The Parthenon Enigma (12 page)

HESIOD TELLS
in his
Theogony
(ca. 700
B.C.
) that in the beginning there was
Chaos, emptiness devoid of matter.
¹⁷
From this emerged
Gaia (Earth),
Tartaros (the stormy abyss that lies deep within the Earth), and
Eros (Love), followed by
Erebos (a place of darkness between the earth and the underworld) and
Nyx (Night). Gaia parthenogenically produced
Ouranos (Sky), the
Ourea (Mountains), and
Pontos (Sea). Each night, Ouranos completely covered Gaia, mating with her and producing powerful and terrifying children. These included six male and six female deities known as the Titans, as well as three horrific one-eyed Giants known as the
Cyclopes and three hundred-handed monsters known as the
Hekatonkheires.

Wary of his children, Ouranos locked them away in the deepest recesses of Earth, Tartaros, a place said to be “as far beneath Hades as the sky is above the earth.”
¹⁸
This caused Gaia great pain, and hoping to liberate her children, she secretly planned to castrate her husband. Giving her youngest,
Kronos, a sickle fashioned from flint, she persuaded him to slice off his father’s genitals, a deed the lad accomplished in one swift stroke. But the awful wound only enlarged the troubled family, as the dripping blood fell upon Earth, impregnating it to produce the Gigantes (Giants), the
Erinyes (Furies), and the
Meliae (Ash-Tree
Nymphs). Ouranos’s severed testicles, meanwhile, fell into the sea off Cyprus (or, by another tradition, off Kythera), effervescing as they hit the water, from which foam emerged that loveliest and most sexually robust of goddesses,
Aphrodite.

Kronos then freed his brothers and sisters from the depths of Tartaros, to become king of the Titans, before siring more children with his sister
Rhea. He remained terrified, however, that his own offspring would grow up to overthrow him as he had done to his father. Ouranos
had prophesied as much. To prevent this, Kronos undertook the accustomed remedy of uneasy fathers and swallowed each infant at birth, all except for his youngest son,
Zeus. In that boy’s case,
Rhea tricked Kronos, wrapping a stone with a blanket in place of the baby. While Kronos swallowed the stone, Zeus was spirited away to a cave on
Mount Ida in Crete to be raised, according to various traditions, by a goat, a nymph, or Gaia herself. When he grew to take as his first love
Metis, this Okeanid nymph contrived her own plan for tricking Kronos. She fed him a mixture of mustard and wine that caused him to regurgitate Zeus’s brothers and sisters. Thus were the gods freed.

Once reunited with their youngest sibling, the
Olympians launched a violent ten-year campaign against their father and his generation of Titans.
¹⁹
As the so-called Titanomachy raged on, Zeus emerged as lord of the Olympians while
Atlas became leader of the other side. The Titans laid siege to
Mount Olympos as only Titans could, piling one mountain atop another until they reached the summit and from there hurling huge boulders at the gods.

The Titanomachy provided a narrative structure for comprehending the cataclysmic events that shaped the universe. The earliest clashes had been those between earth and sky gods; their children, the Titans, eventually battled
their
children, the Olympians. The next
cosmic conflict was that between the
Olympian gods and the Giants of their own generation, the so-called
Gigantomachy. These celestial and terrestrial wars set a new generation against an earlier one in universal struggles to tame the brutal forces of nature and the cosmos. And it was in terms of these “
boundary catastrophes” that primordial time was comprehended and organized into eras, much as the great floods provided reference points in
chapter 1
.
²⁰

The battle of the gods and the Titans follows a classic model for succession seen in ancient Near Eastern and European
genealogical myths in which one generation of divinities overthrows a dominant, older generation. Indeed,
Hesiod refers to the Titans as the “former gods,” the
theoi proteroi
, a term also found in the
Rig
veda, the sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit
hymns dated sometime between 1700 and 1100
B.C.
,
²¹
wherein the older generation of Sadhyas residing in heaven are subdued by the storm god Indra. There are also “former gods” in Hittite texts, identified with the infernal gods of the Babylonian pantheon, the
Anunnaki.
²²
Just like Hesiod’s Titans, the Anunnaki are locked in the depths
of the underworld by a storm god who leads a younger generation of divinities in revolt.
Babylonian myth of the second millennium gives a parallel story in which the Anunnaki are defeated and cast into the depths of Earth by the young
Marduk, a god who rides into battle on his storm chariot, armed with arrows, lightning, and the winds.
²³

The Olympian gods are aided in the Titanomachy by the
Cyclopes, still angry with
Kronos for imprisoning them in the depths of
Tartaros. They arm
Zeus with lightning, thunder, and the thunderbolt, weaponry forged in their foundry deep within Earth. These tools transform Zeus into a proper sky god, the equivalent of his ancient Near Eastern counterparts, all-powerful young upstarts who bring down prior pantheons.
²⁴
The Cyclopes’ offerings to Zeus give intelligible form to the fulmination through which he destroys the enemy. As
Martin West has put it, “Thunder is what you hear, lightning is what you see, and the thunderbolt is what hits you.”
²⁵
Thus, the noise, crash, and din of primordial battle is manifest: a fantastic multimedia and
kinetic display of sound, light, and electrostatic discharge.

This terrifying cosmic spectacle adorns the earliest stone temple on the Acropolis in sculptures summoning the shrieking acoustics, the spectacular visual effects, and the so-called
mysterium tremendum
, the overwhelming awe and dread of confronting the unimaginable power of the gods.
²⁶
Indeed, to inspire such wonder and terror was an essential aim of
architectural sculpture throughout Greece during the sixth century; we need only think of the giant stone pediment of the
temple of Artemis at Kerkyra (Corfu) with its menacing
Medousa, ferocious panthers, and lumbering Giants fallen dead in the corners of the gable.
²⁷
The experience of sacred space was meant to be shocking, anxiety inducing, and disorienting, playing havoc with the emotions. Thus, Archaic sanctuaries teem with
Gorgons, sphinxes, wild animals, monsters, and Giants.

The Athenian Acropolis was the same, only more so. Sometime around 575
B.C.
, the Athenians began work on an immense stone temple, the largest of its day for Attica. By now, several of its neighboring city-states were ruled by powerful tyrants who had enhanced their local sanctuaries with monumental temples, and this might have fueled an innate Athenian competitiveness to build one of their own.
²⁸
By the mid-seventh century the tyrant
Kypselos at Corinth had constructed for
Apollo the first great stone temple with peristyle colonnade and tiled
roof on the Greek mainland, followed shortly thereafter by a comparable structure for
Poseidon at
Isthmia.
²⁹
By the turn of the sixth century, many more mainland temples were surrounded with what would become the classical Greek signature: the exterior colonnade.
³⁰
Since bigger is better when it comes to
prayer and pleasing the gods, Athens was not to be outdone, and Athena would soon have an enormous stone temple of her own.

Deeply apprehensive of surrendering control to any one man, the Athenians had resisted tyranny throughout the seventh and into the sixth century. Power
at Athens remained in the hands of a few noble and highly competitive families, clans that had risen to wealth off the abundance of their landholdings. And so it fell to these
Eupatrids and their oligarchies to initiate the formalization of the Acropolis shrines. But all was not well at Athens; indeed, tensions between the haves and the have-nots had brought the city-state to a point of near collapse. As we have seen in
chapter 1
,
Solon was brought in as archon and mediator in 594 and set to work completely reorganizing civic representation, allowing for limited empowerment of the citizen masses. By forgiving their debts, abolishing their sale into
slavery to fellow Athenians, and giving them an increased voice in the assembly and law courts, Solon raised the people of Athens to a new level of prosperity and fuller participation in government. Interestingly, Solon’s reforms also codified laws concerning prizes for athletic victors, asserting for the first time the role of the state in athletic concerns. Harmony at the intersection of athletics, the aristocracy, and the people was vital to the equilibrium of the state.
³¹

The newfound stability brought by Solon’s reforms enabled Athenians to reconfigure not only their Acropolis as sanctuary but also their local festival of Athena. A string of Athenian athletes had already distinguished themselves at the
Olympic Games during the course of the seventh century, winning victories in 696, 692, 644, 640, and 636
B.C.
³²
Now it was time for them to compete at home in games that would bring competitors to Athens from all across the Greek world. This shift may have been part of a major reorganization of the festival in 566
B.C.
, when the city celebrated its first Great
Panathenaia, an international version of what until then had been a local feast. A series of inscriptions dated to this time show that official action was taken to make a
dromos
(“racetrack” or “road”) and “for the first time” to establish the
agon
(“contest”) for the “Steely-Eyed One,” Athena herself.
³³
Later sources
tell us that this reorganization took place during the archonship of
Hippokleides, that is, in 566/565.
³⁴
As an athletic aristocrat from the horse-racing family of
Miltiades (from the clan
Philaidai), Hippokleides’s exact role with regard to the festival is unknown. But his leadership in this regard seems to have been encroached upon by
Peisistratos, an ambitious member of a rival family from his home district of Brauron in eastern Attica. A late source credits Peisistratos with the introduction of the Great Panathenaia, and given his bold actions soon thereafter, it seems the young aristocrat seized this opportunity to advance his designs for establishing a tyranny of his own.
³⁵

While
Solon’s laws worked well in bettering the lot of the Athenian masses, fierce rivalries within the aristocracy endured, particularly those between three dominant clans. The rich and reactionary conservatives of the grain-producing plains (
pedies
), led by Lykourgos, wanted the new laws repealed. The somewhat weaker men of the coast (
paraloi
), led by
Megakles, were fairly happy with Solon’s reforms. The smallest and poorest group, the men of the hills (
hyperakrioi
), led by Peisistratos, were somewhat disappointed since they had hoped to receive additional lands under the new regime. But of the three noble families and their leaders,
Aristotle tells us that it was Peisistratos who was most open to democracy.
³⁶
A distant relative of Solon himself, Peisistratos would eventually win the backing of both the nobility and the people;
³⁷
in doing so, he would become the shining personality of sixth-century Athens.

THE NEW STONE TEMPLE
on the Acropolis rock might have been a result of Solon’s inspired program, but it would take decades to quarry the limestone, transport it to the summit, organize teams of stonemasons and building crews, and raise the structure. A great ramp, some 80 meters (262 feet) long and over 10 meters (33 feet) wide, had to be built on the western slope of the Acropolis for the hauling of materials and equipment. Surely, the temple was finished in time for the inauguration of the Great Panathenaia of 566, when this same ramp would have served as pathway for the sacred procession, leading the marchers and a hundred head of cattle up the slopes to the
altar
of Athena. The new temple would not disappoint.

It rose from a platform measuring 46 by nearly 21 meters (151 by 69 feet), rivaling the great size of the
temple of Artemis at Kerkyra. Its
Doric
peristyle showed six columns on the façades and thirteen down the flanks (insert
this page
, bottom image, temple at south or top).
³⁸
The temple was made of limestone and adorned with metopes and gutters of Hymettian marble; the roof was crowned with marble tiles and ornaments (akroteria) that included sphinxes, palmettes, and maidens (below).
³⁹

Most astonishing are the robustly carved limestone figures in the gables, richly colored with red, blue, green, and black pigment. A large number of fragments recovered in the late nineteenth century allow for the reconstruction of the pedimental compositions. A lion and lioness killing a bull adorn the center of one pediment, while the other preserves a bull gored by a lioness alone. Both gables feature scenes of cosmic and terrestrial battles, showing serpent-tailed monsters and huge coiling snakes slithering into the narrow corners of the pedimental frame (below, facing page, and insert
this page
, top).
⁴⁰