The Parthenon Enigma
Page 15
Nowhere is this belief more powerfully expressed than in that most famous of Greek orations, the eulogy Perikles delivered in the autumn of 431 at the end of the first season of the Peloponnesian War. Just a year after the Corinthians’ address to the Spartan assembly, war had indeed broken out as feared, and now Perikles stood in the public cemetery (demosion sema, this page) addressing the families of the fallen and the citizenry as a whole. This is what Thucydides tells us he said, honoring the first Athenians to die:
I will speak first of our ancestors, for it is right and seemly that now, when we are lamenting the dead, a tribute should be paid to their memory. There has never been a time when they did not inhabit this land, which by their valour they have handed down from generation to generation, and we have received from them a free state.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.36.1100
Perikles goes on to praise Athens as the best city in all of Greece, attributing its preeminence to its status as a global center. Panhellenism had long been a feature of aristocratic life, but Athens (and Perikles) had awakened all citizens, rich and poor alike, to its virtues. Free trade and a vibrant network of international partners benefited all Athenians:
Because of the greatness of our city, the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.38.2101
Perikles takes this opportunity to respond to critics of his lavish building program, no doubt gesturing toward his gleaming Acropolis overhead. Yes, imperialism had created the wealth necessary to bring together the genius of gifted artists, architects, and artisans and to pay for the sumptuous materials. But this effort made Athens beautiful for all citizens—both the elite and the masses. Perikles makes no excuses for the desire to be surrounded by beautiful things; indeed, with a true populist’s instinct, he deems it shameful not to strive against poverty.
For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.40102
Perikles ends his oration by extolling the superiority of Athenians, who, alone among the Greeks, created a society that others wished to imitate:
We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them.
…
I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.37.1 and 2.41.1103
Of course, as has often been noted, Perikles was speaking only of free male citizens, who gained access to the privileges of democracy as their birthright. All citizens were equal, but others were not equal to them before the law: women, resident aliens, and slaves were excluded. And those living under the yoke of Athenian imperialism would have quarreled with this rosy picture. But even if the Athenian self-understanding was inflated and (somewhat) self-deceiving, its virtues were nevertheless unique. “The power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace”: it was something the citizens of no other city or nation could claim. But like any good ever imagined, it would find its way to wretched excess.
Perikles would be dead within two years but not before suffering the loss of his sister and both his legitimate sons, Xanthippos and Paralos, to the epidemic that swept Athens in three deadly waves between 430 and 426 B.C. The plague arrived in the second year of the Peloponnesian War and overwhelmed the densely populated city, its masses huddled behind the defensive walls. One Athenian in three perished. The proud Perikles was reduced to going before the citizen assembly to plead for an exception to the citizenship law he himself put forth with great fanfare twenty years earlier. In what some critics saw as “punishment for his haughtiness and arrogance,” Perikles begged his people to accept the lad known as Perikles the Younger, the leader’s illegitimate son by his foreign mistress, Aspasia, as an Athenian citizen and his legitimate heir. This they did for him. But the younger Perikles would later know the full wrath of the democracy in a way his father never had. Along with five other strategoi, he was to be executed for his part in the failure to rescue a group of shipwrecked Athenians following the Battle of Arginusae (islands just to the east of Lesbos) in 406 B.C.
A HUNDRED YEARS ON, Athenian democracy was still alive, but the moment that produced the Parthenon was fast being eclipsed. As an indication of how things had changed, let us consider the story of the orator Lykourgos and his condemnation of his fellow Athenian Leokrates, a drama that played out in the law courts of late classical Athens.
Lykourgos was among the most visible and upstanding of Athenians during the third quarter of the fourth century. A former pupil of Plato’s, he came to power in 338 B.C. as steward of the financial administration, controlling the Athenian treasuries and wielding great power for the next twelve years. Lykourgos swiftly balanced the state budget by raising taxes on cargo passing through the port of Piraeus, increasing rents on leases of the silver mines at Laureion, and confiscating the assets of convicted criminals. He used his influence to persuade the wealthiest citizens to make large voluntary contributions (liturgies) to the state under a system known as euergetism (“good works”).
And he did not neglect the legacy of Perikles, undertaking his own vast building program to refurbish fifth-century monuments that had fallen into disrepair. Under Lykourgos, Athens flourished financially, commercially, legislatively, and architecturally; traditional cults were strengthened and new gods introduced.104 Lykourgos constructed a new temple of Apollo Patroos (the “Fatherly”) in the heart of the Agora. He rebuilt, entirely of Pentelic marble, the Panathenaic stadium above the banks of the Ilissos, and the Theater of Dionysos on the south slope of the Acropolis, expanding it to seat some seventeen thousand viewers.105 Just to the north of the Acropolis, Lykourgos refurbished the City Eleusinion and to the west, the Pnyx Hill, the meeting place of the citizen assembly. Beyond the city walls, the Lykeion was enhanced, a new ar- senal was built in the Piraeus, and the sanctuaries of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis and of Amphiaraos at Oropos were refurbished.106
A member of the Eteoboutad clan, one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Athens, Lykourgos could claim descent from the eponymous Boutes, brother of King Erechtheus. In fact, Lykourgos probably served as priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus on the Acropolis; we know that his son Habron was allotted this hereditary priesthood, later ceding it to his brother Lykophron.107 Wooden images of Lykourgos and his sons (carved by Timarchos and Kephisodotos, sons of the master sculptor Praxiteles) were set up within the Erechtheion itself, giving evidence of their close connection to the cult.108 In the years following his death in 324 B.C., Lykourgos would be held up as a symbol of Athenian democracy, posthumously honored in 307/306 with the city’s most illustrious awards: his portrait set up in the Agora and his descendants entitled to eat for life at public expense in the Prytaneion (the seat of the executive officers of Athens).109
At the very heart of the Lykourgan agenda was a desire to educate the youth of Athens, to reinvigorate Perikles’s vision of the city as the “School of Hellas.”110 The statesman placed new emphasis on the training of eighteen-year-old men who had begun their military service in the ephebic corps. Registered according to their demes (districts of the Attic countryside), the youths swore an oath of loyalty upon first receiving their new weapons within the sanctuary of Aglauros on the east slope of the Acropolis.111 The ephebes were given a new pride of place within the religious and athletic life of Lykourgan Athens where they were now entrusted with providing equestrian escort for a host of sacred processions and featured heavily in the Panathenaic festival and competitions. They were also sent on topographical memory tours to holy places all across Attica and its borderlands so they might learn about their ance
stors, local foundation myths, landscapes, and monuments. It was enhanced training for the noble life of the traditional Athenian citizen, one in which patriotism took center stage.112 And it was the spirit of that life Lykourgos might have seen deteriorating before his eyes among his fellow citizens. In any case, when he invoked it in the court action against Leokrates in 330 B.C., his purpose was as much to provide Athenian youths with an object lesson in proper behavior as it was to do justice to a scoundrel.113
Leokrates had comported himself disgracefully eight years earlier, following the defeat of Athens by Philip II of Macedon at the Battle of Chaironeia. In the wake of this disaster, the Athenians passed a decree forbidding citizens or their families to leave the city. Leokrates flagrantly broke this law, fleeing to the island of Rhodes and, later, settling in the town of Megara, 43 kilometers (27 miles) northwest of Athens. Taking along his money, mistress, household goods, and business concerns, Leokrates placed self before city, violating the most sacred tenet of traditional Athenian civic life.114
When, after eight years, Leokrates returned to Athens, Lykourgos hit him with a sensational lawsuit. The charges were many and varied: treason, failure to protect the city’s freedom, impiety vis-à-vis the sanctuaries he was sworn to defend, abandonment of his aged parents, and desertion for his refusal to serve in the armed forces. Most heinous of all, Leokrates had broken the oath sworn as a young ephebe and binding for one’s natural life. Lykourgos quotes the ephebic vow in his oration Against Leokrates:
I will not bring dishonor on my sacred arms nor will I abandon my comrades wherever I shall be stationed. I will defend the rights of gods and men and will not leave my country smaller, when I die, but greater and better, so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all.
Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 77115
In the courtroom Lykourgos would argue foremost that Leokrates had broken this solemn pledge, dishonoring the gods and sinning against the very homeland that had nurtured him to adulthood.
Lykourgos gave the court a rousing civics lesson: “The power that keeps our democracy together is the oath … For there are three things upon which the state is built: the archon, the juryman, and the private citizen. Each of these gives an oath as a pledge, and rightly so.”116 Lykourgos then cites the Oath of the Plataians, pledged by allied Greeks just before the Battle of Plataia in 479.117 “It would be well for you to hear it,” Lykourgos instructs, reading the oath in full:
I will not hold life dearer than freedom, nor will I abandon my leaders whether they are alive or dead. I will bury all allies killed in the battle. If I conquer the barbarians in war, I will not destroy any of the cities which have fought for Greece but I will consecrate a tenth of all those which sided with the barbarian. I will not rebuild a single one of the shrines that the barbarians have destroyed but will allow them to remain for future generations as a memorial of the barbarians’ impiety.
Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 81118
Lykourgos reflects on what makes Athens so special, reiterating the Periklean vision of Athens: “The greatest virtue of your city is that she has set the Greeks an example of noble conduct. In age she surpasses every city, and in valor too our ancestors have no less surpassed their fellows.”119 Lykourgos then invokes the story of Kodros, which we considered in chapter 1, that stirring tale of how the last king of Athens gave his life to save his city. When the Peloponnesians had suffered famine owing to crop failures, they marched north to Athens in search of fertile lands. Kodros knew from a Delphic prophecy that if the Dorians killed him, the people of Athens would be spared. And so the king, disguised as a peasant, bravely wandered out near the enemy camp and provoked a skirmish with its guards, who killed him. “Remember the reign of Kodros,” Lykourgos implores. “Such was the nobility of the kings of old that they preferred to die for the safety of their subjects rather than to purchase life by the adoption of another country.”120
Finally, Lykourgos turns to yet another exemplary tale of the ancestors, a story set in the late Bronze Age, when Eumolpos, son of Poseidon, led an army of Thracians to claim Attica for his own. The son, as we have seen, was attempting to avenge his father’s loss in the contest with Athena for divine patronage of the city. In the late 420s the story was the subject of a play by Euripides, and though it has since been largely lost, it would have still been familiar to Lykourgos’s audience. Erechtheus, king of Athens, seeks advice from the oracle at Delphi on how he might save Athens from this prodigious assault. The oracle’s answer? Nothing less than the sacrifice of his own daughter will suffice. The king shares this shocking news with his wife, Praxithea, who answers with one of the most stirring and civic-minded speeches in all of Greek drama. “Listen carefully to the iambic lines, gentlemen, which in the play are spoken by the mother of the girl,” Lykourgos instructs the jury. “You will find in them a greatness of spirit and a nobility worthy of Athens and a daughter of the Kephisos.”121
The fifty-five lines from Euripides’s Erechtheus that Lykourgos then speaks represent the longest quotation of any Greek play by an ancient orator. Queen Praxithea’s horrific proposition manifests the most basic principles of Athenian patriotism: a conviction that Athens is better than all other cities; pride in the autochthonous origins of its people; devotion to the forefathers and their ancestral religion; the primacy over individual self-interest of the common good, toward which the citizen properly feels an overwhelming sense of love, duty, and honor; boldness and resilience; the ability to take quick action; and above all a readiness to die for one’s country. Praxithea answers her husband without hesitation:
(1) Favors, when granted in a noble way, please people even more. When one acts, but acts slowly, this is less noble. I, then, will give my daughter to be killed. I take many things into account. First, I could not find a better city than this one [Athens]. We are a people born from this land, not brought in from elsewhere. Other cities are founded as if by throws of the dice; (10) people are imported to them, different ones from different places. A person who moves from one city to another is like a peg badly fitted into a piece of wood: a citizen in name, but not in action.
Secondly, our very reason for bearing children is to protect the altars of the gods and our fatherland. The city as a whole has one name but many dwell in it. Is it right for me to destroy all these when it is possible for me to give one child to die on behalf of all? I can count and distinguish between things larger and smaller. (20) The ruin of one person’s house is of less consequence and brings less grief than that of the whole city.
If our household had a harvest of sons in it, rather than daughters, and the flame of war were engulfing the city, would I not send my sons into battle with spears, fearing for their deaths? No, let me have daughters who can fight and stand out among men and not be mere figures raised in the city for no purpose. When mothers’ tears send their children off to battle, many men become soft. (30) I hate women who choose life for their children rather than the common good, or urge cowardice. Sons, if they die in battle, share a common tomb with many others and equal glory. But my daughter will be awarded one crown all to herself when she dies on behalf of this city, and in doing so she will also save her mother, and you [Erechtheus], and her two sisters … are these things not rewards in themselves?
And so, I shall give this girl, who is not mine except through birth, to be sacrificed in defense of our land. (40) If this city is destroyed, what share in my children’s lives will I then have? Is it not better that the whole be saved by one of us doing our part?…And as for the matter which most concerns the people at large, there is no-one, while I live and breathe, who will cast out the ancient holy laws of our forefathers. Nor will Eumolpos and his Thracian army ever—in place of the olive tree and golden Gorgon head—plant the trident on this city’s foundations and crown it with garlands, thus dishonoring the worship of Pallas [Athena].
(50) Citizens, make use of the offspring of my labor pains, save yourselves, be victorious! Not for one life
will I refuse to save our city. O fatherland, I wish that all who dwell in you would love you as much as I do! Then we would live in you untroubled and you would never suffer any harm.
Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 100 = Euripides, Erechtheus F 360 Kannicht122
What Praxithea does not know is that her daughters have already sworn an oath of their own: if any one of them should die, so shall the others.123 The oath of Erechtheus’s daughters is thus invoked by Lykourgos alongside the oath of the ephebes and that of the Greeks at Plataia. It is all to remind the jurors that at the very core of the citizen’s sacred relationship to the state was the solemn act of oath taking, the very tie that binds. In this, Lykourgos echoes the words of his teacher, Isokrates: “First, venerate what relates to the gods, not only by performing sacrifices but also by fulfilling your oaths. Sacrifices are a sign of material affluence, but abiding by oaths is evidence of a noble character.”124
Finishing his long quotation from the Erechtheus, Lykourgos closes his case: “On these verses, gentlemen, your fathers were brought up,” emphasizing the centrality of Euripides’s text in the traditional education of Athenian youth.125 He then asks the jurors to consider how Queen Praxithea, against a mother’s instinct, loved her country more than her own children and was willing to give them in ultimate sacrifice to save the city. Importantly, Praxithea acts quickly and, thus, nobly in ensuring salvation for Athens.126 If women can bring themselves to act like this, Lykourgos declaims, then men (like Leokrates) “should show toward their country a devotion which cannot be surpassed.”127 If all citizens loved Athens as Praxithea did, it would flourish and remain ever safe from harm. Leokrates doesn’t love Athens, and so he must be punished.