Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war. She was the patron of the city of Athens, and the Parthenon temple was dedicated to her. It is the masterwork of Athenian architecture. Battered and mutilated after many centuries of neglect and ill-treatment, it retains its power to awe the spectator.
Sculpture in ancient Greece was painted in bright colors, as the Victorian artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema demonstrates in his
Pheidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends
. The spectators stand on scaffolding to view the reliefs and include the young Alcibiades and Socrates (
left
) and Pericles with his mistress Aspasia (
center right
).
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
.
Inside the main hall, or
cella,
of the Parthenon, stood a colossal gold and ivory statue of Athena Parthenos (the Maiden) by Pheidias. It disappeared in the fifth century
A.D.
and was presumably destroyed at some point thereafter. However, a re-creation in 1990 by Alan LeQuire, inside a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park, gives a sense of the overwhelming impact of the original.
GREAT MEN
With its sensuous lips, quizzically intelligent look, and rough-and-ready appearance, this portrait of Themistocles evokes the qualities of the most successful statesman Athens ever produced. Always ready to accept a bribe, but not necessarily to fulfill his side of the bargain, he had the guile, the boldness, and the strategic forethought to win the struggle against Persian invaders in 480 and 479
B.C
.
A
Roman copy of a fifth-century Greek original, Museo Ostiense, Ostia, Italy.
Nicknamed the “Olympian” for his mastery as an orator in the citizens’ assembly, Pericles ruled Athens during its golden years between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War—despite the fact that, at any moment, the people could dismiss him from office. His defensive military policy toward Sparta and its allies was a failure, and he died in 429
B.C.
a disappointed man.
A Roman copy of a Greek original, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.
Demosthenes was the most celebrated public speaker in the Greek world. He saw himself as following in the footsteps of Pericles. But a century had passed since the great days of Athens, and his ambitions exceeded his city’s capacity. The rising power of the age was Macedon, but instead of allying Athens with the newcomer he did everything possible to thwart its king, Philip, and his son and successor, Alexander. In 338
B.C.
Philip crushed the Greek city-states at the battle of Chaeronea, and Athens lost its independence. Demosthenes deserves a large share of the blame.
A Roman copy in marble of a bronze original, about 200
B.C.
, by Polyeuctus
.
Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
Ostracism was a remarkable political device invented by the Athenian democracy in the sixth century
B.C.
The people voted on whether or not to banish a leading citizen for ten years. If convicted, he could come home after serving his sentence and resume his career. Ostracism removed unpopular politicians or those believed to threaten the constitution. Votes were cast by scratching a citizen’s name on a broken piece of pottery and depositing it in a voting urn. More than 11,000 of these potsherds, or
ostraca,
have been found. Some of them bear the name of Megacles, son of Hippocrates, a controversial aristocrat, as in these examples. In 486
B.C.
he was ostracized. However, he was not shaken by this setback, for in the same year he won the prestigious chariot race at the Pythian Games at Delphi. The
ostracon
on the left names Themistocles, son of Neocles. In 472 or 471
B.C.
the savior of his country was voted out and ended his days as a pensioner of his old enemy, the Persian Great King.
Stoa of Attalus Museum, Athens.
ARMS AND THE MAN
Only wealthy aristocrats could afford to run a horse, and it was the heavily armed infantryman, the hoplite, who fought for and represented the people. He was, in fact, the democratic citizen in arms. He bought his own equipment: helmet with a horsehair crest; bronze body armor; a spear and a sword; and a round shield made from bronze, wood, and leather. Here we see a fully equipped warrior pouring a libation to the gods before his departure for the wars (or perhaps commemorating his death).
An Attic red-figure oil jar from between 480 and 460
B.C.
, Museo Archeologico Regionale, Palermo.
The Greeks were inordinately proud of their victories over the armies of the Persian Great King and liked to represent their defeated enemy as weak, decadent, and overdressed instead of proudly nude, as in this pottery drinking cup of about 480
B.C.
Triptolemus painter, National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
Two great battles frame the rise and fall of Athens. After the famous victory at Marathon in 490
B.C.
the Athenian dead were buried on the field and covered by a tumulus, which survives to this day. The triumphant Athenian general Miltiades dedicated the helmet, which he (almost certainly) wore on the day, to Zeus at Olympia. It is inscribed with his name.
Olympia Museum, Greece.
The second battle, this time at Chaeronea in central Greece, brought the fiercely independent city-states of Hellas to a bloody close. In 338
B.C.
Philip, king of Macedon, routed an allied Greek army. The statue of a lion was erected on the battlefield in honor of the Sacred Band, a body of male lovers from the Greek city of Thebes, which was almost wiped out during the fighting.
The endless wars between the Greek city-states severely depleted the adult male population. Here a tombstone, erected about 460
B.C.
in the heyday of Athenian power, shows the city’s tutelary goddess deep in thought in front of a stone slab. She is probably paying her respects at the grave marker of a fallen soldier.
Three ancient Athenians still have a living influence on today’s world. Socrates, one of the towering originators of Western thought, said, when on trial for his life: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” For him ethics lay at the heart of philosophical inquiry. He wrote nothing down, asking and answering questions of anyone who was willing to talk with him in the city’s streets and the
agora
. He was a critic of the democracy.
A Roman copy of a lost Greek original, British Museum.
Plato was the most famous of Socrates’ many disciples. In a series of brilliantly written dialogues, he devoted his life to recording and promoting his master’s philosophical method. Over time he developed his own ideas and it can be difficult to decide where the historical Socrates ends and Plato’s independent thinking begins. It is hard to exaggerate Plato’s influence. A leading twentieth-century thinker remarked: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”