The Old Market Woman

The Hellenistic period saw a trend toward the representation of the real (as opposed to the ideal) and the lowly or ordinary (as opposed to high end of the social scale): in other words, the very opposite of what artists of the Classical Period chose to represent.

This trend is illustrated by the Greek statue known as the Old Market Woman (in fact it is a Roman copy of a Greek original).  When the statue was first discovered in 1907 at the foot of the Capitoline hill, it was thought to be a woman hawking a pair of chickens and a basket of fruit or vegetables, held in her (missing) left arm.  Her right arm (also missing) is perhaps holding out something else for sale.

She stoops with age (or else “her whole body is contorted as by a sort of recoil from her vociferation,” as an early interpreter supposed), her breasts are partially exposed by her loose garment, and her face shows the signs of old age: “the weary eyes, the sunken cheeks, the deep lines about the mouth, and the shriveled neck and breast all show a sculptor whose aim was to perpetuate an unlovely everyday type precisely as he saw it.”

But what about woman’s costume, legs, and feet?  “The costume is the same that we find on the ideal statues of goddesses or women—a sleeveless chiton, or dress, clasped upon the shoulder, and over this a large himation or mantle. The folds of these two garments fall as gracefully as though they covered the form of a young girl, and it is curious to observe that the limbs which they cover do not correspond at all to the shrunken character of the upper part, but are full and well rounded, as are also the prettily sandaled feet.”  And around her head is a kerchief encircled by an ivy wreath.  The conclusion?  “The occasion on which she is offering her wares for sale is some Bacchic festival.”  So Robinson in 1909.

Since then other interpretations have been offered.  Some think that the woman’s costume and ivy crown make it unlikely that she is a market seller, despite the name by which the statue is known.  Instead, she may be “an aged courtesan on her way to a festival of Dionysos, the god of wine,” while the basket and chickens may be “dedicatory gifts to the god or simply her own provisions for a long day of celebration.”  So the website of the MMA, where the statue may be seen today.

Andrew Stewart agrees that she is a courtesan (her chiton is revealing and "diaphanous"), though one "fallen on hard times."  But he argues against a connection with Dionysus, who had no temple near the findspot.  Instead, he conjectures that the statue was dedicated to the agricultural goddess Ops.

Yet one is left wondering who would commission such a dedicatory statue…

No author.  “Two Kinds of Realism.”  The Classical Weekly 3.8 (1909) 63.

Robinson, E.  “The Old Market Woman.”  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 4.11 (1909) 201-206.

Stewart, A.  Art in the Hellenistic World: An Introduction (2015) 235.

- Christian McKittrick

Claudius as Jupiter

This over-life-size (8’ 4”) marble portrait of the emperor Claudius (ruled AD 41-54) was found in Lanuvium (about 20 miles southeast of Rome) in 1865.  It was made early in his reign, ca. AD 42 or 43. 

The statue presents two incongruities.  First, it obviously joins the body of a young man with the head of a man in his 50s.  Second, it presents the emperor in the guise of the chief Roman god, Jupiter: the oak crown (the oak being the god's sacred tree), the scepter in his left hand, and the eagle at his feet leave no doubt about this (his right hand probably held a thunderbolt—the patera is a mistaken restoration).  How were these (to us) odd combinations received by the ancient viewer?

(1) The head shows the signs of aging common in middle-aged people: forehead lines, bags under the eyes, nasolabial folds.  Claudius was indeed about 50 at the time of his accession in AD 41.  So the head seems true to life.  By contrast, the body is youthful.  His nude torso puts that youthfulness on display.

Realism was the mark of Roman portraiture already under the Republic.  Roman elites kept ancestor masks (imagines) in their homes.  Some Roman portraits are actually hyper-realistic, with exaggerated features (including exaggerated defects): modern scholars call these “veristic” and the style “verism.”  Why exaggerate?  Verism projected aristocratic virtues: maturity, experience, seriousness, determination…  The logic is not unlike that of caricature: physiognomy reveals character, and character belongs to ideology.

The combination of an old head with a young body was also already common under the Republic.  This statue (right) found at Tivoli (known as the Tivoli General—note the military breastplate at his side) joins a realistic head with a semi-nude body that is youthful and muscular.  It is worth noting that this incongruity is a Roman phenomenon: it is not found in Greek portraiture.

So the portait of Claudius was nothing new...  Yet in a way it was.  For Augustus had set a pattern for portraiture that was distinctly classicizing.  His statues and those of his successors Tiberius and Caligula are in the style of the Greek art of the fifth and fourth centuries, i.e., that of Classicism, especially the High Classical moment of Pheidias and Polyclitus.  The early Julio-Claudians are portrayed as ever youthful, more ideal than real (or veristic).  They do not age.  And, generally speaking, all their portraits follow this classicizing pattern.  After all, they were a big ruling family, a dynasty.  They had a claim to rule, and their portraiture showed that they all shared that claim.

So in reverting to the realism of Republican portraiture Claudius was making a statement.  He was staging a return to Republican values.

(2) Claudius’ assimilation to Jupiter was similarly ideological.  "Do not challenge my rule," he seemed to be saying, "unless you want to challenge the very order of the divine world!"  The association of the rule of the Julio-Claudians with that of Jupiter was traditional, a commonplace already in Augustan poetry.  Iuppiter in caelis, Caesar regit omnia terris: “Jupiter rules all in the heavens, Caesar rules all on earth” so runs a line attibuted to Vergil in the Latin Anthology.  Horace compared Augustus to Jupiter (Odes 1.12, 3.5), and so did Ovid.

Augustus is portrayed as Jupiter on the Gemma Augustea (left), where he holds a scepter, with Jupiter’s eagle at his feet.

If the portrait of Tiberius in the guise of Jupiter (right) from the theater at Caere (modern Cerveteri) was indeed recut from a portrait of Caligula, then this piece, too, was a model for portrait of Claudius.

So the answer to the question concerning the Roman reception of Claudius’ incongruous portrait is this: the realism of the head and the link to Jupiter were traditional, part of the conventional language of images.  But as such they made a strong statement.  Claudius was a Julio-Claudian, a legitimate ruler, and he was announcing a return to the values of the Republic.  This program must be understood in its context.  Claudius followed Caligula, who had been assassinated after only four years in power.  He had been found hiding behind a curtain by the Praetorians and made emperor.  He needed to show that he was not going to be another Caligula.  Afflicted with a stutter and a limp, and known more as a bookworm than as a statesman, he needs some powerful PR.  So he chose to present himself as both an old-fashioned Republican general (like the Tivoli General) and a Jupiter-like guarantor of order and stability.  His invasion of Britain in AD 43 was a renewal of the project of Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC.  His big message was that he was turning back the sundial, back to the good old days.

- Ryan Summers

The Mourning Athena

This relief was found in 1888 on the Acropolis and has been dated to ca. 460 BC on the basis of its findspot and style.  It is quite small, some 21’’ high and about 13’’ wide.  The material is Parian marble.

Its subject is the goddess Athena, identified by helmet and spear, her usual attributes.  She does not wear the aegis, which, though her most distinctive attribute, is sometimes absent from her representations in this period.

She stands barefoot, leaning on her spear, looking down at a rectangular object about half her height.  She wears an ankle-length peplos bound at her waist.  Her head and feet are shown in profile, but the pose of her body is nearly frontal—somewhat unnaturally.  Also unnatural are the folds of the peplos: she is leaning forward, but the pleats fall in the other direction.  The viewer's eye tilts with her, follows her intense gaze: the focal point is that mysterious object.  That is the combined effect of the profile head and feet on the one hand and the gravity-defying garment on the other.

Her weight is mostly on her right foot, her left foot being raised so that only her toes touch the ground.  Similarly her right arm is raised so that her hand rests on her hip.  She leans heavily on the spear cradled in her left arm.  The right leg bears weight and is tense, while the left is relaxed; the right arm is relaxed, while the left bears weight and so is tense.  Her right shoulder is raised, her left lowered.  The fingers of her right hand are splayed, while those of her left are gripping the spear shaft—except for her index finger, which touches her forehead at the hairline.  Thus there is a chiasmus in the relation of the four limbs.  Again, all this shifting and balancing of weight (contrapposto) is motivated by her inclination toward the rectangular object.

Whatever that object is, it is the key to understanding this relief.  There is a bewildering number of suggestions, none of which is completely convincing.  Is it an inscribed stele (i.e., a vertical stone slab used as a commemorative marker)?  If so, what inscription did it bear?  A legal text?  A tribute list?  A list of Athenian casualties?  Or is it a boundary marker (horos)?  Or does it have to do with athletics?  A starting or finishing post?  How about a turning post for a horse race?

H. Jung has ruled out the notion that it is an inscribed stele.  If Athena is reading an inscription, then she is reading the front of the stele, and what we see is its side.  Not likely, says Jung, since such stelai are shown frontally in Greek art, not from the side.  So he argues that the object is a pillar marking an athletic venue, and that the whole relief is a votive offering made by a victorious athlete in the Panathenaic Games.  In offering the relief the athlete expresses his gratitude to the goddess for his success.

But what about the goddess’ face?  It used to be thought that her expression is one of sadness—hence the old suggestion that the mysterious slab is a list of Athenian war casualties; hence the traditional name “Mourning Athena.”  Martin Robertson defended that name: “The whole idea of melancholy in the figure is now generally disregarded, conceived as something read by modern eyes into an ancient work of quite another intention.  I doubt if this reaction is right.  The sadness seems to me real, whatever the precise meaning.  Since this is one of the very few dedications from the Acropolis which must be dated between the Persian Sack [480 BC] and the Peace of Callias [449 BC], I have wondered if the goddess may not be shown mourning her ruined fane [i.e., the predecessor of the Parthenon destroyed by the invading Persians].”

In the end, the relief remains a mystery.  Its interpretation is yet another case of quot homines, tot sententiae.

Jung, H., “Die sinnende Athena,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 110 (1995) 95-147.

Robertson, M.  A History of Greek Art.  2 vols.  (1975) 1.178.

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Herakles and the Hesperides

Herakles is one of the most popular figures in Greek art.  Depictions of a single story often number in the hundreds, and they have survived on objects made at different times—from the eighth to the fourth centuries BC—and in different places—from the East Greece to the mainlaind to West Greece (esp. southern Italy and Sicily).  Thus it is hardly surprising that the way the story is told often varies with the time and place of its narration.  There are different variants of the myth.  The story of Herakles and the Hesperides is a case in point.

Herakles’ eleventh labor (in the catalog of Apollodorus) was to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides.  The apples grew on a tree in a garden somewhere in the far west.  The tree and its fruit were tended by nymphs, the Hesperides, with the aid of a snake named Ladon.

In one version, Herakles goes to the garden himself and confronts the serpent guardian.  This version of the myth is depicted on an Attic black-figure lekythos created around 500 BC.  In this depiction, Herakles obtains the apples himself.  Note that here the snake is shown with two heads.  In another version, he made one of the Hesperides pick them for him.

In yet another version of the myth, Herakles acts on the advice of Prometheus, who tells him to seek help from Atlas.  While Herakles relieves Atlas from his burden of supporting the sky, Atlas retrieves the apples from the Hesperides.  In this metope from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (ca. 460 BC), Athena is helping Herakles bear the load while Atlas approaches with the apples.

Yet another version of the myth was meant to make people laugh.  On this red-figure chous (wine pitcher, ca. 460 BC) Herakles is a satyr and the apples are wine pitchers (choes, like the vase itself) hanging on the branches of the tree (the club, the tree, the snake, the fruit all make the reference clear).  This type of vase (chous) was used in the Anthesteria, a festival in honor of Dionysus on the occasion of the maturing previous year’s vintage.  So naturally the joke has to do with wine.  Herakles’ heroic labor, the fetching of the apples at the behest of Eurystheus, is reduced to a satyr’s craving for wine.  The satyr will go to any length—he will even perform a Heraklean labor!—to get the wine that is the reason for the festival.  So this version of the myth is explained by vase painting humor.  For other examples of parody in which satyrs mimic heroes and even gods, see Mitchell (2009).

Mitchell, Alexandre G.  Greek Vase-Painting and the Origins of Visual Humour (2009) 150ff.

- Lesley Ehmer

The Templum Pacis

Begun during the beginning of Vespasian’s reign in AD 71 and dedicated in AD 75, the Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace) was a large multifunctional complex built in the center of Rome, most likely on the site of the recently destroyed Republican Macellum (food market).

It was a huge courtyard surrounded by colonnaded porticoes on three sides.  Its northwest side (in the foreground above) was merely a colonnaded wall adjoining the later Forum of Nerva (see the plan, right).  Its southeast side had at its center the temple proper, which probably housed a statue of the goddess Pax (Peace).  Flanking its hexastyle porch were colonnaded porticoes, but behind them, flanking the temple cella, were large halls.

The square has been likened to a park.  The gardens have been noted on a map of the city (Forma Urbis or Marble Plan) from ca. AD 200 which marked them as a series of rectangles (cf. the restored illustration above).  With gardens instead of a huge open square, it had more in common with a Hellenistic peristyle than with the imperial fora built by other emperors.

The Templum Pacis housed famous pieces of art from the Greek world, primarily sculptures and paintings.  Some argue that it served as an early precursor to the modern museum.  Many of the pieces were taken during the sack of Jerusalem in AD 71, which financed its construction.  It is also believed that the building housed a marble representation of Rome, which was to be the predecessor of the far more widely known Severan version (the Marble Plan mentioned above).  In addition, the building served as a library at one point, the Bibliotheca Pacis, but probably not until the second century AD.

The building may also have had other functions, ranging from a vault to housing for the Praefectus Urbis (Urban Prefect).  However, its greatest significance lay in its cultural message.  This building, with its peristyle layout, artwork, and (later) literature, provided an access point to (mostly Greek) culture for the common man in Rome.  With this building, the emperor was giving the fruits of peace to the Roman people.  After all, it was begun just after the fall of Nero and the ensuing chaos of the Year of the Four Emperors.  Vespasian wanted to show that control, order, and prosperity were returning to Rome; he was giving back to the people what Nero had taken for himself.  While distancing himself from the tyrant Nero, Vespasian was also connecting himself to Augustus, a good emperor.  The name itself, Templum Pacis, evoked Augustus’ Ara Pacis on a much larger scale.  The orientation of the complex was also significant: it faced the Forum Augustum.  The building in essence was constructed to legitimize Vespasian’s authority while cementing Pax (peace) as a cornerstone of Vespasian’s rule.

Elizabeth Pollard has argued that the gardens of the Templum Pacis were a form of “botanical imperialism.”  An abundance of exotic plant species is thought to have grown there.  The varied art and flora collectively displayed the power of Rome under Vespasian.  They in effect showed that Rome could maintain an empire which dominated all of the exotic lands from which the plants were taken; the plants stood metonymically for the empire.  The gardens also demonstrated horticultural know-how: it was no easy task to cultivate such exotic plants in central Italy! 

Vespasian designed and built the Templum Pacis to show that he had restored peace and stability to Rome after a period of rebellion and chaos.  While linking himself to the great Augustus, Vespasian also distanced himself from Nero to show that his rule would be good for Rome and its empire.

Noreña, Carlos F.. “Medium and Message in Vespasian's Templum Pacis.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 48 (2003) 25–43.

Pollard, Elizabeth Ann. “Pliny's Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperialism in First-Century C. E. Rome.” Journal of World History 20.3 (2009) 309–338.

- Christian McKittrick

The Treasury of Atreus

How were the elite buried at Mycenae in the Late Bronze Age?  Some were buried in chambers cut into the side of a hill.  Hence the term “rock tomb” or “chamber tomb.”   The tomb was reached by a long passageway called a dromos.   But a more elaborate burial seems to have been reserved for the rulers and their families: the tholos.  The tholos was also located in the side of a hill.  However, it was not a rectangular chamber but a circular structure with a top in the form of a dome.  Its shape has been likened to a that of a beehive (hence it is sometimes called a "beehive tomb").  There were nine tholos tombs at Mycenae, the earliest dating to ca. 1500 and the latest to ca. 1250 BC.  The most famous is the so-called Treasury of Atreus.  At over 47 feet in diameter and 44 feet in height, the interior is huge.  The fellow in the photo gives a sense of its dimensions.

This is the 114-foot long dromos or entrance passage to the Treasury of Atreus.  The upward-sloping path is flanked by rising walls leading up to a grand doorway.  Receding fascias are cut into the jambs and lintel.

The lintel is in fact two blocks.  The inner lintel block has been calculated to weigh some 120 tons!  Above the lintel is a relieving triangle: a false (corbeled) arch to keep weight off the lintel.  There may have been something (sculpture?) in that triangle (cf. the Lion Gate, also at Mycenae), but if so it has not been preserved.

Zigzag and spiral patterns in the
relief carving on the columns

To either side of the doorway stood engaged columns of green marble, decorated with zigzag and spiral relief carving.  Above these were smaller columns of red marble.  Fragments of these columns may be seen in the British Museum.

Just how was that huge dome made?  Not through vaulting in the sense of a ceiling constructed in the arch principle (with voussoirs and keystone).  No, the principle here is that of the corbel (as in the relieving triangle).  In corbeling each course projects a little farther inward than the one below it, until the sides meet (and a capstone covers the remaining hole).  The blocks are cut on an angle to produce a smooth interior surface.

The Khan Academy video offers a great overview of the tomb.

Ryan Summers