Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa

Chapter Title: Τὸ αἰσχρὸν καὶ τὸ καλόν: “Beauty and the Beast” and Domestic Cults in
Western Greece
Chapter Author(s): Aura Piccioni

Book Title: Looking at Beauty to Kalon in Western Greece

Book Subtitle: Selected Essays from the 2018 Symposium on the Heritage of Western
Greece
Book Editor(s): Heather L. Reid and Tony Leyh
Published by: Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa

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 Aura Piccioni 1
Τὸ αἰσχρὸν καὶ τὸ καλόν: “Beauty and the Beast”
and Domestic Cults in Western Greece2

The concept of beauty was the center of the attention for the
Ancients. Its definition, however, remains elusive: is beauty found in
the whole of something, or do the parts of a thing each have to be
beautiful? Is beauty in proportion, light, symmetry, and color?3 Is it
in the shape, in the unity?4 Does the beauty of a body depend on
communion with the divine λόγος?5 Is form beautiful, and
formlessness ugly? One thing about beauty, though, was clear:
…beauty is that which has real being, but ugliness is the nature
opposite to this. It is this that is the first evil; just as beauty is
likewise the first of things beautiful and good. Or it may be that
goodness and beauty are one and the same. Therefore, we must
investigate the beautiful and good, and the ugly and evil, by the
same process.6
These words of the 3rd c. CE Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus,
probably derive from Plato himself, who introduced the idea of
beauty being connected to “love,” “desire” and the “good,” in
contraposition to the ugly, which can be recognized as such through
the same process, even if opposite, used to define beauty. Even
though ancient Greek art is especially renowned for its expressions
of beauty, it was also able – by contrast – to express ugliness. This
paper will focus on the ways in which ugliness can serve to enhance
the concept of beauty, and what their association could mean in the
contexts of the domestic cults of Western Greece.

1 Aura Piccioni completed her PhD in Classical Archaeology at the Universität

Regensburg, Germany, where she also worked as a Research Assistant. She is
currently giving lectures on Etruscan Art and Archaeology at Paris-Lodron-
Universität Salzburg, Austria, during the spring semester 2018.
2 I would like to thank my friend Cordelia C. Onyekachi for reviewing my English.

3 Cf. Plot. I, 1.

4 Cf. Plot. I, 2.

5 Cf. Plot. I, 2.

6 Plot. I, 6; transl. by the Editors of The Shrine of Wisdom.

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Aura Piccioni

Beauty and Western Greece

Ugliness was seen by
Plotinus as something evil,
but it may also simply
represent the counterpart of
Beauty, without any moral
judgements or connection to
evil. In this sense, ugliness
seems to have played an
important role in the
domestic cults of Western
Greece. Examples can be
found among discoveries in
the chora of Metapontum.
The chora of this
Achaean city in Southern
Italy has been investigated
since the 1980s by the
Fig. 1 Silvestrelli & Edlund-Berry, Chora of
Metaponto, 74, fig. 3.14 b.
Institute of Classical
Archaeology of the
7
University of Texas, and during these explorations a huge number
of Greek farmhouses came to light. In one of these houses in
particular, in the locality of Sant’Angelo Vecchio8 (but not only here,
we shall see), there was discovered a fragmentary clay plaque, the
preserved part of which depicts the legs of a woman, wearing a long
chiton, and a male figure, characterized by goat-legs and a large
phallus (fig. 1).9 The plaque can be dated, based on the style, to the
4th-3rd c. BCE.

7 Cf. Rebecca Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas in Domestic Contexts

and Beyond: The Case of Metaponto,” in Figurines grecques en contexts. Présence
muette dans le sanctuaire, la tombe et la maison, eds. Stéphanie Huysecom-Haxhi
and Arthur Mullereds (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, 2015), 361-83, part. 363.
8 Cf. Francesca Silvestrelli and Ingrid E. M. Edlund-Berry, The Chora of Metaponto, 6.

A Greek Settlement at Sant’Angelo Vecchio (Austin: University of Texas Press,

2016), 63-75.
9 F. Silvestrelli, I. E. M. Edlund-Berry, The Chora of Metaponto, 74, fig. 3.14 (right).

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 Beauty and the Besast

The terracotta mold

found in the farmhouse of
Sant’Angelo Vecchio is not
the only figure of its kind
coming from the chora of
Metapontum. Indeed, its
iconography seems to be
the type most frequently
documented,10 and – what
is more important – seems
to attest a domestic cult
inside that farmhouse,
such as occurs in nineteen
other sites, including the
Fattoria Fabrizio and the
Fattoria Stefan (where 38
fragments came to light).11
The fragmentary clay
plaque from Sant’Angelo Fig. 2: Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting
Vecchio can be Terrcottas,” p. 374, fig. n. 4.
reconstructed in its
entirety, thanks to comparison with non-fragmentary exemplars
coming from the chora. R. Miller Ammermann, who studied the
terracotta figurines from the farmhouses and sanctuaries of the
chora,12 interpreted the iconography of such plaques as Pan, wearing
a wreath on his horns and a panther skin, accompanied in his dance
by a woman, whom he embraces with his right arm. His dancing
partner carries a cornucopia filled with cakes and fruit with the left
arm and raises her veil with the right, in the typical bridal gesture of
anakalypsis.

10 R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 364.

11 R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 364-365.
12 Rebecca Miller Ammermann, “Terracotta Objects,” in The Chora of Metaponto, 3.

Archaeological Field Survey Bradano to Basento, eds. Joseph Coleman Carter and
Alberto Prieto, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 489-538; R. Miller
Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 363.
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Aura Piccioni

Miller Ammermann
underlines that there is also
another version of the
plaque, where Pan
precedes his beautiful
female dancing partner,
who now wears a polos or a
crown over the veil (figs. 2-
3).13 Pan is substituted on
some molds by a Silenus
with equine ears, but the
iconography of the female
remains the same.14
Remarkably, as noted
above, a large number of
terracotta molds with this
iconography have also
Fig. 3: Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting been found in the
Terrcottas,” p. 374, fig. n.375, fig. n. 10.
sanctuaries of Pantanello,
in the chora of Metapontum, as well as in the urban center of the
Greek city, specifically in temple E.15
Appropriately, R. Miller Ammermann refuses to change the
interpretation of the woman based on the changing of her partner, as
other scholars have done, identifying her as a nymph when she
dances with Pan and as a Maenad when she is accompanied by
Silenus.16 In both cases, this association of beauty and ugly appears
to have had an important meaning for the cult, as one will now
demonstrate.
Beauty Contrasted with Ugliness
It is interesting and important to notice how high the percentage
of these plaques is. Moreover, the iconography constantly represents

13 R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 364.

14 R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 364.
15 Cf. R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 365-368.

16 R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 368-369.

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 Beauty and the Besast

a young, beautiful lady, dancing with an ugly being, a Pan or a

Silenus, and even miming an anakalypsis.
According to Ammermann, even if her meaning does not change
as her monstrous partner changes, the young woman could be
interpreted as something similar to a Nymph or a Maenad.17 This, in
my view, could only partially explain the meaning of her bridal
gesture – she was surely not going to marry a monster, was she? The
meaning of her gesture is exactly the question which I will try to find
an answer to in this essay.
The idea of associating ugliness and beauty could be a sign of
something very significant involved in the domestic cult. One should
remember that both of these aspects were connected to the female
world, since beauty gave women the power to seduce, while ugliness
– linked to the twilight years of a person – could become a symbol of
wisdom.18 Here the woman is a beautiful young lady, and ugliness is
represented by her dancing companion.
Before one can appreciate the figure of the beautiful woman, one
must analyze the meaning of her companion. The precise
interpretation of the male figure as a Satyr, Silenus, or Pan is not the
focus of this paper; more important for this present research is the
meaning of the relationship between this “ugly” being and the
beautiful maid.
Explanations for Silenus/Pan suggest that this figure should
have certainly been involved in the cult of Dionysus, which was
widespread in the chora of Metapontum, already in Archaic times.
The Silenoi, Satyrs and Pan all embodied the power of nature, and
alluded to bestial love,19 as demonstrated also by a pinax (type 3/6),20

17 R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 369-72.

18 Cf. Maria Paola Lupo, “Il bello è il brutto, il brutto è il bello. Fra nebbie e fumo,”
in Fortuna & prosperità. Dee e maghe dell’Abruzzo antico, Adele Campanelli and
Maria Paola Lupo eds., (Sulmona: Synapsi 2006), 117-19, part. 117.
19 Fede Berti and Carlo Gasparri eds., Dionysos: mito e mistero (Bologna: Nuova Alfa

Editoriale 1989), 50; John Boardman, The great god Pan. The survival of an image
(New York: Thames and Hudson 1997), 14.
20 Cf. Eleonora Grillo, Marina Rubinich, Roberta Schenal Pileggi, “I pinakes di Locri

Epizefiri. Musei di Reggio Calabria e di Locri,” AttSocMagnaGr, IV serie, II

(2000-2003), vol. 1 (Roma: Società Magna Grecia 2003), 98-109.
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Aura Piccioni

dating to the 5th c. BCE and

coming from the
Persephoneion of Lokroi
Epizephyrioi on the
Mannella Hill, the
“ἐπιφανέστατον τὸν
κατὰ τὴν Ἰταλίαν ἱερόν”
(Diod. 27.4.2). On this
relief, a couple, a man and
a woman, is praying and
offering a libation,
standing in front of an
altar, which is used to
sacrifice to a pair of deities,
apparently Aphrodite and
Hermes. But that which
concerns us in this scene is
the eminent altar, or better,
its decoration. On the
frontal surface of it, in fact,
is represented a sexual act
between a Satyr/Silenus or
Fig. 4: Boardman, The great god Pan, p. 36, fig. Pan, and a doe.
46, photo John Boardman.
Assuming that the
temple on the pinax belongs to the goddess Aphrodite, closely
associated with the important patron goddess of Lokroi,
Persephone,21 this would be evidence that, also in the city of Lokroi,
Pan was associated to Aphrodite, i.e. he goddess of free, wild, natural
love, usually without bonds. But only if one excludes Aphrodite’s
association, at Lokroi, with Demeter’s daughter, the goddess of the
marriage par excellence.

21 Cf. Paola Zancani Montuoro, “Persefone e Afrodite sul mare,” in: Essays in memory
of Karl Lehmann, ed. Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York: Institute of Fine Arts,
New York University, 1964), 386-95.

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 Beauty and the Besast

Fig. 5: Boardman, The great god Pan, 32, fig. 40.

Pan was, in general, associated with Aphrodite: a marble group
(fig. 4), found in the House of the Poseidoniasts of Beirut on Delos,22
shows the goddess of Beauty and Love accompanied by Erōs, and
significantly by an ugly Pan. This association, defined “unpleasant”
by John Boardman,23 becomes even more unpleasant if one follows
the suggestion that Pan seems to have the intention of seducing the
goddess. Ugliness is thus unified with Beauty, exactly like Pan to
Aphrodite or the Satyr/Silenus to the Nymph of our terracottas from
Metapontum.
The relation between Pan and Aphrodite appears to be a
frequent motif throughout Greek art, as the god is present on several
Athenian vases, including a red figured hydria discovered in
Camarina, to be dated around the third quarter of the 5 th c. BCE,24
where Pan witnesses the birth of the goddess, among several other

22
National Archaeological Museum, Athens 3335.
23 Quote from J. Boardman, The great god Pan, 37.
24 Syracuse, Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi, 23912. Cf. John Davidson

Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1963), 1041.11.

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Aura Piccioni

figures, and probably also Erōs.

This birth can be compared with
the emergence from the ground
of a goddess depicted on another
Athenian red-figure skyphos by
the Penthesilea Painter (fig. 5),
coming from the Campanian city
of Vico Equense, not far away
from Naples, and dating back to
the middle of the 5th c. BCE.25
Here Pan is multiple, in the
form of two daemons in his
disguise. Two Satyrs solemnly
greet the anodos of the deity,
celebrating it with their dances. It
Fig. 6: Boardman, The great god Pan,
27, fig. 31.
would be really interesting to
interpret this deity as a Verschmelzung between Aphrodite and
Persephone, since the latter was one of the most important goddesses
of Western Greece, as can be ascertained by the fame of her sanctuary
at Lokroi, by the importance of the Demetric Mysteries in Sicily, and
by various other testimonies, such as the Orphic golden tablets
discovered in several Southern Italian cities which preserve her name
in prayers for the afterlife.26
This goddess could perhaps have been represented as emerging
from the Hades back into the light of the world, connecting herself to
the spheres of fertility and wilderness, underlined by the two
daemonic figures. Interestingly enough, on the other side of the
skyphos makes her appearance a Maenad, in the middle, holding a
kantharos and a thyrsus, preceded and followed by two dancing
Satyrs. This second scene is clearly connected to a dionysiac thiasos,
as the Maenad and the Satyrs demonstrate; the figures of the satyrs
could then be distinguished from that of Pan on the other side of the

25 Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts 01.8032. Cf.
J. Boardman, The great god Pan, 32-33, fig. 40.
26 Cf. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli (ed.), Le lamine d’oro orfiche. Istruzioni per il viaggio

oltremondano degli iniziati greci (Milano: Adelphi Edizioni, 2011), 98 ff.

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 Beauty and the Besast

vase, because they are bald and extremely “unpleasant,” to adopt the
terminology already used by Boardman.
The god of wilderness seems to accompany a dancing Maenad
with the sound of the aulos on an Attic black-figure neck-amphora, to
be dated around the beginning of the 5th c. BCE (fig. 6),27 which seems
to be a prelude to the iconography of our plaque. In fact, Pan, who is
recognizable thanks to his aspect (having the head of a goat, like the
two abovementioned daemonic figures), with his goat-like face and
body, is depicted as playing the aulos, while the beautiful Maenad at
his side outstretches her arms in movements of dance, exactly as they
appear on our plaques. This motif seems to find a direct model, as
underlined by R. Miller Ammermann, in some reliefs discovered in
Attica, dedicated to the Nymphs and coming from the Demetric
sanctuary of Eleusis.28
Not only is Pan connected to Aphrodite through myth and the
arts, but also Satyrs are associated with Nymphs, even from their
birth, as Hesiod (apud Strab. 10.471) attests, mentioning such
supernatural beings as the descendants of Phoroneos’s daughter:29
Once again, the wilderness and ugliness of these figures find their
counterpart in the beauty of their female companions. This
connection was not so superficial, since one could think that ugliness
and beauty were complementary to each other as the two sides of the
same coin in aiming and guaranteeing the fertility and reproduction
of crops, animals, and people.30 Ugliness became, then, also a symbol
of wilderness and of nature, embodied by the Satyrs and Pan.
In central Italy, the same iconography of our mold from
Metapontum, depicting a dancing Satyr or Pan and a beautiful
maiden, can be retraced in a late Archaic terracotta antefix group of

27 Cape Town, South Africa Cultural History Museum, L64.4. Cf. J. Boardman, The
great god Pan, 27, fig. 31.
28 Cf. R. Miller Ammermann, “Interpreting Terracottas,” 369, 382, fig. n. 23.

29
Fede Berti, Caterina Cornelio Cassai, Paola Desantis, Silvana Sani (eds.), La
coroplastica di Spina. Immagini di culto, Catalogue of the exposition, Ferrara, 12-
24 settembre 1987 (Ferrara: Il Museo 1987), 17.
30 Cf. F. Berti, C. Cornelio Cassai, P. Desantis, S. Sani, La coroplastica, 17.

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Aura Piccioni

a Satyr and a Maenad (c. 490 BCE) from the temple of Mater Matuta,
at Satricum, once again in connection to nature and to the figure of
Dionysos31.
The same meaning seems to have been passed down during the
Roman age, even if Pan was not always depicted as monstrous. For
example, the union of ugliness and beauty is what it is represented
on a wall-painting of the first c. CE coming from Pompeii,32 showing
Pan in the act of uncovering a beautiful Hermaphrodite, who still
preserved a connection to the goddess Aphrodite.
Conclusion
In trying to find an answer to the meaning of the bridal gesture
of the beautiful maid dancing with an ugly half-goat like figure, it has
already been understood that the question was a rhetorical one,
which required an affirmative answer, since the marriage here
represented should be interpreted as a symbolic one, between a
Nymph or, perhaps, a nature goddess and a supernatural being, who
through his ugliness expresses precisely his wilderness, and
therefore the free, great power of nature. The fusion of beauty and
ugliness, in this sense, was perceived by the Greeks as a fundamental
element in guaranteeing the perpetuation of the nature itself, and of
its components. Even the name “Pan”, according to Homer, who
narrates that the baby brought happiness to all the gods,33 recalls the
totality of the nature, and its powerful expressions.
In this sense, one could interpret the plaques coming from the
domestic contexts of the chora of Metapontum, on which our
attention has focused in the present paper, as depicting two
supernatural beings, probably identifiable as a Nymph and Pan, who
presided over nature itself, protecting crops, animals, and people at

31 Cf. Alessandro Cassatella, “Note sulla decorazione del tempio di Mater Matuta a
Satrico,” in Dalle sorgenti alla foce. Il bacino del Liri-Garigliano nell'antichità:
culture, contatti, scambi. Atti del convegno, Frosinone-Formia 10-12 novembre 2005,
eds. Cristina Corsi & Eugenio Polito (Roma: Edizioni Quasar 2008), 187-88.
32 Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, 11147, from the Casa dei Dioscuri. Cf. J.

Boardman, The great god Pan, 40, fig. 52.

33 Cf. Hom., Hymn to Pan, 47: “Πᾶνα δέ μιν καλέεσκον, ὅτι φρένα πᾶσιν ἔτερψε;” J.

Boardman, The great god Pan, 26.

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 Beauty and the Besast

the same time. Their symbolic marriage – expressed by some features

of the beautiful woman, such as the gesture of the anakalypsis, but also
the stephane, a typical attribute of the nymphe, the bride herself –
seems to stand at the center of the interest of the inhabitants of the
chora, who aimed to ensure for their oikos the protection of such
wilderness gods, in order to grant safe growth to all its members and
properties. The marriage of the two supernatural beings could allude
both to the rites de passage of the youths of the households, and
especially to the actual nuptial feast that meant so much for the
females; but it should have also alluded to the aspect of fertility,
yielded by the fusion of the beautiful and of the ugly, and then from
the bounds of the marriage, of a controlled love, mixed with the idea
of wilderness, of free, bestial love.
The marriage between “the Beauty and the Beast” should thus
have alluded precisely to this aspect, the importance of the power of
love, wilderness, nature, bounded in the human society and
controlled by the laws of the city, in order to use the might of the first
to grant the perpetuation of the second. This is exactly what the
goddesses Persephone and Aphrodite, in southern Italy, represented:
marriage and free love, the first to control the second.
As a conclusion, it is important to underline here, as previously
done for the Satyrs, the relationships between Pan and various
deities, apart from the obvious link with Hermes, who fathered him.
The major connections seem to be those with Aphrodite/Persephone,
Persephone/Demeter, the Nymphs, and Dionysus. All of these are
important deities for southern Italy, all natural, chthonic and linked
to the mundus muliebris. Such relationships remind us once more of
the complementarity of beauty and ugliness, and of the fact that, in
contrast with what Plotinus may think, they could not exist and be
fertile without each other.

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