How the Greco-Persian Wars changed the way Athenians drank their wine | Curator's Corner S8 Ep4

Hello, my name is Jamie Fraser. I'm curator for the ancient Levant and Anatolia here at the British Museum. And welcome to my corner. Although my day job is curator for the ancient Levant and Anatolia, what I'm working on at the moment is an exhibition called Luxury and Power, Persia to Greece. And I'm really excited that this exhibition is being hosted here at the British Museum, because what it allows us to do is to take a concept, in this case, the concept of luxury, and how that enmeshes with concepts of power and expressions of power, and look at that concept as it spreads across cultures and across communities and across time throughout the whole Middle East and Southeast Europe. And we're really looking at two cultural groups. On the one hand, we've got Achaemenid Persia. This is ancient Persia ruled by a dynasty of kings called the Achaemenid Kings. And on the other, we've got Greece. And particularly Athens in the 5th and 4th century BC. Now, we know a lot about this period because these two groups were at war, known as the Greek-Persian Wars, which ran for about 50 years in the first half of the 5th century BC. And a lot of what we know about this, we know because we're looking at it through the eyes of ancient Greek writers. And that means our historical sources have inherently built into them some sort of bias, because the ancient Greek writers, of course, are writing about the Persians, who are their kind of self-declared nemesis. When we're looking at a concept like luxury, what we're able to do is go beyond these historical tropes and look at the way objects are enmeshed within these various societies, and looking at how these entities exist on a different level beyond what our historians tell us. We're getting new eyes into looking at these ancient cultures. And the role of luxury is central to this. And I'm going to explain how this overlaps with concepts of power and concepts of political offices by comparing, contrasting two of my favourite objects that are in this exhibition. One here on my left, which is made in Achaemenid period Iran, ancient Iran, and the other one, which is made in 5th century Athens in Greece. Both of them are very similar, and both of them are very different. So if we take the first one, this is an object of supreme luxury. What it is is a rhyton, and a rhyton is a wine pourer. It comes from a Greek word, rhytos, meaning to flow. And it's because it's a vessel through which wine would flow out. Now, this is an object of supreme luxury on many different levels. And the first one is its materials. Well, it's made of silver with gold sheet applied to the outside. And you can see from the silver horn and then fixed on the front, an animal-shaped attachment called a protome. And this has been cast in the shape of a griffin and then fixed on the front. The griffin is a sort of fantastical, mythological creature that's kind of half lion, half eagle. You can see the lion's claws stretched out with the beak and the head of an eagle. This has also been given the horns coming across the top. What you're seeing is remarkable details, incredibly rendered feathers, the detail of the horns with the golden tips. And there would have been inlaid a precious gem or a jewel or perhaps even glass in a pendant hanging around the griffin's torso. And we're only seeing kind of half of it because there's a groove running along the back of the griffin into which gold, probably gold sheet or foil, would have been wedged as a mane across the griffin's back, which would have perhaps moved or at least caught the light in a really dynamic kind of way. So it's a luxury because of its materials, a luxury because of its artisanship. But it's a luxury for more than that. It's a luxury for the way it's used as well. So we've come into the basement of the British Museum to try to give you a reenactment of being at one of these feasts. We have a write-on here. It's got the Ibex head of a famous version in New York. This is a replica. I'm going to demonstrate to you with the finest bowl that we could get from the British Museum staff canteen exactly how this would have gone about. Now, you have to imagine that we're in a tent or a sort of a marquee associated with the Persian king, a moment of absolute critical kind of social prestige with all the aristocrats and the dignitaries gathered around. And the king would be reclining on his couch. So you have to imagine my splendid Hugh Jackman physique draped on a reclining couch for reclining dining. And the king would summon in his most virile, most manly, youngest strapping servant. Inward bound the servant, who would then fill the write-on while the king had his thumb over the spout to stop it. And then holding the bowl balanced on three fingers, the king would unstop the write-on and let the wine flow. I think you have to imagine the torchlight flickering off the gold, flickering off the silver, flickering off the wine itself. The king no doubt demonstrating his ability to drink with such skill far more dexterously than I've just done here. And I think when you look at that, I always think of a line by Coco Chanel, the French fashion designer. She said that luxury begins where necessity ends. And if you need a vessel to pour wine, this is far eclipsed necessity. This is something that is celebrating your authority to command the finest resources and to reach for the best craftsmen across your empire as the Persian king could. The king bestows prestige upon an object like this because he is using it. And so there's that wonderful duality, this relationship between the user and luxury where they're both receiving and bestowing prestige upon the other. So this is a wonderful example of luxury in an empire where the king held absolute authority, which brings us to our second object, which looks very, very different. Now this was made in Greece, probably in Athens, sometime between about 500 to 470 BC. Those who know your classical Greek history know that of course the Persian kings pushed into the Greek islands and then the Greek mainland itself to try to take Greece as part of the empire. And this is what we know as the Greek-Persian Wars. This is a conflict that happened over the course of about 50 years with sort of short, sharp, punctated flares of violence. Greece at the time has recently developed a political system that later writers would call a democracy, demos, people, kratos, power, people power. Part of being a good democratic citizen in Athens was to celebrate the discipline and the self-restraint and your civic mindedness in comparison to the threat from the East, the supposedly despotic, decadent, totalitarian East which threatened the freedom of the Athenian peoples. Luxury, particularly in its Eastern forms, is seen as dangerous, something that calls back to pre-democratic times in Greece and something that could betray your sympathies to the Persian East. But luxury is sticky. I think people, wherever we are, whenever we are, have always sought ways to gain a sort of social edge, to celebrate social prestige and social standing. So imagine, for example, that you were a soldier who was fighting against the Persian forces at the Battle of Plataea. This is a land battle, we're talking 479 BC. And Herodotus describes to us the moment that the Greek forces captured the command tent of the Persian leader, which ultimately was the command tent of the Persian king. It's the closest thing that you could do to capturing a palace. And Herodotus, with a narrator's true flair, recounts the astonishment, the amazement of these humble Greek soldiers, seeing the sumptuousness of a military tent covered in remarkable textiles with silver and gold drinking vessels, golden jewellery. The audacity to people to campaign with such luxury astonished the Greeks. And yet, all that booty that was captured during the Greek-Persian wars comes back into places like Athens. So you have here a society which, on the one hand, is deeply suspicious of the ostentatiousness of Eastern luxury, such as this right on here. Yet, on the other, has taken into its society remarkable objects of astonishing luxury on a scale that it hasn't ever really seen before, and it causes a sort of practical and philosophical problem. How do you deal with this stuff? At a practical level, the way you deal with it is to make something that's private and ostentatious public. It goes into public repositories, temple repositories, really, for the glory of the gods, for the collective wealth of the city. But it has that gravity. It's affected the relationship between Athenians and what they consider luxury and how they consider it to operate. And that's where this object comes in. Certain experimental potters working in the Kerameikos, the ceramic-making district of ancient Athens, respond to these Eastern forms of drinking vessels, these kind of gold and gilt-silver vessels, but they turn them into something different that is acceptable in Athenian society, that doesn't threaten the political order, that, in fact, reconfirms the political order, and yet is something new, something innovative, and something of a novelty. And you see that in animal-headed drinking cups. And if you look at this one, you can see that this is a red-figure cup that's made sometime between 500 and 470 BC, and it is the head of a bird. And these animal-headed drinking cups really have their genesis in the animal-headed rhytoms from the East. But rather than making it a rhytom, although some potters experiment with rhytoms early on, it doesn't really catch on. So they give it a handle and they turn it into a cup so that the vessel can be drunk from as you would normally do. But it affirms being Greek in a couple of ways. The first one is that rather than being made for show, these are made for drinking at events called symposium. So this is where Athenian citizens, men, come together to drink and to feast in somebody's house or in perhaps a specialized building or residence reserved for the symposium. An emcee or a master of ceremonies is elected at the beginning of the night by those who are participating. Couches are arranged along the sides of the room so that no one is preeminent more than the other. So the concept of a rhyton where the king is holding it, showing off his ability to command these resources in front of everybody else, this is anathema. This is completely opposite to the way a symposium operates, which is all about celebrating the equality of the participants who were there. And this drinking mug, rather than demarking one individual as preeminent among the others, is really part of that communal feast, affirming an identity within a city-state at the same time. But what I love about this mug, what I love about a lot of these mugs, is that these potters have taken the idea of something from the East and they're playing around with it. They're turning it into something that's quite imaginative and that's quite transformative. On the one hand, if you pick this mug up and you bring it to your face to drink, in a way, you turn yourself into the animal that they represent. And in this case, in the middle of that dining party, brought up in front of everyone is the face of a bird, probably a bird of prey. You can see the hooked beak, the angry raised ridges above the eyes, delicately rendered, and the feathers all coming down his head and its neck. Probably an eagle, possibly a vulture or a falcon. And that face of the bird becomes the face of the drinker as they get further and further, merrily along the way of the symposium evening, blurring perhaps the line between what makes us people and what makes us animals, the deeper into the wine crater you go. But there's something else going on here as well, because the end of the evening, when the vessel is sat down on its flat base like this, the whole vessel transforms. And instead of being the head of a bird, it looks like a bird that's now perching on a roost. The beak becomes the hooded head, the eyebrows and the eye ridges become the wings, the shoulders of the wings, the feathers around the head become the feathers of the body. And can you see these delicate lines right around the base of the vessel? They almost serve as the long tail feathers for the bird itself. This is a vessel that's dynamic, that's animated, that changes upon the ways you use, changes upon the perspective that you have. It owes its genesis to the objects of supreme luxury of the Achaemenid court, refracted into the democratic symposium of 5th century Athens, and heavily burnished on the imagination of certain Greek potters working in the 5th century BC. Something that's completely different to what you get in Achaemenid Persia, but something that owes its genesis to that moment. And I find that the relationship between these two objects is an awful lot about a relationship between two cultures. That our history can say how they were at war, how they were enemies, how they rejected any sort of cultural influence from the other. And yet when we look at the objects they leave behind, and when we twist them around, slightly blur our eyes and look at them in slightly different ways, suddenly these different disparate ancient worlds become inherently connected, entwined and twisted where you can't understand one object from one culture without understanding the object or an object from another. And I think that's why museums like the British Museum are really important because we're able to take these sorts of objects and pull back and look at them across a larger landscape, across space and time to try and get these different sort of perspectives. And that's what we're trying to do in this exhibition, Luxury and Power, Persia de Grace. I hope to see you there.