When a Gesture Was Expected: A Selection of Examples from Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
Extract
IT MAY HAVE BEEN my old mentor, Sterling Dow, who first gave me the image of Paul shaking his cloak as he cursed blasphemers at Corinth, but that would be thirty years ago, and I did not connect Paul’s gesture with the sketchy simulacrum that a Greek performs in conversation today until one summer noon at Assos on Kephallenia in 1973: my wife, Julie, and I asked a local for a ride on his Messerschmidt (which was not an airplane but a three-wheeled, all-purpose farm vehicle). He would have liked to, he said, but he couldn’t. He explained with a single word: police!! 
and as he pronounced the word he shook the front of his jacket vigorously with both hands. And I made a connection that has enriched my perception of ancient Greek representations of speech increasingly since then.
I did not, however, begin to arrange these connections in a formal way until 1985, when I presented a paper at the first joint AIA-APA panel in Washington, D.C. In succeeding years I have presented chapters or developing sequences to students and colleagues at Brown University, the University of Virginia, the Museum of Primitive Culture and Art in Rhode Island, Middlebury College, Yale University, the University of Minnesota, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the University of Glasgow, Boston University, New College in Oxford University, Royal Holloway College in the University of London, the University of Crete at Rethymnon, Eberhard-Karl University, Tübingen, Amherst College, and a session of the Greek National Humanistic Society in Athens. On every occasion I benefited from observations, criticism, and lore provided by my audiences, most of whose contributions have been absorbed one way or another into the text of this book.
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