Chatillon, Vix and the Vase
By DARSIE GILLIE CHATILLON-SUR-SEINE was one of France's many charming little old towns until bombs rained on her in 1940. The water conduits were smashed, the whole centre of the town burned. There are still some fine old houses, two very interesting churches, one with fine glass, and the other where visitors have been recommended for eight centuries (and more in the crypt) to seek benefit from an obscure person called St. Vorles. But until January last year Chatillon had to adjust itself to the sad prospect of being henceforth just one more .of the towns creditably rebuilt, solidly, commo- diously, but without the variety or the inspiration of centuries. Since then Chatillon has been the unexpected possessor of a treasure more spectacularly worth visiting than anything she ever held before.
Chatillon stands in a little plain through which the Seine lazily transports no more water than the smoke-coloured cows of the neighbourhood could easily splash through. But five 'miles below Chatillon the Seine enters a valley between low but fairly steep hills covered even today with forest. Where this valley begins, a small but abrupt isolated hill, a natural acropolis, the Mont Lassois, rises above the village of Vix with the Seine close to its foot. It rises in two stages to a flat top. The lower storey lies away from the river towards the forested tableland but sinks to plain-level before reaching it. A grassy cart track leads up the bushy side of the hill from Vix to the point at which the lower storey adjoins the higher and there, in complete isolation, stands Vix church, square-towered with small rounded windows and the floor at least two feet below the level of the churchyard. An even more grass-grown track leads higher, but soon disperses itself in paths between hawthorn and juniper and stunted beech until you come outs on the grassy top, where ruby-winged insects cling lazily to scabious and thistle and knapweed and sonie French cousin of ragged robin.
It is an easy climb today, but a few stout men in your way could make it a difficult one. The top is eminently habitable and you wonder why the Dukes of Burgundy built their castle by St. Vorles's church above Chatillon instead of in this commanding spot. But the place was appreciated once. For years archwologists have been collecting sherds and other relics of the early iron age from Mont Lassois. Since the war Monsieur Joffroy, the curator of the little museum at Chatillon, has been systematically excavating one side of the hill, but until January of last year he had looked in vain for graves. A burial place the town must have had. The objects found showed that it had flourished in the seventh, sixth and perhaps fifth centuries BO at the end of the era called Halstattian, after a type-site in Switzerland, when the Celtic world stretched from Bohemia to central France and north- westward into the British Isles. Its centre was still on the Rhine and the Main. Celts had not yet conquered Southern France and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, or the Alps into Italy. But Greeks and Etruscans were already in contact with them, as Mediterranean objects found in the tombs of Eastern France, South Germany and Switzerland show. Though the Celts themselves were already good smiths they had not yet developed that curvilinear style of ornament which we associate with them and was to be the glory of the next or La Tene period. Mont Lassois itself must have been in contact with the Mediterranean world, dominating, as it does, the Seine Valley, one of the easy routes (as far as any route in those days was easy) north-westward towards the tin mines of Pretannia, whic'h Caesar fortunately miscalled Britannia some five centuries later. But nobody was prepared for the sumptuous evidence of this contact that was suddenly to be brought to light.
M. Joffroy, like the good archeologist that he is, had done his best to explain to the local farmers why the objects he found on Mont Lassois were interesting and for what he was looking. He received his reward when a farmer from Vix told him that in ploughing one of his fields he had come upon stones of the type used for building in the neighbourhood but which had come from a few miles away. It seemed improbable that, there had ever been a house there. The field lay near the point at which the track up Mont Lassois (which has probably not changed its place in the passing centuries) reaches the level ground, on the side towards the plain of Chatillon where no doubt lay the principal cultivated fields and pastures of the tribe.
The stones in the field were all that was left of what had once been a huge cairn, fortunately used already in Roman times to mend a neighbouring road, so that during the centuries when archeology was merely pillage for curios there had been nothing to mark the spot. Beneath the cairn, in a tomb whose timbers had collapsed, bringing down the stones so that the contents were broken but concealed, was the skeleton of a woman of about thirty-five. She wore on her head a gold half-hoop, not quite like anything that has been found before, but which has been labelled at a guess as Greco- Scythian.. (Influence of Scythian metalwork on that of the Celts has long been thought possible, but there is almost no direct evidence of contact, so that the archeologists may have jumped at the hope that here was a sign of it.) This lovely object is quite plain except for the two terminals, which are formed by an animal's paw clutching a ball. The ball is further connected with the hoop on each side by a minute and most elegant pegasus.
This queen, for she can have been no less, was wearing Celtic beads of stone and amber, and had been carried to her tomb in a chariot of which the bronze hub-covers and iron wheel-rims (so narrow that the chariot was clearly not for the rough-and-tumble of war) were found beside her. But also beside her was an Attic black figure vase, showing warriors fighting, dated about 525 BC. Etruscan bronze vases and a bowl of about the same date, and above all a vase. whether Greek or Etruscan, such as no one had seen for many centuries. In form and ornament, it had indeed parallels—in particular one found thirty-five years ago at Trebenishte in Yugoslav Macedonia near Lake Okhrida. But in size it was such as is only known from the descriptions in ancient writers of particularly notable gifts to such shrines as the oracle of Delphi. This great green monster (bronze-yellow when it was first brought to Mont Lassois) stands four feet seven inches high, would need two big men to put their arms round it and weighs over four hundredweight. Round the neck runs a frieze in high relief of Greek charioteers and warriors. The two handles are ornamented by gorgons—not the happiest of Greek decorative inventions to our eyes—but their serpent legs and the serpents and lions filling the space between the gorgons and the vase itself are admirable. On the lid stood a cloaked and draped female figure, which at first sight looks more archaic than the triumphantly muscular warriors and the champing horses, but which scholars now tend to attribute to the same date. The exact origin of this great vase is not certain. Its structure suggests the work of Etruscan smiths, the frieze that of Greeks. Each group of the frieze was attached separately to the vase and a letter on its back corresponds to a letter on the metal of the vase (itself. These proceed regularly from alpha to kappa, but instead of lambda, which might be mistaken for gamma, if you did not know which way up to read it, the bronze smith has engraved a single stroke. He continued with two, three and more strokes till their number became inconvenient and then reverted to the alphabet. As M. Joffroy and M. Raymond Bloch have pointed out in a joint article, the point at which the alphabet is resumed corresponds only to the Greek alphabell as used by the Western Greeks and more particularly by the Etruscans who borrowed it from them. There would only be enough letters to correspond to the strokes, if two letters of the Phoenician alphabet early dropped by most of the Greeks from their adaptation, were still included, namely the kappa from which, through the Latin alphabet. we derive our 0, and a spare sibilant which' had no future in the west. From this a Greco-Italian or Etruscan origin for the vase is generally concluded, but without any nearer precision.
Whether the vase came from what is now Italy or front Greece itself, the first part of the voyage is not surprking. Much more so is the transport of it by land into northern Burgundy fbur hundred, years before the Romans made tiled first roads in Provence. The Rhone valley is considered an unlikely route. There is, it seems, no evidence for its Ire to enter the Celtic world at this time. The river mouth w0, situated amongst a quite different set of peoples—the Ligurians' Greek Marseilles was still a very young city. The old routes were from the Po valley (where the Etruscans were installed at Mantua) across the Alpine passes, with a portage, one must suppose from the upper Rhine to the SaOne, and anothet from the Saone .to the upper Seine. No pack horse could have carried this heavy, unhandy and delicate object. Was it perhaps packed in basket-work and alternatively floated and dragged on a sledge ? What part in its transport was played by those admirable draught animals—men ?
But who sent it mid why ? Was it a gift to keep open $ trade route, the tin road ? Or a bribe to have it closed to, a rival ? Was it appreciated by the Celts who received it the same people who in their own art were to turn theft backs on the human form so admirably represented on 1110 object ? In the next few generations they were themselves to make enormous advances as bronze smiths. Twenty-five years ago the National Art Collection Fund bought for the' British Museum two admirable Etruscan bronze wine jars and two Celtic bronze flagons, the latter inlaid with coral and decorated with unidentifiable creatures. These were found together near Thionville in Lorraine and smuggled by the building workers who came upon them into Belgium, so that they should be free to sell them on the international market The grave they came from is no doubt effaced below some house or factory or road so that much information is lost for ever. All four are of great beauty. There are no figures oti the Etruscan vases and the decoration on the Celtic flagons suggests a turn of mind quite different from that of any Greet or Etruscan artist. All four are dated from the beginning of the fourth century BC, rather more than a century later thee. the treasure of Vix, where the objects both Greek (or Etruscaae and Celtic have all been dated from the end of the six century.
Finally how could so superb an object as the great v of Vix have been buried at all ? Its possession would ha been the pride of any Greek or Etruscan city. In what circu stances could this unnamed Queen Maebhe have been allow to take it into another world, depriving the stronghold wh she had reigned of its most extraordinary treasure ?
Even today it is an object of desire. Only the stern r of law, based on the determination of the farmer-finder, co have kept it for Chatillon against the claims of the Lou where it was exhibited last winter for a short month. It sten for the moment, rather unhappily, in a small room of Chatillon museum amongst the ineptitudes of Gallo-Rom sculpture. A freshly cut hole in the ceiling, however, indicat the intention of hoisting it up into a room above wh.k Chatillon will present it and the other objects from the tom with due honour. With all the burden of their town's rebuild' on their backs, the Chatillonnais have not skimped th museum since the war. They can be relied on to do th best for their vase, though naturally they cannot offer it palatial a room as the Louvre. But they will know it is th and be proud of its presence, whereas most of the Parisi would soon forget it had ever come amongst them
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