Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.10.

06

Enzo Lippolis, Giorgio Rocco, Archeologia greca: cultura, società,

politica e produzione. Sintesi. Milano: Bruno, Mondadori, 2011.
Pp. xii, 546. ISBN 9788861594883. €39.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Kostas Vlassopoulos, University of Nottingham

(Konstantinos.vlassopoulos@nottingham.ac.uk)

Until a few decades ago a manual on Greek archaeology would be effectively

tantamount to a traditional account of art history devoted to sculpture,
architecture and vase-painting and focusing on the objects and the artists that
created them. In the last thirty years an intellectual revolution with a number of
different sources has truly revolutionised the field. The study of Greek
archaeology has been in significant ways emancipated from a narrow,
nineteenth-century version of art history and incorporated within a wider
perspective on Greek material culture which is interested in the social, economic
and cultural processes of the production, distribution and consumption of Greek
objects as well as in the objects themselves. The volume under review is a good
illustration of these changes in the field of Greek archaeology, and reflects in
many ways both the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches. Apart
from the two main authors, the volume includes contributions by R. Belli
Pasqua, L. M. Caliò, S. Guidone, M. Livadiotti, M. Micozzi, V. Parisi, R. Sassu
and G. Vallarino.

Before discussing the book as a whole and the extent of its success, it is
essential to provide a brief summary of the immense range of subjects covered
in this large volume. Unfortunately, the title chapters are not a very good
indication of the contents of each chapter, so I have omitted them from the
discussion below. Chapter one provides an introduction to the topic, discussing
the utilisation of the various written and material sources, the prehistoric period
of Greek archaeology and the location of Greek archaeology in space and time.
Chapters two to six are devoted to the Protogeometric, Geometric and Archaic
periods. Chapter two examines the formation of Greek culture until 700 BCE,
discussing population increase, the formation of the, polis, the emergence of the
sacred as a distinct field of material culture, the development of Greek pottery
styles, and archaic colonisation. Chapter three is devoted to the Orientalising
period of the seventh century. It examines the development of Greek temples as
specialised buildings with their own architecture and decoration, as well as the
employment of Orientalising styles in pottery and sculpture. Chapter four is a
thematic chapter that explores the material aspects of Greek religion of the
archaic period in its various manifestations. It discusses the archaeological
evidence for religious rituals, the diverse forms of sacred architecture, the form
and role of votive deposits, the emergence of specialised production for
religious purposes and the diverse forms of funerary rituals. Chapter five
examines the world of the poleis during the archaic period. The chapter includes
both thematic discussion of the nature of archaic aristocratic culture, the
archaeological impact of Greek tyrannies, the urban development of archaic
poleis and their housing forms and the emergence of Panhellenic sanctuaries, as
well as discussion of the chronological development of Greek architecture and
sculpture during the sixth century BCE. Finally, chapter six concludes the
archaic section by examining the development of archaic black- and red-figure
pottery within the wider context of a thematic discussion of visual
communication.

Chapters seven to nine constitute the second part, covering the classical period.
Chapter five is devoted to the fifth century, examining the development of
architecture, sculpture and vase-painting, as well as the changing forms of urban
layouts and private housing. Chapter eight is a thematic discussion of the
political culture of classical Greece, including the development of public
buildings and spaces such as assembly-places, theatres and gymnasia, the
intervention of the political community in communication through public
inscriptions and in the economy through coinage, and the development of the
archaeology of warfare in armour and fortifications. Chapter nine is devoted to
changes in the fourth century, discussing the evolution of urban layouts, the
material culture of the Macedonian kingdom and its aristocracy, the
development of Greek architecture, sculpture and vase-painting and the
emergence of novel forms of funerary architecture and sculpture.

Chapters ten to sixteen represent the Hellenistic section of the book. Chapter ten
explores the ways in which Hellenistic material culture was shaped by the desire
to enhance its spectacular appeal to a mass audience, including the novel
importance of ephemeral structures for particular festival and ritual occasions
and of technological inventions used for public spectacles. Chapter eleven is
largely focused on the early Hellenistic period and combines a panoramic tour
of Hellenistic cities, royal capitals and sanctuaries from Athens and the Aegean
to Syria and Mesopotamia, with a discussion of the development of early
Hellenistic sculpture, architecture and painting. Chapter twelve examines the
later Hellenistic period by combining a detailed look at the dynastic capitals of
Pergamon and Alexandria with a discussion of the developing interaction
between Hellenistic Italy and the eastern Mediterranean; the chapter also
includes an exploration of later Hellenistic sculpture. Chapter thirteen is devoted
to the development of an elite culture as expressed in the emergence of
elaborate architectural forms of houses and palaces and impressive techniques to
decorate them through mosaics and wall paintings, and the development of
sumptuous funerary monuments and of material production dedicated to cult
activities. Chapter fourteen discusses Hellenistic production and commerce,
including topics such as the circulation of precious metals and objects, the
development of glass manufacture, the production and distribution of local and
regional amphora types and their forms of stamping, as well as tableware and
perfume vases. Chapter fifteen focuses on the archaeology of Italy in the late
republican period, exploring the role of booty, importations and production of
Greek-style objects for the development of Italian art, the diffusion of
Hellenistic architecture in Italy, and the range and mixture of styles employed
concurrently in Rome and the rest of Italy. Chapter sixteen provides a short
conclusion by briefly examining the impact of Roman conquest and rule on the
material culture of Greek communities in the late republican and early imperial
periods. The book finally includes two appendices devoted to Greek
architectural orders and to the main shapes of Greek pottery, alongside a
bibliographical guide.

As should be obvious from this brief list of contents, this volume is an

impressive panorama of the history of Greek archaeology during the first
millennium BCE. The panorama is impressive because it makes a consistent
effort to cover the whole of the Greek world, rather than the more traditional
Athenocentric perspective. Athens gets its due share of course, but in all
chapters the authors have strived to incorporate Athenian developments
alongside developments in the rest of the Aegean and the western and eastern
Mediterranean. Not everything is of course included, and some readers may
regret the almost complete silence as regards the Black Sea and Cyrenaica, but
one has to be selective even in a work of such length. One of the strongest
appeals of the work is the result of its lavish illustration: I have not tried to
calculate, but one gets the impression that the overwhelming majority of all
objects and monuments mentioned are illustrated with a figure or plan. There is
also a very successful integration between text and image, which makes
following the argument easy and straightforward. Equally important is that the
volume includes the Hellenistic period and accords equal space to all three
periods of Greek history.

The authors have made a valiant effort to incorporate the history of Greek
archaeology within the wider context of Greek economic, social and political
history. It is rather unfortunate therefore that the organisation and arrangement
of the book does not often help the reader to appreciate the value of the volume.
I have already commented that the chapter titles do not reflect very well their
contents: chapter ten for example is titled ‘The multi-ethnic societies: the
Greeks and the Others’, but is rather devoted to the spectacular nature of
Hellenistic culture and architecture. The lack of an index further exacerbates the
problem of following the discussion of particular subjects which are widely
dispersed in different chapters. This also applies to notes and bibliography: there
are no notes and the bibliographical guide is divided thematically into different
forms of objects (sculpture, architecture, vase-painting, etc), rather than
following the chapter arrangement. Accordingly, it is often very difficult, if not
impossible, for the non-specialist to identify the works on which the book’s
account is based.

The authors have tried to combine thematic chapters devoted to a particular

aspect with chapters devoted to developments in sculpture, architecture and
vase-painting within a particular period of time. In my view some of the
thematic chapters are among the most successful in the book, in particular
chapter four on the archaeology of religious life and chapter thirteen on the
archaeology of Hellenistic elite practices. Other chapters are less successful: it
was an excellent idea to incorporate the treatment of black- and red-figure
pottery within a wider discussion of communication through images, but one
wonders why previous and later pottery styles are not examined in the same
way, as well as why sculpture and the figural programmes of Greek temples
could not be examined in the same context. The same also applies to the
discussion of production and trade: the relevant chapter covers only the
Hellenistic period, and the reader is left wondering about similar issues in the
archaic and classical periods. The chronologically-arranged chapters are less
successful, primarily because they compartmentalise discussion of Greek
material culture in separate sections on sculpture, architecture and painting. We
get excellent discussions of developments in each field, but little sense of how
all these aspects fit together in a single whole. A thematic chapter presenting a
snapshot of the interconnected totality of the material culture of a Greek
community at a single point in time would have been particularly helpful, but is
sadly missing. There are many other cases where the choices of the authors
about what to include and where appear problematic and in danger of creating a
misleading impression. The authors’ discussion of the diffusion and
transformation of Hellenistic culture in republican Italy is particularly
interesting, but one wonders why the similar phenomenon of the influence of
Greek art in archaic and classical Etruria is almost completely elided, while the
equivalent phenomenon in Asia Minor is presented as a process of
Hellenisation. In reality, we are dealing with a single if complex phenomenon,
that of the adoption and adaptation of Greek material culture by non-Greek
societies, but the book’s arrangement does not help the reader in understanding
the phenomenon in its wider ramifications or in providing explanations.

This is generally the biggest problem with this volume. It is a very good
description of a great range of aspects of Greek material culture, but it largely
avoids explanation and interpretation. To give one example among many, we
never get any explanation for the manifold changes in figural representation in
Greek art: neither the emergence of the ‘Orientalising’ phenomenon, nor the
appearance of ‘naturalism’ during the classical period are explained or
 interpreted. The authors have made a welcome effort to present the history of
Greek archaeology within the wider context of the social, economic, political
and cultural history of the Greek world; but their avoidance of explanation in
favour of description means that the work is a mixed success. In that respect it is
particularly puzzling why the authors have completely eschewed one of the
most significant developments in Greek archaeology in the last thirty years: the
archaeology of the landscape and land use. Intensive field surveys have
transformed our understanding of Greek history in so many ways, but the book
is inexplicably restricted to the urban setting of Greek history with its temples
and public spaces, leaving the countryside and the landscape largely invisible.

To conclude: as a single-volume manual of Greek archaeology read cover-to-

cover this is one of the most informative accounts we currently have. It is a
promising attempt to examine the history of Greek material culture from a wider
perspective; although its success is often mixed or circumscribed, for the
various reasons mentioned above, its wealth of illustrations and encyclopaedic
coverage in space and time will make it a useful work to consult.