Painter and Poet in Ancient Greece: Iconography and the Literary Arts

432 Pages·1997·66.373 MB·German

by  Eva C. Keuls

Eva C. Keuls
Painter and Poet in Ancient Greece
Beiträge zur Altertumskunde
Herausgegeben von
Ernst Heitsch, Ludwig Koenen,
Reinhold Merkelbach, Clemens Zintzen
Band 87
B. G. Teubner Stuttgart und Leipzig
Painter and Poet in Ancient Greece
Iconography and the Literary Arts
Eva C. Keuls
B. G. Teubner Stuttgart und Leipzig 1997
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Keuls, Eva:
Painter and poet in ancient Greece: iconography and the literary arts /
Eva C. Keuls. - Stuttgart; Leipzig: Teubner, 1997
(Beiträge zur Altertumskunde; Bd. 87)
ISBN 3-519-07636-5
NE: GT
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© B. G. Teubner Stuttgart 1997
Printed in Germany
Druck und Bindung: Rock, Weinsberg
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Professors Reinhold Merkelbach and Ludwig Koenen
of the series Beiträge zur Altertumskunde and to Herr Heinrich Kraemer of
Teubner-Verlag for the opportunity to re-publish a selection of widely
scattered essays in a monograph. I owe a special debt of gratitude to
Ludwig Koenen for guiding me through the intricacies of formatting and
footnoting by computer according to Teubner's standard scheme. The
editors of the periodicals in which the essays were first published, have
graciously given their permission for reprinting.
Chronologically the essays span twenty-six years, from my first
published article on the Dyscolus of Menander, then freshly discovered, of
1969, here number 1, to a recent article, number 20, still in press at the time
of publication of this volume. That my first attempts at creative scholarship
should still be valid and of some interest to classical scholars is due in large
measure to the rigorous standards of relevance and accuracy upheld by the
better journals in the field. The usually anonymous Readers employed by
these publications repeatedly saved me from errors, and pointed out
weaknesses in argumentation and inadequate consideration of previous
scholarship. Had I not been subjected to this severe editorial critique, I
doubt that I would experience much joy in becoming re-acquainted with my
pristine endeavours. I thank these unknown benefactors and have in the
course of time tried to repay their efforts by being equally stem but
constructive in assessing the output of younger scholars.
Wherever possible, I have provided new and better photographs for
the illustrations, and a number of museums have made such available for
this new edition. Their courtesy is acknowledged in the List of
Illustrations.

INTRODUCTION
The field of Classics has always been a kind of Area Studies, long
before this concept was given name. A classicist is expected to be
knowledgeable on all aspects of two very different dead civilizations, not
only on their languages and literatures, but also on their political history,
religious practices and representational arts, to name but a few different
sub-disciplines. When I started my career as an investigative scholar in the
nineteen sixties, the professional literature was already correspondingly
diffuse. Since then the number of journals dedicated to a comprehensive
view of the ancient Greek and Roman societies has multiplied, and, in
addition, numerous new interdisciplinary serials have been initiated, that
aim to cultivate a specific slant on the classical world. Add to this a
proliferation of Festschrifter and volumes of Acta of this and that
conference, and a classicist might suddenly find that his or her thoughts
are strewn over a vast and amorphous publication field, even though they
spring from the same mainsprings of training and curiosity.
Such has happened to this writer. After several decades of
scholarship I find that my sixty or so small publications are dispersed over
quite dissimilar journals and volumes, so that they do not appear to
manifest an inner cohesion of thought Among other goals, the present
volume aims to restore their perceptual unity, as manifested by a common
focus on the connections between the visual and the verbal arts. Like Carl
Robert in his seminal work Bild und Lied of 1881,1 have come to believe
that in the world of the Greeks of the classical age a more intensive
interaction between visual and verbal imagery prevailed than in other past
civilizations in the Western tradition. The foremost Hellenizers of all
times, the Romans, whose culture constitutes our principal link with the
Greeks, never recreated that close correspondence: in the fine arts they
were not able to advance significantly beyond the techniques and visual
vocabulary of the Greeks, whereas in literature, while starting out as
imitators of Greek models, they in the end created genres, styles and
modes of expressions all their own. As a result, the close ties between
poetry and the representational arts that existed in classical Greek culture,
have to be retraced by us directly from the originals.
Another reason for publishing this slight volume is the circumstance
that the vagaries of routine scholarly publication are such that one's more
innovative theories are not always published in outlets with the widest
distribution. The three articles first published in the Mededelingen van
het Nederlands Instituut te Rome (numbers 7,10 and 11) are a case in
point. Not infrequently, I repaid the cordial hospitality of this admirable
institution with lectures on my freshest research, which were subsequently
routinely published in the Institute's own journal (now discontinued), a
serial with impeccable scholarly standards, but that did not necessarily find
its way to every scholar's desktop.
While making a selection of articles for this volume, I have tried to
avoid duplication, whether of essays with each other, or of Gedankengut
first published in article form and later integrated into a monograph. For
the very reason of the inner cohesion of thought, this has not been totally
possible. However, every article here included makes a scholarly
statement not elsewhere published.
Although my first iconographical essay, "The Ass of Dionysus..."
(here number 2, unfortunately not illustrated), eventually led to a
monograph (The Water Carriers in Hades: A Study of Catharsis through
Toil of 1974), it contains much material not there repeated. Similarly, the
argument presented in "Skiagraphia once Again" (number 5), was
summarized in my book Plato and Greek Painting of 1978. Since the
article states my rather controversial theory concerning a pointillistic
painting technique in classical Athens more fully than I could unfold it in
the monograph, I deemed it worthy to be included here.
My essay on the fragmentation of the female in Greek representational
art (number 10), was preliminary to my book on women in classical
Athens (The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in ancient Athens, first
edition 1985), but only partically subsumed in that monograph. On the
other hand I excluded its companion piece "Attic Vase Painting and the
Home Textile Industry" in Ancient Greek Painting and Iconography
(Warren S. Moon, editor, of 1983), even though I believe it to have been
more influential, because it anticipated the book version more fully.
Numbers 7 and 8 are corollaries and in part based on the same
illustrations. Together, they present my theory of the tendentious
interpretation (or rather misinterpretation) of classical tragedy by the
manufacturers of Apulian funerary art.
The view of the Apulian treatment of tragic plot material essentially as
"consolation rhetoric," underlies the distinction I make between Apulian
theater iconography and that of the other Greek colonies in Italy, in article
number 20, on the Sicilian pictorial treatment of tragic motifs.
Number 12, on Attic vase painting as patriotic propaganda, was
published unchanged from the reading text, and hence has no footnoting
apparatus. I beg the forbearance of readers interested in this topic, who
may be annoyed by this omission, particularly because my interpretation of
the spectacular Theseus cup in Ferrara, by the hand of the artist we know
as the Penthesileia Painter, differs significantly from that by other scholars.
I apologize to such readers for the inconvenience, but trust that they can
readily locate the relevant literature through the catalogues by Sir John
Beazley and their Supplements. Number 13, also a study of the specific
compositional techniques of the Penthesileia Painter, was published under
the press of a close publication deadline, and is inadequately documented -
it appeared in one of those rare Festschrifter that actually take its recipient
by surprise -- perhaps an insult to the scholar honored by the volume,
Professor Konrad Schauenburg, himself renowned, among other things,
for his meticulous command of the relevant scholarly literature. Since
these two articles introduce not only new views, but also new and
unfamiliar vase paintings, perhaps the reader will forgive me for my
shortcomings in background documentation.
I have made small editorial corrections, and homogenized spelling and
transliteration wherever this could be done easily. I have, for instance,
changed "italiote" to the now commonly accepted American-English
spelling of "italiot", but standardizing different styles of abbreviation and
footnoting, as practiced by the various scholarly journals and publishing
houses, did not seem worthwhile. Because there are duplicate usages of
some photographs, for the sake of economy these have been printed only
once and numbered consecutively, so that the reader at times may have to
leaf back and forth to locate the appropriate illustrations. Wherever
different views of the same artifact are reproduced in different contexts,
there are cues to that effect in the List of Illustrations.