IT is a truism that we take the greatness of most Greek sculpture, and Greek art in general mainly on trust, since so little of it has survived. That, of course, is also true of Greek literature - we have only a fraction of Sophocles's many plays, just one complete ode and various fragments of Sappho, etc. Greek painting, whose perfection and range are attested by Roman critics and connoisseurs who could still see much of it, is almost a closed book to us.
For the sculpture, we still have Olympia and what remains of the Parthenon; most of the rest is copies, produced commercially for Roman patrons and looters. What used to be called the Venus de Milo (or in English, the Aphrodite of Melos) is now generally agreed to be the work of an obscure local sculptor, and for decades was wildly over rated after its discovery in the 19th century. The Laocoon group in the Vatican is a Roman marble copy of the original, which was probably in bronze. A tiny handful of original bronzes and marbles has survived from the great or "heroic" periods, some of them recently recovered from the sea. Ancient Greece lives on more as an idea, or an ideal, than as a reality.
Names have come down over millennia - Polycleitos, Myron, Pheidias, Lysippos, Callimachus, and art histories write about these men with an authority which, according to this book, is hardly justified. Pheidias, in particular, has been cast in the role of the Michelangelo of antiquity, a kind of artist superman, and his identification with the Parthenon sculptures has become virtually canonical through centuries. But Nigel Spivey leaves us with only a shadowy figure historically, and his direct connection - or otherwise - with the Parthenon is far from proven.
The Parthenon it sell has been argued over by art and classical scholars for centuries. Interpretations of what it represents are legion: are its sculptures primarily a celebration of history (Athens, and therefore Greece, victorious over Asiatics) or religious (the Panathenaic festival) or purely mythological? What is undisputed is that they were begun about the middle of the 5th century BC, when Periclean Athens was at the peak of its short lived power and prosperity. The huge, menacing Persian Empire under its "Great King" had been beaten back, and Athens was now a thalassocracy with a flourishing commercial empire and a powerful fleet.
Athens has come down to us as the prototype of democracy, based largely on the factors that it had regular elections, had got rid of kings or even dictators (tyrannnoi), and believed in what we would now call the consultative process. The statesman orator Perikles was its hero, and history also remembers his mistress, the cultured and obviously remarkable hetaira, Asphasia. Certainly he seems to have been the moving spirit behind the Parthenon, and Perikles was himself a patron of art and literature and a personal friend of leading writers and intellectuals. The triumphal nature of the sculptures seems plain enough, but just what triumph do they celebrate?
More than a generation before, in 490 BC, the "glorious" battle of Marathon had been fought, in which a much smaller Athenian force routed an invading Persian army and forced it to re embark and escape by sea. Compared with the later victories of Salamis and Plataea it was rather a small affair, but it started Athens on its way to greatness, gave it confidence in its own democratic system, and convinced its citizens that the gods were on its side. According to tradition, 6,400 Persians were killed against 192 Athenians. Nigel Spivey has counted the carved figures on the Parthenon, and found that they too numbered 192.
He shows also how much a "good death" meant to the Greeks, and how the heroes of this world hoped to be united with the great dead after their own fall in righteous battle. Marathon itself had been an example of oligoi pros pollous, "few against many", which recalls Churchill's speech about the Battle of Britain pilots and became a symbol of Western democracy battling for survival against Oriental tyrants and their suborned hordes. So the Parthenon probably represents the transmutation of the Athenian dead into heroes and virtual demigods. Yet just how much Pheidias himself was involved we do not know, and when the sculptures were being completed he was in fact in exile from Athens, after a charge of peculation. He was certainly the creator of massive free standing figures of Athena and Zeus, but they vanished long ago - and, in any case, would probably look gaudy and vulgar to modern eyes.
This fascinating book also examines the mythology and facts surrounding the Aphrodite of Knidos, known to us only through second and third hand copies. Greek male nudity was of course common and accepted, but female nudity was not, and Greek women probably led lives not much different from those in the Near and Middle East. The famous statue by Praxiteles, dating from about 360 BC, stood in a shrine in the centre of an open, raised colonnade and showed the goddess when she had apparently undressed for bathing. It is probably the basis for the whole cult of the female nude in Western art, and the element of voyeurism and even pornography was plain from the start (porne in Greek means a prostitute, while graphein means "to write"). Notoriously, Praxiteles had used for his model the famous courtesan Phryne, who was probably his mistress at the time.
The beauty and elegant eroticism of the work were famous in antiquity, and thousands of people made the voyage to Knidos (a Greek colony in Asia Minor) expressly to see it. A dialogue by the late Greek writer Lucian describes a visit to the goddess's shrine, and how Lucian noticed a blot on Aphrodite's otherwise flawless backside. A defect in the marble, perhaps? Not so, an attendant priestess assured him; it had been made by an unfortunate youth who fell in love with the statue, managed somehow to get himself locked into the temple, and attempted to consummate his passion. When caught in the act, he was so ashamed that he threw himself over a nearby cliff and perished. (And, according to Nigel Spivey, there is in fact a sheer drop into the sea just by the temple site.)