Tony Spawforth—
To call someone a ‘Greek god’ is to see them as ‘a paragon of male beauty’, or, more specifically, as having ‘a very well-built, athletic body’. Annually since 2001, French rugby stars have posed artfully naked in a Pirelli-style calendar (but male) calling itself ‘Les Dieux du Stade’ (‘The Gods of the Stadium’). The title’s underlying reference was made explicit in the 2019 calendar (cost: 24.90 euros). This themed the calendar boys as the Greek gods of Mount Olympus: the canonical twelve Olympians reimagined with a certain licence so as to admit Eros, god of erotic desire, and erm, Priapus.
The muscled young originals of ancient Greek art are not always what we might expect. If you are a tourist on the little ferry boat which chugs across the shallow lagoon separating the island of Mozia from the mainland of south-west Sicily, you may not know of the surprise which awaits you in this archaeological site’s museum. Once admitted, you enter a darkened room where, to your left, unseen until this point, up rears an antique statue of stupendous Greek workmanship form maybe the 470s BC. It looks like nothing else the spectator will have seen in this line of ancient Greek artistry.
Guiding on cultural tours here, I have heard a range of reactions to this marbled statue, from ‘I don’t like it: it’s effeminate’ to ‘A dead ringer for Freddy Mercury’, the late pop singer, who had an extravagantly strutting stage persona. Personally, I’m reminded of an exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery of so-called ‘swagger portraits’ by the likes of Van Dyck, portraitist to England’s Charles I: ‘The paintings. . . . do not, strictly speaking, depict those who sat for them. What they depict is, rather, those people’s fantasies of themselves.’
This Mozia figure, a now-mutilated youth without arms, feet or nose, stands with one hand on hip, one foot forward, the body in a ‘[swinging S-curve’, the pose an ‘exaggerated swagger’ on one critic’s view. Almost as unusual is the youth’s costume: an ankle-length number in the crinkliest of fabrics, resembling the dresses, with their hundreds of small pleats, created by the fashion designer Mariano Fortuny in the early twentieth century. With one big difference: the costume given this fantasy of a Greek male is skin-tight, a wet look, clinging to the body, revealing rather than concealing the powerful musculature and prominent genitalia beneath. He could almost be a “dieu du stade’.
Experts hardly know what to make of this figure, a relatively recent find by archaeologists digging at Mozia (1979). The figure is stunningly off the message of days gone by, to judge from a book I have to hand, Greek Sculpture, published with a hundred illustrations by an Edinburgh publisher in 1913. This offers its black-and-white photographs as ‘an art to be enjoyed’. Its introduction gives a typical flavour of the ideological pinnacle on which Europeans and their colonial cousins once placed antique statues of male and female nudes (of which more shortly):
On those marble brows, fronting the ages with the candour and modesty of a resolute race, on those eyes which look forth sure, and glad, and unafraid, there seems to fall the shining of some far-off celestial splendour. . . . Greek sculpture is the story, in bronze or in marble, of the victorious progress of the race. It is the exalting song of a glorious national destiny—the paean of the triumph of Greek culture over the crumbling civilisations of the East. But the supremacy of Greece was the supremacy not merely of a land, not merely even of a race; it was above all the supremacy of the Hellenic ideals.
It would be easy to poke fun at this purplish passage, were its ‘ancient Greek supremacism’ not these days an understandable hackle-raiser for many people. Looking back over the decades to when I was taught Greek sculpture as a university undergraduate, I’m not sure that I could claim with certainty that this utopian way of thinking about Greece had left no mark on my teachers, nor, come to that, on me, at least back then.
Going back to that Mozia figure, it singularly fails to emit the ‘Hellenic ideals’, at least as this passage imagines them. To a modern eye the statue may seem to ‘exalt’, but what? The eroticised fitness of a cocky young man, some might say. It recalls those portraits of sixteenth-century European dandies vaunting their codpieces as symbols of male virility and power. As for ‘candour and modesty: I think not. I start with this figure—depicting a victorious charioteer, most experts think—because it unsettles the traditional values which western culture has projected onto Greek sculptures of athletic males.
Not that these values, a century on from the Edinburgh book, have withstood the buffeting of more recent cultural shifts. In the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, collections of plaster casts from the Greek and Roman antique were a familiar teaching aid in western universities and art schools (see below). Less so now. In Australia, Sydney University’s stupendous collection, running into the hundreds, was put together in the late 1800s and the start of the twentieth century. It ‘fell out of academic favour in the mid—Sixties’. The university ended up giving much of it away to high schools, although the story that casts were ‘broken up and put in as roadbase around the campus’ is no more than an ‘urban legend’. At the university in north-east England where I taught, a few such casts survived the iconoclastic 1960s, to be subjected to periodic indignities by students, or else purloined, in the face of general indifference, to adorn the studies of members of staff.
From What the Greeks Did for Us by Tony Spawforth. Published by Yale University Press in 2024. Reproduced with permission.
Tony Spawforth is emeritus professor of ancient history at Newcastle University. As well as leading cultural tours in Greece, he has presented eight documentaries for the BBC and has published thirteen books, including The Story of Greece and Rome.
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