Plato’s Real Mug: Marble or Myth?

BERKELEY, Calif. – A bust collecting dust in the basement of a University of California museum may turn out to be the very image of the Greek philosopher Plato. Then again, maybe not.
The debate continues after Stephen Miller, a UC Berkeley professor, offered his opinion in April that a piece of statuary at the school’s Hearst Anthropology Museum shows the true face of Plato, who died in 347 BC. The evidence shown so far is compelling, but the academic jury is still out.
Reports from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times indicate that the statuary in question – to be exact, it’s a herm, or a stone pillar topped with a bust – came to California due to the efforts of Phoebe Hearst, mother of famed publisher William Randolph Hearst. A scholar bought the piece for mere Hearst in 1902, but couldn’t vouch for its authenticity.
The herm moved around the museum and, at one point, the bust and column were separated. The two sections found each other again at an unknown date, and resided in storage until Miller – who wanted an illustration for his book, Ancient Greek Athletes – remembered the piece from an earlier visit and took another look last year.
The herm’s inscriptions and the use of ribbons on the bust’s shoulders tipped Miller off that the piece might be an authentic image of Plato. The ribbons correspond to references in Plato’s best known work, The Republic.
Testing at the Demokritos Laboratory of Archaeometry in Athens of a core sample showed the herm’s marble comes from the island of Paros. The quarry closed down in the third century AD, giving credence to the piece’s antiquity. Encrusted pigment on the bust also helps to date the bust back to Plato’s day.
Miller will submit an article on the Berkeley bust to Antike Kunst, an annual journal of classical archeology based in Basel, Switzerland. From there, the arguments may indeed be all academic, but Miller’s convinced other scholars – including experts at Berkeley – that Plato’s face is for real.
Amateur Greek scholars can practice their skepticism by viewing a Flash presentation on the bust at www.berkeley.edu/news/multimedia/2003/04/plato/plato.html.