by Will Durant
3. The Parthenon
In 447 Ictinus, aided by Callicrates, and under the general supervision of Pheidias and Pericles, began to build a new temple for Athene Parthenos. In the western end of the structure he placed a room for her maiden priestesses, and called it the room “of the virgins”—ton parthenon; and in the course of careless time this name of a part, by a kind of architectural metaphor, was applied to the whole. Ictinus chose as his material the white marble of Mt. Pentelicus, veined with iron grains. No mortar was used; the blocks were so accurately squared and so finely finished that each stone grasped the next as if the two were one. The column drums were bored to let a small cylinder of olivewood connect them, and permit each drum to be turned around and around upon the one below it until the meeting surfaces were ground so smooth that the division between drums was almost invisible.49
The style was pure Doric, and of classic simplicity. The design was rectangular, for the Greeks did not care for circular or conical forms; hence there were no arches in Greek architecture, though Greek architects must have been familiar with them. The dimensions were modest: 228 × 101 × 65 feet. Probably a system of proportion, like the Polycleitan canon, prevailed in every part of the building, all measurements bearing a given relation to the diameter of the column.50 At Poseidonia the height of the column was four times its diameter; here it was five; and the new form mediated successfully between Spartan sturdiness and Attic elegance. Each column swelled slightly (three quarters of an inch in diameter) from base to middle, tapered toward the top, and leaned toward the center of its colonnade; each corner column was a trifle thicker than the rest. Every horizontal line of stylobate and entablature was curved upward towards its center, so that the eye placed at one end of any supposedly level line could not see the farther half of the line. The metopes were not quite square, but were designed to appear square from below. All these curvatures were subtle corrections for optical illusions that would otherwise have made stylobate lines seem to sink in the center, columns to diminish upward from the base, and corner columns to be thinner and outwardly inclined. Such adjustments required considerable knowledge of mathematics and optics, and constituted but one of those mechanical features that made the temple a perfect union of science and art. In the Parthenon, as in current physics, every straight line was a curve, and, as in a painting, every part was drawn toward the center in subtle composition. The result was a certain flexibility and grace that seemed to give life and freedom to the stones.
Above the plain architrave ran an alternating series of triglyphs and metopes. In the ninety-two metopes were high reliefs recounting once more the struggle of “civilization” against “savagery” in the wars of Greeks and Trojans, Greeks and Amazons, Lapiths and centaurs, giants and gods. These slabs are clearly the work of many hands and unequal skills; they do not match in excellence the reliefs of the cella frieze, though some of the centaur heads are Rembrandts in stone. In the gable pediments were statuary groups carved in the round and in heroic size. In the east pediment, over the entrance, the spectator was allowed to see the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. Here was a powerful recumbent “Theseus,”* a giant capable of philosophical meditation and civilized repose; and a fine figure of Iris, the female Hermes, with drapery clinging and yet blown by the wind—for Pheidias considers it an ill wind that does not disturb some robe. Here also was a majestic “Hebe,” the goddess of youth, who filled the cups of the Olympians with nectar; and here were three imposing “Fates.” In the left corner four horses’ heads—eyes flashing, nostrils snorting, mouths foaming with speed—announced the rising of the sun, while in the right corner the moon drove her chariot to her setting; these eight are the finest horses in sculptural history. In the west pediment Athena contested with Poseidon the lordship of Attica. Here again were horses, as if to redeem the forked absurdity of man; and reclining figures that represented, with unrealistic magnificence, Athens’ modest streams. Perhaps the male figures are too muscular, and the female too spacious; but seldom has statuary been grouped so naturally, or so skillfully adjusted to the narrowing spaces of a pediment. “All other statues,” said Canova, with some hyperbole, “are of stone; these are of flesh and blood.”
More attractive, however, are the men and women of the frieze. For 525 feet along the top of the outer wall of the cella, within the portico, ran this most famous of all reliefs. Here, presumably, the youths and maids of Attica are bearing homage and gifts to Athena on the festival day of the Panathenaic games. One part of the procession moves along the west and north sides, another along the south side, to meet on the east front before the, goddess, who proudly offers to Zeus and other Olympians the hospitality of her city and a share of her spoils. Handsome knights move in graceful dignity on still handsomer steeds; chariots support dignitaries, while simple folk are happy to join in on foot; pretty girls and quiet old men carry olive branches and trays of cakes; attendants bear on their shoulders jugs of sacred wine; stately women convey to the goddess the peplos that they have woven and embroidered for her in long anticipation of this holy day; sacrificial victims move with bovine patience or angry prescience to their fate; maidens of high degree bring utensils of ritual and sacrifice; and musicians play on their flutes deathless ditties of no tone. Seldom have animals or men been honored with such painstaking art. With but two and a quarter inches of relief the sculptors were able, by shading and modeling, to achieve such an illusion of depth that one horse or horseman seems to be beyond another, though the nearest is raised no farther from the background than the rest.51 Perhaps it was a mistake to place this extraordinary relief so high that men could not comfortably contemplate it, or exhaust its excellence. Pheidias excused himself, doubtless with a twinkle in his eye, on the ground that the gods could see it; but the gods were dying while he carved.
FIG. 1—Hygiaea, Goddess of Health
Athens Museum
(See page 499)
FIG. 2—The Cup-Bearer
From the Palace of Minos.
Heracleum Museum
(See page 20)
FIG. 3—The “Snake Goddess”
Boston Museum
(See page 17)
FIG. 4—Wall Fresco and “Throne of Minos”
Heracleum Museum
(See page 18)
FIG. 5—A Cup from Vaphio
Athens Museum
(See page 32)
FIG. 6—Mask of “Agamemnon”
Athens Museum
(See page 32)
FIG. 7—Warrior, from temple of Aphaea at Aegina
Munich Glyptothek
(See page 95)
FIG. 8—Theater of Epidaurus
(See page 96)
FIG. 9—Temple of Poseidon
Paestum
(See page 109)
FIG. 10—A Krater Vase, With Athena and Heracles
Louvre, Paris
(See page 220)
FIG. 11—The Portland Vase
British Museum
(See page 616)
FIG. 12—The François Vase
Archeological Museum, Florence
(See page 219)
FIG. 13—A Kore, or Maiden
Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 222)
FIG. 14—The “Choiseul-Gouffie?
Apollo”
Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 222)
FIG. 15—Pericles
British Museum
(See page 248)
FIG. 16—Epicurus
Metropolitan Museum, New York
(See page 644)
FIG. 17—Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes
Naples Museum
(See page 319)
FIG. 18—“Birth of Aphrodite”
From the “Ludovisi Throne.” Museo delle Terme, Rome
(See page 319)
FIG. 19—“Ludovisi Throne,” Right Base
Museo delle Terme, Rome
(See page 319)
FIG. 20—“Ludovi
si Thronem,” Left Base
Museo delle Terme, Rome
(See page 319)
FIG. 21—The Diadumenos.
Roman copy, after Polycleitus (?)
Athens Museum
(See page 322)
FIG. 22—Apollo Sauroctonos.
Roman copy, after Praxiteles (?)
Louvre, Paris
(See page 496)
FIG. 23—The Discus Thrower. Roman copy, after Myron (?)
Museo delle Terme, Rome
(See page 323)
FIG. 24—The “Dreaming Athena”
An anonymous relief, probably of the fifth century.
Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 319)
FIG. 25—The Rape of the Lapith Bride
From the west pediment of the temple of Zeus. Olympia Museum
(See page 328)
FIG. 26—Stela of Damasistrate
Athens Museum
(See page 318)
FIG. 27—Heracles and Atlas
Metope from the temple of Zeus. Olympia Museum
(See page 328)
FIG. 28—Nike Fixing Her Sandal
From the temple of Nike Apteros. Acropolis Museum, Athens
(See page 331)
FIG. 29—Propylaea and temple of Nike Apteros
(See page 331)
FIG. 30—The Charioteer of Delphi
Delphi Museum
(See page 221)
FIG. 31—A Caryatid from the Erechtheum
British Museum
(See page 332)
FIG. 32—The Parthenon
(See page 332)
FIG. 33—Goddesses and “Iris”
East pediment of the Parthenon. British Museum
(See page 333)
FIG. 34—“Cecrops and Daughter”
West pediment of the Parthenon. British Museum
(See page 334)
FIG. 35—Horsemen, from the West Frieze of the Parthenon
British Museum
(See page 334)
FIG. 36—Sophocles
Lateran Museum, Rome
(See page 391)
FIG. 37—Demosthenes
Vatican, Rome
(See page 478)
FIG. 38—A Tanagra Statuette
Metropolitan Museum, New York
(See page 492)
FIG. 39—The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
A reconstruction. After Adler
(See page 494)
FIG. 40—Relief from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
British Museum
(See page 494)
FIG. 41—The “Aphrodite of Cnidus”
Vatican, Rome
(See page 495)
FIG. 42—The Nike of Paeonius
Olympia Museum
(See page 324)
FIG. 43—The Hermes of Praxiteles
Olympia Museum
(See page 496)
FIG. 44—Head of Praxiteles’ Hermes
Olympia Museum
(See page 496)
FIG. 45—The Doryphoros of Polycleitus.
As reproduced by Apollonius
Naples Museum
(See page 323)
FIG. 46—Head of Meleager.
Roman copy, after Scopas (?)
Villa Medici, Rome
(See page 497)
FIG. 47—Head of a Girl, from Chios
Boston Museum
(See page 499)
FIG. 48—The Apoxyomenos. A Roman copy, after Lysippus (?)
Vatican, Rome
(See page 498)
FIG. 49—The Raging (or Dancing) Maenad
Roman copy, after Scopas (?)
Dresden Albertinum
(See page 498)
FIG. 50—A Daughter of Niobe
Banca Comercial, Milan
FIG. 51—The Aphrodite of Cyrene
Museo delle Terme. Rome
FIG. 52—The Demeter of Cnidus
British Museum
(See page 499)
FIG. 53—Altar of Zeus at Pergamum
A reconstruction. State Museum, Berlin
(See page 618)
FIG. 54—Frieze from the Altar of Zeus at Pergamum
State Museum, Berlin
(See page 623)
FIG. 55—The Battle of Issus. Mosaic found at Pompeii
Naples Museum
(See page 620)
FIG. 56—The Laocoön
Vatican, Rome
(See page 622)
FIG. 57—The Farnese Bull
Naples Museum
(See page 623)
FIG. 58—The “Alexander” Sarcophagus
Constantinople Museum
(See page 623)
FIG. 59—The Aphrodite of Melos
Louvre, Paris
(See page 624)
FIG. 60—The Venus de’ Medici
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
(See page 624)
FIG. 61—The “Victory of Samothrace”
Louvre, Paris
(See page 624)
FIG. 62—Hellenistic Portrait Head
Naples Museum
FIG. 63—The “Old Market Woman”
Metropolitan Museum, New York
(See page 626)
FIG. 64—The Prize Fighter
Museo delle Terme, Rome
Beneath the seated deities of the frieze was the entrance to the inner temple. The interior was relatively small; much of the space was taken up by two double-storied Doric colonnades that supported the roof, and divided the naos into a nave and two aisles; while in the western end Athene Parthenos blinded her worshipers with the gold of her raiment, or frightened them with her spear and shield and snakes. Behind her was the Room of the Virgins, adorned with four columns in the Ionic style. The marble tiles of the roof were sufficiently translucent to let some light into the nave, and yet opaque enough to keep out the heat; moreover, piety, like love, deprecates the sun. The cornices were decorated with careful detail, surmounted with terra-cotta acroteria, and armed with gargoyles to carry off the rain. Many parts of the temple were painted, not in subdued colors but in bright tints of yellow, blue, and red. The marble was washed with a stain of saffron and milk; the triglyphs and parts of the molding were blue; the frieze had a blue background, the metopes a red, and every figure in them was colored.52 A people accustomed to a Mediterranean sky can bear and relish brighter hues than those that suit the clouded atmosphere of northern Europe. Today, shorn of its colors, the Parthenon is most beautiful at night, when through every columned space come changing vistas of sky, or the ever worshipful moon, or the lights of the sleeping city mingling with the stars.*
Greek art was the greatest of Greek products; for though its masterpieces have yielded one by one to the voracity of time, their form and spirit still survive sufficiently to be a guide and stimulus to many arts, many generations, and many lands. There were faults here, as in all that men do. The sculpture was too physical, and rarely reached the soul; it moves us more often to admire its perfection than to feel its life. The architecture was narrowly limited in form and style, and clung across a thousand years to the simple rectangle of the Mycenaean megaron. It achieved almost nothing in secular fields; it attempted only the easier problems of construction, and avoided difficult tasks like the arch and the vault, which might have given it greater scope. It held up its roofs with the clumsy expedient of internal and superimposed colonnades. It crowded the interior of its temples with statues whose size was out of proportion to the edifice, and whose ornamentation lacked the simplicity and restraint that we expect of the classic style.*
But no faults can outweigh the fact that Greek art created the classic style. The essence of that style—if the theme of this chapter may be restated in closing—is order and form: moderation in design, expression, and decoration; proportion in the parts and unity in the whole; the supremacy of reason without the extinction of feeling; a quiet perfection that is content with simplicity, and a sublimity that owes no
thing to size. No other style but the Gothic has had so much influence; indeed, Greek statuary is still the ideal, and until yesterday the Greek column dominated architecture to the discouragement of more congenial forms. It is good that we are freeing ourselves from the Greeks; even perfection becomes oppressive when it will not change. But long after our liberation is complete we shall find instruction and stimulus in that art which was the life of reason in form, and in that classic style which was the most characteristic gift of Greece to mankind.
CHAPTER XV
The Advancement of Learning
