Читать книгу Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art - Walter Woodburn Hyde - Страница 7

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Centuries before the Achæan civilization of Greece had bloomed, there developed among the Minoans of Crete a passion for certain acrobatic performances and for gymnastics. These Cretans, though strongly influenced by Egypt and the East, did not borrow their love of sport from outside any more than did the later Achæans. On the walls of the tombs of Beni-Hasan on the Nile are pictured many athletic sports, including a series of several hundred wrestling groups,2 but these sports did not influence, so far as we know, Cretan athletics. At Knossos bull-grappling seems to have been the national sport, as we see from the frescoes on the palace walls. In the absence of the horse, which did not appear in early Aegean times in Crete, it is not difficult to understand the development of gymnastic sports with bulls. At Knossos a seal has been found which shows the rude drawing of a vessel with rowers seated under a canopy, superimposed on which is drawn the greater portion of a huge horse. In this design, dating from about 1600 B.C. and synchronizing with the earlier part of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, we doubtless see a graphic way of indicating the cargo, and consequently a contemporary record, it may be, of the first importation of horses from Libya into Crete.3

The Cretan bull seems to have been a much larger animal than the species found upon the island to-day.4 Bull-grappling at Knossos was the sport of female as well as male toreadors. A fragmentary rectangular fresco, dating from about 1500 B.C. (Pl. 1), was discovered there by Sir Arthur Evans in 1901 and is now in the Candia museum. It is executed with extraordinary spirit and shows a huge bull rushing forward with lowered head and tail straight out. A man is in the act of turning a somersault on its back, his legs in the air, his arms grasping the bull’s body and his head raised, looking back to the rear of the animal, where a cowgirl is standing, holding out her arms to catch his flying figure as soon as his feat is concluded. Another cowgirl, at the extreme left, seems to be suspended from the bull’s horns, which pass under her armpits, while she catches hold further up. However, she is not being tossed, but is taking position preliminary to leaping over the bull’s back. Both the man and the women wear striped boots and bracelets; the women are apparently distinguished by their white skin, short drawers, yellow sashes embroidered with red, and the red-and-blue diadems around their brows.[5] On the opposite wall a similar scene was pictured; among its stucco fragments was found the representation of the arm and shoulder of a woman grasping a bull by the horns. The fragmentary representation of another woman and man was also found.

PLATE 1

Bull-grappling Scene. Wall-painting from Knossos. Museum of Candia.

A very similar scene has long been known from a fresco painting from Tiryns, now in Athens.6 A bull is represented galloping to the left, while a man7 clings to its horns with his right hand and is swept along with one foot lightly touching the bull’s back and the other swung aloft. Most early writers interpreted this scene as a bull-hunt, the artist having drawn the hunter above the bull through ignorance of perspective. The execution is very inferior, three attempts of the bungling painter being visible in the painting of the tail and the front legs. Others saw in it the representation of an acrobat showing his dexterity by leaping upon the back of an animal in full career, recalling the description of such a trick in the Iliad, where Ajax is represented as rushing over the plain like a man who, while driving four horses, leaps from horse to horse.8 But this figure must take its place side by side with the one from Knossos just described as another bull-grappling scene. That such sports were not held in the open air, but in an enclosed courtyard, is shown by the seal from Praisos now in the Candia Museum, which depicts a man vaulting on the back of a gigantic ox within a paved enclosure.9 Doubtless the theatral areas discovered at Phaistos by the Italian Archæological Mission10 and at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans in 190311 were not large enough for bull scenes and were used merely for ceremonial dancing and perhaps for the boxing matches to be described.12 Similar acrobats are doubtless to be recognized in the two beautiful ivory statuettes, only 11.5 inches in height, of so-called leapers, found by Dr. Evans at Knossos in 1901.13 These masterpieces of the late Minoan II period represent acrobats (one is probably a woman) darting through the air. “The life, the freedom, the élan of these figures is nothing short of marvellous,” writes Dr. Evans, who calls attention to the careful physical training shown in their slender legs and in the muscles, even the veins on the back of the hands and the finger-nails being plainly indicated as well as the details of the skinfolds at the joints. They doubtless formed a part of an ivory model of the bull-ring and are meant for miniature toreadors, who were hung in the air by fine gold wires14 over the backs of ivory bulls who stood on the solid ground. The heads of the figures are thrown backwards, a posture suitable for such vaulters, but not for leapers or divers. Minoan art culminated in these statuettes and in certain stucco figures in half relief found also at Knossos. Only a few fragments of these reliefs have survived, most of which were decorative or architectonic in character, though among them were also found human disjecta membra in high relief, such as the fragment of a left forearm holding a horn, and not a pointed vase, as Dr. Evans thought. Here the muscles are well indicated, though the veins are exaggerated.15 This fragment may well be a part of the same bull-grappling scenes as those in the frescoes, as also the life-like image of a bull, the details of whose head, mouth, eyes, and nostrils are full of expression, and whose muscles are perfectly indicated.

When compared with the monuments described, the similarity of details on the design of the Vapheio cups ornamented in repoussé, the “most splendid specimens known of the work of the Minoan goldsmith,”16 never again equalled until the Italian Renaissance, makes it more than possible that here again we have scenes of bull-grappling rather than of bull-hunting. On one cup is represented a quiet pastoral scene—a man tying the legs of a bull with a rope, while two other bulls stand near, amicably licking one another, and a third is quietly grazing. On the other, however, are represented scenes of a very different character. In the centre is a furious bull entangled in a net, which is fastened to a tree; to the left a figure, doubtless a woman, is holding on to a bull’s head, while a man has fallen on his head beside the animal, both man and woman being dressed in the Cretan fashion. A third bull rushes furiously by to the right. Most commentators have seen bull-hunting scenes on both these cups. Thus, on the first cup were represented three scenes in the drama of trapping a bull by means of a tame decoy cow; to the right the bull is starting to go to the rendezvous, while in the center the bull stands by the cow’s side and to the left he is finally trapped and tied.17 On the other cup the furious animal at the left was supposed to have thrown one hunter and to have caught another on its horns. But Mosso’s interpretation of this design seems to be the right one.18 The two persons struggling with the bull have no lasso and so can hardly be hunters; besides, if the bull had impaled a hunter with its horns, the hunter would have been represented with his head up and not down. The figure is, however, uninjured and holds on with its knee bent over one horn and its shoulder against the other; it is merely, therefore, intended for a woman acrobat. The net shown in the centre was never used for hunting wild bulls; more probably it was intended as an obstacle in racing. The fallen man has been standing on the netted bull, which, with the gymnast on its back, was expected to have leaped over the net, but has not succeeded; consequently, the acrobat has been tumbled over the bull’s head.

This ancient Cretan sport seems to have been similar to that known in Thessaly and elsewhere in historical days as τὰ ταυροκαθάψια.19 A survival of it still persists to our day in certain parts of Italy, as, e. g., in the province of Viterbo.20

Acrobatic feats of various sorts were attractive to the later Greeks from the time of Homer down. We have already mentioned one passage from the Iliad in which a driver of four horses leaps from horse to horse in motion. On the shield of Achilles tumblers appeared among the dancers on the dancing-place.21 Patroklos ironically remarks over the body of Kebriones, as the charioteer falls headlong like a diver from his chariot when hit by a missile, that there are tumblers also among the Trojans.22 In later centuries the Athenians evinced a great attraction to acrobatic feats. The story told of Hippokleides23 reveals that high-born Athenians did not disdain to practice them. They appear to have formed a sort of side-show attraction at the Panathenaic festival, as such scenes occur frequently on Attic vases. Thus on an early (imitation?) Panathenaic vase from Kameiros in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris,24 there is represented behind the driver a man standing on the back of a horse, armed with a helmet and two shields, while in front another appears to be balancing himself on a pole.

But such acrobatic scenes as those of Crete and later Greece can not properly be classed as athletic. They betoken more the love of excitement than of true sport. The only form of real athletics represented on Minoan monuments, one which was classed in later Greece as one of the national sports, was that of boxing, which seems to have been the favorite gymnastic contest of the Cretans, as it always was of the later Greeks. Boxing scenes appear on seals,25 on a steatite fragment of a pyxis found in 1901 at Knossos and, in conjunction with a bull-grappling Fig. 1.—So-called Boxer Vase, from Hagia Triada (Cast). Museum of Candia. scene, on the so-called Boxer Vase found by the Italians at Hagia Triada (Fig. 1). The vase is a cone-shaped rhyton of steatite, 18 inches high, originally overlaid with gold foil. It belongs to the best period of Cretan art, late Minoan I.26 This vase alone, if no other monumental evidence were at hand, would suffice to show the physical prowess and love of sport of the Minoans. Because of its scenes of boxing and bull-grappling Mosso calls it “the most complete monument that we have of gymnastic exercise in the Mediterranean civilization.”27 The later Greek tradition of the high degree of physical development attained by the Cretans is proved by this monument.28

The reliefs are arranged in four horizontal zones.29 One of these, the second from the top, represents a bull-grappling scene, showing two racing bulls, upon the head and horns of one of which a gymnast has vaulted (not being tossed and helpless, as most interpreters think).30 The other three represent boxers in all attitudes of the prize-ring, hitting, guarding, falling, and even kicking, as in the later Greek pankration. Some are victorious, the left arm being extended on guard and the right drawn back to strike; one (in the top zone) is ready to spring, just as Hector was ready to spring on Achilles;31 others are prostrate on the ground with their feet in the air. The violence of the action recalls the boast of Epeios in the famous match in the Iliad that he will break his adversary’s bones.32

The method of attack by the right arm and defense by the left is the same as that formerly used by English pugilists. In the topmost zone the combatants wear helmets with visors, cheek-pieces, and horse-hair plumes, and also shoes; in the third zone down the pugilists also wear helmets, though of a different pattern, while the bottom zone shows figures, perhaps youths, with bare heads. Some of the boxers appear to wear boxing-gloves. In the lowest zone we see the well-known feat of swinging the antagonist up by the legs and throwing him—if we may so conclude from the contorted position of the vanquished, whose legs are in the air.

A similar figure appears in relief on the fragment of a pyxis found at Knossos.33 A youth with clenched fists stands with left arm extended as if to ward off a blow, while his right arm is drawn back and rests on his hip; below we see the bent knee of a prostrate figure, evidently that of his vanquished opponent. The boxer has a wasp-like waist and wears a metal girdle. His left leg is well modeled, the muscles not being exaggerated.