Understanding the past is always as much about facing our preconceptions as it is about the surviving evidence and its interpretation.* While such an aphorism would seem misplaced in many other contexts of debate, the study of ancient housing offers plenty of reminders of how deep the preconceptions of historical retrospection run. As I hope to show, modern ideas about what constitutes a home not only affect how we interpret evidence of ancient houses; they determine the very notion of what counts as significant evidence and what kind of story about the past constitutes a competent historical account.
In this chapter, I approach the role of preconception in the study of houses through their evolving representation as sites of domesticity in museums. I have chosen to focus on museums because they present a primary site for articulating interpretations of the past that draw on material and textual sources. Furthermore, they play an important, if understudied, role in relaying such interpretations among a diverse public and in forming an idea of the past as an origin and justification for our own society. Owing to their importance in education, museums impart knowledge about the past – a shared awareness of where we come from and who we are – long before their youngest visitors are able to read about history. For many older visitors, museums provide one of few points of direct contact with the outcomes of specialist academic research based on the integration of textual and material evidence. However, since much of this historical knowledge is conveyed implicitly, through the selection and organization of the exhibits rather than explicit statements, its content is not easily recognized as an outcome of interpretation open to scrutiny and criticism.
A survey of three representative museum displays, ranging from 18th-century Italy to contemporary California, indicates a shift in the nature of the ideal type to which the archaeological finds were assimilated. Over the years, they substituted the models provided by the grandiose estates of monarchs and aristocrats with the home of the Victorian citizen, characterized by its gendered distinctions between private and public. The changing patrons, audiences and objectives of the institutions provide only part of an explanation for that shift, as I hope to demonstrate. Just as important is the appearance in the mid-19th century of a new class of archaeological object – Athenian painted pottery with scenes of ‘domestic life’ – that allowed ancient homes to be envisioned in the mould of modern domesticity. A closer look at this class reveals its uncertain value as a record of lived reality. The very notion that vase images should depict everyday life depends on distinctions between myth and reality which are extrinsic to the material under consideration and privilege the constructed authenticity of the scenes over the historically situated contexts of pottery consumption. Museum displays which are structured around ‘domestic scenes’ accordingly turn out to be dependent on definitions of significant action that are aesthetic and, as I aim to show, gendered. On the same grounds, displays based on the distinction between domestic and public promote gender-specific ideas of historical progress and inertia. Such displays draw on false analogical reasoning since a single perceived similarity between past and present is represented as a constant feature of ancient society.
In recent years, archaeologists and historians have grown increasingly sensitive to the contemporary perceptual filters affecting our interpretations of the ancient world. The burgeoning field of household studies in classical scholarship has been pivotal in fostering self-reflexive approaches to archaeological project design, fieldwork and publication, not least because the subject poses particular risks of overdetermined explanation. In most historical settings, ‘home’ has been too familiar an experience to occasion recognition, let alone critical analysis, of the social and ideological forces that underpin its culture as a contingent formation. The centrality of the home in one’s own social cosmos has all too often nurtured the presumption that its foundational values are profoundly human, if not universal. It would be disingenuous to claim that current scholarship is unaware of the risks of prejudgement based on personal experience. A number of studies have demonstrated how modern notions of the home as a highly privatized site of consumption and social reproduction have conditioned earlier interpretations of Greek and Roman household remains to focus on formal criteria of house types and correlate their distinctive features inappropriately with distinct functions and gender divisions.1 In fact, the dangers of anachronism have been raised so often that a separate contribution devoted to the problem may be felt to require special pleading.
In the conventional definition of historical insight as positive knowledge about the past, nothing is to be gained from contemplating a false analogy. But just as any false analogy is rooted in contemplation of perceived similarities, so the problem of equating ancient houses with domesticity as it is known in the modern West is also related to the broader methodological problem of analogical inference in archaeology and ancient history. However naïve any given instance of analogical thinking may seem, it should never obscure that the past only ever acquires meaning through its relations of similarity and difference to the present.2 By the same token, any interpretation of past phenomena, be it mediated in texts or artefacts, rests on implicit referential ties to present phenomena. Any interpretation of historical texts or artefacts involves a more or less explicit process of formulating and eliminating hypotheses on the basis of analogy to other artefacts and situations.
To date, Graeco-Roman antiquity has not featured prominently in methodological considerations of analogical inference, in spite (or precisely because) of the manifold opportunities its textual and archaeological sources hold out for comparative study. The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the benefits which such consideration can bring to the subject. In particular, I intend to show that comparative approaches to artefacts and historical or ethnographic sources pose the same theoretical challenges in so far as the properties that are being compared (1) constitute one observer-determined selection of data out of an infinite number of possible selections, and (2) have either spatial or temporal dimensions, depending on whether the data consist of archaeological assemblages or textual descriptions of processes or practices. A comparative procedure that tests the validity of spatially or temporally distributed analogies equally against a scale of relational complexity is favourable because (1) it makes explicit the observer-centred bias inherent in historical reasoning, and (2) it allows us to compare and contrast the interpretations posited by different disciplinary specialists, working from material assemblages or written sources. A scale of comparison common to historians and archaeologists alike also encourages us to think in a more organized way about the implications of using evidence of household activities from different registers of ideological awareness and intentionality, such as artefactual deposits and visual or textual representations of home life.
For the purpose of this chapter, the analogical deductions that allowed ancient houses to be represented through the lens of modern domesticity are investigated through museum displays concerned with private life in ancient Greece and Rome. Such displays seem to me better suited to reveal the normative assumptions of their time than do contemporaneous scholarly publications. One of the case studies to be considered, the Museo Ercolanese at Naples, was arranged to convey ideas of domesticity at a time when antiquarian folios ordered their material not thematically, but by material, type and, increasingly, on a scale of formal evolution.
The focus on museums also presents advantages for the historiography of modern domesticity, by enabling us to view antiquities as agents of modernization. As a site of non-verbal communication, the museum display endowed modern ideas of the domestic with a quasi-objective dimension and, in so doing, reified its underlying assumptions as historical knowledge. As a result, the interpretations which museums gave rise to also shed light on the 19th-century social transformations associated with industrialization, including the rise of middle-class consciousness and the oppositional definitions of public to private, male to female, and sacred to profane. A museum-centred approach promises to enrich the orthodox accounts of Victorian domestication of households, as exemplified in the scholarship on the ‘Separate Sphere’ ideology, which has long been criticized for its rigid prioritizing of productive relations over the interdependent connections between materials, consumption and systems of understanding.3
Representing Domesticity in Museums
The three displays we will look at come from very different periods and types of institution. The oldest example is the Museo Ercolanese in the Palazzo Reale at Portici, King Charles VII’s personal treasure house for the finds excavated at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Opened in 1758, the museum soon became one of Italy’s foremost attractions for northern European travellers. The history of the collection and its presentation is plagued by a dearth of contemporary records. Access was strictly regulated, and visitors were forbidden to take any notes or draw the exhibits. The Bourbons reserved the right to publish the finds from the Vesuvian sites in the lavishly illustrated Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (eight volumes, 1757–92). Furthermore, the display was constantly enlarged and updated to reflect the progress of the excavations. Agnes Allroggen-Bedel and Helke Kammerer-Grothaus were able to piece together a fairly detailed history of the exhibits’ arrangement from unauthorized accounts, especially those of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the mathematician Johann Bernoulli. Important information derives also from the inventory lists drawn up when the collection was evacuated during the Revolution of 1789 and eventually, from 1808, transferred to the Museo dei Vecchi Studi in Naples (later Museo Borbonico, now Nazionale).4
The second case study is the original incarnation of the Greek and Roman Life Room at the British Museum. Inaugurated in 1908, the ‘Life Room’, as it came to be known, existed relatively unchanged until its evacuation at the outbreak of World War II and the destruction of the gallery by German bombs.5 The exhibition was the brainchild of the then Keeper, Cecil Smith, and is well documented thanks to the guidebooks authored by him.6 Drawing together pieces that had previously lingered in disparate sections of the Department of Greece and Rome, the room was conceived, as the preface to the 1908 guide explains, to ‘illustrate the purpose for which the objects were intended, rather than their artistic quality or their place in the evolution of craft or design’. It was a highly successful innovation, as press reviewers noted; the throngs of visitors who flocked to the gallery seemed to value the contrast it offered to the formal display of monuments on the ground floor. As Ian Jenkins pointed out, the interest in everyday life and custom resonated with the recent anthropological trends pioneered by James Frazer, Jane Harrison and the French sociological school of Émile Durkheim.
A third example is the galleries relating to ‘Men in Antiquity’ and ‘Women and Children’ that greeted visitors at the Getty Villa in Malibu upon its reopening in January 2006. The story of the villa is too well known to warrant detailed description.7 A modern-day replica of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, the structure had been commissioned in the late 1960s by the reclusive oil magnate Jean Paul Getty, to accommodate in a suitable setting his expanding art collection and the growing number of visitors who had come to see it at his previous residence at the site. When the collection was moved to the new Getty Center in Brentwood in 1997, the Villa was closed for extensive renovations and transformed into a state-of-the-art museum for Greek and Roman antiquities with purpose-designed galleries, conservation laboratories, research facilities, cafes, a shop, and an amphitheatre.8 In the process, it became one of a growing number of museums to organize its displays thematically rather than chronologically.9
The three institutions may seem too dissimilar to permit comparison. As a site museum of sorts, the Museo Ercolanese derived its character not only from the extraordinary formation processes of Vesuvian archaeology; the comprehensive (if destructive) sampling policies set down by the Bourbon administration also could not have been more different from the art retrieval operations which the British Museum and the Getty Museum encouraged through either third-part prospecting or commercial agents. As private collections, both the Museo Ercolanese and the Getty Villa articulated and legitimated the aspirations of their owners by associating them with a genealogy of enlightened patronage originating with the Roman emperors. In its avowed mission of civilizing its visitors through aesthetic experience, on the other hand, the Getty collection, as conceived by its founder, shares closer affinities with the British Museum. Getty himself discerned the elevating power of art through his highly personal experience of beauty – the connoisseur’s love of art that justifies the art of collecting.10 In the British Museum, the didactic goals favoured by the curators and trustees transpire from the institution’s efforts to offer its visitors a comprehensive chronological survey. Such a panoramic presentation remained a long-standing but unfulfilled ambition. Even where the collection would have permitted a strictly chronological survey, its realization was quickly sacrificed if its principles threatened to conflict with the illustration of art’s ‘perfection’ in Classical Greece.11 The clash between the museum’s missions in aesthetic and historical education also comes to the fore in the debates of the 1850s, surrounding the proposed break-up of its collection into separate institutions, with items classed as ‘art’ (most notably the Parthenon sculptures) being earmarked for transfer to a new national gallery in South Kensington that was under consideration at the time.12 The British Museum was by no means alone in its struggle for a coherent disciplinary identity. The uneasy combination of historicist and aesthetic principles of display is characteristic of most ‘encyclopaedic’ museums established in the 19th century. It descends from the equally uneasy, if rhetorically compelling, compromise which Winckelmann struck between historical explanation of the Greeks’ privileged conditions and his uninhibited idealization of their art.13
Regardless of these divergent aims and modes of acquisition, however, the three institutions operate on the basis of a shared comprehension of objects that is pivotal for understanding the function of museum space. Besides their general historical background and provenance, the objects exhibited in the three collections by and large lack the specific contextual information that would allow us to interpret excavated remains, without relying on contemporary testimonia, in terms of social practices. In the absence of contextual data, the objects were arranged according to a scheme that did not reproduce their archaeology but represented their presumed meaning. The museum as a space of representation was born in early modern Europe, as a result of the epistemic rift between things and concepts. As Michel Foucault famously argued, following this rupture the meaning of things was no longer understood to be in the objects themselves but in the system of understanding that related visible things to invisible concepts.14 As systems of understanding were now thought to depend on human rationality rather than divine creation, a gap between things and concepts opened up in which one never quite adequately succeeded in representing the other. The museum came to provide the foremost space for contemplating and trying to resolve this inconsistency between material signifiers and immaterial signifieds. The subject of museum display is consequently less a preferred domain of natural history or antiquity than the dominant system of representation that renders objects meaningful.
In the three case studies I deal with, it was, as a result, not enough to order objects according to formal criteria or presumed function; the displays were also required to explain and control the objects’ significatory potential in relation to contemporary values. In the Museo Ercolanese, the intention of conveying ideas of ‘home’ comes to the fore in the separation between finds considered art and decorative or utilitarian objects. Artworks included the monumental sculpture, reliefs and architectural elements exhibited in the courtyard and the stairway of the palace, and the wall-paintings which were sawn from their original context and set in frames for display in a ‘picture’ gallery on the ground floor of the Portici Palace.15 The museum proper, containing the rest of the antiquities, by 1762 occupied almost the entire first floor of the annexe overlooking the Bay of Naples, the Palazzo Caramanico (Figure 2.1).16 Programmatic features were the triclinium in Room 6 and the reconstructed Pompeian kitchen in the vaulted Room 7, complete with a hearth and cooking utensils suspended from the walls. This dining area appears to have provided a focal point for the exhibits’ overall organization and theme. Together with the museum director Camillo Paderni, Winckelmann enjoyed a Roman-style banquet on the stepped, marble-lined construction, using vessels and candelabra from the collection. Without this ‘immersive’ attraction, it would be difficult to discern whether the museum was meant to offer anything more than a taxonomical and decorative array of finds. Most of the other rooms ordered ‘like with like’ according to use-shape and material, such as the separate cupboards for lamps and surgical and musical instruments in Room 1, market weights and scales in Room 4, writing equipment and bronze portrait busts in Room 5 and the most prized possessions in Room 10 – jewellery, metal plate and foodstuffs, including bread loaves, flour, grain, beans, figs and dates.17 From the perspective of later display strategies, the most striking aspect of the museum is the seamless blending of utilitarian instruments and luxury decoration – with ancient floors, candelabra and vessels adorning most of the rooms – and the lack of differentiation between objects relating to production and consumption. In Room 4, the performance of work was even part of the display, as visitors were able to witness Father Antonio Piaggio operating his ingenious apparatus for unrolling papyri.18
Figure 2.1 Francesco Piranesi. Plan of the Museo Ercolanese in the Palazzo Caramanico at Portici, depicting the cupboards that contain the objects found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1803.
This blurring between ancient and modern prefigures to some degree the arrangement in the Getty Villa. As at Portici, visitors are cued by the building’s architecture to understand the contents as expressions of personal wealth. The proximity of the research facilities, located nearby in Getty’s Ranch House, strongly suggests to museumgoers that the specialists who can be seen working there have been enabled to do so by the patron’s largesse. The new interior in some respects maintains this personal tenor through the sumptuous marble floors and walls and the Roman-style gallery furniture, but also undercuts it with the sleek museological equipment – display cases, spotlights and didactic signage and labels. The exhibits’ thematic organization reveals a similar contrast, with some galleries trying to instruct about everyday life in antiquity, while others are more palpably indebted to the collector’s predilections for fine art and consummate craftsmanship.
The clash between the museum’s origins in the collector’s aesthetic outlook, and the current stewards’ ambition to educate, is probably nowhere clearer than in the two large rooms above the Villa’s inner peristyle, displaying respectively ‘Women and Children’ and ‘Men in Antiquity’ (Figures 2.2 and 2.3).19 The world of men is presented through objects depicting men the way they wanted to be seen – mostly portraits of various media and formats and figure-decorated pottery, categorized into sub-themes relating to war, work and leisure. Quite the opposite is the case with women, who are frequently represented through figured monuments made for men to look at, among them symposium pottery showing entertainers or stereotyping supposed womanly vices for comic effect (Figure 2.4).20 The association of women with children is particularly incongruous in the portraits of elite women displayed in the room – such women in antiquity had little to do with the practicalities of childrearing. The odd implications for our understanding of Greek antiquity, of associating women intrinsically with children and childcare, comes to the fore in the red-figure kylix, included in the gallery’s display case ‘Children in Art’, with a paederastic courting scene in its tondo.21 All in all, the Getty Villa accomplished in these galleries a bourgeois domestication of ancient society by stressing boundaries of gender and age at the expense of the class differences to which the objects speak and isolating explicitly religious antiquities (i.e. statues of gods and goddesses) in separate rooms on the ground floor.
Figure 2.2 Women and Children in Antiquity. Interior of gallery 207 in the Getty Villa refurbished by Rodolpho Machado and Jorge Silvetti (1993–2005).
Figure 2.3 Men in Antiquity. Interior of gallery 209 in the refurbished Getty Villa.
Figure 2.4 Elderly woman guzzling wine from a large skyphos while her maid is looking on in embarrassment. The reverse of the vessel shows the interior of a household storeroom. Athenian red-figure skyphos, 460s bce. H 15.3 cm, D 18.8 cm. Malibu, Getty Villa Inv. 86.AE.265.
If the modernizing effect of the Getty Villa is implicit yet persistent, its displays transpose into a fine art museum the historicizing principles that had been established earlier on in the Greek and Roman Life Room of the British Museum. The scholarly trends to which the didactic intentions behind the original Life Room of 1908 responded have been remarked upon by Jenkins.22 Its innovative documentary purpose is especially clear from the inclusion in the display of photographs, casts and other reproductions of objects held elsewhere in the museum or in other institutions, as well as from the strict organization of the exhibits into sections (Figure 2.5). Although the individual artefact groups may be seen to fall quite ‘naturally’ into classes of purpose, as the guidebook states,23 the same claim does not hold for the binary division of the gallery space into public and domestic. Why should ancient religion and industry be classified into either of these divisions? What was ‘public’ about the arms and armour of the many citizen militias of antiquity? And most perplexingly, how did women become prisoners of the domestic sphere?
Figure 2.5 List of sections comprised in the exhibition of antiquities in the Greek and Roman Life Room at the British Museum.
‘Where Stories Have No Plot’: Domesticity as a Problem of Narration
The three museum displays we have looked at demonstrate that the boundary between public and private in the reception of Greek and Roman antiquities acquired its central importance fairly recently. In the Museo Ercolanese, it was of no concern; by the time the first Life Room at the British Museum was inaugurated, the dichotomy between public and private had become the explicit organizing principle. It supported the presentation of homes as a secular sphere, the domain of women, children, semi-durable consumables (furniture, dress, etc.), as well as home industry, agricultural production, crafts and exchange. The particular alignment this division took, both at the British Museum and the Getty Villa, cannot be termed historically accurate in relation to either Greece or Rome, let alone the whole of antiquity. To understand its origins we need to recognize not only how industrialization and the concomitant changes in class consciousness affected attitudes to the home (e.g. the rise of Separate Sphere ideology mentioned above), but also how the archaeology available at the time allowed the past to be drawn upon as a resource to corroborate the present.
If the 19th century was the period of archaeological discovery par excellence, no discovery has arguably had such a profound impact on modern accounts of ancient domesticity as the multitude of Athenian painted pottery showing so-called scenes of life. To be sure, 18th-century antiquarians had already been widely familiar with Greek finewares; but it was only with the excavations in the Etruscan cemeteries from 1828, when the later red-figure pottery found in South Italy and Sicily was supplemented with Athenian black-figure and early red-figure, that the relevant material attained a critical mass and the scenes of life entered scholarly awareness as a separate class.24 The significance of pottery with ‘illustrations of ancient life’ is also stressed in the arrangement of exhibits in the current Life Room at the British Museum, as its author emphasizes: ‘Topics of anthropological nature – “Children”, “Women”, “Marriage”, “Burial Customs” – have a strong Greek bias, because of the light shed upon them by vase-painting.’25 The staggering range of scenes that seem to show the specifics of the quotidian has often been commented on: eating, drinking, sex, sacrifice, weddings, funerals, men leaving for war, women going about household chores, athletics, education, agricultural labour, game hunting, workshop activities and so on. Taken together, the corpus develops a discourse of the real from which notions of domesticity emerge through recurrent associations between gender and space and, as we shall see, the temporal characterization of the depicted occurrences as episodic and unremarkable rather than unrepeatable.
The scenes that are most commonly cited to illustrate ancient domesticity show women in interior spaces occupied with various tasks. In early (Archaic) red-figure painting, women are engaged in wool-working, food-production and childcare. In later red-figure, from the 430s bce, the range of depicted activities is increasingly narrow, with most scenes focusing on body care, self-adornment and wedding preparations. The interior setting is evoked by indexical signs – implements painted on the plain background, as if suspended from a wall, as well as furniture, doors, columns and the different states of casual dress or undress.26 It is easy to see how such depictions of domestic bliss appealed to Victorian sensibilities. They seem to bridge the chasm of time in an unproblematic way, intimating that things back then were how they were supposed to be – in good order. It is also easy to see why they came to be viewed as straightforward historical documents, given that so many of these pictures bring to mind the kind of gendered segregation we hear about in the discourse of the gynaikōnitis (‘women’s quarters’) in classical sources.27 On the basis of this correspondence between texts and images, it is all too tempting to conclude that the metonymic relation between women and homes in visual representation signified domesticity in ancient life.
Household archaeology has demonstrated beyond doubt that the spatial organization of classical homes could not have been as rigid as some sources have led scholars to believe.28 Concurrently, studies of vase-painting have shown that the visual definition of homes as the site of female privacy was a convention propagated on specific pot shapes, for specific audiences and limited periods. Other pots seem to challenge this convention with images of men indoors and women (not necessarily prostitutes or slaves) engaging in a range of occupational, leisurely and religious tasks, sometimes outside the house and alongside men.29 In view of the full pictorial diversity of image types, the category of the ‘domestic scene’ reveals considerable bias. It amounts to a subjective selection out of an infinite number of possible selections, the consequence of classification on the basis of implicit criteria conditioned by modern expectations.
The problem of domestic scenes in Athenian vase-painting is a sub-species of the larger problem of everyday scenes in classical representation. The status of such representations between ideology and practice mostly remains an unacknowledged issue. On the one hand, scholars introduce discussions of such material habitually by pointing out that vase images do not provide ‘snapshots’ of ancient life; but when they set about writing history from these images they tend, despite all caution, to indulge in the impossible pursuit of extracting lived reality from ideological representation. The resulting situation is contradictory, with different scholars invoking an expedient selection of images to support competing models of ancient behaviour. Debates converge on those manifestations of gender and sexuality (same-sex courting and consummation, in addition to gender segregation) where there is most at stake, morally or legally, in having the ancient Greeks as a precedent for modern-day aspirations. In some cases, opposing historical propositions are built on the very same set of images, as is the case with the scenes of women fetching water at a fountain house. Almost eighty examples of the subject are known from Athenian black-figure painting, chiefly on hydriae (vessels for carrying water) dating between 520 and 480 bce.30 Most recently, Lisa Nevett has argued that these scenes, in combination with the archaeological and textual evidence for the construction of fountain houses in Archaic Athens, confirm that even freeborn women enjoyed significantly more freedom of movement than the norm of gender segregation familiar from textual accounts would have us expect.31 Previously, Gloria Ferrari had argued that the fantastical elements that appear on many of the vases – such as the fawns, the luscious vegetation, the inscribed ‘speaking names’, and the figures of Dionysus and Hermes included in a fountain house scene on a hydria in London – are more easily explained as an imaginative depiction of Athens’ mythical past, at the prehistoric Callirhoe fountain.32 In this explanation, the scenes are understood to reflect Athenian beliefs about the ancestral past. It appears that at the time these pots were painted at least some Athenians had come to believe that the primitive social differentiation that had supposedly prevailed in early Athens had permitted practices opposed to those of the present, in particular in relation to women. By implication, Ferrari’s interpretation maintains the norm of relative female seclusion in Archaic and Classical Greece.
Nevett’s matter-of-fact approach shows little regard for consistency. She isolates, in accordance with a predetermined argument, pictorial traits that may be compatible with lived reality from a general combination that could not have drawn on visible reality. Images cannot be idealizing and somehow realistic at the same time. If we submit to this illusion and dissect images selectively into pictorial elements that support our arguments, while disregarding others that contradict our favoured explanation, we risk assimilating the data to the explanatory model rather than vice versa. In other words, we risk misconstruing ancient behaviour on the basis of a false analogy, for the purpose of countering a specific historiographical consensus.
Far from rejecting the intention of ‘reading against the grain’, however, I would hold that household archaeology has not yet gone far enough in realizing its destabilizing potential. The assumption that Athenian depictions of women fetching water allow us to catch a glimpse of actual Athenian women deviating from the norms of society exemplifies the broader assumption that archaeology can reveal everyday practice in pristine form, beyond the distortions inflicted by norms. Where archaeology fails to achieve this goal, the reasons are according to this view to be sought in the failure of properly investigating the stratigraphy, spatial organization, assemblages and formation processes of ancient houses. Yet on reflection, it is undeniable that every activity, however mundane its task, is dependent on situational factors. Different activities may differ in their degree of intentionality and performativity, which in turn depend on such criteria as visibility, duration and ritual necessity, but never take place outside the constraints of social conditioning, regardless of whether the given norms are being maintained or subverted in a particular instance. Even if archaeology could substantiate that women in ancient Greece regularly ventured outside their homes (as they certainly did) we cannot be sure whether they perceived themselves, in their subjective awareness, to have entered the same public space as the men around them going about their civic duties.33
If archaeology does not have privileged access to ancient reality, the different convergences between ideology and practice that are embodied in material remains nevertheless provide new opportunities for understanding how everyday experiences were shaped and maintained. These opportunities can be explored either from synchronic or diachronic perspectives. In synchronic approaches, the material is examined with a focus on the discrepancies it reveals internally and in relation to other registers of representation, such as texts, whereas diachronic perspectives concentrate on the possibilities which antiquity provides for self-identification in the present. To remain with our example of ‘domesticity’ in Greek art, synchronous examination of household scenes in different media and contexts demonstrates that in the collective representation of some Athenians (and presumably other Greek communities) the symbolic articulation of the public–private opposition was indeed aligned with the gender opposition between male and female. At the same time, a closer look at the inconsistencies in surviving images reveals that the opposition originated in ideals that could not have corresponded to visible reality.
To illustrate such discrepancies, we may turn to the example of Athenian white lekythoi showing a couple bidding farewell (Figure 2.6).34 In scenes of this type, normally thought to have been produced for graves commemorating a deceased spouse, the man is depicted in various states of outdoor dress or nudity, while the woman is shown as being indoors, as is indicated by the furniture and the household equipment in the background. The man is already out of the house where he belongs, whereas the woman is right next to him but symbolically enclosed in ideal domesticity. Although the figures may look lifelike to us, the images portray conventional types and settings, not particular individuals in a particular moment of time. Temporal consistency was disregarded so as to highlight the gendered dichotomy, or ‘matrimonial harmony’, between public and private. The same strategy of representation can be found on 4th-century bce sculpted grave reliefs with men shown as being outdoors, sporting military or gymnastic equipment, but standing next to their wives, who are portrayed barefoot and clothed as quintessential denizens of the house.35
a, b (a) Arming and departure for war. The scene shows a woman seated on a klismos before a man holding a Corinthian helmet in his right hand and a shield and spear in his left.
(b) Athenian white lekythos attributed to the Achilles Painter.
In scenes representing traditional stories, the contrast between indoors and outdoors could assume a narrative function, characterizing the moral status of the actions and the figures depicted. On a black-figure lekythos of the early 5th century bce, for instance, the sorceress Circe rises from her diphros to offer her enchanted potion to Odysseus, who is seated on a rock, holding his spears and wearing the shoes and cap of a travelling hero (Figure 2.7).36 While spatially incoherent, the juxtaposition of indoors and outdoors explains the episode by way of an ethical contrast, playing on male anxieties about female secrecy, seduction and subterfuge.
Figure 2.7 Circe offers her skyphos with potion to Odysseus. The effects of her magic are exemplified by the boar-headed companion to the left, fleeing the scene in dismay. Athenian black-figure lekythos, 480s bce. H. of vessel 29 cm.
A diachronic approach to the same scenes entails a shift in focus away from their past existence to their presence as a materialized order of meaning. To put it differently, in adopting a diachronic perspective the aim is less to understand the historical changes that households experienced in antiquity than to change the way we evaluate the home as a sphere of meaningful human interaction. To adopt such an approach, we need to realize that the ‘everyday scenes’ in modern accounts of Classical Greece are a default category originally devised to rationalize the vase-paintings from Etruscan cemeteries whose pictorial content was more easily identified by reference to general ideas about contemporary life rather than specific stories familiar from texts. The category therefore is a function of the division of ancient representations as being either mythical or generic, a division which Ferrari has shown to be anachronistic.37 In trying to resolve this fallacy, however, she introduced a classification according to ‘narrative capacity’, which is by now commonplace among historians of Greek art, but no less problematic. To evaluate a scene’s narrative capacity more often than not means to apply a binary categorization into either narrative or non-narrative. The criteria of this classification are derived from the key authors of modern structuralist analysis, such as Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov. They require us to determine whether the episode depicted could serve as a hinge-point in a narrative – whether the event asserts a teleological tension or the capacity to bring about structural change in the social conditions that define the portrayed event as a crisis.38
The criteria at first sight appear to be neutral but in actual fact go back (or are at least analogous to) Aristotle’s aesthetic analysis of dramatic plots. Aristotle presents his basic definition of tragic plot in the opening of chapter 7 of his Poetics, stressing that it must be (1) complete (teleia), (2) whole (olē) and (3) of ‘a certain magnitude’ (echousē ti megethos).39 None of his criteria can be said to be independent of cultural norms. His stress on the unity of the represented action is later on (1451a11–15) more closely specified as a course of action experienced by a protagonist in a fairly limited timespan, during which the agent’s condition is reversed either from prosperity to adversity or vice versa. The stress on the teleological consequences of narrated actions is the critical overlap between Aristotelian and structuralist plot analysis. Yet, it is still not clear why this criterion of emplotted life-reversal should in principle valorize acts committed by heroic men but devalue as non-narrative or episodic such familiar events as a communal meal or the birth of a child. The key comes from Aristotle’s definition of action (praxis) outlined in his Ethics (iii, 2, 111b8–10, 1139a31) as a self-directed movement requiring the agent’s choice or deliberation about ends (prohairesis). As Cynthia Freeland has demonstrated, this stress on choice explains why Aristotle’s theory prefers as best plots those structured around agent-centred ‘moral-luck’ (i.e. a noble protagonist with freedom of choice, erring due to some failure or ignorance of fact) rather than those in which characters suffer due to actions and circumstances beyond their control.40 The criterion of wholeness and completeness in representations of action turns out to be about ethical perceptions of human volition. The stress on volition in most historical circumstances has meant (at least until Bertolt Brecht’s conception of epic theatre) that representations of male agency were judged as being a priori different and better than those focusing on characters (usually female) who have little choice or are the victims of more powerful agents.
Aristotle’s insistence on dramatic unity provided the grounding not only for modern poetological theory but also for Western academic painting from the 16th century.41 In the realm of pictorial representation, the stress on unity of action resulted in the aesthetic and pedagogical canons that prioritized agent-centred dynamism, monochronic consistency and perspectival effects, as familiar from the grand tradition of history painting. Until the demise of academic art in the 20th century, history painting was ranked as the most accomplished genre, requiring the master to select and fashion key moments from history to create the illusion of sublime presence. The relation in art between history painting and lesser genres is analogous to that between textual representations that recount the past in a narrative form and those that openly adopt a perspective in reporting the past. As Hayden White has emphasized, the difference between historical representations that narrativize the past by leading it to a dramatic resolution and those that resist imposing the structures of stories on past events has less to do with the modes of objective perception which historical narrative presupposes than with the refusal of non-narrative modes ‘to represent the moral under the aspect of the aesthetic’.42 For the same reason of implicit moral judgement, the concept of narrative capacity in modern studies of vase-painting is dependent on the ethical criteria set out by Aristotle, or the bodily attributes and dynamics of the depicted figures that manifest freedom of choice aesthetically.43
These criteria may well be historically correct, in the sense that many ancient viewers interpreted the significance of actions represented on pots against norms of narrative closure similar to Aristotle’s. But this historical consistency should not be taken to imply that all ancient viewers understood images through such criteria or that those criteria should be transubstantiated in modern scholarship and museum displays as a seemingly neutral presentation of historical reality. That presentation, as we have seen, depends to a considerable extent on visual representations in Athenian vase-painting and the classification of those images according to clear-cut distinctions as being either narrative or non-narrative in nature. Narrativity, after all, is the taxonomical principle which guided the allocation of objects in the British Museum and the Getty Villa into galleries exhibiting significant public action or the ‘inconsequential’ processes germane to the private sphere. If Greek vase images were as critical as my sample survey of museum displays suggests in defining the ancient house as a domestic domain in the modern sense (as a privatized and secular sphere, populated by women and subordinate to the public sphere), then the domestication of the ancient household may originate not just in false analogical inferences from modern conditions; the very category of the domestic that emerged in the modern West in the course of the 19th century in fact perpetuates androcentric conceptions of dramatic plot transmitted in ostensibly gender-neutral forms in classical art and narratological theory.
In flagging the modern-day ramifications of our categories of interpretation, scholarship does not renounce its academic commitment to historical truth. On the contrary, to acknowledge the bias inherent in any explanation of antiquity is tantamount to acknowledging the historical fact that already in antiquity different audiences looked at ancient vases and appraised the scenes depicted on them in ways not necessarily intended by the artists or their patrons. The interpretative habits of the dominant group of commissioners and purveyors are not the whole historical truth. Museums of course cannot avoid adopting a particular classificatory scheme in ordering their displays but, rather than presenting its classes as self-evident and natural, we would do better – for the sake of academic integrity – to make explicit the subjective nature of its criteria. With regard to the vase images of everyday activities, the decision whether a given example belongs to the default category of non-narrative scenes should not be presented as a foregone conclusion but as an open-ended question – one that requires the viewer to compare different forms of representation and question their ethical direction and context of use, and allows her or him to recognize the multiple projections of reality that constitute social awareness at any one point in time. The goal of such a presentation of history is not to falsify one or the other source of evidence, but to communicate the diversity of past experiences and clarify the links between them. For the same reason, our histories of antiquity are poorly served if the realm of the house is treated as a disconnected strand, juxtaposing the ‘subaltern’ to conventional accounts instead of highlighting the intricate web of connections between less accessible voices and the dominant voice of ancient historiography.
In this chapter, I have tied together different forms of representation from museums and vase-painting to elucidate their decisive role at the juncture between present and past by allowing the material and textual legacies of ancient housing to be re-scripted through the prism of modern domesticity. The work which ancient and modern representations are made to perform in the production of knowledge draws on the mutual conjunctions between visual and verbal orders of meaning – between the apparent truths of naturalistic images and the unspoken assumptions of morality and habituation. Its effects are as subtle as they are pervasive, establishing which aspect of the past is assigned significance and what kind of occurrence warrants inclusion into an authoritative historical narrative. In a framework that values aesthetic integrity above experiential variety, the routines of home life will always appear less interesting than the spectacle of high-risk outdoor pursuits. The textual and material sources of classical antiquity offer abundant possibilities to show that in real-life situations one aspect of society cannot do without the other. Accounts that pretend otherwise are built on false analogies which enlist a segmental view of the past to fortify an equally partisan view of the present.
