A piece of modern Greek history worthy of Thucydides

Michael Llewellyn-Smith sets the Greek occupation of Smyrna and the war in Anatolia against the background of Greece’s ‘Great Idea’ and of great power rivalries in the Near East. He traces the origins of the Greek statesman Eleftherios Venizelos’s ‘Ionian Vision’ to his joint conception with David Lloyd George of an Anglo-Greek entente in the Eastern Mediterranean. This narrative text presents a comprehensive account of the disaster which has shaped the politics and society of modern Greece.

Visual culture, performance and spectacle lay at the heart of all aspects of ancient Greek daily routine, such as court and assembly, cult and ritual, and art and culture. Seeing was considered the most secure means of obtaining knowledge, with many citing the etymological connection between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ in ancient Greek as evidence for this. Seeing was also however often associated with mere appearances, false perception and deception. Gazing and visuality in the ancient Greek world have had a central place in the scholarship for some time now, enjoying an abundance of pertinent discussions and bibliography. If this book differs from the previous publications, it is in its emphasis on diverse genres: the concepts ‘gaze’, ‘vision’ and ‘visuality’ are considered across different Greek genres and media. The recipients of ancient Greek literature (both oral and written) were encouraged to perceive the narrated scenes as spectacles and to ‘follow the gaze’ of the characters in the narrative. By setting a broad time span, the evolution of visual culture in Greece is tracked, while also addressing broader topics such as theories of vision, the prominence of visuality in specific time periods, and the position of visuality in a hierarchisation of the senses.

Eye and Art in Ancient Greece examines the art of ancient Greece through reconstructions of how the Greeks saw and understood the products of their own visual culture. The material is approached using a newly developed methodology of archaeoaesthetics by which past modes of vision and perception are examined in conjunction with prevailing notions of pleasure and judgement with the purpose of identifying the visual and psychological contexts within which the aesthetics of a culture emerge. Through a wide-ranging examination of ideas found in early written sources, the book examines various key aspects of Greek visual culture, such as continuity and change, nudity, identity, lifelikeness, mimesis, personation and enactment, symmetria, dance, harmony, and the modal representation of emotions, with the aim of comprehending how and why choices were made in the conception and making of artifacts. Special attention is given to factors contributing to the formation of taste and the emergence and transmission over time of concepts of art and beauty and the means by which they were identified and judged. The approach facilitates encounters with the material in ways that give rise to new insights into how the ancient Greeks experienced their own visual culture and how Greek art may be understood by us today.