{"id":79647,"date":"2004-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-ancient-greeks-were-they-like-us-at-all\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:30:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:30:31","slug":"the-ancient-greeks-were-they-like-us-at-all","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-ancient-greeks-were-they-like-us-at-all\/","title":{"rendered":"The ancient Greeks: were they like us at all?"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/font>he classical Greeks were really nothing like us\u2014at least that now seems the prevailing dogma of classical scholars of the last half-century. Perhaps due to the rise of cultural anthropology or, more recently, to a variety of postmodern schools of social construction, it is now often accepted that the lives of Socrates, Euripides, and Pericles were not similar to our own, but so far different as to be almost unfathomable. Shelley\u2019s truism that \u201cWe are all Greeks\u201d has now become, as we say, \u201cinoperative.\u201d<\/p>\n

M. I. Finley, the great historian of the ancient economy, spent a lifetime to prove his questionable thesis that the Greeks\u2014who imported grain from southern Russia, calibrated the cost of the Parthenon to the drachma, and left us a plethora of mortgage stones, financial inventories, and complicated estate exchanges\u2014were to be understood as economically unsophisticated and irrational, more as tribal barterers than calculating capitalists without much abstract appreciation of interest, supply, demand, or any of the other practices associated with the complex market. Historians of gender more recently have sought to show that the Greeks were without real sexual identity, their sexual mores not understandable through innate natural proclivities, much less fathomable by analogy to common social customs across time and space. With whom and how one had sex was instead \u201cconstructed\u201d and thus explicable only through understanding of Foucauldian power relationships of submission and dominance.<\/p>\n

By the same manner, ancient Hellenic childhood is supposedly equally enigmatic to us. Art historians have pointed out that Greek kids were not customarily sculpted and painted as real children, but most often portrayed through convention (or is it due to artistic incapacity?) as veritable shrunken adults\u2014mature frowns and puzzled expressions slapped on tiny faces. The proverbially rich Greek language, we are often reminded further, lacks the variety of English\u2019s clearly defined and evolving hierarchy of childhood nomenclature: \u201cbaby,\u201d \u201ctoddler,\u201d \u201ckid,\u201d \u201cteenager,\u201d \u201cadolescent,\u201d \u201cyoung adult.\u201d The chronological inexactness of Greek\u2019s numerous generic terms for youth\u2014pais<\/i>, kouros<\/i>, neanias<\/i>\u2014is offered as further proof of the great divide that separates attitudes toward coming of age in both ancient Greece and modern America.<\/p>\n

A<\/font>nd yet the sophisticated maritime loans in the Attic orators, or the scurrilous attacks on promiscuity, sodomy, and effeminate men in Aristophanes\u2019 comedies, or the prevalence of love among married couples in ancient Athens makes us wonder whether the Greeks really were all that different from us in their likes, dislikes, prejudices, and habits. Purportedly locked away in their northern European Victorian studies so far from the dust and stones of Greece, so ignorant of the new Cambridge anthropology, were our nineteenth-century classicists all that far off in thinking that the founders of Western civilization were familiar and approachable to us precisely because we as Westerners were their spiritual and intellectual successors? This feeling of a shared and common human experience is exactly what we receive from a wonderful new exhibition of classical Greek art depicting children and adolescents through gravestones, red- and black-figure vases, and terracotta miniature sculptures.<\/p>\n

P<\/font>onder the title of this fascinating exhibition currently at the Cincinnati Art Museum, organized by Jenifer Neils of Case Western Reserve University and John Oakley of the College of William and Mary under the auspices of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities: \u201cComing of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past.\u201d<\/a>[1]<\/a> The phraseology is derived from Margaret Mead\u2019s own famous (and flawed) anthropological study of adolescent sexuality among Samoan teenagers that sought to introduce Westerners to an unfathomable alternate universe of young female ritual among third-world peoples, who were purportedly much more relaxed about their sexual needs and desires. Thucydides may have reminded us that human nature is unchanging across time and space, but contemporary classical scholars have countered that ancient Athens would seem a very bizarre place to us today\u2014witness the current popularity by classical scholars of quoting the poet Louis MacNeice\u2019s famous lines, \u201cAnd how one can imagine oneself among them\/ I do not know;\/ It was all so unimaginably different\/ And all so long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

The effect of viewing some 126 displays from American, Canadian, and European museums is an almost eerier resonance between past and present not discernible even through close reading of Greek literature. Greek children in a variety of contexts in the current exhibition are shown playing with familiar household pets like cats, small birds, and geese. Their toys seem to have come right out of small-town America of the 1940s\u2014spinning-tops, hoops and sticks, jointed dolls, even seesaws. Greek moms, we learn, had their potties and training chairs\u2014and rooms full of assorted cluttered junk such as mechanical toy rollers, pig-rattles, and wheeled horses. If we think clay for plastic, the experience is not much different from strolling through the aisles of Toys-R-Us. One terracotta spherical ink-well is identical to a Voit soccer-ball\u2014even down to the familiar pattern of stitched ridges.<\/p>\n

We are told that Greece was a male-dominated society where women were often segregated and relegated to the kitchen and care of the children, while men fought, conducted business, or ran the government. Perhaps\u2014as, for example, a group of terracotta sculptures from central Greece shows a young girl learning to cook from an older woman. But from this exhibition there also emerges a sense of female confidence and a familiarity between the sexes unknown even today in much of the world. Carefree young girls play knucklebones. They carry one another piggyback as punishment for not hitting a target with stones or balls in the popular game of ephedrismos<\/i>, and bare-armed, bare-faced, and bare-ankled they are taught to dance.<\/p>\n

On an Attic red-figure cylix or stemmed drinking-cup there is a surprising scene of two young women who appear to be headed for school. One nonchalantly carries her writing stylus. Does the vase suggest that females were more commonly educated than we think, or are the two meant to be a weird parody by the painter of an everyday male ritual\u2014or again are they young courtesans who embrace book-learning because it is indispensable to the seductive arts plied in the male-dominated symposia? In any case, learning seems ubiquitous from these scenes of everyday life, as both boys and girls are seen with writing materials. In addition, there are fascinating examples of papyrus paper and wood tablets from Egypt on which school children have left to us unfinished and error-plagued rote assignments\u2014including a particularly poignant example where the young student confused his alphabet, transposing phi <\/i>and chi<\/i>.<\/p>\n

There is subtlety in much of Greek ceramic art that strikes an immediate chord with modern viewers. On a mid-sixth-century Attic black-figure amphora, for example, four men seem to be watching a young girl on a swing. But on closer examination something a bit strange seems to be going on. Most likely we are witnessing the ritual of the Aiora<\/i> (\u201cswinging\u201d), in which youth reenacted the myth of Erione, the young teen who committed suicide by hanging herself in sorrow over the murder of her father Ikarios. Was this just an annual rite, or sometimes an impromptu expiation conducted to stop teen-age suicides\u2014a tragedy that may well have transpired in waves of despair as we sometimes see today among high-school cliques? In any case, swinging amid friends and mentors in the ancient Greek world seems as wise a prophylactic to depression and angst as do Prozac and visits to the local shrink in ours.<\/p>\n

I<\/font>n the past two decades\u2014given the understandable hysteria over sexual predation by clergy and Michael Jackson and his coterie of pre-teen sleep-overs\u2014American society has turned its attention to a purported epidemic of sexual molestation. Like Claude Rains in Casablanca <\/i>we are shocked to see improper behavior in an age of easily accessible pornography, a crass popular culture of simulated sex and breast-grabbing on Super Bowl Sunday, and pre-teen beauty pageants. We are even troubled over the proper nomenclature of this apparent outbreak of physical relationships between adults and those under eighteen\u2014sometimes looking to ancient Greece to learn whether our wayward mentors are pedophiles (\u201csexually interested in all children\u201d) or pederasts (\u201cdominant pursuers of passive male teens\u201d).<\/p>\n

It is not that Greeks were prudes. Indeed, as we see from a number of a variety of red-figure vases, the casualness of male nudity on the racecourse and in the wrestling ring gives off a definite sexual air. But we also see young boys with older tutors in both work and play\u2014Hermes with the infant Arkas, or a near naked youth sitting at the feet of an aged beer-bellied tutor or paidagogos<\/i>. The proximity of older relatives with young boys and girls conveys a naturalness and non-sexual familiarity belied by the lurid stories of Greek love. Why so? Perhaps it is the active participation of vigilant parents \u2014ubiquitous in the exhibition\u2014who escorted their children to school, who were physically proximate to their kids for most of the day, and who felt that everything from cooking to playing were skills acquired only through parental instruction in a society where latch-key kids and day-care centers were unknown.<\/p>\n

If we can learn anything from these examples of the grind of everyday life as portrayed on vases and in stone, the danger of abuse lies not from the close interaction per se of child and adult, but rather from the absence of parental involvement, coupled with the abrogation of family responsibility in favor of the school, church, or baby-sitter. Thus additional Boeotian terracotta figurines capture a balding old man offering grapes to a young solitary girl, in a touching scene that suggests love for a grandchild\u2014similar to a picture from a black-figure Attic vase that portrays a young boy learning the craft of shoemaking surrounded by the company of older adults.<\/p>\n

Of course, we must avoid stereotypes. Not all parents and children are either happy\u2014or even alive. The exhibition presents grim examples of marble grave steles where parents grieve over lost infants\u2014a common occurrence in a premodern society where perhaps half of all pregnancies were not successful, and of those that were, one in three infants did not survive childhood. There is also evidence that the Greeks had no illusions that they all were always either good spouses or parents. In a particularly chilling red-figure calyx-krater from Italy, Jason vents his fury at Medea, even as their two murdered sons (her revenge for his infidelity) lie nearly neglected on a nearby altar. The parents bicker, while only their nurse and male tutor seem to mourn the two young bodies nearby.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>here is a rich diversity in the show\u2014and Professors Oakley and Neils are to be congratulated for the selection of vases, metal jewelry, stone and terracotta sculpture, and wood and paper artifacts that leave us with an appreciation that Hellenic excellence in art spanned four or five centuries and was found throughout the Greek-speaking Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

A final surprise of the exhibition is that the most moving everyday scenes and toys seem to be from Boeotia\u2014the ancient equivalent of our own rural heartland. If we naturally associate sophisticated Greek art only with Athens and to a lesser extent with Corinth and Italy, we forget that thousands of other Greeks in the shadows in places like the perennially maligned Boeotia were just as artistically adept, and perhaps possessed an eye for the everyday things that matter but are forgotten by their more heralded urban counterparts. And that seems yet another lesson for us as well\u2014that there is plenty of art and culture beyond our own triangle of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles that sees what is important in life in pretty much the same way as did these rural Greeks.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\n

Victor Davis Hanson<\/b> is at work on War Like No Other<\/i>, a military history of the Peloponnesian War forthcoming from Random House. <\/font> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Notes<\/b>
\nGo to the top of the document.<\/font><\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n
  1. <\/a> \u201cComing of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past\u201d opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum on May 1 and remains on view through August 1. The exhibition was previously on view at the Onassis Cultural Center, New York, from January 22 to April 15. It will next be seen at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from September 14 to December 5, 2004. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font> <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On \u201cComing of Age in Ancient Greece,\u201d an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Were the lives of the Greeks anything like our own?<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1305,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[647],"department_id":[557],"issue":[3067],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":42,"value_formatted":42,"value":"42","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651b519e4fcb7","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"Yes","value_formatted":true,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651d8874dce6f","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":3,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":1,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}},"set_paywall_at":{"simple_value_formatted":null,"value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66032c7fbb6f0","label":"Set Paywall At","name":"set_paywall_at","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"date_time_picker","value":null,"menu_order":4,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"display_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","return_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","first_day":1,"_name":"set_paywall_at","_valid":1}},"overlay_banner":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66196a3de1de4","label":"Overlay Banner","name":"overlay_banner","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"text","value":null,"menu_order":5,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","maxlength":"","placeholder":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"overlay_banner","_valid":1}}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"featured_img":false,"coauthors":[],"author_meta":{"author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/victor-davis-hanson\/","display_name":"Victor Davis Hanson"},"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 20 years ago","modified":"Updated 1 month ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on May 1, 2004","modified":"Updated on March 22, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on May 1, 2004 12:00 am","modified":"Updated on March 22, 2024 8:30 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","tax_additional":{"post_tag":{"linked":["Art<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Art<\/span>"],"slug":"post_tag","name":"Tags"},"department_id":{"linked":["Art<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Art<\/span>"],"slug":"department_id","name":"Departments"},"issue":{"linked":["May 2004<\/a>"],"unlinked":["May 2004<\/span>"],"slug":"issue","name":"Issues"},"section":{"linked":[],"unlinked":[],"slug":"section","name":"Sections"}},"series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["jetpack_sharing_enabled","author","featured_img","coauthors","author_meta","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","tax_additional","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/79647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/79647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127110,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/79647\/revisions\/127110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79647"},{"taxonomy":"department_id","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department_id?post=79647"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=79647"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=79647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}