Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

57. Ibid., page 62. In politics he had an assistant survey 150 different city-states around the Mediterranean. Cook, Op. cit., page 143. The story of that survival is itself a web of Byzantine complexity. The books were inherited several times, buried in an underground cellar, taken to Rome, where they were catalogued by one Andronicus of Rhodes.

58. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 64.

59. Ibid., page 65.

60. Lereque, Op. cit., page 365.

61. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 69.

62. Ibid. But see Cook, Op. cit., pages 142–143 for Aristotle’s theory that virtue was a mean between two vices.

63. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 71.

64. Leveque, Op. cit., page 363.

65. Ibid., page 364.

66. Ibid.

67. Grant, Op. cit., page 252.

68. Burn, Op. cit., page 204.

69. Grant, Op. cit., page 39.

70. Burn, Op. cit., page 124.

71. Ibid.

72. Grant, Op. cit., page 39.

73. Ibid., page 40. See also Cook, Op. cit., page 145.

74. Burn, Op. cit., page 205.

75. Grant, Op. cit., page 110.

76. Ibid., pages 129–130. Cook, Op. cit., page 145.

77. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 79.

78. Grant, Op. cit., page 158.

79. Ibid., page 159. Cook, Op. cit., page 118.

80. John Boardman, Greek Art, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996, page 145.

81. Cook, Op. cit., page 157. Grant, Op. cit., pages 95–96.

82. Grant, Op. cit., page 81.

83. What many people consider to be the climax of classical Greek sculpture was discovered in 1972 in the sea off Riace in Calabria, southern Italy. These are the so-called Riace bronzes, two male figures about six feet tall. Both are bearded, were originally helmeted and may have carried shields, though these have been lost, possibly looted. The figures have luxuriant hair, with lips and nipples (and possibly eyelashes) made of copper. Technically, and realistically, the statues are second to none and although, in truth, we do not know who fashioned them, the two main candidates are, first, Pythagoras, a sculptor described by Pliny as the ‘first to represent such anatomical details as sinews and veins and hair’ and whose native town was Rhegium (the modern Reggio Calabria), near where the bronzes were brought up; and second, Polyclitus. This attribution is based on the fact that he worked a lot in bronze, in Argos, and because the statues have various Argive features. His work, too, is known only through copies, one the ‘Youth Holding a Spear’ (Doryphorus), in Naples, and the other, ‘Youth Binding a Fillet Round His Head’ (Diadumenus) of which there are various copies. But Polyclitus also wrote a Canon, embodying his view of what the ideal proportions for a human being should be. This shows that Polyclitus had a mathematical view of beauty – it was a philosophical matter of proportions, the human body ‘a supreme demonstration of mathematical principle’. Pliny said that many people were influenced by the Canon. Polyclitus beat Phidias in a competition for the statue of an Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. But none of this proves that the Riace bronzes are by him and the possibility is real that the climax of classical Greek sculpture was produced by an unknown hand. Grant, Op. cit., pages 81ff.

84. Ibid., page 59.

85. John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989, page 8. Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, Circa 530–470 BCE, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

86. Ibid., pages 263–264.

87. Hall, Op. cit., pages 32–33. But many sculptures were painted: see Cook, Op. cit., 151 for a discussion.

88. Hall, Op. cit., page 30.

89. Grant, Op. cit., page 279.

90. Ibid., page 280.

91. Ibid., page 224.

92. Ibid., page 281.

93. Walter Burkhart, The Orientalizing Revolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992 (1984 in German), passim.

94. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, London: Free Association Books, 1987/Vintage paperback 1991, page 51.

95. M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. West says that Egyptian literary influences on Greece are ‘vanishingly small’ but Peter Jones, Op. cit., page 225, says that though many details in Bernal’s account are absurdly exaggerated, much of his general argument is sound.