PICTURE: The fantastical beasts of ancient Greece

We think of the Greeks as the orderly people who
gave us drama, democracy and philosophy. But
the fearsome creatures in Hellenic art reveal a dark
side, writes Alastair Sooke.
What do you think about when you hear the words
‘ancient Greece’? The conventional view is that the
ancient Greeks provided the bedrock for Western
civilisation. After all, they invented democracy,
philosophy and drama. But it would be a mistake
to imagine them as exclusively rational. Their
society was shaped by strange and primal forces
as much as the guiding light of reason. And
nowhere is this more visible than in their art.
One of the most intriguing aspects of ancient Greek
art is its glut of fantastical creatures. When we
consider Greek art, we tend to envisage marble
statues of Olympian gods – but gorgons, griffins,
centaurs and sphinxes are actually just as
common. Lots of them were on show recently in
New York, decorating all sorts of objects in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Assyria to
Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. What was
the significance of all these ferocious supernatural
beasts? Fantastical animals were already part of
the repertoire of Aegean craftsmen in prehistory, a
millennium before the high point of the classical
age in Athens in the Fifth Century BC. For instance,
they star in the art of both the Minoan and
Mycenaean civilisations of the Bronze Age.
The famous ‘Throne Room’ in the Minoan palace at
Knossos on Crete was decorated with frescoes of
elegant griffins – hybrid creatures with the bodies
of lions and the heads of birds of prey. They
flanked the chamber’s so-called throne, as though
conferring supernatural power upon whoever sat
there.
At the site of Mycenae on mainland Greece, the
splendid ‘Lion Gate’, a monumental limestone
relief featuring two leonine creatures on either side
of a central column, dominates one entrance to the
citadel. Because these beasts are headless (the
lost heads, which would have faced outwards, were
once attached using dowel pins), there is a theory
that they weren’t lions at all, but griffins – perhaps
in honour of the griffins that had appeared in earlier
Minoan art.
Dark days?
Traditionally, historians term the chaotic period
that followed the catastrophic breakdown of the
Mycenaean palace centres as the ‘Dark Ages’. Yet
a significant find from a cemetery near the modern
town of Lefkandi on the large Greek island of
Euboea suggests greater sophistication during
these murky centuries than was previously
thought.
It is a ceramic figurine dating from the 10th
Century BC that depicts a sweet-looking monster:
half-man, half-horse. He is probably a centaur (an
unruly creature from the fringes of civilisation),
offering a surprisingly early example of a sculptor
portraying a character from Greek mythology. Five
hundred years later, centaurs would play a
prominent role among the extravagant public
sculptures adorning the Parthenon in Athens.
Yet according to Peter Stewart, director of the
Classical Art Research Centre at the University of
Oxford, the exploding popularity of “mixed
creatures” such as centaurs really occurred around
the Seventh Century BC. “This is sometimes called
the ‘orientalising period’,” he says, “and we start to
find a profusion of fantastic creatures on Greek
pottery, metalwork, and other media influenced by
the art of the Near East and Egypt.”
In this period, ancient Greek society was still under
the influence of foreign cultures. For Greek
merchants, it was a time of prosperity, as they
traded right across the Mediterranean. To give
thanks for their good fortune, these enterprising
seafarers often dedicated bronze cauldrons to their
gods in religious sanctuaries. Decorating the rims
of these magnificent objects were monstrous
heads influenced by the art of far-flung peoples.
“Perhaps this imagery had connotations of exotic
and prestigious imports,” explains Stewart, “but it
probably also echoed the characters of Greek
mythology and religious belief.” A popular choice
for decorating cauldrons was the savage, sharp-
beaked griffin, which reappeared in Greek art with
ferocious flair – and an oriental flavour – having
disappeared from view for centuries.
Human turn
Fantastical creatures in ancient Greek art now had
their utmost ferocity and bristling, bare-fanged
power. But a century or two later, artists would
present monsters in a radically different fashion.
“In the Greek world,” explains Joan Mertens,
curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan
Museum, “many creatures that start off ferocious
and ugly evolve into beautiful figures or animals.
Perhaps the most dramatic example is the gorgon
Medusa who in early Greek art is all fangs and
wrinkles and by the mid-Fifth Century is a beautiful
woman.”
As ancient Greece shifted into the classical era,
says Stewart, “The most noticeable trend is that
the monsters become more realistic. As artists
become more interested in realistic bodies, and
more able to represent them, it perhaps becomes
a challenge to show fantastic creatures in a
plausible way.”
We find a good example of this in the satyrs –
mischievous, often sexually aroused and inebriated
human figures with pointy ears and horses’ tails –
that appear on so many painted pots in ancient
Greece. “On Athenian painted pots of the late Sixth
and Fifth Centuries BC,” says Stewart, “satyrs are
often shown as wild, chaotic creatures beyond the
civilised world of the city. But at least as often they
perform human roles, introducing an element of
anarchy into otherwise very urbane activities like
symposia (drinking parties). Occasionally they
actually behave like refined Athenian citizens.
These are very ironic images, no doubt intended to
provoke thought or amusement, but they do
exhibit a lot of sympathy for the satyrs.”
This last thought is instructive when it comes to
considering the meaning of monsters in ancient
Greece. It is tempting to understand them in
opposition to concepts of Greekness: scary, ‘other’
beings that needed to be shoved beyond the
perimeters of civilisation. But perhaps the attitude
of the ancient Greeks towards monsters was more
nuanced.
As Stewart puts it: “I don’t think that Greeks really
expected to meet a centaur or sphinx, or even a
satyr, out in the countryside, and maybe they were
always regarded as the stuff of legend. But a
recurring trait of Greek art is that monstrous
creatures seem to be held up as a foil to the
Greeks’ concept of civilisation – a sort of
distorting mirror in which the Greeks could look at
themselves. The Greeks seem to have found these
monstrous or semi-human creatures useful to
explore and express their world-view, their ideas
about humanity and civilisation, the mortal and
divine. Fantastical beings were part of the furniture
of the Greek mind.”