moldings called triglyphs. The metopes told the story, over and over, of how very superior the Greeks were to all other peoples. Fourteen metopes under the east pediment showed the triumph of the Olympians over the giants, the original victory of reason over brute force. On the long south side of the temple, thirty-two metopes were devoted to the most ancient Greeks, known as Lapiths, beating back the half-man, half-horse centaurs. Under the west pediment, the Greeks defeated the Amazons, the race of ferocious female warriors whose queen, Antiope, married the Athenian hero Theseus – but who had also, like the Persians, attacked the Acropolis and been repulsed. On the north side, the final thirty-two metopes showed the destruction of Troy at the hands of the Greeks, the subject of the ancient poem Iliupersis, which picked up where Homer’s Iliad left off. In all four of these cycles, the Greeks battled intently but impassively to dispatch the fierce and monstrous foes that threatened their civilization.
Reconstruction of the west pediment, Parthenon.
Phidias, detail of goddesses, east pediment, Parthenon.
The Parthenon was surrounded by a full ring of columns, and visitors who mounted the steps of the platform could have circumnavigated the temple again in the shade and enjoyed yet more relief sculpture above the interior columns. Here there was a continuous frieze running 524 feet around the entire building. Instead of mythological scenes, like those ornamenting the exterior of the Parthenon, this frieze depicted the defining civic ritual of Athens.
Phidias, metope with Lapith battling a centaur, Parthenon.
The Olympic Games, founded in 776 BC and continued until 394 AD, were the most famous and long-running of the ancient Greek athletic festivals, but most cities had a local version of their own. A festival at Athens was first recorded in 566 BC (although the Athenians claimed it originated seven centuries before the Olympics). It was celebrated every year, and every four years there was a larger event, known as the Great Panathenaic Festival. This production included athletic contests, notably the mile-long dash from the port of Piraeus to the city of Athens by torchlight, as well as other traditional sports at the Panathenaic Stadium.1717 There were also music and poetry competitions. Capping off eight days of activities was the delivery of a new peplos to robe the ancient olivewood statue of Athena that was housed on the Acropolis.1818
The Panathenaic Stadium still exists; it hosted the 2004 Olympiad.
According to legend, this rather homely but extremely venerable statue had fallen out of the sky shortly after the foundation of Athens. It was evacuated from Athens during the Persian invasion, and thus survived the sack of the city.
This procession was an exuberant affair that ran through the city and ascended the Acropolis to the sacred space outside the Parthenon. Participants included maidens carrying the peplos, a hundred oxen destined to be sacrificed to Athena, the triumphant athletes and the cream of Athenian youth on horseback. Once the crowd arrived on the Acropolis there was a massive feast that went on all night.
Phidias, detail of north frieze with riders preparing to form a procession, Parthenon.
The inner frieze of the Parthenon showed an idealized image of this procession, the bulk of which was devoted to the Athenian youths. All handsome, chiseled, and dressed only in cloaks, they handled their steeds with the same preternatural calm that characterized the heroes on the metopes. The frieze culminated on the east side of the temple with the preparation of the new peplos. Phidias’s depiction of the Panathenaic procession was a timeless pæan to Athens’s unique character, commemorating the city’s past and affirming its future.
The line between Athenian mortal and Olympian god is blurred throughout the decoration of the Parthenon, with the humans becoming more perfect and the gods becoming more natural than they had been in any previous art. The elevation of the mortal and the humanization of the divine were achieved through careful attention to anatomy and a rigorous application of mathematical proportion to the figures. There is compelling evidence that what later came to be called “divine proportion” or the “Golden Ratio” was used throughout the Parthenon. The principle, which Euclid would describe in his Elements, around 300 BC involves dividing a line so that the ratio of the larger segment to the smaller equals the ratio of the whole line to the larger segment. This ratio was considered especially pleasing to the eye, whether in the dimensions of a rectangle or the proportions of a human body. In the work that Phidias oversaw, all the figures, regardless of size, showed relative proportions consistent with the Golden Ratio, in everything from the size and shape of the head to the distance between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger. The same ratio governed the Parthenon’s architecture as well, from the overall dimensions to the proportions of columns and capitals. While the effect might be subtle in the individual elements, the use of consistent mathematical proportion in both figures and architecture produced an overwhelming impression of supernatural harmony.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Parthenon Frieze to His Friends, 1868.
Hector Leroux, Pericles and Aspasia Visiting Phidias’ Studio, c. 1870.
There are works predating the Persian sack of Athens that show attempts to create figures that seem to respond to the same external forces that affect humans, such as gravity, but are flawlessly beautiful at the same time. This trend was still tentative when the Persians arrived, and the first victory monuments generally reflect the more traditional manner known as the archaic style.
The so-called “Kritios Boy,” c. 480 BC. This figure was smashed by the Persians in the sack of the Acropolis in 479 bc. It is an early example of what came to be known as the classical style.
By comparison, when Pericles launched his building program for the Acropolis, the new style of Phidias must have seemed nothing short of revolutionary. Phidias crafted an image of man not as he was, but as he could aspire to be. This style of sculpture had its critics; Aeschylus, for example, regarded the old style as closer to the gods: “Those ancient statues, though simply made, are to be considered divine, while the new kind, though elaborately worked and inducing wonder, have a less divine aspect to them.”1919 But the idealized naturalism of Phidias was also widely admired. It has since become known as the classical style – the touchstone for excellence in Western art.
As quoted in Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (University of Chicago, 2010), 103.
The pediments, metopes and frieze were all more than forty feet above visitors’ heads, and were made more legible by bright paint and gilding that contrasted with
