The Parthenon Enigma (41 page)

Eugene Andrews taking squeezes of the dowel holes on the Parthenon’s east architrave, 1895. (illustration credit
ill.83
)

By late February 1896, Andrews stood in the library of the American School of Classical Studies on the slopes of
Mount Lykabettos, presenting the results of his labors to the assembled scholars. Draping his squeezes all about the library shelves, he moved from sheet to sheet, explaining his reconstruction of the lost letters, some 251 in all. Andrews had managed to decipher the entire inscription. But not everyone was pleased with the result, least of all Andrews himself.
³

It had long been assumed that the so-called Parthenon Inscription was somehow connected with Alexander the Great’s dedication of three hundred Persian shields on the Acropolis following his decisive victory at Granikos near Troy in 334
B.C.
⁴
This was the first of three major battles he had won against the formidable Persian army. At Granikos, Alexander routed the forces of
Arsames, the satrap of Cilicia, whose forces he’d stripped of their armor, sending it as booty to Athens for dedication at the Parthenon.
⁵
Alexander intended a bold and explicit reminder that the battle of Granikos had been won in revenge for the Persian destruction of the Acropolis in 480. It might have been more than 150 years in the making, but this was a dish as delicious as it was cold.

But Andrews’s decoding of the holes in the Parthenon’s architrave revealed a very different commemoration: praise not for mighty Alexander but, instead, for the most vile of Roman emperors, Nero.

The
Areopagus Council and Council of the Six Hundred and the People of Athens [honor] Emperor Greatest Nero Caesar Claudius Augustus Germanicus, son of a God, In the year of the General of the
Hoplites for the eighth time and also Superintendent [of Athens] and Lawgiver [was] Ti[berius] Claudius Novius Son of Philinos, in the year the Priestess [of Athena was] Paulleina, Kapito’s Daughter.
⁶

We know little of Nero’s interaction with the Athenians, but the Parthenon Inscription attests that in
A.D.
61/62 they granted him a series of unprecedented honors. First, the city’s highest award, a crown, was bestowed upon him by decree. Even more unusual, indeed
unique, was the distinction of immortalizing Nero’s honors with an inscription on the east façade of the Parthenon. The gilded letters followed no Athenian custom but rather the standard practice for texts on Roman triumphal arches and other monuments.
⁷
It was all the more remarkable recognition considering that the emperor, having spent more than a year in Greece, never even bothered to set foot in Athens itself. The accolades were, furthermore, premature. There had been no great victory that year, just the promise of peace on the eastern front. Such self-inflicted indignities were the wages of foreign domination, suffered first under the Macedonians and then under the Romans.

In the mid-first century
A.D.
, the
Parthians were the empire’s great eastern enemy. Rome had battled them for decades over control of
Armenia, a land of strategic importance to both sides. By
A.D.
58, a crisis erupted when the Armenian king installed his brother on the throne. The Romans invaded, removing the brother and crowning a Cappadocian prince who was their trusted ally. Parthia was quick to retaliate in a series of military campaigns that threatened to escalate into a great war. In
A.D.
61/62, however, a compromise was brokered under which the Romans agreed to let the brother rule Armenia provided he acknowledged that he owed his kingship to Nero himself. Resolution of the Armenian problem did usher in a welcome period of peace. It was this relatively inglorious diplomatic victory
of Nero’s that was celebrated in the Parthenon Inscription.

It is not known whether the shields that hung between the gilded bronze letters on the Parthenon were those dedicated by Alexander or ones taken later from fallen Parthians by Nero’s Roman army. The egomaniac Nero would certainly have enjoyed comparison with Alexander. In any event, the inscription revealed by Eugene Andrews’s careful work shows that nearly five hundred years after the construction of the Parthenon, the temple remained an ultimately prestigious victory monument. The Parthenon would ever be a symbol of triumph over eastern enemies: Greeks over Persians, Romans over Parthians, and, as we shall see in
chapter 8
, the
Attalids of
Pergamon over the
Gauls. But the tribute to Nero for his eastern victories would not last long on the Parthenon; the bronze letters of the inscription were swiftly removed from the architrave following Nero’s suicide in
A.D.
68. It was only the dowel holes left behind that would bear witness to what Andrews himself called “the
story of how a proud people, grown servile, did a shameful thing, and were sorry afterward.”
⁸

It is worth remembering that nearly ninety years before Alexander hung Persian shields on the Parthenon, Euripides placed these words on the lips of his chorus of old men in the
Erechtheus:

Let my spear lie idle for spiders to entangle in their webs; and may I dwell peacefully with grey old age, singing my songs, my grey head crowned with garlands, after hanging a Thracian shield upon Athena’s columned halls.

Euripides,
Erechtheus
F 369.2–5 Kannicht
⁹

The Thracian shield of which Euripides’s writes, seized from Eumolpos’s defeated army and hung on Athena’s “columned halls,” points to a tradition for displaying war booty on the Parthenon long before the time of Alexander the Great. The poet seems also to allude directly to the Parthenon’s north frieze, at the place where we see one man among the elders stopping to crown his “grey head with garlands” (
this page
). Euripides’s powerful imagery, envisioning spears left to gather cobwebs, references a time of peace following Erechtheus’s victory.

A century later,
Plutarch quotes these same lines from the
Erechtheus
when looking back on the
Peloponnesian War. He writes of the so-called Peace of Nikias, which brought a welcome, if fleeting, break in the fighting in 423/22
B.C
. During this one-year truce between Athens and Sparta, Plutarch tells us, one could hear choruses at Athens singing “Let my spear lie idle for spiders to entangle in their webs.”
¹⁰
Indeed, it is on the strength of Plutarch’s remarks that the first
performance of the
Erechtheus
has been dated to the City Dionysia of 422.

In fact, the practice of dedicating arms and armor taken from the battlefield is attested in sanctuaries all across the Greek world. Sacred space was everywhere endowed with a distinctly martial aura. After all, much of the asking and thanking that went on within holy precincts had to do with the desire for a positive outcome in combat. And this is because of the
centrality of war in Greek life. Whether with foreigners or fellow Greeks, it was an experience that touched every family; no household escaped the relentless, brutal, and ubiquitous culture of conflict and killing.
¹¹
Prayer and sacrifice offered in petition or gratitude for
victory were very personal as well as communal experiences, and within a fairly all-consuming cycle of death, loss, and remembrance, war and worship were tightly interwoven.

In this respect, as in so many others, Athens was determined to show itself supreme. All male citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty were eligible to fight, making for lifelong engagement with the spectrum of emotions that includes dread, terror, agony, and grief. Sons, brothers, fathers, grandfathers, cousins, and friends all fought side by side and fell together. The solidarity of genealogical
awareness so central to democracy was also a centripetal counterforce to the centrifugal energies of carnage. For much of the Archaic and classical periods, men went to war each “season,” that is, during the summer months between the time for planting and the harvest. In Plato’s
Laws
, the Cretan lawgiver
Kleinias remarks that for Greeks peace “is merely a name; yet, in truth, an undeclared war always exists by nature between every Greek city state.”
¹²
If the Athenians are relatively unrecognized for the obsessively religious folk they were, their martial character is likewise under-remarked in the familiar litany of attributes. But the two in fact go not only hand in hand but also a long way in illuminating the people who made the Parthenon, as well as what it represented to them.

MOSTLY, GREEKS FOUGHT
over border disputes. In the
Peloponnesian War, of course, they fought over much more.
¹³
Athens’s stunning rise to power and empire in the fifty years following the Persian sack filled the
Spartans with dread. The defensive alliance forged between Athens and the naval power Kerkyra in 433
B.C.
, and agreements signed with
Rhegium in southern Italy and
Leontini in Sicily shortly thereafter, created an Athenian monopoly of seaborne trade that threatened the transport of food supplies from Sicily to the Peloponnese. And so by 431
B.C.
, just a year after the stunning sculptures were set up within the pediments of the Parthenon, Athens and its allies entered into a war with Sparta, one that would last some twenty-seven years. This conflict would pit a peerless naval power against an invincible ground force in a historical iteration of the cosmic struggle between sea and land. Across the decades of slaughter, a terrible plague would strike Athens, bringing even more death and dying to the city’s households. For all the sublimity
of the Acropolis temples, the grand festivals, and the sacred rites still performed, gloom now filled the Athenian heart. The next battle, with the next death of a family member, was never far away.

Hoplite warfare only magnified the horrors. It required great phalanxes of foot soldiers, wielding spears and carrying heavy
shields, charging headlong at one another, and the result was piles and piles of corpses, some half a dozen deep. The goriest description is the one
Xenophon gives of the battle at Koroneia in 394
B.C.
: “the earth stained with blood, friend and foe lying dead side by side, shields smashed to pieces, spears broken asunder, daggers drawn from their sheaths, some on the ground, some in bodies, others still gripped by hand.”
¹⁴
Herodotos puts in the mouth of the Persian commander
Mardonios blood-chilling words about the Greek way of war: “When they have declared war on each other, they fight on the best and most level ground they can find, so that the winners go away with great losses; I will not say anything about the losers, for they are utterly destroyed.”
¹⁵

The grisly job of collecting, sorting, and identifying the dead is one that does not easily fade from
memory.
¹⁶
This physically and emotionally draining task befell the army too, the separating of enemy corpses from those of comrades, friends, and relatives, many beyond recognition. We hear that the
Spartans, anticipating great carnage, scratched their names on little bits of wood (
skytalis
), wrapping them around their left wrists as they left for battle against the Messenians.
¹⁷
The need for these proto–dog tags speaks to how disfiguring hoplite warfare was.

At the end of each combat season, Athenians set up inscribed casualty lists giving the name, patronymic, and tribe of each of the war dead.
Pausanias tells us that these lists included not just citizens but also allies, slaves, and foreign mercenaries who fought for Athens.
¹⁸
Cremated remains of the dead were publicly displayed for three days before burial in the public cemetery (
demosion sema
), said by Thucydides to be located in “the most beautiful suburb of the city.”
¹⁹
Excavations show that it started about 200 meters (656 feet) outside the Dipylon Gate and lined the broad avenue running from the Kerameikos to the Academy (
this page
).
²⁰
Along this route casualty lists, mass burials, and tomb monuments have been unearthed; indeed, in 1979 the family plot of
Lykourgos himself was discovered near the Academy’s entrance, confirming what we know from literary sources, that the patriot received
the highest honor of public burial.
²¹
And it was here in the
demosion sema
that Lykourgos’s idol
Perikles would have stood as he delivered his famous eulogy for the first to die in the
Peloponnesian War. Such
rituals of remembrance—funeral orations, grave monuments, epitaphs, casualty lists, and burial rites—all reflect an intense desire to demonstrate that the dead would never be forgotten. Importantly, these public commemorations reassured surviving warriors that should the worst come to pass, their corpses too would be retrieved, their ashes buried, their
memory kept alive, and their families made proud.
²²

The Athenian battlefield was perhaps the most truly democratic space in the democratic society, as men of all ages, equals in representing their tribes, came together in quick, decisive, and bloody resolution of disputes. The brief and brutal anguish of infantry combat has been said to have defined a man’s entire relationship with his family, community, and country.
²³
So, too, the extreme experience of rowing the great triremes of the
Athenian navy (some 170 oarsmen to a ship) brought rich and poor Athenians together on an utterly equal footing, in cramped and miserable galleys where they were acculturated firsthand to democratic values in their rawest state.
²⁴
Sharing long weeks of boredom and anticipation, interrupted by bursts of sheer terror in swift and gory battle, the men of Athens bonded fast with one another in their respective tribal brotherhoods. Fear and loss were as galvanizing as shared lineage. Thucydides speaks of this effect at Athens following the catastrophic defeat of the Sicilian expedition in 413
B.C.
: “They were overwhelmed by their calamity, and were in fear and consternation unutterable. The citizens and the city were alike distressed; they had lost a host of cavalry and hoplites and the flower of their youth, and there were none to replace them … Still they determined, so far as their situation allowed, not to give way. They would procure timber and money by whatever means they might, and build a navy. As befits a democracy, they were very amenable to discipline while their fright lasted.”
²⁵