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By Stephen Miller  When is a discovery made? At what point do you know that you have found something that has been lost for centuries? The answer is sometimes very clear. When a pick goes into the ground and an ancient artifact appears, you feel the thrill of knowing that you are the first person to see and touch it after perhaps thousands of years in the earth. Other times, that thrill of discovery comes after long-term research finally produces results that you know are correct--when all the pieces fit together perfectly to make a larger picture. But even in a long-term quest there can be a specific moment when certainty and clarity come in a flash that illuminates the facts so patiently collected; and the thrill is just as intense and perhaps more satisfying. I am fortunate to have experienced such thrills several times--the ultimate reward for the archaeologist. Goose bumps still come when I walk through the entrance tunnel to the stadium at Nemea and remember the moment of discovery in 1978, when it was clear that our excavations had proven that the Greeks did know how to build the vault. That thrill came again in a split second last December, high above the Swiss Alps, when I had final proof that a relic gathering dust under the Hearst Gym was in fact an item of stunning importance. But the story begins a few months earlier.  In March 2002, I was finishing the manuscript for a book on ancient Greek athletics. The concluding chapter involved a discussion of the concept of arete (excellence, goodness, manliness, valor, nobility, virtue) and the ancient debate reflected in the works of Plato and Aristotle about whether arete could be taught, and the role of athletics in teaching it. I wanted to illustrate this chapter with portraits of the two philosophers. Aristotle was no problem: several good Roman-period copies of his portrait survive. But as I looked at the existing portraits of Plato, I became increasingly frustrated. They were all rather poor copies and they showed a rather unattractive (in a couple of cases really ugly) man. Then came a faint memory of a portrait of Plato in the basement of the Hearst Women's Gymnasium, stored together with other antiquities that had been collected for Phoebe Apperson Hearst in 1902.  A visit to the gym basement proved my memory wasn't haywire. I found a very well-known type of what scholars call a "portrait herm": a head atop a shaft which once had stubby blocks projecting from shoulder sockets on the sides and a phallus from a socket on the front (see figures 1 and 5). It was inscribed with a standard label: "Plato, son of Ariston, Athenian." Lower down were two quotations from works of Plato: "Blame goes to the one who makes the choice. God is blameless" (Republic 617E) and "Every soul is immortal" (Phaedrus 245C). The head itself is of a mature bearded man with fine facial features and a ribbon around his head that, although broken away in the area of the neck, continues down upon his shoulders (see figure 2). The ribbon on the head is held in place by a band that projects above the brow. My interest was aroused: This was the best-looking image of Plato that I had seen; and it was clearly, to my eyes, a piece made in Greece during the Roman period, probably about 125 A.D. The records office of the Hearst Museum, however, showed that its authenticity had once been called into question. The inventory card had a pencilled note in an unknown hand, written at least 40 years ago: "Pertinence of head uncertain." Did the head really belong to the shaft below? At first glance, it is clear that the head has a shiny, glazed, almost watery surface, while the shaft does not. This was the result of the head having been broken off and "cleaned" with acid in a failed attempt to remove the surface encrustations, probably in the late 1890s in Rome, where both pieces were later purchased for Mrs. Hearst. The acid also had gone onto the broken surface of the neck and thus blurred the joint between it and the shaft below. Nonetheless, there was a good "seat" for a comfortable join, and the ribbons of the head matched those on the shoulders, even though the central area had been broken away. Subsequent testing at the Demokritos Archaeometry Laboratory in Athens showed not only that the marble of head and body were the same, but that they came from the island of Paros--the source of the favorite marble for sculptors in antiquity. Since I knew of no evidence of Parian marble being used in the Renaissance or more recently to produce forged sculpture, it was virtually certain that the Berkeley Plato was a genuine antiquity. Indeed, the use of Parian marble indicated that the Berkeley Plato was something special.  But what about the ribbons? As I had learned during a quarter-century of teaching ancient Greek athletics to Cal undergraduates, these ribbons were the preliminary tokens of victory awarded to athletes immediately at the end of their competitions. They appear on dozens and dozens of vase paintings (see figure 3) from Plato's own time (427-347 B.C.) and there are nearly as many written mentions. Some of those vase paintings show the whole procedure at the end of the competition: the victor was announced by the herald as he received a ribbon and a palm branch from a judge. He would then go on his periageirmos, or victory lap, during which time his fans would shower him with flowers and sprigs of various plants and sometimes yet more ribbons (see figure 4). Only at the end of all of the games did he receive his crown or garland of victory. Given that Plato was very interested in athletics and even competed himself, the ribbons on the Berkeley portrait are appropriate. Further, he states in one of his dialogues (Protagoras 342C) that some Athenians actually boxed so that their ears might be broken in imitation of their heroes. The Berkeley Plato, unlike any other ancient portrait of him, has a puffy left ear lobe (the right ear is not swollen) that suggests mistreatment resulting in disfiguration. Could this be a reflection of Plato's literature? A detail of his actual physiognomy? That observation of the puffy ear lead to another: The right ear slopes noticeably back toward the rear, while the left ear is nearly vertical. A quick comparison with all 23 of the previously known portraits of Plato show ears with this same differing orientation on the head. The evidence for the authenticity of the Berkeley Plato was growing. But the ribbons were compelling for another reason. Plato was the teacher and leader in a gymnasium, the school of ancient Greece where young men were trained in mind and in body. (The particular gymnasium where Plato taught gave its name to his philosophy and to today's highest institution of intellectual achievement: the Academy.) In the gymnasium, Hermes was particularly venerated, as might be expected for the god of speed. He was represented with a bearded human head on an incompletely anthropomorphized body: square shaft with stubby blocks projecting from shoulder sockets on the sides and a phallus on the front. That such "herms" might be adorned with the ribbons of victory is a natural inference which is, moreover, documented in vase paintings (see figure 5). Further, it became the custom to replace the head of Hermes with that of a popular educational leader within a gymnasium; and it is again a natural inference that such portrait herms might be decorated with real cloth ribbons that have long since disappeared. Thus, the Berkeley Plato would represent a translation into stone of those real ribbons on the herm of the leader of the Academy. But archaeologists are uncomfortable with unique examples of anything, and there was no other stone herm with stone ribbons--or at least so I thought until September 2002. The good fortune of being on a Bear Treks trip around the Black Sea that month was transformed into a professional gain of major magnitude in Nessebar, Bulgaria (the ancient Messembria). When I turned the corner of an exhibition room in the local archaeological museum and saw a marble herm with stone ribbons, my shriek of excitement probably scared several Cal alums. Suddenly, the Berkeley Plato had a parallel, and my arguments for its authenticity were enormously strengthened. But there was still more to come. It seemed to me that if I were to present an unknown portrait of Plato to the world as an authentically ancient piece, it behooved me to read everything Plato had written. The immediate gain would be, of course, to document his frequent use of athletic metaphors and his estimation of the Olympic victor as the most fortunate of men. Thus, in December, as my wife Effie and I flew to Rome (en route to Nemea) to see other Plato portraits, I was immersed in Plato's Republic, that longest and best known of his works. We were somewhere over Switzerland when I came to the final pages, wherein Plato sets forth his notion of the immortality of the soul--the same notion expressed in one of the quotations on the Berkeley Plato.  Fundamental for Plato in The Republic is the belief that every soul is immortal and that the total number of souls is immutable: Each lives in cycles of 1,100 years--100 on earth, and the next 1,000 years either above in heaven or below the earth (depending upon the justice and virtue of the 100 years just completed). After 1,000 years, each soul, having been allotted a place in line, may chose the kind of life it wishes for its next cycle. The writing is full of whimsy and lessons. Odysseus's soul, for example, about to re-enter this world after its 1,000-year journey, seeks and finds the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business and stayed at home. Atlanta's soul, seeing the great honors given to the male athlete, chooses that life, her former tomboy experience clearly foreshadowing the choice. It is in this context that Plato tells us to be careful: "Blame the one who makes the choice. God is blameless" (617E), the first quotation on the shaft of our herm of Plato. Now The Republic comes to an end with Socrates'--that is, Plato's--final words (621C-D): "If we follow my convictions, we shall believe that the soul is immortal and can endure every kind of bad and every kind of good, and so we shall always adhere to the upward path and pursue justice with wisdom in every way so that we will be friends to ourselves and to the gods, while we remain here and afterward when we receive our reward, just as the victors in the games do their periageirmos, and we will fare well both here [on earth] and in that thousand-year journey of which I have told you." The word periageirmos leapt off the page, the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and goose bumps erupted. The picture was clear: if we lead the good, the just, the wise life, at the end of the race we will be victorious and go on our final periageirmos to collect our ribbons. This is the Plato I had discovered at 30,000 feet. And this is the Plato at Berkeley--viewing the head and the texts together, it is a portrait of the good, immortal soul. The Berkeley Plato, I strongly believe, gives us the most attractive image of both the philosopher and his philosophy. |
 Classics Professor Stephen Miller gazes at the "Berkeley Plato,"which had languished in the basement of the Hearst Gym for a century. Best known for his excavations at Nemea, in Greece, Miller believes the head to be the best surviving image of the Greek philosopher. Photo by John Clayton
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