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The Athena Parthenon (the Maiden’s Apartment) in Athens was built between the years 447 and 432 BCE. It was built on the city’s Acropolis, the sacred rock. This temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena was constructed in a mixture of Dorian and Ionian styling, with a traditional Doric temple floor plan.
The rise of Athens
This huge undertaking signified the rise of the Athenian city-state as the leader over the other Greek city-states.
At this point in history, directly after the Peloponnesian War, the city-states were loosely aligned to defend against the Persians, who continued to attack Greek lands. It marks the beginning of the Athenian (Greek) empire.
And though the great Athena Parthenon temple was in part a political maneuver, it was also built out of true devotion to the goddess. The original temples built on the Acropolis were sacked by the Persians in 480. The Parthenon was built to restore the Acropolis as a place of worship.
Honoring Athena Parthenos
The Athena Parthenon is dedicated to Athena in her aspect of virgin, or maiden: Athena Parthenos. At the height of the Classical Age, there was a huge festival to Athena thrown every four years called the Panathenaea. The celebrations included a procession that ended at the Parthenon, wherein a ceremony was performed that involved placing a woven wool robe upon the statue of Athena.
The Parthenon also honors Athena by housing one of her sacred birds, the little owls, or Athene noctua. According to myth, the goddess was so taken in by the bird’s “great eyes and solemn appearance” that she made the bird one of her symbols. As Athena is a reincarnation of a Neolithic bird-goddess, it is only fitting that the little owl be one of her creatures. Athena took on the name Glaukopis, and in her aspect Athena Glaukopis she is Athena Owl-Eyed, goddess of wisdom. The birds were protected and encouraged to roost at the Acropolis, and can still be found at the ruins of the Athena Parthenon today.
The Parthenon in Story
In ancient literature, the Parthenon serves as the stage for Lysistrata, a comedic play by Aristophanes. Though the goddess Athena does not herself appear in this play, her ideals for the health and well-being of the state echo through it.
Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, brings a troop of married women from across Greece to the Athena Parthenon (the protected place of the virgin goddess) to withhold sex from their husbands. The women claim that the balance of their civilization has grown too masculine. They wove a new cloak of state (in the tradition of the Panathenaea) that incorporated masculine and feminine traits to soften aggression and uphold the law with love. The very idea of combining masculine and feminine traits to bring justness and balance to society is the essence that Athena embodies.
The Artistry of the Parthenon: Then
Though the Athena Parthenon is in ruins today and its treasures scattered, we still have some records of how the Parthenon, and the entire temple complex on the Acropolis, looked in ancient times.
We have books that have preserved through the centuries that were essentially travelogues. Authors such as Plutarch and Pausanias kept detailed accounts of their travels across the Mediterranean:
As you enter the temple that they name the Parthenon, all the sculptures you see on what is called the pediment refer to the birth of Athena, those on the rear pediment represent the contest for the land between Athena and Poseidon. The statue itself is made of ivory and gold. On the middle of her helmet is placed a likeness of the Sphinx–the tale of the Sphinx I will give when I come to my description of Boeotia–and on either side of the helmet are griffins in relief.
These griffins, Aristeas of Proconnesus says in his poem, fight for the gold with the Arimaspi beyond the Issedones. The gold which the griffins guard, he says, comes out of the earth; the Arimaspi are men all born with one eye; griffins are beasts like lions, but with the beak and wings of an eagle. I will say no more about the griffins.
The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Victory about four cubits high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonius. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora in relief. Hesiod and others have sung how this Pandora was the first woman; before Pandora was born there was as yet no womankind. The only portrait statue I remember seeing here is one of the emperor Hadrian, and at the entrance one of Iphicrates, who accomplished many remarkable achievements.- From Pausanias’s Description of Greece
The Artistry of the Parthenon: Now
At one time, the Athena Parthenon was decorated with a frieze, a series of sculptures that ringed around the top of the Athena Parthenon walls. The frieze, which in places has been badly damaged, is housed in pieces across the world, parts in The British Museum, the Louvre, and in the new Acropolis Museum, which is scheduled to open in late 2008 or 2009. Scholars debate over the meaning of the frieze, which appears to be one long procession. One popular theory is that the frieze is a fictional depiction of the Panathenaea.
Though also damaged, the metopes are in much better condition. The word “metope” is an architectural term referring to a square-shaped space in Doric design. Currently housed in the British Museum (which is a hotly debated topic between Greece and England), the carvings on the metopes are excellent examples of the typical public sculpture of Classical Athens: the theme of conflict between two contrasting groups (Buxton, 58).
The metopes are filled with violent images from mythical battles involving Centaurs, Amazons, and Giants, as well as scenes from the Trojan War. These images were meant to highlight that enduring principle that Athena embodies: order against chaos (often represented in Classical times as the Greeks against the rest of the world).
It was in this conflict, the one that Athena always sought to effectively balance, that the ancient Athenian identity was defined.
