Parthenon Frieze

 

 

 

The Parthenon in Athens is crowned with a frieze depicting ancient conflicts as well as a procession with its horses and horsemen, youths and elders, men and women, and animals. This procession is said to be the Great Panathenaia which occurred, like the Olympics, every four years; it was a festival of athletic games and poetry and music competitions culminating at the temple of Athena, goddess of weaving, war, and wisdom where her statue was then presented with a new peplos, a robe woven by the women of Athens. There are no ancient explanations for this frieze; the Great Panathenaia suggestion was made by Englishmen James Stuart (an artist) and Nicholas Revett (an amateur architect) in the late 1700s. Interestingly, should this be a depiction of contemporary 5th Century Greece, it would be rare; Greek temple art usually shows history and myth. The rest of the sculptures on the Parthenon, the pediments and metopes, depict myths from Athens’s founding and prehistory, from the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the city’s patronage to the battle of the Lapiths against the Centaurs. The Great Panathenaia, a contemporary topic for the time, would be a most unusual artistic subject.

Enter Joan Breton Connelly, an American classical archaeologist and Professor of Classics and Art History at New York University. In her book, "The Parthenon Enigma," she  offers a completely different and provocative version of the frieze.

She focuses on the unusual story of Erechtheus, an early Athenian king, King Erechtheus. An ancient story, he was written about by Herodotus and in a lost play by Euripides. Herodotus states that Erechtheus and Athena were worshiped jointly in Athens; he is the king commemorated in the Erechtheion, the small, exquisite temple that sits opposite the Parthenon on the north side of the Acropolis, distinguished by its famous portico of caryatid maidens. New passages of Euripides’ lost play on the subject have been discovered in wrappings from a third-century B.C. Egyptian mummy. Euripides’ play had long been known only from quotations of other ancient authors but this find doubled the numbered of recovered lines from the lost play.

The myth is basically this: King Erechtheus sprang directly from the Attic earth. He had a wife, Praxithea, and three daughters. (The Athenian royal houses ran to daughters.) When Eumolpus, king of nearby Eleusis, threatened a siege of the city, King Erechtheus received a terrible message from oracle at Delphi: He must sacrifice one of his daughters to Athena to save the city. The queen, rather than cringing in horror at the idea, embraced it as patriotic duty. (Praxithea, whose name means “she who acts for the goddess,” delivers a rousing speech in the Euripides play.) Meanwhile, the three girls have vowed that if one dies, they all will—so the two who are not chosen insist either on being sacrificed as well or on killing themselves, possibly by jumping from the Acropolis. Athena then declares that the heroic girls are to be buried in a single tomb and that there should be a sanctuary and sacred rites established in their honor. Erechtheus, who dies in the battle, will have a tomb on the Acropolis and a sacred precinct. Athena makes Queen Praxithea her priestess, and Praxithea will be in charge of a single altar to serve both shrines. 

Connelly connects the frieze as a visual memento of the invisible past—the trauma of the Persian invasion, for instance—and the centrality of the Erechtheus myth to Athens’s sense of itself, the willingness in a democracy to give one life for the good of the many, and for even the city’s leadership to make the supreme sacrifice.

(from an article by A.E. Stallings)