Praxiteles and the Impious Prostitute
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens is one of the great treasuries of the world. As soon as you go in - provided you can get past the grumpy and discourteous guards - you see before you the gleam of precious metal and stare into the golden face of Agamemnon. The showcases to left and right are filled with more gold, the burial treasures excavated by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae.
Reluctantly you tear yourself away from that room and cross the foyer to enter the room on your left. Here the gleam is more subdued, the grey shine of polished marble. Statues of gods and goddesses, famous men and antique heroes, women renowned for their beauty and atheletes renowned for their strength.
By the time you have admired every statue and read every label your feet are beginning to hurt, but you force yourself on to the rooms at the rear of the museum, where the glass cases are filled with the dull green of ancient bronze - strigils, kraters, cauldrons, tripods, medical instruments, tools, and, of course, the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism.
Wearily you leave the bronze rooms and there before you is a long flight of stairs. Most tourists quail at the sight and decide that there is nothing up there worth visiting, but how wrong they are! At the head of the stairs is a room full of objects excavated from Thera, the Greek Pompeii, and to left and right are other rooms crammed with magnificent red-figure and black-figure pottery, from massive jars that held the olive oil given as prizes to the winners of the Panathenaic Games to delicate jars used to hold perfume or tears.
Those who have been round all this are definitely starting to wilt by now and most either do not notice or turn a Nelsonian blind eye to the small sign at the foot of the stairs pointing to "Special Exhibition". I must admit that the temptation to rest my aching feet has been very strong, but I am happy to boast that I rose superior to age and infirmity and did the thing thoroughly.
The first time I took the Diggings Tour to Greece the Special Exhibition consisted of Greek and Roman glass, of which there were some splendid examples, excellently displayed. I dutifully plodded from case to case and even took a few photographs, but my heart wasn't in it. It may be some defect in my upbringing, but I find it very hard to get excited over crockery!
This most recent tour of Greece, however, was a very different matter. This time the Special Exhibition consisted of sculptures by the famous artist Praxiteles. It may have been a response to the recent exhibition of Praxiteles' work in the Louvre in Paris, in which the Greeks grudgingly participated.
Praxiteles was born in Athens around 395 BC and had a long career as a sculptor. We know that he was still had at work in the 330s! He was trained by Cephisodotus, who was probably his father, and we also know that his sons carried on his work, though without his superb skill.
Like most sculptors of the time, Praxiteles worked mainly in bronze, casting statues of gods and heroes to order. However he also experimented with marble and most of the statues on display were of that material.
Unfortunately, most of them were not by Praxiteles! Ancient sculptors rarely signed their work - we have a few statue bases signed with the words "Praxiteles made me", but not the statues that went with them - and we are reduced to relying on descriptions of statues in writers such as Pausanias to identify them. For example, one statue of Apollo depicts the god in the act of killing a lizard - for which it is known as Apollo Sauroctonus, Apollo the Lizard-killer - a sufficiently unusual image that we can be certain that Praxiteles' work has come down to us.
But unfortunately Praxiteles' actual statue has not survived the tribulations of the centuries. The original was taken to Rome and the bronze statue of Apollo Sauroctonus in Cleveland is a copy of the original. Most of the other statues on display are also Greek or Roman copies of Praxiteles' work.
The most famous of these, both in antiquity and today, is the Venus of Cnidus. According to the legend, the islands of Cos and Cnidus both asked Praxiteles to produce a statue of the goddess Aphrodite for them. At the time he was working on two - as well as special commissions he also did work "on spec" - one of which was draped in beautifully carved robes so real in appearance that people reached out to finger the cloth. The other was a nude, the first time the goddess had ever been depicted without her clothes.
The order from Cos arrived just before the order from Cnidus, so when the statues were finished Praxiteles sent for the ambassadors of Cos and offered them their choice of statue. The elderly and respectable ambassadors took one look at the nude and unanimously pointed to the other statue. They were not about to go down in history as the men who brought scandal and even blasphemy to their island.
That left Cnidus with the nude Aphrodite. We are not told whether the representatives of Cnidus were pleased with their acquisition or whether Praxiteles had to do some fast talking to persuade them to accept it. The image was controversial, made even more so by the model on which it was based.
At that time the most beautiful of Athens' many heterae or courtesans was a certain Phryne. Men flocked to her house just to catch a glimpse of her passing the window and when she went abroad she had to go heavily veiled to avoid being crushed by the crowds who rushed to gape at her.
Like modern pop or film stars, she had a love/hate relationship with her admirers. On the one hand she found them an unmitigated nuisance; on the other they were essential to her trade and when public interest in her waned, she took steps to titillate it to greater heights.
It was the annual festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries when initiates and candidates followed the Sacred Way out of Athens and down to the temple and gardens at Eleusis. Part of the ceremonies there was a ritual plunge into the sea and both men and women took part in this, men naked and women decently clothed from head to toe in their white pelops and chlamys.
Phryne walked down to Eleusis decently clad and modestly veiled, but when it came time for the ritual dash into the sea she ostentatiously removed every stitch of clothing and waded naked into the water. The reaction may have been more than she was expecting.
Instead of a crush of lecherous men, there was a shocked silence and when she came out of the water a couple of officials were waiting for her. She was arrested and taken before the Sacred Tribunal on a charge of impiety.
For a time things looked bleak for the courtesan, but the orator she engaged to defend her was equal to the occasion. When the accusers had finished their denuciations he rose and made a graceful speech to the effect that a beautiful body was a gift from the gods and to keep it hidden was the real impiety. As his speech neared its climax, Phryne stood up and in one dramatic gesture he stripped her robe from her so that she stood naked before the judges. "Aphrodite herself is no more beautiful," he declared. "Far from impiety, my client was offering her beauty back to the goddess as the greatest and best gift she possessed."
The judges, swayed, we will charitably assume, by the man's oratory, acquitted Phryne.
Praxiteles' statue was taken to Cnidus and installed with due ceremony - and immediately became a sensation. Pilgrims travelled from all over the Greek world to worship this particular manifestation of the goddess of physical love. Several quite sober historians assert that some men were so overcome by the statue's beauty that they sneaked back at night to climb up onto the plinth and express their love in an (in)appropriately physical manner!
There was no sign of any such scandal in the display at the Athens museum; in fact, the attendants on duty throughout the gallery would have quickly seen to it that any misbehaviour was nipped in the bud. It was most interesting to compare the grace and movement in Praxiteles' work with the stiff, formal poses of the kuroi in the first room of the museum.
Whether, as the experts assert, Greek art went downhill from the time of Praxiteles is a moot point, but there can be no doubt that the great sculptor took his art to new heights.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
