IN SOME SENSE OUR bias toward seeing the Parthenon in political terms can be put down to a success of scholarship: the political sphere of Athens in the fifth century B.C. is the one we know best. The survival of a relative wealth of literature and inscriptions by, for, and about classical Athenians provides access to the world of Perikles, the general and politician who so shaped what is known today as the golden age of Greece, with which the flourishing of democracy is very much bound up. Yet there is much more to Athenian culture than democracy and more to its conception of democracy than what can be perceived by viewing it through a modern lens. For one thing, the Athenian notion of politics transcends our own. Politeia is difficult to translate in English; in fact, the word embraces all the conditions of citizenship in its widest sense. Ancient politeia extended far beyond the parameters of modern politics, embracing religion, ritual, ideology, and values. Aristotle intimates that the primacy of the “common good” played a definitive role in politeia, observing that “those constitutions that aim at the common good are in effect rightly framed in accordance with absolute justice.”28
At the very core of Athenian politeia lies the culture’s fundamental understanding of itself and its origins, its cosmology and prehistory—a nexus of ideas that defined the values of the community and gave rise to a complex array of ritual observances of which the Parthenon was the focal point for nearly a thousand years. Until now, the Parthenon has received relatively little consideration in this light. And yet without such understanding it is impossible to say satisfactorily just what the Parthenon is beyond a supreme architectural achievement or a symbol of a political ideal as understood by essentially foreign cultures in the remote future. If we are to recover the primordial and original meaning of the Parthenon, we must endeavor to see it as those who built it did. We must see it through ancient eyes, an effort that involves the archaeology of consciousness as much as of place.
This aim of discovering the ancient reality of the Parthenon has been advanced by recent archaeological and restoration efforts on the Acropolis as well as by fresh anthropological approaches that are ever widening our understanding of the ancient past. Concrete archaeological discoveries made by the Greek Ministry of Culture’s Acropolis Restoration Service in its meticulous autopsy of the building have revealed new information on the materials, tools, techniques, and engineering employed in the Parthenon’s construction.29 We now know many changes were introduced in the course of building the Parthenon, which may have included the pivotal addition of its unique and magisterial sculptured frieze. It has now been established that this frieze originally wrapped around the entire eastern porch of the temple. Two windows, on either side of the Parthenon’s east door, allowed extra light to flood in upon the statue of Athena. Traces of a small shrine with an altar have been discovered in the temple’s northern peristyle, marking the place of a previously unknown sacred space that predates the Parthenon.30 This opens the way for a new understanding of pre-Parthenon cult ritual and raises questions concerning the continuity of sacred space from deep antiquity to the age of Perikles.
The last decades have seen much more than the proliferation of new data on the design and evolution of the Parthenon as a building. They have also brought sweeping shifts in scholarship that allow us a view of the Parthenon in its more immaterial dimensions. New questions are being asked of the ancient evidence, with new research models and methods deployed to ask them, drawing on the social sciences and religious and cultural history. These have generated a fresh approach to monuments viewed within the fullness of a whole variety of ancient contexts.31 The study of Greek ritual and religion has burgeoned over the past thirty years.32 The embeddedness of religion in virtually every aspect of ancient Greek life is now fully recognized. The study of ancient emotions and also cognition is under way, revealing the effects of language, behavior, and multisensory experience on feeling and thinking in the ancient world.33 We are in a better position than ever before to get inside the heads of those who experienced the Acropolis in Greek antiquity.
Ongoing studies of reception, projection, and appropriation have exposed the ways in which aesthetic, ideological, and nationalist agendas have shaped interpretative frameworks over the past 250 years.34 Modern Western nostalgia for a link with the classical past, one that affirms the West’s own political and cultural aspirations, is now recognized as a controlling force in the construction of narratives that have long dominated our understanding of the monuments. An awareness of an “other Acropolis” is emerging, one that seeks to build a multi-temporal and multisensory appreciation of the site and its buildings, including the Parthenon itself.35 Both of these forces—the discovery of new evidence and the development of new questions and methods through which it can be examined—are at work in forging the new paradigm for understanding the Parthenon that is proposed in this book.
The more we have discovered, the more enigmatic the Parthenon has come to seem, and the more inadequate appear the simplistic meanings ascribed to it by later cultures. As a vastly complex world of cult ritual and spiritual intensity reveals itself, it still remains to be asked of the structure at the very heart of so much strange, dark practice, “What exactly is the Parthenon?”
Of all the physical remains surviving from the classical period, the Parthenon’s sculptured frieze is the largest and most detailed revelation of Athenian consciousness we have. This virtuosic triumph in the carving of marble, this moving portrayal of noble faces from the distant past, this “prayer in stone,” the largest, most elaborate narrative tableau the Athenians have left us, provides a critical and essential way in. Just what is represented by the nearly four hundred figures carved upon it is a question of the utmost importance.
Since the fifteenth century A.D., the Parthenon frieze has been viewed as a snapshot of fifth century B.C. Athenians, and, from the seventeenth century, they have been understood to be marching in their Panathenaic, or all-Athenian, procession, a key event within the annual festival of Athena.36 But this reading places the frieze outside the standard conventions for Greek temple decoration, which regularly drew its subject matter not from contemporary reality but from myth. And so this astonishing ring of stone carving presents us with an enigma within that of the Parthenon itself.
In the pages that follow, I argue for a new interpretation of the frieze, one that stands in sharp contrast to what has become the orthodox view.37 My interpretation starts with religion, not politics, and through pattern recognition within the iconographic, textual, and ritual evidence I propose an understanding that challenges how we see both the Parthenon and the people who built it.
I argue that we are looking not at contemporary Athenians marching in their annual Panathenaic procession but at a scene from the mythical past, one that lies at the very heart of what it means to be an Athenian. A tragic saga unfolds, revealing a legendary king and queen who, by demand of the Delphic oracle, are forced to make an excruciatingly painful choice to save Athens from ruin. This choice requires nothing less than the ultimate sacrifice. Based on the lives of the founding king and his family, the charter myth manifest on the Parthenon frieze suggests a far darker and more primitive outlook than later cultures and classicists have been prepared to face. This harrowing tale provides a critical keyhole into Athenian consciousness, one that directly challenges our own self-identifications with it.
The Parthenon thus leads us toward an understanding remote from the Renaissance and Enlightenment stereotypes of philosophers and rhetoricians that we have become accustomed to imagine. In fact, Athenians were a far more foreign people than most feel comfortable acknowledging today. Theirs was a spirit-saturated, anxious world dominated by an egocentric sense of themselves and an overwhelming urgency to keep things right with the gods. Much of each day was spent asking, thanking, and honoring gods in an attempt to keep balance, reciprocity, and harmony with the all-powerful beings who could play with human fate. After all, Athenians were continuously threatened by war, violence,
and death.
Spirit shadows, divinities, and heroes from the mythical past were a constant presence, fully inhabiting the landscape at every turn. Life was fragile, uncertain, never consistently happy, and full of surprises, except for the looming certainty of death.38 Calendars and the timing of cult rituals, religious festivals, athletic games, and theatrical performances were set by long-established tradition and regulated by the observance of the movement of celestial bodies in the night sky. Cosmology, landscape, and tradition bound ancient Athenians together within an ordered cycle of religious observance, remembrance, and ritual practice.39
The profound, compulsive religiosity of the Athenians, an aspect that earned them a reputation for being among the most “deisidaimoniacal,” or “spirit-fearing,” people in all of Greece, stands in contrast to our idealizing vision of a city inhabited by philosophical rationalists.40 That some Athenians might call out the name “Athena!” upon hearing the hoot of an owl, avoid stepping on gravestones or visiting women about to give birth, and kneel to pour oil on smooth stones at crossroads to avert their power may come as a surprise to the modern reader.41 That he or she might stick pins in dolls fashioned from wood, clay, wax, or lead to place curses or erotic spells on rivals, legal adversaries, or love targets may be more surprising still.42 Perikles, an avowed rationalist, was not beyond tying a charmed amulet around his neck when he fell ill with the deadly plague.43 Riveting accounts of Athenians engaged in love magic, the casting of spells, the inscribing of curses, and the consulting of oracles, dream interpreters, and bird-omen readers (remaining ever vigilant for signs that might portend the future) bring us closer to the experience of actual lives lived. Our own separation of the philosophical from the spiritual greatly obscures our comprehension of the Athenians as they were.
Notwithstanding dark practices, the Athenians aspired, above all, to be “the most beautiful and noble,” to kalliston, a concept that dominated their worldview. This ideal motivated them toward heightened excellence but, at the same time, reveals a certain unease, an apprehension of the possibility that fortunes can suffer sudden reversals. The conviction that they must be “the best” utterly governed the Athenians’ sense of their own being, absolutely and in relation to everyone else. It also profoundly informed their relations to one another.
ENGAGING WITH a new paradigm, we aim for a deeper, more authentic realization of the ancient Athenian experience of the monument than we’ve had for the past two hundred years, seeking an answer not only to the question “What is the Parthenon?” but to the larger one: “Who were the Athenians?” That question’s answer has also been rendered obscure and reductive by the effort of subsequent peoples to seize the ancient mantle. Above all else, the Parthenon—the epicenter of an urgent and spiritually charged civic life—is the key to how Athenian identity was shaped and sustained.
At the same time, the Parthenon was first and foremost a religious building, a temple among temples. Its status as a masterpiece of Western art has long discouraged questions that have been asked of other temples built in places and at times that we know less well than those of Periklean Athens. In this book, I examine the Parthenon in relationship to sacred buildings on the Acropolis and elsewhere throughout the Greek world. I focus on foundation and genealogical succession myths that define local identity and on the signs and symbols that communicate a common origin for the Athenian citizenry. I look at local heroes and gods, at the relationship between their tombs and temples, and at the rituals that built bridges between the two. Such monuments enabled citizens to come into direct contact with their ancestors, reminding them of the values upon which their communities were founded. For a culture without media, without a sacred text, the centrality of a great architectural work in forging this solidarity cannot be overstated. For the Athenians, the Parthenon was a very special nexus in which sacrifice, ritual, memory, and, yes, democracy were closely intertwined.
We shall begin with the natural environment of the Acropolis, its cosmology, and the myth tradition that so shaped Athenian consciousness. We’ll consider the ways in which local myth grew out of local landscape, examining the inseparability of the Parthenon from its natural surroundings, memory structures, and belief systems that derive from its unique setting. We’ll go on to track the transformation of the Acropolis from Mycenaean citadel to sanctuary of Athena, focusing on the shrines and temples that preceded the Parthenon and the cosmic myth narratives of their sculptural decoration. We then turn to the Persian devastation of the Acropolis in 480 B.C. and the comprehensive Periklean rebuilding program that followed some thirty years later. Here, we’ll take a close and culminating look at the Parthenon sculptures, above all the frieze, which provides such a critical aperture into the core meaning of the building.
In later chapters, we shall examine the implications of this reading for our understanding of the Athenians themselves, through a better sense of their rituals, festivals, and games and the legacy of the Parthenon and Acropolis cults. Central in this is the relationship of dead heroes and heroines to rites of remembrance at the Panathenaic festival, the preeminent and defining celebration of Athenian identity, when the Athenians were, so to speak, most intensely, consciously, ecstatically Athenian. Finally, we’ll consider the Athenians’ earliest self-styled imitators, to take an oblique look at the Athenians through the eyes of those who observed them contemporaneously. Though hardly more immune to the sort of distorting reverence that shapes impressions of Athens in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the princes of Hellenistic Pergamon were at least not so separated from their ideal by the alienating effect of two millennia. As we consider the legacy of the Parthenon in the invention of heroic narratives and founding myths at the sanctuary of Athena Polias Nikephoros at Pergamon, we shall endeavor to keep close to the ancient experience, especially to the landscape that shaped local memory and to the narratives of earth, water, and the heavens that dominated local sensibilities. In the evocative words of Christopher Wickham, “Geography, like grace, works through people.”44 This is especially true of the Athenians, who were first and foremost a people of sea and land, of trade and agriculture—in short, of Poseidon and Athena.
But let us start at the beginning, the scene upon which the great, mysterious, and ultimately defining building of the Athenians was created. Then, as now, location was the key to appreciating all real estate, and so let us first explore the Acropolis and its environment.
1
THE SACRED ROCK
Myth and the Power of Place
“THE EASIEST THING to do is to walk right in the stream; this way, we’ll also get our feet wet, which is very pleasant, especially at this hour and season,” Phaidros suggests as he and Sokrates pass beyond the city walls. He’d been in search of a quiet place on the banks of the Ilissos River where he could memorize an oration he’d just heard delivered by the speech writer Lysias. On his way out of Athens, Phaidros bumped into Sokrates, who was happy to join him to discuss the speech, one devoted to the nature of homoerotic love.1
Crossing the Ilissos, the two friends stop at a place by the foot of the Ardettos Hill, near where the Panathenaic Stadium stands today. Sokrates is delighted with the spot and extols the loveliness of its natural surroundings. Plato, who recounts this story in his Phaidros around 370 B.C., places on the lips of Sokrates what is perhaps the most vivid surviving description of the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of the classical Athenian landscape:
It really is a beautiful resting place. The plane tree is tall and very broad; the chaste-tree, high as it is, is wonderfully shady, and since it is in full bloom, the whole place is filled with its fragrance. From under the plane tree the loveliest spring runs with very cool water—our feet can testify to that. The place appears to be dedicated to Acheloös and some of the Nymphs, if we can judge from the statues [of girls, korai] and votive offerings [agalmata]. Feel the freshness of the air; how pretty and pleasant it is; how it echoes with the summery, sweet song of the cicadas’ chorus!
The most exquisite thing of all, of course, is the grassy slope: it rises so gently that you can rest your head perfectly when you lie down on it.
Plato, Phaidros 230b–c2
In this intimate portrait of Sokrates enjoying the simple pleasure of lying with his head deep in the summer grass, Plato evokes not only the humanity of the philosopher, who was his teacher, but also the idyllic natural environment that blessed the city of Athens.
As they’d approached the shade of the river’s edge, Phaidros’s thoughts had turned immediately to myth. “Tell me, Sokrates, isn’t it from somewhere near this stretch of the Ilissos that people say Boreas [the North Wind] carried Oreithyia away?…Couldn’t this be the very spot?” he inquires. “No,” Sokrates replies, that place is “two or three hundred yards farther downstream, where one crosses to get to the district of Agra. I think there is even an altar to Boreas there.” Looking up at the doll-like figurines placed here by worshippers, Sokrates surmises that this must be a spot sacred to the river god Acheloös and the nymphs. Before long, he feels the effects of the mythically charged location: “There’s something truly divine about this place, so don’t be surprised if I’m quite taken by the Nymphs’ madness as I go on with the speech. I am on the edge of speaking in dithyrambs.”3
Sokrates might be forgiven for his spontaneous mouthing of those ecstatic hymns to Dionysos. For these passages from the Phaidros reveal how inseparable were myth, landscape, memory, and the sacred within Athenian consciousness—and also what collective power they exerted on the emotions.4 With signs and symbols of local piety and ritual abounding, Sokrates’s own short bout of nympholepsy (in his day, an agitation induced by proximity to actual nymphs) makes palpable for us the power of place.5 The presence of the gods is real to Sokrates and Phaidros, men of the highly educated elite of the city. While Sokrates may be loath to speculate on the myth of Boreas and Oreithyia (daughter of the mythical king Erechtheus and his wife, Praxithea), he is happy enough to accept common opinion on the setting for the story.6 The ancient landscape bristled with such localities charged with meaning, natural landmarks experienced with an intensified awareness by generations of Athenians, privileged and humble, educated and unschooled alike.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 2
