The Parthenon Enigma

by Joan Breton Connelly

  Two rough limestone column bases found embedded in the foundations of the Old Athena Temple (this page) in 1885 may be remnants of an even earlier incarnation of the shrine dating to the first half of the seventh century.92 These bases would have held wooden columns supporting a superstructure of mud brick. This temple, or perhaps an even earlier (albeit hypothetical) eighth-century predecessor, may be the shrine of which Homer speaks when he says that Erechtheus “entered the rich temple of Athena” on the Acropolis.93 This is likely to have been the temple where Kylon took refuge in his failed coup attempt during the 630s. Interestingly, this seventh-century shrine was called the Old Temple (Archaios Neos), just like the building that replaced it. All these incarnations of Athena’s holy precinct (hypothetical eighth-century shrine, seventh-century temple, Old Athena Temple, and Erechtheion) sat upon the site of the Bronze Age Mycenaean palace (this page), making visible in perpetuity a bond with the heroic past. (At other sites, like Mycenae and Tiryns, Iron Age temples are built atop or near the “big room” or “megaron” of the local palace’s remains.)94 A small bronze cutout relief (previous page) may give a hint at the decoration of the seventh-century Athena temple.95 We see the terrorizing face of Medousa, the Gorgon sister, sticking out her tongue and baring her sharp incisors. If one imagines also the horrifying screech the Gorgons were thought to make, one can re-create the effect meant to scare away any force of sinister intent.

  Bronze Gorgon akroterion (?), from Acropolis, seventh century B.C. Athens, Acropolis Museum. (illustration credit ill.22)

  IN ADDITION TO the construction of the Old Athena Temple, the early years of Athenian democracy might also have witnessed the inception of a second new structure on the Acropolis, set just to the south and roughly parallel to Athena’s shrine. On the very spot where the Bluebeard Temple might have stood, a massive platform of nearly ten thousand limestone blocks was laid in preparation for the building of a new temple, sometimes called the Grandfather of the Parthenon, or Parthenon I, by Dörpfeld, Manolis Korres, and other scholars.96 But a contrasting view dates the foundations much later, after the battle of Marathon in 490, when they would have been positioned to support the immediate predecessor of the Parthenon, a building simply referred to as the Older Parthenon.97 These foundations, constructed of limestone blocks quarried 10 kilometers (6 miles) away in the Piraeus and set some twenty-one courses deep on its south side, represent an enormous undertaking in anticipation of a huge new structure.

  If this platform was already laid at the end of the sixth or early fifth century, it might have been that the young democracy wished to replace the Bluebeard Temple, tainted as it might have been with links to the Peisistratid tyranny. With a new regime dawning, memories of the disastrous ending of the old administration had to be expunged. After all, the tyrant Hippias was now ensconced with the Persians, and his memory was one thing that need not be preserved in stone. Any thought of finishing his giant temple of Olympian Zeus near the Ilissos was abandoned when his tyranny came to an end. So it might have been that the Bluebeard Temple was regarded as a monument in need of replacing. In any event, if there was a plan for a new temple to replace the Hekatompedon, it was not yet to be realized.

  For in the East, King Darius of Persia was busy with plans of his own, ever expanding his empire westward into territories long held by the Greeks of Asia Minor (on the western coast of present-day Turkey). By 499 B.C., these Ionian states had had enough and pushed back against Persian aggression. The Athenians sent help in the form of ships and troops but paid heavily for this support. The Persians crushed the Ionian revolt and then turned their sights, and revenge, squarely upon the Athenians themselves. War was inevitable. With the Persian threat looming, the populist leader Themistokles, elected archon in 493, diverted the Athenian treasury to a more urgent need than that of building a new temple. He focused Attic resources on the creation of a fleet of warships, galvanizing the city’s maritime assets in a move that would prove indispensable to Athenian survival.

  In August of 490 B.C., tens of thousands of Persian troops landed on Marathon beach, the turncoat Hippias showing the way. Plutarch tells us that the hero Theseus appeared to the Athenians in the course of the ensuing battle, rushing out in front of them in full armor and leading them to victory just as in days of old.98 In what is regarded as one of the greatest military watersheds of all time, 6,400 Persians are said to have fallen that day to Athenian losses of just 192.99 The extraordinary bravery of the Athenian soldiers and their Plataian allies instantly catapulted them to epic heroic status. The Marathon dead were awarded the extraordinary honor of burial on the spot where they fell, placed together in one great tumulus that became a monument unto itself.100

  In the wake of the triumph at Marathon, construction began in earnest on the immediate predecessor of the Parthenon, the so-called Older Parthenon.101 Athena needed to be thanked and honored for the astonishing victory. The new temple would have six columns on its ends and sixteen running down its sides (this page and following page), and for the first time ever the Athenians would build a temple entirely of marble. This marble would come from their own Mount Pentelikon, the city’s swelling pride permitting no import of materials.102

  But Persian fury would intervene. A vast Persian army and navy advanced into Attica in 480 B.C. to avenge their defeat at Marathon. Now under the command of Darius’s son Xerxes, the enemy first won a critical battle at Thermopylai, defeating the 300 valiant Spartans under the command of Leonidas, before marching on to Athens. Seeing what was coming and discouraged by reports that the sacred snake had disappeared from the Acropolis, most Athenians evacuated the city, seeking refuge on the nearby island of Salamis. Everyone knew that the Persian attack would be violent, but no one was prepared for the devastating destruction of the most holy buildings on the Acropolis itself. The Persian army surrounded the Sacred Rock, one division positioning itself on the Areopagus to better shoot flaming arrows up at the wooden ramparts. A few Persian soldiers scaled the precipitous and unguarded eastern cliff of the Acropolis, just above the sanctuary of Aglauros (insert this page, bottom). Once on top, they opened the western gate, and the full Persian army flooded in, massacring those few suppliants and defenders who had chosen to stay, plundering the temples, and setting the whole citadel ablaze. It was an atrocity beyond comprehension for the Greeks. Hellenes had long followed a code by which the holy places of enemies were respected and spared during war. After all, their destruction was certain to incur divine wrath. But the Persians worshipped other gods and showed no respect for the Olympians.

  Hypothetical visualization of Older Parthenon and Old Athena Temple in 480 B.C., prior to Persian siege. (illustration credit ill.23)

  The Old Athena Temple was hit hard in the siege, as was the Older Parthenon still under construction to the south of it. Manolis Korres, the architect-engineer-archaeologist who oversaw the Acropolis Restoration Program for some thirty years, has established that the Older Parthenon was standing to a height of just two or three column drums, still unfluted, when the Persians attacked. But there was wooden scaffolding set up all around it, providing plenty of fuel to feed the flames (facing page).103 Korres has identified thermal fractures on many of the temple’s blocks, including the upper steps of its platform, which would be reshaped, capped, and reused more than thirty years later for the Periklean Parthenon.104

  The Athenians did not despair but, keeping hope, retrenched and brilliantly expelled the Persians just a year later. Thanks to Themistokles’s insight and careful preparation, they had developed their secret weapon: a powerful fleet of two hundred warships manned by a legion of highly trained and financially compensated oarsmen drawn from the thetes, the poorest of Athenian citizen classes. Themistokles himself would lead the stunning naval victory off the island of Salamis in September of 480, a victory that would soon be followed in 479 by sound defeat of the Persian land forces, deprived of their naval support, at the Battle of Plataia.105 Thucydides tells us that immediate
ly after the “barbarians had departed from the land,” the Athenians brought their women, children, and possessions back from their places of refuge and began “rebuilding their city and its walls.”106 Any surviving blocks in a condition to be reused were gathered up for hasty construction of the great defensive walls that Themistokles ordered for the immediate securing of the city. These included blocks fallen from the Acropolis buildings. Broken and battered Archaic statues, including the famous korai (“maidens”) that had once stood as sumptuous dedications to the goddess, were collected and buried in pits within the sanctuary, lovingly laid to rest within the sacred space.

  Display of reused column drums, north fortification wall, Athenian Acropolis. (illustration credit ill.24)

  Column drums from the Older Parthenon and surviving triglyphs, metopes, architrave, and cornice blocks from the Old Athena Temple were salvaged and built into the Acropolis’s north fortification wall, no doubt under the watch of Themistokles (previous page).107 That they are displayed in the same architectural order as they would have appeared on the temple (column drums carefully stacked to reconstruct “columns,” metopes and triglyphs reconstructed in their proper sequence) shows a reverential reconstruction meant to evoke the destroyed temples and not simply an expeditious reuse of architectural elements to strengthen the fortification wall. Thus these architectural relics formed a commemorative display: proof of the Persian atrocities and the destruction of the city’s most sacred shrines. They bore witness to the horrors suffered by a generation of Athenian heroes in the early decades of democracy. And so, the Athenians reconciled their desire to remember and their desire to create; their need to memorialize and their need to move forward.

  The Old Athena Temple was not completely destroyed in the Persian attack; its façades and part of its westernmost room (known as the opisthodomos) seem to have remained standing while its roof and interior collapsed (facing page).108 This would help explain why the Erechtheion (built just to the north of it in the last quarter of the fifth century) respected its foundations and adopted such a peculiar design for its southern flank. Indeed, the long stretch of wall to the east of the Porch of the Maidens was left completely blank, something very strange within the larger scheme of Greek architecture. But if battered remains of the Old Athena Temple still occupied parts of the Dörpfeld foundations at the time when the Erechtheion was built, this southern wall might have been left necessarily unadorned as it was mostly hidden by the standing ruins (facing page and this page). The Erechtheion’s karyatid porch extends farther south to encroach upon the Dörpfeld foundations at a place where the Old Athena Temple may have completely collapsed. While it is difficult to prove this was so, it does make sense and would continue the tradition in which ruined walls of earlier periods (see the Mycenaean fortifications, this page) were preserved and respected on the Acropolis as relics of the past. What is clear is that the Acropolis was ever a place of memory, bearing palpable witness to earlier eras, past struggles against deadly enemies, and the victories that defeated them. Again, in the absence of photography or film, it was essential to preserve tangible evidence of past history, or else future generations might forget it, or not believe it at all.

  Hypothetical visualization of surviving opisthodomos of the Old Athena Temple with Erechtheion at right.

  Like the cosmic battles of Zeus and Typhon projected on the Bluebeard Temple pediment and the clash of gods and Giants on the Old Athena Temple, a new generation of terrifying enemies confronted Athenians of the early fifth century. The Persian behemoth had raised its ugly head, but this monster, like Drako, Typhon, Triton, the Hydra, and Enkelados before it, would be soundly slain, this time, in the waters off Salamis and in the wheat fields of Plataia. (illustration credit ill.25)

  3

  PERIKLEAN POMP

  The Parthenon Moment and Its Passing

  PERIKLES WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN when the smoke rose from the smoldering Acropolis in 480 B.C. We cannot know if he watched with his family from Salamis, to which most Athenians fled. It is said that when the Athenian fleet routed the Persians, months later, in waters off that island, his (future) friend Sophokles, aged sixteen, was chosen to lead the victory dance. Already renowned for his good looks and flair as an entertainer, Sophokles performed the triumphant paean, serving as top boy in the male chorus, an auspicious debut for one who would eventually rank among the greatest tragedians of all time.

  We can only wonder how the trauma of the Persian attack affected the psyches of the Attic teenagers who grew up to forge what has been called the golden age of Periklean Athens. Theirs was a rarefied cohort, those young men of the highest privilege, but also united in their common experience of unimaginable shock suffered at a tender age. Did the ordeal of seeing the very existence of the young democracy threatened spur them on to special greatness as thinkers, artists, architects, playwrights, generals, and, yes, politicians, achieving things that endure superlative even today?

  Perikles, for one, was certainly set on a road to success from the start; even his name (peri + kleos) promises he would be “surrounded by glory.” The boy studied music with the theorist Damon and went on to learn philosophy from Anaxagoras, whom he would befriend.1 As an adult, and aspirant to power, Perikles would still enjoy discussing philosophy, especially with Protagoras and Zeno of Elea, and he was close to the geometer Hippodamos of Miletos, whom he would hire to lay out the harbor town of Piraeus. But among his very dearest friends was Pheidias, the master sculptor who would collaborate with him in planning the Parthenon and its sculptural program. That, however, would not be for some time, a quarter century later, when Athens was at its imperial zenith.

  While he was still in his early twenties, in the spring of 472, Perikles’s very first public act was to finance a production of Aeschylus’s Persians, a play that celebrated none other than the Athenian victory at Salamis. It was a canny gesture for the future statesman, presenting a drama that spoke hopefully to his generation, still scarred by the Persian War period and the sack of the Acropolis. Standing at the very center of this cohort, Perikles the aristocrat would rise as a champion of the people, the man as naturally cool and aloof as Olympian Zeus discovering a gift for charismatic oratory with which he could stir the masses.2 By that time it was democracy not as the Athenians had first imagined it but an even purer strain, for good and ill.

  Much of what we know of Perikles comes from the golden hindsight of those who wrote after his death, Thucydides and Plutarch chief among these admirers.3 But a few facts speak for themselves, attesting to the magnitude of Perikles’s accomplishments. Every two years from 450 to 429, he was elected by popular vote (with the exception of only one term) to the council of ten generals, or strategoi. The office of strategos was far more than a military responsibility, giving the ten who held it the authority to speak before all others at meetings of the assembly. One of the few elected positions, the strategos was as close as one could come to being a civic leader in a democracy that now distributed most jobs by lot, or sortition. (This seemed to the Athenians only fair, ensuring every man had an equal chance at most public positions—those requiring no special expertise anyway—and that none was unduly advantaged by reason of wealth.) That Perikles could hold on to his elected office for some twenty years, never successfully challenged or ostracized (as his father had been and so many of his friends and enemies would be), speaks to his exceptional skills.

  IN TIME, Perikles came to embody Athens of the fifth century in a way that Peisistratos had done for the Athens of the sixth. But if the masses were readily swayed, his fellow aristocrats were not as easy to dispatch. Perikles was of the Alkmeonidai, rival clan of the Peisistratids, his mother’s brother being none other than Kleisthenes, architect of the Athenian democracy. And through his father, the war hero and politician Xanthippos, Perikles belonged to the Athenian tribe Akamantis and the deme (or burg) of Cholargos. In 461 B.C., when he was roughly thirty-five, he stepped into the political spotlight as a leading advocate
for the ostracism of Kimon, who was related through marriage to the Philaidai. Enmity between the two families went back a generation, when Xanthippos had imposed exile and a hefty fine of fifty talents on Kimon’s father, Miltiades, the general responsible for the victory at Marathon.4 Unable to pay the fine, the heroic warrior died in jail, bequeathing the onerous penalty and the attendant resentment to his son.

  Kimon would become a war hero in his own right, distinguishing himself fighting the Persians at Salamis and later in Thrace, Skyros, and at the battle on the Eurymedon River in Pamphilia (southern Turkey). As a leading statesman throughout the 470s and 460s, he had a crucial part in building the Athenian navy, which allowed the city to become an empire. Military victory was remunerative, and so, having paid off his father’s debt, Kimon lavished his personal fortune on civic projects. He is said to have been the first to adorn Athens with elegant spaces for public use.5 He planted many plane trees in the Agora. He transformed the Academy into a shady grove, well watered by an aqueduct some 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) long, carrying runoff from the market. Spoils from his military conquests also enabled Kimon to finance the rebuilding of the south wall of the Acropolis, the laying out of the Long Walls connecting Athens to the Piraeus, and the construction of the Klepsydra fountain and the Painted Stoa (from which the philosophical school of Stoicism takes its name). But when, in 462 B.C., Kimon led an unsuccessful mission in support of the Spartans (against the Helot uprisings), he opened himself to accusations of fraternizing with Athens’s enemy. This gave Perikles the perfect opportunity: he launched a case for ostracism against Kimon. Thus did Perikles use a tool of fifth-century democracy (the ancient version of today’s recall referendum) to advance his personal political ambitions, forcing his main rival to leave Athens for ten long years.