There is a great deal to learn in this deeply informed and far-ranging book, as H. attempts to follow a thread traceable from the Odyssey through to Archaic iambic poetry and vase-painting. The artist in question is the clever fictive self (or selves) who, though physically weak, socially inferior and ugly, prevails by craft and wit over the strong. In short, it is the victory of μῆτις over βίη. In addition to the wily Odysseus of the Odyssey, key figures in this study include Hephaistos, Archilochos and Hipponax, and an impressively wide swath of vase-painters.
Yet even with this expansive scope, this is an image rather than the image of the artist in Archaic Greece, as its epic model is exclusively Homeric. Almost entirely absent from this study is Hesiod's Theogony with its own famous image of a poet who names himself and its own story of the relation between μῆτις and βίη in his portrait of Zeus. On multiple occasions, including Hesiod would have enhanced the analysis.
Within its own constraints, H.’s analysis of individual works is compelling, especially in regard to the argument about inventive self-naming, ‘the fictionalization of the self’ (p. 9), used by artisans to artistic effect. Equally compelling is the effort to link literary and visual modes of communication and persuasion. The book is richly illustrated with 25 coloured plates and 65 illustrations, although at times the quality of the reproductions is poor. In analysis of vase-paintings it is hard to be definitive, but at points in this book speculation builds upon speculation, resulting in unsteady scaffolding. Also, on occasion, arguments can be difficult to follow, in part because some extended narratives lack clear direction and in part because the multi-headed argument frequently leads to repetitions and circling back to recurring themes.
The book begins (in the introduction and Chapter 1) with a particular example, that of Smikros (‘Tiny’) and Euphronios, both said to be members of the Athenian Pioneer Group (c. 520–500 bce). H. writes that he has solved a long-standing puzzle about their relationship, by arguing that Smikros is fictitious, invented and impersonated by Euphronios as a pictorial alter ego, created in part for play, in part to bring out the ambiguity of identity, and in part to expose implausible social positions and unrealistic ambitions. Euphronios’ contemporaries would have recognised these multiple namings as social and artistic commentary (Smikros as potter, as one of the symposiasts in a vase-painting, as a Tiny man whose name is written on a vase as if it were an ejaculation from a silen's penis, and perhaps even as if he were the sculptor of a Heracles’ statue depicted on the vase – although in this example H.’s rendering of the Greek strains the rules of syntax), and they were prompted to respond in kind. Thus, when Euthymides famously wrote HOS OUDEPOTE EUPHRONIOS near an image of a man dancing and drinking, it is as if he were saying: ‘Euphronios never partied like this in his own vase-painting’ (p. 54, H.’s italics). For H., ‘these [fictive] people exist primarily within the collective pictorial imagination of the Pioneer vase-painters’ (p. 273), and the vase-paintings are ‘about men who make painted vases’ (p. 279).
The book ends (in Chapter 7 and the epilogue) by arguing against the principle that the inscribed names of potters and vase-painters are historical figures (cf. H. Immerwahr, ‘A Projected Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions’, in Acta of the Fifth International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, Cambridge 1967 [1971], pp. 53–60; T.B.L. Webster, Potter and Patron in Classical Athens [1972]). With many compelling examples, it makes the case that artisans' names should on occasion be read as inventions suited to the particulars of the pot or its paintings. For example, the inscription on an aryballos (in the shape of a rather modestly scaled penis) that ‘“Priapos” made [it]’ intends to draw a playful contrast between the modest penis and the exaggeratedly large penis of the pot's professed maker. Or, in a different mode, the fictive name of ‘Peithinos’ (‘the Persuader’) identified as the cup's painter is intended to serve as a title for the various scenes of sexual seduction on the cup: ‘the subject of the cup is not social history but discourse’ (p. 287). H. argues, in short, that inscribed names of artisans on pots may be part of a vase's pictorial inventiveness and narrative. In making this argument, H. is enticingly doing for these artisans what Aristotle (Rhetoric 1418b23–33) said of Archilochos: what appears as autobiography is often role-playing.
For models of fictional autobiography, H. turns to literature, in the figure of the Odyssean Odysseus and of Archilochos and Hipponax. The persona(e) of the poets is (are) likewise fictive, not historical. The case is easier to make for Archilochos (in Chapter 2) as his first-person role-playing is well-attested, but the argument in Chapter 3 is more challenging, namely that the single, consistent narrator-character of an ugly Hipponax is also fictive. So his sexual rivalry with the sculptor Boupalos (‘Bull-Dick’), like Archilochos’ rivalries, is a construct designed, H. argues, like those in Euphronios and Archilochos to explore the boundaries of social status and the competing strengths of the arts.
When H. discusses vase-painters inventing apt names for silens and nymphs that are ‘perfectly suited to the narrative context’ (p. 236), consideration of the Greek obsession with personified abstractions would have been beneficial, especially as exampled in Hesiod's Theogony, where invented names in genealogical lists re-echo artfully throughout the surrounding narrative in the form of verbs and common nouns (cf. Th. 64–79 and 226–36; also Φιλότης/ϕιλότης at Iliad 14.163–360).
H.’s discussion of the François vase (mostly in Chapter 5) is a good example of his excessive speculation. Side A and the handles of the vase tell the story of Achilles, but for H. they do so in an Odyssean mode, evoking Odysseus-like qualities of cunning and trickery over brawn. So, Achilles ‘traps and ambushes’ Troilos, ‘employ[ing] a covert technique in which Odysseus excelled’ (pp. 189–90). Chiron's presence at the wedding refers subtly to Peleus trapping Thetis on the beach (an episode not depicted directly on the vase) to subdue her for marriage. The scene of Theseus leading the fourteen Athenian youths to the Minotaur suggests more traps (again not depicted). Hephaistos returning to Olympus to unchain Hera from her chair suggests his clever trapping of Ares and Aphrodite in Demodokos’ tale from Odyssey 8, and so on.
Characteristic of H.’s approach, the symbolism of the amphora which Dionysos carries as a gift to Peleus’ and Thetis’ wedding is intentionally ambiguous, suggesting both a vessel full of wine for the wedding and the urn (made by Hephaistos and given to Dionysos) which will carry Achilles’ remains back from Troy. It furthermore is part of a meta-narrative link, joining the Dionysos of this scene on Side A with the Dionysos on Side B, who leads the lame Hephaistos back to Olympus to release his mother from her bondage to her chair. In this context, the amphora is a victory symbol as it ‘celebrates [Hephaistos’] artisanal or artistic abilities’ and ‘subtly suggests an equivalency between heroic and artisanal effort’ (p. 178). Thus, ultimately, for H. the amphora is ‘self-referential’, a ‘tribute to the sort of product manufactured by contemporary Athenian potters’ (p. 178), that is, in effect, Kleitias’ tribute to Ergotimos (the vase-painter's tribute to the potter). H. concludes this train of thought as follows: ‘Thinking through the many implications of the compositional pre-eminence of the amphora, we are led to the idea that the unsung, subjective star of the François vase is the artist himself’ (p. 178). In this vein, the pygmies (on the foot of the vase), as Hephaistos’ children, are also ‘stand-ins for the artist [introducing a] touch of self-mockery … [as] the idea is articulated in such a clever and indirect way’ (p. 203). Not all readers will be able to ride this train all the way to its end stop.
