The Parthenon and its relevance today.

I am indebted to Natalie Levine for some of the images.  Further, Dr. Corinne Besson posted the picture of the Parthenon above.   It was taken in 1901 when it was in a parlous state.  I have borrowed this and I sincerely hope this is in order.

I recently saw a picture of the Acropolis taken either from a Drone or an Aircraft. There had been snow but not so much that would disguise the features. I wondered if events in Greece still possessed the propensity to shape thinking in Europe and other areas as she had done in the past. I soon had my answer. A band of cold weather which, at this time, would have afflicted areas further north was pushed south, wiping out substantial quantities of salad produce and succulent vegetables which, up to this point, had been taken very much for granted as commodities which, without the benefits of air transport and refrigeration, would have been unthinkable years ago. The affected vegetable varieties are a legacy from the Moors and Arab traders so we should thank them for such tasty additions to our culinary experiences. These, along with Feta cheese and olives of diverse kinds form the backbone of fashionable and hasty lunches that change hands on the exchange of a lot of hard cash.

Why the Parthenon? This building that has appeared in so many guises, symbolic of a culture that has largely disappeared and whose architectural features have been copied all over the world?  It was, as some who have studied the Classics and Constitutional History, an image for what some of us understand to be a foundation of ‘democratic government’. I admit to using that term loosely for reasons that may become clear but some who read this may already be seeing (and have seen) a subversion, if not outright usurpation, of this fragile article. The Parthenon resonates with our nobler perceptions of order, symmetry and stability.

H.D.F. Kitto, as distinct from J. Kitto (there were a few of them), was a formidable scholar with a flair for writing in a very precise narrative style. His interests, listed as being of no particular importance save to his wife, two children and a few well-chosen friends and the anxious conductor of the Bristol University Orchestra, are identified on the back of a little Penguin paperback with a white central panel and a powder blue border. He is at the top of a list of people I would find fascinating.

He never tired of speaking about this and other landmarks in the history of Architecture. Deriving from Parthenia (Maiden) it was dedicated to Athena.  Her statue, within the two sets of columns, was visible from a considerable distance.   One legend has it that She and Poseidon engaged in a contest for possession of the Acropolis. She won. Poseidon has a temple there but possibly not as grand as the one dedicated to Athena. It appears, according to Kitto, that this was the result of a collision between two peoples in Attica, an indigenous one and a Hellenic group within which was Athena, the chief Deity.  It is a story of two peoples in collision as a consequence of a mass migration. It is the more remarkable that the cult of Athena was imported and this is supported by evidence of older temples dedicated to Athena built in Sicily. The confrontation had a successful and peaceful conclusion. Later generations would come to learn that hell, in almost any form, might exist when two cultures were in collision. We see this in our times with frightening regularity. The Parthenon existed through a period when control of the Mediterranean Sea was the subject of several confrontations.   At various times the Greeks, Phonecians, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and later the Venetians and the Turks fought for control of trade in the Mediterranean. It was as important then to have a powerful navy as well as a credible system of Deities with a good record of support for the cult followers in times of strife.

Athena and her cult were totally absorbed by the new system and she was adopted as the daughter of Zeus. Her pet owl, symbolic of wisdom and diligence, was always with her even in the Parthenon. The owl, symbolic of social wisdom and justice reminds us that Athena is a nature Goddess, not of a tribe or of a specific population. Kitto points out that many Deities were imported into Greece and were not part of indigenous worship. At the time of the Parthenon's construction Athens had an unemployment problem and Pericles was determined that Athens should be at the intellectual, political and cultural centre of Greece. I am sure we have heard this before in more recent times.  The problem of unemployment beset the Weimar Republic and the one who usurped it also had the solution.  This shows how national leaders can aspire to possess sufficient influence and create massive cultural movements, going on to shape and alter world events.  It can also lead to destruction on a cataclysmic scale.

Historians and students study Greek art, literature, pottery and drama and speak of them as if they had specific energies of their own. The Malay word for energy is Tenaga which, to my mind, is powerful onomatopoeia. The Greeks painted eyes on the prows of their galleys. The wooden lighters or Tonkangs, busy in eastern seas, working general cargo while the vessels swung on the ends of anchor cables were adorned in a similar manner. With their transom bows and heavy sawn log hulls, hewn with an adze and sliced with a tension saw, painted pitch black with eyes to either side they had characters and natures all their own, imbued with not a little menace. I saw them as a younger man and marvelled as they pushed their massive bulks under bridges and in the harbour swell. Like the vessels identified by Herodotus, they were for trade as they had broad beams. The presence of slender craft was a warning of imminent war.

The current Parthenon stands on a site occupied by a former building destroyed in an earlier conflict. While it is not especially large compared to other monuments it is the largest on the Acropolis and the alignment of its longest axis is still discussed. During the confrontations between the Venetians and the Othman Turks it was used as a gunpowder store but, as we still find to our cost, the accumulation of such nasty things in one place usually leads, one way or another, to destruction and thus it was when a Venetian grenade landed and inflicted the damage responsible for the ruin we still see. This was during a period of Turkish occupation during which the sculptures we now have in our museums and galleries were decapitated.

The Othman Turk occupation of Greece is the reason we will never know the face of “Winged Victory”, a fabulous statue now in the Louvre that has power in the body and a will in the limbs, a personification of the people who placed her on the prow of a carved stone vessel in Samothrace.

The decoration of the pediment and the front elevation above the columns is ubiquitous.  The column capitals are of the Doric order. This is the simplest decoration, unlike the sensuous curvature of the Ionic and the wild foliage of the Corinthian. The Doric order is associated with the Dorian mode in music which generally links it to the key of D. The famous “Dorian” Toccata and Fugue by Bach was once described by Albert Schweitzer as a miracle of juxtaposed and superimposed vaulted arches. All this from a simple design for a column on a Greek temple? What magnificent energy is this?

The Greeks understood the flaws in human perception. They knew that the most perfectly constructed geometrical forms were always perceived incorrectly by the human eye and brain. They also knew how to design and construct in such a manner that these imperfections would disappear when the whole design was examined from a distance and it would then appear to be, within the eye and mind of the beholder, what it was intended to be. A visual manifestation of perfection.

An architect friend, a nodding acquaintance for years, became a valued one when we finally got around to entertaining each other in our respective houses. In the slightly subdued aftermath of 9/11 we agreed a meeting. It was one of those languid summer evenings when the breeze hung on a sultry pause as the flowers slowly shrivelled on expanding stamens and lawnmowers cease to clatter and chop. We chatted about this and other ancient monuments. Between sips of a liquor that was somewhere between Ouzo and Sambuca he described how the ancient and collective memory of Man had determined the appearance of the Parthenon’s front elevation.

“Man has and will always possess a memory of living in and among great trees. His first designs of dwellings were vertical trunks of wood, rough-hewn and sunk into the ground with a rough triangular platform for a roof supported by the vertical stumps in a rectangular plan.”

This was my first introduction to the Great Memory. I was not surprised in the least. I had thought as much up to that point but had never used those words to describe it. For years, I had understood the first Dolmens to be statements made by ancient men. They scream at us; “We can DO THIS!!”

As he topped up the snifter glasses he asked me what I knew of the Albigensian Crusade. I told him all I knew as he listened in silence.

“How did you pick all that lot up? How on earth did you make that into such a powerful narrative? You have told me things I never knew yet I have studied those events for years!”

I told him the story of the Troubadour who documented those times.  The Troubadour laments the degradations of the period, pointing to these as the consequence of the departure of wisdom, personified by his patron, Alfonso the Wise (Le sage).

“So, you see David, the attempt to wipe (the Albigensians) out failed and it failed utterly. If you cast your mind back to the Parthenon you will know that the marble sculptures are in the British Museum. But the vandalism that removed them from the pediment did not start with Elgin. The first were taken down in about AD 500 when it was converted to a church and that wilful destruction by a new rising power continued to the second millennium. As you know the Albigensian Crusade was just the last of a series and THAT is why I wondered if you could see any links between them. This memory, & this that I described that is the Parthenon will NEVER be erased.”

I found this account of the activity on the Parthenon during the removal of the famous sculptures.  It is slightly amusing.

“I have, My Lord, the pleasure of announcing to you possession of the 8th Metope, the one where there is the Centaur carrying off the Woman. This piece has caused much trouble in all respects, and I have even been obliged to be a little barbarous.”

Is the removal of the Metope in the quote above an allegory for Elgin carrying off the sculptures?

Greece could justify, to a large extent, that she has been subjected to successive looting over a long period of time to the present day but I was struck by the appearance of the flowery language of the early 19th Century, used to describe one of the most contentious art thefts ever carried out.  It was quite clear that the original builders intended that anyone attempting to remove any or all of the decoration would be at some pains to do it.

Lord Byron wrote of these events with some disdain;

“Dull is the eye that will not weep to see;

Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed

By British hands, which it had best behoved,

To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.

Curs’d be the hour when from their isle they roved,

And once again thy hapless bosom gored,

And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!”

 At times, the most economical verse can encapsulate the most execrable crimes, real or perceived.

Things moved on.  John moved to the south of France to be as close to Mont Segur, the last stronghold of the Albigensians, as his pension would allow for travel. He returned to Britain.  I searched him out but he had the singular temerity to pass away before I could find his new address.

The last quoted words on this should, I think, be left to the authors of a text on the key monuments in the history of architecture.

“More than any other Greek building, The Parthenon is characterized by a passionate concern for subtleties of design and a vast capacity for taking pains. These qualities are met with what we now call optical refinements. Small variations in the normally repetitive dimensions and slight deviations from the perpendicular and the horizontal inform the building from its foundations to the crown of its entablature.  These tend to compensate for the mechanics of human vision that makes straight lines seem to sag and true verticals seem to pitch slightly outward. Unquestionably, these refinements on the Parthenon contribute to its unmatched aura of resilience, vitality and self-assurance. Some may wonder whether some, at least, may have been constructed simply to demonstrate the high degree of subtlety of which Man is capable when attracted to the loftiest of subjects.”

The Parthenon and the Lotus flower pictured above demonstrate that Man can and will aspire to lift his mind above the superficial and temporal.  The paragraph above is from a text on the most important monuments in the history of architecture. Note that there is no specific description of any architecture in the title. The writers draw no distinctions between any examples they examine. They give each an equal consideration; from the earliest Arabic through the Stupas of Siam to the Egyptian pyramids.  The first plate is of a Dolmen in Brittany. I would draw you to their use of the word "monument".  It suggests losses which some may think incalculable but which are not caused by hostility or conflict alone.  In some cases they are wilful and desperate, as desperate as any measures might be that are carried out to obliterate architectural predecessors.  Ignorance obliterates important examples of older architecture and, usually, it arises out of a casual dismissal of the importance of anything that has gone before or was not, in the view of those who made those decisions of the time, politically correct.  The Romans obliterated Carthage following the Punic Wars.  The visible Roman remains are left undisturbed because any attempts to excavate would destroy anything that belonged to the older civilisation.  It is only recently that the underground cistern built in Tunis, fed by aqueducts from oases in the desert, has been unearthed.  The desert has been kinder than men in the preservation of our cultures.  Sometimes, an enlightened view takes the mind of the conqueror and makes him merciful in victory.  After the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 the entire Alhambra and attendant structures were left alone.  Queen Isabella commanded that a church be built in the middle.  The palace of the Moors still stands. Would that the same enlightened view had made the minds of men more merciful to the Temple of Athena.