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Archaeology and Art

Archaeology and Art 'The message of this book is an unpopular one,' announces Anthony Snodgrass at the outset of his **Homer and the Artists.' 'It is that the innumerable surviving portrayals of legendary scenes in the art of early Greece, thousands of which undoubtedly relate to the saga of the Trojan War and its aftermath, and some hundreds apparently to the very action of the Iliad and the Odyssey, were in fact seldom if ever inspired by the Homeric poems.' Unpopular with 'the general public', maybe: as is any effort to detach Homer from the topography of Hisarlik. To Homer's reader on the Clapham omnibus, locating ancient 'illustrations' of Homer must be almost as gratifying as digging up the royal trinkets of Priam. But few current academics would offer much opposition to the case which Snodgrass advances here. As one of the few, and convinced (as is Snodgrass) of the importance of this issue as an art-historical debate, I should gladly battle with his argument point by point, but there is no space for such dispute. Enough perhaps to note one fundamental area of disagreement, which is a question of iconographical methodology. Take the several early representations of the story of the Cyclops. Following the lead of Denys Page, Snodgrass points out that the story of a ferocious giant blinded in a cave is a story which can be proven to have circulated far beyond the Greek world, and with many different nuances of plot depending on locality. Therefore, he argues, we need suppose no artistic acquaintance with the text of Odyssey Book 9. He proceeds to unpick the details of three seventh-century B.C. Greek depictions of the story, and finds that in one respect or another they stray from Homer's account for example, the blinding achieved using a metal spit rather than a sharpened wooden stake or tree-trunk. Proving, he concludes, that the artists involved were not privy to the Homeric account of Odysseus and Polyphemos. This seems to me a rash strategy of interpreting images, especially in a period when no 'canonical' schemes of images yet existed. And it leads Snodgrass into the peculiar dilemma of how to explain more 'accurate' renditions of Homeric epic by Etruscan or Graeco-Etruscan hands. Did the archaic Etruscans have a more pedantic knowledge of Homer than the Greeks, then? But surely that question should not arise. It is sufficient to acknowledge that when Homer smote his lyre, the effect was quite unlike that achieved by other bards. Here was a distinctive sound; a particular enchantment; a 'way of telling' especially memorable. In cliched terms, Homer made it all 'come alive'. Which was all it took to raise enthusiasm, across the Mediterranean, for his heroes and their world. 'Memorable' need not mean to the letter or precise metrical beat. An artist 'inspired' by Homer may even have presumed to improve where the poet lapses in intelligibility (I can imagine anyone scratching his head over Homer's specification of a piece of olive wood for the great long stake to blind Polyphemos). In which case: why chase fidelity of detail; why not allow an artist to 'illustrate' and be 'inspired by' and 'interpret' a text all at once? Dissent is not depreciation: this is a slim book written with great verve and enviable learning. For broad guidance around such and other matters, we now possess