The Parthenon Enigma
Page 18
How did such dark stories of sacrifice and death function within the larger worldview of the Greeks? What role do they play in the construction of models for heroism? Let us, for a moment, consider the great hero Achilles, the “best of the Achaeans,” who fought at Troy. Achilles was faced with an impossible dilemma: to die young and thereby enjoy a “big story” unto immortality, or to survive the war and return home to a long if impermanent life. “If I stay here and fight, I shall lose my safe homecoming [nostos] but I will have a glory [kleos] that is unwilting,” he reflects in the Iliad. “Whereas if I go home my glory will die, but it will be a long time before the outcome of death shall take me.”71 Here lies the essence of Greek heroism. To be a hero, one must experience death. It is death itself that gives the hero power. As Gregory Nagy has explained, the Greek hero is first and foremost a figure of religious worship, a dead person who receives cult honors and who is expected, in return, to bring prosperity to the populace.72
The surest route to heroism is an honorable death in battle. Courage displayed in giving his life to defeat the enemy brings lasting glory to Achilles, as well as to Patroklos, Hektor, and so many of the greatest names that come down to us from Greek epic. The hero Odysseus is unusual in achieving both kleos and nostos. He survives the perils of the Trojan battlefield yet attains a big story through the adventures of his ten-year journey home, as recounted in the Odyssey. Upon reaching Ithaka, Odysseus receives the additional glory of warm welcome from Penelope, the loyal, loving wife still awaiting him.73
A man’s path to heroic status is clear beginning with the earliest epic poetry. But what of a woman’s? No Greek woman is given Achilles’s choice, to fight and die in battle or to journey home to a waiting family. These options are unthinkable within the framework of experiences open to female members of the community. But women of Greek myth do achieve heroic status and lasting honors. Like men, they do so by dying. Their deaths, however, are not on the field of battle but on the altar of sacrifice.
Virgin sacrifice presents a paradox in which something as dark and sinister as the killing of a maiden can be viewed as a female’s means of ascent to heroism. By making the ultimate sacrifice, Greek maidens attain the kleos that comes of having a big story. In return, they achieve immortality and cult adoration. (In a world of such intense pieties, the worshipper can have no higher aspiration than to become herself worthy of worship.) Critics inclined to see cruelty and misogyny will not view this as a square deal. After all, a girl has no real say in whether she lives or dies. The martial hero has at least the opportunity to fight for his life. The fate of the sacrificial virgin is sealed by those who impose it upon her. But this is to miss the point. Within the cultural norms of ancient Greek society, it is impossible to think of a young woman going into battle. How, then, is she able to set herself apart, to offer the ultimate gift and save her community? Without virgin sacrifice, women could have never enjoyed authentic heroic status, the culture’s highest honor.74
Greek myth is full of stories in which girls of noble birth are sacrificed to avert catastrophe in times of social crisis.75 When Herakles and the Thebans were about to attack Orchomenos, an oracle declared that the city could be saved only if a highborn citizen would die by his or her own hand. The daughters of Antipoinos, Androkleia and Aleis, volunteered. Following their deaths, they were buried within the local sanctuary of Artemis Eukleia, where they received cult honors.76 When the same city, Orchomenos, was struck by a terrible epidemic, an oracle proclaimed that only a maiden death could stop the spread of disease. The daughters of Orion, who had been taught weaving by Athena, stepped forward and stabbed themselves in the throats and shoulders with their bodkins and shuttles, thus ridding the city of plague.77 When Athens was threatened by epidemic, or by some accounts famine, the daughters of Leos were given in sacrifice, receiving in return their own shrine and cult honors in the Athenian Agora.78
The most famous virgin sacrifice in Greek myth is of course Agamemnon’s killing of his daughter, Iphigeneia.79 This enabled the Greek fleet to set sail for the Trojan War. A thousand ships were becalmed for months in the harbor at Aulis, waiting for favorable winds, when the commander, King Agamemnon, consulted the seer Kalchas. Nothing short of the sacrifice of the king’s own daughter would reinspire the wind. When Aeschylus tells this story in his Agamemnon of 458 B.C., he focuses on the rage of the girl’s mother, Klytaimnestra. But when Euripides tells the tale in his Iphigeneia at Aulis in 405, we see a tremendous shift in emphasis. Euripides’s Iphigeneia first begs for her life but later goes willingly to sacrifice, reminding her distraught mother that in doing so, she will save Hellas. “You bore me for all the Greeks not yourself alone,” Iphigeneia remonstrates, expressing much the same sentiment as Praxithea: just as boys go to war, girls go to sacrifice, both for the good of the city.80
Why such a shift in sentiment between the telling of this tale by Aeschylus and its retelling by Euripides? In the wake of the Persian Wars, themes of heroism and self-sacrifice gained popularity on the Athenian stage. Sophokles took up the subject of virgin sacrifice in his Andromeda, Iphigeneia, Polyxena, and, possibly, in his lost Kreousa. But it is during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) and the plague at Athens (430, 429, 427/426 B.C.) that we see a great eruption of interest in these stories. Perhaps their retelling helped to acknowledge the burden of loss and sacrifice shared by the women of Athens during these troubled times. Euripides brings human sacrifice to the stage in his Hekuba, Ion, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Children of Herakles, and, of course, Erechtheus.81 And, notably, the Children of Herakles and Erechtheus share a common framework for projecting a strong, cohesive Athenian ideology.82
In Children of Herakles, Euripides gives us the rare opportunity to hear words from the lips of a sacrificial victim, Makaria, the “Blessed One,” daughter of Herakles and Deianeira. Together with her brothers, she takes refuge at Athens, having been expelled from Trachis. When the children’s uncle Eurystheus declares war on Athens, an oracle advises the Athenian king, Demophon, that only the voluntary death of one of Herakles’s children can save the city.83 Makaria valiantly volunteers. Following her sacrifice, a spring is named for her at Marathon.84 As Makaria marches stalwartly toward the altar of her death, she delivers a compelling treatise on virgin sacrifice, exalting it as an opportunity for female heroism. Makaria views herself as an active agent in the saving of the city, one glad to trade her life for kleos:
Then fear no more the Argive enemy’s spear! I am ready, old man, of my own accord and unbidden, to appear for sacrifice and be killed. For what shall we say if this city is willing to run great risks on our behalf, and yet we, who lay toil and struggle on others, run away from death when it lies in our power to rescue them? It must not be so, indeed; for it deserves nothing but mockery if we sit and groan now as suppliants of the gods and yet, though we are descended from that great man who is our father [Herakles], show ourselves to be cowards. How can this be fitting in the eyes of men of nobility?
…
Lead me to the place where it seems good that my body should be killed and garlanded and consecrated to the goddess [Athena]! Defeat the enemy! For my life is at your disposal, full willingly, and I offer to be put to death on my brothers’ behalf and on my own. For, mark it well, by not clinging to my life I have made a most splendid discovery, how to die with glory.
Euripides, Children of Herakles 500–10, 528–3485
Dying with honor had incomparable resonance in a society as ravaged by war and plague as Athens was during the last third of the fifth century. Scarcely a family was spared the loss of someone in these terrible times. Describing the bravery of those who stayed in Athens to nurse the sick during the plague, Thucydides hailed the Athenian instinct to feel shame for thinking of one’s own safety in the face of communal crisis.86 Against the backdrop of these events, we can understand how the retelling of tales of virgin sacrifice was far more than theatrical entertainment. It was a means of expressing the core values of Athen
ian democracy at a time when solidarity among citizens was paramount.
As we have said, Euripides’s Erechtheus was probably first performed round about 422 B.C.87 Presented in the Theater of Dionysos on the south slope of the Acropolis, the play was viewed by thousands.88 Each year the festival of the City Dionysia brought together the greatest assembly of all Athenians in one spot.89 Viewers were not merely entertained but took in a harsh message, one presented within the ritual framework of a religious feast. The message was simple: democracy requires pain and loss.
“Of all the rituals relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent,” writes the classicist and political theorist Danielle Allen. She demonstrates how democracy must prove to its citizens who have suffered loss, in one instance, that they should continue to keep faith with their government and fellow citizens in the future.”90 Responding to this need takes the shape of public rituals, repeated acts that create and sustain trust and order within the community—necessities that simply don’t exist to such a degree, if any, in authoritarian regimes. The story of the daughters of Erechtheus manifests precisely the nexus of sacrifice, loss, trust, and ritual that makes democracy work. This is why it was so central to Athenian foundational myth and why, as we shall see, it was such an obvious subject matter for commemoration on the Parthenon.
The Erechtheus continued to have profound resonance for Athenians a century after its first performance, when Lykourgos quoted so extensively from it in making his case against Leokrates. In her book Why Plato Wrote, Allen demonstrates how Lykourgos adopted Platonic vocabulary, deliberately using one of Plato’s favorite superlatives, to kalliston (“the most beautiful and noble”), a total of six times in the speech. At eight different points, he exhorts the jurors to learn from the paradigms he holds up for them. First among these is the importance of educating the people toward virtue (arete) and that which is noblest (to kalliston).91 And in turning toward virtue, Athenian youths will inevitably find their way to patriotism.92 Behind Lykourgos’s words is a practical policy agenda. He insists on the importance of training the ephebes as part of his larger mission of paideia.93 Thus, Perikles’s vision of Athens as the “School of Hellas” lives on in the courtroom of Lykourgos, even if the words are not as stirring as they were in Perikles’s day.
In what are likely to be the most authentic words surviving from Perikles, those of the funeral oration that he delivered for the soldiers who died in the Samian War of 439 B.C., he reflects, “We cannot see the gods … but we believe them to be immortal from the honors we pay them and the blessings we receive from them, and so it is with those who have given their lives for the city.”94 Here we are at the intersection of the civic religion into which Athens grew and the cosmological awareness it had possessed since time immemorial. Those who will give themselves for the common good are as worthy of collective worship as the gods themselves. Democracy is no mere political arrangement but ultimately a spiritual one.
The daughters of Erechtheus were not only worshipped as divinities at Athens; they were set up into the heavens by Athena herself, transformed into stars for all eternity.95 Catasterism is the greatest honor of all: to become one with the eternal cosmos as a star shining ever after down upon Athens. “I have caused their spirit to dwell in the uppermost reaches of heaven,” Athena proclaims in the Erechtheus, “and I will give them a name men will call them all throughout Greece, the Hyakinthian goddesses.”96 Joined together in an everlasting choral dance among the stars as the constellation Hyades, the noble daughters of “great-hearted” Erechtheus and “great-spirited” Praxithea take their place as founding daughters in a charter myth worthy of Athens itself. Athena places the maidens lovingly into that same sky wherein she once hurled the giant Drako in a primordial cosmic battle, endless eras earlier.
5
THE PARTHENON FRIEZE
The Key to the Temple
HE WAS HACKED to death in Isfahan. Francis Vernon died the way he lived: adventurously.
Pirates had kidnapped him as a young man just out of Christ Church, Oxford, selling him into slavery. Traveling along the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth in October 1675, he watched his companion Sir Giles Eastcourt succumb to disease at Vitrinitza between Amphissa and Naupaktos.1 Later that year, Vernon set sail from Greece to Turkey, losing all his field notes and letters when his boat was plundered along the way. Still his “insatiable desire of seeing” impelled him on, eventually to Persia, where, in September 1676,2 at age forty, he met his end at the hands of some locals who liked his penknife.
Before his untimely murder, Vernon had earned the respect of some of the greatest thinkers of his day. In 1669 he was sent to Paris as secretary to Ralph Montagu, ambassador extraordinary to Louis XIV, and became over the next three years an important intermediary in scholarly exchanges between French and English scientists. He came to know many members of the newly founded Royal Society and kept its secretary, Henry Oldenburg, informed of scientific developments on the Continent.3 Vernon regularly corresponded with the orientalist Edward Pococke, whom he may have known from his Christ Church days, and with the astronomer Edward Barnard and the mathematician James Gregory, who expressed admiration for Vernon’s “great knowledge in many sciences and languages.”4 Vernon would be among the first to see the young Isaac Newton’s influential treatise on calculus, “De analysi per æquationes numero terminorum infinitas,” sent to him by the mathematician John Collins.5 Upon his return to England in 1672, Vernon himself was elected to the Royal Society, his nomination made by none other than its secretary, Henry Oldenburg.
Vernon didn’t linger long in London. By June 1675, he was on the move to Venice and then to Greece, disembarking on Zakynthos with Eastcourt. The pair had decided to break off from their traveling party bound for Constantinople and to journey instead around the Greek Peloponnese and on to Athens where they stayed a few months.6 In September, they crossed to the north side of the Gulf of Corinth, where Eastcourt fell ill and died. Vernon returned to Athens, where he stayed until late that year, copying inscriptions and examining architectural monuments. In all, he visited the Acropolis three times with the express purpose of measuring the Parthenon.7 Vernon’s calculations have proven to be remarkably accurate. Especially significant is his measurement of the width of the interior room, or cella, at the east end of the temple, where others would reckon only the size of the exterior colonnade. Just twelve years later, Venetian cannons would blow the interior of the Parthenon to bits, and the original dimensions of the room Vernon had taken such care to measure would be lost but for him. Fortunately, he had recorded his findings in his personal diary as well as in a letter to Oldenburg posted from Smyrna on January 10, 1676, before setting off for his fateful rendezvous in Isfahan.8
Vernon was the first to see in the Parthenon frieze animals brought to sacrifice followed by a triumphant procession. Somehow, he found time to look up from his calculations to describe the “very curious sculptures” (facing page) in the letter he posted from Smyrna.9 And in writing of the south frieze in his diary entry for August 26, 1675, Vernon notes, “Men to west end on horseback people in triumphant/Chariotts.” His entry for November 8 describes a procession showing “Severall Bullockes with people conducting them to Sacrifice.”10 Vernon’s field notes having been lost at sea, his personal diary and the letter to Oldenburg preserve his only surviving observations on what he calls the “Temple of Minerva.” The building “will always bear witness that the ancient Athenians were a magnificent and ingenious people,” he writes. Vernon didn’t leave Athens without making his own mark. To this day, one can see “Francis Vernon” carved on a block on the south wall of the Theseion, a temple that has been since ascribed to Hephaistos, in the Athenian Agora.11 This inscription includes the date, 1675, as well as the names of his companions, Eastcourt and Bernard Randolph.12
West portico of Parthenon. William J. Stillman, from albumen silver print, 1882. (illustration credit ill.45)
Precious few commentaries on th
e Parthenon sculptures between antiquity and the seventeenth century survive, making Vernon’s observations all the more significant. That he takes a careful look at the long “ribbon”13 of figured relief that wrapped around the interior of the Parthenon’s colonnade is not surprising: the exquisiteness of its carving, the classic lines and features of its human figures, the sensitive modeling of the drapery over flesh—all these aspects have led to the recognition of “Parthenonian style” as the highest standard for Western perceptions of beauty. But that he should have beheld in those lovely figures something that succeeding centuries of commentaries have failed (or been reluctant) to perceive, that it shows a triumphant sacrificial procession, may be the ultimate tribute to this remarkable man’s powers of seeing.14
THE EARLIEST SURVIVING EXPLANATION of the Parthenon sculptures dates a full six hundred years after the temple was built. In his Description of Greece, the traveler Pausanias, who visited the Acropolis in the second century A.D., identifies the subject matter of the east pediment as the birth of Athena, and Athena’s contest with Poseidon as that on the west.15 He also describes in detail the monumental gold and ivory statue, the so-called Athena Parthenos, housed within the east room of the temple. Dazzled by the radiance of the colossal image, Pausanias heads straight for the east door to peer inside at the statue, apparently never looking up to notice the frieze set high among the shadows within the porch (below).
Had he looked up, Pausanias might have caught a glimpse of the lively spectacle, a band of sculptured relief showing 378 human and 245 animal figures and running some 160 meters (525 feet) around the top of the cella wall within the colonnade. Set at a height of 14 meters, or about 46 feet, and deeply shaded under the ceiling of the peristyle for most of the day, the frieze measures just over 1 meter from top to bottom, or roughly 3 feet 4 inches in height.