The appeal of Classical Greece

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 27

The appeal of Classical Greece

Land of Loot Goda: The Search for Claaaical Greece. By R. Stoneman. Hutchineon, 1997. 346 pp. Illuatratione. $5999. (Reviewed by Graham Zanker) “I like my archaeologists romantic,” Stoneman declares. For all the valuable light that the twentiethcentury science of classical archaeology can shed on the fascinating but dark ages and aspects of ancient Greece, he argues, the main work for the student of the Greek influence on modem European art and architecture, the rediscovery of Classical Greece, has been done. To show just how great a pull the Greece of the "romantic archaeologists” Greece continues to exert on the popular European imagination he has only to point to the hordes of tourists bustling over the old sites, the Acropolis, Mycenae, or Delphia: however, incidentally, these people are searching for the sources of their culture.

Appropriately, then, he addresses his book to non-specialists interested in the development of the Greek Taste in Europe and seeking a comprehensive survey of the facts of the rediscovery and an intelligent analysis of them. His historical ambit is as huge as it is rich, stretching from the Roman Republic’s depredations to the close of

the last century. The key protagonists are all there: Cicero, who prosecuted Verres for denuding Sicily of its Greek art, but begged his friend, Atticus, to send him Pentelic herms’ Cyriac of Ancona, the philhellene who read to Mehmed the Conqueror from classical literature the night before the sack of Constantinople: the topographers Spon and Wheler, who in 1675 found in scriptions to copy at Heraclea, but, having lost their pens, fell eagerly upon a goose quill lying on the road to complete their task; the imposing Victorian, Charles Newton, whose particular penchant was to collect lion statues for the British Museum; and of course, Schliemann, of whom there is no hard evidence that he said “I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon.” The catalogue of destruction and avaritious despoliation is heartbreaking, from the Romans’ insanely vindicative sack of Corinth in 146 B.C. to the Venetians’ catastrophic bombardment of the Parthenon in 1687. Stoneman’s account of how the Classical Greek inscriptions, coins, statues and architecture directed European taste is equally fascinating. We are given a clear outline of the part played by the ruins of Greece in the eighteenth-century cult of the “picturesque” and how this in turn informed the historical consciousness,

the desire to recall the past which produced the ruins. It is amazing, too, to be reminded what an impact the Elgin marbles had on artists: whereas a Flaxman was instantly won ver by their realism of detail, the Society of Dilettanti scorned them because their realism undermined the society’s claims about the Greek Ideal. It is salutary, finally, to remember how nationalism and power politics in nineteenth-century London, Paris, Munich, and last but not least Athens itself, fostered the arrogation of the ancient monuments as symbols of prestige, and thus affected artistic taste, starting with the host-museums themselves. In such a comprehensive book, it is inevitable that minor factual errors exist Goethe’s Italian journey took place in 1786-87, not 1781, for example. Sometimes, too, the task of martialling the material gets out of hand; Stoneman frequently has to pull himself up with a formula like “But we must begin at the beginning.” The. overall organisational principle is clear, however. “Land of Lost Gods,” in fact maintains our interest in no small part because of Stoneman’s enthusiasm and sprightly pen, but mainly, as the author would be the first to admit because of the intrinsic importance and fascination of his subject.