The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Despite the archaeological digs and studies that have been carried out for dozens of years the Erechtheion has remained one of the most difficult Greek sanctuaries to identify. Various cults are mingled and piled on top of each other. “The true chaos of a holy place” as someone aptly remarked.

  The Erechtheion does not give the impression the Parthenon does of a uniform construction, and in fact it is two connected temples: the eastern part dedicated to Athena, the western part to Poseidon, whom tradition identified with Erechtheus, one of the first mythical rulers of Attica. And so the intention of the architects was for this to be a temple of reconciliation, as we know these two gods of Olympus engaged in a dispute over the land of Athens.

  The northern part of the Erechtheion is the most mysterious, both in terms of its layout and its significance. We know that the altar was usually situated in front of the Greek sanctuary; here, however, we find all of three altars inside. It was also a sanctuary mausoleum or rather a sanctuary tomb, where the remains of the first Attic kings were placed, surrounded with honor, under the portico of caryatids. The stone benches running alongside the walls suggest that initiations took place here. So the Ionian temple envelops the oldest reliquary of Athenian myths and cults.

  What is the Acropolis as a whole? The answer from the school textbooks would be: a harmonious architectural ensemble. But an unprejudiced eye discovers this is not the case. The monumental Doric Parthenon stands next to the Ionian Erechtheion, the massive Propylaea next to the exquisite, delicate temple of Athena Nike, chiseled like a fine sculpture.

  The archaeologist Arnold Walter Lawrence12 compared the Acropolis to the palace at Persepolis and concluded that Pericles wanted to compete with the magnificent construction of the defeated Persian monarchs. The evidence for this is supposed to be the principle of dysymmetry, alien to Greek art, the focus of the main accents on one building, not centrally situated, the splendid palatial entrance, and also a certain excessive lavishness of exterior decoration.

  A simpler and more likely answer to the question why the Acropolis is not an ensemble of homogenous design is given by the chronology of the particular buildings. We do not know what plans Pericles had, because they were never fully realized. The outbreak of war and the death of the leader interrupted the work. The Parthenon and Propylaea are his accomplishment.

  One spirit gave rise to both buildings. Monumental, clearly laid out, conveying the triumph of democracy, full of pride and faith in the future.

  When Pericles pronounces his funeral oration (which we have from Thucydides) in honor of the Athenians who perished in the first year of the Peloponnesian war, we might expect a long litany of gods to whose protection he commends the citizens’ fate. But no, it is in praise of the city. The name of Athens is sounded in a tone not just lofty but almost religious or mystical.

  The Peloponnesian war brought an end to mighty Athens. Its shadow can be traced on the buildings of the Acropolis. The Parthenon is twenty years older than the Erechtheion (barely a generation’s difference), but the temples seem to belong to different epochs. The first, massive, is dedicated to one divinity, or to a worshipped city. The second, with its capricious layout (halls on two levels, three entrances decorated with the large, nonfunctional caryatids), gathers under its roof many heroes and gods. One may see in this a flight into the past characteristic of epochs of decline, a return to old times, a desperate search for tradition. The columns of the Parthenon are like the stony chorus of Antigone.* The Erechtheion, like the drama of Euripides, is a promise of the Hellenistic world, a world of imperial quarrels and unrest.

  II

  Athens, filled with the ruins of ancient palaces, is a great impoverished hospital where there are as many beggars as there are Christians.

  BABIN

  IN THE COURSE OF nearly two thousand and five hundred years, the Acropolis was assaulted by tidal waves of war, siege, pillage, and profanation. It seems an extraordinary thing that Pericles’s creation was even partially reconstructed. A few Gothic inscriptions, Turkish tombstones, Venetian lions—these are the only material testimony to the stormy history of the sacred mount.

  Alexander the Great knew that Athens was and would long remain a center of anti-Macedonian irredentism. But the prestige of the former Greek capital was so great that after the battle on the Granicus, which opened the gates to Asia for him, he sent twenty captured shields, which were hung on the columns of the Parthenon.

  The son of one of his generals, a certain Demetrios, called Conqueror of Cities, permitted himself a profanation unprecedented and unrivaled in the history of the Acropolis. He simply moved into the Parthenon, that is, he turned a part of the temple into his private residence, explaining to the Athenians that the goddess herself had invited him into her house. His conduct throughout was quite uninhibited. He held ostentatious feasts in the company of noisy courtesans, and when the scandal exceeded all bounds, there were theatrical reconciliations with the goddess. Plutarch speaks of this with a fine restraint: “With an eye to the city’s glory there is no need to give an explicit or detailed account of all the horrors and indignities committed here.13” The Demetrios episode seems straight from the Lives of the Emperors of Suetonius.

  The sack of Corinth by the Romans in 146 B.C. (a suggestive description by Polybius: “Paintings thrown into the dust14 and soldiers stretched out on them playing dice”) should be a terrible memento for Athens. But in that city, where every rhetor was a disconsolate lover of lost freedom, people only waited for the right occasion for revenge.

  Rome’s internal difficulties led the Pontic king Mithrydates to look for enemies of Rome in the East and in Greece. At the head of the anti-Roman movement in Athens stands the rhetor Aristion, whom the mob call a strategist. The Roman Senate sends out Sulla against Mithrydates. His military forces were weak but the cruelty with which he went about bringing the Greeks to their knees was unequaled. The treasuries of Olympia, Epidauros, and Delphi were plundered, sacred groves uprooted. “We are the soldiers of the gods, because the gods pay us.”

  The siege of Athens lasted ten long months. The Acropolis defended itself most stubbornly. When Aristion, putting too much faith in eloquence, sent two rhetors to convince the Roman commander of the necessity of lifting the siege, Sulla’s answer was curt: “The Senate and the Roman people sent me here not to take lessons in fine language but to punish the rebels.” In May 86 B.C., the Acropolis falls. A massacre of its defenders and the suicide of the best citizens follow, and ships loaded with works of art and manuscripts set sail for the new capital of the world.

  It is difficult to make even an approximate tally of the sacrifices and losses Greece suffered in order to become a school for Rome. For to the pillage of war, which was in some sense “official” one must add the great number of works taken away by private collectors.

  An archaeological sensation came a few years before World War I with the discovery on the seabed off the coast of Tunisia, near the town of Mahdia, of a ship filled with works of art, furniture, and even finished architectural objects like four meter long columns, blocks of marble, capitals. These objects were of high artistic quality and scholars established without any difficulty on the basis of the inscriptions on tombstones that they came from Athens. The shipwreck must have occurred at the beginning of the 1st century B.C. There is no doubt that this was one of the ships carrying Sulla’s loot from Piraeus to Rome. Chased by a storm, overloaded with cargo, it went down near the Tunisian coast. In any case, we know that Sulla brought columns from Athens which were used to rebuild the Roman Capitol, which had been burnt during the civil war.

  The famous Verres trial of 70 B.C., immortalized in Cicero’s speech for the prosecution, offers us valuable analogies and gives us a sense of what the Roman “hunger for art” really was. In the three years during which he held high office in Sicily, Verres stole everything, from the statues of gods in temples to the rings he spotted on the fingers of wealthy Sicilians. The wolfish appetite of th
e new rulers of the world did not always go hand in hand with connoisseurship and we often encounter astonishing ignorance on the part of the Romans. The consul Mummius, who conquered and plundered Corinth, threatens those responsible with the transportation to Rome of objects of Greek art that if they damage them, he will force them—as if it were possible—to recreate the masterpieces.

  Cicero himself, a passionate collector, as we know from his letters to Attica when the latter was in Greece (“If you find any sculptures15 I’d like, don’t hesitate to purchase them for me”), committed an array of errors in his speech against Verres (false attributions, a failure to differentiate real artistic value, and so on).

  From the time of Augustus the Roman emperors employed a rather liberal policy toward Athens. In the Satyricon Petronius jokes that in Athens it was easier to meet a god than a man. And indeed, under Roman rule the former capital of Greece underwent a true invasion of statuary—not only gods and emperors but also minor protectors and benefactors of the city. Augustus himself had many statues in Athens, of which at least one stood on the Acropolis. Near the Parthenon, twenty meters from its eastern façade, a temple was raised, dedicated to Rome and the emperor. Some fragments remain from which one can surmise that this small, round, heavy building, placed right next to a masterpiece from the time of Pericles, was—to put it mildly—an aesthetic misunderstanding. In the area of the western wall of the Pinakoteka there is to this day a huge pedestal of gray marble which served as an elevation for successive statues in honor of one of the kings of Pergamon, then Anthony* and Cleopatra, finally Agrippa, the emperor’s brother-in-law, who as we know secured privileges for the city.

  Not only pedestals exchanged owners; frequently a new emperor’s head was simply plonked down on an existing torso and given a new inscription, so that the same sculpture represented first Tiberius, then Nero, Vespasian, or Titus.

  Saint Paul the Apostle gave the Athenians too much credit when he called them the most religious of people, having seen a temple in Athens dedicated to an unknown god16. This was the usual cautionary procedure, just as the monuments of emperors were not evidence of enthusiasm but of opportunism.

  Emperors Claudius and Caligula are credited with the construction of the great steps in the style of the Capitol that lead to the Propylaea. One of the most authentic friends of Hellas, the emperor Hadrian, carried out his plans for the beautification of Athens off the grounds of the sacred hill. But as Pausanias notes, his monument stood inside the Parthenon. We don’t know if this was because Hadrian considered himself a new Theseus or because no appropriate spot could be found among the many statues crowded together on the sacred hill.

  Julian the Apostate was the last emperor who wished to return Olympus to the gods of Hellas and to Greece its ancient glory. In a letter to the Senate and the people of Athens he writes: “What floods of tears I wept, what groans I uttered, stretching out my arms to the Acropolis and beseeching Minerva to shield her servant and not abandon him.”

  A legend relates that he sent ambassadors to Delphi—plundered by Herulians—to obtain counsel from the oracle and ask for a blessing on his plans. He got the following answer: “Say to the king: the once joyous edifice of the temple now lies in ruins; the god is without shelter; the springs and laurel groves are silent; even water has ceased to speak.”

  The name of Deksippos is sunk in the sands of oblivion. There was no Plutarch then to write his life, nor any fine sculptor to pass on his likeness. But this Athenian orator and author surely deserves to be remembered by Hellenophiles. When in the middle of the third century the Goths conquered Attica and managed to settle within the walls of Athens, Deksippos organized an improvised citizens’ army in the gorges of Pentelikon and Parnassus which drove the Goths out. The last, if but brief, victory of the Greeks. In the Louvre there is an inscription in honor of Deksippos. From it we learn that he was an archon and a member of the honorary committee of the Great pan-Athenaia, which is testimony to the vitality (at least nominal) of traditional Athenian institutions.

  Toward the end of the fourth century, Athens comes under Byzantine rule. In Constantinople a university is founded in 425, controlled and endowed by the state. The free schools of the Athenian philosophers now have serious competition. For centuries, Athens withstood the competition of other centers of ancient civilization, but the doctrine of Neoplatonism which had developed so vigorously in the fourth and fifth centuries was judged hostile to the state religion—Christianity—and this was one of the main reasons philosophers and rhetors were driven out of Athens by a decree of Justinian in 529. This administrative act was harsher than any lost battle. Athens was reduced to the role of a small garrison town of the Eastern empire.

  At the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries the Parthenon was converted to a church of Divine Wisdom. This actually meant adopting the Greek temple in an unaltered state. A wall was built between the columns of the peristyle. An entrance to the temple was made on the west side, and the old entrance was walled up, making an apse18 covered with frescoes; a bishop’s throne was “borrowed” from the theater of Dionysus. All this work did not, however, alter the Parthenon’s structure. Its exterior appearance was not violated. In similar fashion, the Erechtheion was converted into a Church of the Mother of God.

  The rulers of Byzantium rarely visited the former capital of Hellas. The visit of Basil II at the beginning of the eleventh century impressed itself most deeply on the popular consciousness. He chose the Acropolis to celebrate his victory over the Bulgarians. It was a bow to a long-extinct tradition. We may gain a sense of the spiritual state of the Athenians at the end of the twelfth century from the homilies of Michael Akominatos, who was archbishop of Athens for thirty years. He resided on the Acropolis, he celebrated mass in the Parthenon; one might think he attained the ultimate dream of every humanist. In his flowery sermons this erudite Christian and lover of Antiquity mixed mythology with Scripture and exalted his flock, telling them they were the golden seed and that their faith would make them morally superior to Ajax, Diogenes, Pericles, and Themistocles.

  The poor illiterate flock (also a rather complex ethnic mixture, speaking a language remote from classical Greek) listened and understood nothing. Archbishop Michael could not suppress a cry of disappointment: “O Athens—mother of wisdom19, how low you have fallen into ignorance! When I deliver my sermons, so simple, so devoid of artifice, it seems to me that I am saying incomprehensible things in the foreign tongue of some Persian or Scythian.”

  Waves of crusades weakened the Byzantine Empire, already exhausted by constant battles with the Turks and Bulgarians. Greece is irrevocably taken from the Byzantines and split up into a number of kingdoms. Athens fell to Otto de la Roche, who adopts the title of Megas Kyr and wins the title of prince from the king of France. And so arose the Frankish dynasty that ruled Attica for three generations, until the heirless death in 1308 of the last of the Attic de la Roches. In that time the Acropolis is made over into a medieval fortress. It was surrounded with a turreted wall, and on the southern wing of the Propylaea a massive square watchtower was built, which lasted right up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

  Near the city, where Philip the Macedonian routed the Greeks and Sulla won a victory over the expeditionary force of Mithrydates, the Franks suffered a defeat at the hands of the Catalans. They were mercenaries whom the Byzantine emperor Andronicus Paleologus had recruited to do battle with the Turks. Soon however they started making conquests on their own initiative. Athens and Thebes fell into the hands of the Catalans, but their rule was brief and did not leave any mark on the architecture of the sacred hill.

  Florentines from the wealthy merchant family of Acciauoli—the next rulers of the duchy of Athens—brought on the Acropolis one of the most bizarre episodes in its architectural history. One of the Acciauoli, Nerio, had the ambition to make Athens equal the princely courts of the Italian trecento. The main buildings of the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheion, w
ere temples. That left the Propylaea, which were turned into an Italian-style palace. The monumental entrance from the age of Pericles was walled in and windows were opened in the walls, forming in this way four large reception halls. This curious Italian-Dorian Palazzo d’Acropoli was connected to the Pinakoteka. New stories were added onto its flat roof.

  In 1456, shortly after the fall of Constantinople, Omar, the deputy of Muhammed II, incorporates Athens into his holdings. For the Turks it was a strategic point and nothing else.*

  The new techniques of war and the decisive role of the artillery, which celebrated its triumph at the time of the conquest of Byzantium, demanded fundamental changes in the defensive architecture of the sacred mount. The medieval fortifications of the Athenian princes were inadequate. The Propylaea disappeared behind defensive walls, and inside the fortress military buildings and storehouses for ammunition arose. The Parthenon was converted into a mosque. The only architectural addition visible from the outside was a minaret planted on the roof of the classical edifice. The harem of the castle’s warden (aga) was accommodated in the Erechtheion.

  Storehouses of gunpowder were kept inside the Propylaea, in a specially built hall with a cupola. Popular tradition, repeated by a certain French traveler, says that in 1656 the aga of the Acropolis decided to bomb the church of Saint Demetrios during one of the Islamic holidays. In the night before this base plan was to be carried out, a thunderstorm broke out and a lightning flash that hit the Propylaea caused an explosion which brought down the roof and architrave. The stores of gunpowder were then transferred to the Parthenon, whose solid construction, it was thought, was a guarantee of safety.