The Parthenon Enigma

by Joan Breton Connelly

  33. Chaniotis, Unveiling Emotions; Y. Hamilakis, “Archaeologies of the Senses,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, ed. T. Insoll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 208–25; Chaniotis, “Rituals Between Norms and Emotions”; Chaniotis, “From Woman to Woman”; Chaniotis, “Dynamic of Emotions and Dynamic of Rituals”; D. Cairns, ed., Body Language in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2005); D. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Sojc, Trauer auf attischen Grabreliefs; K. Herding and B. Stumpfhaus, eds., Pathos, Affekt, Gefühl: Die Emotionen in den Künsten (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004); J. H. Oakley, Picturing Death in Classical Athens (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004); D. Konstan and K. Rutter, eds., Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); W. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); S. Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999); H. A. Shapiro, “The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art,” AJA 95 (1991): 629–56; Winkler, Constraints of Desire; P. Zanker, Die trunkene Alte: Das Lachen der Verhöhnten (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989); P. Walcot, Envy and the Greeks: A Study of Human Behaviour (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1978).

  34. D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos, eds., A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece (Athens: Benaki Museum, 2008); Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek Archaeology”; Hamilakis, Nation and Its Ruins; Brown and Hamilakis, Usable Past; Hamilakis, “Monumental Visions”; Hamilakis, “Cyberpast/Cyberspace/Cybernation”; Hamilakis, “Sacralising the Past”; Bastea, Creation of Modern Athens; Hamilakis and Yalouri, “Antiquities as Symbolic Capital”; Yalouri, Acropolis.

  35. Hamilakis, “Museums of Oblivion”; Yalouri, “Between the Local and the Global”; Hamilakis, “Monumentalising Place”; Yalouri, Acropolis; Y. Hamilakis, “ ‘The Other Parthenon’: Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002): 307–38.

  36. Cyriacos of Ancona, writing in 1444, is the first to identify the frieze as showing a victory from the days of Perikles (see Bodnar, Cyriacos of Ancona, letter 3.9, pages 18–19), while Stuart and Revett (Antiquities of Athens, 2:12) are the first to identify the frieze as a representation of the Panathenaic procession.

  37. Connelly, “Parthenon Frieze and the Sacrifice of the Erechtheids”; Connelly, “Parthenon and Parthenoi.”

  38. M. Lefkowitz, Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 237–39.

  39. Boutsikas, “Greek Temples and Rituals”; Boutsikas and Hannah, “Aitia, Astronomy, and the Timing of the Arrhe¯phoria”; Boutsikas and Hannah, “Ritual and the Cosmos”; Boutsikas, “Astronomical Evidence for the Timing of the Panathenaia”; Salt and Boutsikas, “When to Consult the Oracle at Delphi”; Boutsikas, “Placing Greek Temples.”

  40. Pindar, frag. 76; Acts of the Apostles 17.22.

  41. Theophrastos, “The Superstitious Man”; see D. B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 23–24.

  42. J. N. Bremmer, and J. Veenstra, eds., The Metamorphosis of Magic from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2003); C. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); F. Graf, Magic in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); P. Mirecki and M. Meyer, eds., Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2002); D. Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); D. Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

  43. Plutarch, Life of Perikles 38.2.

  44. C. Wickham, The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6.

  1 THE SACRED ROCK

  1. Plato, Phaidros 229a. Translation: Nehamas and Woodruff, Phaedrus, 4.

  2. Translation: Nehamas and Woodruff, Phaedrus, 6.

  3. Plato, Phaidros 238d. Translation: Nehamas and Woodruff, Phaedrus, 18, and earlier discussion of Boreas and Oreithyia, 229b–c, 4.

  4. The bibliography on landscape and memory in ancient Greece is ever growing. Essentials include L. Thommen, Environmental History of Ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012); I. Mylonopoulos, “Natur als Heiligtum—Natur im Heiligtum,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 10 (2008): 51–83; A. Cohen, “Mythic Landscapes of Greece,” in Greek Mythology, ed. R. D. Woodland (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 305–30; J. L. Davis, “Memory Groups and the State: Erasing the Past and Inscribing the Present in the Landscapes of the Mediterranean and the Near East,” in Negotiating the Past in the Past, ed. N. Yoffee (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 227–56; H. A. Forbes, Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape: An Archaeological Ethnography (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007); J. Larson, “A Land Full of Gods: Nature Deities in Greek Religion,” in Ogden, Companion to Greek Religion, 56–70; S. G. Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Van Dyke and Alcock, Archaeologies of Memory; S. Alcock, “Archaeologies of Memory”; N. Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (New York: Zone Books, 2002); R. Bradley, An Archaeology of Natural Places (London: Routledge, 2000); W. Ashmore and A. Bernard Knapp, eds., Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); H. A. Forbes, “The Uses of the Uncultivated Landscape in Modern Greece: A Pointer to the Value of the Wilderness in Antiquity?,” in Shipley and Salmon, Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity, 68–97; J. D. Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Tilley, Phenomenology of Landscape; Isager and Skydsgaard, Ancient Greek Agriculture; R. Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside (London: George Philip, 1987); A. Motte, Prairies et jardins de la Grèce antique, de la religion à la philosophie (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1971).

  5. See W. R. Connor, “Seized by the Nymphs: Nympholepsy and Symbolic Expression in Classical Greece,” ClAnt 7 (1988): 155–89; Larson, Greek Nymphs, 10–20, for discussion of nympholepsy and divination; C. Ondine-Pache, A Moment’s Ornament: The Poetics of Nympholepsy in Ancient Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37–44.

  6. For Plato’s positive conception of traditional Greek religion, see M. McPherran, The Religion of Socrates (State College: Penn State University Press, 1999), 291–302.

  7. Definitions proposed by I. Morris and B. Powell, The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2009), 119–21, 179. Greek historians differentiated myth and history in various ways. Writing about the flooding of the Nile in his Histories 2.21–23, Herodotos contrasts his own efforts in laying out history with what is “mythic.” The association of the inundation of the Nile with Okeanos is, for Herodotos, the most mythikon and the most anepistemonikon (“not worth knowing”) way of looking at the event. Thucydides, in turn, comments that his history will be perceived as less easy to read because of the absence of mythodes within it; see Peloponnesian War 1.22. I thank Nickolas Pappas for very helpful discussions of this material.

  8. Scodel, “Achaean Wall,” 36.

  9. López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born, esp. 1–47.

  10. See, among others, Vlizos, E Athena kata te Romaike Epokhe; Smith, Athens; Goette, Athens, Attica, and the Megarid; Camp, Archaeology of Athens; Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary; Harrison, Primitive Athens as Described by Thucydides.

  11. Plato, Kritias 111a–e.

  12. Thompson, Garden Lore.

  13. Isager and Skydsgaard, Ancient Greek Agriculture, 19–43; L. Foxhal
l, Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); L. Foxhall, “Farming and Fighting in Ancient Greece,” in Rich and Shipley, War and Society in the Greek World, 134–45.

  14. K. Mitchell, “Land Allocation and Self-Sufficiency in the Ancient Athenian Village,” Agricultural History 74 (2000): 1–18; R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1991), esp. 208–12 (Solon’s reforms).

  15. D. Braund, “Black Sea Grain for Athens? From Herodotus to Demosthenes,” in The Black Sea in Antiquity: Regional and Interregional Economic Exchanges, ed. V. Gabrielsen and J. Lund (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), 39–68.

  16. Aristotle, Politics 1326a40–b24.

  17. These reforms included the standardization of weights and measures, coinage, the prohibition on exports (except for olive oil), and the institution of the Council of 400 comprising a hundred representatives chosen from each of the four Ionian tribes.

  18. Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 77. Translation: Burtt, Minor Attic Orators, 69–71. The oath is inscribed on a fourth-century stele found in 1932 in the sanctuary of Ares and Athena Areia at Acharnai: L. Robert, Études épigraphiques et philologiques (Paris: Champion, 1938), 296–307; M. N. Tod, Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 2:303, no. 204. The oath is also cited by Pollux 8.105ff. and Stobaeus 4.1.8. Though surviving evidence dates only from the fourth century, Sie- wert, in his “Ephebic Oath,” cites allusions to the pledge already in the fifth-century works of Sophokles and Thucydides and suggests its roots may go back to the Archaic period.

  19. Thompson, Garden Lore.

  20. For the Academy, see Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary, 42–51, figs. 213, 417; Camp, Archaeology of Athens, 64.

  21. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.34; Plutarch, Life of Kimon 13.7; scholion on Sophokles, Oidipous at Kolonos 698, 701.

  22. See Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary, 345–47. According to Guy Smoot, the word could, alternatively, be connected to the root “leuk,” “light,” or “to shine,” and thus to Apollo’s role as the god of dawn and the rising sun. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.19.3, says that the Lykeion was named after Lykos, son of Pandion, and that Apollo Lykaios was first named so here. Since Pandion means “All-Shining,” it might follow that the name of his son, Lykos, continued this sense.

  23. D. Birge, “Sacred Groves in the Ancient World” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982); R. Barnett, “Sacred Groves: Sacrifice and the Order of Nature in Ancient Greek Landscapes,” Landscape Journal 26 (2007): 252–69.

  24. Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators 8.41–42; Thompson, Garden Lore, 6.

  25. J. P. Lynch, Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 68–105; for Theophrastos, see Diogenes Laertius, De causis plantarum 5.46. For the gardens of the Lykeion, see E. Vanderpool, “The Museum and Gardens of the Peripatetics,” ArchEph (1953/1954B): 126–28. The trees of the Lykeion were cut down, like those of the Academy, by the Roman general Sulla when he sacked Athens in 86 B.C. Desperate for wood to build his deadly siege engines, Sulla deforested much of Athens and its surrounding countryside; see Plutarch, Life of Sulla 12.3. Remains of the ancient Lykeion were unearthed, by chance, in 1996 during construction of the Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art, between Rigillis Street and Vassilissis Sofias Avenue. Subsequent excavation of the site has produced material dated from the sixth century B.C. to the early Byzantine period. A well of the fourth century B.C. is lined with curved ceramic tiles and pierced with hand and foot holes for climbing in and out. The foundations of a large palaistra (50 by 48–50 meters, or 164 by 157–64 feet), complete with central courtyard surrounded by stoas, date mostly to the first century A.D. Baths at the northeast and northwest corners of the complex preserve hypocausts, a furnace, frigidarium, and calderium (NE) as well as a tepidarium, caldarium, and footbath (NW). See Ε. Lygouri-Tolia, “Οδός Ρηγίλλης (η παλαίστρα του γυμνασίου του Λυκ∊ίον,” ArchDelt 51 (1996): 46–48; E. Lygouri-Tolia, “Excavating an Ancient Palaestra in Athens,” in Excavating Classical Culture in Greece: Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Greece, ed. M. Stamatopoulou and M. Geroulanou (Oxford: Beazley Archive and Archaeopress, 2002). I thank Dr. Niki Sakka of the Greek Archaeological Service and Emorphylli Panteliadis of the Directorate for the Restoration of Ancient Monuments for their kindness in showing me the site.

  26. For Kodros, see Kearns, Heroes of Attica, 56–57, 178; LIMC 6, s.v. “Codrus”; Kron, Die zehn attischen Phylenheroen, 138, 195–96, 215, 221–27, 246; N. Robertson, “Melanthus, Codrus, Neleus, Caucon: Ritual Myth as Ancient History,” GRBS 29 (1988): 225–26. Kodros appears with the Eponymous and Marathonian heroes in Pheidias’s Marathon monument at Delphi, probably dating from the 450s; Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.10.1. Basile is of uncertain identity, though the name seems to be associated with Basileia, “Queen.” H. A. Shapiro, “The Attic Deity Basile,” ZPE 63 (1986): 134–36.

  27. Traditional dates for Kodros: 1089–1068 B.C. Aristotle gives an alternative account in the Athenian Constitution 3.3, where he states that Medon was king of Athens rather than the first archon.

  28. IG II24258, funerary epigram of Kodros, dating to Augustan period.

  29. The earliest attestation of this story is by Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 84–87, who says Kodros was killed near the gate, outside the city. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.19.5, adds that Kodros was killed near the banks of the Ilissos River.

  30. G. Anderson, “Before Tyrannoi Were Tyrants: Rethinking a Chapter of Early Greek History,” ClAnt 24 (2005): 173–222.

  31. IG I3 84, decree for sanctuary of Kodros, Neleus, and Basile; see Athens, Epigraphical Museum 10616 (418/417 B.C.). J. R. Wheeler, “An Attic Decree, the Sanctuary of Kodros,” AJA 3 (1887): 38–49; C. L. Lawton, Attic Document Reliefs: Art and Politics in Ancient Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 83–84, plate 2, no. 4.

  32. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary, 332–33, places the sanctuary within the city walls in an area today bordered by Makrigianni Street, Syngrou Avenue, and Chatzichristos Street. G. T. W. Hooker, on the other hand, places it outside the city walls on the banks of the Ilissos, “The Topography of the Frogs,” JHS 80 (1960): 112–17, in keeping with the testimonia of Lykourgos and Pausanias (note 29, above), who state that Kodros was killed outside the walls of Athens.

  33. Smoot, “Poetics of Ethnicity in the Homeric Iliad,” notes that in the Iliad, Medon is the bastard brother of Lokrian Ajax and substitute leader of Philoktetes’s contingent at Troy. According to Smoot, Lokrian Medon and Athenian Medon are based on the same prototype.

  34. Plutarch, Life of Kimon 13.8.

  35. Thompson and Wycherley, Agora of Athens, 135.

  36. Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes 31.

  37. R. Lamberton and S. Rotroff, Birds of the Athenian Agora, Agora Picture Book 22 (Princeton, N.J.: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1985).

  38. H. K. L. Mühle, Beitraege zur Ornithologie Griechenlands (Leipzig: E. Fleischer, 1844); N. Dunbar, Aristophanes, “Birds” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  39. R. Simms, “Agra and Agrai,” GRBS 43 (2002/2003): 219–29.

  40. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary, 112–20; E. Greco, Topografia di Atene: Sviluppo urbano e monumenti dalle origini al III secolo d.C., vol. 2, Colline sud-occidentali, Valle dell’Ilisso (Paestum, Italy: Pandemos, 2010).

  41. Aristotle, On the Heavens 294a28. For the impact of water sources on memory and place, see Ö. Harmanşah, ed., Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place (Providence, R.I.; Joukowsky Institute Publications/Oxbow Books, 2014).

  42. Larson, Greek Nymphs, 10.

  43. Connerton, How Societies Remember; J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 26; N. Lovell, Locality and Belonging (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–2; N. Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. C.
Pache and J. Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

  44. Zachariadou, “Syntagma Station,” 154.

  45. IG I3 257; Encyclopedia of Ancient History (2013), s.v. “Ilissos”; I. Arnaoutoglo, Ancient Greek Laws: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1998), 77.

  46. Kallimachos, Collection of Rivers, quoted by Strabo, Geography 9.1.19.

  47. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.32.1; Encyclopedia of Ancient History (2013), s.v. “Kephissos.”

  48. In 2007, the Kathimerini newspaper and Skai 100.3 FM radio launched a campaign for the environmental improvement of the Kephisos River. The architect and town planner Vassilis Zotos and the British Graduates Society assembled a team of architects to create a program of environmentally sustainable interventions and guidelines for the regeneration of the river. See D. Koutsoyiannis, “On the Covering of Kephisos River” (in Greek), Daemon of Ecology, October 6, 2002.

  49. Athens National Archaeological Museum 1783, ca. 410 B.C.; IG I3 986 (CEG II 743), LIMC 6, s.v. “Kephisos,” no. 1. The relief was discovered in 1903 at the sanctuary of the Kephisos in Echelidai halfway between the Piraeus and Phaleron. O. Walter, “Die Reliefs aus dem Heiligtum der Echeliden in Neu-Phaleron,” ArchEph (1937): 97–119; G. Güntner, Göttervereine und Götterversammlungen auf attischen Weihreliefs (Würzburg: K. Triltsch, 1994), 21–23, 78–80. See also Parker, Polytheism and Society, 430–32; Sourvinou-Inwood, Athenian Myths and Festivals, 92.