…
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
From these lines we can hardly divorce the figures of the Parthenon frieze seen by Keats in the British Museum: maidens, pipe players, offering bearers, sacrificial victims, priest, and lowing heifers.
The technique used by Euripides has been called cinematic, employing “zoom” and “wide-shot” narration to modulate the audience’s intimacy with powerful visual icons.191 In the Erechtheus, he gives us a close-up of Pheidias’s statue of Athena Parthenos wrought in gold and ivory: “Raise a cry [ululate], women, so the goddess may come to the city’s aid, wearing her golden Gorgon.”192 The chryselephantine statue of Athena did, indeed, wear a Gorgon-headed aegis upon her chest (insert this page, bottom) and Euripides effectively “zooms” in on this detail, focusing his audience’s attention on the famous cult image. I would argue that Euripides also accesses the sculptures of the Parthenon’s west pediment when he places on the lips of Praxithea these words: “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.”193 So, too, he evokes the aulos and kithara players that we see on the north frieze (this page, this page, and front of book) when he has his chorus of old men sing: “taking up the task of my aged hand, the Libyan (lotus) pipe sounding to the kithara’s cries.”194 The next slab over from the musicians on the north frieze, in fact, shows a group of old men, one fixing a wreath upon his head (this page). It can be no coincidence that Euripides’s chorus intones: “and may I dwell peacefully with grey old age, singing my songs, my grey head crowned with garlands.”195
Thus Euripides seems to draw poetic inspiration from the Parthenon itself. He is even more imaginative when he focuses on the groups of men and maidens depicted on the east frieze (this page, this page, and front of book). In his mind’s eye, the marble maidens come to life as the chorus of old men asks: “shall the young girl share with aged man in the dance?”196 It may have been a bit of fantasizing on the part of the poet by now approaching sixty. For these are the parthenoi of the first Athenian maiden chorus, and their dance partners will be the young ephebes, not the old men of the city.
THE PARTHENON HAS long been recognized as the most lavishly decorated of all Greek temples. The profusion of sculptures adorning its pediments, metopes, and frieze, its chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos, no less than the sophistication of its architecture, set it apart from other temple buildings. Indeed, its abundance of adornment has aptly been described as “hyper-decoration.”197 This distinctly Athenian predilection for opulence has, in turn, been read as a wasteful effort to flaunt and enhance Athenian ethnic prestige and political power.198
But one can imagine a further motivation for the hyper-decoration of the Parthenon, one beyond pretension. The vivid and abundant sculptural adornment might have served much the same purpose as the astonishing cultivation of the literary and rhetorical arts at Athens during this same period. In her study of Plato’s view of the uses of philosophy, Danielle Allen articulates Plato’s theory of the role of language in politics. The philosopher calls for the vivid (enarges) and abundant use of language to educate the citizenry toward the formation of values.199 We might make the same claim for architectural sculpture.
Sculptured images permanently visible on major monuments went a long way in teaching and sustaining these values for the citizens that beheld them every day. And they spoke with equal eloquence not just to the elites, who could read, but to those of the populace who were illiterate. The primary function of the hyper-decoration of the Parthenon, in some sense of the Parthenon tout court, was paideia, the education of the young by means of a visual extravaganza.
As Allen has shown, Plato and Lykourgos recognized the central role of myth, poetry, and aitiology in teaching the young. Architectural sculpture provided a giant screen onto which the myths could be projected. Turning the next generation toward virtue by reminding them of the sacrifices made and the oaths taken by the youths and maidens of early Athens inspired generation after generation of young Athenians to do the same. The forefronting of Athenian youths in the Panathenaic competitions, especially in the tribal contests, the choral dances of the night vigil, the procession, and on the Parthenon frieze itself makes explicit the necessity of engaging the next generation in just what it means to be an Athenian.
Nude male, horse rider, adolescent, and boy, north frieze, slab 47. Parthenon. (illustration credit ill.82)
The carved figures render the gods and the ancestors eternally present. They teach the genealogy of a venerable people, the origins of their enduring rituals, and the values that defined Athenian identity. Now, at last, we can see a powerful myth narrative animating the lifelike features of the Parthenon frieze to help us recognize a more profound meaning in its imagery. By engaging with a new paradigm and adjusting our perspective by a few degrees, we can see things that have not been evident for centuries.
At the very northwest corner of the Parthenon frieze is an arresting figure, among the first that visitors might see as they emerge from the Propylaia and make their way toward the front of the temple. Should they stop here and make the effort to look up into the shadows of the colonnade, they would behold a beautiful male nude who steadies a rearing horse while gesturing with his left hand to three young men who follow behind him (facing page). It is as if he were urging them forward. The first is a young mounted rider shown in profile, the next is an adolescent on foot, wearing a short tunic, and the third is a boy much younger by far, partially nude with mantle thrown loosely across his shoulders. We seem to be looking at the ages of man: boy, youth, and young adult are hailed and welcomed into the march of life as Athenians.
Farther down this north frieze, we see the group of old men marching. There is the one who stops in his tracks and deliberately turns toward the viewer, lifting his arms to crown himself (this page), his strong, mature body caught in an arresting pose. He represents the best, the noblest, and the most handsome of Athenian elders, the very pinnacle of what a man can become when nurtured by and devoted to his city. The frieze thus provides a mirror in marble, reflecting back the ideal citizen from childhood to maturity, his glory, not his individuality, not the poetry or philosophy he makes, but in the fact of his being one of the many. It is the responsibility of Athens to educate him in the history, identity, values, and interests into which he has been born. In doing so, the polis provides the answer to that most compelling of all human questions: Where do I come from?
6
WHY THE PARTHENON
War, Death, and Remembrance in the Shaping of Sacred Space
THE GERMAN ARCHAEOLOGIST PITCHED out a challenge. Eugene Plumb Andrews was intrigued. Freshly graduated from Cornell, Andrews had come to Greece on a fellowship from the American School of Classical Studies with hopes of running in the first modern Olympic Games the following summer. On this blustery afternoon in December 1895, atop the Acropolis summit, he was one among many students who had gathered to hear what Dr. Wilhelm Dörpfeld had to say. Young Andrews would come away seized by a new and overpowering purpose, one that would cause him to set aside his Olympic dreams altogether.
Directing attention to the architrave, the great hundred-foot lintel resting atop the eight columns of the Parthenon’s east façade, Dörpfeld had pointed out deep holes just below the metopes. He then drew the students’ attention to the outlines of great circles, each 1.2 meters (4 feet) in diameter and barely visible as a discoloration in the marble. These were the “ghosts” of metal shields that once hung here, booty seized from a defeated enemy and displayed as trophies. But whose victory?
Dörpfeld then pointed to hundreds of small holes drilled just beneath the triglyphs. These comprised twelve groups of cuttings, each of three lines, except for the
last two groups of two lines each. The professor explained that these were dowel holes for the attachment of large gilded bronze letters that once spelled out a dedication. By studying the relative positions of the holes, one could, in theory, make out the letters of the alphabet that had been attached and in this way work out the inscription. “Such things have been done, and it is time that this were done,” Dörpfeld mused on the puzzle he was presenting.1 Eugene Andrews decided on the spot that he was the man to solve it.
Within a month, Andrews was riding up the Parthenon’s east façade each morning in the rigging of a boatswain’s chair (below), grateful no doubt for his experience as a yachtsman. He took strips of wet paper, crossed at right angles, and pushed them deep into the drillings; thus Andrews took squeezes of each cluster of holes in the inscription. The work was arduous. He could complete just one squeeze a day, leaving the paper to dry overnight and praying that winds would not blow it off before morning.2
Eugene Andrews taking squeezes of the dowel holes on the Parthenon’s east architrave, 1895. (illustration credit ill.83)
By late February 1896, Andrews stood in the library of the American School of Classical Studies on the slopes of Mount Lykabettos, presenting the results of his labors to the assembled scholars. Draping his squeezes all about the library shelves, he moved from sheet to sheet, explaining his reconstruction of the lost letters, some 251 in all. Andrews had managed to decipher the entire inscription. But not everyone was pleased with the result, least of all Andrews himself.3
It had long been assumed that the so-called Parthenon Inscription was somehow connected with Alexander the Great’s dedication of three hundred Persian shields on the Acropolis following his decisive victory at Granikos near Troy in 334 B.C.4 This was the first of three major battles he had won against the formidable Persian army. At Granikos, Alexander routed the forces of Arsames, the satrap of Cilicia, whose forces he’d stripped of their armor, sending it as booty to Athens for dedication at the Parthenon.5 Alexander intended a bold and explicit reminder that the battle of Granikos had been won in revenge for the Persian destruction of the Acropolis in 480. It might have been more than 150 years in the making, but this was a dish as delicious as it was cold.
But Andrews’s decoding of the holes in the Parthenon’s architrave revealed a very different commemoration: praise not for mighty Alexander but, instead, for the most vile of Roman emperors, Nero.
The Areopagus Council and Council of the Six Hundred and the People of Athens [honor] Emperor Greatest Nero Caesar Claudius Augustus Germanicus, son of a God, In the year of the General of the Hoplites for the eighth time and also Superintendent [of Athens] and Lawgiver [was] Ti[berius] Claudius Novius Son of Philinos, in the year the Priestess [of Athena was] Paulleina, Kapito’s Daughter.6
We know little of Nero’s interaction with the Athenians, but the Parthenon Inscription attests that in A.D. 61/62 they granted him a series of unprecedented honors. First, the city’s highest award, a crown, was bestowed upon him by decree. Even more unusual, indeed unique, was the distinction of immortalizing Nero’s honors with an inscription on the east façade of the Parthenon. The gilded letters followed no Athenian custom but rather the standard practice for texts on Roman triumphal arches and other monuments.7 It was all the more remarkable recognition considering that the emperor, having spent more than a year in Greece, never even bothered to set foot in Athens itself. The accolades were, furthermore, premature. There had been no great victory that year, just the promise of peace on the eastern front. Such self-inflicted indignities were the wages of foreign domination, suffered first under the Macedonians and then under the Romans.
In the mid-first century A.D., the Parthians were the empire’s great eastern enemy. Rome had battled them for decades over control of Armenia, a land of strategic importance to both sides. By A.D. 58, a crisis erupted when the Armenian king installed his brother on the throne. The Romans invaded, removing the brother and crowning a Cappadocian prince who was their trusted ally. Parthia was quick to retaliate in a series of military campaigns that threatened to escalate into a great war. In A.D. 61/62, however, a compromise was brokered under which the Romans agreed to let the brother rule Armenia provided he acknowledged that he owed his kingship to Nero himself. Resolution of the Armenian problem did usher in a welcome period of peace. It was this relatively inglorious diplomatic victory of Nero’s that was celebrated in the Parthenon Inscription.
It is not known whether the shields that hung between the gilded bronze letters on the Parthenon were those dedicated by Alexander or ones taken later from fallen Parthians by Nero’s Roman army. The egomaniac Nero would certainly have enjoyed comparison with Alexander. In any event, the inscription revealed by Eugene Andrews’s careful work shows that nearly five hundred years after the construction of the Parthenon, the temple remained an ultimately prestigious victory monument. The Parthenon would ever be a symbol of triumph over eastern enemies: Greeks over Persians, Romans over Parthians, and, as we shall see in chapter 8, the Attalids of Pergamon over the Gauls. But the tribute to Nero for his eastern victories would not last long on the Parthenon; the bronze letters of the inscription were swiftly removed from the architrave following Nero’s suicide in A.D. 68. It was only the dowel holes left behind that would bear witness to what Andrews himself called “the story of how a proud people, grown servile, did a shameful thing, and were sorry afterward.”8
It is worth remembering that nearly ninety years before Alexander hung Persian shields on the Parthenon, Euripides placed these words on the lips of his chorus of old men in the Erechtheus:
Let my spear lie idle for spiders to entangle in their webs; and may I dwell peacefully with grey old age, singing my songs, my grey head crowned with garlands, after hanging a Thracian shield upon Athena’s columned halls.
Euripides, Erechtheus F 369.2–5 Kannicht9
The Thracian shield of which Euripides’s writes, seized from Eumolpos’s defeated army and hung on Athena’s “columned halls,” points to a tradition for displaying war booty on the Parthenon long before the time of Alexander the Great. The poet seems also to allude directly to the Parthenon’s north frieze, at the place where we see one man among the elders stopping to crown his “grey head with garlands” (this page). Euripides’s powerful imagery, envisioning spears left to gather cobwebs, references a time of peace following Erechtheus’s victory.
A century later, Plutarch quotes these same lines from the Erechtheus when looking back on the Peloponnesian War. He writes of the so-called Peace of Nikias, which brought a welcome, if fleeting, break in the fighting in 423/22 B.C. During this one-year truce between Athens and Sparta, Plutarch tells us, one could hear choruses at Athens singing “Let my spear lie idle for spiders to entangle in their webs.”10 Indeed, it is on the strength of Plutarch’s remarks that the first performance of the Erechtheus has been dated to the City Dionysia of 422.
In fact, the practice of dedicating arms and armor taken from the battlefield is attested in sanctuaries all across the Greek world. Sacred space was everywhere endowed with a distinctly martial aura. After all, much of the asking and thanking that went on within holy precincts had to do with the desire for a positive outcome in combat. And this is because of the centrality of war in Greek life. Whether with foreigners or fellow Greeks, it was an experience that touched every family; no household escaped the relentless, brutal, and ubiquitous culture of conflict and killing.11 Prayer and sacrifice offered in petition or gratitude for victory were very personal as well as communal experiences, and within a fairly all-consuming cycle of death, loss, and remembrance, war and worship were tightly interwoven.
In this respect, as in so many others, Athens was determined to show itself supreme. All male citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty were eligible to fight, making for lifelong engagement with the spectrum of emotions that includes dread, terror, agony, and grief. Sons, brothers, fathers, grandfathers, cousins, and friends all fought side by side and fel
l together. The solidarity of genealogical awareness so central to democracy was also a centripetal counterforce to the centrifugal energies of carnage. For much of the Archaic and classical periods, men went to war each “season,” that is, during the summer months between the time for planting and the harvest. In Plato’s Laws, the Cretan lawgiver Kleinias remarks that for Greeks peace “is merely a name; yet, in truth, an undeclared war always exists by nature between every Greek city state.”12 If the Athenians are relatively unrecognized for the obsessively religious folk they were, their martial character is likewise under-remarked in the familiar litany of attributes. But the two in fact go not only hand in hand but also a long way in illuminating the people who made the Parthenon, as well as what it represented to them.
MOSTLY, GREEKS FOUGHT over border disputes. In the Peloponnesian War, of course, they fought over much more.13 Athens’s stunning rise to power and empire in the fifty years following the Persian sack filled the Spartans with dread. The defensive alliance forged between Athens and the naval power Kerkyra in 433 B.C., and agreements signed with Rhegium in southern Italy and Leontini in Sicily shortly thereafter, created an Athenian monopoly of seaborne trade that threatened the transport of food supplies from Sicily to the Peloponnese. And so by 431 B.C., just a year after the stunning sculptures were set up within the pediments of the Parthenon, Athens and its allies entered into a war with Sparta, one that would last some twenty-seven years. This conflict would pit a peerless naval power against an invincible ground force in a historical iteration of the cosmic struggle between sea and land. Across the decades of slaughter, a terrible plague would strike Athens, bringing even more death and dying to the city’s households. For all the sublimity of the Acropolis temples, the grand festivals, and the sacred rites still performed, gloom now filled the Athenian heart. The next battle, with the next death of a family member, was never far away.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 24