Our term ‘‘Greek art,’’ with its demands of selectivity, is an old-fashioned and misleading term that should be permanently retired. What we have from the Greek world are remnants of the material culture - artifacts and monuments - some of which may be beautiful and some not, but all of which are valuable in helping us to understand the culture that flourished there. For the Greeks themselves, who had no word equivalent to our ‘‘art,’’ all of these remains were the work of artisans - technl - and they all had a function within the society. Art for art’s sake is not a concept that a Greek would have understood.
Among the artifacts and monuments that have come down to us many include images, sculpted and painted, and these images will be the focus of the discussion here. Figure-decorated vases, principally from Attica, are our richest source of images; more than 50,000 of them with images from myth and daily life have been cataloged from the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Many of these images are explicitly religious in that they show rituals or depict deities. Many others with no obvious religious content are on objects that had religious functions as offerings to gods (votives) or as elements of festivals or rituals. In every case, however, the object or monument on which an image appears had a function that is fundamental to an understanding of the image itself.
In looking at images there are two dangers to be avoided. One is to ignore the context (i. e. what sort of objects they appear on, what the objects were used for, where and when they were made, and where they were found), which leaves them floating in a kind of synchronic limbo as curiosities or abstractions that give us little sense of a connection with living, breathing people. The other danger is to think of them as photographs. Painters are always selective in their choice of what to include in an image. In scenes of daily life made by an Athenian for Athenians, the painter had no reason to include details that we might like to see but which his customers would have taken for granted.
In what follows here I have limited my discussion to Athens during the second half of the fifth century, when our sources are particularly rich. All the artifacts and monuments discussed were made in Athens and the majority of them were found there as well. The central question I address is: what can the study of artifacts and monuments tell us about religion in Athens, particularly during the second half of the fifth century? I interpret the term ‘‘religion’’ here (another for which there is no Greek equivalent) as activity related to the worship of gods, with the understanding that a fundamental purpose of worship was to attract and maintain the gods’ support through offerings - which could be sacrifices or appropriate objects (votives) dedicated to the deity. However, it will quickly become clear that in the world of fifth-century Athens, it is all but impossible to separate the ‘‘religious’’ from the artistic, economic, and political dimensions of life.
World History
