What Is the Biggest Enemy to the Parthenon
For the past 230 years or so, the story that was sculpted into the frieze of the Parthenon, the most influential building in the western world, has seemed adequately straight-forward, depicting a civic parade that honored — as did the Parthenon itself — the Greek goddess Athena.
But a shocking discovery involving mummies has called this meaning into question, archaeologist and NYU professor Joan Breton Connelly argues in her new volume "The Parthenon Enigma" (Knopf).
From what Connelly calls "a bang-up detective story," we've learned that the frieze tells a far more tragic tale.
In ancient Egypt, while the Male monarch Tuts of the world were buried in gold sarcophagi when they died, mere mortals were mummified with cheaper materials — recycled papyrus that held early drafts of written works, including transcribed texts from aboriginal Greece.
When a Greek scholar examined scraps from i of these mummies, he made an astounding discovery — nigh 250 lines of a lost play, "Erechtheus," by the great Greek playwright Euripides.
"These coffins end upwards existence our best source of lost Greek texts," says Connelly, who notes that while the sarcophagus containing the play was excavated in 1901, the technology to remove the papyrus without destroying it did not exist until the 1960s.
"Nobody knew how to separate these little papier-mâché strips without damaging the writing on them until so," she says, "when someone devised a method by which they steamed the mummy case in a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid and glycerin and requite it a steam bath so they could pull off these layers."
The play tells the tale of an early king of Athens, and how, "when the outset Barbarian invasion was surrounding the city, he was told past the Delphic oracle to sacrifice his youngest girl" in order to win the battle.
Connelly commencement learned of the play — especially challenging to read because it was in "fragmentary Greek," and "the papyrus strips were cutting into the shapes of falcon'southward wings" — in the 1990s and, over fourth dimension, had a revelation.
"[I realized that] Euripides was talking about what you run across in the middle of the Parthenon frieze," she says. "It's a family grouping — a mother, father and three girls — and they're preparing to sacrifice the littlest girl. It was a virgin cede, a night tale."
Greek tragedy
Still, Connelly'southward interpretation of this scene ultimately held a lighter, even positive bulletin, one that speaks to the influence of the Parthenon in the fields of architecture, government and the very nature of civilized lodge.
"It's a beautiful bulletin that I connect with democracy and how the Athenians were unlike from everyone else of their time," she says.
"The message they chose to put above the door of their finest temple, their cadre belief, was that no family, not even the royals, can put themselves above the mutual skillful. Information technology was a great embodiment of the notion of self-sacrifice. It's the spiritual backbone of Athenian democracy."
In helping the states sympathize the significance of the Parthenon, Connelly uses a metaphor we can deeply chronicle to, in that the building was a "replacement building" created later a monumental tragedy that occurred effectually 480 BC — what she considers an ancient Greek version of 9/11.
"The Western farsi Army did the unthinkable. They marched into Greece, went to the Acropolis and burned it — the most iconic building in the city — to the ground," says Connelly.
"The Athenians were in shock, because the Greeks had an unwritten rule of warfare that you ever left the religious spaces of your enemies sacred. You did not burn down temples or any holy precincts. But the Persians lived by unlike rules, and they came in and burned down what nosotros call the father of the Parthenon, the old Athenian temple."
Given that the Persians invaded on foot, the Greeks had ample alert and had evacuated to neighboring Salamis Island before the onslaught.
There, they watched smoke engulf the city equally their massive temple burned.
That consequence, Connelly contends, had a remarkable impact on culture moving forward.
"What's amazing well-nigh this story," she says, "is that the kids that were 15 or 16 at the time were the people who went on to build the Gilt Age of Greece — Pericles, Sophocles, all these large names that come down to us from politics, theater, philosophy. They were all teenagers, and this fabricated a behemothic impression on them."
Parable of a people
The Greeks left their temple in ruins for about thirty years, not out of fail, just as a reminder to the people of what had happened.
Decades afterward, the now-grown children who witnessed the destruction decided it was fourth dimension to rebuild. Led by Athenian ruler Pericles, they ready out to construct a monument to the swell goddess Athena that was more regal than any that had ever been and wound up with what Connelly calls in the book, "the biggest, nigh technically astonishing, ornately busy, and aesthetically compelling temple always known."
Past around 447 BC, the Athenians had finally defeated the Persian Ground forces. Their desire for this new building, then, was multi-faceted, equally they sought to "forge a new narrative for their city, one of Athenian triumph and supremacy," and to salute Athena in the near imperial manner imaginable to limited gratitude for their victory.
"Since more is more when information technology comes to prayer," Connelly writes, "the Parthenon had to be excessive in its splendor."
But also, Connelly sees the Parthenon — particularly the frieze — as the ultimate expression of the Athenian conventionalities in the power of democracy.
"The Parthenon is the culmination of the 50 years earlier information technology," she says, explaining that the Athenians had defeated a serial of ruling tyrants, and established a republic in 508 BC.
"This was a immature democracy that was really radical in terms of what other metropolis-states were doing at the time, in the way they dispersed power and governance across the citizen torso," she says. "Even poorer people could vote in the denizen assembly. It was actually incredible."
As well the 250 lines found on the papyrus, Euripides' play is lost to history. Simply Connelly'southward theory is that the story, of a family willing to sacrifice their daughter for the greater expert of Athens, was a parable and an idea accounted important enough to beautify the edifice.
The Parthenon, then, was the physical manifestation of the urban center's ethics.
"Information technology gives a visual expression of who the Athenians are — their self view," she says. "At the same time this is coming out visually, information technology's also coming out in theater, with the neat playwrights, and in philosophy, with the groovy philosophers. This is all a huge expression of what it meant to be Athenian [at that time]."
Architecture of liberty
The decade-and-a-one-half construction of the Parthenon, from 447-432 BC — which Connelly estimates price the equivalent of around $281 million today — as well served as a massive, long-running jobs program, employing hundreds or thousands of laborers.
"More a hundred m tons of marble needed to be quarried," she writes, "and seventy thousand blocks had to cut and transported. Too, roads had to be congenital for access to new quarries some 16 kilometers (10 miles) to the southwest."
The Parthenon was built "entirely of high-quality, fine-grained white marble from the metropolis's ain Mount Pentelikon," and benefited from the latest in Athenian naval technology, including "knowledge of lines, winches, blocks and pulleys."
The construction also led to the evolution of pioneering architectural techniques including the "advanced employ of optical refinements, which they raised to high art."
When viewed from a altitude, optical distortions could crusade the appearance of sagging at the centre of long horizontal lines.
"There are few, if any, direct lines in the Parthenon," Connelly writes. "An extraordinary correction [to the perceived sagging] was plant . . . by making all horizontal surfaces bow upwardly at center. For example, the steps on the flanks of the platform arch up 6.75 centimeters higher at their centers than at their ends." The temple's infamous columns too "taper up, so they are wider at the base than at the peak."
The influence of these great architectural accomplishments began to be felt in the 18th century, when fine art historian Johann Winckelmann "kickoff linked the emergence of individual liberty to the evolution of high classical way," arguing that "the rise and decline of artistic styles followed developments in the political sphere," and that "the pinnacle of Greek art coincided with the democratic form of government."
The side by side century put that theory to practise, with the proliferation of buildings incorporating Parthenonian style, including the US Treasury Building in Washington, the British Museum and, a century later, the US Supreme Court Building.
To Connelly, the adoption of this style was not just an aesthetic choice, but a philosophical one also in how they "reproduced classical architectural forms to communicate a set of values, implicitly aligning themselves with the flowering of democratic Athens."
"When we see this Doric architectural facade, the colonnade, it but screams stability, and security and that you tin can trust this," says Connelly.
Losing the marbles
Despite this appearance, though, the life of the Parthenon has not ever been defined past such stability. Fires swept through parts of the temple in both 195 BC and at some point in the third or quaternary century Advertisement, the latter destroying the structure'due south roof. And an attack by the Venetian army in 1687 caused a "trigger-happy explosion that sent its interior walls, nearly a dozen columns on its north and south flanks, and many of its decorative sculptures flying out in all directions."
From that day along, the Parthenon became known not as a temple, but equally a ruin.
The Parthenon was subject area to widespread plunder in the early 1800s when the Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce, the British ambassador to the Ottoman court at a time when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, "manag[ed] to cutting most of the sculptures from the temple, pack them up and ship them to England." Then, Connelly says, Elgin sold the sculptures to the British Museum.
While there has long been dispute about whether he had official permission to practise so, at that place is no dispute that at the time the Greeks were not in control of their own country and properties, as they were under Turkish occupation.
The Greeks have sought the return of the sculptures, commonly known as the Elgin Marbles, for some fourth dimension, and Connelly says that while they nonetheless take a ways to go, the last few decades have seen the tide plough in their direction.
"At that place'southward been a existent sea modify in cultural heritage issues over the last 30 years," she says. "Some people call up the marbles were illegally removed, and others would argue they were legally removed under the laws of its day. But nowadays, people say, 'Permit'southward put legality aside and talk about ideals. Allow'south talk about doing the right affair.'"
But whatsoever challenges have befallen the structure over fourth dimension, Connelly believes that its resilience, combined with changing interpretations of its pregnant, make the Parthenon an ever-increasing bellwether for the celebration of democracy.
"When we contemplate how we're unlike from that first democracy, we learn something virtually our republic itself and whether democracy can survive without the notion of sacrifice at the cadre," she says.
"The Parthenon is an icon of Western art, and the very symbol of republic itself."
It's a mirac . . . it's in the pigsty!
Bill Murray is most as renowned at this point for his part as a bon vivant – singing karaoke with random twenty-somethings and stealing French fries off stranger's dinner plates – as he is equally an role player.
Now it appears he has another career-in-waiting, that as a peak-notch archeologist.
Connelly runs a plan where people pay to accompany her on excavations, and she was surprised in 2006, on a dig off the coast of Republic of cyprus, when Murray was ane of her participants.
"It'south a great excavation that'due south been going on for 24 years on an island where there's a temple to Apollo," says Connelly. "Neb came out, and proved himself to be a brilliant excavator."
Murray, information technology turns out, has "a passionate involvement in the ancient world."
"He could have been a slap-up archeologist," she says. "Information technology's non too late, actually, because he has a really corking sense of stratigraphic excavation. He has a bully physicality, and when y'all're excavation, you need to be very agile to motion in the trenches."
Murray existence Murray, though, that physicality didn't utilise to but the work.
"He's such a great dancer," she says, "and was fifty-fifty teaching people Greek dancing at night."
After spending a week with him, Connelly found Murray to be the exact opposite of what y'all'd wait from an A-list star.
"He was one of the guys," she says. "He's the kind of guy who clears the table at nighttime and pitches in in the kitchen. When nosotros needed him, he worked. He's a smashing team player."
Source: https://nypost.com/2014/01/26/the-secret-history-of-the-parthenon/
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