Emily Vermeule

Baby Aigisthos and the Bronze Age

Greek poets and painters of all archaic and classical stages actively used the Bronze Age as their major medium of expression. Their plots are made of legends they attribute to Bronze Age places, their characters are heroes, often royal, who contest those places and thrones, and fight at home and overseas for small quantities of metals, horses, cattle, women. The heroic figures of the classical imagination, especially in tragedy, are isolated and highlighted before general backgrounds of palaces, battlefields, sacred shrines, altars and groves, or tombs. The characters often take on aspects that seem to emanate from these settings – kingly, quarrelsome, acquisitive, enemies or puppets of the gods, exposed to and angry at death. The heroes often seem like dead divinities, sentient watchers inside the earth, contemplating contemporary life, like Amphiaraos watching from some breathing cave near Harma in Boiotia, while an image of them is projected on the stage to walk and talk through their remembered, familiar pathea .

A Protoattic Human Sacrifice

It is exciting to see a new scene in Greek art, especially the first attempt to paint a myth which will become famous later. When the painting is done by a well-known artist in an age whose experimental illustrations of myth are rarely preserved, there is special pleasure. A sadly broken vase of the middle of the seventh century B.c. shows a woman being carried along on her back by several men; there are sea-monsters below (pls. 69-71). This large Protoattic krater, or what remains of it, seems to illustrate a scene which is usually avoided in later painting although richly exploited by poets, a woman being sacrificed alive. On a well-known black-figured vase, a Tyrrhenian amphora, made nearly a century later than this one, the victim is labeled Polyxena, princess of Troy2 (pl. 72, fig. 6). Here it may be the same girl, or possibly a better-known princess who suffered a similar fate, Iphigeneia of Mycenae. One hopes that the rest of the vase, or parts of it, will turn up some day to spread the whole scene before us. The description and interpretation suggested here are necessarily tentative. The fragments on loan in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, make up slightly more than a quarter of a large Protoattic ovoid krater with a low rim and a horned bulls head handle. There is one

Toumba tou Skourou, Northwest Cyprus

Toumba tou Skourou is the surviving fragment of a once-considerable Late Bronze Age town on the north bank of the Ovghos River near Morphou in northwest Cyprus. Most of the town disappeared under bulldozers in the early 1950s. The remainder, on the west edge of the settlement, consists of a mudbrick mound stratified from the sixteenth to the fourteenth centuries B.C., a series of stone houses or potting establishments below the mound facing the river, and a cemetery with six tombs (twelve individual chambers) whose contents range from about 1570 to 1350 B.C. The site was excavated by Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1971-1973. The mound lies a dozen miles from the copper mines in the north foothills of the Troodos moun-