The Parthenon Enigma (55 page)

Athenian silver tetradrachm, ca. 450 B.C. (illustration credit
ill.107
)

For those who made the cut, the benefits of belonging were enormous. Citizens alone could own land and household properties and assume the considerable rights and duties of the propertied class.
¹⁵⁴
They could purchase leases for the silver mines at Laureion, receive windfall distributions of cash and corn, participate in tribal and public festivals, and hold public offices and priesthoods. Only citizens could vote, speak, and plead in the law courts and in the assembly. Thus the citizenry utterly monopolized economic, legal, political, and social privileges at Athens. It is no wonder that Athenians jealously guarded this identity, keeping the system stable throughout the fifth and fourth centuries and for much of the Hellenistic period.

The legend of autochthony played beautifully into the perpetuation of this system. It has been shown that the concept of indigenousness was introduced during the first half of the fifth century in tandem with the advancement of a democratic ideology that asserted political equality for all citizens. Under a common autochthonous origin, even the lowliest citizen was of noble birth and, therefore, superior to any noncitizen. This was especially important in a cosmopolitan city like
Athens where the population of outsiders was ever growing. These noncitizens included many with greater wealth than the majority of true Athenians.
¹⁵⁵

Thus, we can understand why the story of Erechtheus and his family reemerged at precisely this time, in the age of the Parthenon. It provided an important model not only for autochthony but for the new inclusion of Athenian women in the requirements of citizenship. As we have seen, under the
Periklean citizenship law one had to be born not only of a citizen father but also of a woman whose father was a citizen. The mother, furthermore, had to have been accepted as a legitimate member of her father’s brotherhood group (phratry) and township (deme).
¹⁵⁶

Certainly, there is no greater spokesperson for the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship than
Praxithea herself. Her formidable speech in the
Erechtheus
is as xenophobic as it is patriotic:

First, I could not find a better city than this one. We are a people born from this land, not brought in from elsewhere. Other cities are founded as if by throws of the dice; people are imported to them, different ones from different places. A person who moves from one city to another is like a peg badly fitted into a piece of wood: a citizen in name, but not in action.

Euripides,
Erechtheus
F 360.5–13 Kannicht
¹⁵⁷

By this time, Praxithea has already made clear her harsh views on
adoption: “Where is the advantage in adopted
children? We should consider those truly born better than mere pretences.”
¹⁵⁸
Later in the play, we find a fragmentary line that further disparages “otherness.” The speaker, who seems to be Erechtheus himself, remarks: “The region beyond is inhabited, I believe, by barbarians who eat no fish.”
¹⁵⁹
Nothing could have been stranger to an Athenian than people who prefer a fish-free diet.

Athenians believed themselves superior to everyone else, in the Greek world and beyond, and looked upon outsiders—fish eaters and abstainers alike—with a measure of contempt. The irony, perhaps, from our perspective at least, is that such chauvinism was the lifeblood of their notion of democracy. Only with pure Athenian blood could the delicate balance of sacrifice and privilege be assured to function. The ethnically variegated, those random assemblies of strangers constantly streaming
in, with no genetic loyalty to the polis, might as easily favor
tyranny and oligarchy, if it seemed convenient.
¹⁶⁰
Citizenship according to authentic Athenian descent was the only way to safeguard the system that had been so hard-won, wrestled from the tyrants of the sixth century. It also ensured that privileges were guaranteed even to those true Athenians who had few possessions or skills.
¹⁶¹
Thus was Athenian democracy in essence a system for distributing privileges and responsibilities according to pedigree. Autochthony transcended wealth, power, and any other status.

Athens stood out among all cities of its day for the level of personal engagement that it allowed citizens in the management of their polis.
¹⁶²
For this system to work required not only genetic affiliation but proper formation, too. The city instructed its young in the responsibilities, no less than the privileges, of
politeia
from a very early age. Paideia and the socialization of citizen offspring took precedence over everything else,
performance in choral song-dance, athletic competitions, and public
ritual being entirely mandatory. The institution of the
Panathenaia was in this sense the great showcase of the formation efforts: not merely
the
ritual extravaganza of the year, but a way of ensuring that the mold would stay more or less intact across the generations. The procession at the heart of the festival was all the reminder an impressionable soul needed about his or her place in the world. Making their way from the Kerameikos cemetery and the graves of the ancestors, through the Athenian Agora, the great scene of commerce, and up the slopes of the Acropolis to the sacred precinct of Athena, the living felt themselves linked in a great chain to the dead and to the gods.
¹⁶³

Perhaps, then, it is not so surprising that one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge from democratic Athens is the notion that a citizen should be
in love
with his city. Indeed, Euripides puts on Praxithea’s lips some of the most startling words ever uttered by a mother: “I love my
children but I love my country more.” The queen goes on to lament that others do not share the depth of her fervor: “O fatherland, I wish that all who dwell in you would love you as much as I do! Then we would live in you untroubled and you would never suffer any harm.”
¹⁶⁴

Perikles himself is credited with having introduced the concept of this emotional bond to the polis. Nowhere is this more eloquently expressed than in his funeral oration for the first to fall in the
Peloponnesian War. Looking out at the mourners and up at the Acropolis, Perikles instructs:

You must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by
courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this.

Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War
2.43
¹⁶⁵

LOVE, COURAGE, DUTY, HONOR
, and action: these are the virtues that upheld Athenian democracy. And if the burdens were compensated by substantial rewards, no Athenian would have traded this birthright for five times the gold of the richest man in the polis. The values of
politeia
were deeply ingrained and subscribed to by even the most ironically minded. To be an Athenian was in the end to profess a
religion, and civic performance was the expression of one’s identity as well as devotion. Performance was the means by which the young were educated and thereby the values of the community perpetuated. Procession, recitation, musical and athletic competitions, singing, dancing, sacrificing, and feasting—all these actions constituted a greater “prayer” to Athena. They delighted the goddess and commemorated the ancestors while uniting the citizenry under the banner of collective celebration. No less than a hundred head of cattle or the lavishly embroidered peplos, the communal expenditure of energy through motion, exertion, and competition was a votive offering. Naturally, it took forms that expressed the Athenians’ special love of excellence and beauty, as well as their healthy appetite for rivalry and contest, fed by an extravagant self-regard.

8

THE WELL-SCRUBBED LEGACY

The Sincerest of Flattery and the Limits of Acquired Identity

HE GOT AS FAR AS
the inside of a cigar box. Opening the lid of Argüelles, the Havanas that Lopez & Brothers sold out of Tampa, Florida, one could find a portrait of the artist in a prospect of laurel leaves and scenes from his painting
Sappho
of 1881. By then, he had amassed a fortune and every honor available to a Victorian gentleman. But his success did not sit well with every set in London. “The case of Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema is only an extreme instance of the commercial materialism of our civilization,” sniffed the eminent critic
Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury Group. “Doubtless most real artists covet honestly enough a tithe of Sir Lawrence’s money. That does not smell. But his honors! Surely by now, that is another thing. How long will it take to disinfect the Order of Merit of Tadema’s scented soap?”
¹

It took around sixty years. A shrewd businessman and jolly good company, Alma-Tadema was among the most financially successful painters of his day. Offering colorful images of toga-clad Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians luxuriating in romantic architectural settings, he delighted a Victorian public yearning to make a little piece of this fantasy their own. By the time of his
death in 1912, the weight of critical opinion dismissing his work as sentimental kitsch had become overwhelming,
and with the ultimate ascendancy of less naturalistic styles, his work, meticulously researched and wrought, fell into obscurity.

Opinion began to change in the early 1970s, as retrospectives and new publications brought renewed attention. By 1990, a catalogue raisonné had appeared.
²
Alma-Tadema’s rehabilitation is now more or less complete, taking account of his interaction with the Pre-Raphaelites, his influence on European Symbolist painters like Klimt and Khnopff, and his broader role within nineteenth-century English painting.
³
As usual, the sales history tells the larger story: His major painting,
The Finding of Moses
, had sold for £5,250 in 1904, though by 1960 the Newman Gallery couldn’t find a buyer for it. Failing to meet its reserve, it was bought in later that year for £252.
⁴
By November 2010, however,
Moses
sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a record-smashing $35,922,500.

One of the reasons for the rediscovery of Lawrence Alma-Tadema is the obsessive exactitude with which he tried to make the antique work visible. Archaeological exertion and archival digging were part of his art. And so it is that this Dutch-born artist, dismissed by Ruskin as the worst painter of the nineteenth century, enters into the story of latter-day efforts to understand the Athenians’ great architectural enigma, the Parthenon. In particular, it is his answer to a fiery question of classical scholarship—was the Parthenon painted or pure white as popularly imagined?—that matters most for our story. Sir Lawrence made his view clear with a painting from 1868 called
Pheidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends
(insert
this page
, bottom).
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It is a fantastic re-creation of the moment when the sculptor unveils his newly carved frieze to
Perikles and his mistress,
Aspasia. The young Alkibiades is present too, leaning against his teacher,
Sokrates, the entire viewing party aloft on a wooden scaffold erected high above the Acropolis, affording them a rare “frieze-eye” view. Inspiration for this painting came, no doubt, from Alma-Tadema’s visit to the
British Museum in 1862, when he first set eyes on the
Elgin Marbles.