- Sappho, as translated from the Greek by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter: Fragment of Sappho, New York: Alfred A, Knopf: 2002.
"Kore I must be called
evermore; instead of marriage,
by the gods this
name became my fate."
- inscription on the base of the stature of Phrasikleia
She gazes at us straight on, neither coy nor shy. This is not the studied indirection we are accustomed to in statues from ancient Greece, the figures often seeming to gaze inward or at a world they alone can see.
Her bearing is regal, displaying her robe striped with meanders on a field of rosettes, indicators of her family's high status. Because the base she once stood on was found in a church nearby we know that her name was Phrasikleia, that she was created by the sculptor Aristion of Paros ("Aristion of Paros made me") between 550-540 BCE, and that she died a young unmarred woman. Even well-born women led constricted lives, not welcome in the public sphere, they were confined to child-bearing and wool-spinning. They did eat better food than slaves, though.
On May 18, 1972, in a field at Merenta in Attica, a kore (a young maiden, an unmarried woman) was unearthed from a shallow grave where she had been buried since the 6th century BCE. Next to her was her brother, a kouros. The most famous excavation of kourais was made on the Acropolis at Athens in the 1880s. Kourais had one foot in the world and the other pointed toward the gods. Originally created as votive offerings to goddesses in worship and supplication, the kourais gradually developed an aura of what we now call conspicuous consumption, their elaborate robes attesting to the status of their families.
The pink caste to the figure of Phrasikleia in the photograph is not due to the red backdrop but rather is attributed to the red polychrome with which the figure was originally painted. While the colors have been bleached by time her gaze retains its dazzling directness,
Image:
Phrasikleia Kore - c.550-540 BCE, photograph courtesy of National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
The pink caste to the figure of Phrasikleia in the photograph is not due to the red backdrop but rather is attributed to the red polychrome with which the figure was originally painted. While the colors have been bleached by time her gaze retains its dazzling directness,
Image:
Phrasikleia Kore - c.550-540 BCE, photograph courtesy of National Archaeological Museum, Athens.