Meggie Macdonald

The first weekend in November, I had the pleasure to attend the Fifth Annual Leventis conference at the University of Edinburgh where the chosen topic for discussion were the Gods of Ancient Greece. Due to scheduling conflicts, I was only able to attend the Saturday lectures; and yet, I found myself deliciously engaged.

The first presentation by Ohio State’s Sarah Johnston on Signs of the Gods investigated divination in Ancient Greece using three sources: the Magical Papyri (PGM and PDM), the Chaldean Oracles, and the Egyptian Mysteries. Using each of these, Dr. Johnston discussed the power held by the god and by the magician where, although the god was seemingly calling the shots, it was the magician who could predict, expect, and control the ways in which the deities manifested themselves. What I found stunningly implicit in her presentation was the ways in which ancient Greek divination and its purposes so closely resembles Christian spiritualism. That the presence of a god purified the soul, that during “photogogia” the god manifested as light – in a bowl of water, in a lamp, etc. – that magicians were always wary of “false prophets” and devised methods of identifying true gods; all these encounters were intended to bring the god itself into the physical presence of the magician. Such an ecstatic event was something often yearned for by Christian saints and religious officials, but also by everyday people: nuns, monks, and peasants.

Dr. Johnston also talked about a crisis of truth at one point in the history of Greek divination (although she did not give a precise date for this crisis). When not only gods but othere diviners could deceive the magician doing the spell, there developed a need and a desire for expected forms of divine manifestation. This was the result of an increased interest in and fear of “daemones”, representing the existence of different levels of divinity, and thus of different levels of deception. Dr. Johnston asks a valid question: who did these magicians think they were that they could discern thruth from deception?Most by this point had been initiated into the various mysteries that were active in Greece and helpd privileged positions wherein they had access to inner sanctuaries and temples that were heavily invested with spiritual significance.

This gradual transition into a semi-elite divinatory caste, a priestly caste if you will, acknowledges both the evolutionary nature of human spiritualism and one possible route by which Christianity developed into the powerhouse of the Middle Ages as it did.

I was incredibly impressed with Dr. Johnston’s presentation style. She was both subtle and accessible with a topic that I was entirely unfamiliar with, outside of generic textbook identifications, and it made me consider a great deal more in regards to the rituals of religions I was familiar with in an attempt to understand their origins.

The second speaker of the morning was Stella Georgoudi from l’Universite de Paris, a tiny lady with the rare and cherished ability to get right to the point. Her presentation on “Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations” drew attention to the assertion in scholarship of guilt involved in animal sacrifice. References to the need for the animal to nod its head in ascent was interpreted as permission for the sacrifice to be held and vindication by the sacrificers that the animal had died willingly. Dr. Georgoudi immediately brushes this notion aside with some well-aimed comments about the lack of any concrete evidence that guilt over the murder of the sacrificial victim existed at all. Instead, she offers the interpretation that sacrificial ritual was about the willingness of the god to the accept the offering and not about guilt over killing a living thing. She believes that the “free will” of the animal, acknowledged through the nodding of the head, was directed at the gods, and is not an issue related to the human sacrificers.

Her very direct observation that guilt over sacrifice is a modern anachronism and not grounded in the available evidence is quite valid. I have come up against such overly moralizing scholarship in my own research on gladiators and have often found myself irritated at such modern western enlightenment ethics. And yet, Dr. Georgoudi was neither scathing nor condemning of the work of these other scholars; she merely offered what in her opinion was a much more feasible option. This munificence and scholarly professionalism are things I still need to learn.

The third speaker, Anja Klochner from Giessen, took archaeological depictions of epiphany and examined them through the interpretation of symbolic and iconographic elements on vases and reliefs. Here the morning’s associations with Christian spiritualism turned sharply away from the comparative as Dr. Klochner first noted that Greeks felt neither love nor joy for their gods but fear. This fear is shown from the leaning back of the upper body in the presence of a god. She also noted that it is usually women who show an overt emotional reaction and that, as a result, thsi can be identified as a potential iconographic element.

This raised the issue of gender reactions versus human reactions to epiphany. The manner of veneration depends on gender, age, social status, and so on. Dr. Klochner also asks if men, who stand upright and show dignified respect for the god, are in fear of him/her or feel an emotional intimacy with the god.

She went on to describe several other unique iconographic elements in archaeological remains, including divine care represented when a god touches a man, the frequent examples of Aesclepius depicted in the presence of his family and wearing Athenian clothes (something particularly unusual outside of healing cults), and images of the heroic couple banqueting. In all instances, however, the god is depicted as separate and distinct from the humans in the scene, either by their relative size or by the use of dividing architectural elements.

Dr. Klochner’s presentation was thought-provoking, not least because her perspective was refreshingly non-literary. Archaeology has always held that fascination for me because it takes its practitioners right to what the creator of an object thought; it is intentions they are interpreting rather than text. I am sure that other archaeologists and scholars will disagree with Dr. Klochner’s conclusions, and that is of course their prerogative, but her interpretations can stand quite comfortably on their own, in the humble opinion of this amateur.

In the second half of the morning, after a short coffee break and chat with Andrew Erskine (the conference organizer and my potential doctoral supervisor) and Calum MacIver (one of the most pleasant senior PhD students I have ever met), the schedule began again with Ken Lapatin from the J.Paul Getty Museum. Admittedly, I found his presentation fascinating for all the reasons he declined to go into. One of his life-long curiosities is apparently krys-elephantine statuary, and I should look for a book of his on the topic, and he spoke for a short time on the competition between city states in the creation of these mighty gold and ivory statues. Again, for someone who is not intimately familiar with the entire corpus of ancient Greek textual fragments, the existence of more than two of these statues (being the Athena Parthenos in Athens and the Zeus at Olympia) came as a wonderful shock. Dr. Lapatin’s reference to a statues of Athena, begun at Megara but never completed, standing half finished for hundreds of years, was enthralling. I was especially overjoyed to learn that this statue, existing well into the Roman occupation of Greece, garnered acknowledgement on the obverse side of a Roman coin of approximately the second century.

I simply must find a text that describes in detail the histories of these several statues, and see also about identifying the coin Dr. Lapatin spoke of with the Megarian Athena. This is a topic I was happy to have introduced to me by an enthusiastic expert and I will enjoy pursuing it further.

The final speaker of the morning was Tom Carpenter, also from Ohio State, who discussed Greek Gods in Apulian imagery. I found this an interesting geographical choice, particularly when Dr. Carpenter mentioned the sophisticated intellectual knowledge of Greek myths necessary for the highly symbolic representations on Apulian red-figure wares.

He also identifies a regularly occuring divine group, consisting of (from left to right), Apollo, Artemis, Athena in the centre, Aphrodite, and Eros. I have included an example of this group that I photographed at the British Museum after the conference. Occasionally, Poseidon is on the far right, and there are also instances of Nike. He also notes that the krater, upon which much of these representations exist, was a vessel favoured in Apulia not Greece and so this sophisticated mythological knowledge was intended for the people on the Italian peninsula and not for export.

Dionysus is a frequent figure, despite the use of these vases as funerary pieces, alluding to a possible Apulian understanding of the god in a funerary context, separate from the god of wine and theatre recognized in mainland Greece. There are often depictions of Dionysus as a nude male youth, identifiable only by the northex (a flowering fennel stalk) and the presence of a satyr. Dr. Carpenter suggests that this may simultaneously represent the god and the deceased youth for whom the funerary vessel was made.

I was well aware of the extensive interest in Apulia for the study of Greek culture and of the 1939 study of Taranto that is constantly being explored. And yet, this one particular example of Dionysus brought to light a good deal of what must undoubtedly appeal to scholars of the subject: a unique perspective for interpretation, a probe into the depths of Greek culture, and an example of the incredible creativity of a people when examining their own cultural traditions.

I was incredibly impressed with the intellectualism and topical variety of the conference and wish to express my thanks to Andrew Erskine for inviting me to attend. Such a production as this has made me all the more impressed with the University of Edinburgh and has further heightened my desire to one day be a doctoral student there. Kudos!