Download - INVOLVED SPECTATORSHIP IN ARCHAIC GREEK ART · INVOLVED SPECTATORSHIP IN ARCHAIC GREEK ART GUY HEDREEN The most conspicuous feature of the ancient Greek type of cup known as the eye

INVOLVED SPECTATORSHIP IN ARCHAIC

GREEK ART

G U Y H E D R E E N

The most conspicuous feature of the ancient Greek type of cup known as the eyecup (for example, plate 4.1) is that it is looking back at its beholder.1 It will notblink or turn away, but is permanently attentive. The cup asks the viewer tosubmit to it. What exactly the cup wants from the beholder, the precise form thatthis submission takes in an encounter with it, is considered here.

The eye cup first appeared in Greek art in the late Archaic period, sometimebetween 540 and 530 BCE. Between that time and the end of the Archaic period, in480 BCE, the eye cup became extraordinarily popular in more than one productioncentre. Some scholars have argued that there is little significant meaning to befound in the eye scheme of decoration.2 However, while it is one thing to questionthe significance of a decorative motif – for example, the meander pattern presentin Greek art from the Late Geometric to the Hellenistic periods3 – the eye schemeis different, because it appears all of a sudden, fully developed, achieves greatpopularity for a limited period of time; and is not in any event subsidiarydecoration but the main decoration of the cups. An earlier, widely held inter-pretation, that the eye decoration was apotropaic in intention, aimed at warding

4.1 Chalkidean black-figure eye cup, c. 530–520 BCE. Ceramic, 10 � 27 cm. Munich: Staatliche

Antikensammlungen (589). Photo: reproduced courtesy of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen

und Glyptothek M .unchen.

ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 2 . APRIL 2007 pp 217-246& Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 2179600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

off evil, at least had the merit of assuming that the motif had some specificfunction or meaning. The difficulty with the apotropaic interpretation of thecup’s eyes is that it attempts to account for a sophisticated pictorial conception interms of primitive superstitious belief in the absence of any positive evidenceconnecting the two phenomena. A related visual motif in Greek art, the gorgoneion(the frontal face of the legendary gorgon Medusa), is also accorded powerfulapotropaic force, both in ancient mythology and modern scholarship. Yet theextraordinary popularity of the gorgoneion as a visual motif attests to its ineffec-tiveness as an apotropaic device in any literal sense, a point that even someancient writers recognized. In a recent article in this journal, Rainer Mackproposed a new interpretation of the gorgoneion that contextualizes it withinancient artistic practices of visual narration and pictorial convention, rather thannotions of primitive magical belief.4 I take an approach similar to Mack’s in thisstudy of eye cups. It is important to recognize, as several scholars have demon-strated, that the faces of eye cups, like the face of the gorgoneion, represent thefaces of particular mythological individuals or types of mythical characters (silens[also known as satyrs], nymphs and perhaps Dionysos the god of wine). The eye cupand the gorgoneion are characterized by similar manipulations of pictorialconventions, including eye contact between the represented figure and the vieweras well as the elimination of pictorial space within the image. The effect of thosemanipulations, I argue, is to put the viewer into the position of being an inter-locutor – a counterpart within the mythical world – of the gorgon, silen, ornymph represented on the vase. Explaining precisely how the visual motifsencourage that response is the principal aim of this essay.

It is also argued that this particular mode of pictorial engagement with aviewer is not unique to ancient art. Richard Wollheim’s model of a spectatorwithin a representation, with whom the beholder of the work identifies, helps toclarify how the interpretation advanced in this paper differs from the inter-pretation of Norbert Kunisch and others, which holds that the eye cup functionedas a mask for the user of the vase. I also show that this mode of pictorialengagement is not limited in ancient art to gorgoneia or eye cups, but also char-acterizes some representations of silens shown en face, with a frontal face.

Although my arguments are based primarily on the formal analysis of thepictorial conceptions of eye cups and other works of ancient visual art, they canbe supported by consideration of the formal characteristics of some poetryperformed during symposia, which are the most likely context in which the vasesin question were originally experienced. The poetry employs literary conventions(first-person narrative forms, the re-performance aloud over generations oftraditional poems in the symposium) that facilitated the temporary adoption offictional personae. Both poetry and vase-painting afforded symposiasts theopportunity, provided them with an incentive, or induced them temporarily toidentify with fictional or mythical figures. Contextualizing eye cups, gorgoneiaand en face silens more broadly, I argue that there are affinities between the kindof engaged spectatorship informing those works and certain structural featuresof early Greek drama as examined by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s descriptionof the twofold experience of inhabiting a dramatic role or persona, on the onehand, and being aware of oneself in the role, on the other, is not fundamentallydifferent from Wollheim’s model of engaging with a spectator in a picture: that

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218 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

is, a beholder taking on the point of view of a spectator located conceptually withinthe virtual world of a picture yet spatially on the spot where the beholder is located.

Perhaps because of the schematic nature of the decoration of eye cups or thegorgoneion as a visual motif, many scholars have tended to look to comparativefolklore rather than to the history of art for insights into the significance of thosevisual artefacts. Nietzsche’s analysis reminds one that the visual motifs werecirculating at a time when the Greeks were developing particularly sophisticatedforms of mimetic poetry and drama, forms that had special interest in theexperience of both performers and audience. There is no inherent reason why thepictorial forms of that time may not have been just as sophisticated.

A B R I E F H I S T O RY O F E Y E C U P SThe cup now in Munich (plate 4.1) belongs to the so-called Chalkidean workshopof Archaic Greek pottery. The decoration of cups from this production centrealways includes a pair of eyes on each exterior side. It usually includes a nose and

4.2a and 4.2b Chalkidean black-figure eye cup, c. 530–520 BCE. Ceramic, 13.7 � 27.6 cm. New York:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of F. W. Rhinelander, 1898 (98.8.25). Photos: all rights reserved,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


219& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

ears as well. Occasionally, in place of the ears or nose, one encounters silens,nymphs, vases, flowers, or sphinxes (plate 4.2).5 In Archaic Athenian vase-painting, there is a comparable series of cups bearing a pair of eyes, usually also anose, and occasionally ears.6 Possibly the earliest extant Athenian eye cup is theone signed by the innovative potter Exekias and dated around 535 or 530 BCE (plate4.3).7 In his study of Chalkidean vases, Andreas Rumpf argued that no extantChalkidean eye cup is likely to be earlier than the cup signed by Exekias. But hepointed out that the eye cup appears with suddenness in Athenian vase-painting,at a time when it was dominated by other shapes and schemes of decoration ofcups. He suggested that a Chalkidean eye cup earlier than any now known mighthave been the source of inspiration for the Athenian series.8 It seems unlikely,however, that the Athenian eye cup in its entirety derives from Chalkideanmodels. The shape of most Athenian eye cups differs from Chalkidean cups in the

bowl and foot; Exekias’s cup, for example, does not have a drum-shaped foot. HansBloesch has demonstrated that the Athenian shape, known as type A, originatedwithin Athenian pottery workshops.9 The scheme of decoration employed on typeA cups also rarely includes ears, which are common on Chalkidean eye cups. Thetwo series of eye cups, Chalkidean and Athenian, might derive independentlyfrom the so-called ‘eye bowls’ manufactured in East Greece from the late seventhto the mid-sixth centuries.10 Alternatively, all three series may be independentmanifestations of a pictorial conception that is the chief subject here.

WH O ’ S A F R A I D O F T H E E Y E S O N A C U P ?The eyes staring out from the cup have often been understood to be apotropaic inintention, a magical means of warding off ill effects or evil forces.11 The inter-pretation has been supported with reference to the modern Greek practice ofpinning a small blue glass eye to a person’s clothing – to ward off the ‘evil eye’, asit is called – though evidence of continuity between the modern practice andArchaic Greek culture is hard to come by. There are, however, numerous diffi-culties with any simple apotropaic interpretation of eye cups, as Didier Martens,among others, has shown.12 Adherents of this theory cannot agree on what is

4.3 Athenian black-figure type A cup, c. 535–530 BCE, Exekias. Ceramic, 13.6 � 30.5 cm. Munich:

Antikensammlungen (2044). Photo: courtesy of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyp-

tothek M .unchen.



being protected by the pair of eyes: do they protect the wine contained in the cupsfrom impurity, or the cups themselves from breakage during shipping? If the eyesprotect the users of the cups from harm, what kind of harm was envisioned? AsNorbert Kunisch put it, why should a drinker, in the midst of his companions, inthe relative safety and comfort of the symposium, feel a need for such protec-tion?13 Is it conceivable that the function of such a sophisticated and popularceramic invention is nothing more than a desire to ward off the jealousy ofservants, as W. Hildburgh suggested?14 If the function of the eyes is essentially aprimitive one, why does the popularity of the motif occur only relatively late inthe history of Greek ceramics? And if the decorative scheme were magicallyeffective, then why did the fashion die out so quickly and completely around theend of the Archaic period?15 Can a traditional magical practice lose its perceivedeffectiveness overnight? If the intention of the decoration were magical, wouldnot one eye suffice? After all, the modern custom is to wear a single eye, not apair.16 Most significantly, the apotropaic interpretation does not explain thedecoration of the eye cup in its entirety. The earliest eye cups – East Greek,Chalkidean and Athenian – almost invariably include a nose in addition to theeyes; and the Chalkidean cups very often include ears as well. Eyes, ears and nosetogether, arranged symmetrically on the exterior of the cup, make up a frontalface. From time to time, the nose or ears were replaced by other motifs, but theoriginal conception of the eye cup in all three fabrics is that of a face, not just apair of eyes.17

T H E G O R G O N E I O NThe strongest argument in favour of an apotropaic interpretation of the eye cuphas always been the argument that connects the face with the gorgoneion, thedisembodied frontal face of thegorgon Medusa (for example, MunichN. I. 8760, plate 4.4). The gorgoneion isamong the earliest known monstersin Greek art. Over the course ofcenturies, the image occurs, it seems,in every context in which a circularpictorial motif might be called for.18

In suggesting that the eyes of the eyecup were apotropaic in origin, J.D.Beazley argued that they were some-times thought of as gorgon’s eyes.19

On several eye cups (as, for example,that in plate 4.3) there are one ormore dots above the eyes, on theforehead of the face, so to speak.Beazley suggested that the dotsrepresent a kind of artificial beautymark or mole that mothers occasion-ally depicted on the foreheads of theirbabies, in order to diminish thebeauty of the child and, in that way,

4.4 Athenian black-figure plate, c. 560 BCE, Lydos.

Ceramic, diameter 24 cm. Munich: Staatliche

Antikensammlungen (N. I. 8760). Photo: courtesy

of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und

Glyptothek M .unchen.



ward off envy, one root of the evil eye.20 Whether or not Beazley’s interpretationof the dots is correct, the fact remains that they are very common in repre-sentations of the gorgoneion (as in plate 4.4). When the dots occur as part of theimagery of eye cups, the decoration as a whole, including the round shape of thebowl, resembles the gorgoneion.21 It is true that the dots are not restricted torepresentations of the gorgoneion, occurring on occasion in vase-paintings ofsilens or masks of Dionysos, but it is nevertheless hard to deny that the eye cupand the gorgoneion share the qualities of disembodiedness and stark frontality, aswell as the occasional beauty mark.22 Most Athenian eye cups contain a repre-sentation of the gorgoneion in the centre of the bowl, which would have facilitatedthe comparison of the eye scheme and the gorgoneion by the maker and user of thecup. On a few eye cups, the gorgoneion is brought directly into close, formalrelation to the eyes on the exterior surfaces. On the outside of an eye cup inMadrid, the gorgon herself occupies the space between the eyes.23 On an eye cupin Cambridge the pupils of the eyes on the exterior are filled by gorgoneia.24 Itappears that the two visual motifs or decorative schemes, eye cup and gorgoneion,were understood to be intrinsically related in some important way.

For the apotropaic interpretation of the eye cup, what has always beenimportant about the gorgoneion is its association with the myth of Medusa,because the myth explicitly connects her gaze with a dangerous magic. The wordgorgoneion derives from the name ‘Gorgo’, a synonym for Medusa. She was the

4.5a and 4.5b Athenian red-figure pelike, c. 470–450 BCE, Hermonax. Ceramic, height approx.

20 cm. Rome: Villa Giulia. Photos: courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i beni archeologici

dell’Etruria meridionale.



mortal member of a trio of gorgon sisters, grandchildren of the dark andmysterious depths of the primeval sea Pontos. In the myth Perseus cut off andcarried away Medusa’s head; he gave the head to Athena, who affixed it to herspecial defensive armour, the aegis, as a repellent device, for the head of Gorgo,even after its separation from its body, had the very special effect of turning tostone whosoever looked it in the eye.25 It is certain that the monster’s headpossessed this power, because Perseus used it to transform the Titan Atlas into amountain of stone in North Africa (Ovid, Met. 4.631–62);26 to turn to stone thosewho interfered in his plan to marry Andromeda (Ovid, Met. 5.177–235); and topetrify Polydektes for harassing his mother Danai. The use of the head to turnPolydektes to stone is attested as early as Pindar (Pyth. 10.46–48, first half of thefifth century BCE), who specifies that the power of the gorgon’s look was enough topetrify the entire population of the island of Seriphos. The use of the head againstPolydektes is also attested in fifth-century vase-painting, as on an Early Classicalpelike by Hermonax (plate 4.5).27 But the power of the gorgon is already givenvisible form in the earliest surviving representation of the beheading of Medusaby Perseus. On a Cycladic relief pithos of around 670 BCE (plate 4.6) the dangercontained in the gorgon’s eyes is attested by the precaution taken by Perseus, whoaverts his gaze and uses his sense of touch to guide his sword to her neck.28 Theaverting of the gaze, which becomes a traditional feature of the iconography ofPerseus, indicates that Medusa alreadypossessed the power to kill with hereyes when she became a subject ofnarrative art.29

The relief pithos and other earlyrepresentations of the story of Perseusand Medusa also show that the prin-cipal traits of the face of Medusa in artare those of the disembodied gorgo-neion.30 The round frontal face in artthat is the closest parallel for the eyecup is inextricably bound up with atraditional mythical narrative. Typicalfeatures of gorgoneia – the big, toothy,fanged grin, the lolling tongue, squa-shed nose, spit-curled hair, centralparting, and, above all, stark frontality– characterize the face of the living,breathing Medusa on the Corfu pediment of 590 BCE (plate 4.7), the gorgon at themoment of her death on a mid-sixth-century vase by the Amasis Painter, andmany other representations of Medusa in Archaic narrative art.31 Even the rela-tively less monstrous conception of Medusa on the Early Classical hydria by theNausikaa Painter (plate 4.8) – sleeping imperturbably as Perseus creeps towardsher with his knife ready (he can look directly at her because her eyes are closed) –retains the wide-open mouth, central parting, and frontality of the traditionalgorgoneion.32 The early monumental pedimental sculpture of the gorgon from thetemple of Artemis at Corfu (plate 4.7) suggests that the defeat of Medusa byPerseus is part of the very conception of the monster, even when she is depicted

4.6 Cycladic relief pithos, c. 670 BCE. Ceramic,

height 130 cm. Paris: Musee du Louvre (CA 795).

Photo: courtesy of the Reunion des musees

nationaux/Art Resource, NY.



4.7 Pedimental sculpture,

temple of Artemis, Corfu,

c. 590 BCE. Marble, height

279 cm. Corfu: Archaeological

museum. Photo: Hermann

Wagner, Deutsches arch.a-

ologisches Instituts Athen,

neg. no. D-DAI-ATH-1975/885.

All rights reserved.

4.8 Athenian red-figure hydria,

c. 460–450 BCE, Nausikaa

Painter. Ceramic,

44.5 � 33 cm. Richmond:

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

(62.1.1), Arthur and Margaret

Glasgow Fund. Photo:

rVirginia Museum of

Fine Arts.



alone: in the pedimental sculpture, thegorgon is identified as Medusa (ratherthan one of her immortal sisters)through the inclusion in the compo-sition of Pegasos and Chrysaor, andthey call attention to the beheading ofMedusa by Perseus, because theyemerged from the creature’s neck onlywhen her head was removed.33 Theidentity of the head of the mytholo-gical figure Medusa and the isolatedgorgoneion is eloquently established ona pelike by the Pan Painter (plate 4.9):it shows Perseus holdingthe head ofMedusa, which he has just removedfrom its body and which takes theform, visually, of the gorgoneion. Thevase-painting leaves no room for doubtthat the ubiquitous artistic motifknown as the gorgoneion was created inthe course of a traditional heroic deed;intrinsic to the visual motif is anarrative significance.34

The vase-painting by the PanPainter also neatly illustrates theproblem with any simple apotropaicinterpretation of the gorgoneion.Perseus turns his own head away fromthe image, because to look directly atthe face would, he knows, turn him tostone, but he directs the face ofMedusa directly at the viewer, so thatit is impossible to consider the vase-painting at all without doing the onething that the myth guarantees wecannot do: look the gorgoneion directly in the eye. Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux hasargued that the visual artists regularly employed a special formal strategy, adouble apostrophe, in depicting the death of Medusa: Perseus averts his gaze fromthe paralysing effect of the gorgon’s look, and the gaze of the gorgon is alsoaverted from anyone within the narrative plane of the image. The vital necessityof avoiding the gaze of the gorgon is expressed in the visual representations notonly by Perseus’s action but also by making it impossible for any of the figureswithin the visual narrative to catch the eye of the gorgon; they cannot look her inthe eye, because she is looking at us.35 The formal visual means of conveying theimpossibility of enduring eye contact with Medusa, however, undercuts the effi-cacy of the image, because the Medusa’s gaze is invariably endured by anyone whoencounters the work of art from outside the virtual world of the visual narrative.As Mack nicely put it, the question is ‘why it made sense to articulate a monstrous

4.9 Athenian red-figure pelike, c. 470–460 BCE,

Pan Painter. Ceramic, height approx. 20 cm.

Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlungen

(8725). Photo: courtesy of the Staatliche

Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek M .unchen.



power only in order to ‘‘defeat’’ it’.36 The artists could have turned the regard ofthe gorgon so that the gorgon would avoid the gaze of both the protagonist in thestory and the beholder of the visual narrative. There would be no risk in viewingan image of the gorgon, and no art-historical problem to solve.37

In attempting to explain the ineffectiveness of visual representations of thegorgon’s frontal regard, some scholars have argued that the story itself, thetestimony to the potency of the image, is a secondary development. In ThaliaHowe’s account of the development of the imagery, the gorgoneion is, in origin, aprimitive mask – that accounts for its frontality – and it existed before any mythabout a dangerous gorgon.38 The notion that the mask of the gorgon precededthe development of a mythology about the creature is a good example of the earlytwentieth-century scholarly tendency to privilege ritual and discount theimportance of mythology as ‘ritual practice misunderstood’, as Jane Harrisonfamously put it.39 It necessitates an account of the creation of the story in whicha misunderstanding on the part of the storytellers is central. For example, Howeargued that ‘[a]lthough the gorgoneion, rather than the Gorgon, was the originalelement in the myth, the Greeks, not realising that fact, soon after its appearancereasoned that it must have belonged to a figure which had been decapitated.’40 Asnoted earlier, however, art-historical research has revealed that the narrative is asearly as the disembodied image of the monster’s head. The belief that thedisembodied head of Medusa had a prior existence independent of any narrativeentanglement rests entirely on theoretical speculation about the nature of therelationship between ritual and myth.

A more productive explanation of the failure of the gorgoneion to petrify thebeholder takes its point of departure from a type of vase-painting that firstappears in the fourth century BCE. Those vase-paintings depict Perseus and Athenacontemplating the reflection of the gorgon’s face in a pool of water or polishedshield in a quiet moment after the hero has accomplished the decapitation (forexample, plate 4.10).41 The vase-paintings advance a nuanced understandingabout the regard of the gorgon: it paralyses only those who look at it in a directand unmediated fashion. A similar conception informs Ovid’s account of thebeheading of Medusa (Met. 4.782–786), in which Perseus positions a polishedshield in such a way that he is able to guide his sword visually to its target andaccomplish a clean, effective beheading without looking directly at his prey. Thevisual representations of Medusa and gorgoneia are similar to the reflections ofthe gorgoneion in a pool or polished shield in so far as they are images of themonstrous head, not the head itself.42

It is very likely, however, that the specular motif originated at the end of thefifth century BCE, when it first appears in art, and not earlier. Jean-Pierre Vernantargued that the use of reflection is a narrative development related to otherintellectual trends of the late fifth century, including the rise of perspectivalillusion in painting, theories of mimesis in philosophy, and developments inoptical science.43 Moreover, the widespread image in earlier Greek art of Perseuslooking away from Medusa as he kills her shows that Archaic artists had devel-oped a means of conveying the story without resorting to the use of reflectivedevices.44 It seems fair to assume that early Greek artists and viewers recognizedthat they survived direct visual encounters with the frontal gorgoneion becausethey were looking at representations of it, rather than at the actual head of the



monster. But one may doubt that they conceptualized the reason for theirsurvival in the analytical or formal manner in which, say, Aristotle attributes thepleasure people take in contemplating accurate representations of things that arepainful to look at in themselves (for example, ugly animals, corpses) to universalhuman impulses to make representations, enjoy them, and learn from them.45

How the frontal image of the gorgon’s fatal gaze was experienced before thelate fifth century has only been adequately accounted for by Rainer Mack. Mackemphasizes that the fiction of the gorgon’s deadly visual power is embedded in anoverarching story in which the danger of the gorgon’s look is overcome byPerseus. As vase-painters or pottery users took up the image of the gorgoneion, theypierced the fiction of the unsustainability of its gaze, and in doing so, theyreplicated the legendary victory of Perseus over the monster.46 Mack suggests thatthe image of Medusa, even the gorgoneion, depicts not merely the petrifying powerof the monster’s gaze, but more specifically a power that was overcome byPerseus. ‘The viewer, by this account, played the role of Perseus, and in the simpleact of viewing the image . . . re-enacted his heroic triumph over the monster . . .The image is not illustrating an object in the legend (the severed head) but stagingan episode from the legend.’47 Mack’s thesis locates the effectiveness of thefrontal gorgoneion not in primitive magical belief but in the practice of visualnarration and the structure of the motif’s pictorial conception.

4.10 Apulian red-figure bell krater, c. 400–380 BCE, Tarporley Painter.

Ceramic, height 30.5 cm. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts (1970.237), gift of

Robert E. Hecht, Jr. Photo: rMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston.



W HO S E FA C E D E C O R AT E S T HE E Y E C U P ?The eye cup has important affinities with the gorgoneion beyond the formalcharacteristics already enumerated. Like the gorgoneion, which is the face of aparticular notorious individual, the face on many, if not all, eye cups is notgeneric. And like the gorgoneion, the eye cup also invites the viewer to insert him-or herself into a specific mythological context. Gloria Ferrari has emphasized thatthere are at least two specific types of figures represented on Chalkidean eye cups.On many cups (for example, the so-called Phineus cup, obverse, plate 4.11a) horseears indicate that the face is that of a silen. In other instances (Phineus cup,reverse, plate 4.11b) human ears with earrings, often combined with a form of eyelacking a pronounced tear duct, suggest a female face.48 The female faces areusually identified as the faces of nymphs, companions of silens.49 MatthiasSteinhart demonstrated why the decorative programme of the Phineus cup inparticular suggests that the female counterpart to the frontal silen face onChalkidean eye cups is a nymph. One side of the exterior is decorated with twoeyes, a nose and a pair of silen ears, the other with a pair of eyes lackingpronounced tear ducts, a nose and two human ears with earrings. Between eachhandle and ear there is a pair of figures – one silen and one female figure in eachvignette – echoing the juxtaposition of the two different frontal faces on the cup.That the female companions of the silens in the four vignettes are nymphs issuggested by their intimacy with the silens – they are even engaged in sexualintercourse on one side of the cup. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (262–63), aswell as numerous later sources, the mythical sexual companions of silens arealways nymphs.50

4.11a and 4.11b Chalkidean black-figure eye cup, c. 525 BCE, the so-called Phineus cup. Ceramic,

12 � 39 cm. W .urzburg: Martin-von-Wagner Museum der Universit.at (L 164). Photos: Courtesy of

the museum/K. Oehrlein.



Silen ears also occur on Athenian eye cups that imitate Chalkidean models inshape and decoration, the so-called ‘Chalkidizing’ cups. The most importantexample is a cup in Houston signed by the prolific Athenian potter Nikosthenes(plate 4.12). In shape, the cup appears to have been modelled directly on an earlyform of the Chalkidean cup with broad bowl and drum-shaped foot; its decora-tion, especially the line connecting the nose to the silen ears, is also very close tothe Chalkidean scheme of eye-cup decoration.51 There are also a few Athenian eyecups with ears that are not Chalkidizing in shape.52 Other characteristics ofAthenian eye cups have been taken to indicate that the frontal face is that of asilen, or that more than one type of figure is represented by the faces. Frontisi-Ducroux suggested that the snub nose represented on many Attic eye cupsresembles the characteristic squashed nose of a silen.53 For Jette Keck, in Athe-nian workshops, unlike Chalkidean ateliers, the handles of the eye cup may havebeen envisioned as the ears of the painted face.54 The pointed profile of theupturned handles of the cup might specifically suggest the pointy ears of thesilen. Kunisch has emphasized that, on Athenian eye cups, there is more than onetype of eye, the masculine as well as feminine eye, which suggests that the faces ofAthenian eye cups represent several specific types of faces, most notably silensand nymphs, and not merely the human face in the abstract.55 A few Athenianeye cups, such as the so-called Bomford cup (plate 4.13), bring the face of the eyecup into close proximity to the frontal face of the silen.56

Two other figures have also been identified in the faces on eye cups. The mostplausible identification is that of Dionysos. Evelyn Bell and Gloria Ferrarisuggested that the eye cup may derive from, or occasionally represent, the frontalface or mask of Dionysos.57 Ferrari suggested that the earrings adorning the earson some Chalkidean eye cups need not rule out the possibility that the humanears were those of a male figure, such as Dionysos. And she noted that, on anumber of Attic eye cups, a frontal mask of Dionysos is depicted between the eyes,sometimes with the mask of a silen on the reverse of the cup. Matthias Steinharthas argued that the Athenian eye cup represents the face of a particular Diony-

4.12 Athenian black-figure Chalkidizing eye cup, c. 520 BCE, signed by the potter Nikosthenes.

Ceramic, 9.5 � 35.9 cm. Houston: De Menil Collection (70–50-DJ). Photo: courtesy The Menil

Collection, Houston.



sian animal, the panther, which is always depicted in Greek art in frontalaspect.58 In sum, the faces on most eye cups, Chalkidean or Athenian, appear notto be generic but to represent the faces of specific types of creatures: manyChalkidean, and some Athenian, eye cups represent the faces of silens; someothers most probably depict the faces of nymphs; and some possibly convey theface of Dionysos or a panther. In general, the creatures all seem to belong to themythical circle of Dionysos.

The recognition that eye cups represent certain types of characters was animportant step because it encouraged the consideration of the cups in connectionwith the practice of masking, rather than apotropaic magic. John Boardmannoted that the face of the eye cup acquires a general mask-like character speci-fically when the cup is used for drinking: ‘consider one raised to the lips of a

drinker: the eyes cover his eyes, the handles his ears, the gaping underfoot hismouth.’59 Kunisch developed this idea further. The face was not just a symbol of amask, it became a veritable mask when the cup was used for drinking: the eye cuptransformed the symposiast, for his fellow symposiasts watching him lift the bowlto his face, into a silen, nymph, or some other Dionysiac figure.60

The interpretation of the eye cup as a mask that covers the face is attractive,but it is not without difficulties. Frontisi-Ducroux objected to the idea that thedrinker offered a false face to his fellow drinkers.61 The conception of a mask assomething that conceals the identity of the figure wearing it is, she argues, amodern idea. Judging from Ancient Greek literature, the mask was employed toeffect an identification of the wearer with some other figure, not to conceal thewearer’s own identity.62 Kunisch believed that the drinker could never don themask of the god Dionysos, and thus discounted the possibility that any of thefaces on eye cups represented the face of the god.63 For Martens the interpreta-tion of the eye cup as a mask cannot account for the meaning of the many eyeschemes that decorate other pottery shapes, such as neck amphoras or kraters.Those shapes do not regularly cover the faces of drinkers, and yet they are

4.13 Athenian black-figure eye cup, c. 530–520 BCE, manner of the Lysippides Painter, the so-called

Bomford cup. Ceramic, 13.8 � 34 cm. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum (1974.344). Photo: courtesy of

the Ashmolean Museum.



frequently decorated with the same kind of decoration as eye cups. To treat theeye scheme of decoration on amphoras and kraters as dependent for its inspira-tion on the eye cup merely begs the question of how it might have been under-stood on those vessels which cannot be used as masks.64 Those objections rightlycall into question an interpretation of the eye cup that limits its effect to onlythose moments when the cup passes in front of the face of the drinker andprovides him visually with a new facial identity.

In the debate about the status of the eye cup as a mask, the full significance ofthe frontality of the image – of the eye contact that the represented figure makeswith us – has been lost sight of. The gaze of the frontal face is so unremitting as toendow the figure with a high degree of attentiveness. The unflinching gaze givesthe impression that the figure is actively looking for something or someone. Thepossibility of identifying the faces on eye cups as specific types of figurescontributes significantly to determining what specifically the figures may behoping or expecting to see. For example, recognizing that the gorgoneion wascreated by Perseus in an heroic confrontation with the monster Medusa suggeststhat the gaze of the gorgoneion is directed at her destroyer. Medusa hoped to stophim in his tracks with her petrifying gaze, but the round shape of the motifimplies that he has already succeeded in beheading her. Perseus caused her gazeto be fixed forever, through rigor mortis, as it was the moment when sheencountered him. In other words, familiarity with the narrative context in whichthe gorgoneion belongs helps the viewer to determine who the gorgoneion is lookingat. In the case of eye cups, silens, nymphs and Dionysos also derive from narrativemythology.65 Silens and nymphs are the most frequent companions of the godDionysos, and they are collective identities – they are always open to broadermembership. On the Francois vase (Florence: Museo Archeologico Etrusco) ofaround 570 BCE, the most informative extant painted vase on matters ofmythology, containing ten different visual narratives and over one hundredpersonal names identifying the figures, the silens and nymphs are unusual inhaving collective, not individual, labels.66 In Archaic Greek vase-painting, silens,nymphs and Dionysos are most often seen in the company of each other, often inthe company of as many silens and nymphs as could be fitted into the availablespace.67 A silen, nymph, or Dionysos, looking attentively at something, is mostlikely gazing at another silen or nymph, or perhaps at the god.

The viewer is drawn into the scene by the direction in which the silen, nymph,or god is looking. He or she, looking for a companion silen or nymph, makes eyecontact with us, the viewers of the vase. Consider again the case of the gorgoneion:Medusa has just encountered her destroyer, because the myth assures us that thehead belonged to a body, and the round, disembodied form of the image impliesthat it has been successfully removed. The hero is obviously not present withinthe narrative plane of the image, where protagonists are almost invariably to befound in Greek narrative art – there is no room for him there. The direction of themonster’s attention suggests that Perseus is to be found where the viewers of theimage are located. Like the gorgoneion, the eye cup does not provide a pictorialspace within which the vigilant frontal face can find what it is looking for. Thespace in which the face must look is the space of the viewer of the cup. Thispictorial structure implicitly encourages the viewers of the vase, I believe, toadapt their response to the frontal face as if they were the persons or type of



figure that a silen, nymph, Dionysos, or Medusa would expect to see in the spacebefore them.

T HE S P E C TAT O R I N T H E P I C T U R ETo understand how Archaic Greek vase-paintings specifically elicit such asubjective experience cross-cultural and trans-historical comparisons may behelpful. In his study of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century group portraitureof Holland, Alois Riegl observed that Dutch artists developed a means of engaginga viewer’s imagination, not merely his or her powers of observation.68 Theydirected the attention of some (or all) of the figures within a painting towards aperson (or persons) not depicted in the image but necessarily – due to thedirections of the figure’s (or figures’) gaze(s) – occupying the place taken by aviewer of the painting. Riegl noted that a figure within such a painting usuallyresponds to the undepicted figure(s) in such a way that their character or thenature of the encounter is discernible. Of Rembrandt’s Syndics: The Sampling Offi-cials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild of 1662 (plate 4.14) he wrote,

B .urger-Thore was the first to describe the dramatic content. Above all, he correctly presumed

the presence of an unseen party in the space of the viewer, with whom the syndics are nego-

tiating. The presiding officer is presenting the guild’s position – with which the party in

question presumably disagrees – in such a superior and cogent way that his colleagues, the

moment they hear his convincing argument, gaze triumphantly at their humbled opponent.

This interpretation is no doubt broadly correct, though Thore, as a Frenchman, overly

dramatised the situation and invented an all too sharply polemical contrast between the

regents and the presumed party. To a dispassionate observer, the expressions of the figures and

the general mood of didactic attentiveness probably convey more a feeling of contentment and

assent than malicious satisfaction and schadenfreude.69

The figures in the painting respond to one or more persons occupying theviewer’s position, not as if those persons were visitors to an art museum but as ifthey had an interest in cloth or some other business with the guild.70

Riegl seemed to think that the location of the unseen protagonist(s) of thatsort of picture was more than an accident or coincidence, but he was not veryprecise about its significance. He frequently spoke of the viewer of the paintingand the unseen protagonists as if they were interchangeable. Of Hals’s Banquet ofthe Officers and Junior Officers of the Civic Guard of Saint George (1616, Haarlem: FranzHals Museum) Riegl contended: ‘[the] banqueting guardsmen . . . have a variety ofactive and passive relationships with the viewer: that is to say, with the arrivingguests whom some of them have just spotted, but who are invisible to theviewer.’71 The appearance of this kind of pictorial conception in the history of artrepresented for Riegl an important step towards an art directed to the subjectiveinvolvement of the spectator: ‘[t]he artists of Holland were the first to realize thatthe viewing subject can take mental control over all the objects in a painting bymaking them part of the viewing subject’s own consciousness.’72

Richard Wollheim refined the understanding of this sort of representation intwo important ways. First, paintings of any date, in principle, can ‘have a repre-sentational content in excess of what they represent. There is something which



cannot be seen in the painting: so the painting doesn’t represent that thing. Butthe thing is given to us along with what the painting represents: so it is part ofthe painting’s representational content.’73 Paintings that contain an unrepre-sented protagonist are not necessarily limited to seventeenth-century Europe.Second, the implied location of the unseen protagonist(s), not merely in front ofthe picture plane but more or less exactly where the spectator of the picture takesup his or her position, is of particular significance. The purpose of incorporatingan unseen, internal spectator into the representational content of the painting isto provide us, the external spectators, with a special means of perceiving thecontent of the work of art. ‘[A]dopting the internal spectator as his protagonist,[the external spectator] starts to imagine in that person’s perspective the personor event that the painting represents . . . [he] identifies with the internal spectator,and it is through this identification that he gains fresh access to the picture’scontent.’74 Paintings that successfully incorporate an internal spectator provideenough information about the identity or personality of that figure that theviewer or external spectator can adopt that character as a point of view.

Wollheim envisioned one objection to the concept of a spectator in thepicture that is especially relevant here: that the spectator in the picture is notdistinct from the spectator of the picture.75 In that regard, Wollheim clarified adistinction between two types of pictures: those, on the one hand, that invite thespectator to identify with a figure within the represented space; and paintings, onthe other, in which ‘we are expected to believe on the basis of what we see that arepresented figure enters our space’.76 The differentiation is especially important

4.14 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Syndics: The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’

Guild, 1662. Oil on canvas, 191 � 279 cm. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum (inv. no. SK-C-6).

Photo: r Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.



in the case of eye cups. When an eye cup was lifted to the face of the drinker, andits painted face covered his actual face, one might plausibly say that the paintedfigure on the cup entered the space of the drinker’s companions, and that it waspart of the intention of the potter and/or vase-painter that the cup create such animpression when used for drinking.77 Equally, as I suggest here, when the eye cupis not held up to the face of drinker, its painted face invites a different kind ofresponse, one that accords with Wollheim’s notion of a spectator in the picture.When the cup is not being used as a mask, the painted frontally facing mytho-logical figure does not enter the space of viewer; rather, the beholder is invited toidentify imaginatively with a figure within the mythical space of Dionysos and hisfollowers. As Wollheim emphasized, ‘[t]he impossible thing is for the spectator toenter the represented space, given, that is, that he doesn’t belong there, or hasn’tbeen put there by the artist.’78

In short, the pictorial conception described by Riegl and Wollheim is similar, Ibelieve, to the conception of the Archaic Greek visual image of the gorgoneion andthe eye cup. In those works of art, the figures within the painted decoration makeeye contact with a figure of a particular sort in front of them. The localization ofthe unrepresented figure in the position that we occupy as spectators encouragesus to adopt the figure’s story or role as a point of view.79 This not only accountsfor the fact that the faces on many cups are those of specific figures, such as silensor nymphs, but also suggests that the eye cup was designed to facilitate imagi-native engagement whether or not it was lifted to the face of a drinker. Thetraditional apotropaic interpretations of the eye cup and the gorgoneion are notcompletely off the mark in seeing the images as particularly powerful. The sourceof that power, however, is the insistent claim made on the viewer by the atten-tiveness of the figures. It relies on formal artistic choices rather than magic.80

T H E E N FA C E S I L E NThe hypothesis that the decoration of the eye cup often serves as an invitation toadopt the persona of a silen is supported by the pictorial conception underlyingsome vase-paintings of silens shown en face or with a frontal face, who make eyecontact with the viewer (for example, plate 4.15). The narrative significance ofthe isolated gorgoneion is clarified in part by the many representations of the storyof Perseus and Medusa in which the face of the living monster is that of thegorgoneion. Similarly, the invitation imaginatively to join the ranks of silens im-plicit in many eye cups is explicit in some vase-paintings of frontally faced silens.

Scholars have occasionally argued that the frontal face of the silen, like thatof the gorgon, was apotropaic in function. It will suffice to consider the mostexplicit ancient literary assertion that the face of the silen had an apotropaiceffect, because the context of the statement playfully undercuts its very claim. Inthe fifth-century BCE satyr play by Aischylos entitled Isthmiastai, the chorus ofsilens abandons its allegiance to Dionysos and takes up athletics. In one fragmentof the play, the silens marvel at images of themselves, which they are probablyholding in their hands:

look and see whether this image could [possibly] be more [like] me, this likeness by the Skillful

One; it can do everything but talk! . . . I bring this offering to the god to ornament his house, my



lovely votive picture. It would give my mother a bad time! If she could see it, she’d certainly run

shrieking off, thinking it was the son she brought up: so like me is this fellow.. . . [L]et each

fasten up the likeness of his handsome face, a truthful messenger, a voiceless herald to keep off

travellers; he’ll halt strangers on their way by his terrifying look.81

It is uncertain precisely what kind of images the silens are holding, but Ferrariand other scholars have argued that the silens are most likely holding theatricalsatyr masks, which they intend to dedicate in the temple of Poseidon, in imitationof the practice of dedicating dramatic masks in the Athenian temple of DionysosEleuthereus.82 That practice is known from visual sources, Lysias (21.4), and afragment of Aristophanes: ‘ ‘‘can you tell me where the Dionysion is located?’’ ‘‘It isthere where the mormolukeia are suspended.’’ ’ The fragment of Aristophanes isnoteworthy because his choice of terminology for the masks, mormolukeia (bogeys,hobgoblins), conveys the idea that the masks could inspire fear, but nothing inthe fragment suggests that they have such an effect in this context.83 ChristopherFaraone argued that one statement in particular of the silen-chorus in the Isth-miastai suggests that the masks they hold are meant to be understood as terrormasks: each one ‘will halt strangers on their way by his terrifying look(j�o½bon� bl�epon).’84 The passage as a whole, however, is not unambiguous aboutthe source of the terror that the images might inspire, for the silens have just saidthat the images will frighten their own mother because, it seems, of the highdegree of likeness or verisimilitude: ‘if she could see it, she’d certainly run

4.15 Athenian bilingual amphora, c. 520 BCE, Psiax. Ceramic, approx. 70 � 38 cm. Madrid: Museo

arqueologico nacional (11008). Photo: courtesy of the Photo Archive, National Archaeology

Museum, Madrid.



shrieking off, thinking it was the son she brought up: so like me is this fellow(dokouB

; ˛�em;eI’

˘

nai t�on e’x�eyrecen� o˛�utoB e’mjerZB

˛�od’ e’st�in).’85 Hugh Lloyd-Jones

perceptively noted that the fear that the images might inspire in the satyrs’mother or in passers-by could also be understandable if the art of portraiturewas thought of as unusual or new at the moment represented in the play.86 Giventhe high frequency with which inventions or the foundation of institutions aretreated in satyr play, it seems possible that the silens are to be envisioned asmaking the first-ever dedication of masks in a temple, or contemplating the first-ever theatrical masks of silens.87 The playful emphasis on the verisimilitude ofthe masks would have been greatly enhanced in the actual performance of theplay if the chorus members had been wearing masks identical to the ones thatthey were holding. Finally, the tone of the passage – the self-consciousness of thesilens, as they look at the images of themselves and calmly and analyticallydescribe how frightening they will be to their mother or to strangers – undercutsthe idea that the images were really effective in that way.

The en face silen is often alternatively – and, it seems to me, more correctly –understood as a means of conveying to the viewer the heightened emotional stateof the silens.88 Frontisi-Ducroux has eloquently explained how the visual motifgets that idea across formally: the en face figure disengages from visual interactionwith the other figures in the image, and in that way suggests that his or herattention is elsewhere.89 There are numerous early vase-paintings of silens andDionysos together in which one of the silens turns his face away from the god andtowards the viewer, as if to escape from subordination to the deity.90 On anamphora in Madrid by Psiax (plate 4.15), Dionysos turns around to look at thesilen behind him, because the silen is no longer attending to the god, havingturned his attention towards the spectator.91 The lovely symmetry of thecomposition, rooted in the central, transcendent figure of the god Dionysos, isspoiled by the independent-minded silen, who disregards his master’s claim to hisattention, and perhaps invites some undepicted figure into an otherwise perfectlybalanced, closed composition.

Although it appears in many cases that the en face figure is disengaged fromthe other figures within the representation, Frontisi-Ducroux acknowledged thatevery frontal face also potentially contains an address to the viewer.92 She arguedthat it seems very probable that the original viewers of the vase-paintings would,in some cases, have seen someone very like themselves reflected in the en facefigure. The likelihood is greatest, she argued, in depictions of such en face figuresas warriors or symposiasts, in which the painted figure’s vocation or identity wasmost similar to that of the original viewer, the symposiast examining the vase heis using. A symposiast named Thoudemos is portrayed on a fragmentary krater byEuphronios (plate 4.16), staring out over the top of his cup at a viewer who, thevase-painter could safely have presumed, was also a symposiast similarly holdinga cup.93 Here the en face figure becomes a kind of mirror in which the spectatorsees a reflection of himself. Vase-paintings of the gorgon, eye cups, as well as somelater paintings in the Western tradition, suggest that some en face figures canalternatively be understood to elicit an otherwise uncharacteristic role from thespectator. Frontal figures of that sort do not reflect back to the viewer an identitythat he or she already possesses, but invite the viewer to identify temporarily withcharacters who may be quite different in lifestyle or values.



Some vase-paintings of silens possess a marked visual address to an unde-picted silen whose position, as indicated by the depicted figures, is essentiallythat of the viewer. One way to understand the address is as a means of puttingthe user of the vase into the unseen silen’s shoes, so to speak, despite thedifferences in ontological status and way of life. The depiction of three mastur-bating silens on the aryballos by Nearchos (plate 4.17), one of the very earlyrepresentations of a frontally faced silen, provides a good example. The imageis dominated by a silen who looks directly at the spectator.94 One amusingpossibility is that the en face silen has seen someone in the space occupied by theviewer who has aroused him to his current state of excitement. In Aristophanes’sFrogs (542–6) Dionysos envisions himself, in an inversion of expected roles,watching his servant Xanthios embracing a slave girl, and imagines himselfroused to the point of auto-eroticism by the sight. The structure of Nearchos’svase-painting, however, encourages a different interpretation. To either side, asilen identical to the en face silen is depicted in profile. The silens to right andleft face each other and are, in a sense, mirror images. The symmetry betweenthose two figures encourages the viewer to envision an identical unseen silenfacing the en face silen. The coincidence between the position of the unseen silenconjured by the pictorial composition, on the one hand, and the position of theviewer, on the other, encourages the viewer to imagine himself in the role of asolipsistic silen.

4.16 Fragmentary Athenian red-figure calyx krater, c. 515–510 BCE, Euphronios. Ceramic,

38.3 � 53 cm. Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlungen (inv. 8935). Photo courtesy of the

Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek M .unchen.



S Y M P OT I C PO E T RY A N D R O L E – P L AY I N GThe interpretation of eye cups advanced in this essay – that their frontal faces ofsilens or nymphs are looking for other mythical creatures of their kind in thespace occupied by the viewer – is based primarily on a formal analysis of thepictorial conception or structure that informs the decoration of the cups. Socialand historical considerations support this interpretation. Most of the vase-paintings considered here were designed, so far as one can tell, for use in thesymposium.95 A large body of Archaic Greek poetry also affords the participantsin symposia the possibility of temporarily adopting alternative identities. Thosepoems consist of first-person narratives. In both ancient and modern scholarship,the first-person form of poetic narrative has often been taken to reflect the poems’function as autobiographical records of the lives of the poets. Two trends inmodern scholarship have modified that approach. Scholars have called intoquestion the status of the poetry as faithful autobiography.96 And scholars haverecognized that first-person poetic narratives were very often traditional poems,sung by participants in symposia, sometimes for generations.97 Scholarly interest

4.17 Athenian black-figure aryballos, c. 560 BCE, Nearchos. Ceramic, height

7.8 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Cesnola

Collection, by exchange, 1926 (26.49). Photo: all rights reserved, The

Metropolitan Museum of Art.



has broadened to include the question of how poetry functioned within thesymposium, in addition to the traditional question of how poetry related to thelives of the poets; the former question is of particular relevance to the inter-pretation of vase-painting that circulated in the same context. The re-performanceof first-person poetic narratives aloud, before one’s fellow symposiasts, by personsother than the poets, introduced anachronistic, fictional, and sometimes evenpurely mythical, personae into the drinking group. When a symposiast sang atraditional first-person narrative, he necessarily adopted the first-person pronounof the poem, and all the experiences recounted by that voice, as his own,98 as inthe well-known poem by Archilochos: ‘Some Saian exults in my shield which I left– a faultless weapon – beside a bush against my will. But I saved myself. What do Icare about that shield? To hell with it! I’ll get one that’s just as good anothertime.’99 Thanks to the forms of the verbs or pronouns and the participatorynature of sympotic entertainment, the symposiast who sang such a song claimedout loud, before his companions, to be someone that he perhaps was not, or tohave had an experience that in all likelihood was something that he had neverexperienced. Vase-paintings intended for use in the symposium employ thefrontal face, in some cases, for the same reason: as a structural device to elicit theadoption of a persona by the user or viewer of a vase.

Ewen Bowie has pointed out that a poem such as Archilochos fragment 1 – ‘Iam the servant of lord Enyalios and skilled in the lovely gift of the Muses’ – mightbe sung with equal relevance by any of the poet’s companions, all of whom werefamiliar with war and singing.100 Other Archaic poems demand a more radicalshift in the temporary identity of any symposiast performing them, thanks to thecontent, as well as the first-person structure, of their narratives. The most strikingand unambiguous examples are first-person poetic narratives that have femalenarrators: ‘I am a fine, prize-winning (kal�Z ka�i a˛eyl�iZ) horse, but I carry a manwho is utterly base, and this causes me the greatest pain. Often I was on the pointof breaking the bit, throwing (o˛sam�enZ) my bad rider, and running off.’ (Thgn.257–60) The feminine forms of adjectives and participle assure us that thenarrator is female, yet the poem was almost certainly intended for presentationin a symposium, the social preserve of men. It is true that flute girls and cour-tesans attended symposia, but there is no evidence to suggest that they partici-pated in the central sympotic activity of singing poetry.101 Consider also thefragment ‘me, wretched woman ( ˛�eme de�ilan, feminine adjective), me, sharing inall misery . . .’, composed by Alkaios according to Hephaisteion;102 or the frag-ment ‘I come up from the river bringing (j�erousa, feminine participle) [thewashing] all bright’, attributed to Anakreon by Hephaisteion.103 Although thefragmentary nature of the verses prevents one from ascertaining the theme orgenre of the original poems (erotic?), neither poem seems to begin with a diegeticintroduction to the effect that ‘I, a male voice, am going to quote the speech of awoman’; rather, the poems appear to begin emphatically in the persona of awoman – ‘me, wretched woman’.104 Bowie concluded that: ‘taken together thesongs are better seen as evidence for male symposiasts entertaining each other bytaking on – in song at least – a female role.’105 The invitation implicit in gorgoneia,many eye cups, and some frontal images of silens on drinking vessels, to take onthe identity of Perseus, a silen, or a nymph, seems related to the role-playing builtinto much of the poetry that served as the principal form of entertainment at the



symposia in which the vases were used. And the extraordinary transformationsinherent in such pictorially inspired metamorphoses – from a member of thearistocracy in good standing to a scurrilous, half-breed silen or hippy nymph – isparallelled by the diversity of first-person narrators in the poetry, which includenot only women but also sex maniacs and thieves.106

N I E T Z S C H EListening to a symposiast sing a traditional first-person narrative, no one mistookthe performer for the fictional character, least of all the performer himself. Theeye contact afforded by gorgoneia, eye cups and some visual representations offigures en face facilitate the temporary augmentation of the identity of the viewer,not its wholesale replacement. As the viewer takes up the point of view of Perseus,a silen, or a nymph, he or she does not lose sight of his/her regular identity. Thatpoint was developed in the earliest modern articulation of the form of specta-torship that is the subject of this paper, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy(1876).107 The Birth of Tragedy distinguishes between two different means by whichart relates to creator, audience, or viewer, a distinction between a medium orientedtowards the subjective involvement of the spectator, on the one hand, and a mediumthat is concerned with making something objectively present, on the other:

[t]o see oneself transformed before one’s own eyes and to begin to act as if one had entered into

another body, another character. This process stands at the beginning of the origin of drama.

Here we have something different from the rhapsodist who does not become fused with his

images but, like a painter, sees them outside himself as objects of contemplation.108

For my purposes, The Birth of Tragedy is useful because it offers a nuanced accountof the subjectively involved experience that certain forms of early Greek poetryafforded its audience as well as its performers. The account helps to clarify moreprecisely the kind of imaginative engagement that, I believe, characterized theexperience of eye cups. As a sketch of the origins of tragedy – as an account of howthe genre came into being – Nietzsche’s book remains as problematic as it waswhen it was first attacked by Wilamowitz in the late nineteenth century.109

Having lost sight of the importance of subjective involvement for the audi-ence of theatre, Nietzsche argued, moderns have difficulty in accepting theancient belief that the chorus alone was the original form of Greek drama:‘[a]ccustomed as we are to the function of our modern stage chorus, especially inoperas, we could not comprehend why the tragic chorus of the Greeks should beolder, more original and important than the ‘‘action’’ proper, as the voice oftradition claimed unmistakably.’110 Nietzsche traced the primacy of the chorus toa psychology of Dionysiac ritual:

the revelling throng, the votaries of Dionysus jubilate under the spell of such moods and

insights whose power transforms them before their own eyes till they imagine that they are

beholding themselves as the restored geniuses of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the

chorus in tragedy is the artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon.111 . . . In [Greek] theatres

the terraced structure of concentric arcs made it possible for everybody to overlook the whole

world of culture around him and to imagine, in absorbed contemplation, that he himself was a



chorist. In the light of this insight we may call the chorus in its primitive form, in proto-tragedy,

the mirror image in which the Dionysian man contemplates himself. This phenomenon is best

made clear by imagining an actor who, being truly talented, sees the role he is supposed to play

quite palpably before his eyes.112

Especially striking is the degree of self-consciousness of the votary, audiencemember and actor in the experience of drama or its ritual predecessor. Thevotaries do not simply become – they are not just transformed into – satyrs, losingany sense of who they were before. The ritual experience allows them to perceivethe transformation in themselves or, to follow the complex articulation in thetext, ‘transforms them before their own eyes till they imagine that they arebeholding themselves’ as satyrs. The self-awareness of the audience is alsoexpressed through Nietzsche’s use of the mirror as a metaphor: in absorbedcontemplation, an audience member can imagine that he is a chorus member,but what is revealed, as if in a mirror, is himself as someone opened up to theaesthetic experience. In this account, the measure of true talent in acting is whenthe actor is able to see himself in his role palpably before his own eyes, not (onemay speculate) the ability to lose or forget oneself completely in one’s role. Thespecial quality of doubleness characterizing Nietzsche’s conception of theaesthetic experience of early drama, of simultaneously experiencing transfor-mation and being aware of the difference between self and other, is expressed inan essay preceding The Birth of Tragedy: ‘so must the thrall to Dionysus be intoxi-cated, while simultaneously lurking behind himself as an observer.’113

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the origins of the eye cup have been associated with thedevelopment of the mask in the early history of Athenian drama.114 As I haveargued, however, the link between eye cups and drama is deeper and morecomplex than just a tangible object such as a mask. And the aesthetic effect of theeye cup is not limited to those moments when it is lifted to the face and, like amask, replaces the visage of a drinker. The eye cup may translate into the mediumof ceramics some of the properties of dramatic masks, but it also, like thegorgoneion, makes use of properties unique to pictorial art to evoke the presence ofan imaginary figure with whom the viewer is invited to identify. What links thediverse cultural forms studied in this paper – eye cups, gorgoneia, some frontalimages of silens, much sympotic poetry, and perhaps even early drama orDionysiac choral performance – is something essentially structural. Although theshared aesthetic conception manifests itself concretely in quite different ways inthe different media – through the use of first-person pronouns and verb forms inpoetry, the prominence of a chorus in drama, and the role of frontality and eyecontact in vase-painting – all the works of art considered here discourage thesinger, drinker and/or spectator from contemplating the work of art or poetryfrom a cool distance, and embroil them fully in the fiction.

Notes

For useful comments on a draft of this paper, I wish to thank my colleagues inthe art department at Williams College, Massachusetts. The following special



abbreviations are used in the notes: ABV: J.D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters,Oxford, 1956; ARV2 : Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1963;Para: Beazley, Paralipomena: Additions to Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters and to Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Second Edition), Oxford, 1971; CVA: Corpus vasorum antiquorum;LIMC: Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae; RVAp: A.D. Trendall and Alex-ander Cambitoglou, The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, Oxford, 1978–82. The Beazleyarchive database may be found at http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/. Abbreviations ofancient authors and texts are after Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawford,eds, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn, Oxford, 1999.

1 Munich 589, Andreas Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen,Berlin, 1927, 36, no. 244, pl. 178.

2 See, for example, D.A. Jackson, East Greek Influ-ence on Attic Vases, Society for the Promotion ofHellenic Studies, supplementary paper, no. 13,London, 1976, 68.

3 For the possibility of meaning, even in someinstances of the meander pattern, see NikolausHimmelmann-Wildsch .utz, .Uber einige gegen-st.andliche Bedeutungsmoglichkeiten des fr.uhgriech-ischen Ornaments, AbhMainz, no. 7, Wiesbaden,1968.

4 Rainer Mack, ‘Facing down Medusa (anaetiology of the gaze)’, Art History, 25, 2002,571–604.

5 New York 98.8.25, Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, 38,no. 263, pl. 187. For the Chalkidean seriesgenerally, see Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, 35–9,125–6; Jette Keck, Studien zur Rezeption fremderEinfl.usse in der chalkidischen Keramik, Arch-ologische Studien, vol. 8, Frankfurt am Main,1988, 64–79. For the location of the productioncentre (Chalkis or Rhegion), see Marion True,‘The murder of Rhesos on a Chalcidian neck-amphora by the Inscription Painter’, in The Agesof Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule,eds Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris, Austin,1995, 427, n. 8.

6 The Athenian eye cup was studied in detail byJeanne Aline Jordan, Attic Black-Figured Eye-Cups,University Microfilms International, no.8812638, Ann Arbor, 1988.

7 Munich 2044, type A cup, ABV 146, 21, ErikaSimon, Max Hirmer and Albert Hirmer, Diegriechischen Vasen, 2nd edn, Munich, 1981, pl.XXIV, 73. On the position of the cup within theseries of Athenian eye cups, see Gloria Ferrari,‘Eye-cup’, Revue archeologique, 1986, 12; Jordan,Eye-cups, 7–9.

8 Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, 126. On the chron-ology of Chalkidean cups, see also Keck, Chalk-idischen Keramik, 65.

9 Hansjorg Bloesch, Formen attischer Schalen vonExekias bis zum Ende des strengen Stils, Bern, 1940,2–4.

10 For example, London 1888.6–1.392, MatthiasSteinhart, Das Motiv des Auges in der Griechischen

Bildkunst, Mainz, 1995, pl. 20,3. For variousopinions on the relationships between, orderivations of, the different series of eye cups,see Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, 125; Jackson, EastGreek Influence, 64–5; Keck, Chalkidischen Keramik,70, 72; Norbert Kunisch, Berlin 4, CVA Germany33, Munich, 1971, 44; Steinhart, Motiv des Auges,62; H.R.W. Smith, The Origin of Chalkidean Ware,University of California publications in clas-sical archaeology, vol. 1, Berkeley, 1932, 123;Jordan, Eye-cups, 8–9; Didier Martens, Une esthe-tique de la transgression: Le vase grec de la fin del’epoque geometrique au debut de l’epoque classique,Memoire de la classe des beaux-arts, collectionin-8o, 3e serie, vol. 2, Brussels, 1992, 315–16;Ferrari, ‘Eye-cup’, 13–14.

11 For references, see Norbert Kunisch, ‘Die Augendes Augenschalen’, Antike Kunst, 33, 1990, 21, n.9; Martens, Transgression, 332–5.

12 Martens, Transgression, 332–47. See also J.L.Benson, ‘The central group of the Corfu pedi-ment’, in Gestalt und Geschichte: Festschrift K.Schefold, Antike Kunst Beiheft 4, Bern, 1967, 48–50. See also Alexandre G. Mitchell, ‘Humour inGreek vase-painting’, Revue archeologique, 2004,7.

13 Kunisch, ‘Augen’, 20.

14 W.L. Hildburgh, ‘Apotropaism in Greek vase-paintings’, Folklore, 57–8, 1946-47, 158.

15 For the latest eye cups, see Dyfri Williams, ‘Thelate archaic class of eye-cups’, in Proceedings ofthe Third Symposium on Ancient Greek and RelatedPottery, eds Jette Christiansen and TorbenMelander, Copenhagen, 1988, 675–83.

16 See Ferrari, ‘Eye-cup’, 11.

17 On this point, see Anna Collinge, ‘A ‘‘Chalk-idean’’ cup restored’, Arch.aologischer Anzeiger,1984, 567; Keck, Chalkidischen Keramik, 70;Steinhart, Motiv des Auges, 55.

18 Munich N. I. 8760, plate, Para 46, Lydos, LIMC, 4,pl. 165 Gorgo, Gorgones 38. A survey of themotif appears in Ingrid Krauskopf and Stefan-Christian Dahlinger, ‘Gorgo, Gorgones’, LIMC,4, 1988, 285–330.

19 J.D. Beazley, The Development of Attic Black-Figure,eds Dietrich von Bothmer and Mary B. Moore,Berkeley, 1986, 62.



20 J.D. Beazley and Filippo Magi, La raccolta Bene-detto Guglielmi nel museo gregoriano etrusco,Vatican City, 1939, 58.

21 Beazley and Magi, La raccolta BenedettoGuglielmo, 57.

22 Compare Martens, Transgression, 348–51.

23 Madrid inv. 1999/99/72, Paloma Cabrera Bonet,ed., La coleccion varez fisa en el museo arqueologiconacional, Madrid, 2003, 217–19, no.73. CompareNaples 81146, Claude Berard, et al., A City ofImages: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece,trans. Deborah Lyons, Princeton, 1989, 159, fig.

218; Munich 2027, ABV 205, LIMC, 4, pl. 166Gorgo, Gorgones 41.

24 Cambridge GR 39.1864 (G 61), ABV 202,2,Painter of Cambridge 61, CVA Cambridge 1, pl.18,2a–b, LIMC, 4, pl. 166 Gorgo, Gorgones 43.

25 For the literary sources, see Dahlinger in

Krauskopf and Dahlinger, ‘Gorgo’, 285–7.

26 See also Polyidos in David A. Campbell, The NewSchool of Poetry and Anonymous Songs and Hymns,vol. 5 of Greek Lyric, Cambridge, MA, 1993, no.837.

27 Rome, Villa Giulia, ARV2 485,25. See alsoBologna 325, bell krater, ARV2 1069,2, Poly-

dektes Painter, LIMC, 4, pl. 187 Gorgo, Gorgones337.

28 Paris, Louvre CA 795, LIMC, 4, pl. 183 Gorgo,Gorgones 290. See also Louvre CA 937. Biblio-graphy may be found in Miriam Ervin Caskey,‘Notes on relief pithoi of the Tenian-Boiotian

Group’, American Journal of Archaeology, 80, 1976,28.

29 Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque auvisage: Aspects de l’identite en grece ancienne, Ideeset recherches, Paris, 1995, 69.

30 Compare Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 12, on the

lack of terminological distinction in theliterary sources.

31 Corfu pediment, LIMC, 4, 311 and pl. 182 Gorgo,Gorgones 289; Amasis Painter: London B 471,ABV 153,32, LIMC, 4, pl. 183 Gorgo, Gorgones293.

32 Richmond, Virginia Museum 62.1.1, ARV2

1683,48bis, LIMC, 4, pl. 183 Gorgo, Gorgones299.

33 Mack, ‘Medusa’, 581, 584–5, 585 n. 30. See alsoBenson, ‘Corfu’, 51–5. On the narrative signifi-cance of attributes, see Nikolaus Himmel-mann, ‘Narrative and figure in Archaic art’,

trans. H.A. Shapiro, in Reading Greek Art: Essaysby Nikolaus Himmelmann, ed. William Childs,comp. Hugo Meyer, Princeton, 1998, 67–102. Forthe traditional apotropaic interpretation of thepedimental sculpture, see Janer DanforthBelson, The Gorgoneion in Greek Architecture,

University Microfilms International no.8202559, Ann Arbor, 1981, 192, 217.

34 Munich 8725, pelike, ARV2 554,85, Pan Painter,Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, Fig. 17.

35 Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 69–70.

36 Mack, ‘Medusa’, 578. The simple apotropaicinterpretation of the gorgoneion was undercutalready in some ancient literary sources: seeFrontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 11.

37 Vase-painters only occasionally depicted thefrontal face of the severed head of Medusa withits eyes closed: for example, Berlin F 2377,hydria, ARV2 582,16, Perseus Painter, CVA Berlin9, pls 10 and 11,7.

38 Thalia Phillies Howe, ‘The origin and functionof the gorgon-head’, American Journal of Archae-ology, 58, 1954, 215. Cf. J.H. Croon, ‘The mask ofthe underworld daemon – some remarks onthe Perseus-Gorgon story’, Journal of HellenicStudies, 75, 1955, 11–13.

39 On the Harrison quotation, see H.S. Versnel,Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual, vol. 2 ofInconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion,Studies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 6, II,Leiden, 1993, 25.

40 Howe, ‘Gorgon-head’, 215–16. Compare Jane E.Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Reli-gion, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1908, 187.

41 Boston 1970.237, bell krater, RVAp I 48,16,Tarporley Painter, LIMC, 7, pl. 285 Perseus 69.For other examples, see Linda Jones Roccos,‘Perseus’, LIMC, 7, 1994, 336–37, nos. 66–72, andBasel, H.C. Cahn 203, lekanis fragment, Alex-ander Cambitoglou and Jacques Chamay, Cera-mique de grande grece: La collection de fragmentsHerbert A. Cahn, Hellas et Roma, vol. 8, Zurich,1997, 176–9.

42 Compare Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 71–2.

43 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘In the mirror of Medusa’,in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed.Froma I. Zeitlin, Princeton, 1991, 147–9. Seealso Edward Phinney Jr, ‘Perseus’ battle withthe gorgons’, Transactions of the American Philo-logical Association, 102, 1971, 456–7.

44 See, for example, Timothy Gantz, Early GreekMyth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources,Baltimore, 1993, 307; Roccos, ‘Perseus’, 345–6.

45 Aristotle, Poet. 4.1448 b 4–17.

46 Mack, ‘Medusa’, 588.

47 Mack, ‘Medusa’, 593.

48 Phineus cup, W .urzburg L 164, Rumpf, Chalk-idische Vasen, pls 43–4,1. Ferrari, ‘Eye-cup’, 14.Lists of Chalkidean cups with ears may befound in Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, 35–9; Keck,Chalkidischen Keramik, 308 n. 283.

49 Rumpf, Chalkidische Vasen, 111; Kunisch, ‘Augen’,24–5.

50 Steinhart, Motiv des Auges, 61–2. Compare NewYork 98.8.25, plate 4.2; Berlin, V. I. 3282, CVA,Berlin 4, pl. 178, and perhaps the Chalkideaneye cup in Florence discussed by Collinge,‘Cup’. For the sources on the relationshipbetween silens and nymphs, see Guy Hedreen,Silens in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting: Myth andPerformance, Ann Arbor, 1992, 71–3; Hedreen,‘Silens, nymphs, and maenads’, Journal ofHellenic Studies, 114, 1994, 47–54.



51 Houston, De Menil Foundation, 70-50-DJ, c.530–525 BCE, Vincent Tosto, The Black-FigurePottery Signed NIKOSYENES EPOIESEN, AllardPierson series, vol. 11, Amsterdam, 1999, 144–5,pl. 143, no. 156. Other Attic Chalkidizing cupswith silen ears: Munich 2018, ABV 204,9, Athe-nische Mitteilungen, 25, 1900, 57 fig. 17; Orvieto580, ABV 204,10 (unpublished); Taranto, ABV204,11 (unpublished); Munich 2019, ABV204,12, Athenische Mitteilungen, 25, 1900, 56, figs15–16; Tampa, Museum of Art 86.51, Para 93,photo, Beazley Archive vase no. 350999;Bochum inv. S 1079, Kunisch, ‘Augen’, pl. 5,1;W .urzburg H 5334, CVA W .urzburg 1, pl. 39;Villa Giulia M. 626, Paolino Mingazzini, Vasidella collezione Castellani, Rome, 1930, pl. 99, 5and 11; Vatican 228, Carlo Albizzati, Vasi antichidipinti del Vaticano, Rome, 1925–32, pl. 17; NewYork, private, Jordan, Eye-cups, 322, no. W167.See also Steinhart, Motiv des Auges, 62, n. 565,who mentions an unpublished example on theSwiss market. On Chalkidizing cups generally,see Jordan, Eye-cups, 317–31; Keck, ChalkidischenKeramik, 75–6, 284–8; ABV 204–205.

52 Milwaukee N 17928/22266, Warren G. Moonand Louise Berge, Greek Vase-Painting in Midwes-tern Collections, Chicago, 1979, 88–9, no. 52 (silenear); Munich, cup fragments, Jordan, Eye-cups,31 C26, 34, and pl. 9,1: a human, not silen ear.

53 Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 101.

54 Keck, Chalkidischen Keramik, 70.

55 Kunisch, ‘Augen’, 25.

56 Oxford 1974.344, manner of the LysippidesPainter, John Boardman, ‘A curious eye cup’,Arch.aologischer Anzeiger, 1976, 281–90.

57 Evelyn Elizabeth Bell, ‘Two krokotos mask cupsat San Simeon’, California Studies in ClassicalAntiquity, 10, 1977, 9; Ferrari, ‘Eye-cup’, 16–18.

58 Steinhart, Motiv des Auges, 55–60.

59 Boardman, ‘Eye cup’, 288.

60 Kunisch, ‘Augen’, 23–6.

61 Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 101.

62 Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 39–41. CompareHelene P. Foley, ‘The masque of Dionysus’,Transactions of the American Philological Associa-tion, 110, 1980, 128, with an eloquent summaryof the view of John Jones.

63 Kunisch, ‘Augen’, 25, with n. 36.

64 Martens, Transgression, 357. On the remarkabletransformations of the eye motif in Athenianvase-painting, see Francois Lissarrague, TheAesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine andRitual (Un flot d’images), trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, Princeton, 1990, 141–3.

65 For a survey of the mythological contexts inwhich one finds silens, nymphs, and Dionysostogether, see Hedreen, Silens, 13–103.

66 Florence 4209, volute krater, ABV 76,1, Kleitiasand Ergotimos, Mauro Cristofani, Maria GraziaMarzi et al., Materiali per servire alla storia delvaso Francois, Bollettino d’arte serie speciale,vol. 1, Roma, 1980.

67 For surveys of ancient Greek visual repre-

sentations of silens, nymphs and Dionysos, see

Carlo Gasparri and Alina Veneri, ‘Dionysos’,

LIMC, 3, 1986, 414–514; Ingrid Krauskopf, Erika

Simon and Barbara Simon, ‘Mainades’, LIMC, 8,

1997, 780–803; Monique Halm-Tisserant and

Gerard Siebert, ‘Nymphai’, LIMC, 8, 1997, 891–

902; Erika Simon, ‘Silenoi’, LIMC, 8, 1997, 1108–

33.

68 Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland,

intro. Wolfgang Kemp, trans. Evelyn M. Kain

and David Britt, Texts and documents, Los

Angeles, 1999 (orig. 1902). A perceptive account

of the ethical significance of Riegl’s study,

which is what principally concerns me, may be

found in Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation

in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, University Park,

Penn., 1992, 155–69.

69 Riegl, Group Portraiture, 285. The painting is in

the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. SK-C-6.

70 See now Benjamin Binstock, ‘Seeing repre-

sentations; or, the hidden master in

Rembrandt’s Syndics’, Representations, 83:

Summer, 2003, 1–37, who has argued that the

unseen protagonist of the image is Rembrandt

himself. Thanks to Eva Grudin for calling my

attention to Binstock’s article.

71 Riegl, Group Portraiture, 322. The painting is inv.

no. os I-109.

72 Riegl, Group portraiture, 366. See also Riegl,

Group Portraiture, 271–2.

73 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, The A. W.

Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1984, Bollingen

series, vol. 35, Princeton, 1987, 101.

74 Wollheim, Painting, 129.

75 Wollheim, Painting, 183–5. This objection to

Wollheim’s concept was pressed by Robert

Hopkins, ‘The spectator in the picture’, in

Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as

Representation and Expression, ed. Rob van

Gerwen, Cambridge, 2001, 221–9. See also

Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or The Face of

Painting in the 1860s, Chicago, 1996, 344–5. For a

defence of Wollheim’s position against Fried’s,

see Renee van de Vall, ‘The staging of specta-

torship’, in Richard Wollheim on the Art of

Painting, 184.

76 Wollheim, Painting, 185. The examples he gives

are highly illusionistic, trompe-l’oeil paintings.

77 As Wollheim, Painting, 365, n. 36, noted, works

of art that operate in this way are ‘theatrical’,

in the sense articulated by Michael Fried in his

well-known essay on minimalist art, ‘Art and

objecthood’, Artforum, 5: 10, June 1967, 12–23.

78 Wollheim, ‘A reply to contributors’, in Richard

Wollheim on the Art of Painting, 257–8. See also

Wollheim, Painting, 365, n. 35.

79 Mack, ‘Medusa’, 590–2, arrived at his compel-

ling narrative model of the gorgoneion via a

different route, through consideration of the

late fifth- or early fourth-century development



of the idea of catching the image of the gorgonin a reflection.

80 Compare the analysis of H.E. Barnes, as quotedin Belson, Gorgoneion, 1.

81 Aisch. Theoroi or Isthmiastai, 4–17, text andtranslation after Lloyd-Jones in Agamemnon,Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments, trans.Herbert Weir Smith, appendix and addendumHugh Lloyd-Jones, vol. 2 of Aeschylus,Cambridge, Mass., 1957, 550–3. For the text, seealso Edgar Lobel, ‘New classical fragments:2162. Aeschylus, YeoroI

˛�Z ˛IsymiastaI?’ TheOxyrhynchus Papyri, 18, 1941, 14–22.

82 Ferrari, ‘Eye-cup’, 19–20; J.R. Green, Theatre inAncient Greek Society, London, 1994, 45–6;Gerhild Conrad, Der Silen: Wandlung einer Gestaltdes griechischen Satyrspiels, Bochumer alter-tumswissenschaftliches Colloquium, vol. 28,Trier, 1997, 64–5; P.E. Easterling, ‘A show forDionysus’, in The Cambridge Companion to GreekTragedy, ed. P.E. Easterling, Cambridge, 1997, 49;Pierre Voelke, Un theatre de la marge: Aspectsfiguratifs et configurationnels du drame satyriquedans l’Athenes classique, Le rane: Studi, vol. 31,Bari, 2001, 286–7. For further bibliographyconcerning the identification of the objectsheld by the satyrs, see Wessels and Krumeich inRalf Krumeich, Nikolaus Pechstein, and BerndSeidensticker, eds, Das griechische Satyrspiele, Textund Forschung, vol. 72, Darmstadt, 1999, 142–4.

83 For the archaeological as well as literaryevidence for the practice of dedicating masks,see J.R. Green, ‘Dedications of masks’, Revuearcheologique, 1982, 237–48. On the termmormolukeion, used of theatre masks, and onthe significance of the fragment of Aris-tophanes for the understanding of the Isth-miastai, see Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 14.

84 Christopher A. Faraone, Talismans and TrojanHorses, New York, 1992, 38.

85 On the implications of realism or verisimili-tude in this passage, see Mary Stieber,‘Aeschylus’ Theoroi and realism in Greek art’,Transactions of the American Philological Associa-tion, 124, 1994, 85–119.

86 Smyth and Lloyd-Jones, Agamemnon, 543.

87 On inventions and discoveries in satyr-play, seeRichard Seaford, Euripides: Cyclops, Oxford, 1984,36–7.

88 For example, see Adolf Greifenhagen, Eineattische schwarzfigurige Vasengattung und dieDarstellung des Komos im VI. Jahrhundert, Konigs-berger kunstgeschichtliche Forschungen, vol.2, Konisberg, 1929, 73; Yvonne Korshak, FrontalFaces in Attic Vase Painting of the Archaic Period,Chicago, 1987, 11.

89 Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 81–97.

90 See Hedreen, Silens, 76. To the vases listed thereadd W .urzburg L 250, amphora, ABV 136,48,Group E, Ernst Langlotz, Griechische Vasen inW.urzburg, Munich, 1932, pl. 71; Budapest50.189, amphora, Para 61, Exekias, Dietrich von

Bothmer, ‘An amphora by Exekias’, Bulletin duMusee hongrois des beaux-arts, 31, 1968, 17–25.

91 Madrid 11008, bilingual amphora, ABV 294,24,CVA Madrid 1, pls. 23,1b, 25 and 26,1.

92 Frontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 19–20, 88, 90. See alsoKorshak, Frontal faces, 13.

93 Munich 8935 plus other fragments, fragmen-tary krater, ARV2 1619, 3 bis, Euphronios, AlainPasquier, et al., Euphronios: Peintre a Athenes auVIe siecle avant J.-C., Paris, 1990, 89–95, no. 5. SeeFrontisi-Ducroux, Visage, 88–9.

94 New York 26.49, ABV 84,4, Nearchos, LIMC, 7, pl.435 Psoleas 2.

95 For the representational evidence, see WernerOenbrink, ‘Ein ‘‘Bild im Bild’’-Ph .anomen – ZurDarstellung fig .urlich dekorierter Vasen aufbemalten attischen Tongef.aXen’, Hephaistos, 14,1996, 81–134. For other evidence for sympoticuse of Athenian vases, see the survey in JohnBoardman, The History of Greek Vases: Potters,Painters and Pictures, London, 2001, 244–68.

96 See, for example, K.J. Dover, ‘The poetry ofArchilochos’, in Archiloque, Entretiens surl’antiquite classique, vol. 10, Vandoeuvres,1964, 183–212; M.L. West, Studies in Greek Elegyand Iambus, Untersuchungen zur antikenLiteratur und Geschichte, Berlin, 1974; Mary R.Lefkowitz, ‘Fictions in literary biography: Thenew poem and the Archilochus legend’,Arethusa, 9, 1976, 181–9.

97 See John Herington, Poetry into Drama: EarlyTragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, Satherclassical lectures, vol. 49, Berkeley, 1985, 48–50,207–10.

98 Compare Eva Stehle, Performance and Gender inAncient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in its Setting,Princeton, 1997, 213.

99 Archil. frag. 5, trans. after Douglas E. Gerber,Greek Iambic Poetry: From the Seventh to the FifthCenturies BC, Cambridge, Mass., 1999. This verypoem is envisioned by Trygaios in Ar. Peace,1265–1304, as the kind of traditional song thata boy might sing at a wedding party.

100 Ewen Bowie, ‘Early Greek elegy, symposiumand public festival’, Journal of Hellenic Studies,106, 1986, 14–15.

101 Bowie, ‘Elegy’, 16–17; Richard P. Martin, ‘Justlike a woman: Enigmas of the lyric voice’, inMaking Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in GreekLiterature and Society, eds Andre Lardinois andLaura McClure, Princeton, 2001, 71.

102 Alkaios frag. 10B in David A. Campbell, Sappho,Alcaeus, vol. 1 of Greek lyric, Cambridge, Mass.,1982.

103 Anakreon frag. 385 in David A. Campbell,Anacreon, Ancreontea, Choral Lyric from Olympus toAlcman, vol. 2 of Greek Lyric, Cambridge, MA,1988.

104 Martin, ‘Enigmas’, 72.

105 Bowie, ‘Elegy’, 17. See also Dover, ‘Archilochos’,207; Anne Pippin Burnett, Three Archaic Poets:Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Cambridge, Mass.,



1983, 31. To the list of possible female first-

person narrators, add Simonides, frag. 22, as

interpreted by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis,

‘Simonides fr. eleg. 22W2 : To sing or to

mourn?’, Zeitschrift f .ur Papyrologie und Epigra-

phik, 120, 1998, 1–11.

106 The argument summarized in this section islaid out in further detail in an essay entitled ‘‘‘Ilet go my force just touching her hair’’: Malesexuality in Athenian vase-paintings of silensand Iambic poetry’, in Classical Antiquity, 25,2006, 277–325.

107 The significance of Nietzsche’s analysis ofinvolved spectatorship was appreciated by LeoSteinberg in his article on Picasso’s DemoisellesD’Avignon (1907), ‘The philosophical brothel’,October, 44, 1988, 7–74. Steinberg’s interpreta-tion also takes Riegl’s Group portraiture as apoint of departure. For a recent appreciation ofhis interpretation of the Demoiselles, see LisaFlorman, ‘The difference experience makes in‘‘The philosophical brothel’’’, Art Bulletin, 85,2003, 769–83.

108 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and theCase of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, NewYork, 1967, 64.

109 Some of the problems with The Birth of Tragedyas an historical account of the origins oftragedy are explored in M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern,Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge, 1981, 142–59.For some aspects of the origins of Athenian

drama, see Hedreen, ‘Myths of ritual in Athen-ian vase-paintings of silens’, in The Origins ofTheatre in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual toDrama, eds Margaret C. Miller and Eric Csapo,Cambridge, 2007, 150–95.

110 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 65.

111 Compare the more general statement inNietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 40: ‘the destruc-tion of the principium individuationis becomesan artistic phenomenon.’

112 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 62–3.

113 From an essay of 1870 entitled ‘The DionysianWorldview’, text and trans. after James I.Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on TheBirth of Tragedy, Stanford, 2000, 53. Porter hasadvanced a comprehensive reading of The Birthof Tragedy along non-metaphysical lines: seeespecially 13–14, 35, 40, 43, 49, 53 and 56. For adifferent and highly original interpretation ofthe eye cup, in which loss of self-consciousnessplays an important part, see Herbert Hoff-mann, ‘‘‘Evil eyes’’–or–‘‘eyes of the world?’’ (ashort psycho-archaeological excursion into thehistory of consciousness)’, Hephaistos, 21–2,2003–2004, 225–36.

114 Ferrari, ‘Eye-cup’, 18–20. See also Bell, ‘Maskcups’, 9–10, and Claude Berard and ChristianeBron, ‘Dionysos, le masque impossible’, inDionysos: Mito e mistero. Atti del convegno inter-nazionale Comacchio 3–5 novembre 1989, ed. FedeBerti, Ferrara, 1991, 313.



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