And finally, Phidias. We know little about that trial, or series of trials. The basis of the accusation was again that convenient, because vague, charge of impiety. The sculptor was accused of having carved his own image and that of Pericles on a shield of Athena that represented the battle with the Amazons. The prosecutor was one Meno—a foreigner and colleague of Phidias’s. One of Pericles’s powerful opponents was probably hiding behind this personage. The mob also spread a rumor about gold intended for a monument to Athena which the sculptor had embezzled. Phidias was condemned to banishment.
Plutarch transmits one of the most touching and human portraits of Pericles. He is sitting, sunk in perturbed thought, on a slope of the Acropolis, holding his unlovely large onion-shaped head in his hands. History has passed on the names of many great dreamers, but among them the figure of Pericles is one of the most detailed and concrete.
It was held against him that the gigantic project of rebuilding the Acropolis consumed a considerable part of the treasury of the Athenian League (moved to Athens from Delos in the mid-fifth century), which was meant for purposes of defense, not for the beautification of the city. Many arguments may be advanced in defense of Pericles.
The construction of the main temple of the Parthenon was begun twenty-two years after the end of the second Persian war and in the fourteenth year of Pericles’s reign. Those years were spent rebuilding the city. In contrast with those of the Romans, the Greeks’ houses and public architecture were extraordinarily modest. The pride swelling the chests of the Athenians after their victory over an Asiatic power, the role of Athens, Greece’s de facto capital—or as it was gently called, “the school of Hellas”—demanded works that measured up to their ambitions.
It was thought for a long time that the cost of building the Parthenon exceeded the sum of two thousand talents. The archaeologist Robert Spencer Stanier, basing his calculations on preserved inscriptions, came to the conclusion that the largest temple on the Acropolis cost 469 talents, more or less the amount paid annually in tribute to Athens by the almost two hundred cities of the League.
The walls, columns, and foundation took up the lion’s share of the expenses, 365 talents. The ceiling, roof, and gates cost 65 talents. On the other hand—and this is typical—the sum spent on the friezes23 and the sculptures of the pediment24 and metopes10, the works we now value highly and place in the realm of artistic creation, was the relatively low sum of 39 talents.*
It should be added here that this whole calculation only relates to the buildings. We know that there was a statue of Athena in the temple—by the hand of Phidias. The invaluable Pausanias—patient maker of inventories of so many lost historical monuments of antiquity—has passed on the following description to us: “The statue represents Athena standing3, wearing a tunic that falls to her feet; on her chest, an ivory sculpture of a Medusa’s head. Athena holds in one palm the goddess of victory, four elbows high, and in the other a thunderbolt. There is a shield at her feet, and on the spot where the thunderbolt touches the earth—a snake. This snake without any doubt portrays Erichtonios. The pedestal is covered with a frieze showing the birth of Pandora, the first woman to appear on the earth, as Hesiod and other poets tell us.”
The statue perished, and all hypothetical reconstructions, if only the best known, by Austrian scholar Kamil Praschniker, casts us into a kind of aesthetic embarrassment; a colossus twelve meters tall, held up by an internal construction of wood, the body done in ivory, the garment of gold plate, the eyes of enamel, pupils of black stone. Fortunately the statue was veiled by the shadows of a dark naos4. And in addition the cost of this monstrous jewel is assumed to have been four times that of the surrounding edifice.
Athens was experiencing a period of unprecedented economic growth. The intensively exploited mines in Laurion yielded not only a valuable ore—silver, but also allowed for the minting of the strongest and universally sought-after coin which soon became international. In the time of the Pisistratides the capital of infertile, barren Attica counted about twenty thousand inhabitants, whereas by the time of Pericles the number had risen to two hundred and fifty thousand (including metics5 and slaves), which resulted in a population density unusual for that age (over 100 inhabitants for each square kilometer). Undertaking great public construction works was not merely a way of repaying the gods for their help in the battle with the Persians, but also an economic necessity.
It is easiest to imagine that the Acropolis was the work of a great state enterprise that hired thousands of slaves, and that projects were naturally carried out by Athenian architects of genius: Iktinos, Callicrates, Mnesicles, while the free citizens supervised the work and were responsible for the sculptural décor of the temples. However, the truth is that the Acropolis was a “collective work”—a thing we seem unable to grasp these days—by hundreds of small artisan workshops. Each part of a construction was put together in workshops at the foot of the sacred hill and then wended its way up to the Acropolis on the back of a mule. An infinitely important and useful detail: the quarries where the marble was extracted were situated almost a day’s journey from Athens.
Participation in the construction was proportional to the wealth of the citizens. An Athenian who owned one slave was obliged to bring in ten cartloads of marble; one who employed two free artisans and three slaves entered into a contract for the erection of one column. Work on one column took 50 to 110 days.
The circle of employees was naturally not confined to masons and sculptors; it also included carpenters, ropemakers, goldsmiths, and painters.
What did they earn? We know the accounts from the time of the Erechtheion’s construction (work was begun in 409–408 B.C.). The laborers, artisans, architects were paid a drachma, which was the lowest wage on which a family could be supported (at that time, 55 liters of grain cost 2 drachmas in Athens; an ox cost 50–100 drachmas). The astonishing thing is that positions were not differentiated. An ordinary mason was paid a daily wage, an architect got his pay every few weeks. One is also struck by the small difference between the earnings of the heavy laborers and highly skilled workers on the one hand and on the other, the “diets” of the various civil servants, judges, and scribes of the magistrature. Renowned artisans did not receive a financial recompense commensurate with their skills; there was no premium for talent.*
Parts that would be hidden from the eye were built with the same care as external parts. The columns gave the impression that they had been forged out of a single block. This effect was achieved by means of very precise cuts in particular drums of stone, which fit together almost perfectly. Imperfections in the seams were removed by rubbing the adjoining surfaces with sand and water. In the center of the columns there were square openings. Olivewood pegs were driven into them. Neither mortar nor metal elements were used.
The preserved testimonies all concur that the work, which was supervised by Phidias, was carried out in an atmosphere of joy and enthusiasm. It is the only way to explain the perfection of the construction and the speed with which the temples grew. The Parthenon, begun in 477 B.C., was basically finished in the course of nine years, though work on the friezes continued another six years. The Propylaea, whose final completion was interrupted by the Peloponnesian war, was raised in the record time of five years.
According to legend the goddess Athena watched over the labors herself. When one of the best artisans falls from the scaffolding and is mortally injured, Athena appears to Pericles in a dream and recommends a magical remedy which saves the life of the man doing the work. This story seems to have been taken straight from the chronicles of the builders of Gothic cathedrals.
The mountain on which the Acropolis temples stand is beautiful; it plunges down precipitously on three sides in almost perpendicular slopes of a grayish-blue hue. Only on the side facing the sea is the slope gentler, but a pilgrimage to the sacred mount always had the character of an arduous climb. The rock of the Acropolis is 50 meters in height, the flat top of the mountain
has a more or less triangular shape with a base of 150 meters and sides of 300 meters. In these figures alone, one finds a natural module and a principle of proportion, as if the earth itself had set the tempo for the rhythms of architecture.
Today you enter onto the Acropolis by a gate called the Beulé Gate. A pathetic inscription in Greek informs you that it was France that discovered the gate, as well as the walls, towers, and steps. Dated: 1856.
What a French archaeologist called the main entrance and took to derive from the classical age was nothing but a space between two pylons raised in the age of a later empire, without a trace of Greek construction. They were probably erected at the time when the Acropolis had to defend itself against barbarians from the North.
It would seem that there is no object archaeology has studied more thoroughly than the Acropolis. This is the suggestion given by guide books, who give the layout of the main buildings grosso modo6 in the time of Pericles. But one should not forget that the sacred hill had been populated from Neolithic times. There are remains here of a palace from the Mycenean age and remnants of Cyclopian walls similar to those found at Argos and Mycenae. Wooden temples were probably built here and later stone temples, raised by tyrants. Here the first legendary Athenian kings were buried. It served as a refuge from enemy invasions. The Acropolis had this dual character of a fortress and a place of worship throughout the millennia of its stormy history.
The ancient road traveled by processions to the sacred hill was replaced by paths winding their way between trees, for the convenience of tourists. The closer you get to the buildings on the top of the hill the more they vanish from view. First the Erechtheion goes, blocked from view by the massive wall of the Pinakoteka, and then the Parthenon disappears. The mighty stems of columns, the piling up of bastions; the offensive of perpendicular stone masses holds one’s gaze. What were the Propylaea of which the Athenians were so proud? They had no defensive purpose, that much is certain. They expressed the deluded hope of the people of the Periclean age that the Acropolis would never again be a fortress, a final refuge. Whoever stepped from the sharp light into the shade of the colonnade’s roof—now no longer in existence—must have felt admiration and respect for the power of the city that had raised that structure.
If one may speculate on the subject of the Propylaea’s aesthetic function, it seems they were a stone curtain, a holding back of sight. Beyond them, one would meet the Parthenon face to face. The passage was like a drawing in of breath before an exclamation of delight. After passing through the Propylaea, the Parthenon appears more unexpectedly, larger, and more massive than if it had grown slowly before the eye with each step of the journey.
One should not forget, however, that—leaving aside the condition the site is in—we now see the Acropolis completely differently than did the ancients. After passing through the Propylaea, an Athenian of the fifth-century B.C. would have barely seen the upper part of the Parthenon, whose western façade was screened off by the encircling wall of the no longer existent sanctuary of Artemis. His sight was probably drawn first of all to the nine-meter-high statue of Athena Promachos, a work of Phidias now lost. To the left of the statue of Athena was a bronze chariot, on the right, trophies captured from the Persians during the second Median war: prows of ships, armor, helmets, and shields.
Ancient tourists were less sensitive to the purely aesthetic qualities of architecture—the rows of columns, the balance of building blocks—but they were crazy about these curiosities (like the model of the Trojan horse), monuments, ex vota, trophies, tombstones, reliquies, trees, and stones of mythical origin. We know this if only from the meticulous descriptions of these (to us trivial) details compiled by ancient authors and travelers, men like Polemon of the second century B.C. who devotes a full four books of his works to them. Ancient temples, the Acropolis along with others, were not only places of worship but genuine museums of curiosities and national relics.
The Propylaea, that lavish, proud, I want to say palatial, stage set, cost four times more than the main temple on the Acropolis. Mnesicles managed to finish it before the Peloponnesian war, but both wings show signs of a sudden halt in construction.
North of the Propylaea stands the Pinakoteka, a now empty museum of Greek painting, whose loss dooms us to speculation and fantasy. Was Apelles’s grapevine really so naturalistic that it drew living birds? And how should we imagine the art of Pamphilos, who painted lightning and thunder and as Pliny writes, “that which cannot be painted7”?
On the southern wing, on the bastion that sticks farthest out, is the small Ionian temple of Athena Nike, disturbingly light and fragile above the precipice from which the unfortunate Aegeus threw himself.
For a long time it was thought that the Parthenon appeared in sight when one passed the last columns of the Propylaea. But one was supposed to approach its Western façade, where there was a triangular courtyard with small Propylaea, through which one took in the whole mass of the construction. Greek architects not only erected the temples but, using the terrain’s declivities, terraces, and walls, organized “points of view” with the same consistency and finesse as they did the other architectonic details.
The Parthenon is certainly one of the most beautiful Doric temples. It seems much larger and more massive than its actual measurements suggest: length, 69 meters; width, 31 meters; height, 17 meters. This impression of enormity is also due—if we do not wish to content ourselves with the aesthete’s remark, “Greek temples have no measurements, only proportions”—to the fact that it is as if the building is torn loose from the earth. It stands on a great stylobate8 with three levels of differing height. The highest is the level on which the columns rest.
It is a wounded building, stripped of its sculptures, which were part of the essential, integral architecture. The Greeks’ eyes would have run invariably toward the highest parts of the temple, now empty, where Phidias carved in stone the quarrel between Poseidon and Athena (the western pediment) and the birth of Athena (the eastern pediment). The sculptures were polychromatic, covered with gold, painted sky blue, red, and brown—and not at all “discreetly,” as the bloodless aesthetes would have it. Those brightly colored images of the heavens of Antiquity were not made for us, but for the merchant from Delos, the peasant from Boeotia, for the delegates of remote and impoverished cities of the League, and they were meant to dazzle them. Athena, identified with the city, was the dazzling force she was in the Homeric hymns. Great Olympus trembled under the weight of the mighty goddess with blue-green eyes: “All around the earth let out9 a shattering scream, a storm gathered at sea, raising dark billows, then the harsh waves suddenly subsided.”
The themes on the metopes were the battles of giants, gigantomachia, the conquest of Troy, the war with the Amazons, and finally the fight of the Centaurs with the Lapites. The selection of these legendary episodes was far from arbitrary and possessed its own clear ideological meaning. It was like a mythological prologue to the Persian wars, crowned with the victory of Europe over Asia. The Old Testament of Greek legend here extends its hand to a history contemporary with the artists.
The partially preserved so-called interior frieze represents a pan-Athenian procession.* It is a group portrait of the free citizens of a free city, going to pay homage to their heavenly protectress. Those who in reality stood on the steps of the temple were brought into proximity with the gods not on their knees but in a fine parade, without false modesty and without defiant heaven-storming pride. It is an unsettling fact (unsettling for those who see Greek temples as shrines of rationalism) that this frieze was almost invisible, permanently in the shadow cast by the ceiling of the peristyle17.
Today none of this exists. We have learned to look at works of Greek art as fragments and scraps. We believed too easily that they owe their perfection and beauty to being fragments and scraps. We cannot, nor do we even want to imagine the Venus of Milo or any Greek temple as they really were.
We derive a strange aesthetic satis
faction (which has probably never been fully analyzed) from the fact that the capital of a column holds up nothing, that the marble cheek of a goddess suddenly loses its fleshly smoothness and turns into raw uneven stone. This constant neighboring of art and nature, the clear border between what was carved by the artist’s chisel and nature’s chisel, does not prompt the imagination to fill out the whole but on the contrary, silences it.
The aesthetes of the nineteenth century (and these days this attitude to ancient works of art is almost universal) were glad in a certain way that Greek architecture had come to us stripped of color and sculpture. Time had reduced them to skeletons, to rudimentary shapes. We are filled with a joy, more intellectual than sensual, flowing from the analysis of forms. We revel in the Greeks’ “optical corrections” that make their most splendid constructions look as though they had come from under the chisel of a single sculptor. The columns standing on corners are in fact slightly thicker, because they were more directly struck by light, which thins shapes, and they were also set closer to the neighboring columns, in order not to seem isolated. The line of the stylobate and the architrave11 are not horizontal but lightly curved. For the great builders of the Parthenon, Iktinos and Callicrates, these “optical corrections” were not merely a matter of aesthetics but a real technical postulate: they ensured the building’s compactness and equilibrium.
North of the Parthenon near the wall of Themistocles is the Erechtheion, which was not finished until 407 B.C. In classical times, despite the obvious chronology, it was called the old temple. Herodotus relates that during the Median war, when the Persians were forcing their way onto the Acropolis, its last defenders looked for refuge here, it was here they implored the gods for a miraculous intervention. This episode indicates that it was the holiest site on the sacred mount, perhaps the seat of an oracle in preclassical times, and also the palace of Mycenean kings.
The Collected Prose Page 59