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Nations and Nationalism 7 (4), 2001, 467±486. # ASEN 2001
Myths of ancestry*
ATHENA S. LEOUSSI
Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences, The University of Reading,
Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AA
ABSTRACT. This article examines the national significance of fifth-century BC
Greek sculpture and especially the so-called Elgin Marbles. It examines the significance of these archaeological remains not for the Greek nation but for the British, and
specifically the English, nation during the nineteenth century. The national significance of fifth-century BC Greek art lies in its incorporation into nineteenth-century
debates concerning the identity of the English nation. At a time when physical appearance or race was accepted as an important and, indeed, determining component of the
`self' and a measure of collective belonging, Greek sculpture, which was primarily
figural in its subject-matter, came to be seen as an image of the English `self'. The
belief in the Greek identity of the English caused a Greek revival in English life and
art. In life, this revival took the form of care for the body and the imitation of the
athletic practices of Greek youth through the practice of sport in English school and
university education. It was thus that nineteenth-century English youth turned itself
into a work of art.
This article examines the national signi®cance of the discovery by nineteenthcentury European archaeologists of ®fth-century BC Greek sculpture. This
sculpture was exempli®ed by the so-called Elgin Marbles, the sculptures
which, until Lord Elgin brought them to London early in the nineteenth
century and the British Museum acquired them for `the Nation' in 1816, had
decorated the temple of Athena Parthenos in Athens (Rothenberg 1977; Cook
1984; Jenkins 1992: 75). The Parthenon sculptures, carved between c. 447/6
and c. 442 BC, represented a distinctive and, at the time, little-known phase of
ancient Greek art, a phase whose centre was in Athens and whose most
brilliant exponents had been Pheidias and his followers, Polycletus and
Myron. The `Athenian Marbles' in¯uenced most decisively artistic practice
and historical research in Europe. The exposure of the Elgin Marbles to
Western eyes caused, like the Belvedere torso in the sixteenth century, a High
Renaissance in Western art, and they were deemed `of great assistance to the
* I should like to thank the anonymous referees of this article for their careful reading, and for
sharing with me their expertise and detailed understanding of the ®eld, thereby helping me greatly
to improve the quality of this work. I am also grateful to Dr Alex King of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, for guiding me through the V&A's Boris Anrep archive with the excitement of
the expert and the generosity of a friend.
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Athena S. Leoussi
historian' (Haskell and Penny 1982: 314; Jenkins 1992: 202). This in¯uence
has been well documented (for example, Rothenberg 1977; Jenkyns 1992
[1991]; Wood 1983; Gaunt 1952; Jenkins 1992: 83). What is less known is the
signi®cance of the Elgin Marbles for the development of a new, physical
conception of English national identity construing the modern English as
ancient Greeks.
The belief that the English were Greek was the result of three factors: first,
nationalism, and specifically the peculiarly nineteenth-century quest for a
scientific basis of community and identity; secondly, a radical transformation
of archaeological views regarding ancient Greek art. This transformation was
caused by the importation into Western Europe of major and original
specimens from their country of origin, of fifth-century BC Greek art; and,
thirdly, the development within the life-sciences of the new science of physical
anthropology whose researches produced the ideas of race and racial determinism ± the view that mankind was divided into permanent and distinct
physical types, and that the physical type of a community determined its
cultural abilities (Banton 1990).
In what follows I shall indicate the way in which, in the course of the
nineteenth century, new, national interpretations of the archaeological
remains of ancient Greece emerged in the life-sciences and came to dominate
not only English, but also European thought. Given the scope of the article
and the limited space available, I shall not consider the other, and as important, link between the development of classical archaeology itself, as a discipline, and Victorian nationalism; neither will I consider current political and
academic debates regarding British and Greek claims to the Elgin Marbles.
My concern with the anthropological construction of a Greek genealogy
for the English people and with its wide resonance, inscribes itself within the
theoretical position of Anthony D. Smith. He maintains that the belief, be
it mythical or historical, alleged or real, in common ancestry, remains a
formative component of modern nations (Smith 1986). By means of a case
study, this article points to some ambiguities in the modernist view of nationformation, a view which Anthony D. Smith, as well as Steven Grosby, has
criticised, both empirically and theoretically (Smith 1998; Grosby 1995). The
central position which the idea of race acquired in modern British national
discourse shows, first, the persistence of primordial and traditional elements
at the core of modern, and in many other respects, rational, `progressive' and
civic political communities; and secondly, the very modernity of primordial
identifications. It shows, as Grosby has indicated, the continuing recognition,
well into the `age of reason', of relations of descent, those primary relations
which bear, in Saint Augustine's words, `the miraculous power of the seed'
(Grosby 1995: 144). Physical anthropology, like many other nineteenth-century
human sciences, including philology, attempted to give ethnicity a scientific
justification ± a material basis. In so doing, physical anthropology transformed ethnicity from a hitherto rather vague, intuitive and traditional social
bond, into a modern concept, in the sense of a scientifically authenticated and
Myths of ancestry
469
measurable idea ± that of biological race or lineage. It thus performed the role
which Smith attributes to other such modern nationalising institutions created
by scientific and nationally minded intelligentsias: the modernisation, in
Smith's sense of scientific authentication, deepening, extension and streamlining of pre-existing, collective ways of identification, communication and
association (Smith 1999: 215). In the case examined here, these pre-existing
collective ways included the traditional European love of ± and, indeed,
identification with ± the `ancients' (Smith 1981). I shall pursue the development of what might now be called the myth of Greek ancestry, through the
analysis of those pieces of ancient Greek sculpture which, as a result of the
new interpretations, came to embody the highest aspirations of Victorian
England: the Elgin Marbles, Polycletus's Diadumenus and Myron's Discobolus.
I shall begin, however, with the Apollo Belvedere.
The aesthetic signi®cance of classical archaeology: idealism versus naturalism
in art
Idealism ± the Apollo Belvedere
The Apollo Belvedere belongs to what might be called the pre-Pheidian age of
modern European thought about ancient Greek art, although during the later
Pheidian age it was assimilated, at least partly, to the new vision and its
national implications. The Apollo Belvedere was the masterpiece of the neoclassical school of European aesthetics whose spokesman and driving force
was the great German classical scholar and father of classical archaeology,
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717±68) (Bindman 1970; Morris 1994; Potts
1994; Shanks 1996).
Winckelmann had advocated the close observation and comparison of the
actual remains of antiquity as an important new discipline. He exemplified
the new field of study in his most influential book, History of the Art of
Antiquity, published in 1763±4. Winckelmann upheld the supremacy of Greek
over Roman art and for the first time organised Greek statues according to
their stylistic development, instead of limiting himself to the usual iconographic commentary. He thus played a dual role, first, in reawakening an
admiration of Greek art, and thereby instigating the neo-classical `Hellenism'
which marked European culture during the second half of the eighteenth
century and beyond; and secondly, in applying a new level of rigour in the
analysis of sculptures, an approach to ancient material remains which was to
shape the development of archaeological studies (Morris 1994: 15±18; Potts
1994: 23; Shanks 1996: 56±8).
Winckelmann's Greek revival was the second in a series of European
revivals of Greek artistic forms, which began with the Italian Renaissance in
the fifteenth century and which constituted so many interpretations of the
aims of Greek artists. Eighteenth-century neo-classicism was succeeded by
yet another Greek revival, which marked the second half of the nineteenth
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Athena S. Leoussi
century and which I consider below. Winckelmann's other contribution to
Greek archaeology, his stylistic chronology of antique art, identified four
main periods in Greek art:
1
2
3
4
The `straight and hard', which characterises the severe lines of the archaic
period.
The `grand and square' style of the Pheidian era, which includes the work
of Polycletus, Scopas and Myron.
The `¯owing beauty' exempli®ed by the idealised naturalism of the softer
Praxitelean period and including the work of Lysippus and Apelles.
The merely imitative and decadent copying of nature of the Roman period
(Jenkins 1992: 22; Lloyd-Jones 1982: 42; Richter 1959; Morris 1994: 56).
Winckelmann's scheme provided an evolutionary account of the stylistic
development of ancient art, which it described as a cyclical pattern of rise and
decline. This scheme was ultimately derived from Latin literature and
especially from theories of rhetoric that Giorgio Vasari had applied to the arts
in his Vite, his history of the lives of the most famous artists of the Italian
Renaissance (Potts 1994: 40; Morris 1994: 16±18; Shanks 1996: 56).
The Apollo Belvedere belonged to Winckelmann's third and most favoured
period of Greek art. The statue was ideal: it embodied the Platonic conception of beauty as the form which is perceived by the eye and perfected by
the mind. Winckelmann had called this beauty ideal beauty or beau ideÂal. The
Apollo was recorded as being in the Vatican by 1509. It represented a god, not
a man, and his form was thus perfect ± that is, different from a man's. His
body was characterised by such imaginative distortions of natural form as the
enlargement and elongation of the legs and thighs. The Apollo further displayed what, according to Winckelmann, were also features of divine, or
perfect, form ± `noble simplicity and calm grandeur' (`eine edle Einfalt und
eine stille GroÈsse'); although, and rather unexpectedly, Winckelmann had
included the LaocooÈn, an intensely convoluted sculptural group, in his
examples of the `eine edle Einfalt und eine stille GroÈsse' (Bindman 1970: 87;
Haskell and Penny 1982: 148; Potts 1994: 1±4; Morris 1994: 18).
Naturalism ± the Elgin Marbles
Winckelmann had condemned naturalism in art, in the sense of the imitation
of nature for its own sake, as mere mimesis. Artists should do more than just
produce a convincing imitation of nature. They should perfect or idealise
nature, which is always imperfect. Winckelmann had arrived at his conclusions about the aims of Greek artists via Plato and the evidence of Roman
copies of original Greek statues. These he had studied in Italy. New evidence,
which appeared during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showed
another aspect of Greek art.
One of the consequences of European travels to Greece, as indeed, to other
parts of the world, was the creation of collections of antiquities in the museums
Myths of ancestry
471
of European capitals. The Louvre included among its Greek antiquities the
Venus of Melos, which was displayed there in 1821; while Ludwig of Bavaria
acquired in 1812 for his Glyptothek in Munich the early Greek Marbles of
Aegina. These new and specifically Greek rather than Roman acquisitions,
and above all the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, caused a revolution in
European thought, and casts could soon be found in most European academies
of art. These sculptures from that major monument of Greek civilisation, the
Parthenon in Athens, showed the commitment of Greek sculptors to naturalism ± a commitment to the creation of illusion, that of the human body as it
really is. They showed what Ernst Gombrich has described in his book Art
and Illusion as `the Greek Revolution', and G. M. A. Richter as `the climax of
the long struggles by Greek artists to attain naturalistic form' (Gombrich
1989: 99±125; Richter 1959: 110).
Of course, the realism of classical Greek sculpture must be distinguished
from the realism of, say, seventeenth-century Dutch art. The difference is one
of degree. Nevertheless, in his `Lettres aÁ Canova' of 1818, the great French
politician and beau-ideÂal archaeologist QuatremeÁre de Quincy, referred with
admiration to the `naturalisme inconcevable' of classical Greek sculpture: `le
TheÂseÂe, l'Illyssus sont effrayants de veÂriteÂ; aÁ l'exactitude de la musculature se
joint la sensation de la chair et de l'eÂpiderme . . . ces figures vivent et respirent'
[the Theseus, the Ilyssus are frightening in their truthfulness; they combine
muscular precision with the sense of flesh and skin] (Dury 1986: 298). But not
everyone was converted. John Flaxman insisted that the Apollo Belvedere was
`a ``higher'' work of art than the . . . ``Theseus'' of the Parthenon because of its
``ideal beauty''' (Haskell and Penny 1982: 150; see also Rothenberg 1977: 261).
Nevertheless, by 1878, when Frederick Leighton, one of the greatest champions
of Pheidian art of the second half of the nineteenth century, became president
of the Royal Academy, Greek art of `the time of Pericles . . . the Pheidian age'
was widely accepted as the `best work' (Marshall 1878: 6).
The incorporation of the style of Pheidias, as a fundamentally naturalist
style, into the core of British artistic culture during the second half of the
nineteenth century must be associated with certain peculiarities of British art
at that time. First, the expansion, from the late eighteenth century onwards,
of the positive, scientific spirit of observation and experimentation, into other
spheres of British culture, including religion and the arts. This was the spirit
that Francis Bacon established in the seventeenth century. As William
Vaughan has shown, it was this very attachment to naturalism, to the observation of life and movement, which gave rise to what the French called, with
approval, le style anglais, and which constituted not only the modernity, but
also the greatest achievement of British painting. This `Golden Age' began
with Hogarth and ended with Turner (Vaughan 1999; Pevsner 1988; Taylor
1987: 241±5; Altick 1974: 235). And secondly, Pre-Raphaelitism. PreRaphaelitism was also naturalist. It had its roots in a specifically Protestant
reverence towards the natural world, towards birds' nests, blue hills, vine,
corn and crystals of quartz, what John Ruskin, the great champion of
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Pre-Raphaelitism, had called `the body of the earth'; and this reverence was
extended, during the 1860s and 1870s, to the nude, `the body of man', which
both the Pre-Raphaelite artists and Ruskin had initially excluded from pictorial representation (Ruskin quoted in Warner and Hough 1983: 23; Hilton
1979: 200; Tate Gallery 1984; Jenkyns 1992 [1991]). To these circumstances
was added the anthropological interpretation of Greek art.
The national signi®cance of classical archaeology
Apollo's nose
At the same time as ancient Greek art was being studied by archaeologists
and art critics from an aesthetic point of view, anatomists and other lifescientists who were inquiring into the natural history of mankind were also
studying ancient Greek art. Their purpose was to account for human physical
diversity in time and space. They inquired into the naturalism of ancient
Greek art ± that is, the extent to which it represented the actual physical
appearance of the ancient Greeks.
These parallel researches were conducted during the second half of the
eighteenth century. Winckelmann, who, as indicated above, was the father of
classical archaeology, published his History in 1763±4, while the father of
what came to be called, in the nineteenth century, `physical anthropology',
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752±1830), published his classification of the
human races, De Generis Humani Varietate, in 1775.
Initially, physical anthropologists studied human variations in skin colour
and head shape. Blumenbach had classified mankind according to these
criteria, which produced three primary varieties or races: the Caucasian
(white), Ethiopian (black) and Mongolian (yellow), establishing a framework still in use today (Banton 1988). Already in the writings of Blumenbach
and of his British follower James Cowles Prichard, there is a critique of
Winckelmann's idealist view of ancient Greek art, and especially of the Greek
nose. It must be noted, however, that Winckelmann attributed the origins of
the Greek figural ideal, the ideal nude, to the actual beauty of the ancient
Greek physique. As Alex Potts has pointed out, Winckelmann, like his contemporaries, saw `ideals of physical beauty as culturally specific, dependent
upon a society's immediate experience of its own ethnic type' (Potts 1994:
160). At the same time, and contrary to this cultural relativism, the Greek
ideal nude was exceptional in its transcendence of all relative notions of
beauty, alone possessing absolute, objective beauty, the Platonic beau ideÂal.
Winckelmann and the neo-classical school had claimed that the
perpendicular profile of Greek statues was imaginary, a feature of the beau
ideÂal. Prichard, however, claimed to have observed similarities between the
shape of the head of Greek statues and that of modern Greeks. Thus, in his
very popular book Physical History of Mankind, first published in 1813,
Prichard stated that: `It has been supposed indeed that the ``Grecian profile''
Myths of ancestry
473
has been exaggerated or drawn from the imagination, but Blumenbach, in a
memoir . . . has refuted this opinion' (Prichard 1836±47: III, 507). Furthermore, the Greeks possessed all the characteristics of the white race in their
fullest development, including the `oval or ooidal form of the cranium,
characteristic of the Indo-Atlantic, by Blumenbach termed Caucasian
nations' (ibid.: I, xvii):
Among European nations the Greeks have perhaps displayed the greatest perfection in
the form of the head; in other words, it has been supposed that the Grecian race in the
con®guration of the cranium which belonged to that people, have exhibited the
characteristic traits of the Indo-Atlantic nations in the highest degree. This has been
inferred from the remains of Grecian sculpture. (ibid.: I, 303)
With the further evidence of the Elgin Marbles, the belief in the ultimately
naturalist aims of Greek art would prevail. It would lead to the assimilation
of even the Apollo Belvedere into the naturalist canon so that in 1850 the
in¯uential anatomist Robert Knox would describe Apollo's head as `the
noblest of all human heads' (Knox 1862 [1850]).
The interest in the scientific study of both mankind and art led to attempts
to measure precisely and hence quantify human physical differences. One
such measure was the `facial angle'. This was devised by the eighteenthcentury Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper and dominated nineteenth-century
anthropological opinion (Leoussi 1998). It was, in effect, a measurement of
prognathism but for Camper it was a measure of intelligence: the wider the
`facial angle', the greater the intelligence of the subject or race. In Camper's
estimation, the Greek head displayed the `ne plus ultra' for a human head
which Greek artists had only slightly exaggerated in their statues, thereby
producing `what Winkelman [sic] calls ``beau ideal''' (quoted in Leoussi 1998:
9). Camper's classification of `facial angles' is as follows: Greek statuary of
gods and heroes measured 100; Greek men 90; Europeans 80; negroes 70; and
the apes 30 (Camper 1794).
The `classic' body in the streets of London
The middle of the nineteenth century marked the establishment of physical anthropology as a new and separate science of man. In 1859 the ®rst
anthropological society was founded in Paris by Paul Broca as the SocieÂteÂ
d'Anthropologie de Paris and in 1863 James Hunt formed the Anthropological Society of London in imitation of the French. By that time
anthropologists had expanded their inquiries beyond variations in the
shape of the head to co-variations in other parts of human anatomy and
physiology.
The study of archaeological material remained an object of anthropological inquiry. In England, this material became directly associated with
inquiries into the physical identity and genealogy of the English nation.
Robert Knox's studies are a case in point. In 1850 Knox, `the real founder of
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Athena S. Leoussi
British racism', published his major work, The Races of Men: A Fragment
(Curtin 1973: 377). This was followed by a second edition in 1862. It was
illustrated with drawings of the Elgin Marbles, the Cnidian Venus, and other
specimens of ancient Greek art.
Knox believed in the naturalism of Greek art. He claimed that what he
called the `classic' Greek type could be seen in European museums and in
such famous statues as `the Apollo, the Venus, the Dian, the Hercules, the
Niobe, the Bacchus' (Knox 1862 [1850]: 400; Biddiss 1976). And he referred
to these works as `the immortal and transcendental Venus and Niobe', which
displayed `a real, not an ideal form' (Knox 1862 [1850]: 419). On the basis of
such sculptural evidence, Knox described Greek men as `large limbed' and
`athletal'. As far as Greek women were concerned, `fair and flowing locks, full
bosomed, fleshy, and large limbed, seem to have been the characters of
Grecian women; look at the Niobe, the Venus of Gnidos [sic] and a hundred
others' (Knox 1862 [1850]: 403).
Knox traced the genealogy of the `classic' Greeks to a north European race
which he called the Scandinavian or Saxon race. Members of this race were
`early in Greece, say 3500 years ago'. This belief in the north European roots
of ancient Greece was quite common and, in fact, constitutes one of the
dominant models of nineteenth-century historical thought (Shanks 1996: 88;
Birch 1989: 116). According to Knox, the Scandinavian or Saxon people
were north European aborigines from `Holland, Western Prussia, Holstein,
the northern states of the ancient Rhenish Confederation, Saxony Proper,
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark' (Knox 1862 [1850]: 13). When these northern invaders arrived in Greece they mixed with `aboriginal Pelasgic hordes',
who inhabited Greece and Macedonia (ibid.: 14). Celtic and `perhaps even'
Slavonian blood was also added. From the intermarriage of all these people
`arose a new race of men . . . a mixed race'. It was this `mixed' race which
produced Greek civilisation and which was `destined to cease at a given
period' because `a mixed race [is] an anomaly on earth' (ibid.).
Knox claimed that Greece owed the beauty of her men and women and
thus the beauty of her art to the Scandinavian or Saxon race. This `classic'
type, which, according to Knox, could no longer be found in Greece, could
now be found in England:
the streets of London abound with persons having this identical facial angle [the Greek
vertical pro®le]; and it is in England and in other countries inhabited by the Saxon or
Scandinavian race that women resembling the Niobe, and men the Hercules and Mars,
are chie¯y to be found. (Knox 1862 [1850]: 403)
The same belief in the physical and genealogical identity of the English and
the Greeks was held and propagated by the followers of the theory of the
Aryan race. This theory came to dominate anthropological and lay thought
about the racial type of European nations. The idea of an Aryan people was
initially a linguistic classi®cation which made an important contribution to
nineteenth-century philological studies by identifying two major language
Myths of ancestry
475
families, the Aryan or Indo-European family, and sometimes also called
Indo-Germanic, and the Semitic family. The term `Aryan' to designate the
Indo-European language family was used by the great German philologist
Friedrich Max MuÈller, professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, in his lectures to
English audiences in 1859±61 (Mosse 1963: 78). However, Max MuÈller had
speci®cally rejected the idea of an Aryan race: `Il existe des langues aryennes
et seÂmitiques, mais il est anti-scienti®que, de parler, . . . de race aryenne, de
sang aryen, ou de craÃnes aryens' [There exist Aryan and Semitic languages,
but it is unscienti®c to speak of an Aryan race, Aryan blood or Aryan skulls]
(in Poliakov 1971: 216).
The most influential advocate of the theory of the Aryan race was the
Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau (1816±82) (Biddiss 1970). In his Essai sur
l'IneÂgalite des Races Humaines published in four volumes between 1853 and
1855, Gobineau followed the now established classification of humankind
into three primary races, the white, the yellow and the black. However, he
claimed the superiority of a particular branch of the white race, the Aryans ±
`cette noblesse humaine'. Members of this branch had conquered and colonised the world ± `diffeÂrentes branches ont reÂgne dans toutes les contreÂes
policeÂes de l'Univers' (Gobineau 1967 [1853±5]: 30). To this branch belonged
the Hellenes, as did the Scandinavian warriors and also the Brahmans of
ancient India.
Gobineau's view of the Aryan Greeks was based on a variety of sources,
including classical literary sources such as Homer and Greek sculpture.
According to Gobineau, the Aryan peoples had the glory of providing the
admirable models for the Venus, the Apollo, and the Farnese Hercules ± `ces
peuples ont eu la gloire de fournir les modeÁles admirables de la VeÂnus, de
l'Apollon et de l'Hercule FarneÁse' (Gobineau 1967 [1853±5]: 124).
The physical and moral characteristics of the Aryan Hellenes, both men and
women, were the same as those of the other Aryan nations. They were white,
blond, with a vigorous muscular development, regular features, great physical
energy, love of freedom and a desire for continuous conquest (Gobineau 1967
[1853±5]: 458).
In England, the theory of the Aryan race found support among some of
the most culturally creative figures of the age, who eagerly stressed its
implications for the English. These included the artist Frederick Leighton. In
his lectures or `Addresses' to Royal Academy students, which he began in
1879 as president of the Royal Academy, Leighton pointed out that models
for Greek figural subjects could be `sometimes found in the women of another
Aryan race ± your own' (quoted in Hersey 1976: 110). The politician and
novelist Benjamin Disraeli was also an ardent supporter of the theory of race
and of the Aryans as the `chosen race', in which he included both the English
and the Jews. He is also supposed to have exchanged views with Gobineau
(Poliakov 1971: 239±41). Finally, Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian
educationalist, would remark in Culture and Anarchy of 1869, `we English, a
nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of
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Hellenism' (Arnold 1990 [1869]: 141±2). And in this movement of `Hellenism'
the Parthenon marbles occupied a central position.
The Parthenon horsemen
From the variety of images that were carved on the Parthenon marbles, one
motif proved most absorbing: the motif of the man and horse. The Parthenon
horsemen, carved in low relief, dominate the north and south friezes of the
temple of Athena. They are the heroes of the battle of Marathon. Their status
as heroes is indicated by means of two artistic conventions: ®rst, their nudity, and secondly, the presence of horses, for horses are always associated
in Greek tradition with the concept of military heroism (Clark 1980; Cook
1984: 39).
As the symbol of heroes, the motif of the man on a horse became an
English national symbol. It also symbolised the English identification with
the Greeks. The Parthenon horsemen became a recurrent motif in Victorian
visual culture. We find them in Leighton's Self-portrait as President of the
Royal Academy of 1881; we also find them in numerous paintings and sculptures of the second half of the nineteenth century representing Greek heroes
and especially Perseus. However, and perhaps most significantly, we find
them on English coins, first at the time of the purchase by the British Museum
of the Elgin Marbles, and again during the third quarter of the century.
In 1871 the design for the gold sovereign changed (Yeoman 1984). On the
reverse of the new coin appeared a virtually naked Greek rider modelled on
one of the Parthenon horsemen killing a dragon. It was, in fact, an image of
St George subduing the Dragon. In his pronounced muscularity and nudity,
apart from a cloak (chlamys) fastened around his neck, this figure represents a
rather un-Christian iconography of the national patron saint of England, who
is usually represented in full Roman armour. In fact, if one did not know the
intended identity of the personage in advance, it would be impossible to
recognise him as St George. With his billowing cloak, helmet and sword, the
horse and the dragon dying at its feet, St George could well be Perseus mounted
on a wingless Pegasus and charging to rescue Andromeda. Indeed, the compact
nude figure of St George on horseback is very similar to Leighton's later
paintings of Perseus in Perseus and Andromeda (1891) and Perseus on Pegasus
(c. 1895±6), both of which seem to echo the Parthenon horsemen.
The rather unusual iconography of St George depicted on the coins of
1871 and subsequent years went back to the reign of George III. It first
appeared in 1817 on the new sovereign and pattern crowns of that year and
was designed by an Italian immigrant who became famous as a medallist and
gem-engraver, Benedetto Pistrucci (1784±1855) (Forrer 1906). If the original
intent of Pistrucci's so-called `Dragon' design was to celebrate the recently
acquired Elgin Marbles, its revival in the 1870s corresponds to two new and
interrelated cultural impulses: first, the belief in the Greek identity of the
English, which was believed to be both physical and cultural. This is
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477
expressed not only in the figural type of St George which is identical with that
of the Parthenon horsemen, but also in the type of activity in which St George
is engaged, one that distinguished both Greek heroes and Christian saints: the
rescuing of the weak from evil. Secondly, muscular Christianity; that great
Protestant revival of the second half of the nineteenth century which sought
to reform England by combining the physical strength of the Greek heroes
with the morals of Christianity. Muscular Christianity was articulated
and propagated by Thomas Arnold's former pupils at Rugby School, Charles
Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. Primarily through their novels, such as
Westward Ho! (1855) and Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), Kingsley and
Hughes advocated the revival of the classical ideal of man that Thomas
Arnold had cultivated in the 1840s in his pupils: the healthy body in a healthy
and specifically Christian mind (Vance 1985). A `Christian Gentleman',
Arnold's ideal of the Englishman, needed to be strong `for the protection of
the weak, and the advancement of all righteous causes' (Mangan 1988: 217;
see also Holt 1990; Dunning 1971; Jenkyns 1984).
During the period of British imperialism that marked the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, the Pheidian motif of the man on a horse also became
associated with the idea of the British and especially the English as an imperial race. G. F. Watts's equestrian statue Physical Energy echoes the theme
and dynamism of the victorious horsemen on the Parthenon frieze. But what
is even more significant is that one version of this statue was sent to the
Matoppos in Zimbabwe to be erected on the tomb of Cecil Rhodes, whom a
contemporary commentator described as `the most idealistic of English
conquerors' (West and Pantini n.d.: xxx). Furthermore, the horse was
believed to be the favourite animal of all Aryan nations, the Aryans being, as
seen above, a warrior race (Gordon Childe 1926).
The Diadumenus of Polycletus
By the middle of the nineteenth century the Parthenon marbles were joined by
replicas and copies of Polycletus's Diadumenos and Doryphoros, which were
also used in anthropological enquiries. Polycletus was a ®fth-century BC
follower of Pheidias. He was noted for his statues of athletes who embodied
the Greek conception of physical beauty, and wrote a book, the Canon, now
lost, which analysed the body of the athlete as a set of geometrical and
mathematical elements. The combination of these elements supplied the formula for the representation of athletes according to which Polycletus's statues,
such as the Doryphoros (spear bearer) and the Diadumenos (athlete decorating
himself), were made.
One of the dreams of European artists and anatomists was the rediscovery of Polycletus's canon and with it the actual appearance of the Greeks. In
1863 the Doryphoros of Polycletus was recognised in a marble copy and in a
bronze head which had been excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the
eighteenth century. A statue in the British Museum was soon afterwards
478
Athena S. Leoussi
recognised as a replica of the Diadumenus (Haskell and Penny 1982: 118). The
American sculptor and writer, William Wetmore Story, studied the replica of
the Diadumenos in the British Museum and published in 1866 The Proportions
of the Human Figure according to a New Canon, for Practical Use, with a
Notice of the Canon of Polycletus.
In this book Story described the canon as `a scientific and geometric rule of
proportion' and claimed that the principal components of this rule were the
numbers 3, 4 and 12 and the regular geometrical shapes, the circle, the square
and the triangle (Story 1866: 17). Their combination produced a medium,
square figure, `figura quadrata'. This figure contrasted with Homer's account
of the Iliadic heroes as being of stupendous proportions (Schadow 1883
[1834]: 11). It also differed from Hellenistic representations of athletes by
Lysippus, such as Athlete with the Strigil (also called the Apoxyomenos), who
distorted the human figure making it, as Story remarked, `small in the head,
slight in the body, long in the limbs' and thus `wanting the massive quadrate
grandeur and harmonious dignity of Phidias as well as the manly and compact proportions of Polycletus' (Story 1866: 21). In Story's opinion, Polycletus's
canon was a device for showing `men as they were' (ibid.). According to Story,
the specific geometrical and mathematical principles which shaped the Greek
athlete turned his body into a little world, a microcosm. In ancient Greek,
Chaldean, Egyptian and Jewish philosophy, these particular numbers and
shapes both described and symbolised the universe, making perfect man an
integral and harmonious part of it. From this, Story concluded that the
Diadumenus was an image of Christ: `The measures of Christ are the measures
of the perfect man' (ibid.: 42).
The recognition of Polycletus's Diadumenus captured the Victorian imagination and produced a new vision of human perfection, that of physical
perfection which was congruent with contemporary Judaeo-Christian notions
of human perfection, that of Christ as well as Adam, the first man, made
perfect `in the image of God'. And this religious conception of the Greek
athlete was projected in English art and pursued in English life. William
Holman Hunt's painting The Shadow of Death, first exhibited at Agnew's in
1873, is a case in point. Hunt's Christ echoes the Diadumenus as he stretches
his arms and shows in the near-nakedness of his body his muscular physique,
the result not of athletics, but of their equivalent, manual labour. Edward
Burne-Jones's image of Adam for the huge stained glass east window of All
Saints' Church, Cambridge (1866) is an exact replica of the figure of
Diadumenus. And Edward John Poynter imagined a female Diadumene
(exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1885). However, and at the same time,
Darwin's evolutionary ideas about the descent of man from the anthropoid
ape were casting doubt on these deeply embedded notions of human
perfection as lying in a primordial past (see, for example, Marshall 1878).
The desire for the Greek body and its calculated pursuit through physical
exercise had originally a primarily Christian purpose. This conception of
care for the body was the work of Thomas Arnold, who became in 1828
Myths of ancestry
479
headmaster of Rugby School. Under his influence Rugby and other public
schools became nurseries of the Greek body (Fitch 1897). After his death in
1842 games and athletics, whose practice expanded to the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge, gradually came to dominate English middle-class
and elite education, sometimes at the expense of what Arnold had called arete
mousike ± the cultivation of the spirit.
During the second half of the nineteenth century the torch of Thomas
Arnold's classical desire to combine in every English public schoolboy the
perfection of the body with that of the spirit was upheld and amplified not
only by his former Rugby pupils, Kingsley and Hughes, but also by his son,
Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold echoed his father's `muscular Christianity'
in his public advocacy of `Hebraism and Hellenism' as a national project in
Culture and Anarchy (1869) (see Delaura 1969). His participation in public
affairs was compounded by his work as a government inspector of schools
from 1851 to 1886.
`Hebraism and Hellenism', which marked the second half of the nineteenth
century expressed a new humanism, a new concern for man. Its `Hellenism'
was an awakening to that other side of man, his physical and intellectual
nature, which the Greeks had first apprehended and Christianity or
`Hebraism' had suppressed. Hellenism meant in effect `sweetness and light'.
`Sweetness' was the pursuit of beauty as the Greeks had conceived it in the
form of the young athlete, and pursued in their own persons; `light' was the
pursuit of reason, the Greek imperative of `seeing things as they really are'
(Arnold 1990 [1869]: 134). This interpretation of the aims of Greek culture
marked in England a new awakening to what Walter Pater described as the
`presence of man' (quoted in Potts 1999: 112). It complemented the JudaeoChristian apprehension of the presence of God and his moral commandments
preserved in the Mosaic law.
For Pater, the new cultural impulse, the Greek `care for physical beauty,
the worship of the body', combined with the comeliness of Christianity would
bring about a new Renaissance (Pater 1986 [1873]: xxxi±xxxii). However,
both Arnold and Pater justified the new attempt to synthesise the two cultures
scientifically, in anthropological terms. This they did, first, because earlier,
pre-Darwinian anthropological theories had distinguished between and
indeed opposed `Aryan' and `Semitic' races as separate creations. With the
publication, in 1866, of Darwin's fourth edition of On the Origin of Species
(1859), these theories lost ground in favour of the theory of monogenism, the
descent of the human `races' from a common ancestor (Harris 1968: 93; see
also Banton 1990); and secondly, because earlier Judaeo-Grecian amalgamations had been more intuitive than scientific.
According to Arnold:
Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of
difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and
history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is
of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of
480
Athena S. Leoussi
Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But
nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man than the af®nities we can
perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members
of another.
The af®nities between the English and the Hebrew people were a case in point
and lay in their common moral sense:
no af®nity . . . is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and
prominence of the moral ®bre, which, notwithstanding immense elements of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us English, . . . to the genius
and history of the Hebrew people.
Seventeenth-century English Puritanism proved this; it was as a reaction of
English `Hebraism against Hellenism', against the `moral indifference . . .
which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renascence' (Arnold 1990
[1869]: 141±2).
Walter Pater quite explicitly advocated the unification of Christianity with
Greek paganism on scientific grounds. He thus pointed to the scientific proof,
the `positive knowledge', of the unity of human nature. From this he deduced
the `unity of culture', which, as he said, `men's ignorance had divided' (Pater
1986 [1873]: 17, 32). And in his famous book The Renaissance of 1873, Pater
referred to the `scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment with . . . pagan
poetry and philosophy' (ibid.: 29).
Victorian humanists who included in their ranks the four times Prime
Minister William Ewart Gladstone, himself a devout Christian and a distinguished classical scholar, pursued the perfection of what Matthew Arnold
had described as `the whole man' by means of the `balance' of `Hebraism and
Hellenism'(Turner 1981: 164±9; Arnold 1990 [1869]: 154). This was because,
for Arnold, `Hebraism and Hellenism' were `the most signal and splendid
manifestations' of mankind's `forces'. As he pointed out, `between these two
points of influence moves our world . . . and it ought to be, though it never is,
evenly and happily balanced between them' (Arnold 1990 [1869]: 130).
In the context of this widely held high Victorian belief in a `balanced'
culture, it is worth considering, briefly, Martin Bernal's views. Such a consideration shows that in England, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, much of the cultivated centre of British opinion regarded the
issue of English national identity and Greek affinity in terms which are, in
fact, at variance with Bernal's own account of these terms in his book Black
Athena (Bernal 1987; Shanks 1996: 87±91). In this book, Bernal polemically
characterised nineteenth-century European thought about itself and about
ancient Greece as Europeanist and he contrasted it with his own, Afroasiatic
understanding of ancient Greek and European civilisation. However, as seen
above, much of the educated and influential opinion in Britain not only
acknowledged the presence of eastern influences in classical Greek civilisation, but also celebrated and advocated such `oriental' and specifically `Semitic'
influences for British national development (Lefkowitz 1996a and 1996b).
Myths of ancestry
481
The Discobolus
Nazi Germany has given the statue of the Discobolus a bad reputation. Nazi
Germany transformed the Discobolus into an image of the destructive, animal
®tness for war of the so-called Aryan race; that mythical master race that the
Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, identi®ed with the German people in his
Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [The Myth of the Twentieth Century] of
1934. But this had not always been the case.
The original statue, now lost, of a stooping discus-thrower by the Greek
artist Myron was made of bronze c. 460±50 BC. However, in 1781 a marble
replica was discovered which is now in the Museo Nazionale in Rome (Haskell
and Penny 1982: 199). It was this marble replica of the Discobolus which
Hitler pursued with such passion from 1937 until he finally bought it on
18 May 1938 for 5 million lire from the Italian minister for foreign affairs,
Galeazzo Ciano. The statue was in Germany by 29 June 1938 and was displayed in the Glyptothek, in Munich. It was returned to Italy on 16 November
1948 (ibid.). In fact, during the 1930s, the period which immediately preceded
and indeed prepared Germans, both physically and mentally, for a second
world war, the Discobolus acquired such centrality in German culture, that
Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Olympia, opened
with the metamorphosis of Myron's discus-thrower into a live contemporary
athlete (McFee and Tomlinson 1999: 95).
Purely military interpretations of the Aryan race in general and of the
Discobolus in particular were more German than English. The Discobolus
entered the British Museum as a marble replica and as a part of the collection
of antiquities of Charles Townley which the British Museum bought in 1805
(Jenkins 1992: 102±6; Haskell and Penny 1982: 200). Since their first
appearance in 1781, the many replicas of the Discobolus have much exercised
the ingenuity of archaeologists as to their relative artistic merit and faith to
the original statue. But in England, and during the second half of the
nineteenth century, the Discobolus also came to embody the exploration of
the possibility of a purely physical or sensual existence. This was a type of
human existence entirely devoted to the shaping and contemplation of the
body which it emptied of all content ± either rational or moral. This peculiar
conception of humanity, which Walter Pater called `pure humanity', a
humanity which could be wholly satisfied with the simple `vision of itself',
also became associated with fifth-century BC Greek culture which Pater
described as `the age of athletic prizemen' (quoted in Potts 1999: 116, 110,
114). This most radical interpretation of classical civilisation, so different
from that proposed by the two Arnolds and indeed by Pater himself elsewhere, was a major component of Victorian aestheticism. In its attachment to
the `unveiled human form' Victorian aestheticism idealised the young, male
and athletic body (Pater 1986 [1873]: 31). And, in its acceptance and enthusiasm for the elements of youth, its innocence and simple joys, it was a playful
movement. As such, it engaged the physical energies of young men (young
482
Athena S. Leoussi
women were still confined at home) in playful activities, games and sport
through which it shaped their bodies in the image of the Greek athletes.
The Victorian awakening to man's physical nature, to the beauty of the
human body and its pursuit as an end in itself through physical exercise was
crystallised in the Discobolus. And the Discobolus could be seen everywhere in
England. Pater, for example, writing in 1894, would declare that the Greek
Discobolus embodied `all one had ever fancied or seen in old Greece or on
Thames's side, of the unspoiled body of youth' (quoted in Haskell and Penny
1982: 200). This was because not only athletics but also certain manual
occupations produced the same result as athletics. Consequently, the Greek
body was not the exclusive possession of public schoolboys and Oxford
students, but could be found, as F. W. Moody, instructor in decorative art at
the South Kensington Museum remarked in 1873, among `half-stripped
navvies, and the titanic forms of men employed in gas and other plutonic
works' (Moody 1873, Lecture I: 18).
Pater readily recognised in the English cricketer a Greek discobolus
(Jenkyns 1984: 219±20). However, other Hellenists, such as Oscar Wilde,
criticised cricket because the players' attitudes were `indecent' and `not Greek'
(quoted in Ellmann 1987: 4). Nevertheless, cricket, a specifically English
game, became part, together with genuinely Greek sports and games such as
rowing, swimming and boxing, of the English pursuit of the Greek body
(Jenkyns 1984: 217). This was so despite Wilde's other complaint, made in
1874, when he was studying at Oxford, that the rule of rowing with a straight
back was not Greek: `I am sure the Greeks never did so at Salamis' (quoted in
Ellmann 1987: 38).
The Greek physical ideal, and especially its embodiment in the Discobolus,
dominated English national consciousness well into the twentieth century.
Nowhere is this ideal more graphically or, indeed, more publicly affirmed
than on the floor of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The main
entrance vestibules were decorated in mosaic made of marble and were
designed by the Russian-born artist, Boris Anrep (1885±1969). Anrep had
championed the revival of mosaic technique in modern art and architecture,
for, as he claimed in 1927, `Mundane and frivolous subjects of modern town
life, bucolic pleasures as well as the business activities of duty could form
delightful subjects for mosaic decoration and be treated in a style suitable to
the building, recording thus for future generations images of our modern
civilisation' (Anrep 1927: 210). One such image of `our modern civilisation'
was the mosaic entitled Football. Football was completed in 1929 and shows
two young men playing football. Its significance lies in the fact that the player
in the foreground reproduces the attitude of the Discobolus, thereby affirming
the Greek inspiration of an important aspect of modern English life. Football
was one of two scenes representing sport ± the other being Cricket ± which
formed part of the cycle decorating the pavement of the east vestibule on the
general theme, `The Pleasures of Life'. This was completed in 1933. And
nothing could prove more persuasively the different uses to which ideas and
Myths of ancestry
483
artefacts can be put than the different uses to which the Discobolus was put in
England and Germany during this period.
The ideal of the Discobolus, as, indeed, of other Greek statues of athletes,
was an aesthetic ideal ± the pursuit of beauty in one's own person. English
Protestantism had neglected the body as `flesh'. Victorian Hellenism reintroduced the aesthetic life into English, national life. But when the care for the
body ceased to be balanced by either morality or reason, the result was
disastrous. This happened, first, with the rise of aestheticism, the pursuit of
beauty for its own sake; and second with the rise of Social Darwinism, the
pursuit of brute strength. Aestheticism caused the demoralisation of the
English soul which was most dramatically typified in Oscar Wilde's The
Picture of Dorian Gray of 1891. Dorian Gray is a Greek-looking (Dorian)
Englishman, `the counterpart of Antinous', who, like Dr Faust, sells his soul
to the devil. But, unlike Dr Faust, he sells it not for knowledge but beauty.
Social Darwinism encouraged the brutalisation of the human soul which
Thomas Arnold had condemned among his pupils as banausic (Fitch 1897).
Conclusion
The nineteenth-century belief in the Greek identity of the English was the
product of a conjunction of physical anthropology with classical archaeology
and the traditional desire of Western Europe to be Greek which went back to
the Renaissance and imperial Rome. It was a belief that came to be shared by
all European nations as members of what physical anthropologists called the
white, European, Indo-European or Aryan race. Physical anthropology identi®ed ®fth-century BC Pheidian statues of athletes and warrior heroes as
images of the European racial type. Belief in the racial identity between the
English and the Greeks made the English want to be more Greek, to copy in
their own person the beauty and strength of the Greek body. It was this active
pursuit in life and not only in art of the Greek ®gural type that distinguished
the nineteenth-century Greek revival from earlier such revivals. And it was
this love of Greece that breathed life into archaeological remains and turned
statues into humans, as in the myth of Pygmalion.
However, in the twentieth century, Nazi Germany turned the Greek body
into an instrument of death. Although subsequent observations in the lifesciences persuaded many biologists to abandon the idea of race as it was then
conceived, in terms of different bodily types, the belief in race, and specifically
the race of Greek statues, was to dominate the twentieth century as probably
the most destructive myth of that century.
This article has expanded on an area which was touched upon, but not
explored as exclusively or indeed in as much depth, in my earlier published
work on the Hellenism of nineteenth-century English and French nationalisms (Leoussi 1998). More specifically, it has focused on the archaeological
basis of these nationalisms and shown the extent to which anthropological
484
Athena S. Leoussi
classifications of English as well as other European nations relied on the
archaeological remains of classical Greece and did so well into the twentieth
century. By adopting this specifically archaeological angle, and by weaving
both new and familiar material into a new synthesis, this article is a contribution to what Ian Morris has called, the `archaeologies of Greece'. This
article has another, subsidiary concern: to set the reaffirmation of descent
which we find in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European national identifications, within the broader theoretical framework of Anthony D. Smith's
critique of the modernist view of the nature of nations as modern, rational,
forward-looking, and economic growth-oriented social formations.
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