North Syrian relief from Carchemish with a winged lion-man, 8th century BC, one model for the Greek chimaera. Other eastern monsters add an animal head to the wing. London, BM. GO fig.80
The chimaera personified the poisonous exhalation from a cave in Lycia, taken to be an evil-smelling goat (chimaira). Literature (Homer, Hesiod) made it a monster, and more threatening by adding a lion in front, a snake behind - impractical since immobile, and the form appeared only briefly in Greek art. Instead artists looked to eastern representations of winged lions, turned the wing into a goat's head and neck, breathing flame, and giving the tail a snake head. This remains the canonic form and literature adopts the form.
An eastern lion-fighter as copied in Crete in the 8th century BC, on a quiver from near Knossos. Heraklion Museum.
The Greek version of a; on another side of the tripod he carries a sheep, as saviour of flocks. Attic late 8th century BC. Kerameikos Museum.
The earliest group of Herakles fighting the lion in art copies an eastern group, where they stand and the hero uses a sword. In the later 7th century he adopts the lionskin and club (mace) from the example of eastern arts. The lion is translated from a threat to the farmer (as in Homer's Anatolia) to something more dangerous by being made invulnerable. Herakles therefore has now to wrestle it like another human and abandons the sword. Some writers explained skin and club (mace) as rustic, but both are oriental insignia. His development from a generalised Greek hero into a localised one with aspirations to godhead is traced in art not literature and in art we can trace his adoption by Athens despite his Dorian origins.
A rare example of Herakles still fighting the lion with the sword, but it cannot fully penetrate the lion's skin. Attic mid-6th century. Ashmolean Museum.
Herakles wrestles the lion like a man, 'on the canvas'. Attic, about 500 BC.
Copenhagen Museum.
A rhapsode or aulode (a flautist on the other side of the vase) declaiming the first lnes of an unknown epic: 'Thus once in Tiryns…'. Attic, early 5th century. By the Kleophrades Painter. British Museum.
Several vases show revellers or rhapsodes singing, and give the words. Apart from one version of Sappho all the verses are otherwise unidentified, not even Homer, indicating our ignorance of the most popular orals compositions.
In epic poetry the 'weighing of souls' (an Egyptian motif) appears only for the duel between Achilles and Hector. In art it appears only, and often, and in different parts of the Greek world (monumenatally on the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, about 525 BC), for the duel between Achilles and Memnon, indicating a totally different visual tradition from the literary.
Open and counted voting is not a feature of the heroic world or of early archaic Greece. It is introduced in Athens in the later 6th century. It affects literature in Aeschylus' Eumenides, where Athena gives a casting vote after a hung jury; and as early, art, in scenes of the open voting of heroes for possession of Achilles' arms by either Ajax or Odysseus. Attic, early 5th century. Vienna Museum.
From a mid-4th century Sicilian vase, showing a raised stage and actors in comic costume, including Herakles, enacting probably an Attic comedy. (Lentini Museum).
A unique depiction, on a mid-4th century BC Campanian vase of what could be a stage depiction (the projecting wings) of a tragedy; however, the 'actors' are not in costume, but the heroic nude'. (Louvre Museum)
In the very rare instances where a staged story is represented in art - effectively only for comedy and on South Italian vases - the stage setting and costumes are made explicit. There are no grounds whatever for supposing that the tragic scenes on vases from the same artists and areas depict stage tragedies, since none of the stage trappings are shown, as they are for the comedies. Pure prejudice leads the still not uncommon custom of taking such vase scenes as depictions of stage tragedy. Some vase painters were literate and may have shared to a minor degree the inventive ideas of writers, but their inventions are normally visual.
A tragic actor in costume, holding his mask, on a vase fragment from Tarentum, mid-4th century BC. (Würzburg Museum)
© Beazley Archive 1997-2010 | Last updated:
24 February, 2010
John Boardman
