Decoding the Ancient World

Archaeologist, art historian and academic Jenifer Neils ’68 has spent half a century deciphering the past, making discoveries that have changed the way we understand the ancient world. Now as director of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens, she’s leading the next generation of scholars in the place that inspired her career.

COVER STORY

DECODING THE ANCIENT WORLD

Written by Bonny Wolf ’68

Jenifer Neils had been thinking about the seating arrangement of the Olympian gods on the Parthenon frieze for decades. The 524-foot-long sculpted marble scene that once ran along the exterior walls of the ancient temple is regarded as one of the masterpieces of Western art. Neils was puzzled by why the dozen gods were split into two groups, facing in opposite directions, all with their backs to a ceremony honoring the goddess Athena. Scholars long cited the arrangement as a design flaw. Hearing that over the years made her antennae go up, says Neils. “I would say to myself, ‘No, there are no design flaws in this building. ’”

Then one day when she was teaching, it came to her. “Literally, I had a blink moment,” she says. “I had the gods section of the frieze on my screen, and I realized what the artist was trying to show.” The Olympian deities, she concluded, were sitting in a semicircle. “If you bring the two groups together, they actually face the ceremony.” An inability to visualize the scene three dimensionally had been the barrier to solving the mystery.

In the world of academia, art history and archaeology, this was a radical concept. “People didn’t believe me,” she says. “One scholar told me the Greeks don’t think three dimensionally.” Neils disagrees and explains her reasoning: “I see the frieze as a documentary film strip,” she says. “People used to say the Greeks did monoscenic representations, meaning they didn’t create scenes that move through space and time. Yet, the frieze begins outside the city gates with a ceremonial procession of horsemen, musicians and sacrificial animals and moves through Athens as people prepare for the festival. The end of the film strip is the presentation of a gift to Athena—a beautifully woven robe called a peplos.”

When Neils speaks, those who study the ancient world listen. Her work on the Parthenon, built in the mid-5th century BC to honor the goddess Athena, has earned her a reputation as one of the world’s authorities on the monument. For nearly four decades, she was a professor of art history and classics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. During that time she published prolifically, excavated in Greece and Italy, and held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Getty Research Center and the Mellon Center for British Art at Yale University. She has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University. Her 2001 book The Parthenon Frieze, which includes her thesis on the seating of the gods, was published by Cambridge University Press and is the most comprehensive study of the subject.

“Jenifer is one of the foremost classical archaeologists in the world,” says Alan Shapiro, professor emeritus of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University, who has known her since graduate school at Princeton University. “She became the most prolific scholar of Greek art and archaeology of her generation.”

At the end of her tenure at Case Western, Neils won the first-ever award for distinguished scholarship in the humanities. “She’s brilliant. Prolific. Her mastery of the field is mind-boggling. Her knowledge is encyclopedic,” says Rachel Sternberg, an associate professor in the classics department.

DIGGING FOR DETAILS

Neils has been on the path that leads to the Parthenon since reading The Gold of Troy in fifth grade when she was at Northrop Collegiate. (The all-girls school, one of Blake’s three predecessor institutions, is the current Upper School.) The story of Heinrich Schliemann’s 19th-century excavation of ancient Troy fired a passion for classical archaeology that she has retained ever since.

She attributes much of her early focus on classical archaeology to Northrop teacher Beatrice Blodgett from whom she learned Latin and Greek. As a tenth grader, Neils traveled to Europe with Blodgett and a group of junior girls. “When I saw the Acropolis,” she says, “I was hooked.”

What makes archaeology exciting is there's always something new surfacing that makes us reconsider all the assumptions we've reached about a culture.

Neils found a role model in her aunt Pat Neils Boulter ’44. Boulter earned an undergraduate and master’s degree and a doctorate in Greek at Bryn Mawr College, where Neils also chose to go. At the time, it was the only college in the country to offer an undergraduate major in classical archaeology. As a senior, Neils went on her first archaeological dig near Siena, Italy, excavating a monumental Etruscan building covered with terracotta sculpture. The experience led to her first publication.

After receiving a doctorate at Princeton in 1980, Neils began work at the university’s archaeological site in Morgantina, Sicily. Colleagues had been digging there since 1959, trying to ascertain how far Greek colonists had penetrated to the interior of Sicily. The seafaring Greeks had founded colonies as far back as 900 to 700 B.C.E., mostly on the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Less was known about their activities inland.

She began studying fragments of painted vases and realized they were pieces of a crater, a large mixing bowl for water and wine. She was able to attribute the bowl—one of only two in existence—to a famous Athenian painter. “This imported pottery proved they were drinking wine out of Greek vases in the middle of Sicily,” Neils says.

Jenifer Neils '68

Neils’ expertise in Greek vases led to her first opportunity as a curator. The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College was interested in an exhibit on Greek art and contacted Neils. “I thought about their collection, and they have only one Greek vase, with Athena on one side and a wrestling match on the other,” she says. It was what is called “a prize vase,” awarded at the Panathenaic Festival to victors in athletic contests.

Neils recommended that Hood mount a show on the Panathenaic Festival, held every four years to honor Athena— the same celebration depicted on the Parthenon frieze. “They said, ‘Great, you do it,’” she says. “And I did it and I loved it, because one of the more fulfilling parts of my career has been as a museum curator.” This marked the first of two major exhibitions Neils curated for the Hood. The second, which focused on childhood in ancient Greece, like the first, traveled throughout the U.S. and was accompanied by catalogues, symposia and lectures.

Studying hundreds of Greek vases has given Neils a grounding in visual artistic conventions and a keen eye for detail. “Many ancient historians say read ancient texts,” she says. “What text-based people don’t realize is that the Parthenon frieze is also a text, if you know how to read it. A hairstyle can denote something about age, gender and social status,” the kind of details she learned from studying hundreds of Greek vases.

Neils says she particularly loves deciphering the details of the Parthenon frieze and tells a story to illustrate. “At the beginning of the frieze, there’s a man leading his horse and both he and the animal are posed awkwardly,” she says. Neils brought this up at a colloquium, where an audience member who knew a horse trainer offered to send him a picture of the horse and rider. They got an answer right away: He’s parking the horse. In 250 years of studying the frieze, no one had noticed this. Neils tells students to consult experts even if they are way out of their field.

TAPPING THE TACTILE

Neils has always used unconventional teaching methods. As an enthusiastic Latin student at Northrop, she invited classmates to her home for a Roman banquet. Under a long colonnaded patio, students lounged on mattresses while they were waited on by her two younger brothers, dressed as Roman slaves in short tunics and sandals.

Many ancient historians say read ancient texts. What text-based people don't realize is that the Parthenon frieze is also a text, if you know how to read it.

When Blodgett taught Caesar’s Gallic wars, students were assigned to make a map depicting the action. Most drew on paper. Neils found a large piece of plywood and a wood-burning kit and burned the entire map of the Gallic campaigns into the wood. “It looked like one of Caesar’s legion naires had actually made it,” she says. In her senior year, she gave a Northrop chapel talk on the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which was playing at the Guthrie Theater.

Her Parthenon frieze thesis provided another opportunity for creative teaching. In 2011, she assigned each of the 12 art history majors in a seminar a Greek deity to research. Then, one chilly spring day, she assembled the students in front of the classical columns at the nearby Cleveland Museum of Art, where they dramatized the seating of the gods, each dressed in white and carrying symbolic objects to identify their deity. Neils collaborated with a professor from the theater department to show the students how to walk like gods. Colleagues from the music department provided trumpet and lyre. The production was captured on video (parthenonproject.com).

And if you can show it to students...something they can handle in a museum studies class or dig up in the field, it is much more meaningful than studying it in a book.

“Who in an art history class gets to do something as innovative and as fun as making a video to enhance their professor’s thesis on a really influential subject?” the student playing Dionysos asks on camera.

Neils had asked a student to create a computer-generated 3-D model to show how the gods would appear in a semicircle. In the video, students assemble in the exact formation of the gods on the Parthenon frieze: divided into two groups, one facing south and the other north. “As soon as we shifted into the semicircle, it felt a lot more natural and a lot more elegant,” says the student playing Apollo.

It is this kind of exercise that led Mary Lefkowitz, professor emerita of classical studies at Wellesley College, to talk of Neils’ “rare gift” for teaching complex subjects to non-experts.

RECONSIDERING HISTORY

Her appointment as director of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens in 2016 brings Neils full circle. In 1970, she attended the American School’s summer program. In following years, she returned as a visiting professor, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and as chair of its managing committee. While the school is America’s oldest overseas research institute, Neils is its first female director.

Founded in 1881, the school attracts graduate students and scholars from nearly 200 American colleges and universities who come to Greece for research and archaeological excavations. It has operated sites at the Athenian Agora since 1931 and at ancient Corinth since 1896, one of the longest continuing excavations in the world.

“What makes archaeology exciting is there’s always something new surfacing that makes us reconsider all the assumptions and conclusions we’ve reached about a culture,” Neils says. Even road construction and looting sometimes bring forth discoveries.

What binds it all together, Neils says, is interest in material culture. “Anything man-made tells us something about life, beliefs, political systems,” she says. “And if you can show it to students not just with slides but with something they can handle in a museum studies class or dig up in the field, it is much more meaningful than studying it in a book.”

Even after half a century, her enthusiasm for the ancient world has not dimmed. “One of the great thrills—and it never stops being a thrill—of living and working in Athens is that I get to take students, visitors, friends to the top floor of the Acropolis museum, which has the Parthenon gallery,” Neils says. “For the first time since antiquity we have an almost complete collection of the entire sculptural adornment of the Parthenon.” The majority of the original figures from the frieze—the so-called Elgin Marbles, named for the British ambassador who had them removed from Greece—are in the British Museum in London. The remaining fragments along with plaster casts are part of the complete display at the Acropolis museum.

“I still pinch myself when I see the Parthenon,” Neils says. “I still can't believe it's there. From the first time I saw it to this day, I am always amazed.”

Bonny Wolf ’68 has been a journalist and National Public Radio commentator and lives in Washington, D.C. She is the author of "Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories."