Chs Dialogue with Leonard Muellner - Vase paintings, boar hunts, and eroticism

Hello everybody. This is Sarah Scott, on behalf of the Center for Hellenic studies in Washington DC. I'm here again with Leonard Muellner. Thanks for joining us, Lenny. And we've been looking at some of the questions, comments and discussions that have come up on our forums. I'd like to just pick up on a couple of things, that we hope might be of interest and helpful to our viewers. The first one is is about some of the vase paintings and maybe the reason why some of the images have areas of white or of dark colors What's the meaning of that? Yes, and I mean this is also came up in the discussion of the of the ... color of the tomb being white Okay and maybe we should say something first about that because .. I don't want to say anything about that because it's gonna come up in the class— it's in Hour 18, and there's a very interesting explanation of what the whiteness of the tomb signifies and ... You know it's you should look forward to that explanation. Okay, not to be.. I don't want to be a spoiler Okay, but I think to make another sort of methodological point one of the things you want to do in looking at Greek vase paintings on the one hand and epic text on the other is to try and understand the symbolism of each on its own before you.. and not think of the images as illustrating the epic or the epic as making a narrative on the basis of the images; that these are fundamentally conventional means of expression on their own, and they certainly have a common store of stories and themes that they're portraying. But before you want to interpret the symbolism of one thing or the other you need to understand them each in their own appropriate artistic context. So the whiteness of the tombs of that we want to disassociate from why the charioteers are robed in white, okay, and that's a... It's definitely a fact that in in a black figure vase painting— remember there are two kinds of vase painting, one of which the .. there are black figured and red figure vases, okay, red being the color of the clay. And on the red figure vases, which are later, the vase is red and you paint with a black glaze to get the images, and the black figure vase is the other way around. Okay, it seems like a very difficult thing, but in these images the people are silhouetted and it's amazingly difficult process— but these each of these kinds of vase painting have — then there is also a later sort of vase which are white figure vases which have a different set of colors and a different kind of construction and also different conventions of their own. These are there are three traditions, and they are definitely Interrelated and they're sequential in time But they have their own conventions than the black figured vases that there is the convention that women are portrayed in white and men and in black, okay. So for example there's a famous black figured image of a shield on a tray and there are white arms coming out of it and It's probably a woman, okay, who is being embodied as the shield. It's a striking sort of image and those are the things that you can understand and try and interpret on the basis of the conventions of the medium. When it comes to why the charioteers are white, I don't... I'm not an art historian I don't have a good example, but I think it's something that we need to understand within the context of the vase paintings and what its colors are like, and what if there are people who have different colored clothing, and which kinds of you know, are they portrayed as black, and stuff like that. And you can try and construct a set of rules about it, okay, and we should try and understand that first before we move on to the fact that both traditions, that is the vase painting tradition and the epic tradition, portray the tombs as being white okay, and that's that's a ritual fact that is external to both of them, but that which they both represent. So maybe this is clarifying to some extent, and there are more riddles in what I'm saying. I'm not trying to puzzle you, but I don't want to give up everything Okay, they're also both questions of my ignorance in play because I'm not sure; I would hesitate to give you an answer as to why the charioteers of clay are robed in white okay. But they're very defintely robed, aren't they. They aren't wearing armor in the same way as the warrior. Yes. ...clothed in their respective roles. Yeah. I am trying to remember the you know there's this wonderful statue of the charioteer at Delphi that most people have seen. And there are traces of the color you know, because all Greek statues were painted whether they were marble or bronze. That's a bronze statue and what remains of the colors are in the eyes of the charioteer, but there are traces of painting on his robe I'm not sure what color there, but that would be an interesting thing for example. That's just another artistic medium sculpture, okay Again it's got its own conventions. Exactly. Okay, so the other thing people wanted to ask you about, we have a discussion thread going on about the language of eroticism in Sappho and epic. One of the examples is about the boar hunt of. Meleager. Now is this the same Meleager or Meleagros as in some of these epigraphs that are mentioned? Epigrams I think is what... epigrams— so there's the Garland of Meleager, okay? That's a poet, a Hellenistic poet, and his poems are preserved in a collection called the Greek Anthology. And he's a Hellenistic poet and that's a just a totally different person who happens to have the same name as the mythological figure named Meleagros, okay, or Meleager. So shall we will probably want to keep them separate. But the boar hunt in the story of Meleager is a very famous mythological motif with representations in the epic and elsewhere, okay. We know we have the most famous.. one of the most famous Greek vases: it's very large vase called a volute krater. And it has one of its central motifs it has —it's a very big vase and that has bands of images all, you know, about five or six of them— the middle band has the marriage of Peleus and Thetis and but one of them, one of the central bands, is also the the hunt for the Calydonian boar who is a huge creature that dwarfs all the human beings in the vase and they're all labeled so and that features Meleagros of course, and also even Achilles is there, among other people. So this is a very, obviously, a very prominent and famous story in the epic tradition of the vase painting producers. We have a very encapsulated version of that in the Iliad, during Phoenix's... ...speech, yes. And we focused previously on the later part where there's a war going on. Yes. ... Yes, and a war is that's about the division of spoils, cuz once they killed the boar how does it get divided up which may resonate with you, because you have a problem about the division of spoils from the beginning of the Iliad, right: about who got which woman, and why, and taking them away, so this is a real epic theme. Okay, going back to the boar hunt it seems to be the young men who go out hunting boar, and we see that also in the part of the back story of Odysseus. He went out on a boar hunt as well when he was young. So what is the significance of boar hunts in particular? Well I think you can say a few things about that and that is that hunting, being a hunter and being a warrior are two sides of the same thing, Okay, so you will see hunting images and similes about hunting within the context of battle books, okay? And so being initiated as hunting as a young person and being able to hunt this is even we know that in ritual Initiations in that in ancient Greece for adolescents one of the things they learned how to do was to hunt. So this is about growing up into the warrior role as part of one's adulthood, becoming an adult, is passing through the stage of learning how to hunt which is almost the same as being learning how to fight, okay? Now if you look at the similes in the Iliad, there are similes which compare warriors and there prey to, and the people they are fighting, to boars and lions for example, okay,. And there are some where the simile says it's either a boar or a lion, and some where it's specifically a lion, and some specifically a boar, so there there's a vocabulary to these similes, and I think boars and lions are the most the difficult of animals to hunt in the epic conventions, and the most dangerous. And the difference between them is very clear: is that what boars do is they they respond to by... with that... by defending themselves in the most violent way, whereas lions are aggressive to begin with okay? So boars are an animal that you should avoid challenging unless you want to hunt them. The other thing that's important, and that's reflected in the story of the Odysseus, is that they are animals that have been hunted for a long time by human beings, and apparently boars with their tusks know instinctually, or in some other way, where the femoral artery is in a human being's upper thigh, which is a mortal blow, and they know they know that that's a place to get human beings for example. This is proved by, you know, people who study the natural history of boars. So these are formidable prey, and hunting them is the equivalent of proving yourself as a warrior. And that's why there is this relationship between these two things In such a profound way, and you'll see a lot more about them. And and I think when it comes to Odysseus the story about his hunting of the boar has a very clear role in his, in the development of, his identity, right. Which is a huge theme in the Odyssey, right? So all these things will come together. I think as you keep on reading and a beautiful, and I hope a synthetic way. I don't mean.. I mean it's "synthetic" not in a sense of fake, but a sense of bringing things together. Okay. Treat as synthesis. I wonder if you could also just talk a little bit to us on a beautiful word. Glukoprikos. A compound word consisting of the word for sweet, glukus, where you get glucose in English, and pikros, which means bitter, and which is a conventional term even for chocolate in our culture! But it seems it seems to be from .. there was lovely a lovely post by somebody who tried to do a search for it in Perseus, which is a nice place, a nice site to know about, and it does occur many times actually. I I did a little search, and there are about 40 or more examples of it, and I didn't have a chance to go through all of them but most of them refer explicitly, or inexplicitly, to the language of Sappho and it is an epithet of erōs which is in the poem that gets cited in that thread where where it's applied as an epithet erōs, which you which you should translate not as "love" but as... It's a *** passion, *** desire. I think "desire" is a better way of doing it Okay but it's explicitly the term for *** desire. So it's an epithet of that in the tradition and it may well be that Sappho invented this term. But it seems to be frozen in that significance, so it's a part of the standard vocabulary, this combination of things that are sweet and bitter. And the other theme of these in that discussion now also was the way in which which themes of violence and themes of sex, or how violence is eroticzed for example in the Iliad, and I think that's very important and very right on in pointing at that. I think that some of the the descriptions of violence are definitely eroticized, and there are important aspects. Achilles as a hero of love song is not a coincidence, as the posters have pointed out. And I thought there's one vase painting which I believe is in the Ancient Greek Hero text book, I'm not sure— there may be a pointer to it— in which there's this is not a story that's told in the Iliad, but there was an Amazon, the queen of the Amazons, whose name is Penthesilea. It's actually her name is like the feminized form of Achilles' name. Achilles' name is composed of akhos, which means grief, and a synonym for the word grief in epic as well as in the Greek language in general is penthos, and the -leia part of her name is the same as the as the -leos or -laos part of Achilles' name, so these are two creatures who are male and female components of the same central idea, and there's a... they have a love affair— not in the epic tradition but Achilles ends up killing her, and there's a There's a vase painting in which the two of them are where Achilles is plunging his sword into her, and it's a very *** state. Their eyes meet. You I think Sarah said she would find it for you. So this you can see in the vase painting tradition as well as of the epic tradition this way in which you— and in the lyric tradition— the way in which violence can be eroticized and which the language, even in the language of Sappho, there's a use of warrior terminology, like in the poem about Helen, okay, that's quoted at length, in relationship to, in contrast with, *** relationships. It's a very powerful combination of things that are contrasted, but also Have a kind of ... can be can be layered on top of one another and in striking ways. And that would tie in again with the idea of hunting. Exactly yep. Yep. Yep, hunting is an important metaphor for love relationships. Okay, so you have *** vase paintings, which feature hunters that produce gifts for the beloved which he's hunted for. All sorts of intertwining of these motifs and themes, yeah. That's great. Thank you Lenny We'll now start to be able to see and notice more examples of that as we go through. I bet you will — exactly. Thanks very much. Not at all thank you.