BBC Treasures of Ancient Greece (2015) s01e01 Episode Script
The Age of Heroes
It was the ancient Greeks who shaped our ideas of what art should look like.
No other civilisation has played such an important role in creating our vision of artistic perfection.
Of beauty.
Of realism.
Today, we take the idea of realistic art for granted.
But in fact, it was the ancient Greeks who invented it.
In a fundamental sense, they taught us how to see.
But while we're taught that Western civilisation was born here in ancient Greece, its art emerged from a much darker, stranger place - an older world of myths, monsters and the imagination, with roots in unexpected places.
A world that's still being revealed, even now.
Over a period of 1,000 years, the idea of Greece would emerge from a handful of kingdoms scattered across the Mediterranean.
And art would be instrumental in bringing the Greek people together.
From a fascination with the natural world, the intricacies of geometric design, heroic tales of gods and monsters, to a passion for the human form .
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and the triumph of Athens, and the Classical Style.
In this programme, I'll be piecing together what we know about those earliest influences and separating history from myth.
Drawing on the epics of Homer and the discoveries of the 20th century .
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to reveal how the miracle of Greek art came into being.
Our quest for the origins of Greek art begins not in ancient times, but just over a century ago.
In the year 1900, an Englishman arrived on the island of Crete.
Arthur Evans was the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
But what brought him to Crete was a long held dream.
His guide was the ancient Greek poet Homer.
"There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea, "a fair rich land, surrounded by water.
"Among their cities is the great city Knossos, where Minos reigned.
" Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed these lines probably in the 8th century BC.
Over 2,500 years later, Evans recalled them as he set foot on Crete.
Evans never forgot his Homer.
The Greek poet told stories of King Minos, said to be the ruler of ancient Crete.
And according to myth, his palace incorporated a maze or labyrinth, and at its dark centre was this terrifying monster - half-man, half-bull - the Minotaur, a creature that dined on the flesh of boys and girls.
Evans was convinced he was onto something.
One morning in March, he set out for the hill of Kefala, to begin digging at a site he'd recently purchased.
An ancient palace was thought to be buried under the hill.
What no-one knew was how big it was.
It didn't take long for Evans' team of diggers to find the first archaeological remains.
What they unearthed exceeded even Evans' wildest dreams.
He believed that he had found Knossos, the royal palace of Minos, king of a people Evans termed the Minoans.
Evans and his workers uncovered the sprawling remains of a vast series of unfortified buildings mostly dating from between 1700 and 1400 BC.
He reconstructed sections of Knossos in an attempt to bring the Minoan world alive.
With its network of twisting passageways, he believed he'd had found his labyrinth.
And everywhere he looked, he saw bulls.
This bull's head was used as an elaborate vase or drinking vessel.
It has two openings - one at the top of the head, the second under the snout.
Evans plainly knew that the Minotaur was a mythical creature.
But objects like these seemed to offer historical proof that bulls did play a major role in the ceremonial lives of the Minoans.
And one of the most exciting pieces of evidence was this remarkable wall painting.
This is such an extraordinary fresco, and it's one of the real prizes that Evans unearthed here at Knossos.
And it is partially a reconstruction.
If you look closely you can tell which bits are the original fragments.
But nevertheless, as reconstructions go, it's entirely plausible.
And what it appears to represent is a central spectacle in public Minoan life, which is the very dangerous sport of bull-leaping.
And compositionally, it's such an effective work of art.
Dominating everything in the middle is the magnificent beast, the bull himself.
He's charging, hurtling pell-mell through space at this light-skinned attendant at one end.
Your eye is naturally drawn, in a very subtle fashion, via the sinuous curve that goes from the tips of the bull's horn around onto his head, over the hump of his powerful neck and then down onto his back, leading your eye towards the other light-skinned attendant at the other end.
But of course, in human terms, the star of the show here is this red-skinned figure in the middle.
The daredevil acrobat, the toreador himself.
And he's depicted mid leap - his hair is fluttering in the air - there's a tremendous sense of buoyancy, joyful movement and life, as he spins through the air.
It makes me think of works of art created thousands of years later by Matisse, his paper cut-outs of acrobats.
They both share artistically what you might call the audacity of simplicity.
The bigger picture pieced together by Evans at Knossos was of a people at one with nature, deeply connected with the world around them.
The patterns of the natural world preoccupied Minoan artists.
They were fascinated by its curves and shapes, but also its dangers - this Minoan goddess holds two snakes aloft, one in each hand, defiant.
Arthur Evans was convinced he'd found the Knossos he was looking for.
But what he had actually discovered was, in a sense, far more tantalising.
An apparent Eden of peace and plenty, a people in harmony with nature.
The myth of King Minos would remain just that - a myth.
But the sensitive and subtle art found on Crete - which dated back to 1,000 years before the heyday of Classical Greece - proved without doubt that Greek art had deeper, richer roots than anyone had previously imagined.
And a recent discovery on an island north of Crete showed that those roots spread further than even Evans knew.
The legend of a Minoan empire stretching across the sea is a recurring theme from Homer in the 8th century BC, to the philosopher Plato, more than 300 years later.
Plato wrote about a large and prosperous island, where the people sacrificed bulls within splendid palaces, but which sank beneath the waves following an earthquake.
And he called this lost island Atlantis.
Whatever the literal truth about Atlantis, it is tempting to understand the story of its disappearance as a distant Greek memory of Minoan civilisation.
Especially when an island in the Minoan world would suffer an uncannily similar fate.
Santorini sits among a group of smaller islands in the Aegean Sea, a day's sailing from Crete.
Originally, it was one single island.
But more than 2,500 years ago, it was blown apart by a colossal volcanic explosion - one of the largest in recorded history.
Little was known of life there before the eruption - until in 1967, a team of Greek archaeologists made an extraordinary discovery.
Buried beneath really thick layers of volcanic ash, they discovered this ghost town - a winding, warren-like settlement filled with one, two, even three-storey buildings.
And inevitably, the site was instantly called the 'Greek Pompeii.
' As at Pompeii, the catastrophe had transformed the town, as well as its contents, into this astonishing time capsule, offering remarkable visual evidence for what life was like on Santorini before the island was obliterated.
What the archaeologists found here showed that the inhabitants of the town, known today as Akrotiri, were in regular contact with Crete.
In other words, Akrotiri was a Minoan colony.
And evidence for this came with the discovery of a series of exquisite frescoes, that share the Minoan love of the natural world seen by Arthur Evans on Crete.
Looking at Minoan art, it's easy to be transported to this pastoral realm, where everything is lush and sunny.
So many of the paintings from Akrotiri, they have this joyful, springtime quality.
This scene, for example, it exalts in the volcanic landscape of Santorini, with its eye-catching red rocks, and these billowing clusters of lilies in full, rampant bloom.
But the details that are most delightful have to be the pairs of cavorting, flirting, amorous swallows.
They twist and kiss in midair, like nimble fighter-jet pilots spinning, barrel-rolling just for fun.
And we're presented here with something fleeting, playful.
It's a moment of spontaneity, but one that's been preserved for millennia.
Time and again, the frescos from Akrotiri offer insights into the lives and habits of its inhabitants.
These blue monkeys appear irrepressible as they clamber over the rocks of Santorini.
They are supple and lithe, with nimble limbs and alert eyes.
Whoever has created it has thought long and hard about the intrinsic quality of monkeyness.
The device is so effective because it relishes how you can unleash this visual energy simply by varying up quite straightforward elements.
The slope of a back, a bent knee, the curling, sinuous tails, even the differences between their stiletto-like feet.
It's almost as if whoever entered this room, decorated with this fresco, has provoked the monkeys into this whirlwind of activity.
You can almost hear them chattering away with alarm and consternation.
The beguiling world captured by the Akrotiri frescoes would come to a brutal end.
The island of Santorini was blown sky-high by the volcano sometime around 1600 BC.
Yet the pumice and ash preserved another fresco that offers evidence that a new, very different people had already reached the island.
There are drowned bodies here.
Warriors are marching up a hill.
We can tell from their weaponry and armour that these aren't Minoans or friendly traders.
They're fighting men - Mycenaeans, from mainland Greece.
And in time, they'd take over at Knossos on Crete.
Just as the Minoans had colonised Santorini, so the Mycenaeans colonised the Minoans.
But their art would offer a stark contrast to the paradise imagined in the art of the Minoans.
The Mycenaeans occupied key strategic positions on the Greek mainland.
From 1600 BC, their capital was a citadel on a rocky hillside in the Peloponnese.
Like the treasures of Knossos, their art is known to us thanks to the exploits of a maverick explorer.
In 1876, a 54-year-old German adventurer and chancer, who'd spent time in California during the Gold Rush, arrived here.
And like Arthur Evans, he came in search of heroes - the kings and royal palaces celebrated in Homer.
Heinrich Schliemann was his name, and he'd plundered already royal treasures from Troy.
But now his quest was to unearth here in Mycenae the grave and riches of Agamemnon - leader of the Greeks at Troy, who'd returned home after ten years of war only to be murdered by his wife and her new lover.
It's possible there was a king called Agamemnon.
But as with the rest of Homer, what was myth and what was history was anyone's guess.
Mycenae was a huge fortified palace that had lain in ruins for around 3,000 years.
And when Schliemann arrived, it had lost none of its imposing presence.
Approaching Mycenae feels like stepping into a scene from Lord of the Rings.
It's a fortress, a citadel on a hilltop, a place built by warriors for warriors - the sort of men who'd neck a pint of bull's blood before breakfast.
And just look at these thick, intimidating, utterly impregnable walls! They're constructed using these vast, monumental blocks.
So you have to imagine - you're an approaching army, you're heading up this steep ramp, hoping to storm the citadel - looking at this, you'd be quaking in your boots already.
And that's before you arrived at the gate itself, where any would-be marauders would then be confronted by this.
To enter Mycenae, you had to pass through the Lion Gate, under a carved relief showing two upright feline creatures flanking a central column.
Schliemann believed the Lion Gate guarded treasures buried within.
And once inside, it didn't take him long to discover a monument to the kings of Mycenae.
Enclosed by the city walls was a circle of shaft graves.
These graves, sunk into the ground, were rectangular trenches several metres deep.
At the entrance stood an imposing carved stone.
And what lay beyond would exceed even Schliemann's dreams of Homeric riches.
Just imagine the excitement of uncovering the horde.
Glittering amid the gloom of the graves, Schliemann discovered hundreds of luxurious golden objects, more than justifying Homer's description of Mycenae as "rich in gold.
" Including this spectacular full-sized death mask.
And although there is an obvious interest in pattern and design and symmetry - the spirals of the ears echoing each other, the horizontal lines of the eyes - there's also a sense that it was meant to convey something at least of an individual.
A well-groomed, debonair individual, in this case.
Look at the way his moustache curls up at either end.
The way that the beard has been fashioned, with these artfully ruffled lines in different directions.
It must have made Schliemann's heart stop.
And there's a story that at once, he feverishly sent off a telegram that said "I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.
" The stunning horde included this poignant golden burial suit for a young child.
And a dagger blade, inlaid with precious metals, gold and silver, showing an intricate action scene - a lion hunt.
Schliemann had discovered an unparalleled wealth of treasures that shone new light on royal life and death at Mycenae.
In time, it would turn out that these artefacts didn't actually belong to Agamemnon and his family - they predated Homer's hero by several centuries.
But in a sense, what Schliemann had uncovered was even more exciting - the riches of a powerful, sophisticated civilisation that numbered the Minoans among its conquests.
And there's evidence of their two worlds coming together, in a pair of exceptional objects.
These two golden cups combine the bull imagery of the Minoans with the hammered gold of the Mycenaeans.
They were made by pressing thin golden sheets from behind to create these raised designs, in this case, two scenes of wild bull-hunting.
And the detail in the landscape is completely extraordinary.
If you look close, you can make out the gnarled trunks and miniature branches of olive trees.
And while one of the scenes is perfectly peaceful, as a docile bull is trapped using a rope tethered around its leg, the other one is remarkably fierce and vigorous.
Just look at this enraged bull, hurtling around the side of the cup, and smashing into its would-be captors, toppling them like skittles.
On one level, you could read these cups as a reflection on man's relationship with the natural world.
But perhaps there's another reading here too.
Because if we understand the bulls as symbols of political power, then maybe what we see here is the upending of one civilisation by another, much fiercer way of life.
But the Mycenaeans were about to experience an apocalypse of their own.
By the 11th century BC, all of the strongholds on the Greek mainland, such as Mycenae, lay abandoned, their people fled.
Centuries later, the ancient Greeks would rediscover Mycenae, and marvel at the ruins, wondering who had built them, and for whom.
They called the walls at Mycenae 'cyclopean,' because they believed that only a giant, like the Cyclops from The Odyssey, could move such immense, awe-inspiring stones.
The Age of the Mycenaeans - an age of wild beasts, warrior kings - would become their Age of Heroes.
And in the centuries to come, legends left over from that mythical era would inform Greek art as well as shaping Greek identity.
The destruction and abandonment of palaces and settlements across the Aegean came to be known as Greece's Dark Ages.
An era that lasted around 300 years, from 1100 to 800 BC.
Historians traditionally dismissed this as a period of obscurity - an interruption in the otherwise glorious progress of Greek history.
The population plummeted by three-quarters.
Those who were left were forced to scratch out an existence.
The causes of the catastrophe remain a mystery.
Was it environmental disaster - plague, famine, earthquake? Cataclysmic war? Deadly internal power struggles? Or perhaps a 'perfect storm' of all of them? Whatever it was, Mycenae and other kingdoms across the Mediterranean rapidly fell apart, ushering in a new age that was characterised by hardship, pain and grief.
The accepted history was that the visual arts almost disappeared during the Dark Ages.
Certainly, one casualty was the human figure, which vanished from Greek art for several centuries.
Yet in recent years, the idea of a lengthy interruption in Greek art and culture has been challenged.
Just off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland lies the island of Euboea.
Here, evidence is only now emerging that life in the so-called Dark Ages wasn't quite as dark as has been thought.
The site is known today as Lefkandi.
For 3,000 years, there was nothing here but a gigantic mound.
When they started digging, though, they uncovered the remains of a vast building - it was 45 metres in length.
It had a thatched roof, and it was surrounded by a wooden colonnade, preceding the architecture of Greek temples by an astonishing two centuries at least.
But the most exciting discovery of all was hidden even deeper.
They discovered the cremated remains of a man in his forties, and the skeleton of a younger woman.
Among the grave goods were fine items of jewellery, including a Babylonian necklace that at the time was already 1,000 years old.
And nearby they came across a remarkable object, dating from the 10th century BC, that pointed the way to an emergent new vision for Greek art.
This impish little fellow is a centaur - a fantastical creature, half man, half horse - potentially an unruly being on the fringes of civilisation.
And to our eyes, he looks initially like a toy - a plaything - a My Little Centaur for the ancient world.
But it would be doing him a disservice to belittle him like that, because he offers us the first known depiction of mythology in Greek sculpture.
He doesn't quite have the impact of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, or the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, but this pixie-ish creature offers a blueprint for the development of Greek art over the next few centuries, because it combines a love of geometric pattern with a passion for mythology.
The founding myths of the Greek world, and of Greek art, began to develop at this time among the surviving people of the region.
Tales of their dimly remembered forefathers, from places like Knossos and Mycenae.
In time, these myths would become integral to Greek art.
But it was the fascination with pattern that would lead Greek art out of the Dark Ages.
For centuries, rather than human scenes, Greek pots were decorated with swathes of geometric designs.
But thanks to this survival from an ancient cemetery, we can witness the moment in around 750 BC when the human figure returns to Greek art.
By the 8th century BC, big, swollen pots just like this one were being used as tomb markers in cemeteries.
And all of them were covered, from the neck to the foot, with regiment upon regiment of marching, relentless ornament and geometric pattern.
Rows of triangles and dots, parallel lines, meanders, zigzags, even bands of well-drilled animals, in this case grazing deer.
The whole thing similar in effect to the patterned centaur of Lefkandi.
But then - as you move down the pot - you suddenly chance upon something totally new.
The central pattern, filled with human figures, commemorates a custom known by the Greeks as 'prothesis' or lying in state, where the dead person would be laid out to be mourned by friends and family.
And you can see ranks of mourners here on either side, tearing out their hair with grief, their blocky bodies, this play of angles and geometry, with triangular torsos - but then also surprisingly shapely legs.
And in the middle, there's the deceased - probably a woman, judging by the clothing - with a ceremonial blanket laid out above the body.
Despite their humble, even rudimentary appearance, these matter-of-fact stickmen mark a crucial moment in the development of Greek art because they stand at the start of the Greek obsession with the human form.
The decoration on Greek vases soon acquired a new, vivid quality.
The figures were no longer just ornamentation - now they were people and monsters.
By the 7th century BC, the decoration of large pots like this one was changing very fast indeed.
All that dense, claustrophobic pattern has disappeared - there are geometric motifs here, but they float freely like elaborate snowflakes.
And those ranks of tiny animals - they've swollen, they've gained in interest - here on the shoulder you can see this handsome lion and a boar.
And the figures, well, they've expanded.
In fact, some of these are the largest ever painted on a Greek vase.
Up here you have three men thrusting a stake into this slumped giant, bearded, holding a cup of wine.
And it's a story that's related by Homer in The Odyssey, when Odysseus gets the Cyclops Polyphemus drunk, before blinding him.
The body of the pot is also painted with huge figures.
These are some of the earliest depictions of Gorgons in Greek art.
Recognisable by their snake hair, they could turn you to stone just by looking at you.
And that stony stare draws you into a world of myths and monsters that soon transformed the substance of Greek art.
That change was hastened by the arrival of a new decorative style for Greek pots.
It's known as black-figure technique.
At their studio in Athens, Vicky Xyda-Ralli and her colleagues have spent years learning how to faithfully reproduce the black-figure technique.
First, decorative bands are painted on, to show where the design should be drawn.
Then Vicky begins to mark out the design onto the pot.
Can I see what it is doing? Right, so it's a very clever way of transferring the design.
Do you think that ancient artists would use tools like this, or was it all freehand? The next stage is for Vicky to paint on the figures using a watered-down clay.
You're applying a colour to the pot which looks kind of orangey-red.
So how does it turn black? What was new about black-figure was the use of a sharp point to scratch in the detail - a technique learnt from Middle Eastern metalworkers.
I think I've got a basic handle on the technique, and I know that I've got down here, well, this is a pot you've prepared already.
Which is the same design, but it's once it's been fired.
So, it's a total transformation, obviously.
Black-figure became the dominant style in Greek pottery for the next century or so.
Its bold, graphic approach opened up exciting possibilities for storytelling.
One of the things we start to find during this period is that there was an explosion of pots decorated with mythical scenes.
Here, we've got the death of Patroclus, best friend of Achilles, at Troy - whose burial was described by Homer.
Around this time, sets of stories, folktales really, handed down through generations were being canonised - effectively that's what Homer was doing.
And as the stories became common currency, painted onto pots just like this one, they started to contribute to a binding sense of Greekness.
Perhaps surprisingly, that growing Greek identity was stimulated by foreign influence.
As was Greek art.
The island of Samos lies in the eastern reaches of the Aegean.
In antiquity, it was frontier territory - where Western culture could meet and mingle with the East.
At an ancient site known as the Heraion and dedicated to the goddess Hera, a remarkable horde of treasures has been retrieved, showing distinct Eastern influence.
These hammered bronze griffin heads were originally a Middle Eastern image.
Now they were made in workshops on Samos, and put on Greek cauldrons dedicated at the Heraion.
This bronze goddess is recognisably from Egypt, dedicated by a pilgrim in around 700 BC.
This wooden figurine, produced 50 years later, clearly owes a debt to the Egyptian statue.
Yet it was made by Greek hands.
In the early 1980s, archaeologists at the Heraion on Samos made a discovery that dramatically laid bare that Eastern influence.
This giant statue stands nearly five metres tall, and dates from the 6th century BC.
When you first look at this monster, you have to ask yourself - is he from ancient Greece or ancient Egypt? Because at first, everything screams Egypt! The stiff pose, with his fists clenched by his sides, the frontality, the monumental scale.
And ancient Egyptian art was extremely powerful and effective - after all, it lasted for thousands of years.
In part, because it used easy-to-replicate formulas such as dividing up the block for carving using a grid of squares.
Yet there is another spirit here too.
A Greek spirit.
And it's visible in the slight softening of the flesh, the sensuousness of his face.
And also these folds of muscle above his knees.
And this frankly curvy quality to the back and the buttocks, all of which anticipates later developments in Greek art.
And unlike the sort of Egyptian statuary that provided the model, this man is very clearly naked.
In Greek art, statues like this one, they form an important type known as kouroi, or youths.
And originally this particular kouros, along with many other statues, lined the Sacred Way of the Heraion.
What you can't deny is that his overblown presence has a truly mesmerising power.
Like so much early Greek art, kouroi reveal a deep fascination with symmetry and pattern.
In time, they would be found all over Greece - marking graves or commemorating victories.
By the end of the 6th century, it's estimated there were as many as 20,000 kouroi in the Greek world.
The heyday of Samos coincided with an important period in the development of Greek art.
Greek artists were in thrall of course to these strange but seductive influences from the East, but they also melded them to fashion characteristic Greek forms, such as the kouros.
As the 6th century wore on, Samos wasn't the only ambitious Greek city with splendour to show off.
And gradually, as the Greeks accumulated wealth and power, they stopped looking east, and began searching instead for somewhere they could gather to compete on their own terms.
Greece - more a people than a nation - had begun to coalesce into a number of thriving city-states, such as Athens, Corinth and Sparta.
Ambitious rivals, they fought frequently.
But they also needed places to come together in peacetime.
To share what they had in common - poetry, religion.
Or to compete in athletics.
One of the most important of these places was Delphi.
As soon as you come here, you sense why this spot was so special for the ancient Greeks.
Delphi has an aura, a presence, a rugged majesty, and it transports you that little bit closer to the divine.
Over the centuries, the significance of Delphi as a sacred site grew and grew, until it became what is known as a 'sanctuary' - a vital spiritual and religious space that was visited by Greeks from every city-state.
And so it was essential in forging that strong sense of Greek togetherness.
The origins of Delphi as a sanctuary lay in the tradition that the voice of Apollo could be heard from a crack in the rock.
This oracle became a way for warring city-states to settle their disputes.
And once here, they wanted to leave their mark.
Sanctuaries like this were a complete godsend for artists.
From the 6th century onwards, this place would have been completely crammed, a visual jumble, a cornucopia of imagery - images of gods, statues of athletes commemorating great victories in the games - even elaborate sculpted friezes decorating impressive buildings that were built to honour and record military triumphs.
And all of it, all this stuff, it was given up, inevitably, as thanks to the gods, but it was also a way very simply of showing off.
Because Delphi was an arena for public competition in many different senses, including the highly political contest between city-states of the most conspicuous expenditure and power - all of it communicated via art.
Greek city-states built treasuries along the Sacred Way to impress visitors to the sanctuary.
The fanciest treasury at Delphi was built by one of the smallest Greek states - the wealthy island of Siphnos.
The Siphnian Treasury had an elaborate frieze that ran around its outside like a ribbon.
And while a statue like a kouros was stiff and formal, here the carved human form leaps into life.
The frieze dramatises a battle from Greek mythology, the struggle between the gods and the giants to rule the world.
It's about the forces of order and civilisation - the Olympian gods, vanquishing the savagery and barbarism of the helmeted giants.
The interest for us, if you like, of this frieze now is the way it's been sculpted, because you find this surging, rippling, pulsing rhythm to the piece, which takes us right into the melee of the battle.
The tumult of activity.
But it's the carving of the figures that's so crucial here.
They're not seen in isolation, one by one.
You have all of this interweaving, overlapping of form.
For example, this corpse here, you find him snaking in-between legs of the giants above.
But maybe the choicest scene of all is this moment, very ferocious, at the heart of the frieze, where one of the Olympians riding a chariot charges towards the giants.
And the chariot is powered by these two lions.
And you can see one of them here attacking this poor giant that we're almost invited to sympathise with.
The lion is practically hugging his haunches.
You can see the way that the paws overlap and there's a real sense of depth of space.
This is something that felt dynamic, it felt radical, it felt unprecedented.
In fact, it ushered in a whole new spirit for Greek art, that takes us out of that archaic world of stiffness, towards something resembling, if not real life, then a certain new vigour of animation and spirit.
Sanctuaries like Delphi stimulated a new energy and creativity in Greek art.
Motivated less by noble ideals than by something far more down-to-earth - competition.
Athletic contests at the sanctuaries - they led to a greater demand for art - but in turn, the artists began to compete among themselves, like athletes, in a bid to scale new creative heights.
But if that was the purpose of all this art, then the effect was much greater and more unexpected, because art, like the revered words of Homer, began to bind Greeks together, just as much as it was used to distinguish one city-state from another.
It wouldn't be long before writers used a single word - Hellas - for the land occupied by Greek speakers.
This new sense of Greek identity would soon invigorate even the stiff, formal kouroi.
While they still owed something to the original Egyptian model, there was no denying they were relaxing into something unmistakably Greek.
This imposing figure was found in a cemetery.
And what's interesting artistically about him is that although he exhibits many of the hallmarks of kouroi generally - the frontal pose, his arms rigidly clamped by his sides, even his long hair - he also has something new, something of the poise and presence of a real person.
It's true that, to our eyes, his pumped-up muscles don't necessarily seem realistic.
Particularly in the lower half - his buttock, haunches, his calves, they're all overinflated - yet this isn't an empty exercise in symmetry, this is an expressive attempt to start to understand how human anatomy actually works.
Slowly but surely, Greek sculpture was softening up, and before long, kouroi like this, standing to attention for eternity, would be a thing of the past.
By the end of the 6th century BC, Athens was emerging as the dominant city-state in Greece.
And it was here that the heroic aspirations of Greek artists were most keenly felt.
In 514 BC, two Athenian citizens murdered the brother of the city's tyrant ruler.
Within a few years, the fledgling democracy of Athens had commissioned statues of the 'tyrant slayers,' as they became known.
When these two figures were erected in the main public square of Athens, just think what a dramatic impact they must have had.
Everything about the sculpture announces a new self-confidence - both artistically, and in terms of Greek identity.
The viewer is cast, with daring panache, in the role of the victim.
And the old stiffness and formality of those outdated kouroi has been consigned to history.
Instead, we've got this moment of vigorous action, in the round, all lunging legs and slashing arms.
These two dynamic figures are rushing headlong into a new era for Greek art.
Over a period of 1,000 years, the civilisation of ancient Greece had gone from an age of scattered kingdoms trading, waging war upon each other, surviving Dark Age catastrophe, to a cultural rebirth and the development of a rich mythology.
And finally, to the foundations of what we know today as classical Greece.
Now Greek art was a leader, on the brink of its own unique, distinctive style.
A revolution was just around the corner.
Next time The revolution is announced.
Art in Greece's classical Golden Age.
No other civilisation has played such an important role in creating our vision of artistic perfection.
Of beauty.
Of realism.
Today, we take the idea of realistic art for granted.
But in fact, it was the ancient Greeks who invented it.
In a fundamental sense, they taught us how to see.
But while we're taught that Western civilisation was born here in ancient Greece, its art emerged from a much darker, stranger place - an older world of myths, monsters and the imagination, with roots in unexpected places.
A world that's still being revealed, even now.
Over a period of 1,000 years, the idea of Greece would emerge from a handful of kingdoms scattered across the Mediterranean.
And art would be instrumental in bringing the Greek people together.
From a fascination with the natural world, the intricacies of geometric design, heroic tales of gods and monsters, to a passion for the human form .
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and the triumph of Athens, and the Classical Style.
In this programme, I'll be piecing together what we know about those earliest influences and separating history from myth.
Drawing on the epics of Homer and the discoveries of the 20th century .
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to reveal how the miracle of Greek art came into being.
Our quest for the origins of Greek art begins not in ancient times, but just over a century ago.
In the year 1900, an Englishman arrived on the island of Crete.
Arthur Evans was the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
But what brought him to Crete was a long held dream.
His guide was the ancient Greek poet Homer.
"There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea, "a fair rich land, surrounded by water.
"Among their cities is the great city Knossos, where Minos reigned.
" Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed these lines probably in the 8th century BC.
Over 2,500 years later, Evans recalled them as he set foot on Crete.
Evans never forgot his Homer.
The Greek poet told stories of King Minos, said to be the ruler of ancient Crete.
And according to myth, his palace incorporated a maze or labyrinth, and at its dark centre was this terrifying monster - half-man, half-bull - the Minotaur, a creature that dined on the flesh of boys and girls.
Evans was convinced he was onto something.
One morning in March, he set out for the hill of Kefala, to begin digging at a site he'd recently purchased.
An ancient palace was thought to be buried under the hill.
What no-one knew was how big it was.
It didn't take long for Evans' team of diggers to find the first archaeological remains.
What they unearthed exceeded even Evans' wildest dreams.
He believed that he had found Knossos, the royal palace of Minos, king of a people Evans termed the Minoans.
Evans and his workers uncovered the sprawling remains of a vast series of unfortified buildings mostly dating from between 1700 and 1400 BC.
He reconstructed sections of Knossos in an attempt to bring the Minoan world alive.
With its network of twisting passageways, he believed he'd had found his labyrinth.
And everywhere he looked, he saw bulls.
This bull's head was used as an elaborate vase or drinking vessel.
It has two openings - one at the top of the head, the second under the snout.
Evans plainly knew that the Minotaur was a mythical creature.
But objects like these seemed to offer historical proof that bulls did play a major role in the ceremonial lives of the Minoans.
And one of the most exciting pieces of evidence was this remarkable wall painting.
This is such an extraordinary fresco, and it's one of the real prizes that Evans unearthed here at Knossos.
And it is partially a reconstruction.
If you look closely you can tell which bits are the original fragments.
But nevertheless, as reconstructions go, it's entirely plausible.
And what it appears to represent is a central spectacle in public Minoan life, which is the very dangerous sport of bull-leaping.
And compositionally, it's such an effective work of art.
Dominating everything in the middle is the magnificent beast, the bull himself.
He's charging, hurtling pell-mell through space at this light-skinned attendant at one end.
Your eye is naturally drawn, in a very subtle fashion, via the sinuous curve that goes from the tips of the bull's horn around onto his head, over the hump of his powerful neck and then down onto his back, leading your eye towards the other light-skinned attendant at the other end.
But of course, in human terms, the star of the show here is this red-skinned figure in the middle.
The daredevil acrobat, the toreador himself.
And he's depicted mid leap - his hair is fluttering in the air - there's a tremendous sense of buoyancy, joyful movement and life, as he spins through the air.
It makes me think of works of art created thousands of years later by Matisse, his paper cut-outs of acrobats.
They both share artistically what you might call the audacity of simplicity.
The bigger picture pieced together by Evans at Knossos was of a people at one with nature, deeply connected with the world around them.
The patterns of the natural world preoccupied Minoan artists.
They were fascinated by its curves and shapes, but also its dangers - this Minoan goddess holds two snakes aloft, one in each hand, defiant.
Arthur Evans was convinced he'd found the Knossos he was looking for.
But what he had actually discovered was, in a sense, far more tantalising.
An apparent Eden of peace and plenty, a people in harmony with nature.
The myth of King Minos would remain just that - a myth.
But the sensitive and subtle art found on Crete - which dated back to 1,000 years before the heyday of Classical Greece - proved without doubt that Greek art had deeper, richer roots than anyone had previously imagined.
And a recent discovery on an island north of Crete showed that those roots spread further than even Evans knew.
The legend of a Minoan empire stretching across the sea is a recurring theme from Homer in the 8th century BC, to the philosopher Plato, more than 300 years later.
Plato wrote about a large and prosperous island, where the people sacrificed bulls within splendid palaces, but which sank beneath the waves following an earthquake.
And he called this lost island Atlantis.
Whatever the literal truth about Atlantis, it is tempting to understand the story of its disappearance as a distant Greek memory of Minoan civilisation.
Especially when an island in the Minoan world would suffer an uncannily similar fate.
Santorini sits among a group of smaller islands in the Aegean Sea, a day's sailing from Crete.
Originally, it was one single island.
But more than 2,500 years ago, it was blown apart by a colossal volcanic explosion - one of the largest in recorded history.
Little was known of life there before the eruption - until in 1967, a team of Greek archaeologists made an extraordinary discovery.
Buried beneath really thick layers of volcanic ash, they discovered this ghost town - a winding, warren-like settlement filled with one, two, even three-storey buildings.
And inevitably, the site was instantly called the 'Greek Pompeii.
' As at Pompeii, the catastrophe had transformed the town, as well as its contents, into this astonishing time capsule, offering remarkable visual evidence for what life was like on Santorini before the island was obliterated.
What the archaeologists found here showed that the inhabitants of the town, known today as Akrotiri, were in regular contact with Crete.
In other words, Akrotiri was a Minoan colony.
And evidence for this came with the discovery of a series of exquisite frescoes, that share the Minoan love of the natural world seen by Arthur Evans on Crete.
Looking at Minoan art, it's easy to be transported to this pastoral realm, where everything is lush and sunny.
So many of the paintings from Akrotiri, they have this joyful, springtime quality.
This scene, for example, it exalts in the volcanic landscape of Santorini, with its eye-catching red rocks, and these billowing clusters of lilies in full, rampant bloom.
But the details that are most delightful have to be the pairs of cavorting, flirting, amorous swallows.
They twist and kiss in midair, like nimble fighter-jet pilots spinning, barrel-rolling just for fun.
And we're presented here with something fleeting, playful.
It's a moment of spontaneity, but one that's been preserved for millennia.
Time and again, the frescos from Akrotiri offer insights into the lives and habits of its inhabitants.
These blue monkeys appear irrepressible as they clamber over the rocks of Santorini.
They are supple and lithe, with nimble limbs and alert eyes.
Whoever has created it has thought long and hard about the intrinsic quality of monkeyness.
The device is so effective because it relishes how you can unleash this visual energy simply by varying up quite straightforward elements.
The slope of a back, a bent knee, the curling, sinuous tails, even the differences between their stiletto-like feet.
It's almost as if whoever entered this room, decorated with this fresco, has provoked the monkeys into this whirlwind of activity.
You can almost hear them chattering away with alarm and consternation.
The beguiling world captured by the Akrotiri frescoes would come to a brutal end.
The island of Santorini was blown sky-high by the volcano sometime around 1600 BC.
Yet the pumice and ash preserved another fresco that offers evidence that a new, very different people had already reached the island.
There are drowned bodies here.
Warriors are marching up a hill.
We can tell from their weaponry and armour that these aren't Minoans or friendly traders.
They're fighting men - Mycenaeans, from mainland Greece.
And in time, they'd take over at Knossos on Crete.
Just as the Minoans had colonised Santorini, so the Mycenaeans colonised the Minoans.
But their art would offer a stark contrast to the paradise imagined in the art of the Minoans.
The Mycenaeans occupied key strategic positions on the Greek mainland.
From 1600 BC, their capital was a citadel on a rocky hillside in the Peloponnese.
Like the treasures of Knossos, their art is known to us thanks to the exploits of a maverick explorer.
In 1876, a 54-year-old German adventurer and chancer, who'd spent time in California during the Gold Rush, arrived here.
And like Arthur Evans, he came in search of heroes - the kings and royal palaces celebrated in Homer.
Heinrich Schliemann was his name, and he'd plundered already royal treasures from Troy.
But now his quest was to unearth here in Mycenae the grave and riches of Agamemnon - leader of the Greeks at Troy, who'd returned home after ten years of war only to be murdered by his wife and her new lover.
It's possible there was a king called Agamemnon.
But as with the rest of Homer, what was myth and what was history was anyone's guess.
Mycenae was a huge fortified palace that had lain in ruins for around 3,000 years.
And when Schliemann arrived, it had lost none of its imposing presence.
Approaching Mycenae feels like stepping into a scene from Lord of the Rings.
It's a fortress, a citadel on a hilltop, a place built by warriors for warriors - the sort of men who'd neck a pint of bull's blood before breakfast.
And just look at these thick, intimidating, utterly impregnable walls! They're constructed using these vast, monumental blocks.
So you have to imagine - you're an approaching army, you're heading up this steep ramp, hoping to storm the citadel - looking at this, you'd be quaking in your boots already.
And that's before you arrived at the gate itself, where any would-be marauders would then be confronted by this.
To enter Mycenae, you had to pass through the Lion Gate, under a carved relief showing two upright feline creatures flanking a central column.
Schliemann believed the Lion Gate guarded treasures buried within.
And once inside, it didn't take him long to discover a monument to the kings of Mycenae.
Enclosed by the city walls was a circle of shaft graves.
These graves, sunk into the ground, were rectangular trenches several metres deep.
At the entrance stood an imposing carved stone.
And what lay beyond would exceed even Schliemann's dreams of Homeric riches.
Just imagine the excitement of uncovering the horde.
Glittering amid the gloom of the graves, Schliemann discovered hundreds of luxurious golden objects, more than justifying Homer's description of Mycenae as "rich in gold.
" Including this spectacular full-sized death mask.
And although there is an obvious interest in pattern and design and symmetry - the spirals of the ears echoing each other, the horizontal lines of the eyes - there's also a sense that it was meant to convey something at least of an individual.
A well-groomed, debonair individual, in this case.
Look at the way his moustache curls up at either end.
The way that the beard has been fashioned, with these artfully ruffled lines in different directions.
It must have made Schliemann's heart stop.
And there's a story that at once, he feverishly sent off a telegram that said "I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.
" The stunning horde included this poignant golden burial suit for a young child.
And a dagger blade, inlaid with precious metals, gold and silver, showing an intricate action scene - a lion hunt.
Schliemann had discovered an unparalleled wealth of treasures that shone new light on royal life and death at Mycenae.
In time, it would turn out that these artefacts didn't actually belong to Agamemnon and his family - they predated Homer's hero by several centuries.
But in a sense, what Schliemann had uncovered was even more exciting - the riches of a powerful, sophisticated civilisation that numbered the Minoans among its conquests.
And there's evidence of their two worlds coming together, in a pair of exceptional objects.
These two golden cups combine the bull imagery of the Minoans with the hammered gold of the Mycenaeans.
They were made by pressing thin golden sheets from behind to create these raised designs, in this case, two scenes of wild bull-hunting.
And the detail in the landscape is completely extraordinary.
If you look close, you can make out the gnarled trunks and miniature branches of olive trees.
And while one of the scenes is perfectly peaceful, as a docile bull is trapped using a rope tethered around its leg, the other one is remarkably fierce and vigorous.
Just look at this enraged bull, hurtling around the side of the cup, and smashing into its would-be captors, toppling them like skittles.
On one level, you could read these cups as a reflection on man's relationship with the natural world.
But perhaps there's another reading here too.
Because if we understand the bulls as symbols of political power, then maybe what we see here is the upending of one civilisation by another, much fiercer way of life.
But the Mycenaeans were about to experience an apocalypse of their own.
By the 11th century BC, all of the strongholds on the Greek mainland, such as Mycenae, lay abandoned, their people fled.
Centuries later, the ancient Greeks would rediscover Mycenae, and marvel at the ruins, wondering who had built them, and for whom.
They called the walls at Mycenae 'cyclopean,' because they believed that only a giant, like the Cyclops from The Odyssey, could move such immense, awe-inspiring stones.
The Age of the Mycenaeans - an age of wild beasts, warrior kings - would become their Age of Heroes.
And in the centuries to come, legends left over from that mythical era would inform Greek art as well as shaping Greek identity.
The destruction and abandonment of palaces and settlements across the Aegean came to be known as Greece's Dark Ages.
An era that lasted around 300 years, from 1100 to 800 BC.
Historians traditionally dismissed this as a period of obscurity - an interruption in the otherwise glorious progress of Greek history.
The population plummeted by three-quarters.
Those who were left were forced to scratch out an existence.
The causes of the catastrophe remain a mystery.
Was it environmental disaster - plague, famine, earthquake? Cataclysmic war? Deadly internal power struggles? Or perhaps a 'perfect storm' of all of them? Whatever it was, Mycenae and other kingdoms across the Mediterranean rapidly fell apart, ushering in a new age that was characterised by hardship, pain and grief.
The accepted history was that the visual arts almost disappeared during the Dark Ages.
Certainly, one casualty was the human figure, which vanished from Greek art for several centuries.
Yet in recent years, the idea of a lengthy interruption in Greek art and culture has been challenged.
Just off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland lies the island of Euboea.
Here, evidence is only now emerging that life in the so-called Dark Ages wasn't quite as dark as has been thought.
The site is known today as Lefkandi.
For 3,000 years, there was nothing here but a gigantic mound.
When they started digging, though, they uncovered the remains of a vast building - it was 45 metres in length.
It had a thatched roof, and it was surrounded by a wooden colonnade, preceding the architecture of Greek temples by an astonishing two centuries at least.
But the most exciting discovery of all was hidden even deeper.
They discovered the cremated remains of a man in his forties, and the skeleton of a younger woman.
Among the grave goods were fine items of jewellery, including a Babylonian necklace that at the time was already 1,000 years old.
And nearby they came across a remarkable object, dating from the 10th century BC, that pointed the way to an emergent new vision for Greek art.
This impish little fellow is a centaur - a fantastical creature, half man, half horse - potentially an unruly being on the fringes of civilisation.
And to our eyes, he looks initially like a toy - a plaything - a My Little Centaur for the ancient world.
But it would be doing him a disservice to belittle him like that, because he offers us the first known depiction of mythology in Greek sculpture.
He doesn't quite have the impact of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, or the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, but this pixie-ish creature offers a blueprint for the development of Greek art over the next few centuries, because it combines a love of geometric pattern with a passion for mythology.
The founding myths of the Greek world, and of Greek art, began to develop at this time among the surviving people of the region.
Tales of their dimly remembered forefathers, from places like Knossos and Mycenae.
In time, these myths would become integral to Greek art.
But it was the fascination with pattern that would lead Greek art out of the Dark Ages.
For centuries, rather than human scenes, Greek pots were decorated with swathes of geometric designs.
But thanks to this survival from an ancient cemetery, we can witness the moment in around 750 BC when the human figure returns to Greek art.
By the 8th century BC, big, swollen pots just like this one were being used as tomb markers in cemeteries.
And all of them were covered, from the neck to the foot, with regiment upon regiment of marching, relentless ornament and geometric pattern.
Rows of triangles and dots, parallel lines, meanders, zigzags, even bands of well-drilled animals, in this case grazing deer.
The whole thing similar in effect to the patterned centaur of Lefkandi.
But then - as you move down the pot - you suddenly chance upon something totally new.
The central pattern, filled with human figures, commemorates a custom known by the Greeks as 'prothesis' or lying in state, where the dead person would be laid out to be mourned by friends and family.
And you can see ranks of mourners here on either side, tearing out their hair with grief, their blocky bodies, this play of angles and geometry, with triangular torsos - but then also surprisingly shapely legs.
And in the middle, there's the deceased - probably a woman, judging by the clothing - with a ceremonial blanket laid out above the body.
Despite their humble, even rudimentary appearance, these matter-of-fact stickmen mark a crucial moment in the development of Greek art because they stand at the start of the Greek obsession with the human form.
The decoration on Greek vases soon acquired a new, vivid quality.
The figures were no longer just ornamentation - now they were people and monsters.
By the 7th century BC, the decoration of large pots like this one was changing very fast indeed.
All that dense, claustrophobic pattern has disappeared - there are geometric motifs here, but they float freely like elaborate snowflakes.
And those ranks of tiny animals - they've swollen, they've gained in interest - here on the shoulder you can see this handsome lion and a boar.
And the figures, well, they've expanded.
In fact, some of these are the largest ever painted on a Greek vase.
Up here you have three men thrusting a stake into this slumped giant, bearded, holding a cup of wine.
And it's a story that's related by Homer in The Odyssey, when Odysseus gets the Cyclops Polyphemus drunk, before blinding him.
The body of the pot is also painted with huge figures.
These are some of the earliest depictions of Gorgons in Greek art.
Recognisable by their snake hair, they could turn you to stone just by looking at you.
And that stony stare draws you into a world of myths and monsters that soon transformed the substance of Greek art.
That change was hastened by the arrival of a new decorative style for Greek pots.
It's known as black-figure technique.
At their studio in Athens, Vicky Xyda-Ralli and her colleagues have spent years learning how to faithfully reproduce the black-figure technique.
First, decorative bands are painted on, to show where the design should be drawn.
Then Vicky begins to mark out the design onto the pot.
Can I see what it is doing? Right, so it's a very clever way of transferring the design.
Do you think that ancient artists would use tools like this, or was it all freehand? The next stage is for Vicky to paint on the figures using a watered-down clay.
You're applying a colour to the pot which looks kind of orangey-red.
So how does it turn black? What was new about black-figure was the use of a sharp point to scratch in the detail - a technique learnt from Middle Eastern metalworkers.
I think I've got a basic handle on the technique, and I know that I've got down here, well, this is a pot you've prepared already.
Which is the same design, but it's once it's been fired.
So, it's a total transformation, obviously.
Black-figure became the dominant style in Greek pottery for the next century or so.
Its bold, graphic approach opened up exciting possibilities for storytelling.
One of the things we start to find during this period is that there was an explosion of pots decorated with mythical scenes.
Here, we've got the death of Patroclus, best friend of Achilles, at Troy - whose burial was described by Homer.
Around this time, sets of stories, folktales really, handed down through generations were being canonised - effectively that's what Homer was doing.
And as the stories became common currency, painted onto pots just like this one, they started to contribute to a binding sense of Greekness.
Perhaps surprisingly, that growing Greek identity was stimulated by foreign influence.
As was Greek art.
The island of Samos lies in the eastern reaches of the Aegean.
In antiquity, it was frontier territory - where Western culture could meet and mingle with the East.
At an ancient site known as the Heraion and dedicated to the goddess Hera, a remarkable horde of treasures has been retrieved, showing distinct Eastern influence.
These hammered bronze griffin heads were originally a Middle Eastern image.
Now they were made in workshops on Samos, and put on Greek cauldrons dedicated at the Heraion.
This bronze goddess is recognisably from Egypt, dedicated by a pilgrim in around 700 BC.
This wooden figurine, produced 50 years later, clearly owes a debt to the Egyptian statue.
Yet it was made by Greek hands.
In the early 1980s, archaeologists at the Heraion on Samos made a discovery that dramatically laid bare that Eastern influence.
This giant statue stands nearly five metres tall, and dates from the 6th century BC.
When you first look at this monster, you have to ask yourself - is he from ancient Greece or ancient Egypt? Because at first, everything screams Egypt! The stiff pose, with his fists clenched by his sides, the frontality, the monumental scale.
And ancient Egyptian art was extremely powerful and effective - after all, it lasted for thousands of years.
In part, because it used easy-to-replicate formulas such as dividing up the block for carving using a grid of squares.
Yet there is another spirit here too.
A Greek spirit.
And it's visible in the slight softening of the flesh, the sensuousness of his face.
And also these folds of muscle above his knees.
And this frankly curvy quality to the back and the buttocks, all of which anticipates later developments in Greek art.
And unlike the sort of Egyptian statuary that provided the model, this man is very clearly naked.
In Greek art, statues like this one, they form an important type known as kouroi, or youths.
And originally this particular kouros, along with many other statues, lined the Sacred Way of the Heraion.
What you can't deny is that his overblown presence has a truly mesmerising power.
Like so much early Greek art, kouroi reveal a deep fascination with symmetry and pattern.
In time, they would be found all over Greece - marking graves or commemorating victories.
By the end of the 6th century, it's estimated there were as many as 20,000 kouroi in the Greek world.
The heyday of Samos coincided with an important period in the development of Greek art.
Greek artists were in thrall of course to these strange but seductive influences from the East, but they also melded them to fashion characteristic Greek forms, such as the kouros.
As the 6th century wore on, Samos wasn't the only ambitious Greek city with splendour to show off.
And gradually, as the Greeks accumulated wealth and power, they stopped looking east, and began searching instead for somewhere they could gather to compete on their own terms.
Greece - more a people than a nation - had begun to coalesce into a number of thriving city-states, such as Athens, Corinth and Sparta.
Ambitious rivals, they fought frequently.
But they also needed places to come together in peacetime.
To share what they had in common - poetry, religion.
Or to compete in athletics.
One of the most important of these places was Delphi.
As soon as you come here, you sense why this spot was so special for the ancient Greeks.
Delphi has an aura, a presence, a rugged majesty, and it transports you that little bit closer to the divine.
Over the centuries, the significance of Delphi as a sacred site grew and grew, until it became what is known as a 'sanctuary' - a vital spiritual and religious space that was visited by Greeks from every city-state.
And so it was essential in forging that strong sense of Greek togetherness.
The origins of Delphi as a sanctuary lay in the tradition that the voice of Apollo could be heard from a crack in the rock.
This oracle became a way for warring city-states to settle their disputes.
And once here, they wanted to leave their mark.
Sanctuaries like this were a complete godsend for artists.
From the 6th century onwards, this place would have been completely crammed, a visual jumble, a cornucopia of imagery - images of gods, statues of athletes commemorating great victories in the games - even elaborate sculpted friezes decorating impressive buildings that were built to honour and record military triumphs.
And all of it, all this stuff, it was given up, inevitably, as thanks to the gods, but it was also a way very simply of showing off.
Because Delphi was an arena for public competition in many different senses, including the highly political contest between city-states of the most conspicuous expenditure and power - all of it communicated via art.
Greek city-states built treasuries along the Sacred Way to impress visitors to the sanctuary.
The fanciest treasury at Delphi was built by one of the smallest Greek states - the wealthy island of Siphnos.
The Siphnian Treasury had an elaborate frieze that ran around its outside like a ribbon.
And while a statue like a kouros was stiff and formal, here the carved human form leaps into life.
The frieze dramatises a battle from Greek mythology, the struggle between the gods and the giants to rule the world.
It's about the forces of order and civilisation - the Olympian gods, vanquishing the savagery and barbarism of the helmeted giants.
The interest for us, if you like, of this frieze now is the way it's been sculpted, because you find this surging, rippling, pulsing rhythm to the piece, which takes us right into the melee of the battle.
The tumult of activity.
But it's the carving of the figures that's so crucial here.
They're not seen in isolation, one by one.
You have all of this interweaving, overlapping of form.
For example, this corpse here, you find him snaking in-between legs of the giants above.
But maybe the choicest scene of all is this moment, very ferocious, at the heart of the frieze, where one of the Olympians riding a chariot charges towards the giants.
And the chariot is powered by these two lions.
And you can see one of them here attacking this poor giant that we're almost invited to sympathise with.
The lion is practically hugging his haunches.
You can see the way that the paws overlap and there's a real sense of depth of space.
This is something that felt dynamic, it felt radical, it felt unprecedented.
In fact, it ushered in a whole new spirit for Greek art, that takes us out of that archaic world of stiffness, towards something resembling, if not real life, then a certain new vigour of animation and spirit.
Sanctuaries like Delphi stimulated a new energy and creativity in Greek art.
Motivated less by noble ideals than by something far more down-to-earth - competition.
Athletic contests at the sanctuaries - they led to a greater demand for art - but in turn, the artists began to compete among themselves, like athletes, in a bid to scale new creative heights.
But if that was the purpose of all this art, then the effect was much greater and more unexpected, because art, like the revered words of Homer, began to bind Greeks together, just as much as it was used to distinguish one city-state from another.
It wouldn't be long before writers used a single word - Hellas - for the land occupied by Greek speakers.
This new sense of Greek identity would soon invigorate even the stiff, formal kouroi.
While they still owed something to the original Egyptian model, there was no denying they were relaxing into something unmistakably Greek.
This imposing figure was found in a cemetery.
And what's interesting artistically about him is that although he exhibits many of the hallmarks of kouroi generally - the frontal pose, his arms rigidly clamped by his sides, even his long hair - he also has something new, something of the poise and presence of a real person.
It's true that, to our eyes, his pumped-up muscles don't necessarily seem realistic.
Particularly in the lower half - his buttock, haunches, his calves, they're all overinflated - yet this isn't an empty exercise in symmetry, this is an expressive attempt to start to understand how human anatomy actually works.
Slowly but surely, Greek sculpture was softening up, and before long, kouroi like this, standing to attention for eternity, would be a thing of the past.
By the end of the 6th century BC, Athens was emerging as the dominant city-state in Greece.
And it was here that the heroic aspirations of Greek artists were most keenly felt.
In 514 BC, two Athenian citizens murdered the brother of the city's tyrant ruler.
Within a few years, the fledgling democracy of Athens had commissioned statues of the 'tyrant slayers,' as they became known.
When these two figures were erected in the main public square of Athens, just think what a dramatic impact they must have had.
Everything about the sculpture announces a new self-confidence - both artistically, and in terms of Greek identity.
The viewer is cast, with daring panache, in the role of the victim.
And the old stiffness and formality of those outdated kouroi has been consigned to history.
Instead, we've got this moment of vigorous action, in the round, all lunging legs and slashing arms.
These two dynamic figures are rushing headlong into a new era for Greek art.
Over a period of 1,000 years, the civilisation of ancient Greece had gone from an age of scattered kingdoms trading, waging war upon each other, surviving Dark Age catastrophe, to a cultural rebirth and the development of a rich mythology.
And finally, to the foundations of what we know today as classical Greece.
Now Greek art was a leader, on the brink of its own unique, distinctive style.
A revolution was just around the corner.
Next time The revolution is announced.
Art in Greece's classical Golden Age.