Beauty from the Dead
Boeotia was a fertile region of nearly 1,000 square miles and home to about 250,000 residents, with a rich heritage that dated back to Mycenaean times. Yet it was a land mostly agricultural. There were neither great cosmopolitan cities, major seaports, rich gold and silver mines, nor tourist attractions, major Panhellenic festivals, or strategic trading centers. The intrigues of the ancient royal house of Thebes were grist for the mill of Athenian tragedy across the border, where playwrights felt at ease chronicling the tales of hereditary incest, fratricide, and parent-killing among their bitter enemies over the mountains.
So tragedy was mostly an Athenian, not a Boeotian, event. The same was true of Hellenic literature in general—Hesiod, Pindar, Corinna, and Plutarch are notable exceptions—that was usually associated with Athens, Sicily, Ionia, and Corinth rather than with the agrarian states of the northern interior.
The same generalization applies to Greek art and architecture. Although some remarkable treasures have been unearthed in Boeotia—decorative Mycenaean terra-cotta sarcophagi, Archaic miniature clay figurines of men and women at work, and marble statuary from the Hellenistic age—the best Greek vase painting, the most impressive temples, and the great bronze sculptures come from Athens, the Peloponnese, Ionia, Sicily, and southern Italy.
In the ancient world, mastery of art usually required large cities. Only there could commerce and money provide artists with either patronage or sales, in addition to the knowledge of novel rival work. In contrast, in a society of farmers it is difficult for both artists and their audience to find either time or money. The isolation of the farm offers seclusion rather than the fellowship of cities. For all the protestations of the artist that he is a creature of independence and solitude, his stock and trade are people—viewers of his paintings, buyers of his pots, rivals for his trade, teachers and students of his craft, coteries of genuine admirers and flatterers alike. The great Theban general, patriot, and democrat Epaminondas once boasted to his Athenian enemies that should they continue to pry into Boeotian affairs, he might well storm their acropolis and carry off the Propylaea, the monumental entranceway to the Periclean temples, only to rebuild it on the Theban Cadmea—a provocative boast of Theban military power, but also an admission that there was nothing in Boeotia at all like the majestic buildings of the Athenian acropolis.
Yet for a single day in November 424 B.C., a small plain near Delium was the greatest city in Boeotia, where some fifty thousand men crowded together in an area less than a mile wide, comprising a population twice the size of Thebes herself. The equipment of the respective combatants alone might have totaled eighteen tons of wood and metal. In the battle’s aftermath from those warriors came much death and spoil, and from death and spoil tragedy and money—and so from tragedy and money at last art!
Greek armor was not cheap. The helmet, breastplate, and greaves were cast and worked from bronze, the sword, spear tip, and spear-butt forged from iron. The massive three-feet-in-diameter shield required careful fabrication of planks of cured oak along with a hammered and polished bronze veneer. Altogether the hoplite’s ensemble might weigh from sixty to seventy pounds and cost 100 to 300 drachmas—the equivalent of three months’ wages for a laborer.
Seven thousand Athenian hoplites fought at Delium. Although only a thousand were killed on the battlefield, the majority of the rest fled in panic and must have jettisoned most of their armor to escape their Boeotian and Locrian pursuers. Perhaps at least 5,000 panoplies were lost, somewhere around 500,000 drachmas’ worth of bronze and iron—enough capital to put a thousand men to work every day for nearly a year and a half, or to pay the staging costs of two hundred lavish Greek tragedies. In addition, most Greeks took money for food and expenses with them to battle, so there may well have been even more loot among the detritus of Delium. What the ultimate tally of captured treasure was is not recorded, but it must have been a vast sum.
In any case, nearly four hundred years after the battle the historian Diodorus remarked of the radical effects that the windfall of captured booty had upon the city of Thebes, in a passage that emphasizes the often forgotten relationship between military lucre and the creation of art:
From the proceeds of booty, the Thebans not only built the great stoa in their marketplace, but also adorned it with bronze statues. In addition, they also covered with bronze the temples and the colonnades of their marketplace by nailing up the armor from the spoils of the battle. And finally, they instituted the festival called the “Delia” from money they acquired from the spoils.
This money from the sale of the captured armor and any other loot found on the bodies also found its way into other avenues of artistic expression in Boeotia. Some of the most beautiful of all Boeotian art consists of larger-than-life painted and incised grave steles, with figures of the last moments of hoplites etched into black limestone. Interestingly enough, at least two of the inscribed names of the fallen heroes on these six extant sculptures—Saugenes and Koironos—also appear on a stone casualty list uncovered from the Boeotian town of Tanagra, in the neighborhood of Delium, where some of the steles themselves were unearthed. Since the left wing of the Boeotian battle line—made up of hoplites from the hamlets of Thespiae, Tanagra, and Orchomenos—suffered the majority of the casualties from the battle, it is likely that an entire series of grave sculptures was commissioned to commemorate the ghastly losses that these small communities suffered at Delium.
The annihilation of the left wing at Delium, and the enormous amount of booty captured from the battle, together account for the creation of these extraordinarily beautiful and moving sculptures. The trove perhaps suggests that some unknown gifted artist was hired by these otherwise rural and poor communities to craft a series of commemoratives on premium black limestone for their fallen townsmen. In fact, some scholars believe the painter and sculptor was the famous Pythagorean innovator Aristeides of Thebes.
In the Saugenes stele, the Tanagran warrior steps forward to fight with short sword and shield. His broken spear rests at his feet, along with several stones that have apparently been hurled at him. The ground is uneven and hilly—as we know was true of the Delium battlefield. The scene most likely accurately captures the desperate last moments of the Theban left, where the overwhelmed hoplites must have had their spears shattered and were forced to turn to their secondary swords. In an artistic sense, Saugenes himself is not merely sculpted to a near-perfect human proportion, but the entire scene displays a mastery of perspective, as the artist is able to make the hoplite’s shield appear concave rather than merely round, and to capture trees in the distance. On the right border of the stele an enemy spear point intrudes, aimed right at the face of Saugenes, leaving no doubt that we are witnessing the last seconds of the doomed defenseless warrior. At the top of the sculpture are scenes from a banquet scene—the first example of Greek funerary sculpture to equate death with dining—emphasizing the Pythagorean idea that the departed are treated to perpetual feasting in the hereafter.
The steles represent the high point of classical Boeotian sculpture and match the excellence of any inscribed figures in Greece. What prompted Aristeides, if indeed he was the artist, so lavishly to sculpt these otherwise nondescript rural warriors must have been both the fame of their sacrifice—and the money—that accrued after sale of the Athenian loot. These black limestone incised warrior steles—their polychrome painted finishes have mostly faded—seem to appear out of nowhere, suggesting that Delium was an important day in the artistic history of this rural province. As in the case of the great paintings that followed the Christian celebration of the victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto (1571), a magnificent victory and the accompanying spoils of battle can be the catalysts of artistic genius.