The Parthenon Enigma (3 page)

Ongoing studies of reception, projection, and appropriation have exposed the ways in which aesthetic, ideological, and nationalist agendas have shaped interpretative frameworks over the past 250 years.
³⁴
Modern Western nostalgia for a link with the classical past, one that affirms the West’s own political and cultural aspirations, is now recognized as a controlling force in the construction of narratives that have long dominated our understanding of the monuments. An
awareness of an “other Acropolis” is emerging, one that seeks to build a multi-temporal and multisensory appreciation of the site and its buildings, including the Parthenon itself.
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Both of these forces—the discovery of new evidence and the development of new questions and methods through which it can be examined—are at work in forging the new paradigm for understanding the Parthenon that is proposed in this book.

The more we have discovered, the more enigmatic the Parthenon has come to seem, and the more inadequate appear the simplistic meanings ascribed to it by later cultures. As a vastly complex world of
cult ritual and spiritual intensity reveals itself, it still remains to be asked of the structure at the very heart of so much strange, dark practice, “What exactly is the Parthenon?”

Of all the physical remains surviving from the classical period, the Parthenon’s sculptured frieze is the largest and most detailed revelation of Athenian consciousness we have. This virtuosic triumph in the carving of marble, this moving portrayal of noble faces from the distant past, this “prayer in stone,” the largest, most elaborate narrative tableau the Athenians have left us, provides a critical and essential way in. Just what is represented by the nearly four hundred figures carved upon it is a question of the utmost importance.

Since the fifteenth century
A.D.
, the
Parthenon frieze has been viewed as a snapshot of fifth century
B.C.
Athenians, and, from the seventeenth century, they have been understood to be marching in their
Panathenaic, or all-
Athenian, procession, a key event within the annual festival
of Athena.
³⁶
But this reading places the frieze outside the standard conventions for Greek temple decoration, which regularly drew its subject matter not from contemporary reality but from myth. And so this astonishing ring of stone carving presents us with an enigma within that of the Parthenon itself.

In the pages that follow, I argue for a new interpretation of the frieze, one that stands in sharp contrast to what has become the orthodox view.
³⁷
My interpretation starts with religion, not politics, and through pattern recognition within the iconographic, textual, and
ritual evidence I propose an understanding that challenges how we see both the Parthenon and the people who built it.

I argue that we are looking not at contemporary Athenians marching in their annual Panathenaic procession but at a scene from the mythical past, one that lies at the very heart of what it means to be an Athenian. A tragic saga unfolds, revealing a legendary king and queen who, by demand of the Delphic oracle, are forced to make an excruciatingly painful choice to save Athens from ruin. This choice requires nothing less than the ultimate sacrifice. Based on the lives of the founding king and his family, the charter myth manifest on the Parthenon frieze suggests a far darker and more primitive outlook than later cultures and classicists have been prepared to face. This harrowing tale provides a critical keyhole into Athenian consciousness, one that directly challenges our own self-identifications with it.

The Parthenon thus leads us toward an understanding remote from the Renaissance and Enlightenment stereotypes of philosophers and rhetoricians that we have become accustomed to imagine. In fact, Athenians were a far more foreign people than most feel comfortable acknowledging today. Theirs was a spirit-saturated, anxious world dominated by an egocentric sense of themselves and an overwhelming urgency to keep things right with the gods. Much of each day was spent asking, thanking, and honoring gods in an attempt to keep balance, reciprocity, and harmony with the all-powerful beings who could play with human fate. After all, Athenians were continuously threatened by war, violence, and
death.

Spirit shadows, divinities, and heroes from the mythical past were a constant presence, fully inhabiting the landscape at every turn. Life was fragile, uncertain, never consistently happy, and full of surprises, except
for the looming certainty of
death.
³⁸
Calendars and the timing of
cult
rituals, religious
festivals,
athletic games, and theatrical
performances were set by long-established tradition and regulated by the observance of the movement of celestial bodies in the night sky. Cosmology, landscape, and tradition bound ancient Athenians together within an ordered cycle of religious observance, remembrance, and ritual practice.
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The profound, compulsive religiosity of the Athenians, an aspect that earned them a reputation for being among the most “
deisidaimoniacal,” or “spirit-fearing,” people in all of Greece, stands in contrast to our idealizing vision of a city inhabited by philosophical rationalists.
⁴⁰
That some Athenians might call out the name “Athena!” upon hearing the hoot of an owl, avoid stepping on gravestones or visiting women about to give birth, and kneel to pour oil on smooth stones at crossroads to avert their power may come as a surprise to the modern reader.
⁴¹
That he or she might stick pins in dolls fashioned from wood, clay, wax, or lead to place curses or erotic spells on rivals, legal adversaries, or love targets may be more surprising still.
⁴²
Perikles, an avowed rationalist, was not beyond tying a charmed amulet around his neck when he fell ill with the deadly plague.
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Riveting accounts of Athenians engaged in love
magic, the casting of spells, the inscribing of curses, and the consulting of oracles, dream interpreters, and bird-omen readers (remaining ever vigilant for signs that might portend the future) bring us closer to the experience of actual lives lived. Our own separation of the philosophical from the spiritual greatly obscures our comprehension of the Athenians as they were.

Notwithstanding dark practices, the Athenians aspired, above all, to be “the most beautiful and noble,”
to kalliston
, a concept that dominated their worldview. This ideal motivated them toward heightened excellence but, at the same time, reveals a certain unease, an apprehension of the possibility that fortunes can suffer sudden reversals. The conviction that they must be “the best” utterly governed the Athenians’ sense of their own being, absolutely and in relation to everyone else. It also profoundly informed their relations to one another.

ENGAGING WITH
a new paradigm, we aim for a deeper, more authentic realization of the
ancient Athenian experience of the monument than we’ve had for the past two hundred years, seeking an answer not only to
the question “What is the Parthenon?” but to the larger one: “Who were the
Athenians?” That question’s answer has also been rendered obscure and reductive by the effort of subsequent peoples to seize the ancient mantle. Above all else, the Parthenon—the epicenter of an urgent and spi
ritually charged civic life—is the key to how Athenian identity was shaped and sustained.

At the same time, the Parthenon was first and foremost a religious building, a temple among
temples. Its status as a masterpiece of Western art has long discouraged questions that have been asked of other temples built in places and at times that we know less well than those of Periklean Athens. In this book, I examine the Parthenon in relationship to sacred buildings on the Acropolis and elsewhere throughout the Greek world. I focus on foundation and
genealogical
succession myths that define local identity and on the signs and symbols that communicate a common origin for the Athenian citizenry. I look at local heroes and gods, at the relationship between their
tombs and temples, and at the rituals that built bridges between the two. Such monuments enabled citizens to come into direct contact with their ancestors, reminding them of the values upon which their communities were founded. For a culture without media, without a sacred text, the centrality of a great architectural work in forging this solidarity cannot be overstated. For the Athenians, the Parthenon was a very special nexus in which sacrifice, ritual,
memory, and, yes, democracy were closely intertwined.

We shall begin with the natural environment of the Acropolis, its cosmology, and the myth tradition that so shaped Athenian consciousness. We’ll consider the ways in which local myth grew out of local landscape, examining the inseparability of the Parthenon from its natural surroundings, memory structures, and belief systems that derive from its unique setting. We’ll go on to track the transformation of the Acropolis from Mycenaean citadel to sanctuary of
Athena, focusing on the shrines and temples that preceded the Parthenon and the cosmic myth narratives of their sculptural decoration. We then turn to the Persian devastation of the Acropolis in 480
B.C.
and the comprehensive Periklean rebuilding program that followed some thirty years later. Here, we’ll take a close and culminating look at the Parthenon sculptures, above all the frieze, which provides such a critical aperture into the core meaning of the building.

In later chapters, we shall examine the implications of this reading
for our understanding of the
Athenians themselves, through a better sense of their
rituals,
festivals, and games and the legacy of the Parthenon and Acropolis cults. Central in this is the relationship of dead heroes and heroines to rites of remembrance at the Pan
athenaic festival, the preeminent and defining celebration of Athenian identity, when the Athenians were, so to speak, most intensely, consciously, ecstatically Athenian. Finally, we’ll consider the Athenians’ earliest self-styled imitators, to take an oblique look at the Athenians through the eyes of those who observed them contemporaneously. Though hardly more immune to the sort of distorting reverence that shapes impressions of Athens in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the princes of Hellenistic
Pergamon were at least not so separated from their ideal by the alienating effect of two millennia. As we consider the legacy of the Parthenon in the invention
of heroic narratives and founding myths at the sanctuary of Athena Polias Nikephoros at Pergamon, we shall endeavor to keep close to the ancient experience, especially to the landscape that shaped local
memory and to the narratives of earth, water, and the heavens that dominated local sensibilities. In the evocative words of
Christopher Wickham, “
Geography, like grace, works through people.”
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This is especially true of the Athenians, who were first and foremost a people of sea and land, of trade and agriculture—in short, of Poseidon and Athena.

But let us start at the beginning, the scene upon which the great, mysterious, and ultimately defining building of the Athenians was created. Then, as now, location was the key to appreciating all real estate, and so let us first explore the Acropolis and its environment.

1

THE SACRED ROCK

Myth and the Power of Place

“
THE EASIEST THING
to do is to walk right in the stream; this way, we’ll also get our feet wet, which is very pleasant, especially at this hour and season,”
Phaidros suggests as he and
Sokrates pass beyond the city walls. He’d been in search of a quiet place on the banks of the
Ilissos River where he could memorize an oration he’d just heard delivered by the speech writer
Lysias. On his way out of Athens, Phaidros bumped into Sokrates, who was happy to join him to discuss the speech, one devoted to the nature of homoerotic love.
¹

Crossing the Ilissos, the two friends stop at a place by the foot of the
Ardettos Hill, near where the Panathenaic Stadium stands today. Sokrates is delighted with the spot and extols the loveliness of its natural surroundings.
Plato, who recounts this story in his
Phaidros
around 370
B.C.
, places on the lips of Sokrates what is perhaps the most vivid surviving description of the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of the classical Athenian landscape:

It really is a beautiful resting place. The plane tree is tall and very broad; the chaste-tree, high as it is, is wonderfully shady, and since it is in full bloom, the whole place is filled with its fragrance. From under the plane tree the loveliest spring runs with very cool water—
our feet can testify to that. The place appears to be dedicated to Acheloös and some of the
Nymphs, if we can judge from the statues [of girls,
korai
] and votive offerings [
agalmata
]. Feel the freshness of the air; how pretty and pleasant it is; how it echoes with the summery, sweet song of the cicadas’ chorus! The most exquisite thing of all, of course, is the grassy slope: it rises so gently that you can rest your head perfectly when you lie down on it.