The Parthenon Enigma
Page 29
The Athenians, as we have said, were the most religious in a world steeped in religion. At Athens, it has been estimated that there were around 130 to 170 festival days per year, meaning more than a third of the calendar was devoted to observing religious feasts.18 These offered the opportunity for eating flesh, a happy by-product of the animal sacrifices offered to the gods (this is the “meat sacrificed to idols” against which Paul will later warn the Church at Corinth). By a convenient twist of mythological precedent, it was determined that gods preferred the inedible parts of sacrificial victims, the fat and bones, leaving the juicy cuts of meat to be shared by the human worshippers.19 The absence of refrigeration meant that sacrificial meat from a large animal like a cow, bull, or ox had to be cooked and eaten on the spot. Meat was rarely eaten outside religious contexts, making for a “chicken every Sunday” way of life in which large family groups feasted together as part of sacred rites. At both the Great and the Small Panathenaic festivals, where a hundred head of cattle were sacrificed, there was plenty to go around.
The musical and athletic contests of the Panathenaia were also part of the larger, overarching religious program. Athletic games were not the secular enterprises we know today, centered on the glory of the individual winner. The goal of the festival was to give honor to the goddess, to please Athena, and to remember the ancestors. So sacred was the athletic endeavor that a truce was called for the period before and during the Olympic Games, known as ekecheiria, or “the laying down of arms.”20 This allowed festival participants to travel safely to and from Olympia over a three-month period. The same principle would have applied during the Great Panathenaia. In the months leading up to the feast, special ambassadors called spondophoroi were sent out to announce the competitions to Greek communities across the Mediterranean and as far east as the Arabian Gulf.21
The Panathenaic Games stood out from the other Panhellenic contests for their lucrative cash prizes.22 Those high-minded people had an appetite not merely for competition but for rewards of material value. The Athenian state paid out vast amounts to sponsor the games. So, too, did the oldest and most affluent families of the city, upon whom the expectation of benefaction rested very heavily. By the fifth century, however, Athenian allies and colonists were obliged to send a cow and a panoply of weapons for the Great Panathenaia.23 Thus, the financial burden came to be more broadly shared.
From the mid-sixth century on, prizes for the Panathenaia took the form of precious Athenian olive oil held in vessels specially commissioned by the state. Known as Panathenaic prize amphorae, these vases conform to particular specifications of size, volume, shape, and decoration.24 On one side, they show Athena helmeted in her full martial guise, brandishing her spear and shield and striding aggressively forward. In painted letters beside the picture panel appear the words “From the Games at Athens,” TON ATHENETHEN ATHLON. Some idea of the value placed on winning in the Panathenaic Games can be understood from the size of the prizes. Panathenaic amphorae held exactly thirty-six kilos of olive oil. We hear of one winner who received 140 amphorae, five tons of oil in all. The value of that quantity has been estimated at 1,680 drachmas, roughly five and a half years’ salary for the average worker.25 The exorbitant compensation of star athletes is one of our lesser-known Athenian legacies.
An amphora from the so-called Burgon group, dating to around 560 B.C., represents the earliest in the sequence of prize amphorae (previous page).26 Athena is shown striding forward on the belly of the vase, with a bird-bodied siren on one side of its neck and an owl on the other. It is of great interest that the two winged creatures, both associated with mourning and lament, are paired together on this very early Panathenaic prize amphora. By the 540s, a canonical image is established for Panathenaic amphorae, one that shows Athena striding forward and flanked by two columns surmounted by cocks; a vase by the Princeton Painter follows this Panathenaic model (below).27 By now, the goddess’s iconic mascot, the little owl, has come to perch upon her shield. We shall soon have more to say about the persistence of winged creatures within the orbit of Athena, where they have very special significance.
Panathenaic prize amphora with Athena brandishing spear and shield; siren on neck, owl on reverse of neck. Burgon type, ca. 566 B.C. (illustration credit ill.94)
The reverse side of Panathenaic vases regularly shows images drawn from the musical and athletic competitions. The Burgon, for example, shows a two-horse chariot race known as the synoris. Straight through the Hellenistic period, Panathenaic amphorae will continue to be decorated in the black-figured technique of the sixth century. Thus, they maintain an Archaic look, deliberately evoking the earliest days of the festival.
While the precise event schedule of the Great Panathenaia is not known for certain, it is believed that the feast was celebrated across eight days, from roughly the twenty-third to the thirtieth day of the month Hekatombaion.28 Athens, like many Greek cities, had its own names for months. Hekatombaion means an offering of “one hundred” animal victims, referring to the number of cattle sacrificed at the Panathenaia. Athenian Hekatombaion falls roughly from the middle of July to the middle of August in our calendar. The Panathenaic festival would thus have taken place during the final eight days of the month, culminating in procession and sacrifice on the twenty-eighth of Hekatombaion, or, around the fifteenth of August. In time, this day came to be recognized as the birthday of Athena.29 The legacy remains with us: our month of August falls under the zodiac sign of Virgo, the Virgin. And in both the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions, the fifteenth of August is celebrated as the greatest feast of the Virgin Mary, the day on which she was taken up bodily into heaven.
Amphora of Panathenaic shape and iconography, showing Athena brandishing a spear and a shield (on which an owl alights). Princeton Painter, ca. 540s B.C. (illustration credit ill.95)
The schedule of athletic events for the Great Panathenaia can be reconstructed, up to a point, thanks to the survival of lists of prizes for winners given in order of their victories. These are preserved on a key inscription dated around 380 B.C.30 Of course the inscription attests to practices of the early fourth century and may not reflect those in other periods of the festival’s more than eight-hundred-year history; however steeped in tradition, the Panathenaic festival was by no means static or unchanging. Events and venues were added and eliminated across the centuries. Nonetheless, we can confirm that by the fourth century the festival program ran across eight days.
The first day was devoted to musical contests and the recitation of poetry, the second day to athletic competitions for boys and youths, the third day to men’s athletic contests, and the fourth to equestrian events. The fifth day began the tribal contests open to Athenian citizens alone, and carried over into the sixth on which the torch races and the all-night vigil on the Acropolis, the pannychis, took place. (It should be said that this all-night revel may have taken place later in the week, following the sacrifices and feasting.)31 The seventh day saw the great procession and sacrifices on the Sacred Rock, followed by more tribal competitions, the apobates and boat races, on day eight. While it is not known precisely when the prizes were awarded, it is assumed that this took place on the final day.
Let us imagine the experience of participants over this week of festivities. Around the twenty-third of Hekatombaion, worshippers gathered for musical competitions and recitations of epic and lyric poetry that signaled the start of the Panathenaia. Indeed, music may have served to summon the essence of the divine, inviting the goddess’s presence for the week of events offered in her honor. We must not mistake the primary function of music in sacred ritual: it is a means of communicating with the divine, bringing the community together in a shared experience that transcends the quotidian, an altered state of being.
The musical events were first performed in the Agora, where temporary stands were erected in an area known as the orchestra. Some believe that the contests were transferred in the 430s to a music hall built by Perikles at the so
utheast foot of the Acropolis, just beside the Theater of Dionysos (this page).32 Still, epigraphic evidence attests to the continued use of the Agora for some musical performances, even after the death of Perikles.33
By the last quarter of the fourth century, Demetrios of Phaleron is believed to have moved the musical and rhapsodic competitions to the Theater of Dionysos.34 The theater had been entirely rebuilt by Lykourgos in the 330s, increasing its seating capacity to around seventeen thousand. Lykourgos also built a new Panathenaic stadium entirely of marble, set just beside the Ilissos River (this page). The footraces along with most of the gymnastic events were no doubt moved at this time to the lavish new stadium. Venue changes allowed contemporary Athenian leaders to put their own stamps on the competitions, eclipsing the memory, not always pleasant, of former regimes. Setting the Panathenaic competitions became, in this sense, a power play, whereby vast numbers of worshippers could be made aware of the contributions of political leaders to refreshing traditions, even as the universal past was invoked and glorified.35
The recitation of epic song narratives on the first day of the festival reconnected worshippers with the sentiments and ideals of their ancestors. If there was anything that approached the status of a sacred foundation text for all Greeks, it was Homer’s account of the Trojan War and its aftermath as told in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Against Leokrates, Lykourgos emphasizes that the ancestors legislated changes to the Great Panathenaia in order to ensure that Homer’s, and only Homer’s, work would be recited at the festival. “Poets,” Lykourgos observes, “depicting life itself, select the noblest actions and so through argument and demonstration convert men’s hearts.”36 Lykourgos is referring to what has been called the “Panathenaic Regulation,” by which the Homeric poems were established as those to be performed, or “reperformed,” at the Panathenaia. This measure has been traced, by some, all the way back to Solon’s day.37 Listening to the Iliad and the Odyssey enabled all participants in the festival, Athenians and non-Athenians alike, to start the week off “on the same page,” reflecting in the proper spirit on their common origins as Hellenes. There would be plenty of time later in the week for the Athenians to show off their superior lineage while the outsiders watched.
A roster of rhapsodes recited the Homeric poems in a relay sequence, one picking up where the other left off, each declaiming five hundred to eight hundred lines. In a sense, this resembled the footraces of the tribal competitions that followed, the sharing of the performed text as a “team event.” Indeed, both the athletic and rhapsodic competitions were referred to as agones (contests). And like all Panathenaic contests the rhapsodic, at its core, was a ritual, one in which participants both collaborated and competed, as Gregory Nagy has emphasized. It is generally believed that the versions of the Homeric poems recited at the Panathenaia were organized, or reorganized, by Hipparchos, son of Peisistratos.38 By the Hellenistic period, theatrical contests were added to the schedule of events, and by Roman times we hear that tragedies were also performed.39
In the middle of the fifth century, Perikles, by now one of the athlothetai overseeing the festival, seems to have put his own stamp on the first day of the festival. Apparently, he had a decree passed introducing a musical contest, personally prescribing every detail of how contestants should blow on the aulos, sing, or pluck the kithara.40
That musical competitions became so integral to the Panathenaic Games signals the centrality of music making (which included rhapsodic recitation) in ancient Athens. It equates this art with athletic contests, placing it under the same umbrella of competition and expenditure of energy for the delight of the goddess, a species of prayer. There is indeed a certain physicality to playing instruments, singing, and reciting poetry that renders the effort akin to athletic exertion. Music, no less than athletics, demands raw talent, rigorous training, and performance skills. For this reason, with memorization of words, athletics, and dance, music was central to the education of the young. That the Panathenaic competitions tested all the abilities cultivated in Athenian paideia is no accident: this training of the next generation in the values and ideals of the polis was essential to good citizenship. To be Athenian was to belong, by reason of birth above all but by formation as well.
Music was ubiquitous at the Panathenaia. The sounds of pipes and lyres accompanied athletic contests as well as animal sacrifices and other rites. Indeed, the shrill tones of the aulos masked the cries of animal victims as their throats were cut upon the altar of sacrifice. Music punctuated and articulated the progressive stages of sacrifice. Some sense of the ancient experience may survive in the Spanish bullfight in which a band of musicians accompanies each phase of the spectacle: arrival of the bull, arrival of the torero and banderilleros, entry of the picador on horseback, killing of the bull, awarding of prizes, and exit from the arena. In Athens, musical punctuation also marked stages within athletic competitions, the sound of pipes signaling the start of events and the awarding of prizes.
The musical competitions (musikes agones), held on the first day of the festival, were divided into two classes, one for boys and one for men, separating voices that had not yet changed from those that had.41 They were further subdivided into contests for playing and singing with aulos accompaniment and ones for accompaniment by the kithara.42
The English word “guitar” derives from the word kithara denoting the large seven-stringed lyre.43 The global renown of ancient kitharodes who traveled on tour from town to town finds certain parallels in the fame of contemporary rock musicians who sing and play the guitar. In some sense, kithara players were the rock stars of Greek antiquity, and they were comparably compensated, enjoying the patronage of wealthy tyrants and political leaders. At the Panathenaia, the value of their prizes hugely exceeds the awards given in all other contests. First-place kitharodes received not an amphora of olive oil but a gold crown worth a thousand drachmas, plus five hundred drachmas in silver. By comparison, kitharistai, those who played the kithara but did not sing, received a crown worth just five hundred drachmas, plus three hundred drachmas in cash. And the kitharode competition had second-, third-, fourth-, and even fifth-place finishers, where no other Panathenaic contests did. All musical competition was lucrative but nothing matched the kithara contest. First place in competitions for a combination of singing and playing the pipes (aulodia) brought prizes of a wreath and three hundred drachmas in cash. Musicians who played the pipes alone without singing (auletai) received only a wreath.44
Athletic competition, meanwhile, was organized into three leagues: one for boys, one for beardless youths (ageneioi), and one for men.45 These contests started on the second day, with boys competing in six events and youths in five. On the third day, the men’s competitions comprised nine events.46 Track-and-field contests included running the stadion (at Athens, a distance of 185 meters, or 607 feet), the diaulos (2 stadia, or 370 meters), the hippios (4 stadia), and the dolichos (24 stadia). Men also competed in a special two-stadia race that required them to run fully armed, testing the strength and endurance needed on the battlefield.
The pentathlon events were hugely exciting for viewers, who watched naked athletes compete in a comprehensive and grueling test of their physical strength, stamina, speed, and flexibility. Indeed, competitors had to show real versatility and all-around robustness in running the stadion, competing in the long jump, throwing the discus and the javelin, and wrestling.47 Boxing and the punishing pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling with no holds barred (only eye gouging, kicking, and biting were forbidden), rounded out the gymnikoi agones, literally contests undertaken in the nude. A Panathenaic amphora by the Kleophrades Painter, dating to the last quarter of the sixth century, captures something of the brutal drama of the pankration: a burly nude combatant is twisted into an unwieldy position by his able adversary as a judge watches (previous page).48 These contests provided thrilling and extreme spectacles for the throngs of Panathenaic viewers. We hear of one acclaimed pankratiast from Sik
yon, Sostratos, who in the fashion of modern-day World Wrestling Federation stars, won a nickname for his special prowess: Akrochersites, “the Fingerer” or “Mr. Fingertips.” This was owing to his signature move, in which he entered the ring and immediately broke the fingers of his opponents, putting them at serious disadvantage for the rest of the match. It proved an effective strategy; indeed, “the Fingerer” won three consecutive victories at the Olympics (364, 360, and 356 B.C.), twelve combined victories at the Nemean and Isthmian Games, and two at the Pythian Games at Delphi. Though there is no surviving evidence that he competed at Athens, we know he was honored with portrait statues set up at both Olympia and Delphi.49
Burly athletes competing in the pankration. Panathenaic prize amphora, the Kleophrades Painter, ca. 525–500 B.C. (illustration credit ill.96)
The fourth day of the Panathenaia was devoted to equestrian events. These were first held in the Agora but, by the fourth century, had been transferred to a hippodrome built at New Phaleron.50 The equestrian competitions naturally had a certain military aura about them, testing the speed of the horses as well as the agility of riders and drivers, skills critical on the battlefield. There were bareback races, two-horse chariot races (synoris) that ran eight laps around the hippodrome, and four-horse chariot races (tethrippon) that ran for twelve laps. There were races for Athenians and those for non-Athenians; races run by yearlings and those run by mature horses. As is the practice today, awards went to the owners rather than to the jockeys or charioteers. Indeed, fielding a team of horses was enormously expensive, impossible for all but the wealthiest of the elite.