Sacrifices were offered en route. The peplos was taken from the ship up the steep slope to the Acropolis. There the little girls handed the tunic to the women weavers, who carried the wooden divinity down to the seashore where they washed both it and the tunic. After further sacrifices, the ergastinae dressed the statue in the new peplos. The proceedings ended with a feast attended by invitees chosen by lot from each deme in Attica. They ate the cooked meat of the sacrificed animals together with bread and cakes.
In each of the three years between festivals a smaller celebration was staged for citizens only, but the Great Panathenaea with its athletic and arts contests open to all spread the name of Athens throughout the Greek world.
—
It was a pity that the city looked such a mess. The state buildings in the marketplace were adequate to purpose, but no one would call them grand or well suited to the capital of an empire. The Athenians were as good as their word when they and the other allies had sworn their famous oath before the culminating victory over the Persians at Plataea thirty years previously.
According to one of its clauses, they had vowed not to rebuild any of the burned and demolished temples but to leave them as a memorial. The only new monument to the war was a colossal bronze statue of Athena Promachus (“she who fights in the front line”), which stood on the Acropolis about thirty feet high and could be seen by sailors at sea. It was created by the internationally known sculptor, painter, and architect Pheidias. Otherwise, the Athenian citadel remained a plateau of broken and blackened marble debris.
The peace treaty with the Persians of 449 changed the mood. Pericles moved that the oath of Plataea be rescinded. Once the Delian League members had been bullied and cajoled into obedience again and resumed their annual payments for maritime protection, Athens found that it was becoming richer and richer. The reserve fund had grown from nothing in 478 to 9,700 talents, when it was transferred from the island of Delos to Athens in 454. The end of the war boosted trade, the silver from Laurium continued to flow into the treasury, and in the absence of an enemy it was no longer necessary to dispatch large fleets to sea. In quiet years the Athenians only sent out a flotilla of sixty ships.
The demos, guided by the Olympian, decided to go on a spending spree. They would rebuild all the temples, not only those in the city, but across Attica. The end of the war had driven up unemployment and this massive construction program would not only beautify the city, but also create many jobs. However, there was opposition. Thucydides, son of Melesias (not the historian), who was an aristocrat and a relative of Cimon, led the conservative faction in the ecclesia. He developed the clever tactic of getting his supporters to sit together at assembly meetings in one bloc and to react and applaud in unison—a first step towards a political party. According to Plutarch, they argued:
…the Greeks must be outraged. They must consider this an act of bare-faced tyranny. They can see that, with their own money, extorted from them for the war against the Persians, we are gilding and adorning our city, as if it were some vain woman doing herself up with precious stones and statues and temples worth millions of money.
Thucydides felt that Pericles shaped his policy to bribe citizens with benefits, constantly giving them pageants, banquets, and processions and “entertaining the people with cultural delights.”
Pericles acted decisively. Using his in-built majority in the ecclesia, in 443 he arranged for Thucydides to be ostracized. For the time being that put an end to carping about the grands projets that were to occupy the Olympian’s attention for the next twenty years. History hears no more of Thucydides, who is reported to have settled in a Greek city in southern Italy.
—
Pheidias was placed in overall charge of the Athenian building program and Pericles seems to have collaborated closely with him. Distinguished architects were hired for specific developments as well as a large team of first-rate sculptors. The work proceeded at great speed and many different kinds of business and craft skills were in high demand, as Plutarch reports:
The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress-wood, while the skilled labor needed to work these materials up were those of carpenter, moulder, coppersmith, stone mason, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, and engraver, and in addition the carriers and suppliers of the materials, such as merchants, sailors, and pilots for maritime traffic, and cartwrights, trainers of draft animals, and drivers of everything that came by land. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders and miners.
In one way or another much of the city’s workforce was involved.
An inscription survives that lists sculptors of the Erechtheum and their earnings. Built between 421 and 406, this complicated little structure, also on the Acropolis, replaced a destroyed archaic temple of Athena, with shrines to various divinities and divine heroes, and was the home of the wooden statue of Athena. They include:
To Praxias, resident at Melite [a city
deme
], for the horse and the man seen behind it who is turning it—120 drachmas.
To Mynnion, resident of Agryle [a
deme
on Mount Hymettus], for the horse and the man striking it. He afterwards added the pillar (for which he was paid a little more)—127 drachmas.
The Acropolis was transformed. Intended to rival the temples of Artemis of the Ephesians and of Hera on Samos, the Parthenon, a huge brand-new edifice, was one of the first construction projects and was completed in 443/2. It was made entirely from local Pentelic marble, which takes on a golden tint in sunlight, and was in the Doric style. Wide fluted columns stood without a base directly on the flat platform (the stylobate) on which the temple was built and were topped by plain stone slabs. The temple was decorated with sculptures painted in bright colors. Their purpose was educational as well as aesthetic, for they celebrated contests of Lapiths and Centaurs, Greeks and Amazons, Gods and Giants, all of them symbols of the triumph of civilization over barbarism. On the triangular pediments at either end of the temple the birth of Athena was displayed and the rivalry between the goddess and her uncle Poseidon for the right to be the patron deity of the city.
Inside the colonnade were two large windowless inner chambers. High up on the outside of their walls a long frieze, depicting the Panathenaeic procession, ran around the temple; sacred shrines were usually reserved for gods and heroes, but here ordinary Athenians were depicted. The larger of the rooms, the cella, was the home of a forty-foot-tall statue of Athena Parthenos, the virgin goddess, created by Pheidias. Her flesh was represented by ivory (because of the dry atmosphere this had to be regularly dampened with water) and her full-length tunic by molded gold plates (in total the gold weighed a little more than one ton and belonged to the Athenian treasury; it could be removed for use in a financial crisis). Gleaming in the gloom, Athena was an awe-inspiring sight.