Mary Beard is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS. Her books include a Life of Jane Ellen Harrison and The Parthenon.
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Vol. 22 No. 23 · 30 November 2000
pages 26-27 | 3305 words
Builder of Ruins
Mary Beard
- Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth by J.A. MacGillivray
Cape, 313 pp, £20.00, August 2000, ISBN 0 224 04352 8
Evelyn Waugh was characteristically unimpressed by the remains of the prehistoric Minoan palace at Knossos and its famous decoration. His 1930 travelogue, Labels, contains a memorable account of his disappointment, not so much at the excavation site itself (‘where,’ he writes archly, ‘Sir Arthur Evans . . . is rebuilding the palace’) but at its collection of prize paintings and sculpture, which had been removed to the museum in Heraklion. In the sculpture, he ‘saw nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all’. The frescoes were much more difficult to judge, ‘since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last twenty years, and it is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstructions with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue’.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 24 · 14 December 2000
From Charles Plouviez
In her review of J.A. MacGillvray's book on Arthur Evans (LRB, 30 November), Mary Beard's excursus into the way prehistoric archaeologists debate the moral failings of their predecessors was slightly marred by her own sneer at Schliemann. 'Who cares very much, after all,' she asks, 'whether he did, or did not, gaze upon the face of Agamemnon?' referring to the familiar story that Schliemann sent a telegram from Mycenae to the King of Greece, claiming to have done just that. He did not. The whole story is best told by Leslie Fitton in her 1995 book, The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age. She says that 'the nearest equivalent ' and it is nothing like so dramatic or romantic ' seems to be his comment in a telegram to the Greek press: "The corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon."' Of course, without his belief in Homer's historical value, Schliemann wouldn't have uncovered the shaft graves at all.
Charles Plouviez
London NW3
Vol. 23 No. 1 · 4 January 2001
From Parina Douzina Stiakaki
I cannot agree with Mary Beard (LRB, 30 November 2000) that most visitors do not realise that 'those distinctively primitive, stumpy red columns, which are the trademark of the site of Knossos, are built wholly of modern concrete and are part of the "rebuilding" by Evans.' This is in fact painfully obvious (especially to those who have also visited the site of Zakros, whose ruins have not been reconstructed in such a horrible way). However, Evans was at least trying to reconstruct the palace and not vandalise it and take it home with him. He was forgiven everything by the Cretans when it was learnt that he died of a heart attack at the news that the Germans were bombing Crete.
As to R.G. Collingwood's comment that a visitor would think Knossian architecture consisted of 'public lavatories', I don't think this is a slur at all. In the late 1950s, my father, who was bored by museums and ancient sites, was told to take a group of Belgians around the ruins as a bit of PR since they were thinking about opening a shipyard on Crete – my father, an engineer, was in charge of the project. He ended up having to be dragged away from the palace. What so impressed him? Neither Evans's concrete columns nor the 'Prince of the Lilies', but the sewage system. He thought this was the most fantastic thing he had ever seen and wanted to inspect every aspect of this impressive feat of hydraulic engineering.
Parina Douzina Stiakaki
Athens
