Just how precarious such good order can be, and how laboriously wrought, is signified by the end of the Odyssey. Homer’s song does not end as it might have with Odysseus, Laertes, and the faithful servant Dolios sharing a meal as evening falls. Instead, the scene shifts abruptly from that harmonious tableau to a depiction of the swift, citywide course of the news of the suitors’ death. The city cries for retribution, but the cry is not unanimous. Medon, the wise herald, and Phemios, noble bard, address the angered masses in hopes that further violence can be avoided. The suitors, they argue, deserved what they got for their reckless, outrageous behavior towards Odysseus and his household. To their minds, the score had been settled. Of course, this pacifistic counsel does not prevail; such is the force of human emotion. Had Athena not intervened, armed with the oaths of Zeus, all may have been lost, for where discord thrives, community can never gain a secure foothold.

Figure 2. Blueprint of the ideal polis. Reconstruction: The Shield of Achilles. Concept by Donald Dunham and Annette Giesecke, drawing by Michael Monahan.

Not surprisingly, the scenes depicted on the Shield are replete with references, some more overt than others, to limits and boundaries in the world of the polis. Nowhere in the Iliad are descriptions of human interaction with the natural environment more concentrated, and as in the case of the Odyssey, the natural world is not abstractly conjured as a pleasant reverie but as a force to contend with. Human activities in this environment must be mediated by boundaries, physical and otherwise. Starting cartographically at the point of greatest remove from the city center and spiraling gradually inward, we, the audience, behold nomoi ‘pastures’ for cattle and sheep (Iliad 18.587). Pastures constitute Nature inscribed by virtue of human use or presence and not necessarily by the fabrication of physical boundaries. It is in such places, particularly when unbounded, that humanity is most vulnerable, since these are fundamentally wild places, more open to view, certainly, than forests, but still full of potential menace. Such menace descends upon the cowherds in their pasture by the river (Iliad 18.573–586). Two stealthy lions attack and then greedily devour one of their bulls, and, ultimately, nothing the herdsmen or their terror-stricken dogs can do will prevent it. While beyond a doubt a grisly scene, its gore is instructively rivaled by another, which likewise takes place in a pasture, specifically at a watering hole (Iliad 18.520–532). In this rival or “companion” scene, an army of “bestial” men, not predatory animals, sets upon herds and herdsmen alike. Humanity appears particularly susceptible to bestial behavior in wild, unbounded places. As the Shield here and elsewhere vividly demonstrates, human nature or impulse must also be held in check.

Figure 3. A landscape “of unusual, even startling interest.” Red-figure pelikē: drawing of Side A, Odysseus, Elpenor, and Hermes in the Underworld. The Lykaon Painter, ca. 440 BCE. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Amory Gardner Fund, inv. no. 34.79.

Heroes derived from the realm of myth would also make an appearance under Eastern influence, and it was their deeds, as well as deeds of more ordinary men and women, that ultimately captured the imagination of both painter and patron, now less attracted to genre scenes focusing on “survival” in the face of menacing Nature than their eighth-century counterparts. This was the case particularly in Athens, where a uniquely dynamic and experimental Orientalizing style was forged. Vases painted in this Protoattic style retain some features characteristic of the Geometric such as multiple bands of decoration, human figures rendered in silhouette but with frontal torso, and a pronounced horror vacui ‘dread of vacant space’, especially in early examples. However, figures, both human and animal, have a more organic appearance, and artists painted them not only in solid silhouette but also in silhouette combined with incision and outline, sometimes filled with white. Bold figured scenes, primarily inhabiting the vases’ prominent belly and neck zones, toy with the limiting authority of the bands that enclose them; a horse’s ear, a hoof, a hand, or a foot may break through such linear barriers. Still, these protective barriers remain, and they separate figured scenes from the registers of ornamental spirals, cables, rosettes, and leaves that constitute their frame. Strikingly, vegetable and other “natural” motifs became stylistically “frozen” both in appearance and in decorative application, while painters strove to render the human (and super-human) form ever more realistically. It is true that the odd chubby shrub or spiky tree appears in Protoattic figure scenes amid the general flutter of filling ornament from which it is sometimes nearly indistinguishable, and in such cases it serves as a sort of “shorthand” indicating that the scene represented is taking place out of doors. Most organic forms, however, would remain confined within ornamental bands or in relatively obscure zones such as those beneath a given vase’s handle or handles, serving in both instances as frames for the figured scenes that dominate the vase’s picture field. As the Greek poleis continued to define themselves spatially, politically, and ideologically, it was evidently perceived that humanity could flourish, human society could continue to evolve, only if Nature were held at bay.

Figure 4. Alone in the realm of Nature. Attic black-figure amphora: the suicide of Ajax. Attributed to Exekias, ca. 530 BCE. Collection du Château musée de Boulogne sur mer, inv. no. 558. Photo, courtesy of the Château musée de Boulogne sur mer.

Figure 5. The storm of war. Attic red-figure hydria: Iliupersis. The Kleophrades Painter, ca. 500-450 BCE. Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico, inv. no. H2422. Photo, courtesy of the Museo Nazionale Archeologico.

Although the Philoctetes was composed when Athens was no longer in its prime, the play’s lessons may nevertheless be fruitfully applied to the interpretation of Exekias’ and the Kleophrades Painter’s vases. As he prepares to take his own life, Ajax is not so very different from Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos. Ajax, believing that the Atreidae and Odysseus had stripped him of his honor, deliberately severed himself from his social milieu. He had been denied the prestigious prize of Achilles’ armor, and the resulting fit of madness both revealed his human frailty and robbed him of the possibility for revenge. A life thus dishonored was not worth living. So Ajax, like Philoctetes, finds himself isolated from his social milieu, and when he retreats from society, he too stands alone in the realm of Nature. Exekias’ composition is stunning in its economy and in the emotion it conveys. The painting reveals everything we, the viewers, need to know. At this climactic moment, we see Ajax alone with only one witness, a solitary palm that is, by its very nature, unfeeling. The palm indicates that Ajax has been driven—or has driven himself—out of his circle of friends into the wild. The desolate wilderness is “where” Ajax is physically and psychologically. He is isolated and utterly alone. Meanwhile, the armor standing before him fleshes out the drama before our eyes; it tells us “why.” Nature does not mourn Ajax. This is a human drama played out by a man for an audience of his peers and family. They, and we, experience the weight of his loss.

Figure 6. Nature as parergonal frame; beyond the walls of Athens and Piraeus, and beyond the long parallel walls that connect them, Nature tamed resides. The garden districts of Classical Athens. Map after Maureen Carroll-Spillecke, ΚΗΠΟΣ: Der antike griechische Garten (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1989), 29, fig. 10.

Figure 7. Microcosm of the polis. Classical Athenian houses on the Areopagus. Plans after T. Leslie Shear Jr., “The Athenian Agora: Excavations of 1971,” Hesperia 42 (1973): 148, fig. 4. Reprinted courtesy of The American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Figure 8. Greek versus beast. Relief metope from the Parthenon, Athens. South metope no. 27: Lapith and Centaur. British Museum, inv. no. 316. Photo, © Art Resource.