The Parthenon Enigma (28 page)

The newly recovered fragments of the
Erechtheus
preserve for us the
pivotal closing speech of Athena, in which she commands her old rival Poseidon to leave Athens in peace:
⁵⁷

(55) I bid you to turn your trident away from this soil, sea-god Poseidon, and not to uproot this land and destroy my delightful city … Has not one victim given you your fill? Have you not torn my heart apart, (60) hiding away Erechtheus deep beneath the earth?

Athena then turns and speaks directly to Queen
Praxithea:

Daughter of Kephisos, savior of this land. Now hear the words of motherless Athena. (65) First, I shall tell you about the girl whom your husband sacrificed for this land. Bury her where she breathed out her lamented life, and these sisters of hers in the same earth-tomb, because of their nobility (70) for they did not presume to abandon their oath to their dear sister. Their souls have not gone to
Hades but I myself have brought their spirit [
pneuma
] to the uppermost reaches of heaven [
aither
] and I shall give them the name that mortals will call them all throughout Greece, “the Hyacinthian goddesses” (75)…brightness of the hyacinth, and saved the land. To my fellow citizens I say not to forget them over time but to honor them with annual sacrifices and bull-slaying slaughters, (80) celebrating them with holy maiden dancing choruses … enemy … to battle … spear army … make to these, first, a preliminary sacrifice before taking up the spear of war, not touching the wine-making grape nor pouring on the pyre anything other than the fruit of the hardworking bee [honey] together with river water. It is necessary that these daughters have a precinct that must not be entered [
abaton
], and no one of the enemies should be allowed to make secret sacrifice there, for their victory and the suffering of this land.

(90) And I order you to construct a precinct for your husband in mid-city with stone enclosure. On account of his killer, he will be called, eponymously, Holy
Poseidon-Erechtheus, by the citizens worshipping in cattle sacrifices.

(95) And for you, [Praxithea], who re-erected the foundations of this city, I grant, being called priestess, the right to make burnt sacrifice on my altar on behalf of the whole city. You have heard what [must be] brought to pass in this land. Now I shall pronounce the
judgment of Zeus, my father in heaven. Eumolpos, born from the Eumolpos who has died.

Euripides,
Erechtheus
F 370.55–101 Kannicht
⁵⁸

In the chapters that follow, we shall see how the goddess’s words have reverberated in the Athenian psyche, expressing the very essence of the people’s self-understanding, thereby forming a basis for our understanding of Acropolis temples, cults, and rituals. We have already noted that Athena’s speech reads like the text of so many
sacred laws establishing cult places. Euripides’s play and, as we shall soon see, Pheidias’s
Parthenon sculptures, vividly express Athenian core values while at the same time they instruct the citizenry on how things came to be as they are. For now, let us acknowledge how explicitly Euripides’s Athena explains the origins of the two temples that stand on the Acropolis: the
Erechtheion and the Parthenon. Euripides etymologizes the names of these two cult places, one meaning “of Erechtheus” and the other “of the Maidens.” The special character of Acropolis cult practice, in which the Erechtheion and the Parthenon shared a single priestess and a single altar, can now be understood in relation to the myth in which Praxithea is charged with looking after the shrine of her husband (the Erechtheion) and that of her daughters (the Parthenon), both set within temples of Athena.

Lykourgos’s lengthy quotation from the
Erechtheus
takes on heightened meaning when we consider that he himself was regarded as a direct descendant of the noble family of Erechtheus and Praxithea. His family clan, the Eteoboutadai, controlled the hereditary priesthoods of Poseidon-Erechtheus and Athena Polias, passing the sacred offices down through its generations for an astounding seven hundred years. Likely to have served as priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus himself, Lykourgos was highly knowledgeable about Acropolis cult and hierarchies. When he stands before the jury and recounts patriotic tales from the legendary past, he does so with the authority of his own birthright and experience.
⁵⁹

As the consummate Athenian, Lykourgos closes his case with an invocation of the Attic landscape, the shrines, and the monuments that bound the citizenry together in a common identity:

If you acquit
Leokrates, you will vote for the betrayal of the city, of its temples, and its fleet. But if you kill him, you will be encouraging others to preserve your country and its prosperity. Imagine then,
Athenians, that the country and its trees are appealing to you, that the harbors, dockyards, and walls of the city are begging you for protection, yes, and the temples and sanctuaries, too.

Lykourgos,
Against Leokrates
150
⁶⁰

For all this effort and eloquence, the jury returned a split verdict: 250 voting to convict Leokrates, 250 to acquit. The man whose crime was presented as an affront to the very soul of the city walked free.

The example of
Erechtheus and his family continued nonetheless to loom large within Athenian consciousness, serving as a model for civic selflessness, even when the days of such fervor and of the democracy it enabled were numbered. The idea of sacrificing one’s life for the
common good (
to kalon
) remained central to Athenian democratic ideology over the century separating
Perikles and Lykourgos, as weariness over paying the ultimate price grew. Wars to maintain Athenian supremacy took their toll even before the city-state’s forces were crushed by
Macedonian legions in 338
B.C.
during Philip’s effort to unite Greece. After Chaironeia, Athenians no longer controlled even their own food supplies and, increasingly threatened by the whims of foreign generals and kings, found themselves gripped by anxiety and unease. Meanwhile, the story of Erechtheus and his daughters endured as a recurring theme in Attic funeral orations, which is no wonder, given how effectively Euripides’s play employed traditional Athenian language of the
logos epitaphios
.
⁶¹
The myth is invoked in the Platonic dialogue called the
Menexenus
, as well as in Isokrates’s
Panegyrikos
and in his
Panathenaikos
.
⁶²
And when it comes time to eulogize the fallen from the
Battle of Chaironeia in 338
B.C.
,
Demosthenes praises the example of Erechtheus’s daughters as inspiration for the young men of the tribe Erechtheidai, who resisted the Macedonians.
⁶³
Later, the orator
Demades will have to save his still-refractory fellow Athenians from the wrath of their conqueror Philip, but this same Demades will also hail the daughters of Erechtheus for their noble virtue and devotion to the land that reared them.
⁶⁴

The esteem of the Athenians for the story of the sacrifice of Erechtheus’s daughter is as striking as it is long-lived. To realize its centrality to Athenian consciousness is to appreciate that the Parthenon’s most prominent puzzle has a solution hidden in plain sight. But before we come to that appreciation, let us reflect a bit upon the meaning and implications of this most definitive myth of Athenian belonging.

WHAT ARE WE
to make of such admiration for what is, essentially, an act of violence against a blameless maiden? In presenting
virgin sacrifice as an inspiring example of selflessness, were the Athenians not simply whitewashing a tale of cruelty and misogyny? In answering this question, we must first make it clear that the examples of virgin sacrifice encountered in Greek literature are all set in the mythical past. Not one source attests to the actual killing of a maiden during historical times. Furthermore, archaeological evidence for
human sacrifice, even in prehistoric Greece, is problematic, inconclusive, and slight.
⁶⁵

Herodotos only once describes an instance of human sacrifice, and this drawn, again, from the realm of myth. He tells us that
King Menelaos, bringing his wayward wife, Helen, back from Troy, was becalmed at a port in Egypt. Here, he was compelled to sacrifice two Egyptian boys to ensure that favorable winds would fill his sails and allow his ship to continue.
⁶⁶
Calling this measure an “unholy act,” Herodotos clearly finds human sacrifice repellent.

Plutarch recounts the story of three captive
Persian princes, the nephews of Xerxes, who were killed by
Themistokles as a preliminary sacrifice (
sphagia
), just before the
Battle of Salamis.
⁶⁷
If true, this would constitute a rare historical instance of human sacrifice in Greece. But this act could equally be understood as the execution of enemy captives during time of war. It is far from clear whether Plutarch is recounting an actual event or is just invoking an old paradigm.
⁶⁸
The historicity of Plutarch’s account has been thrown into question by the fact that the sacrifice of the Persian boys is said to have been made to
Dionysos Omestes, a god worshipped on
Lesbos, home to Plutarch’s source for the story,
Phainias.
⁶⁹
And, in a sense, Plutarch’s account presents a parallel to the deaths of the daughters of Erechtheus, three Attic princesses sacrificed as
sphagia
prior to the battle, just as are the three Persian princes.
⁷⁰
This symmetry may suggest a fictive rather than a historical occurrence.

There is hardly a culture on earth that does not have some shadowy prehistory of human sacrifice practiced by certain groups under certain circumstances. While there is no evidence that fifth-century
B.C.
Athenians sacrificed maidens, they surely believed that virgin sacrifice occurred in the days of the heroic past. And, as we shall see, they might
even have believed that the tomb of the daughters of Erechtheus rested beneath the western room of the Parthenon, a chamber they themselves called Παρθενών (“of the Maidens”). I shall argue in
chapter 6
that the maidens in question are none other than the daughters of Erechtheus and
Praxithea.

How did such dark stories of sacrifice and
death function within the larger worldview of the Greeks? What role do they play in the construction of models for heroism? Let us, for a moment, consider the great hero
Achilles, the “best of the Achaeans,” who fought at
Troy. Achilles was faced with an impossible dilemma: to die young and thereby enjoy a “big story” unto immortality, or to survive the war and return home to a long if impermanent life. “If I stay here and fight, I shall lose my safe homecoming [
nostos
] but I will have a glory [
kleos
] that is unwilting,” he reflects in the
Iliad
. “Whereas if I go home my glory will die, but it will be a long time before the outcome of death shall take me.”
⁷¹
Here lies the essence of Greek heroism. To be a hero, one must experience death. It is death itself that gives the hero power. As
Gregory Nagy has explained, the Greek hero is first and foremost a figure of religious worship, a dead person who receives cult honors and who is expected, in return, to bring prosperity to the populace.
⁷²

The surest route to heroism is an honorable death in battle.
Courage displayed in giving his life to defeat the enemy brings lasting glory to Achilles, as well as to
Patroklos,
Hektor, and so many of the greatest names that come down to us from Greek epic. The hero
Odysseus is unusual in achieving both
kleos
and
nostos
. He survives the perils of the
Trojan battlefield yet attains a big story through the adventures of his ten-year journey home, as recounted in the
Odyssey
. Upon reaching Ithaka, Odysseus receives the additional glory of warm welcome from
Penelope, the loyal, loving wife still awaiting him.
⁷³

A man’s path to heroic status is clear beginning with the earliest epic poetry. But what of a woman’s? No Greek woman is given Achilles’s choice, to fight and die in battle or to journey home to a waiting family. These options are unthinkable within the framework of experiences open to female members of the community. But women of Greek myth do achieve heroic status and lasting honors. Like men, they do so by dying. Their deaths, however, are not on the field of battle but on the
altar of sacrifice.

Virgin sacrifice presents a paradox in which something as dark and
sinister as the killing of a maiden can be viewed as a female’s means of ascent to heroism. By making the ultimate sacrifice, Greek maidens attain the
kleos
that comes of having a big story. In return, they achieve immortality and cult adoration. (In a world of such intense pieties, the worshipper can have no higher aspiration than to become herself worthy of worship.) Critics inclined to see cruelty and misogyny will not view this as a square deal. After all, a girl has no real say in whether she lives or dies. The martial hero has at least the opportunity to fight for his life. The fate of the sacrificial virgin is sealed by those who impose it upon her. But this is to miss the point. Within the cultural norms of ancient Greek society, it is impossible to think of a young woman going into battle. How, then, is she able to set herself apart, to offer the ultimate gift and save her community? Without virgin sacrifice, women could have never enjoyed authentic heroic status, the culture’s highest honor.
⁷⁴