A few decades later, the goddess of wisdom completed the Christians’ work for them. Athene appeared to Proclus in his dream and whispered an order into his ear. “Make your house ready,” she said; “they have turned me out of my temple, so now I come to live with you.” Proclus wept, and then he prepared himself. The goddess, it is said, went to live with him in his little house on the southern slopes of the Acropolis, and she was never seen again. Her empty image was removed from its sanctuary and shipped away to Constantinople by the emperor’s agents. And so the Parthenon, whose virgin goddess had been cast out of her own sanctuary, was ruined for the first time.
Eight hundred years later, the Christian rabble of Constantinople would tear an ancient statue to pieces because they were convinced it was the habitation of a demon. It was said that this statue stood over eighteen feet tall. She wore a helmet and held a shield and spear, and a winged figure of Victory fluttered in her hands.
1687
WHEN IT WAS some twenty-one centuries old, the Parthenon was ruined a second time. A Holy League of Christians descended on Athens, now a city in the Ottoman Empire, and laid siege to the Acropolis. Cannonballs rained onto the marble, and smoke blackened the sky and choked the air. Terrified, the harem of the Ottoman garrison, who were trapped on the rock, gathered their children about them and took refuge in what was now their mosque. Holed up in the shadows as the cannonade rumbled and cracked outside, the women told their children stories to reassure them.
One woman recounted tales from the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi. This mosque had been built as a madrassa by the wise man Plato long ago, she said, and he had delivered his lectures from the throne now used by the imam at prayer time. He had dwelled here with the goddess Athene, to whom he used to pray for wisdom. The mosque had been standing here for many thousands of years, the woman told her children, and it was not about to fall down now.
This Plato had constructed the mihrab, the niche pointing toward Mecca, in sheets of alabaster, which glowed even now in the darkness of the bombardment. The women pointed at the niche: “See, it glows still; Allah has not deserted us yet.” Plato had taken the bronze gates of Troy and had made them into the doors of his Academy. “The gates of Troy, which were never breached except by treachery, will keep us safe and sound,” said the women.
A Christian woman of the harem recounted tales from another traveler, the Italian Niccolò Martoni. Plato had lived long before the time of Jesus, let alone the prophet Muhammad, she said, and in those days many came to study the arts of wisdom in this building. One day, a young student called Dionysius was standing in the porch when the sky went dark and the earth began to tremble. This young Dionysius felt that some event of great significance was happening. Something moved him, and he turned to the mighty column next to which he was standing. With his knife, he carved an emblem into the marble: a cross. And the day on which he carved it, the Christian woman of the harem said, was the very day on which Jesus Christ was crucified for all our sins; and she crossed herself.
Later, when the Christians came and converted the building into a church, they repeated the little vandalism of Dionysius again and again. They worked their way around the friezes of sculpture, and they hacked off the heads and faces of the horsemen, the officials, the women bearing jars of oil and water, and the small child who carried the sacred gown; these were pagan idols and the habitation of demons. Just one sculpture—a pair of robed women, one seated and one standing—was left alone by the Christians, because they imagined that it represented the Annunciation. Centuries passed, and every passing archbishop cut his name into the marble walls, just as Dionysius had once carved his cross. In those days, the woman said, this darkened hall had been gorgeous with golden mosaic, clouded with incense, ringing with bells and chanting. There had been an icon of Our Lady that had been painted from life by Saint Luke himself, a copy of the gospels that had been transcribed by Saint Helena, the head of Saint Makarios, the arms of Saint Dionysios, Saint Cyprian, and Saint Justin, and the elbow of Saint Maccabeus.
When the Christian woman had finished speaking, her Muslim sister picked up the story. Not so very long ago, she said, when the Roman Empire of the Christians finally fell to the forces of the prophet, the church had been turned into a mosque. The sultan Mehmet had come to see the place and had marveled at its beauty. As the Christians had done before them, the people of the prophet excised from their temple the idolatrous images they found, and the gruesome frescoes of the Last Judgment disappeared under whitewash. There was just one image that they did not dare to remove, a mosaic of the Virgin Mary in the vault of the mihrab. Once upon a time, a soldier had taken a shot at it, and the Virgin Mary had withered his arm away in punishment; so despite the disapproval of the authorities, the icon was allowed to remain.
Even though the virgin goddess of wisdom who held a winged Victory in her hand had been cast out of the Parthenon many centuries before, something of her spirit remained in the mosque on the Acropolis with its icon of the Virgin, which had once been the church of Holy Wisdom. Because this was so, the women and children thought the spirit of the Parthenon would protect them, and they stayed in the shadows, telling their stories. And because he listened to their stories, the commander of the garrison decided to store not only his wives and his children in the building but also a great magazine of gunpowder.
The forces of the Holy League shelled the Ottoman position for three days, but the Acropolis held out; it seemed to be as invulnerable as the women and the children and the commander had imagined. Then, on the third day, an Ottoman deserter told the gunners about the store of gunpowder hidden inside the ancient mosque.
They took aim.
The explosion shook the earth. The middle of the mosque blew apart, and the columns of the northern and southern colonnades were flattened. Sharp shards of white marble fell on the hills a mile away
from the Acropolis. A fire raged for two days, and nearly all the people who had taken refuge in the building perished.
The general commander of the Holy League, Francesco Morosini, sent a terse report back to the Senate in Venice. “A fortunate shot reached a depot containing a considerable quantity of powder,” he wrote. “It was impossible to extinguish the flames.”
The Ottoman forces surrendered, and Morosini made his way up to the smoking ruin of which he was now the master. His men set up ropes and pulleys, and they climbed up the face of the building toward the pediment, where the images of Athene and Poseidon were locked in their ancient contest for the suzerainity of Athens. The soldiers were going to do what the Venetians always did: take the statues down and bring them back to Venice, to adorn the piazzas and palaces of their robber republic. But the pulleys came free of their housings and the ropes snapped, and Athene and Poseidon crashed to the ground and smashed to pieces. Morosini walked away from the ruin, and it was returned to the Ottomans about a year later. Other things were more important to the Holy League than a derelict mosque.
And so the Parthenon, whose virgin goddess had been cast out and whose usefulness as a building had come to an abrupt end, was ruined a second time. There was one survivor. It is said that when the troops of the Holy League walked up to the remains of the Parthenon, a young virgin girl walked out of the ruins. It is not recorded what they did with her.
1816
WHEN THE PARTHENON was in the twenty-third century of its existence, it was ruined a third time. The House of Lords sat in Parliament in the Palace of Westminster in London, and before them lay the Petition of the Earl of Elgin, Respecting his Collection of Marbles. Before them, indeed, stood the Earl of Elgin himself.
In his garden shed in London’s Park Lane was a jumbled heap of broken images. Once upon a time they had been beautiful and perfect and whole, but now their noses (and their heads and their hands and their feet) were missing. They were cracked and scarred and worn down by time, and so was Lord Elgin. He stood before his peers and told them his story.
Once upon a time,
he said, he had been young, and—as all young milordi should—he thirsted for improvement and politeness, beauty and truth. To learn the art of warfare, he studied Herodotus and Thucydides; for statesmanship, he read Plutarch; for wisdom, Plato and Aristotle; and for feeling, Euripides and Aeschylus.
Lord Elgin knew all about the Parthenon. The modern publications that made their way to his library showed him just how perfect the Parthenon had been. James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, the result of much scholarly measuring and excavation, illustrated the temple in a state of completeness. Pale aquatints showed the severe colonnade of eight Doric columns at each end, surmounted by an architrave and a pediment filled with the magnificent marble bodies of the ancient Athenians frozen in time. Stuart and Revett’s seductive topographical views of Athens recalled to his mind the pleasing prospect of Edinburgh Castle viewed over the Firth of Forth at sunset.
Just as Thucydides had once predicted, Lord Elgin was convinced that Athens had been mistress of a greater empire than it ever had really ruled; and he hoped that one day his own nation would come to equal, if not surpass, the greatness of that empire. He dreamed of Scotland—North Britain, he called it—as a new Hellas, and of Edinburgh as a new Athens of the North. When he was made ambassador to the court of the sultan in Constantinople, he saw himself as a modern Alcibiades, called to foreign climes in the service of a country about to taste greatness.
On his way to Constantinople, Lord Elgin collected an entourage. There was Giambattista Lusieri, a landscape painter; Feodor Ivanovitch, a Tartar freedman whose talent for figure drawing had much distinguished him at Baden-Baden; two architectural draftsmen and two molders of casts. He engaged these artificers to measure, to draw, and to make plaster copies of the antiquities of Athens, with a view to assembling a collection of sculpture, drawings, and casts that would be beneficial to the fine arts of Great Britain.
Lord Elgin and his entourage disembarked in 1800, but the
Athens they found was not the imperial capital for which they had hoped. The decrepit market town was ruled over by a provincial governor of the Ottoman sultan. The Parthenon, meanwhile, lay under the jurisdiction of the commandant of the Acropolis, which was then a fortress no less barbarous than those of Lord Elgin’s homeland.
These Turks did not appreciate the significance of the ruins that lay all around them. They treated the Parthenon more like a quarry than a building, collecting the fragments of marble and grinding them down into a dust, which they used to make lime mortar. They broke the stones into small pieces for the maze of garden walls and cottages that covered the Acropolis.
But to Lord Elgin’s horror, the British dilettanti resident in Athens were no more reverent toward the Parthenon than their Ottoman hosts. One of them, John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, wryly observed:
It is very pleasant to walk the streets here. Over almost every door is an antique statue or basso-relievo, more or less good though all much broken, so that you are in a perfect gallery of marbles in these lands. Some we steal, some we buy . . . We have just breakfasted, and are meditating a walk to the citadel, where our Greek attendant is gone to meet the workmen, and is, I hope, hammering down the Centaurs and Lapiths [from the frieze of the Parthenon] . . . Nothing like making hay when the sun shines, and when the commandant has felt the pleasure of having our sequins for a few days, I think we shall bargain for a good deal of the old temple.
He wasn’t the only one thus occupied. Just as Morritt was filching what he could, Louis Fauvel, the agent of the French ambassador to the Ottoman court, received his instructions: “Take away everything that you can. Do not neglect any opportunity to remove everything in Athens and its neighbourhood that is removeable.”
If Elgin was to “improve the arts of Great Britain,” speed was of the utmost necessity, since Napoleon’s agents had exactly the same idea in respect to their own nation. Lord Elgin left his entourage behind
in Athens and sailed on to Constantinople, hoping that he could persuade the sultan and the grand vizier to stop the French in their tracks.
He didn’t have to wait long. Napoleon was roundly defeated by the British in Egypt, and the grand vizier saw which way history was turning. On 22 July 1801 a directive from the court of the sultan appeared in Athens. The vizier’s letter ordered the commandant of the Acropolis to allow Elgin’s men:
To enter freely within the walls of the citadel, and to draw and model with plaster the ancient temples there.
To erect scaffolding and to dig where they may wish to discover the ancient foundations.
Liberty to take away any sculpture or inscriptions which do not interfere with the works or walls of the citadel.
Fourteen years later, some several hundred pieces of the Parthenon—the frieze of the procession of the gown, the pedimental sculptures of Athene and Poseidon and all the gods, the Lapiths and the Centaurs, and even a capital of the colonnade—were safe in London, rescued from the Turks, the dilettanti, and the French.
These sculptures had been pried off what was left of the Parthenon, dug up from the ground about it, and extracted from the cottages of the feckless peasants who still inhabited the site. They had been packed into crates and loaded onto ships. Some of the ships were captured in war, and the sculptures had to be recovered from the enemy; others of them sank, and the sculptures were salvaged from the bottom of the sea. On their journey, these marbles attracted wonder, veneration, and envy. In Rome, Lord Elgin asked Antonio Canova to restore the statues, but the sculptor refused, saying that it would be blasphemy to take his chisel to that which the hand of Phidias had touched.
Now the Parthenon lay in a shed in a back garden in Park Lane, and presiding over it was a man as broken as the marbles he possessed. Lord Elgin’s term as ambassador was over. He had barely made it home: he had been taken prisoner while traveling in France and had languished there for three years before being allowed to return to
Britain. His coffers were empty. His very body had come to resemble the violated perfection of his marbles, since he had contracted an infection in Constantinople and, like a classical statue, had lost his nose. Elgin had only one hope of restoring his lost fortunes: he would have to sell his marbles. But he was keen to stress to his peers that this was not for wanton gain, and he concluded his petition Respecting his Collection of Marbles with a noble if self-serving statement.
In amassing these remains of antiquity for the benefit of my Country, and in rescuing them from the imminent and unavoidable destruction with which they were threatened, had they been left many years longer the prey of mischievous Turks, who mutilated them for wanton amusement, or for the purpose of selling them piecemeal to passing travellers; I have been actuated by no motives of private emolument.
The lords and their advisers were not impressed. Richard Payne Knight, a connoisseur of the Society of Dilettanti and founder of the British Museum, listened to his story and replied: “You have lost your labour, my Lord Elgin. Your marbles are overrated: they are not Greek, they are Roman, of the time of Hadrian.” The refined milordi and the dilettanti of Great Britain were not used to gazing upon broken fragments of marble, pitted with shrapnel wounds and worn away by the wind and the rain. To them, this heap of stones represented not an improvement of the arts of Great Britain but a fool’s errand.
There were some who were horrified by the way in which Elgin’s men had destroyed what was left of the unity of the Parthenon to amass this pile of stones. His peer Lord Byron included a devastating attack on Lord Elgin in his poem Childe Harold.
Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee,
Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they lov’d;
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defac’d, thy mouldering shrines remov’d
By British hands, which it had best behov’d
To guard those relics ne’er to be restor’d.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they rov’d,
An
d once again thy hopeless bosom gor’d,
And snatch’d thy shrinking Gods to northern climes abhorr’d.
And he argued that the Parthenon should be allowed to crumble away in the place where it had always stood.
When Lord Elgin went before the House of Lords, he offered his marbles to the nation for the sum of £62,440. The lords laughed in his face and proposed to give him less than half that sum. Lord Elgin appeared before them a second time, and then the House of Lords ordered that he be paid £35,000 for his trouble. Elgin, deeply disappointed, had no choice but to accept.
In that year of 1816, the Elgin marbles were moved into the British Museum, and there they remain. They are now entombed in the Duveen gallery, built especially for them in the 1930s. The gallery inverts the original arrangement of the sculptures, so that the frieze and the pedimental statuary face inward toward a toplit room, rather than outward toward the dazzling marble plateau of the Acropolis. Mutilated, perching on plinths in the gloomy London light, the Elgin marbles confront us at eye height, simultaneously impressive and tragic.
Other pieces of the Parthenon were scattered all over Europe. There are two heads in Copenhagen that fit onto bodies that are now in the British Museum, and there is another one in Würzburg, in Germany. There are pieces in the Vatican, in Vienna, Munich, and Palermo. There are fragments in the Louvre, collected by the defeated and disgraced French from Lord Elgin’s leavings. There are, of course, a few pieces left in Athens, and not many of those are actually affixed to what had once been the Parthenon.
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Page 3