We don't actually know ANYTHING!

Today we went to the British Museum and life and certainty as I knew it just started to crumble around me. This started when I was thinking about a blog post that I was drafting yesterday. I was reflecting on Hercules Received into Olympus found in the Red Drawing Room at Waddesdon Manor. The ceiling painting was created by Dutch artist Jacob de Wit. When first looking at the painting from the floor I found it difficult to know quite what I was looking at. After looking at the information panel in the room I found out that it was showing the apotheosis of Hercules. According to the website, Mercury is the more prominent figure in the painting being the one charge of the horses. I felt that in the whole painting it isn't the chariot that draws my eye, but Mars in darker colours in the foreground and Minerva in lighter but brighter blue colours a little in the background. I think it is the colours that are the main attraction for me. They're clearer and so its what I see first. It wasn't until I looked at the enlarged photo that I managed to even see Mercury and Hercules, which the picture on the left shows. If I wasn't told then I would not have guessed this was Hercules because he seems to be lacking his main attributes lilke his lion skin and club. Maybe he is holding them, because there is something on his hip and he's leaning on something wooden but it isn't clear, and far away on the ceiling. How would anyone have known? Well, when a painting was created it 1725 you'd ecpect and hope that the artist has said something about it somewhere, or as least named it so we know the general subject matter. However when something was created more than 2000 years ago how can we know anything about it?

This was my problem at the British Museum today. During the handling session with Alexandra Villing we looked at vase with a winged figure on it (right).
Its a winged female leaning before an altar. We weren't too sure what it would have been used for and it was quite small. We were asked who we thought it was and we answered Nike but I asked "how can we know?" After a quick internet search I find from the theoi website that Nike "was depicted in ancient Greek vase painting with a variety of attributes including a wreath or sash to crown a victor, an oinochoe and phiale (bowl and cup) for libations, a thymiaterion (incense burner), an altar, and a lyre for the celebration of victory in song." Ok, so our little vase has a winged woman in front of an altar therefore it must be Nike right? But why? How can we know? Are all the winged figures we see depicted Nike? Could there maybe be a figure that has been lost and missed out in our version of Greek mythology that we have mistaken for Nike? These sorts of questions were just answered with we can't really be sure and that made my whole world start crumbling around me as things I considered fact or something that I didn't know as a uneducated student were shown to be pretty unstable, fluid and not known to even the most authoritative scholar. I suppose that's why there are so many scholarly debates on different topics within Classics as people try to make sense of what we know with what little evidence we have left.

One of these debates that we have been thinking about in class is identifying the figures on the east frieze of the Parthenon. During the first lesson on it we were shown the figures and allowed to look at what they're carrying and think of the mythology we know to come to the right conclusion, or at least, the conclusion most scholars agree with. Whether it's the right one is unknown but visitors to the museum are presenting with what appears to be solid fact. Of course I don't expect labels like "This figure might possibly, maybe could be Zeus, but then again maybe not." because that would be completely ridiculous and visitors would leave knowing less than they started with but I had never noticed before how limiting and self assured the labels appear to be. It was interesting for us to note that the figure commonly thought to be Iris wasn't even

referred to by the label, maybe because the curators don't want to claim they know who she is. Although often considered to be Iris, Jenifer Neils argues that it is actually Hebe, Hera's daughter, standing behind her mother, in symmetry with Eros standing behind his mother Aphrodite on the other side of the frieze.

Its an interesting theory but how will we ever know anything? So until we build a time machine my world continues to crumble.