What remains to be said about Athens in the fifth century bce? Plenty, according to this new volume, which brings together eighteen essays that were originally part of a 2019 conference at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA). ‘From Kallias to Kritias’ serves as a bridge to a 2017 symposium at the Acropolis Museum that covered the last quarter of the sixth century and the first half of the fifth century bce (published as: Palagia and E. Sioumpara [edd.], From Hippias to Kallias: Greek Art from 527 to 449 b.c.). This new volume augments the former with essays pertaining to the period when Athenian imperial power reached its apex and then decline, forming a robust and detailed picture of the visual and material culture of Athens from roughly the stable period that followed the Persian Wars to the political and social upheaval brought about by the Peloponnesian War.
The eighteen essays provide exciting and intriguing new perspectives on Athenian art during the second half of the fifth century bce and confirm that these decades were anything but stagnant. The topics at hand are not limited to art, as the title suggests, and include a multitude of other subjects related to the archaeology, history, architecture and topography of classical and late classical Athens. Focused upon a diverse set of themes related to Athens’ broad visual reach during this time, the essays meld new perspectives on old excavations alongside innovative, and sometimes hypothetical, interpretations of the built environment, architectural and freestanding sculpture, and decorated and utilitarian pottery. Since it is not possible to discuss every paper here, I will focus on a few select highlights and interweave several overarching themes found throughout the volume.
After a short preface and an introduction that provides a summary of each essay, the text is divided into five somewhat uneven sections that move topographically from Athens’ centre (first the Acropolis, then the Agora) to the peripheries of Attica and beyond, although the major focus is on Athens and its archaeology and monuments. The first two sections are devoted to the pinnacle of classical Athenian visual achievement, the Acropolis and its prominent Parthenon. These six essays engage with both the topographies of sacred space and the human experience of rituals and processions (P. Valavanis et al.) as well as revised interpretations of sculpture, both architectural and freestanding, that relate to the mytho-historical narratives displayed upon and around the monuments of the Acropolis (M. Fullerton, Palagia and Neils).
Of particular note is V. Manidaki's essay on the Ionic inner frieze of the Parthenon cella. Her research compares truncated slabs in the British Museum with those that were left on the Acropolis, a familiar sight to anyone who has seen the animated display in the Acropolis Museum that illustrates the decorated frieze's removal by Lord Elgin's team in the early nineteenth century. Although evidence is scant, Manidaki's deft architectural analysis argues for the possibility of a plain or even decorated inner frieze, encouraging new considerations of the viewpoints from within the Parthenon's inner colonnade as well as potential avenues of research into unidentified – and sometimes misidentified – frieze fragments from the Acropolis and the Agora. R. Jacob picks up this theme in a subsequent chapter, bringing together a handful of sculptural fragments from the Parthenon's pediments to construct a short catalogue and history of the challenges of studying such dispersed and un(der)interpreted material.
In the third section, ‘Public Discourse in the Agora’, several essays revisit legacy excavations of the ASCSA, serving as models for the necessity of fully analysing (and sometimes re-analysing) large corpora of archaeological material. A. Steiner, for example, takes a data-driven approach to pottery deposits from the excavations of the Agora's Tholos, where large numbers of men partook in communal meals. Her methodical examination of functional vessels from the mid- to late-fifth century leads to the conclusion that a system of standard measures reflected a sense of equality and an ‘egalitarian ethos’ for a representative set of the citizenry. S. Rotroff and K. Lynch also pick up the torch of quantifying large amounts of pottery and other finds from the Agora's Crossroads Enclosure and its nearby well, excavated in the early 1970s but never systematically studied. Replete with a medley of finds, the Crossroads Enclosure has revealed a wide variety of artefacts and other materials, ritual and otherwise, deposited within a short time frame upon and around the mysterious yet clearly significant central boulder. Whatever its purpose, the structure's assorted finds are clearly an integral source for illuminating the history of ‘unassuming’ sacred places at the centre of the ancient city, and Rotroff and Lynch's work in progress is well situated within recent scholarship on public religion and ritual in the Greek world.
Following on the theme of ritual spaces, ‘Cult Places and their Images’ constitutes the fourth section; just one essay here considers vase painting (D. Williams, on architectural environments depicted on red-figure vases) while the three subsequent chapters examine sculpture in the round and in relief. Moving beyond Athens, H.R. Goette reassesses two votive reliefs from the Laurion Museum in south-east Attica. Though only one of the reliefs has a secure provenience, a four-sided monument of a victorious athlete with the labours of Herakles and Theseus on the sides, Goette convincingly argues that it and another, more roughly hewn relief depicting Herakles may have both originated at a local sanctuary of Herakles epí Souníou. Building upon earlier studies by J.H. Young, his careful analysis of the topography of Sounion and its environs places the two reliefs in the context of Herakleia in Attica and their connection to athletes, for whom Herakles and other heroes were models, and demonstrates the variety of sculptural styles that are evident in votive objects from the Attic demes.
Three essays comprise the final section, ‘Athens Beyond Athens’, which considers pottery and iconography from sites peripheral to Athens. E. Kefalidou brings together ten small red-figure fragments discovered in a densely packed cistern during excavations near the Piraeus in 2016. Kefalidou's careful reconstruction yielded an exceptionally large (44 cm) plate or disc decorated with dancers wearing kalathiskos baskets upon their heads, a Dioskouros and several other figures. Kefalidou suggests a number of possible yet hypothetical reconstructions, mostly related to Spartan narratives but also to the cult of the Dioskouroi in Athens. She then ‘connects the dots’, admittedly with much speculation, in an attempt to contextualise the plate with its findspot in the Piraeus, including its possible owner and use, and encourages us to push the boundaries of our understanding of the relationship between Sparta and Athens in the late fifth century.
The value of fresh exegeses of archaeological finds through the careful analysis of older excavations is a running theme throughout the volume, but there is something to be said for the study of singular objects as well. This is nowhere better seen than in D. Ignatiadou's close examination of a large bronze paw with clipped talons from the storerooms of the National Archaeological Museum, acquired from a private excavator in the late nineteenth century but never systematically published. By narrowing the possibilities down from other types of paws found in Greek material culture, Ignatiadou suggests that it belonged to a hybrid creature and demonstrates how it must have been fastened to a vertical element as part of a larger monument. She concludes that it may have belonged to the fifth-century sundial of Meton on the Pnyx, based on the object's recorded yet vague provenance, literary sources and the meagre remains of foundational beddings that were studied nearly a century ago. Detailed photographs of the paw from all angles and X-ray analysis situate the object within the history of sundials in the Mediterranean to form a persuasive argument for a singular remaining fragment of a now largely lost monument.
The speed with which this volume was produced, less than three years after the conference and in the midst of a global pandemic, should be commended, despite several small typographical errors. It joins a spate of other recent edited volumes on ancient Athens that focus on both introductory and specific topics (most recently, J. Neils and D.K. Rogers [edd.], The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens [2021]). Concerns about Athenocentrism aside, at times the volume feels somewhat fragmented in addressing the big questions of Athenian hegemony and reach during this period, yet the individual essays point to the value of looking closely at iconography, topographical space and material culture, both from the past and from more recent excavations. In this regard, many of the essays demonstrate well how objects from secure and known archaeological contexts can still be re-examined and reinterpreted, even many years after excavation, opening new avenues for sustained research into classical Athens.
At such a high cost, and with seemingly no e-book option, the volume regrettably will be inaccessible to many students and early career scholars who could most benefit from these deep dives into current scholarship and methodologies. Indeed, the preface explicitly states that the volume is intended for ‘upcoming generations of scholars and students’; so this lack of accessibility is surprising. Videos of most of the original papers are archived on the ASCSA's website (https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/news/newsDetails/videocast-from-kallias-to-kritias-athens-in-the-second-half-of-the-5th-century). The archive includes fifteen of the original conference papers, with the addition of another paper by Sioumpara on the Acropolis’ Chalkotheke, which was not published in the volume.
A word should also be said about the images in this volume. Figures are not integrated into the text but are placed after each essay's bibliography and consist of a mixture of black-and-white and colour images, depending on published source and institution. In the case of architectural renderings and plans, such as those by Valavanis et al. and Manidaki, the greyscale makes highlighted areas of note difficult to discern. Moreover, many of the images are printed at a very small scale, often not filling the page. This creates an optical loss in terms of the rich elements of iconography, sculptural characteristics and stratigraphic layers, which is particularly frustrating for so many topics that rely heavily on precise visual details.
Overall, however, the volume is at its strongest when it makes the connection between material culture and the political and social experience of a half century of Athenian visual developments. The variety of perspectives from an international slate of scholars illustrates the value of close examination, much of which can only be accomplished through physical contact with objects and sites. While many of these essays are still clearly works in progress, as a ‘state of the field’ volume, it will be intriguing to contextualise them within the interminable trajectory of studies of Athenian art and archaeology for years to come.
