The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (18 page)

Rivalry among scores of poleis kept them building, writing, singing. The Greek city-states in their heyday lived a story of endless wars. No one could dominate all the rest, and efforts to form a United City-States of Greece never succeeded. Their great prose epic, Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War
, was a chronicle of competition between Athens and Sparta, with loosely affiliated, dubiously reliable allies. It was a grand parable of turbulent centuries that still somehow produced the glory that was Greece. While other eras would call up their Alexanders and Caesars, Elizabeths or Napoleons as patrons and catalysts of culture, ancient Greece left a legacy of communities in competition revealing the transcendence of culture over politics.

Before the fourth century
B.C.
, architecture in Greece was primarily the art of building temples, products of community spirit and community rivalry. There is no apt modern counterpart of such civic loyalty, except perhaps the nineteenth-century American rivalry among young Western cities in building hotels and railroad stations. The residential and community center of the Greek city-state was anything but an aesthetic delight. The contrast between the random disorderliness of their city streets and the “canonical” symmetry of the Doric or Ionic “order” of their temples was striking. Since the threat of invaders was ever present, the objection to a geometric city plan was quite practical, because the confusion of streets, as Aristotle observed, bewildered and delayed invaders.

The pioneer city planner Hippodamus of Miletus (born c.500
B.C.
) remains a shadowy figure, like others to whom the Greeks attributed heroic roles. Aristotle, unfriendly to Hippodamus’ abstract approach, discounted him as a man of “long hair” and unworkable theories, “the first man without practical experience of politics” who dared to devise an ideal constitution. Anticipating John Stuart Mill, he appears to have argued that the law in his ideal state of only ten thousand citizens should do no more than protect citizens against one another. The whole business of his Utopian government would be to prevent or punish insult, injury to person or property, and murder—leaving each individual to find for himself the good life. Still Hippodamus did not hesitate to box city dwellers into his own geometric gridiron scheme, a stark contrast to the higgledy-piggledy streets of Greek cities in his time. His native Miletus, in western Anatolia, at the mouth of the Meander River, had been the Greek cultural capital in the East. After it had been leveled by the Persians in 494
B.C.
, Hippodamus proposed that the city be rebuilt with streets on his grid plan. The Athenians in the mid-fifth century
B.C.
had him plan their port of Piraeus. He probably
helped plan the Greek colony of Thurii in southern Italy (c.443
B.C.
), and also Rhodes. The appealing grid town plan came to be called Hippodamian.

But the leading Greek city-states had not been planned. They had simply grown. Houses of the classic period, unimpressive from the outside, were not expected to add to the beauty of the city. Private residences were squeezed into areas not occupied by the agora, the temples, the theater, gymnasia or other places for community functions. In the second century
A.D
. Pausanias, at Delphi along the Sacred Way up to the Temple of Apollo, described the remains of the monumental clutter that had been built in the fifth century
B.C.
He saw relics of a gilded statue of the courtesan Phryne erected by her lover Praxiteles next to two statues of Apollo, one from the Persian wars, another to commemorate a victory over Athens, then the statue of an ox memorializing a victory over the Persians, more statues of Apollo, and so on up the hill.

Ancient Greek cities commonly began around a public square, or agora, surrounded by market stalls wherever there was space. The open agora in its day became a symbol of the free exchange of goods and ideas. “I have never yet been afraid of any men,” Cyrus the conquering king of Persia sneered, “who have set a place in the middle of their city, where they could come together to cheat each other and tell one another lies under oath.” In the later, Hellenistic age of empires, when planned cities were more common, the agora would be closed off on all four sides, a sign that people were no longer so free to gather. For Aristotle the plan of a city expressed its form of government. While “a level plain suits the character of democracy,” a single high citadel (or acropolis) suited monarchies or oligarchies, and an aristocracy called for “a number of different strong places.”

The Acropolis, the citadel and still the symbol of classic Athens, was enclosed by a wall and served as the central fortress as early as the thirteenth century
B.C.
Never the center of commerce or of government, it became the focus of the polis’ religion and civic ceremony. By the early sixth century
B.C.
the Acropolis was the site of at least two grand limestone temples, with smaller temples or treasuries. A new marble temple and a great new entranceway were being built when the invading Persians occupied and leveled Athens in 480
B.C.
Then, when the citizens began rebuilding they started on the Agora as their symbol of a revived democratic spirit, and neglected the Acropolis. But Pericles led them back to the Acropolis, and his restoration would remain for millennia the visible reminder of the glory that was Greece and the uncanny power of the polis. The Acropolis revealed the possibilities of “urban renewal.”

Many buildings of the Periclean Age that glorified the Acropolis were built on foundations of earlier buildings with reused stones cut for earlier purposes. The Parthenon, an expanded version of an already partially completed
temple, was not a monument to any one architect. It was finally the product of a battle of improvisation between an eminent general, Cimon (507?–499
B.C.
) and an ambitious politician, Pericles.

Rebuilding the Acropolis, as Plutarch (
A.D
. 46?–120?) recalled, was a shrewd politician’s design for public works. Recovering from the Persian invasion, after rebuilding the city’s defenses and restoring the Agora, Pericles offered his grand exercise in civic glory and popular gratification.

The “architects” for the great temples on the Acropolis, as we have seen, did not play the role of architects in our time. Not clearly distinguished from the engineers, contractors, or master workmen, they were charged only to redo conventional plans. Although an official architect had a greater share of honor, he might not be paid much more than a skilled workman. When the architect and the building commission had agreed on the design, a herald in the marketplace invited bids for parts of the work. The architect was expected to draw up specifications for each part and contracts were awarded to the lowest bidders, each backed by a guarantor. Since there is no sign of profit for the guarantors, they probably were performing a civic service. The accounts for the building of the Erectheum, for example, show citizens working alongside “metics” (non-Athenians) and slaves, all with much the same pay.

The cost of a public building was met by appropriations from the treasury or through public subscription. The Parthenon (exclusive of the colossal gold-and-ivory statue of Athena) is estimated to have cost some five hundred talents at a time when the whole annual internal revenue of Athens was about four hundred talents. The classic Greeks seem to have made a fetish of keeping the public informed of the progress and cost of public works. Instructions to contractors and workers were probably posted on wooden bulletin boards. For the whole citizenry, and for future generations, a permanent record was carved on stones set up as public monuments. Surviving fragments of these tablets remain our richest source of information about classic Greek building practice. They include requests for tenders by contractors, specifications for materials and workmanship, the length of
the working day, the fines for overruns, and, of course, procedures for the resulting lawsuits. Citizens were no less eager then than now to know what became of “the taxpayers’ money.”

The names of a few Greek architects became legendary, but none reached the divine status of an Imhotep nor even became a celebrity in his own time. As community enterprises, the great temples were deeply entangled in city politics—none more so than the Acropolis, and especially the Parthenon. In the Age of Pericles Athens’s city-state allies, who had contributed money to a war chest, were scandalized at the grandeur of Athens’s public buildings, constructed at the allies’ expense. The astute Pericles, as Plutarch recalled, had removed the common treasure of the Athenian allies from the isle of Delos and put it in Athenian custody, offering “their fairest excuse … namely, that they took it away for fear the barbarians would seize it, and on purpose to secure it in a safe place.” Pericles then made that security doubly safe by transferring the investment from the treasury into the rebuilding of the Acropolis. “Greece cannot but resent it as an insufferable affront,” the allies complained, “and consider herself to be tyrannized over openly, when she sees the treasure, which was contributed by her upon a necessity for the war, wantonly lavished out by us upon our city, to gild her all over, and to adorn and set her figures and temples, which cost a world of money.” Even as the people of Athens enjoyed their remunerative employment on the public works the Parthenon became a center of public controversy when Pericles decided to increase its size and cost substantially. The story recently untangled by scholars is worthy of twentieth-century machine politics.

A politician selecting an “architect” for a public building in Pericles’ day would have had a much wider choice than that of a modern mayor or city commission. When the city of Tokyo in 1986 decided to erect a great municipal center (to be the largest building in Japan), it announced a competition and appointed a panel of leading architects as judges. Tange’s winning plan was chosen not only for its functional appeal but also for its splendor and originality. But choosing an “architect” for the Parthenon was nothing like that, for what they wanted was a supervisor of construction and a master of detail, someone who could keep workers supplied with schedules of measurements, and sometimes even with full-scale patterns for their carving. He was expected finally to see all the pieces hoisted and fitted according to the familiar requirements of the order (Doric or Ionic) in which the structure was to be built.

Callicrates had been chosen by the celebrated Athenian general Cimon, then a virtual dictator, to be master builder of the first Parthenon. He was well along in the work when Cimon lost the favor of the Athenian people.
In a democratic revulsion led by Pericles, Cimon was prosecuted for allegedly having accepted a bribe, was stripped of his powers and ostracized in 461. Pericles, aiming to undo, or at least to redo, the work of his hated enemy, removed Callicrates from the job and replaced him with his own man, Ictinus. Callicrates did not receive any major assignments for some time, and none within the city. Meanwhile Pericles substantially revised the plans for the Parthenon. The earlier design (six by sixteen columns), he argued, had been too long for its width and so it was replaced by a relatively broader building (eight by seventeen columns). The new dimensions, covering an area more than a third greater than its predecessor’s, increased the cost correspondingly. But it offered a more appropriate setting for the huge statue of the town’s patron goddess, Athena. Incidentally, it also extended the years of employment on public works, with obvious political benefits for Pericles and his supporters.

The fame and the credit for building the Parthenon came not to its “architects” but mainly to Pericles, with incidental notice to Phidias as Pericles’ supervisor for all the reconstruction on the Acropolis. A century later Demosthenes (385?–322
B.C.
) looked back with nostalgia on that admirably anonymous public spirit.

He might have added that no statue was erected to Miltiades after the Battle of Marathon, nor to Themistocles after the Battle of Salamis. In those days even the tyrants did not dare build monuments to themselves.

Since the canons of classic Greek architecture allowed variety only in the scale of the building or in decorative detail, the supervising architects were also sometimes known as sculptors. But sculptors and stonemasons were hardly distinguished from one another, for they worked in the same medium and used the same tools. Both proceeded by similar stages, first roughing out the sculptural block or masonry column and then gradually cutting, dressing, and smoothing the stone once it was in place. To minimize the danger of accidental damage, the finishing was left until after the moving and hoisting had all been done. Finally tinted wax was worked into the pores of the marble to give the desired color to sculptured parts like hair, eyes, lips, costumes, triglyph, moldings, and metopes.

Sculptors and architect builders both followed fixed rules of proportion. Just as the architect had his canons for the parts and proportions of the Doric or Ionic order, so too the sculptor had prescribed for him the anatomical proportions of each figure in integers easy to remember. The sculptor Polyclitus (fifth century
B.C.
), as we shall see, so perfectly embodied the simple proportions in his
Doryphorus
, a young athlete holding a spear, that the work itself came to be known as “the canon.” The
Doryphorus
became a model for sculptors just as the Parthenon was a model for architects. Vitruvius was struck by the mathematical precision of canons of the sculptors of the Great Age.