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k Review of Books
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The Parthenon EnigmaAn
Exchange
British Museum, London/Erich Lessing/Art Resource
Detail of the Parthenon Frieze showing the
figures identified by Joan Breton Connelly as
King Erechtheus and his sacrificial daughter
Peter Green, Garry Wills, Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg, and Norman Hammond,
reply by Mary Beard
MAY 22, 2014 ISSUE
In response to:
The Latest Scheme for the Parthenon from the March 6, 2014 issue
To the Editors:
As Mary Beard reminds us, in an eminently
clear and well-balanced review [The Latest
Scheme for the Parthenon, NYR, March 6],
Joan Breton Connellys interpretation of the
Parthenon Frieze has been around for some
time. It has always seemed to me a classic
example of a thesis that is worked out with
close attention to the immediate evidence, yet
nevertheless contrives (mainly, as Beards
review makes clear, through chancy
speculation) to arrive at a conclusion totally
irreconcilable with the mores of the society in
which it is set. The frieze was, in an almost
literal sense, the diadem of the Parthenon; and
the Parthenon was planned and executed as
the emblem of Periclean Athenss civic and
intellectual ideals. Yet we are asked to believe that the chief message it carried was
centered on human sacrifice, to exemplify the desirability in this society of
submitting ones own desires to that societys greater good.
Never mind that human sacrifice was so abhorrent to fifth-century Athenians that
an exactly parallel myth, that of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis to win a
favorable sailing wind to Troy, was already being euphemized by the substitution
of a sacrificial deer on the altar; or that in both cases the alleged self-sacrifice
involved the murder of an underage innocent who had no say in the matter; or that
when we do hear a contemporary allegation of human sacrifice it is a desperate
political attempt to smear Themistocles; or that the one instance recorded by
Homer, that of Achilles at the funeral of Patroclus, was universally regarded as a
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Homer, that of Achilles at the funeral of Patroclus, was universally regarded as a
serious blot on his character. Why, then, should the Parthenon Frieze choose to
perpetuate just such an incident?
One minor point about Mary Beards review: while I much appreciate her
generous effort to bolster my reputation for heterodoxy, I have to confess that
both the bloody Parthenon ejaculation and the choice of the Eleusis cement
works as a preferable object of contemplation were the choice of my lunch
companion, not my own. Even at the time, my own attitude was traditional enough
to write an admiring book about the Parthenon: not the one, by the way, from
which Mary Beard culled her anecdote.
Peter Green
Department of Classics
University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa
To the Editors:
Mary Beard cast well-conceived doubts on the Joan Connelly interpretation of the
Parthenonthat it is all about the founding myth of Erechtheus. She might have
added another argument. If the Erechtheus myth defined the spirit of fifth-century
Athens, why is it never referred to in that centurys main expression of Athenian
identity, the funeral oration Thucydides confected for Pericles? Even in the fourth-
century funeral orations, celebrating the Athenian past, there are only a couple of
passing references to Erechtheus. It seems doubtful that Erechtheus could be
everywhere on the Parthenon and practically invisible elsewhere in Athenian
political life and propaganda. We cannot trust Euripides to be a booster of Athens
on the basis of one plays fragments.
Garry Wills
Evanston, Illinois
To the Editors:
In reviewing The Parthenon Enigma, Mary Beard does not seem to understand
that in her brilliant and eloquent study, Joan Connellys interpretation of the peplos
scene invests the frieze with a depth that enriches and elevates it into the ranks of
art suggestive of Aeschylus trilogy, The Oresteia, in which the murders of blood
revenge committed in the first two plays culminate in the redemptive epilogue of
The Eumenides. One would not expect to see a sacrificial scene represented on
the frieze any more than it would be in a Greek tragedy.
Indeed, even in the preliminaries to the sacrifice that Connelly maintains are
represented in the peplos scene, terror would not have to be inscribed on the
faces of the principals, who like some of heroes and heroines in Greek tragedy
remain composed as they learn their horrible fate. An Apollonian veneer is also
reflected by the dedication of the temple adjacent to the Parthenonthough not to
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reflected by the dedication of the temple adjacent to the Parthenonthough not to
Erechtheus daughter but to Erechtheus himself. (Her name is not known.)
Feelings of loss over her death could have overshadowed the joy experienced with
Athens saved from destruction, and a dirge for women could have been a threat to
patriarchy.
The story of this ancient sacrifice becomes especially dramatic by recalling details
not mentioned by either Beard or Connelly and infrequently recorded in studies of
the earliest period of Greek mythical history. The first mythical king of Athens,
Kekrops, who is almost identical to Erechtheus, banned human and animal
sacrifice in introducing civilization to the Athenians. Later Erechtheus violated this
law to save Athens. Was Erechtheus imagined to soften the bitter irony that the
king who violated the law banning sacrifice was the very same king who decreed
it?
Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg
English Department
Hunter College of the City University of New York
New York City
To the Editors:
In her wide-ranging discussion of The Parthenon Enigma, Mary Beard observes
that the controversy over the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles has complexity, at many
different levels, and at every period. This was brought home to me on a visit to
the new Acropolis Museum, where the frieze blocks brought down from the
Parthenon have been mounted at eye-level. The originals are interpolated with
casts of the blocks now in the British Museum: the casts were a gift from the
museum to Greece a century or so ago, and were painted to look like the original
sculptures. This meant that they recorded the sculptured surfaces prior to the
disastrous attempt at cleaning undertaken at Lord Duveens instigation in the
1930s, and were an invaluable art-historical document. Unfortunately, to make the
political point that they are only casts, the Acropolis Museum has painted them all
in a flat light shade, and thus erased the evidence as surely as the lime-burners of
Athens were doing with fallen originals when Lord Elgin happened along and took
some of them away to London.
Norman Hammond
Professor of Archaeology Emeritus
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts
Mary Beard replies:
My apologies to Peter Green for my loose phrasing, which made it appear that he
was the author (rather than the reporter) of the phrase the bloody Parthenon;
and my thanks to both him and Garry Wills for casting further doubts on the idea
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and my thanks to both him and Garry Wills for casting further doubts on the idea
that human sacrifice and the myth of Erechtheus were central to the culture of
classical Athens.
Norman Hammond raises an important question on the role of plaster casts in the
story of the Parthenon sculptures, which goes beyond the Acropolis Museum.
One of the controversies surrounding the display of the Elgin Marbles in the
British Museum (hinting at wider and changing views on authenticity and
originality) has been how far casts have a part to play. In the late nineteenth
century the marbles were displayed alongside casts, which stood in for the
sculptures (or parts of sculptures) remaining in Athens. But in 1928 a committee
established to reconsider the display reversed that policy, recommending that the
originalshowever fragmentarybe shown without their plaster supplements.
The juxtaposition of marble and plaster is bound to be inharmonious, they
wrote.
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