Classics are back...in Australia, too!

Ancients back from the deadFont Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print Luke Slattery | September 24, 2008

SIMON Goldhill, the rock star of the classical revival, has the head of the Farnese Hercules -- though not, mercifully, his heft -- and an almost Periclean love of an audience.

Professor of Greek literature and culture at Cambridge, and the author of numerous scholarly and popular books on the classics, including Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shaped our Lives, and Who Needs Greek?, Goldhill is a powerful communicator. His boosterism for the classics could even be described as evangelical, if that word didn't invite a certain mixing of cultural metaphors.

In Goldhill's view, Roman orator Cicero best explains the danger of ignoring the past.

"If you don't know where you come from you are destined to spend your life as a child, and by being a child, Cicero means being disempowered, ignorant, at sea," Goldhill says. "It is impossible to understand the development of Western thought, religion and culture without engaging with its obsession with ancient Greek and Roman culture."

The HES catches up with Goldhill as he prepares a talk on Sophoclean ironies for the University of Sydney's Nicholson Museum. That night he warns a spellbound crowd never to fall into the trap of imagining the ancients as children in relation to us; as less sophisticated in their appreciation of their texts and, in this case, Sophoclean subtleties.

Julia Kindt, a lecturer in the department of classics and ancient history, remarks afterwards: "Goldhill truly performs his lectures and is not afraid to challenge his audience with those questions that concern the very core of our engagement with the classical past."

Goldhill has no doubt there is a revival under way of interest in the classical world, but he's not entirely sure why.

"Greek tragedy has had a remarkable renaissance, which is hard to explain," he tells the HES. "There have been more productions in the past 50 years than the five centuries before. It's something to do with tragedy's ability to get past the censor: that is, to reach moral and emotional levels that plays apparently more relevant can't reach.

"Also they treat big themes of gender, power, violence, extremism -- themes that are really relevant -- and do so with more intelligence and greater poetry than many modern plays.

"Long may it last."

Classicists such as Goldhill have been cheered by the rising enrolments in ancient history at school and university -- "booming in England and Australia" -- and the public's apparently inexhaustible appetite for books, films and exhibitions on aspects of antiquity. An exhibition on the legacy of Hadrian, for example, is drawing big crowds at the British Museum, while Melbourne's Victoria Museum is preparing a show for 2009 on a day in the life of Pompeii.

The revival has also helped to stir the coals of classical studies at Monash University, the institution sponsoring Goldhill's visit.

Classics was axed from Monash in 1998. Four years later it was revived and placed under the leadership of Jane Griffiths, a self-confessed Goldhillian.

"He taught me as an undergraduate and has been immeasurably influential as a friend and mentor: the sort of man who has the ability to teach you how to think, not what to think," she says. "I've tried to pass on to our students some of the passion, original thinking and intellectual engagement that Simon passed on to me when I was his student. Classics generally owes him a great deal for his ability to engage an audience while forcing them to shake up their preconceptions."

On Saturday night Goldhill delivered the Trendall lecture at Monash, named after the internationally renowned Australasian classicist and expert on the redfigure pottery of Magna Graecia, Dale Trendall.

Classics and ancient history are fizzing at Sydney, in part because of their popularity at school. At Monash, interest in classical antiquity is rebounding from its nadir of 1998: the department now boast about 200 students and 40 majors.

Goldhill is only too well aware that the classical revival comes at the end of a long period of decline; classical languages, once the heart of the liberal arts curriculum, remain a minority interest. And while the bridge between the present and the antique past is being rebuilt, it is only suitable at present for light traffic.

"This is the first generation since the Renaissance where it is somehow thought acceptable for an intelligent and educated person to be ignorant of the ancient world," he says.

"I don't mean just picking up the occasional reference to mythology. I mean what is it like to think about democracy, sexuality and religion without appreciating where these ideas come from and have come about?

"So for me learning seriously about the ancient world is a must."

But Goldhill, a scholarly innovator with a conventional pedigree, envisages any permanent revival of classical literacy in a particularly exacting way.

For him the "royal road" to understanding Greek and Roman antiquity threads through the ancient languages themselves. "Greek and Latin may not regain their position in the curriculum, but to shut them down or make them unavailable to kids who do want them is a real pity and very short-sighted," he says. But he warns of the classical "name dropping, mythology and etymology mongering" that is, and always has been, more about acquiring some prestige from the glamorous past than any nuanced understanding of it.

Despite his injunction against name-dropping, Goldhill is prepared to contemplate an Epicurean version of the desert-island question: Who from the classical world would you invite to a dinner party, or symposium?

"Sappho to sing and play," he shoots back. "Hypatia (late antiquity's first woman of mathematics) to talk shop; Aristophanes to keep it light; Alcibiades (orator, general, and intimate of Socrates), to make sure everyone else hears about it; and Phryne (legendary Athenian courtesan) for Sappho to sing about. That would be more fun than Augustus, Caesar, Jesus, St Paul and Cicero."

Greece's Influence on the Far East in Art

How Greece influenced Chinese art
The Greeks' artistic debts to the East are well documented. But less well known is how pervasively Greek art influenced India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China.
Thursday, August 21, 2008 By John Boardman

The Greeks probably came from the east, Anatolia, in the first place - and they never ignored the other coast of the Aegean Sea, whether you believe there was a Trojan War or not.

Before the end of the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great, with his Macedonian and Greek armies, had overthrown the Persian empire, and he marched on east, through Central Asia even to India, founding new Alexandrias to add to the one he had built in Egypt.

Not all Greek soldiers wanted to go home. One group of Greeks in northern Afghanistan rebelled against Macedonian rule and made a new Greek kingdom in Bactria, on and around the River Oxus. They created what amounted to a whole new Greek state, in touch still with the homeland, building cities which compromised between the east and Greece.

These Indo-Greeks moved on south, even into northwest India, modern Pakistan, which had been becoming Buddhist. One Greek king became a Buddhist sage, and the Indo-Greeks even made one daring raid across north India to the great city of Patna, some 500 miles beyond Delhi.

Greek arts informed the Buddhist arts of the area. A clay figure of an attendant of the Buddha in east Afghanistan is to all intents a pure 4th-century Greek Herakles and only his club has been replaced - by a thunderbolt - for his new function as Vajrapani, the Buddha's guard and attendant. We even find a representation of the Trojan Horse entering Troy, guarded by a highly oriental version of Cassandra. And the first image of the Buddha we have is on a coin of classical type and labelled, in Greek letters, BODDO.

In the 2nd century BC, northern Afghanistan had been taken over by a nomad people, who had been moved west from the borders of China - the Yueh-chi or Ru-zhi.

Once the Chinese Han dynasty got the better of the nomads, they pressed south the Greeks on the Oxus, and the succession of the so-called Indo-Greek kings can be traced mainly through their coinage and art, from the 2nd century BC even into the 1st century AD in north India.

The relics of these Yueh-chi near the Oxus are pieces of relief gold jewellery from six burials excavated by Russian archaeologists in 1978 at the site of Tillya Tepe, which lies just south of the Oxus River in northern Afghanistan, west of the great city of Balkh (Bactra). They date somewhere just before the mid-1st century AD.

The gold and the brilliance is distracting, and I soon found it best to redraw figures from the photographs, thus forcing myself to understand each part and not make assumptions about identity and detail from a quick glance or the descriptions of others.

As time passed and the pencil drawings accumulated, the focus of interest was sometimes shifted away from being purely Greek towards even China and India.

There are interregna of Parthians here and of the Saka (Scythians), all gone by the mid-1st century AD, by which time one of the tribes of the Yueh-chi from Bactria had moved south and, at the time of our gold, were founding the Kushan dynasty. The Kushans were to rule north India (partly Pakistan now) for three centuries.

Back in the 5th century, Euripides knew of the god Dionysos' visit to Bactria, where Greeks deported by the Persian king were living - and no doubt making wine - in an area long associated with festive agriculture and behaviour, remarked even by Indian writers in the Mahabharata. But you will find no exact parallel in Greek art for Dionysos and Ariadne sitting on a lion.

The lion has a leafy beard, a common feature introduced to Central Asian animals by Greek art - call it acanthoid - and a mane like a Greek griffin. The artist of this, or its model, was at home with the Hellenistic iconography of Dionysos and Ariadne and made a confection in keeping with his eastern home, where lion-riders are not uncomm

New underwater museum to highlight the treasures of Alexandria

The Ptolemies through plexi-glass
The committee to establish Egypt's proposed underwater museum will have its first meeting next month in Alexandria, Nevine El-Aref reports

The history of a city caught in a time-warp when it was submerged by the sea while it was part of a unique civilisation that once held sway over much of the ancient world will, in the near future, be accessible and visible to all visitors to Alexandria. The International Scientific Advisory Committee is meeting in October to discuss plans for Egypt's first offshore underwater museum.

On the seabed of Alexandria's Eastern Harbour lie the royal quarters of the Ptolemaic dynasty complete with temples, palaces and streets. Queen Cleopatra's Palace and Antirhodos Island, now near the centre of the harbour between Qait Bay fortress to the north, Silsila on the east and Mahattat Al-Raml to the south, were in the same position.

These magnificent monuments were hidden beneath the waves after sinking in antiquity until 1996, when a joint mission by the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), with sponsorship from the Hilti Foundation of Liechtenstein, began scientific and archaeological studies in the Eastern Harbour.

Initial discoveries included the remains of the submerged royal quarter, among which were columns, statues, granite blocks, a sphinx, pavements and ceramics. The mission also identified the island of Antirhodos, the site of one of Cleopatra's palaces, the peninsula where Mark Antony's palace stood, the Timonium, was located, the Poseidon sanctuary and the royal harbour of Cape Lochias.

In 1997 the mission continued its underwater excavations and discovered the reefs at the entrance of the Magnus Portus. They also found the ancient coastline with its ruins revealing the inner palace, temples and administrative buildings. Evidence was also discovered suggesting that ships were docking in Antirhodos even before Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great. Archeologists have previously assumed that the whole of the Ptolemaic city of Alexandria, built by Alexander and developed through to the Byzantine era, particularly the fourth century when Constantinople became the capital of the Eastern Roman empire, lay beneath the modern city. Excavations at Kom Al-Dikka and other areas in central Alexandria have thrown up only isolated historical cameos, but these latest discoveries will, one hopes, enable historians and archeologists to trace a continuity from before the settlement of the ancient city, through its growth, development and decline. Further excavations in the harbour uncovered a 2,000 year-old shipwreck, statues, columns, platforms, docks and ruins dating from the time of Cleopatra.

The mission then turned to underwater excavations at Abu Qir Bay, where they found the sunken fleet of Napoleon Bonaparte along with the submerged cities of Heracleion and Canopus. These two cities figure prominently in ancient history and Greek legend, but their discovery cast fresh light on urban areas of the Mediterranean that predated Alexandria.

The discoveries included the ruins of the great temple of Heracleion, dedicated to Amun and Heracles- Khonsu. There were also giant statues of gods, kings and their consorts; as well as stelae, domestic implements, pottery, jewellery, and even the ruins of the wall of the inundated city, not to mention no fewer than the wrecks of nine wooden ships.

These excavations revealed important parts of a lost world, not only the ancient city of Heracleion and the eastern reaches of Canopus but a sunken part of the Great Port of Alexandria and the city's legendary royal quarter. The finds shed new light on the history of those cities and on the history of Egypt as a whole over a period of almost 1,500 years, from the last Pharaonic dynasties in the Canopic region to the rise of the Ptolemies after the death of Alexander the Great, followed by Roman control, the advent of Christianity in Byzantine late antiquity and, finally, the dawn of the Islamic era.

Famed for its temples, especially those of the god-king Osiris, Canopus was the site where the goddess Isis was believed to have found the 14th and final part of Osiris's savaged body. According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was murdered by his jealous brother Seth, who scattered the dismembered parts of his body all over Egypt. Isis, so legend has it, assembled the scattered pieces and placed them in a vase which was kept at Canopus. Osiris, who also summoned the annual floods, is often represented in the shape of a "canonic" vase with a stopper in the shape of a crowned head.

Following all these discoveries, all that was required was an underwater museum to make these monuments accessible to the public. However, setting up an offshore, submarine archaeological site anywhere is not an easy task, let alone in a city with the water pollution problems of Alexandria. Yet the remarkable discoveries made by underwater archaeologists over the last decade justify further serious efforts for what would be an invaluable cultural exercise.

The site and form gives cause for conjecture. Should it be in Alexandria's Eastern Harbour, the Sisila area or Abu Qir Bay? What will it look like? Should it resemble the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney or the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology at the spectacular Uluburun Wreck in Turkey, or the Musée de Marine in Paris? All these display a collection of sunken ship wrecks, flora and fauna.

These questions and more were raised at an international workshop held in 2006 to discuss the feasibility of constructing such a museum. On the table were a projected ground plan, an architectural design and a programme to study the environmental conditions of the Mediterranean Sea at Alexandria and its state of marine pollution, the socio-economic problems related to the success of the underwater archaeological museum project, and its urban impacts. The workshop was held under the umbrella of UNESCO and the Ministry of Culture at the Alexandria Art Creativity Centre, where a multidisciplinary team of 28 international and Egyptian experts were gathered.

During the workshop Culture Minister Farouk Hosni revealed that the aim of the workshop was not only to study the possibility of building the world's first ever underwater archaeological museum in Alexandria, but is also to set up international principles as a model or a pilot project for any country which wanted its own submarine museum. Singapore, China and Greece are on top of the list.

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the SCA, described the initiative as a "beautiful dream" for Alexandria. He told the assembled experts that he had decided four years before to stop removing all ancient objects from the seabed with the exception of coins, jewellery and small artefacts that were vulnerable to looting.

"Hence, it is about time to think about an underwater museum to make such magnificent monuments accessible and visible to all," he said.

François Rivier, UNESCO's assistant director, reviewed UNESCO's efforts to protect and preserve the Alexandria monuments, especially the underwater sites. He also referred to previous attempts to establish an underwater museum between 1994 and 2001, the year UNESCO issued its convention on the protection of the underwater cultural heritage.

Rivier outlined the problems surrounding the establishment of a museum. Among the most serious issues was the sewage output into the sea, which obscured underwater visibility and led to a disturbing increase in pollution. Beyali Hosni El-Beyali, a consultant for the water and drainage company, said however that the Alexandria governorate had already closed the three main sewerage tunnels with outlets in the archaeological area. The closure was permanent, and they were only opened upon the governor's direct orders when it was considered necessary to let out rain water on stormy days. "For the last three years the tunnels have not been opened at all," El-Beyali pointed out.

El-Beyali told Al-Ahram Weekly that a new project aimed at upgrading Alexandria's sewage system was now under comprehensive study in order to find a way of separating the rain water drainage system from the city's waste water system, which would be diverted to a sewage station in the desert near king Maryut. "The on- land treated waste water will be used for cultivating woodland areas southwest of Alexandria," he said, adding that this project was scheduled to be implemented in three phases in cooperation with international experts and the International Monetary Fund.

Hosni explained that the projected museum would be one of the world's modern wonders. It would be on three floors, the first one an onshore building exhibiting the previously submerged objects from all over Alexandria -- not only the Eastern Harbour -- as well as any further items that might be discovered in the future and could not be left in situ. The second would contain important items from the sea that might be installed in their original environment and exhibited in aquariums. The third level would be an underwater plexi-glass tunnel providing a unique window on the sunken capital of the Ptolemies.

"This level would stretch only a few kilometres along the seabed, or round one area of the sunken city, in an attempt to provide us with a first experience by which we could judge the success of the technology and, if there are any disadvantages, avoid repeating them in further extensions," Hosni said.

"I would like visitors to be able to view this marvellous discovery in situ," Hawass said. "It would be the first underwater museum of its kind in the world and I'm sure we can meet the challenge."

Greek myth and modern science

Whither Prometheus' Liver? Greek Myth and the Science of Regeneration
Carl Power, PhD, and John E.J. Rasko, MBBS, PhD

16 September 2008 | Volume 149 Issue 6 | Pages 421-426


Stem-cell biologists and those involved in regenerative medicine are fascinated by the story of Prometheus, the Greek god whose immortal liver was feasted on day after day by Zeus' eagle. This myth invariably provokes the question: Did the ancient Greeks know about the liver's amazing capacity for self-repair? The authors address this question by exploring the origins of Greek myth and medicine, adopting a 2-fold strategy. First, the authors consider what opportunities the ancient Greeks had to learn about the liver's structure and function. This involves a discussion of early battlefield surgery, the beginnings of anatomical research, and the ancient art of liver augury. In addition, the authors consider how the Greeks understood Prometheus' immortal liver. Not only do the authors examine the general theme of regeneration in Greek mythology, they survey several scholarly interpretations of Prometheus' torture.

The Roman version of Washington Irving

Mystery of 49 headless Romans who weren't meant to haunt us
By Daya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed a Roman cemetery in York with the skeletons of 49 beheaded young men.
Experts from the York Archaeological Trust have yet to explain why the men had been decapitated. One of the victims was buried with thick iron rings around his ankles that had been forged on to him while he was alive. Patrick Ottaway, the trust’s head of fieldwork, said: “That really is odd. We’ve never had anything like that before, in Roman Britain or the Roman world.”

There are also skeletons of seven children, though their bodies were not mutilated. Dr Ottaway believes that the men were beheaded as part of a ritual in order to ensure that they could not haunt the living.

The skulls were removed after death and placed in the grave by their feet, legs or pelvis. Analysis of the bones has suggested that all of the adult skeletons were young men under the age of about 45. Dr Ottaway said: “Why were they decapitated? Had they been executed or killed in battle? Was this a military burial site for soldiers of York, or were they foreigners from another part of the Roman Empire with curious customs? The head was considered the seat of the soul in the Roman period, and by removing it it was perhaps thought that the deceased were prevented from coming back to haunt the living.”

It is the first discovery of its kind in Roman Britain. “There are ones and twos of decapitated men in Britain and Europe. To find such a large group is very unusual.”

The skeletons date from about AD200, roughly when Emperor Septimius Severus came to York with an army to fight in Scotland.

A team from the York Archaeological Trust made the discovery in a small plot of land on The Mount in York during a three-month excavation at the site, which is being redeveloped by building contractors.

The trust targeted the area because it lies alongside the main Roman road leading to York from Tadcaster. Burials near settlements were forbidden under Roman rule so most cemeteries were located alongside roads into towns such as York. Roman burial customs were varied; some people were cremated, while others were buried unburnt and usually survive as skeletons.

Now the skeletons, and other remains including pottery found with them, have been taken to be cleaned and analysed by the trust. Another intriguing find was that of a young child buried in a casket.

It was unusual for children of that age to receive elaborate funerals, so this could be a much-loved child, or one from an important family.

Dr Ottaway said he would be liaising with archaeologists abroad to see whether burial rituals from Rhineland, where many soldiers in the army originated, or North Africa, where the emperor was born, fitted the York deaths.

Romans helped the barbarian Scots with prosperity

Why life was sweet for Scots at edge of the Roman empire
Mike Wade
An archaeological dig in North East Scotland has laid bare the quality of the opposition the Romans faced at the very fringes of their empire.

The discovery of a tiny piece of a horse's harness at a site at Birnie near Elgin shows the tribe that lived there had wealth and prestige enough to warrant the attention of the would-be invaders from the south.

The harness, which was found along with a dagger and sheath, was almost certainly part of a fixing from a chariot, “the Ferrari of the Iron Age”, according to Fraser Hunter, the leader of the dig.

“These people were well connected and wealthy. It is no surprise that the Romans should choose to do business with them. It was almost certainly a means of keeping the boundaries of their empire intact,” he said.

Between the first and third centuries AD, the Romans attempted twice to conquer Scotland, but in the intervening years they tried to keep Scots at bay with bribes. Some tribes were sweetened to fight others who were not so favoured - a classic case of divide and rule, a policy beloved of dictators ever since.

Dr Hunter, curator of Iron Age of Roman Collections at the National Museums of Scotland, said it was plain that the Birnie group was favoured by Roman patronage because of the influence it wielded in the area.

“This was essentially a big powerful family group. There would have been others living in the area, but this would have been one of the most important. The range of finds is spectacular,” he said.

The site, which lies on farmland, first came to the attention of archaeologists in 2000 after the discovery of two hoards of Roman coins there. Since then two ancient roundhouses have been found, with a third likely to be uncovered on Monday. Dr Hunter said that aerial photography had shown that 15 roundhouses, each with a diameter of about 16 metres, had been built on the site. Other discoveries include a gold torc, glass beads and quernstones for grinding corn. There is also evidence of smelting, casting and of a blacksmith on the site.

It is probable that the rich farming countryside close by accounted for the wealth of the settlement, which is likely to have remained inhabited for at least 1,000 years from 800BC. “It's not a coincidence that this part of Speyside would eventually become so famous for its barley and its whisky. This was and is good land for growing crops,” Dr Hunter said.

Some of the finds offered new insights into the lives of the inhabitants. The dagger and sword were both found in the roofs of houses, suggesting they might have been left as gifts to the gods when the houses were abandoned. Likewise, broken quernstones had been found that had probably been deliberately destroyed.

One building had been badly damaged in a fire. Dr Hunter speculated that a house might be burnt if it had become associated with bad luck.

The Moray Forth represented the limits of the Roman invasion of Scotland. When the bribes of silver coins proved insufficient to quell powerful groups like those at Birnie, the Emperor Septimius Severus led his troops north in the third century. “There was no climactic battle, but he certainly got to Aberdeen and possibly as far as the Moray Firth. But areas there were never settled; the Romans just campaigned right through,” Dr Hunter said.

Barbarians forced the Romans to build Venice

How the barbarians drove Romans to build Venice

Richard Owen in Rome
The hidden ruins of an ancient lagoon city that was the ancestor of Venice have been unearthed by scientists using satellite imaging. The outlines are clearly visible about three feet below the earth in what is now open countryside.

Venice was a powerful maritime power during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It seemed, however, an unlikely spot to choose for a leading world power, stretching across 118 small islands in the marshy saltwater Venetian lagoon.

Historians agree that the explanation is that Venice was founded on the islands by refugees from Roman cities such as Ravenna, Padua and Aquileia as they fled from invasions, first by Attila the Hun in the 5th century and then, a century later, by the Lombards, as the final remnants of the Roman Empire crumbled.

However, Paolo Mozzi, a researcher at the University of Padua geography department, said high-definition satellite photographs had revealed the ruins of an extensive town much closer to present day Venice at Altino – known in Roman times as Altinum – a little more than seven miles north of the city, close to Marco Polo airport.

“The hypothesis is that as Altinum also succumbed to the Barbarian invasions, the inhabitants fled farther down to the lagoon to build Venice on the islands, using some of the stones from their city,” he said. At its height, he said, Altinum had been an important trading and seafaring centre on the Adriatic, before it was overrun by Attila in the mid-5th century.

The newly identified ruins include streets, palaces, temples, squares and theatres, as well as a large amphitheatre and canals, showing that Altinum was a wealthy and thriving city. By the 10th century, however, it had been abandoned. “The city in which Venice had its origins finally has a face,” said the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Mr Mozzi said that Altinum probably had about 20,000 inhabitants. A plan to excavate the ruins is being drawn up at the universities of Padua and Venice, in collaboration with the Veneto region superintendent of archaeology.

The folk memory of Altinum is preserved in the names of several Venetian islands which are derived from districts of the abandoned Roman town: Torcello (from Torricellum), Murano (Ammurianum) and Burano (Porta Boreana). In the 9th-century the ducal seat of Venice was moved to Rialto island, which is still the city centre, where the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica of St Mark were erected. In 828 the relics of St Mark were taken to Venice from Alexandria and placed in the new basilica. They were later venerated as a symbol of the new Venice as it developed into a mighty naval and commercial power in the Middle Ages.