Spanning an entire wall in the Great Room in the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London is an ornate painting of a classical Greek landscape with figures (Figs. 15–17). The painting – Crowning the Victors at Olympia by the Irish artist James Barry (1741–1806) – shows a sort of frieze of figures (all of them male) framed by large statues to left and right and with a hilltop temple in the background; most of the figures stand in small groups, but there are also two men on horseback, one in a chariot, three on a sculpted dais, and one, an old man, held aloft by two youths. Unlike in Raphael’s Vatican frescoes (an important influence on Barry),1 most of the figures are carefully identified in a guide written by the painter himself. Some are victors at the games, including (in the chariot) Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, and (raising their aged father) the sons of Diagoras of Rhodes, who was himself an Olympic champion (and reportedly died of joy on his sons’ success (Aulus Gellius 3.15.3)). Others are spectators, consisting, Barry explained, ‘for the most part … of all those celebrated characters of Greece, who lived nearly about that time, and might have been present on the occasion’.2 The names he supplied are a roll call of the leading cultural and political figures of classical Greece: among them, the poet Pindar (complete with lyre); the dramatists Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes; the military and political leaders Cimon and Pericles; and various protagonists in the Greek intellectual revolution, including the philosophers Anaxagoras and Democritus, the medical writer Hippocrates and the historian Herodotus.
While Barry’s guide offers the impression that the painting shows with some verisimilitude a possible gathering at Olympia, some of his contemporaries did wonder just how much chronological artifice was involved in the vision he presented. Susan Burney (sister of the novelist Fanny), who visited the artist while he was at work on the painting, found it a ‘very fine Performance’ which ‘to we fair sex appeared extremely well executed’. She did profess herself, however, unable to determine ‘Whether He may not have committed some anachronisms’.3 Another of Barry’s acquaintances raised directly with the painter the objection that Pericles was depicted with the features of the Earl of Chatham (William Pitt the Elder) – but, according to Barry’s account at least, ‘a little reflexion soon convinced him that this was no Anachronism’, there having been no model for Pericles’ head at the time he was painting.4 The sensitivity to anachronism shown by these incidental comments was picked up by the clergyman Robert Bromley in his treatise on aesthetics. Bromley, as we noted in Chapter 8, found Raphael guilty of anachronism in the School of Athens, but he was prepared to acquit Barry of the same charge: ‘not a single anachronism or unnatural blending is to be found, all the characters introduced are of the same age’. And yet, despite this verdict, the clergyman confessed to being ‘not quite satisfied with the head of Chatham put upon the shoulders of Pericles’.5
Fig. 15 Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, Pindar and the artist as Timanthes: left-hand section of James Barry, Crowning the Victors at Olympia (1777–83), Royal Society of Arts. © RSA, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.
Fig. 16 William Pitt as Pericles, Diagoras of Rhodes with his sons: central section of James Barry, Crowning the Victors at Olympia, Royal Society of Arts. © RSA, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.
Fig. 17 Herodotus and the Olympic judges: right-hand section of James Barry, Crowning the Victors at Olympia, Royal Society of Arts. © RSA, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.
The varied responses to the chronology of Barry’s painting seem to suggest that anachronism is in the eye of the beholder. Some viewers were alert to the possibility of anachronism, and yet prepared, it seems, to ignore the ancient evidence. Hiero was, according to all our sources, victor in the chariot race in the seventy-eighth Olympiad (468 BC), and it was five Olympiads later that the sons of Diagoras of Rhodes were victorious on the same day. Nor do the chronological complications of the painting lie simply in its depiction of victories twenty years apart as if they happened at the same games. Similar problems are posed by some of the spectators: Aristophanes stands close to Cimon, who died before Aristophanes was born. Aristophanes, moreover, is said by Barry to be ‘attentive to nothing but the immoderate length of Pericles’s head, at which he is ridiculously pointing and laughing’6 – a clear allusion to the attacks on Pericles (and the shape of his head) in Aristophanes’ plays. But those attacks were posthumous: Pericles died in 429 BC, when Aristophanes was about sixteen. A further problem is created by the figure who, Barry explains, is declaring ‘the Olympiad, and the name, family, and country of the conqueror’. Barry here nods to the fact that ‘the Greek chronology was regulated by those games’,7 but, as we saw in Chapter 4, this chronological use of Olympiads began at the earliest c. 400 BC; there is no evidence for any sort of Olympic record-keeping prior to that time. Finally, on the far left, cut off slightly from the other figures, a man sits with an easel, staring directly out at the viewer. This artist is identified in Barry’s account as Timanthes, who lived in the fourth century BC, well after the other figures in the painting, and is said to be painted here, ‘from a vanity not uncommon amongst artists’,8 with the features of Barry himself.
The Olympia painting was one of a series of six paintings depicting ‘The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture’ created by Barry for the walls of the Great Room between 1777 and 1784 (with occasional subsequent alterations). The series reflected his ambitions for public art in Britain. Thwarted in a proposal to fill St Paul’s Cathedral with historical paintings, Barry persuaded the Society of Arts to let him paint the Great Room in return for expenses and proceedings from an exhibition, with the unusual stipulation that he be allowed to choose his theme himself. He made little money from his years of work, but he used his artistic freedom to forge what is on the surface a strong Enlightenment story of progress.
The first painting in the series shows the musician Orpheus as a civilizing figure ‘in a wild and savage country, surrounded by people as savage as their soil’; their savage state is illustrated in Barry’s guide with quotations from Lucretius’ evolutionary account of early human life.9 Next in the series is A Grecian Harvest Home, or Thanksgiving to the Rural Deities, Ceres, Bacchus & c., an agricultural scene fittingly supported in the guide by a quotation from Virgil’s Georgics. The third painting, the scene at Olympia, marks a further stage in the path of progress and seemingly a culmination within Greece itself. The Enlightenment model then continues with two British scenes, Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames and The Distribution of Premiums in the Society of Arts (an event that took place in the very room in which Barry was painting). Alongside this model of progress, however, as the art historian William Pressly has demonstrated, is a parallel Christian (and specifically Catholic) narrative: Orpheus is iconographically linked to St John the Baptist; the harvest scene includes a nativity modelled on images of the birth of Christ; the introduction of Bacchus and Ceres, wine and bread, is an allegory of the eucharist; the elderly Diagoras held aloft is modelled on images of papal processions; and the three judges stand for the Trinity.10 The Olympia picture picks up, moreover, parallels drawn in eighteenth-century scholarship between Greek athletic festivals and Catholicism.
The religious theme is openly suggested in the final painting in the series, Elysium, or the State of Final Retribution. Filling the whole wall opposite Crowning the Victors, it depicts a mass of figures in period clothing, most of them carefully identified by Barry: the philosophers Shaftesbury and Locke talk to Plato and Aristotle, while Thales and Archimedes are grouped with Roger Bacon and Descartes; William Penn shows his law code to the ancient law-givers Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, and Zaleucus (Fig. 18); and above them Homer sits with his lyre next to Milton, with Sappho and Alcaeus nearby (the latter conversing with Ossian). Barry in this way fulfilled his wish ‘to bring together in Elysium, those great and good men of all ages and nations, who were cultivators and benefactors of mankind’, as ‘a kind of apotheosis, or more properly a beatification of those useful qualities which were pursued through the whole work’.11
Fig. 18 William Penn showing his law code to the ancient law-givers Lycurgus, Solon, Numa and Zaleucus. Detail from James Barry, Elysium (1777–1801), Royal Society of Arts. © RSA, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.
The painting of Elysium seems to have excited some of the same worries as Crowning the Victors, even though it purports to display a scene in the afterlife. An abridgement of Barry’s guide to the series added the claim that ‘this sublime Picture’ is ‘without any of those anachronisms which tarnish the lustre of other very celebrated performances’.12 The extra clause suggests a certain defensiveness, as if the very attempt to avoid anachronism in the depiction of costumes exposed the anachronism of the painting’s corporeal encounters.
Barry’s series and the debates to which it gave rise captures many of the themes which we have explored throughout this book: definitions of anachronism (what latitude is allowed before a chronological breach of an ‘age’ is felt as such?); anachronism in creative works (Barry’s inclusion of his own and Chatham’s features may even have been inspired by Phidias’ inclusion of himself and Pericles on Athena’s shield on the Athenian acropolis (p. 59)); the history of chronology; narratives of human development and historical change; conceptions of exemplarity; the capacity of artworks to embrace multiple temporalities. The series even allows reflection on the way anachronism is implicated in the dialectical relationship of antiquity and modernity. The anachronism of the Olympia scene creates a sense of the classical Greek past as cohesive and whole, and yet as necessarily superseded, its very wholeness dependent on its pastness. The modern artist uses the anachronism of hindsight to crown the victors of antiquity.
Classical antiquity itself can easily be seen as another of the victors crowned by historical hindsight. It has been hived off as an idealized space, a point of origin for ‘Western’ political and intellectual concepts such as democracy, liberty and even history itself, as well as for numerous artistic and literary traditions. In part the position that antiquity has enjoyed reflects the choices that thinkers and creative artists and writers have made to rework the material and literary remains of the Greeks and Romans, while attaching themselves at the same time to a chain of intermediaries. This form of adherence to Greco-Roman antiquity has necessarily been at the expense of other cultures – sometimes wilfully so. The neglect or suppression of alternative points of origin is particularly regrettable in accounts of the development of historical consciousness, which typically neglect the well-documented peoples of the Ancient Near East by whom the Greeks themselves were undoubtedly influenced.
Classical antiquity, too, has paid a price for its success. While fifth-century Greece is the starting place for many modern narratives about the creation of a sense of history, it is often defined in these narratives in terms of absence. The Greeks, it is thought, lacked a sense of anachronism, and this alleged lack acts in turn as an a fortiori justification for dismissing the claims of other cultures to a sophisticated sense of historical difference. Paradoxically, however, such narratives of absence are themselves (as we saw in Chapter 2) the product of an anachronistic application and reification of later conceptions of history.
‘One must look to the end of every affair, to see how it turns out.’ How does Solon’s advice to Croesus seem at the end of our anachronistic tour of antiquity? The wisdom (and not just the chronology) of Solon’s advice was debated in antiquity: can one really not regard someone as happy until they are dead?13 Our concern here is with Solon’s reflections on hindsight rather than on happiness. We have used anachronism in this book in part to explore the richness of ancient thought on temporality, in part to explore the constructedness of classical antiquity itself. Both of these investigations have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that antiquity is the product of hindsight with its accompanying emotions of desire and disdain. Our goal has been to replace the binary narrative of before and after with a more varied and dynamic picture of the workings of temporal consciousness among (and between) the Greeks and Romans, a picture that does justice to the surviving evidence in its varied multiplicity. Throughout, the texts and images we have studied have spoken to a robust sense of historical difference. As we look back from the end, antiquity itself turns out to have been among the most enduring anachronisms of modernity. But we can also see that the storehouse of ancient thought on anachronism which we have explored in this book did much to form the temporal imagination that continues to give antiquity its contours.