Once reunited with their youngest sibling, the Olympians launched a violent ten-year campaign against their father and his generation of Titans.19 As the so-called Titanomachy raged on, Zeus emerged as lord of the Olympians while Atlas became leader of the other side. The Titans laid siege to Mount Olympos as only Titans could, piling one mountain atop another until they reached the summit and from there hurling huge boulders at the gods.
The Titanomachy provided a narrative structure for comprehending the cataclysmic events that shaped the universe. The earliest clashes had been those between earth and sky gods; their children, the Titans, eventually battled their children, the Olympians. The next cosmic conflict was that between the Olympian gods and the Giants of their own generation, the so-called Gigantomachy. These celestial and terrestrial wars set a new generation against an earlier one in universal struggles to tame the brutal forces of nature and the cosmos. And it was in terms of these “boundary catastrophes” that primordial time was comprehended and organized into eras, much as the great floods provided reference points in chapter 1.20
The battle of the gods and the Titans follows a classic model for succession seen in ancient Near Eastern and European genealogical myths in which one generation of divinities overthrows a dominant, older generation. Indeed, Hesiod refers to the Titans as the “former gods,” the theoi proteroi, a term also found in the Rigveda, the sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dated sometime between 1700 and 1100 B.C.,21 wherein the older generation of Sadhyas residing in heaven are subdued by the storm god Indra. There are also “former gods” in Hittite texts, identified with the infernal gods of the Babylonian pantheon, the Anunnaki.22 Just like Hesiod’s Titans, the Anunnaki are locked in the depths of the underworld by a storm god who leads a younger generation of divinities in revolt. Babylonian myth of the second millennium gives a parallel story in which the Anunnaki are defeated and cast into the depths of Earth by the young Marduk, a god who rides into battle on his storm chariot, armed with arrows, lightning, and the winds.23
The Olympian gods are aided in the Titanomachy by the Cyclopes, still angry with Kronos for imprisoning them in the depths of Tartaros. They arm Zeus with lightning, thunder, and the thunderbolt, weaponry forged in their foundry deep within Earth. These tools transform Zeus into a proper sky god, the equivalent of his ancient Near Eastern counterparts, all-powerful young upstarts who bring down prior pantheons.24 The Cyclopes’ offerings to Zeus give intelligible form to the fulmination through which he destroys the enemy. As Martin West has put it, “Thunder is what you hear, lightning is what you see, and the thunderbolt is what hits you.”25 Thus, the noise, crash, and din of primordial battle is manifest: a fantastic multimedia and kinetic display of sound, light, and electrostatic discharge.
This terrifying cosmic spectacle adorns the earliest stone temple on the Acropolis in sculptures summoning the shrieking acoustics, the spectacular visual effects, and the so-called mysterium tremendum, the overwhelming awe and dread of confronting the unimaginable power of the gods.26 Indeed, to inspire such wonder and terror was an essential aim of architectural sculpture throughout Greece during the sixth century; we need only think of the giant stone pediment of the temple of Artemis at Kerkyra (Corfu) with its menacing Medousa, ferocious panthers, and lumbering Giants fallen dead in the corners of the gable.27 The experience of sacred space was meant to be shocking, anxiety inducing, and disorienting, playing havoc with the emotions. Thus, Archaic sanctuaries teem with Gorgons, sphinxes, wild animals, monsters, and Giants.
The Athenian Acropolis was the same, only more so. Sometime around 575 B.C., the Athenians began work on an immense stone temple, the largest of its day for Attica. By now, several of its neighboring city-states were ruled by powerful tyrants who had enhanced their local sanctuaries with monumental temples, and this might have fueled an innate Athenian competitiveness to build one of their own.28 By the mid-seventh century the tyrant Kypselos at Corinth had constructed for Apollo the first great stone temple with peristyle colonnade and tiled roof on the Greek mainland, followed shortly thereafter by a comparable structure for Poseidon at Isthmia.29 By the turn of the sixth century, many more mainland temples were surrounded with what would become the classical Greek signature: the exterior colonnade.30 Since bigger is better when it comes to prayer and pleasing the gods, Athens was not to be outdone, and Athena would soon have an enormous stone temple of her own.
Deeply apprehensive of surrendering control to any one man, the Athenians had resisted tyranny throughout the seventh and into the sixth century. Power at Athens remained in the hands of a few noble and highly competitive families, clans that had risen to wealth off the abundance of their landholdings. And so it fell to these Eupatrids and their oligarchies to initiate the formalization of the Acropolis shrines. But all was not well at Athens; indeed, tensions between the haves and the have-nots had brought the city-state to a point of near collapse. As we have seen in chapter 1, Solon was brought in as archon and mediator in 594 and set to work completely reorganizing civic representation, allowing for limited empowerment of the citizen masses. By forgiving their debts, abolishing their sale into slavery to fellow Athenians, and giving them an increased voice in the assembly and law courts, Solon raised the people of Athens to a new level of prosperity and fuller participation in government. Interestingly, Solon’s reforms also codified laws concerning prizes for athletic victors, asserting for the first time the role of the state in athletic concerns. Harmony at the intersection of athletics, the aristocracy, and the people was vital to the equilibrium of the state.31
The newfound stability brought by Solon’s reforms enabled Athenians to reconfigure not only their Acropolis as sanctuary but also their local festival of Athena. A string of Athenian athletes had already distinguished themselves at the Olympic Games during the course of the seventh century, winning victories in 696, 692, 644, 640, and 636 B.C.32 Now it was time for them to compete at home in games that would bring competitors to Athens from all across the Greek world. This shift may have been part of a major reorganization of the festival in 566 B.C., when the city celebrated its first Great Panathenaia, an international version of what until then had been a local feast. A series of inscriptions dated to this time show that official action was taken to make a dromos (“racetrack” or “road”) and “for the first time” to establish the agon (“contest”) for the “Steely-Eyed One,” Athena herself.33 Later sources tell us that this reorganization took place during the archonship of Hippokleides, that is, in 566/565.34 As an athletic aristocrat from the horse-racing family of Miltiades (from the clan Philaidai), Hippokleides’s exact role with regard to the festival is unknown. But his leadership in this regard seems to have been encroached upon by Peisistratos, an ambitious member of a rival family from his home district of Brauron in eastern Attica. A late source credits Peisistratos with the introduction of the Great Panathenaia, and given his bold actions soon thereafter, it seems the young aristocrat seized this opportunity to advance his designs for establishing a tyranny of his own.35
While Solon’s laws worked well in bettering the lot of the Athenian masses, fierce rivalries within the aristocracy endured, particularly those between three dominant clans. The rich and reactionary conservatives of the grain-producing plains (pedies), led by Lykourgos, wanted the new laws repealed. The somewhat weaker men of the coast (paraloi), led by Megakles, were fairly happy with Solon’s reforms. The smallest and poorest group, the men of the hills (hyperakrioi), led by Peisistratos, were somewhat disappointed since they had hoped to receive additional lands under the new regime. But of the three noble families and their leaders, Aristotle tells us that it was Peisistratos who was most open to democracy.36 A distant relative of Solon himself, Peisistratos would eventually win the backing of both the nobility and the people;37 in doing so, he would become the shining personality of sixth-century Athens.
THE NEW STONE TEMPLE on the Acropolis rock might have been a result of Solon’s inspired program, but i
t would take decades to quarry the limestone, transport it to the summit, organize teams of stonemasons and building crews, and raise the structure. A great ramp, some 80 meters (262 feet) long and over 10 meters (33 feet) wide, had to be built on the western slope of the Acropolis for the hauling of materials and equipment. Surely, the temple was finished in time for the inauguration of the Great Panathenaia of 566, when this same ramp would have served as pathway for the sacred procession, leading the marchers and a hundred head of cattle up the slopes to the altar of Athena. The new temple would not disappoint.
It rose from a platform measuring 46 by nearly 21 meters (151 by 69 feet), rivaling the great size of the temple of Artemis at Kerkyra. Its Doric peristyle showed six columns on the façades and thirteen down the flanks (insert this page, bottom image, temple at south or top).38 The temple was made of limestone and adorned with metopes and gutters of Hymettian marble; the roof was crowned with marble tiles and ornaments (akroteria) that included sphinxes, palmettes, and maidens (below).39
Most astonishing are the robustly carved limestone figures in the gables, richly colored with red, blue, green, and black pigment. A large number of fragments recovered in the late nineteenth century allow for the reconstruction of the pedimental compositions. A lion and lioness killing a bull adorn the center of one pediment, while the other preserves a bull gored by a lioness alone. Both gables feature scenes of cosmic and terrestrial battles, showing serpent-tailed monsters and huge coiling snakes slithering into the narrow corners of the pedimental frame (below, facing page, and insert this page, top).40
Modern interpreters have called this Archaic building by many names: Hekatompedon (“Hundred-Footer”), Temple H, H-Building, the Ur-Parthenon, and the Bluebeard Temple,41 this last designation referring to a unique sculptural group usually assigned to the corner of one of the pediments.42 It shows a weird and wonderful human-headed, three-bodied monster with spreading wings incised on the back wall of the tympanum and a lower torso that terminates in three entwined snaky coils (above and insert this page, top). The grinning, mustachioed, and wide-eyed faces of the beast are trimmed at the chin by pointed beards highlighted in blackish-blue paint: hence the nickname. Scholars have long debated the identity of this beast.43
Reconstruction drawing of façade of Bluebeard Temple (Hekatompedon?) by M. Korres. (illustration credit ill.14)
Bluebeard Temple pediment (Hekatompedon?). Athens, Acropolis Museum. (illustration credit ill.15)
As it appears so early in the history of architectural sculpture, this fantastic creature has few iconographic parallels. The closest is found not in monumental stone but painted on a Chalkidean water jug dated some thirty years later (insert this page, bottom).44 The vase shows a very similar composite with human head (albeit only one), giant bird wings, and legs in the form of viper coils. This monster, too, is wide-eyed with a pointed beard and must represent Typhoeus or Typhon, the most hideous monster of the primordial era. By some accounts, he was the last son of Gaia and Tartaros and known as the Father of All Monsters. But in the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, Typhon is the child of Hera alone—a kind of parallel to Zeus’s child Athena.45 Fascinatingly, Hephaistos is also regarded as the son of Hera alone; both Typhon and the god of the fiery forge can be seen as the embodiment of Hera’s rage against Zeus. The presence of Typhon on the Hekatompedon pediment might in some way have reminded the Athenians of their problematic ancestor He- phaistos.46 Whatever the case, Typhon represents a Greek counterpart to the gruesome water reptiles slain by gods/heroes in Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Hittite, Vedic, and European lore.47 Following the model of the great dragon figure that can only be slain once, Typhon meets his match in the storm god Zeus, who kills him with extraordinary violence.
Typhon appears amiable enough on the Chalkidean water jug, though he is shown on his very best behavior, beseeching Zeus to spare his life. Zeus, whose name appears in a painted inscription just before him, fiercely brandishes his flaming thunderbolt. Head-to-head in cosmic combat, the elegant, well-coiffed, and beautifully dressed Zeus confronts the wild, hairy, and lumbering behemoth Typhon in an archetypal clash between the younger generation of civilized Olympians and the older generation of feral monsters, celestial and terrestrial.
When we turn to the Bluebeard pediment, we find a demon creature similarly confronted by Zeus, very little of whose figure survives; just a small part of the storm god’s draped left arm can be made out in low relief against the tympanum wall. It is clear, however, that the arm stretches out toward the three-bodied monster, and it is likely that we have Zeus, once again, threatening with his thunderbolt.
Apollodoros tells us that Typhon was a beast like no other: taller than the mountains, his head brushing the stars. When he spread his arms, he could touch the farthest reaches of East and West.48 Hesiod tells us that out of Typhon’s shoulders came “a hundred fearsome snake-heads with black tongues flickering.”49 The Bluebeard monster’s chest and shoulders are, indeed, pierced by holes with traces of lead surviving within them, where twelve small limestone snakes may once have been attached.50 Writing centuries later, Apollodoros similarly reports that from the monster’s thighs down, huge vipers emitted a long hissing sound: “Such and so great was Typhon when, hurling kindled rocks, he made for the very heaven with hissing and shouts, spouting a great jet of fire from his mouth.”51
We should not underestimate the “acoustical effect” of monstrous creatures portrayed in Archaic Greek sanctuaries. We are at a disadvantage today, our sense of realism persuaded only by Dolby Surround sound. The ancients were far more suggestible, and the evocation of sound completes pictures and brings deeper understanding to how the images were received. Looking at the deliberately openmouthed Typhon on the Chalkidean vase or at the beseeching hand gesture of the Bluebeard monster, we must try to imagine what those versed in Hesiod’s description of the beast would have heard: “There were voices in all his fearsome heads, giving out every kind of indescribable sound. Sometimes they uttered as if for the gods’ understanding, sometimes again the sound of a bellowing bull whose might is uncontainable and whose voice is proud, sometimes again of a lion who knows no restraint, sometimes again of a pack of hounds, astonishing to hear; sometimes again he hissed; and the long mountains echoed below.”52 These susurrous sounds and clamor brought the narrative to life, palpably inducing the intended emotional response of fear.
Zeus is angry and unmoved by the monster’s clattering arsenal. He unleashes the full force of the elements, inciting a horrifying din of his own with fire, water, and wind. Hesiod describes it: “A conflagration held the violet-dark sea in its grip, both from the thunder and lightning and from the fire of the monster, from the tornado winds and the flaming bolt. All the land was seething, and sky, and sea; long waves raged to and fro about the headlands from the onrush of the immortals and an uncontrollable quaking arose.”53 The Bluebeard-Typhon holds out in his hands a wave, a flame, and a bird, signaling the cache of water, fire, and wind that he will surrender to Zeus if only he is spared. But Zeus stands firm and Typhon is destroyed. A full blast of celestial and terrestrial tumult is thus effectively conjured in the single image of the Acropolis pediment’s Bluebeard monster.
At the left of the gable, Zeus’s son Herakles is shown subduing the water serpent Triton (this page and insert this page, top).54 This can now be understood as a parallel scene in which the father-son duo tame the forces of nature and the cosmos across two generations: Zeus dispatches Typhon, while Zeus’s son Herakles kills Poseidon’s son Triton. And, of course, Triton has his own special genealogical connection to the myth narrative of Athens, having served as Athena’s foster father following her birth near the lake or the river Triton in Libya. Indeed, the Bluebeard pediment is framed with imagery evoking the north Libyan wetlands where Triton lived and this battle with Herakles took place. Some forty fragments from the underside of the raking cornice show two forms of brightly painted, incised lotus flowers (insert this page, bottom); twenty othe
rs show waterfowl, including storks and sea eagles.55
The clash of Zeus and Typhon similarly took place at the seaside, alternatively set along the coasts of Syria and Cilicia. According to one tradition, Zeus lures Typhon out of his pit with the promise of a fish feast by the seashore. In another, Typhon hides Zeus’s weapons and sinews within his cave near the sea.56 The lotus and waterfowl on the underside of the pediment’s raking cornice thus evoke the flora and fauna of Typhon’s lair as well as that of Triton. And thus the architectural frame is conceived as a “window” through which flying birds and marsh vegetation can be seen to set the stage on which gods, heroes, and monsters engage in cosmic clashes.57
EXACTLY WHERE the building that held the Bluebeard pediment stood and by what name it was called in antiquity remain a mystery. This is because the temple seems to have occupied the same spot where the Parthenon stands today. In any event, we cannot know what filled that space before the construction of the giant twenty-five-course platform on which the Parthenon still rests.
There is, however, another theory about the placement of the Bluebeard Temple, one setting it to the north of the Parthenon where foundations are preserved from a temple built at the end of the sixth century. The so-called Old Athena Temple, as we have seen, will be destroyed by the Persians and supplanted by the Erechtheion. But meanwhile, it stood on what have been nicknamed the Dörpfeld foundations after the nineteenth-century Acropolis excavator Wilhelm Dörpfeld (this page). He believed that the Bluebeard Temple had been set on the innermost foundations until the Old Athena Temple, built on the outermost, replaced it.58
The Parthenon Enigma Page 8