The composition of the statue base has been reconstructed on the evidence of surviving copies and according to the testimony of Pliny, who tells us that some twenty divinities were shown in the scene (insert this page, bottom, and following page, top).124 From what we can understand, “Pandora” was shown at the center of the group as a small girl wearing a peplos, standing frontally with her arms hanging at her sides. Athena stands at the right with a stephane in her hand, ready to crown the maiden.125
Two Athenian vases that predate the Parthenon show very similar imagery. On a red-figured krater in London we see a girl being crowned by Athena, while Zeus and Poseidon (to the left) and (to the right) Ares, Hermes, and a female goddess (Aphrodite or Hera?) attend the ceremony (following page, bottom).126 Athena holds out a leafy wreath for the girl, who is dressed in a peplos and faces frontally, frozen and statue-like, clutching an olive (or laurel) branch in each hand. The maiden’s transfixed frontal gaze suggests the intensity of her altered state. She is isolated within the composition, separated by more than space in the very center of the scene, which has traditionally been interpreted as the creation of the first woman, Pandora. That reading, however, is frustrated by the absence of Hephaistos, a key figure in the creation story, and the prominence of the war god Ares, who rushes in at the right in full battle dress. He is a companion figure here to the warrior goddess Athena, who stands at the left of the girl. The atmosphere is not one of creation but one of martial victory. We are reminded of Praxithea’s proclamation in the Erechtheus: “My child, by dying for this city, will attain a crown destined solely for herself.”127 Here, then, is Athena awarding the promised crown to the daughter of Erechtheus following her sacrificial death. Running in from the battlefield, Ares bears news of the Athenian victory that this death has ensured.
Reconstruction drawing of the base of Athena Parthenos statue showing girl about to be crowned. By George Marshall Peters after N. Leipen, Athena Parthenos, Pl. 6. (illustration credit ill.99)
A similar female figure—shown in a frontal pose, arms hanging at her sides, and dressed in a peplos—can be observed on a white-ground cup (facing page) from Nola, near Naples. It too has been interpreted as showing the creation of Pandora, as told by Hesiod. We see Athena and Hephaistos reaching out to crown the girl from either side.128 The maiden’s name is inscribed above her: “Anesidora,” meaning “She Who Sends Up Gifts,” a name very similar to Pandora, “Giver of All.”129 But the name Anesidora carries a distinctly chthonic connotation, since her gifts are sent up from below. Indeed, the name suggests a dead girl buried within the earth.130 It is very possible that a maiden named Anesidora, in some fifth-century tradition, comes to be known as Pandora by the time Pausanias writes in the Roman period. I submit that the base of the Athena Parthenos statue shows a crowning of Erechtheus’s daughter, a girl variously named Anesidora/Pandora/Pandrosos. She is appropriately joined by Athena and Hephaistos, in a sense her “grandparents,” who caused the birth of Erechtheus/ Erichthonios. The deceased girl is shown welcomed into her new status as heroine, crowned, in the words of Praxithea, with a wreath “destined solely for herself.”
Enthroned Zeus and Poseidon at left; Athena crowning daughter of Erechtheus at center; Ares and Hermes at right. Calyx krater, the Niobid Painter, ca. 460–450 B.C. (illustration credit ill.100)
Anesidora, at center, crowned by Athena and Hephaistos. White-ground cup from Nola, the Tarquinia Painter, ca. 460 B.C. (illustration credit ill.101)
If we take account of this special relationship between Athena and Pandora, understood to be the parthenos daughter of Erechtheus, certain persistent problems in Acropolis ritual practice are resolved. For instance, the principle that “whoever sacrifices a cow to Athena is obliged to sacrifice a ewe to Pandora [or Pandrosos].” This comes to us from Philochoros, who, having served as seer and inspector of sacred victims (mantis and hieroskopos) at Athens at the end of the fourth century B.C., knew whereof he spoke. Surviving manuscripts give both variants of the name Pandora/Pandrosos.131 Also this: the Parthenon’s south frieze shows cows alone being taken to sacrifice, reflecting Athena’s command that Erechtheus be honored with cattle sacrifices. The north frieze, by contrast, shows a combination of cows and sheep in procession. It is likely that the sheep sacrifice was destined for Erechtheus’s daughter, a girl alternately called Pandora, Pandrosos, or Anesidora. The connection between Philochoros’s text and the Parthenon frieze has been noted before, but there has never been a plausible explanation for why a sacrifice should be made to Pandora within the context of Acropolis ritual.
This reading also helps shed light on a long-baffling passage in Aristophanes’s Birds. The soothsayer Bakis pronounces an oracle that demands, “First sacrifice to Pandora a white-fleeced ram.”132 The meaning of this oracle has never been understood. But if this Pandora is the benevolent Erechtheid of the Attic tradition, and not the problematic Pandora of Hesiod, things fall into place.
IF THERE IS ONE more piece of the puzzle of the Panathenaia, of how the Athenians understood their great festival, it is a figure whose ubiquity renders it hidden in plain sight.
From the Panathenaic amphorae, to the famous silver tetradrachms that dominated Athenian coinage, to a host of images from Attic vase painting and sculpture, there is one symbol that is utterly synonymous with Athena. This is, of course, the owl. The inseparability of Athena and her winged companion has long been studied but never fully explained. Why is the owl so intimately associated with her? What is it about this particular creature that makes it the quintessential symbol of the goddess and, by extension, the city of Athens?
As a natural predator, the owl has a distinctly martial aspect that jibes with Athena’s role as warrior goddess.133 Again and again, we find the owl appearing on the battlefield to urge Athenian soldiers on to victory. In Aristophanes’s Wasps, we are told that Athena sent her sacred owl to fly over Athenian troops at Marathon, bringing them good luck.134 Plutarch writes of the difficulties Themistokles suffered in convincing the Greek allies to fight at Salamis—until, that is, an owl landed on the rigging of his trireme.135 On Attic coins of the Roman imperial period Themistokles stands in full armor aboard his ship, a little owl alighting on its prow.136
“Queen of the Night,” winged she-demon with talon feet; flanked by lions and large owls. Terra-cotta relief, Old Babylonian period, ca. 1800–1750 B.C. (illustration credit ill.102)
In Greek art, owls are regularly shown with their heads facing front, their bodies turned in profile. On a purely naturalist level, this manifests the exceptional range of rotation of an owl’s head and emphasizes the effect of its outsized eyes with their intense, unwavering gaze. Gloria Ferrari has explained that this straight-on stare was perceived as a masculine trait in ancient Greece (as it still is in some parts). Men looked at those whom they would confront straight in the eyes: bold, brash, and unafraid. Women, on the other hand, were expected to be “cow-eyed” (boopis) as Hera, queen of the gods, is so often described.137 The female glance should be lowered, to express aidos, that is, “shame,” “modesty,” or “humility.”
Athena is called glaukopis, “owl-eyed,” as early as the seventh century in Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony.138 This epithet could refer to the silvery, gleaming gray-green (glaukos) colors of her eyes or to her steely, unblinking gaze, as unusual for a female as Athena’s warrior aspect. Indeed, Athena Glaukopis is the most masculine of female divinities, and as goddess of war, wisdom, and craft she evinces no shame in her wide-eyed stare.
It must be acknowledged that frontal faces are quite rare in Archaic and classical Greek art.139 The effect of this unusual perspective is purposefully arresting, to say that something out of the ordinary is happening. This invariably involves a physical or psychological transition between two states of being. Individuals caught between wakefulness and sleep, sobriety and drunkenness, silence and musical rapture, calm and sexual ecstasy, life and death, all look directly at the viewer, seizing upon a single mo
ment suspended in time. We have noted in the images of Anesidora/Pandora that her full face is to the viewer as she experiences a kind of “apotheosis” through her crowning. At this moment the daughter of Erechtheus is caught between life and death, humanity and divinity. That Athena’s owl presents the same unsettling aspect is no coincidence. Death, indeed, hangs in the air.
Owls were understood to portend death as early as the Babylonian period in Mesopotamia, circa 1800–1750 B.C. Consider the terra-cotta plaque known as the Queen of the Night, or the Burney relief (above), believed to be from southern Iraq. It shows a nude female figure with wings springing from her shoulders and bird talons on her feet. She perches atop two lions and is flanked by a pair of huge, menacing owls. The she-demon’s identity is much debated; suggestions include Lilîtu/Lilith, female demon of an evil wind and/or the night; Innana/Ishtar, goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare; and Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, Ishtar’s sister.140 In her hands she holds the ring and rod symbols that signify the measurement of time by use of a string and stick.
In the Greek world, owls carried a similar connotation of death, lament, and mourning. In the visual arts, winged figures often represent the human soul leaving the body. Female “death spirits,” sometimes called Keres, were understood to transport souls to Hades. We find winged sirens, harpies, griffins, and sphinxes employed as guardian figures on Greek funerary monuments.
The winged soul of the dying Prokris can be seen flying out of her body and up to the heavens on a red-figured krater in London, dating to around 440 B.C. (below).141 Her husband, Kephalos, out hunting, accidentally killed her with his spear, mistaking her for a wild animal hiding in the bushes. We see him with his hunting hound, at left, while Prokris’s father, King Erechtheus, stands at right, pointing with great agitation to her winged spirit as it slips away. Prokris’s soul, shown as a woman’s head on a bird’s body, faces the viewer head-on, just like the lifeless face of the woman left behind, the two together telling of the ineffably altered state that is death.
The owl’s role as harbinger of death holds the key to its close association with Athena. We have seen that the word ololugmata, the shrill wailing of women at times of sacrifice and death, provides the root for the word “owl,” ulula in Latin and ule in Old English. Alkman’s First Partheneion, or “Maidens’ Song,” a remarkable text dated to the seventh century B.C., preserves lines sung by the girls’ chorus under his supervision at Sparta:
Death of Prokris, showing her “bird-soul” leaving her body while her husband Kephalos and father Erechtheus watch. Column krater, by Hephaistos Painter, ca. 440 B.C. (illustration credit ill.103)
I would say I myself,
a maiden, wail [lelaka] in vain from the sky,
an owl [glaux].
Alkman, First Partheneion 85–87142
Gloria Ferrari points to an important connection between the girls’ chorus that sings this song and the Hyades, the inconsolable nymph sisters who mourn the death of their brother, Hyas, killed in a hunting accident. Known for their weepy raininess, the Hyades become the archetypal singers of dirges, engaged in eternally funereal lament. In the “somber, relentless quality of the night owl’s hooting,” Ferrari hears the “mourning voice” of the Hyades.143 Their grief culminates in their transformation into the star cluster Hyades, a constellation that is further associated with the dead daughters of Erechtheus, catasterized as the Hyakinthides. Some of the final lines preserved in the fragments of Euripides’s Erechtheus give the words “to/for the Hyakinthides,” and “stars.”144
In Athenian vase painting, we find a number of intriguing images that show Athena in the company of three owls. A white-ground lekythos in Kansas bears the image of a helmeted Athena seated within her sanctuary (facing page).145 One owl alights upon her shield, another stands beneath it, and a third perches atop her altar. When the image is read as the souls of the three daughters of Erechtheus, the owl on the altar can be seen as the maiden who was sacrificed (on Athena’s altar) while her sisters, who kept their oath and died as well, are paired together at the left of the scene (as we see them on the Parthenon frieze, set apart from their little sister). The dead heroines are shown on the vase as winged souls, their bodies lost but their spirits living on within the sanctuary of Athena. In this, I build on Ferrari’s interpretation, whereby she associated these owls with the daughters of Kekrops.146 I argue instead that they represent the daughters of Erechtheus, who are, after all, related to and (in the ancient record) often confused with the Kekropids.
A hydria in Uppsala, Sweden, makes the connection even more emphatically. Here, a single owl perches atop an altar within Athena’s shrine, signified by a Doric column (insert this page, top).147 A man leads a ram to sacrifice while a bull stands in readiness at the far right. These represent the same animal victims (sheep and cattle) that are depicted on the north frieze of the Parthenon. Remember Philochoros: “Whoever sacrifices a cow to Athena is obliged to sacrifice a ewe to Pandora.”148 If the owl perched upon the altar represents the sacrificed daughter of Erechtheus, whose name may, in fact, be Pandora, then the ram is an offering for her, while the bull is destined for her father, Erechtheus.
Athena seated in her sanctuary with two owls by her shield, at left, and one sitting upon her altar, at right. White-ground lekythos, the Athena Painter, ca. 490–480 B.C. (illustration credit ill.104)
An intriguing image of an anthropomorphized owl, appearing on a mug in the Louvre, once again embodies the intimacy of Athena and the girl who gave her life for Athens (following page).149 The wide-eyed bird staring back at us is armed and helmeted as it charges into battle, human arms emerging from its feathered body to brandish a spear and a shield (an olive frond spreads across the back of the vase). Here is a warrior owl, a predator, a bird dressed like a hoplite. In this single image, Athena and her favorite symbol merge into one. And in their combined presence, we sense as well the soul of the little princess who saved Athens. Praxithea likened the sacrifice of her daughter to sending a son into battle: heroism such as few girls could accede to but one to equal any heroic death for the salvation of the city. On this cup the sacrifice and the transformation have already occurred: the “warrior girl” is dead, and transformed; her spirit lives on as a winged owl. Flying over the battlefield, she inspires Athenian victory, just as hovering above the Acropolis, she summons Athenians to ritual observances.
Anthropomorphized warrior owl brandishing spear and shield. Mug, ca. 475–450 B.C. (illustration credit ill.105)
The Louvre cup dates to the second quarter of the fifth century and is related to a series of Athenian vases known as owl skyphoi, produced from about 490 B.C. into the 420s, after which production relocated to the workshops of Apulia in southern Italy. Thousands of these distinctive vessels survive, uniform in shape and decoration. On front and back they show an owl flanked by two olive twigs.150
Many of these cups have one horizontal and one vertical handle, an unusual configuration that may have to do with a dual function. A horizontal handle might be used to bring the skyphos to a drinker’s lips, while the vertical handle might be used to pour libations upon the ground or an altar. In chapter 1, we visited the so-called Skyphos Sanctuary on the north slope of the Acropolis. Here, over two hundred cups of skyphos shape were found deliberately arranged in rows, perhaps reflecting how worshippers performing such a ritual set down their cups after offering a libation. Indeed, it is likely that the owl skyphoi were used on very specific ritual occasions.
We find yet another anthropomorphized owl on a tiny terra-cotta loom weight from Tarentum in southern Italy (facing page), now in the Art and Artifact collections at Bryn Mawr College.151 As on the owl mug in the Louvre, human arms are seen to emerge from the bird’s body. The owl is busy spinning, lifting a distaff as it draws wool from a basket down below. Form, function, and decoration meld seamlessly in this object: when suspended in air from the loom, dangling on threads, these little owls would appear to fly. Imagin
e the tiny fingers of a girl weaving the weft through the warp, tickling the threads and causing the owls to dance in the air.
Girl owl with human hands spins thread on distaff. Terra-cotta loom weight from Tarentum. (illustration credit ill.106)
No class of objects, however, made for a wider dissemination of Athena’s companion than the large silver tetradrachms, known simply as “owls.” Minted without interruption from the last decade of the sixth century until the first century B.C., these coins and their contemporary imitations circulated as far away as Yemen and Afghanistan.152 They present Athena on the obverse and, on the reverse, her owl, an olive sprig, and the letters ATHE (an abbreviation for the words “of the Athenians”). Some specimens show the crescent moon in the field just to the left of the owl’s head (following page), a device that, we have argued earlier, may well signal the Panathenaic festival itself, a feast that culminated on the day the moon waned. As the quintessential Athenian celebration, the Panathenaia was so synonymous with Athens that the crescent moon communicated what the city was best known for. In Aristophanes’s Birds, the owl coins are famously referenced when Euelpides asks, “And who is it brings an owl to Athens?”153 This can be understood as a kind of “coals to Newcastle” joke, hilarity at the thought of bringing to the city the one thing it was awash in.
AS NOTED at the opening of this chapter, the Panathenaia was not the most important event in Greece, but it could not have been more important at Athens, as the ultimate rite of belonging. We have focused on the singular role of the tribal events, competitions, and rituals that set the Panathenaia apart from all other Panhellenic festivals. These represent a manifestation of a larger Athenian obsession with genealogy that we have tracked throughout this book. Legitimacy of descent was the sine qua non of membership in the citizenry.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 32