The Parthenon Enigma (29 page)

Greek myth is full of stories in which girls of noble birth are sacrificed to avert catastrophe in times of social crisis.
⁷⁵
When
Herakles and the Thebans were about to attack
Orchomenos, an oracle declared that the city could be saved only if a highborn citizen would die by his or her own hand. The daughters of
Antipoinos,
Androkleia and
Aleis, volunteered. Following their deaths, they were buried within the local sanctuary of
Artemis Eukleia, where they received cult honors.
⁷⁶
When the same city, Orchomenos, was struck by a terrible epidemic, an oracle proclaimed that only a maiden death could stop the spread of disease. The daughters of
Orion, who had been taught weaving by Athena, stepped forward and stabbed themselves in the throats and shoulders with their bodkins and shuttles, thus ridding the city of plague.
⁷⁷
When Athens was threatened by epidemic, or by some accounts famine, the daughters of Leos were given in sacrifice, receiving in return their own shrine and cult honors in the Athenian Agora.
⁷⁸

The most famous virgin sacrifice in Greek myth is of course
Agamemnon’s killing of his daughter,
Iphigeneia.
⁷⁹
This enabled the Greek fleet to set sail for the
Trojan War. A thousand ships were becalmed for months in the harbor at Aulis, waiting for favorable winds, when the commander, King Agamemnon, consulted the seer
Kalchas. Nothing short of the sacrifice of the king’s own daughter would reinspire the wind. When
Aeschylus tells this story in his
Agamemnon
of 458
B.C.
, he focuses on the rage of the girl’s mother,
Klytaimnestra. But when Euripides tells the tale in his
Iphigeneia at Aulis
in 405, we see a tremendous
shift in emphasis. Euripides’s Iphigeneia first begs for her life but later goes willingly to sacrifice, reminding her distraught mother that in doing so, she will save Hellas. “You bore me for all the Greeks not yourself alone,” Iphigeneia remonstrates, expressing much the same sentiment as
Praxithea: just as boys go to war, girls go to sacrifice, both for the good of the city.
⁸⁰

Why such a shift in sentiment between the telling of this tale by Aeschylus and its retelling by Euripides? In the wake of the
Persian Wars, themes of heroism and self-sacrifice gained popularity on the Athenian stage. Sophokles took up the subject of virgin sacrifice in his
Andromeda
,
Iphigeneia
,
Polyxena
, and, possibly, in his lost
Kreousa
. But it is during the
Peloponnesian War (431–404
B.C.
) and the plague at Athens (430, 429, 427/426
B.C.
) that we see a great eruption of interest in these stories. Perhaps their retelling helped to acknowledge the burden of loss and sacrifice shared by the women of Athens during these troubled times. Euripides brings human sacrifice to the stage in his
Hekuba
,
Ion, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Children of Herakles
, and, of course,
Erechtheus
.
⁸¹
And, notably, the
Children of Herakles
and
Erechtheus
share a common framework for projecting a strong, cohesive Athenian ideology.
⁸²

In
Children of Herakles
, Euripides gives us the rare opportunity to hear words from the lips of a sacrificial victim, Makaria, the “Blessed One,” daughter of Herakles and
Deianeira. Together with her brothers, she takes refuge at Athens, having been expelled from Trachis. When the children’s uncle
Eurystheus declares war on Athens, an oracle advises the Athenian king,
Demophon, that only the voluntary death of one of Herakles’s children can save the city.
⁸³
Makaria valiantly volunteers. Following her sacrifice, a spring is named for her at Marathon.
⁸⁴
As Makaria marches stalwartly toward the
altar of her death, she delivers a compelling treatise on virgin sacrifice, exalting it as an opportunity for female heroism. Makaria views herself as an active agent in the saving of the city, one glad to trade her life for
kleos:

Then fear no more the Argive enemy’s spear! I am ready, old man, of my own accord and unbidden, to appear for sacrifice and be killed. For what shall we say if this city is willing to run great risks on our behalf, and yet we, who lay toil and struggle on others, run away from death when it lies in our power to rescue
them
? It must not be so, indeed; for it deserves nothing but mockery if we sit and groan now
as suppliants of the gods and yet, though we are descended from that great man who is our father [
Herakles], show ourselves to be cowards. How can this be fitting in the eyes of men of nobility?

…

Lead me to the place where it seems good that my body should be killed and garlanded and consecrated to the goddess [Athena]! Defeat the enemy! For my life is at your disposal, full willingly, and I offer to be put to death on my brothers’ behalf and on my
own
. For, mark it well, by not clinging to my life I have made a most splendid discovery, how to die with glory.

Euripides,
Children of Herakles
500–10, 528–34
⁸⁵

Dying with honor had incomparable resonance in a society as ravaged by war and plague as Athens was during the last third of the fifth century. Scarcely a family was spared the loss of someone in these terrible times. Describing the bravery of those who stayed in Athens to nurse the sick during the plague, Thucydides hailed the
Athenian
instinct to feel shame for thinking of one’s own safety in the face of communal crisis.
⁸⁶
Against the backdrop of these events, we can understand how the retelling of tales of virgin sacrifice was far more than theatrical entertainment. It was a means of expressing the core values of Athenian democracy at a time when solidarity among citizens was paramount.

As we have said, Euripides’s
Erechtheus
was probably first performed round about 422
B.C.
⁸⁷
Presented in the
Theater of Dionysos on the
south slope of the Acropolis, the play was viewed by thousands.
⁸⁸
Each year the festival of the City Dionysia brought together the greatest assembly of all Athenians in one spot.
⁸⁹
Viewers were not merely entertained but took in a harsh message, one presented within the
ritual framework of a religious feast. The message was simple: democracy requires pain and loss.

“Of all the rituals relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent,” writes the classicist and political theorist
Danielle Allen. She demonstrates how democracy must prove to its citizens who have suffered loss, in one instance, that they should continue to keep faith with their government and fellow citizens in the future.”
⁹⁰
Responding to this need takes the shape of public rituals, repeated acts that create and sustain trust and order within the community—necessities that simply don’t
exist to such a degree, if any, in authoritarian regimes. The story of the daughters of Erechtheus manifests precisely the nexus of
sacrifice, loss, trust, and ritual that makes democracy work. This is why it was so central to
Athenian foundational myth and why, as we shall see, it was such an obvious subject matter for commemoration on the Parthenon.

The
Erechtheus
continued to have profound resonance for Athenians a century after its first
performance, when
Lykourgos quoted so extensively from it in making his case against
Leokrates. In her book
Why Plato Wrote
, Allen demonstrates how Lykourgos adopted Platonic vocabulary, deliberately using one of Plato’s favorite superlatives,
to kalliston
(“the most beautiful and noble”), a total of six times in the speech. At eight different points, he exhorts the jurors to learn from the paradigms he holds up for them. First among these is the importance of educating the people toward virtue (
arete
) and that which is noblest (
to kalliston
).
⁹¹
And in turning toward virtue, Athenian youths will inevitably find their way to patriotism.
⁹²
Behind Lykourgos’s words is a practical policy agenda. He insists on the importance of training the ephebes as part of his larger mission of paideia.
⁹³
Thus, Perikles’s vision
of Athens as the “School of Hellas” lives on in the courtroom of Lykourgos, even if the words are not as stirring as they were in Perikles’s day.

In what are likely to be the most authentic words surviving from Perikles, those of the funeral oration that he delivered for the soldiers who died in the
Samian War of 439
B.C.
, he reflects, “We cannot see the gods … but we believe them to be immortal from the honors we pay them and the blessings we receive from them, and so it is with those who have given their lives for the city.”
⁹⁴
Here we are at the intersection of the civic
religion into which Athens grew and the cosmological
awareness it had possessed since time immemorial. Those who will give themselves for the
common good are as worthy of collective worship as the gods themselves. Democracy is no mere political arrangement but ultimately a spiritual one.

The daughters of Erechtheus were not only worshipped as divinities at Athens; they were set up into the heavens by Athena herself, transformed into stars for all eternity.
⁹⁵
Catasterism is the greatest honor of all: to become one with the eternal cosmos as a star shining ever after down upon Athens. “I have caused their spirit to dwell in the uppermost reaches of heaven,” Athena proclaims in the
Erechtheus
, “and I will give
them a name men will call them all throughout Greece, the Hyakinthian goddesses.”
⁹⁶
Joined together in an everlasting choral dance among the stars as the
constellation Hyades, the noble daughters of “great-hearted”
Erechtheus and “great-spirited”
Praxithea take their place as founding daughters in a charter myth worthy
of Athens itself. Athena places the maidens lovingly into that same sky wherein she once hurled the giant
Drako in a primordial cosmic battle, endless eras earlier.

5

THE PARTHENON FRIEZE

The Key to the Temple

HE WAS HACKED
to
death in Isfahan.
Francis Vernon died the way he lived: adventurously.

Pirates had kidnapped him as a young man just out of
Christ Church, Oxford, selling him into slavery. Traveling along the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth in October 1675, he watched his companion Sir
Giles Eastcourt succumb to disease at Vitrinitza between
Amphissa and Naupaktos.
¹
Later that year, Vernon set sail from Greece to Turkey, losing all his field notes and letters when his boat was plundered along the way. Still his “insatiable desire of seeing” impelled him on, eventually to Persia, where, in September 1676,
²
at age forty, he met his end at the hands of some locals who liked his penknife.

Before his untimely murder, Vernon had earned the respect of some of the greatest thinkers of his day. In 1669 he was sent to Paris as secretary to
Ralph Montagu, ambassador extraordinary to Louis XIV, and became over the next three years an important intermediary in scholarly exchanges between French and English scientists. He came to know many members of the newly founded
Royal Society and kept its secretary,
Henry Oldenburg, informed of scientific developments on the Continent.
³
Vernon regularly corresponded with the orientalist
Edward Pococke, whom he may have known from his Christ Church days, and
with the astronomer
Edward Barnard and the mathematician
James Gregory, who expressed admiration for Vernon’s “great
knowledge in many sciences and languages.”
⁴
Vernon would be among the first to see the young
Isaac Newton’s influential treatise on
calculus, “De analysi per æquationes numero terminorum infinitas,” sent to him by the mathematician
John Collins.
⁵
Upon his return to England in 1672, Vernon himself was elected to the
Royal Society, his nomination made by none other than its secretary,
Henry Oldenburg.