For the past 230 years or so, the story that was sculpted into the frieze of the Parthenon, the most influential building in the western world, has seemed fairly straight-forward, depicting a civic parade that honored — as did the Parthenon itself — the Greek goddess Athena.
But a shocking discovery involving mummies has called this meaning into question, archaeologist and NYU professor Joan Breton Connelly argues in her new book “The Parthenon Enigma” (Knopf).
From what Connelly calls “a great detective story,” we’ve learned that the frieze tells a far more tragic tale.
In ancient Egypt, while the King Tuts of the world were buried in gold sarcophagi when they died, mere mortals were mummified with cheaper materials — recycled papyrus that held early drafts of written works, including transcribed texts from ancient Greece.
When a Greek scholar examined scraps from one of these mummies, he made an astounding discovery — about 250 lines of a lost play, “Erechtheus,” by the great Greek playwright Euripides.
“These coffins end up being our best source of lost Greek texts,” says Connelly, who notes that while the sarcophagus containing the play was excavated in 1901, the technology to remove the papyrus without destroying it did not exist until the 1960s.
“Nobody knew how to separate these little papier-mâché strips without damaging the writing on them until then,” she says, “when someone devised a method by which they steamed the mummy case in a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid and glycerin and give it a steam bath so they could pull off these layers.”
The play tells the tale of an early king of Athens, and how, “when the first Barbarian invasion was surrounding the city, he was told by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice his youngest daughter” in order to win the battle.
Connelly first learned of the play — especially challenging to read because it was in “fragmentary Greek,” and “the papyrus strips were cut into the shapes of falcon’s wings” — in the 1990s and, over time, had a revelation.
“[I realized that] Euripides was talking about what you see in the middle of the Parthenon frieze,” she says. “It’s a family group — a mother, father and three girls — and they’re preparing to sacrifice the littlest girl. It was a virgin sacrifice, a dark tale.”
Greek tragedy
Still, Connelly’s interpretation of this scene ultimately held a lighter, even positive message, one that speaks to the influence of the Parthenon in the fields of architecture, government and the very nature of civilized society.
“It’s a beautiful message that I connect with democracy and how the Athenians were different from everyone else of their time,” she says.
“The message they chose to put above the door of their finest temple, their core belief, was that no family, not even the royals, can put themselves above the common good. It was a great embodiment of the notion of self-sacrifice. It’s the spiritual backbone of Athenian democracy.”
In helping us understand the significance of the Parthenon, Connelly uses a metaphor we can deeply relate to, in that the building was a “replacement building” created after a monumental tragedy that occurred around 480 BC — what she considers an ancient Greek version of 9/11.
“The Persian Army did the unthinkable. They marched into Greece, went to the Acropolis and burned it — the most iconic building in the city — to the ground,” says Connelly.
Given that the Persians invaded on foot, the Greeks had ample warning and had evacuated to neighboring Salamis Island before the onslaught.
There, they watched smoke engulf the city as their massive temple burned.
That event, Connelly contends, had a remarkable impact on civilization moving forward.
“What’s amazing about this story,” she says, “is that the kids that were 15 or 16 at the time were the people who went on to build the Golden Age of Greece — Pericles, Sophocles, all these big names that come down to us from politics, theater, philosophy. They were all teenagers, and this made a giant impression on them.”
Parable of a people
The Greeks left their temple in ruins for about 30 years, not out of neglect, but as a reminder to the people of what had happened.
Decades later, the now-grown children who witnessed the destruction decided it was time to rebuild. Led by Athenian ruler Pericles, they set out to construct a monument to the great goddess Athena that was more majestic than any that had ever been and wound up with what Connelly calls in the book, “the biggest, most technically astonishing, ornately decorated, and aesthetically compelling temple ever known.”
By around 447 BC, the Athenians had finally defeated the Persian Army. Their desire for this new building, then, was multi-faceted, as they sought to “forge a new narrative for their city, one of Athenian triumph and supremacy,” and to salute Athena in the most majestic manner imaginable to express gratitude for their victory.
“Since more is more when it comes to prayer,” Connelly writes, “the Parthenon had to be excessive in its splendor.”
But also, Connelly sees the Parthenon — particularly the frieze — as the ultimate expression of the Athenian belief in the power of democracy.
“The Parthenon is the culmination of the 50 years before it,” she says, explaining that the Athenians had defeated a series of ruling tyrants, and established a democracy in 508 BC.
“This was a young democracy that was really radical in terms of what other city-states were doing at the time, in the way they dispersed power and governance across the citizen body,” she says. “Even poorer people could vote in the citizen assembly. It was really incredible.”
Besides the 250 lines found on the papyrus, Euripides’ play is lost to history. But Connelly’s theory is that the story, of a family willing to sacrifice their daughter for the greater good of Athens, was a parable and an idea deemed important enough to adorn the building.
The Parthenon, then, was the physical manifestation of the city’s ideals.
“It gives a visual expression of who the Athenians are — their self view,” she says. “At the same time this is coming out visually, it’s also coming out in theater, with the great playwrights, and in philosophy, with the great philosophers. This is all a huge expression of what it meant to be Athenian [at that time].”
Architecture of liberty
The decade-and-a-half construction of the Parthenon, from 447-432 BC — which Connelly estimates cost the equivalent of around $281 million today — also served as a massive, long-running jobs program, employing hundreds or thousands of laborers.
“More than a hundred thousand tons of marble needed to be quarried,” she writes, “and seventy thousand blocks had to cut and transported. Also, roads had to be built for access to new quarries some 16 kilometers (10 miles) to the southwest.”
The Parthenon was built “entirely of high-quality, fine-grained white marble from the city’s own Mount Pentelikon,” and benefited from the latest in Athenian naval technology, including “knowledge of lines, winches, blocks and pulleys.”
The construction also led to the development of pioneering architectural techniques including the “advanced use of optical refinements, which they raised to high art.”
“There are few, if any, straight lines in the Parthenon,” Connelly writes. “An extraordinary correction [to the perceived sagging] was found . . . by making all horizontal surfaces bow upward at center. For example, the steps on the flanks of the platform arch up 6.75 centimeters higher at their centers than at their ends.” The temple’s infamous columns also “taper upward, so they are wider at the base than at the top.”
The influence of these great architectural accomplishments began to be felt in the 18th century, when art historian Johann Winckelmann “first linked the emergence of individual liberty to the development of high classical style,” arguing that “the rise and decline of artistic styles followed developments in the political sphere,” and that “the peak of Greek art coincided with the democratic form of government.”
The next century put that theory to practice, with the proliferation of buildings incorporating Parthenonian style, including the US Treasury Building in Washington, the British Museum and, a century later, the US Supreme Court Building.
To Connelly, the adoption of this style was not just an aesthetic choice, but a philosophical one as well in how they “reproduced classical architectural forms to communicate a set of values, implicitly aligning themselves with the flowering of democratic Athens.”
“When we see this Doric architectural facade, the colonnade, it just screams stability, and security and that you can trust this,” says Connelly.
Losing the marbles
Despite this appearance, though, the life of the Parthenon has not always been defined by such stability. Fires swept through parts of the temple in both 195 BC and at some point in the third or fourth century AD, the latter destroying the structure’s roof. And an attack by the Venetian army in 1687 caused a “violent explosion that sent its interior walls, nearly a dozen columns on its north and south flanks, and many of its decorative sculptures flying out in all directions.”
From that day forth, the Parthenon became known not as a temple, but as a ruin.
The Parthenon was subject to widespread plunder in the early 1800s when the Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce, the British ambassador to the Ottoman court at a time when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, “manag[ed] to cut most of the sculptures from the temple, pack them up and ship them to England.” Then, Connelly says, Elgin sold the sculptures to the British Museum.
While there has long been dispute about whether he had official permission to do so, there is no dispute that at the time the Greeks were not in control of their own country and properties, as they were under Turkish occupation.
The Greeks have sought the return of the sculptures, commonly known as the Elgin Marbles, for some time, and Connelly says that while they still have a ways to go, the last few decades have seen the tide turn in their direction.
“There’s been a real sea change in cultural heritage issues over the last 30 years,” she says. “Some people think the marbles were illegally removed, and others would argue they were legally removed under the laws of its day. But nowadays, people say, ‘Let’s put legality aside and talk about ethics. Let’s talk about doing the right thing.’”
But whatever challenges have befallen the structure over time, Connelly believes that its resilience, combined with changing interpretations of its meaning, make the Parthenon an ever-increasing bellwether for the celebration of democracy.
“When we contemplate how we’re different from that first democracy, we learn something about our democracy itself and whether democracy can survive without the notion of sacrifice at the core,” she says.
“The Parthenon is an icon of Western art, and the very symbol of democracy itself.”
It’s a mirac . . . it’s in the hole!
Bill Murray is almost as renowned at this point for his role as a bon vivant – singing karaoke with random twenty-somethings and stealing French fries off stranger’s dinner plates – as he is as an actor.
Now it appears he has another career-in-waiting, that as a top-notch archeologist.
Connelly runs a program where people pay to accompany her on excavations, and she was surprised in 2006, on a dig off the coast of Cyprus, when Murray was one of her participants.
“It’s a great excavation that’s been going on for 24 years on an island where there’s a temple to Apollo,” says Connelly. “Bill came out, and proved himself to be a brilliant excavator.”
Murray, it turns out, has “a passionate interest in the ancient world.”
“He could have been a great archeologist,” she says. “It’s not too late, actually, because he has a really great sense of stratigraphic excavation. He has a great physicality, and when you’re digging, you need to be very agile to move in the trenches.”
Murray being Murray, though, that physicality didn’t apply to just the work.
“He’s such a great dancer,” she says, “and was even teaching people Greek dancing at night.”
After spending a week with him, Connelly found Murray to be the exact opposite of what you’d expect from an A-list star.
“He was one of the guys,” she says. “He’s the kind of guy who clears the table at night and pitches in in the kitchen. When we needed him, he worked. He’s a great team player.”