The Parthenon Enigma

by Joan Breton Connelly

  Plutarch tells the story of a plane tree that stood in the very center of the Agora, just beside the bronze statue of the orator Demosthenes.36 When a soldier accused of wrongdoing was summoned before his chief officer, he stopped first at this statue, placing in the entwined fingers of Demosthenes the only gold he had. Leaves from the plane tree blew down and covered the gold within Demosthenes’s clasped hands. When the soldier returned from his ordeal, he found his treasure intact. This was taken as proof of the incorruptibility of Demosthenes.

  THE TREES, GARDENS, WOODS, and wetlands of Athens were inhabited by a robust wildlife. We can imagine rock doves, jackdaws, swifts, nightingales, swallows, cuckoos, crows, eagles, falcons, and other raptors flying overhead.37 Of course, the little owl, or glaux, took pride of place as the symbol of Athens and its patron goddess. Aristophanes’s Birds, first performed in 414 B.C., reads like an ornithological handbook for the city. A sampling of Aristophanes’s fowl includes the hoopoe, nightingale, magpie, turtledove, swallow, buzzard, pigeon, falcon, ring-door, cuckoo, red-foot, red-cap, purple-cap, kestrel, diver, ouzel, osprey, wood thrush, quail, goose, pelican, spoonbill, redbreast, peacock, grouse, horned owl, teal, swan, bittern, heron, stormy petrel, fig-picker, vulture, sea eagle, titmouse, redbird, finch, gull, coot, chick, and wren. If even a fraction of this list was truly resident in Attica, the avian population of the city-state could be regarded as exceptionally wide-ranging and diverse.38

  We must not underestimate the aural presence of native wildlife to the experience of ancient Athens. In the days before the urban noise-scape of automobiles, sirens, trains, planes, and factories, it was the song, cry, and croak of the wild that accompanied life’s moments through the day. For those listening, these sounds signaled the passage of time as well as making it possible to echolocate oneself within the city. Natural acoustics are easily forgotten in our era of headphones and earbuds. But the sounds of the Greek countryside—from the tune of songbirds in the morning, to the screech of cicadas in the peak heat of the day, to the croaking of frogs at dusk and the hooting of the owl in the evening—were to ancient listeners like the chiming of a clock. It is no wonder that Aristophanes seized upon the resident avian and reptilian populations for his dramatis personae in the Birds and the Frogs. Anyone who has spent long Mediterranean days with seagulls overhead, or evenings sleeping beside wetlands thick with frogs, knows that cacophony that so resembles crowds of humans rapt in conversation. To reconstruct in our mind’s ear the music and mayhem of Mother Nature is essential to appreciating the ancient ambience.

  While man-made groves and gardens adorned the metropolitan environment, it was tracts of land left wild that brought something of the countryside into the city’s reach. Just a short walk to the southeast of the Acropolis, outside the city walls and on the banks of the Ilissos, was a marshy, wooded area known as Agrai, literally “Wilderness” or “Hunting Ground” (this page).39 Damp with wetlands and uncut vegetation, this was a refuge for waterfowl, game birds, and other small animals. Just minutes from the Acropolis, Agrai was easily accessible for urbanites wishing to hunt and fish. It was also an area bristling with shrines and sacred landmarks commemorating past encounters between mortals and the divine. Local place-names reflect this landscape: Dionysos in the Marshes (Limnai), Artemis the Huntress (Agrotera), the Mother in the Wilderness (Metroon in Agrai).40 So, too, the slopes of the Acropolis itself were (and still are) rich with natural microenvironments: caves, springs, rocks, crags, and brambles that served as the setting for the most venerable tales from the city’s distant past.

  THAT SO MANY of these places of memory should have to do with water should come as no surprise. In words attributed to the sixth-century philosopher Thales of Miletos, “water sustains all.”41 This certainly was the case for Athens, where the life-giving power of ancient sources bound generations of citizens to the same places: springs, lakes, pools, rivers, streams, marshes, caves, and watery crevices were places to which local inhabitants flocked for respite from the Mediterranean heat and to quench their thirst. Over time, wells and fountain houses were built atop natural springs to capture the gush of potable water. They became central meeting places for the community and one of the few destinations to which the young women of Greek households could be sent honorably and safely to collect what was needed for family use. Naturally, these locations became the settings for tales of nymphs and maidens. Spring nymphs figure centrally in local genealogies. Regularly identified as the very earliest ancestors, these nymphs supposedly married into local royal families, providing a hereditary link to the natural environment and, for future generations, an implicit claim upon the land.42

  Myths emerged from local landscapes, helping to explain how things came to be as they are. Generations of Athenians believed in a common ancestry all blessed by local divinities that inhabited an intimately familiar topography. This common origin is the key to Athenian identity and solidarity. It makes possible a communal spirit while also potentiating a chauvinism vis-à-vis other Greeks, to say nothing of lesser peoples. Such beliefs, whether real or fanciful, dominate collective imagination and shape a worldview of past, present, and future. To stand in the same cave or at the same spring as one’s great-great-grandmother did; to set the same offering of fruit, grain, meat, or honey on the same altar in a ritual performed by blood relatives centuries before; to perceive that fellow citizens share one’s genetic continuity with a very ancient past—the power of these experiences attests to the oft-claimed truth that nothing defines identity and belonging like the ways in which individuals and communities remember and forget.43 And since human beings tend to comprehend identity best as a narrative, the stories that the Athenians told themselves and the setting of these tales are the key to understanding not only who they believed they were but also their most monumental collective efforts.

  THE MODERN CITYSCAPE of Athens has all but eclipsed the rich network of ancient springs and waterways, now buried beneath congested thoroughfares. Street names preserve their memory and track their courses: Kifissou Avenue runs atop the Kephisos River some 3 kilometers (2 miles) to the west of the Acropolis, while Kallirrhöe Street, at the southeast, begins near its eponymous spring and carries on to the south following the route of the Ilissos River that runs beneath it. The tributary of the Kephisos, the Eridanos River, courses underground to the northwest of the Acropolis skirting the north flank of the Agora. A stretch of its wide riverbed, some 50 meters (164 feet) across, was rediscovered during the digging of the Constitution Square metro station in the late 1990s beneath Amalias Avenue at Othonos Street.44 The Eridanos flows on toward Mitropoleos Square, where it manifests itself in the presence of a few old plane trees now growing among the tables of the street cafés.

  To the east of the Acropolis, the Ilissos River, long converted into an underground rainwater conduit, flows along its original course beneath Mesogeion, Michalakopoulou, and Vasileos Konstantinou Avenues. From here it runs past the ancient spring of Kallirrhöe and carries on beneath Kallirois Avenue through the suburb of Kallithea, from which it has been routed, in modern times, directly into the Bay of Phaleron. But, in antiquity, the Ilissos circled around to the south of the Acropolis, coursing westward to join up with the Eridanos before emptying into the Kephisos and flowing on into Phaleron Bay.

  The three rivers of Athens rise in the mountains to the north of the city: the Kephisos flows from Mount Parnes, the Ilissos from Mount Hymettos, and the Eridanos from Mount Lykabettos (this page and this page). These waterways would have been the principal points of reference for the city, sustaining vibrant ecosystems, providing a focus for human activity, and serving as thoroughfares for transporting goods and people. While Plato’s Phaidros paints an idyllic image of the pastoral along the Ilissos’s grassy banks, we must acknowledge that the reality on the ground might have been quite different. An inscription, dating to the late fifth century B.C., forbids that anyone tan hides or throw litter into the Ilissos, further stipulating that no animal h
ides should be left to rot in the river above the temple of Herakles.45 Similarly, the Eridanos was so filthy in antiquity that it was said no Athenian maiden could draw “pure liquid from it” and “even cattle backed off” from its waters.46

  The Kephisos is the largest of the three rivers. It gushes south for some 27 kilometers (16.8 miles) from the foothills of Parnes, a great mountain where wild boars and bears once roamed.47 Coursing south across the Thriasion Plain to the west of Athens, the river eventually flows into the Bay of Phaleron. Today, it can be seen channeled in conduits running alongside the Athens-Lamia National Road and, for its southernmost 15 kilometers (9 miles), languishing in canals beneath the four-lane elevated highway known as Kifissou Avenue, a place for dumping garbage and toxic waste. An environmental reclamation effort is under way.48 For now, though, the Kephisos bears little resemblance to the noble river of antiquity, one so revered that it was worshipped at its own sanctuary.

  The shrine was located close to the place where the Ilissos joined the Kephisos, about halfway between the port of Piraeus and Phaleron. Around 400 B.C., a man named Kephisodotos (“Given by the Kephisos”) dedicated a marble relief stele here.49 It is likely that he was named by grateful parents whose prayers for a child had been answered favorably by the river. Greeks prayed to rivers to help them conceive children, and we can detect a certain trend toward potamonymy (“naming after rivers”) in communities flanking famous streams.50

  Moisture being essential for conception and growth, it follows that rivers and their female offspring, the nymphs, were closely associated with the begetting and nurturing of children.51 In the sculptured stele offered by Kephisodotos (below), he perhaps stands as donor, second from left, between a female figure of uncertain identity (Artemis?) and a personification of the Kephisos, at center; three spring nymphs follow behind. The sanctuary in which Kephisodotos set up this dedication had, in fact, been founded by a woman named Xenokrateia just ten years earlier. It seems that she may have vowed to dedicate her young son to the river but, because of the Spartan invasion of Attica at this time, she was unable to move beyond the city walls. Xenokrateia found an ingenious solution to this dilemma by establishing her own new shrine to the Kephisos in a protected area where the river flowed inside the city’s Long Walls. Here, Xenokrateia offered a marble relief to the Kephisos, and to the “altar-sharing gods,” as “a gift for the didaskalias” (“instruction” or “upbringing”) of her son, Xeniades.52 The stele shows Xenokrateia standing behind her little boy (following page), who reaches up to a male figure that must be the Kephisos River. At the far right of the scene we see Acheloös, whose cosmic, primordial identity makes him an ideal prototype for all Greek rivers.53 Portrayed as a man-headed bull, here he does not specifically reference the great old river of Akarnania but, instead, represents the riparian nature of the shrine, just like that encountered by Sokrates and Phaidros on the banks of the Ilissos in the passage quoted at the opening of this chapter.

  Marble relief stele dedicated by Kephisodotos, shown second from left, followed by the Kephisos River (with horns) and three nymphs. (illustration credit ill.7)

  Marble relief stele dedicated by Xenokrateia, shown in foreground, at left, with young son who reaches up to the Kephisos River; the bull-bodied Acheloös at far right. (illustration credit ill.8)

  The child-nurturing powers of the Kephisos are further attested by a marble statue group that Pausanias spies as he’s passing along its banks in the second century A.D.54 The sculptures showed a woman named Mnesimakhe and her little son depicted in the very act of cutting his hair as a votive offering. We know from many sources that first locks were cut from the hair of children and offered to rivers as “a token of the fact that everything comes from water.”55 Here, we see something of the very personal relationships that bound Athenians with the rivers that made life itself possible.

  The relief sculpture dedicated by Kephisodotos shows the Kephisos River as a man with small horns. Euripides calls the Kephisos “bull-visaged” in his play the Ion.56 Even the loud rushing of the river’s currents is likened to the deep, lowing sound of a bull. We have also seen the grand old river Acheloös appearing as a horned bull with a human face on the votive relief dedicated by Xenokrateia. As the second-largest river in Greece, flowing in the west between Akarnania and Aitolia, the Acheloös was regularly depicted in vase painting as a bull- or human-headed bovine with a great beard, denoting its venerable age.57

  Three other Greek rivers are named Kephisos: one flowing from Mount Parnassos near Delphi, another from Mount Kithairon and through the Nysian Plain near Eleusis, and another at Argos where, Aelian tells us, the people portrayed their Kephisos with “a likeness to cattle.”58

  The Kephisos of Athens, bullish as the rest, played a prominent role in the great procession of initiates who marched from Athens to Eleusis as early as the seventh century B.C. for induction into the Mysteries. In September of every year for a thousand years, worshippers walked west from Athens along the 14-kilometer (9-mile) Sacred Way to the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore. This was an occasion to which youths and scoundrels of Athens greatly looked forward. For on this day, they were allowed to stand by the Kephisos bridge and shout gross obscenities at their elders marching in silent procession, unable to speak back. We learn that to enjoy such sport, men and women, or perhaps men dressed as women, wore masks and veils to hide their faces as they harassed those crossing the bridge.59 This misbehavior was ordained by the sacred rite and is typical of role-reversing cult practices in which people of lower rank are temporarily given license to mock their superiors. Such suspension of social hierarchies may have enabled participants in the Mysteries to approach Demeter and Kore with a fitting sense of humility.60 In any case, bridges and bad language went together. The Greeks even had a word for it, gephyrismos, or “bridginess,” and in Plutarch “bridge words” correspond to our “four-letter words” today.61

  Like all rivers, the Kephisos was understood to be the child of Okeanos, the freshwater river that encircled the earth, and his wife, Tethys, a sea goddess whose name means “Nurse.”62 By some accounts, the Kephisos had a daughter named Diogeneia, who gave birth to the naiad nymph Praxithea. (The word “naiad” comes from the verb nao, “to flow,” and refers to river nymphs.) By other accounts, Praxithea is the daughter, rather than the granddaughter, of the Kephisos.63 In any case, Praxithea marries King Erechtheus of Athens, a union that follows a well-attested pattern by which naiads wed local kings and play prominent roles in local genealogies. The maiden Oreithyia (she who was abducted by the North Wind along the Ilissos, as discussed by Sokrates and Phaidros) was a daughter of Praxithea and, thus, a granddaughter (or great-granddaughter) of the Kephisos. And so we find the royal family of Athens descended directly from its greatest river and his nymph daughter. As a naiad, Praxithea nurtures her family, providing the wetness necessary for the germination of seed, ensuring fecundity, growth, and prosperity in the royal line. In this, she follows a model in which naiad nymphs, as mothers of the city, protect the community’s all-important water supplies that come from local springs and streams.

  According to Apollodoros, Praxithea had a nymph sister, Zeuxippe, who married King Pandion of Athens in a similar arrangement. Zeuxippe gave birth to two daughters, Prokne and Philomela, and twin sons, Boutes and Erechtheus.64 This is the same Erechtheus who goes on to marry Praxithea, his mother’s sister. Hyginus names Zeuxippe as daughter of the Eridanos River.65 It can be difficult fitting various versions of myths, recounted for different purposes and across many centuries, into comprehensive genealogies, and there is no avoiding repetition and contradiction. Compilers of myth variants, working centuries later than the first telling of the tales, created anthologies filled with inconsistencies.66 Mythmaking is an ever-dynamic process with no definitively “right” or “wrong” version, though a force akin to natural selection seems to exert itself on the crucial features.

  The Eridanos (“Morning River” or “River of Dawn”) i
s the shortest of the Athenian rivers, rising from the slopes of Mount Lykabettos and coursing southwestward to skirt the north side of the Agora.67 Wastewater and torrential overflows from the ancient marketplace were, by the end of the sixth century B.C., guided into the Eridanos through a stone channel that has been designated by its excavators as the “Great Drain.”68 When the politician and general Themistokles built new fortifications for Athens following the Persian destruction of 480, the Eridanos was enclosed in a stone-lined channel directing its flow out beyond the Dipylon, the “Double Gate,” and through the Kerameikos cemetery.

  Athenians had begun to bury their dead along the banks of the Eridanos very early, by the end of the twelfth century B.C. One hundred sub-Mycenaean graves have been found on the north side of the river and a few on the south bank. During the tenth century there was a shift, and the south bank was increasingly used for burials. By the Archaic period, that is, roughly, from the turn of the seventh to the sixth century B.C., the main necropolis was firmly established here. It became known as the Kerameikos cemetery owing to its proximity to an industrial area where potters (keramei) worked their kilns firing ceramics for the city (this page).69 The Eridanos may have been regarded as a kind of river of Hades and, like the river Styx, a stream to be crossed on one’s journey to the underworld.70