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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 Gospel of the Lots of Mary

Robin Ngo — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 11:00:36 +0000

AnneMarie Luijendijk has studied a previously unknown Late Antique text called The Gospel of the Lots of Mary. Photo: Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Mrs. Beatrice Kelekian in memory of her husband, Charles Dikran Kelekian, 1984.669.

Princeton University professor of religion AnneMarie Luijendijk has identified a previously unknown text called The Gospel of the Lots of Mary in a fifth–sixth-century C.E. Coptic miniature codex. Luijendijk’s research is presented in her recently published book Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

The miniature codex, LiveScience reports, is composed of pages just 3 inches in height and contains 37 oracles that would have been used for divination.

The opening lines of the codex read, in Coptic (a script adapted from Greek and used by Egyptian Christians):

“The Gospel of the lots of Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, she to whom Gabriel the Archangel brought the good news. He who will go forward with his whole heart will obtain what he seeks. Only do not be of two minds.”

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In this context, “lots” refer to objects drawn at random to make a decision. The Gospel of the Lots of Mary is not a gospel (from evangelion—“good news”) in the traditional sense that it describes the life and death of Jesus or is canonized as part of the New Testament. This gospel combines divinatory phrases and Biblical allusions.

“The fact that this book is called that way is very significant,” Luijendijk told LiveScience. “To me, it also really indicated that it had something to do [with] how people would consult it and also about being [seen] as good news. Nobody who wants to know the future wants to hear bad news in a sense.”

According to Luijendijk, the gospel would have been used like this: A person who needed guidance or an answer to a question would go through the book and randomly pick out an oracle for the solution—leaving the selection all up to chance. The small size of the codex meant it could be carried around easily.

The Gospel of the Lots of Mary, then, is sort of like an ancient Magic 8 Ball. And like the Magic 8 Ball, the oracles are vague enough that one could draw personalized interpretations from them. For instance, oracle 34 reads:

“Go forward immediately. This is a thing from God. You know that, behold, for many days you are suffering greatly. But it is of no concern to you, because you have come to the haven of victory.”

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A version of this article was previously published in Bible History Daily on February 10, 2015.

The post The Gospel of the Lots of Mary appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

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.

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 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.

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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.

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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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Hierapolis and the Gateway to Hell

Noah Wiener — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 20:13:28 +0000

Italian archaeologists excavating the Phrygian city of Hierapolis in southwestern Turkey uncovered the remains of Pluto’s Gate, a site considered an entrance into the underworld in the Greco-Roman period. The apostle Philip preached and died at Hierapolis, a thriving Roman city that became an important Christian center.

Pluto’s Gate in ancient Hierapolis was considered a gateway to hell and sacred to the underworld deity Pluto. Photo: Francesco D’Andria, Discovery.

Shrouded in misty poisonous vapors, Pluto’s Gate, or the Plutonium, was a cave entrance sacred to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. According to the first-century geographer Strabo, the site was home to rituals in which any animals entering the enclosure “meet with sudden death.”

Hierapolis archaeologist Francesco D’Andria reconstructed the route of the area’s thermal spring to discover Pluto’s Gate, which was destroyed by Christians in the sixth century. The Plutonium’s infamous mystique is not just the stuff of legend; during the excavation, several birds were killed by carbon dioxide emissions as they approached the Plutonium cave’s entrance.

During the excavation, poisonous fumes from Pluto’s Gate killed several birds, echoing the seemingly mythological tales recorded by Strabo. Photo: Francesco D’Andria, Discovery.

This is not the first astounding discovery at D’Andria’s excavation at Hierapolis, located next to the often-visited hot springs and travertines at the World Heritage Site of Pamukkale. According to the apocryphal Acts of Philip, the apostle Philip preached and converted many Hierapolis residents, yet he was martyred there nonetheless. An octagonal church was built in Hierapolis to memorialize the saint, and a sixth-century bread stamp depicts Philip standing at the very site. The publication of D’Andria’s article “Conversion, Crucifixion and Celebration” in the July/August 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review was followed by the discovery of a small church that D’Andria believes to be the tomb of St. Philip.

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“CASTLE OF COTTON.” The translation of Pamukkale, the modern Turkish name for the area near Hierapolis, aptly describes the breathtaking natural travertine formations at the site. Hierapolis sits on an active seismic fault line that has created earthquakes and hot springs over the millennia, the latter an early attraction of the site. The precipitation of minerals from the geothermal hot springs harden into the sedimentary rock travertine and form the so-called “cotton flowers” that continue to attract visitors. Photo: Archive of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Hierapolis.

Hierapolis’s gateway to hell was an important sacred space in the city. The first-century traveler Strabo described its deadly properties:

The Plutonium, below a small brow of the mountainous country that lies above it, is an opening of only moderate size, large enough to admit a man, but it reaches a considerable depth, and it is enclosed by a quadrilateral handrail, about half a plethrum in circumference, and this space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Now to those who approach the handrail anywhere round the enclosure the air is harmless, since the outside is free from that vapor in calm weather, for the vapor then stays inside the enclosure, but any animal that passes inside meets instant death. At any rate, bulls that are led into it fall and are dragged out dead; and I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell. But the Galli, who are eunuchs, pass inside with such impunity that they even approach the opening, bend over it, and descend into it to a certain depth, though they hold their breath as much as they can (for I could see in their countenances an indication of a kind of suffocating attack, as it were)—whether this immunity belongs to all who are maimed in this way or only to those round the temple, or whether it is because of divine providence, as would be likely in the case of divine obsessions, or whether it is, the result of certain physical powers that are antidotes against the vapor (Strabo, Geography 13.4.14, trans. by Horace Leonard Jones).

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).

Word Play

Glenn J. Corbett — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 15:44:37 +0000

At the bottom of this magic incantation bowl from late antique Babylonia, a shackled and bound demon is shown surrounded by the spiraling words of a prayer for protection. It was believed that the written words of the encircling prayer would be able to keep the evil forces in the center of the bowl at bay. Throughout ancient Israelite and Jewish history, authors used writing as a sort of sympathetic magic, a way to directly control and manipulate forces beyond their control. Photo: Hershel Shanks.

To the modern world, the written word is often taken for granted. We are so removed from the origins of writing that when we write something, whether on a piece of paper, on a sign or on the internet, we don’t even think about the physical act of creating words. For us, writing is simply a means to an end, an almost primordial and instinctive technology that we use to communicate with each other.

But 3,000 years ago, when alphabetic writing had just begun to spread across the masses of the ancient Near East, written words were far more than idle marks meant simply to be read. Words were repositories of power, physical vessels that gave material reality to one’s innermost thoughts and even the soul itself. So it was in ancient Israel.¹

In the Hebrew Bible there are clear indications that writing was often thought to have tangible, even magical, properties. In Numbers 5:11–28, a woman accused of adultery is made to consume “the water of bitterness,” a cloudy concoction infused with the washed-off ink from the words of a written curse. If the woman is innocent, the curse will have no effect; if she is guilty, the curse will cause her thighs to waste away and her belly to swell. In a similar vein, when Ezekiel accepts his prophetic mission from God during a dreamlike trance, he eats a scroll inscribed with the words of the divine message (Ezekiel 2:9–3:11). Having ingested the words, Ezekiel and God’s message become one.

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The magical properties of writing meant that written words, once they came into being, were active and sometimes even unstable forces that could be manipulated, both for good and for ill. Numerous short dedicatory inscriptions found in Iron Age Israel and elsewhere make requests for divine blessing and protection,* many having only the author’s name, what is requested and the name of the deity. As Biblical scholar Susan Niditch has said, it is as if the act of writing the prayer “[brought] the God-presence into a sort of material reality,” thus allowing the words to become infused with “visceral power.”²

But just as writing could help an author’s prayers get answered, it could also be used to inflict pain and suffering. Curse inscriptions often protected tombs, monumental inscriptions and seemingly mundane graffiti throughout the ancient Near East, and ancient Israel was no exception.** In a world where the simple act of erasing an author’s name was tantamount to wiping out a person’s very life and essence, author’s went to great lengths to ensure that would-be vandals and robbers suffered the same fate. Hiram, a tenth-century B.C. king of Byblos, wrote on his sarcophagus that anyone who attempted to destroy his inscription would have their own inscription (i.e., life) blotted out. Likewise, the anonymous author of an inscription found at the seventh-century B.C. site of Horvat ‘Uza in the eastern Negev claimed that if the words of his text were not heeded, the grave of the disobedient reader would be destroyed.

Similar ideas about the transformative power of written words continued to persist among the Jewish populations of the Near East throughout antiquity. In late antique Babylonia (third–seventh centuries A.D.), for example, countless ceramic bowls were inscribed with prayers, curses and healing rituals written in the Jewish-Aramaic script.*** The spiraling, cramped inscriptions of the bowls often encircled drawings of bound demons and other evil spirits. Writing, even in this late period, was still invested with the power to bring prayers and curses to life.

——————

Check out “Rare Magic Inscription on Human Skull” in the March/April 2009 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review for more information about ancient inscriptions.

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Notes:

* Gabriel Barkay, “The Riches of Ketef Hinnom,” Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August September/October 2009.

** Hershel Shanks, “The Tombs of Silwan,” Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1994.

*** Hershel Shanks, “Magic Incantation Bowls,” Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2007.

1. For a thorough overview of the power and uses of the written word in ancient Israel, see Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1996).

2. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, pp. 46–47.

Fragment of Homer’s Odyssey Unearthed at Olympia

Robin Ngo — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 17:17:55 +0000

Archaeologists working at the Greek site of Olympia, home of the ancient Olympic Games, discovered near the sanctuary of Zeus a Roman-period clay tablet containing 13 lines of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. The discovery was made by the archaeological project The Multidimensional Site of Olympia, led by Dr. Erofili-Iris Kollia, Director of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Ilia, and first announced by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Discovered at Olympia in Greece, this third-century C.E. tablet inscribed with lines from Homer’s Odyssey poses many interesting questions about its context. Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Preliminarily dated to the third century C.E., the tablet contains the portion of The Odyssey in which the cunning Greek warrior Odysseus, having spent 10 years journeying home to Ithaca after the Trojan War (with several obstacles and detours along the way), has come to the hut of his slave Eumaeus, a swineherd.

This passage, from Book 14, is “an account of how Eumaeus, whose job is to take care of the pigs, constructed his own yard and a neatly arranged set of pigsties during the 20 years that Odysseus was away from home, with no help from his owners,” explains Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in a London Review of Books article discussing the discovery at Olympia. Wilson recently published a translation of The Odyssey (Norton, 2017)—the first woman to do so in English.

The 12,000-line Odyssey and the preceding epic The Iliad, which recounts the final year of the 10-year war between the Greeks and Trojans, are regarded as the earliest-surviving and most important works of Greek literature. These epic poems are attributed to a bard named Homer who may have lived in the eighth century B.C.E., although some scholars have questioned whether Homer was one person or a name ascribed to a collection of oral poems.

Although media reports have erroneously described the discovery at Olympia as the oldest attestation of The Odyssey, several archaeological finds pre-date this third-century C.E. tablet, including the oldest known example: a broken pottery piece (ostracon) dating to the fifth century B.C.E. from the ancient Greek city of Olbia in Ukraine containing line 9.39 of The Odyssey.

In the London Review of Books, Wilson cautions readers to view news stories with a critical eye:

“The bright side to this inaccurately reported story is that it reveals a hunger among the general public for news about the ancient world. […] Maybe this fake news story will inspire more people to investigate the ancient world for themselves, and also to realize that the stories told about the Odyssey are—like the poem’s wily, scheming, deceitful protagonist himself—not always to be taken at face value.”

Despite the misleading spin, the tablet from Olympia is interesting in its own right.

“This extraordinary and unique discovery raises so many new questions,” said Diane H. Cline, Associate Professor in the history department at The George Washington University, in an email to Bible History Daily. “Is this a gift to the gods, and if so, who would choose to dedicate a plaque with 13 lines of The Odyssey to Zeus? Why would someone inscribe these particular lines, which aren’t really that pithy or significant? A large zone in the archaeological site at Olympia is an area used by athletes, the gymnasium and palaestra. There they exercised but also took lessons, and this text may be related. Was this part of a set of tablets used for study and teaching?”

On his blog, Classicist Peter Gainsford of the Victoria University of Wellington, who made a preliminary examination of the inscription based on pictures provided by the Greek Ministry, described the unusual medium on which the inscription was written: “It isn’t written on papyrus, like most literary texts. It isn’t a verse inscription on stone, of which we have many. It’s a clay tablet. This was never a common writing medium in the Greco-Roman world. Its use for this tablet, and for this text, is something quite unique.”

“[While the] artifact is extraordinary, it is important to remember that the text is at least a thousand years later than the date of Homer’s composition,” explained Cline. “What did these verses of Homer mean to people living in the time of the later Roman Empire? The meaning of this artifact in its physical and temporal contexts will be debated in the years to come. Scholars like myself are eager to learn more about its find-spot and how the text compares to other versions of The Odyssey.”

Alexander in the East

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 18:20:34 +0000

Alexander the Great never reached his goal of conquering all the inhabited earth. This was simply beyond his army’s endurance. But he did get as far east as ancient Bactria, in modern Afghanistan. More than two thousand years later, archaeologists have begun to recover evidence of Greek settlers Alexander left behind at a village called Ai Khanoum. Unfortunately, much of what remains in this remote area of war-torn Afghanistan is being looted from the site and plundered from museums. The tale is nonetheless heroic, even if it ends in tragedy.

History, it is said, is a huge mirror, a reflection of who we were and are. If so, archaeology is the painstaking recovery of pieces of that fragile looking glass, and the life of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) represents but a tiny sherd of that mirror.¹

Spurring his beloved horse Bucephalus into the fray, Alexander the Great (far left) seeks out his Persian adversary Darius III (center, wearing a golden helmet) in this second-century B.C. mosaic from Pompeii’s House of the Faun. The mosaic depicts the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.) in northern Syria, where Alexander defeated the Persians. Darius managed to escape and two years later was again defeated by Alexander (whose idealized image is captured in the Roman marble bust in the next photo) at Gaugamela, in present-day Iraq. Not content merely to rule the former Achaemenid Empire, Alexander proceeded east. His goal? Becoming the Lord of Asia and all the known world. At its height, Alexander’s empire stretched east to India, north to the Danube River and south to the upper Nile. Berthold Werner’s image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Archaeologists have turned up Alexander’s traces in Egyptian temples, Apulian vases, Etruscan reliefs, Pompeian mosaics, Gandharan sculptures and medieval medallions—as well as in a village in Afghanistan.

Over and over, succeeding generations of Greek heroes, Roman imperialists, saintly medieval kings and modern totalitarian dictators have recognized reflections of their own glory in Alexander’s grand, panoramic career.²

The Alexander I see was neither a ruthless monster nor a poster-boy for world peace and brotherhood.³ He was cultured and charismatic but also cunning and cruel. He grew up in a dangerous world of war and intrigue that gave no quarter to real or imagined weakness. His native Macedonia in northern Greece embraced the old warrior code of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: No challenge went unanswered, no insult passed unpunished. Men fought hard, hunted recklessly and drank epically—monarchs most of all.

Macedonian kings did not order their armies into battle; they led them. Alexander, like his father Philip II, bore the conspicuous scars of brutal combat as badges of leadership. A mutilated eye, arm, collarbone and leg distinguished Philip among friends and foes. Alexander endured wounds to the head, neck, shoulder, chest, thigh, leg and ankle. Never safe, the threat of assassination also haunted these restless heads of state. Alexander witnessed the murder of his father during a royal procession in 336 B.C.; in later years, his mother, two wives and son would also be killed. Every one of Alexander’s relatives died at the hands of assassins.⁴

Although bred for battle, Alexander nonetheless received the finest education possible under the tutelage of the philosopher Aristotle. The young heir-apparent proved himself a devoted student of Greek culture, and as king he was a lavish patron of the arts. He built or refurbished many shrines and temples, founded cities (usually named Alexandria) and vied to outdo the deeds of his avowed ancestors, both mortal and divine: Zeus, Herakles, Achilles.

That Alexander set out to conquer Greece’s traditional enemy, the Persian Achaemenid Empire,^a should come as no surprise. The conquest of Persia had been his father’s unfulfilled dream, and the promise of gold and glory fired the ambitious young king’s imagination. But the magnitude of Alexander’s successes—the swiftness and decisiveness of his victories—remains shocking even after 23 centuries.

Backed by a shaky coalition of Greek city-states, Alexander led an army of 37,000 troops against Persia in the spring of 334 B.C. He soon rocked the cradle of civilization with astonishing victories: the Battle of Granicus in 334, the Battle of Issus in 333, the Siege of Tyre in 332 and the Battle of Gaugamela in 331. In just four years, Alexander overran and occupied the rich territories of the modern Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The Persian “King of Kings,” Darius III, lay dead, his palaces plundered and his armies—which had always outnumbered Alexander’s—scattered. At the age of 26, Alexander had become the mightiest, wealthiest and most celebrated conqueror of all time.⁵

But he did not stop there. Although his army was anxious to return home to Greece, Alexander decided to push ever eastward toward the fringes of the then-known world. How he drove his men through the hardships to come remains a mystery of military science.

For the next three years (329–327 B.C.), Alexander’s forces struggled desperately to win control of Bactria, the harsh, inhospitable region of modern Afghanistan.⁶ At times, weather seemed the Greeks’ worst enemy. A lack of provisions and waist-deep snows in the Hindu Kush mountains compelled the men to eat their baggage animals raw; howling blizzards in the Pamir Mountains actually froze many Greeks where they stood or slept. In summer the burning plains of Bactria claimed more lives than any battle fought by these long-suffering troops. Dehydration and brackish water debilitated everyone, including Alexander.

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The idealized image of Alexander is captured in this Roman marble bust (compare with photo of mosaic from Pompeii’s House of the Faun).

All the while, the local peoples put up fierce resistance. First led by Bessus, a kinsman of the dead King Darius, and later more ably by one of Bessus’s generals named Spitamenes, the native populations engaged the Greeks in a new style of warfare—the hit-and-run guerrilla combat that still works so well in Afghanistan.

In 328 B.C., while Greeks back home gathered to celebrate the 113th Olympic Games, Alexander’s army competed in a much grimmer contest 3,000 miles away. They stormed mountain fortresses and chased mobile insurgents all over the region. The Greek soldiers faced stern opposition, with enemies coming at them from all sides; it was like trying to put out a forest fire that kept breaking out in different areas. In an essay on Alexander, the Greek historian Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.) chooses a different metaphor:

But if the spirit of Alexander had not been great, had not drawn strength from virtue, had not defied Fortune, then would he not have wearied and given up marshalling and arming his troops, besieging cities, chasing down subjects in numerous revolts, desertions, and riots, pursuing faithless kings to Bactra, Maracanda, and Sogdiana as if he were cutting off the heads of the Hydra which always grew back in renewed wars.⁷

Under the strain, some of Alexander’s men became mutinous and the king himself cracked: He murdered a Macedonian general named Cleitus the Black—who had once saved his life in battle—simply for insulting him at a dinner party.⁸

To retain control of the region, Alexander settled his men in military colonies at strategic points in Bactria. These soldiers lamented their orders, which required them to spend their careers living so far from the sun-splashed beaches and balmy climate back home in Greece. In 327 B.C. Alexander finally enjoyed a change of fortune. Spitamenes’s own exhausted troops (or his unhappy wife, as one source reports) betrayed him and delivered his head to the Greek camp.⁹

Seizing the moment, Alexander married the daughter of a captured Bactrian leader, Oxyartes, to win favor among the disheartened locals. His young bride, Roxanne, may seem a romantic figure, but she was a mere pawn queened by her father and husband in a move toward peace in central Asia. Leaving behind 13,500 reluctant soldier-settlers to garrison Bactria, Alexander headed east once again.

Photograph by Sharon Suchma, courtesy of the American Numismatic Society
The ancient Greek silver decadrachm shown here was minted in 323 B.C. (possibly in Babylon) and depicts a mounted Alexander charging an Indian war elephant (compare with photo of medieval miniature). During the Battle of the Hydaspes River, many of the wildly trumpeting elephants panicked, trampling Porus’s foot soldiers, while Macedonian archers picked off his cavalrymen. The Indian rajah’s defeat was devastating; his casualties have been variously estimated at 12,000 to 23,000 men. Yet Alexander saluted his foe’s bravery by magnanimously permitting Porus to continue to rule—under Greek control, of course.

In 326 B.C., Alexander’s troops encountered yet another hostile world in northwest India. The monsoons swamped the invading army and made the five great rivers of the Punjab nearly impassable. On the far side of one of these raging torrents, the Hydaspes River, the forces of a defiant rajah named Porus lay in wait. His elephant corps, the panzers of the ancient past, complicated Alexander’s task immensely but did not stop the Greeks. Alexander outmaneuvered the Indians, ferried his main army across the river under cover of rain and darkness, and overwhelmed Porus with a surprise dawn attack. After a harrowing fight punctuated by the screams of trampled men and trumpeting elephants, the Indian forces collapsed and Porus was captured.

Unexpectedly, Alexander rewarded the rajah’s bravery by restoring his throne, a rare outcome indeed for an ancient battle. Many historians consider the Battle of the Hydaspes to be Alexander’s greatest victory and compare it to the Norman invasion of Britain or (conversely) the Allied landing at Normandy.¹⁰ It turned out to be the last major battle of Alexander’s career. Soon thereafter his weary Greeks begged to turn back. Alexander’s personal goal, reaching the end of the inhabited earth, obviously lay far to the east across the Indian subcontinent, well beyond the limits of his army’s endurance. Grudgingly, the 30-year-old king settled on a less grandiose plan: He would build a fleet and subdue the Indus Valley as far south as the Indian Ocean, then divide his forces and return by land and sea to Babylon.

Still leading by fearless example, Alexander suffered grievously during these last campaigns. Attacking the town of Multan in India, he was the first man over the wall and sustained a life-threatening arrow wound to the chest. Afterward, on his arduous trek westward across the bleak Gedrosian Desert, the king refused water in order to share the suffering of his men. This march cost many lives and left a rare stain on his exemplary record of logistical planning.¹¹

In “The Ancient Library of Alexandria,” learn about the research center established by Ptolemy I in Alexandria, Egypt.

Undaunted by torrential monsoon rains, Alexander crossed the Hydaspes River in 326 B.C. to take on the elephant-mounted troops of the Indian rajah Porus—a scene captured in the medieval miniature shown here (compare with photo of Greek silver decadrachm). Alexander displayed his tactical genius during the battle, confusing Porus with feints and mounting an attack on the Indian army’s flanks.

Some modern scholars insist that these hardships drove Alexander to despair, even dementia.¹² He put to death some of the high-ranking officials in his imperial government, ordered the Greeks to worship him as a god, mourned excessively the death of his dearest friend, Hephaestion, compelled many of his generals to marry Persian noblewomen and dreamed of improbable conquests across Africa, Asia and Europe. Although his body was battered by war, his mind raced ahead to envision a supranational world under his divine power. Then, swiftly and unexpectedly, Alexander sickened and died in Babylon, probably the victim of either typhus or malaria.¹³ He was only 32 years old. According to tradition, his final prophetic words were, “I foresee a great funeral contest over me.”

Alexander had single-mindedly carved out an empire ranging from the Adriatic Sea to the borders of India. His ambitious generals gradually killed off all the conqueror’s kinfolk, including Roxanne and her royal son Alexander IV, so that the empire could be whittled into new dynastic kingdoms: Antigonid Macedonia, Seleucid Syria, Ptolemaic Egypt, Attalid Pergamum, Diodotid Bactria and others. Alexander’s remarkable conquests and untimely death gave birth to a new epoch, called the Hellenistic Age (323–30 B.C.); its civilization has generally been considered more like ours than any other in history. We can see in that ancient world similar patterns of imperialism and colonialism, and a comparable array of social and ethnic tensions. Then, as now, economies boomed, scientific discoveries dazzled the public, cults and astrology flourished, and people sought personal liberation. According to one modern scholar, the Hellenistic Age confronts us with “an overpowering sense of déjàvu.”¹⁴

Phototgraph by Sharon Suchma, courtesy of the American Numismatic Society
East meets West on the two sides of the silver tetradrachm shown here, minted in the Bactrian city of Panjhir around 145 B.C. The obverse is inscribed with Greek writing and a helmeted bust of Menander, a Hellenistic Bactrian king who converted to Buddhism in the mid-second century B.C. The coin’s reverse is written in the local Kharosthi script—which uses an alphabet derived from Aramaic—and depicts Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, hurling a thunderbolt.

There is, however, one notable blind spot in this mirror of history. We can see with some clarity the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions of Alexander’s old empire, but the eastern edge has long eluded us.¹⁵ Ancient texts tell us simply that Alexander’s legacy in Bactria and India was a troubled one. After Alexander’s death, the unhappy Greeks who had settled in Bactria tried to pack up and leave their posts, but they were compelled to stay under penalty of death by Alexander’s generals, among them Seleucus, the founder of the Seleucid dynasty. In 318 B.C., further east, Greek settlers assassinated Porus (the rajah whom Alexander had conquered and then returned to power), leaving Seleucus little choice but to trade India back to the natives for 500 war elephants. The literary sources tell us little more; they provide only a fantastic image of Greek merchants and mercenaries adrift in central and south Asia—a land beyond history where fierce griffins flew, strange rivers oozed oil and honey, native peoples ate their aging parents, and giant ants heaped up mounds of gold. Ancient geographers and poets wrote of a thousand lost cities in this neverland of monsters and missing Greeks. In the 13th century A.D., Marco Polo sought the lost cities in vain; Chaucer imagined one of their kings, Emetrius, as a man who rode a splendid steed “like Mars,” attended by an entourage of lords, lions and leopards.

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

When Englishmen arrived in the 19th century to play out the infamous “Great Game” between Czarist Russia and British India, they found the hoary ghosts of Alexander and his army everywhere in Afghanistan. Tribesmen in remote valleys claimed to be the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks; even the ancestors of their horses, it was said, had been sired by Alexander’s famous steed, Bucephalus. Lakes and towns bore many variations of the ubiquitous name Iskendar (Alexander), as did such leaders as Sha Sikander Khan. These tireless legends even trickled into Rudyard Kipling’s tale “The Man Who Would Be King.” Not long ago, a Tadjik native told me about an amateur archaeologist who took a skull he had found to a local museum. “Alexander’s,” the man proudly informed the curator. Pleased by the museum’s eagerness to display his find, the man quickly returned with a smaller skull. “Alexander’s, too,” he reported, “only a little younger!”

Alexander himself will never be found in Afghanistan (the king’s mummy, with one head only, was actually entombed in Alexandria, Egypt). But what of his lost colonists in the Alexandrias of central Asia? What became of the Greeks forced to build a new life in that far-off land?

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The towering mountains of the Hindu Kush overlook the Bamiyan valley of Afghanistan, where Taliban soldiers recently reduced most of the famed Buddhas of Bamiyan to rubble (see John C. Huntington, “The Buddhas of Bamiyan”). Alexander’s troops faced punishing weather and terrain as they made their way through narrow mountain passes. (Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle, had conjectured that the ends of the earth should be visible from the peaks of the Hindu Kush.) Alexander moved on, conquering Bactria and sweeping into the Punjab, finally reaching the Indian Ocean near the modern city of Karachi, Pakistan. The Greek conqueror then returned westward through Persia and Mesopotamia, where he died suddenly in Babylon in 323 B.C.

The scientific search for them began in earnest with the foundation of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) in 1922. Alfred Foucher, a French expert on the Greco-Buddhist art found in Gandhara, guided this mission in the belief that Alexander’s colonies in Bactria were the obvious missing link in the evolution of Greek-style art in ancient India (See Rekha Morris, “Imagining Buddha”). Hellenistic cities must have survived in central Asia long after Alexander was gone, but where were they? Foucher excavated in vain. No traces of Greek cities or monumental art turned up anywhere in Afghanistan, forcing the exhausted archaeologist to declare 20 years later that he had been chasing a “mirage.”¹⁶ Others continued the search until finally, in 1961, the mirage lifted and revealed a significant piece of the mirror of history near a village named Ai Khanoum.

On a royal hunt in a remote corner of his realm, King Muhammad Zahir Shah of Afghanistan spotted a strange outline in the dry soil between two rivers. Looking down from a hillside at this confluence of the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus) and Kochba rivers, the king could see traces of a well-planned ancient city: A wall and defensive ditch stretched from the hill to the Oxus, broken only by a gateway leading to the main street inside the settlement. The shapes of many large buildings bulged underneath the thin carpet of dirt, and at least one Corinthian column rose up like a signpost of Hellenistic civilization. Here, at last, was Alexander’s elusive legacy in the East.

In 1965, the DAFA commenced full-scale work at Ai Khanoum that continued until the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During those years, under the very fortunate direction of French archaeologist Paul Bernard, archaeologists wrested the remarkable story of Hellenistic Bactria from the ruins of Ai Khanoum.¹⁷

The Greek founder of this colony, which may have been called Alexandria Oxiana,^b was a man named Kineas, whose fourth-century B.C. shrine and tomb stood in the heart of the city. Kineas may have been one of Alexander’s soldiers, sent to settle this strategic fortress on the frontiers of Bactria. There are indications of an attack on the site soon after Alexander’s demise, perhaps part of the disturbances that took place when Greek settlers attempted to abandon Bactria. Fifty years later, under the aegis of the Seleucid dynasty, a major building phase began. True to Greek cultural traditions, the later citizens of the city enjoyed a large theater, a gymnasium with a pool, and quantities of olive oil and wine. Papyrus for writing was transported from Egypt.

The Archaeology of Afghanistan
Inscribed at the base of the funerary monument of Kineas, the founder of the city of Ai Khanoum, are five Delphic maxims (shown here, compare with photo of confluence of the Oxus and Kochba Rivers)—exhortations to follow certain ethical behaviors at each of life’s stages. A high premium was placed on preserving such Greek values in imperial backwaters like Ai Khanoum. The philosopher Clearchus made a special trip to Delphi to make a transcript of the maxims and carried them all the way back to Ai Khanoum to inspire the city’s inhabitants.

These ancient Greeks built large, luxurious private homes and a great sprawling palace. Their Greek names and political titles appear on tombstones and government records. To preserve Greek values in this alien land, an Aristotelian philosopher copied the Delphic Maxims in Greece and carried them all the way to Bactria. An inscription found at Ai Khanoum explained to the colonists that these maxims were the wise counsel of earlier Greeks as codified by priests at the sacred site of Delphi. Their closing lines convey the idea of this Hellenic creed “blazing from afar”:

As a youth, be self-controlled.
As an adult, be just.
As an elder, be wise,
As one dying, be without regrets.¹⁸

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

Ancient Ai Khanoum must also have been visited by numerous itinerant merchants and nomads, from both East and West. Archaeologists have found a few ostraca (texts inscribed on potsherds) in Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew that the Persians used for administrative purposes. (Aramaic also influenced the development of contemporary Indian scripts, such as Kharoshthi.)

What of the Bactrians themselves, the natives who fought Alexander and outnumbered the Greek immigrants? Are they reflected in the mirror of history as equal partners at Ai Khanoum or as an exploited underclass? The archaeological record reflects a picture that is disturbingly similar to the ghettos and barrios of our own cities. The Bactrians (ancestors of today’s Tadjik peoples) huddled in single-room houses—well away from the guarded mansions and public buildings of the Greek ruling class. Some Bactrian names appear in lists of the city’s officials, but only in the very lowest ranks and always under Greek supervisors.

Coins minted at Ai Khanoum and other Bactrian sites give us the first real evidence of cultural integration. On these coins, the Greeks introduced images of native deities and even inscriptions in local languages. Square coins, like those favored in India, were also minted. The more valuable the coin, the more purely Greek it tended to be, and some of this money was precious indeed. The largest gold and silver coins ever minted in the ancient world came from the Greek kings of Hellenistic Bactria.

The Bactrian kings condensed as much information as they could onto these portable billboards: royal names, titles, portraits, regalia, religious patronage, dynastic connections and military victories. Their coin inscriptions reveal that new dynasties continued to arise in Bactria. In about 250 B.C., the region rebelled against the Seleucids and established itself as an independent Greek kingdom under Diodotus I and II, an ambitious father and son who fell in turn to Euthydemus I and his family. This next dynasty flourished and carried Greek power back into India, retracing and then surpassing Alexander’s original conquests. One Euthydemid king, Agathocles, honored Alexander’s memory with a special coin. In the second century B.C., the usurper Eucratides—the first Greek king to call himself “the Great”—defeated the Euthydemids, but was then assassinated by his own son around 150 B.C.

All of this in-fighting weakened Hellenistic Bactria. As a result, 200 years after the reign of Alexander, the Greek settlements along the Oxus River were overwhelmed by nomadic invaders from the north.¹⁹ The settlement at Ai Khanoum was among the first to be abandoned, its inhabitants fleeing into the mountains or moving south into India.

Paul Bernard
Archaeological excavations (the outlines of the ancient city near the confluence of the Oxus and Kochba Rivers can be seen in this photograph, compare with photo of Kineas funerary monument inscription) have revealed that Ai Khanoum’s colonists also took these maxims seriously and built institutions—a large theater, palace library and gymnasium—that fostered traditional Greek mores.

Lost for 2,000 years, these Hellenistic settlements are vanishing once again—this time, forever.²⁰ In war-ravaged Afghanistan, the tangible traces of Alexander’s legacy are being systematically destroyed. Ai Khanoum lies looted, its buildings cratered into a lunar landscape by clandestine digging, its treasures trucked away for sale. Artifacts excavated by the DAFA and “safely” stored in the National Museum at Kabul have also been plundered; some of these antiquities are now being publicly auctioned on the World Wide Web to collectors in Europe and America.²¹ So once again the fragile mirror of history has been shattered; its sherds swept up by the greedy among us. We may at least be grateful to archaeology for providing us with a fleeting glimpse of a tumultuous era hauntingly similar to our own.

I dedicate this article to the unsung heroes of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage.

“Alexander in the East” by Frank Holt originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2001. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily on April 22, 2015.

Frank Holt, a professor of history at the University of Houston, is a leading authority on Alexander the Great. In his books Thundering Zeus (University of California, 1999) and Alexander the Great and Bactria (Brill, 1993), Holt pursues his fascination with Alexander’s eastern campaigns.

Notes:

a. The Persian dynasty descended from Achaemenes (c. 700 B.C.) ruled over a vast empire, which Darius I (521–486 B.C.) expanded from the Nile to the Indus. Yet Darius failed to conquer Greece in the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., and his son Xerxes was defeated at Salamis ten years later.

b. No inscription from the site mentions its ancient name; however, Bernard associated the site with the Alexandria Oxiana referred to by Ptolemy (c. 90–168 A.D.) in his Geography 6.12.5–6.

1. Following are recommended histories of Alexander’s reign: Alan Bosworth, Conquest and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986); Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991); Nicholas Hammond, The Genius of Alexander the Great (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina, 1997); John O’Brien, Alexander the Great (London: Routledge, 1992).

2. Important studies include Andrew Stewart, Faces of Power (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993); George Cary, The Medieval Alexander (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956); and Ernst Badian, ed., Alexandre le Grand: Image et Réalité (Vanduvres-Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1976).

3. Frank Holt, “Alexander the Great Today,” Ancient History Bulletin 13.3 (1999): pp. 111–117.

4. On Philip II and the Macedonian background, see Eugene Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990). Alexander’s murdered kinfolk included his father, mother, siblings, two wives and son.

5. In one month, Alexander captured 4,835 tons of gold and silver. Greek sources record only 116.2 tons of plundered silver in the Aegean wars of the previous 150 years!

6. Full details may be found in Frank Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria (Leiden, the Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1988).

7. Plutarch, Moralia 341 f.

8. Alexander killed Cleitus the Black, whose career is included in Waldemar Heckel, The Marshals of Alexander’s Empire (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 34–37.

9. The first-century A.D. Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus (Life of Alexander the Great 8.3.1–15) claims that Spitamenes’s beloved wife begged him to end the war, but he refused. She therefore cut off his head as he slept and then personally delivered the trophy to Alexander’s tent. The king rejoiced but ordered the woman to leave his camp, lest she unnerve his army. The daughter of this woman was later married to Seleucus, one of Alexander’s generals and the founder of the Seleucid dynasty in Syria.

10. For example, John Frederick Charles Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1960), p. 188, and Andrew Robert Burn, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 153.

11. The classic study of this important topic is Donald Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978).

12. Alexander’s insecurities are discussed most notably by Ernst Badian in “Alexander the Great and the Loneliness of Power,” in Studies in Greek and Roman History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).

13. For instance, David Oldach et al., “A Mysterious Death,” The New England Journal of Medicine 238.24 (1998), pp. 1764–1769.

14. Peter Green, Alexander to Actium (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), p. xxi.

15. For full details on what follows, see Frank Holt, Thundering Zeus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999).

16. Alfred Foucher, La vieille route de l’Inde de Bactre à Taxila, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Éditions d’art et d’histoire, 1942), pp. 73–144.

17. The voluminous publications on this site are generally in French (for example, the ongoing Fouilles d’Ai Khanoum), but a good illustrated English summary may be found in Paul Bernard, “An Ancient Greek City in Central Asia,” Scientific American 246.1 (1982), pp. 148–159.

18. Contemporary edicts promulgating the “competing” Buddhist ideology were set up east and south of Bactria by the Indian King Asoka; see Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 175–176.

19. The nomadic Yueh-Chi tribes eventually settled into cities of their own and created the mighty Kushana Empire astride the Silk Road linking Rome and China. They borrowed the Greek script to write their language, and their graves are filled with Greek-inspired art. See Victor Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1985).

20. Nancy H. Dupree, Status of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage (Peshawar, Pakistan: Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, 1998).

21. I myself have notified authorities that Bactrian silver coins from the famous Kunduz Hoard, found near the Oxus River and stored in the National Museum, are being sold on the Web, specifically on eBay. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to stop the rapid disappearance of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage.

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