Image and story
Art and literature

This site is designed to give students and the interested reader an introduction and insight into the problems of relating Greek art and literature, especially in matters of narrative, of their relationship in antiquity, and of the evidence they offer to the modern viewer/reader. A short introductory essay is followed by a few comparative examples or case studies.

By 'Classical literature' we think of the epic poems of Homer, lyric poetry, the tragedies and comedies of the Athenian stage in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and the works of historians. We need, however, to recall:

1. that what survives is a tiny proportion of all that was written;
2. that what has survived was not necessarily the best or most informative but dependent on its value to later readers and scholars, and sometimes the result of pure chance (papyri, reused for other purposes);
3. that in considering its role in antiquity we have to remember that most Greeks were illiterate;
4. we have therefore to consider that our sources for knowledge of ancient narratives are not exactly the same as those of Everyman in antiquity.
5. and that his major sources were primarily what he heard casually at home or, if he was lucky, at school, and what he saw in an environment in which both story-telling and images, including old images, were commonplace.

The oral tradition (at mother's knee or street corners) was important, and from it stemmed all narratives since it reached back to days before there was writing. It might emerge in recited poems, but such recitals were probably rare and might be very lengthy. In Athens the plays were viewed only at festivals and then at a rate of four or five a day over several days and were seldom re-staged. There could have been very few scripts. Their messages were more important than the story-line, which was determined by the author's imagination as much as any tradition. In Athens art generally translated stage satyr-players into real satyrs, and took little visual inspiration from the stage, except perhaps for some 'stagey' compositions. Stage plays were not an exclusively Athenian phenomenon, but nearly so, and Athens is not all Greece.

Looking at Greek art we need to remember too how much has been lost - almost all paintings on walls or panels, much on perishable material like textiles, much on valuable metals that might be melted down, and this includes statuary since marble goes to the limekiln. Nevertheless, many media have survived well - notably painted pottery of the 8th to 4th centuries BC, which is a major source since it was exploited as an important medium for narrative subjects (and in a period of considerable activity by the literate minority), while the art displayed on major monuments like temples has often survived well, especially where there were concentrations, as at sanctuaries. Decorated Greek vases were numerous, almost indestructible and most were not expensive; we have tens of thousands. Our record of the ancient visual evidence for narrative is therefore rich, but does it merely illustrate the texts, lost or surviving?

We acknowledge the priority of an oral tradition, going back to at least 1000 BC if not into the Bronze Age (Mycenaean), and remember that alphabetic writing was only invented for the Greek language in the 8th century, when some order began to be put into myth by writers (Hesiod) as well as new invention to fill gaps and genalogies. Narrative imagery and writing appeared at about the same time, but each craft rapidly devised its own idiom and canon of stories - the literary very often dependent on copying from other written sources and the convenience of narrative formulae; the art dependent on what stories could be portrayed, usually without the help of inscriptions to identify people, and never descriptive captions. And there was always the inspiration from surviving monuments of the 'heroic' past, from the foreigner whose arts were then profoundly re-shaping those of Greece, from sheer invention, and sometimes from the need to answer or illustrate a new situation with a new story.

The result was very often a divergence of detail even for the same tale, and we often have to concede priority to art for the earlier period when literary sources are meagre. This would hardly have worried Greek Everyman: he could not read and need not have picked up much detail from listening, but his world was one full of images from public monuments to the utensils of everyday life. A result is often simple contradiction between art and literature, and although we depend on the latter often to identify the subjects in art this is by no means invariable, since the artists devised formulaic idioms which enable us to recognise their intentions, and sometimes they do add the names. There are a great many stories and details of stories known to us only from art. And the writers of antiquity were themselves exposed to narrative images far more frequently, indeed on a daily basis, than artists or the public were to texts or performances; there is as much to learn about the effects of art on literature as vice versa, but each craft tended to adhere to its own traditions.

The subject matter was almost always heroic, mythical. Contemporary events and politics were not subjects for Greek art although they could be alluded to, often through myth, but contemporary life, generalised, was - feasting, the workplace, religion. So, although we have historical records from authors and monuments, there can be cause to refer to them only where they seem to have inspired a visual, mythical, parallel.

Images were important; they are still, even in our highly literate society. They recall places and people and stories more rapidly and dramatically than words, and for many people, in what seems to be becoming an increasingly illiterate (or at least non-reading) society, they identify all the important elements of modern life.

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand" "One picture is worth a thousand words" Chinese proverbs

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