Ancient heroes in the campus corridors
Every morning, for millions of years, she opened the gates, and her brother emerged to ride his chariot across the sky. He was Helios, the Greek god of the sun. She was Eos, the goddess of the dawn, a full figure with a fascinating inner life. Powerful, beautiful, and consumed by desire, Eos, like many gods of ancient myth, was imperfect. A seducer and kidnapper of young men, her story is just one of hundreds that came to be portrayed in the art and architecture of the period, and which can be further explored in a krater (vase) at the UCD Classics Museum.
Wander through Belfield’s Newman Building (the ‘Arts block’), and you’ll find the Classical Museum, one of UCD’s many hidden treasures, and Ireland’s main public Classics exhibit. A small, teaching- focused collection of Greek vases, Greek and Roman coins, bronze and bone objects of daily life, terracottas, Egyptian antiquities and some papyri, as well as Roman pottery and glass, the museum has a rich and complex history of its own.
Students at the UCD School of Classics have had a hands-on interaction with these objects, the stories behind them, and the everyday realities of life in the ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian worlds, for over 100 years.
The museum’s founder and first curator, the Rev Henry Browne, Professor of Greek at UCD, was a visionary. “He firmly believed that students would gain the greatest insight into the real life of ancient Greeks not by sitting passively in lectures but by actively engaging with archaeology – what people did and how they lived their lives,” explains Dr Christina Haywood, Lecturer and Curator of the Classical Museum.
Dr Christina Haywood, Curator UCD Classical Museum
Since its inception in 1910, the museum has been central to the work of classical scholars and students at UCD. The current exhibition, Heroes and Mortals in Ancient Greece, was created by UCD students and shows how the Greeks made sense of their heroes.
“Teams of student volunteers compile the exhibitions, choosing the most suitable pieces to illustrate a particular theme” says Dr Haywood. “The artefacts make a connection between the human and heroic conditions. The heroes, portrayed as historical figures, were half-
mortal and half-God and seen by the ancient Greeks as much closer to the human condition.”
Classical hero tales rarely have a pleasant ending, usually concluding with the tragic death of the protagonist rather than a happy-ever-after marriage – and this comes across in the pieces. One vase depicts the flawed hero Theseus in pursuit of a woman who he abducted and raped; the reactions of the figures also seem to indicate social disapproval of his actions.
Social mores and norms are also communicated in a piece depicting the hero Achilles. The vase shows him dragging away the body of Penthesileia, warrior queen of the Amazons, after he kills her in battle. But Achilles had already fallen in love with the slain queen, his enemy. When a fellow warrior taunts him for breaking another taboo – salvaging an enemy corpse – Achilles kills him too.
Other vases depict the triumphs and battles of their heroes during their often all-too-brief lives, giving insights into their battles, chariots of war, armour, and weapons.
“I use these objects to explain how the composition was constructed, how a myth was told, and how the creators and users of these pieces lived their lives,” says Dr Haywood.
“They’re an invaluable teaching aid, and from a personal point of view, I feel a great emotional connection to each piece. When I get a new object to research, it is very exciting.”
An archaeologist by training, Dr Haywood is currently undertaking a fieldwork project on Kephalonia, one of the Ionian islands, with assistance from UCD undergraduate and postgraduate students. But her heart lies in a room in Belfield, this museum that still has teaching at the core of its purpose.
“The museum doesn’t get a lot of outside visitors due to its location, but it is accessible to our students and that was always its primary aim. It always should be.”
The Story of Henry Browne
At the turn of the 20th century, one man’s discoveries at a small site on Crete, an island off Greece, changed our view of the ancient world forever. Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos, the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization, shed new light on both the historical truth of Greek mythology and the deeper meaning of Homer’s poems.
The finds had a huge influence on Rev. Henry Browne, who went on to establish the Classics Museum at University College Dublin. An Anglican convert to Catholicism, Browne was Professor of Greek in UCD from 1890 until his retirement in 1922. He stood at a generational precipice: Classics, which at the time consisted largely of linguistic studies, was under threat from new and emerging disciplines such as modern languages and the sciences.
Retreat or advance? Browne argued that the future of the subject no longer lay exclusively in the analysis of texts, but also in an understanding of the material culture unearthed by this bold, fledgling discipline known as archaeology. In a few short decades, it had arguably pushed back the frontiers of civilisation in Greece more than centuries of previous scholarship.
“What grandeur, what beauty, what individuality has been disclosed by the spade of the archaeologist,” said Browne during a series of three lectures at UCD in February 1905. Browne, a figure of boundless energy, set about gathering artefacts for the new Classics museum. His task began with a single letter to the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum requesting “duplicate” specimens.
The British Museum also played a pivotal role in the development of the collection, sending figurines and metal finds from Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, which are still amongst the museum’s holdings. Browne closely co-operated with the National Museum of Ireland, organising and negotiating reciprocal loans and joint purchases.
Then, in 1922, the steady flow of additions ceased until, in 1936, the museum purchased an important collection of funerary sculpture and inscriptions from the sale of the contents of Shanganagh Castle in Bray, Co. Wicklow.
No major collections have since been added, although the museum has received occasional donations from individuals, including coins from private collectors.