Stealing Athena

by Karen Essex

  We started our viewing at the beginning of the frieze, which, in content, was also the beginning of the procession.

  “The horsemen prepare,” Pheidias said dramatically, pointing to a long cavalcade of riders. A young man at the head of the procession motioned for his friends on rearing steeds to join him. Behind him, a long run of horsemen charged, some nude, with only capes flowing in the wind. Figures of overlapping horses carrying riders, some with helmets and armor, seemed a miracle of motion. Pheidias invited us to put our heads right up to the frieze and look down at the long, shallow relief that was only a few inches thick. “Since it will be seen at a great distance, I could not rely upon facial expressions to convey the desired excitement; hence, dramatic gestures and semblances of motion are employed to capture the anticipation of the moment.”

  I put my face as close to the relief as I dared and looked ahead. I could smell the fresh paint clinging to the figures. Horses’ heads rose and fell along the length of the frieze like waves, seeming to obey the same rhythm as the riders, all linked together in an unbroken dance. So lifelike were the figures that it did not take much to imagine oneself at the actual event.

  Gold paint accenting the more muted colors of the frieze shimmered in the torchlight. I saw that the horses were decorated with metal rings and leather bridles, some linking the horses to the ten charioteers moving swiftly on their vehicles, whipping the beasts on. These were the chariot races, which would also take place tomorrow at the games.

  We followed Pheidias as he continued the tour of his creation, the ladies shying away from the flames of the torches that lit our way. As we moved around the frieze, the rest of the sculpted procession came to life. Tray bearers carried barley cakes with honey to bait the sacrificial animals to the altar. Some of the cows seemed docile, while others—protesting, shaking their heads—were catching on to their fates. One threw its head back, mouth wide open, as if howling a final plea to the gods for clemency. The rest of the suppliants to the goddess followed—girls holding bowls to pour out the sacrifices of wine, oil, and blood, one following with a tall incense burner. Ahead of them, the elders, magistrates, and officials leaned on their walking sticks, herding the entire procession to the centerpiece of the frieze, where the Olympian gods, seated, ignored the commotion surrounding them, waiting for the Athenians to bring them their due.

  Hephaestus, the lame god, crutch under his arm, sat facing Athena, who carried a spear in her right hand. She was not in warrior pose, but was reclining in leisurely fashion upon a chair, waiting to see what her people would bring. The goddess’s back was turned to a mortal girl behind her who was accepting the peplos from the Royal Archon, the top religious official of the city. Behind him was Athena’s priestess, facing young girls carrying stools upon their heads. Zeus, father of Athena, was seated with Hera, his wife, his back turned to his daughter. The other gods—Hera, Nike, Ares, Demeter, Poseidon, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Eros—rested on benches, each ignoring the suppliants.

  “Pheidias?” I said. “Why did you choose to position the gods in this way, with their backs to those who are bringing them gifts?”

  “Because they owe us nothing,” he said, his eyes wide as he spoke. “Because we are uncertain if they are ever listening to us or heeding our desperate prayers. Because at times they seem not to pay us any attention at all,” he answered, far too quickly and, to my mind, too honestly. I could hear little gasps and murmurs escape from several pairs of polite lips. Artists were always being criticized for their impiety. Pheidias, who had already received heavy criticism, did not need to add this to the list of accusations against him.

  I had never seen such a decoration as this in a temple, where artistic ornamentation always consisted of scenes from the great myths or stories of the heroes. These figures represented an event in recent memory. I remember challenging Pheidias in the concept stage as to why he’d chosen something such as this to decorate Athena’s temple.

  “The mortals are given more emphasis than the gods, Pheidias. The idea seems more an homage to the people of the procession—some of whom are undoubtedly still alive—than to the goddess,” I had said. “I hope this will not be perceived as sacrilege.”

  “Perhaps it is time for Athenians to be featured alongside the gods,” he had answered.

  “They certainly behave as if they deserve it,” I had replied, and he’d laughed. I had left him that day with an anxious feeling, worried over his choice of subject and how Athens’s more conservative critics would perceive it.

  But as I walked around the frieze, a strange feeling came over me. It was as if I were staring into the near future, as if the very naturalistic images before me were going to take the form of flesh and blood during the night and assume their places at dawn, lining up at the Dipylon Gate to participate in the festival. I suppose that that was the effect that Pheidias had hoped to achieve.

  I wondered if the odd sensations I felt had anything to do with the fact that the forty-foot statue of the goddess inside the temple, presently draped in linen, that was to be unveiled tomorrow, carried the image of my own face. I’d sat for Pheidias only a few times in the early stages of his design; all the sittings had been scheduled during the time that Perikles was away leading the expedition against Samos. I had not seen the face of the goddess since it had been painted and adorned.

  Pheidias had assured me that by the time he was finished with the icon, no one would notice the resemblance. “I consider it more a spiritual likeness than a realistic one,” he had said. “I imbued the face of the goddess with your qualities more than with your features.”

  When I said that I did not find the qualities of wisdom and boldness in my own face, Pheidias replied, “Of course you don’t see them. But I see them in you. And I know it is because circumstance has forced these attributes onto your very pretty face.”

  I was flattered that the great sculptor of our age identified such strengths in me. But the larger question was: Would anyone notice? And if so, would people protest?

  After we toured the frieze, Lysikles, a wealthy man who had made his fortune raising sheep on the immense grazing lands of his ancestors, approached me. He was a fixture at the drinking parties Perikles and I gave, and I always enjoyed conversing with him.

  “My dear Aspasia, I come to you with a request that I addressed to Perikles, who in turn told me to speak directly with you.”

  He was a handsome man, perhaps ten years older than I. His dark skin, tanned from long hours in the sun, contrasted nicely with his deep-set blue eyes. He had lush black eyelashes that would have been nice on a woman.

  “What question could you possibly have put to Perikles that he needs me to answer?” I asked.

  “Some of the ladies, my wife included, are weary of hearing next-day reports of the drinking parties that you host. As tiresome as it is, many of us husbands are forced to try to recite large portions of the previous evening’s conversations, which are of a very scintillating nature at the time they are had, but are not easily remembered the next day.”

  “Especially if one drinks to the bottom of the bowl,” I said, and laughed.

  “I never knew that ladies wished to hold philosophical dialogues. Perhaps they do not. Perhaps they are merely interested in observing the behavior of their husbands. But the request I bring you is from the ladies. They wish to attend one of your notorious parties.”

  I was surprised on many levels. Considering how much the men drank, and how often the evenings included turns taken in the bedrooms with one or more of the hired prostitutes, I couldn’t believe that any honest account of these parties had ever been given.

  “Lysikles, are you actually suggesting that gentlemen bring their wives tomorrow evening?”

  “I do not suggest it, Aspasia, but the wives have suggested it. Because it is on a feast night, and because it is hosted by you, who are also a woman, they do not wish to be left out.”

  “Being a woman, I suppose that I have no logical grounds
upon which to exclude other women. Tell the ladies that they may attend the party with my compliments.” I nodded to Adelpha, whose eyes lit up at the suggestion. If the husbands did not need to exclude their wives, then what objection could I possibly have? It would be amusing to see the altered behavior that the presence of respectable ladies was bound to produce.

  I put the idea to Perikles later in the evening. We were in our private dining room, where I usually dined on a couch—sometimes the same couch as my lover. When we entertained guests, of course, I sat in a chair. Even the professional courtesans who sometimes dined with us were of too high a class to eat reclining in the presence of men. This was a cozy room, though plain, with bare walls upon which I had hung a group of particularly expressive terra-cotta satyr masks that I liked. The room had simple stone floors, two small tables for food and drink, and a stack of blankets and furs that we used in the cold months. A lone black vase that we found amusing, painted in red figures, with a satyr plucking a young woman’s pubic hair, sat on a tripod. Here in this room we often shared our most private thoughts, after which we inevitably made love.

  “Do you think these ladies are secretly planning to spy on me, gathering yet more information to slander me in the marketplace?”

  “No, I think that your renown has spread even to female quarters, and that they are curious about a woman who has gained the respect of the cleverest men of the city.”

  “We shall see. Shall we tell the prostitutes not to come?”

  I worried over this. I could not imagine the reaction of the ladies when faced with brothel-dwelling whores of Athens, though we hired only the most intelligent of them to appear in our home. I always expected Perikles to slip off with one of the women during the night, but he never did. Perhaps he had women who serviced him in secret. Though we loved each other passionately in bed and out of it, I could never believe that he was pleased to have only me as his lover. But that was the way it appeared.

  “If the ladies of Athens wish to attend a drinking party, I think we should allow them the entire experience,” Perikles said. “If they object to the presence of the prostitutes, they will leave. But if we do not have prostitutes, I will hear no end of it from the men whose wives are not present. No, let them all come, wives, prostitutes, and whoever else wishes to attend. After all, it’s the feast day of Athena. The goddess is democratic in her love for all native-born Athenians.”

  IT DID NOT MATTER that I was the beloved of the most powerful man in Athens; I still had to wear red at the Great Panathenaic Festival to distinguish myself as a resident alien. Anyone with the means to travel to Athens could observe the Grand Procession that opened the festival, but only Athenian citizens could participate without a special invitation.

  “The goddess desires it this way,” Perikles told me. “Athens literally belongs to Athenians. It is not like other Greek cities. It was not taken by conquest. We have always been here. The members of the Ten Tribes are the descendants of the original heroes—Erechtheus, Ajax, Leos, Kekrops, and the like. We are born to the soil.”

  Kalliope and I decided that if we were to be set apart in red on this day when all the city was present, we would adorn ourselves to be as beautiful as possible. We made dresses of the finest incarnadine linen, trimming them with gold silk ribbons. Several evenings before the festival began, Kalliope proposed that we have a rehearsal to try out our coiffures, so we dismissed the women who worked in my house and, as when we were girls, made pin curls in each other’s hair. The next day, we laced red ribbons into our long locks, which we then tied up in pleasing ways, with ringlets dangling nicely around our faces.

  We began the first day of the festival long before dawn. Perikles was to preside over the commencement of the procession. Games and contests would follow for five days, but today was the most holy day, the day in which Athena would receive her new robe woven by the women of the city and carried by the arrephoroi, adolescent virgin girls chosen from the most prominent families. At sunset, a solemn sacrifice was to be made to Pandrosos at her altar on the Akropolis. A priestess of Athena had apparently foreseen the advent of a plague, but claimed that, in a vision from the goddess, she was instructed to make a sacrifice to Pandrosos, that singularly obedient daughter of King Kekrops, that would hold the plague at bay for ten years.

  Kalliope and Alkibiades met up with me at the head of the procession. My sister looked very pretty. She wore the gold necklace we had inherited from our mother, and I wore the long earrings, which I thought complemented my upswept hair. Besides, the necklace was the more valuable, and she, as the older sister, should have the privilege of wearing it on special days.

  The morning was still gray, but the necklace brought color into her pale face. Hers was not a happy life. Alkibiades, many years her senior, treated her as he might a serving girl who should be grateful for her bread and cakes. When he was not around, she tried to share with me conspiratorial gossip about the horrors of men and the marriage bed—trials with which I could not, in my own circumstances, identify. I did not want to make her life more unhappy by revealing that all men are not ogres in the bedroom or outside of it, for I was sure that an old and cantankerous dog like Alkibiades would not soon change his ways. The best we could hope for was that he would not live to a ripe old age.

  I did speak up once, after my sister told me that he had slapped her for spilling his wine.

  “Alkibiades, I am aware that you do not respect my opinion, though the men of Athens eagerly seek it on domestic matters,” I began. “But I feel compelled to advise you that a wife treated with kindness and respect will blossom and bring happiness and prosperity to a home, whereas one treated cruelly will only wither.”

  “I do not require your advice, Aspasia,” he said coldly. “I know that a woman with noisy opinions is considered a welcome anomaly among Perikles’ more perverse friends. But in my regard, you are still just a big-mouthed girl, and I do not need you to tell me how to run my household.”

  I did not say anything further to him because I knew that he would use whatever I said as a reason to abuse my sister again. She had very little power in her household. She was a foreigner, and therefore not an Athenian citizen; nor were her children, owing to Perikles’ law. But in Alkibiades’ mind, and in the minds of others, she was a cut above me in society because she had the status of a legitimate wife.

  I was excited to see her this morning because I wanted to share the extraordinary news from the night before. I desperately wanted her to come to our party, so as hard as it was for me, I obeyed protocol and addressed the request to her husband.

  “Alkibiades, I do not know if you are planning to attend our party this evening,” I began. I was sure that he was not planning to attend because neither Perikles nor I could tolerate him and so we never invited him to these occasions. “Many of the gentlemen are bringing their wives. I invite you to bring my sister along with you, as this is a very special evening.”

  “Aspasia, I do not approve of my wife coming into your house when you are there by yourself, much less when the drunkards and peacocks of Athens are present, spewing their subversive ideas. Do not raise the issue again.”

  His face assumed its usual countenance—that of a bloated, grumpy animal. He turned away abruptly, taking Kalliope by the arm. She gave me a sad look as he dragged her off.

  I rushed to rejoin Perikles, who smiled when he saw me, reaching out with his long arm to clasp me to his side. It was destined to be a very long, hot day, so I’d worn my most comfortable shoes rather than suffer the tall platform sandals that made me look more regal and compatible with Perikles, who towered above me.

  Though the procession took place on the twenty-eighth day of Hecatombaion, the hottest month of the year, the air was unusually crisp at dawn. Perikles and I arrived at the Dipylon Gate just as the light was breaking. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of suppliants had arrived to stand in the line, which wrapped around the storehouse where all the festival’s accessories were kept,
then staggered for what looked like miles down the road. Normally, onlookers would line the Panathenaic Way to watch as the sacred procession of horse riders, charioteers, priestesses, arrephoroi, gift-bearing maidens, musicians, specially chosen citizens and city officials, and the Royal Archon—all the characters depicted in Pheidias’ frieze—would lead the cart carrying the peplos like a great sail to the goddess in her temple. Only those involved in the procession could enter the temples, of course. But Perikles had decided that this year—the year of its dedication—all Athenians who wished to do so could follow the procession up to the Parthenon, where they would be led inside by soldiers and ushered past the colossal statue of the goddess.

  “Why should all Athenians not celebrate the unveiling of the great statue of the goddess since all have, in one way or another, paid for it?” Perikles had said over the objections of some members of the Assembly. Though an aristocrat by birth and by temperament, Perikles had a democratic streak that always led him to consider the common people.

  At the moment the sun began to appear over the east side of the Akropolis, the ceremonies began. Perikles climbed to a podium set up for the event and addressed the people. Though his voice would not carry to the multitudes, much of his speech would be whispered through the crowd. Scribes would also copy his words and write up pamphlets of their contents to be sold in the marketplace in the coming days.

  “The Temple of Athena Parthenos and the colossal statue of the goddess that will be unveiled today are public works, voted on and approved by the Assembly. True, they are magnificent in appearance and great in scale, but let me remind you citizens of the ways in which we of this city deserve such monuments to commemorate our deeds and our services to our allies in the Delian League.”