The Parthenon Enigma (10 page)

AT THE VERY CORE
of Athenian solidarity and civic devotion was the
awareness of a shared past, and part of that awareness for some was special pride in being earthborn, or
gegenes
(from the Greek Ge or
Gaia, meaning “Earth,” and
genes
, meaning “born”).
Gegenes
denotes a literal springing up from the earth itself. The sense is slightly different
from another designation,
autochthonos
, from
autos
(“self”) and
chthon
(“earth”), which refers to the very first or oldest inhabitants of a region, a people that have always lived on the same land and that were not brought in from elsewhere.
¹²⁸
But even in antiquity many authors, including
Plato, use the two words interchangeably.
¹²⁹
In the funeral oration of his
Menexenus
, Athenians are praised for coming out of the soil, and Athens is acclaimed for “growing human beings.”
¹³⁰

According to certain accounts, the
first earthborn ruler of Attica was the primeval
Ogyges, whose name may reflect a connection with that of
Okeanos.
¹³¹
He is said to have been the first lord of Boiotia (named for his father, Boiotos) and king of
Thebes (named for his wife, Thebe).
¹³²
By other accounts, Ogyges is the first king of Athens and father of the Attic hero
Eleusis. During his rule, the earth suffered its first worldwide flood, the Ogygian
deluge named after him. Next came the
autochthon
Aktaios, who is sometimes identified as the first king of Attica. Indeed, it has been suggested that there may be a connection between the names Aktaios and Attica with an alternation that allows for a further connection with the similarly non-Greek “Ath-” form, seen in Athena and Athens.
¹³³
Aktaios’s daughter, the nymph Agraulos or Aglauros I (mother to Aglauros II, she of the sanctuary near the Acropolis
east cave), married the second
gegenes
, King Kekrops.
¹³⁴
In the visual arts, gegenic rulers are traditionally shown with snaky legs, signaling, among other things, their close connection to the earth, and Kekrops is no exception (
this page
).
¹³⁵
By most traditions Kekrops and Aglauros I had three daughters,
Herse, Aglauros II, and
Pandrosos, as well as a son,
Erysichthon. By another tradition they had a son called
Kranaos, said to be an
autochthon
, who succeeded as king. Fascinatingly, Kranaos is described as a Pelasgian. Following the reign of Kranaos there was yet another flood, the
deluge of
King Deukalion of Attica. And finally, we come to the gegenic
Erechtheus, or Erichthonios, who ruled Attica during the days when kings were human.
¹³⁶
Homer is the first to speak of him as earthborn and specifically as springing from the cultivated lands of Attica: “Great-hearted Erechtheus whom once Athena tended after the grain-giving fields had born him.”
¹³⁷
It was an appropriately auspicious start.

Erechtheus’s birth myth is singular in every respect. According to
Apollodoros, conception occurred when the god Hephaistos caught sight of the maiden Athena.
¹³⁸
He chased her, even as the virgin goddess
resisted his advances. Much excited, Hephaistos “spilled his seed” upon her leg. Disgusted, Athena wiped the semen from her thigh with a piece of wool and threw it upon the ground. There, the seed of Hephaistos impregnated Mother Earth. From this improbable union, the hero known as Erechtheus was conceived. All
Athenians were the progeny of this king, and while not sprung directly from the soil, they understood themselves to be descended from Mother Earth herself.
¹³⁹
No birth story could give the Athenians a stronger claim upon the land.

THE EARLIEST GENEALOGIES
of the Athenian people are richly inhabited by both earth and water divinities. But the origins of the goddess who would become the city’s patron are in water. By most accounts, Athena is said to have been raised on the banks of
Lake Tritonis or the river Triton, in Libya.
Aeschylus refers to the river Triton as Athena’s “natal stream” (
genethlios poros
).
¹⁴⁰
Versions of her birth myth are conflicting and many. By some accounts, she is the daughter (or foster daughter) of the sea god Triton, son of
Poseidon. By most, she is the daughter of
Zeus.
Hesiod tells us that Zeus gave birth to Athena on the banks of the river Triton. Apollodoros adds that Zeus then placed her under the care of Triton, who reared her alongside his own daughter,
Pallas.
Pausanias contradicts this version, identifying Athena as the daughter of Poseidon and a
nymph named Tritonis.
¹⁴¹
Thus, Athena’s epithet
Tritogeneia, which could mean “Triton-Born,” might point to her foster father, Triton, or to the lake/river beside which she was born, or to her nymph mother, who mated with Poseidon. Alternatively, the epithet could refer to the third day of the month on which Athena is said to have been born or even to “third born,” which might have some connection to the recurring triad of daughters born to Athenian kings.
Herodotos tells us that somewhere near Lake Tritonis Athena was drawn into a fight with her sibling Pallas. Athena killed her sister and claimed the name, thereby becoming
Pallas Athena.
¹⁴²
By other accounts, Pallas is a patronymic. Whatever the case, references to Lake Tritonis, the river Triton, and the epithet Tritogeneia persist across time and may point to the goddess’s Libyan origins, long before she came to Athens.

The most widely known account of Athena’s birth story has her spring from the head of Zeus as a fully formed warrior-goddess. Zeus
had heard a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his second child, and so, when the nymph
Metis, daughter of
Okeanos and
Tethys, conceived a baby, Zeus had to prevent her from giving birth. And so, naturally, he swallowed her whole.
¹⁴³
In time, Zeus suffered a terrible headache, and
Hephaistos, god of craft, came to the rescue. Taking up his ax, Hephaistos struck Zeus’s throbbing skull in an effort to bring relief. Out popped Athena in full armor, brandishing her spear. Born from a father rather than from a mother, Athena nonetheless inherited traits from her maternal side. Metis, whose very name means “Cunning” or “Wise Counsel,” endowed her daughter with such astuteness that she was ever known as the goddess of wisdom. The birth story of Athena is so crucial in the Athenian
awareness that it will take center stage on the
east pediment of the Parthenon. Celebrating the very moment she sprang into being only befits the “mother” of all Athenians.
¹⁴⁴

Despite watery origins, Athena comes to be more strongly identified with the earth, with the serpents that live in it and the olive trees that grow from it. Above all, she becomes a fierce advocate for the land of Attica. She is a shrewd architect of military strategies designed to protect it and a warrior goddess prepared to defend it with all her might.
¹⁴⁵
It is Athena’s wisdom, cunning, and craft, as well as her increasingly intimate ties to the land and therefore the people, that finally enable her to win Attica for her own.

Writing in the age of the Parthenon’s creation,
Herodotos tells the story of Athena’s victory in the contest for the patronage
of Athens, a foundation myth retold in greater detail by
Apollodoros four hundred years later.
¹⁴⁶
Zeus had announced that the Athenians’ primary devotions would go to whichever divinity could first provide a witnessed gift to the city. Toward that end,
Poseidon, going first, struck his trident into the Acropolis to unleash a gift of a sea spring.
¹⁴⁷
For her part, Athena planted an olive tree, an offering that promised the precious commodities of oil and wood but that required care and patience in its cultivation. The choice was one between the wild, untamed sea and olives that demand human attention and vigilance, the development of agriculture, and, indeed, civilization itself. Kekrops testified that he had witnessed Athena plant the olive tree first, and so the twelve gods whom Zeus appointed as arbiters judged Athena the winner. Infuriated at the outcome, Poseidon let loose a torrent, submerging Attica beneath the rising flood.

Poseidon’s retributive flooding of the
Thriasion Plain, the great flatland between Athens and
Eleusis, is not simply yet another inundation. We must view it alongside the age-old flood myths of the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew traditions.
¹⁴⁸
Just as these floods serve to mark an ultimate “before and after,” a transformed relationship between god and man, a point from which the present age can claim descent, so too the flooding of the Thriasion Plain, signaling the end of the first
Bronze Age, marks the dawn of Athenian
awareness. And more: Poseidon’s power to summon torrential waters, earth-splitting tremors, and era-ending cataclysms suggests an age of virtual chaos.
Athena, in contrast, represents the approach of a “thinking divinity”: civilized, orderly, intelligent, nourishing, cultivated, and urbane—everything the Athenians, somewhat despite themselves, will aspire to be.

All is not necessarily for the better, though. Just as in the ancient Near East, the great flood marks a decisive break between man’s protohistory, a spiritually informed age of antediluvian sages, and a later era in which spiritual information was less available and held by a jealous elite.
¹⁴⁹
So, too, in the
Works and Days
of Homer’s contemporary Hesiod we find a world getting, for the most part, progressively worse.
¹⁵⁰
Hesiod describes a Golden Age of peace and harmony during the rule of
Kronos, followed by a Silver Age during the reign of
Zeus. This, in turn, gives way to a Bronze Age, then a Second Bronze Age, or “Age of Heroes,” before the Iron Age of Hesiod’s own day, characterized as a time of toil and misery for men.
¹⁵¹
However much we may exalt the glories of Periklean Athens as constituting a golden age, their own view was that the best days were past.

The flood that Poseidon unleashed was by no means the first to consume Attica. The sources are inconsistent on just how many times Athens was inundated. We have already noted the first Greek flood, which occurred during the primordial era of
Ogyges and is usually associated with the flooding of the Kopaic basin in Boiotia to the northwest of Attica.
Plato placed this flood around 9500
B.C.
, though others have dated it much later, probably sometime in the fourth millennium.
¹⁵²
But there is a separate tradition for a local
Ogygian deluge in Attica itself.
Sextus Julius Africanus, writing in the third century
A.D.
, observes, “After Ogyges, on account of the great destruction caused by the flood, what is now called Attica remained without a king for 189 years, until the time of Kekrops.”
¹⁵³
It was this Ogygian deluge that was understood
by the Greeks to have brought an end to what
Hesiod called the Silver Age.

In his
Kritias
, Plato gives a vivid description of just how radically this first inundation changed the
topography of Athens, especially the Acropolis, whose summit was supposedly once vast, connecting the far-flung hills of Athens into one high plateau:

The Acropolis was different from now, since by now it has suffered from the effects of a single night of torrential rain which washed away the soil and left the Acropolis bare; and this appalling deluge—the third destruction by water before the one that took place in the time of Deukalion—was also accompanied by earthquakes. Before then, the Acropolis extended from the Eridanos to the Ilissos, included the
Pnyx, and ended, on the side opposite the Pnyx, with Lykabettos; and the entire Acropolis was covered in soil and was almost all level.

Plato,
Kritias
111e–112b
¹⁵⁴

The Ogygian deluge occurred three floods before the
deluge of
King Deukalion’s time.
¹⁵⁵
Now Deukalion was the son of the Titans
Promania and
Prometheus, and the great flood that took place in his reign was understood to have brought an end to the first
Bronze Age.
¹⁵⁶
Foreseeing this catastrophe, Prometheus advised his son to build a chest, to take his wife,
Pyrrha, with him, and to wait out the rising waters within the safety of its walls. For nine days and nights Deukalion and Pyrrha floated until the storm subsided. When the waters receded, they founded a new race of men. The debt is clearly to Mesopotamian and later myths in which a “
flood hero” survives the deluge and goes on to become progenitor of a new line.
¹⁵⁷
From
Ziusudra in the
Eridu Genesis
, to
Atrahasis of the
Epic of Atrahasis
, to
Utnapishtim of
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, to
Noah of the Bible’s
book of Genesis, we see the same story of a sole survivor who builds a chest/boat/ark to wait out the waters and start over.
¹⁵⁸
Deukalion and Pyrrha start over in a big way. They give birth to three daughters.
¹⁵⁹
And they give birth to a son,
Hellen, who gives his name to a new nation called Hellas and a new people called
Hellenes.