Elizabeth Pierce Blegen, Archaeologist

 

 

Elizabeth Pierce

            Born June 26, 1888                             Died September 21, 1966

 

Row 13 in the Protestant Section of the First Cemetery

 

Yes, all the constituents were there: separate, and unsynthesized – waiting for a catalyst (1)

When thinking of the life of Elizabeth “Libbie” Pierce Blegen, the word that comes to mind is “catalyst”, not so much in its meaning as an entity causing reactions without altering because I am sure that she did change over time, but more in the sense of a person who precipitates events without seeming to be the mover herself. 

If her mentor Ida Thallon had not seen a promising young student and entered into a romantic relationship with her and had not wanted Elizabeth to experience life as she had once experienced it at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Carl Blegen would not have met Elizabeth and fallen head over heels in love with her. He wanted her in his life so badly that he persuaded his friend and mentor Bert Hodge Hill (then director of the ASCSA) to make a move that would clear the way to his marrying Elizabeth by marrying Ida. Carl then proposed that they all live together as a Quartet. 

It was 1924.

 

 

 

Her Life

Elizabeth Denny Pierce was born on June 26, 1888 in Allegheny Pennsylvania. Her parents, Flora McKnight and William Lemmex Pierce, were of Gaelic descent and proud enough of it to use their forebears’ last names as each of their four children’s middle names.  Elizabeth (Libbie) grew up with three brothers.  She received her AB from Vassar in 1910 and her Masters in Latin in 1912 when she was 22. While a first year student at Vassar, Elizabeth had studied Latin in a class taught by Ida Thallon, a classicist 13 years her senior.  Ida would become her friend and mentor and would introduce Elizabeth to the classical world.  

Following in the footsteps of Ida, Elizabeth did further graduate studies (including Greek architecture and sculpture), at the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University between 1912 and 1915 before returning to Vassar in 1915 as an assistant curator of the Vassar Art Museum which had opened its doors in 1865.

 

The Vassar Art Museum

Vassar believed that fine art was so important to a well rounded education that a gallery for original works and reproductions was included in the original building design.  Their collection was created before any public museum of art had opened its doors in the United States.  Fine art was deemed a ‘manifestation of moral truth’ and, as if to emphasize that, the founders placed their gallery next to the chapel.  Well before Elizabeth’s time, elective courses in art history were opened to all Vassar students for college credits. As the collection grew, new buildings were required.  When Elizabeth became assistant curator in 1915, the collection was housed in Taylor Hall.

 

Taylor Hall

 In 1918, Elizabeth also became an instructor of Fine Arts at the college.

 

Ida and Elizabeth and their Boston Marriage

The term Boston Marriage was coined after Henry James had described such a relationship in his novel The Bostonians. It was a close and abiding relationship between two financially independent women who chose to live together and perhaps not marry at all. At that time, the belief that educated women should eventually marry was firmly entrenched in college circles too. The ‘moral and patriotic’ education provided was supposed to spread beyond each graduate in her future role as wife and mother (2). Perhaps it had not occurred to many at the time that financially independent women might have other goals….

Ida and Elizabeth lived in adjoining rooms at Vassar and formed just such a partnership. It was not uncommon amongst women who were college graduates and very common in these all female campuses where so many graduates returned to teach. Educated women in the general workforce, with the exception of teachers and secretaries, were thin on the ground until after the First World War, and even then…

 

Elizabeth Attends the ASCSA, Writes a Paper, and Meets Carl Blegen

Ida Thallon had enjoyed her two years at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens between 1901 and 1903. In fact they had been an impetus for her increasing interest in the new science of archaeology and how it related to her own field of history. She and Elizabeth set out for Greece in 1921 to explore and with the idea that Elizabeth might like to join the ASCSA for the school year of 1922-3. Elizabeth did. She believed the School offered an opportunity for her to ‘study material first hand’ as an aid to her teaching back home.

 

Elizabeth and Ida in 1920

Her classmates were congenial and the subjects interesting. There was even a course in modern Greek. The School’s director Bert Hodge Hill taught ancient architecture and the assistant director, 34 year old Carl Blegen taught prehistory and general topography. 

 

Carl (left) and Bert in 1915

Carl had just completed his book on Korakou, a site in Corinth which had revealed to him and his co-excavator, Alan Wace, a history and chronology for the fascinating prehistoric people who would coalesce into Mycenaeans and the Greeks of the classical period. It was groundbreaking work in the exciting new field of Greek prehistory; an era that could only be understood by digging since no written records existed. (3)

 

Carl’s book on Korakou can be read on line today

 

Elizabeth herself was still working to complete her Phd dissertation on Gaius Asinius Pollio a writer and historian who had hobnobbed with Julius Caesar and then retired to write histories and plays. 

                      Her 1922 book can be bought on Amazon or read on line today 

 As worthy a subject as Pollio was, I am venturing into speculation by guessing that continuing to add a few more footnotes to the well trodden path of Roman history (which she was doing so well) could not have held a candle to myths seeming to come alive and the exciting prehistoric finds at Korakou, Corinth, and elsewhere being revealed and discussed in class by the excavator himself.   

While at the School, students were encouraged to take on a project of their own.  Elizabeth therefore prepared a small paper on A Daedalid in the Skimatari Museum in Boeotia.

 

 

Elizabeth’s daedalid was a little the worse for wear , but it was a start (4)

 

In her paper, she wonders if the similarity of such figures across much of the Greek world indicated an awareness of the Daedalus myth itself or even if there might have been a Cretan school of such art that then spread to the Peloponnese and farther.

 

 

A typical daedalic figure. Who knew they would eventually morph into those beautiful kourai and kouroi with their archaic smiles?

 

It is a very nice, compact analysis, very suited to her own research talents and begins with the statement that people used to think there was no truth to Greek myths…. So already she is thinking along the lines of Carl Blegen who did not necessarily believe wholeheartedly in Homer the way Schliemann did, but did believe such writings were a perspective on real happenings.

Meanwhile, Carl was taking a close look at Elizabeth, and he was smitten. He proposed marriage. Elizabeth first accepted and then reneged, partly perhaps because she did have an offer of an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but mostly because of Ida. They had been partners for some time and the thought of abandoning her was crushing, although Ida had given her blessing and was prepared to step aside.

It was Carl who came up with the cunning plan:  Bert would marry Ida, Elizabeth would marry him, and all four create a ‘pro par’ (professional partnership) relationship that would offer a great deal of freedom to the women to enjoy their time and travels together and yet would allow them to work well as a functioning team.  The Athenian Quartet was formed.

 

The Rest

It proved to have been a brilliant idea and did not offend the mores of the time. In that most collaborative and fascinating of sciences, here were four kindred spirits who could work together, discuss archaeology together, help each other in their endeavours and, all the while, be in touch with and in the thick of the latest archaeological discoveries in Greece.

It did turn out to be ‘dream team’. If there were bumps along the way, the final result was a smooth running collaboration. Eliazabeth and Ida were in a position to catalogue, examine, and even excavate the myriad pottery finds of Carl’s excavation in Prosymna and later Troy and finally at Nestor’s palace in Pylos. Ida helped Bert by cataloguing the terra cottas from the Corinth excavations and encouraging the one member of the team who was not adept at publishing to finish the papers on his long Corinth excavations which he had not managed to do by 1924. (5) 

This procrastination would eventually cause him to be removed as director of the ASCSA. But Carl would continue under the aegis of the University of Cinninati and Bert under the University of Pennsylvania in Cyprus and the connection with the ASCSA would never be severed because Carl would often work in association the School and Elizabeth had bought a house at 9 Ploutarchou Street in Kolonaki, close to the ASCSA. (6)  Their home became a centre for archaeologists of every nationality to meet and a spot where every American diplomat sent to Athens would have been delighted to be invited for a meal and interesting conversation.

It is interesting to note that no member of the pro pars seemed to have been diminished by the other’s accomplishments. Ida continued to write and publish until she died in 1954 while on board a ship returning her and Elizabeth to Greece.  Bert did eventually publish his Corinth findings and proved helpful to other archaeologists following in his footsteps while also excavating in Cyprus. If Carl was the star it was because of his excavations and observations in Korakou, Prosymna, Troy, and finally Pylos. Elizabeth helped in every instance.

Nor was she merely an acolyte.  From 1925 to 1952, Elizabeth wrote  A Newsletter from Greece, articles which were published in the American Journal of Archaeology with analyses and tidbits of information that would have been of interests to professionals in the field as well as to the public at large. She was well placed to offer news and insights. One 1946 article  that can be found on line was entitled News Items from Athens in which she describes the state of Athenian museums after the war, how the statues in the National Archaeological Museum were buried under the floor during the war, and how they fared once retrieved:

 

 

 

We also learn that the Mycenaean gold was placed in the vaults of the Bank of Greece during the war and that many statues of the Acropolis museum were cemented into surrounding caves for the duration.

I know I would have been one of the people awaiting her next article!

Apparently Elizabeth was also always ready to help a fellow archaeologist  research an item in a  Greek museum. Her help on the spot must have been invaluable.

Elizabeth, as did Carl, Bert, and Ida, took part in the life of Athens. She served as an officer of The American Women’s  Association of Greece, and the Hellenic American Women’s club, and was a member of the American Association of University women, the American Historical Association and the Archaeological Institute of America.

Elizabeth suffered a debilitating stroke in 1956 that left her in a wheelchair. Undaunted, she continued to assist Carl at Pylos.

She died in September 21, 1966 and is buried in the Protestant section of the First cemetery of Athens.  

The Blegens’ headstone is one of the most beautiful in the cemetery and one of the most apt.

 

The Grave

 

Row thirteen in the Protestant Section of the First Cemetery

 

The Map

 

 

 

Footnotes

(1)  Colin Dexter

 (2).   The professed aim of this gallery for the women attending Vassar was: to promote national identity and individual morality while fostering the ability to make informed visual distinctions and acquire the cultivated taste that young women could pass on to their children and communities. See https://www,vassar.edu/art/history.

(3)  Linear B script had not been deciphered and would not be until 1952. Even then, although it provided fascinating insights like the fact that that the Mycenaeans called their animals names like Dapple or Blossom, it was not adequate for an historical narrative.

(4) Her paper was published in the American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1924) and can be read online.

(5)  Bert’s Corinth papers were finally published in 1964, well after his death.

 (6)  Elizabeth left the house to the  ASCSA in the event of all of their deaths.

         

9 Ploutarchou Street is today the seat of the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation which promotes Greek Culture and Arts within and outside of Greece

 

Sources

The best source for the entire Quartet is the ASCSA itself.  They are very generous with their on line Information. Archaeologist Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan  and her wonderful From the Archivist's Notebook  offers a wealth of information  about the school and its archives. See https://nataliavogeikoff.com From the Archivist's Notebook

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Blegen_Elizabeth%20Pierce.pdf

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/499458?journalCode=aja

https://www.jstor.org/stable/499458

 

George Finlay

         Born in Kent 1799                                  Died in Athens 1875

George Finlay was a Scottish Philhellene who first came to Greece in 1823, fought during the War of Independence, and stayed on in the new state until his death in 1875. Over time, he wrote a comprehensive history of Greece from Roman times up to and including his own era and was the first to include the Byzantine interlude as an important part of the Greek historical continuum.(1) While not an impartial observer (what historian is?), he was an acute and very well informed one. 

I was first 'introduced' to Finlay at the British Consul Library in the 1970s and liked him immediately. Like me, he was a Scottish Presbyterian somehow grafted on to the Greek body politic. I admired his acerbic style and, at the time, certainly didn’t question his point of view or his prejudices because, in so many ways, they dovetailed so nicely with my own. Over the years, his histories and articles for periodicals and newspapers emanated from his home in the heart of 19^th century Athens. His house, or one of them, is still standing at the corner of Thoukididou and Kekropia  streets in the Plaka and is one of the few houses in the area with a marble plaque commemorating its most famous inhabitant.

 His personal life is a mystery although some letters and a journal exist. He apparently destroyed many personal papers before his death.(2) Nor did he bequeath his extensive library to any institution, a practice which was very common at the time. We know that his wife, Enectar, (whom he called Katherine), was an Armenian woman (nee Asker) from Constantinople. They married around 1829 and had a daughter who died at the age of 10 in 1841. Enectar survived him by 17 years.

His Life

George was born in Kent in 1799 of Scottish Protestant, merchant stock, and spent much of his early life in Scotland. He studied law in Glasgow and then in Gottingen. Idealism and a strong sense of adventure brought him to Greece in 1823. He was with Byron on Cephalonia and during the last months of the poet’s life in Messolonghi; later he served on the Karteria under his friend and fellow Philhellene Frank Abney Hastings. 

After the war, Finlay did much to assist the fledgling state. In 1834, at the request of the Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis, he took on the role of assistant to the Athenian nomarch to help in the rehabilitation of Athens. He was a member of the Attica tax commission in the 1840s, took part in the founding of the Ionian Bank, and supported the founding of the University and the National Library, all the while working on and revising his history. He received many honours and titles during his lifetime: Hon. Member of the Royal Society of Literature, Member of the American Antiquarian Society, Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute at Rome, Knight Gold Cross of the Greek Order of the Redeemer, and was, for a time, a special correspondent to the London Times.

He was also a land speculator but so was everyone else in Athens with a little bit of money in their pocket. He bought land in the area of today’s National Gardens (which was confiscated by the state much to his chagrin), a home in the Plaka, and a farm in Liosia near Athens. This latter purchase convinced him that he was a failure as a gentleman farmer. History would be his métier.

“Fair Greece, Sad Relic of Departed Worth”…

(Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 11.73.693)

Finlay’s history, while factually accurate, is imbued with a tone that is the hallmark of so many of the Greek Philhellenes who chose to write about Greece. Their beau ideal was ancient Greek excellence, albeit one that had been filtered through the lens of the European enlightenment. One of the compelling reasons so many Europeans had supported the Greek cause was their own classical education and the resulting reverence for ancient Greece. Everyone, Finlay included,  hoped for some sort of revival of Greece’s ancient glory within the new modern state but, with this in mind, the Greeks they actually encountered were consistently found wanting. There was a pervasive moral aspect underlying these comparisons that might be summed up by ‘present debasement versus the glory before the Fall’. Finlay often wrote ‘in sorrow’, believing that it was his ‘melancholy task to record the errors and crimes of those who governed Greece.’ (3) 

Three Typical Finlay Observations:

On freedom fighters: Every Greek chief celebrated his own praises, on politicians: Their whole souls were absorbed in Party contests for wealth and power, and on Prime Minister Kolettis: Nothing but want of personal courage and honesty prevented him from becoming the first man in Greece. And so on… The fact that he wrote so well made his criticisms memorable and quotable. 

Writers like Finlay were never mere observers, but rather didactic advisors whose duty it was not to merely record but to ‘civilize’ a backward population. It was an attitude shared by most of the educated Greeks from the diaspora who flooded into Athens after 1830 to help create the new state. 

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the model was flawed. It was a ridiculous ideal to foist on a new country forged in very different times and under very different circumstances a view that assumed Greece should somehow be ready for a western, liberal concept of freedom and still exhibit the perceived characteristics of their wonderful ancestors.  True, there is a kind of inevitability about this model given the temper of the times, but its adoption has left its mark on the Greek national psyche: a fierce nostalgia for an ideal past coupled with a sense of deep inferiority about the present and, one might add, a certain sensitivity to European ‘advice’ because of the tone in which it has so often been delivered. (4)

   

But Finlay did truly did love Greece and its people deeply: The strength of the Greek cause lay in the hearts of the people (Book Three). He would write time and time again that the people simply “never had the good fortune to find a leader worthy of their cause”. 

His History of Greece was widely read by the foreign community and the Greek intelligensia. For non Greek speakers, it was their only introduction to Greek history. It was translated by no less a literary luminary than Alexandros Papadiamantis.

Constantinos Paparrigopoulos, soon to become Greece’s most influential historian, read and admired it while composing his own History of the Greek Nation. But no history is definitive. Finlay (as an outsider) may have been competent to write a history of Greece, but perhaps not to write,as Paparrigopoulos planned to do, a history of the  'nation'. (5) Paparrigopoulos took a different tack and set out to explain the facts of Greek history from a Greek perspective with different philosophical parameters. The result was more pleasing to a country that was in dire need of a modern identity that still encompassed its past. (See   http://athensfirstcemeteryinenglish.blogspot.com/2018/02/constantinos-paparrigopoulos.html  

The Grave

Finlay’s memorial is easy to find. It is towards the back and the largest in the Protestant section of the First Cemetery. It is very imposing: a sarcophagus set on a plinth which then sprouts a stele topped by a bust of the historian – symbolic overkill maybe, but, still, a real effort to convey his importance. There is even a small ‘temenos’ with a metal surround creating a sense of special grandeur that is somewhat spoiled by the large garbage bin on its south side. The monument’s height offers Finlay a view towards the city he lived in and loved for so many years.

Footnotes

(1) He revised constantly, finishing his history in the 1860s. Volume One on the Greeks under the Romans, had been published as early as 1844. The final version was published in 1877, two years after his death. It was entitled A History of Greece (From Its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864)   Modern historians have questioned some of his facts, but no one has seriously questioned his scholarship or the enormity of his effort.  In 2008 the Greek parliament, to honour his contribution, republished his exhaustive history. 

(2) Information kindly offered by Amalia G. Kakissis | Archivist at the British School in Athens.

(3) I obtained this quote about his ‘melancholy duty’ from a review of his history in the Saturday Review, Nov. 9, 1878.

 (4) Byron commented often that the Greeks he met were not suited for a modern state although he had hope that they might make a ‘suitable colony’ or be a ‘useful dependency’ for some European nation. Chateaubriand had lamented in the same vein: “this sacred soil filled with past greatness and present debasement”, etc.  Google David Roessal’s In Byron’s Shadow:Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination for more in the same vein.   
(5)  See David Rick's "The Making of Modern Greece". It raises some interesting questions...