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“At once full of form and full ofabundance, at once philosophizing

and creating, at once tender andenergetic, we see [the Greeks] unite

the youth of phantasy with manlinessof reason in a glorious humanity.”

—Friedrich Schiller

When the Mycenean civilizationdescribed by Homer in his Iliad

and Odyssey collapsed around 1000 B.C.,a Dark Age descended upon the Greekworld. The Dorian invasions of theNinth century B.C. drove the remnantsof Mycenean culture across the AegeanSea to colonize Asia Minor. By theEighth century B.C., the brutal slavocra-cy of Sparta had become the unchal-lenged power of the Greek mainland(even though the great Homeric epicpoems, the Iliad and Odyssey, were thenbeing sung throughout the

FIGURE 2. “Anavyssos Kouros,” 530 B.C.FIGURE 1. “Sounian Kouros,” c.600 B.C.

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Glimpsing the Beauty of the Eternalthat image of man, reflecting obviousEgyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrianinfluences on early Greece [SEE Figure1]. They are always static, heavy andimmobile, essentially bas-reliefs in fourdimensions: the frontal pose, the twoside views, and the back. Both feet ofthe kouros are always firmly rooted tothe ground; all the weight distributedequally on both legs; arms and handsfrozen to the side, with just the barestsuggestion of anatomical detail. Thekouros is, therefore, an archetype—asymbol of an unchanging world, devoidof uniqueness, lacking transformationor development.

The compositional and technicalbreakthroughs we see in the later GreekClassical Period, which distinguish thegreatness of Greek art, are therefore notmerely the result of some new “technical

discoveries” in working stone, butreflect instead a changed conception ofthe nature of man, based on the idea ofbeauty, individuality, and progress inman’s universe. They reflect, as LyndonLaRouche has remarked in his recentessay “Behind the Notes” (Fidelio, Sum-mer 1997), “the life-like effect of animage . . . as if caught in mid-motion,”an effect which captures the “role ofmetaphorical qualities of irony” as a cel-ebration of the quality of human cogni-tion that distinguishes mankind fromthe beasts.

Revolutionizing the Kouros

This changed view of man began toemerge in Greece in the early half ofthe Sixth century B.C. The Egyptian-trained Athenian poet Solon assumedthe leadership of his bankrupt and

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Hellenic world). It wasfrom out of this Dark Ageof war and chaos, that thedawn of Classical Greekcivilization, the first greatrenaissance of humanthought, emerged in theSixth century B.C.

Before the Sixth century,Hellenic art was based on aspecific idea of man: theimperial concept, in whichevery man is a fixed part of astatic social order. At the topof the social pyramid are theruling elite, the priest caste,and the servants of theimperium. The rest of thepopulation, ninety-five per-cent, are slaves or serfs,beasts of burden, whosequality of life and position insociety, for themselves andfor their posterity, neverchanges.

The kouros figures of theSeventh century B.C. are astriking representation of

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fractious home city in 572 B.C., settinginto motion a revolution in statecraft.Pre-Socratic philosophers and scien-tists, such as Pythagoras and Thales ofMiletus, voiced new hypotheses aboutthe cosmos, and man’s relationship toit. Among the artists nurtured in thisrevolutionary environment, we see thefirst, clumsy attempts to portray manas something other than a symbolicarchetype.

The “Kouros of Anavyssos” from 530B.C. [SEE Figure 2], representing theyouth Kroisos, illustrates just such anattempt. Although the figure is still stat-ic and fixed within that traditional com-positional framework, the anatomicaldetails are somewhat more finely andfirmly chiselled than in the kouroi of thefirst half of the Sixth and preceding Sev-enth centuries.

The Fifth century B.C. opened withthe revolt of the Ionian city-statesagainst the Persian Empire. In 490 B.C.the Persian Wars began, and the Per-sian Empire experienced its first majordefeat at the hands of the Athenians onthe Plain of Marathon. Another crucialyear was 480, when the Spartans out-fought the Persians at Thermopylae,and Xerxes I of Persia burned Athensand destroyed the Acropolis. Later thatsame year, the Athenian navy destroyedthe Persian fleet at the Bay of Salamis.These wars of resistance to Persian

domination of the Peloponnesus lasteduntil the independence of the Greekcity-states was established at the Peaceof Callias in 448.

It was during the early years of thePersian Wars that the transition fromthe late Archaic to the Classical Periodof Greek art began.

Resistance to EmpireThe resistance of theGreek city-states to impe-rial rule by what was,until that time, the invin-cible Persian Empire, andtheir pride in that accom-plishment, was certainlyreflected in the sculptureof the early ClassicalPeriod. The figures fromthe pediment of the Tem-ple of Aphaia at Aegina,c.490-480 B.C., are amongthe best examples of theearly Classical Period.The sculptor celebratesthe freedom of presentingmotion and change infrozen stone. A great

moment of history, myth, and reli-gion, is portrayed as if a stage scenefrom a play of Aeschylos or Sophocles,captured at the point of greatestaction. If we compare these dramaticscenes of battle and death to the typi-cal kouros of only ten to fifteen yearsearlier, the differences are stunning.

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FIGURE 3. “Fallen Warrior,” pediment of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, c.490-480 B.C.

FIGURE 4. Myron, “Athena and Marsyas,” c. 460-450 B.C. (marble copy).

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The Temple of Aphaia figures areanatomically correct representations ofmen at war; the action of battle is cap-tured in mid-motion. Warriors swingtheir swords down, hammering theiropponents’ shields; archers draw theirbows, about to let fly at the enemy.Figure 3 shows a fallen warrior fromthe Temple’s East Pediment. He hasfallen, mortally wounded, perhapsstruggling in his last moments to riseagain to fight. Yet, the face of this andall the Temple figures remain strange-ly calm, immobile, unmoved by thedeath and rage of battle that surroundsthem. The dying warrior seems tosmile as he meets what the Greeksbelieved to be the perfect death—deathin battle.

Although the years 500-449 B.C. wereyears of constant war, they were also atime of cultural maturity and economicgrowth for Hellenic culture, inaugurat-ing the Classical Age. During this peri-od, as the Athenian Maritime Confed-eracy was being crafted, the Acropoliswas rebuilt by the great monumentalsculptor and architect, Phidias. Theplays of Aeschylos and, later, Sophocles,were performed before audiences thatincluded the young Socrates. Theseplays, such as the Orestes trilogy, wereaimed at educating the citizens ofGreece, and Athens in particular, to thenew ideas of natural law and liberty.Meanwhile, philosophy and sciencewere dominated by the ideas ofAnaxagoras, Democritus, and Protago-ras, concerning the paradoxes of theInfinite: of the One and the Many, andof motion and rest.

Myron: Solution to Paradox

The paradox facing the Greek Classicalartist was to create sculpture which wasappropriately at rest, yet alive and mov-ing—to thus create a metaphor throughwhich the process of mind animatingthe sculpted figure could be portrayed.To achieve this, sculptors such asMyron, a contemporary of Phidias, usedmoments of tension-filled pause, to con-nect the end of one action with thebeginning of another. All the tension ofboth the preceding and the future

motions is contained in that one instant.Study the famous “Diskobolos” byMyron [SEE inside back cover, thisissue], for example. The athlete has justcompleted placing himself in the neces-sary position to throw the discus—“winding up,” so to speak—and is nowcaught at the moment immediatelybefore exploding into the throw. This isthe paradox. In this brief pause in theactual motion of throwing the discus,the sculptor captures the grace andbeauty of the entire throw, from begin-ning to end.

This metaphor is repeated again inMyron’s “Athena and Marsyas” [SEE

Figure 4]. According to legend, thegoddess Athena invented the musicalpan pipes. But she threw them down indisgust, when she sawhow the beauty of herface was distorted byblowing on them; atwhich point the satyrMarsyas, enthralled bythe sound, ran to pickthem up. Myron chosesto present the instant ofconfrontation betweenAthena and Marsyas,when the satyr hasbeen startled by Athenaand is about to flee, inorder to recount thewhole story in stone. Itis the moment of tran-sition, in which the en-tire action of the mythis embodied. Unlikethe sculptor of the ped-iment of the Temple ofAphaia at Aegina,Myron does not merelycreate a freeze-frame ofan instant in the action;he instead choses a nec-essary pause; a momentin the action in whichto capture all past andfuture action. The com-positional structurehighlights the impor-tance of this moment:The invention of thepipes, which rest on

the ground between Athena andMarsyas, was considered by the Greeksto be the beginning of instrumentalmusic.

We see this paradox in the work ofanother important contemporary ofPhidias, the sculptor Polykleitos. Polyk-leitos’ perhaps most important statue iscalled the “Doryphorus,” or “Spear Car-rier” [SEE Figure 5]. A characteristic fea-ture of the sculpture of this period, ofwhich the “Doryphorus” is a brilliantexample, is that the tensions betweenmotion and rest are given a harmoniousresolution. It is sculpted precisely accord-ing to the laws set down by the Polyk-leitos in a manual, called the Canon (forthis reason, the “Doryphorus” is alsoknown as the “Canon”), which was used

FIGURE 5. Polykleitos, “Doryphorus (The Spear Carrier),”450 B.C. (copy after bronze original).

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Like Pinocchio, the more MichaelNovak writes, the longer his nose

becomes. As Lyndon LaRouche recentlywrote in an essay entitled “MichaelNovak, Calvinist?—‘Not by Market-place Alone!’ ” (Executive IntelligenceReview, July 4, 1997): “For both practicaland spiritual reasons, the most crucialaspect of the New Age corruptionwhich must be reversed, if the U.S.A isto assuredly outlive this century, is thekind of Manicheanism which MichaelNovak expresses by his gnostic’s relianceon ‘the magic of the marketplace.’ ”

In these two books, Novak attemptsto cloak his underlying Manicheanism byselective references to Pope John Paul II’sencyclical Centesimus Annus, while ignor-ing the Pope’s calls for debt forgivenessand reform of the international financialsystem; by extensive quotes from Alexan-der Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, andthe U.S. Constitution, which ignore thecentral role of the nation-state; and byreferences to the concept of man createdin the image of God, the Creator, whichat best render human creativity anempty construct, and at worse reduce itto piracy.

Embrace of Aristotle

The philosophical source of Novak’scorruption is his unabashed embrace ofAristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Poli-tics, from which he quotes extensively inboth books. What Novak fails to men-tion is, that in the Politics, Aristotleargues that slavery is natural, that abor-tion should be employed to limit popu-lation, and that productive labor is igno-ble and inimical to virtue. In his Ethics,Aristotle begins by rejecting Plato’s ideaof the Good, and therefore man’s capaci-ty to participate in the Good, a conceptessential to Christianity. Aristotle’s tenmoral virtues, discussed in the Ethics,not insignificantly omit justice, a con-cept Novak, like his mentor Friedrichvon Hayek, has trouble applying tosocial policy.

Central to Novak’s argument in both

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to educate future generations of Greeksculptors, and influenced the compositionof sculpture for millennia to come.

It is important to note, that most ofwhat remains of the works of the greatsculptors of mature Classical Period artare actually Hellenistic Greek or Romancopies. Appreciating these works istherefore much like trying to appreciatea great poem in translation. You get thegeneral sense of the structure, the themeand the metaphor, but much of themusic is gone, much of the beauty lack-ing. This is certainly the case with thiscopy of the “Doryphorus,” which isheavier and less graceful than theedescriptions by ancient chroniclers of theoriginal work.

Even in the copy, however, the“Doryphorus” demonstrates a mar-velous balance between the static kourosand the motion of the early ClassicalPeriod. The weight of the body rests onthe right leg, muscles tensed; the leftleg is placed perhaps in mid-step, noweight, muscles relaxed. The right armhangs relaxed and free, while the leftarm is raised, hand clenching a spear.The shoulders and hips are in harmon-ic counterposition, and the head isturned and slightly tilted down. Everyfeature of the “Doryphorus,” everymuscle, is simultaneously in motionand at rest.

Praxiteles: The Moment of Discovery

The years following Phidias, Myron,and Polykleitos mark a decline in theeconomic strength and political powerof the city-states of the Greek mainland.Unable to conquer the Hellenes byforce, agents of the Persian Empiremanipulated them into the fratricidalPeloponnesian Wars. Nonetheless, itwas in this period that Socrates wasteaching in the agora of Athens, fightingfor the principle of truth; thatXenophon marched across Asia Minor,perhaps writing his Anabasis; and thatPlato established the Academy atAthens, and set down The Republic, themost important work of political state-craft in human history. Philip II ofMacedonia ruled a Western Empire,which included Greece; the young

Alexander had not yet been born.It is fortunate that from this late

Classical Period, we have at least oneoriginal work from the hand of thegreat sculptor Praxiteles, the “Hermesand Dionysus” [SEE inside back cover,this issue]. This sculpture meets all therequirements of harmony and balanceof the Polykleitos Canon; for, despite theanatomical features being softer thanthose of Myron and Polykleitos, the ten-sion between motion and rest remains.The god Hermes tenderly holds hisinfant brother Dionysus, tempting himwith some object held high in his righthand. Yet, there is a kind of indifferencein the face of Hermes, as if he has dis-covered some new thought and is nolonger aware of his brother’s presence.Praxiteles has caught Hermes, not mere-ly in mid-motion, not just at a necessarypause in motion, but at a point of intel-lectual discovery.

We can see that same quality of “in-betweenness” of thought and discovery,in Praxiteles’ “Cnidian Aphrodite” [SEE

inside back cover, this issue]. Again, thefigure expresses all the beauty of thecounterbalance and harmony of Myronor Polykleitos. We see the Goddess justas she has dropped her robe to enter thebath. The eyes are set deeper than nor-mal, creating a darker, shadowed effect.It is as if Aphrodite had discovered, atthat moment, that she was beingobserved, is unconcerned about it, andperhaps a bit pleased. After all, she is thegoddess of Love.

It is by capturing the irony, the “in-betweenness” of mid-motion accompa-nying the moment of thought, thatPraxiteles offers us a glimpse of beautyas a reflection of the eternal. For thepower of the beautiful, as Socratesinstructs Phaedrus in Plato’s dialogue,is “. . . the fourth kind of madness,with which a man is inspired whenev-er, by the sight of beauty in this lowerworld, the true beauty of the worldabove is so brought to his remembrance. . . that he longs to soar aloft; but thepower failing him, gazes upward like abird and becomes heedless of all basermatters.”

—Ted Andromidas

BOOK S

There Is Fraud in