There was another contender for leadership at Athens, Perikles’s own mentor Ephialtes, the great reformer and champion of the masses. A tumultuous moment, 462 was also the year Ephialtes introduced reforms stripping the Areopagus Council (the aristocratic body composed of former archons and other elite officeholders, a kind of senate) of nearly all its functions except that of murder tribunal. Henceforth, all other criminal and civil trials would be handled by the law courts, in which all Athenian citizens could serve. This decisive truncation of aristocratic influence and its typically moderating effect marks the beginning of what has been called Athens’s radical democracy. To put it mildly, not everyone was pleased. The following year, Ephialtes was assassinated. This left Perikles’s path to power wide open.
By 457, Perikles was recognized for valor at the Battle of Tanagra, Plutarch reporting that among Athenian soldiers he was “the most conspicuous of all in taking no care for his safety.”6 And so, before reaching the age of forty, this consummate patriot and thoughtful man of action managed to consolidate his position as the leading statesman of Athens. Over the next thirty years he would preside over a radical democracy, a powerful empire, a savage war with Sparta, and an extravagant building program on the Acropolis. Before considering the latter, which gave us the Parthenon, chief among its wonders, let us consider the political context, which was then, as ever, bound up with the Athenian self-understanding.
Even the greatest cynic must acknowledge that the central tenets of Athenian radical democracy were inspired: individual freedom, self-government, equal protection before the law (regardless of wealth), the right of any citizen to own land and houses in Athenian territory, and an affirmation of the individual’s commitment to the well-being of the community as a whole. All Athenian (male) citizens could participate in the deliberations and vote in the assembly, or ekklesia (where some measures required a quorum of six thousand), and by serving as jurors in the law courts, the heliaia, where a minimum panel of two hundred males over the age of thirty was required but up to six thousand were kept in service. With the authority to impose ostracism, this body, not the assembly, was where the real power lay. Then there was the Council of 500 (boule), comprising fifty members chosen by lot from each of the ten Kleisthenic tribes. In all, some eleven hundred citizens now held office each year at Athens, most chosen through sortition, only about a hundred elected, including the ten strategoi. After 487 B.C., archons were no longer elected by the people but chosen by lot;7 and by 457 even zeugitai (those of minimal property, enough for subsistence) could serve as archons. Civic life grew to ensure a job for every citizen, with anyone who neglected his due involvement reviled as an idiotes. Thus power was never more dispersed in the polis and, as a consequence, its exercise never more fractious. Soon, the need for a monumental reminder of first things would seem ever more urgent.
Democracy had taken form for the first time in human history precisely because of the profound and all-pervading sense of a common Athenian ancestry, one that originated in the mists of the Bronze Age, the sons of Erechtheus—of Athena herself—all belonging to the land. Politeia, that touchstone of Athenian life denoting the conditions and rights of the citizen, was a concept whose sense extended far beyond our notions of politics, positing a mythic “deep time” and a cosmic reality in which the citizen could not locate himself or understand his existence except through religious awareness and devotions. All were pledged to the good of the polis, and by extension that of one another, and by that mutual understanding popular rule could be trusted. But radical democracy was inevitably an expansive vision of rule and, just as inevitably, a costly one, dependent on the revenues of empire. However much that vision may have included ever more lavish tributes to the divine order of things, its abundant benefits to the individual citizen distracted him, weakening the very solidarity and selflessness that had made democracy trustworthy.
It was Perikles himself who introduced payment for jury service. Now men sitting on juries were compensated for their service just as soldiers and the oarsmen of the great triremes were. Priesthoods, long an inherited privilege of the elite, were now opened to a wider cut of the citizenry through use of the lot. And while sacred offices had always brought emoluments, we now hear of cash salaries and payments in skins, hides, and meat portions from the animal victims. The benefits of citizenship grew so great that in time it seemed better to limit those eligible rather than to restrain the benefits, lest too many outsiders share in the wealth of Athens. Aristocratic Athenian men had long favored rich foreign brides, as Perikles’s own maternal grandfather had done, marrying well at Sikyon. As typically happens, less eminent citizens began following suit, taking foreign wives, with every confidence of passing Athenian citizenship on to their sons. But in 451/450 B.C., Perikles introduced legislation under which citizenship could be conferred only on those whose mother and father were both from Athenian families.8 The Periklean citizenship law, exclusionary as it was, had the effect of elevating the status of Athenian women by making them, more than ever, desirable for marriage. Apart from the ownership of property and its legal protection, women had few rights or benefits, being ineligible for military service or politics. It was required that male guardians speak for them in the law courts and handle all their financial and legal affairs, but women did enjoy the wealth of the city equally within their families, and those who held key priesthoods enjoyed not only the prestige but a salary and a share in the sacrifices.9
Amid the demands of a populace expecting ever greater emoluments, the key to Perikles’s success, apart from his spending lavish sums, was certainly his unrivaled gift for oratory. Plato calls him, in the Phaidros, “the most perfect of all in rhetoric,”10 though elsewhere the philosopher takes him to task for artifice in delivering orations that seem to have been written out in advance.11 In his comedy The Demes (performed in 412 B.C.), the playwright Eupolis gives a rather breathless description of Perikles’s gifts:
Speaker 1: That man was the most powerful speaker of all.
Whenever he came forward, like a great sprinter
Coming from ten feet behind, he bested his rivals.
Speaker 2: You say he was fast … But, in addition to his speed,
Persuasion somehow or other sat on his lips,
So entrancing was he. He alone of the politicians customarily left his sting in his hearers.
Eupolis, Demes, PCG V 10212
That sting would need to remain in effect if Perikles was to persuade his fellow Athenians to join his vision for a newly resplendent Acropolis. To judge by his stunning success, it did.
BY THE MIDDLE of the fifth century, the Acropolis had stood in semi-ruins for thirty years. The platform on which the Older Parthenon was to have been built lay broken, its marble blocks still fractured from Persian fire. The roof of the Old Athena Temple had collapsed, but despite the utter destruction of the interior its battered façades and apparently a good bit of its westernmost room still stood (this page).13 Cleanup on the Acropolis had already begun under Themistokles in the 470s, when usable blocks were salvaged for hasty construction of the city’s new defensive walls. But much of the Sacred Rock remained a sad, wounded, and dark memorial to Persian atrocities. There could have been no more galvanizing reminder of this sacrilege.
This is why the famous oath said to have been sworn by the Greeks just before the Battle of Plataia in 479 included this line: “I will not rebuild a single one of the shrines that the barbarians have destroyed but will allow them to remain for future generations as a memorial of the barbarians’ impiety.”14 Though the authenticity of this oath has been questioned, its citation in both the literary and the epigraphic records suggests that it was real.15 So, too, does archaeological evidence, which shows no major building initiatives on the Acropolis between 480 and 447 B.C. But, as Manolis Korres has stressed, this pledge was probably motivated as much by a need to restore Athenian solvency as by the totemic power of the ruins.16 Rebuilding could not take place until Athe
ns was on a stable financial footing, and this would take time.
Fighting with the Persians, in fact, continued after the Athenian victory at Plataia, as the Greek allies attempted to dislodge the enemy from lands it had taken across the Aegean Islands, Thrace, Asia Minor, Anatolia, and Cyprus. A confederation of Greek states was created in 478 for joint defense against the Persians, at first consisting largely of islanders but in time growing to include 150 to 170 member states. The island of Delos in the very center of the Aegean made the perfect base for the organization that historians have labeled the Delian League but in antiquity was simply called “the Greeks and their allies.” Member states contributed ships, timber, grain, and troops to the war effort. Finally, in 449 B.C., the Athenian ambassador Kallias negotiated a peace with the Persians, ensuring freedom for the Greek cities of Asia Minor and prohibiting Persian satrapies (even Persian ships) anywhere in the Aegean.17 This marked a watershed not only for the Greek confederation generally but for the Athenians in particular, who were now launched on a new course toward empire.
Perikles lost no time in turning to a long-deferred goal: the rebuilding of the Acropolis (below). With peace at hand, the unspent balance in the league’s treasury was no longer needed to fund the war. Perikles transferred five thousand talents into “Athena’s account,” which would now serve as a blank check for his vision. A monumental double gateway, the Propylaia, would replace the former entrance at the west; the shrine of Athena Nike, just beside it, would be wholly reconfigured with a new marble temple surrounded by a sculptured parapet. The unfinished Older Parthenon at the south of the plateau and what remained of the Old Athena Temple at the north would be renewed with the building of the Parthenon and the Erechtheion. Every structure would be made from bright white Pentelic marble and enhanced with a dazzling profusion of carved decoration. It would cost a fortune.
Plutarch tells us that the extravagance of Perikles’s plan brought loud resistance in the citizen assembly, where critics accused him of squandering state funds.18 Thucydides (not the historian but a man of the same name who was the political successor to Kimon) was one of those who railed most fiercely against Perikles. But the leader deftly parried all accusations, offering to cover the expenses himself, provided he be allowed to inscribe “Perikles built it” upon the sacred structures.19 In the end, the citizen assembly acquiesced fully to their leader and his ambitious plans, allocating vast sums year after year to move the project forward. And move forward it did, creating the biggest, most technically astonishing, ornately decorated, and aesthetically compelling temple ever known (above).
Reconstruction drawing of the Athenian Acropolis, classical through Hellenistic periods, by M. Korres. (illustration credit ill.26)
Parthenon from northwest, 1987. (illustration credit ill.27)
First and foremost, this supremely deisidaimoniacal people wanted to honor Athena in the most spectacular way they could, thanking her for victory over the Persians. Since more is more when it comes to prayer, the Parthenon had to be excessive in its splendor. By now, an entire generation of Athenians had grown up never having known a grand and glorious Acropolis. And so, too, perhaps, the “Persian War teenagers” wanted to leave their own children something more than a citadel in ruins, a barren ground zero that fossilized the bitter memories of defeat. It was time to forge a new narrative for the city, one of Athenian triumph and supremacy, a visual tribute to its miraculous rise from the ashes. Athens possessed all the necessary ingredients to achieve this: a strong leader, the collective will of the people, an abundance of talented artists and artisans, access to quality marble, an exquisitely evolved aesthetic sensibility, optimism, manpower, and money, lots of it.
The Parthenon would be, among other things, a new home for the treasury of the allied Greek states, Perikles having shrewdly maneuvered the relocation of the funds from Delos to Athens in 454/453 B.C. The previous year, when the Greek fleet had suffered a serious defeat by the Persians in the waters off Egypt, Perikles used the setback as his pretext for moving the treasure to Athens, allegedly for safekeeping. With that, the confederation was suddenly transformed into what we call the Athenian League. From the 460s on, more and more states contributed money rather than ships to the common pool of resources and it now fell to the Athenians alone to administer these funds. By 454, when Perikles effected the fund transfer, the balance stood at an extraordinary sum of 8,000 talents.20 The allies would still have to collectively donate a total of 600 talents to Athens in annual tribute (roughly 17 tons of silver, worth something like $360 million in present value, though this is terribly difficult to figure).21 A sixtieth of this tribute was reserved for the goddess Athena herself and placed in a special account controlled, of course, by the Athenian state. We know that by 431 B.C., some 6,000 talents (170 tons of coined silver) were housed on the Acropolis, much of this within the Parthenon itself. The gold and ivory statue of Athena in fact served as a kind of vault (insert this page, bottom). Its robes were plated with 40 to 44 talents of solid gold, weighing twenty-three hundred to twenty-five hundred pounds. Piety permitted that the city could use this raiment as a line of credit, removing sections of the gold as needed, provided the debt was eventually repaid.22 Thus, a staggering treasure came under Athenian control. It permitted the polis to build a peerless navy for defense of the Athenian League but also to advance Athenian self-interest, expanding its international trade and beautifying the Acropolis beyond all imagining. There were also those lavish benefits to individual citizens. In this process, Athenian hegemony over the confederation’s members evolved into the Athenian Empire, reducing the other Greek members to subject peoples.23
The Parthenon, a potent symbol of the growing wealth and power of this empire, attested to Athenian supremacy, feeding the city’s eternal appetite for competition with other states and nations. It was also, more literally, the place where the profits of lording it over foreign Greeks, the riches of allied tribute, were held. Inscribed inventories confirm a burgeoning treasure.24 Dedications wrought from gold, silver, and bronze, and fashioned from ivory, packed the Parthenon’s interior: weapons, vessels, lamps, shields, furniture, boxes, baskets, jewelry, musical instruments, statues, and other gifts for the goddess.25 These filled the eastern cella (called the hekatompedon in the inventory lists) as well as the westernmost room (referred to as the parthenon). Built at a moment when civic religion, self-regard, and imperial ambitions began to overtake Athenian thinking, the Parthenon, even in all its luxurious grandeur, was looked upon with sincerity and awe as the epicenter of the city’s most venerable ideals and virtues.
Perikles’s master plan for the Acropolis had yet another motivation: long-term employment for hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers. More than a hundred thousand tons of marble needed to be quarried for the rebuilding of the Acropolis; seventy thousand blocks had to be cut and transported to the Sacred Rock, hauled to the top, where they would be finished by stonemasons, and set in place.26 Roads had to be built up the slopes of Mount Pentelikon for access to new quarries, as well as to Athens itself, some 16 kilometers (10 miles) to the southwest. Manolis Korres has reconstructed the process of quarrying, cutting, and transporting the blocks (some weighing as much as thirteen to fourteen tons) to the city center.27 Riggers and teamsters loaded the freshly hewn stones at the quarry onto wheeled carts and sledges pulled by oxen and horses for the six-hour journey along a flagstone road. A new ramp, broadened to 20 meters (66 feet) in width, was built up the west slope of the Acropolis for hauling materials to the top. There, a team of as many as two hundred craftsmen worked on the marble, up to fifty sculptors carved the figured decoration, and any number of additional men labored on construction crews and support teams.28
Thus, all citizens would share in the prosperity of the city. Plutarch expounds the litany of laborers employed in Perikles’s scheme: carpenters, modelers, metalworkers, stonemasons, dyers, gilders, ivory softeners, painters, embroiderers, and engravers, as well as the purveyors of al
l the materials needed and those who transported materials, including sailors, helmsmen, wagon makers, keepers of oxen, and muleteers. In addition, rope makers, linen weavers, leather workers, road builders, and quarrymen were needed, plus a host of unskilled laborers to support all the others. “The requirements of these projects,” Plutarch observes, “divided and distributed surplus money to pretty well every age-group and type of person.”29 The citizenry of Athens would be employed not only for the sixteen-year period of the Parthenon’s construction and adornment (447–432 B.C.) but also for the time it took to build the Propylaia (437–432), the Erechtheion (421–405), and the temple of Athena Nike (427–409). Indeed, full employment, thanks to Perikles’s vision, lasted well past his death, into the last decade of the fifth century.
Inscribed accounts listing payments to these workers, as well as expenditures for construction materials, suggest that the total cost of the Parthenon was around 469 silver talents (something like $281 million today).30 This was paid, in part, with revenues from the silver mines at Laureion but largely from Athena’s own coffers, those fed by allied tribute. A financial committee of six Athenians and a scribe was elected annually to administer the payment of a vast array of expenses for the construction of the temple.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 11
