Reading Response around 400 words(History of Art)

ART, DESIRE, AND THE BODY

IN ANCIENT GREECE

ANDREW STEWART University of California, Berkeley

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Part One: " ... To Make This Art Seem Strange" I. Perspectives

I. Bodies Familiar and Unfamiliar 2. Body and Gender in the Greek City 3. "Visuality," Gaze, and Glance 4. The Public Eye 5. Looking Around the City

2. Nakedness

I. The Problem 2. Nakedness in Greek Life 3· Nakedness in Early Greek Art

3· Tooling the Body

I. Art, the Body, and Desire 2. Marble 3· Bronze 4· Painted Pottery

Part Two: Men and Women, Gods and Mortals 4. Three Attic Ideologies

I. Best and Brightest 2. Marathon Man

3· Eternal Springtime?

5· Of War and Love I. Bed and Battle 2. The Doryphoros

3· The Knidia 4· Of Pain and Pleasure

VII

page IX

XIII

3 3 7

13 14 19

24

24 26 34

43 43 45 47 56

86 86 86 96

106

VIII

6. "Womanufacture" I. "Going Dorian"

CONTENTS

2. Athenian Perspectives 3. Hegeso Revisited

Part Three: Social and Antisocial Bodies 7. The Athenian Body Politic

I. Athens to ca. 510 2. From Kleisthenes to Xerxes (510-480) 3. Kimonian and Periklean Athens (479-429) 4. Conflict and Disaster (431-403) 5. Revival and Ruination (403-322)

8. Erotica I. For Men 2. ForWomen

9. Beyond the Walls I. Two Images of Alterity 2. Centaurs and Amazons 3. Role Reversal: The Praxitelean Satyr

Coda ro. Looking Forward: After Alexander

I. New Horizons 2. In and Out of the City 3. The Kingdoms: Insiders and Others 4. Gender Drift and the Bisexual Body

Appendix: Archaic and Early Classical Small Bronzes of Girls "Going Dorian"

Bibliographical Notes

Bibliography

Some Important Dates

Glossary

Index

ro8 ro8 II8 r24

r33 134 137 141 148 151

r56 156 171

r82 182 191 199

205 205 206 216 228

23r

235

268

CHAPTER FIVE

OF WAR AND LOVE

i. BED AND BATTLE

This chapter explores the chief icons of the male and female body in the ancient world - the bronze Doryphoros or Spearbearer by Polykleitos (see Figs. 5 r and 5 5) and the marble Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles (see Figs. r, 57, and 5 8). It is unfortunate that both of them survive only in Roman copy, which limits one's address to them quite severely, but to omit them would be like discussing the Renaissance body without Michelangelo's David and Titian's Venus of Urbino, or the nineteenth-century body without Rodin's Age of Bronze and Manet's Olympia.

My excuse for pairing them is that together they construct a new metaphysic of masculinity and femi- ninity, and that a polarity well recognized in classical Greece both divides and unites them. For although the Doryphoros with its mighty spear became the supreme embodiment of the warrior-athlete, the Kni- dia, surrounded by her luxuriant garden, represented the apotheosis of female sexuality- the very paradigm of what the Greeks called the Race of Women.

Yet like the genders they embody, the two of them were linked reciprocally in a permanent nexus of power and vulnerability: As the philosopher Empe- dokles taught, Love and Strife make the world go round. For not only did Aphrodite and the war god, Ares, end up in bed together, but the Greek word for "bedmate/wife," alokhos, is derived from the same Inda-European root "legh "to lie down" - as that for an ambush and thus a company of spearmen, lokhos. This, in turn, could also be used to mean "childbirth." So men's labor (ponos} is war, women's is procreation.

In ancient Greece, few could escape either ordeal. From the gruesome accounts of the piles of butchered

86

corpses that littered the field after each major hoplite battle, to the skeletal data showing that the average fifth-century Greek woman bore five children and had a life expectancy at birth of only thirty-six years as opposed to forty-four years for her husband, the evi- dence is overwhelming: For both sexes, life was often far from the romantic idylls of the nineteenth century. In these circumstances, the Spartan custom of allow- ing only the names of those men who had died in bat- tle and those women who had died in childbirth to be inscribed upon their tombs seems poignant and unex- pectedly humane. For as Medea bitterly remarked, she would rather stand three times in the front line of bat- tle than bear one child.

So the pessimistic conviction that war and procre- ation were what men and women, respectively, were made for was fundamental to ancient Greek thought, and still conditions the thinking of many traditional societies. The fact that this kind of social gendering is no longer acceptable in the modern West is not only historically irrelevant, it impedes our understanding both of the Greeks and of our own stance in relation to them. Because the Doryphoros and Knidia take definitive positions concerning particular aspects of the classical Greek habitus, especially its sense of gen- der and gender roles, they demand separate and indi- vidual attention. Furthermore, as will appear, the ways in which they incarnate these positions simulta- neously problematize them and reveal a certain inse- curity in the Greek patriarchal psyche.

2. THE DORYPHOROS

Despite its formidable reputation, Polykleitos's Doryphoros is a tissue of enigmas. Not only does it

FIGURE 5 r. Doryphoros by Polykleitos of Argos (Roman copy); bronze original, ca. 440. Marble; height r.99 m. Naples, Museo Nazionale. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Rome.

88 MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

not survive in the original, but the copies (see Fig. 51) disagree on the exact poise of its head and spear; the texts disagree on whether it was identical with his Kanan or "Rule"; and scholars disagree upon its pre- cise subject and original location. Happily - since these problems have generated an enormous literature - the statue's interest for the present enquiry does not depend upon our solving any of them at all.

To summarize: The word doryphoros means "spearbearer," and was in common use in the sixth and fifth centuries for the bodyguards of tyrants and "bar- barian" kings. Since representing one of these men can- not have been Polykleitos's intention, his statue must have acquired this name later. (The first extant refer- ence to it dates to 46 B.c.) Maybe its original title had already been forgotten by then, or maybe the statue itself had even been destroyed, for despite its immense fame in Roman times, noone tells us where it stood.

Yet since classical Greek sculpture invariably rep- resented specific subjects, scholars have hunted high and low for a name. The argument goes as follows: Since Polykleitos's statue carried the martial doru, not the light javelin or akontion used in the games, it must represent a warrior. At over six and a half feet tall, it would have towered over the average adult Greek male by a full foot. This and the sheer size of its spear (evidenced by the curled fingers of the Naples copy: see Fig. 5 r) point to a mythological hero. As Friedrich Hauser suggested in 1909, the leading candidate is Achilles, the "best of the Achaians" and the greatest fighter and runner among the Greeks at Troy; though some disagree, this theory remains the most popular.

Circumstantial evidence to support it is all Roman, but no less compelling for that. It includes Pliny's state- ment that "naked figures holding spears modeled after ephebes from the gymnasia and called 'images of Achilles' - were popular" in Rome; Quintilian's com- ment that the Doryphoros's physique was "suitable both for war and athletics"; and the discovery of bronze berms of it and an Amazon opposite one another in the Villa dei Papyri at Herculaneum: Achilles and Penthesileia come to mind. The consensus is that the original bronze was made in the 44os.

The Doryphoros set a new standard for the repre- sentation of masculinity: Fortunately, the ancients did agree about this, and offer many reasons for its renown. The epitome of Measure (to metron) or the Mean (to meson), it adopted a posture that was inter- mediate between rest and movement; "suitable both for war and for athletics," its physique fell midway between the thin and the fat; a "virile youth," it stood

on the brink of manhood. Its pose was rigorously worked out so that each weight-bearing limb or mus- cle was placed in diagonal opposition to a relaxed one; its body was perfectly proportioned according to a formula that related all its parts mathematically to one another and to the whole; and it was finished with meticulous accuracy of detail.

The intent of all this was clearly polemical, not only to criticize predecessors (e.g. Figs. 3 3 and 40) but to establish a new standard, an absolutely perfect male body generated by a priori reasoning that would guide future practitioners (as Pliny says) "like some sort of a law." The obsession with balance and har- mony, in particular, was probably a response to theo- ries like those of the influential early fifth-century doctor Alkmaion of Kroton. He argued that the human body maintains its health through an isono- mia between the "powers" (moist and dry, hot and cold, etc.), but gets sick if one of them achieves monarchia. The meaning of monarchia is obvious, but isonomia or "equal-law" was no less charged. The drinking songs composed to honor Harmodios and Aristogeiton, for example, proclaim that when they killed the tyrant (see Fig. 3 9) they made the Athenians isonomoi. In both cases, then, isonomia should mean either "equality before the law" or "equality of rights" - a balance among all the individual elements of both body and city that automatically guarantees physical and civic health. In politics, if that balance were to one's liking, one would would call it dike; if not, one would castigate it as adikia.

Mesmerized by all this, scholars often seem to for- get that the Doryphoros belongs to a genre: He is a warrior. This genre already had over three centuries of history behind it when Polykleitos took up his tools, and its unique social resonance had elevated it to a commanding place in Greek visual culture. For every citizen was expected to take up arms when his city was in danger: Warfare was endemic in Greece, and it became a commonplace that the polis was an organi- zation geared for war. Probably on any given sum- mer's day, somewhere in the Greek world, men put their bodies on - and in the line in this way, risking agony, mutilation, and death on their city's behalf. Battle was the supreme test of Greek masculinity, and like all such tests revealed more about those who took it than they often cared to admit.

The freestanding warrior first appears at Olympia in the eighth century, when bronze statuettes of belted or helmeted but otherwise naked men brandishing spears became popular as rim attachments to cal-

OF WAR AND LOVE

FIGURE 52. Warrior from Olympia, ca. 700. Originally part of the handle to a tripod caldron. Bronze; height 2 3. 3 cm. Olympia Museum. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens.

drons; several have holes in their lowered left hands, probably for horses' reins (Fig. 5 2). Derived from the Near-Eastern type of the Smiting God, they are iden- tified by some as Zeus, by others as Pelops. Both pro- posals have their drawbacks, not the least of which is

that the same type soon turns up at Delphi, Athens, and elsewhere.

During the seventh and sixth centuries, warriors often don hoplite armor and shield, and either adopt an assertive stride forward (Fig. 5 3) or, more rarely, stand quietly with their spears by their sides. The first type reappears in battle scenes in both sculpture and painting, the second primarily on gravestones. Com- pletely naked spearbearers, Doryphoros-style, are generally avoided, and even when kouroi represent men who have died in battle, like Kroisos (see Pl. IIla; Fig. 3 8 ), they carry no weapons. Archaic Greek artists were in many respects minimalists at heart but also disliked ambiguity, so they preferred to reserve the naked spearbearer for athletes.

Armor, then, was a supplement, or parergon, to the bronze or marble warrior's essentially naked body (which generated his martial arete), and was intended to contextualize him to a greater or lesser extent. Complete outfits as in Figure 5 3 are rare, but helmet and shield alone are common; the breastplate, which leaves the genitals exposed, appears more seldom, since many sculptors and painters preferred to display the naked torso in all its strength and power.

Full-scale battle scenes generally bear a similarly equivocal relation to reality. For it has often been remarked that although Greek infantry warfare involved mass formations of spear-wielding hoplites (Fig. 5 4), archaic and classical Greek art almost always opts for one-on-one combat. Phalanxes are shown only on seven archaic vases and one archaic marble frieze (that of the Siphnian Treasury at Del- phi), and there are none in extant classical Greek art unless one includes the fourth-century Lykian reliefs - carved at least in part by Greeks but for a non-Greek clientele. The jug in Figure 54 and four other vases are Corinthian and belong to the mid-seventh century, when the phalanx was still a novelty. The remaining two were made in Athens around 560, and the frieze around 525.

Four of these Corinthian pictures show battles on more-or-less equal terms, but the fifth, in London, depicts the next stage, when one side is collapsing. Of the two Attic vases, one takes up this theme by having the defeated phalanx actually run away en masse as the other charges forward, whereas the other mythol- ogizes it, showing the Greek army in phalanx forma- tion pouring through the gates of Troy as Neopto- lemos kills Astyanax. On the Treasury, the phalangites are the Giants, vainly attempting to storm heaven and destroy the Olympians. Since the latter fight in ones

FIGURE 53. Hoplire from Dodona, ca. 500. Bronze; height 12.8 cm. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulrurbesitz. Photo: Museum.

OF WAR AND LOVE 91

and twos, here the Giants' phalanx formation may be intended specifically to mark them as mere mortals, getting far above their station.

Why this reluctance to represent phalanxes? Pre- dictably, scholars often explain the preference for duels as heroic or heroizing, and invoke Homer to back up their case, but even though many of the scenes are taken from myth, this begs the same question as calling male nudity itself "heroic." Although to show contem- porary warriors as latter-day heroes would certainly have done them signal honor, at least two other factors may have been at work: the Greeks' recognition that the citizen-soldier was an individual, not a mere robot programmed to kill for his city, and their actual experi- ence of the terrifying loneliness of hoplite battle.

The citizen-soldier's individual contribution to the battle was both extolled in Greek war poetry and rec- ognized by the bestowal of prizes upon the most val- orous. The seventh-century Spartan poet Tyrtaios, for example, exhorts "each man" to grit his teeth, advance with firm step (cf. Figs. 53 and 54), brandish his spear, toss his helmet crest, and learn to fight by experience. Don't stand aloof beyond the hail of mis- siles, he says, but,

Instead, each man get close and spear your enemy, Or spit him with your sword, and take his life.

With foot set against foot and shield set against shield,

And crest against crest and helm against helm, And chest thrusting hard against chest, let each man

fight With sword in hand, or far-injuring spear.

Prizes for outstanding bravery and extraordinary feats of arms are first heard of around 600. Much cov- eted, they conferred immense prestige. So although victory in a phalanx battle depended largely upon col- lective discipline, the Greeks balanced recognition of the citizen's unflinching dedication to the group with acknowledgment of his individual contribution to its success. The Persians, on the other hand, simply pun- ished cowards with death or mutilation.

Yet valor was only half the story; the other half was fear. Tyrtaios and the other poets have a lot to say about it how it freezes the soldier's heart and numbs his limbs. Imprisoned and stifling in his brazen armor, unable to see much beyond the approaching enemy and his immediate neighbors, and carried inexorably forward by the massed ranks around him, the indi-

FIGURE 54. Protocorinthian olpe from Veii, ca. 650. Phalanx battle. Height of frieze 5 cm. Rome, Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Rome.

92 MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

vidual hoplite often (to judge from Aristophanes' grim jokes) had a hard time retaining control of his bowels. Writer upon writer remarks how terrifying it was to face the glinting armor and massed spears of the enemy, especially the awesome Spartans, that "single mass of bronze and scarlet" whose pipers accompa- nied their silent, steady tramp into battle with eerie, spine-chilling melodies (cf. Fig. 54). Not surprisingly, some opponents took one look, turned, and fled - as on the sixth-century Attic cup, described previously.

As Victor Hanson has remarked:

The peacetime fascination with the use of shield and spear, the hoplite's ritualistic dance, the competitive race in armor and the interest of sculptor, vase painter, and poet - was, I believe, symptomatic of the anticipation and anxiety that gnawed in the heart of every man, growing large in inverse proportion to the relatively few moments of actual fighting on the battlefield. . . . For men aged twenty through sixty uninitiated and veteran alike the charge, the collision of spears, the pushing, trampling, wounding, panic, confusion, even the pile of battlefield dead, were all similar events to be experienced one awful, fatal time, or perennially until a man could fight no more. . . . For the Greek citizen of every age, there was one image alone of the hoplite spearman, imprinted in the mind like the warriors on the frieze courses of so many Greek temples, a picture that each man shared with every man he knew.

Or, as a feminist critic has put it, "in mastery of fear men experience freedom: Conflict is action, action is masculine." So the supreme image of unfet- tered masculinity in Greek art was not the collective killing machine of the phalanx but the individual war- rior, represented exactly as he was at that fateful moment: alone. With this image every Greek male could identify, for in it he saw himself.

The high point in pre-Polykleitan representations of the warrior is undoubtedly statue A from Riace Marina (see Figs. 33 and 34). His assertive posture with left foot advanced, body braced, spear and shield (now lost) at the ready, and head turning to speak - surely in anger - proclaim him a lion among men: Agamemnon, Achilles, or a Founding Hero of one of the Sicilian colonies? A rugged killer, he epitomizes the public eye's image of the hero: fearless, unyielding, jealous of his honor, quick to take offense, and implacable in requiting it.

Yet in order to mold himself to the stern dictates of the honor code and the public eye, he affects to ignore us completely even while presenting his magnificent body full frontal to us. In doing so, he neatly encapsu- lates the problem of a society in which the homoerotic

glance is taken for granted. For although men like this can be surveyed doing masculine activities and may freely stimulate the fetishizing eye, they must never reveal themselves as vulnerable to it. As in the kouroi (see Pl. Illa; Fig. 38), the warrior's undersized penis, man's most problematic organ, displaces our attention to his magnificent body, but with its ultra-smooth sur- faces and iron-hard muscles this turns out to be as impenetrable as a suit of armor. His gaze and speech are directed elsewhere; blatantly agonistic, they channel our eyes away from him to the Other, his competitor.

Polykleitos inflected this tradition in several quite fundamental ways (see Figs. 5 r and 5 5). Not only did his Doryphoros proclaim an ideal of perfect self-mas- tery (which every Greek knew translated into mastery over others), but its sermonizing rhetoric of balance and limit placed the observer in a completely new relationship to it. The statue's unhurried movement, self-contained pose, foursquare physique, and tightly circumscribed forms announce not only the defining constituents of true human greatness, but how such greatness may be controlled, disciplined, and sus- tained. It suggests that perfect freedom is possible for us all - provided, of course, we are young, free, Greek males and train day after day like him.

The statue's age, on the brink of manhood, pro- claims that this physical and mental conditioning must be completed by the time a man reaches maturity. Its evident youth attracts us to it as a potential eromenos, but its mature muscularity and the austere architecture of its body keeps our desire safely at arm's length. Even its ostentatiously neutral expression and slightly low- ered and averted head, poised midway between the macho arrogance of Riace A and the meek aidos of the youths of the Parthenon frieze (see Plate IV; Figs. 33 and 44), speak to this project. By disavowing hybris, avoiding engagement of any sort with others, and refusing the eroticized glance, they discreetly reestab- lish the image's power and autonomy.

So this man, Polykleitos asserted, is the perfectly con- trolled warrior-athlete, no primitive killer but the quin- tessence of disinterested male self-discipline. Measure personified and the very epitome of male sophrosyne, he represents Polykleitos's fantasy of the most perfect, most complete, freest, and therefore most powerful male ego in the world. This fantasy was eagerly taken up by the culture, to judge by his extraordinary reputa- tion and the large number of replicas that survive. And to promote it, he used all the weapons in his formidable arsenal. Striving for both the most rigorous abstraction (the Kanon) and the most thoroughgoing corporeality, he sought to use each to reinforce the other.

OF WAR AND LOVE 93

For the Doryphoros's balancing act between whole and part, realized through its strict division of the muscles into major and minor, active and passive, tense and relaxed, and their proportionally based integration into the whole, created a visual hierarchy of forms that was intended to appeal to both eye and mind. Essentially, the statue was perfect anatomy and perfect geometry combined. It strove to balance and to satisfy both the sensual requirements of the glance, which seeks to scrutinize (theasthai) move- ment, detail, and texture, and the mind's eye (theo- ria), which takes sight's atemporal sense of simultaneity to privilege being over becoming, spec- ulation over observation, abstraction over mere flesh.

Yet to the critical observer the deep transitions between the muscles and the binary code that divides them into engaged and relaxed tend to segment this body to a degree that no mental effort can counter. The reduction of attributes to the barest minimum (the spear) only reinforces this effect, for it leaves one with nothing else to focus upon but limbs and mus- cles. By decontextualizing the statue, this suggested he was or could be everyman, boosting the Greek spec- tator's already strong proclivity to identify with him. And for the Greeks, the temptation to narcissistic involvement of this kind would have been even stronger, for they were schooled to regard beauty as specific and clarity of articulation as beautiful.

In the Odyssey, for example, when Odysseus pre- pares to fight the bully Iros, he tucks his rags around his middle to reveal his "great and shapely thighs, broad shoulders, chest, and brawny arms." The char- ioteer in Figure 14 fits this description point for point, and both together remind us that ancient notions of beauty do not always coincide with our own. In particular we set little value on thighs, but to the Greeks their appeal was considerable. Archaeol- ogy students have aptly nicknamed the kouros of Plate Illa and Figure 3 8 "thunder-thighs," and from the sixth century they were a strong homoerotic stim- ulus, fetishized because of the liking among Greek men for intercrural homosexual intercourse (see Figs. 9 5 and roo, extreme left). Aischylos even has Achilles reproach the dead Patroklos for abandoning him by saying:

Ah, Patroklos ...

You felt no compunction for my pure reverence of your thighs;

0 what an ill return you have made for so many kisses!

Another, even more explicit fragment from the same play mentions "god-fearing converse with your thighs," and on a lighter note, Sophokles a few years later has Ganymede's thighs "set Zeus aflame."

Fetishism of this sort naturally tended to privilege the· part over the whole. Thus, in Xenophon's account of Sokrates' conversation with Parrhasios, the philosopher makes the painter admit that since it is difficult to find a completely flawless model he takes the most beautiful parts from many and combines them into one surpassingly gorgeous image. Roman writers even alleged that Parrhasios's great rival, Zeuxis, staged a beauty contest at Kroton for this pur- pose. Commissioned to make a painting of Helen, he supposedly lined up the city's five comeliest virgins, got them to strip, and composed his figure from "the most laudable features of each." Seven hundred years later nothing had changed, as witness pseudo-Lucian's account of the Knidia, quoted in Section 3.

These strategies could have been effective in engen- dering beauty only if the artist both articulated the parts clearly and integrated them with the whole. Aristotle endorses this, flatly announcing that "the main species of beauty are proportion, articulation, and order." Since he praises Polykleitos's work twice in this particular text and once in another, and his word for "proportion," symmetria, is the same as the artist himself employed, it is clear that he regarded this particular balancing act as a successful one. Yet for all the Doryphoros's commitment to unity, the ten- sion between whole and part remains - a standing temptation to a fetishistic, bodybuilding, but ulti- mately dismembering scopophilia. For he simultane- ously excites our desire for a whole body like this and focuses it on the individual parts, inviting us to scruti- nize (theasthai) his statue in detail and attempting to shame us into developing biceps, pectorals, thighs, and calves precisely like his own.

Since Polykleitos turned muscles into a fetish, it is time to pay them closer attention. For in addition to being beautiful, muscles are natural, achieved, struc- tured, hard, and powerful.

r. Muscles are beautiful. Since the Greeks idolized the physical perfection of the well-trained male body, it follows that a man's muscles are a prime constituent of his beauty.

2 •. Muscles are natural. Men's potential for muscu- larity is a biological fact, so the spectator can accept them as given. But they are also a means for dominating competing males and women: Their very naturalness helps to legitimize male

FIGURE 5 5. Reconstruction of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos by Georg Roemer, 1920-2r. Bronze; height r.99 m. Formerly at Munich University, destroyed in 1944. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Rome.

OF WAR AND LOVE 95

power. In the Doryphoros, where they are backed up with a lethal weapon, they naturalize and so legitimize the patriarchy.

3. Muscles are achieved. They bespeak the ponos or labor of long training and conditioning, suggest- ing that a man can improve what heaven has given him. They proclaim their bearer's self-dis- ci pline and potential to achieve more, and implicitly put down the less strongly muscled: other men, and women. They signal success in the battle of life.

+Muscles are structured. Not only are they among several natural components of the rational, hier- archically organized structure of the human body, but when cultivated like the Doryphoros's, they blatantly manifest this structure. In an age when to exercise naked in the gymnasion was men's basic training for war; when the muscle cuirass was in common use (see Fig. 42); and when armies were hierarchically organized by tribes, demes, and so on - the Doryphoros's muscles (backed up by his giant spear) were a metaphor for the most awesome human organi- zation of all: the cohesive, ordered, disciplined phalanx (see Fig. 54).

5. Muscles are hard. The Doryphoros's pose and modeling style emphasize their hard lines and angular shapes. They thus serve as a fetishistic substitute for the phallus, particularly to a cul- ture that played down penis size because of this organ's embarrassing imperviousness to mental and physical control, and identified phallicism with gross, unacculturated creatures like satyrs and centaurs (see Figs. 9, II, 86, and I20-23). Muscles introduce the phallus into the polis in disguise.

6. Muscles are powerful. Because muscularity is beautiful, natural, achieved, structured, and hard, it is the preeminent sign of phallic power, of the patriarchy, and thus of the thrusting dynamism of the polis system itself.

So the Doryphoros's close-knit, apparently impen- etrable muscles symbolize the robustness and physical inviolability of the citizen body and therefore of the polis as well. "Suitable both for war and for athlet- ics," its physique makes it both a one-man phalanx and a one-man Olympics - in fact, a one-man polis. It represents and legitimizes the patriarchy with all the tools at its maker's disposal. Yet although it offers a seductive goal for every man to strive for, and for that

reason never lacked admirers, its gospel of iron self- discipline hints at repressed anxieties, and as a physi- cal and moral exemplar it is more problematic than many want to admit.

To begin with, though Polykleitos's implied equa- tion of across-the-board moderation and total emo- tional disengagement with absolute freedom may be very Greek, it is far from unproblematic; and if he really did choose a hero as his statue's subject, this choice merely dramatized the fact. For in both battle and athletics, self-discipline may be a virtue but self- restraint is not, and heroes in particular were notori- ously emotional characters.

Central to Homeric society but standing far above it, they somewhat resembled contemporary tyrants - the very men who often used doryphoroi as their bodyguards. Achilles had indeed been the greatest warrior among the Greeks, but at Troy his very extremism, towering ego, and ironclad dedication to the honor code had almost destroyed them. So if he were indeed the Doryphoros's subject, its construc- tion of a middling, modest, self-disciplined, and clin- ically detached Achilles, no matter how appealing to the fifth-century citizen mind, was paradoxical indeed.

Indeed, by dedicating itself so obsessively to mar- tial order and discipline, the Doryphoros not only embodied each citizen's hopes but secretly revealed his fears. For every Greek knew that indiscipline, fear, and chaos were endemic in all armies, even at times the Spartan, and unless matched by equal chaos on the other side, they could be fatal. Thus, despite all the Athenian propaganda about the invincibility of the Marathonomachoi, by the later fifth century the city's phalanx was notoriously the weakest link in its armed forces, and was several times worsted on the battle- field with heavy casualties. And in 42I Polykleitos's home town of Argos, dissatisfied that its phalanx had been unable to defeat the Spartans for almost 250 years, established an elite corps of I,ooo young, aris- tocratic phalangites who then immediately pro- ceeded to plot against the city's democracy and failed to stop the city from losing its next battle against the Spartans, in 4 r 8. Seven hundred Argives died in the rout.

Polykleitos's ideology of dispassionate moderation was at odds with fifth-century political realities, too. For by the 44os, politics in many cities were getting noticeably more extremist, Athens and Sparta were anxious to aggrandize their power, and their allies had all bur lost their independence. Political polarization

MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

was now the order of the day, and fanaticism in defense of one's beliefs was increasingly no vice. In this climate Polykleitos somewhat resembled a prophet in the wilderness: universally respected but of dubious relevance in practice.

Furthermore, though the Doryphoros's physique was certainly perfect for soldiering, it was less well suited to the realities of contemporary athletics. For years the real stars at Olympia, Delphi, and elsewhere had not been citizen mesomorphs but specialists, ranging from slim sprinters to grotesquely overmus- cled professionals like the wrestler Milon of Kroton, "finest among the finest, who in six victories at Oiympia never fell to his knees." A gigantic bull of a man, he liked to lift a four-year-old heifer onto his shoulders, to carry it around the festival, then to sac- rifice it, roast it, and eat it all. He could consume twenty loaves of bread and nine liters of wine at one sitting. He died when a tree he was splitting with his bare hands sprang back and trapped him, and he was eaten by wolves.

And finally, the statue's dedication to corporeal perfection and its blankly neutral expression effec- tively bracket out the life of the mind: Greek civiliza- tion's greatest achievement. Though it radiates self-possession and thus testifies to a degree of intro- spective self-knowledge, its unrelenting glorification of physical fitness nevertheless all but enslaves mind to body. And this, in turn, excites the suspicion that the stillness at the Doryphoros's center is but an intel- lectual void, that it is flesh made immortal and little more.

Understanding these limitations of the Polykleitan ideal, the painter Giorgio de Chirico (r888-r978) used to replace the heads of his pseudoclassical figures with footballs. Another critic, quieter but perhaps even more damning, once acidly remarked that he found it difficult to imagine a Greek statue conduct- ing an intelligent conversation, and Michel Foucault hit upon the late-twentieth-century equivalent when he first saw a group of young California men sunning themselves on a Santa Cruz beach: "Greeks!" he exclaimed, "Greeks without brains!"

Yet unlike these real-life golden boys, not only was the Doryphoros's physical perfection utopian, but its emotional disengagement and the ironclad architec- ture of its physique left little opening for the eroticized glance. Though after Chapter Four some readers may greet this with a sigh of relief, it is arguable that by deflecting such spectatorial involvement, Polykleitos

FIGURE 56. "Readiness" by Arno Breker, 1939. Model for the centerpiece to a monument celebrating Benito Mussolini. Bronze; height 3 m. Formerly in Munich, now (its arms amputated in an attempt to de-Nazify it) in the artist's private collection. From Peter Adam, Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, by permission.

OF WAR AND LOVE 97

severely compromised his goal of stimulating the Greek viewer to identify narcissistically with his statue, and thereby drastically limited the impact of his gospel of limit.

Viewed pessimistically, then, Polykleitos's fantasy of the most perfect, most complete, most self-con- trolled, and therefore most powerful male ego in the world tends to set up an economy of masochism between us and his statue, reducing us to helpless voyeurs who can look and envy, but little more. And stripped of its ethical content, of its commitment to moderation - as in the hellenistic strongmen (see Fig. 139) and their latter-day successors (Fig. 56) - this fantasy can easily become fascist.

Yet to stop here is to belittle the magnitude of Polykleitos's achievement and to censure him for the sins of his successors. Against the macho arrogance of Riace A, for example (see Figs. 33 and 34), his gospel of universal moderation was both deeply humane and optimistic, and its enthusiastic reception - enough clients to keep at least two dozen pupils busy for a century - shows that its message indeed struck a responsive chord in many. Moreover, it not only sur- vived the assaults of Lysippos and the hellenistic baroque (see Figs. 135, 139, and 147-50) to become the central paradigm for the Romans, but remains a potent source of inspiration for postmodernist artists today.

3. THE KNIDIA

Praxiteles probably carved his Aphrodite of Knidos around 3 50, almost exactly a century after Polykleitos made the Doryphoros. The sources tell us that there (see Pl. Vb) she was worshipped amid luxuriant gar- dens as Aphrodite Euploia, a cult title that commem- orated her "fair voyage" from Paphos in Cyprus to Greece and her patronage of the city's sailors. Her stopover in Knidos to wash the sea foam off her body furnished the sculptor with his brief.

Like the Doryphoros, she too is preserved only in copy (see Figs. l, 57, and 58) and poses numerous problems of reconstruction, of which the exact posi- tions of her head and arms are the most serious - and this time cannot quite be ignored. Her setting, though, is known, for her fine Doric rotunda (see Pl. Vb; Fig. 59) has been found high up on a terrace at Knidos that overlooks the stunningly beautiful junction between the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean proper. An inscribed pillar was placed outside the building; now

damaged, it carries parts of Praxiteles' name and the words "naked" and "superior" (i.e. to all others?). This rotunda was copied by the Emperor Hadrian for his temple of the Knidian Aphrodite at Tivoli (see Pl. Va), and seems to be what Pliny is talking about when he mentions that the Knidian shrine "is completely open so that the goddess's image can be viewed from every side ... " Why the Knidians chose this type of building is uncertain; perhaps it was intended to sym- bolize the universe (kosmos) over which the love god- dess holds sway.

Its entrance faced just south of east and a large stone altar stood a short distance away on the same axis. Inside the remains of the cella the excavators found what must be the statue's limestone base (visi- ble in the center foreground of Pl. Vb), standing on the same axis but displaced well to the west by the earth- quake and landslide that destroyed the building. It is square, two and a half feet high, and has a cutting in the top for a plinth; this cutting is parallel to the front and sides of the base but rounded at the back, evi- dently to accommodate the goddess's withdrawn left foot. So she stood facing the doorway with her body frontal to the approaching observer and her head turned away from him to his right, as in the copies (see Figs. l, 57, and 58). Knidian coins stamped with the goddess's image verify this reconstruction, for they show her from exactly this point of view.

Yet the whole rotunda complex was apparently built in the second century B.c., and although the remains of a limestone predecessor have also been reported, nothing definitive has yet been published. Some skeptics, therefore, prefer to hold to the old opinion (based on pseudo-Lucian's lively account, quoted later), that the original shrine was a little naiskos rather like Hegeso's (see Fig. 7 5 ), but accessi- ble from the back as well. Yet since Lucian's anony- mous imitator lived in the third century A.D., this would entail that for all its engaging vividness, his narrative was not based on firsthand experience but simply borrowed from an early hellenistic source. In fact, a more plausible explanation for the discrepancy was suggested long ago: that the statue had been moved to another, smaller shrine in the meantime. Possibly the rotunda was undergoing repair, or had even been rendered unusable by the earthquake and landslide whose effects are still visible today. What- ever the truth, in both cases the observer's first view of her (see Fig. 57) would have been the same.

Around six feet high, the goddess was completely

FIGURE 57. Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles of Athens (Roman copy); original, ca. 3 50. Marble; height 2.04 m. Rome, Musei Vaticani. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institur, Rome.

OF WAR AND LOVE 99

FIGURE 58. Back view of a plaster cast of Figure 57.

naked but for a hairband and a jeweled armband; her limbs were gracefully proportioned, her flesh soft and yielding, her lips slightly parted in a smile, and her eyes shining, clear, and melting. Her pubic hair and vulva were omitted, as on the sixth-century naked females (see Pl. VII; Figs. 26, 3 5, 6 5, and 67); her suc- cessors in the genre follow suit (see Figs. 64 and r 5 3 ), although in both these pictures the area is obscured). The missing pubic hair is easily explained by the com- mon practice of depilation (a standard beauty treat- ment), but the other is more problematic. As R.R. R. Smith succinctly observes,

It was a basic principle of Greek art that it record all the visible essentials of the human body. The smooth, unparted genital surface of the Aphrodites is a rare and presumably highly significant departure from this princi- ple. One may contrast the very detailed treatment of gen- itals on male statues. Indian sculpture, for example, has goddesses with finely carved sex-parts which rule out any bogus aesthetic arguments for the Aphrodites. Accu- rate female genitals on statues, we can only surmise, might have been deemed too immodest, or have been felt unconsciously to be too sexually aggressive.

Phryne, Praxiteles' mistress, was supposed to have been the model for all this, of which more later. He made his statue of Parian marble; her hair, jewelry, and the pot by her side were surely gilded and her hairband and cloak painted, perhaps by his favorite colorist, Nikias. Her body was either left marble- white or at most was gently tinted; her lips were rouged; and her eyes were possibly blue-black with a hint of reflection. This delicate polychromy would help to explain why the copies are so bland and so

SM

I o'"r-=--==-- SM

FIGURE 59. Reconstruction by Iris Love of rhe temple of Aphrodite Euploia at Knidos. From AJA 76 (1972): 74, ll. 9.

IOO MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

capricious, for taking molds from the original for plaster casts would have irreparably damaged it, and so was surely forbidden.

Indeed, the two copies formerly considered to be the most faithful, both in the Vatican (one is illus- trated in Figs. 57 and 58), may not be derived directly from the original at all, but from a free hellenistic vari- ant that not only enlarged and updated the pot and shrank the drapery, but slightly changed the pose as well. For it has been pointed out that their composi- tion is somewhat confused: Though the pot is a hydria and so ought to contain the goddess's bathwater, not only does the cloak awkwardly cover the vessel's mouth, but one cannot tell whether she is taking the garment off or putting it on.

In other versions (see Fig. r) Aphrodite responds more consistently to the observer's presence, looking less vacantly into space, hunching her shoulders slightly, and lifting the cloak up and forward. The pot, now no longer a hydria and too small to contain her bathwater, is perhaps a perfume jar, for use after she has dressed. Many of these examples look like tourist reproductions by uninspired hacks: bad but essen- tially faithful. If they are to be trusted, the serene and impregnable detachment that is often ascribed to her (following a classic essay by Gerhard Rodenwaldt) requires some qualification.

The Knidia was Praxiteles' response to a problem- raising situation. As Nicole Loraux has observed:

Aphrodite incarnates the immediacy of realized desire, the very image of "love made flesh." And indeed the body of the goddess, "her marvellous throat, her desirable bosom, her flashing eyes," is how Helen in [Iliad] book 3 recognizes Aphrodite in her disguise as an old spinster, which ought better to have concealed her .... More pow- erful than all appearances, her body is always visible.

So how could Praxiteles body forth the love god- dess's epiphany in all its stunning glory and power, if to do so adequately entailed that he strip her naked? For even if she initiated the encounter, for a man to see her naked normally brought lifelong impotence, and if she did not initiate it, the result was instant and ter- rible retribution. So to have her stand naked in public forever was a highly charged decision that carried with it large consequences and needed to be handled with considerable tact.

Praxiteles' solution was nothing less than revolu- tionary. That it was recognized as such by the Greeks and Romans is proven both by a long series of epi- grams on the Knidia's nakedness and erotic appeal,

and by Pliny's report that he originally made two Aphrodites, one draped and one naked, but for the Koans, giving them an option on both. They chose the draped one "because this was the sober and modest thing to do," whereupon the Knidians at once took the other, "the fame of which became immensely greater." This anecdote, which is surely unhistorical (for classical Greek sculptors produced cult statues exclusively on commission), illustrates how Praxiteles staked out his position in the field, recognizing that a space had opened up within it and using the Knidians' commission to move resolutely to occupy it. For him, Aphrodite's stopover in Knidos to clean up was liter- ally a godsend.

Almost 700 years after Praxiteles took up his chisel, an anonymous Greek author wrote a fictional account of a visit to the Knidia by three friends, using his personal knowledge of sanctuary and statue to set the scene. The narrator and Charikles are devotees of female beauty, whereas Kallikratidas - an Athenian - predictably prefers boys. Their conversation is most revealing.

( r 3) When the plants had given us pleasure enough, we went into the temple. The goddess stands right in the middle - a most beautiful statue of Parian marble - haughtily smiling a little as a grin parts her lips. Draped in no garment, all her beauty is stripped bare, though she unobtrusively hides her private parts with one hand. So great was the power of the sculptor's art that the hard, unyielding stone does justice to every limb. Charikles at any rate shouted in a mad, distracted voice, "Happiest indeed of the gods was Ares, bound in chains because of her!" And as he spoke, he ran up and, stretching out his neck, started to kiss the goddess with importunate lips. Kallikratidas stood by in amazed silence.

The temple had two doors for those who wanted to get a good view of the goddess from behind, so that no part of her be left unadmired. As a result it's easy for peo- ple to enter by the other door and look at the beauty of her back.

( 14) So we decided to see all of the goddess, and went round to the back of the shrine. Then, when the door had been opened by the woman who had charge of the keys, we were filled with instant wonder at the beauty we saw. The Athenian, who had been so impassive an observer a minute before, upon inspecting those parts of the goddess that recommend a boy, suddenly raised a shout more frenzied than Charikles'. "Herakles!" he exclaimed. "What a well-proportioned back! What gen- erous flanks! How satisfying an armful to embrace! How well-delineated is the flesh on the buttocks, neither too

OF WAR AND LOVE IOI

thin and close to the bone, nor endowed with too great a quantity of fat! And as for those precious parts sealed in on both sides by the hips, how inexpressibly sweetly they smile! How perfect the proportions of the thighs and shins as they stretch down in a straight line to the feet! So that's what Ganymede looks like as he pours out nec- tar for Zeus ... ! "

( r 5) When we were sated with admiration, we noticed a mark on one thigh like a stain on a dress; its ugliness was shown up by the brightness of the marble everywhere else. I guessed that it was a natural defect in the marble .... But the attendant near us told a strange, incredible tale. She said that a young man of not undis- tinguished family - his deed has blotted out his name - who often visited the precinct, was so ill-starred as to fall in love with the goddess, and would spend all day in the temple apparently lost in pious awe. In the morning he would leave his bed long before dawn to go to the tem- ple and only return home reluctantly after sunset. All day long he sat facing the goddess with his eyes fixed unin- terruptedly on her, whispering indistinctly and carrying on a lover's complaints in secret conversation ....

(r6) ... [He finally contrived to creep in at sunset and stay the night.] ... These marks of his amorous embraces were seen after day broke and the goddess had that blem- ish to prove what she had suffered. As for him, they say that he hurled himself off a cliff or into the sea and com- pletely disappeared.

This account indicates the magnitude of Praxiteles' task. His Aphrodite had simultaneously to acknowl- edge the protocols of female modesty laid down by the public eye; overwhelm the eroticized glance with her irresistible sexuality; and yet still maintain her dis- tance and dignity as a goddess. These requirements were fundamentally incompatible. For as an all-pow- erful being who brought both gods and men to their knees, unmanned the mortals she slept with, and destroyed those who crossed her, she in essence chal- lenged the sculptor (as one scholar has justly remarked) to represent the unrepresentable.

In particular, Aphrodite problematized the whole Greek conception of females as inferior or unfinished males, characterized by an unstable mixture of lack and excess. She personified a more radical version that made the feminine the locus of the incommensurable and unlimited, an ever-present threat to the bounds of a securely centered, rational, dominant, masculine subjectivity. Since her sexuality was her power, it could hardly be subject to restraint, yet what might repre- senting it do to the security of the patriarchy?

This characterization of the feminine as irremedia- bly Other was not unknown to earlier Greek culture. Numerous eighth- and seventh-century figures and figurines of the Near-Eastern "naked goddess" or "Astarte" type have been found in southern Greece, the Aegean islands, Crete, and the coastal cities of Asia Minor, where they seem to have represented a variety of divinities, including Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Eileithyia, and even Athena (see Figs. 26 and 60). Stark naked except for jewelry and headgear, they confront the observer directly, standing bolt upright and often proffering either or both breasts with their hands and/or pointing to their pudenda. They thereby ignore absolutely and categorically all Greek norms of behavior, of aidos, for mortal women.

Some simply modify the dominant male physique by adding breasts, eliminating the penis, and smooth-

FTGCRE 60. Two plaques with naked goddesses from Khania in Crete, ca. 650. Terracotta, height 13 cm. Heraklion Museum. Pharo: Deutsches Archiiologisches Institut, Athens.

102 MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

FIGURE 6 r. Egyptian statuette of a girl from the Heraion at Samos, ca. 650. Bronze; height 17.3 cm. Samos Museum. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens.

ing out the transitions between the parts. Many, how- ever, retain the bodily structure of their Near-Eastern models (Fig. 61). Their flesh is uniformly soft and spongy, their torsos are like hourglasses, their shoul- ders slope, their hips and thighs are large, their calves and ankles are slim, and their feet and hands are small. As noted in Chapter One, these women are polar opposites to men rather than merely unmascu- line, and if the Knidia's copies are to be trusted, Prax- iteles clearly preferred this particular conception of

the female to the other - though as will appear, his take on both of them was anything but conventional.

Though some of these "naked goddesses" perhaps survived till Praxiteles' day, no new ones were made in Greece after about 600, and from then until the late fifth century all the divinities they represented were decorously draped. Artists did, however, begin to rep- resent some mortal women in diaphanous drapery by ca. 500, and by the late fifth century its seductive effects (cf. Figs. 7 5 and 90) were a standing joke in Attic comedy. And since the love goddess was literally the apotheosis of female sexuality, and the essence of that sexuality was her body, should her body not be revealed?

This was the problem-raising situation described earlier, and Praxiteles' immediate predecessors approached it in a typically cautious way. On the Parthenon's east pediment, carved in the 43os, Aphrodite's diaphanous drapery slips to reveal her shoulders and clings to her full-breasted, languidly voluptuous body, but the decisive step was taken out- side Athens and in a different genre. Around 420, Paionios draped his Nike at Olympia (see Fig. 30) in a completely transparent chiton that actually reveals a breast. A few years later, the sculptor of the so-called Genetrix Aphrodite (Fig. 62) followed suit, and around 370, if the traditional chronology and attribu- tion are correct, Praxiteles laid bare her entire torso in his "Aries" Aphrodite. Two decades or so later came the Knidia (see Figs. r, 57, and 58).

This development demolished at one stroke the entire Greek project of female containment announced by the myth of Pandora (cf. Fig. 28) and by the allied trend to clothe women in painting and sculpture, described in Chapter Two. It opened up the abyss: For if the mere sight of Helen's breast could overwhelm Menelaos when they met again after the fall of Troy (and all but one of the many archaic and classical images of this encounter show her fully clothed), what might a fully naked Aphrodite do? The story of the stain supplies the answer.

Attempting to balance these requirements, Praxite- les produced a study in ambiguity. Though his statue's scale, elevated base, and cultic setting proclaimed her to be no mere mortal, her stance is ambiguous. For the poise of her legs, arms, and head, together with the location of her drapery and vase, creates a distinct contrast between her two sides. Her "closed" right side with its vertical limbs, convex curves, and taut contours anchors her body in space and repels the eye,

OF WAR AND LOVE 103

while her left side's flexed limbs, concave curves, and broken contours beckon it in - even as she draws her cloak forward to cover herself.

Praxiteles thus constructs the spectator as both worshipper and voyeur. In fact, he seems to construct

FIGURE 62. So-called Genetrix Aphrodite (Roman copy); original, ca. 410. Marble; height r.65 m. Paris, Louvre. Photo: Alinari/Arr Resource, New York.

two spectators, linking them and her in a triangular relationship of voyeuristic complicity and erotic rivalry. One of these individuals (me) sees her frontally as he enters the temple, while the other (already pre- sent off to my right) apparently provokes her sideways glance and smile. For I can interpret these to mean that she is either modestly turning away from me or ignor- ing me in favor of this notional third party.

If the latter, the protective gesture of her right hand is presumably her response to him, but in fact shields her only from me, and that with no great efficiency. Its very casualness and distance from what it seeks to protect prompts me to move right, following the turn of her head, so that I can join my apparent rival and get a peek at the ineffable. And is she taking up her cloak simply because she has finished her ablutions, or in response to one or both of us? But if she has caught sight of us, why doesn't she lift it higher to shield her breasts (contrast Fig. 64)?

Similarly, her slight stoop and the sinuous S-curve that traverses her body from head to toe signal her modesty and suprahuman status, but only serve to stoke my desire. For against a man's active posture and straight back, his centrifugal body language that sig- nals a will to dominate and to be on top (compare the kouroi, Riace A, and the Doryphoros, PL Illa and Figs. 33, 38, 51, and 55), a stoop characterizes a woman as centripetal, close to the earth, dominated, submissive. Yet the concavity it creates is but a void waiting to be filled; here it suggests that Aphrodite has registered the impact of my desiring glance, and is surreptitiously beckoning me in. As for the S-curve, this both effec- tively dematerializes her body by endowing it with a eurhythmy beyond everyday mortal experience (for a response to gravity no longer generates the composi- tion) and yet simultaneously hints that it is undulating in reaction to my ocular caresses.

Finally, Praxiteles' very choice of Parian marble and treatment of its surface no doubt had a similarly ambiguous effect. The luminous radiance of the finely crystaled stone both suggested the ethereal, untouch- able loveliness of the goddess's snow-white skin (cf. Fig. 3 r) and yet beckoned the eye to immerse itself in its subtly modulated, gently glowing surfaces. Indeed, in other works (Figs. r 3 2 and r 3 3 ), the sculptor even used both the S-curve and this surface treatment for males, thereby redefining their masculinity in a way that had enormous impact both in his own time and later.

This immensely seductive surface treatment prompts one more observation. Whereas the Doryphoros's sur-

MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

face consisted of hard, swelling planes clearly demar- cated by deep lines and gullies, the Knidia's was by all evidence a smoothly modulated continuum. It is here that her peculiar fascination in great part resides. Surveying the landscape of her body, one realizes that it is a series of convexities enclosed by a concavity, and hides yet another concavity within these. The jar, an immemorial symbol for female fecundity, inscrutability, and hiddenness (think of Pandora's jar),1 simply metaphorizes this progression, and the half-lifted cloak completes the effect. And because Praxiteles, unlike the authors of the Cretan bronzes, some of the earlier "naked goddesses," and the red- figure erotica (see Pl. lib; Figs. 23, 24, ror, and 103), omits the goddess's genitals and so conceals/seals the ultimate concavity, at the statue's center we find an enigma.

So Praxiteles was the first Western sculptor to get beyond the supposition that the (male) spectator nec- essarily plays active subject to the female body's pas- sive object, which is simply taken over and possessed by his desire, or as Sigmund Freud put it, is cathected (besezt) by it. Using Aphrodite to demonstrate the awesome power of female sexuality, he demonstrates that a simple phallocentric paradigm ordered around the notion of female lack is both inadequate and psy- chologically untenable.

Instead, he folds her supposed lack into the (male) spectator's. She avoids/voids his "cocksure" phallocu- larcentrism by affecting to ignore it for another's; and since he cannot completely possess her, his ocular gropings turn into physical frustration. The all-pow- erful goddess offers him no closure, no safe haven for his desire. Instead, she makes him but one member of a putative love triangle, holding him in her grip like putty, able at her whim either to turn, smile, and bestow unimaginable bliss upon either him or his rival, or avenge their trespass with devastating effect.

So, paradoxically, a bodily display that for two cen- turies had been unthinkable in monumental sculpture outside acts of violence against women (see Figs. 9 and IL) still shocks us, yet no longer merely reconfirms female subservience but actively suggests its opposite. It turns passivity and receptiveness into a source of power and choice. Compare one of the twentieth cen- tury's most sophisticated essays in this vein, Dora Maar's superb r934 photograph of the "supermodel"

1Not her box: This mistake goes back to the fifteenth-cen- tury translation of Hesiod by Erasmus, who mistook the Greek pithos for pyxis

Assia (Fig. 63 ), which not only engages all of this, but brilliantly uses lighting to intensify and narcissistically qualify the message, shadowing both Assia's crotch and face and projecting her splendid profile assertively on the wall for her own eyes to enjoy.

A number of Greek epigrams prove that the fore- going reading of the Knidia is not anachronistic, for they make the goddess herself catch sight of it and exclaim: "Oh my, where did Praxiteles see me naked?!" They thus put the sculptor in the place of the first observer (me), having him catch her unawares while her attention is diverted by the second. They thereby construct him as antiquity's most successful voyeur and simultaneously its most accomplished craftsman - the fastest worker of all time.

Indeed, if one believes the sources, his statue's com- plex sexual dialectic was even played out in Praxite- les' own life, via his relationship with the hetaira Phryne. Though scholars usually either accept the ancient stories about this relationship at face value or dismiss them as mere sensationalism, it may be more rewarding to view them as "true fictions," a mythol- ogy that, like the ancient historians' made-up speeches and the tale of the Koans' rejection of the Knidia her- self, was developed from a kernel of fact and is psy- chologically true if not always literally so.

Thus, Phryne allegedly captured Praxiteles' heart when he caught sight of her emerging naked from the sea. She soon obligingly modeled for what were to become the ancient world's two most celebrated images of Aphrodite: his own Knidia and the Aphro- dite Anadyomene ("Hair-binder") by Apelles, both of which showed the goddess rinsing off after her sea voyage from Cyprus. At this point, then, Phryne effec- tively became Aphrodite's terrestrial representative - Aphrodite Pandemos ("Popular") to the goddess's own Ourania ("Heavenly"); and Praxiteles, in turn, became her worshiper-voyeur and then her lover. Unsurprisingly, one hopeful client tried to flatter her by calling her "Praxiteles' little Aphrodite."

Praxiteles responded to the challenge by making portraits of her in all three major media: a marble one grouped with an Aphrodite at her home town ofThes- piai; a gold one set on a column at Delphi (commis- sioned by the locals); and a bronze one later nicknamed the Smiling Courtesan. Around A.D. r70, Pausanias saw the first two and read their inscrip- tions, so both they and the relationship are historical. Suggestively, though, the stories that it generated pic- ture the sculptor as precisely the kind of subject con- structed by the Knidia herself: male, heterosexual,

FIGURE 63. Assia, photograph by Dora Maar, 1934. From Christian Bouqueret (ed.), Assia sublime modele (Mont-de-Marsan 1993), pl. 83.

ro6 MEN AND WOMEN, GODS AND MORTALS

hopelessly smitten by her naked beauty, and anxious to please.

So when Phryne asked him to give her whichever of his statues he judged the most beautiful, and he couldn't decide, she sent a slave to tell him that a fire had broken out at his shop and that most of his work had been destroyed. Rushing home, he shouted that his life would be ruined if his Satyr or Eros had gone; smiling, she bade him cheer up, confessed her trick, and took the Eros. Indeed smiles, as with Aphrodite, were her forte: She was nicknamed "Teary-smile" (Klausigelos); in the Smiling Courtesan, Pliny tells us, "people detect the artist's love and the reward revealed in her face"; and on another statue of Eros he allegedly wrote the following somewhat mawkish epigram:

Praxiteles carved Me, the very Love he bore; He drew My model from his own heart's core.

Phryne received Me as My fee. My bow no more Need shoot Love's spells: Just glance at Me;

adore!

Phryne's charms conquered the wider public as well. When the Athenians indicted her for impiety, her defender Hypereides put her on the stand and allegedly pulled her chiton down to her waist, displaying her breasts to the 500-man jury. Predictably, the prosecu- tion's case immediately collapsed. Like Aphrodite's and Helen's, her body was simply irresistible.

Praxitele.s and his ancient audience understood, then, that when all looking is predicated as male, a sovereign female subjectivity, or some semblance of it, can only be constructed by placating the gaze and subverting the glance. His successors in the genre (Fig. 64) were less subtle, paying more homage to the pro- tocols of the public eye. By rearranging Aphrodite's pose, closing the contours, moving her other hand up to shield the breasts, and making her head turn sharply away, they bring her abruptly down to earth, and reduce the spectator to the sordid status of a Peep- ing Tom. We shall return to them in Chapter Ten.

4. OF PAIN AND PLEASURE

In an influential paper on men's and women's labor (ponos), Nicole Loraux has shown how fifth- and fourth-century Greeks used this term to mark the ful- fillment of the two sexes' respective lives in battle and childbed. Yet whereas "the classical period saw only the beautiful side of war - neither groans nor suffering, blood nor tears, only high deeds," valorizing and aes- theticizing the ponos of battle, Greek writers (all male)

FIGURE 64. Aphrodite of the Troad (Roman copy); signed by Menophantos; original third to second century. Marble; height r.87 m. Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano. Photo: Deursches Archaologisches Instirut, Rome.

OF WAR AND LOVE 107

did little to idealize women's suffering, to which they usually gave only grudging respect. Since the Doryphoros and Knidia body forth the quintessence of the classical Greeks' conception of the sexes, can this observation help us to understand them a little better?

The Doryphoros seemingly betrays nothing of the dark side of war's labor - or does he? He walks, yet pauses, and averts his head. Not for him Kroisos's serene step forward (see Pl. Illa; Fig. 3 8), the hoplite's thrusting stride (see Fig. 53 ), or the rocklike stance of Riace A (see Fig. 3 3). If he is thinking at all, the thoughts that give him pause must be about war, and so about wounds, pain, and death. For he and we all know that any body thus deployed in battle will soon bear its scars, and sooner or later probably suffer worse - as did Achilles.

Indeed, in the Iliad Achilles - like other heroes - often reflects upon his own death, bur also (uniquely) ponders the effect it will have upon others such as his parents and the Achaian host. Once he even takes fright for a moment, at the "far-shadowing spear" of Aphrodite's son, Aeneas; for even the Best of the Achaians

... has a body that might be torn by the sharp bronze;

There is only one life in him, and people say he is mortal.

The road from Troy to the classical city was far from direct, and one of its many dead ends was the latter's adamantine refusal to acknowledge the dark side of the warrior's ponos, the ghastly horrors of bat-

with edged weapons. So has Polykleitos's nod to the classical spectator's demand for interiority opened a chink in his statue's armor, tiny but significant nev- ertheless?

The Knidia is another matter. Though ostensibly incarnating "the immediacy of realized desire,'' in one crucial respect she clearly refuses that desire and its consequences, the womanly "work" of intercourse and thus of childbearing. For as remarked earlier, she has no vulva, presumably in order to shield her body from the male spectator's penetrating glance - or worse. If justification were needed for this omission, the story of the stain supplies it. Yet every Greek knew that Aphrodite had a normal - albeit divine - female body and a most active sex life. Hephaistos, Ares,

Hermes, Dionysos, and the mortals Anchises, Adonis, and Boutes had all bedded her at one time or another, and she had borne numerous children as a result, including Fear, Terror, Harmony, Priapos, Hermaph- roditos (see Figs. r58 and 159), and the heroes Aeneas, Eryx, and Golgos.

Praxiteles, then, could not totally block out this central aspect of her femininity. Instead, his wish to constitute her body as the ultimate receptacle for male desire but also to seal it from that desire's ultimate consequences entailed that he refocus the spectator's libido elsewhere. So not only did he show her lips receptively opening in a smile, but (in contrast to PL VII and Figs. 26, 3 5, 60, and 6 5, for instance) clearly emphasized her rounded belly as well, in the process speaking directly to his culture's patriarchal notions of the centrality of female ponos.

As to the smile, all Greeks knew that a woman's mouth was but one end of a conduit that led eventu- ally to her vagina, the mouth of her womb. In that peculiarly Greek system of homologies that passes for gynecology but is actually part of "the literate repre- sentation of Greek folklore," each orifice implies and implicates the other, and a naked woman's open, smil- ing mouth, then as now, is a quite unambiguous invi- tation. Yet the Greeks also knew that though the female body is disturbingly open to traffic in both directions, a tight-shut womb is unhealthy and can even be fatal, except in one circumstance: pregnancy. For only when a woman assumes the safely socialized role of mother does she cease to be Hesiod's "beauti- ful evil" and finally fulfill her destiny.

Though (as it happens) nothing prohibits one from attributing the Knidia's ablutions to her second jour- ney from Paphos, after purifying herself from her adultery with the brutal Ares, this is not to imply that her missing vulva and rounded belly hint that she is pregnant with Fear, Terror, Harmony, or anyone else. Instead, her strangely incomplete anatomy merely replicates her culture's view of Woman as puzzle - as a strange and ultimately unfathomable being that is "at once too open and always too closed." In this as in all else she perfectly embodies the profoundly dis- turbing paradoxes of this "contradictory unity of dis- parate things, where the opposition between artifice and animality breaks down": the Race of Women.