Lykourgos asserts that Athenians owe a debt to Euripides for passing this story down to them, thus providing a paradeigma (“fine example”) that citizens can keep before them to “implant in their hearts a love of their city.”128 By no coincidence, this same word appears in the Periklean funeral oration: Athens does not copy (mimeitai) other cities but is a paradeigma to them. Lykourgos is doubtless recalling that great moment of oratory.129 But all these Lykourgan flourishes would not achieve their intent: in the end, despite abundant evidence and exhortation, the jury would acquit Leokrates by a single vote. The verdict must have surely confirmed Lykourgos’s worst fears about the hearts of his fellow citizens. For all he had done in his political life to uphold and reanimate the values that had made Athens great, here was painful evidence that at least for half of the citizenry the days when those values were truly inviolable were past. The good of Athens above all was sacred no more to the Athenians, the prospect of Macedonian domination after Chaironeia perhaps having finished a job that the radical democracy, with all its bountiful blandishments, had begun.
NEVERTHELESS, LYKOURGOS’S SPEECH Against Leokrates was not entirely in vain. Without it, we would know very little of Euripides’s lost play or of the story of Erechtheus and the sacrifice of his daughters, a centrally important one for our purposes. As the great progenitor in whom the primordial past culminates and through whom the Athenians enter history, Erechtheus represents a kind of missing link, his place in the Parthenon’s sweep of the ages unsuspected until recently. In fact, the family of Erechtheus can now be understood to stand at the very heart of the Parthenon sculptural program. This recognition will furnish the key to understanding the temple’s most enigmatic and prominent imagery, and in so doing lead us to revise our most basic understanding of the building itself. It is the story of the magnanimity of the royal house of Erechtheus that brings so vividly to life that most essential conviction expressed by Perikles in his funeral oration: Athens is worth dying for. And it turns out that even as the once indelible principle was fading, someone saw fit to illustrate it for all time in the holiest of places.
4
THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
Founding Father, Mother, Daughters
THE YEAR WAS 1901. The site was Medinet Ghoran. Pierre Jouguet and his team of excavators set off across the Egyptian sands to the southwest of the Fayum oasis. Here, they would dig through the winter months, from January through March, efforts that were mightily repaid. The French team unearthed hundreds of mummies from a broad network of rock-cut tombs comprising a vast Hellenistic cemetery.1 While the burials themselves were not particularly rich, the mummy casings would prove, some sixty years later, to be a treasure trove.
Those casings were not of gold or gilded wood, like Tutankhamen’s coffin and those of other well-known Egyptian royalty. Rather, they were of papier-mâché. For more cost-conscious customers, morticians of Hellenistic Egypt used discarded scraps of papyrus, pasting them together over the linen wrappings of the dead. When it had dried and hardened, the resulting cartonnage could be plastered, painted, or even gilded to give the impression of a much finer material. This treatment is typical of burials of commoners during the last three centuries B.C., when Alexander the Great’s Macedonian general Ptolemy I and his descendants ruled Egypt.
The ink on those paper scraps did not dissolve, and so together with the earthly remains, the texts that had originally been copied onto those papyri by scribes at Alexandria and elsewhere survived. More copies than ever intended: if a scribe made an error in his transcription, the whole sheet was discarded, only perfect copies being good enough for the libraries of the Hellenistic world. But as paper was precious, the abortive imperfect copies would be sent off to morticians for making coffins. And so Hellenistic Egyptian tombs and their mummy casings have become crucial sources for the recovery of lost and unknown texts.
Pierre Jouguet contemplating a mummy casing. La Revue du Caire 13, no. 130 (1950). (illustration credit ill.39)
Jouguet brought dozens of mummies back from the trenches of Medinet Ghoran for study at the Institutes of Papyrology in Paris and Lille (above). From these, he managed to extract a number of Greek and demotic Egyptian texts, though it proved difficult to separate the fragile papyrus layers without damaging them to the point of losing what had been written. This would remain the case until the early 1960s, when Professor André Bataille and Mlle Nicole Parichon of the Sorbonne’s Institut de Papyrologie developed a new technique, first soaking the cartonnages in a 13 percent solution of hydrochloric acid, heated to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and then placing them in a steam bath of 10 percent glycerin solution. This dissolved the glue and allowed individual sheets to be peeled apart, revealing lines of Greek not seen since the third century B.C. The innovation caused something of a popular sensation, Life magazine (below) proclaiming in November 1963, “Secrets Cooked from a Mummy.”2
In 1965, however, what might be viewed as the “curse of the mummy” struck.3 Crossing a street in central Paris, Bataille was hit by a car and killed. But the papyrus fragments he had extracted back on September 19, 1962, had already created a buzz. Mummy casings 24 and 25 had yielded texts from a Greek comedy, the Sikyonios (“the man from Sikyon,” a city in the Peloponnese not far from Corinth), together with the name of its author, Menander. Written in the late fourth or early third century B.C., the play was already known from 150 lines extracted from the mummies by Jouguet just a few years after their discovery. Remarkably, the new additions belonged to the very same manuscript Jouguet had identified sixty years before, suggesting that a single papyrus scroll had been recycled across three different mummies!
Professor André Bataille and Mlle Nicole Parichon extracting the Erechtheus fragments from the mummy cartonnage. Life, November 15, 1963, 65. (illustration credit ill.40)
Scholars of Greek comedy were energized. Among them was the young Colin Austin, a doctoral student at Christ Church, Oxford, just finishing his dissertation on the comic playwright Aristophanes. In the autumn of 1966, Austin traveled to Paris. He was welcomed by Jean Scherer, Bataille’s successor at the Institut de Papyrologie at the Sorbonne. Scherer presented Austin with fragments of the Sikyonios for study, making clear that he had reserved for himself the rights of publication. He also produced additional fragments recovered from mummy casing 24, and considering these mere “scraps” compared with Menander’s text, he generously offered them to the young scholar to publish.
Colin Austin’s heart skipped a beat. In that instant, he had already recognized that these “scraps” contained lines from the long-lost play titled the Erechtheus, by one of the greatest of all Greek dramatists, Euripides.4
The existence of the Erechtheus had long been known from later authors who quote from it freely.5 Far and away the longest quotation is the chunk of fifty-five lines we have seen Lykourgos use in his oration Against Leokrates delivered in 330 B.C., nearly a century after the Erechtheus was first performed, probably around 422 B.C.6 Making his case against the traitor, Lykourgos hails the example of the eponymous king’s daughters, who gave their lives to save Athens, and he quotes the patriotic speech of their mother, Queen Praxithea, who willingly acceded to sacrificing her progeny. But how does a Hellenistic papyrus text, literally buried until the early twentieth century and still unrecognized for another sixty years, transform our understanding of the world’s most familiar building today? As much as anything, the answer reveals the improbably circuitous workings of the field of classics.
Colin Austin’s knowledge of Greek was so expert that he instantly recognized in the Sorbonne papyrus the same play of Euripides that Lykourgos had quoted in his oration. To recover a more substantial portion of a major text was a coup that classicists dream of. But Austin kept a poker face. Thanking the professor, he went straight home, over the moon at his good fortune.
Austin dispatched his duties in record time, transcribing the Greek and publishing it, with commentary, a year later. It was not easy work. To begi
n with, huge chunks of text were lost where the paper had been cut into the shape of wings, the wings of the Egyptian Horus falcon, a decorative element on the mummy case to which the cartonnage naturally had to conform (below).7 Austin’s first publication of the fragments appeared in Recherches de Papyrologie for 1967, with translation in French, under the title “De nouveaux fragments de l’Érechthée d’Euripide.”8 The following year, he published the Sorbonne papyrus together with all known fragments of the Erechtheus from other sources in his Nova fragmenta Euripidea in papyris reperta.9 Austin’s accompanying commentary was in Latin with no translation, in accordance with the convention of the German series (Kleine Texte) in which it appeared.
Fragments preserving Euripides’s Erechtheus. Sorbonne Papyrus 2328b–d. (illustration credit ill.41)
Fragment preserving Euripides’s Erechtheus. Sorbonne Papyrus 2328a. (illustration credit ill.42)
While the monumental discovery of Euripides’s lost Erechtheus was big news in philological circles, it remained largely unnoticed by archaeologists. Such discoveries take quite a while to reach the mainstream of classical studies, let alone the general public. A Spanish translation of the play would appear in 1976 and an Italian one in 1977.10 But the text would not come out in English until 1995, more than thirty years after the recovery of the fragments.11 And nearly twenty-five years would pass between Austin’s first publication of the Erechtheus fragments and my demonstration of their relevance to the Parthenon frieze.12 One might well imagine classical studies as a focused and insular field in which everyone knows the doings of everyone else. But those who study Greek sculpture rarely keep up with papyrological discoveries, just as papyrologists seldom follow what’s new in Greek architectural sculpture.
The fragments peeled from Jouguet’s mummy casing 24 are known as Sorbonne Papyrus 2328 and contain approximately 120 lines of the Erechtheus, not including the 55 quoted by Lykourgos. Prior to this discovery, only 125 lines of the play had been known: Lykourgos’s quotation plus 34 additional lines given by Stobaeus and various individual lines quoted in a number of other sources.13 With the new discovery the extent of the play recovered rose to just under 250 lines, which, to judge by other Euripidean dramas, should account for one-fifth or one-sixth of the entire play.14
But how do new fragments of this ancient play lead us to reexamine the Parthenon? Before we answer that question in the next chapter, it is worth delving a bit into the story of the primordial Athenian king, who looms larger in the classical Athenian consciousness than has been understood for millennia.
AS WE HAVE SAID, it was through Lykourgos’s lengthy quotation in Against Leokrates that the Erechtheus had been known to modern readers. But the play’s significance, and that of its namesake, Erechtheus, had not been fully appreciated until Austin’s publication of the new fragments in 1967. Indeed, Erechtheus had been best known from the temple on the Acropolis that bears his name, the Erechtheion. Its construction is generally placed in 421 B.C., after the Peace of Nikias brought a break in the fighting between Athens and Sparta, ending the first phase of the Peloponnesian War. The Erechtheion is thought to have been completed sometime after 409/408 B.C., when inscribed building accounts detail work completed as well as work left to be done.15 Largely based on circumstantial evidence, the date for the start of construction on the Erechtheion remains contested, with some scholars putting it as early as 435 B.C. and others as late as 412.16 The temple’s famous Porch of the Maidens, the arrangement of six karyatids holding up the lintel at the southwest corner, is known to every schoolchild who studies Western art (this page). But what do we know of the hero for whom the building is named?
The Oxford classicist Martin West has aptly called Erechtheus “the big spider at the heart of Attic myth.”17 The hero is already present in the Iliad, wherein Homer says that “Athens, the well built citadel,” is the land of “great-hearted Erechtheus.” Born of the earth, “giver of grain,” Erechtheus was nursed by Zeus’s daughter Athena, who settled him “in her own rich temple” on the Acropolis.18 In the Odyssey this imagery was reversed.19 It is Athena who enters “the strong house of Erechtheus” atop the Acropolis, presumably a reference to the Mycenaean palace erected here during the Late Bronze Age (this page). Herodotos tells us that Erechtheus and Athena were worshipped jointly at Athens.20 The people of Epidauros made an annual sacrifice to the divine pair, according to an old agreement by which the Epidaurians gained, in return, permission to cut Athenian olive trees for the carving of sacred statues. Herodotos refers to Erechtheus both as “earth-born” and as “king of the Athenians,” telling us the people first acquired this name during his reign. The temple of Erechtheus, Herodotos also reveals, housed the venerable olive tree and sea spring, tokens of the ancient foundational contest between Athena and Poseidon.21
Erechtheus is not always easy to distinguish from a figure known as Erichthonios, or from a variant named Erichtheus.22 These personae share the same extraordinary birth myth, arising directly out of the earth.23 Each has a wife named Praxithea.24 The yoking of horses and the introduction of the chariot are ascribed to both heroes. And both are associated with the Panathenaic festival.25
That the two share a very unusual birth myth concerning Hephaistos signals that they are, in fact, one and the same. As we have seen, the smithing god was smitten by the beauty of the maiden goddess Athena. Ignoring her protests, he pursues her but manages only to ejaculate upon her thigh.26 The unwelcome effluent is wiped away by the chaste goddess with a piece of wool she discards on the ground. This gesture of disgust results in the impregnation of Mother Earth who, in time, gives birth to Erechtheus/Erichthonios. It has been argued that the hero’s very name derives from erion or erithechna (meaning “wool” or “woollen”). Alternatively, it has been seen as deriving from chthonios (meaning “belonging to the earth”). Some combine the two and translate “Erechtheus” as “Woolly-Earthy,” though this is unlikely. 27
In Athenian eyes there was only one hero, Erechtheus.28 He was the primordial king of the polis, born from the earth and nurtured by Athena. But at some point during the fifth century B.C. Erechtheus “splits” into two.29 The construct of “Erichthonios” appears and, by the fourth century, has entirely taken over the early mythologies of the birth and childhood of the hero. Erechtheus then develops into a persona exclusively associated with the mature king of Athens who sacrificed his daughter and fought the war against Eumolpos.30
Erechtheus and Erichthonios thus come to be perceived as two distinct personalities or, possibly, a younger and older version of the same individual. Erichthonios is always depicted in Greek art as a child or baby, sometimes shown accompanied by guardian snakes.31 Erechtheus, on the other hand, is always portrayed as an adult, the mature king of Athens.32 A red-figured vase in Berlin, dating to the third quarter of the fifth century B.C., shows the two heroes together, each labeled by name: Erichthonios as a baby and Erechtheus as an adult (previous page and above).33 Some have argued on this basis that the two are completely separate individuals.34 We must, however, take care not to read visual culture too literally. The image-generating process, like the mythopoetic, is complex and nonlinear.35 It is fully possible to have two aspects of one hero portrayed on a single vase, just as it is feasible for Erechtheus to “split” into two personae. The dynamic character of myth and the processes through which images are created and used allows for far more flexibility than some modern interpreters might like.
Ge rises from the earth to hand the baby Erichthonios to Athena while Kekrops, with the tail of a snake, watches at left; Hephaistos and Herse (?) stand at right. Cup by Kodros Painter, 440–430 B.C. From Tarquinia. (illustration credit ill.43)
Aglauros and King Erechtheus (with scepter) at left; Pandrosos at center; Aigeus and Pallas (?) at right. Cup by Kodros Painter, 440–430 B.C. From Tarquinia. (illustration credit ill.44)
Greek myth is an ever-changing phenomenon that “morphs,” as George Lucas would have it, into new and sometimes c
ontradictory versions with each retelling. There is no correct or better version of any myth, just as there is no “wrong” recounting of these tales. Their transformative nature forces upon the modern audience a frustrating, even unsettling level of ambiguity, a theme to which we shall return. Suffice it to say, our heroes Erechtheus and Erichthonios are hopelessly intertwined, their stories woven together by each other’s myriad adaptations spanning hundreds of years. What remains indisputable, however, is that Erechtheus is the only name given to the defining king of Athens. He is known as such from his very first appearance in the Iliad. Erechtheus alone is the recipient of a cult in a temple called the Erechtheion, not the Erichthoneion. Athens is called the land of Erechtheus, never the land of Erichthonios. Likewise, the Athenians were always the “Erechtheidai” and at no time the “Erichthoniadai.”36
To be sure, our appreciation of Erechtheus has been muted over the years, not by his lack of importance, but by the vicissitudes of surviving material evidence. It doesn’t help matters that he has sometimes been outshone by another legendary king, Kekrops, who Herodotos tells us reigned a generation earlier.37 This too is a pair that presents distracting similarities. Both Kekrops and Erechtheus/Erichthonios are associated with autochthony and the establishment of Athenian cult. In art, Kekrops is depicted with serpent legs (this page) and Erechtheus/Erichthonios is often shown with snakes.38 Most tellingly, each has three daughters, two of whom come to a terrible end, by some accounts leaping to their deaths from the cliffs of the Acropolis. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has argued persuasively that Kekrops is in fact a transformation of Erechtheus. She sees the former’s persona as governed by “an intensification and emphasis on the element of autochthony,” hence his depiction with a snaky tail.39 We do well to reconcile ourselves to the dynamic complexity of Athenian foundation myths over the longue durée, in all their richness of projection, transference, and contamination.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 16
