David's Sling. Victoria C. Gardner Coates
Sparta, breaking into full-scale war in 431 and putting an end to the building projects.
Fortunately, the crown jewel in Pericles’ complex had already been completed by this time. The space atop the Acropolis was dominated by a new temple to Athena, which came to be known as the Parthenon, taking its name from her title Athena Parthenos (virgin). Rectangular stone temples surrounded by columns standing on a platform of steps had a long tradition in the Greek world, and had been constructed as far afield as Sicily. The Parthenon had all the customary elements of this temple type, but on a larger scale and with an unprecedented quantity and quality of decoration.
Phidias had employed two engineer-architects, Ictinus and Callicrates, to oversee the building process. He planned to put a second statue of Athena even taller than the bronze Athena Promachos inside the temple, which was also to house whatever was left of the Delian treasury, so its proportions threatened to become bulky. Ictinus and Callicrates approached the project with surgical precision, adjusting their measurements by the millimeter to trick the eye into believing this huge masonry structure was light and elegant.1515
The design of the Parthenon was so complex that Ictinus wrote a mathematical treatise on its intricacies, which is now lost.
Reconstruction of the Acropolis with the Propylaea, Athena Promachos, and Parthenon.
Greek temples traditionally had peaked roofs, creating a triangular space known as a pediment above the horizontal shelf on top of the columns. Pediments were logical places for sculptural decoration, being highly visible. They were also awkward spaces; fitting a composition into a triangle was always a challenge. Earlier artists had simply made figures on a smaller scale in the sharp angles, but Phidias wanted to craft a design that would appear more natural, with all figures on the same scale.
The east pediment of the Parthenon, facing out toward the city, showed Athena’s miraculous birth. Her mother, Metis, the primordial goddess of wisdom, had been one of Zeus’s many paramours. When she became pregnant there was a dire prophecy that if the baby was a girl, she would be a goddess and a close ally of Zeus, but if a boy, he might one day dethrone his father. Zeus attempted to solve the problem by swallowing Metis whole. Nine months later, he suffered a headache so severe that he called for Hephæstus, the god of fire and the forge, and demanded that he cut open his head with an axe. Hephæstus obliged. To the amazement of all, Athena emerged full-grown and armed to the hilt. Metis was not heard from again.
Plan of the Parthenon.
This blessed event, according to legend, had occurred at dawn. Phidias envisioned it taking place in a sort of communal bedroom as the Olympian gods and goddesses were just starting up from their couches. The chariot of the sun was peeping out of the left-hand corner, while the tired horses of the moon goddess, Selene, descended into the right. The rest of the pediment was crowded with figures of the Olympians reclining in various states of undress. Dionysus, for example, was naked. For the goddesses like Hera and Aphrodite, less prudish than Athena, Phidias had been able to indulge his taste for clinging, diaphanous drapery. While they were still clothed, their voluptuous forms were so clearly revealed that everyone assumed he had used models covered in wet linen.
On the west pediment, Phidias had carved the foundation myth of Athens, the scene of the contest between Athena and Poseidon for control of the city. All Athenians coming up through the Propylæa toward the Parthenon would be reminded both of their special relationship with their protectress, and of how their ancestors had participated in deciding their city’s future.1616
This pediment was severely damaged in the seventeenth century and is almost impossible to reconstruct.
Moving around the temple, visitors would have found seventy-eight rectangular stone reliefs known as metopes above the exterior colonnade. Rather like a comic strip, the metopes were individual scenes framed by decorative moldings called triglyphs. The metopes told the story, over and over, of how very superior the Greeks were to all other peoples. Fourteen metopes under the east pediment showed the triumph of the Olympians over the giants, the original victory of reason over brute force. On the long south side of the temple, thirty-two metopes were devoted to the most ancient Greeks, known as Lapiths, beating back the half-man, half-horse centaurs. Under the west pediment, the Greeks defeated the Amazons, the race of ferocious female warriors whose queen, Antiope, married the Athenian hero Theseus – but who had also, like the Persians, attacked the Acropolis and been repulsed. On the north side, the final thirty-two metopes showed the destruction of Troy at the hands of the Greeks, the subject of the ancient poem Iliupersis, which picked up where Homer’s Iliad left off. In all four of these cycles, the Greeks battled intently but impassively to dispatch the fierce and monstrous foes that threatened their civilization.
Reconstruction of the west pediment, Parthenon.
Phidias, detail of goddesses, east pediment, Parthenon.
The Parthenon was surrounded by a full ring of columns, and visitors who mounted the steps of the platform could have circumnavigated the temple again in the shade and enjoyed yet more relief sculpture above the interior columns. Here there was a continuous frieze running 524 feet around the entire building. Instead of mythological scenes, like those ornamenting the exterior of the Parthenon, this frieze depicted the defining civic ritual of Athens.
Phidias, metope with Lapith battling a centaur, Parthenon.
The Olympic Games, founded in 776 BC and continued until 394 AD, were the most famous and long-running of the ancient Greek athletic festivals, but most cities had a local version of their own. A festival at Athens was first recorded in 566 BC (although the Athenians claimed it originated seven centuries before the Olympics). It was celebrated every year, and every four years there was a larger event, known as the Great Panathenaic Festival. This production included athletic contests, notably the mile-long dash from the port of Piraeus to the city of Athens by torchlight, as well as other traditional sports at the Panathenaic Stadium.1717 There were also music and poetry competitions. Capping off eight days of activities was the delivery of a new peplos to robe the ancient olivewood statue of Athena that was housed on the Acropolis.1818
The Panathenaic Stadium still exists; it hosted the 2004 Olympiad.
According to legend, this rather homely but extremely venerable statue had fallen out of the sky shortly after the foundation of Athens. It was evacuated from Athens during the Persian invasion, and thus survived the sack of the city.
This procession was an exuberant affair that ran through the city and ascended the Acropolis to the sacred space outside the Parthenon. Participants included maidens carrying the peplos, a hundred oxen destined to be sacrificed to Athena, the triumphant athletes and the cream of Athenian youth on horseback. Once the crowd arrived on the Acropolis there was a massive feast that went on all night.
Phidias, detail of north frieze with riders preparing to form a procession, Parthenon.
The inner frieze of the Parthenon showed an idealized image of this procession, the bulk of which was devoted to the Athenian youths. All handsome, chiseled, and dressed only in cloaks, they handled their steeds with the same preternatural calm that characterized the heroes on the metopes. The frieze