MANTO x Pausanias

written by Anika Campell

I was lucky to spend the semester two recess working with Greta Hawes as a PACE intern on the incredible MANTO project. I was the only intern on this project, and getting to work this closely with Greta and Pausanias was such a rewarding experience, I’m honoured to be one of the contributors to such an amazing database. We spent two weeks combing through Pausanias’s Periegesis, the unofficial tour-guide to Ancient Greece, trying to align his descriptions of artworks with preexisting identifiers.

Marble relief sculpture of reclining Dionysos, from Parthenon east pediment, ca. 447–433 BC. British Museum, inv. 1816,0610.93. This is part of one of the few artefacts described by Pausanias (1.24.5) that is still surviving. I had the pleasure of cataloguing it as part of this project. 
Image: Wikimedia Commons

MANTO had already added all the times Pausanias mentions the mythological world - whether it be a wall painting of the Dioscoroi, or where Heracles was claimed as an ancestor - and added that as a tie into the database. My job was to find every time Pausanias described an artefact — a statue, a wall painting, or a relief — and match these descriptions with LIMC and iDAI database identifiers to add each of these artefacts into the MANTO database and the ties already in place. I was also working from an amazing spreadsheet made by Brady Kiesling of the Digital Periegesis that matched Pausanias’s descriptions with iDAI and wikidata links. I also added any museum numbers and identifiers if these artefacts had survived and were stored in museums. The result, after sifting through the enormous volumes of LIMC catalogues and cursing the gods for the lack of a digital database of so many museums and several iced coffees, is a little over 100 new artefacts made in the MANTO database. All are linked to Pausanias’s ties so that we can access, identify, and find them in other databases.

[editor’s note: Anika’s careful and tireless work of collecting the artefacts described by Pausanias is not yet visible in the public interface, but will become accessible in the next few months as part of further development of MANTO]

Macquarie PACE internship, day four. Image: Anika Campbell

From a mythological standpoint, I only included artefacts that tell a story or add something to our mythic knowledge. So, if Pausanias is only describing a statue of Apollo standing there looking pretty, it doesn’t add anything to the database (and, frankly, Apollo doesn’t need another boost to his ego). But if Pausanias describes a statue of Amphitrite and Poseidon together, that is worth including since it represents their marriage.

Reading through Pausanias this way was like taking a guided museum tour of what the Romans thought most interesting about Ancient Greece. Working through his writings, city by city, temple by temple, revealed the sheer complexity of mythological depictions and the sites they were displayed on. One intriguing thing that stood out to me was how many times a god or hero popped up in a place where you wouldn’t expect them to be. The Throne of Apollo in Amyclai has reliefs of Artemis, Achilles, various gods and labours of Herakles, and then Theseus fighting and capturing the bull of Minos. An Athenian hero? On a statue of Apollo in the Tomb of Hyacinthos? In Laconia? Seems odd that a relief of Theseus would show up in Laconia, of all places. Or a bronze relief of Amphitrite and Poseidon in the Temple of Athena Poliouchos. Why would Poseidon and his wife be displayed in Athena’s temple? Certainly not to depict the contest for Athens, since the temple is in Sparta. Perhaps these myths were less locally locked than we thought, and they were treated more as artistic motifs. Or perhaps these depictions were ways for myths to travel out of otherwise local traditions and into the mythological ‘canon’ (if there even is such a thing) of Ancient Greece.