The City of Two Seas

A couple of weeks ago, since we had a rental car for a while, I told John (the only driver between us) I had a yen to visit MArTA (the National Archeological Museum of Taranto).

Investigating how to get from Gallipoli to the City of Two Seas, we saw that the recommended a route seemed absurdly circuitous, 147 kilometers via Lecce. We decided to take the coastal road instead, which was only 96 kilometers and just an easy line up the coast.

On the coastal road there were many, many roundabouts. There were excursions through busy and labyrinthine medieval towns with multiple blind corners. There were all kinds of surprise exits and intersections, multiple road bumps, potholes and blind corners. Just to complicate things, every driver had a great sense of personal style: some sped, others dawdled, some stopped just where they were for a moment to have a little think. When we finally arrived in downtown Taranto, it was a different sort of struggle, coping with scooters, pedestrians, a laissez faire attitude to indicating and a shortage of parking.

From my point of view, it had been a scenic drive full of interest; for John, it had been a nightmarish real-life videogame in which the prize for momentarily losing concentration was serious injury or death. By the time we got out of the car he looked pale and shaken and wished to lie down somewhere in a dark room.

We’d parked right on the edge of the Mar Piccolo (Little Sea), a natural harbor. It was clear why Taranto is known for its sea-related business: fishing, mussel farms, a large military arsenal and naval base, not to mention its commercial and industrial ports.

In 1931, David Randall-MacIver wrote of the city:

“Taranto is a place of extraordinary charm. Nowhere else in the world except at Venice do the life of do the life of sea and land so delightfully mingle and interlace. The superb outer harbour are guarded by the two long islands, known in ancient days as the Choerades and now called S. Pietro and S. Paolo, which leave a wide entrance on the south for ships to pass in from the gulf. On a rock a little over half a mile in length is built the old town, which occupies the site of the Greek acropolis. This is an island divided from the mainland by two channels, of which the more southern is artificial and is wide enough to allow passage to the largest ships. Having traversed the channel the ships find safe harbourage in the most wonderfully protected natural harbour, the Mare Piccolo, a salt-water lagoon, five miles in length, which forms the focus of half the life of Taranto. All along the inner front of the old city stretches the fishermen’s quarter. Here the fishermen, a fine hardy race of men, who do not speak Greek but only nautical Apulian, may be seen mending their nets, weaving fish-baskets, bringing in their hauls; while at the northern end there is lively business in the fish market. Every kind of oyster and mussel may be seen in the market, as well as other strange shellfish of every kind….”

“After more than two thousand years the fisherman’s life goes on here with little change, and nowhere in the whole world is it more picturesque and attractive. Two great industries of old Greek days, however, have disappeared. The purple-yielding mussels are no longer sought, as they were in the days when the purple dyes of Tarentum were more prized than those of Phoenicia. Nor is that shell-fish called by savants the ‘pinna marina’ collected for the silky filaments by which it attached itself to the rocks. From these filaments the Tarentines, like the Coans, used to make garments like silk, but when the Byzantines brought silkworms from the East the more ancient industry disappeared. The famous sheep of the Galaesus, with their wonderful fleeces mentioned by the Latin writers, have also disappeared.”

We’d parked on the tiny island that was historically the heart of the city and has a castle to prove it. As such, we faced a walk uphill in shocking heat (the Mediterranean is burning up thanks to climate change). We hugged what little shade there was and trudged, sweating, past an anarchist library, skeezy bars, tenements and a fish market up to the bridge that connects to the mainland, walking over a navigable canal that connects the Mar Piccolo to the Ionian Sea.

Feeling faint and irritable from the exertion and heat, we collapsed at a ‘puccia’ place, had a couple of sandwiches and cans of cold soda. A puccia, particular to Puglia, is essentially a pita pocket—a round flat bread that you stuff with a filling of your choice. Served warm, it is very tasty, especially with fresh local ingredients like rich tomatoes, greenish olive oil, eggplant, rucola and the like. It never tastes as good when I make it as when you get it at one of these places.

John was still in shock from the drive so the prospect of spending hours in a museum looking at potsherds lacked appeal. He decided to find an air-conditioned place to read and rest before he had to face the grueling return to Gallipoli. Unfortunately, the only air-conditioned café around was something called Jérôme Chocolat, which was completely pink and decorated with giant teddybears. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable lurking about there for an indefinite amount of time, so we found an outdoor table at another bar and he sat under an umbrella for an hour reading while the staff completely ignored him.

Meanwhile, I headed over to the museum. One welcome thing about it was that it was wonderfully cool. The friendly woman at the ticket counter instructed me on the correct procedure and I obediently followed her directions as far as I understood them, taking the elevator up to the second floor. The first thing I saw made me immediately glad I’d come because it was so odd and charming.

Orpheus 

It was a group of three almost life-sized figures: Orpheus seated and playing a (missing) instrument, and two Sirens facing him. One Siren is singing, the other holding her chin in a pose that the caption said is a common attitude of distress. Two of the figures were missing their hair, on the Siren that still had hers you could see that each curl was fashioned separately. The group of statues, discovered in the 1970s, had been illegally trafficked to the USA but has been back in Italy since 2021.

The usual story about Orpheus is that he was such a gifted musician that his lyre could tame wild beasts and pacify savage enemies. When his new wife, Eurydice, died from a snake bite, Orpheus went to the Underworld and charmed everyone, even Cerberus, with his musical skill. He played for Hades and Persephone, who were so moved that Orpheus was allowed to lead Eurydice back to the world of the living on one proviso: if he looked behind him, he would lose her forever. Naturally, he was just a few steps from the living world when suspicion overtook him; he couldn’t hear her footsteps and worried that Hades has tricked him. Naturally, he looked back.

The tale of Orpheus and the Sirens, shown in this statue group, is much happier and less well known. It is told in Apollonius’ epic Argonautica, which recounts the adventures of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Jason and his men are returning from their quest and pass by the Island of the Sirens. Ordinarily, anyone in that situation is going to fall under the Sirens’ singing spell, seek them out and be ripped to pieces. Orpheus prevents this by playing his lyre and singing a lively tune so loudly that the sailors can’t even hear the Sirens. The Sirens aren’t so happy—there are some versions where they throw themselves off a cliff in their disappointment.

Pythagoras and the Music of the Spheres

Why use this statue group to decorate a tomb though? Some people think that the person buried in the relevant tomb was an adherent of Orphism or Pythagoreanism or Orphic-Pythagoreanism. Orphism was a belief system based on the myth of Dionysus (who was killed by the Titans as a baby but brought back to life by Zeus’s lightning bolt). Adherents held that every human consists of a body (soma) and a soul (psyche). Those initiated into the Dionysian mysteries were purified by ritually reliving the death and rebirth of Dionysus, effecting their escape from bodily existence and securing a spiritual eternity with heroes like Orpheus. The uninitiated, by contrast, were doomed to endless, embodied, reincarnation. Pythagoras (a disciple of the Orphic philosopher Pherekydes), adopted similar ideas.

Thin gold tablets have been found in tombs that appear to reference such beliefs. They functioned as Totenpässe or passports to the Afterlife, containing messages for appropriate deities. One of these tablets reads: “Now you have died and now you have come into being, O thrice happy one, on this same day. Tell Persephone that the Bacchic One himself released you.” Such tablets were rolled up and worn around the neck, in readiness.

A philosopher, mathematician and cult leader who was considered practically immortal in his own time, Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos but studied in Egypt and in later life had his own school/sect/cult in Crotone (modern Crotone in Calabria). From Pythagoras, we have received the term ‘music of the spheres’, the concept that astronomy and music are sciences whose study requires a knowledge of mathematical proportions. He and his adherents regularly sang together in a circle every day because life was hard and they were all crazy as a bag of firecrackers.

What I didn’t realize at school, when learning about triangles and things, was that Pythagorus was essentially a religious figure. Science and religion weren’t opposed in his world; in fact, his ideas were rooted in worship. The mathematical principle he postulated was practically embodied in the god Apollo, god of healing, music and prophecy. As Jacqueline Behling puts it, “the newly-defined Apollo was an abstract, unifying, mathematical and rational force or principle, qualitatively different from and superior to all other gods, and potentially available for natural and benevolent communication with human individuals in need of salvation through the new practice of philosophy, conceived as including mathematics, music and asceticism.”

Pythagoras spent his final years in Metapontum, about 40 kilometers away from Taranto. His teaching spread throughout the Greek world, but it was particularly strong in Magna Grecia and around the Gulf of Tarento. Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fl. 4^th century BCE), known as ‘the father of musicology,’ wrote a life of Pythagoras and his disciples, and a book on Pythagorean doctrine. It is no surprise that someone would have a statue of Orpheus in this part of the world, as the mythical musician represented the immortality of the soul.

Musical Instruments

There are reminders of how important music was to the Greeks throughout the museum. Several vases feature depictions of ‘auletes,’ people who played the double flute. It even appears on a vase that was awarded to the winner of the pentathlon at the Panatheniac Olympic Games, the man buried with other rich treasures in the so-called ‘Tomb of the Athlete’. Recently, musical archeologists have reconstructed the aulos and you can even listen to how it may have sounded here and here. I also a detail of a winged satyr playing something like a panpipe.

One interesting but slightly sad sight was the remnant of a chelys or tortoiseshell lyre, supposedly invented by Hermes. According to the myth, Hermes was a young boy when he stole a herd of sacred cows from Apollo. He slaughtered them all and offered everything but the entrails to the gods. From the entrails he created the lyre. Apollo was enraged until he heard Hermes play the lyre, when he accepted the instrument as a fair price for the cows. These instruments were usually made of wood or bone, with the tortoise shell used as a resonator. As the myth suggests, the strings were made of cow or sheep gut. Here is a modern replica, played by the UK composer for lyre Michael Levy.

Bronze Age Beauties

John’s favorite artefacts from my collection of photos were those from Bronze Age settlements in the area, pre-dating Greek colonization by millennia. There were two ‘Venuses of Parabita’ dating to 18,000 BCE. They are both carved out of a splinter of bone from an aurochs or horse, depict women with exaggerated breasts, their hands held around distended bellies, as in pregnancy, and their heads covered with a veil or a hood. Anna Consonni describes them here and suggests they were probably used in fertility rituals.

Another striking piece is this owl-faced human figurine found in a grave from about 4,300-4,000 BCE.

This weird pig-faced female:

And a Mycaenaean minion:

Spartan Taranto

Some sat that the city of Taranto is named for the mythical hero Taras, a son of Poseidon, who was shipwrecked off the coast of Laconia and rescued by a dolphin that took him over here, to the corner of the heel and sole of Italy’s boot in the Ionian Sea. This may be why the dolphin is something of a city mascot:

Another story has it that a hero named Falanto led an expedition of Parteni, children born of Spartan women and male helots (the despised slave class of the Spartan state), so they could have their own city.

Whatever the truth is, the colony was founded in the 8^th century BCE by people from Laconia. In the heart of the city there are still two great Doric pillars testifying to a giant temple erected close to the time of the city’s founding. And there are various works that recall the flavor of Sparta. One is this impressive bronze statue, 74 centimeters high, from the Archaic period:

Another is a plate showing Laconian Zeus and his eagle in conference:

Potty for Pottery

Taras, as the city was originally called, was a major pottery center. There were several examples of pots in-the-process of being made. For example, there was this shard containing a sketch so that the artist could check how an image would come out after being fired (at least that’s what I imagine was going on). It looks surprisingly modern.

Then there are examples of molds, like this one of a satyr trying his hand at the potter’s wheel, with a grimace:

And one of a thoughtful girl:

Perfume, Make-up & Jewelry

The Greek women of Taras paid a lot of attention to their toilette. There are some exquisite pieces that appear to have been cosmetic cases. This one–the inner lid of a compact–is particularly remarkable:

Sometimes a real shell might be used for containing powder or pigment. In this case it is the type of scallop known as the scallop of St. James (because his body was covered with them when he was dug up). It later would become the symbol of Christian pilgrims.

One of the collections the museum is best known for is the ‘Gold of Taranto’–gold jewelry of the city’s Greek and Roman periods. Here is a small sample of that:

There were a lot of perfume bottles and jars in creative shapes. Some of these would have been for ritual scents and unguents, especially for funerals, but some of them would have been for secular use too.

Women and Eros

I found depictions of women and girls unexpectedly vivid and colorful. Here is a female running deity from the Archaic period. She was one of a pair and probably sat perched on the pediment of a temple. She has lost her color but undoubtedly would have once been brightly painted.

An intriguing bas relief showed a scene of a bride on the eve of her wedding, surrounded by symbols of the impending ceremony. Afrodite stands in front of her, pushing Eros towards her. He himself is offering her the fillet, a kind woven cloth band used for ritual purposes (for example one was often tied to a sacrificial victim). There is a water jug containing purified water for her bridal bath, and on top of that is the trousseau. At her feet is her maid (slaves are usually drawn as smaller to reflect social inferiority) and the bridal bath tub.

One of my favorite statues is this archaic Kore (girl), who has an innocent and sweet expression on her face.

Finally, in honor of Barbie the movie, which came out this week, I should include this doll:

There was lots of other cool stuff but I have spent too long on this already. Here are three more highlights.

1. A bronze nutcracker in the shape of hands

2. A lonesome bird

3. A veiled woman looking out of a window