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ARTS IN LETTERS
The Aesthetics
of Ancient Greek Writing
38 Alexandra Pappas
the way we learn to write and sing our abcs today. Thus, it appears
that, after seeing someone inscribe the verse dedication on the
oinochoe, a second person tried his hand at learning a few letters of
the novel Greek alphabet. Instead of alpha, beta, however, this student
has begun with kappa, omitted lambda, and gone on to mu and nu.
This is remarkable evidence for the process of learning how to write
at virtually the same moment that the Greek alphabet was invented.
What is even more remarkable, particularly in light of the trends in
other early writing systems, is the close association of the earliest uses
of this new technology with the poetic arts and, as I will emphasize,
the visual arts. Unlike the invention of the Mesopotamian cuneiform
or Mycenaean linear B writing systems, for example, the Greek al-
phabet does not immediately serve the needs of economy, trade, or
law.7 Recalling the definition of the Greek alphabet already cited
that it attempts to translate the aural, invisible elements of human
speech into graphic, visible signswe might say more specifically
that the early Greek alphabet quite often translates the invisible ele-
ments of poetic speech into graphic, visible signs and, as we shall in-
vestigate, that those signs, in turn, exhibit a kind of visual poetics.
Notably, the inscription on the oinochoe, incised after firing,
was carefully placed so as not to violate the preexisting concentric
bands of black slip and saw-toothed decoration on the vase. The
first inscriber used the undecorated, solid-black shoulder zone as a
ground line for the spidery writing, although the less-proficient
second writer was not able to write so neatly. Nonetheless, the graf-
fitos placement respects the rest of the decorative motif and neatly
integrates with the vases overall aesthetic plan. Indeed, it may itself
have looked like an innovative decoration to its viewers, many of
whom, no doubt, could not have read it.8 I suggest, then, that we
see the writing on the Dipylon Oinochoe as a prototype for writ-
ings ability to contribute to an objects decorative schema, or for
writings communicative aesthetics. The following four objects un-
der consideration more fully exhibit these communicative aesthet-
ics and comprise a representative sample that illustrates a pervasive
trend spanning the late eighth to early fifth centuries b.c.e.9
To illustrate the communicative aesthetics of Greek writing in an-
other medium, we shift from Athens to Boeotian Thebes, from wine
jug to figurine, from athletic to religious context with an inscribed
bronze statuette manufactured about forty years after the oinochoe,
the so-called Mantiklos Apollo (figure 3.2). Dedicated to the archer
god by one Mantiklos, this diminutive warrior with triangular head,
torso, and lower extremities features a formulaic hexameter inscrip-
tion in two lines of continuous, vertically oriented boustrophedon script
weaving back and forth (as the ox ploughs) on his thighs.
Reading left to right and beginning with the outer line, the first
hexameter speaks forth in the first person, personifying the figurine
and naming its dedicator, Mantiklos, as well as the dedicatee, the sil-
ver-bowed far-darterthat is, Apollo. The second hexameter, read-
ing right to left, or retrograde, snakes back on itself, looping inside
the first inscribed line, and names the cost of commissioning the stat-
uette, concluding with a direct address to Apollo: Mantiklos dedi-
cated me to the far-darter, him of the silver bow, as a tenth part; / so
do you, O Phoibos, grant a pleasing gift to me in return.
The writing here complements the other physical details of the
figure, which are also marked out by incision. The pectoral and ab-
dominal musculature, although relatively crude, are defined by in-
cised lines, as are details of the head and hair. Although most early
Greek inscriptions run horizontally, this one reads vertically, a fact
partly explained by the availability of space: the thighs of the war-
40 Alexandra Pappas
3.3.
Attic lekanis lid, circa 63020 B.C.E.
Athens National Museum, 852. Pho-
tograph by author.
42 Alexandra Pappas
ways, this enables and invites the cups painter to integrate writing
within its scenes so that the shape and placement of the written
words communicate with the viewer on multiple levels simultane-
ously; in the context of figural narrative, the visual poetics of the
written word realize their potential even more fully.
Between the cups handles on one side, the hero Heracles and his
ally Iolaos battle the many-headed monster Hydra. On the other side,
men, whose padded rear ends suggest their identity as comedic actors,
dance. Although the scenes are superficially different in subject mat-
ter, I maintain that the cups inscriptions unify them visually, if not
thematically. On the side featuring Heracles, a pair of horses, labeled
as belonging to the hero, stands yoked to a chariot behind which
Athena, also labeled, stands holding a wine jug, or oinochoe (figure
3.4a). Next, a figure labeled Herakles fights the Hydra with help
from his companion, labeled Wiolas (that is, Iolas), who attacks the
monster from behind (figure 3.4b). This scene is a lively and dynamic
heroic struggle and the names contribute to this sense. The horses la-
bel, of Herakles, syntactically declares that they belong to Heracles
but also suggests the motion of the animals advancing legs as the la-
bel curves underneath their bellies. So, too, Heracles name vertically
braces his rear leg as he rushes toward the Hydra, and Iolaos fills in
the space between his legs, solidifying his stance as he readies for an
attack from one of the monsters heads.
44 Alexandra Pappas
parody of the Heracles myth.14 Having reached the same conclusion
independently, I endorse his reading and add to it the evidence of the
names, which both unite the two scenes and unify the iconography
on the cup as a whole. The design of the label of Heracles horses links
the hero with the dancers, the interwoven heads and necks of the Hy-
dra resonate in the general weave of the dancers names, and the in-
tertwined lotus and palmette motif in the decorative band below reflects
the overlap of dancers legs and names, resulting in an aesthetic unity
on the surface of the cup. To neglect the visual impact of these words
is to miss a great deal of the message they communicate. As many of
the essays in this volume explore, in this alphabetic context, too, the
forms of the inscriptions, rather than accidental and arbitrary, are es-
sential to the communicative act.
To illustrate that the semantic meaning of these words is not their
only important feature, I conclude this portion of the survey with a
roughly contemporary vase, a type often used for cooling wine called
a psykter (figure 3.5a).
In a comic scene similar to that on the kotyle, males with exposed
genitals and nude females all dance. Thus, as on the kotyle, the writ-
ing among these dancers also emphasizes the action of the figures,
highlighting their physical movements and articulating the interac-
tions among them (figure 3.5b). But when we turn to the meaning
of the names, we find that they do not communicate semantically
with the audience at all, for these are nonsense inscriptions, painted
to resemble words but whose letters do not combine to form any
known words when read.15 While legible names dramatize the lively,
rhythmic movement of the dancers on the kotyle, here we see how il-
legible, meaningless names perform an analogous function, their vi-
sual presence alone contributing to the aesthetic organization of the
scene and communicating with the viewer.
As we move away from this survey of early Greek inscriptions
in their visual contexts, it is important to keep in mind that the an-
cient Greek verb graphein meant both to write and to draw or
paint. While this double meaning may initially strike us as odd,
we note a similar range of meaning in our English cognates. For ex-
ample, graphite is the lead used in pencils for writing, while the ad-
jective graphic often implies the visuality of an image, as in the
discipline of graphic arts or when referring to violence in a movie
that may be visually intense. That one verb could govern two dis-
tinct techniques betrays their overlap in the minds of their Greek
practitioners. Indeed, the multivalent semantic range of graphein
finds its context in the general definition of writing I apply to this
study, first put forth by Emmett Bennett, Jr., in 1963: any system
of human intercommunication by means of a set of visible marks
with a conventional reference.16 Improving on earlier definitions
46 Alexandra Pappas
cle persists but now as something to be viewed in the minds eye or
even on the stage itself. Here, too, the Greek distinction between
word and image is blurred; and once again, letters and words are
themselves the locus of viewing.
A tantalizing fragment from Euripides play Theseus, from the
latter half of the fifth century, illustrates precisely what variety of
political, social, and cultural identities could be at stake when view-
ing the word in classical Greece. In this tragedy, an illiterate herds-
man tries to communicate to another character the name of the
Athenian hero Theseus, which he has seen inscribed somewhere.
Because he is unable to read, the herdsman resorts to describing the
uppercase letters that spell Theseus name as basic shapes:
and spells the heros name. For the audience to understand the
word the herdsman attempts to communicate, we must visualize
the Greek letters in our minds eye; and in this dramatic context, as
in the material world of vases, the appearance of letters and words
is critically important. Seeing these letters together as a word, after
all, names the title character of the play and must have been a key
point of recognition in the tragedy.
Within a couple of decades of Euripides production, in the
later fifth century, a lesser-known tragedian, Agathon, imitated the
Euripidean passage in half as many lines in his play Telephus.19
Here, too, an illiterate character works to communicate the word
Theseus to another character:
48 Alexandra Pappas
The audience literally observed letters in action, however, in this
next and final exemplum from Attic drama, a late fifth-century com-
edy by Callias that decks the stage with lettersin fact, all the letters
of the Ionic alphabet to be seen in the flesh by the audience.23 Rather
curiously, in this play, alternately titled the Letter Show or the Letter
Tragedy, each member of a chorus of women portrayed one of the
twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, and the chorus members
would dance out two-letter combinations of a vowel and a consonant,
creating a four-dimensional representation of a traditionally two- or
three-dimensional medium. As one fragment from this comedy in-
dicates, the coupling of letters started off by joining beta, the first con-
sonant in the Greek alphabet, with each Greek vowel in order; and
the chorus members would pair themselves off physically and then
make the sound of the syllabic combination their twosome created,
by singing, for example, beta alpha ba, beta epsilon be, beta eta b,
beta iota bi, and so on, rendering a series like English ba-be-bi-bo-
bou. Although most details of the plays performance remain un-
known, it seems likely, from the extant fragments, that this curious
pairing occurred for each consonant and vowel combination possible
and, at the plays conclusion, culminated in an obscene phallic joke
implied by the final combination of letters.24
To focus on a more relevant aspect of the plays interest in visi-
bility, it is immediately striking that Callias has put letters on stage
as characters in a drama. The initial oddity of this fades a bit, though,
when we consider it along with the earlier material I have presented
in this essay. Like the painted inscriptions on the archaic vases, where
the visual presentation of the words itself is meaningful, here the au-
diences gaze is once again directed toward letters as they are presented
in the round, on display for public viewing, perhaps not such an odd
occurrence for a Greek audience accustomed to see carefully placed
letters and words in countless other contexts.
This manipulation of the visual qualities of writing is taken to new
heights in this essays final material, the Hellenistic technopaegnia, or
pattern poems, a form likely familiar from more modern examples
such as George Herberts Easter Wings or e. e. cummingss poems.
These ancient epigrammatic poems, five of which survive from the
third to first centuries b.c.e., formed the shapes of material objects on
the pages of a poetry book, creating their images by alternating the
length of the poems lines.25 The ancient titles tell us that they are a
pair of Eros wings spread in flight, a double axe head, an egg, an al-
tar, and a panpipe, called a syrinx and reproduced here (figure 3.6).
The content of each poem corresponds in some way to the shape
it makes on the page. For example, the Wings poem speaks forth
as a personification of the wings of Eros, the Axe claims to be the
very one that cut the wood for the Trojan horse, and the Syrinx
describes its owner Pan and his love for the nymph Echo. While in
the eighth through early fifth centuries craftsmen of vases, statues, or
grave stelae often inscribed their material creations with epigrammatic
poems, in the third century these clever poets used the epigram itself
to create an image of the object, which was now physically absent.
What we view in the technopaegnia is simultaneously word and ob-
ject: an object on the page made out of words. As readers of these po-
ems, we are also spectators of the pictures they make, a duality the
authors revel in. The first two words of the Wings, for example,
command the reader: leusse me (gaze upon me). So, too, the author
of the Altar effectively tricks the reader into looking upon a repre-
sentation of the same altar whose viewing was instrumental in
Philoctetes injury: according to myth, when Philoctetes violated a
taboo by looking on a divinitys altar, he was bitten in the foot by a
50 Alexandra Pappas
poisonous snake, which delayed his journey to fight against the Tro-
jans at Troy. Thus, the technopaegnia self-consciously stand at once
as literary and visual artifacts, and the boundaries between ancient
Greek words and images, arts and letters, have once again collapsed.
As this brief essay has illustrated, and as many scholars of the clas-
sics have neglected to note, modes of viewing the word in ancient
Greece defy simple categorization because writing traveled fluidly be-
tween literary and material worlds, at once communicating on lexi-
graphic and sematographic levels. In one instance writing creates a
literary text, and in another it is used for image making, whether on
archaic vases, the classical Athenian stage, or the pages of a Hellenis-
tic poetry book. Indeed, ancient Greek visible writings collapse the vis-
ible and the legible into one, align the visible and the legible along
parallel lines, incorporate the legible within the visible, and at times
even privilege the visible over the legible.26 For this material, I con-
clude, to ignore the appearance of ancient writing is to fail to read
it thoroughly.
To return to where we began, it is precisely this materiality and
visuality that troubled Plato, leading him to condemn writing. Writ-
ing, after all, is deceptive, for it is the appearance of wisdom rather than
true wisdom. Exhibiting a true understanding of the flexibility of the
medium, Plato even makes explicit the analogy between writing and
painting: Strange indeed, Phaedrus, is this power of writing, and in
this particular way it is really like painting; for the products of paint-
ing stand there as if alive, but if you ask them something, they are al-
together solemnly silent. And [written] words are the same. You
might think that they said something as if they were sentient, but if,
wanting to learn, you ask them something about what they say, they
only communicate the same one thing every time.27
We must understand ancient Greek writing as material, and
gaining insight into Plato is just one of the many important impli-
cations of this phenomenon. Nor should it come as any surprise
that the same people, whose aesthetic sensibilities yielded the tem-
ples and statues that boast broad appeal even today, conceived of
their written language as another form of visual art, combining
word and image to create arts in letters.
This essay has benefited from the critical feedback of the Visible Writings confer-
ence audience, this volumes editors, and the careful attention of Marcy Dinius and
Holly Sypniewski. Any errors are, of course, my own.
1. Plato, Phaedrus, 274b279b.
2. While scholars of Greek language have tended to neglect the objects to which that
language was often attached, scholars of Greek objects have often overlooked the materi-
ality of the words on them. Thus, for example, Greek inscriptions often appear in texts as
typographically neat and with little or no reference to their original physical context, mak-
ing full contextual study impossible. Important recent exceptions to this limited and lim-
iting approach include Jeffrey Hurwit, The Words in the Image: Orality, Literacy and Early
Greek Art, Word and Image 6 (1990):18097; Franois Lissarrague, Graphein: crire et
dessiner, in Limage en jeu: de lAntiquit Paul Klee, ed. Christiane Bron and Effy Kass-
apoglou (Lausanne: Universit de Lausanne, Institut darchologie et dhistoire ancienne,
1992), 189203; Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds., Art and Text in Ancient Greek
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Zahra Newby and Ruth E.
Leader-Newby, eds., Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Jocelyn Penny Small, The Parallel Worlds of Classical Art and Text (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Graham Zanker, Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic
Poetry and Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); and Michael Squire, Im-
age and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Although still a minority, these interdisciplinary approaches happily represent what appears
to be a growing trend.
3. Alexandra Pappas, Greek Writing in Its Aesthetic Context: Archaic and Hel-
lenistic Arts and Letters (Ph.D. diss., University of WisconsinMadison, 2004);
Robin Osborne and Alexandra Pappas, Writing on Archaic Greek Pottery, in Newby
and Leader-Newby, Art and Inscriptions, 13155.
4. Barry B. Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991), 567, reviews the evidence, arguments, consensus, and
bibliography.
5. Ibid., 2.
6. Barry B. Powell, The Dipylon Oinochoe and the Spread of Literacy in Eighth-
Century Athens, Kadmos 27 (1988): 6586.
7. On Mesopotamian cuneiform as generated out of administrative necessity, see
Piotr Michalowski, Mesopotamian Cuneiform, Origin, in The Worlds Writing Systems,
ed. Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 33
36; on the early uses of Linear B, see Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Aegean Scripts, Linear
B, in Daniels and Bright, Worlds Writing Systems, 12530. In contrast, it took nearly
150 years for ancient Greek writing to serve these arenas consistently.
8. Actual levels of literacy throughout the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic peri-
ods have remained impossible to quantify. For the relative trends suggesting that the
vast majority could not read, see William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989), and Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient
Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9. Osborne and Pappas, Writing on Archaic, 13155.
10. It was relatively common to place dedicatory inscriptions on the legs of archaic
monumental statues as an alternative to the more usual inscribed statue base, and it re-
mains to be explored whether other examples bear out the aesthetic explanation pre-
52 Alexandra Pappas
sented here. This figure was broken off at the knees after manufacture; and although
this alters our overall impression of the statuette today, it does not affect this aesthetic
reading: the lower legs, void of inscription, would have balanced the chest, while the
head and upper legs would still correspond visually.
11. Henry R. Immerwahr, Attic Script: A Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990), 10. Although the lekanis itself seems to be Attic, the writing is diverse: the lamb-
das recall the Argive dialect, while the gamma and sigma are Ionic.
12. The owners signature, which marks out an object as belonging to someone
who is named on the object, is one of the earliest and most common types of inscrip-
tion. This must reflect an impulse immediately inspired by the early alphabet: to claim
ones belongings.
13. Koppa corresponds essentially to our letter Q and appears in inscriptions from
specific regions including the Dorian islands Thera, Melos, and Crete: Leslie Threatte,
The Grammar of Attic Inscriptions, vol. 1, Phonology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980
96), 2123. Over time the koppa drops completely from the alphabetic repertoire, and
kappa is universally used instead.
14. Matthias Steinhart, Die Kunst der Nachahmung: Darstellungen mimetischer
Vorfhrungen in der griechischen Bildkunst archaischer und klassischer Zeit (Mainz am
Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2004), 4043.
15. Immerwahr, Attic Script, 4445, documents four types of ancient Greek non-
sense inscriptions: mock or near sense, which prompt the reader to recall the real
words they imitate since their garbled letters imitate formulaic phrases often found on
pots; meaningless, which have clearly legible letter forms but bear no close relation to
actual words; imitation, which look as if they are comprised of a series of letters, but
the letter forms are unidentifiable; and blot or dot, which consist of rows of blots or
dots and suggest to the viewer that an inscription could have stood in that place. The
example presented here falls into the meaningless category with its legible letters.
16. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Names for Linear B Writing and for Its Signs, Kad-
mos 2 (1963): 98123.
17. See, for example, Ignace Jay Gelb, A Study of Writing, 2d ed. (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1963), 1213.
18. Richard Kannicht, Euripides, vol. 5 in Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed.
Bruno Snell, Richard Kannicht, and S. L. Radt (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,
1971 ), from 382. The herdsman describes uppercase letters because the epigraphical con-
vention was to use all capitals.
19. August Nauck, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Teub-
neri, 1889), with a supplement by Bruno Snell (Hildesheim, 1964), from 4. The trage-
dian Agathon appears to be the same fictional Agathon whose tragic victory is the cause
for celebration in Platos Symposium, 173a.
20. Kann has a particularly marked association with the world of craftsmanship,
denoting sometimes the supports that preserve the shape of a shield or sometimes a
straight rod used in weaving, masonry, or carpentry. Indeed, the word may very well
have elicited an association with the famous Polycleitus, sculptor of the Doryphorus,
and his treatise by the same name in these recent decades after its composition, circa
44030 b.c.e.
21. Thomas, Literacy and Orality, 139.
22. Editors note: Transmedia writing offers insights into the connections of power,
knowledge, and the cultures of text. This is evoked in other essays: through a hesitant
celebration of democracy in Barbara Krugers poster art (Marilyn Symmes); through
54 Alexandra Pappas