The First Thirty-Six Years of the Boeotia Project, Central Greece

A description by one of Anthony’s collaborators of the progress and achievements of archaeological survey work in Boeotia.

Coins in a ‘Home Away from Home’: The Case of Sicily

Coins are part of a culture and they should be able to provide significant information about the peoples who made and used them. The early coinages of Sicily provide an ideal field in which to pursue such wider questions, of the sort that have engaged you from the outset of your career: I mention just one example (Snodgrass 1994: 1), where you referred to the ‘robust independence’ of the new settlements, their ‘challenge [to] the attainments of the Aegean cities by a wide range of criteria’, their ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘degree of integration of indige

Homer and the Sculptors

‘In the beginning, Homer was just a very good poet living in Ionia’ (Snodgrass 1998: 11). That premise is more controversial than perhaps it seems at first sight: if Homer appeared to his contemporaries an extraordinary genius, a poet uniquely privileged with divine inspiration, then one might indeed argue that he directly catalysed the coming of Greek literacy, and the development of figure scenes in early Greek art.1 But suppose, for present purposes, that the reputation of an eighth-century BC Homer was local to Ionia, and that the poet died (as one legend had it)poor and obscure. So his genius was only recognised/created/celebrated later; and so ‘a very good poet’ became Homer the great founding father of Classical literature. How important was it that visible form was given to this transfiguration? We can argue about what Homer did for artists. What did artists do for ‘Homer’?

The Poetics of Ruins in Ancient Greece and Rome

The term ruins (ereipia) in Greek derives from the verb ereipo, meaning to cut down, to cause to fall, as already documented by Homer. If the word appears in Herodotus, it is rarely found in the corpus of Greek tragedies and in Thucydides: ruins do not constitute a prominent theme before the Hellenistic period. It is not until Latin poetry that poetic nostalgia becomes a key element in sensitivity to the past. For Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, Troy is the setting of a massive and sudden destruction, a vast area of rubble devastated by pillage and fire; it is not yet a ruin. Things are different in the case of Latin poetry, which constructs a topos of the deserted and abandoned city from the image of the city’s destruction. In order for the feeling of ruins to be expressed as a melancholy in the face of vestiges, which are nothing more than traces of a former flourishing life or of a splendid monument reduced to some blocks of stone, it is necessary for time to take its toll and for the poet to get to grips with the feeling of loss which ensues (Papini 2011).

Loropéni and Other Large Enclosed Sites in the South-West of Burkina Faso: An Outside Archaeological View

The World Heritage site at Loropéni is the best-preserved of about a dozen large quadrangular sites enclosed by stone walls in the southwest of modern Burkina Faso. They are located mostly in the modern Départment of Loropéni a short distance west of the Black Volta river in the Savannah region, roughly midway between the river Niger and the southern edge of the Sahara and the forest belt close to the Atlantic south coast of western Africa (Fig. 15.1). Historically this region is crossed by the major north–south trade routes, linking the trans-Saharan trade of North Africa with the coastal regions. The area close to the sites has been gold-producing, with the mineral extracted from sedimentary deposits mainly by small-scale workings (Kiéthega 1983; Perinbam 1988); and it supports a modest agriculture with millet, sorghum and cotton among its principal products. It is occupied by several ethnic groups, notably the Lobi and the Gan, who, at the start of the colonial period a century ago, and still partly today, could be described as having a village-based social organisation and practising traditional religion (Labouret 1931; Père 1988; 2004).

Space, Society, Religion: A Short Retrospective and Prospective Note

It is now a well-established fact in the human and social sciences that the study of the spatial distribution of social life, including religion, is one of the best accesses to the analysis and understanding of societies. But it has not always been so. For quite a long time, in Classical studies, the only approach to space was traditional ‘historical geography’, the scope of which was primarily to identify the places mentioned in the ancient sources or known through archaeological or epigraphic evidence. This was and remains an important contribution to the study of ancient societies. But in these works the study of topography does not sustain a general conception of space as such and as a fundamental aspect of social life; and in fact, space as a category of study was not formalised as such.

Homer’s Audience: What Did They See?

At his weekly seminar, Jean-Pierre Vernant used to begin his answer to a friend’s or a colleague’s question with these words: ‘écoute voir’, which could be translated as: ‘listen to see’. Of course, in our century saturated by images of all kinds, this sounds just like a verbal tic, but nevertheless it is significant of a certain form of perception of reality. Indeed, in an aniconic world like that of the auditors of the Homeric poems, the recitation of the verses leads to a very different reception of the poetic images they convey.

‘Is Painting a Representation of Visible Things?’ Conceptual Reality in Greek Art: A Preliminary Sketch

Recent approaches to Greek and Roman art unanimously and emphatically stress the character of images as visual and material ‘constructions’ (Bažant 1985; von den Hoff and Schmidt 2001). This concept is held by the most advanced, thoughtful and serious voices of art history, and it is applied to all kinds of figurative representation, from individual figures to multi-figured scenes, through all genres and periods of ancient art. Thus, Richard Neer sees Archaic statues as ‘signs’ to which the concept of likeness to real persons is fundamentally alien (Neer 2012: 110–12). François Lissarrague interprets scenes of a warrior’s departure on Athenian vases as non-realistic constellations of the Greek oikos (Lissarrague 1990: 35–53). Wolfgang Ehrhardt analyses the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii as a purely fictitious depiction of the historical battle between Alexander and Darius III (Ehrhardt 2008).

Context Matters: Pliny’s Phryges and the Basilica Paulli in Rome

In the nineteenth century, remains on the north-eastern side of the Forum Romanum were identified as belonging to the Basilica Paulli (Chioffi 1996 4–5; Fig. 17.18 below), which had been situated opposite the Basilica Iulia. This identification had been based on ancient texts which are, however, ambiguous in their reading. They attest in the Forum Romanum either a single Basilica Fulvia-Aemilia-Paulli (communis opinio) or two separate basilicas, namely an archaeologically unverifi ed Basilica Aemilia and the verified Basilica Fulvia-Paulli. The latter is here called the Basilica Paulli and not the Basilica Aemilia, which is what, confusingly, most scholars have called it.2 In 1993 Eva Margareta Steinby scrutinised the opposing statements again and concluded that only the assumption of two separate basilicas, set up in the Forum Romanum in two different areas, would resolve the contradictions in the texts.

Anthony in Edinburgh

A summary of Anthon’s career in Edinburgh, including not only the academic side but also his walking exploits in the highlands of Scotland.