Ancient bearers of tales displayed in the John Hugh Sutton collection

IT is impossible to do more than speculate what John Hugh Sutton, a brilliant classical studies scholar, might have accomplished had he lived.

A Mycenaean jug.

IT is impossible to do more than speculate what someone who dies young might have accomplished had he lived; sometimes even early promise and precocious success are no indication of future achievement.

But sometimes ability displays itself in a deeper and more substantial way than simply being good at examinations, and in those cases one may well regret the loss of a mind that had the potential to be deep and original.

Such may well be the case with John Hugh Sutton, who was in his time the most gifted boy at Melbourne Grammar and went on to brilliant classical studies at the University of Melbourne, where he lived at Trinity College. It was there, unfortunately, that he had a motorbike accident in the driveway and died in 1925. He was mourned by the university community, which published a volume of his early writings, and his family donated the considerable sum of £500 - about $200,000 in today's money, we are told - to establish a collection of antiquities in his memory.

Prices were lower in those days and more works available to purchase from archeological digs and private collectors. An eminent Cambridge classicist and numismatic specialist, Charles Theodore Seltman, was commissioned to build the collection, and during the next four years or so he put together the works now displayed at the university's Ian Potter Museum, together with some other more recently promised donations to the university archeological collection.

The first thing that strikes you about the collection is that for all its relatively modest size, it has been selected with a discriminating eye for quality. All the pieces are very fine and appear to be in a very good state of conservation. Some are quietly spectacular, like the big wine cup of the Archaic period with its magnificent black interior and decorative black-figure frieze around the outside. The little Mycenaean stirrup jars, the beautiful Corinthian pyxis with a lid, the tiny painted oil flasks, are all elegant and refined pieces.

But this was not just a set of precious antiquities, it was a teaching collection, and one designed - no doubt in memory of Sutton's interests, as well as reflecting Seltman's own - to be as much an aid to the understanding of ancient literature and culture as an object of archeological research. This bronze strigil, you suddenly realise, is not a sample or a reconstruction: it was actually used to scrape the oil, dust and sweat from the body of an athlete, about 450BC, at the height of classical Greek civilisation and before the disaster of the Peloponnesian War (431BC-404BC), which eventually brought about the defeat of Athens by Sparta and its allies.

Then you see that one object after another not only has a story to tell but more exactly links us in a quasi-magical way to the time and place of the works of literature that speak to us so eloquently. The Mycenaean stirrup jars, dated to 1300BC and 1200BC, belong to the world evoked in The Iliad and The Odyssey - a world, of course, to which Homer already looked back across a gulf of four centuries as a legendary past.

Homer's and Hesiod's time is evoked by the low-standed bowl with a lid in the Attic geometric style, with its lively decoration of horses, from about 700BC. Greece was emerging from the 400 years of dark ages that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean Bronze Age civilisation, and the great movement of migrations was spreading Greek culture far to the west, to southern Italy and Sicily: Naxos, at the foot of what is now Taormina, was founded in 735BC and Syracuse in 734BC.

The beautiful convex pyxis with a lid, from 590BC-570BC, and the black cup, already mentioned, of 540BC take us into the world of Archaic Greece, whose most characteristic literary expression - later than Homeric epic and before the tragic authors of the fifth century BC - was in lyric poetry. Perhaps because of the femininity of the pyxis, one thinks especially of Sappho, the great poet of Lesbos, whose oeuvre, though terribly diminished by the passage of time, is sufficient to leave us in no doubt of her genius.

On the other hand, the iron spearhead that sits next to the strigil but also belongs to the sixth century BC, evokes another Archaic lyric poet: Archilochus, who in a well-known short poem speaks of himself as the servant - therapon - of Ares, the god of war, a man who, in a warlike time, lives by his spear. But then one suspects that the literary recollection also may be a way of avoiding the disquieting thought that this iron point very likely has been through human flesh and brought death to one or more men.

A small terracotta figure, described as representing a young man, possibly Apollo, almost certainly must represent the god, with his youthful appearance and long hair as well as the lyre he holds in his left hand. The god is draped in a long mantle that covers his shoulders but is open in front to reveal his naked body. The proportions are sensitively reproduced, and the figure stands in contrapposto with the weight resting on the left leg and the axis of the hips tilted accordingly. Similarly, the forward angle of the rib cage - when seen from the side - and the backward angle of the pelvis are rendered with a fluent ease that was perfected only in sculpture of the same years to which this little work is dated, 450BC-425BC: it is all the more striking that qualities only just mastered in the most ambitious bronzes of the time, such as the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, should already be reproduced in an inexpensive figure, mould-manufactured for domestic use.

Seltman, who put together this collection, was a numismatist, so it is not surprising that he acquired a significant body of ancient coins as well. The Greeks were not the first to use coins but they were the first to realise their full potential not only as a medium of exchange but as a way of advertising what we might think of as national identity; except that because there was no Greek nation, but a constellation of independent city-states whose rivalry fuelled the prodigious energy of the civilisation, each polis could use its coinage to present and circulate an image of itself. In this regard, some of the smaller and newer cities, especially in Sicily and southern Italy, took pride in making beautiful coins, while Athens, whose currency was the most important and widely used, preferred a conservative and unchanging design, much like the US currency in our time.

Coins were made using two moulds, one for the obverse and one for the reverse: they had to be engraved by hand, and one was set in an anvil while the other was in the handheld punch. A piece of silver of the appropriate weight, called the flan, was heated to make it malleable, then placed on the mould in the anvil and struck with the punch. The edges of the coin could be uneven, but this did not matter greatly in silver coins. Later, gold coins were made with the serrated edge we still use to avoid the risk of their being surreptitiously filed down. The striking of coins naturally stressed the moulds, which often cracked, so that new ones had to be engraved, and even when the same design was reproduced time and again, there were inevitably variations, both in iconography and, above all, in the refinement of workmanship.

The result is that unlike modern coins, it is unusual to find two ancient ones that are identical; and so it is not only the state of the individual coin that is important to a collector - whether relatively fresh from the minting process or worn down - but the quality of the particular mould and the skill of the minting. Here, for example, the famous Syracusan coin with the head of the nymph Arethusa surrounded by dolphins is represented by a rather indifferent specimen.

There are, however, many other fine pieces, and once again they tell stories as well as prompt our memory of history, literature and even art history - as with the Macedonian silver hemidrachm (306BC-283BC) whose figure of Nike standing on the prow of a ship and blowing her horn has the same the attitude as the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre. Thrace - modern Bulgaria - was famous for its horses and is represented by a tiny coin with the foreparts, the protome, of a horse (400BC-350BC). Two other Thracian coins remind us that Orpheus, associated with the cult of Dionysus, was from this land: a beautiful Hellenistic coin of Dionysus crowned with ivy (148BC) and an almost contemporary one retaining a much more archaic design of a satyr carrying off a nymph.

A silver stater from Sybaris shows a bull turning to lick his flank. It is dated to 550BC-510BC, just before the city, famous for its luxurious and hedonistic way of life, was destroyed by Croton, its neighbour in the Gulf of Taranto. The city was so utterly obliterated - a river was diverted to flow across the former site - that scholars remained uncertain until the later 20th century of its exact location.

The victorious city of Croton was dominated at the time by the philosophical sect of Pythagoras, but they were soon afterwards expelled in an uprising and massacre, the details of which remain obscure.

Pythagoras retired to the nearby city of Metapontum, represented here by a coin with an ear of barley, alluding to the fertile plains that made the city a prosperous agricultural centre. Today Metapontum is an archeological site and a new town, Metaponto, was built on the coast in the 1960s as a beach resort. In the off-season it is a ghost town of shuttered pizzerias and abandoned beaches in which it is hard to imagine the great thinker speculating that the key to the universe, as to musical harmony, was to be found in numbers.

There are stories hidden everywhere in these objects, yet it is also their reticence that draws our attention and makes us wonder. And perhaps nothing here is more suggestive yet elusive than a tiny bronze horse of the geometric period, in the age of Homer. It will have come from a burial, but it is also its stylised profile that speaks to us across the millennia, with its slim waist, strong limbs and trumpet snout, incongruous yet elegant evidence of what has been called the will to form.

The John Hugh Sutton Collection,  Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne. Until October 20.