Ancient Art Podcast 11a, Parthenon Frieze Part 2

In episode 10, we learned about the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon Frieze, and what's the same and what's different between the two. In a nutshell, there's some crossover between the two, but each term refers to its own collective body of artwork. The Parthenon Frieze is a work of art conceived and executed in the 5th century BC, whereas the Elgin Marbles is a hodgepodge collection of sculpture from the Acropolis, now in the British Museum. We also began to explore how Athens came to adopt the role of empire over the eastern Mediterranean after the defeat of Persia, who had previously ruled the Ionian Greek city-states of Asia Minor. And with no previous imperial model for Athens to emulate other than her enemy Persia, ironically Athens came to model herself after that very Persia. We can see this direction manifesting in Athenian artwork of the time, namely the Parthenon Frieze, when closely compared to the Apadna reliefs at the Persian capital of Persepolis. But how can we begin to make a comparison between the Persian Apadna reliefs and the Athenian Parthenon Frieze? First, we need to establish some evidence for a vehicle that carried this influence from Persia to Athens, and we find this vehicle in the roots of the Ionic Frieze and its Ionian artists. Let's start by exploring the role of the Ionian Greeks at Persepolis. Ionia, if you're not completely familiar with the term, was the region comprised of culturally Greek nations along what's now the western coast of Turkey. So, the role of Ionian Greeks at Persepolis. To put things in perspective, we need to understand that the employment of eastern Greeks, specifically Ionian craftsmen in the Near East, was far from an isolated event at Persepolis. When Ionia was part of the Persian Empire, they enjoyed good relations and strong trade with the many surrounding Near Eastern nations. There's significant evidence that Ionian artistry was a big influence throughout much of the Near East, particularly in Asia Minor. Asia Minor, that's the name we use for the Turkish Peninsula, specifically in ancient times. One such example of Ionian influence in Near Eastern art can be found at Xanthos in Lycia, where we find the so-called Harpy Tomb from around 480 BC, about 30 years before construction began on the Athenian Parthenon. The artists at Xanthos were clearly representing Near Eastern themes in a distinctly Greek design. To culturally define Lycia at this time may be a slippery slope. While there's a tremendous Ionian Greek cultural influence, Lycia was undoubtedly perceived of as being somewhat alien to mainland Greek culture. There was also a tremendous Near Eastern cultural presence here, not only from the Persian occupation since about 540 BC, but also from the millennia of close relations and proximity to the Ancient Near East. So while the funerary offering or tribute scene that we see on the Harpy Tomb may seem foreign to an Attic or Athenian audience, Ionians were pretty familiar with this sort of thing on account of their long-standing occupation under Persia. The Harpy Tomb exemplifies the hybridization of Ionian and Near Eastern culture and artistry. While many details of the subject matter and the composition of the scene as a whole definitely are not Ionian or any kind of Greek, the figural style could easily be lifted straight out of contemporary Ionian relief art. Considering the subject matter, though, the audience that commissioned this work was probably leaning culturally a little more towards the Near East or Persia rather than Greece. The tomb's occupant, in fact, is thought to have been the Lycian warrior King Caibernus, who Paroditus tells us was the leader of the Lycian contingent in the Persian army of Xerxes against Greece. At Xanthos and sites further east, Ionian trade artists worked with their own familiar technique, yet under a Near Eastern iconographic program, and you can imagine that the Ionian style could in turn have been influenced by the multicultural association, if not formally, then perhaps thematically. Xanthos and the Harpy Tomb reliefs offer us a sensible medium between the two widespread Ionian projects that we're focusing on here. The Persepolis of Hadna reliefs, with their extremely Persian formal quality, despite whatever apparent Ionic influences, and the Parthenon frieze, the defining work of the high classical Greek style, despite what apparent Ionic influences.