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)
