More ancient greek differences and similarities
The Ancient Greeks
Were they like us at all?
Victor Davis Hanson
The New Criterion, Vol. 22, No. 9, May 2004
The classical Greeks were really nothing like us-at 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's truism that "We are
all Greeks" has now become, as we say, "inoperative."
M. I. Finley, the great historian of the ancient economy, spent a lifetime
to prove his questionable thesis that the Greeks-who 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-were 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
"constructed" and thus explicable only through understanding of Foucauldian
power relationships of submission and dominance.
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-mature frowns and puzzled expressions slapped on tiny faces.
The proverbially rich Greek language, we are often reminded further, lacks
the variety of English's clearly defined and evolving hierarchy of childhood
nomenclature: "baby," "toddler," "kid," "teenager," "adolescent," "young
adult." The chronological inexactness of Greek's numerous generic terms for
youth-pais, kouros, neanias-is offered as further proof of the great divide
that separates attitudes toward coming of age in both ancient Greece and
modern America.
And yet the sophisticated maritime loans in the Attic orators, or the
scurrilous attacks on promiscuity, sodomy, and effeminate men in
Aristophanes' 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.
Ponder 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: "Coming of
Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past."[1] The
phraseology is derived from Margaret Mead's 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 schol- ars have countered that ancient Athens would
seem a very bizarre place to us today-witness the current popularity by
classical scholars of quoting the poet Louis MacNeice's famous lines, "And
how one can imagine oneself among them/ I do not know;/ It was all so
unimaginably different/ And all so long ago."
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-spinning-tops,
hoops and sticks, jointed dolls, even seesaws. Greek moms, we learn, had
their potties and training chairs-and 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-even down to the familiar pattern of
stitched ridges.
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-as, 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, and
bare-armed, bare-faced, and bare-ankled they are taught to dance.
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-or 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-including a particularly poignant example where the young
student confused his alphabet, transposing phi and chi.
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 ("swinging"), 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-a 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.
In the past two decades-given the understandable hysteria over sexual
predation by clergy and Michael Jackson and his coterie of pre-teen
sleep-overs-American society has turned its attention to a purported
epidemic of sexual molestation. Like Claude Rains in Casablanca 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-sometimes looking to ancient Greece to learn
whether our wayward mentors are pedophiles ("sexually interested in all
children") or pederasts ("dominant pursuers of passive male teens").
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-Hermes with the infant
Arkas, or a near naked youth sitting at the feet of an aged beer-bellied
tutor or paidagogos. 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 -ubiquitous in the exhibition-who 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.
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-similar 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.
Of course, we must avoid stereotypes. Not all parents and children are
either happy-or even alive. The exhibition presents grim examples of marble
grave steles where parents grieve over lost infants-a 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.
There is a rich diversity in the show-and 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.
A final surprise of the exhibition is that the most moving everyday scenes
and toys seem to be from Boeotia-the 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-that 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.
Victor Davis Hanson is at work on War Like No Other, a military history of
the Peloponnesian War forthcoming from Random House.
Notes
"Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the
Classical Past" 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.
©2004 Victor Davis Hanson
