Hi I'm Jamie Fraser curator for the ancient Levant and Anatolia here at the British Museum
and welcome to my corner!
[Music] One of the things that I find most extraordinary about working in British Museum
is that sometimes some of the smallest seemingly most insignificant objects have the loudest,
largest, most interesting stories.
What I want to share with you now is the story behind one of the smallest objects that we've
got on display in our current exhibition Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece.
This object is, well it's less than two centimetres high.
It's a an ancient gemstone that would have once fixed inside a swivel ring.
And it was made probably between 450 BC and 400 BC in the city of Athens in ancient Greece.
What is amazing about it is that it's depicting a peacock.
The peacock is front on, it's got its tail fanned out behind it, and it's holding in
its talons two snakes; One of which has a beard…
don't ask me why.
Depictions of peacocks in ancient Athens are not that unusual but it is unusual for being
this early.
Almost all of our images of peacocks come from the Hellenistic periods, particularly
associated with a sanctuary to the goddess Hera on the island of Samos.
And we know that the Samians, the inhabitants of this city on Samos, minted coins of the
city with peacocks as its insignia.
We have another object in the collection from the same period that is a bronze handle of
a mirror case and it shows in repoussé - a technique of hitting the metal from behind
into shape - a young woman feeding fruit to a peacock or a peahen with its tail down.
But what's unique about this special gemstone is that because it's made in Classical period
Athens 450 to 400 BC give or take, it's the earliest depiction of peacocks that we have
from Athens and in fact it's probably the earliest depiction of a peacock we have anywhere
from Europe.
Peacocks came originally from India and to get all the way into Greece by about 450 440
BC they've come all the way through the Middle East that has been stitched together as part
of this massive Achaemenid Empire.
And we know that the achaemenid King, the ruling dynasty of this ancient Persian Empire
created elaborate gardens known as Paradisos in some of his capital cities, and he stocked
these gardens with exotic birds.
The most exotic of which of course is the well plumaged, beautiful, noisy peacock.
So how on earth did a peacock become to inscribed with such delicacy on such a small gemstone?
Well in order to understand that question we have to step back and look at the whole
geopolitical landscape that's going on in Greece and the wider world at this time in
the second half of the 5th Century BC so 450 to 400 BC Athens has just emerged from a 50-year
long conflict with the largest superpower the world had ever seen up to that point which
was ancient Persia.
Athens emerged from these Greek Persian Wars as one of the wealthiest cities anywhere in
the Mediterranean.
Its wealth was generated in part from tribute paid by its subject allies as part of this
coalition against the Persians it was in part generated by a discovery of silver at Laurion
about 50 kilometers away from Athens it was in part by the spoils, the booty, that it
was capturing off the battlefields against the Persian armies and the Persian navies.
And it also came through its extremely efficient and elaborate network of trade with its maritime
vessels.
By the 440s and by the 430s Athens is an extremely prosperous place and to walk through the streets
of Athens in the 440s BC is kind of to walk through the streets of Dubai about 10 years
ago.
Cranes everywhere, scaffolding everywhere as the city was transforming and rebuilding
itself after the Persian incursions.
And this elevated Athenian citizens into levels of prosperity and levels of extravagance that
they had never yet experienced.
Now into that scenario I want to introduce you to one particular Athenian statesman his
name was Pyrilampes and Pyrilampes he was a great mate of Pericles who was the sort
of the main statesman at the time.
And we know that Pyrilampes in the 440s BC was sent to represent Athens as an ambassador
on several missions to the various courts in the Persian East.
And we think that on one occasion he returned to Athens with a gift that he had been given
by the Persian king or one of his governors, which was a breeding pair of peacocks.
Or as the Athenians called them, the ‘Persian bird’.
Probably the first peacocks ever to cross from the Middle East into Southeast Europe.
Now these were birds of empty vanity par excellence.
They were there to be kept for their plumage and their strut and their preen and their
sheen.
But they had no practical application whatsoever.
You couldn't eat them!
One historian said that to eat a peacock would be one of the fastest ways to spend your money
imaginable.
They were noisy they required a keeper they required large aviary or a large garden.
One estimate said that the cost to keep a pair of peacocks over just a year was the
same as to purchase two of the finest marble statues.
But this was their point.
This empty vanity.
We can see this being lampooned through the words of the Greek satirical playwright Aristophanes
and in his play the Archanians he spoke about an ambassador who returned from the Persian
Court.
We don't know who but he's probably lampooning Pyrilampes that owner of the peacock farm.
And he has an aged elderly man who's sitting on the streets looking on seeing this Embassy
emerge back from having spent time in Persia complaining loudly at the luxuries they had
to endure.
‘We had to drink un-watered wine from crystal cups!’ he exclaims.
The old man rolls his eyes…
‘oh I am sick of these ambassadors with their peacocks and pretensions!’
he says.
And it's a really interesting remark pretensions.
As well as being something for show.
Because peacocks in ancient Athens were regarded as a luxury, and luxury was an extremely destabilizing
influence.
This was a democratic city that had emerged by placing codes to try and suppress social
inequality in a new political system whereby every citizen had the same right to participate
in decision making, assuming that of course that they were Athenian born, adult men.
To be wealthy was fine in this system but to be ostentatious about your wealth was potentially
dangerous, and it could potentially lead to charges that you were sympathizing with the
Persian enemy and ultimately to ostracism from the city.
And in this context owning peacocks could be construed as dangerous.
We know this from one extraordinary legal case that was brought against Pyrilampes’
son Demos around about 415 BC.
So Demos inherited these peacocks which presumably had kept breeding as part of this peacock
farm kept by his father in the city.
And political enemies brought a prosecution case against him where the main worry, the
main concern in this Democratic city of Athens was that he was keeping something for the
precious privilege for the few.
That this was a luxury that hadn't been democratized.
And of course the defence Council said: ‘Well hang on a minute, it's really difficult to
democratize a couple of birds!’
But you know what we've been doing?
Every month on the day of the new moon Demos would open his garden, for a price, for public
admission so that anyone from the city could come and view these Persian birds.
Luxury was ok, peacocks were ok if they were made the preserve of the community rather
than the preserve of a precious few.
And we see in that story I think the deep neuroses that are developing in the psyche
of ancient Athens at this.
Where you have this newfound wealth confronting these new political ideals and shaking it
around in ways that no one had really imagined.
Well I think you're seeing in this our own nervous cynicism about luxury that we've inherited
from The Classical period Greeks.
Luxury for us is something to aspire to.
Something to covet.
We want to drive the fancy car.
And yet luxury is something that we're also deeply cynical about we question its motives
we question its viability and its validity and I think in that deeply uneasy attitude
to luxury that we have today we hear echoes, we hear the resonances of the uneasy relationship
against luxury that the ancient Athenians had in the 5th Century BC that have filtered
down to us across the centuries to our own relationship with our Kardashians today.
Thanks very much for watching I hope you enjoy the video!
This gemstone is on display in an exhibition called Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece.
It's running at the moment and will be running until the 13th of August 2023.