Greek diaspora on display in odyssean epic show in Melbourne

The ancient Greeks were open-minded and curious as they interacted with other civilisations during their expansion.

Statue of Antinous-Osiris featured in Open Horizons - Ancient Greek Journeys and Connections at Melbourne Museum. Credit Museums Victoria. Photographer Tim Carrafa

The National Museum of Australia’s Greek exhibition – from the British Museum in London – closed a few weeks ago, and now the Melbourne Museum is presenting works from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The Melbourne show is smaller, and different in theme as well as in emphasis, evoking the continuities of ancient and modern Greece and the links with the considerable Greek diaspora community in Melbourne.

Diaspora – which comes from the Greek verb for sowing seed – is indeed at the heart of the Melbourne exhibition, complementing the themes of contest and competition in the earlier one, since that competitive spirit arose from the decentralised, or more exactly multi-centred, structure of Greek civilisation with its many independent and self-reliant city-states whose number grew through the diaspora process.

The Greeks migrated into the Greek peninsula in several waves, most notably the Bronze Age Mycenaeans in the second millennium BC and later, after the Trojan War, the Iron Age Dorians. The Aegean region was already a dynamic and sophisticated one long before the arrival of the Greeks, as we are reminded by a magnificent Cycladic figure at the entrance to the exhibition, possibly from the island of Naxos and dating to 1000 years before the Hellenic period.

But the most important centre was Minoan Crete, and the first Greek civilisation evolved through the assimilation of this more developed culture, which they eventually conquered in the middle of the second millennium BC. These were the Greeks who fought the Trojan War and whose remains were uncovered in the excavation of Mycenae in the late 19th century. A beautiful cup of beaten gold with repousse figures of octopuses shows how skilfully the Mycenaeans learned from the Minoans, and is an example of the striking lifelikeness that must have amazed Homer and his contemporaries in the Geometric period.

The next wave of Greeks, the Dorians, as already mentioned, were armed with iron weapons but were culturally much less advanced. Their arrival initially helped precipitate the region into four centuries of dark ages and cultural regression before the ancient Greece we are most familiar with emerged in the eighth century, the age of Homer, followed by the Archaic period in the seventh and sixth centuries and the Classical in the fifth and fourth.

Greek migration beyond the peninsula began very early: when the Dorians invaded, many of the Mycenaeans migrated to the islands and the Ionian coast (much later Turkey), which would be the birthplace of Homer and still later of the first Greek philosophers, including Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes from Miletus, Pythagoras from Samos and Heraclitus from Ephesus, among others.

Statue of a Sphinx featured in Open Horizons - Ancient Greek Journeys and Connections at Melbourne Museum. Credit Museums Victoria. Photographer Tim Carrafa

An even greater wave of migration and colonisation, however, occurred in the lifetime of Homer himself and over the following century. This migration took the Greeks to new lands in the west, where they settled especially in Sicily and southern Italy, and as far northwest as Marseilles – incidentally introducing olives, grapes and figs wherever they went. They also spread to the northeast and into the Black Sea, establishing colonies in what is now Ukraine and especially the Crimea, lands occupied by the Scythians, an Iranian people.

The first Greek colony in Sicily was Naxos below what is now Taormina, in 735BC, and in the following year Syracuse was established further south. Megara Hyblaea followed around 726, Gela in 698, Akragas (Agrigento) in 582 and so on. The first colony on the mainland was Cumae, founded by Euboeans in the eighth century, then Naples; countless others followed in the south, including Taras, (modern Taranto) Metapontum, Sybaris, Croton, Elea, and Paestum. A fragment of a Geometric period funerary krater in the exhibition has a vivid image of the kind of ship that could have sailed to Sicily in this period.

Adventure and sea voyages had long captured the Greek imagination; the oldest, the most celebrated and traditionally the first sea voyage was that of the Argo, when Jason and his companions crossed the Black Sea to Colchis in what is today Georgia to find the Golden Fleece.

But the real voyages of exploration and settlement in the eighth century must have seemed no less adventurous, and it is not surprising that so much of the Odyssey takes place in these newly discovered and still almost fabulous lands that might well harbour Cyclopes and Laestrygonians.

More striking than the picturesque details, however, is the spirit of restless adventure and questing for knowledge that Homer embodies in the character of Odysseus. He brilliantly re-imagines the story of the Sirens, marine temptresses from the myth of Jason, so that their seduction is specifically tailored to each man’s desire, and in the case of Odysseus to his longing for knowledge. Yet for all Odysseus’s restless curiosity, the whole of the poem is also a story of a journey home. It was this ambiguity that made Odysseus such an inexhaustible inspiration for later authors, especially Dante (Inferno XXVI, 1322), who imagines the final voyage predicted in Homer; Tennyson, who follows Dante in evoking this last adventure (Ulysses, 1833); Cavafy, who contemplates the role of home as ultimate destination in the long wanderings (Ithaka, 1911); and Joyce, who retells the epic in an ordinary day in Dublin (Ulysses, 1922).

The process of colonisation followed logically from the multi-centred nature of Greek civilisation: that is to say, each colony was sent out by a particular polis (or sometimes a pair of poleis acting in concert), which was known as the “mother city” or metropolis. The expedition was called an apoikia, a “leaving home”, and the settlement was led by an oikistes, or “home-maker”.

Thus Corinth was the metropolis of Syracuse, Sparta of Taras. Mature colonies in their turn could send out further colonies, as Sybaris, itself a colony of the long-lost Achaean city of Helike, established Poseidonia (Paestum) before it was destroyed by Croton. Colonies were independent and had to stand on their own feet, but retained political relations with their mother cities and with those of kindred peoples, as can be seen in the lining up of alliances during the Peloponnesian War and especially the Athenian invasion of Sicily.

The emphasis of this exhibition, however, is on the interactions of the Greeks with the many different peoples they encountered in the course of this expansion. They were open-minded and curious, and it is striking that in many cases they have left the main historical documents we possess for other contemporary civilisations.

Herodotus, for example, has left us in his Book II the first witness account of life in Pharaonic Egypt, and in Book I the first detailed account of the ancient Near East. He and later Xenophon, Arrian and other Greek authors are responsible for the totality of the literary sources we possess for the history of Persia; already by the Sassanian period the memory of everything before Alexander the Great, in Persia itself, had dissolved into myth.

The Greeks were well aware that many of the other civilisations they encountered were very old indeed; they were intrigued by the Near East and fascinated by the immemorially ancient traditions of Egypt. One of the early pieces in the exhibition is a sixth century sphinx, evoking the Egyptian tradition but also the story of Oedipus, solver of riddles. Nearby a bronze gryphon head of the seventh century represents a Greek modification of a near-eastern theme that would return to the east in the architectural ornamentation of Persepolis.

In the earlier period, there are formal borrowings like this and also foreign objects that attest to a curiosity about non-Greek cults. A copper cup from Phoenicia (c. 725-675) is lined with a frieze of intriguing figures, some of which represent the goddess Astarte, whom the Greeks identified with Artemis, and whose cult is described by Herodotus in Book I, evoked centuries later by Catullus (Poem 63) and later still by Lucian in On the Syrian Goddess. We can see the cult figure of the goddess holding her breasts while her eunuch priests dance and play the tambourine.

Two funerary steles, one for a Phoenician and the other for an Etruscan, attest to the presence of foreigners like this in Greece. Curiosity about other peoples is reflected in an early fifth-century vase with two female heads back-to-back, a black African and a white one, recalling the words of Xenophanes in the previous century, complaining about the fallacy of an anthropomorphic view of the gods: “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.”

The most impressive piece in the exhibition is a colossal head of Zeus from the second century BC, after the conquests of Alexander. But in this period, when Greeks found themselves ruling non-Greeks, there was also a tendency to religious syncretism, particularly in Ptolemaic Egypt, where the composite figure of Serapis combined elements of Zeus, Osiris and Dionysus.

Among the later pieces is a statue of Cybele, the oriental mother goddess, the sepulchral effigy of a young Greek woman as a votary of the Egyptian Isis, and a figure of the increasingly popular hermaphrodite; originally this was the mythological figure Hermaphroditus but later even Apollo is sometimes represented with the physical attributes of both sexes.

The last part of the exhibition is dominated by a pair of standing figures that look at first sight like the classic pairing of an Archaic kouros with the Egyptian standing figures that served as the starting point of the earliest Greek sculptors. But in fact the chronology is reversed, and the Egyptian figure is about 700 years later, in the second century AD, from the time of the emperor Hadrian. It portrays his lover Antinous, who was deified after his mysterious drowning in the Nile, in Egyptian headdress and in the hieratic pose of statues from thousands of years earlier.

The kouros figure, from Boeotia, represents a rejection of the hieratic pose as well as many other features of Egyptian sculpture: it is naked rather than clothed, freestanding rather than engaged in a wall, and above all a figure of man in general rather than a portrait of a monarch. The Antinous, on the other hand, is probably the work of a Greek or Greek-trained sculptor pastiching the ancient Egyptian style.

One cannot help wondering too how the emperor himself thought of the cult he had instigated. Was it really religious, or merely sentimental?

Hadrian was a Philhellene and reader of philosophy, but he also underwent ritual initiation at Eleusis on several occasions. And one can ponder the same question for Herodes Atticus, on whose estate this statue was found; why would a scholarly gentleman of the second century build a sanctuary to the Egyptian gods? Did he really believe in them or was it a kind of jeu d’esprit? Or is it the symptom of a new religiosity matching the rise of Christianity?

Open Horizons is at the Melbourne Museum until August 14

Open Horizons

Melbourne Museum, until August 14