Inscribed Classical Victory Offerings at Olympia in the longue durée

Abstract

Past as PresentVictory monuments -a category of offerings well represented in Olympia -take as their primary function the task of thanking the divinity for granting victory.At the same time, they also serve a commemorative and representative function, since they help to perpetuate the memory of the battle won and the glory of the victorious polis.The first function addresses the sanctuary's divinity, the second the sanctuary's public -visitors and official representatives of the Greek poleis who gather in Olympia every four years on occasion of the great festival.Just like the other great panhellenic sanctuaries, Olympia thus provided an ideal stage for the dedicating poleis to present their military glory in front of the whole Greek world.By way of example, Pau sa nias' description of the sanctuary, in which Classical victory offerings feature prominently, shows eloquently that victory offerings could be very successful in fulfilling this commemorative function.1They may prompt visitors of the sanctuary to remember and recount the glory of the victorious cities even many centuries later.Scholarship of the last decades has given a lot of attention to this memorial aspect of victory offerings.2Indeed, Olympia is a Greek lieu de mémoire3 par excellence, and 1 See Schröder 2020, 301, with similar conclusions.2 This is particularly true for offerings from the Persian wars, which have been intensively studied at least since Gauer 1968.The simple act of grouping together the offerings referring to specific wars (and not e.g.offerings of the same date, produced by one particular artist, standing in one particular sanctuary), as was carried out in Gauer's study, already implies a shift towards the memorial aspect of such offerings.This memorial aspect has since been carved out more and more clearly.Among the recent publications, see especially T. Hölscher's general book on art and war in Greece and Rome, drawing on his long and deep engagement with Graeco-Roman art in its relation to especially military history (see especially Hölscher 1973 [on Greek Historienbilder], 1980a [on Roman Republican art and its specific Geschichtsauffassung] and 2014), and discussing (among many others) the same monuments explicitly in terms of commemoration: Hölscher 2019, 83-164: "Krieg und Identität im klassischen Griechenland: Denkmäler und mythisches Gedächtnis als Waffen".See recently also Schröder 2020, 137-154 (from the perspective of ancient history); Duffy 2018 (in general); Monaco 2014 (the case of Athens).On war memorials from Antiquity to the present, see Borg 1991.A habilitation thesis on Archaic and Classical victory monuments is currently been prepared by B. Bergmann (Regensburg).For a project outline, see https://www.uni-regensburg.de/philosophie-kunst-geschichte-gesellschaft/klassische-archaeologie/forschung/abschlussarbeiten/ habil-feier-des-sieges/index.html[accessed 07.07.2020]).See also Bergmann 2019.3 On the concept of lieu de mémoire, see Nora 1984-92.On Greek lieux de mémoire in general, see This publication originated in the Collaborative Research Centre 933 "Material Text Cultures.Materiality and Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies" (subproject A10 "Text and Image in Greek Sculpture: A Case-Study on Athens and Olympia From Archaic to Imperial Age").The CRC 933 is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).6 On the materiality of statue inscriptions of the Archaic and early Classical age, see Dietrich/Fouquet/Reinhardt 2020.As it has been pointed out by H. Whittaker, (what I would call) the materiality of inscriptions (and not only their informational content) already mattered for Pau sa nias: Whittaker 1991, 171-172.7 On Pau sa nias' (from the perspective of modern art-history, disturbingly different) way of describing artworks, see e.g.Pretzler 2007, 105-117.For a very short characterization of Pau sa nias' way of describing artworks, see Kreillinger 1997, 475-477.8 As pointed out in Tzifopoulos 2013, 149, the Periegesis integrates more inscriptions (transcribed literally or only mentioned) than any other Ancient literary text known to us.Within the Periegesis, by far the greatest number of literally quoted inscriptions are found in the description of Olympia (according to Chamoux 2001, 33 out of 41 inscription quotations are found in book V and VI [=Elis I and II]).On inscriptions in Pau sa nias see Habicht 1984 and 1985, 64-92;Whittaker 1991;Bearzot 1995;Chamoux 2001;Modenesi 2001;Zizza 2006 (with commentaries on all inscriptions directly cited in the Periegesis); Hartmann 2010, 477.481-482; Tzifopoulos 2013.Concerning the inscriptions at Olympia specifically, see: Gallavotti 1978aGallavotti , 1978bGallavotti and 1979;; Tzifopoulos 1991.9 Pau s. 5, 10, 4. 10 Dittenberger/Purgold 1896, 370-374 no.253.On the victory offering, see also Clairmont 1982; Wolters 1928; Scott 2010, 192-193.15 Note e.g. the long row of Hellenistic votive monuments in front of the Echo Hall, which are just as prominent in the archaeological record as those Classical monuments standing in front of the temple (on these monuments, see Leypold 2014a), but completely missing in Pau sa nias' account.On Pau sanias' general disinterest in Hellenistic art, see Kreilinger 1997, 483-487.16 On Pau sa nias' mention of Imperial age objects in the temple of Zeus and its status as lieu de mémoire, see Gangloff 2013b, 12-14.17 As a matter of fact, Pau sa nias' lack of interest in the coherence of time and his immediate juxtaposition of events from different eras are what previous scholars have rightly noticed.See e.g.Bowie 1996, 213-216;Sidebottom 2002.Pau sa nias' preference for the coherence of space over the coherence of time may also be put in the following way: he uses the things seen in that space (votive offerings, details of the architecture, inscriptions) to trigger those most varied stories which the Periegesis is made of (see Tzifopoulos 2013).Pau sa nias' method of allowing things disposed in space to structure and lead the author through his account of Greece may in turn be paralleled with Roman mnemonics, namely with the much discussed technique suggested e.g. in Quintilian, Training of the Orator 11, 2, 18-20 (see the comments in Elsner/ Squire 2016, 181-190).Quintilian advises the orator who is willing to memorize his speech to place signa in an imaginary space through which the orator should walk in his mind, while making these signa jog his memory of the different components of his speech and put them in the right order.In the case of Pau sa nias at Olympia, those signa and the space in which they are disposed would be 'real', even though from the perspective of his readers, the experience of Olympia afforded by Pau sa nias' text remains an 'imaginary' one.On Pau sa nias' account of Greece and Roman mnemonics, see Konstan 2014.However, the coherence of space is not the only structuring principle in Pau sa nias' account of Olympia.Indeed, whereas within the lengthy description of the temple of Zeus, things close to one another in space are also juxtaposed in his text even when heterogeneous in kind, the same is not true to the description of Olympia as a whole.Indeed, as J. Elsner has shown (Elsner 2001, 10-11), the described things are structured in thematic sections within his text: the temple of Zeus (5, 10, 1 -5, 12, 8), the 69 altars in the Altis (5, 13, 1 -5, 15, 12), the temple of Hera (5, 16, 1 -5, 20, 5), the statues of Zeus (5, 21, 2 -5, 25, 1), the votive offerings that do not represent either victorious athletes (5, 25, 2 -5, 27, 12) or the victor statues (6, 1, 3 -6, 18, 7), etc.Therefore, things juxtaposed in space (e.g. a statue of Zeus standing next to a victor statue) might well be mentioned apart from each other in Pau sanias' text or again translated into the logic of moving through space: "The pilgrimage round the Altis is

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.