A beautifully carved marble votive relief of Asklepios, the god of medicine, leaning on his staff welcomes us as we enter The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander at the National Geographic Museum. The noble procession of the god and his children confronting a group of worshippers echoes, on a small scale, the sculptures of the Parthenon frieze. This remarkable object is but 1 of some 550 pieces sent from the collections of 21 Greek museums, from Athens to Vergina, making this exhibition the most comprehensive in a generation. Washington is the final stop of its two-year tour of North America, so visiting the National Geographic this summer is not only your last chance to see this show but the next best thing to a trip to Greece.
After the classical orektika, we are thrust back thousands of years into a Bronze Age gallery, looking at an object shaped like a frying pan (and so dubbed by archaeologists) that depicts a longboat being rowed across the waves. The image deftly suggests the rich and transformative exchange of goods and ideas that occurred between the Cyclades islands and mainland Greece, Crete, and Asia Minor. Nearby, our eyes cannot help but lock onto those tall, thin, highly abstract female figurines with folded arms that are among the most iconic of all works of Greek prehistory. Their uncanny simplicity inspired the radical modernist experiments of Picasso, Brancusi, and Modigliani.
Moving ahead we find ourselves face-to-face with the astonishing discoveries of the 19th-century German businessman-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who after excavating the ancient ruins of Troy made an even more spectacular find in Mycenae in southern Greece: a series of royal tombs filled with fabulous treasure including several gold funeral masks.
Schliemann jumped to the conclusion that he had found the tomb of the legendary Agamemnon, the ill-fated king immortalized in the Iliad who led the Greeks against Troy only to be murdered by his wife on his return home. We know now that the artifacts are much older than the supposed date of the Trojan War; yet so great is the hold Homer’s stories exerted on the Western imagination that this tomb and its treasure is forever branded as “belonging to Agamemnon.” Of the two funeral masks on display, the moon-shaped one is a Mycenaean original; the second, the widely reproduced “handsome bearded” man, is a copy, though a historic one.
Throughout the exhibition, the panoply of weaponry and body armor from different centuries reminds us that war was a constant preoccupation of all ancient people, and none more so than the Greeks. There is a wild boar tusk helmet, one that is strikingly similar to what Homer describes Odysseus wearing in the Iliad. One gallery is filled with archaic bronze and gold helmets stuck on poles. Their powerful design enhanced by dramatic lighting achieves an unnerving effect, like being dropped into an ancient prequel to Game of Thrones.
Spiritedness, courage, and sacrifice are on display in almost every room, along with boldness, wit, and resourcefulness. Three moments in the life of Achilles are depicted on funerary vases: his education at the foot of the centaur Chiron; his rage against the corpse of Hector for the killing of Patroclus; and finally, mighty Ajax bearing Achilles’ lifeless body on his shoulders. On a krater fragment there is one of the best of all depictions of wily Odysseus putting out the eye of the Cyclops, Polyphemus. As is often the case in an exhibition of this size, the smallest item may pack the biggest punch, so don’t miss the small bronze plaque that depicts Odysseus strapped to the underbelly of a ram as he makes his escape from the giant.
Entering the second part of the exhibition we encounter the Greek love of the beautiful in its most palpable form: a hall of archaic marble statues of naked young men and modestly garbed young women. The former, radiating muscular manliness and superabundant good health, embody the ideals of the aristocracy and served as role models for the viewer. At the end of this hallway, we come upon the bust of a bearded hoplite, one of those rare statues found on the Spartan acropolis and long associated with Leonidas, the valiant Spartan king who died with his men at Thermopylae defending Greece from the onslaught of the Persian Empire.
With the victory of the Greeks against the Persians, the exhibition’s focus shifts to the flourishing of Athens. Over the course of the fifth century b.c., the city becomes the home of democracy, drama, comedy, medicine, and philosophy. A sculpture of a young man might depict an athlete taking off his olive wreath and preparing to dedicate it to a god or goddess, or it might be a metaphor of democracy itself. The kleroterion, which allowed for the random selection of jurors and other officials, reminds us that the democratic mode of selection is by lot. The name of the renowned statesman Themistocles, appearing on a clay shard used in his ostracism vote, tells us that even great figures could be victims of the democratic will.
Amid the exhibition’s celebration of Athenian achievements, however, there is an astonishing hole in the story. In the half-century after the Persian Wars, Athens converted its defensive alliance into an empire using the tribute from allies to beautify Athens. Without that tribute there would be no Parthenon on the Acropolis; but without that empire, there would have been no war between Athens and Sparta. Yet Pericles, the empire, and the 30-year war that the democracy fought and lost are not mentioned here.
But just in time, the two masters of Greek thought make their appearance (though in Roman copies of the original Greek busts) as philosophers of the polis. Listening to Plato’s Socrates propounding the idea of the philosopher-king, or Aristotle asserting the political nature of human beings, will give visitors some sense of their profound interventions in the life of mankind.
The rise of political philosophy comes, historically, in the twilight-of-the-polis period, the fourth century b.c. The orator Demosthenes warns the Athenians to defend their liberty against a growing menace in the north. This allows for an elegant segue into the galleries devoted to the rise to power and wealth of Philip of Macedon and his extraordinary son, Alexander. From the royal tombs of Vergina we see breathtaking myrtle wreaths and crowns of gold. Digital restorations of the tomb paintings allow us to peek at some of the most exciting artistic discoveries of 20th-century archaeology. Our last image is of Alexander as the official court sculptor Lysippus portrayed him: beardless, lion-maned, dramatically turning his neck with an upward aspiring glance, eternally scanning the horizon for new worlds to conquer.
Joseph R. Phelan is a writer in Washington.
