The Parthenon Enigma (11 page)

Among those Hellenes, even in antiquity, Athenians were regarded as the most
deisidaimoniacal (intensely religious), a fact borne out by our brief tour through their
places of memory. Writing in the first half of the
fifth century
B.C.
,
Pindar described Athens as “daimonion,” that is, possessed or inhabited by
daimones
(“divine beings”). Five hundred years later,
Saint Paul was struck by the same quality, observing, “Men of Athens, I found you in all things daimon-fearing.”
¹⁶⁰
Thus, in the
Phaidros
, when
Sokrates and his student settle in along the banks of the Ilissos for an afternoon’s conversation, it is normal that their thoughts turn straightaway to the divine. They are simply behaving as good Athenians do. Indeed, as they finish their discussion, Phaidros asks, “Shouldn’t we offer up a
prayer to the local gods before we leave?” Sokrates obliges, uttering these words to the rustic gods of the woodlands:

O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wiser man rich.

As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him. Do we need anything else, Phaidros? I believe my prayer is enough for me.

Plato,
Phaidros
279b–c
¹⁶¹

The natural landscape brimmed with divine presence. The power of place is so intense that the slightest moment, or glimpse of an object, or word, can evoke the sacred.
Votive objects, most likely terra-cotta dolls dangling from the sheltering trees, trigger the
memory process and inspire the two friends to pray. Stories from the past, no doubt first heard by Sokrates and Phaidros as
children, come flooding back and subsume the present moment. “Isn’t it from somewhere near
this
stretch of the Ilissos that people say Boreas carried
Oreithyia away?” Phaidros asks. Narrative and earthly matter are incessantly directing the Athenians’ attention backward in time, and this overwhelming suggestiveness of myth and place would literally be carved in stone on the ultimate place of memory and sanctity, the Acropolis and its supreme temple.

An
awareness of the rich network of
places of memory embedded in its rivers and springs, marshes and woodlands, caves and summits, reveals to us the enormous impact of the Attic landscape on ancient sensibilities. The comprehension of divine presence in a human world, of
genealogical succession across great spans of time, and of heroic deeds that lie at the very foundation of cities—all this
knowledge was inseparable
from the local landscape, the earth and water, vegetation and wildlife, that bore witness to how things came to be as they are. But for the gods and their progeny, even the earth itself was not a large enough stage. For a full understanding of reality as Athenians perceived it, we must also turn our eyes skyward and consider the great arc of heaven under which their past unfolded.

2

BEFORE THE PARTHENON

Gods, Monsters, and the Cosmos

ON ANY CLEAR
night you can see it hanging in the far northern sky.
Drako, the “Dragon” or “Serpent,” is circumpolar, never rising or setting for most observers in the Northern Hemisphere. From around 3942 to 1793
B.C.
,
Thuban (Alpha Draconis) was the north polar star. The earth’s axial precession will bring it round again, and it will be the polestar once more sometime around
A.D.
21000.
¹

The Greeks believed that
Athena herself pitched Drako into the night sky. In the primordial battle between the gods and the Giants she heaved the monster with all her might into the heavens:

Some also say this Drako was thrown at Athena by the Giants, when she fought them. Athena, however, snatched its twisted form and hurled it to the stars, fixing it at the very pole of heaven. And so, to this day, it appears with twisted body, as if recently transported to the stars.

Pseudo-Hyginus,
Astronomica
2.3
²

From the northern cliffs of the Acropolis, one can see Drako even now, perpetually looming on the night horizon.

The Serpent still keeps vigil over a sanctuary that in antiquity teemed
with the imagery of snakes, sea
monsters, and serpent-tailed human composite figures (insert
this page
, top). This abundance of land and sea serpent
iconography, though largely unstudied, is absolutely vital to our understanding of the pre-classical Acropolis. Since the second quarter of the sixth century
B.C.
, limestone sculptures filling the pediments of the Archaic sanctuary buildings would depict coiled serpents ready to strike, a triple-viper-bodied monster pleading for mercy, and
Herakles battling both the fish-tailed Triton and the snake-headed Hydra. One cannot help but wonder whether this plethora of reptilian monsters washed into the Athenian imagination with the great
deluges of the primordial era. The receding waters might well have been thought to have beached all manner of fearsome monster in need of slaying.

In any case, by the time the Parthenon is built, or rebuilt, in the mid-fifth century
B.C.
, this iconography is still de rigueur, and so its west pediment bursts with serpentine images. At the left side of the gable a snake emerges from beside Kekrops, the first Attic king (
this page
), while, at center, serpent-tailed Triton supports Poseidon’s chariot and a sea monster serves as foothold for Poseidon’s sea nymph wife,
Amphitrite (insert
this page
, right). A Triton similarly holds up Athena’s chariot from beneath while, at her side, a serpent once wrapped round her olive tree. And within the Parthenon’s eastern chamber, a great golden snake was coiled within the shield of the Athena statue (insert
this page
, bottom).
Pausanias, who saw
Pheidias’s masterwork of gold and ivory, now long lost, tells us that this
drakon
is
Erichthonios himself, the progenitor of all Athenians.
³

We know from
Herodotos that as early as the second decade of the fifth century a real snake (
ophis
) was kept on the Acropolis to guard the Sacred Rock, and no doubt also as a reminder of the earthborn origins of the earliest Athenian kings.
⁴
The priestess of Athena fed this snake a monthly ration of honey cakes. As the Persians advanced on the city in 480
B.C.
, the priestess announced that the cake had been left uneaten. Taking this as a sign that the sacred snake had abandoned the Acropolis, she advised the Athenian people to do the same. Thus, the Athenians were persuaded to evacuate their city prior to the attack that destroyed the earlier iteration of the Parthenon, along with the Old Athena Temple and most everything else on the Acropolis.
Plutarch calls this act of the
drakon
an omen straight from heaven, signaling that Athena herself had fled.
⁵

In the last quarter of the fifth century, when the temple known as the
Erechtheion (after
Erechtheus) was built near the site of the ruins of the Old
Athena Temple, the sacred snake came to live there (
this page
and
this page
). This snake was, apparently, given full run of the space beneath the shrine. We hear of an
altar called “
Thyechoos,” believed to have stood on the north porch, just above where Poseidon’s trident struck the Acropolis rock. Though the etymology is much debated, one interpretation of “Thyechoos” has it meaning “Cake-Eating Snake”;
⁶
and a semicircular hole in the floor of the Erechtheion’s north porch might well have served as the chute for dropping honey cakes to the resident in the crypt beneath.
⁷

The cat
asterization of
Drako, the smashing of the Serpent giant into stars, was an enduring commemoration of Athena’s victory in the
Gigantomachy, or fight for cosmic hegemony between the gods of Olympos and the nether forces of Chaos. As a
constellation, visible for all eternity, Drako was a perpetual reminder of the battles that shaped the world as Athenians came to know it. Other
monsters, too, were likewise installed within the arc of heaven. The
Lernaean Hydra, an evil water serpent whose multiple heads grew back twice over once they were cut off, was catasterized following its
death at the hands of
Herakles. Having raised the beast deliberately to kill Herakles, the goddess Hera was so saddened at the Hydra’s death that she lovingly placed it in heaven’s dark blue vault, where it became known as the constellation by the same name. So, too, Hera catasterized a crab she sent to bite Herakles, creating the star group Cancer. But the firmament is not merely a rogues’ gallery; heroes and heroines find permanent homes there as well. King Erechtheus becomes Auriga, the charioteer, while his three daughters are transformed into the constellation Hyades through the intervention of Athena.
⁸
Star groups are thus the ultimate
places of memory, set up as eternal reminders of cataclysmic and epic sagas from the very distant past.

It is against this backdrop that we should understand an alternative tradition in which Athena destroys a giant named Aster, or “Star.” We are told that a festival “was held during the reign of Erichthonios because of the murder of Asterios the Giant.”
⁹
The sixth-century tyrant
Peisistratos is said to have transformed this local feast into the great festival known as the Panathenaia, and
Aristotle reports that the games associated with it were held “on account of the Giant Aster who was killed by Athena.”
¹⁰

In our age of electronic screens the night sky no longer commands such rapt attention. In antiquity, however, the heavens served as the night’s most captivating spectacle and the only thing that huge numbers of people could see simultaneously from far-flung locations. The heavenly bodies did not merely bear the names of heroes and monsters; they were those very beings transformed. And the movements of the stars were crucial to managing agriculture and navigation, as well as for the
festival
calendars of Greek sanctuaries.
¹¹
This, of course, was true throughout the ancient world as early as predynastic Egypt and fourth-millennium Sumer.

In recent years, a fresh focus on
archaeoastronomy has revitalized interest in the impact of Greek cosmology on ancient ritual practice.
¹²
Recognition of links between star groups, their periods of visibility, and the Athenian festival calendar has been made possible through the development of new software.
¹³
These programs enable us to call up the night sky on any given date in Greek antiquity and to know precisely which astronomical bodies were visible from which locations. It is even possible to embed the local horizon and so re-create the astronomy in the context of specific landscape features that, depending on their height, would have changed the visibility of the night sky.
¹⁴
Especially significant are the
heliacal rising, the one time in the year when a star or constellation appears above the horizon in the east just before sunrise, and the
acronychal rising, the time when a celestial body is seen to rise in the east a few minutes after sunset.
¹⁵
These events served as giant megaphones to alert observers that it was time to start plowing, to begin a sea voyage, to make one’s way toward the sanctuary for a festival, or to undertake some other purpose unthinkable outside its proper time.

In this chapter, we will attempt to turn out the lights and see the ancient night sky as it was. For the features of the earth tell only part of the story; we cannot fathom the consciousness that created the Parthenon without appreciating the collective
memory of cosmic battles, ancient star wars, and clashes with Giants and monsters. These primordial events furnish the big picture of Athenian
awareness, the key to the people’s existence and origins. One therefore looked to celestial movements not only for the proper timing of rituals commemorating the past’s defining events but also for guidance in any purpose, none more important than the development of sacred sites.

The sculptural decoration of the Acropolis buildings beginning in
the sixth century opens for us a world in which religious and cosmological narratives are tightly interwoven, one that feeds a larger appetite for
genealogical narrative already explored in
chapter 1
. The Athenian urge to tell the story of how things came to be finds its roots in the heavenly and
epic narratives of the ancient Near East. In Archaic Athens, just as in Sumer two millennia before,
succession myths gave sanction to the present state of affairs. By projecting into an invented and very remote past, one could attempt to explain and understand the present.
¹⁶