Gonda Van Steen

Rolling out the Red Carpet: power 'play' in Modern Greek Versions of the Myth of Orestes from the 1960s and 1970s (II)

Part I of this article was published in Issue 1 of this volume (IJCT 9.1 [Summer 2002], above, pp. 51–95). Part II illustrates how the myth of Orestes was used and abused during the junta years in Greece (1967–1974). The regime promoted antiquarian versions of the myth of Orestes, which exuded conformism and stability but were barely viable theatrically. Progressive circles, however, countered with provocative stage and film interpretations of the Orestes myth, which, to them, represented one of the most useful agitational myths of revolutionary tyrannicide. In their hands, the myth of Orestes also grew from highly theatrical to self-consciously metatheatrical.Full bibliographical references can be found in the “List of Works Cited” at the end of part I (above, 89ff.).

The Venus de Milo

When, how, and why did Marcellus obtain the Venus de Milo? What took priority in his subsequent experience of remembering, and writing about, his act of acquisition? Surely it is problematic that Marcellus, whose narratives follow a regimen of Orientalist representation, saw himself as a philhellene and regarded his act of collecting ancient art as a philhellenic contribution? I use the Frenchman’s account as a case study that has a prismatic quality to it, and will ground it in the local context of real places and people of the eastern Mediterranean. Marcellus’s remembrances of how he purchased the Venus, or the “facts” and tales about his fabled “trophy,” are preserved in Chapter 8 of his 1839 travelogue, Souvenirs de l’Orient.1 This autobiographical account, however, “has long been shunned as a tainted source” on the subject of the Venus, in the words of art historians Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott.2 My aim is to revisit Marcellus’s story, not to rehabilitate it, but to unlock it with the implements of the Orientalist toolkit with which it was originally made. The Frenchman elevated an archaeological find by subjecting it to an Orientalist imaging process, and he thereby captured cultural encounters that tell multiple tales. His account of the statue’s acquisition illustrates economic hierarchies and conflicting interests, exchanges of monies, gifts, and favors, and the dynamics of reward and punishment (through the Greek subjects’ relationship to the violent exercise of power by other Greeks as well as by Ottomans).