Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium

399 Pages·2005·12.73 MB·English

by  Emma Stafford

PERSONIFICATION
IN THE GREEK WORLD:
FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM
Centre For Hellenic Studies IC IN G ’S
j^JOo/Iege
King’s College London LONDON

Publications 7
University of London
PERSONIFICATION IN
THE GREEK WORLD
•
•
From Antiquity to Byzantium
edited by
Emma Stafford and Judith Herrin
First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2017 by Routledge
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711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an infonna business
Copyright © 2005 Emma Stafford and Judith Herrin
The editors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium. - (Publications for the
Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London; 7)
I. Greek literature - Themes, motives. 2. Personification in literature.
3. Personification in art. 4. l\lythology, Greek in literature. 5. l\lythology, Greek in
art. 6. Greece - Religious life and customs. I. Stafford, Emma. II. Herrin Judith.
III. King's College, London. Centre for Hellenic Studies.
880.9'15
US Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium/ edited by Emma
Stafford and Judith Herrin.
p. cm. - (Publications for the Centre for flellenie Studies, King's College
London; 7)
Includes biographical references.
I. Personification in art. 2. Arts, Greek. 3. Cults - Greece - History -To 1500.
I. Stafford, Emma. II. I lcrrin, Judith. III. Series. IV. Publications (King's College
(University of London). Centre for Hellenic Studies); 7.
NX650.P48P47 2004
700'.415-dc22 2004016984
Typeset by W.l\1. Pank, King's College London.
ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5031-7 (hbk)
THE CENTRE FOR HELLENIC STUDIES,
KING'S COLLEGE LONDON, PUBLICATIONS 7
Contents

Contributors vii
List of Figures xi
Editors’ Introduction xix
Part I Origins and varying modes of personification
1. Hesiod in context: abstractions and divinities in an
Aegean-Eastern koine
Walter Burkert 3
2. Disaster revisited: Ate and the Litai in Homer’s Iliad
Naoko Yamagata 21
3. Brightness personified: light and divine image in ancient Greece
Eva Parisinou 29
4. The gender of Death
Diana Burton 45
5. The Greek heroes as a ‘personification’ of the past in the present
Kerasia Stratiki 69
6. Neo-Platonic personification
Lucas Siomanes 77
Part II Personification in myth and cult
7. Side: the personification of the pomegranate
Efthymios G. Lazongas 99
8. Personified abstractions in Laconia: suggestions on
the origins of Phobos
Nicolas Richer 111
9. Situational aesthetics: the deification of Kairos, son of Hermes
Arlene Allan 123
10. Eros at the Panathenaea: personification of what?
Irina Kovaleva
135
VI CONTENTS
Part III The poet and his work
11. The Muses: creativity personified?
Penelope Murray 147

12. A lover of his art: the art-form as wife and mistress in
Greek Poetic Imagery
Alan H. Sommerstein 161
13. Personifications of the Iliad and Odyssey in Hellenistic and Roman art
Kristen Seaman 173
Part IV Looking at personifications
14. Eunomia or ‘make love not war?: Meidian personifications
reconsidered
Barbara E. Borg 193
15. From Drunkenness to a Hangover: maenads as personifications
Amy C. Smith 211
16. Personifications and paideia in Late Antique mosaics from
the Greek East
Ruth Leader-Newby 231
17. Rivers of Roman Antioch
Janet Huskinson 247
Part V Images of power, time and place
18. Poleos erastes: The Greek city as the beloved
Yorgis Yatromanolakis 267
19. Personification in impersonal context: late Roman bureaucracy and
the illustrated Notitia dignitatum
Iskra Gencheva-Mikami 285
20. Good Luck and Good Fortune to the Queen of Cities:
empresses and Tyches in Byzantium
Liz James 293
21. The Labours of the Twelve Months in twelfth-century Byzantium
Elizabeth Jeffreys 309
Consolidated Bibliography 325
Index 359
Index of Modern Authors 375
About the Contributors

Arlene Allan is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Otagar, having
previously been Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University (2001-02) and
Assistant Professor at Trent University (2002-04). She held the Leventis
Graduate Research scholarship at the University of Exeter from 1998-2001,
successfully completing her PhD, The Lyre, The Whip and the Staff of Gold:
Readings in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in 2003.
Barbara E. Borg is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter, having
previously been Hochschuldozentin at the Institute of Classical Archaeology
at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Among her major fields of
interest are the iconography and the ‘rhetorics’ of images, both Greek and
Roman. The same interest guided her study of personifications, which is the
subject of her Der Logos des Mythos: Allegorien und Personifikationen in der
griechischen Kunst (Munich 2002).
Walter Burkert has been Professor of Classics at the University of Zurich
(1969-96) and visiting professor at Harvard, Berkeley and other universities
in the USA. His research concentrates on ancient Greek philosophy and
religion, their interrelation, oriental contacts, and perspectives of anthro­
pology. His major publications include Lore and Science in Ancient Pythago-
reanism (Harvard 1972), Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual
(Sather Lectures 1979), Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Harvard 1985),
The Orientalizing Revolution (Harvard 1992), Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of
Biology in Early Religions (Harvard 1996).
Diana Burton is Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington.
Her research interests centre around death and immortalisation in ancient
Greek myth, and particularly the iconography of death-related figures. She is
working on a book on the immortalisation of heroes in archaic Greek art and
myth.
Iskra Gencheva-Mikami was Assistant and then Associate Professor in
Roman History and Late Antiquity at the University of Sofia ‘St. Climent
Ohridski’ and the New Bulgarian University, Sofia (1993-2001). She is cur­
rently a visiting professor at the Department of Religious Studies, University
of Tokyo, Japan. Among her main research interests and publications are
various aspects of Roman imperial bureaucracy: bureaucracy and art,
bureaucracy and religion, bureaucracy and politics. Her research on the
Notitia dignitatum is connected with these major fields of interest.
viii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Judith Herrin is Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at
King’s College London. From 1995 to 2002 she was Director of the Centre
for Hellenic Studies, KCL, which sponsors conferences such as the one

devoted to Personification and publishes the proceedings. Her most recent
book is Women in Purple. Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (2001) and she is
currently working on an introductory study, a Byzantium for beginners.
Janet Huskinson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies
at the Open University. Her research interests are in the art of Roman
empire and its relationship with the society which produced and used it, and
she has also written on sarcophagi and portrait sculpture.
Liz James is a Reader in the Department of Art History, University of
Sussex, where she teaches Byzantine art. Her book, Empresses and Power in
Early Byzantium (London 2001) looks at the representations of female power
in Byzantium and she is interested in the changing iconographies of
empresses.
Elizabeth Jeffreys is Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and
Modern Greek Literature in the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Exeter
College. She works on texts that are at the interface between spoken and
written medieval Greek. Her recent publications include editions of the
fourteenth-century War of Troy and the twelfth-century epic-romance Digenis
Akritis.
Irina Kovaleva is Associate Professor of Classics at Moscow State
Lomonosov University. She has been British Academy Visiting Scholar
(1995) and Alexandras S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholar (1996).
She has published over 70 essays on ancient Greek mythology, philosophy
and literature, as well as on Modern Greek and Russian literature. Her PhD
thesis was on The Peculiarities of the Genre of Maximus of Tyre's Orationes
(1990), and her publications include: Joseph Brodsky, Centaurs: Antique Motifs
(St Petersburg 2001); (in Russian) Miltos Sachtouris, The Head of a Poet
(Moscow 2003); (translation into Russian and introductory article)
Metamorfoseis poleon (Moscow, 2003). She is currently working on a mono­
graph on Greek mythology, Teiresias and Actaion: Narrative and Non-Narrative
Structures of Myth.
Efthymios G. Lazongas is a researcher in archaeology. His doctoral
research, submitted during the year 2004 in the University of Paris 1,
Pantheon-Sorbonne, is entitled NAOS. La symbolique du temple grec dans Tart
et la religion. The place of symbols in Greek religion is his major area of
research, though he is also interested in other aspects of Greek religion, in
architecture, in decorative patterns and in iconography.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS IX
Ruth Leader-Newby recently held a British Academy postdoctoral
fellowship in the Department of Classics, King’s College London. Her
research interests include the relationship between education and visual

culture in late antiquity, and the role of inscriptions and name-labels in late
Roman art. She is also the author of Silver and Society in Late Antiquity: Aspects
and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries AD (Aldershot
2004).
Penelope Murray is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of
Warwick. She has written on a wide variety of topics in ancient literature and
is particularly interested in poetics. Her publications include Plato on Poetry
(Cambridge 1996) and Music and the Muses in Classical Athenian Culture, ed.
with Peter Wilson (Oxford 2004).
Eva Parisinou is Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She is author
of a book on light in Greek cult (The Light of the Gods: the Role of Light in
Archaic and Classical Greek Cult, Duckworth 2000) and several articles on
Greek social history, art and archaeology.
Nicolas Richer is Professor of Greek History at the Ecole Normale
Superieure, Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon, having previously worked
at the University of Strasbourg (Strasbourg-II). He has written especially
about Archaic and Classical Sparta (Les tLphores. fctudes sur I'histoire et sur
l'image de Sparte (VIIIe-IHe siecle avant Jesus-Christ, Paris 1998).
Kristen Seaman is a PhD candidate at the University of California at
Berkeley. She received her BA from Yale University and was a Regular
Member and Fulbright Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at
Athens during 2002-03. She has excavated in Greece, Italy and Israel, and
her main research interests are sculpture and the interrelationship of art and
text.
Amy C. Smith is Lecturer in Classics and Curator of the Ure Museum of
Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading. She is interested in Greek
and Roman art, particularly in the spheres of politics, myth, and religion. Her
work on personifications comprises several articles and a forthcoming book,
Personifications of Political Ideas in Classical Athenian Art. She is currently
writing a volume of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum for the Ure Museum.