MANTO x DAD

written by Greta Hawes

It’s teaching recess here at Macquarie University, which means it’s time to assemble another crack team of PACE interns and set to work!

This semester, we are delving into the extraordinary corpus of shieldbands recovered from Olympia.

I was barely aware of the existence of these objects until longtime MANTO collaborator Rosemary Selth wrote to me asking whether I’d seen the Gdańsk Decorated Armour Database (DAD). A few clicks, and I was hooked.

More than 200 shieldbands — or fragments of shieldbands — have been excavated at Olympia. These are bronze (sometimes silver plated) strips that provided a decorative front to the central band (porpax) that secured the shield at the hoplite’s elbow. The most likely scenario is that hoplite shields were dedicated as offerings at the sanctuary, and then periodically cleared away when too many had accumulated. Many were recovered from the fill used to build up the embankment around the stadium.

Detail of exterior of Attic red-figure kylix from Capua, now in the Louvre (G 115) ca. 490–480 BCE. Paris is pursued by Menelaos who is depicted with the inside of his shield visible showing how it attaches to his arm. The shieldband runs vertically through the middle of the shield and over his elbow.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Most importantly for us, these bands are frequently decorated with scenes from myth. Each band consists of a sequence of small images (called metopes). These images are pressed into the bronze using dies, and so the same scenes and sequences reappear time and again. This production process goes to the heart of what is so fascinating about these objects. On the one hand we have a kind of mass-production of such objects happening (probably) in the Argolid. On the other, we should imagine the intimate experience of engaging with these scenes: the primary viewer must have been the hoplite himself while he was armed with the shield. What kinds of messages did he read into them? Certainly some promote heroic strength — Heracles’ labours are common — and others suggest a valid kind of martial violence, as when Orestes is shown killing Aigisthos, who has usurped his father’s throne. But all is not glory; amongst them we find also the traumas of war. There is a particularly confronting depiction of Aias’ rape of Cassandra, which occurs when the Greeks finally take Troy. And the realities of battlefield deaths are there too, in scenes of Aias carrying Achilles’ corpse, and Priam recovering that of his son Hector.

Our main task in this internship is to align the data from DAD that Cezary Kucewicz has created with information held in LIMC and Digital LIMC, to compare both to the relevant volumes of Olympische Forschungen in which they were originally published and which have better images, and to identify the mythic scenes and add them to MANTO. This data will start to appear on the public interface this week, with blogs from the PACE interns that describe some specific aspects of their work.

Thanks go to the PACE interns on this project — Maxim Angelos, Chris Hitchens, Archie Mercer, Victor Russo, Ruby Woodbury —, to Anika Campbell for supporting their work, and to Yvonne Inall and the team at the Macquarie University History Museum for hosting us.

Thanks also to Cezary Kucewicz for providing data from the Gdańsk Decorated Armour Database, and to Rita Gautschy for providing data from Digital LIMC.