Karyatid porch of Erechtheion, from southeast, Athenian Acropolis. © Robert A. McCabe, 1954–55. (illustration credit ill.98)
THE DAY FOLLOWING the Panathenaic procession, that is, the seventh day of the festival, saw two great tribal contests: the apobates race and the boat races. Considered the “noblest and grandest of all competitions,” the apobates race required a charioteer to drive four horses at full speed while an armed hoplite jumped in and out of the chariot.91 In principle, this mimicked the actions of a warrior in battle, but as we have noted, the days of chariot warfare were long past. Like other tribal events, the apobates race evoked the days of early Athens and the exploits of the ancestors.
As observed, the founder himself, Erechtheus/Erichthonios, introduced the chariot to Athens and competed in a chariot race at the very first Panathenaia. The fact that the apobates race concluded at the City Eleusinion highlights a special connection between this event and the defeat of Eumolpos. We have already noted that the Panathenaic procession takes a special detour around the City Eleusinion on its way up the Acropolis (insert this page, top). This was perhaps done as a nod to Eumolpos, who went on to play a central role in Eleusinian cult.
The tribal regatta held the same day at Munychia Harbor in the Piraeus was, in essence, a mock naval battle. We are told that the tomb of Themistokles was positioned with full view of these rowing races, which surely commemorated Athenian victory at the Battle of Salamis, a monumental triumph won under his leadership.92 As with other tribal contests, the prize for the boat races went to the entire team rather than to an individual winner. First prize consisted of three oxen, a three-hundred-drachma cash award, plus another two hundred drachmas set aside “for banqueting.”93 From this we can infer that the winning tribe enjoyed a great feast of ox meat following their victory.
MUCH AS WE MAY try to reconstruct the days of the Panathenaia, a central mystery remains: Just how did the ancient Athenians themselves understand their most important festival? What, in their view, were its origins, and how did they comprehend the meaning behind the rituals they practiced so faithfully for nearly a thousand years? This was, after all, a culture intensely pious and obsessively aware of its past; its understanding might have shifted over centuries, but in such a world there is no place for mere traditions, custom for its own sake. Yet recovering the contemporary understanding is frustrated by a problem inherent in ancient religions: those bound by a shared system of beliefs rarely have cause to describe them. It is mostly from outsiders looking in that we learn about a community’s religious practice.94 But there were no outsiders then writing about Athenian cult ritual.
Late-nineteenth-century scholars, eager to explain the Panathenaia, seized upon the birthday of Athena as the occasion for the festival.95 Despite immediate protests from August Mommsen, the brother of the great Theodor Mommsen, the only classical scholar ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, this idea was generally accepted.96 Over the course of the twentieth century it became “established fact,” with some scholars still holding to the notion even today. In fact, though, despite knowing so much about it, we are at a loss to definitively explain the reason for the Panathenaia, a cause for chagrin. Some have interpreted it as a kind of New Year’s festival; others as a celebration of the new fire.97 Noel Robertson has neatly summed it up this way: “Although so many details are so well illuminated, the center is dark. There is no understanding of the origin and significance of the festival, of its social or seasonal purpose, and there has been almost no inquiry.”98
One alternative to the birthday-party hypothesis has gained strength in recent decades. This view holds that the festival commemorated Athena’s victory in the Gigantomachy.99 To be sure, the battle of the gods and the Giants looms large in Acropolis ritual and iconography. It was spectacularly displayed on the Old Athena Temple at the end of the sixth century (this page). That this episode from cosmic prehistory was woven into the peplos offered to Athena is significant, as is its appearance in Athenian vase painting from the mid-sixth century on, including many fragments found on the Acropolis itself. There is enough evidence, however, that the Gigantomachy, though central, is but one of several boundary events celebrated at the Panathenaia, one among a group of core narratives by which the Athenians defined themselves. In this sense, what can be said of the Parthenon can also be said of the festival, and this is no accident: it presents several pieces of the genealogical story at once.
The foundation myth of Erechtheus’s victory over Eumolpos, and the virgin sacrifice that ensured this Athenian triumph, is also one of these central events celebrated in the Panathenaic festival. Capping off the Late Bronze Age, this victory joins the Titanomachy, the Gigantomachy, the exploits of Theseus, the Trojan War, and other genealogical myths celebrated on the Acropolis from the Archaic period on. Just as ancient Near Eastern epic and visual culture simultaneously celebrated succession myths across a vast stretch of time, so, too, Athenian ritual commemorated a “layering” of successive local victories pushing Athenian identity further and further back into the distant past. Indeed, it would be strange if a ritual as deeply social as that of the Panathenaia could have developed without a strong mythological narrative at its core. And so the deep history that informed Athenian consciousness was every year enacted kinetically, just as throughout the year it was attested in the immobile marble of the Parthenon.
But what of the games? From the Iliad on, athletic competitions are associated with funeral games established in memory of dead heroes.100 The death of Achilles’s beloved friend Patroklos and the funeral competitions held in his honor become the archetype for athletic contests of the historical period. Games are appropriate memorials for heroes since physical labor and the expenditure of energy embody the struggles of humans on earth. It is fitting, then, that games honor human heroes rather than divinities, although the honors for mortals and immortals are never far apart. As we saw in the last chapter, the tombs of local heroes are set close to temples of Olympian gods: Pelops at Olympia, Opheltes-Archemoros at Nemea, and Melikertes-Palaimon at Isthmia.101 It is their deaths that the Panhellenic athletic competitions commemorate. But this raises another question: Which Athenian heroes exactly were commemorated in the Panathenaic Games?
A half century ago, Homer Thompson was one of the few who looked for local heroes behind the contests at Athens, focusing on the hero shrines of the Athenian Agora.102 But if one is to look there, why not on the Acropolis itself? Surely Erechtheus, whose tomb was understood to lie beneath the Erechtheion, presents an ideal candidate. Certainly, he follows the model we have seen at Olympia, Nemea, and Isthmia, where the deaths of local royal heroes are commemorated through athletic games.
And if we are to look for the most obvious heroes, why not heroines? After all, unlike the other Panhellenic game sites, the Athenian Acropolis is sacred to a female divinity. It seems plausible that with the general elevation of women brought about by the Periklean citizenship law of 451/450, the daughters of Erechtheus would have been incorporated into the joint worship of Athena and Erechtheus. In fact, we know that by Cicero’s time Erechtheus and his daughters were worshipped as divinities at Athens.103 It is likely, then, that the heroines, together with their father, were commemorated in the Panathenaic Games.
THE PRESENTATION OF THE SACRED peplos to Athena represents a culminating moment within the Panathenaic festival. And we have seen how the same prominence has been ascribed to a garment on the central slab of the Parthenon’s east frieze. This prominence has supported the faulty view of the frieze narrative as depicting a historical Panathenaia, but while the frieze cloth is not Athena’s peplos, as some have thought, the salience of such a garment in the festival and on the frieze is no co- incidence.104 But before we investigate the connection, it is natural to ask, why would a peplos be woven for Athena in the first place? After all, ritual does not exist without reason; there must be a precedent in myth.
The offering of clothing to divinities was widespread in Gre
ek religious practice. But evidence for the ritual weaving of garments for cult statues, such as the months of laborious work preceding the Great Panathenaia, is less abundant. Ongoing excavations are constantly adding to what we know.105 The ritual weaving of garments is attested in the sources for Athena Polias at Athens, Hera at Argos, Hera at Olympia, and, as we have seen, Apollo at Amyklai.106 Fabrics woven for Hera are understood to represent her wedding dress, an appropriate symbol for Zeus’s wife, the archetypal bride. At Amyklai, a mantle (chiton) was woven as the funeral shroud of Hyakinthos, who, we have noted, was buried beneath Apollo’s statue base.
Fabrics were woven with elaborate figured designs for three great occasions in Greek life: birth (swaddling clothes), marriage (the wedding dress), and death (the funeral shroud). The peplos woven for Athena cannot represent her swaddling clothes (given her birth fully grown) or her wedding dress (given her perpetual virginity). But if we remember that Athena-Parthenos was worshipped jointly on the Acropolis just as Apollo-Hyakinthos was at Amyklai, by comparison with the chiton woven for Apollo (as Hyakinthos’s shroud), the peplos of Athena could represent the funerary cloth of the daughter of King Erechtheus. The pattern is the same. Local deity and local hero are so intimately associated that the death shroud of the hero becomes the dress-offering for the divinity.
As noted earlier, ancient sources refer to two distinct peploi: a small one offered to Athena’s olive wood statue at the annual Panathenaia and a large one presented at the Great Panathenaia, a huge tapestry with woven figured scenes. At least by the end of the fourth century, the tapestry/ peplos was transported to the Acropolis in procession aboard ship. Like a sail it was hoisted up the mast of a vessel, which some believe was one of the triremes from the Battle of Salamis, that was lifted from the water and set on a wooden carriage. The Panathenaic ship became an important “object of memory” for the Athenians, a relic from their victory over the Persians.107 It was pulled in procession atop a wheeled cart that carried it along the Panathenaic Way from the Kerameikos as far as the City Eleusinon.108
The peplos-sail attached to the boat’s yardarm was woven with images showing the battle of the gods and the Giants and, very likely, with scenes of other cosmic clashes and boundary events from primordial and epic days. When, in 302/301 B.C., Demetrios the Besieger, the prince of Macedon, audaciously had his own image woven into the peplos, it was regarded as a colossal act of hubris (a graver sin than the mere cockiness the word connotes today). Clearly, the gods were displeased: a giant squall blew in during the procession, ripping the peplos-sail in two, a terrible omen.109
What exactly did this peplos—dress, tapestry, and sail—represent? Citing Elizabeth Barber’s work on the role of ornately woven figure cloths in funerary rituals, Brunilde Ridgway has suggested that the peplos tapestry was used as a shroud to veil the ancient olive wood statue of Athena during the festival of the Plynteria.110 This ritual, which called for the stripping, washing, and wrapping in cloth of Athena’s image, mimics the preparation of a corpse for burial in funerary rites. It may allude to a period of mourning for Aglauros, the first of the sacred plyntrides, in honor of whom the festival was founded. These interpretations illustrate the ambiguity and flexibility of the various ancient Greek terms used to describe cloth.
Heliodoros’s novel, the Aethiopika, may hold relevance for our understanding of the origins and function of the Panathenaic peplos, a fabric apparently connected with death. Here, we find Theagenes, a descendant of Achilles himself, traveling from Thessaly to Delphi to participate in celebrations at the shrine of Neoptolemos-Pyrrhos, as discussed in chapter 6. In the course of the festivities, he catches sight of the beautiful virgin priestess Chariklea and falls madly in love. Chariklea returns his affections, but the lovers are thwarted by her guardian, who hopes to marry her off to his nephew. And so the pair plan to elope in the dead of night, making their way to a Phoenician ship in nearby harbor, bound for Carthage.
Arriving at the boat, Chariklea is dressed in a sacred garment that is described as her “mantle of victory” (niketerion) or her “funeral shroud” (entaphion).111 It is a curious choice of very divergent meanings for the garment. Heliodoros’s description must be based on some historical precedent understood by the ancient audience but lost on us. I would suggest that the peplos of Athena fulfilled both of the functions described by Heliodoros, a writer much influenced by the tradition of Athenian cult practice. He readily draws upon Panathenaic ritual in his fictional description of the festival at Delphi, transferring key elements: a procession, a hekatomb, ritual dancing, and a priestess. For historical Athenians the peplos was very much a mantle of victory, just as the entire Panathenaia was a celebration of Athenian supremacy. The mythological basis for the peplos, however, is the funeral shroud of the parthenos who gave her life to ensure Athenian victory over Eumolpos. It is thus symbolically, though not actually, the shroud so proudly displayed on the Parthenon’s east frieze. Just as the chiton woven for Apollo at Amyklai was a replica of the shroud of his beloved Hyakinthos, so the peplos woven for Athena commemorates the winding cloth of her beloved parthenos. Thus the merging of meanings (victory mantle and funerary shroud) in the fictional account of Chariklea’s dress, a powerful image conjured by Heliodoros just a hundred years before the last of the Panathenaic peploi was presented to the goddess.
ONE FUNCTION, among many, of Greek temples was to house the image of the divinity.112 The colossal statue of Athena that towered within the eastern cella of the Parthenon at nearly 12 meters, or 39 feet, in height, was a spectacle beyond belief.113 Pheidias created the likeness from the most precious materials known to man, gold and ivory. Athena’s face, arms, and feet were carved from ivory, while a ton of pure gold was hammered into the draping of her dress, helmet, spear, and shield. The lifesize replica of the Athena Parthenos statue made for the Centennial Park Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, gives us some idea of its original grandeur (insert this page, bottom).114 Athena’s outstretched right hand held a golden statue of Nike standing some 6 feet tall. Between Athena’s shield and her feet coiled a golden snake, the sacred serpent of the Acropolis and very embodiment of the founder Erechtheus/ Erichthonios. The cost of the statue is estimated to have been as much as, or even more than, the building of the Parthenon itself.
We know quite a lot about the appearance of the so-called Athena Parthenos, thanks to an eyewitness description by Pausanias, comments by Pliny and Plutarch, and some marble copies carved on smaller scales.115 Athena’s helmet was decorated with a sphinx and two Pegasus figures while griffins and deer adorned the visor and cheek pieces. Such guardian figures accentuated the protective power of the goddess. An ivory Gorgon’s head adorned Athena’s chest, and low at her side rested the golden shield, nearly 5 meters (16 feet) across. Its surface was decorated with reliefs repeating the great martial themes of the Parthenon’s east and west metopes: Gigantomachy on the interior of the shield and Amazonomachy on the exterior. The soles of Athena’s sandals were adorned with images from the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, echoing the theme of the Parthenon’s south metopes. The statue’s iconography summed the past just as the Parthenon did.
Pliny and Pausanias, writing more than five hundred years after the dedication of the statue, tell us that its base showed the birth of Pandora.116 Pausanias immediately thinks of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. She was the first woman, and her curiosity compelled her to open a secret jar better kept closed; she thus released all manner of great evils into the world.117 But why should this colossal troublemaker be featured on the statue base of the Athena Parthenos? Indeed, she has nothing to do with Athens.
It happens there is a second, independent tradition at Athens, for another Pandora, this one beneficent and with earth goddess associations.118 Her very name, “Giver of All,” reflects a generous nature belied by her doppelgänger. A confusion seems to have arisen by Roman times between the local Athenian Pandora and the evil one of Hesiod’s creation story.
Hesiod himself mentions this other persona in his Catalogue of Women as the “lovely Pandora,” the daughter of King Deukalion and Pyrrha.119 This Pandora is said to be the sister of Thyia and Protogeneia, names also given for the daughters of Erechtheus.120 It is this Attic Pandora, the youngest daughter of Erechtheus who “gave all” to save her city, who I assert is the maiden shown on the base of the Athena Parthenos statue.
It should be remembered that Erechtheus had a trio of daughters with the same names as Deukalion’s three girls: Pandora, Protogeneia, and Oreithyia (or Thyia). This clearly suggests contamination, or fusion, between the stories of two mythical family lines. We have already noted in chapter 4 the complexity attending the names of Erechtheus’s daughters, with sources giving conflicting lists over several hundred years. In the great tangled web of Attic myth, the pattern of three daughters repeats itself. Just as Deukalion and Erechtheus have daughters named Pandora, so, too, Kekrops has a daughter named Pandrosos. There may well be fusion here between the names Pandora and Pandrosos, just as we have already seen for Erechtheus and Erichthonios.121 But let us proceed with the understanding that the “birth of Pandora” attested by Pausanias on the base of the Athena Parthenos statue was the birth, or rather the crowning, of Pandora, daughter of Erechtheus. Just as the Amazonomachy, Gigantomachy, and Centauromachy from the Parthenon metopes are quoted on Athena’s shield and sandals, so, too, the story told on the frieze—that of the sacrifice of Erechtheus’s daughter—is quoted on the base of the Athena Parthenos statue.122 The statue base has been estimated to have stood roughly 90 centimeters (35 inches) tall, and since the Parthenon frieze itself also measures roughly a meter in height, we may have yet another visual link between the sculptured relief of the base and that of the frieze.123
The Parthenon Enigma Page 31
