We begin our examination of the Parthenon with its broader natural surroundings, the landscape that so shaped Athenian consciousness of place and time, of reality itself (below). It is out of Attica—the greater territory surrounding Athens—that the forces of nature and divinity, of human drama and history, issued. To commemorate their favorable resolution required nothing less than what the Parthenon would be: the largest, most exquisitely planned and constructed, lavishly decorated, and aesthetically compelling temple that the Athenians would ever build. It would also be a monument steeped in carved images retelling vibrant stories from the city’s mythical past. For in the Greek view, mythos (a “saying” or “story” without rational claim to truth) and history (the empirical search for truth about the past)7 were often indistinguishable; both were inscribed in epic and genealogical narratives set in a landscape thought to have existed since the world was created out of chaos. Places of memory within this landscape held special meaning for generations of inhabitants who passed age-old narratives down to their children.
Acropolis at dawn from west. © Robert A. McCabe, 1954–1955. (illustration credit ill.4)
The Greeks comprehended their distant past according to certain fixed “boundary catastrophes” that punctuated and divided time into distinct eras.8 Cosmic battles, global deluge, and epic wars are chief among the catastrophes that marked the succession of one period by another: in the early chapters of this book we shall consider the power of each sort of upheaval. (All show influence from the ancient Near East, some of it direct, but much via Syro-Palestinian and Phoenician sources.)9 But of the three disruptive forces, none, of course, could have done more to shape the landscape or the culture’s awareness of it than the ebb and flow of water. The recurrence of floods and deluges became a definitive means for dividing time into eras, the division between the antediluvian and the diluvian being as important to the Greeks as to the Sumerians and Hebrews.
The recounting of ancient narratives that describe era-defining floods, clashes among the gods, and epic battles of Greeks against exotic “others” (Amazons, Centaurs, Trojans, and Thracians) was utterly essential to Athenian paideia (education) and piety. That these phenomena played out in an ancient landscape still visible to Athenians of the historical period bound them to a mythic past in a way scarcely imaginable to us; for them the remote past was not remote but immanent in everything. The meaning of the Parthenon—the sense of its design and decoration, no less than its location—cannot be understood without wading into the spring of associations from which it issues. To do so, we must start at ground level with the ecology and topography of the ancient city.
ATTICA COMPRISES a triangular peninsula of some 2,400 square kilometers (927 square miles) that juts into the Aegean Sea at the very southeast corner of the Greek mainland (facing page).
It is bordered on the northwest by the Kithairon Mountains, some 104 kilometers (65 miles) distant, a range that separates it from the neighboring territory of Boiotia. Mounts Parnes and Aigaleos rise to the north and west of Athens; Mounts Pentelikon and Hymettos lie to its northeast and east. Mounts Keratovouni and Paneion sit to the southeast of the city, near Laureion. In between these mountains stretch four valleys and three great plains: the Mesogeia Plain to the east of Mount Hymettos, the Pedion (literally, “Plain”) to the northwest of Athens, and the Thriasion Plain between Athens and Eleusis. The Acropolis (literally, “Peak or High Point of the City”) is one of a series of smaller hills that rise within Athens itself (facing page).10 The Areios Pagos, or Areopagus (“Hill of Ares”), sits just beside it at the west, with the Kolonos Agoraios to the northwest skirting the ancient marketplace, or Agora. Farther to the west rise the Pnyx and the Hill of the Nymphs, while at the southwest sits the Mouseion Hill. Ardettos Hill rests to the southeast of the Acropolis beyond the city walls, and farther away at the northeast we find Mount Lykabettos and Strefi Hill. Even farther north rises the ancient Anchesmos (“Sharp-Peaked”) Hill, later called Lykovounia (Wolf Mountains) and, today, Tourkovounia (a more recent reference to Ottoman times). At the south, Attica opens onto the Saronic Gulf through a series of excellent harbors and bays (previous page). It has been estimated that by the 430s B.C., Attica had a population of between 300,000 and 400,000 people. About half of these are believed to have lived in Athens and the area immediately surrounding it.
Map of Attica. (illustration credit ill.5)
It is difficult to grasp today, given the density and overdevelopment of modern Athens, just how diverse the ecosystems of ancient Attica were. Already in Plato’s time, there was a sense that the countryside had changed dramatically over the preceding millennia. In the Kritias, he tells us that the Attic landscape once had mountains with high arable hills, fertile plains deep with loamy soil, and thick forests all around.11 Still, even in his day, the countryside was rich with olive and plane trees, oaks and cypresses, Aleppo pine, cedar, laurel, willow, poplar, elm, almond, walnut, and mastic as well as the evergreen bushes myrtle and oleander. Fruit-bearing trees kept Athenians happy with figs, pears, apples, plums, cherries, pomegranates, and more. Vines and vineyards provided grapes for eating, for drying as raisins, and for making wine. No doubt, vine-entwined arbors provided shade for outdoor living much as they do today. Giant fennel grew wild, along with broom, eglantine, ivy, buckthorn, hemlock, akanthos, and celery.12 Vegetable gardens provided garlic, onions, and prickly lettuce as well as broad beans, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes. A host of herbs, including thyme, sage, oregano, and mint, enlivened the local cuisine.
The fertile fields of the Attic countryside (chora) fed thriving agricultural ventures that produced olives, cereals, and vines (this page). Barley and (to a lesser extent) wheat were grown as mainstays of the diet under a system of crop rotation that left half the land fallow in any given year.13 Above all else, Athenians valued the self-sufficiency that these farms, fields, plantations, and groves brought to their extended families.14 Indeed, the greatest product of Athenian agriculture was the sense of autonomy and independence it brought the people, a citizenry based on landownership. Of course, during the Peloponnesian War, Athens’s survival depended on foreign food imports, especially grain, to supplement local production.15 Nonetheless, Athens prided itself on being an autarkestate polis (a “self-sufficient city”), an ideal held up by Aristotle as a shining virtue of the state.16
Map of Athens. (illustration credit ill.6)
In so many ways the stability and security brought by these private farms created the conditions for the unprecedented rise of democracy—and eventually undemocratic excesses as well. The population boom of the eighth century and subsequent scarcity of land, increasingly concentrated in the hands of a superrich aristocracy, would threaten this agrarian stability until, around 594 B.C., the statesman (and poet) Solon was authorized to introduce reforms.17 His measures helped the peasantry by banning slavery for debt, limiting the amount of land one family could hold, and greatly increasing the number of free, landholding citizens. Still, one’s level of civic participation and representation in government remained commensurate with one’s landholdings. In the new scheme of social census classes introduced by Solon’s reforms, citizens of the uppermost rank, the pentakosiomedimnoi (named for the fact that they owned enough land to produce five hundred measures of grain a year), were eligible for the highest offices of treasurer and eponymous archon (chief magistrate). The next class, the hippeis (named for those who could afford to maintain a horse and thus participate in the cavalry), held property that produced three hundred measures of grain per year. Next came the zeugitai, or teamsters (named for those who maintained a pair of oxen that could be yoked for plowing), whose land produced two hundred measures a year. The lowest class belonged to the thetes, or common laborers, who owned no land whatsoever and could participate only in the assembly (of all citizens) and, importantly, as jurors on law courts. Ownership of land and the cultivation of grain thus rested at the very heart of Athenian civic engagement. Indeed prope
rty came to define Athenian belonging almost as much as genealogy, both being hereditary privileges. By the fourth century, the “Ephebic Oath,” in which young men reaching the age of eighteen pledged to defend the state, spoke as much of agricultural as religious patrimony:
I will honor the religion of my fathers.
I call to witness the gods…
The borders of my fatherland,
The wheat, the barley, the vines,
And the trees of the olive and the fig.18
Attica was also a land bedecked with flowers. We can picture hyacinths, crocuses, anemones, narcissi, cyclamen, asphodels, irises, roses, lilies, hellebore, larkspur, and a multitude of other species beautifying streets, gardens, and open spaces.19 A kind of greenbelt flourished along the edges of Athens, inside and outside the city walls (this page). Groves and gardens were planted close to natural water sources. And many of these came to be regarded as hallowed, associated with local shrines and divinities. At the northwest of the city, a twenty-minute walk beyond its walls and not far from the Kephisos River, grew twelve trees consecrated to Athena in an area called Akademos. The place took its name from the Arkadian hero who showed Kastor and Polydeukes where Theseus had hidden their sister Helen, having stolen her away to Athens. This is the same leafy setting where Plato established his school in 387 B.C., called the Academy after the eponymous place-name.20 The Academy grove was believed to have developed from offshoots of the original sacred olive tree planted by Athena on the Acropolis. A curse hung over anyone who dared cut down the Academy olives, a crime punishable by death or banishment. Oil from the olives of these trees filled the prize amphorae given to winning athletes at the Panathenaic Games. By the 470s B.C., when Athens was recovering from the Persian Wars and enjoying the growth of its young democracy, the aristocratic statesman and general Kimon, as part of his enormously generous public works program (aimed at consolidating political support), built a wall around the Academy and diverted the waters of the Kephisos to irrigate it. He constructed an aqueduct 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) long to bring even more water from the northwest corner of the Agora out to Academy groves, where he planted many more olive and plane trees. Set outside the city walls and in the valley of the Kephisos, the natural setting of the Academy, with its gardens, walkways, and trees, offered Plato and his pupils the perfect place for contemplation and discussion. By the time Plutarch wrote of it in the second century A.D., the Academy was the most wooded spot in all of Athens.21
Philosophers similarly gravitated to a tree-filled retreat at the northeast of Athens known as the Lykeion (this page), presumably after a sanctuary of Apollo Lykaios (“Wolf God”) located somewhere nearby.22 Groves sacred to Apollo are found at his sanctuaries throughout the Greek world, and the trees of the Lykeion may well have originated as a wood connected with Apollo’s worship.23 A gymnasium for sporting activities was already established here in the sixth century. We know from Plato that the Lykeion was a favorite haunt of Sokrates’s (the Platonic dialogue Euthydemos is set here, and, in the Lysis, Sokrates is en route from the Academy to the Lykeion when he gets distracted, ending up at a new palaistra). Aristotle would establish his own philosophical school at the Lykeion in 335 B.C., upon returning from Macedonia, where he taught the young Alexander the Great. It was around this time that the leader and visionary Lykourgos, scion of one of the oldest and noblest Athenian families, the Eteoboutadai, came to power as steward of the financial administration. He allocated funds for the planting of many more trees at the Lykeion.24 Aristotle’s custom of strolling and talking with his pupils under the shade of the Lykeion’s covered walkways and colonnades (peripatoi) led to their being called the Peripatetics. Upon Aristotle’s exile from Athens in 322, his successor, Theophrastos, took up, among other things, the study and organization of botany while working in the Lykeion’s leafy setting.25
Somewhere beneath the Acropolis, in the direction of the Ilissos River, a grove of two hundred olive trees grew within the shrine of Kodros, Neleos, and Basile.26 Kodros belonged to the period called the Dark Ages (ca. 1100–750 B.C.) when kings ruled Athens; he was the last of them, and Neleos was his son.27 An inscription of Roman date, found to the southeast of the Acropolis, claims to be the epitaph for Kodros’s grave monument.28 It tells us that the body of the king (who valiantly gave his life to save the people from an advancing Dorian army) was embalmed by the Athenians and buried at the foot of the Acropolis.29 The Delphic oracle had foretold that the Dorian invaders would prevail only if they avoided killing the Athenian king. When Kodros heard of the prophecy, he disguised himself as a peasant and wandered out beyond the city walls, pretending to gather wood. Coming upon the enemy camp near the Ilissos River, the king intentionally provoked an argument with two guards, whereupon a fight ensued, with Kodros killing one of the soldiers and the other killing Kodros in turn. Realizing what had happened, the Athenians asked the invaders to return to them the body of their king. When the Dorians, too, figured out that they had killed the king of Athens, they retreated, certain that their siege could now only fail.
By the fifth century B.C. the days of Kodros and the Athenian monarchy (“rule by one”) were long gone. Indeed, the great kingships of Mycenaean Greece (ca. 1600–1100 B.C.) did not survive the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, and when monarchies emerged in the period that followed, local kings (basileis) seem to have been considerably weaker than their Mycenaean predecessors. During the eighth and seventh centuries these kings would have ruled with the consent and support of aristocratic families, most likely buttressed by marriage alliances. The transition away from kingship seems to have been a gradual one, with local aristocracies (“rule by the best”) and oligarchies (“rule of the few”) eventually taking over.30 At Athens, a few eminent old families had become enormously wealthy off the bounty of their landholdings. Known as the Eupatrids (“Good-Fathered” or “Wellborn”), these clans were fiercely competitive with one another, establishing rivalries that endured for generations. In the course of the eighth century they gained control of the powerful civic offices of polemarch (magistrate of war) and eponymous archon (chief magistrate). In 712 B.C., the aristocracy’s authority was further increased when the office of archon basileus (king magistrate) was opened to them as well, giving the Eupatrids power within all branches of city administration, including the law courts. The Athenians seem to have had an innate resistance to the idea of any one individual dominating governance. Originally, the three archonships were held for a ten-year term, but in 684/683 they were reduced to one year, limiting the power of any one man. Under the reforms of Solon, who served as eponymous archon in 594 B.C., there was a brief period during which the number of archons rose to ten, but it was later reduced to nine when the office of polemarch was moved to the body of strategoi (“army leaders” or “generals”). The movement toward fuller inclusion in participatory government began under Solon and culminated at the end of the sixth century with the “democratic revolution” led by Kleisthenes in 508/507 B.C.
By the time Antiphon served as eponymous archon in 418/417, Athens had thus enjoyed ninety years of democracy, and its nine annual archons were now chosen by lot from a short list of eligible candidates. An inscribed decree published during the archonship of Antiphon lays out terms for the lease of the sacred precinct of Kodros.31 There is debate over the exact location of this sanctuary. Some scholars place it within the city walls to the southeast of the Acropolis, and others locate it outside the walls on the banks of the Ilissos.32 In any case, the inscription prescribes that the lessee enclose the temenos with a wall, paid for at his own expense. He is also required to plant no fewer than two hundred young olives within the sanctuary, more if he likes. In return, the lessee will have control over “the ditch and all the rainwater that flows between the shrine of Dionysos and the gates through which the mystai [initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries] make their way to the sea,” that is, to the Bay of Phaleron. He shall also have control of all the water that flows “between
the public house and the gates that lead to the baths of Isthmonikos.”
This text underscores the great premium on water in ancient Athens and use of open spaces as water traps for capturing this precious resource. The lessee gets a fair deal: in exchange for building the enclosure wall and planting the grove, he claims the freshwater collected here. In the process, he honors the gods and forefathers by beautifying the shrine of one of the noblest and most selfless of Athenian mythic ancestors. Indeed, upon Kodros’s death (by tradition, around 1068 B.C.) it was decided no one would deserve the title of king again. His son Medon (whose name means “Ruler”) thus became the first archon, or “commander.”33
THE MARKETPLACE OF ANCIENT ATHENS, known as the Agora, occupied a low, flat area to the northwest of the Acropolis (this page). This space was filled with flowers and greenery. We are told that the general Kimon, responsible for the Academy grove, also planted plane trees in the Agora in an effort to beautify the city following its destruction by the Persians.34 The sack of the Acropolis in 480 B.C. destroyed the temple (still under construction) that immediately preceded the Parthenon, a building known as the Older Parthenon. But the wrath of the Persians spilled down from the Acropolis cliffs as well and consumed the city. The relandscaping of the Agora went a long way toward reestablishing normalcy. A grove of laurel and olive trees surrounded the Altar of the Twelve Gods in its northwest corner; excavations have revealed pits, measuring roughly a meter in diameter, for planting these trees.35 The grove was watered by a channel directing runoff from two fountain houses at the higher ground to the south.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 3