The Parthenon Enigma (61 page)

In great pain, Telephos consults an oracle: only the weapon that inflicted the wound, he learns, can heal it. The south frieze shows his journey back to the Greek mainland in search of the spear that pierced him. He is received at
Agamemnon’s palace in Argos as a visiting dignitary. Nonetheless, when the king refuses to help find the spear, Telephos explodes with rage and grabs his infant son,
Orestes. The frieze shows Telephos holding the boy upside down, about to kill him upon Agamemnon’s household altar, until, finally, Chiron’s spear is found. Filings from its tip are rubbed into the wounded foot and it heals.

We next see Telephos returning to Pergamon to become king and establish a cult of Dionysos. Thus is the angry god appeased, his vendetta against the royal house ended. It is a version of what we have observed at Athens, where
Poseidon was in constant conflict with Athena. Angered by the rejection of his gift of a sea spring, the god unleashed earthquakes and floods.
Erechtheus, however, does not make timely amends. In the play named for him, Euripides has Poseidon create a great chasm that swallows the king into its depths. It is only when Queen Praxithea establishes a new cult of
Poseidon-Erechtheus on the Acropolis that bygones are bygones.

The worship of Athena Polias remains the primary cult for both Athens and Pergamon. But secondary cults are welcomed in both cities to assuage divine hurt feelings. Queen Praxithea and Queen Auge serve analogous roles as priestesses of the primary cults of Athena Polias. King Erechtheus and King Telephos hold special roles as founders of new, secondary cults: that of Poseidon-Erechtheus and that of Dionysos Kathegemon, the “God Who Leads.”

The southern wing of the Telephos frieze shows the final chapter in
Telephos’s story. Reclining on a couch, he is now consecrated the founding hero of Pergamon, his recumbent pose straight from established formulas for showing Herakles after the completion of his labors. Like father, like son, is the unmistakable message. The founder at last takes his ease, having traveled so far and accomplished so much, having won for his people the world to which they are now heirs.

His final resting place also speaks to following received models carefully. Deep within the foundations of the Pergamon Altar are the remains of an apsidal building made of andesite blocks dating to the time of Attalos I.
⁷⁶
The builders of the altar took evident care to respect this subterranean construction. It appears to describe a tomb-shrine on the model of those we have seen for Pelops at Olympia, Opheltes at Nemea, Melikertes-Palaimon at Isthmia, Hyakinthos at
Amyklai, and Erechtheus and his daughters at Athens. These founders all received cult worship at the places where they were believed to have been buried. And so the apsidal structure beneath the Pergamon Altar is likely to have been just such a hero shrine, for none other than the city’s forefather, Telephos.
⁷⁷
The claim proved persuasive:
Pausanias speaks of those who make sacrifices to Telephos at Pergamon and remarks that all
hymns sung within the local Asklepieion began with mention of Telephos’s name.
⁷⁸
He further states that the tomb of Auge could still be seen at Pergamon, a mound of earth surrounded by a basement of stone.
⁷⁹
If the example of Athens applied, mother and son must have received joint worship on the Pergamene citadel.

The Telephos story not only enabled the Attalid kings to integrate themselves into Athenian
genealogy and the great boundary events of the Amazonomachy and Trojan War. It allowed them to acknowledge the fact (or contradiction, at least in relation to their being Athenian) of their Asiatic roots as well. The name Telephos is, actually, Hittite in origin, from Telepinu, which means “Disappearing God.”
⁸⁰
It certainly befits one who wanders from the mountains of Arkadia to the shores of Mysia, to
Agamemnon’s palace in Argos, and back to Mysia. Telephos’s marriage to the Amazon queen
Hiera and his fighting beside her against the Greeks has a similar effect, squaring the circle of being at once Athenian and Asiatic, admitting the Attalid dynasty to the mythic narratives common to all mainland Greeks while at the same time locating their origins in Anatolia. The exploits of Telephos furthermore establish military prowess and piety as two of the greatest hallmarks of Attalid rule.
With no great “mother city” or past to call their own, the Attalid kings could have done much worse in a century and a half.

In their studied self-fashioning, the Attalids went beyond myth and mortar to raise the “Athens of the East.” At the very summit of their citadel lies a building that has been identified as a library, to which they brought all the learning of the ancient world home.
⁸¹
In the center of the reading room stood a copy of
Pheidias’s statue of Athena Parthenos, carved in marble imported all the way from Mount
Pentelikon.
⁸²
Standing just over 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) tall, roughly a fourth of the size of the original, this local copy served to remind the city of its aspirations, calling all Pergamenes to the Athenian ideal, the virtue that Plato describes as
to kalliston
, all that is most noble.

The Attalids went so far as to organize their own Panathenaic festival. The feast is mentioned in a letter sent by Eumenes I to the people of Pergamon, dated around 260–245
B.C.
⁸³
The king recommends that at the next Panathenaia the people should award gold crowns to five generals (strategoi) who have performed their duties in an exemplary manner. A series of bronze festival coins minted by the Pergamene sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros in the second century
B.C.
commemorated the occasion.
⁸⁴
These show the head of Athena on the obverse and, on the reverse, an inscription:
ATHENA NIKEPHOROU
, “of Athena Who Brings Victory.” Beside the inscription, we find, of course, the little owl.

The emulation of Athens may have been nowhere as pervasive or intense as at Pergamon, but the practice continued well beyond the twilight of that kingdom, into the Roman imperial period. At the very center of the Athenian Agora, one sees today three great stone figures rising up from their pilasters. These are the
Tritones, mythical descendants of the sea serpent Triton, slain by Herakles: human from the waist up, seaweed sprouting from just below their hips, coiling fish-tailed bodies from the waist down. Their torsos show the flamboyant musculature observed in the akroteria Tritones from the Pergamon Altar and, indeed, in male figures all across its Gigantomachy frieze. But the Agora Tritones take their immediate inspiration from a model much closer to home: the figure of Poseidon from the Parthenon’s west pediment (insert
this page
, right).

Shown subjugated as captives, bound and in pain, the three figures are, in fact, all that is left of a series of Tritones and Giants that once decorated a stoa attached to the façade of a music hall. But this sculpture is not the handiwork of Athenians or even admiring Pergamene
craftsmen. The covered auditorium (
odeion
) was built by the Roman general Agrippa in the first century
B.C.
After its collapse during the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius in the mid-second century it was rebuilt as a lecture hall.
⁸⁵
The Tritones date to this later phase.

The pilasters supporting the Tritones are decorated with sculptured relief panels showing quintessential symbols of Athena: the olive tree and sacred snake.
⁸⁶
And these same symbols can be seen in the Provincial Forum at Emerita Augusta, modern Mérida, in Spain. The marketplace, set up in about
A.D.
50, was decorated with sculptured images of the Erechtheion karyatids and
Medousa heads, drawn from the classical Athenian repertoire. One marble relief shows an olive tree, the sacred snake, and three birds.
⁸⁷
The Roman legions that accompanied Augustus and Agrippa to Athens were clearly impressed with the city’s monuments and aspired to re-create them back in their home cities, as far afield as Spain, if not quite with an ardor to rival Pergamon. Of course, Athenian models were regularly copied at Rome itself. Mark the Erechtheion karyatids reproduced in the Forum of Augustus and at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli.
⁸⁸

Likewise, Roman provincial coinage placed the image of the Athenian Acropolis in the hands of individuals far from Athens. Issued around
A.D.
120–150, the bronze coins show the cave of Pan on the north slope of the Acropolis, the staircase leading up to the Propylaia, a gabled temple that represents the Erechtheion, and, towering above all, the colossal statue of the
Bronze Athena.
⁸⁹
If only by scale of production, the Roman Empire propagated images of Athens farther and wider than any force before or since. Still, there is more to appropriating a culture than copying its
iconography or even insinuating oneself in its mythic foundations.

THE ATTALID KINGS
did much more than re-create the city of their “college days.” In a
Platonic sense, they did not imitate mere appearance, as Plato said that artists did, but rather they looked to the reality of the object they copied, as carpenters contemplated the
idea
of a couch or table when building a new one. In his rejection of mimesis in book 10 of the
Republic
, Plato derides poets, who, as captives to their own inspiration, merely imitate that which appeals to the senses, never arriving at truth, the province of philosophers.
⁹⁰
The Attalid princes, having
studied at Athens, were not about to make such a mistake. Far from creating a copy that was the sum of its copied parts, they seem to have visualized an
idea
that was Athens and modeled their city accordingly. Beyond amassing more than 200,000 scrolls for their great library, or importing Pentelic marble for their replica of Athena Parthenos, the Pergamenes wanted to re-create the very spirit of the ideal society they found in the Athenian model. Toward this end they adopted certain codes of behavior, including impeccable military discipline and a desire for harmonious transfer of power at times of leadership transition. The Attalid succession, the process by which Attalos I assured that his sons would follow him in turn without strife, is in its orderliness a model of Athenian
politeia
and an exception in the world of Hellenistic monarchies, riddled as they were with intrigue and murder.

And so the princes of Pergamon fulfilled the imitation of Athens that
Perikles had envisioned in his famous funeral oration nearly three hundred years earlier: “We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them.”
⁹¹

Of course, there is an element of Athenian experience of which Pergamon, a monarchy, like Rome, an empire, could not avail itself. What the Athenians’ greatest temple, especially the frieze encircling it, most passionately attests is the secret to Athenian democracy: the idea that no life was above any other or the
common good. Recognition of the sacrifice of Erechtheus’s daughter as the subject matter of the frieze unveils a rich system of references manifesting the paramount importance of group solidarity at Athens, especially in times of crisis. It was this particular sense of community, of belonging and its privileges, that made Athenian
citizenship so enviable. More than anything else, this was the essence of the enduring Athenian identity, which bound generation after generation to it. And while this solidarity did not lead inevitably to democracy, that utterly new social arrangement could not have worked in Athens without it.

We must not lose sight of the fact that the Parthenon celebrates
demokratia
in ancient Athenian terms, not those of our time. Where democracies today pride themselves on the separation of
religion from the state, no such distinction could have existed in ancient Athens, where myth, religion, and
politeia
interwove seamlessly. And while modern democracy claims its superiority to other systems on the basis of being a guarantor of individual rights and freedoms, in the classical version
emphasis fell solidly on the
common good and the sacrifice of individual interests for its sake.

Not that the individual, apart from the truly heroic, counted for much elsewhere in the Greek world, certainly not in militarist
Sparta, where it was the good of the polis itself, rather than the collective well-being of the people, that mattered. The idea of a sacred responsibility to one’s fellows, of willing self-sacrifice for the common good, was, like democracy, an utterly revolutionary notion in the fifth century
B.C.
The Athenians had in effect revised the concept of heroism: the Homeric hero fought and died to assert his own individual prowess and so that his name might gloriously outlive those of all others. The Athenian hero, in contrast, fought and died to save his fellow citizens. And they would have done likewise for him. The common good took precedence over self-interest during civil crises as well, during, for instance, the plague of 430
B.C.
, when, rather than fleeing the city, many Athenians stayed behind to nurse the sick, risking their own lives.
⁹²

In Euripides’s
Erechtheus
, Queen
Praxithea gives utterance, as we have seen, to these noble but strange ideas—so strange Lykourgos fears they are in danger of being forgotten by the time he quotes them in
Against Leokrates:

The city as a whole has one name but many dwell in it. Is it right for me to destroy all these when it is possible for me to give one child to die on behalf of all?