s mother is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry). Photo: Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, INV.

Skull necromancy also brings us back to Sparta, just a few decades prior to the reign of Pausanias. Another of Sparta’s great men, King Cleomenes I, founded the Peloponnesian League that would eventually destroy the Athenian empire. As a boy, Cleomenes had sworn to his bosom friend Archonides that, should he become king, he would share all his plans with him. Upon his eventual accession, Cleomenes chopped off Archonides’s head, pickled it in honey, and kept it in a pot. But he was as good as his word: Before every major enterprise he would “discuss” his plans with the head. Can we doubt that mad Cleomenes owed his successes to the skull’s advice?

———–“Lay That Ghost: Necromancy in Ancient Greece and Rome” by Daniel Ogden originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2002. It was first republished in Bible History Daily on October 31, 2017.

Daniel Ogden is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter.

Notes:

1. The Suda is a tenth-century A.D. Byzantine lexicon that preserves some valuable information about the ancient Greek world—and not a little misinformation, too.

The Ancient Library of Alexandria

BAS Staff — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:00:37 +0000

When Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.E.,
the Ptolemaic dynasty was given control of Egypt.
Ptolemy I (c. 367–283 B.C.E.) established his capital at Alexandria and immediately began to build up the city.
Ptolemy’s grandest project, begun in 306 B.C.E., was the Library of Alexandria, a research center that held one million books by the time of Jesus. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

In March of 415 C.E., on a sunny day in the holy season of Lent, Cyril of Alexandria, the most powerful Christian theologian in the world, murdered Hypatia, the most famous Greco-Roman philosopher of the time. Hypatia was slaughtered like an animal in the church of Caesarion, formerly a sanctuary of emperor worship.¹ Cyril may not have been among the gang that pulled Hypatia from her chariot, tearing off her clothes and slashing her with shards of broken tiles, but her murder was surely done under his authority and with his approval.

Cyril (c. 375–444) was the archbishop of Alexandria, the dominant cultural and religious center of the Mediterranean world of the fifth century C.E.² He replaced his uncle Theophilus in that lofty office in 412 and became both famous and infamous for his leadership in support of what would become known as Orthodox Christianity after the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451), when basic Christian doctrine was solidly established for all time.

Cyril’s fame arose mainly from his assaults on other church leaders, and his methods were often brutal and dishonest. He hated Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, for example, because Nestorius thought Christ’s divine and human aspects were distinct from one another, whereas Cyril emphasized their unity. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Cyril arranged for a vote condemning Nestorius to take place before Nestorius’s supporters—the bishops from the eastern churches—had time to arrive. Nor was Cyril above abusing his opponents by staging marches and inciting riots. It was such a mob, led by one of Cyril’s followers, Peter the Reader, that butchered the last great Neoplatonic philosopher, Hypatia.

Cyril is honored today in Christendom as a saint. But at the time of his death, many of his fellow bishops expressed great relief at his departure. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, wrote that Cyril’s “death made those who survived him joyful, but it grieved most probably the dead; and there is cause to fear lest, finding him too troublesome, they should send him back to us.”³

One reason Cyril had Hypatia murdered, according to the English historian Edward Gibbon, was that Cyril thought Hypatia had the political ear of Alexandria’s chief magistrate, who vigorously opposed Cyril’s ambition to expel from the city those who held different religious views from his own.⁴ Cyril was also jealous of Hypatia because scholars from all over the world crowded into her lectures in Alexandria, Athens and elsewhere. Socrates (380–450), a church historian from Constantinople, says of Hypatia:

[She] was so learned that she surpassed all contemporary philosophers. She carried on the Platonic tradition derived from Plotinus, and instructed those who desired to learn in…philosophic discipline. Wherefore all those wishing to work at philosophy streamed in from all parts of the world, collecting around her on account of her learned and courageous character. She maintained a dignified intercourse with the chief people of the city. She was not ashamed to spend time in the society of men, for all esteemed her highly, and admired her for her purity.⁵

Hypatia’s father, Theon, was a leading professor of philosophy and science in Alexandria. He had prepared a recension of Euclid’s Elements, which remained the only known Greek text of the great mathematician’s work until an earlier version was discovered in the Vatican Library in this century.⁶ Theon also predicted eclipses of the sun and moon that occurred in 364.

Hypatia, who was born about 355, collaborated with her father from early in her life, editing his works and preparing them for publication. According to one authority, she was “by nature more refined and talented than her father.”⁷ The extant texts of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables were probably prepared for publication by her.⁸

Such scientific and philosophical enterprises were not new or surprising in Hypatia’s Alexandria, which already boasted a 700-year-old, international reputation for sophisticated scholarship. Founded in 331 B.C.E.⁹ by command of Alexander the Great, the city contained almost from its beginnings an institution that would remain of immense importance to the world for the next 2,300 years. Originally called the Mouseion, or Shrine of the Muses, this research center and library grew into “an institution that may be conceived of as a library in the modern sense—an organization with a staff headed by a librarian that acquires and arranges bibliographic material for the use of qualified readers.”¹⁰

Learn about the dazzling discoveries coming out of the Alexander the Great-era tomb at Amphipolis in Greece.

Indeed, the Alexandria Library was much more. It “stimulated an intensive editorial program that spawned the development of critical editions, textual exegesis and such basic research tools as dictionaries, concordances and encyclopedias.”¹¹ The library in fact developed into a huge research institution comparable to a modern university—containing a center for the collection of books, a museum for the preservation of scientific artifacts, residences and workrooms for scholars, lecture halls and a refectory. In building this magnificent institution, one modern writer has noted, the Alexandrian scholars “started from scratch”; their gift to civilization is that we never had to start from scratch again.¹²

In 323 B.C.E., as summer was breaking upon the northern coast of Egypt, Alexander the Great died in Mesopotamia. Within little more than a year, Aristotle died in Chalcis and Demosthenes in Calaurie. To this day, these three gigantic figures, more than any others, save Jesus and Plato perhaps, remain essential to the ideal of civilized life throughout the world. The reason these and other figures remain alive for us today is the ancient library and “university” of Alexandria.¹³

When Alexander died, his empire was divided among his three senior commanders. Seleucis I Nicator became king of the empire’s eastern reaches, founding the Seleucid empire (312–64 B.C.E.) with its capital at Babylon.¹⁴ Antigonus I Monopthalmus (the One-Eyed) took possession of Macedonia, Greece and large parts of Asia Minor, where he established the Antigonid dynasty, which lasted until 169 B.C.E.¹⁵ A third commander, Ptolemy, assumed the position of satrap, or governor, of Egypt. Ptolemy made Alexandria his capital, brought Alexander’s body to the city for a royal entombment and quickly embarked upon a program of urban development.¹⁶

Ptolemy’s grandest building project was the Alexandria Library, which he founded in 306 B.C.E. Almost immediately the library epitomized the best scholarship of the ancient world, containing the intellectual riches of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Rome and Egypt. Until it was closed in 642 C.E.—when the Arabs conquered Egypt and carried off the library’s treasure—it was the major vehicle by which the learning of the past was kept alive.¹⁷ Not only did the library preserve the ancient sciences, but it proved to be a vital philosophical and spiritual force behind the surprising new worlds of Judaism, Neoplatonism and Christianity.

The history of the library and its university center falls into five stages. The first, from its founding in 306 B.C.E. to about 150 B.C.E., was the period of Aristotelian science, during which the scientific method was the dominant feature of scholarly investigation. The second, from 150 B.C.E. to 30 B.C.E., was marked by a decided shift away from Aristotelian empiricism to a Platonic preoccupation with metaphysics and religion. This period coincided with the consolidation of Roman influence in the Mediterranean basin. The third was the age of Philo Judaeus’s influence, from 30 B.C.E. to 150 C.E. The fourth was the era of the Catechetical School, 150 to 350 C.E., and the fifth was the period of the philosophical movement known as the Alexandrian School, 350 to 642 C.E. Together, these five stages cover a thousand years. No other institution of this kind has proved to be so long-lived or so intellectually dominant of its world and subsequent history as Alexandria’s library.

Sometime between 307 and 296 B.C.E., Ptolemy I brought from Athens a noted scholar named Demetrios of Phaleron (345–283 B.C.E.) to undertake his vast library project.

Demetrios set about this task with vigor, providing the course the library was to follow for a millennium. His genius lay in his conception of the library as something more than a receptacle for books; it was also to be a university where new knowledge would be produced. The library’s initial design called for ten halls for housing the books. These halls were connected to other university buildings by marble colonnades. Scholars were extended royal appointments with stipends to live and work in this university community. At the same time, task forces commissioned to acquire books were scouring the Mediterranean. Books were even confiscated from ships moored in Alexandria’s harbor, copied and then restored to their owners. The scriptorium where the copies were made also served as a bookstore, creating a lucrative enterprise with an international clientele.

In 283 B.C.E. Demetrios was succeeded as chief librarian by Zenodotus of Ephesus (325–260 B.C.E.), who held the office for 25 years. This brilliant scholar was a Greek grammarian, literary critic, poet and editor. He continued Demetrios’s work on Homer, making a detailed comparative study of the extant texts, deleting doubtful passages, transposing others and making emendations. He also produced the first critical editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and set each of them up in the 24 books in which we have them today.

The Athenian Agora was a great center of ancient learning. Read about recent agora excavations in the Bible History Daily feature “Stoa Poikile Excavations in the Athenian Agora.”

It was probably Zenodotus who established as part of the library the public lending section known as the Serapeion—so named because it was a sanctuary for the god Serapis as well as a public library. He appointed two assistant librarians: Alexander of Aetolia (born c. 315 B.C.E.), to specialize in the Greek tragic and satiric plays and poetry; and Lycophron of Chalcis (born c. 325 B.C.E.), to concentrate on the comic poets. Both of these men became famous in their own right as writers and scholars.

One of the things we would most like to have today from the Alexandria library is its catalogue, called the Pinakes, the great work of Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 305–235 B.C.E.), who served under four chief librarians but never rose to that position himself. The full title of the Pinakes is Tablets of the Outstanding Works in the Whole of Greek Civilization.¹⁸ Pinakes means “tablets” and probably referred originally to the tablets or plaques attached to the stacks, cabinets and rooms of the library, identifying the library’s wide variety of books from numerous cultures, most of them translated into Greek.a

Although only fragments of the Pinakes have survived, we know quite a lot about it. Most dependable sources agree on the organizational method utilized in the catalogue, which amply demonstrates the sophisticated character of the ancient library. The Pinakes consisted of 120 scrolls, in which all the works in the library were organized by discipline, with a substantial bibliographical description for each work.¹⁹ The encyclopedia of knowledge as it has been conceptualized since ancient times is derived from Callimachus’s design. As a leading scholar has noted, “The Western tradition of author as main entry may be said to have originated with Callimachus’s Pinakes.”²⁰

The Pinakes identified each volume by its title, then recorded the name and birthplace of the author, the name of the author’s father and teachers, the place and nature of the author’s education, any nickname or pseudonym applied to the author, a short biography (including a list of the author’s works and a comment on their authenticity), the first line of the work specified, a brief digest of the volume, the source from which the book was acquired (such as the city where it was bought or the ship or traveler from which it was confiscated), the name of the former owner, the name of the scholar who edited or corrected the text, whether the book contained a single work or numerous distinct works, and the total number of lines in each work.²¹

The Pinakes was the first great library catalogue of western civilization, just as The Bible of Gutenberg was the first great printed book. [I]t earns for its author the title of “Father of Bibliography.” Thus, as in all intellectual efforts, the Greeks fixed the canons of cataloguing, which have been incorporated, more or less, in our Library of Congress, European, and other systems. However, the Pinakes was more than a catalogue. It was the work of the foremost man of letters of his age. He could not treat even a purely scientific subject as the Pinakes…without imparting to his work the rich stores of his scholarship, and thus the first world catalogue of knowledge became also the first literary and critical history of Hellenic literature, and also earned for its author the title of “Father of Literary History.”²²

By the end of Callimachus’s life, the library is purported to have contained 532,800 carefully catalogued books, 42,800 of which were in the lending library at the Serapeion. Two and a half centuries later, in the time of Jesus, it held one million volumes.²³

It was officials with the conquering Arab army who last saw the library in its operational state. Undoubtedly much of it was carried off to their royal libraries. It is likely that the character and structure of Callimachus’s Pinakes was used as a model for a brilliant Arabic counterpart from the tenth century known as the Al-Fihrist, or Index, by Ibn-Al-Nadim, which we have in virtually its complete and original form. Surviving fragments of the Pinakes confirm the likelihood of this.²⁴

For its first two centuries, the library at Alexandria continued to be a center for nearly every kind of research in the natural sciences as well as in philosophy and the humanities, employing the scientific method developed by Aristotle, which, thanks to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), forms the foundation of modern science.²⁵

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275–195 B.C.E.), a student of Callimachus who rose to become chief librarian, is a classic example of the Alexandrian scholar of the period. He was an accomplished mathematician, geographer, astronomer, grammarian, chronographer, philologist, philosopher, historian and poet. He founded the sciences of astronomy, physical geography, geodetics and chronology. He was known as the most learned person of the Ptolemaic age²⁶ and was acclaimed by his contemporaries as second only to Plato as a literary thinker and philosopher.

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Eratosthenes dated the Trojan War to about 1184 B.C.E., a date generally accepted in ancient times and respected by many modern scholars. He worked out a calendar that included a leap year, and he calculated the tilt of the earth’s axis. One of his most memorable accomplishments was the invention of an accurate method for measuring the circumference of the earth (see the sidebar to this article).

During his tenure as chief librarian, Eratosthenes brought to Alexandria the official Athenian copies of the three great Attic tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This involved a bit of scurrilous horse-trading: Ptolemy III approved an arrangement for borrowing these precious manuscripts from Athens, pledging the modern equivalent of $4 million as surety.²⁷ With the documents in hand, Ptolemy III then forfeited his deposit, cavalierly retaining the original manuscripts for the Alexandria Library, and instructed the staff to make good copies on fine quality papyrus, which were then sent back to Athens. “The Athenians with both the money and the copies,” one scholar has observed, “also appear to have been satisfied with the deal.”²⁸

Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–180 B.C.E.) followed Eratosthenes as chief librarian and served for about 15 years. He was a man with a photographic memory and could cite at length the literary sources in the library.²⁹ He had read them all. It is said that while judging poetry competitions he regularly detected plagiarized lines, and on a number of occasions, when challenged by the king to justify his criticism, cited the sources and recited the original passages. As a philologist, grammarian and author, Aristophanes produced poetry, dramas and critical editions of the works of his famous namesake, Aristophanes (c. 450–c. 388 B.C.E.), the Greek poet and dramatist.

Near the end of his life, Aristophanes was imprisoned by Ptolemy V Epiphanes for entertaining an offer to move to the great library of Pergamum. Such repression did not create an ideal climate in which scholarship might flourish. After his imprisonment, the library languished under an interim director, Apollonius Eidograph. But in 175 B.C.E. a new chief librarian was appointed, Aristarchus of Samothrace (217–130 B.C.E.), who returned the institution to its grand tradition of high scholarship and scientific sophistication.

Aristarchus was chief librarian for 30 years, from 175 to 145 B.C.E. He is still considered one of the greatest literary scholars because his recension of the works of Homer continues to be the standard text (textus receptus) upon which all modern versions are based. Besides his two critical editions of Homer, he produced similarly erudite editions of Hesiod, Pindar, Archilochus, Alcaeus and Anacreon. He wrote commentaries on the works of all these classical poets as well as on the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, and on the historian Herodotus.

Aristarchus had been the teacher of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, and though the latter gained a reputation for being a monster, the two apparently remained friends. When a civil war and political insurgency against the king arose in 131 B.C.E., Aristarchus accompanied him in his banishment to Cyprus. There Aristarchus died before Ptolemy VIII returned in triumph in 130 B.C.E. to continue his oppressive reign for another 14 years. With his reign, the history of wise and humane Ptolemies and illustrious librarians ended. Thereafter, valuable scholarship continued in Alexandria, such as the work of Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.), the Catechetical School of Clement and Origen (150–350 C.E.) and the Neoplatonic School (350–642 C.E.), but after 130 B.C.E. both kings and scholars were lesser lights. Revolutions, insurrections and persecutions wracked the kingdom as dynastic political intrigue plagued the country, the city and the scholarly community. By the end of Aristarchus’s tenure, such dissatisfaction existed among the scholars regarding the character of the king and the conditions of the scholarly community that Ptolemy VIII imposed a military controller upon the operations of the library.

Considering the extensive accumulation of scientific data collected by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and their advanced methods of empirical research, it is surprising that they did not achieve some key breakthrough in chemistry or physics that would have precipitated an industrial revolution. The Greeks and Romans both understood, for example, the power of steam produced by heated water. The Romans harnessed steam for powering toys. There is some indication that they employed it for powering siege guns. What held them back from utilizing it in steam-driven machinery, which would have enabled that giant leap from mere muscle to mechanical power? They had refined sciences of optics, geometry and physics. What prevented them from imagining and creating a microscope? They understood atomic theory in some coarse way. What prevented them from identifying the components of water as hydrogen and oxygen and thus moving on to the intricacies of chemistry? They seem to have marched right up to the intellectual and scientific threshold for mechanization and then fallen back into a 1,500-year darkness. Their sciences needed to be rediscovered and reinvented in the Renaissance of the 12th to 14th centuries before the next step forward could be made. Why?

The likely answer lies in the area of two cultural circumstances: (1) the shift in Alexandrian Library scholarship from Aristotelian empiricism to Platonic metaphysical speculation in about 100 B.C.E., and (2) the barbarian subduction of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries C.E.

Increasingly during this period of decline, the wealth and intellectual capital of Alexandria was dissipated in trying to maintain workable relations with the rising power of Rome. As the tribute to Rome increased, and the material investment in the library and its scholarship suffered, the superior intellectual importance, prowess and productivity that had been standard under the early Ptolemies proved impossible to maintain: “The dons were drawn into the political vortex, and those not so inclined were silent. The zest to produce the things of culture was permanently interrupted.”³⁰

One consequence of these disturbing times was an intense turn toward religion. Hellenistic Jews were experimenting with various kinds of theologies.³¹ In Greco-Roman culture, mystery religions were popular, despite the prominence of the emperor cult. The roots of Christianity, Gnosticism and rabbinic Judaism were already insinuating themselves into the rich soil of this uneasy world. In Alexandria, the scholarly community abandoned its intense, fruitful focus upon empirical science after the mode of Aristotle and lost itself in the scholarly inquiry into the religion and philosophy of Platonism.

Father of geometry. The Alexandrian scholar Euclid is depicted calipers in hand by the 15th-century Dutch painter Joos van Ghent; the work is now in the Palazzo Ducale, in Urbino, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Although the decline of the golden age of the ancient library and university center is sad to contemplate, the “sea change” nevertheless ushered in the newly productive era of the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.); the Hellenistic Neoplatonism of Plotinus (205–270 C.E.), Porphyry (c. 234–305 C.E.), Olympius (c. 350–391 C.E.) and Hypatia (355–415 C.E.); and the Hellenistic Christianity of Pantaenus (c. 100–160 C.E.), Clement (c. 150–215 C.E.), Origen (c. 185–254 C.E.), Tertullian (c. 155–225 C.E.), Athanasius (c. 293–373 C.E.) and Cyril of Alexandria (c. 375–444 C.E.). So the scholarly culture of the ancient library became the seedbed of the great philosophies of Judaism and Christianity and thus has continued to influence Western culture for two millennia, showing little sign of abating as we move into the third.

Philo Judaeus was surely one of the most prominent scholars in Alexandria at the turn of the millennium. His life overlaps that of Jesus of Nazareth and is the scholarly bridge between the pre-Christian era of Greek antiquity and the begin ning of Christian history in Alexandria. With the appearance of Philo, Jewish scholarship became a prominent force there. Philo was a member of a distinguished Jewish family in the influential Alexandrian Jewish community. His brother, Alexander the Alabarch, led that community. Philo lived much of his life in contemplation, authoring a large array of books.

The Jewish community included half of the city of Alexandria in Philo’s time and a large part of the general population of Egypt. Philo and his contemporaries considered themselves to be faithful Jews. Hellenized Judaism was generally welcomed by the Jews of Egypt and provided both an interpretation of Judaism for the Greeks and an interpretation of Hellenism for Jewish society, stretching the whole upon the frame of historic Jewish traditions.

Philo sought to demonstrate that Judaism could be accepted by the Greeks for its universal wisdom and superior insight into ultimate truth. The subjects Philo treated and the organization he used reflect the pattern set for scholarship at the library by Callimachus’s Pinakes. Philo systematically addressed the full range of topics that had formed the categories of that great catalogue. His writings include investigations of theology, philosophy, literary criticism, textual analysis, rhetoric, history, law, medicine and cosmology. However, Philo was not simply interested in objective scientific exploration. His greatest motive was to demonstrate that all that is valuable and virtuous in Greek thought and ideals was also epitomized by the biblical patriarchs and heroes of faith of Jewish religious tradition. Philo treated the Greek notion of Logos, for example, as the universal expression of Hebrew Wisdom (Khokhma in Hebrew; Sophia in Greek), God’s self-expression in the material world.

Philo lived at a time when confidence in a world governed by cause and effect had given over to questions about the purpose of life and history. His questions concerned the nature of God; God’s function in the universe as creator, manager and redeemer; and the meaning and destiny of humankind. The primary question for Platonic-minded scholars and laypersons alike was how a transcendent, ineffable God of pure spirit could be linked to a material universe. Moreover, it seemed evident that the material world was shot through with pain and evil. How could a perfect God create a flawed world?

In both the Jewish and Greek traditions that Philo inherited, this problem was solved by a model of the world in which God was separated from the created universe by a series of intermediaries. These were thought of as divine forces, agencies or persons. The main intermediary was the Logos. The Greek Stoic philosophers had made much of the concept of Logos from the time of early Platonism onward. Philo saw Greek tradition as simply another expression of the references to Wisdom in Job 28, Proverbs 1–9, The Wisdom of Ben Sirach, Baruch and other literature in the Hebrew tradition. Philo understood the Logos to be responsible for creating the material universe, supervising it providentially and redeeming it. For Philo, Logos was God’s rationality, both in God’s own mind and in the rational structure of creation. Sophia was the understanding that God has and that humans acquire when they discover God’s Logos in all things. Philo, on occasion, allegorically refers to Logos/Sophia as an angel and, rarely, as a “second God.” In his exposition of Genesis 17 (describing God’s covenant with Abraham), he characterizes God as a trinity of agencies.³²

Between 150 and 180 C.E. a Stoic philosopher named Pantaenus was converted to Christianity and became the headmaster, if not the founder, of a Christian institution known as the Catechetical School of Alexandria. This school reflected the long-standing intellectual tradition of the Alexandrian Library and may well have been a part of that scholarly enterprise.³³

Pantaenus served as head of the Catechetical School long enough to bring it out of obscurity and then, handing over its leadership to Clement, became a missionary. In India Pantaenus discovered a community of Jewish Christians, disciples of the apostle Thomas, whose faith and life were built around their use of a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew. Pantaenus never returned to Alexandria.³⁴

Clement (c. 150–215 C.E.) was a student of Pantaenus, and Origen (c. 185–254) was very probably a student of Clement. The theological connection between them, as well as their dependence upon Philo’s work of 150 years earlier, urges this conclusion. Clement and Origen seem to have taken over Philo’s model of God’s relationship to the created world, particularly the function of the Logos in creation, providence and salvation.

These two towering figures of early Christian theological development were headmasters of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, which flourished under them and quickly became famous throughout the Christian world. Eusebius (c. 260–348), a church historian, refers to it as “a school of sacred learning established…from ancient times, which has continued down to our own times, and which we have understood was held by men able in eloquence, and the study of divine things.”³⁵

Its relationship to Philo and his classical Greek predecessors has been described as follows:

The first representatives of early church exegesis were not the bishops but rather the “teachers” (didaskaloi) of the catechetical schools, modeled after the Hellenistic philosophers’ schools in which interpretive and philological principles had been developed according to the traditions of the founders of the respective schools. The allegorical interpretation of Greek classical philosophical and poetical texts, which was prevalent at the Library and Museum (the school) of Alexandria, for example, directly influenced the exegetical method of the Christian Catechetical school there. Basing his principles on the methods of Philo of Alexandria and Clement of Alexandria, his teacher, and others, Origen…created the foundation for the type of Christian exegesis (i.e., the typological-allegorical method) that lasted from the patristic period and the Middle Ages up to the time of Luther in the 16th century. Origen based his exegesis upon comprehensive textual-critical work that was common to current Hellenistic practices such as collecting Hebrew texts and Greek parallel translations of the Old Testament. His main concern, however, was that of ascertaining the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures, the transhistorical divine truth that is hidden in the records of the history of salvation in the Scriptures. He thus developed a system containing four types of interpretation: literal, moral, typological, and allegorical.³⁶

Clement’s theological and philosophical emphasis differed little from that of Philo, except that the orientation of his notion of the Logos/Sophia doctrine was Christian rather than Jewish. Clement’s aim in his teaching and ministry was to convert to Christianity members of the educated Greek community in Alexandria, the sort of people who would previously have been attracted to Philo’s type of Hellenistic Judaism. “Just as Philo had presented Judaism as the highest form of wisdom and the means by which humankind would come to ‘see God,’ so Clement urged that Christianity was the end to which all current philosophy had been moving…the new melody superior to that of Orpheus.”³⁷

Origen advanced Clement’s ideas and directly identified the Logos with the person of Jesus of Nazareth, thus personifying the Logos. Such personification of the Logos was not uncommon in the world of Philo, Clement and Origen. Indeed, it was a relatively common practice in both Jewish and Greek tradition to conceive of divine powers or agents as identified at various times with specific extraordinary persons. As the divine agency was personified in a human person, the divine was humanized and the human deified.

It was this significant North African theological perspective in the theology of Clement and Origen that dominated Christian thought from the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E. At these councils the doctrines of the deity of Christ and the trinitarian nature of God were worked out. Thus, there is a straight line between the Alexandria Library, Philo Judaeus’s Hellenistic Judaism and the Christian doctrines of the deity of Christ and the nature of the trinity. This connection is, of course, very complex, and other forces also affected this development, such as the great variety of polytheistic theologies (which propose that there exist intermediary beings between God and creation) present in the Judaisms of 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. and that Philo wished to counteract in order to refine and protect Jewish monotheism. However, it is the influence of Philo’s theological and philosophical model (mediated through Clement and Origen to the bishops who met at the great councils), combined with the very speculative allegorical interpretation of scripture under the influence of Neoplatonism (typical of the outlook in Alexandria), that explains the theological move of the councils from a Jesus who was filled with the Logos to a Christ who was the being of God.

As this Judeo-Christian development unfolded, the seeds of the Alexandrian school were sown at the ancient library and its university. Plotinus (205–270 C.E.) established the movement with his articulation of a new kind of Platonism. Many similarities can be seen between this Neoplatonism and Judaism and Christianity in the second and third centuries C.E. Neoplatonism stood for an intense personal spirituality, estimable ethical principles and a theology rooted in the Hellenistic philosophy that so significantly shaped Philo.

Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry (c. 234–305 C.E.) looked for the ultimate religious experience as an ecstatic vision of God, adhered to standards of personal purity that made the most ardent Christian envious and proclaimed that God is revealed in the material world in a trinity of manifestations. This singularly attractive alternative to Christianity was championed in the fourth and fifth centuries in Alexandria by the notable Neoplatonist “saints,” Olympius and Hypatia—bringing us back to where we started.

Although Hypatia was brutally murdered by Cyril for advocating a philosophy he thought was antithetical to “orthodox” Christianity, her brand of Neoplatonism became increasingly attractive to Christian philosophers. By the sixth century, it was taken over by them. Though the Alexandrian school was formally eclipsed when the Arabs destroyed the library—and much of the city—in 642, its spirit survives to this day in its influence over Christianity.

That is the story of the Alexandria Library, too. After destroying the library, the Arabs preserved a large percentage of the ancient volumes—as evidenced by the fact that they possessed, in Greek and Arabic translations, many of the works of the ancient poets, playwrights, scientists and philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Eratosthenes. When the European Crusaders encountered the Arabic world in the 11th and 12th centuries, those venerable works became known again in Europe, giving rise to the Renaissance. Islamic philosophers and scientists—such as Averröes, a Spanish Arab (1126–1198 C.E.), and Avicenna, a Persian (980–1037 C.E.)—gave the ancient books and their wisdom back to the Western world and taught Christian Europe to know again and prize its roots in ancient Greece.

So the ancient library of Alexandria rose like a phoenix from her own ashes. She has been wounded, perhaps, but has never really died.

“The Ancient Library of Alexandria” by J. Harold Ellens originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of Bible Review. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in May 2013.

J. Harold Ellens is a retired scholar who researched at the University of Michigan and served as an occasional lecturer for the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School in California. He is the author of hundreds of articles and numerous books, including The Ancient Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development (Claremont Graduate School, 1993).

Notes:

a. The best-known book collected from a non-Greek culture and translated into Greek at the library was the Hebrew Bible, known in its Greek form as the Septuagint (LXX). It seems to have reached the state of a largely completed and official Greek text between 150 and 50 B.C.E. Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.) obviously knew and worked with a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.

1. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 93. Cf. J. Harold Ellens, The Ancient Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development, Occasional Papers 27, Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (Claremont: Claremont Graduate School, 1993), pp. 44–51.

2. “Saint Cyril of Alexandria,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 3, cols. 329–330.

3. Theodoret, quoted in The Works of Charles Kingsley, 2 vols. (New York: Co-operative Publishing Society, 1899).

4. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J.B. Bury, 3 vols., with notes by Gibbon, introduction and index by Bury and a letter to the reader from P. Guedalla (New York: Heritage, 1946).

5. Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica 7.15, in A.C. Zenos, ed., vol. 2 of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d ser., ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), p. 160. See also Edward A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library, Glory of the Hellenic World: Its Rise, Antiquities, and Destructions (London: Cleaver-Hume, 1952), p. 356.

6. “Theon of Alexandria,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 9, col. 938; “Euclid,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 6, col. 1020; Ellens, Alexandria, p. 44; and Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, pp. 68–69.

7. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, p. 70, quoting Damascius without citing what source.

8. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, pp. 70–73.

9. Steven Blake Shubert, “The Oriental Origins of the Alexandrian Library,” Libri 43:2 (1993), p. 143.

10. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” pp. 142–143.

11. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 143.

12. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 143.

13. Ellens, Alexandria, pp. 1–2.

14. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 16, cols. 501–503.

15. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 1, cols. 990–991.

16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 15, cols. 180–182.

17. For a detailed discussion of the date of the destruction of the library, see Ellens, Alexandria, pp. 6–12, 50–51; and the superbly objective and thorough treatment of the process of the library’s demise by Mostafa El-Abbadi, Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris: UNESCO/UNDP, 1990), pp. 145–179. See also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 1, pp. 57–58, and vol. 2, chap. 28 (on the destruction of the library); and Parsons, Alexandrian Library, pp. 411–412.

18. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 144, in which reference is made to the tenth-century C.E. Byzantine Greek volume called the Suidas Lexicon. This lexicon cites the full name of the Pinakes and describes its size as 120 scrolls. Cf. Ellens, Alexandria, p. 3; and F. J. Witty, “The Pinakes of Callimachus,” Library Quarterly 28 (1958), p. 133.

19. Suidas Lexicon; Tzetzes, as cited in El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, p. 101. See also Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 144; and Witty, “Pinakes of Callimachus.”

20. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 144. It is interesting in this regard that Anne Holmes (“The Alexandrian Library,” Libri 30 [December 1980], p. 21) suggests that the Pinakes may have been a list of authors and books that Callimachus wanted to acquire for the library rather than a catalogue of existing library holdings. This is unlikely because of the detailed bibliographical and critical material incorporated in each entry, including the indication that the book was purchased from some other library source or confiscated from some traveler. Lionel Casson (“Triumphs from the Ancient World’s First Think Tank,” Smithsonian 10 [June 1985], p. 164) urges that the Pinakes was conceivably only an encyclopedia of Greek literary history. In such a case, one wonders why it was called the Pinakes, connecting it with the tiles designating the categories of storage compartments and their contents.

21. El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, p. 100; and Parsons, Alexandrian Library, p. 211. See also J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1906–1908), p. 34 n. 3.

22. Parsons, Alexandrian Library, pp. 217–218.

23. Parsons, Alexandrian Library, pp. 110, 204–205. See also El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, pp. 95, 100; and Tzetzes, a 12th-century scholar whose Prolegomena to Aristophanes, also known as Scholium Plautinum, may be found in R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), p. 101.

24. El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, p. 102.

25. Kathleen Marguerite Lea, “Francis Bacon,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 2, cols. 561–566. See also Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon, The Temper of a Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).

26. Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (New York: Scribner, 1897), p. 387.

27. Casson, “Triumphs.” The ancient sources describe the sum as 15 talents, which would probably exceed $4 million today.

28. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” pp. 145, 166 n. 8, cites Galen’s Comm. II in Hippocraits Epidem. libri III 239–240, which I have not been able to consult. See also J. Platthy, Sources on the Earliest Greek Libraries (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968), pp. 118–119; Holmes, “Alexandrian Library,” p. 290; and P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 325.

29. Vitruvius, De Architectura 7.6–8. See also Parsons, Alexandrian Library, p. 150; and El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, pp. 105, 111. Vitruvius lived during the same period as Julius Caesar, Philo Judaeus and Jesus Christ. He was a famous Roman architect, engineer and city planner. The work cited here is a handbook for Roman architects. His style for architecture and city planning was largely Greek, as he lived at the beginning of the phase of creative Roman architectural style, and his work heavily influenced Renaissance art, architecture and engineering. Pliny the Elder borrowed heavily from Vitruvius in the preparation of his Natural History. As was typical in the ancient world, Pliny does not cite his sources and credit Vitruvius. De Architectura contains ten books on building materials, Greek designs in temple construction, private buildings, floors and stucco decoration, hydraulics, clocks, measurement skills, astronomy, and civil and military engines. He was classically Hellenistic in his perspective.

30. Parsons, Alexandrian Library, p. 152; see also p. 229, where Parsons, citing a letter from Thomas E. Page to James Loeb, declares that “But for the patronage of the Ptolemies and the labor of devoted students in the Museum, Homer…might have wholly perished, and we might know nothing of Aeschylus…We still owe Alexandria a great debt.” Murray (Literature, p. 388) remarks, “Zenodotus, Callimachus [sic], Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus were the first five librarians; what institution has ever had such a row of giants at its head?”

31. In this regard see, for example, Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991); Jarl Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985); Gabrielle Boccaccini, Middle Judaism, Jewish Thought, 300 B.C.E.-200 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).

32. Philo Judaeus, The Works of Philo, trans. C.D. Yonge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993). See also Harry A. Wolfson, Philo, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947).

33. Some scholars question whether there really was a formal catechetical school as early as the second century, rather than just independent teachers; see Roelof van den Broek, “The Christian ‘School’ of Alexandria in the Second and Third Centuries,” in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, ed. J.W. Drijvers and A.A. MacDonald (Leiden: Brill, 1995). The preponderance of evidence, however, strongly indicates that there was one; see W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 286; Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1955), pp. 190–191, 217–255; Schaff and Wace, eds., The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), pp. 224–226, 249–281; and G. Bardy, “Aux origines de l’ecole d’Alexandrie,” Reserches de Science Religieuse 27 (1937), pp. 65–90.

34. Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 286.

35. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, p. 190. See also Annewies van den Hoek, “How Alexandrian Was Clement of Alexandria? Reflections on Clement and His Alexandrian Background,” HeyJ31 (1990), pp. 179–194.

36. Ernst Wilhelm Bentz, “Christianity,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, vol. 4, col. 498.

37. Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 286.

The post The Ancient Library of Alexandria appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

What Were the Ancient Olympics Like?

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 14:00:17 +0000

Beginning in 776 B.C. as a simple foot race, the quadrennial Olympic Games grew—during a span of 1,200 years—into the most prestigious athletic/religious festival of the Greek-speaking world. The feats of Olympic champions were recorded by historians and poets, and victorious competitors were thought to be the favorites of Zeus, chief god of the Greek pantheon. Below, learn what the ancient Olympics were like in David Gilman Romano’s article “When the Games Began” from the July/August 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey.—Ed.

When the Games Began

Sport, religion and politics converged in ancient Olympia

By David Gilman Romano

Nestled in a valley bordered by the Alpheus and Kladeus rivers, the ancient sanctuary of Olympia hosted the earliest, and most prestigious, Greek athletic-religious festival. Starting in 776 B.C. as a simple foot race dedicated to Zeus, the quadrennial Olympic games expanded into a five-day festival—during which 100 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus, and athletic events were contested—that attracted tens of thousands of people to Olympia from all over the Greek-speaking world. Photo: From Ancient Greece.

It’s one of history’s curiosities. A rural sanctuary of Zeus in a relatively obscure part of Greece—far from the bustle and brilliance of Athens—became the site of the most famous athletic-religious festival of the entire ancient world, the direct precursor of the modern Olympic Games.

As in antiquity, we call these celebrations Olympiads, and we number them sequentially. Athletes from around the world participate in events also contested in long-ago Olympia: the javelin, the long jump, footraces, wrestling and boxing. Even the words we use to refer to these events are often the same (“discus,” “pentathlon”), as are the names of places for competition and training (“gymnasium,” “stadium” and “hippodrome”).^a

According to the fifth-century B.C. Greek poet Pindar,

If you wish to celebrate great games
look no further for another star
shining through the sky
brighter than the sun
or for contests greater than the Olympic Games.¹

Every four years, athletes, dignitaries, emissaries and tourists traveled to Olympia for an athletic-religious festival in honor of Zeus. The festival began with the second full moon following the summer solstice—that is, the end of July or the beginning of August. At first, in the eighth century B.C., the festival was small and the athletes came from the nearby cities and towns of the western and southern Peloponnesus. By the fifth century B.C., however, athletes were flocking to Olympia from all over the Greek-speaking world for the five-day celebration, and 100 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus at Olympia’s sanctuary.

Olympia is actually located far from the mountain that gives the site its name. Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece (9,570 feet) and the mythological home of the Greek pantheon, sits hundreds of miles to the north. Olympia lies at the juncture of the Alpheus and the Kladeus rivers, in a wide, fertile river valley only 7 miles from the Ionian Sea.

The Olympic Games were the oldest and the most prestigious of the four great panhellenic festivals (or national festivals, as opposed to the numerous local festivals celebrated all over the Greek world), each of which was dedicated to a god. The games at Olympia (Zeus) were supposedly inaugurated in 776 B.C.; the games at Delphi (Apollo) in 582 B.C.; the games at Isthmia (Poseidon) also in 582 B.C.; and the games at Nemea (Zeus) in 573 B.C. (See Stephen G. Miller’s “The Other Games: When Greeks Flocked to Nemea.”)

Once filled with the richest olive oil, this sixth-century B.C. vase, now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, was presented to a champion athlete at a local festival in Athens. Whereas winners’ prizes at the four ancient panhellenic games (held at Olympia, Nemea, Delphi and Isthmia) were simply wreaths symbolizing victory, athletes at local festivals often received prizes of material value. Photo: Erich Lessing.

The victors in all of the panhellenic events received symbolic awards, in the form of wreaths. Those who won events at local festivals, however, generally received prizes of some material value; victors in the games at Argos won a shield, for example, while those who won in Athens received amphoras filled with olive oil. The panhellenic victors, too, often received a little something in addition to honor; they were routinely rewarded with cash and privileges upon returning home.^b A fifth-century B.C. inscription recounts that Athenian citizens who won competitions at panhellenic festivals got a free meal every day for the rest of their lives in the prytaneion (town hall), along with other civic honors.²

Two Greek myths account for the origins of the ancient Olympic Games. According to Pindar, Heracles created the site of Olympia for the festival:

[Heracles] measured out a sacred precinct for his father most mighty; he fenced in the altis^c and set it apart in the open, and he made the surrounding plain a resting place for banqueting.³

The second-century A.D. writer Pausanias relates that Heracles won victories at Olympia in wrestling and pancratium.⁴

In another story, a young man named Pelops travels to the western Peloponnesus to compete for the hand of Hippodameia, the daughter of the wealthy king Oenomaus. According to Pindar, Pelops and Oenomaus compete in a chariot race, during which the king is killed. Pelops wins the race, marries Hippodameia and establishes the Olympic Games.⁵ The region of Greece where Olympia is found is thus named the Peloponnesus, or “Pelops Island.” At Olympia, the ancients erected a shrine to Pelops, called the Pelopeion.

Both myths are depicted in the sculptural program of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. The pedimental sculpture from the east facade depicts the moment before the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus, and the metopes—or relief carvings—inside the front and rear porches include depictions of Heracles’s 12 labors (one was to clean the Augean Stables, which Heracles accomplished by diverting one of the two rivers that meet at Olympia, the Alpheus).

A Doric colonnade encloses Olympia’s third-century B.C. palaestra, a large square courtyard where ancient athletes trained for the games. A series of rooms and halls opened off the colonnade, including three chambers that functioned as a library, and a room that served as a dining room. Photo: The Art Archive/Dagli Orti.

The exact origins of the Olympic festival, however, are lost in the shadowy dark ages of Greek history. The 776 B.C. date is based on the Olympic Register, a listing of Olympic victors compiled by Hippias of Elis in the fifth century B.C. and then worked on by others throughout antiquity. But there is evidence that the religious cult, and possibly even the athletic contests, may be even older. Pottery found in recent German excavations at Olympia suggests that cult activity in the area of the altis (the enclosed heart of the sanctuary) dates to the late 11th century B.C.⁶ Bronze dedications from the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. have also been discovered at Olympia, including tripods and miniature charioteers—which may indicate that equestrian games were held at this early date.

The sanctuary of Zeus lay just south of Cronus Hill (named after Zeus’s father). The principal part of the sanctuary was the altis, a walled enclosure that included the ash altar of Zeus, the altar of Hera (Zeus’s wife), the Pelopeion, the Temple of Hera, the Temple of Zeus and the Temple of Rhea (Zeus’s mother). Statues were set up in and around the altis to honor victorious athletes and to commemorate military victories and political alliances.

The ash altar to Zeus was probably the earliest structure at the sanctuary. At the beginning of each Olympic festival, participants would march into the sanctuary and sacrifice 100 bulls to Zeus at this altar. In the second century A.D., according to Pausanias, the altar consisted of a stone platform, where animals were sacrificed; piled on this base was a tower of ash, where the thighs of the sacrificed animals were burned. Pausanias observes that the ash altar reached 22 feet into the air. Following the sacrifice of the bulls, the crowd consumed the meat at a great public banquet.⁷

The massive Temple of Zeus, built between 471 and 457 B.C., was 210 feet long and 90 feet wide—only 16 feet shorter and 10 feet narrower than the Parthenon in Athens (which was completed some 20 years later). The temple’s Doric colonnade consisted of six columns at each end and 13 columns along the sides, and the roof supported tiles made of Pentelic marble (from Mount Pentelicus, near Athens, which also supplied the marble for the Parthenon). The temple’s pediments, 40 feet above the ground, were adorned with sculptures depicting scenes from Greek myth—Lapiths battling Centaurs on the west end, and Pelops, Oenomaus and their entourages on the east end (where visitors entered).

Inside the temple, completely filling its west end, was a 40-foot-high bronze statue of Zeus sitting on a throne—which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The statue was made by the Athenian sculptor Phidias (c. 490-425 B.C.) in a common Greek style called chryselephantine, meaning that it was covered with gold and ivory (like the statue of Athena in the Parthenon, which was also made by Phidias).

Zeus (the headless central figure) oversees preparations for a chariot race between the hero Pelops (to the left of Zeus) and King Oenomaus (to the right of Zeus), who ruled the area around Olympia. Now in Olympia’s museum, these statues originally adorned the east pediment of the fifth-century B.C. Temple of Zeus at Olympia. In Greek myth, Oenomaus promises his daughter, Hippodameia (left of Pelops), to any man who can beat him in a chariot race. Pelops bribes Oenomaus’s charioteer, Myrtilus (shown kneeling next to Oenomaus’s wife, who stands to the right of her husband), to loosen the linchpins of his master’s chariot. After Pelops wins the race, he celebrates by establishing the religious/athletic festival at Olympia. In honor of Pelops, the region of Greece where Olympia is located is called the Peloponnesus (“Pelops Island”).Photo: Vanni Archive/CORBIS.

To the west of the Temple of Zeus was a modest fifth-century B.C. facility where the Olympian athletes bathed. The building had a series of tubs, in which the athletes reclined and had water poured over their heads. A 5-foot-deep swimming pool, measuring 79 feet by 52 feet, lay adjacent to the baths; this pool also dates to the fifth century B.C.

FREE ebook. The Olympic Games: How They All Began. Read about the ancient origins of the Olympics, some 2,700 years ago. Download now.

In the third century B.C. a palaestra was added just north of the bath building. This was a large open-air courtyard enclosed on all four sides by a colonnade, which was surrounded by rooms. The Greek word “palaestra” means “the place of wrestling,” so wrestling and other events were probably practiced in the courtyard.

In the second century B.C. a large gymnasium was constructed to the north of the bath facility. This structure included a roofed racecourse, 600 feet long, allowing runners to train under cover. The gymnasium also included a large open-air courtyard for practicing the discus, javelin and long jump.

Only naked athletes and the judges who officiated at the games were permitted to pass through this entranceway, described by the second-century A.D. writer Pausanias as “the secret entrance.” The arched gate, newly constructed at the time of Pausanias’s visit, opened into a vaulted tunnel that led to Olympia’s stadium, which was built in the fourth century B.C. on the site of a running track (dromos) dating centuries earlier. Photo: The Art Archive/Dagli Orti.

A vaulted entrance led from the altis to the stadium, and this was the route that athletes and judges would follow during the games.

The Olympic stadium evolved considerably over the years. It began as a simple rectangular running track, or dromos, on which the athletes competed. Gradually spectator facilities were added around the sides of the race track. Archaeologists have found starting lines carved in stone at both ends of the dromos, 600 feet apart (the length of a stadion). Spectators used the northern slope of the Cronus Hill to view the contests. By the mid-fifth century B.C., the dromos was surrounded on four sides by artificial earth embankments on which 45,000 spectators could watch the contests.

Spectators at Olympia stood while watching the games. The word stadion, in fact, may have originally meant “the standing place”—only later coming to mean the length of the stadium (and, for us, the stadium itself). The judges, however, had a small seating section reserved for them on the southern embankment of the stadium. There were also simple seats for dignitaries and diplomats.

The hippodrome—for equestrian events—was located south of the stadium, in the broad, flat plain north of the Alpheus River. Although the hippodrome has not been excavated, Pausanias gives us a description of the structure with particular attention to the mechanical starting gates, designed by one Kleoetas, which provided a fair start for as many as 40 chariots at one time. The starting line had the triangular shape of the prow of a ship, with each of the two sides more than 400 feet long. A mudbrick altar at the tip of the “prow” held a bronze eagle with outstretched wings. The contestants lined up along the wings of the prow, behind ropes held by officials. They then moved slowly forward; when they came even with the altar, the ropes were released and the race began. The hippodrome track was probably about 2,000 feet long and 650 feet wide. One lap of the hippodrome would have been about three-quarters of a mile long.⁸

An athlete balances on one foot while his trainer helps him stretch, on this sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater painted by Euphronius. The athletic/religious festival at Olympia was dedicated to Zeus, the chief god of the Greek pantheon, and victorious athletes were thought to be the favorites of Zeus—largely because they combined prodigious athletic prowess with moderation and modesty. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

Athletes at ancient Olympia competed to please Zeus. An Olympic champion was the man most pleasing to the god, and the qualities that made him attractive to the god were aidos (modesty and self-respect), sophrosune (moderation) and arête (excellence).

Pausanias tells us that the athletes who competed at Olympia had to swear an oath in the bouleuterion (the archives building), before a statue of Zeus Horkios (Zeus holding a thunderbolt in each hand) and upon slices of boar’s flesh—that they would do nothing to dishonor the Olympic Games.⁹ The athletes also had to swear that they had followed the regulations for training during the ten preceding months. The athletes trained at Elis, another town in the western Peloponnesus, for the month directly before the festival at Olympia.

From the Olympic Register, we have the names of more than 794 ancient Olympic champions,¹⁰ who won a total of 1,029 events.¹¹ The first recorded victor was Koroibos of Elis, who won the stadion race in 776 B.C. The last champion we know about was Zopyrus, a late-fourth-century A.D. boxer from Athens.¹²

Unfortunately, the Olympic Register is incomplete, nor does it include athletes who competed but did not win. In the 293 Olympiads from 776 B.C. to 393 A.D., 4,760 events were contested; our known 1,029 victories constitute less than 22 percent of the total number. If the ratio between victors and victories recorded in the Olympic Register (794:1,029) is representative of what actually happened over the entire history of the games, we would expect to have 3,672 ancient victors—meaning that we know nothing at all about 2,878 Olympic champions. Possibly future scholars will discover the names and deeds of at least some of these unknown heroes.

Is it possible to determine the greatest Olympic champion? We know of seven athletes who won three times in a single day, the so-called triastes. The only known athlete to accomplish this feat on more than one occasion was Leonidas of Rhodes, who achieved triastes status at four different festivals between 164 B.C. and 152 B.C. He was a swift, powerful runner, winning the stadion (a sprint of 600 feet, or one length of the stadium), the diaulos (a sprint of 1,200 feet, or two lengths of the stadium) and the hoplitodromos (a race with armor).

Leonidas’s 12 gold medals (or, rather, olive wreaths) may well make him the greatest Olympic athlete of antiquity, perhaps even of all time.

The ancient Olympic festival, based so completely on the cult of Zeus, came to a close because of competition from another religion: Christianity. Following Constantine (274-337 A.D.), most Roman emperors embraced Christianity as the state religion and, as such, sought to end pagan cults and festivals, like the cult of Zeus at Olympia. The most conspicuous competition for the Christian church came in the form of the festive, intense and wildly popular Olympic Games. In 393 A.D. the Roman emperor Theodosius I closed all pagan temples and called for the end of pagan festivals.

Sidebar: The Other Olympiad

Photo: HIP/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

In his Description of Greece, the second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias tells of a second festival held at Olympia, called the Heraia.

Every four years a committee of 16 married women, one from each of the cities of the region, wove a sacred robe called a peplos for Hera (the wife of Zeus) and held games—footraces for unmarried girls—in three age groups. The three races were held in the stadium at Olympia, though the race was only 5/6 the length of the dromos (the running track in the stadium) for boys and men.

Pausanias vividly describes the girls running their races: their hair hangs down their back, their chiton reaches to just above the knees, and they bare their right shoulder as far as the breast (as can be seen in the early-fifth-century B.C. bronze figurine, probably from Sparta). Each victor received an olive wreath, a portion of the cow that was sacrificed to Hera, and the right to make an offering to Hera.

The Temple of Hera, the earliest temple at Olympia, was built around 600 B.C. It was a Doric structure originally with wooden columns, though these were gradually replaced with stone columns. Some scholars believe that in the beginning this temple was used to house both the cult of Zeus and the cult of Hera, since the Temple of Zeus at Olympia was not built for almost 150 years.

When the Games Began by David Gilman Romano was originally published in the July/August 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey.

David Gilman Romano is the Nicholas and Athena Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology in the School of Anthropology at University of Arizona. He is a specialist in the Ancient Olympic Games, Greek and Roman cities and sanctuaries, ancient surveying, and modern cartographic and survey techniques to reveal and study ancient sites. He has directed the Corinth Computer Project since 1988, and he is the Director of the Archaeological Mapping Lab in the School of Anthropology. Romano is the Field Director and Co-Director of the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project, a founding member of the Parrhasian Heritage Park, and Director of the Digital Augustan Rome project.

Notes:

a. There are startling differences as well. Whereas the ancient festival was held in Olympia over a period of about 1,200 years, the modern games move around the world from city to city. The modern games, too, are much larger and more extravagant, probably the greatest secular gathering of peoples in the history of mankind. At the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia, for example, 10,651 athletes from 199 countries competed in 300 events, for which 6.7 million tickets were sold. And 3.5 billion people watched the games on television!

b. The Greek word athletes means “one who competes for a prize (athlon)” and could refer to those who won symbolic prizes as well as prizes of material worth.

c. The altis at Olympia was an enclave of temples, altars and freestanding statuary enclosed by a wall—the cult center of the sanctuary.

1. Pindar, Olympian Odes 1.5-8.

2. Inscriptiones Atticae, vol. 1 (2), 77.

3. Pindar, Olympian Odes 10.43-45.

4. Pausanias, Description of Greece 5, 8, 4.

5. Pindar, Olympian Odes 1.

6. Helmust Kyrieleis, “Zu Anfangen des Heligtums von Olympia,” Olympia 1875-2000, 125 Jahre Deutsche Ausgrabungen (Mainz am Rhein, 2002), pp. 215-217.

7. Pausanias, Description of Greece 5, 13, 8-11.

8. Pausanias, Description of Greece 6, 20, 10-19.

9. Pausanias, Description of Greece 5, 24, 9.

10. L. Moretti lists a total of 794 individual Olympic victors in two publications: Olympionikai, i vincitori negli antichi agoni Olimpici (Rome: MemLinc, 1957).

11. This number includes Olympic victories of uncertain date and authenticity.

12. This information comes from a bronze inscription from the clubhouse of the athlete’s guild at Olympia. The building was constructed in the first century A.D. by Nero and was in continuous use until the late fourth century A.D. (see U. Sinn, Olympia: Cult, Sport and Ancient Festival [Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000], pp. 114-118).

The post What Were the Ancient Olympics Like? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Athenian Acropolis

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:24:24 +0000

Harrison Eiteljorg, II’s article “Antiquity’s High Holy Place: The Athenian Acropolis” was originally published in the November/December 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. BAS Library Members can read every article ever published in AO online.

In 480 B.C.E. the Persians invaded Athens. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, they “plundered the temple and burnt the whole of the Acropolis.”¹ Although the Athenians and their allies followed up with a victory at the famous naval battle of Salamis, the Persian army returned the following year and “burnt Athens and utterly demolished whatever wall or house or temple was left standing.”² Ten years earlier, in 490 B.C.E., the Persian king Darius had invaded Greece, only to be thwarted on the plain of Marathon northeast of Athens. The devastating attacks of 480 and 479 B.C.E. were the revenge of Darius’s son and heir, Xerxes.

The setting sun illuminates Athens’s Acropolis (literally, High City) in the photo taken from the southwest. Prior to its destruction by the Persians in 490 B.C.E. and again in 480–479 B.C.E., the Acropolis was a sacred precinct with a temple to Athens’s tutelary goddess, Athena. The rebuilding of the Acropolis in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. was the inspiration of the leader Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.), who appointed the sculptor Phidias to supervise the entire project. Photo: Photo by AP/Petros Giannakporis.

The Greeks forced the Persians to retreat from the country shortly after the second sacking of the city (though the Persian Wars would continue for another 30 years). The Athenians then “prepared to rebuild their city and their walls,” according to the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.E.). “For only isolated portions of the circumference had been left standing, and most of the houses were in ruins.”³

The city and its defensive walls were the first order of business—not the Acropolis, which also lay in ruins. The Acropolis was cleaned up enough to permit worship at its altars, and the gate was made secure again to protect not only the sacred places but the state treasury, which was kept on the Acropolis. So it wasn’t until the Persians had been fully vanquished and peace declared that the Athenians turned to repairing the Acropolis.

Fortunately, the Persian destruction of the Acropolis was not as complete as the ancient historians imply. Still standing, for example, were portions of the Old Temple of Athena, which housed the image of Athena Polias, the city’s patron deity. In addition, the so-called Older Parthenon, a temple that was under construction when Xerxes attacked, was still partially standing, though burnt and severely damaged. Nonetheless, the Acropolis we think of today, an imposing fortress-like hill with four magnificent buildings—the Parthenon, the Propylaea (entrance building), the Temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheum—is almost entirely a creation of the second half of the fifth century B.C.E.

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

Much of the work took place under the auspices of Athens’s leader Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.), who intended to make the Acropolis a lasting memorial to the Greek spirit and to the glory of Athens. However, all who worked on the Acropolis were constrained by the remains of the buildings damaged by the Persians and the requirements of the cult places on the Acropolis.

The Parthenon and Erechtheum are the most prominent buildings in the photo taken from the southeast. The small niche jutting north from the Erechtheum (toward the Parthenon) is the Porch of the Caryatids. Three columns of the eastern facade of the Propylaea (the entrance to the Acropolis) are visible just beyond and to the right of the Parthenon. Photo: Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis.

The first structure erected as part of Pericles’s renovation of the Acropolis was the Parthenon, which was designed by the architect Ictinus with the aid of Callicrates. The Parthenon was built between 449 and 437 B.C.E., and it was built on the platform of the Older Parthenon. That platform was both enlarged and shifted for the new structure, and much of the damaged material from the Older Parthenon was used in the new structure. Recent examinations of the walls of the Parthenon, for instance, show that wall blocks from the Older Parthenon were re-used but reversed so that the damaged surfaces could not be seen.

In design, the Parthenon is a fairly typical Greek temple, though it was larger than most (228 feet by 101 feet) and built entirely of marble quarried at nearby Mt. Pentelikon (visible near the road into Athens from the new airport). The core of the structure is a simple rectangular building divided into two rooms, which are entered from the outside (that is, from opposite ends of the core). The larger, east-facing room is the temple’s cella, or cult room. The smaller, west-facing room, or opisthodomos, would have held offerings and other valuables in antiquity. In front of each room is a shallow portico, itself fronted by a line of six columns. A colonnade of 46 Doric columns encloses the core and porches—eight columns on the ends and seventeen on the long sides (counting each corner column twice). In antiquity, the entire structure was also covered with a roof, now almost entirely missing. Even the roof tiles were carved of marble rather than molded of terracotta.

Photo: From The Greek World.

The Parthenon represents the culmination of skills and traditions that had guided the Doric style in Greek architecture over the preceding centuries, and it can be seen as the ultimate achievement of architecture guided by a craft tradition. Much of what makes the Parthenon so magnificent involves an artistic subtlety that cannot be planned mathematically but stems from an individual stone mason’s training and experience and the accumulated experience passed down over generations.

For example, the floor of the Parthenon is not flat. Its four corners lie approximately at the same elevation, but the floor curves slightly upward (rising from the corners to the middle of each side, and rising still higher to the center of the building), so that the surface is convex, with the lowest points of the floor at the corners and the highest point at the center. Whether this design was a practical requirement for shedding rain water or an optical refinement to make the floor appear flat is irrelevant. It endows the structure with a sculptural quality. Only skilled, experienced masons could have accomplished this design.

This sculptural quality is enhanced by the designs of the columns. The diameter of each column is reduced from bottom to top, but not continuously; instead, the columns curve and swell along their edges so that they are often said to be cigar-shaped. Modern neoclassical buildings rarely employ this subtlety (called entasis), and their columns, as a result, seem brittle, ready to snap. By contrast, the Parthenon’s columns (and those of most ancient structures) seem to have accepted the weight they bear and to be prepared to stand for eternity.

The columns are also positioned as a sculptor, rather than an engineer, would place them. They are not vertical; they lean slightly back, toward the core of the structure, out of plumb by about one centimeter. This attention to detail can also be seen in the corner columns, which lean slightly back toward the diagonally opposite corner. The corner columns are also a little larger in diameter than the others.

The columns are also unevenly spaced around the perimeter of the temple. The nature of the Doric triglyph-metope frieze (see box) creates a conflict at the corners. As a result, the corner columns and the columns next to them have been adjusted to create spacing that may appear to be regular but is not. The frieze was also adjusted so that the final effect is of both a regular frieze and a regular colonnade, though both are subtly irregular.

The Parthenon’s entablature isn’t horizontal either. The beams of the architrave and the frieze directly above it share the curvature of the floor, rising from corner to center and falling again from center to corner, making the entire structure seem elastic and alive—a surprising effect, given the use of so solid a building material as marble.

All the subtle adjustments in the Parthenon’s design made it impossible for most of the blocks of the structure to be cut as simple right-angled blocks. Each was, in the end, carved to fit its particular spot, with surfaces that might be curved rather than flat and that might not be at right angles to one another. The skill and training of the masons were essential.

As a temple and the home of the warrior-virgin Athena, known as Athena Parthenos, the Parthenon’s sculpture illustrates mythico-religious themes. The birth of Athena and the struggle between Athena and Poseidon to become Athens’s patron filled the two pediments, and various other mythical contests filled the metopes.

Pericles chose Phidias (c. 465–425 B.C.E.), the most famous Greek sculptor of the day, as supervisor of the sculptural program for the building. (Phidias was also selected to supervise the planning of the Acropolis as a whole.) Phidias’s own great sculpture, the statue of Athena gazing out toward the altar, stood in the cella. Made of ivory and gold on a core of wood,^a the sculpture depicted a helmeted Athena holding a spear in one hand and a figure of the victory goddess Nike in the other. Though long since destroyed, the statue is well known to us, as it was often shown on ancient coins, and it was described in great detail by the second-century C.E. Roman traveler Pausanias: “The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa [Athena’s emblematic Aegis] is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Victory about four cubits high.”⁴ (Since four cubits were about 6 feet, Athena held a life-size statue in her hand.)

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Athenian youths carry offering jars in this relief from the Parthenon’s 524-foot-long frieze. Set in the entablature (see box) of the inner colonnade, which enclosed the core of the Parthenon, the frieze was obscured by the entablature of the outer colonnade—making it very difficult for visitors to view the carvings. The frieze may have depicted the Greater Panathenaea, a procession held every four years in which a new peplos (an ancient garment) was draped over the statue of Athena in the Old Temple of Athena. In the early 19th century, Lord Elgin removed 247 feet of the frieze to the British Museum, where it remains on display to this day. Photo: From Ancient Greece.

The most famous portion of the Parthenon’s sculpture was the continuous frieze band that lay above the outer wall of the core, facing outward. This positioning meant that the frieze was obscured by the entablature; it was thus visible only from below and only with the aid of reflected light reaching into a naturally dim area. (This kind of positioning was never again used in antiquity, suggesting that its disadvantages were recognized.) Indeed, given that the frieze was so difficult to see, its fame is a testament to its beauty.

Once about 524 feet long,^b the frieze depicted a procession of young horsemen, older men, chariots, cattle and horses, youths bearing jars on their shoulders, musicians, men possibly serving as parade marshals and a few women, most of them carrying ritual vessels. The parade was really two parades, both beginning at the southwest corner: One group moved east along the south side of the building, then north along the east facade; the other group moved north along the west facade, east along the north side of the building, and then south along the east facade to face the other group. The two groups converged to face the culminating scene above the east portico. There the Olympian gods, seated, watched a ceremony most commonly interpreted as the presentation of a new peplos (an ancient garment) to Athena. This procession may depict the central event of the Greater Panathenaea (held every four years), when such a garment was brought to the Old Temple of Athena to adorn the image of the goddess (in fact, however, our knowledge of the meaning of the frieze is not very certain; we will probably never know exactly what was depicted on it).

The Parthenon looks very different today from the way it looked in the fifth century B.C.E. Today we see the soft, subtly changing tones of weathered marble—gray in dull light, almost white in the bright sun, and a warm golden color at sunset. But in antiquity the Parthenon’s sculptures and the building itself were enlivened with color. The overall effect must have been stunning, with even moldings and portions of the ceilings painted red, green, blue or gold. So fixed is our impression of what a Greek ruin should look like that we would undoubtedly be shocked, perhaps even outraged, if some present-day restorer took it upon himself to splash a variety of colors on the Acropolis. Our outrage, of course, would be entirely misguided.

The Parthenon was built in a very short time, from 449 to 437 B.C.E., though the sculpture was not completed until 432. The speed of the building process is remarkable. In one sense, though, it was never finished, since Athenians continued to nail small dedications to its walls in the years following its erection.

Check out the article “The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?” in Bible History Daily.

The construction of the Parthenon had just been completed—though not the sculpture—when a monumental entrance structure for the entire precinct was started: the Propylaea, through which all who enter the Acropolis must pass even today.

Visitors to the Acropolis (ancient and modern) pass through the great entranceway, called the Propylaea, at the sanctuary’s western side. The Propylaea is a U-shaped complex with a central, rectangular chamber and wings to the north and south. To get to the Acropolis sanctuary, visitors walk up the steps, enter the central chamber, which is divided by a wall (now covered in scaffolding) into western and eastern rooms, and pass through each of the rooms before stepping onto the sacred precinct. Then they can continue on to the Parthenon (clearly visible in the photo) and the Erechtheum. Photo: Duby Tal/Albatross.

The Propylaea’s northern wing (to the left of the central chamber) was probably a room used for ritual dining, with a porch fronted by a colonnade. The southern wing also had a columned porch, though the purpose of this wing was simply to allow access to the Temple of Athena Nike at the wing’s westernmost edge.

Like the Parthenon, the Propylaea replaced an earlier less-impressive structure. Designed by an architect named Mnesicles, the Propylaea was built to fulfill three primary functions: It would guard the entrance to the Acropolis, preventing thieves, runaway slaves and the unclean from entering;^c it would include a room for ritual dining; and it would provide access to the sanctuary of Athena Nike. Mnesicles’s task was quite different from that of his colleague Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon. Not only did his building have to serve multiple unrelated functions but he had to build it on a very steep slope.

The Propylaea’s northern wing (to the left of the central chamber in the photo) was probably a room used for ritual dining, with a porch fronted by a colonnade. The southern wing also had a columned porch, though the purpose of this wing was simply to allow access to the Temple of Athena Nike at the wing’s westernmost edge (bottom right in the photo). The temple, covered with scaffolding in the photo, is now undergoing reconstruction.

If Ictinus was essentially a sculptor working on a large scale, Mnesicles resembled more a modern architect or engineer. He could have designed three separate buildings to fulfill the required functions, but he made the more difficult and more aesthetically satisfying choice of creating a unified structure, a task that required a complexity of design unknown in previous Greek architecture. Mnesicles needed to plan his structure more fully and carefully than did his contemporaries working on other buildings—despite the fact that his planning tools were, to the best of our knowledge, extremely limited. Scaled drawings were unknown, and we have no evidence for scale models. He could not rely on masons and their experience for the complexities; the building he conceived went well beyond their experience, as well as his own.

The core of the Propylaea is a deceptively simple rectangular structure with a wall dividing it into two porches—a western and eastern porch—each with a six-column colonnade on its exterior. (Thus Mnesicles presented two temple-like facades, with columns and a pediment above, one to visitors entering the Acropolis and one to those leaving the Acropolis). To enter the sanctuary, one walked up the steps into the outer porch, passed through one of the five doorways in the wall into the inner porch, and then entered the Acropolis.

The outer porch offered shelter to those waiting for the sanctuary to open, so it was deeper, occupying about two-thirds of the depth of the whole. To make the structure more complex, Mnesicles designed the eastern porch at a slightly higher level than the western porch (the roof level is also raised, but not as much); visitors had to climb five steps before passing through one of the doorways into the eastern porch. This change of levels was required by the difficult, steeply-pitched site; it allowed visitors to reach the level of the Acropolis while passing through the Propylaea.

Grafted onto the central building were two wings, both on the west side and therefore lower than and outside the sacred area of the Acropolis. The northwest wing seems to have been a room for ritual dining, with a shallow colonnaded porch in front. The southwest wing only provided a passage to the small sanctuary of Athena Nike. Although the southern wing was much shallower and only about two-thirds as wide as the northern one, the two wings present virtually identical facades to the visitor who looks left and right while passing into the central building. However, the apparent symmetry is the architect’s conceit. The two wings are quite different in plan.

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A U-shaped platform, one of Mnesicles’s crucial innovations, draws together the central building and two western wings, ensuring that all three of these structures lie at the same elevation, even though the facades of the two wings are much smaller in scale than the facade of the central building. Indeed, the two wings and the central building of the Propylaea have virtually no common structural elements other than the platform. Each rises independently from that platform, and the small walls that connect each wing to the central building are structurally unnecessary. Yet when looking upon it from the west, the entire structure appears to be a fully unified whole.

There were to have been two other wings on the eastern side of the building, but neither was completed. The southern wing on the east side was apparently abandoned rather early in the building process, but the northern wing seemed to have been intended up to the moment construction stopped. Unlike the western wings, the eastern ones presented serious structural complications and truly novel problems to the architect, who could not have completed them as intended without significant changes to the central building and possibly the western wings.^d

What Mnesicles tried was daring because it was novel; it required a kind of conceptual thinking new to architects of antiquity who were accustomed to slow, evolutionary changes to intensely conservative forms. Whereas the Parthenon represents the culmination of the conservative temple form, the Propylaea represents the emergence of a more revolutionary approach to architectural forms. The essential vocabulary has not changed, but the concept here is new. It is the idea that a building can transcend its past. The complexity and the (false) symmetry are new, to be sure, but what is revolutionary is the idea that an architect can invent something truly new.

The delicate Temple of Athena Nike (the goddess Athena in her manifestation as Victory) is perched at the far western edge of the Propylaea’s southern wing. Each facade of this small temple has four Ionic columns (whereas the columns on the part of the wing just to the east [left, in the photo] of the temple are Doric). The temple precinct was originally surrounded by a balustrade set with relief carvings. Photo: Roger Wood/Corbis.

The Propylaea also shows us an architect working to push the limits of his materials. Mnesicles let iron bars into the tops of some beams so that the crossbeams above would rest on the iron bars rather than the marble beams; he even left room for the bars to give as weight bore down upon them. Although he lacked the analytic tools to determine the effect of the experiment (which, in fact, reduced the load-bearing capacity of the beams), he was attempting to go beyond his predecessors here as well.

The masons who worked on the Propylaea were almost certainly the same masons who had worked on the Parthenon, and they worked some of their magic here as well. The structure’s coffered ceilings, for example, made of wonderfully carved marble blocks painted blue with gold stars, were still impressive 600 years later when Pausanias declared them to be “down to the present day unrivalled.”

Both Ictinus and Mnesicles were firmly rooted in the Doric tradition, but both experimented with Ionic elements in the buildings they created. Ictinus used the more slender Ionic columns only in the opisthodomus (or western chamber) of the Parthenon. Mnesicles, on the other hand, brazenly used Doric for the exterior colonnades of the Propylaea and Ionic for the columns on either side of the passageway running down the middle of the central building. This design allowed for the Doric columns of the facade and the Ionic columns of the interior to be visible at the same moment—quite a revolutionary choice.

The delicate Temple of Athena Nike (the goddess Athena in her manifestation as Victory) is perched at the far western edge of the Propylaea’s southern wing. The temple precinct was originally surrounded by a balustrade set with relief carvings—including the one shown of Athena Nike fixing her sandal. Photo: Acropolis Museum, Athens/Bridgeman Art Library.

The smallest of the Acropolis structures, the Temple of Athena Nike, is a fully Ionic building. It stands at the westernmost reach of the precinct, above the natural bedrock and the earlier walls that had been sheathed in well-cut masonry as part of Pericles’s overall plan. In 1686 the Ottoman Turks completely demolished the building, salvaging its stone for the construction of fortifications. The temple has been reconstructed several times using blocks retrieved from that fortification, with each version attempting to correct errors made by previous builders. At the time of this writing, in fact, the temple is being reconstructed yet again.

The original Nike temple, completed about 425 B.C.E., did not have a fully enclosing colonnade. Instead, four columns graced each of the facades (east and west). In addition, the small site upon which the temple was built required that the porches behind those facade columns be relatively shallow. The balustrade that surrounded the precinct provided the setting for relief sculptures, including the famous depiction of the goddess Nike fixing her sandal, now in the Acropolis Museum. That figure epitomizes the small Nike temple—graceful, light, almost ethereal. If the Parthenon, constructed at the height of Athens’s economic and military power, symbolized the city’s grandeur and lofty ambitions, the diminutive Nike temple seems to foreshadow Athens’s narrower aspirations after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.), the long conflict between Athens and Sparta chronicled so memorably by Thucydides.

An intriguing but complicated building, the Erechtheum, built in the last two decades of the fifth century B.C.E., was intended to house a variety of diverse cults, each with its own designated space. The principal entrance was through a facade with six Ionic columns on the structure’s eastern side (far right in the photo). The Erechtheum also had a north porch (far left in the photo) with an Ionic colonnade and a south porch with columns in the shape of beautiful maidens (the caryatids). Photo: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.

The last of the structures on the Acropolis, the Erechtheum, was also built entirely in the Ionic style. By all odds, it should have been the first to be built, since it housed the Athenians’ most important image—the statue of Athena Polias, the city goddess. This primitive wooden image was said by Pausanias to have fallen from the sky. It was adorned with a new garment (peplos) every four years as part of the Greater Panathenaea, a celebration that was even more elaborate than the annual Lesser Panathenaea. Both festivals included religious ceremonies, but the Greater Panathenaea also included contests, both athletic and musical, as well as the great procession culminating in the presentation of the new peplos. However, the Erechtheum was not begun until about 420 B.C.E., and it was not finished until nearly the turn of the century, because work was halted during the later years of the Peloponnesian War.

Like the Propylaea, the Erechtheum lies on difficult terrain, falling sharply downhill to the north. The ritual activity inside the Erechtheum involved a variety of cults, and the building included sacred areas for Athena Polias, Erechtheus (a mythical king of Athens), Boutes (the mythical priest and brother of Erechtheus), the god Poseidon and Cecrops (another mythical king). The location of each of these areas was specified and had to be honored by the architect.

This article was originally published in Archaeology Odyssey. Every article ever published in that magazine, along with Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review is available in the online BAS Library.

As a result of the building’s many requirements, the Erechtheum is not an unqualified success. To a relatively simple—but two-leveled—rectangular building have been inelegantly grafted two porches that are on opposite sides of the core (north and south) but are not related to one another in terms of scale, style, elevation or position. The result is a much less unified structure than the Propylaea; the Erechtheum seems more of a pastiche than single creation. (Adding an unfortunate but necessary insult to this design, the modern restoration of the 1980s includes new, whiter blocks on the major walls of the building. The marble has already weathered and become less distinctly different; over time the difference will become less and less visible. In the meantime, however, the building looks strangely diseased. When the weathering has made the stones indistinguishable by color, surface treatment will still show clearly which blocks are new and which old.)

We don’t know who designed the Erechtheum, but lengthy inscriptions concerning the Erechtheum survive, partly because the work was stopped for a time and an inventory of its unfinished state was required. The inscriptions tell us that everyone who worked on the building—architect and mason, citizen and slave—received the same daily wage of one drachma. They also relate that about half the work force consisted of foreigners, and nearly as many of the Athenian workers were slaves as were citizens.

The major facade of the Erechtheum (the east facade) has six Ionic columns. The north porch has another Ionic colonnade. Above the walls ran a continuous sculpted frieze consisting of painted marble attached to a gray stone background. Only fragments remain today.

Elegant, graceful, serene, the caryatid columns of the eastern porch of the Erechtheum seem to move gently forward, as if stepping out into empty space. The Greek word “caryatid” means “women of Karyai” (Karyai is another name for Laconia, the region of the Peloponnesus where Sparta is located). The five caryatids (of six, since one is missing) now on the structure are replicas; one of the original maidens was removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, and the others are now in the Acropolis Museum. Photo: AP/Lefteris Pitarakis.

The south porch, facing the Parthenon, also features a colonnade—but the marble columns here assume the shape of maidens, the beautiful caryatids.^e The caryatid porch has made the Erechtheum famous, and justly so. The graceful figures seem entirely comfortable with the weight bearing down on their heads. They stride forth gracefully, as if in procession, the three maidens on the viewer’s right advancing their right legs, the other three putting forth their left legs. These marble maidens give the building a sense of lithe elegance and delicacy.

The magnificently refined and sculptural Parthenon, the complex and innovative Propylaea, the enchanting caryatids of the Erechtheum and the small, graceful Nike Temple—these are what, together with the imposing hill on which they stand, have cast a spell over so many, not only scholars and antiquarians, but poets, artists and ordinary tourists. I first started working on the Acropolis in February of 1975, when people could wander about the Acropolis more or less as they wished. One day a French tourist wandered over to where I was working. He looked down into the area of the remains of the old entrance and saw, much to his surprise, a very cold archaeologist. We chatted briefly, and he told me that, having seen the Acropolis, he could now die in peace. I was young enough to be amused rather than moved, but the moment has stuck with me ever since.

The Acropolis is not just an imposing site with beautiful, battered buildings from the remote past. It is visible, tangible proof that we humans can create magnificent, enduring works of true genius.

Distinguishing Dorians from Ionians

Doric and Ionian architectural styles take their names from peoples who spoke different Greek dialects. The Dorians conquered most of mainland Greece by the end of the second millennium B.C.E. The Ionians inhabited the west coast of Anatolia, a region that came to be known as Ionia. After about 750 B.C.E., Ionian culture became very influential among Greek-speaking peoples. Throughout the East, in fact, the name “Yawani” (Ionian) became a generic term for “Greek.”

The simple, sturdy Doric architectural style, so impressively on display in the Parthenon, is characterized by 20-sided columns that have no base and rest right on the floor. Doric columns are topped by plain capitals and are spanned by an architrave composed of triglyphs (three vertical, grooved lines) and metopes (blank panels which were often painted or sculpted).

The more delicate Ionic columns rest on bases that look like a series of stacked rings. Their capitals are decorated with volutes (a spiral scroll design) and support an architrave that has a continuous frieze, rather than a pattern of triglyphs and metopes.

The Other Acropolis: Where People Really Worshiped

Photo: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY.

Along with the Propylaea, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nike, there were numerous shrines, fountains, altars and sanctuaries crowding the Acropolis.

The best known of those other monuments was probably the bronze statue of Athena called the Athena Promachos (Athena, Defender of the City). Although no trace of it remains today, the statue stood about 30 feet high on a pedestal in the open area just east of the Propylaea. Created by Phidias, the statue stood with its back to the wall supporting the terrace on which the Old Temple of Athena stood. The statue dates before 450 B.C.E., so the Old Temple of Athena would have been at least partially standing when it was first erected. According to Pausanias, sunlight reflecting from the bronze—and the added silver details—made the statue visible to sailors coming into Athens’s port of Piraeus.

One of the most important monuments on the Acropolis was the altar where the Athenians made sacrifices to Athena. The altar lay in the area east of the Erechtheum, though the only possible remains are places in the bedrock that have been smoothed. (Thucydides, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E., indicates that that the altar was very large; but Pausanias, who visited the Acropolis in the second century C.E., does not even mention it.) The altar was the true focal point of ancient worship. (In fact, people rarely entered temples, which were the homes of the gods/images and were often used as treasuries.)

Worship took place in the open air at the altar. There offerings were presented and burned so that the god received the smoke. The sacrificed animals were brought up to the Acropolis in processions that passed through the Propylaea—which helps to explain why the central passageway was actually a path on bedrock, with the floor and steps of the building lying on either side of this central path. Animals could thus walk to the Acropolis without climbing steps, and building materials could be transported more easily onto the sanctuary.

At the time of the Persian invasion, the Acropolis would have been full of sculptural offerings to the gods. Those offerings were damaged by the Persians, and they were then buried by the Athenians on the Acropolis so they would remain in a sacred area. As a result, we have a number of sculptures from the period before 480 B.C.E. that would otherwise have been removed. (The statue, which dates to 570–560 B.C.E., shows a youth carrying a calf to be sacrificed at the altar. The statue was dedicated to Athena Promachos by a man named Rhombos.) They provide not only beautiful examples of ancient art for those who visit the Acropolis Museum but also surprising examples of the extent to which ancient statues were sometimes painted (since burying the statues preserved some of the paint).

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The Acropolis was used from at least the Neolithic period on. During the Bronze Age it was a citadel, and parts of the surrounding walls were built at the end of the period, around 1200 B.C.E., to protect the city. All other remains from the Bronze Age were erased during the classical period or later.

Many changes also occurred after the classical period, though virtually all traces have been erased. Roman additions were common, of course. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century C.E., the Parthenon, Erechtheum and Propylaea all became, at least in part, Christian religious structures. These structures were also used, and re-modified, during the time the Turks controlled Athens (1456–1832). Indeed, the Propylaea facade was even made into one wall of a fortified entrance courtyard, with the blocks from the Nike Temple used to fill in the spaces between columns.

Damage was also inflicted on the buildings in the course of the various battles for control of Athens. The most famous—and most damaging—incident occurred when the Venetian doge Francesco Morosini bombarded the Acropolis; in 1697 his canons exploded gunpowder stored by the Turks in the Parthenon.

The most recent major damage was done by Lord Elgin (1766–1841), who removed parts of the Parthenon—not only most of the frieze but also portions of the pedimental sculpture and one of the caryatids from the Erechtheum.

Since Greece achieved independence again in 1832 (when Athens was just a small village of a few thousand, though it became the capital within a year), the Acropolis has been the subject of nearly constant work to return it to its appearance during its heyday in the late fifth century B.C.E. Work continues on the Parthenon, the Propylaea and the Temple of Athena Nike, with a short pause for the Olympics, and will not be finished for some years.

“Antiquity’s High Holy Place” by Harrison Eiteljorg, II, originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2004. It was first republished in Bible History Daily on April 25, 2014.

Notes:

a. Plutarch, the Roman historian, reports that Phidias had been advised by Pericles to make all the gold on the statue removable so that it could be weighed and accounted for, in the event the sculptor was accused of theft; indeed, such a charge was brought, so the plan was indeed well-advised.

b. Almost half of the frieze was removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century and placed in the British Museum in London. See Jacob Rothenberg, “Lord Elgin’s Marbles: How Sculptures from the Parthenon Got to the British Museum,” Archaeology Odyssey, Spring 1998.

c. By the time the Propylaea was constructed, the Acropolis itself was no longer fortified. After the Persians departed, walls were constructed to encompass much of Athens, not just the Acropolis.

d. The standard view is that the Propylaea was not finished because of the Peloponnesian War. I believe that construction was stopped because the northeast wing could not be built without modifications to the central building and the northwest wing.

e. The caryatids seen on the structure today are replicas. One of the originals was taken by Lord Elgin; the others have been removed to the Acropolis Museum.

1. Herodotus, Histories 8.53.

2. Herodotus, Histories 9.13.

3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.89.3.

4. Pausanias, Attica 24.6-7.

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What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World?

Ellen White — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 23:00:36 +0000

Louise Hitchcock

What does the ancient Aegean world in the west have to do with the Biblical world in the east? Quite a lot, according to Aegean archaeology specialist Louise Hitchcock.

The term “Aegean” refers to Greece in the Bronze Age and includes the Minoan civilization, which inhabited Crete (c. 1900–1450 B.C.E.), as well as the Mycenaean civilization, which inhabited Mainland Greece (c. 1500–1200 B.C.E.) and Crete (c. 1450–1200 B.C.E.).

In her Archaeological Views column “View from the West: Why Aegean Archaeology Matters” in the May/June 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, University of Melbourne professor Louise Hitchcock explains that one needs to explore the connections between these Aegean cultures and their Eastern Mediterranean neighbors in order to fully comprehend the pervasive influence each had on the other.

Aegean archaeology specialist Louise Hitchcock explains that the appearance of the Egyptian goddess of childbirth Tawaret in the art of the Aegean world is one example of the influence the east and west had on one another. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“[The Aegean world] culturally represents the western-most sphere of ancient Near Eastern influence, which in turn influenced developing European nations,” Hitchcock explains. “Aegean seafarers, traders and crafters were engaged in cultural exchange with the east, and ultimately the Aegeans were a major artistic and cultural influence on the Philistines, who were perhaps ethnically related to them. The Philistines, in turn, had a large impact on the Israelites, especially during the period of the Judges and the United Monarchy. Thus Aegean culture is important for understanding Biblical archaeology.”

In the Aegean world, the Minoans and Mycenaeans enjoyed extensive trade with their eastern neighbors. Through archaeology, we have been able to observe that the Minoans, for instance, imported copper, tin, gold and ivory from the Near East, while Near Eastern civilizations seem to have imported artistic styles from the Aegean world. The east and west even exchanged cultural icons and religious traditions. The Egyptian goddess Tawaret, the goddess of childbirth, became a frequent image in Aegean art, while the Aegean flying gallop motif made its way into Near Eastern imagery.

Louise Hitchcock demonstrates that the extensive exchange between the Aegean world and the Near East makes Aegean archaeology critical to understanding the Biblical world.

For more on the importance of Aegean archaeology, read the full Archaeological Views column “View from the West: Why Aegean Archaeology Matters” by Louise Hitchcock in the May/June 2015 issue of BAR.

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BAS Library Members: Read the full Archaeological Views column “View from the West: Why Aegean Archaeology Matters” by Louise Hitchcock in the May/June 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Classical Corner: Phidias and Pericles: Hold My Wine

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:00:48 +0000

The Pericles Cup is on display at the Epigraphical Museum in Athens. Photo: Diane Harris Cline.

People tend to get possessive with their things. These feelings are human, so it should come as no surprise that ancient people felt possessive about their stuff, too. One way we protect our things is to label them. Ancient Greeks were no different when it came to such practices, including two famous fifth-century B.C.E. Athenians: the artist Phidias and the politician Pericles, who exhibited the same tendency of ownership.

In 1958, German archaeologists excavating near the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Greece, discovered a small ceramic cup with ribbed walls covered in black, inside and out. Inscribed on the base were the simple words, “I belong to Phidias.” We know this man—Phidias was a famous sculptor who is best known for creating the larger-than-life-size statue of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens and for the two-story-tall gold-and-ivory cult statue of Zeus at Olympia, which was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

It is unusual to find something so directly tied to a historical individual, but there is little doubt that this cup must have belonged to Phidias. When he scratched his name into the ceramic surface with something like a dental tool, what was on Phidias’s mind?

In the mid-fifth century B.C.E., Phidias supervised many artisans and craftsmen working with him to construct the statue of Zeus. Considering such a long construction period, we can imagine that a favorite cup could go missing. Since here we have his name, very neatly written with a sharp tool long after the cup was manufactured, we may well be reading letters that Phidias wrote himself, fed up after losing one too many cups. To picture the great artist Phidias, sipping from this artifact, drinking water and wine (they didn’t have coffee or tea yet) as he worked at Olympia, is a romantic and yet probably realistic image.

In contrast, our second cup demonstrates another tendency that we have in common with people who lived long ago, namely our desire to keep a souvenir to celebrate moments that we want to remember. Later, when we look at the object, it brings back a flood of memories, which help us hold on to that time just a little longer.

In the summer of 2014, an apartment complex in a suburb of Athens was being torn down. Archaeologists were allowed to do some excavation before a new structure was built in its place. They found an unremarkable grave, with just a few offerings in it. But one item turned out to be more precious than gold, both to us and probably to its original owner. It is a delicate cup, originally standing about 3 inches high, which was found broken into 12 pieces. Like Phidias’s cup, it was colored black, inside and out, with two handles and thin walls.

When the archaeologists pieced the fragments back together, they were astonished to see six names scratched onto the side of the cup, which they could clearly read, but only when they turned it so the bottom was facing up. Whoever had written the names had first turned the cup upside down, as if it had just been washed and left to dry. Then he inscribed the names and drew a box around them. From top to bottom, the names read: “Aristides, Diodotos, Daesimos, Arriphron, Pericles, Eukritos.” On the base is one more name, Drapetis, which means that there are seven names in all.

Of the seven names, the one that jumps out at us is Pericles, for that was the name of one of the most famous Athenians ever to live. He was an annually elected general whose soaring oratory inspired and influenced the Athenians until his death in 429 B.C.E., captured most dramatically in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. He is the one who came up with the idea of the building program on the Acropolis in Athens, which included the Parthenon and Phidias’s statue of Athena. Is this really his name on the cup, along with six friends or companions?

From his family tree, we know that Pericles had an older brother and a grandfather both named Arriphron, which otherwise is a very rare name. On this cup, Pericles and Arriphron are listed one above the other, like brothers should be. Angelos Matthaiou, whose expertise is in ancient Greek writing, said there is a 99 percent chance that this is our Pericles. The cup dates roughly to 480–465 B.C.E., when Pericles would have been a young man in his 20s.

What are we to make of all these individuals named? It may be that they had gotten together for a symposium, a kind of gathering where men would recline on couches, drink wine and eat snacks, and have rich conversations. By lamp light, memorable evenings helped develop friendships, create social networks, and facilitate the spread of news and innovations. Ancient Greek men (of a higher economic class) all over the Mediterranean would attend such events several times a week; some would be unforgettable evenings, stimulating in every way. It was a part of Greek culture for centuries.

It is not hard to imagine that these seven men attended such a party and that one of them, perhaps Drapetis, took a cup as a souvenir when the evening came to an end. Maybe after the party one of them scratched their names onto the cup as a memento. The men’s names inside the box seem to have been written by just one man, but the name on the bottom, Drapetis, by another. Within a decade, Pericles became influential, but the others remained relatively obscure. Perhaps Drapetis held on to the cup as a treasured possession, to remember the night when he was in the great man’s presence. When Drapetis died, he was buried with this most precious memento from the best night of his life—the “Pericles Cup,” as it is now called. That is one possible scenario, but we will never know for sure.

“Classical Corner: Phidias and Pericles: Hold My Wine” by Diane Harris Cline originally appeared in the January/February 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Diane Harris Cline is Associate Professor of History at The George Washington University and author of National Geographic’s The Greeks: An Illustrated History (2016).

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