Pausanias and Modern Perceptions of Primordial Greeks - Classical Receptions Journal 2010

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Pausanias and modern perceptions ofprimordial Greeks

Milette Gaifman*

The history of the selection and extraction of Pausanias 7.22.4 — a passage about

thirty square stones in the city of Pharae in Achaea — has proved one of the most

significant matrices for the discussion of the primitive in both art and religion in

Greece. From Winckelmann, via a great German tradition, to Tylor and Frazer in

Britain, this piece explores the development of arguments about and interpretationsof this text from the eighteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century.

In book seven of the Periegesis we read the following:1

Close to the image stand about thirty square stones: these the people of Pharae revere, giving

to each stone the name of a god. In the olden time all the Greeks worshipped unwrought

stones instead of images (agalmata).

3st–kasi d1 2gg0tata toA 2g0lmato” tetr0gwnoi l0qoi tri0konta m0lista

2riqm0n� to0tou” sŒbousin o3 Fare8”, 3k0stN qeoA tin1” 5noma 2pilŒgonte”. t1

d1 7ti palai0tera ka1 to8” p8sin E2 llhsi tim1” qe8n 2nt1 2galm0twn e9con 2rgo1

l0qoi.

In modern scholarship, Pausanias’ Periegesis 7.22.4 is probably the most frequently

cited passage from ancient literature on Greek litholatry.2 Its appeal can be ex-

plained not only in the first-hand portrayal of the people of Pharae engaging in

stone worship in the second century AD, but also in the broader assertion, which

offers an entry into the inaccessible recesses of the past; in the depths of antiquity,

throughout Hellas, all Greeks alike, venerated rough rocks in place of images.

In this article I examine modern readings of this account, beginning with Johann

Joachim Winckelmann and ending with Sir James George Frazer. The exploration

of a broad range of receptions of one detail from the text, rather than the Periegesis as

a whole, reveals not only the vast scope of Pausanias’ readership and his work’s place

within a range of different scholarly discourses, but also some of the major twists

and turns in modern historiography of the subjects on which this particular

*Classics and Art History Departments, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

milette.gaifman@yale.edu

1 Pausanias 7.22.4. Translation adapted from Frazer (1898: 1.361–2).

2 See for example in addition to the literature discussed below, Hiller von Gaertringen

et al. (1899–1902: 3.64); Burkert (1985: 85); Nilsson (1974: 206); Freedberg (1989: 66);

Steiner (2001: 82); Donohue (2005: 56).

Classical Receptions Journal Vol 2. Iss. 2 (2010) pp. 254–286

by guest on October 29, 2010

crj.oxfordjournals.orgD

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passage reflects. The variety of inferences made from the same passage by German

and Anglo-Saxon scholars from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early

decades of the twentieth, encapsulates a twofold story concerning the Periegesis as an

ancient text, on the one hand, and modern perceptions of the earliest history of

Greek religious art, on the other. From the perspective of Pausanias’ work, this

range of interpretations reveals the degree to which the periegete’s descriptions not

only invite the reading of selected fragments, but also facilitate the excerption of

certain sections, and their subsequent incorporation into entirely different, some-

times contradictory, contexts and arguments. This process of de-contextualization

and re-contextualization is helped by Pausanias’ self-construction as a mere pre-

senter of monuments and ideas, who offers relatively little personal opinion on his

dryly painted picture of Greece. In the account of litholatry in Pharae, Pausanias’

manner allows for the excerpted statement to be deployed as support for a variety of

theories that are often incompatible with each other. By quietly shifting from veri-

fiable specifics regarding the city of Pharae in the second century AD and its thirty

quadrangular stones to vague generalizations concerning the entirety of Greece at an

unspecified point in the past, when unknown numbers of rocks of unmentioned

form were venerated, Pausanias has set a stage for the free usage of the concrete and

the notional as the bases for very different modern reconstructions of Greek

antiquity.

From the perspective of modernity, the texts discussed here, which vary greatly

yet rely on the same ancient passage, reveal Pausanias’ crucial place in modern

reconstructions of the earliest stages of Greek art and religion. The path paved by

these works, from Winckelmann’s grand opus of 1764,3 to Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the

Old Testament of 1918,4 captures some of the trends in the historiography of

Classical Studies in German and British circles of this period.5 In this context,

the stones of Pharae, which in Pausanias’ original text stood right next to an

image, a semi-figural herm,6 and were integral to the religious and visual landscape

of second-century AD Greece, have acquired the role of key witnesses of the earliest

phases of Greek culture. Whereas in Periegesis 7.22.4 the structuring of the passage,

specifically the generalizing comment regarding greater antiquity, merely suggests

that the square blocks of Pausanias’ times resemble the practices of the past, these

nuances have been obliterated through the rhetorical strategy of excerption and

quotation in most accounts. In contrast to Pausanias’ distinctions between Greece

under Roman rule and imagined primordiality, modern readings have mostly rele-

gated the square stones to the depths of antiquity, the age of rough rocks. They have

been seen as symptomatic of the earliest phases of Greek art and culture and as

fundamentally marginal to the great achievement of Greek art.

3 Winckelmann (1764).

4 Frazer (1918).

5 Vick (2002); Williamson (2004).

6 This is described in the previous sentence of the same section, Periegesis 7.22.3.

P A U S A N I A S A N D M O D E R N P E R C E P T I O N S O F P R I M O R D I A L G R E E K S

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Whereas this view remained essentially constant, from Winckelmann’s continen-

tal Enlightenment to Frazer’s Late Victorian Britain, the position of Pharae’s blocks

in the perceptions of Greek religious art specifically shifted profoundly. If for

Winckelmann and for early-nineteenth-century Classicists stone worship was inte-

gral to the origins of the grand Kunstgeschichte of the Greeks, in the course of the

nineteenth century Greek litholatry effectively lost much of its place in German and

Anglo-Saxon histories of Hellenic art and visual culture. At the time when the field

of anthropology and the notion of aniconism acquired their modern meanings, the

venerated stones came to be examined primarily through an anthropological rather

than an art-historical lens. Whereas in the late eighteenth century and early nine-

teenth century these stones were seen as the seeds of Greek art, by the early twen-

tieth century they came to exemplify fetishism, the lowest stratum in Greek religious

experience and behaviour.

The Stones of Pausanias’ Pharae: from the Seeds of Greek Art to Aniconic Symbols

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) was the father of the modern discipline of

the history of art and the greatest promoter of modern philhellenism.7 In his grand

opus, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, first published in 1764,8 the stones of

Pharae feature in the first chapter.9 After his brief overview of the arts of the Orient,

Winckelmann states:10

Among the Greeks, art began much later than in the Eastern lands but with the same

simplicity, such that the Greeks appear, as they themselves report, not to have gathered

the first seeds for their art from another people but rather to have been its original inventors.

For they already visibly honoured thirty deities before they gave them human form; they

were content to represent them by a rough block or a rectangular stone, as the Arabs and the

Amazons did.11

7 See, for example, Marchand (1996: 7–13); Potts (2000, 2006).

8 Winckelmann (1764); for a recent edition with commentary, see Borbein (2002).

9 Furthermore, on Winckelmann’s readings of Pausanias see the papers by Katherine

Harloe and Maria Pretzler in this issue.

10 Winckelmann (2006: 112).

11 Winckelmann (2002: 8).

Bey den Griechen hat die Kunst, ob gleich viel spater, als in den Morgenlandern, mit

einer Einfalt ihren Anfang genommen, daß sie, aus dem was sie selbst berichten, von

keinem andern Volke den ersten Saamen zu ihrer Kunst geholet, sondern die ersten

Erfinder scheinen konnen. Denn es waren schon dreyßig Gottheiten sichtbar verehret,

da man sie noch nicht in menschlicher Gestalt gebildet hatte, und sich begnugete, die-

selben durch einen unbearbeiteten Klotz, oder durch viereckigte Steine, wie die Araber

und Amazonen thaten, anzudeuten.

M I L E T T E G A I F M A N

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The reference to the thirty deities hints at what becomes apparent from the text’s

notes,12 that Winckelmann used Pausanias’ description of Achaian Pharae as the

source for his vision of primordial Greeks. While drawing upon Pausanias’ text,

Winckelmann’s interpretative gloss altered the original; he transformed Pausanias’

thirty rectangular blocks, that were venerated in the second-century AD and named

as gods, into thirty divinities, who were visibly worshipped in the depths of time,

either as rough rocks or quadrangular stones. This re-presentation served

Winckelmann’s objective of offering a seemingly authentic portrayal of the very

beginnings of Greek art, rather than the picture of Pharae under Roman rule

combined with the hazy image of the distant past, which he found in Pausanias’ text.

By blurring the original passage’s distinctions between rough and square rocks,

between the remote past and the second century AD, Winckelmann could make a

claim which was fundamental to his project, namely that the Greeks themselves were

the inventors of their art. The notion of the indigenousness of Greek artistic pro-

duction was one of the cornerstones of Winckelmann’s Geschichte, whose purpose

was not only to describe the holistic path of image-making in antiquity, but also to

demonstrate the superiority of Greek art. Within his universal model for the devel-

opment of an artistic tradition from humble beginnings that were driven by neces-

sity, through the ascent to greatness and beauty to its eventual downfall, the art of

the Hellenes was to stand out.13 Its excellence was the result of Greece’s climate,

system of government, the appreciation of artists and the application of art.14 If this

eminence was the consequence of Greece’s natural conditions (among other causes),

then inevitably Greek art could not be anything but indigenous; it must be necessi-

tated by the blessed land of Hellas and its people.

Pausanias’ Pharae provided a powerful ancient support for this view. In contrast

to Herodotus, who asserted that carving images was imported to Greece from

Egypt,15 the claim of the periegete that Greeks in primordial times worshipped

stones in place of images provided an important endorsement for Winckelmann’s

perceptions. The notion that the functions fulfilled by agalmata were in earlier

periods accomplished by simple rough rocks could suggest that the very need for

artistic representation was already present in Greece in the depths of time; it was

12 Winckelmann originally refers to Pausanias 50.7. on p. 579. l.32, which is Pausanias

Periegesis 7.22.4, see Winckelmann (2006: 123).

13 On Winckelmann’s position in the historiography of the history of art, and its philhel-

lenic agenda, see Potts (2000: 11–46, 2006) with further bibliography.

14 These points are summarized in the opening of the fourth chapter of the first part of the

Geschichte. See Winckelmann (2002: 212, 2006: 186).

15 Herodotus Histories 2.4.2 (Text and translation A. D. Godley, Loeb ed.)

The Egyptians first brought into use the names of the twelve gods, which the Greeks

took over from them, and were the first to assign altars and images (agalmata) and temples

to the gods, to carve figures in stone. �u0dek0 te qe8n 2pwnum0a” 7legon pr0tou”

A2gupt0ou” nom0sai ka1 E2 llhna” par1 s’Œwn 2nalabe8n, bwmo0” te ka1 2g0lmata ka1

nho1” qeo8si 2pone8mai s’Œa” pr0tou” ka1 �Ja 2n l0qoisi 2ggl0yai.

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merely unrealized. In other words, the necessity for art was Hellenic. Originally, it

was visible only through the rough or the rectangular rock, and it was only a matter

of time for this urge to develop gradually into mimetic representation.

Winckelmann’s insistence on a gradual development further bolstered his agenda.

Art was the natural product of Greece, and not of external influence. To employ one

of his own favourite organic metaphors, Winckelmann could concede that the seeds

of art were disseminated across many ancient territories, and may have yielded some

of their earlier crops in the Orient. Indeed, in their fundamental need for art the

Greeks were no different from other peoples,16 who also deployed stones in order to

worship their gods. It was on Hellenic ground however, that these initial kernels

brought forth their most delectable fruit.

Winckelmann’s adoption of Pausanias as a faithful witness for the earliest evi-

dence of the innateness of Hellenic art surfaces more clearly in the second edition of

the Geschichte, which was published posthumously in 1776. Here, he specifies that

the thirty divinities, which were not rendered in human form in great antiquity,

could still be witnessed in Pausanias’ times in the city of Pharae in Arcadia.17

Whereas nowhere in the original does the periegete claim that the Pharaean

square blocks were survivors from the depths of the past but rather silently implies

that these recall ancient customs, in the 1776 version of the Geschichte Pharae’s

venerated rocks have become genuine fossils from the very beginning of Greek

civilization. This re-presentation of Periegesis 7.22.4 reveals once again

Winckelmann’s loose approach to his source, the interpretative possibilities made

possible by the process of excerption, and the extent to which his history was

agenda-driven.

Similarly, Winckelmann’s error in placing Pharae in Arcadia rather than Achaia

seems not to result from ignorance about its location,18 since in the Anmerkungen

uber die Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, which was published in Winckelmann’s

lifetime in 1767, he correctly reports that Pharae was in Achaia.19 The assertion of

the second edition of the Geschichte emerges as an alteration of the original for the

sake of ideology; by moving Pharae from Achaia to Arcadia, Winckelmann could

support the claim made in both versions of his grand opus that Arcadia preserved the

oldest forms of art.20 This idea fits the broader Early Modern vision of Arcadia as a

16 In the same passage Winckelmann cites Maximus of Tyre’s description of the veneration

of stones by Arabs, in Discourses II.8c-d, and the description of the stone worship by the

amazons found in Apollonius Argonautica 2.1176.

17 ‘ . . . and these thirty stones were found in the city of Pharae, in Arkadia, still in Pausanias’

time.’ ‘ . . . und diese dreyßig Steine befanden sich in der Stadt Phera, in Arcadien, noch

zu den Zeiten des Pausanias.’

18 Commentators on the passage suggest that the error stems from Homeric references to a

city named Phere and Pherai in Arcadia. See Borbein et al. (2007: 73).

19 Borbein et al. (2008: 29).

20 Winckelmann (2002: 8–9).

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timeless land untouched by progress,21 a notion whose roots can be traced, at least in

part, back to Pausanias’ rendition of the region as profoundly antiquated.22 As

support for his assertion regarding the antiquity of art in Arcadia, Winckelmann

refers to Pausanias’ claim that the Arcadians seem to be particularly fond of the

tetragonon agalma, the square-shaped image, or in other words the semi-figural

hermaic form.23 By displacing the thirty stones of Pharae to Arcadia,

Winckelmann effectively amplified the impression made by Pausanias’ descriptions

of the region as old-fashioned, so that it could be envisioned as the locus of all

ancient art forms, not only the semi-figural herms described by the periegete but also

the simple stones.

Winckelmann’s clustering of the alleged earliest forms of art in the time-capsule

of Arcadia served to illustrate the process of evolution in art which he had postu-

lated.24 The visitor to Arcadia could witness the earliest developmental stages of

Greek art from the simple stone to the semi-figural herm, all of which belong in the

same section of his scheme. Rough stones, blocks, and herms attest the origins and

earliest development of art in Greece, and are the essential beginning points in the

grand story of the art of Hellas. At the same time, they do not possess any of the

features of the perfected and the beautiful, the main subject of the Geschichte.

Furthermore, whereas these rocks were the first evidence for the necessity of art,

it was wood with its natural malleability which allowed Daedalus to create the first

fully figural images,25 the earliest holistic representations of the human figure.

Consistent with this idea, and despite the position of the pillars of Pharae as corner-

stones in Winckelmann’s construct of Greek superiority, they do not receive any

attention in the main core of his book. These are effectively the marginal, nearly

invisible substructures of the grand edifice, not the shoots or the flowers of the

Greek ideal.

Against the backdrop of Winckelmann’s propositions,26 nineteenth-century

German intellectuals engaged in a debate on the origins and evolutions of Greek

art and culture, which included a spectrum of views, ranging from Winckelmannian

perceptions of indigenousness and gradual evolution to models which espoused

21 This notion was famously captured in Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego of 1637–8.

Winckelmann’s esteem for Poussin is apparent in his reference to this artist’s works in

order to illustrate his notion of beauty. See Winckelmann (2002: 283) with Borbein et al.

(2008: 225).

22 Pretzler (1999).

23 Pasuanias Periegesis 8.48.6. Pausanias notes other sites in Arcadia in: 8.31.7, 8.32.1

8.35.6

24 That this is the meaning of tetragonon agalma is clear from Pausanias Periegesis 8.32.1.

25 Winckelmann (2002: 8, 2006: 112).

26 For Winckelmann’s impact on the field of classical archaeology in nineteenth-century

Germany, see Bruer (1994).

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external, primarily Oriental influences, and sudden shifts.27 This discourse was

more than a theoretical discussion of the earliest histories of the Greeks; it was a

highly charged locus for formulating ideologies about the nature of national identity,

particularly of the German people, through propositions regarding the Hellenes.28

Within this learned framework, Pharae’s stones were invoked time and again both by

those subscribing to Winckelmann’s postulates as well as those who questioned

Among these intellectuals was the Classicist Georg Friedrich Creuzer

(1771–1858), one of the more radical challengers of the Winckelmannian model

and the author of the highly controversial Symbolik und Mythologie der alten

Volker, besonders der Griechen, first published in 1810–2.29 In this book, Creuzer

set out a broad and complex argument that esoteric symbolism formed the universal

foundation for religious experience throughout the ancient world; this cosmology,

which was based on the observations of the heavens and expressed in symbols,

originated among the Brahmanic priests, was transformed into myths which ren-

dered it more comprehensible, and spread from India all the way to Greece.30

Creuzer’s book was harshly criticized. The Protestant philologist who taught in

Heidelberg — a Catholic university — was attacked for shifting the emphasis

from Greece to the Orient, for undermining the admired values of freedom and

individuality, for digressing from the methodological norms of Classical Philology,

as well as for crypto-Catholicism.31 Despite the fact that to a large extent Creuzer

was on the losing side in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, and that his work

was never translated into English, the Symbolik exercised an immense influence,

which extended far beyond the study of Classical antiquity, leaving its mark on

figures such as Georg W. F. Hegel, Gustave Flaubert, and Carl Jung.32

Pausanias’ account of the stones in Pharae is cited in the first edition of the

Symbolik in support of an argument on the symbolic nature of images of the

divine.33 In place of Winckelmann’s Enlightened, effectively secularized vision of

Greek art, Creuzer claimed that the image of the god should express a

27 Notably, this discourse was one of the targets of Martin Bernal, who attacked the German

emphasis on Greek autonomy as driven among other factors by racism; yet as many have

pointed out, his position is one-sided and does not take into account the multiplicity of

factors influencing the thinking of this period. See Bernal (1987); Lefkowitz and Rogers

(1996); Bernal and Moore (2001). On German Orientalism see Marchand (2001);

Marchand (2004); Marchand (2009).

28 Vick (2002).

29 Creuzer (1810–2).

30 For a general overview of the Symbolik, see Williamson (2004: 127–135).

31 See for example one of the harshest critiques, Voss (1824–6). For further overview of the

scandal, see Williamson (2004: 135–45); Marchand (2009: 66–71).

32 Williamson (2004: 122); McGuire (1974: 122–3); on his impact in Britain, see Louis

(2005: 336–7).

33 Creuzer (1810–2: vol. I, 172).

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comprehensive theology of the divine being.34 Essentially, all forms of representa-

tions of the gods, whether fully naturalistic or hybrid types, such as the multi-

breasted Artemis of Ephesos, are symbolic. Despite the fundamental difference

with Winckelmann, Creuzer follows him in taking Pausanias’ account of Pharae

as the beginning point for the history of Greek image-making. Like Winckelmann,

whom he cites, he claims that this city preserved the earliest forms of Greek art.35

However, rather than evidence for indigenousness, in the Creuzerian scheme these

stones served the theory on the primacy of the symbol; according to Creuzer,

Pharae’s stones prove that initially all divinities resembled each other, and that

therefore in the earliest phase attributes were essential, for thanks to them a

visual differentiation between the otherwise identical monuments was possible.

These stones therefore prove that attributes, or signs, preceded figural images.

According to Creuzer’s history of religious art, these distinctive attributes were

abandoned over time, and the human form came to be regarded as essential. Art

separated itself from incidental elements and eventually reached a point in which the

divine could be seen in naturalistic corporeal representations. Although Creuzer’s

approach is radically different from the Winckelmannian model, his history both

starts and climaxes in the same place. In fact, he cites verbatim Winckelmann’s

evocative account of naturalistic images of the Greek gods as embodiments of the

ideal.36 Following this citation, Creuzer asserts that by this stage they were no

longer reminders or allegories of divinities, but that the supreme images in

Winckelmann’s history of Greek art were the highest ‘essences’ (Wesen) of worship

itself, being not only the highest ideas that art could create, but also, as Creuzer

emphasizes in the original text, Gottersymbole.37 Despite the significant shift in the

role of images from mnemonic devices and allegorical references to embodiments of

the essence of the divine, symbolism remained constant from the age of the simple

stones of Pharae to the era of the Greek ideal.

Whereas in this section of the Symbolik Creuzer deployed the stones of Pharae to

support his theory without paying much attention to their possible meaning in their

own right, in the third edition of his grand opus he comments on their significance.

In a discussion of hieratic images, Creuzer bolsters his universalist position by

arguing that the representation of divinities in what he calls multi-formed (mehr-

gestaltet) images, — forms that do not conform to the Winckelmannian ideal —,

such as a four-handed Apollo, or a two-headed silenus, was widespread and existed

34 Creuzer (1819–21: vol. I, 139): ‘Das Gotterbild sollte ein Inbegriff aller moglichen

Bezeichnungen seyn, die man bei seinem Begriffe denken mochte; es sollte Alles aus-

drucken, was eine inhaltsreiche Theologie von dem gottlichem Wesen aussagte.’

35 Creuzer (1819–21: vol. I, 144).

36 Creuzer (1819–21: vol. I, 145). Creuzer cites from Winckelmann’s discussion of ideal

figures, originally published in Winckelmann (1767). See Winckelmann and Gottfried

(1817: 83 no. 15).

37 Creuzer (1819–21: vol. I, 145–6).

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among a variety of peoples.38 In the footnote to his list of examples he asserts that,

prior to herms, stones occupied the place of cult statues (Cultusbilder), as is explicit

in Pausanias’ testimony. Tucked between parentheses, we find a comment which

endows the stones with a cosmological meaning: ‘7.22.3 is a passage about the 30quadrangular stones in Pharae, each named after a god; unmistakably, this is a

designation (Bezeichnung) of the 30 calendar-gods of the days of the month.’39

Here, the number thirty allowed for the Pharaean stones to confirm Creuzer’s uni-

versal cosmology and symbolism. Each stone is interpreted as a designator of the

divinities whose identity is determined by the heavenly bodies. The stones of Pharae

came to offer a firm proof for symbolic cosmology in Greek antiquity through

Creuzer’s reading of Periegesis 7.22.4.

In contrast to the harsh reception of Creuzer’s Symbolik in the Protestant north,

southern Germany greeted the book warmly. Its Catholic overtones could be seen, at

least in part, as the grounds for its wholehearted welcome in Catholic Bavaria.40 The

leading Classicist in Munich at the time was Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch (1784–

1860), who was an admirer of Creuzer’s work,41 and like him a self-aware humanist

as well as a Protestant who taught in a Catholic environment. In fact, despite

Thiersch’s Protestantism, in 1829 he was entrusted by the royal court with the

task of restructuring the Bavarian educational system, as Wilhelm von Humboldt

had done in Prussia in 1809.42 In this context, Thiersch can be seen as a genuine

neohumanist who was engaged in the project whose purpose was the formation

(Bildung) of mankind so that the humanity (Menschheit) within each and every

person would be fully formed.43

Thiersch’s history of the earliest phases of Greek religious art and his approach

to Periegesis 7.22.4 incorporates the notion of symbol and intercultural exchange,

found in Creuzer’s theory; at the same time reinstates Winckelmann’s idea that

fully figural reprsentations were images (Bilder) rather than symbols. Upon closer

examination, however, this version is strikingly resonant with Thiersch’s own biog-

raphy, his internationalism, his role as the usher of philhellenic education in Bavaria,

and his overt adherence to Protestantism in a Catholic context.

38 Creuzer (1836–42: vol. I, 55).

39 Creuzer (1836–42: vol. I, 55): ‘Fruher als die eigentlichen Hermen vertraten Steine die

Stelle der Cultusbilder, woruber das audruckliche Zeugniss des Pausanias vorliegt

(7.22.3 von den 30 viereckten Steinen zu Pharae, jeder nach einem Gotte genannt;

unverkennbare Bezeichnung von 30 Kalendergottern der Monatstage);’

40 Notably the Munich Glyptothek, whose construction began in 1816 under the auspices

of the Crown Prince Ludwig, offered an illustration of Creuzer’s vision; see Williamson

(2004: 144), with further bibliography. See the reference to Creuzer’s Symbolik in the

museum’s description, which was written by its architect Leo von Klenze: Klenze and

Schorn (1837: 31).

41 Kirchner (1996: 60).

42 Sandys (1908: 110–2); Kirchner (1996: 5–155); Benes (2008: 178–9).

43 On the significance of Bildung see, in particular, Mann (2005: 144–5).

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In lectures first published in the years 1816, 1818, and 1825 under the title Ueberdie Epochen der Bildenden Kunst,44 Thiersch followed Herodotus in postulating that

the source for Greek image-making was the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily

Egypt. He argued that initially the Pelasgians, — an ethnic group typically

known from ancient literature as the primeval inhabitants of Greece —,45 did not

differentiate between the variety of gods either in name or in personality, and that

they had symbols in the form of rough stones.46 He finds support for the first part of

this claim in Herodotus’ assertion that formerly the Pelasgians did not refer to the

gods by individual names but rather called them ‘gods’, theoi.47 The second part

finds its ancient proof in Periegesis 7.22.4, namely in Pausanias’statement that in

still greater antiquity all Greeks worshipped rough rocks, which Thiersch quotes in

full. In this conflation Thiersch positions himself midway between Winckelmann’s

indigenousness and Creuzer’s symbolism; he adopts the idea of litholatry as native to

Greece and substantiates the point further, by equating Pausanias’ generic primeval

Greeks with the Pelasgians. At the same time, the local stone is identified as a

symbol, not as an object which proves an innate urge for art.

According to Thiersch, whereas the symbolic rock was Greek, plastic art was an

import; it was brought to Hellas by settlers, and even existed earlier among the

Greeks of the diaspora.48 The idea that the development in the visual arts was an

outcome of outside influences recalls Creuzer’s universalism, and places Thiersch in

a German intellectual lineage which viewed cultural transmission as central in

human history.49 From a biographical perspective, this is consistent with

Thiersch’s own intercultural position as an avid traveller50 interested in world

affairs, a self-conscious Christian admirer of the pagan Greeks, and a Protestant

educator in a Catholic environment.51 Along with Thiersch’s internationalism

comes an unequivocal rejection of evolution. In place of Winckelmann’s gradual

addition of bodyparts to pillars and poles, Thiersch argues that complete images

came to take the place of stones and planks; the old idols were not discarded but were

preserved as objects of worship. For proof he turns first to the stones of Pharae. For

Thiersch, these were nothing less than holy monuments. The locals worshipped

44 Thiersch (1816, 1819, 1825).

45 For a discussion of the complex identity of the Pelasgians in Herodotus, see Sourvinou-

Inwood (2003).

46 Thiersch (1829: 19).

47 Herodotus Histories 2.52. For further discussion of this passage and the significance of

calling each of the gods by individual names, see Thomas (2000: 275–8).

48 Thiersch (1829: 19–20).

49 This line of thought is exemplified by Johann Gottfried Herder’s critique of

Winckelmann. See Vick (2002: 485–9). Further on Herder and his interest in the

Orient in particular, see Marchand (2009: 43–52).

50 This worldview of a shared cultural heritage particularly with Italy emerges from the

introduction of the book’s second edition: see Thiersch (1829: 10).

51 Kirchner (1996).

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them, he emphasizes quoting the Greek: toutous sebousi; they gave each one a name of

a god he notes. Further he implies that the stones were ancient.52 Such sacred relics

could not be altered.

In addition to the Pharaean blocks, other venerated rocks and poles are listed,

mostly derived from Pausanias’ Periegesis. In conclusion, Thiersch claims that such

evidence shows that the ancient symbols did not accommodate the people’s urge to

create images (Bildungstriebe). The awe and sanctity with which they were regarded

by those who lived around them, rendered any quest for alteration a sacrilege

(Frevel).53 In this proposition, religion — specifically the sanctity of the ancient

monuments — is confronted with the urge for Bildung, or image making, and pre-

sented as an unassailable obstacle to the drive for transformation. Thirsch’s deploy-

ment of the terms Bildung and Frevel betrays the voice of a Protestant driven by the

urge for Bildung — a term which in the context of the passage can be understood as

the creation of distinctive forms, but as we have seen, signifies formation and edu-

cation as well. The transformation of the sacred symbol into a formed image is

nothing less than sacrilege. This vision of Greece formulates a statement on

Germany; the neohumanist impulse for Bildung is to take its proper course without

altering the old symbolic tradition, which like the native sacred stones of Pharae is to

survive. German Protestantism is to coexist side by side with the newly rediscovered

humanism of Hellas.

Both Winckelmann’s and Creuzer’s histories are holistic; the first assumes art as

primarily representational and indigenous, while the second sees it as essentially

symbolic and a product of cultural exchange. By contrast, Thiersch draws upon both

predecessors, yet introduces a sharp break in the trajectories they posit. Both symbol

and image are incorporated as fundamental elements: the first is native, the latter an

import, and rather than the gradual flow of a Kunstgeschichte, his model espouses

distinct eras, different Epochen. In response to these models, the great Classicist Karl

Otfried Muller (1797–1840) offered a fourth variant, which effectively re-endorsed

Winckelmann’s indigenous evolution and at the same time incorporated a religious

element like Creuzer’s and Thiersch’s histories.

K. O. Muller was a genuine prodigy; in 1819, when he was in his early twenties, he

was appointed to the chair of Altertumswissenschaft in Gottingen.54 Having studied in

Berlin with August Boeckh, promoter of the emerging historicism,55 he was one of

52 Thiersch (1829: 22).

53 Thiersch (1829: 23): ‘Solche Thatsachen zeigen, daß jene alten Gottersymbole am aller-

wenigsten dem Bildungstriebe des Volkes Raum gaben, und ihrerseits der Kunst eher

einen unubersteiglichen Damm entgegenstellten, weil die Ehrfurcht und Heiligkeit, von

denen sie umgeben waren, jeden Versuch der Aenderung als Frevel mußten erscheinen

lassen.’

54 Generally on K. O. Muller, see Sandys (1908: 213–6); for the immense impact and

reception of his work, see Calder et al. (1998).

55 See, for example, Marchand (1996: 42–3); Benes (2008: 171–7).

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the more vocal critics of Creuzer’s Symbolik, although he held Creuzer’s work in

great esteem.56 Muller’s rejection of the notion of cultural interractions is reflected

in his earlier grand project Geschichte Hellenischer Stamme und Stadte from the years

1820 to 1824, which included Die Dorier, first published in 1824.57 In this work,

Muller described the Dorians, the worshippers of Apollo from the north, and

praised them for their great piety, manliness, sense of order, obedience and self

restraint. The book with its profound racist undercurrents exercised an immense

influence and triggered much controversy well into the twentieth century.58

Muller offers his version of the earliest phases of Greek art in his Handbuch derArchaologie der Kunst, which was first published in 1830 and translated into English

as Ancient Art and its Remains.59 Here, along with the rescuscitation of

Winckelmann’s model of autochthony and evolution, we find piety, and simplicity

of forms, which he ascribed to his much admired Dorians,60 as dominant features of

primordial Greece. His philological training is evident in the presentation of the

evidence in discrete categories. According to Muller, originally the Greeks did not

have an image (Bild) — a term which he equates with the Greek word eikon — of a

god; they had a symbolic sign (Zeichen) in order to designate the presence of a

divinity. Muller’s own pietism surfaces in his explanation for this absence; the

piety of ancient times required less externalization, so that the belief in the presence

of the divinity was felt more internally.61

After listing the earliest types of monuments in cult including rough rocks, stone

pillars, and wooden poles, he notes that these were set up as cult images, recalling

Pausanias’ statement that in greater antiquity unwrought stones were venerated

instead of the agalmata. Muller then restates religion’s primacy in the depths of

time, claiming that these symbols were venerated more through their consecration

(hidrusis) and less because of their appearance and form. He notes however, that if a

monument of cult was made in a more costly and ornamental manner it was called an

agalma.

In the footnote accompanying this generalized account Muller not only cites

ancient sources, but also divides them into types and provides a Greek term for

most of the entries of his list. Yet, in this empirical taxonomy, Muller in effect treats

the sources as mines for technical terms, and more crucially distorts them for the

56 Williamson 2004 (145–7); Williamson (2006b); Blok (1994, 1998).

57 Muller (1824).

58 On Die Dorier and its reception, see, for example, Hall (1997: 5–16); Goldhill (2002: 150);

Donohue (2005: 88–95); Benes (2008: 186–7); Losemann (1998); Armstrong (1998). On

racism specifically see Martin Bernal’s critique in Bernal (1987: 1.308–16); in response

see Blok (1996); Marchand (1996: 44).

59 Muller (1830); Muller and Welcker (1850); further on his history of art, see Marchand

(1996: 46–7).

60 For Muller’s views of the simple art of the Dorians, see, for example, Muller (1824: vol.

II, 401–2) with Donohue (2005: 92–5).

61 Muller (1830: 42).

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creation of a seemingly well-founded picture of ancient Greek religion, which is

more a figment of his own imagination than an authentic reflection of his evidence.

The first among his ancient texts is Pausanias’ Periegesis, and the uniquely Pausanian

expression argoi lithoi (unwrought stones)62 is the first item in Muller’s list.

According to Muller, who cites Periegesis 7.22.4 as a comparandum, argoi lithoiare characteristic of great nature divinities. Yet Pausanias uses the phrase for a

variety of rocks, from the gigantic stones of the Cyclopean walls to the rock on

which Orestes sat in Laconia.63 Muller exemplifies his assertion by referring to

Pausanias’ description of the stone of Eros in Thespiae,64 as well as the periegete’s

account of the stones of the Graces in Orchomenos, although these are described in

the Greek text as petrai, and not as argoi lithoi.65

Following rough rocks, the second cateogry on Muller’s list is hermaia, which he

defines as heaps of stones, citing the medieval lexicon, the Suida.66 He refers to

Theophrastus’ mention of shiny stones on crossroads,67 as well as Pausanias’ de-

scription of Orestes’ rock in Laconia, which was named Zeus Kappotas, 68 although

in the original it is said to be an argos lithos, not a heap of stones. Next, under the

category of pillars, come the square stones of Pharae, which according to Muller’s

interpretation served as Bildsaulen (image-pillars) of many gods. Despite the evident

misrepresentation of his sources, this taxonomy nonetheless reveals Muller’s philo-

logical attentiveness to the Pausanian distinctions between rough and rectangular

forms. At the same time, it ignores the periegete’s distinctions between the deep past

and the second century AD; both rocks and pillars belong to the earliest phase, and

were signs.

In the next section, following the description of the period of signs, Muller offers

his explanation for the emergence of fully figural representations in ancient Grece

according to an evolutionary scheme. In place of Winckelmann’s innate urge for art,

Muller claims that the drive for change from signs to images was religion; in order to

create a closer link between the sign and the god, certain significant elements were

added to the original monuments, such as heads and phalloi. In this way, herms and

62 Generally in the Periegesis, the phrase argos lithos is not necessarily used to describe stones

in cult; it appears five times in the plural: in 1.28.5, for two stones in the Areopagos, in

1.37.7, for wall stones, in 2.25.8, and 7.22.4, to describe the ancient stones in Greece and

in 9.18.2, for three stones which were burial markers for heroic figures in Thebes. In the

singular it is found three times: in 3.22.1 for a stone which was said to be Orestes’ seat and

was named Zeus Kapotas, in 9.24.3 for a stone venerated in a sanctuary of Herakles and

for the stone of Eros in Thespiae in 9.27.1.

63 See note above.

64 Pausanias Periegesis 9.27.1.

65 See Pausanias Periegesis Pausanias 9.38.1.

66 Muller (1830: 42).

67 Theophrastus, Characters 15.5.

68 Pausanias Periegesis 3.22.1.

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the masked pillars of Dionysos came into being.69 In contrast to stone herms, which

according to Muller lasted for a long time, the first full images were made of wood.

These were the xoana, which represented the human figure in its entirety. Muller’s

scheme combines Winckelmann’s notion of evolution with Thiersch’s perception of

the symbol as fundamentally distinct from the image, yet marginalizes stone in

relation to wood; in this model, Pausanias’ unwrought stones, and Pharae’s thirty

blocks, did not lead to the creation of images, but rather to herms. The development

of art in stone remained effectively frozen for a long period. Wood, on the other

hand, allowed for the emergence of the holistic Bild of the human figure.

Despite Muller’s short life, his scholarship exercised an immense impact on the

study of Classics in general, as well as Classical Archaeology specifically.70 When the

question of origins and the initial evolution of Greek religious art came to be

scrutinized once again, it was Johannes Adolph Overbeck (1826–95) who engaged

more than any of the scholars I review here with Pausanias’ description of Greek

litholatry. Overbeck is probably best known today for his magisterial collection of

ancient texts on Greek art,71 a gem of nineteenth-century German erudition, whose

scope renders it still a fundamental resource.72 Overbeck came from a prominent

northern Protestant family, and was the nephew of Johannes Friedrich Overbeck,

the Nazarene painter who converted to Catholicism. He studied in Bonn with

Friedrich Ritschl and Friedrich Gottlob Welcker, was appointed extrordinarius in

Leipzig in 1853, and was made professor of Classical Archaeology in 1858, a post he

held for the rest of his life. As can be seen in his grand Schriftquellen, Overbeck could

be regarded as an exemplary product of the neohumanist tradition and the fields of

Altertumswissenschaft in which he was trained.

Overbeck’s reconstruction of the beginnings of Greek religious art, which incorp-

orates a variety of elements found in the earlier discussions we have seen, is more

detailed. Yet once examined in relation to its immediate context, Overbeck’s more

complex vision of primordial Greece emerges as a powerful statement of the affinity

between his own German culture and great Hellas. Following Winckelmann and

Muller, Overbeck held a firm view that Greek art was indigenous and strongly

rejected the idea that it originated in the Orient; like others, he postulated that

originally the Greeks did not produce images of gods.73 In a lecture published in

1864, he describes this era as one with no eikones, or in his words as the age of

Anikonismus, a term derived from the Greek noun aneikoniston — the quality of

being non-representable —, first attested in Clement of Alexandria’s writings.74

69 Muller (1830: 43–4).

70 For example, Fittschen (1998); Bruer (1994: 101–2).

71 Overbeck (1868).

72 See for instance a recent French edition, Muller-Dufeu (2002).

73 In addition to the scholars already mentioned, see, for example, Friedrich Gottlieb

Welcker in Welcker (1857: 219), and Eduard Gerhard in Gerhard (1854: vol. I, 35).

74 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I.24.163.6 with (Overbeck, 1864).

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The Germanic undercurrents of Overbeck’s primeval Greece are apparent from the

opening of this piece. Rather than taking unwrought rocks and Pausanias’ Pharae as

his point of departure, in the way his predecessors did, Overbeck begins with

tree-worship — relying on Karl Wilhelm Boetticher’s Baumkultus der Hellenen of

1856, which postulated that the Greeks were originally tree-worshippers.75 Like the

pagan Germans of Jacob Grimm (1785–1863, the great German grammarian,

mythologicist and collector of fairy tales), whose religion centred around the tree

as an all-bearing column, so Overbeck’s Greeks of primordial times worshipped

spirits of nature, who inhabited caves, springs and above all forests and trees.76

According to Overbeck’s narrative, which recalls Winckelmann’s organic model

of evolution, the worship of trees gradually led to the veneration of man-made

objects, namely wooden standing cult monuments, such as poles, planks, and scep-

tres. Recalling Grimm’s Germanic religion, which itself resembled Enlightened

Protestantism,77 the place of such wooden posts in Overbeck’s primeval Greece is

strikingly similar to the status of the wooden cross in Christian theology. In

Overbeck’s account, wood takes primacy for its malleability the way it does in

Winckelmann’s Geschichte, yet it is the symbolic relationship between wood as ma-

terial and the divinity, which accounts for tree worship as well as the creation of the

first fully anthropomorphic images of gods out of wood. Furthermore, the very

materiality of aniconic wooden monuments such as poles and planks (rather than

their form) endows them with a unique connection to the divine.78 Like the wooden

cross and its intimate connection with (the Christian) God, as described by the

second-century Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria in the key passage

where the term aneikoniston first appears in Greek,79 Overbeck’s primeval wooden

posts of the ancient Greeks had a special symbolic relationship with the divine. The

implicit Protestant Christianity of all this — with an aniconic wooden object at the

origin of divine worship — is no less obvious than its homology with the fantasy of

primitive Germanic tree-worship.

Pausanias’ description of the veneration of unwrought stones in the depths of

the past poses a challenge to this reconstruction, as is apparent from Overbeck’s

attentive critique of Periegesis 7.22.4, to which he turns twice in this article.

75 Boetticher (1856). Notably, Karl Wilhelm Boetticher (1806–89), who also published

under the name Carl Boetticher, was a classical archaeologist, a theorist of architecture

who taught in the Bauakademie in Berlin. Boetticher was the author of the influential

book on the aesthetics of architecture, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, whose first volume

appeared in 1844. See Botticher (1844–52); Schwarzer (1993); Mayer (2004).

76 Grimm (1854: 64); Williamson (2004: 105).

77 Williamson (2004: 105–12).

78 Overbeck (1864: 140), and in greater detail 147–8.

79 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I.24.163.6. Notably, the passage ends with a descrip-

tion of the holy light running through the entire cosmos and culminates with the wooden

cross, the xulon. For Clement of Alexandria’s account of the cross’ intimate relationship

to God, see, for example, Osborn (2005: 40, 46); Schneider (1999: 77–82).

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After reviewing the evidence for tree cult and asserting that wood was innately holy,

Overbeck turns to unwrought stones, to which he frequently refers in the text using

the Pausanian phrase argoi lithoi. He paraphrases Pausanias’ statement that in deep

antiquity all Greeks worshipped unwrought stones, and charges that as it stands the

periegete’s assertion is incorrect, requiring some additions and further specifica-

tions. He argues that the phrase argoi lithoi did not designate the only cult objects

from the beginning of antiquity, and he shrewdly notes that this expression appears

only in Pausanias’s description of Greece, and not in any other ancient source;

therefore, not only rough rocks, but also trees and wooden poles were worshipped

in primordial antiquity. As evidence for tree worship he refers again to Boetticher,

and for wooden poles he turns to his Christian source, Pausanias’ contemporary

Clement of Alexandria, who discusses pagan veneration of wooden beams and

planks. Furthermore, he contests that Pausanias fails to provide a specific chron-

ology for his argoi lithoi, and that tree worship should be regarded as more ancient.

Overbeck further criticizes Pausanias for not stressing that the veneration of rough

rocks continued throughout pagan antiquity, just like tree worship. Overbeck’s

engagement reveals the degree to which Periegesis 7.22.4 did not supply the evidence

he sought for his picture of primeval Greece.

Overbeck returns to Pausanias’ description of Pharae in his discussion of

man-shaped aniconic monuments, where he addresses the thirty square stones.

He situates his own view against two earlier interpretations of the passage: the

first proposed by his old professor, Welcker, in Griechische Gotterlehre of 1857,80

and the second made by Karl Bernhard Stark,81 in the second edition of Karl

Friedrich Hermann’s Lehrbuch der gottesdienstlichen Alterthumer der Griechenin 1858.82 Against Welcker’s position that the thirty square blocks were like the

argoi lithoi, Overbeck stresses that they were not rough rocks, but rather square

shaped. Against Stark’s claim that the Pharaean square stones were ‘also herms’,

Overbeck retorts with philological acuity that nowhere are herms referred to as

square stones. Further he notes the passage’s striking parallelism between the

square stones in a single city in Pausanias’ day and the rough rocks throughout

Greece in the depths of antiquity, and that all of these venerated objects were not

agalmata. In this critique, more than any of the readers I review here, Overbeck

emerges as acutely sensitive to Pausanian rhetoric.

Overbeck’s fundamental view of venerated rough stones as secondary to wood, is

most clearly demonstrated in the conclusion to his review of the evidence for

litholatry. While the worship of trees and wooden objects goes back to the very

beginnings of primeval Hellas, the origins of stone worship in Greece and Italy are of

less interest, he asserts, for its roots are in the Orient. In sharp contrast to

Winckelmann’s approach to Pausanias’ Pharae, Overbeck rejects the view of litho-

latry as indigenous; he asserts that the Oriental origins of Hellenic stone worship are

80 Welcker (1857: 220).

81 Karl Bernard Stark (1824–79) taught in Heidelberg. See Sandys (1908: 225).

82 Hermann (1858: 96).

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evident in the Greek word baitylos — an ancient term describing magical stones —

which he suggests comes from the Semitic hypostasis Beth-El, which literally means

house of god.83 For Overbeck, stone worship was originally Syro-Phoenician, where

it originated in the veneration of meteorites and star worship. This phenomenon has

spread from the East through Greece, where (as he notes invoking Pausanias’ state-

ment at Periegesis 7.22.4) rough stones took the place of agalmata, and continued

further west to Italy. Rather than a specifically Greek phenomenon, a practice shared

by all Greeks reaching back to the depths of time, the veneration of argoi lithoi is

presented here as an all-encompassing ancient Mediterranean phenomenon, which

stemmed from the Orient and migrated westward, through Greece, and even further

afield all the way to Italy.

Overbeck’s envisioned primordial Greece resonates with a variety of elements in

his German culture — its mythologized Germany and its paganism which revolved

around the veneration of trees, its Christian and specifically Protestant symbolism,

whose sacred monument was the cross, and its philhellenic Bildung. The only for-

eign (i.e. non-Greek and non-Germanic) element in this tableau were the stones.

They were part of a broader ancient Mediterranean phenomenon whose origins lay

in the Orient. If for Winckelmann Pausanias’ argoi lithoi and the thirty rectangular

stones of Pharae formed a foundation for a history of Greek art, for Overbeck they

were neither really Greek, but rather a product of a very ancient Oriental influence,

nor did they have any relation to Greek artistic production. Indeed, this perception

has been enshrined in the Schriftquellen fur die bildende Kunst; despite Overbeck’s

thorough acquaintance with Periegesis 7.22.4, the passage is not included in his

grand opus of texts on ancient Greek art.

The Stones of Pausanias’ Pharae: Primitive Fetishes

While some of Overbeck’s views, particularly his reconstruction of the transition

between the earliest aniconic age to the era of figural representation were still

under discussion in the latter part of the nineteenth century,84 the perception

of Greek litholatry as a long-surviving religious practice from the depths of time

which was effectively irrelevant to the study of Greek art, remained dominant in the

second half of the century. This can be seen in the Griechische Kunstgeschichte of

1893 by Heinrich Brunn (1822–94), Germany’s other luminary of Greek art and

archaeology of the period.85 Brunn’s point of departure is man’s innate artistic

83 On the term baitylos, see Gaifman (2008) with further bibliography.

84 For example, Schreiber (1883: 288).

85 This late work was published in two volumes: Brunn (1893); and the posthoumous

publication, Brunn and Flasch (1897). Like Overbeck, Heinrich Brunn studied with

Ritschl and Welcker in Bonn. Upon receipt of his doctorate in 1843, he moved to

Rome and worked at the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut. In 1865 he became the

first holder of the chair of Archaeology at Munich, which he held for the rest of his life.

On Brunn, see Emerson (1894); Flasch (1902); Sandys (1908: 221–2); Marchand (1996:

110–11).

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drive.86 The impulse for art is distinct from religion, as it stems from man’s predis-

position to translate visible reality into images, rather than give form to the invisible

gods. Religion is not irrelevant to this Kunstgeschichte, but is only a subcategory.

In a section on the earliest images of gods, we encounter rough rocks and upright

blocks when Brunn refers his readers to Overbeck’s article of 1864 and states that in

Greece at its deepest antiquity, the veneration of gods was without images.87 Standing

stones and pillars mark a place of worship, but only as symbols, not as works of art.

Periegesis 7.22.4 is not mentioned here, but Pausanias’ stones could be understood as

belonging to a stage in which religious practice did not call for the visual arts, and

hence they do not make up part of the grand story of Greek artistic production.

Rather than in Brunn’s history of Greek art, Periegesis 7.22.4 appears in diction-

aries and encyclopedias of the second half of the century. Under the heading argoilithoi, in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et romaines,88 and

in the Real-encyclopadie der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft,89 the passage is cited

as one of the primary ancient sources for the veneration of stones. In addition to the

familiar ideas of Greek litholatry as primeval, related to the cults of meteorites and

typical to the Orient, these entries include new attitudes, which originated in the

rising field of anthropology. Within the late nineteenth-century discourse on the

nature of primitive cultures, which was inseparable from the period’s colonialism,

Pausanias’ argoi lithoi and the square stones of Pharae came to exemplify primitive

fetishes of Greek antiquity.90

The ideas of the ‘primitive’ and of ‘fetishism’ gained firm ground in modern

scholarship with the publication in 1871 of Primitive Culture by Edward Burnett

Tylor (1832–1917), a founding figure in the modern field of anthropology.91 In this

seminal book, the stones of Pharae are cited among myriads of examples for a

phenomenon which Tylor classifies as a type of ‘animism’ — namely fetishism —

and which for convenience’s sake, as he puts it, he refers to as stone and stock

worship.92 Tylor’s point of departure is that the veneration of such objects is

characteristic of and comprehensible among lower cultures and races. He raises

the question whether the stone or the stock is thought to be intimately connected

86 Brunn (1893: 1–2).

87 Brunn and Flasch (1897: 56).

88 Saglio (1877).

89 Reisch (1895).

90 On the primitive, see, for example, Stocking (1987, 1995); contrast, for instance, with

French anthropology, Rogers (2001).

91 Tylor (1871). On Tylor’s place in the history of Anglo-American anthropology, see, for

example, Leopold (1980); Stocking (1995). Generally on the modern idea of the primitive

on its problematic nature, see, for example, Hsu (1964); Kuper (1988, 2005); and for

fetish and fetishism, see Pietz (2003); Apter and Pietz (1993).

92 Tylor (1871: vol. II, 147).

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with the divinity, or merely having a symbolic function, and admits to the difficulty

in assessing the conceptions of the worshippers. Rather than pondering this theor-

etical problem, Tylor turns to his survey of contemporary fetishism from around the

globe. His colonial worldview is apparent from his list of examples of present-day

fetishism, which opens with the ‘lower races of the Americas’, continues into West

India, includes a variety of regions in all continents, but excludes Europe and Great

Britain. He asserts that this overview helps explain through the theory of survival

the puzzling existence of this practice in more developed cultures.93

His first example for such survival from ‘barbaric antiquity’ is ancient Greece.

Tylor begins his account of Greek fetishism by citing verbatim the claim in George

Grote’s History of Greece, that ‘[t]he primitive memorial erected in honour of a god

did not even pretend to be an image, but was often nothing more than a pillar, a

board, a shapeless stone, a post, etc.’94 The resemblance between this statement and

the earlier German descriptions of primeval Greek worship with no images is hardly

surprising — Grote cites Thiersch and K. O. Muller as his modern sources.

If for Classicists like Thiersch or Muller the question of Greek stone worship was

part of a broader exploration of the nature of Hellenic art and culture, for Tylor

Greek litholatry was yet another example for the survival of the lower strata from the

age of barbarism in later, more developed ages of antiquity. The veneration of the

thirty stones of Pharae is simply characterized as being in ‘archaic fashion’.95 While

using Pausanias as a source for the existence of such underdeveloped behaviour,

Tylor pays no attention to the text or the stones’ possible meaning. Following

the Greeks, Tylor continues his anthropology of ancient cultures, surveying the

‘Semitic race’, and the Near East including the Muslim Ka’aba and the

Phoenicians. This list, which has no reference to stone worship in Rome or Italy,

is consistent with earlier German views of Greek stone worship, which we have seen;

this habit is a kind of rude barbarism, which was ubiquitous in antiquity, particularly

in the Near East.

From the survey of the ‘barbaric’ past Tylor finally turns to fetishism in European

societies. Once closer to home, his English and Protestant worldview surfaces more

sharply. Tylor begins with French and English prohibitions of such practices still in

the Middle Ages. He then invokes Indian standing stones as possible explanations

for the prehistoric European menhirs. Getting even closer to his contemporary

England, he describes stone worship among Norwegian villagers of the late-

eighteenth century.96 Finally, he cites an account from 1851, describing stone

93 Ibid.: 151.

94 Grote (1849: 132).

95 Tylor (1871: vol. II, 151).

96 This brief mention belongs to the broader British fascination with Norway in this period.

Norway was seen as having a shared Teutonic ancestry with the British, and at the same

time, as in Tylor’s case here, as a primitive backwater and the opposite of British

industrialized society. See Fjagesund and Symes (2003).

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worship on the Irish Isle of Inniskea. Thanks to these near-contemporaries Tylor

could resolve the problem, which he poses in the beginning of his discussion re-

garding worshippers’ perceptions of their fetishes: ‘No savage ever showed more

clearly by his treatment of a fetish that he considered it a personal being, than did

these Norwegians and Irishmen.’ Closest to home, among the neighboring savages

of the north the Englishman finally found the best evidence for his theory that the

fetish was thought to be inhabited by a spirit. In addition to his national identity, and

overt anti-Irish position, Tylor’s upbringing in the Quaker form of Protestantism97

is apparent in the assertion that the veneration of images is no less a form of fetish-

ism, and that higher culture discarded image worship.98

Although Tylor could hardly be regarded as an engaged reader of the Periegesis,

his reference to Pausanias is significant, for it reveals the point at which the Greek

text came to be read through the newly formed lens of anthropology. In this new

light the stones of Pharae have changed meaning again; from aniconic symbols of the

unseen spirits of nature, they have become mere fetishes. While remaining within a

Protestant perspective, Tylor’s High Imperial viewpoint reverses the line of

thought, which saw Greek worship of wood and stone through the German per-

ception of pre-Christian ancestry or Protestant plainness as ideally simple and sym-

bolic by contrast with mimetic imagery. If for Overbeck Pausanias’ stones still had a

legitimate place in the imagined religion of primeval Greece (despite their Oriental

connotations), for the Englishman their possible religious value is reduced to fet-

ishism; these are objects venerated by the savages, who are by definition other to his

English civilization.

The strongly Protestant perspective on idolatry as well as stone worship is still

more apparent in the account of fetishism offered by Friedrich Max Muller (1823–

1900).99 The German philologist and Sanskritist, who in 1851 took up residence in

Oxford, and was the first occupant of the Oxford chair in Comparative Philology

from 1868, held a theory which reversed Tylor’s position, and yet still saw fetishism

as a fundamentally lower form of religious behaviour. Whereas Tylor’s fetishism

constituted an early, lower stage in social development, for Max Muller it was a type

of regression in advanced cultures.100 One of his key-witnesses for the existence of

this corrupt stage of religion in ancient Greece was Pausanias’ Pharae.

97 On Tylor’s Protestantism and its impact, see Regard (2007). Further on Protestantism

and modern anthropology, see, for example, Douglas (1966); Higham (2003).

98 Tylor (1871: 154). Notably, in Tylor’s scheme, image worship is somewhat more

advanced than stone and stock worship, and lies somewhere in the intermediate

strata of culture, between extreme savagery and ‘middle civilization’.

99 On Friedrich Max Muller, who is usually known as Max Muller, see, for example,

Masuzawa (1993: 58–61); Girardot (2002); Williamson (2004: 217–8); Benes (2008:

211–21); Marchand (2009: 130–4).

100 Muller (1878: 105).

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In the Hibbert Lectures, which Max Muller inaugurated in Westminster Abbey

and published in 1878, he addressed the origin and growth of religion.101 The

second lecture tackles the problem of whether fetishism is a primitive form of re-

ligion. Muller argues against the view of Tylor and others that contemporary savages

provide evidence for the earliest cultures of the past, and he questions the idea of

continuous cultural progression. Before asserting that fetishism is a corruption of

religious experience, Muller surveys the evidence for fetishism, beginning with

ancient Greece in order to show its ubiquity.

His anthropological approach and utter disregard for the form of the venerated

object is apparent from the beginning; his first example of a Greek fetish is the

palladium of Athena in Troy, presumably a figural image of the divinity, and the

second is the stones of Pausanias’ Periegesis 7.22.4. Both image and stone worship

are seen as coexistent types of fetishism. Rather than fossils from the beginnings of

time, the stones of Pharae, as well as the other venerated rocks mentioned by

Pausanias, are first and foremost evidence for stone worship in the Greece of the

second century AD, side by side with the veneration of figural images of gods. Max

Muller proceeds to ancient Rome and then to Christian churches. His Protestantism

jumps off the page when he claims that the Spanish adoration of the Virgin Mary or

stories about Russian peasants covering the faces of icons when they do something

improper, provide evidence for recent and current fetishism, and hence are forms of

religious corruption.102 The general category of Muller’s fetishism includes

Christian image worship, statues venerated by the Greeks, as well as ancient

Greek litholatry. Rather than fossils of the deep past, the stones of Pharae are

presented here as an ideal type of religious corruption, a testament of decline,

rather than the practice of very ancient traditions. While earlier versions of the

stones of Pharae were primitive or primeval stages in the origin of religion, in

Muller’s scheme they are proof of its late decadence.

At the tail end of this trajectory we come to J.G.Frazer (1854–1941) and his

treatment of Periegesis 7.22.4, beginning with his landmark commentary on the

Periegesis.103 In contrast to all the other texts I have discussed here, this work

took Pausanias’ descriptions as its primary subject. We find the stones of Pharae

mentioned already in Frazer’s general introduction to his edition. The Cambridge

Classicist notes Pausanias’ interest in monuments of religion, ‘especially when they

were more than old and quaint’,104 and lists the thirty Pharaean blocks as the first

example among such ‘queer images’ found in the Periegesis. Although Frazer de-

scribes the venerated stones as types of images, they are not mentioned in his

101 Muller (1878).

102 On Muller’s overt Protestantism Girardot (2002: 218–9); Williamson (2004: 217).

103 On James George Frazer’s reading of Pausanias, see Sabine MacCormack’s paper in

this issue. On Frazer in general, see Ackerman (1975); Ackerman (1987); Ackerman

(1991); Stocking (1995); Stocking (2001: 145–62).

104 Frazer (1898: 1, 36).

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overview of Pausanias’ account of art. In Frazer’s view, they are remarkable not for

their beauty or form, but rather for their religious meaning and unique oddities.

Their primary meaning lies in the realm of religion, not visual culture.

Frazer’s anthropological perspective on the Pharaean monuments as examples for

fetish stones and not as curious works of religious art is evident in his commentary

to Periegesis 7.22.4.105 Rather than treating the textual features of the passage, its

particular usage of terms, rhetoric and structure, or its broader implications for the

history of Greek religious art, Frazer examines it from the vantage point of an

anthropologist. He begins his discussion by listing a number of places in the

Periegesis where other sacred stones are described.106 He finds further comparanda

in Plutarch’s account of the sacred rock of the Aenianes — a primeval tribe in the

north of Greece. He then paraphrases Plutarch’s description of the sacred rock, to

which the Aenianes sacrificed and which they covered with the fat of the victim.107

Frazer’s choice of comparanda reveals his interest in the specifics of ritual per se —

both the sacrifice and the smearing, over and above other potentially relevant issues

such as the representation of the divine, or the perception of the particular wor-

shipped deity.

Frazer’s anthropological and comparativist approach to Pausanias’ account

emerges further when he states that the worship of stones is ubiquitous, and like

Tylor offers a broad range of examples from a variety of geographic regions through-

out the world. For each case he reveals his fascination with the specificities of rituals,

noting for instance that the Mandan Indians smoke to the stone, or alternatively

smoke their pipe themselves, and then offer it to the stone.108 In this presentation,

Frazer’s Greeks are no different from Mandan Indians or Norwegian villagers.

Where Pausanias failed to offer a full description of the ritual performed for the

stones of Pharae (unlike other instances in his Periegesis, which may be seen as

models for Frazer’s own accounts of rituals),109 Frazer’s presentation frames

Pharaean practice within the context of other types of fetishism, supplied by himself

as commentator. The final item on the list is Syria, where he notes sacred stones

were known as baetylii. Once again the Orient represents a strong ancient tradition of

fetishism.

This overview not only signals Frazer’s anthropological bent, but also his back-

ground. Closing his brief account of Oriental fetishism he cites William Robertson

Smith’s overview of Semitic rituals and sacrificial rocks.110 Frazer was a friend of

105 Frazer (1898: 2. 154–5).

106 Frazer (1898: 2. 154).

107 Plutarch Greek Questions XIII = Moralia 294 C 1-7.

108 Frazer (1898) 2. 155.

109 For instance in the same section of the Periegesis Pausanias describes in details the ritual

directed to the herm at Pharae, see Periegesis 7.22.1–3. Further on ritual in Pausanias,

see Elsner (1996).

110 Robertson Smith (1889: 201).

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Robertson Smith (1846–92), the Scottish Semiticist, who, like Frazer, was a product

of the Free Church of Scotland.111 From an overtly Protestant standpoint, but

against Tylor who saw ritual as an expression of beliefs, Robertson Smith argued

that ritual, rather than creed or myth, was the defining feature of primitive reli-

gions.112 Frazer’s emphasis on ritual in his commentary on the fetishism of Periegesis7.22.4 rises from this line of thought and from the Protestant perception that sees

ritual as key to lower forms of religion.113

Frazer invokes his own Scottish roots when he recounts the practices in the

Highlands of Scotland, where every village is said to have venerated a stone called

Gruagach, a Gaelic and hence indigenous name. Along similar lines, Frazer cites

Tylor’s description of late-eighteenth-century Norwegian stone worship. Both these

instances of stone worship at the native pre-Christian stratum of northern Europe

are presented in the past tense. In contrast to the litholatry of his own homeland, the

worship of fetishes in places such as Burma and a variety of regions in India is

described in the present tense. In the colonies litholatry can still be witnessed in the

last decade of the nineteenth century. Among these uncivilized and untransformed

savages this habit continues. Unlike Germany’s romanticized tree-worshippers, who

were converted to Christianity, and acquired philhellenic education, or the Scottish

and Norwegian villagers, who up until recently adhered to native customs, these

barbarians are still engaged in these odd and at the same time fascinating rituals. The

stones of Pharae are reminiscent of old, bygone ancestral traditions, such as the one

found in Scotland, as well as the current practices of the colonized natives.

In Frazer’s treatment of Perigesis 7.22.4 in his Pausanias commentary we already

see the notion that stone worship is characteristic of the Orient, but this perception

emerges still more prominently in his other works, beginning with his most influ-

ential and popular book, the Golden Bough.114 As curious monuments worshipped

by the underdeveloped forefathers of the ancient Greeks, one might have expected

to find Pharae’s stones among the hundreds of pages of the Golden Bough, a project

whose professed initial objective was to uncover the meaning and origins of an

ancient Italian priesthood,115 and to offer an understanding of the religion of

111 Robertson Smith was a true prodigy appointed in his early twenties as Professor of

Hebrew and Old Testament at the Free Church College in Aberdeen. Following his

heresy trials he left Scotland and in 1883 became member of Trinity College,

Cambridge where he met Frazer. On Robertson Smith and his connection to Frazer,

see Wheeler-Barclay (1993); Ackerman (1987); Stocking (1995: 133–5).

112 On the relationship between Robertson Smith’s own religious belief, and his percep-

tions of primitive religion as ritual based, see especially Wheeler-Barclay (1993).

113 Similarly, see Douglas (1966: 66–7).

114 The Golden Bough’s three editions: Frazer (1890); Frazer (1900); Frazer (1911–5); and

abridged edition: Frazer (1922). On the Golden Bough and immense influence and

receptions see, for example, Ackerman (1987); Douglas (1978).

115 See the preface to the first edition, Frazer (1890: vii), with Smith (1973).

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Europe’s ancestors, namely the Aryans.116 However, the indices of the Golden

Bough’s different editions suggest that Pharae is completely absent from Frazer’s

majestic opus.117 As we shall see below, rather than in the Golden Bough it is

referenced in a book dedicated to the non-European primitives, the Folk-Lore in

the Old Testament, published in 1918.118

The Golden Bough does include a holy rock from Pausanias’ Greece, yet this relic

is cited within an entirely Levantine context. In the extensive twelve-volume third

edition, Frazer discusses Cyprus and the well-known shrine of Aphrodite in Paphos,

where according to ancient testimonia, notably Tacitus’ Histories, the goddess was

venerated in the form of a conical rock.119 Frazer refers to Pausanias’ account of

anointments of a stone at Delphi, which was said to have been the ancient stone

offered by Rhea to Cronos in place of the infant Zeus,120 in order to support his

reconstruction of the rituals in Paphos. For although no ancient text indicates that

the Paphian rock was the recipient of oil libations, Frazer follows an earlier mis-

reading of a Cypriot inscription,121 and asserts the stone was anointed in a solemn

festival.122 The Periegesis furnishes a useful supplement for this reconstruction.

The reason behind Frazer’s need to affirm the existence of anointments in ancient

Paphos is not so much an interest in antiquity, but rather his greater claim about the

present; in contrast to the Delphic stone, which is no longer the recipient of any

rituals, the ancient veneration of Aphrodite at Paphos survived among the Cypriot

peasants under the guise of the worship of the Maid of Bethlehem. In fact, Frazer

cites verbatim David George Hogarth’s account of Cypriot women’s anointment of

the cornerstones of the ancient temple at Kouklia with the assertion that Mary is still

116 See the preface to the first edition Frazer (1890), vii with the central argument of the

project found in Frazer (1911–5: X, v). See also Ackerman (1987: 81, 97). For the

origins of the notion of Aryanism, see Marchand (2009: 124–31).

117 Frazer (1890); Frazer (1900); Frazer (1911–5); Similarly, the index of the abridged

version does not list Pharae either. See Frazer (1922).

118 Frazer (1918).

119 Tacitus Histories 3.3. For Paphos and the shrine of Aphrodite, see Maier and

Karageorghis (1984).

120 Pausanias 10.24.6; for the myth, see Heoisd Theogony 497–500. Frazer follows

Montague Rhodes James’ original discussion of inscription from Kouklia, and the

alleged anointment festival. Hogarth et al. (1888: 188) and Frazer (1991–5: 5.36).

121 Frazer adopts the early interpretation of a marble inscription found at Kouklia, (New

Paphos), –British Museum (1888),1115.15; SEG 20.174–, which lists contributors to

the 2laiocr0stion. Originally, the Greek term was understood as a name of a festival

involving the anointment of oil, presumably of the stone. However, it apparently refers

to the usage of oil. See LSJ sv. 2laiocr0stion. The Cypriot inscription is now under-

stood as a list of contributors to oil supply at the gymnasium of New Paphos. Compare

Hogarth et al. (1888: 188, 231), with Mitford (1961: 6 no. 5).

122 Frazer (1991–5: 5.36).

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entreated by Moslems and Christians to remove the curse of barrenness from

Cypriot women, or increase the manhood of Cypriote men.123

The site for the continuous litholatry is neither Greece nor Italy, but rather

Cyprus, which, as the title of Frazer’s source suggests, was seen as an integral

part of the Levant at the time.124 This is a place where presently not only

Moslems but also Christians adhere to primitive practices. We find here an attack

on early-twentieth-century Christianity by a man who — in resistance to his up-

bringing in the Free Church of Scotland — was to claim that he was no Christian.125

Frazer’s direct target however is not his childhood Church or any other Protestant

denomination but rather the local Greek Orthodox Church.126 Cypriot Christianity

is presented as no different from Islam, the Levant’s distinctive religion, which for

Frazer was a marker of cultural decline.127 Both religions fit Frazer’s broader

portrayal of the Orient as a site of litholatry. This vision is brought home a few

pages later in a section dedicated to stone and stock worship among the Semites,

which details the procreative virtues the ancient Levantines ascribed to stones.128 As

in the deep past, in his contemporary Cyprus, the Oriental tradition of stone worship

for the sake of fertility still thrives.

Although not in the Golden Bough’s grand tour through Europe’s primitive strata,

Periegesis 7.22.4 is referenced in a book whose aim is to explore the traces of rude

practices among the ancient Israelites as attested in the Old Testament.129 In

Folk-Lore in the Old Testament Frazer takes the Hebrew Bible as his point of de-

parture, and focuses on the parts in which he identifies primitive behaviour. The

book is structured as a kind of commentary, where Frazer paraphrases sections of

the ancient text in his evocative language and then, in accordance with the

123 Hogarth (1896: 179–80).

124 This can be seen from the title of Frazer’s source on the citation, David Hogarth’s book

The Wandering Scholar in the Levant. Hogarth (1896).

125 See, for example, letter from 1904 where Frazer professes ‘I am not a Christian, on the

contrary I reject the Christian religion utterly as false,’ in Ackerman (1987: 188–89).

126 Although Frazer usually refers to Christianity as a single body, when he contrasts

Protestantism with other churches, particularly Catholicism, the differences are strik-

ing; Catholics emerge as far closer to the savage primitives whereas Protestants appear

as the more civilized. See, for example, his description of seventeen-century Catholics

treating a bell from a ruined Protestant church as if it were an animate object, Frazer

(1918: 3.443). Even more blunt is his discussion of the fear of the dead in primitive

religions in his later lectures from the 1930s: ‘This belief in the continued power of the

dead to affect life of the survivors for good or ill is one of the marked differences

between the primitive and the civilized conceptions of life after death. In Protestant

religion it has little or nothing to correspond to it, but in Catholicism it has a close

analogy in the cult of the saints. . .’ See Frazer (1933: 11).

127 Frazer (1917: 382).

128 Frazer (1911–5: 5.107–9).

129 Frazer (1918: 1.7).

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comparative approach, offers numerous parallels from among underdeveloped

societies in antiquity and mostly in modernity, whose purpose is to show the affinity

between uncivilized societies and the ancient Israelites.

Pharae and its blocks feature as one of these comparanda, specifically as parallels

to the well-known stone in Bethel, which according to the book of Genesis was

anointed by Jacob following his dream-vision of the ladder with the angels of

God.130 Frazer uses Pausanias to shore up his views that ancient Bethel was a site

where primitive practices flourished, an idea which is apparent already from

Frazer’s presentation of the original Hebrew text; while embellishing his sources

— other travelers’ accounts, guidebooks, and commentaries, which note the rocky

and stony terrain of the site —, Frazer portrays the town which greeted Jacob as a

desolate place, filled with grey rocks as well as stones that were ‘piled up in weird

forms of pillars, menhirs or cromlechs.’131 Whereas in the book of Genesis Jacob

merely picks up some stones and sets them under his head, in Frazer’s version Jacob

spent the night in the center of a circle of great stones. Ancient Bethel is uncannily

reminiscent of Stonehenge. The Biblical Orient is fused with primeval Europe.

Nonetheless, as becomes apparent later in the text, the differences between the

two are profound; ancient European standing stones are now abandoned, whereas

in the Levant stone worship still continues.

Frazer asserts that over the years Bethel turned from a dismal place to a thriving

religious center, in which the ‘great standing-stone or pillar, which doubtless stood

beside the principal altar, was believed to be the very stone on which the wanderer

laid his weary head that memorable night’. Furthermore, according to Frazer, ori-

ginally the deity was conceived as actually residing in the stone. Like numerous

scholars before and after him, he takes the complex passage in Genesis, in which

Jacob declares that should he return safely from his journey the stone shall be a

house of God,132 as evidence for this idea. He asserts that this perception of stones as

tenanted by gods was common among many peoples, and then offers as his first

comparison ancient Arab stone worship, which, as he stresses, still continues in the

worship of the Black Stone in Mecca. Whereas the prophet Isaiah denounced such

idolatrous practices and Israelite religion eventually condemned them, contempor-

ary Islam is the home for such savagery. Given this text’s date — the time when

Britain was engaged in great conquests in the Middle East — the underlying

Imperial tenet is conspicuous. The native majority in the newly conquered region

still adheres to customs which have long been denounced and rejected by more

sophisticated cultures. The implied message is quite blunt: the colonized

Moslems are primitive.133

130 Genesis 22.11–22.

131 Frazer (1918: 2.41).

132 Genesis 12.22. On the interpretations of this passage, see Gaifman (2008: 44–51).

133 One does not need to turn Edward Said’s Orientalism in order to identify this attitude

toward the inhabitants of the Middle East in Frazer’s text. See Said (1978), and for

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From the Levant Frazer turns to ancient Greece, and enumerates venerated

stones culled from Pausanias’ text. Periegesis 7.22.4 is his first example. The peri-

egete’s assertion that in greater antiquity Greeks worshipped unwrought stones

instead of images emerges as an ideal parallel; like the ancient Israelites, the

Hellenes, too, underwent a transition over time: in the past they had adhered to

litholatry, in place of the venerated images of Pausanias’ time. The deeper

significance of this change transpires from his presentation of the stone of Eros in

Thespiae, the last item on his list of rocks cited from the Periegesis. In the original the

periegete opens his description of the Thespian worship of Eros by stating that: ‘Of

all the gods the Thespians honour Love the most, and have always done so: they

have a very ancient image of him, consisting of an unwrought stone.’134 Frazer’s

version is: ‘The inhabitants of Thespiae, in Boeotia, honoured Love above all the

gods; and the great sculptors Lysippus and Praxiteles wrought for the city glorious

images of the amorous deity in bronze and marble. Yet beside these works of refined

Greek art the people paid their devotions to an uncouth idol of the god in the shape

of a rough stone.’135 The two images of Eros mentioned by Frazer are described

further in the same passage in the Periegesis, where Pausanias recounts the sinful

removals of Eros’ statue by Roman emperors, the loss of Praxiteles’ original master-

piece and its replacement with a copy.136 Frazer’s nuanced paraphrasing and usage

of Pausanian rhetoric betrays his deep familiarity with his Greek source and at the

same time his purposeful reversal of the original’s meaning.

In the Periegesis, the assertion regarding Eros’ ancient rock comes immediately

after the claim that the god is the most venerated in Thespiae. As a result of this

stringing of information, the second observation helps to substantiate the first; the

stone emerges as a tangible visible proof of the divinity’s elevated position. Frazer,

on the other hand, replaces the crude object with magnificent artworks; the statues

of the divinity are presented as a proof of the same idea, namely that Eros was the

most venerated god in Thespiae. If for Pausanias the unwrought relic demonstrates

the importance, antiquity and continuity of the Thespian cult, for Frazer Eros’

higher status is to be seen in the works of two of Greece’s greatest artists made of

precious materials. Whereas in the Preiegesis the lost Praxitelean original and its

substitution illustrate Roman destruction and the rough rock demonstrates Greek

survival despite foreign intervention, for Frazer the statue exemplifies Greek cul-

tural achievement, and the rock reveals the survival of the crude.

In the Periegesis stone and statues, which end up side by side, tell together the

history of the cult, and both belong to the same sphere of religion. For Frazer the

more recent discussions and revisions of the subject of British colonial discourses

Clarke (1997); Washbrook (1999).

134 Translation adapted from Frazer (1898: 1.476); Pausanias 9.27.1: qe8n d1 o3 �espie8”

tim8sin EA rwta m0lista 2x 2rc8”, ka0 s’isin 4galma palai0tat0n 2stin 2rg1” l0qo”.

135 Frazer (1918 : 2.60).

136 Pausanias 9.27.3–4.

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masterpieces reveal the centrality of Eros, and yet they are made by great artists and

are given to the city, not the shrine. Great art belongs to civic society, whereas

uncouth monuments, such as Thespiae’s stone and Pharae’s blocks, belong to the

lowest form of religion, to the sphere of inane superstitious idolatry. We return to

the point where we began Frazer’s readings of Periegesis 7.22.4; Pausanias’ un-

wrought stones are first and foremost monuments of religion, distinct from great

works of art.

Following his enumeration of Pausanias’ venerated stones, Frazer embarks upon

a textual journey to the world’s sites of litholatry. Numerous stones and pillars

venerated in a variety of places, including, among others, Canada, Burma, India,

Africa, Scotland, and Norway, are brought forth as parallels for stone worship in the

Orient, where not only in the past but also in the present savage practices continue.

In this sea of stones, Pharae’s blocks lose their unique meaning and ties to Greece.

They, like countless similar monuments, put in sharper relief the primitive nature of

the practice at the heart of the religion which dominates the Levant. If for

Winckelmann Greek litholatry and the stones of Pharae were the seeds of Greek

art, for Frazer they are uncouth fetishes, fundamentally distinct from works of art.

For the father of the field of Kunstgeschichte Pharae’s blocks confirmed the idea that

Greek artistic creation was indigenous, even if the Orient preceded Greece in

creating works of art. For Frazer the same stones demonstrated the lack of cultural

development in the colonies, particularly the Levant. The primarily Oriental phe-

nomenon existed in the past in ancient Greece, prehistoric Europe, and elsewhere;

however, among the colonized especially in the recently conquered Middle East,

primitive fetishism still thrives.

The trajectory which I have traced here left an undeniable mark on

twentieth-century scholarship on Greek litholatry — especially in approaches to

Periegesis 7.22.4 and to the phrase argoi lithoi. Pausanias’ venerated stones are often

seen as exemplary of the primitive strata in Greek antiquity, as fundamentally

marginal to Greek culture, as strongly associated with the Near East as well as

with cults of meteorites.137 However, this series of contextualized nineteenth- and

early-twentieth-century readings of the same extract not only casts lights on the

variety of methodologies and approaches to this text, in a range of discourses, but

more poignantly tells a very Pausanian story. If Pausanias’ Greek landscape

constituted a canvas for articulating Greek identities and ideologies of the second

century AD,138 Periegesis 7.22.4 set the stage for modern agenda-driven positions on

the nature of Greek antiquity, and by implication for the assertion of German,

137 See, for example, De Visser (1903); Kron (1992); Nilsson (1961).

138 See, for example, Elsner (2001).

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British Imperial and especially Protestant identities from the late eighteenth to the

late-nineteenth century.139

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the participants in the colloquium at Corpus Christi College, where

this article was first delivered, in particular to Maria Pretzler, Katherine Harloe, and

Sabine MacCormack. I have benefitted immensely on issues related to nineteenth-

century German and British cultures from conversations with Timothy Barringer

and Gundula Kreuzer. My deep gratitude to Jas Elsner for giving me the opportu-

nity to present this article, and for commenting on earlier drafts. Finally, my special

thanks to the anonymous readers and Constanze Guthenke for their insightful

comments.

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