1.6 Votive eyes

Hello. I’m Helen King. I’m Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University. And I’m joined today by Jessica Hughes, my colleague from classical studies, who’s an expert on votives.

Hello.

What sort of votive eyes do we have? Are they all sort of really realistic looking model eyes or more vague sort of pictures with eyes on?

There’s quite a few stylistic differences. It depends what material they’re being represented in. So in France, we tend to find lots of tiny little bronze eyes. They can be represented singly or in pairs.

In classical Greece, we get marble reliefs with eyes carved on them. They might have been painted. So I don’t know if we can get the full impact of them now. Terracotta eyes are very common in Italy, and they would have been made in moulds. So you get all different kinds.

And you also get things like masks, which show the two eyes in the context of the forehead and the nose, and heads and half-heads, as well, which show eyes. So all these things present their own interpretational challenges.

Yeah. Well, let’s push you on that one. So what sorts of reasons would you give an eye or a mask with eyes on it? Is it just about disease, do you think?

It could be about disease. It could be a way of keeping the two eyes together so to speak. People have tried this retrospective diagnosis and thought, well, perhaps it’s more about the heads, about migraine or headaches. That’s what could have motivated someone not to pick a single little model of the eye but to go for the eye mask or the portrait face.

And then there might be other symbolic resonances of these objects, as well. And I think scholars have explored some of these and suggested that perhaps some eyes, particularly in sanctuaries of Demeter where there's a connection to the mysteries, this might be a symbolic representation of some kind of divine sight or some kind of divine vision that the dedicant has experienced during these mystery initiations.

Wow. So that’s quite a range. What about ears? Are ears always about ear disease?

Ears are possibly about ear disease. Again, there's a range of different things you could say about those. It could be the year of the gods, the listening god. And we do have inscriptions that talk about this god who is hearing the prayers. Again, that's something else that might apply to eyes. Could it be the eyes of the gods who's watching you and who's looking over you, this omniscient god who can see everything that you do, right or wrong.

It’s very difficult to arrive at a really secure conclusion. But I tend to think that most of them probably were for healing because we do find them all lumped together, all these different body parts. And I think that’s probably more of an economic interpretation, if you see what I mean, rather than thinking that every single body part had its own unique meaning and gesture. I like to think that they were probably dedicated for healing. But within that, the individual dedicant then had the agency to maybe appropriate that body part and use it for something that might have been quite different.

Well, thank you. That's an extremely rich account of votives. Thank you very much, Jessica.

Thank you.