A face-making application and a little Photoshop bring the Classical Greeks to life.

BY DAN DEWEESE

THIS SUMMER I was cruising the internet for news from the classical world, as one does. (Actually, I teach college for a living, and one of the subjects I cover is the history of rhetoric, so I’m kind of always keeping tabs on new insights into antiquity. Classical sculptures were painted and the Greeks weren’t White, but you already knew that.) I came upon an article about a man who was using a face-creating artificial intelligence application and then some Photoshop tweaking and polishing to create realistic color faces of Roman emperors.

I immediately thought: I use Photoshop. I can tweak and polish. And the face-creating app is free. I am going to do this.

I want to see Socrates.

Here, then, is a marble bust of Socrates from the Louvre:

The museum dates this sculpture to the first century and claims it is “perhaps a copy of a lost bronze statue made by Lysippos.” Lysippos was a well-known sculptor in the Classical Greek era, but unfortunately (for my purposes), he was born a few years after Socrates died. So this is Lysippos’s estimation of what Socrates looked like, maybe (hopefully) based on some consulting with older Greeks who knew Socrates, or perhaps informed by some drawings or paintings of Socrates that did not survive antiquity. But it’s what we have to go on.

I then searched the application for the face of an older Greek man, and had the application put the skin and hair tones of the older Greek man on the face of Socrates.

So: sit down. Through the miracle of proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence, you will now be the first human beings in over 2400 years to gaze upon this face. Without further ado, I give you...Socrates of Athens:

Not bad, right? I mean, is this actually Socrates? No. But it’s an earnest estimate. I am sharing with you a thinking exercise I shared (remotely, this quarter) with my students. If you are objecting and having But wait, wouldn’t… thoughts right now, yes, I totally agree. This is not the actual Socrates. This is an exercise I did to help me try to think about who these Greeks really were.

Here is a marble bust of Plato held in the Musei Capitolini in Rome:

The only information on this I can find (when working quickly on a weekday) is that the museum feels this bust is a copy of an “original of the 4th century BCE.” That implies that the original was possibly sculpted during Plato’s lifetime, so maybe this is an okay model to work from.

I had the face-generating application apply the skin and hair tones of an older Greek man to the bust of Plato. From the depths of time, I give you: Plato.

Our class won’t move on to reading any Aristotle for a couple more weeks, but I see no reason not to invite him to this (virtual) party. Below, we’re looking at the work of Lysippos again:

This piece is actually described as a “Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos.” (The colored mantle was added later.) Lysippos was alive at the same time as Aristotle, though, and knew him. So if this is a faithful copy, we might be able to look at it with a little more confidence than the bust of Socrates.

I asked the application to give Marble Aristotle skin and hair. Somewhere in the underworld/afterlife Alexander the Great’s teacher felt a tug on his cloak as he was pulled back into the light of this world:

Again: is this truly what these three Greek philosophers/teachers/rhetoricians looked like? No. These can only be the vaguest of (virtual) sketches. The most obvious problem is that all three men have roughly the same beard. And I couldn’t figure out a way to get the application to create thick or curly hair. But these three human beings that we know only as names or austere stone sculptures did, at certain points in history, walk the streets of Athens, arguing about how to live.