Athanasios Rhousopoulos

Athanasios Sergiou Rhousopoulos ( el, Αθανάσιος Σεργίου Ρουσόπουλος) (1823 – ) was a Greek archaeologist, antiquities dealer and university professor. He has been described as "the most important Greek collector and dealer between the 1860s and 1890s", and as "a key figure in the early days of archaeology in Greece."

Born in 1823 in a region of northern Greece under the Ottoman Empire, Rhousopoulos was educated in Constantinople and Athens before receiving financial support from the antiquarian and philanthropist Konstantinos Bellios to pursue formal archaeological training in Germany. In 1853, he returned to Greece to work as a teacher, before being appointed to a post at the University of Athens in 1855. He wrote and translated numerous educational works concerning Greek history, culture and archaeology.

Rhousopoulos played a significant role in the foundation of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and was a prominent member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, itself an important fixture in Greek archaeology during his lifetime. He excavated in Athens's Theatre of Dionysus as well as in the Kerameikos, where his 1863 discovery of the Grave Stele of Dexileos helped to confirm that the site was that of Athens's ancient cemetery. He attracted controversy in the early 1870s for his criticism of the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, and of Schliemann's claim to have found artefacts from the Trojan War at the site of Hisarlik.

Rhousopoulos was renowned for his collection of ancient artefacts, particularly coins, which was considered among the most impressive private collections in Greece. He was also a prominent dealer of antiquities, trading regularly with collectors, museums and society figures from around the world, and heavily involved in the illegal excavation and trafficking of ancient artefacts. From 1865, his activities came to increasing public and official attention, particularly that of the Ephor General, Panagiotis Efstratiadis; Rhousopoulos was fined after his illegal sale of the Aineta aryballos to the British Museum, and expelled from the Archaeological Society.

Dismissed from his academic post in 1884 for reasons that remain unclear, Rhousopoulos died in 1898. He made significant contributions to Greek epigraphy, and was a major source of artefacts for several of the world's largest museums. In the twenty-first century, study of his extensive correspondence, particularly with the British scholars George Rolleston and Arthur Evans, has provided important evidence for the practice of archaeology and antiquities trading in nineteenth-century Greece.

Early life and education

Athanasios Sergiou Rhousopoulos was born in 1823, in the village of Vogatsiko, near Kastoria in the northern Greek region of Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He received his early education in Constantinople and Athens.

In 1846, Konstantinos Bellios, a wealthy Greek merchant and antiquarian then living in Vienna, funded Rhousopoulos to attend Leipzig University and the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He studied Greek literature and archaeology, before moving to the University of Göttingen, which awarded him a doctorate in 1852. Rhousopoulos wrote his thesis, entitled (''On Zalmoxis, According to the Authority of the Ancients''), in Ancient Greek. It was the first doctoral dissertation ever written on Zalmoxis, a Thracian deity mentioned by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.

Academic career

In 1853, Rhousopoulos returned to Greece. From 1855 until 1858, he worked as a teacher in the First Gymnasium (secondary school) of Patras, in the northern Peloponnese. During his time in Patras, he translated the Danish philologist ''Handbook of Greek Antiquity'' (german: Handbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten) into Greek for use as a school textbook. He also taught Greek for twenty-four years at the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School of Athens, and spent four years teaching ancient Greek civilisation at the Athens Polytechnic.

In 1855, he was appointed to a temporary professorship of Greek at the University of Athens. In the same year, he published ''Manual of Greek Archaeology'', a textbook which has been situated within the early-nineteenth-century trend for archaeological works relying primarily on literary sources rather than material culture to reconstruct the past. In 1857, he constructed a house for himself on Lycabettus Street in central Athens, excavating in the process three hundred ancient tombs on the site. His professorship was made permanent in 1860.

The Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society founded in 1837, had significant responsibility for archaeological work and heritage management in Greece throughout the 19th century. It had stagnated and all but disbanded between April 1854 and 1858, under pressure from its own financial troubles and a cholera outbreak that had killed its president, Georgios Gennadios. The society reformed in 1858: in 1859, Rhousopoulos was elected to its governing council, as the only member of the council with a background in archaeology rather than philology. In 1862, the society re-established the ''Archaeological Journal'' (), which published news of excavations and of the activities of the society and of the Greek Archaeological Service. Rhousopoulos was the head of publications for its first twelve issues. His eleven articles in the ''Journal'' focused primarily on Greek literature and culture, with only a few on archaeology.

During the 1860s and 1870s, he was involved in the foundation of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which eventually opened in 1893. In 1864, he was selected by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs to serve on a committee to identify a suitable location for what became the National Archaeological Museum, which included prominent archaeological figures such as Panagiotis Efstratiadis, Stefanos Koumanoudis and Alexandros Rizos Rangavis. Rhousopoulos worked on categorising the materials transferred to the new museum from other institutions around Greece.

Rhousopoulos's discovery in the spring of 1863 of the Grave Stele of Dexileos, alongside the contemporary excavation of the nearby funerary enclosure of Agathon, helped to identify the location of the ancient Athenian cemetery known as the Kerameikos. In 1866, excavations conducted by Rhousopoulos and his fellow archaeologist Petros Pervanoglou near the Theatre of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis of Athens uncovered a marble sphere, approximately in circumference, inscribed with images of the god Helios and magical inscriptions.

In 1868, Rhousopoulos was moved from his professorship in Greek to one in archaeology at the University of Athens. He was unusual among Athens's early archaeological professors for not having worked for the Greek Archaeological Service. On , Rhousopoulos was dismissed from his post. The reasons for his dismissal are uncertain: the Greek newspaper () reported that he had left his post "on account of old age". The archaeologist and archaeological historian Yannis Galanakis has, however, suggested that Rhousopoulos was more likely dismissed on grounds of ill health, given that his age of 61 was relatively young, though little information about his health is available.

Relationship with Heinrich Schliemann

Rhousopoulos has been described as "a particularly vehement critic" of Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who excavated the site of Hisarlik ( Troy) in various phases between 1871 and 1890.

On , the German newspaper ' published a report of a conversation between Rhousopoulos and a number of his friends while he had been visiting Hannover. The newspaper reported the comment that the so-called Treasure of Priam, which Schliemann had excavated in May of that year, was "undoubtedly one of the most important indsof its kind", but that the period to which it belonged was uncertain; separately, the article quoted the judgement that Schliemann's find had "self-evidently nothing to do with the Treasure of Priam." Although it was unclear from the 's report which, if any, of these remarks had been made by Rhousopoulos himself, as opposed to his conversation partners, the report attracted a bitter response from W. Gosrau, the court chaplain of George I of Greece, who accused Rhousopoulos of having "driven the learned gentlemen wild" out of "bread-envy" (). In November, the ', a rival newspaper of the , defended Rhousopoulos, pointing out that the alleged remarks could not be securely attributed to him, and accusing Gosrau of "a complete lack of tact" and "unwarranted arrogance."

During his first informal exhibition of the finds from Troy at his house on Mouson Street in Athens in 1873, Schliemann invited all of Athens to visit, so that they could, in his words, "convince themselves with their own eyes of the atrocious calumnies" of Rhousopoulos, to whom he referred as "that foul fiend." Modern scholarship considers Schliemann's 'Treasure of Priam' to date to the Early Bronze Age (), several centuries earlier than the putative date of the mythical Priam's reign as king of Troy (). In 1879, Rhousopoulos examined a key that Schliemann had found at Troy, writing him what Schliemann described as "a valuable note" on its design and the symbolism of its decoration.

Antiquities collecting and trading

Galanakis has called Rhousopoulos "the most important Greek collector and dealer between the 1860s and 1890s". In 1873, his collection was described by the German scholar Friedrich Wieseler as among the most remarkable in Greece, second only to that of the Russian consul-general Peter Alexandrovich Saburov – which, according to the archaeological historian Angeliki Kokkou, "exceeded the limits and possibilities of a private collection". Rhousopoulos was particularly noted for his numismatic collection of ancient coins, which numbered over 6,000 objects by 1874. Saburov moved his collection to Berlin in 1880, and had sold it by 1884; in 1885, the Austrian consul in Corfu, Alexander von Warsberg, described Rhousopoulos's collection as the richest in Athens.

Antiquities dealership

Rhousopoulos was registered as an art dealer until 1893, though it is unclear when he began to practise. By the early 1870s, his collection included 3,000 Neolithic stone tools, including two complete stone axes. Between 1873 and 1874, Rhousopoulos unsuccessfully tried to sell his stone artefacts for £120 () to George Rolleston, professor of anatomy and physiology at Oxford University. Rolleston did, however, purchase an assemblage of bones and artefacts from Rhousopoulos in 1871, paying a total of 475 francs (around £19, ). The assemblage included seven ancient skulls, which Rolleston wanted for his phrenological research into the ancestral links between the modern and ancient populations of Greece. Rolleston ordered another skull from Rhousopoulos in 1873, and donated all eight to Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum in 1874. Between these two purchases, Rhousopoulos and Rolleston maintained what Galanakis has called "an amicable correspondence". Rolleston travelled to Athens to view Rhousopoulos's antiquities in his home, and Rhousopoulos travelled to Oxford to visit Rolleston in his.

Rhousopoulos's collection and dealership made him a fixture of Athenian high society. An 1884 guidebook to Athens, produced by the British publisher John Murray, listed Rhousopoulos's collection as a must-see for archaeologically minded visitors to Athens. Rhousopoulos opened his house to invited viewers between 2pm and 5pm each day, and offered any item for sale, though commentators noted that his prices were considerably higher than those charged by other dealers in Athens, London and Paris. His home was often visited by high-status foreign travellers, including Emperor Pedro II of Brazil in 1876 and Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1891.

Rhousopoulos sold several items to major European and American museums, including London's British Museum. In the early 1870s, he sold sixty-two gems, which he identified as "Graeco- Phoenician", for £240 () to Charles Newton, then keeper of the museum's Greek and Roman antiquities. Later, in 1884, he sold four Tanagra figurines to the museum for a total of £760 (), two of which were later found to be forgeries. The following year, having spent two years negotiating with Rhousopoulos over its price, the museum bought from him a mirror with a scene of the goddess Nike sacrificing a bull, paying 80,000 francs (around £320, ). He may have played a significant role in the trade in ancient (voting-plates), of which only a handful have survived to modern times. On , he purchased one such that had been illegally excavated from a tomb at Profitis Ilias, near the Panathenaic Stadium: Galanakis has suggested that Rhousopoulos may have been involved in the sale of many other now found in European museum collections.

Rhousopoulos is the only Athenian art dealer who can be definitively placed as supplying Cretan seal-stones to Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who collected these objects as part of his early studies into the Minoan writing systems later known as Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A. Galanakis has suggested that Evans may have purchased further stones from Jean Lambros, a rival dealer to Rhousopoulos. In 1888, Rhousopoulos sold twenty-one vases, terracotta statues and bronze statues to the American philanthropist Jane Stanford, which would form part of the early collection of the Stanford University Museum of Art.

Sale of Rhousopoulos's antiquities

Rhousopoulos died in Athens on . His numismatic collection, described in 2008 by the numismatist Alan S. Walker as "truly encyclopaedic", was sold in 1905 by the Munich auctioneer Jacob Hirsch. Hirsch divided the collection into 4,627 individual lots, producing what Walker describes as "the largest and best illustrated auction catalogue to have appeared up to that time" to accompany the auction. Though Hirsch did not name Rhousopoulos as the previous owner of the coins, his identity was an open secret among many of the buyers. Other objects from Rhousopoulos's collection were purchased by collectors and museums around the world, including several potsherds – of minimal commercial value – which are, , held by the of Heidelberg University.

Antiquities crime

The archaeological historian Nikolaos Papazarkadas has written that Rhousopoulos "was heavily involved in dubious transactions involving illegally-excavated antiquities." Rhousopoulos once opined, in 1861, that the Greek nation had "no need of new antiquities", but rather to catalogue and protect those "scattered in every corner of the city f Athens – which, he claimed, were "wearing out, disappearing, and being stolen." The archaeologist Helen Hughes-Brock has written that Rhousopoulos had some connection with the illegal excavation of a chamber tomb at Kara on Mount Hymettus on Crete. Some time before 1896, he paid forty drachmae to Georgios Ghiouroukis, an excavator from the Cycladic island of Melos, to carry out an illegal excavation in the southwest part of the site of Phylakopi, searching for obsidian tools. The excavation was halted by the authorities after three days; Ghiouroukis later called this the "best day's pay that had ever been earned in Melos in the memory of man". In a letter to Rolleston, Rhousopoulos boasted of being able to call upon "all the Athens grave-diggers () who dig for tombs throughout Attica".

In 1896, the numismatist Ioannis Svoronos wrote a pamphlet, entitled ''Light upon Archaeological Scandals'' (), in which he accused Rhousopoulos of being an "antiquities looter" ( el, αρχαιοκάπηλος, translit=archaiokapilos, lit=antiquities trader); as part of a broader set of accusations that the Ephor General, Panagiotis Kavvadias, had failed to address antiquities crime and been inappropriately friendly towards archaeological criminals. Rhousopoulos sued Svoronos for libel in response.

Sale of the Aineta aryballos

In 1862, Rhousopoulos published an article in the journal of the on a Corinthian aryballos, now known as the Aineta aryballos, which had been excavated in Athens. This article was possibly the first on epigraphical matters written by any Greek in a foreign journal. Rhousopoulos sold the to the British Museum for 1,000 drachmae in 1865, via Charles Merlin, a British banker and diplomat resident in Athens who often acted as an intermediary for antiquities purchases. Charles Newton had previously selected the for purchase, and subsequently received it from Merlin.

In 1865, Efstratiadis, by this point the Ephor General in charge of the Greek Archaeological Service, had written in his diary of the size and richness of Rhousopoulos's antiquities collection, marking the first time that Rhousopoulos's activities had come to official attention. The main law governing antiquities was the Archaeological Law of , which has been described as "loosely interpreted and even more loosely enforced". Under the 1834 law, private excavators – often known as "grave-robbers" – required the permission of the Ephor General to excavate, but he was required to grant that authorisation if the excavation took place on private land and had the landowner's consent. Furthermore, antiquities discovered in such excavations were considered the joint property of the state and the private excavators, and would be shared between the landowners and the excavators. Such artefacts could be sold overseas, provided that their owners secured the judgement of a state committee of three experts that the object was "useless" to Greek museums. Rhousopoulos failed to secure this permission, but wrote to defend himself in the newspaper () on , arguing that the was "of no artistic value, the size of an apple, only valued for 25 drachmae". Efstratiadis, meanwhile, denounced Rhousopoulos as a "university professor; antiquities looter".

Efstratiadis's ability to respond to Rhousopoulos's breach of the law was limited: the state had limited financial, human and legal resources to address the illegal excavation and trade of antiquities, and his superiors in government had little political will to do so. He also needed to maintain good relations with Athens's art dealers, who undertook more excavations in this period than either the Archaeological Service or the closely-aligned Archaeological Society of Athens, and usually offered to sell the artefacts they uncovered to the state. Furthermore, Rhousopoulos was periodically a member of the appraising committee of three, and often acted as a consultant to it, further limiting Efstratiadis's ability to use the state's archaeological apparatus against him.

Rhousopoulos was, however, fined 1,000 drachmae (the same as the price for which he had sold the ) later in 1867 for exporting antiquities without the Ephor General's permission. His actions were condemned by the Minister for Education and Religious Affairs, who oversaw the Archaeological Service, and by the Archaeological Society of Athens, which expelled him at some point in the 1870s. According to Galanakis and the archaeological historian Magalosia Nowak-Kemp, Rhousopoulos subsequently "went to great lengths" to operate outside the knowledge and scrutiny of the state. For instance, he asked Evans, to whom he had sold numerous gems and seal-stones over a period of years, to ensure that his name was not mentioned in any publication involving the objects or their excavation. When the presence of these artefacts in Oxford became known in 1894, the Greek newspaper () expressed its bafflement as to how such objects had left Greece, and other parts of the Greek press criticised Evans for his purchases.

Personal life and family

Rhousopoulos married the German Louisa Murray, whom he had met while a student at Göttingen. Murray's family were of Scottish descent and may have migrated to Germany around the time of the 1707 Acts of Union between Scotland and England. They had nine children. One of their daughters died in 1897; they had four other daughters — Agnes, Sophia, Bertha and Martha — and four sons: , Asterios, Roussos and Petros. According to Galanakis and Nowak-Kemp, Murray likely assisted Rhousopoulos in writing letters in English, which he did only rarely.

Othon, born in 1856, became a chemist at the National Archaeological Museum, and has been credited as one of the most important figures in the early history of archaeological conservation. Roussos, meanwhile, was born in 1854 and became the Modern Greek tutor of Empress Elisabeth of Austria; he visited Corfu with her in 1889. In March 1891, Elisabeth appointed him as Professor of Greek Language at the Orientalischen Handelsakademie in Budapest, and he later became Professor of Greek at the University of Budapest, serving until the end of the First World War and dying in 1954.

After his death, Rhousopoulos became the father-in-law of the German classical archaeologist Ernst Pfuhl, who married Sophia Rhousopoulos in 1904. The two met while Pfuhl was excavating on the Cycladic island of Thera. Sophia may also have sent impressions of some Cretan seal-stones to Arthur Evans, who received impressions of examples in her father's collection after Rhousopoulos's death.

Rhousopoulos was known to be cosmopolitan, multilingual and well-connected in European society, particularly in German-speaking countries. Stefanos Koumanoudis, his contemporary in the Archaeological Society of Athens, and fellow professor (of Latin) at the University of Athens, described Rhousopoulos in 1846 as "antiquities-mad" (). Rhousopoulos defended his sale of Greek antiquities as a way of protecting Greek heritage and promoting its standing abroad – a view contested by the Archaeological Society and by Koumanoudis, who co-authored a pamphlet in 1872 with Philippos Ioannou, the society's president, calling on Greeks to use their "intelligence and patriotism" by refraining from looting or exporting antiquities.

Honours and legacy

Rhousopoulos was elected as a member of the Académie Française, to whom he dedicated his book ''Treatise on an Icon of Antigone'' ().

Papazarkadas has described Rhousopoulos as "a competent philologist" and judged that "his epigraphical publications were as good as any studies of the mid-nineteenth century." According to Galanakis and Nowak-Kemp, Rhousopoulos was unusual among Athenian art dealers of his time for his "academic approach", by which he attempted to impress the archaeological importance of his wares upon his potential buyers, using his knowledge of the archaeological literature and debates of the day. Hughes-Brock has described him as "a key figure in the early days of archaeology in Greece", while Galanakis has described him as a "founding father" of Athens's National Archaeological Museum.

Rhousopoulos's detailed notes on the excavations with which he was connected – often unpublished and unmentioned in the academic archaeological press, given their informal and often illegal nature – have allowed the reconstruction of several of these excavations, including early digs in the Kerameikos cemetery. His extensive correspondence, particularly with Rolleston, has also been used to reconstruct the networks and dynamics of the trade in and collection of ancient artefacts in late nineteenth-century Athens.

Selected publications

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Footnotes

Explanatory notes

References

Sources

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Rhousopoulos, Athanasios
1823 births
1898 deaths
People from Orestida
Greeks from the Ottoman Empire
Emigrants from the Ottoman Empire to Greece
19th-century archaeologists
Greek art dealers
Art crime
University of Göttingen alumni
Leipzig University alumni
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
Academic staff of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens