The Parthenon Enigma (24 page)

I will speak first of our ancestors, for it is right and seemly that now, when we are lamenting the dead, a tribute should be paid to their
memory. There has never been a time when they did not inhabit this land, which by their valour they have handed down from generation to generation, and we have received from them a free state.

Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War
2.36.1
¹⁰⁰

Perikles goes on to praise Athens as the best city in all of Greece, attributing its preeminence to its status as a global center.
Panhellenism had long been a feature of aristocratic life, but Athens (and Perikles) had awakened all citizens, rich and poor alike, to its virtues. Free trade and a vibrant network of international partners benefited all Athenians:

Because of the greatness of our city, the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own.

Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War
2.38.2
¹⁰¹

Perikles takes this opportunity to respond to critics of his lavish building program, no doubt gesturing toward his gleaming Acropolis overhead. Yes, imperialism had created the wealth necessary to bring together the genius of gifted artists, architects, and artisans and to pay for the sumptuous materials. But this effort made Athens beautiful for all citizens—both the elite and the masses. Perikles makes no excuses for the desire to be surrounded by beautiful things; indeed, with a true populist’s instinct, he deems it shameful
not
to strive against poverty.

For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it.

Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War
2.40
¹⁰²

Perikles ends his oration by extolling the superiority of Athenians, who, alone among the Greeks, created a society that others wished to imitate:

We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them.

…

I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian
in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace.

Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War
2.37.1 and 2.41.1
¹⁰³

Of course, as has often been noted, Perikles was speaking only of free male citizens, who gained access to the privileges of democracy as their birthright. All citizens were equal, but others were not equal to them before the law: women, resident aliens, and slaves were excluded. And those living under the yoke of Athenian imperialism would have quarreled with this rosy picture. But even if the Athenian self-understanding was inflated and (somewhat) self-deceiving, its virtues were nevertheless unique. “The power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace”: it was something the citizens of no other city or nation could claim. But like any good ever imagined, it would find its way to wretched excess.

Perikles would be dead within two years but not before suffering the loss of his sister and both his legitimate sons,
Xanthippos and
Paralos, to the epidemic that swept Athens in three deadly waves between 430 and 426
B.C.
The plague arrived in the second year of the Peloponnesian War and overwhelmed the densely populated city, its masses huddled behind the defensive walls. One Athenian in three perished. The proud Perikles was reduced to going before the citizen assembly to plead for an exception to the
citizenship law he himself put forth with great fanfare twenty years earlier. In what some critics saw as “punishment for his haughtiness and arrogance,” Perikles begged his people to accept the lad known as
Perikles the Younger, the leader’s illegitimate son by his foreign mistress,
Aspasia, as an Athenian citizen and his legitimate heir. This they did for him. But the younger Perikles would later know the full wrath of the democracy in a way his father never had. Along with five other strategoi, he was to be executed for his part in the failure to rescue a group of shipwrecked Athenians following the
Battle of Arginusae (islands just to the east of Lesbos) in 406
B.C.

A HUNDRED YEARS ON
, Athenian democracy was still alive, but the moment that produced the Parthenon was fast being eclipsed. As an indication of how things had changed, let us consider the story of the orator
Lykourgos and his condemnation of his fellow Athenian
Leokrates, a drama that played out in the law courts of late classical Athens.

Lykourgos was among the most visible and upstanding of Athenians during the third quarter of the fourth century. A former pupil of
Plato’s, he came to power in 338
B.C.
as steward of the financial administration, controlling the Athenian treasuries and wielding great power for the next twelve years. Lykourgos swiftly balanced the state budget by raising taxes on cargo passing through the port of
Piraeus, increasing rents on leases of the silver mines at
Laureion, and confiscating the assets of convicted criminals. He used his influence to persuade the wealthiest citizens to make large voluntary contributions (liturgies) to the state under a system known as
euergetism (“good works”).

And he did not neglect the legacy of
Perikles, undertaking his own vast building program to refurbish fifth-century monuments that had fallen into disrepair. Under Lykourgos, Athens flourished financially, commercially, legislatively, and architecturally; traditional cults were strengthened and new gods introduced.
¹⁰⁴
Lykourgos constructed a new temple of
Apollo Patroos (the “Fatherly”) in the heart of the Agora. He rebuilt, entirely of Pentelic marble, the Panathenaic stadium above the banks of the Ilissos, and the
Theater of Dionysos on the
south slope of the Acropolis, expanding it to seat some seventeen thousand viewers.
¹⁰⁵
Just to the north of the Acropolis, Lykourgos refurbished the
City
Eleusinion and to the west, the
Pnyx Hill, the meeting place of the citizen assembly. Beyond the city walls, the
Lykeion was enhanced, a new ar- senal was built in the Piraeus, and the sanctuaries of
Demeter and Kore at
Eleusis and of
Amphiaraos at
Oropos were refurbished.
¹⁰⁶

A member of the Eteoboutad clan, one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Athens, Lykourgos could claim descent from the eponymous
Boutes, brother of King
Erechtheus. In fact, Lykourgos probably served as priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus on the Acropolis; we know that his son
Habron was allotted this hereditary priesthood, later ceding it to his brother
Lykophron.
¹⁰⁷
Wooden images
of Lykourgos and his sons (carved by
Timarchos and
Kephisodotos, sons of the master sculptor
Praxiteles) were set up within the
Erechtheion itself, giving evidence of their close connection to the cult.
¹⁰⁸
In the years following his death in 324
B.C.
, Lykourgos would be held up as a symbol of Athenian democracy, posthumously honored in 307/306 with the city’s most
illustrious awards: his portrait set up in the Agora and his descendants entitled to eat for life at public expense in the Prytaneion (the seat of the executive officers of Athens).
¹⁰⁹

At the very heart of the Lykourgan agenda was a desire to educate the youth of Athens, to reinvigorate
Perikles’s vision of the city as the “School of Hellas.”
¹¹⁰
The statesman placed new emphasis on the training of eighteen-year-old men who had begun their military service in the ephebic corps. Registered according to their demes (districts of the Attic countryside), the youths swore an oath of loyalty upon first receiving their new weapons within the
sanctuary of Aglauros on the east slope of the Acropolis.
¹¹¹
The ephebes were given a new pride of place within the religious and athletic life of Lykourgan Athens where they were now entrusted with providing equestrian escort for a host of sacred processions and featured heavily in the Panathenaic festival and competitions. They were also sent on topographical memory tours to holy places all across Attica and its borderlands so they might learn about their ancestors, local
foundation myths, landscapes, and monuments. It was enhanced training for the noble life of the traditional
Athenian citizen, one in which patriotism took center stage.
¹¹²
And it was the spirit of that life Lykourgos might have seen deteriorating before his eyes among his fellow citizens. In any case, when he invoked it in the court action against Leokrates in 330
B.C.
, his purpose was as much to provide Athenian youths with an object lesson in proper behavior as it was to do justice to a scoundrel.
¹¹³

Leokrates had comported himself disgracefully eight years earlier, following the defeat of Athens by Philip II of Macedon at the
Battle of Chaironeia. In the wake of this disaster, the Athenians passed a decree forbidding citizens or their families to leave the city. Leokrates flagrantly broke this law, fleeing to the island of Rhodes and, later, settling in the town of
Megara, 43 kilometers (27 miles) northwest of Athens. Taking along his money, mistress, household goods, and business concerns, Leokrates placed self before city, violating the most sacred tenet of traditional Athenian civic life.
¹¹⁴

When, after eight years, Leokrates returned to Athens, Lykourgos hit him with a sensational lawsuit. The charges were many and varied: treason, failure to protect the city’s freedom, impiety vis-à-vis the sanctuaries he was sworn to defend, abandonment of his aged parents, and desertion for his refusal to serve in the armed forces. Most heinous of
all, Leokrates had broken the oath sworn as a young ephebe and binding for one’s natural life. Lykourgos quotes the ephebic vow in his oration
Against Leokrates:

I will not bring dishonor on my sacred arms nor will I abandon my comrades wherever I shall be stationed. I will defend the rights of gods and men and will not leave my country smaller, when I die, but greater and better, so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all.

Lykourgos,
Against Leokrates
77
¹¹⁵

In the courtroom Lykourgos would argue foremost that Leokrates had broken this solemn pledge, dishonoring the gods and sinning against the very homeland that had nurtured him to adulthood.

Lykourgos gave the court a rousing civics lesson: “The power that keeps our democracy together
is
the oath … For there are three things upon which the state is built: the archon, the juryman, and the private citizen. Each of these gives an oath as a pledge, and rightly so.”
¹¹⁶
Lykourgos then cites the
Oath of the Plataians, pledged by allied Greeks just before the
Battle of Plataia in 479.
¹¹⁷
“It would be well for you to hear it,” Lykourgos instructs, reading the oath in full:

I will not hold life dearer than freedom, nor will I abandon my leaders whether they are alive or dead. I will bury all allies killed in the battle. If I conquer the barbarians in war, I will not destroy any of the cities which have fought for Greece but I will consecrate a tenth of all those which sided with the barbarian. I will not rebuild a single one of the shrines that the barbarians have destroyed but will allow them to remain for future generations as a memorial of the barbarians’ impiety.

Lykourgos,
Against Leokrates
81
¹¹⁸

Lykourgos reflects on what makes Athens so special, reiterating the Periklean vision of Athens: “The greatest virtue of your city is that she has set the Greeks an example of noble conduct. In age she surpasses every city, and in valor too our ancestors have no less surpassed their fellows.”
¹¹⁹
Lykourgos then invokes the story of
Kodros, which we considered in
chapter 1
, that stirring tale of how the last king of Athens gave
his life to save his city. When the Peloponnesians had suffered famine owing to crop failures, they marched north to Athens in search of fertile lands. Kodros knew from a Delphic prophecy that if the
Dorians killed him, the people of Athens would be spared. And so the king, disguised as a peasant, bravely wandered out near the enemy camp and provoked a skirmish with its guards, who killed him. “Remember the reign of Kodros,” Lykourgos implores. “Such was the nobility of the kings of old that they preferred to die for the safety of their subjects rather than to purchase life by the adoption of another country.”
¹²⁰

Finally, Lykourgos turns to yet another exemplary tale of the ancestors, a story set in the late
Bronze Age, when
Eumolpos, son of
Poseidon, led an army of Thracians to claim Attica for his own. The son, as we have seen, was attempting to avenge his father’s loss in the contest with Athena for divine patronage of the city. In the late 420s the story was the subject of a play by
Euripides, and though it has since been largely lost, it would have still been familiar to Lykourgos’s audience. Erechtheus, king of Athens, seeks advice from the
oracle at Delphi on how he might save Athens from this prodigious assault. The oracle’s answer? Nothing less than the sacrifice of his own daughter will suffice. The king shares this shocking news with his wife,
Praxithea, who answers with one of the most stirring and civic-minded speeches in all of Greek drama. “Listen carefully to the iambic lines, gentlemen, which in the play are spoken by the mother of the girl,” Lykourgos instructs the jury. “You will find in them a greatness of spirit and a nobility worthy of Athens and a daughter of the Kephisos.”
¹²¹