Читать книгу Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art - Walter Woodburn Hyde - Страница 21

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PLATE 2

Marble Statue of a Girl Runner. Vatican Museum, Rome.

The assumption long held that short hair was always characteristic of the athlete is incorrect.473 It is controverted equally by literary evidence and by the monuments. The Homeric Greek took pride in his long hair,474 and doubtless the contestants at the games of Patroklos in the Iliad had long hair. Long hair was worn by some Athenians throughout Athenian history. From the end of the fifth century B.C., long hair was regarded as a mark of effeminacy475 and was regularly worn only by the knights.476 Short hair was worn as a sign of mourning in Athens from early days down.477 Only the slaves regularly wore very short hair in the fifth century B.C.478 The change to short hair in Athens was certainly due to the influence of the palæstra and to athletics in general.479 We see just the opposite custom in vogue in Sparta. There, according to the code of Lykourgos,480 men were compelled to wear long hair and children short hair. Thus the heroes of Leonidas entered the battle of Thermopylæ after combing their long locks.481 After the Persian wars only children and men with laconizing or aristocratic sympathies482 wore their hair long at Athens. When boys arrived at the age of ἔφηβοι, they had their hair cut at the feast of the οἰνιστήρια483 and dedicated it to a god.484 Soon after the Persian war period, athletes wore their hair short. Before that time, the wearing of long hair had already been discarded for obvious reasons in wrestling.485 Similarly, in boxing and the pankration long hair was in the way, and was therefore early braided into two long plaits which were wound around the head in a peculiar way and tied into a knot at the top, the so-called Attic κρωβύλος, the oftenest mentioned manner of dressing the hair in Greek literature.486 The oldest notice of this style of wearing the hair is found in a fragment of Asios.487 Herakleides Ponticus488 says it was used up to the time of the Persian wars. The locus classicus is in Thukydides, who says it was worn in his day by old people only.489 Earlier young men wore it,490 but it went out of fashion between 470 and 460 B.C. In this connection we should mention that the professional athlete under the Roman Empire wore his hair uncut and tied up in an unsightly topknot known as the cirrus.491

The monumental evidence bears out the literary. Thus, on old Corinthian clay tablets freemen are represented with long hair, while slaves have short hair.492 Hydrias from Caere (Cerveteri) and paintings from Klazomenai show that the Ionians wore their hair short for the first time in the sixth century B.C., the custom not becoming general until the fifth. Older Spartan monuments represent the hair long.493 Attic vases show long hair on men until the second half of the sixth century B.C., when the black-figured vase masters began to represent them with short hair, a custom becoming general in the first half of the fifth. In statuary the Diskobolos of Myron (Pls. 21, 26, and Figs. 34, 35) has short hair, and most statues of athletes before it have long hair, while most after it have short. Before the time of the Diskobolos, b.-f. and early r.-f. vase-painters often represented athletes with braided hair in the fashion of the warriors on the Aegina pediments. When short hair began to be used on athlete statues, these older braids were often replaced by victor bands.494 We may roughly summarize by saying that statues before the date of the Diskobolos which do not have long hair are probably those of athletes and not of gods, and, in any case, if they have braids bound up in the fashion of the κρωβύλος, they are almost always statues of athletes.495 As for short hair on representations of gods, Furtwaengler has shown that it appears only after the middle of the fifth century B.C.496 Prior to that date the hair of divinities fell over the neck and shoulders in curls, as in the statue of the Olympian Zeus by Pheidias. By the time of Perikles, however, short curly hair reached only to the nape of the neck on statues of Zeus, and this style frequently appears on figures of the god on Attic vases of that period. Dionysos has short hair for the first time on the Parthenon frieze.497 Furtwaengler has shown that Pheidias did not invent the short bound-up hair for goddess types, as we see it in the Lemnian Athena, but that he borrowed it from works already in existence.498 Though the style was unknown in the archaic period, it appears on helmeted heads of Athena of the early fifth century B.C. showing Peloponnesian style—on coins, statuettes, reliefs, etc. It appears in Attic art exclusively on bareheaded types of Athena of the period just prior to that of the Lemnia.

Bulle499 has gone carefully into the technique of the hair by different Greek artists. In archaic times this was “ein, man darf sagen, unmoegliches Problem.” The primitive means at the disposal of the early artist made it impossible to render the hair naturally and hence it was conventionalized. Two styles arose in archaic times, which endured with modifications all through Greek art. The one was the pictorial (malerisch), where only the general appearance of the hair was represented, the merest necessary plastic form being added.500 Painting here helped the shortcomings of the sculptor to some extent. The second style was the plastic (plastisch), where individual locks were attempted. The plastic use of light and shade made the use of color now less necessary. Such examples as the Korai of the Akropolis Museum and the Rampin head in the Louvre show the difficulty which the early artist encountered in representing hair plastically. In the Rampin head501 we see examples of three sorts of plastic hair treatment: the pearl-string (Perlschnuerre) on the neck, grained hair (Koerner) in the beard, and snail-volutes (geperlte Schnecken) on the forehead. None of the three seems to belong integrally to the head, but each appears to have been pasted on. The pearl-string fashion was first used in the soft poros stone and was only later successfully transferred to marble. During the severe style of Greek sculpture, both fashions, pictorial and plastic, were used, as we see them in the pediment groups from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. In the period of Pheidias the plastic treatment was used almost exclusively, as we see in the Lemnian Athena. In the next century impressionism came in, though the plastic treatment still continued, for we see it in the bronze work of Lysippos and the marble work of Praxiteles. The old pictorial treatment was revived again in the later Hellenistic age.