This commitment of the Athenians to their city was shown in the way they transformed it. By the 450s, the inhibition against rebuilding was weakening and there was a determination to create a city worthy of the new democracy. An important new building from this period, already noted, was the circular Tholos used as the meeting place of the Council of Fifty. It was placed next to the main meeting place of the Boule. Behind these buildings, on higher ground to the west, a temple to Hephaestus, god of fire and hence blacksmiths and craftsmen in general, rose to overlook the Agora and face the Acropolis. It remains as the best preserved of all Greek temples and reflects the growing industrial importance of the city (although Hephaestus was also honoured by Athenians as the god who cut open Zeus’ head with an axe to release Athena).
The most glorious achievement of Athens in the second half of the fifth century was the rebuilding of the Acropolis. The great citadel had been the religious and defensive centre of the area since Mycenaean times. A major rebuilding programme for its main temples had been under way before the Persian attack. This was halted. Columns from the unfinished temples can be seen incorporated in the wall of the Acropolis itself, possibly as a memorial to the attack. Others were inserted in the walls built around the city by Themistocles in the 470s. (These were subsequently enlarged so that, as the Long Walls, they ran down to the Piraeus and made Athens impregnable.) All that was left on the rocky surface of the Acropolis were the foundations of the planned temples. When the procession of the Panathenaea arrived on the summit each year, it would have found a desolate site. (Jeffrey Hurwit, The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present, Cambridge and New York, 1999, already cited, is fundamental here.)
The first new commission for the rock came in 457. It was for a vast bronze statue of Athena Promachus, Athena as the warrior defender of the city. It was to be financed from the spoils of the wars against the Persians, possibly as a commemoration of Cimon’s victory at the Eurymedon river ten years before. The statue was some thirty feet high and the glint of Athena’s spear could be seen as far off as Cape Sounion. It was one of the earliest commissions of Pheidias, a brilliant Athenian sculptor.
For ten years the statue stood alone but then Pericles decided that the temple to Athena Parthenos must be rebuilt on its original site. It was to be a grand commission made of the finest Pentelic marble and rich in sculptural decoration. The problem was finding the money. By now, the treasury of the Delian League had been transferred to Athens and Pericles brazenly diverted it to his programme. It was too much for his critics. Pericles’ biographer Plutarch recorded their outrage, here in the English poet John Dryden’s famous translation. ‘Greece cannot but resent it as an insufferable affront, and consider herself to be tyrannized over openly, when she sees the treasure, which was contributed by her upon a necessity for the war, wantonly lavished out by us upon our city, to gild her all over, and to adorn and set her forth, as it were some vain woman, hung round with precious stones and figures and temples, which cost a world of money.’ Pericles’ retort was that so long as Athens honoured her promise to defend her allies, then the money was hers to use as she wished.
Building began in 447 Bc. Pheidias was involved from the start. His greatest contribution was the colossal gold and ivory cult statue of Athena that was to dominate the interior of the temple. The cost of the gold alone, a ton of it, would have been enough to finance a fleet of 300 triremes, the total cost over seven times that of the Athena Promachos. Perched on the hand of the goddess was Nike, the goddess of victory. Athena’s shield portrayed Athens battling her mythological enemies, a symbolic memory of her recent victory over the Persians. A pool of water was placed in front of the statue, reflecting it (but also providing humidity for the sheets of ivory that Pheidias had carefully cut from tusks). So when approached through the wide doors at the front of the Parthenon, it would have been a shimmering and awe-inspiring sight.
Around this forty-foot creation, the temple rose. Building began on the foundations of the earlier Parthenon with some of the original marble being reused. Some 20,000 tons were needed from the quarries of Mount Pentelikon 16 kilometres away. The temple was always planned to be spectacular and the refinements were impressive. The platform on which the temple stood was slightly domed, the columns subtly swollen and each leant inwards, those in the outside row more so than the inner ones so that, if extended, they would all have met at a single point far above the temple. The sophisticated understanding that straight lines can create the illusion of being otherwise and so need to be corrected was effected with meticulous accuracy. Building techniques were also advanced. A restoration in the early 1900s saw the marble being corroded by the new iron clasps; the fifth-century BC Athenians had covered the iron in lead to make sure this did not happen. (Mary Beard’s The Parthenon, 2nd edition (to include details of the new Acropolis
Museum), London, 2010, is a lively introduction. See also the essays in Jennifer Neils (ed.), The Parthenon: From Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge and New York, 2005.)
It took five years for the walls to reach roof level and before this was begun a series of metopes, rectangular reliefs, were sculpted and lifted into place above the architrave where they could be clearly seen from the ground. They show a battle between humans and centaurs. The centaurs are frenzied, the humans restrained and calm in their resolute combat. So here is humanity that has risen above the emotions that can sway or destroy those that succumb to them, a theme also to be found in contemporary philosophies of moderation. Some see the hand of Pheidias here but, as he was still busy on his cult statue until 438, it is unlikely. Even so he must have been deeply involved in the overall conception of the temple’s design, especially its sculpture. He was on site every day, one great statue completed, another being ingeniously crafted (and a third, the massive Zeus at Olympia, still to be conceived).
The Parthenon is essentially a Doric temple, as was common on the Greek mainland, but the final embellishment, the frieze that ran around the inner colonnade, followed Ionian precedents. Here Athens may have been acknowledging her Ionian subjects in the eastern Aegean. The frieze was never planned in the sumptuous form it finally took but the confidence of the builders and their patrons must have grown with time. The theme is the Panathenaic procession, although there are hints that it was being presented as set in a mythological past, perhaps celebrating too the heroes of Marathon. (Attractive and ingenious though this theory is, it involves some selective counting. The heroic-looking charioteers would have to be excluded but the marshals and grooms included if the numbers are to work.) On the west, north, and southern walls, the procession leads towards the eastern fa9ade. There are horsemen and chariots and then those on foot, elders, musicians, and men with water jugs with the sacrificial oxen in front of them. It is fascinating to see the chariots used in the procession are drawn by four horses, always a sign of elite or divine status. So the Athenian citizens are seeing themselves as worthy of divine or at least aristocratic honour.
The sculptures were completed, in 432, by the pediment scenes that showed off Athena’s relationship with her city. On the eastern pediment the birth of Athena was recorded, on the western Athena competes successfully with Poseidon for the patronage of the city. Plutarch, writing at the beginning of the second century ad, well over 500 years after the Parthenon was built, was still amazed by the building. It remains ‘untouched by the wear of time. . . it is as if some ever-flowering life and unageing spirit had been infused into the creation of these works.’
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