KOINE: Mediterranean Studies in Honor of R. Ross Holloway

By Oxbow Books

The Oxford English Dictionary defines koine as 'a set of cultural or other attributes common to various groups' . This volume merges an academic career over a half century in breadth and scope with an editorial vision that brings together a chorus of scholarly contributions echoing the core principles of R. Ross Holloways own unique perspective on ancient Mediterranean studies. Through broadly conceived themes, the four individual sections of this volume (I. A View of Classical Art: Iconography in Context; II. Crossroads of the Mediterranean: Cultural Entanglements Across the Connecting Sea; III. Coins as Culture: Art and Coinage from Sicily; and IV. Discovery and Discourse, Archaeology and Interpretation) are an attempt to capture the many and varied trajectories of thought that have marked his career and serve as testimony to the significance of his research. The twenty-four papers (plus four introductory essays to the individual sections, biographical sketch and main introduction) contain recent research on subjects ranging from the Kleophrades Painter to the Black Sea, Sicilian Coinage and archaeology in modern Rome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Nov 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9781782973645

Book preview

SECTION I

INTRODUCTION

A View of Classical Art: Iconography in Context

Susan Heuck Allen

R. Ross Holloway traces his interest in ancient art to sketching classes that he took at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston when he was a young child. Asked whether his first interest in antiquity came from archaeology, art or classics, Holloway is quick to answer that it was archaeology, but that interest began so early that he cannot pinpoint the exact time. It may have been nurtured by the Explorers’ Club at the Museum of Natural History in Boston where he gave his first archaeological lecture. Be that as it may, the first excavation for this student of iconography was far from the rarified world of ancient art. In fact, it took place in a pigpen in Scituate, Massachusetts with the Massachusetts Archaeological Society. Soon thereafter the Greek master at Roxbury Latin School opened Holloway’s eyes to Greco-Roman antiquity, introducing him to the world of university scholarship which was to become his career and lifelong passion. This teacher handpicked him for Greek, the study of which ensured his membership in a very privileged club where he read Plato, Homer, Xenophon, and Thucydides.

Holloway showed his independent streak early on when, at a time when 12 out of 16 graduates of Roxbury matriculated at Harvard, he instead struck out for western Massachusetts and the greener pastures of Amherst College. At Amherst Holloway encountered his most important mentor, Professor Charles Hill Morgan (1902–1984), founder of the Department of Fine Arts as well as the Mead Art Museum and a scholar of vast interests who published books on Greek sculpture of the fourth century BC, as well as on Michelangelo and the Hudson River School. When the college disposed of its 19th century plaster cast collection, it was Morgan who salvaged a few and had Holloway work on the iconography of the Eleusis relief of Demeter and Kore for a senior essay; this research resulted in Holloway’s first published article. According to Holloway, Morgan had an amazing gift to offer in the style of his scholarship which he chose to emulate.¹

Holloway won a Fulbright Fellowship in his senior year at Amherst which gave him the opportunity to sample the wealth of archaeological activity at the University of Pennsylvania and its famous museum where he took seminars with the enormously stimulating Rodney Young. In turn, Dorothy Burr Thompson encouraged Holloway to migrate to Princeton where he began his doctoral work on the coins of Aegina, a dissertation topic on which he had settled during a summer fellowship at the ANS. Holloway first excavated in the Mediterranean at Morgantina, an ancient Greek city on the island of Sicily where a Princeton University team under the direction of Richard Stillwell in 1958 and 1959 and Eric Sjoqvist in 1961 and 1962 was turning up bushels and bushels of coins. During this period, Holloway also attended a summer session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1958, but only after he had set foot on Sicily and lost his heart to the Central Mediterranean.

Bookended by seasons at Morgantina were two propitious years, 1960–62, which Holloway spent at the American Academy courtesy of the prestigious Rome Prize. At the Academy he discovered that opportunities for foreign excavations were far more ample in Italy than in Greece. Whole areas, such as Lucania, had been virtually unexplored. At a workshop on archaeology, photography, and illustration conducted by Dino Adamestianu, Holloway met his great collaborator, Tony Hackens of the University of Louvain. It was also during those years that he met Gisela Richter who had just retired to Rome in her late 70s after more than half a century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where for over 20 years she had been Curator of Greek and Roman Art. Richter maintained a kind of salon in her ground floor apartment near the American Academy where, over tea and cakes, she introduced younger scholars to each other and provided friendship and moral support. Her prolific scholarship spanning Greece and Rome also set a powerful example for them and Richter’s formative impact on Holloway and his scholarship is reflected by his dedication of his first book to her memory.

In 1964, after two years of teaching at Princeton and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Holloway joined the Classics Department at Brown University, whose larger-than-life Professor of Classics, Charles Alexander Robinson, had long wanted a Brown University excavation in Athens. Holloway was able to realize Robinson’s dream only after his death, conducting a six-week season of excavations between the Agora and the lower slopes of the Acropolis under the auspices of Nicholas Platon, Ephor of the Acropolis.

In 1978, Holloway teamed up with Rolf Winkes and founded the Center for Old World Archaeology and Art. Around the same time, Martha Sharp Joukowsky joined the faculty at the Center, expanding the scope of its activities to the Middle East and providing a powerful role model for young women entering the field (see Winkes, this volume). Holloway was interested in the power of hero cults in Athens and surely, through his role as co-founder of the Center for Old World Archaeology and Art at Brown University, now called the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, he qualifies as an oikist, the founder of a colony. An earlier festschrift, Interpretatio Rerum: Archaeological Essays on Objects and Meanings edited by S. S. Lukesh (Providence, 1999) included contributions on iconography from a number of participants in this volume who studied with Holloway at Brown