Rushing Athena, with Gorgon’s head on her chest. Akroterion figure, Pergamon Altar. (illustration credit ill.117)
Poseidon emerges from the sea. Akroterion figure, Pergamon Altar. (illustration credit ill.118)
Burly Triton with “skirt” of seaweed. Akroterion figure, Pergamon Altar. (illustration credit ill.119)
WITH SO MANY direct quotations from the Parthenon manifest, it should come as no surprise that the altar’s Telephos frieze takes direct inspiration from the Erechtheus frieze of the Parthenon. Indeed, there may be no greater proof that the Parthenon frieze shows the myth of Erechtheus than this later frieze that strives so explicitly to emulate it. Both friezes channel the myth of the city founders, the oracles that determined their fates, their roles in defending their cities from hostile invaders, and their contribution in establishing local cult. Both do so in a long, continuously sculptured “ribbon” of marble relief. But as with the altar’s Gigantomachy panels, there is a key difference. While the Parthenon frieze rings the upper recesses of the peristyle, the Telephos frieze encircles the interior colonnade of the altar’s raised court, seen directly at eye level (this page).70 One wonders if, once again, in their conscientious imitation of the Parthenon, the sculptors at Pergamon set out to compensate for a weaker claim to divine descent. No one in Athens was in any doubt of Athenian genealogy. But the Telephos frieze had to make a somewhat harder sell, establishing the legitimacy of the Attalid dynasty for all, Pergamene and visitor alike, to see. There were no centuries of certainty that this descent issued from prehistory.
It is perhaps not surprising that the Pergamene kings, in their sedulous cultivation of neo-Athenian identity, chose for their founder a hero who had been celebrated in an eponymous play of Euripides’s. After all, if the Athenians could point to the master’s Erechtheus, the Attalids could claim his Telephos.71 Greek tragedy, just like Greek architectural sculpture, was an important vehicle for retelling charter myths.72 Again and again in Greek drama we find the foundation of local cult occasioned by the death of a local royal hero: Pentheus at Thebes, Hippolytos at Troezen, Opheltes at Nemea, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Erechtheus and his daughters at Athens, and, yes, Telephos in Mysia. No one was keener to tell these tales than Euripides, whose corpus included not only the Erechtheus and the Ion, but the Children of Herakles and Iphigeneia at Aulis, as we have seen, also the Bacchai, Hypsipyle, and Telephos. In fact, the theatrical propagation of myth might have, if anything, seemed more urgent to the Pergamenes. Andreas Scholl has stressed the architectural similarity between the Great Altar and the skene (scene building) of the Greek theater.73 It is possible that the very form of the altar itself refers to the Greek stage and to the mythic dramas played out upon it.
Presenting a continuous narrative in which leading characters appear repeatedly as they make their way through sequential episodes of the foundation story, the Telephos frieze is nothing if not far easier to read than the one on the Parthenon. We take it in like a cartoon strip with successive events in sequence side by side, beginning with the birth of Telephos and ending with his death. Thus, we learn the full story of how Pergamon came to be. It begins with the lovely Auge, princess of Tegea in the Greek Peloponnese, who served as virgin priestess for the local cult of Athena. Her father, King Aleos, had good reason to place his daughter in this sacred office: an oracle had prophesied that if Auge ever gave birth to a son, he would grow up to kill his grandfather’s male heirs.
Auge had a special role among the plyntrides at Tegea, that is, the sacred washers of the goddess’s robes. In this, she mirrors Aglauros, princess daughter of King Kekrops at Athens, who served among the plyntrides of Athena. One day, when Auge was on the banks of a stream washing the robes of the goddess, Herakles came by. He seduced the princess, and as always happens when gods or demigods make love to mortals, Auge immediately conceived. Ashamed of losing her virtue, the princess exposed her infant son on the slopes of Mount Parthenion, meaning “of the virgin.” In this, we see a parallel to King Erechtheus’s daughter Kreousa, who left her baby son, Ion, to die in a cave on the north slope of the Acropolis, the very cave in which Apollo had made love to her. Telephos is saved from exposure by a deer or lioness. Ion is rescued by Hermes, sent by Apollo to carry him to Delphi. And so did Ion go on to found the Ionian race. Telephos naturally has the chance to father a people, too. As the frieze would have it, these are the Attalids of Pergamon. Of all the heroes the Pergamenes might have appropriated as their founder, and there are many, they chose thoughtfully and well. Telephos (“the Wanderer”) embodied both their Asiatic roots and their Athenian ambitions.
The north side of the Telephos frieze depicts the earliest chapters in the hero’s life: the story of his parents, their impromptu romance, and its aftermath. Having left baby Telephos on the mountainside, Auge is sent off to sea in a little boat by her father, to hide her shame from the people of Tegea. The boat washes up at Mysia on the western shores of Anatolia, not far from where the city of Pergamon will be founded. The kindly king Teuthras rushes down to the beach and rescues Auge, whom he adopts and comes to love as his own daughter. She establishes a cult of Athena, brought directly from Tegea, where she had formerly been priestess of the goddess. The new cult, however, is named for Athena Polias, the same title under which Athena was worshipped at Athens. And as first priestess of Athena Polias at Pergamon, Auge assumes a role parallel to that of the Athenian queen Praxithea.
Herakles pauses to admire his infant son Telephos, suckled by a lioness. Telephos frieze, Pergamon Altar. (illustration credit ill.120)
Meanwhile, back on Mount Parthenion, the infant Telephos has survived, nursed by a lioness. On the north wall of the colonnade, we see a panel showing Herakles as he discovers Telephos (facing page).74 The beefy hero, leaning on his signature club, dissolves into tenderness at the sight of his infant son. The trophy of his violent slaying of the Nemean lion, the fearsome skin he wears, looks more like a benign blanket draped atop his club. With one leg crossed over the other as he watches his boy suckling on the teats of the lioness, the hero seems quite undone. (Earliest traditions had it that Telephos was suckled by a deer rather than by a lioness. But since the deer was sacred to the Gauls, hated enemies of the Attalids, the lioness variant was preferred. Of course, the lion also has the advantage of close association with Herakles’s first labor.)
Along the eastern wall of the colonnade, we see the wanderings of Telephos as a young man. Having consulted the Delphic oracle about finding his mother, Telephos is told to travel east to the shores of Anatolia. This brings him to Mysia, where he is welcomed by the sympathetic king Teuthras, still on his throne. The king begs the obviously heroic lad to help him defeat Idas, an enemy who threatens to usurp him. Success, Teuthras promises, will win Telephos the hand of Princess Auge in marriage. Since Auge’s priesthood of Athena Polias was no doubt like the sacred office at Athens (on which it is modeled), open to married women, it posed no impediment for her proposed nuptials.75
In the panel showing Telephos and his men welcomed at Teuthras’s court, we see figures in Phrygian caps, setting the scene in Anatolia. Next come Telephos’s comrades, one of whom wears an Athenian helmet, signaling that he hails from the Greek mainland. At the far right, we see Telephos himself, in a full-muscle cuirass (following page). The hero turns to the right to receive a helmet and weapons from Auge, again connecting her with Aglauros, for, as we have seen, it is within the sanctuary of Aglauros on the Acropolis’s east slope that Athenian ephebes received their weapons. At Athens, it was the priestess of Aglauros who oversaw the ritual in which young soldiers also swore their oath of loyalty. And here, we find Auge enacting this same priestly role.
Telephos as a young warrior wearing breastplate (far right) welcomed in Mysia; his comrades (at left) wear Phrygian cap and Attic helmet. Telephos frieze, Pergamon Altar. (illustration credit ill.121)
The remainder of the east frieze is devoted to Telephos in battle with Idas’s troops and the aftermath. Return
ing as a victor, Telephos is met by King Teuthras, ready to make good on his promise of marriage. Fortunately, mother and son recognize each other just in the nick of time, averting an incestuous side story. But Telephos does not remain lonely, going on to marry the local Amazon queen, Hiera. When Argive Greeks arrive in Mysia, having lost their way to the Trojan War, they engage in battle with Hiera’s Amazons. The frieze shows Telephos fighting for the Amazons against the Greeks. Thus are the Attalids ingeniously able to write their founding hero into the scripts of two great boundary events we have already seen in the Parthenon metopes: the Trojan War and the Amazonomachy. In the Pergamene version of the battle with the Amazons, Hiera is killed, and Telephos is badly wounded by Achilles.
Not without justification, it happens. Dionysos had been deeply offended when Telephos failed to make sacrifice to him. The god retaliated during the battle with the Greeks, causing Telephos’s leg to become entangled in the roots of a grapevine, making Telephos a sitting duck for Achilles’s lance. The son of Peleus wields the special spear the Centaur Chiron had given his father as a wedding gift. The wound Achilles inflicts will not heal, and Telephos is lamed.
In great pain, Telephos consults an oracle: only the weapon that inflicted the wound, he learns, can heal it. The south frieze shows his journey back to the Greek mainland in search of the spear that pierced him. He is received at Agamemnon’s palace in Argos as a visiting dignitary. Nonetheless, when the king refuses to help find the spear, Telephos explodes with rage and grabs his infant son, Orestes. The frieze shows Telephos holding the boy upside down, about to kill him upon Agamemnon’s household altar, until, finally, Chiron’s spear is found. Filings from its tip are rubbed into the wounded foot and it heals.
We next see Telephos returning to Pergamon to become king and establish a cult of Dionysos. Thus is the angry god appeased, his vendetta against the royal house ended. It is a version of what we have observed at Athens, where Poseidon was in constant conflict with Athena. Angered by the rejection of his gift of a sea spring, the god unleashed earthquakes and floods. Erechtheus, however, does not make timely amends. In the play named for him, Euripides has Poseidon create a great chasm that swallows the king into its depths. It is only when Queen Praxithea establishes a new cult of Poseidon-Erechtheus on the Acropolis that bygones are bygones.
The worship of Athena Polias remains the primary cult for both Athens and Pergamon. But secondary cults are welcomed in both cities to assuage divine hurt feelings. Queen Praxithea and Queen Auge serve analogous roles as priestesses of the primary cults of Athena Polias. King Erechtheus and King Telephos hold special roles as founders of new, secondary cults: that of Poseidon-Erechtheus and that of Dionysos Kathegemon, the “God Who Leads.”
The southern wing of the Telephos frieze shows the final chapter in Telephos’s story. Reclining on a couch, he is now consecrated the founding hero of Pergamon, his recumbent pose straight from established formulas for showing Herakles after the completion of his labors. Like father, like son, is the unmistakable message. The founder at last takes his ease, having traveled so far and accomplished so much, having won for his people the world to which they are now heirs.
His final resting place also speaks to following received models carefully. Deep within the foundations of the Pergamon Altar are the remains of an apsidal building made of andesite blocks dating to the time of Attalos I.76 The builders of the altar took evident care to respect this subterranean construction. It appears to describe a tomb-shrine on the model of those we have seen for Pelops at Olympia, Opheltes at Nemea, Melikertes-Palaimon at Isthmia, Hyakinthos at Amyklai, and Erechtheus and his daughters at Athens. These founders all received cult worship at the places where they were believed to have been buried. And so the apsidal structure beneath the Pergamon Altar is likely to have been just such a hero shrine, for none other than the city’s forefather, Telephos.77 The claim proved persuasive: Pausanias speaks of those who make sacrifices to Telephos at Pergamon and remarks that all hymns sung within the local Asklepieion began with mention of Telephos’s name.78 He further states that the tomb of Auge could still be seen at Pergamon, a mound of earth surrounded by a basement of stone.79 If the example of Athens applied, mother and son must have received joint worship on the Pergamene citadel.
The Telephos story not only enabled the Attalid kings to integrate themselves into Athenian genealogy and the great boundary events of the Amazonomachy and Trojan War. It allowed them to acknowledge the fact (or contradiction, at least in relation to their being Athenian) of their Asiatic roots as well. The name Telephos is, actually, Hittite in origin, from Telepinu, which means “Disappearing God.”80 It certainly befits one who wanders from the mountains of Arkadia to the shores of Mysia, to Agamemnon’s palace in Argos, and back to Mysia. Telephos’s marriage to the Amazon queen Hiera and his fighting beside her against the Greeks has a similar effect, squaring the circle of being at once Athenian and Asiatic, admitting the Attalid dynasty to the mythic narratives common to all mainland Greeks while at the same time locating their origins in Anatolia. The exploits of Telephos furthermore establish military prowess and piety as two of the greatest hallmarks of Attalid rule. With no great “mother city” or past to call their own, the Attalid kings could have done much worse in a century and a half.
In their studied self-fashioning, the Attalids went beyond myth and mortar to raise the “Athens of the East.” At the very summit of their citadel lies a building that has been identified as a library, to which they brought all the learning of the ancient world home.81 In the center of the reading room stood a copy of Pheidias’s statue of Athena Parthenos, carved in marble imported all the way from Mount Pentelikon.82 Standing just over 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) tall, roughly a fourth of the size of the original, this local copy served to remind the city of its aspirations, calling all Pergamenes to the Athenian ideal, the virtue that Plato describes as to kalliston, all that is most noble.
The Attalids went so far as to organize their own Panathenaic festival. The feast is mentioned in a letter sent by Eumenes I to the people of Pergamon, dated around 260–245 B.C.83 The king recommends that at the next Panathenaia the people should award gold crowns to five generals (strategoi) who have performed their duties in an exemplary manner. A series of bronze festival coins minted by the Pergamene sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros in the second century B.C. commemorated the occasion.84 These show the head of Athena on the obverse and, on the reverse, an inscription: ATHENA NIKEPHOROU, “of Athena Who Brings Victory.” Beside the inscription, we find, of course, the little owl.
The emulation of Athens may have been nowhere as pervasive or intense as at Pergamon, but the practice continued well beyond the twilight of that kingdom, into the Roman imperial period. At the very center of the Athenian Agora, one sees today three great stone figures rising up from their pilasters. These are the Tritones, mythical descendants of the sea serpent Triton, slain by Herakles: human from the waist up, seaweed sprouting from just below their hips, coiling fish-tailed bodies from the waist down. Their torsos show the flamboyant musculature observed in the akroteria Tritones from the Pergamon Altar and, indeed, in male figures all across its Gigantomachy frieze. But the Agora Tritones take their immediate inspiration from a model much closer to home: the figure of Poseidon from the Parthenon’s west pediment (insert this page, right).
Shown subjugated as captives, bound and in pain, the three figures are, in fact, all that is left of a series of Tritones and Giants that once decorated a stoa attached to the façade of a music hall. But this sculpture is not the handiwork of Athenians or even admiring Pergamene craftsmen. The covered auditorium (odeion) was built by the Roman general Agrippa in the first century B.C. After its collapse during the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius in the mid-second century it was rebuilt as a lecture hall.85 The Tritones date to this later phase.
The pilasters supporting the Tritones are decorated with sculptured relief panels showing quintessential symbols of Athena: the olive
tree and sacred snake.86 And these same symbols can be seen in the Provincial Forum at Emerita Augusta, modern Mérida, in Spain. The marketplace, set up in about A.D. 50, was decorated with sculptured images of the Erechtheion karyatids and Medousa heads, drawn from the classical Athenian repertoire. One marble relief shows an olive tree, the sacred snake, and three birds.87 The Roman legions that accompanied Augustus and Agrippa to Athens were clearly impressed with the city’s monuments and aspired to re-create them back in their home cities, as far afield as Spain, if not quite with an ardor to rival Pergamon. Of course, Athenian models were regularly copied at Rome itself. Mark the Erechtheion karyatids reproduced in the Forum of Augustus and at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli.88
Likewise, Roman provincial coinage placed the image of the Athenian Acropolis in the hands of individuals far from Athens. Issued around A.D. 120–150, the bronze coins show the cave of Pan on the north slope of the Acropolis, the staircase leading up to the Propylaia, a gabled temple that represents the Erechtheion, and, towering above all, the colossal statue of the Bronze Athena.89 If only by scale of production, the Roman Empire propagated images of Athens farther and wider than any force before or since. Still, there is more to appropriating a culture than copying its iconography or even insinuating oneself in its mythic foundations.
THE ATTALID KINGS did much more than re-create the city of their “college days.” In a Platonic sense, they did not imitate mere appearance, as Plato said that artists did, but rather they looked to the reality of the object they copied, as carpenters contemplated the idea of a couch or table when building a new one. In his rejection of mimesis in book 10 of the Republic, Plato derides poets, who, as captives to their own inspiration, merely imitate that which appeals to the senses, never arriving at truth, the province of philosophers.90 The Attalid princes, having studied at Athens, were not about to make such a mistake. Far from creating a copy that was the sum of its copied parts, they seem to have visualized an idea that was Athens and modeled their city accordingly. Beyond amassing more than 200,000 scrolls for their great library, or importing Pentelic marble for their replica of Athena Parthenos, the Pergamenes wanted to re-create the very spirit of the ideal society they found in the Athenian model. Toward this end they adopted certain codes of behavior, including impeccable military discipline and a desire for harmonious transfer of power at times of leadership transition. The Attalid succession, the process by which Attalos I assured that his sons would follow him in turn without strife, is in its orderliness a model of Athenian politeia and an exception in the world of Hellenistic monarchies, riddled as they were with intrigue and murder.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 36
