167 I am not troubled because I must die, but because my death comes at the hands of a womanish archer. Plut., Sayings of the Spartans: Mor., 234 46 (Cole Babbitt, Trans. 1931) This paper challenges current attempts to impose conceptual order upon the imagined world of the Greek viewer and, by extension, polis society as a whole. Whilst literary and iconographic records project a seemingly clear-cut polarity between archer and hoplite, east and west, such formal constructs mask a reality of far greater complexity; divine and heroic archers also existed, hunters and warriors alongside cowards and villains. Although totalising statements referring to notions of Greek ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are both commonplace and a practical necessity within modern scholarship, the use of such broad and generalising terms, when combined with the uncritical application of post-structural approaches such as altérité, leads to increasingly schematised analyses whose simplicity is entirely deceptive. Current misconceptions relating to the function and status of bow imagery in a Greek context refl ect the unquestioning acceptance of highly partisan source material, thus serving to perpetuate ancient ideologies and prejudices. This often results in a manifest contradiction between the ways in which bow imagery was evidently employed and understood by contemporaries and subsequent interpretations whereby both archers and archery in general are portrayed as being socially and ideologically isolated: barbarian, low status, and cowardly, in opposition to the civic, hoplite ideal. The fact that bow imagery could be subjected to various ‘competing readings’ ensured that archers remained both elusive and ambiguous fi gures problematising Greek notions of self and the symbolic systems by which these were articulated. An investigation of Greek ideologies surrounding the practice of archery in war would go some way towards explaining the way in which bow imagery was ‘understood’ following the outbreak of hostilities with Persia. A coherent understanding of the iconographic and semantic contexts that operated in the Greek world is very much dependent upon how deeply ‘ancient realities’ are probed for data (Sourvinou-Inwood 1991). These realities bear little relation to the conventional argument that archery in Greece was a relatively marginal activity, even within the confi nes of the hunt. Empirical observation, combined with a patriotic aversion towards bow imagery promulgated by the Great King, was not the sole basis for traditions surrounding the effete, cowardly, ‘Oriental archer’. It must be emphasised, rather, that the polarity of opposites around which Greek civic identity was constructed included, almost from the outset, the pairing of the archer and the hoplite. This juxtaposition was by no means immutable; earlier traditions in which archery enjoyed a status similar to that which it held in the ancient Near East may well have been suppressed by a dominant hoplite ethos, formulated during the early days of the archaic polis (Lissarrague 1990a: 97). The values and identities that these warrior types embodied changed over time in reaction to social, cultural and political tensions wholly internal to the polis. Although these tensions contributed signifi cantly towards the pejorative manner in which Orient and ‘Orientals’ were represented in the artistic and literary traditions of the fi fth and fourth centuries BC, the interpretation of such imagery was necessarily a complex and inherently problematic affair –then as now. It is in Homeric epic, a body of tradition fi xed c. the end of the sixth century BC that archery fi rst comes unambiguously to the fore—the position of the archery contest at the culmination of festivities at Patroclus’ funeral games being an obvious example. Whether this refl ects the persisting infl uences of Near Eastern thought systems prevalent within a wider Indo-European tradition (Morris 1997; Hall 1989a: 42, no. 132) or the archaic remnants of some indigenous practice is a moot point. Occasions on which archers are portrayed in a negative fashion could conceivably be described as anachronisms whose authenticity is belied by the fact that heroic archers can be found amongst Greeks and Trojans alike (Hom., Il., IV 50-126; V. 171; 246; VIII. 710; XIII. 581; 650). The texts as they now stand were signifi cantly modifi ed, The Uses of Bow Imagery in a Greek Context: The Enemy Within Joe Skinner Day, Jo, et al. SOMA 2004: Symposium On Mediterranean Archaeology. Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of Postgraduate Researchers, School of Classics, Trinity College Dublin. 20-22 February 2004. E-book, Oxford, UK: BAR Publishing, 2006, https://doi.org/10.30861/9781841719474. Downloaded on behalf of Newcastle University