The Akanthos Column ultimately derives from the long tradition of setting images up on tall pillars within Greek sanctuaries, winged figures that appear to fly. Just as the great Archaic sphinx, dedicated by the people of Naxos at Delphi, hovered high beside Apollo’s temple (see its location on this page), so, too, the dancing Erechtheids hung in the air atop the Akanthos Column. And like the flying Nike of Paionios set in front of Zeus’s temple at Olympia (this page), the Akanthos Column reminded all who passed, friend and foe alike, of the supremacy of Athens and the enormous sacrifices made to achieve this. Each girl raises her right arm to support a great bronze tripod, lost long ago. It has now been shown that this tripod was further surmounted by a stone omphalos, the very symbol of Delphi as center of the Earth.128
Over time, Neoptolemos develops into a model hero for young men, just as the daughters of Erechtheus do for young women. In fact, the very name Neoptolemos means “young warrior” or “recruit.” And like other heroes encountered in this chapter, he acquires a second name: Pyrrhos.129 This means “fire” and further links Neoptolemos to the fire of Apollo’s altar, just meters from his tomb. Importantly, the name also connects him with Pyrrha, wife of the Athenian king Deukalion. The chest in which Pyrrha and Deukalion took refuge during the great flood, in fact, came to rest atop Mount Parnassos, just above Delphi. The name Pyrrhos thus associates Neoptolemos with the Athenian royal family and may help to explain why the Akanthos Column and its dancing Erechtheids were placed so close to the hero’s shrine (this page).
Two key memorials were thus intentionally juxtaposed at Delphi. One commemorated the archetypal young warrior: bold, ruthless, and “fiery.” The other celebrated the archetypal maidens: graceful, elegant, yet no less brave and tenacious in giving their lives to save their city. Indeed, both male and female role models were required in the education of young citizens, in shaping a common knowledge for appropriate gendered behavior, both steeped in valor and patriotism. In the shadow of Apollo’s temple and in the light of its eternal altar fire, youths and maidens sang, danced, and sacrificed. The shrine of Neoptolemos-Pyrrhos and the column of the dancing Erechtheids above it served as a key destination for young pilgrims at Delphi, especially those from Athens, a place where they performed special rites of initiation and reinforced their identities as Athenians in full view of all.
YOUTHS AND MAIDENS PERFORMED THESE rites in preparation for their future lives in which war, death, and remembrance would figure so centrally. These forces were as powerful in the shaping of the youthful psyche as in the formation of Greek sacred spaces and the monuments that filled them. As festive and joyful as the atmosphere of holy shrines might have been, energized with processions, singing, dancing, and other spectacles, we must remember the darkness that otherwise overhung daily life: the darkness of incessant warfare and of primordial self-sacrifice, both of which made that life possible. The aching memory of lives lost by every single family who entered the holy precinct was carried with them up the Sacred Way.
What Athenian paideia was ultimately trying to teach was courage. For courage was essential to survival in the brutal world that was Greek antiquity. Athenians spent two out of every three years at war during most of the fifth century. It has been argued that in this war making, Athenians understood more clearly what they were doing than others of their time.130 For democracy fostered free speech, deliberation, and forethought, all of which clarified the reasons for one’s actions. From this, the revolutionary ideal of self-sacrifice for a greater good was born. Piety, paideia, and ritual tradition fueled the bravery needed to sustain this ideal. And it is this courage that enabled Athenians, old and young alike, to face the enormous challenges that winning and defending democracy so urgently required.
7
THE PANATHENAIA
The Performance of Belonging and the Death of the Maiden
ONLY TEN WOULD BE CHOSEN. Night after night, nervous boys filed into the ruins of the Theater of Dionysos at the foot of the Acropolis, taking a place center stage. There, each sang his heart out while the odd foreign woman sat among the marble thrones, where eminent Athenians had assembled in ancient times. She fixed her gaze upon each of them, one by one, until she had seen two hundred “ragged urchins.” Isadora Duncan knew exactly what she was looking for. She would leave Athens with a chorus of ten Athenian boys.1
Duncan and her family had come to Athens in the autumn of 1903, setting up residence at a place called Kopanos on the slopes of Mount Hymettos, a location that afforded them an unobstructed view of the Acropolis. Construction of the family compound, which they called their “temple,” was begun with great ambition but never finished. With typical impetuousness, the family had purchased land lacking an accessible water source. By the end of the year Isadora would have left. But the months spent in Athens were transformative and full. Engaging with poets, singers, dancers, monks, villagers, and royalty, they created their own community, in which they experimented with dance, theater, music, and weaving. The Duncans recited and danced each morning in the Theater of Dionysos. In the afternoons they scoured the city’s museums and libraries, trying to understand ancient Greek form and movement through a study of poetry, drama, sculpture, and vase painting.
Especially eager to understand the sound of ancient music, Isadora and her brother Raymond, who had met and quickly married Penelope Sikelianos, sister of the great poet, sought out manuscripts of Byzantine liturgical music. They had a theory that songs of the early Christian Church derived from the strophes of ancient Greek hymns. The Duncans also listened carefully to local men and boys singing traditional folk tunes, ever alert for vestiges of classical Greek music.
Isadora was determined to re-create an ancient boys’ chorus to tour with her across Europe in Aeschylus’s Suppliants. Indeed, she collected the best young male voices of Athens, enlisting an Orthodox novice priest with a specialty in Byzantine music to train the ten lucky lads for the ensemble known as the Greek Choir. Clan Duncan and the singing boys left Athens for Vienna, Munich, and Berlin before the year’s end.
In Munich they performed for students of the great archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler, who introduced the event with a lecture on the Greek hymns that had been set to music by the novice. The boys, costumed in robes and sandals like an ancient chorus, sang this canon. Isadora herself danced all fifty of the Danaids. The audience was enthralled.
With each new venue, however, enthusiasm for the choir waned. By the time they got to Berlin, six months into the tour, the boys’ voices had started to change, the once mellifluous tones growing ever more shrill and off-key. They had lost that heavenly boyish expression that had so captured Duncan in the Theater of Dionysos. They had also grown in height, some sprouting up by as much as a foot, and in rambunctiousness. By the spring of 1904, they would be sent home to Athens via second-class coach train from Berlin, in their bags the knickerbockers that had been bought for them at Wertheim’s department store, mementos of Duncan’s great experiment re-creating the ancient Greek chorus.2
Though breathless and flamboyant, Isadora’s pursuit of what she perceived to be ancient sounds and movements remains instructive today. During her time in Athens, Duncan climbed the Acropolis often, summoning the power of the architecture to stir something within herself. Her descriptions of awaiting inspiration are affecting and natural:
For many days no movement came to me. And then one day came the thought: these columns which seem so straight and still are not really straight, each one is curving gently from the base to the height, each one is in flowing movement, never resting, and the movement of each is in harmony with the others. And as I thought this my arms rose slowly toward the Temple and I leaned forward—and then I knew I had found my dance, and it was a Prayer.3
Duncan had understood, in an instant, the quintessence of movement as prayer. Her epiphany, within the peristyle of the Parthenon, elicited a gesture that sprang from her diaphragm, forcing her arms upward in a pose of supplication. Edward Steich
en’s celebrated photographs of Duncan’s striking stances within the Parthenon’s colonnade (previous page) were shot in 1920, seventeen years after she wrote the lines quoted above.4 Like so many others before and after her, Duncan would feel compelled to revisit the Parthenon throughout her life.
Isadora Duncan in the porch of the Parthenon, photographed by Edward Steichen, 1920. (illustration credit ill.93)
Generations of ancient Greeks did the same. In fact, every August for more than 800 years they streamed en masse toward the Acropolis, in a colorful procession that was the climax of the Panathenaic, or “All-Athenian,” festival. Officially founded in the year 566/565 B.C., according to tradition, the Panathenaia was celebrated until the fourth century A.D., when a series of edicts issued by the Christian emperor Theodosios put an end to all “pagan” rites and festivals, closed Greek temples, and eradicated traditional worship. The final festival was probably held in A.D. 391 or, at the very latest, in 395.5
Across the uninterrupted centuries of observance, every fourth year saw an especially grand weeklong version of expanded contests and rites. Known as the Great (or Greater) Panathenaia, this version was international, open to participants and competitors from across the Greek world, whereas the Small (or Lesser) Panathenaia, observed during each of the intervening years, was local, its competitions open to Athenian citizens alone.6 One naturally thinks of the Olympics by comparison, the quadrennial games open to the whole Greek world (with Panhellenic contests held in the intervening years at Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia). There are indeed meaningful similarities, not least of which is that the Panathenaia, like the Olympics, was at bottom a religious observance. But while it must be allowed that the Olympic, the Pythian, and other Panhellenic festivals were more important occasions in the Greek world generally (even than the greater version of the Panathenaia), there was no more important occasion in Athens. The Panathenaia comprised the days when the Athenians were most intensely, ecstatically themselves—a crescendo of being and consciousness. At its heart, more important than any of the other rituals or competitions, was the procession itself. And the destination of that sacred, definitive procession was none other than the sacred altar of Athena just to the northeast of the Parthenon (insert this page, top).
In what can be described as the ultimate multimedia spectacle, the procession of worshippers was the culmination of both the Great and the Small Panathenaic festivals. This visual and acoustic marvel began at dawn in the Kerameikos, just outside the city gates at a structure called the Pompeion, or “Procession Building.” Here, processionists lined up in groups according to their social status, gender, and age cohort. Passing through the Double Gate (Dipylon), they followed the Sacred Way, crossing the Agora and climbing up the Acropolis, where they entered through the monumental gateway (Propylaia) before marching on toward Athena’s sacred altar (this page).7 In train were a hundred head of cattle for sacrifice to the goddess, an act of collective devotion. Following the sacrifice, the meat was cooked and distributed, a feast shared by all participants, citizens and noncitizens alike.
The Small Panathenaia was, as we have said, a local festival, its competitions open only to citizens from the ten tribes. The Great Panathenaia, including contests open to all Greeks, nevertheless restricted certain competitions to Athenian citizens alone. These so-called tribal events included some of the horse races, the boat race, the torch relay race, and a men’s beauty contest. Also among these was the pyrrichos, a competition for armed dancers, and the apobates race, which involved contestants jumping on and off a moving chariot wearing full armor. The vigil called the pannychis, or “all-nighter,” generally thought to have been held on the eve of the procession, was open only to youths and maidens from citizen families. The following day, as the procession reached the gateway of the Acropolis, only members of these families were allowed to enter Athena’s sacred precinct.
The rites and competitions of the Panathenaia, in substance and exclusivity, enabled Athenian citizens to articulate the very essence of who they were. In no other setting, perhaps not even warfare, would they have so keenly felt the awareness of being bound together as families and tribes descended from a common point in the epic past. As in Linnaean taxonomy, one could find himself based on membership in a household (oikos), a kinship group (genos)—known across four generations and associated with the elite—a larger “brotherhood” group (phratry), and one of the ten tribes (phylai) established by Kleisthenes in 508/507 B.C. in the early days of the democracy. This intricate system made the blood bond of Athenian citizenship essential while exerting enormous pressure against any notion of including outsiders.8
The prominence of the tribal events at the Panathenaia sets it apart from festival practice at other Panhellenic game sites, those at Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea. Little if any emphasis was placed on the superiority of the local hosts at these sanctuaries. Indeed, at Athens, administration of the festival was itself very much a tribal affair. Each tribe appointed one representative, drawn by lot, to a board of ten magistrates known as athlothetai who oversaw the organization and preparations for the festivities, including the awarding of prizes.9 They were also responsible for the financing of the games, a hugely expensive undertaking. The office had a four-year term, providing time enough for officeholders to announce and organize the contests, as well as for them to oversee the weaving of the sacred peplos for Athena, a job performed by a group of women called ergastinai (workers) over nine months.10 As we understand it from the fragmentary sources, a giant tapestry-peplos was presented to the goddess (from the sixth century on) every four years at the Great Panathenaia, while a small peplos was woven for the Small Panathenaic festivals held during the intervening years.11 These peplos offerings are understood to have been deposited near the olive wood statue in the Old Athena Temple (or what remained of it) and possibly later in the Erechtheion, following its construction in the last quarter of the fifth century B.C., though this is by no means certain.
Time was crucial in all matters related to administering the festival. The timing of the events themselves was synchronized with celestial configurations of star groups and moon phases so that the Panathenaia would be as one with the cosmos.12 Athenian piety also required that the festival be in harmony with the natural surroundings, the landscape, flora, and fauna of Athens, all the places of memory that pulsed with the mythic past and kept it alive. But like the rivers and the wind, the observances of the festival were sometimes wildly kinetic, and this is perhaps the hardest element for us to recover.
Maps, plans, and models of ancient Athens, still and inert as they are necessarily, give little sense of the robust fields of movement that enlivened the city in antiquity. We are conditioned to experience “ruins” as static and unchanging, and so it is hard to grasp the vibrancy of ritual in action, the motion that once invigorated the placid scenes that we see today. We instinctively focus on the buildings when, in fact, the action took place in the spaces left between them. Temples were usually locked tight, serving as safe houses for valuable votive offerings and treasure. Life throughout the ancient Mediterranean, meanwhile, was lived mostly outdoors. Working, worshipping, dining, dancing, even sleeping for much of the year, happened on verandas, under covered porticoes and grape arbors, in courtyards, on balconies, in streets, roadways, marketplaces, fields, and, yes, sanctuaries. It is therefore ultimately necessary to focus on the voids between structures, the open spaces that served as gathering places for spectacle and performance. We will consider how these spaces were transformed by the actors and by the processions, dances, footraces, and rituals that brought life to them. Engaging with the ephemeral and performative aspects of Panathenaic ritual allows us to better understand the full dynamics of the process through which Athena was honored.13
Such engagement suggests that in Greek antiquity the expenditure of energy through physical exertion constituted a prayer or votive act unto itself. Just as recent scholarship has encouraged us to view the act of writi
ng, not just the inscription, as a votive, so, too, ritual movement can be understood as an offering that brought pleasure to the gods.14 Looking cross-culturally at the Classic Maya, we find examples of the practiced, rapid movement of the feet—dance, in other words—constituting an attitude of prayer. Ritual foot shuffling summoned the essence of the divine.15 The physicality of the human body was thus employed as an instrument of ritual communication. It is important to view the Panathenaia within this context. At Athens, we see the full citizenry of the body politic coming together with outsiders from across the Greek world in a grand kinetic offering to the goddess through marching, singing, reciting, running, jumping, throwing, wrestling, riding, sacrificing, and feasting.
BEFORE FOCUSING on the Panathenaia itself, we would do well to consider the festival within the broader context of Greek religion. We must remember that the Greeks had no “sacred book” to set down a universal system of beliefs and laws. They had no unified “church” with central authority, no “clergy” to instruct in beliefs. The Greeks did not even have a separate word for religion, since there was no area of life that it did not permeate.16 Religion was embedded in everything. And it was wholly a local enterprise, dependent on the traditions of tightly knit family groups across many generations. Thus, every detail concerning religious practice was locally ordained. Each sanctuary had its own rules and regulations, guidelines for access, dress, comportment, festival calendars, dedications, sacrificial practice, and hierarchy of sacred officials to oversee administration of sacred rites.17
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