The Parthenon Enigma (52 page)

But what of the games? From the
Iliad
on, athletic competitions are associated with funeral games established in
memory of dead heroes.
¹⁰⁰
The death of
Achilles’s beloved friend
Patroklos and the funeral competitions held in his honor become the archetype for athletic contests of the historical period. Games are appropriate memorials for heroes since physical labor and the expenditure of energy embody the struggles of humans on earth. It is fitting, then, that games honor human heroes rather than divinities, although the honors for mortals and immortals are never far apart. As we saw in the last chapter, the tombs of local heroes are set close to temples of
Olympian gods:
Pelops at Olympia, Opheltes-
Archemoros at
Nemea, and
Melikertes-Palaimon at
Isthmia.
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It is their deaths that the Panhellenic athletic competitions commemorate. But this raises another question: Which Athenian heroes exactly were commemorated in the Panathenaic Games?

A half century ago,
Homer Thompson was one of the few who looked for local heroes behind the contests at Athens, focusing on the hero shrines of the Athenian Agora.
¹⁰²
But if one is to look there, why not on the Acropolis itself? Surely Erechtheus, whose tomb was understood to lie beneath the
Erechtheion, presents an ideal candidate. Certainly, he follows the model we have seen at Olympia, Nemea, and Isthmia, where the deaths of local royal heroes are commemorated through
athletic games.

And if we are to look for the most obvious heroes, why not heroines? After all, unlike the other Panhellenic game sites, the Athenian Acropolis is sacred to a female divinity. It seems plausible that with the general elevation of women brought about by the Periklean
citizenship law of 451/450, the daughters of Erechtheus would have been incorporated into the joint worship of Athena and Erechtheus. In fact, we know that by
Cicero’s time Erechtheus and his daughters were worshipped as divinities at Athens.
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It is likely, then, that the heroines, together with their father, were commemorated in the Panathenaic Games.

THE PRESENTATION OF THE SACRED
peplos to Athena represents a culminating moment within the Panathenaic festival. And we have seen
how the same prominence has been ascribed to a garment on the central slab of the Parthenon’s east frieze. This prominence has supported the faulty view of the frieze narrative as depicting a historical Panathenaia, but while the frieze cloth is not Athena’s peplos, as some have thought, the salience of such a garment in the festival and on the frieze is no co- incidence.
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But before we investigate the connection, it is natural to ask, why would a peplos be woven for Athena in the first place? After all, ritual does not exist without reason; there must be a precedent in myth.

The offering of clothing to divinities was widespread in Greek religious practice. But evidence for the ritual weaving of garments for
cult statues, such as the months of laborious work preceding the Great Panathenaia, is less abundant. Ongoing excavations are constantly adding to what we know.
¹⁰⁵
The ritual weaving of garments is attested in the sources for Athena Polias at Athens,
Hera at
Argos, Hera at
Olympia, and, as we have seen, Apollo at
Amyklai.
¹⁰⁶
Fabrics woven for Hera are understood to represent her wedding dress, an appropriate symbol for Zeus’s wife, the archetypal bride. At Amyklai, a mantle (chiton) was woven as the funeral shroud
of Hyakinthos, who, we have noted, was buried beneath Apollo’s statue base.

Fabrics were woven with elaborate figured designs for three great occasions in Greek life: birth (
swaddling clothes), marriage (the wedding dress), and death (the funeral shroud). The peplos woven for Athena cannot represent her swaddling clothes (given her birth fully grown) or her wedding dress (given her perpetual virginity). But if we remember that Athena-Parthenos was worshipped jointly on the Acropolis just as
Apollo-Hyakinthos was at Amyklai, by comparison with the chiton woven for Apollo (as Hyakinthos’s shroud), the peplos of Athena could represent the funerary cloth of the daughter of King Erechtheus. The pattern is the same. Local deity and local hero are so intimately associated that the death shroud of the hero becomes the dress-offering for the divinity.

As noted earlier, ancient sources refer to two distinct peploi: a small one offered to Athena’s olive wood statue at the annual Panathenaia and a large one presented at the Great Panathenaia, a huge tapestry with woven figured scenes. At least by the end of the fourth century, the tapestry/ peplos was transported to the Acropolis in procession aboard ship. Like a sail it was hoisted up the mast of a vessel, which some believe was one of the triremes from the
Battle of Salamis, that was lifted from the
water and set on a wooden carriage. The Panathenaic ship became an important “object of memory” for the Athenians, a relic from their victory over the Persians.
¹⁰⁷
It was pulled in procession atop a wheeled cart that carried it along the
Panathenaic Way from the Kerameikos as far as the City Eleusinon.
¹⁰⁸

The peplos-sail attached to the boat’s yardarm was woven with images showing the battle of the gods and the Giants and, very likely, with scenes of other cosmic clashes and boundary events from primordial and epic days. When, in 302/301
B.C.
,
Demetrios the Besieger, the prince of Macedon, audaciously had his own image woven into the peplos, it was regarded as a colossal act of hubris (a graver sin than the mere cockiness the word connotes today). Clearly, the gods were displeased: a giant squall blew in during the procession, ripping the peplos-sail in two, a terrible omen.
¹⁰⁹

What exactly did this peplos—dress, tapestry, and sail—represent? Citing
Elizabeth Barber’s work on the role of ornately woven figure cloths in funerary rituals,
Brunilde Ridgway has suggested that the peplos tapestry was used as a shroud to veil the ancient olive wood statue of Athena during the festival of the
Plynteria.
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This ritual, which called for the stripping, washing, and wrapping in cloth of Athena’s image, mimics the preparation of a corpse for burial in funerary rites. It may allude to a period of mourning for Aglauros, the first of the sacred
plyntrides
, in honor of whom the festival was founded. These interpretations illustrate the ambiguity and flexibility of the various ancient Greek terms used to describe cloth.

Heliodoros’s novel, the
Aethiopika
, may hold relevance for our understanding of the origins and function of the Panathenaic peplos, a fabric apparently connected with
death. Here, we find
Theagenes, a descendant of
Achilles himself, traveling from Thessaly to Delphi to participate in celebrations at the shrine of
Neoptolemos-
Pyrrhos, as discussed in
chapter 6
. In the course of the festivities, he catches sight of the beautiful virgin priestess
Chariklea and falls madly in love. Chariklea returns his affections, but the lovers are thwarted by her guardian, who hopes to marry her off to his nephew. And so the pair plan to elope in the dead of night, making their way to a Phoenician ship in nearby harbor, bound for Carthage.

Arriving at the boat, Chariklea is dressed in a sacred garment that is described as her “mantle of victory” (
niketerion
) or her “funeral shroud”
(
entaphion
).
¹¹¹
It is a curious choice of very divergent meanings for the garment. Heliodoros’s description must be based on some historical precedent understood by the ancient audience but lost on us. I would suggest that the peplos of Athena fulfilled both of the functions described by Heliodoros, a writer much influenced by the tradition of Athenian cult practice. He readily draws upon Panathenaic ritual in his fictional description of the festival at Delphi, transferring key elements: a procession, a
hekatomb
, ritual dancing, and a priestess. For historical Athenians the peplos was very much a mantle of victory, just as the entire Panathenaia was a celebration of Athenian supremacy. The mythological basis for the peplos, however, is the funeral shroud of the
parthenos
who gave her life to ensure Athenian victory over Eumolpos. It is thus symbolically, though not actually, the shroud so proudly displayed on the Parthenon’s east frieze. Just as the chiton woven for Apollo at
Amyklai was a replica of the shroud of his beloved Hyakinthos, so the peplos woven for Athena commemorates the winding cloth of her beloved
parthenos
. Thus the merging of meanings (victory mantle and funerary shroud) in the fictional account of Chariklea’s dress, a powerful image conjured by Heliodoros just a hundred years before the last of the Panathenaic peploi was presented to the goddess.

ONE FUNCTION
, among many, of Greek temples was to house the image of the divinity.
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The colossal statue of Athena that towered within the eastern cella of the Parthenon at nearly 12 meters, or 39 feet, in height, was a spectacle beyond belief.
¹¹³
Pheidias created the likeness from the most precious materials known to man, gold and ivory. Athena’s face, arms, and feet were carved from ivory, while a ton of pure gold was hammered into the draping of her dress, helmet, spear, and shield. The lifesize replica of the Athena Parthenos statue made for the Centennial Park Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, gives us some idea of its original grandeur (insert
this page
, bottom).
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Athena’s outstretched right hand held a golden statue of Nike standing some 6 feet tall. Between Athena’s shield and her feet coiled a golden snake, the sacred serpent of the Acropolis and very embodiment of the founder Erechtheus/ Erichthonios. The cost of the statue is estimated to have been as much as, or even more than, the building of the Parthenon itself.

We know quite a lot about the appearance of the so-called Athena
Parthenos, thanks to an eyewitness description by
Pausanias, comments by
Pliny and
Plutarch, and some marble copies carved on smaller scales.
¹¹⁵
Athena’s helmet was decorated with a sphinx and two Pegasus figures while griffins and deer adorned the visor and cheek pieces. Such guardian figures accentuated the protective power of the goddess. An ivory
Gorgon’s head adorned Athena’s chest, and low at her side rested the golden shield, nearly 5 meters (16 feet) across. Its surface was decorated with reliefs repeating the great martial themes of the Parthenon’s east and west metopes:
Gigantomachy on the interior of the shield and Amazonomachy on the exterior. The soles of Athena’s sandals were adorned with images from the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, echoing the theme of the Parthenon’s south metopes. The statue’s
iconography summed the past just as the Parthenon did.

Pliny and Pausanias, writing more than five hundred years after the dedication of the statue, tell us that its base showed the birth of
Pandora.
¹¹⁶
Pausanias immediately thinks of Pandora in Hesiod’s
Theogony
and
Works and Days
. She was the first woman, and her curiosity compelled her to open a secret jar better kept closed; she thus released all manner of great evils into the world.
¹¹⁷
But why should this colossal troublemaker be featured on the statue base of the Athena Parthenos? Indeed, she has nothing to do with Athens.

It happens there is a second, independent tradition at Athens, for another Pandora, this one beneficent and with earth goddess associations.
¹¹⁸
Her very name, “Giver of All,” reflects a generous nature belied by her doppelgänger. A confusion seems to have arisen by Roman times between the local Athenian Pandora and the evil one of Hesiod’s creation story. Hesiod himself mentions this other persona in his
Catalogue of Women
as the “lovely Pandora,” the daughter of
King Deukalion and Pyrrha.
¹¹⁹
This Pandora is said to be the sister of
Thyia and
Protogeneia, names also given for the daughters of Erechtheus.
¹²⁰
It is this Attic Pandora, the youngest daughter of Erechtheus who “gave all” to save her city, who I assert is the maiden shown on the base of the Athena Parthenos statue.

It should be remembered that Erechtheus had a trio of daughters with the same names as Deukalion’s three girls: Pandora, Protogeneia, and
Oreithyia (or Thyia). This clearly suggests contamination, or fusion, between the stories of two mythical family lines. We have already noted in
chapter 4
the complexity attending the names of Erechtheus’s
daughters, with sources giving conflicting lists over several hundred years. In the great tangled web of Attic myth, the pattern of three daughters repeats itself. Just as Deukalion and Erechtheus have daughters named Pandora, so, too, Kekrops has a daughter named
Pandrosos. There may well be fusion here between the names Pandora and Pandrosos, just as we have already seen for Erechtheus and Erichthonios.
¹²¹
But let us proceed with the understanding that the “birth of Pandora” attested by
Pausanias on the base of the Athena Parthenos statue was the birth, or rather the crowning, of Pandora, daughter of Erechtheus. Just as the Amazonomachy,
Gigantomachy, and Centauromachy from the Parthenon metopes are quoted on Athena’s shield and sandals, so, too, the story told on the frieze—that of the sacrifice of Erechtheus’s daughter—is quoted on the base of the Athena Parthenos statue.
¹²²
The statue base has been estimated to have stood roughly 90 centimeters (35 inches) tall, and since the Parthenon frieze itself also measures roughly a meter in height, we may have yet another visual link between the sculptured relief of the base and that of the frieze.
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