Exhibit gives Greek art a fair shake

Known as aryballos, it was for holding olive oil typically used by athletes before and after exercises. It is within the keeping of the father as a reminder of all the athletic activities no longer performed by his son.

If it is within the capacity of a powerful work of art to move, this one certainly does it in a highly restrained way — there's no explicit reference to death.

Another exhibit on view at the Nanjing Museum that has shed considerable light on the power of Grecian art is a marble female figurine dating to a period between 2800 BC and 2300 BC.

With her gender indicated as much by protruding breasts as by the inverted pubic triangle, the figurine demonstrates an artistic brevity that would have lived up to the intense scrutiny of any modern art critic.

Yet the most powerful examples of the Grecian way of merging art with living are to be found on ancient Greek potteries.

"Wrapped-around canvases, this pottery art depicts every aspect of the Grecian existence and every character who had populated the Greek narrative, be it history or mythology," says Guan, pointing to a few pottery pieces on display that have as their themes a funerary procession, a boxing match and a struggle between Minotaur and Theseus, a divine hero who eventually subdued the human-bodied, bull-headed monster.

Ancient Greece was a land of stories, and the best of all its storytellers was Homer, who lived around the eighth century BC and whose two epic poems — Iliad and Odyssey — are considered the foundational works of not only Greek but also Western literature.

Homer wrote with such bristling details about the Trojan War, fought between the Greek forces and the city of Troy, arguably located in Hisarlik in modern-day Turkiye, that archaeologists and historians who came millennium later found it hard to believe that the author had written purely from imagination.