The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The Acropolis, the citadel and still the symbol of classic Athens, was enclosed by a wall and served as the central fortress as early as the thirteenth century B.C. Never the center of commerce or of government, it became the focus of the polis’ religion and civic ceremony. By the early sixth century B.C. the Acropolis was the site of at least two grand limestone temples, with smaller temples or treasuries. A new marble temple and a great new entranceway were being built when the invading Persians occupied and leveled Athens in 480 B.C. Then, when the citizens began rebuilding they started on the Agora as their symbol of a revived democratic spirit, and neglected the Acropolis. But Pericles led them back to the Acropolis, and his restoration would remain for millennia the visible reminder of the glory that was Greece and the uncanny power of the polis. The Acropolis revealed the possibilities of “urban renewal.”

  Many buildings of the Periclean Age that glorified the Acropolis were built on foundations of earlier buildings with reused stones cut for earlier purposes. The Parthenon, an expanded version of an already partially completed temple, was not a monument to any one architect. It was finally the product of a battle of improvisation between an eminent general, Cimon (507?–499 B.C.) and an ambitious politician, Pericles.

  Rebuilding the Acropolis, as Plutarch (A.D. 46?–120?) recalled, was a shrewd politician’s design for public works. Recovering from the Persian invasion, after rebuilding the city’s defenses and restoring the Agora, Pericles offered his grand exercise in civic glory and popular gratification.

  … it being his desire and design that the undisciplined mechanic multitude that stayed at home should not go without their share of public salaries, and yet should not have them given them for sitting still and doing nothing, to that end he thought fit to bring in among them … these vast projects of buildings and designs of works … and just occasion of receiving the benefit and having their share of the public moneys.… Thus, to say all in a word, the occasions and services of these public works distributed plenty through every age and condition.

  (Translated by John Dryden and others)

  The “architects” for the great temples on the Acropolis, as we have seen, did not play the role of architects in our time. Not clearly distinguished from the engineers, contractors, or master workmen, they were charged only to redo conventional plans. Although an official architect had a greater share of honor, he might not be paid much more than a skilled workman. When the architect and the building commission had agreed on the design, a herald in the marketplace invited bids for parts of the work. The architect was expected to draw up specifications for each part and contracts were awarded to the lowest bidders, each backed by a guarantor. Since there is no sign of profit for the guarantors, they probably were performing a civic service. The accounts for the building of the Erectheum, for example, show citizens working alongside “metics” (non-Athenians) and slaves, all with much the same pay.

  The cost of a public building was met by appropriations from the treasury or through public subscription. The Parthenon (exclusive of the colossal gold-and-ivory statue of Athena) is estimated to have cost some five hundred talents at a time when the whole annual internal revenue of Athens was about four hundred talents. The classic Greeks seem to have made a fetish of keeping the public informed of the progress and cost of public works. Instructions to contractors and workers were probably posted on wooden bulletin boards. For the whole citizenry, and for future generations, a permanent record was carved on stones set up as public monuments. Surviving fragments of these tablets remain our richest source of information about classic Greek building practice. They include requests for tenders by contractors, specifications for materials and workmanship, the length of the working day, the fines for overruns, and, of course, procedures for the resulting lawsuits. Citizens were no less eager then than now to know what became of “the taxpayers’ money.”

  The names of a few Greek architects became legendary, but none reached the divine status of an Imhotep nor even became a celebrity in his own time. As community enterprises, the great temples were deeply entangled in city politics—none more so than the Acropolis, and especially the Parthenon. In the Age of Pericles Athens’s city-state allies, who had contributed money to a war chest, were scandalized at the grandeur of Athens’s public buildings, constructed at the allies’ expense. The astute Pericles, as Plutarch recalled, had removed the common treasure of the Athenian allies from the isle of Delos and put it in Athenian custody, offering “their fairest excuse … namely, that they took it away for fear the barbarians would seize it, and on purpose to secure it in a safe place.” Pericles then made that security doubly safe by transferring the investment from the treasury into the rebuilding of the Acropolis. “Greece cannot but resent it as an insufferable affront,” the allies complained, “and consider herself to be tyrannized over openly, when she sees the treasure, which was contributed by her upon a necessity for the war, wantonly lavished out by us upon our city, to gild her all over, and to adorn and set her figures and temples, which cost a world of money.” Even as the people of Athens enjoyed their remunerative employment on the public works the Parthenon became a center of public controversy when Pericles decided to increase its size and cost substantially. The story recently untangled by scholars is worthy of twentieth-century machine politics.

  A politician selecting an “architect” for a public building in Pericles’ day would have had a much wider choice than that of a modern mayor or city commission. When the city of Tokyo in 1986 decided to erect a great municipal center (to be the largest building in Japan), it announced a competition and appointed a panel of leading architects as judges. Tange’s winning plan was chosen not only for its functional appeal but also for its splendor and originality. But choosing an “architect” for the Parthenon was nothing like that, for what they wanted was a supervisor of construction and a master of detail, someone who could keep workers supplied with schedules of measurements, and sometimes even with full-scale patterns for their carving. He was expected finally to see all the pieces hoisted and fitted according to the familiar requirements of the order (Doric or Ionic) in which the structure was to be built.

  Callicrates had been chosen by the celebrated Athenian general Cimon, then a virtual dictator, to be master builder of the first Parthenon. He was well along in the work when Cimon lost the favor of the Athenian people. In a democratic revulsion led by Pericles, Cimon was prosecuted for allegedly having accepted a bribe, was stripped of his powers and ostracized in 461. Pericles, aiming to undo, or at least to redo, the work of his hated enemy, removed Callicrates from the job and replaced him with his own man, Ictinus. Callicrates did not receive any major assignments for some time, and none within the city. Meanwhile Pericles substantially revised the plans for the Parthenon. The earlier design (six by sixteen columns), he argued, had been too long for its width and so it was replaced by a relatively broader building (eight by seventeen columns). The new dimensions, covering an area more than a third greater than its predecessor’s, increased the cost correspondingly. But it offered a more appropriate setting for the huge statue of the town’s patron goddess, Athena. Incidentally, it also extended the years of employment on public works, with obvious political benefits for Pericles and his supporters.

  The fame and the credit for building the Parthenon came not to its “architects” but mainly to Pericles, with incidental notice to Phidias as Pericles’ supervisor for all the reconstruction on the Acropolis. A century later Demosthenes (385?–322 B.C.) looked back with nostalgia on that admirably anonymous public spirit.

  The edifices which their administrations have given us, their decorations of our temples and the offerings deposited by them, are so numerous and so magnificent, that all the efforts of posterity cannot exceed them. Then, in private life, so exemplary was their moderation, their adherence to the ancient manners so scrupulously exact, that, if any of you ever discovered the house of Aristides or Miltiades, or any of the illustrious men of those
times, he must know that it was not distinguished by the least extraordinary splendour.

  He might have added that no statue was erected to Miltiades after the Battle of Marathon, nor to Themistocles after the Battle of Salamis. In those days even the tyrants did not dare build monuments to themselves.

  Since the canons of classic Greek architecture allowed variety only in the scale of the building or in decorative detail, the supervising architects were also sometimes known as sculptors. But sculptors and stonemasons were hardly distinguished from one another, for they worked in the same medium and used the same tools. Both proceeded by similar stages, first roughing out the sculptural block or masonry column and then gradually cutting, dressing, and smoothing the stone once it was in place. To minimize the danger of accidental damage, the finishing was left until after the moving and hoisting had all been done. Finally tinted wax was worked into the pores of the marble to give the desired color to sculptured parts like hair, eyes, lips, costumes, triglyph, moldings, and metopes.

  Sculptors and architect builders both followed fixed rules of proportion. Just as the architect had his canons for the parts and proportions of the Doric or Ionic order, so too the sculptor had prescribed for him the anatomical proportions of each figure in integers easy to remember. The sculptor Polyclitus (fifth century B.C.), as we shall see, so perfectly embodied the simple proportions in his Doryphorus, a young athlete holding a spear, that the work itself came to be known as “the canon.” The Doryphorus became a model for sculptors just as the Parthenon was a model for architects. Vitruvius was struck by the mathematical precision of canons of the sculptors of the Great Age.

  For Nature has so constituted the human body that the face.… from the bottom of the chin to the lower edge of the nostrils is a third of its height; from the nostrils to the median termination of the eyebrows the length of the nose is another third; and from this point to the springing of the hair, the forehead extends for yet another third part.… The rest of the bodily members have also their measured ratios, such as the ancient painters and master sculptors employed for their attainment of boundless fame.

  (Translated by Rhys Carpenter)

  Phidias (born c.490 B.C.), skilled as a sculptor, owed his prominence to Pericles, who chose him to supervise all the building on the Acropolis. Still, we cannot surely identify Phidias’ own work on the Parthenon, except for the statue of Athena that the Parthenon housed. When Pericles no longer controlled Athens, Phidias became a target for Pericles’ enemies. First, as Plutarch recounts, they accused him of stealing the gold supplied for the Athena Parthenos. “There was nothing of theft or cheat proved against him; for Phidias, from the very first beginning, by the advice of Pericles, had so wrought and wrapt the gold that was used in the work about the statue, that they might take it all off, and make out the just weight of it, which Pericles at that time bade the accusers do.” When they failed in this, they charged him instead with impiety, “especially that where he represents the fight of the Amazons upon the goddess’s shield, he had introduced a likeness of himself as a bald old man holding up a great stone with both hands, and had put in a very fine representation of Pericles fighting with an Amazon.” Plutarch tells us that “Phidias then was carried away to prison, and there died of a disease; but as some say, of poison, administered by the enemies of Pericles, to raise a slander or a suspicion at least, as though he had procured it.”

  The architect builders put up their canonical temples all across the mainland and the Peloponnese, producing the remarkable uniformity of classic Greek architecture. After leaving the Parthenon, Callicrates found a half-dozen other assignments outside Athens, building temples at Sunion, in Acharnai, at Rhamnus, and on Delos. Ictinus, too, followed his completion of the Parthenon by work on the temple of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, and the temple of Apollo at Bassai. Perhaps Phidias did not die in jail, for there is evidence that after the date of his trial he was working on an enormous ivory-and-gold statue of Zeus for the temple at Olympia. Despite the battles between the poleis and the intestine conflicts of politicians, all the gods still dwelled in houses of strict Doric or Ionic order.

  12

  Orders for Survival

  THE most un-Greek thing we can do, philosophers tell us, is to imitate the Greeks. Yet the great works of Greek art that invited imitation did not inspire creation. The legacy of Greek architecture was “classic” forms and their arrangement in “orders.” This was appropriate too, for, as we have seen, their architecture followed a few well-known traditional models. The last will and testament of Greek architecture was written not by a Greek but by a Roman, four centuries after the building of the Parthenon. The author was Vitruvius, a Roman military engineer and architect of the Age of Augustus in the first century B.C. We know so little about him that even his name is in doubt. Vitruvius was only his first name.

  Though not an eminent man of letters, he writes self-consciously about himself. Unlike other architects, he says, he could not appeal to clients by his good looks. He probably served as engineer-architect on Julius Caesar’s far-flung expeditions in the Maritime Alps, in Spain, and in Africa. And after Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C., he seems to have served Octavian, to whom he dedicates his Ten Books of Architecture (De Architectural).

  This work, in which he “disclosed all the principles of the art” (about three hundred printed pages in English translation), had an uncanny power over later centuries. But Vitruvius’s name as architect was definitely associated with only one building, the basilica and shrine in honor of Augustus at Fano in Umbria. While most of the architectural monuments of his age disappeared, Vitruvius survived in his words. Since none of his illustrations remained, he exerted his influence as the prime exponent of classical architecture through his verbal instructions, observations, and word pictures of the model orders for Western architecture. Later editors had to supply or to invent their own illustrations, and they did.

  The accidents of history conspired to make Vitruvius’s work the West’s primer of architecture for a millennium and a half, with a fertile and vigorous afterlife. Did it survive because it was important in its time? Or is it important because it happened to survive? Classical scholars condescend to his style and try in translation to preserve the “crudities” of his language. But for the modern lay reader it is one of the few seminal works of technical literature that can be read for entertainment.

  Reading Vitruvius today, we are not surprised that he remained the messenger of classical architecture. He helps us understand, too, why and how the Romans made architecture their master art. For Rome was a civilization of organization and mastery, and architecture was Vitruvius’s name for the arts of shaping and organizing the whole man-made environment. “In architecture,” observed Nietzsche, “the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power.” And it was never more so than in ancient Rome. Cicero, Vitruvius’s contemporary, classed architecture with medicine and teaching, and Vitruvius called architecture a great profession. But in his time, even in Rome, it was not yet organized as a separate profession. The master builder, the environment-shaping artist, was not distinguished from the engineer, the planner, or the interior designer. Nothing that concerned space or time was alien to him.

  The architect’s work, according to Vitruvius, was the most comprehensive and most liberal of the arts, “for it is by his judgment that all work done by the other parts is put to test.” A man of natural ability and quick learning, the architect must “be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.” His treatise covers, in turn: town planning and the siting of cities; the primordial substances (and building materials); the principles of temple building, symmetry, and the classic orders; public buildings, theater
s, baths, and gymnasia; domestic buildings; stucco, fresco, pavement, and coloring; water, its collecting, supply; acqueducts and wells; geometry, astronomy, the measuring of time by sundials and water clocks; machines for hoisting, moving, and measuring; military machines and defenses.

  The architect could not properly site the streets of a city unless he knew the directions of the prevailing winds to avoid their blowing through the alleys. “Then let the directions of your streets and alleys be laid down on the lines of division between the quarters of two winds.” Since there were “only eight” winds, houses could be sited to avoid their worst bluster. History had to explain the familiar elements of classic architecture:

  For instance, suppose him to set up the marble statues of women in long robes, called Caryatides, to take the place of columns, with the mutules and coronas placed directly above their heads, he will give the following explanation to his questioners. Caryae, a state in Peloponnesus, sided with the Persian enemies against Greece; later the Greeks, having gloriously won their freedom by victory in the war, made common cause and declared war against the people of Caryae. They took the town, killed the men, abandoned the State to desolation, and carried off their wives into slavery, without permitting them, however, to lay aside the long robes and other marks of their rank as married women, so that they might be obliged not only to march in the triumph but to appear forever after as a type of slavery, burdened with the weight of their shame and so making atonement for their State. Hence, the architects of the time designed for public buildings the statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and the punishment of the people of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity.