|
| connelly's
parthenon |
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 1996
From:
David Silverman
Subject:
AEGEANET Connelly's Parthenon
Now
that Joan B. Connelly's re-interpretation of the Parthenon frieze,
which attracted some attention even from the national press, has
been fully published (AJA 100 [1996] 53-80), perhaps people will
want to discuss it. I'll start with an uncritical and superficial
summary of her arguments, just in case anyone does not have access
to the original, then pose a few questions. *Summary* The
traditional interpretation, identifying the frieze as the
Panathenaic procession, goes back to the eighteenth century
travelers Stuart & Revett. It has two main points of
vulnerability. First, some items are missing which would be
expected: e.g. kanephoroi (women carrying reed baskets), allies
shown as tribute bearers, hoplites, the sacred trireme. Second, the
violation of convention (having a contemporary scene where there
should be a mythological one) would be severe and anomalous. Some
scholars have met these objections by supposing that we have an "original"
Panathenaia retrojected into mythic time. C's solution begins with
the "peplos" panel on the east frieze. She holds that it
represents the mythical king Erechtheus, together with his wife
Praxithea and their three daughters. Our main Athenian source for
this myth consists of the fragments of Euripides' play *Erechtheus*.
One large fragment is preserved by the orator Lycurgus (*Against
Leocrates* 101) =
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/text?lookup=lyc.+1.101 and
another is preserved on papyrus (Sorbonne 2328 = Recherches de
Papyr. 4, 1967, pp. 11-67). The myth can be reconstructed as
follows: Erechtheus' new city is threatened by a rival, Eumolpus the
son of Poseidon (whose gift of a spring was rejected in favor of
Athena's olive). Delphi says Erechtheus must sacrifice his daughter
to save the city. The three girls make a pact that if one of them
must die they will all die. The youngest is sacrificed and the city
wins the battle, though Erechtheus himself is swallowed by an
earthquake; the other girls will die later. Athena directs the
queen, Praxithea, to honor the dead girls with a sacred precinct on
the Acropolis. On the peplos panel, there are 5 figures. Left to
right, we have two girls, a woman, a bearded man, and a smaller
child of indeterminate sex. C first suggests that the woman, usually
identified as the priestess of Athena, is Praxithea the wife of
Erechtheus. She wants to identify the bearded man (traditionally
seen as a priest or as the Archon Basileus) as Erechtheus himself,
with the attributes of a sacrificing priest. She says the bearded
man's tunic is ungirt like that of priests about to sacrifice; but
in her parallels, the men are holding knives (and the bearded man on
the Parthenon frieze is not). She maintains convincingly that the
smaller child at the right must be a girl. There is no known role
for a boy even in the peplos ritual. The traditional interpretation
says this girl is one of the arrephoroi; but they always appear
elsewhere in pairs. C argues, also convincingly, that a girl's nude
buttock on display at the culminating moment of this sacred ritual
(involving the peplos and Athena's statue) would be offensive to the
Athenians. The nudity must be purposeful; it is not Athena's peplos
but rather Erechtheus' youngest daughter changing her clothes to be
sacrificed. But C does not want the Erechtheid daughter preparing to
be sacrificed nude. Parallels for the sacrifice of the virginal
daughters of kings are adduced: Iphigeneia, Makaria, Polyxena. C
wants to argue that such victims should be clad in a special kind of
robe which works like a straightjacket. A wrapped-up Polyxena (as
she appears on a 6th century Tyrrhenian amphora) provides her
strongest parallel for this form of dress of the human sacrificial
victim. The stools carried by the two girls at left are
traditionally thought to be for the priestess and the Archon to sit
on, but C adduces parallels for stools used as shelves for clothing.
The gods and goddesses seated at right are turned away because it is
unseemly for them to watch mortals die. The procession is "the
first commemorative sacrifice in honor of Erechtheus and his
daughters." The nine or ten men usually seen as the eponymous
heroes or as the archons are generic elders. The chariots and the
lack of hoplites in the procession accord with the idea that this is
an army of the distant past, not a fifth century army. The cavalry
evoke the distant past. The young men with horses evoke the sense of
ephebes at the dokimasia. The Thracian caps are booty taken from the
defeated Thracians in Eumolpus' army. The Pandora whose birth was
represented at the base of the chryselephantine Athena was not
Hesiod's Pandora but rather a daughter of Erechtheus. C finds some
parallels for the kosmos (or dressing scene) of Pandora; hence she
suggests that the littlest girl on the Parthenon "peplos"
scene is Pandora. However, the mythographic tradition was fairly
confused about the names, numbers, and even sexes of the children of
Erechtheus. C further suggests that the west room of the Parthenon
was believed to rest upon the tombs of the maidens, because in the
papyrus fragment Euripides has Athena directing that a precinct be
established where the girls are buried. So the name "Parthenon"
is explained by C as a genitive plural ("the place of the
maidens") rather than, as it usually explained, being formed
from Athena's epithet Parthenos. Indeed, C thinks the local epithet
Parthenos for Athena results from her being conflated with the
Erechtheid girl. The Panathenaic festival was not originally a
celebration of Athena's birthday, as is usually thought, but rather
elaborate funeral games for the daughters of Erechtheus, who (she
suggests) had a hero-cult on the Acropolis. Finally, she returns to
the folded cloth. The usage of Athena's peplos in some ways suggests
a funerary shroud; so the real peplos or peploi alluded to the one
depicted on the Parthenon frieze, which however was not a
representation of it but rather of the Erechtheid girl's
bridal/funereal wrap. In fifth century ritual the arrephoroi weave
the peplos; the pair of girls at left on the "peplos"
scene thus evokes the arrephoroi. *Questions* The strengths of C's
interpretation are evident. What are its weaknesses? First,
conceiving of the procession as separated in time from the scene on
the "peplos" slabs is perhaps a weak link ("the
central scene may be read as a sort of flashback," p. 67). In
the fragment of the play on papyrus, Athena instructs Praxithea to
establish a ritual in honor of the girls. But are there parallels
from architectural sculpture of the Classical period for this sort
of temporal disjunction? Does it not seem more likely that whatever
is depicted on the frieze, it all takes place at one time? Why not
just suggest that the procession is somehow part of the same ritual
event in which the sacrifice takes place? Second, is it reasonable
to have a royal family so prominently celebrated by democratic
Periklean Athens? C does not deal with this at length; she says that
the Erechtheids in fact conform to "democratic" social
ideology because they put the city's needs ahead of their own family
(and she attributes this argument to R. Seaford, note 124). Third,
what about the clothing of the human sacrificial victim? It appears
from Aeschylus *Agamemnon* 239 that Iphigeneia is imagined as unclad
at the moment of being sacrificed. Is she also unclad on the
white-ground lekythos by Douris of c. 470 BC (ARV(2) 446.266,
mislabeled as 226 in C's note 84)? Polyxena too tears off the top of
her robe in preparation for the knife (Euripides *Hecuba* 555-562).
Polyxena is probably the weakest of C's three parallels for the
royal virgin sacrifice, since she is not sacrificed to save a city
(Troy has already fallen) but to appease the ghost of Achilleus. But
it is Polyxena who (as she appear on the 6th century Tyrrhenian
amphora) provides C's strongest parallel for the dressing up of the
human sacrificial victim. Is there any inconsistency here? On the
one hand, C wants the exposed buttock of the Erechtheid girl to
evoke the nudity of the sacrificial victim. But at the same time she
wants the moment depicted to be prior to the actual sacrifice.
Erechtheus does not even have the knife in his hand yet. C focuses
on bridal clothing and funereal clothing, invoking the "bride
of death" paradigm; but this episode would be first and
foremost a sacrifice. Does it make sense to assimilate the robe to
bridal or funereal wear if "Pandora" is going to remove or
tear it before she dies? Does it make sense to say the gods are
turned away because it is unseemly for them to see humans being
killed, when (as C reads the panel) the victim is not dying, but
merely preparing to die?
Date:
Tue, 6 Feb 1996
From:
Kevin Clinton
Subject: AEGEANET Connelly's Parthenon
In
response to David Silverman's request... I think that Joan
Connelly's attempt to interpret the Parthenon frieze as a mythical
scene is a healthy development, but there are many problems, major
and minor, with her interpretation. Others have pointed out (and
will point out) problems with her iconography of sacrifice, but
there are some serious problems concerning the myth, as I mentioned
in the AJA colloquium in San Diego in which we both took part. C.
wishes to see the myth of Eumolpos vs. Erechtheus as a vitally
central myth to the Athenians: "... it is the orator Lycurgus
who informs us of the centrality of the myth within the
consciousness of the Athenians. 'On these verses, gentlemen, your
fathers were brought up,' he reminds his audience as he launches
into a 55-line quotation from Euripides' lost tragedy, the
Erechtheus, ...' Actually, Lycurgus makes this comment *after* he
quotes Euripides, but more significantly, he does not generalize in
the way that C's mistranslation suggests. He actually said: "In
these matters, gentlemen, he (sc. Euripides) educated your fathers."
What a difference the active makes! There is no basis here for
seeing this myth as traditionally expressing an Athenian paideia,
and Lycurgus does not claim it. The values that he is interested in
he attributes specifically to Euripides' version. C interprets the
peplos scene as "... three girls preparing for death. The
youngest girl goes first, so her funerary dress is being unfolded;
the oldest daughter, second from left, is in the process of handing
down a stool to her mother. The daughter at far left..." The
parents are preparing their daughters for death, as she stated more
explicitly in her talk in San Diego. However, in Euripides' play the
parents have no idea that all three daughters will die. The oracle
asks for only one, and Praxithea is willing to go along for the sake
of the city: "And she will save her mother and you (sc.
Erechtheus) and her two sisters" (lines 36-7). The tragedy is
that she does not. Erechtheus and her sisters die; such is the news
that is related to her mother at the end of the play, as C
recognizes. Thus the play, our earliest literary version of the
myth, in which the parents certainly do not intend to sacrifice all
three daughters, does not offer a parallel for C's interpretation of
the peplos scene. C's answer in San Diego to this difficulty I did
not find persuasive: 1) Euripides may have been altered the myth. 2)
If I understood it correctly, the scene may not necessarily be
suggesting that the parents know that all three are going to die,
yet the death of all three is being alluded to. I had a hard time
following this, so I may not be representing it correctly. It
strikes me as very difficult. What do the parents think they are
doing? Aren't they, according to this reading, preparing them all in
the same fashion? If so, isn't it for the same purpose? As for 1),
it involves special pleading. And the implications are rather
amazing. Virtually all attestations of the myth in literary sources
follow Euripides in the main lines: Erechtheus must sacrifice one
daughter and he only intends to sacrifice one. No version has him or
his wife sacrificing or intending to sacrifice *all* their
daughters. It is astounding, then, that a mythical scene on Athens'
most famous building, which represents a major variant of the myth,
has left no trace in any of the later accounts of the myth. (One
might plead that in Euripides' Ion, there is a reference to it in
Ion's question to Creusa and her response (lines 277-8): "Did
your father Erechtheus sacrifice your sisters?" "He dared
to kill the maidens as sacrifices (sphagia) for the land." But
here allusion is being made very briefly, in the space of a single
verse, to the result of the myth, for which Erechtheus is being
criticized. It would be hard to argue from this that an alternative
version is lurking here, that Euripides has presented two very
different accounts. In each case "sacrifice" and "kill"
may be understood in a causative sense.) It is also very odd that a
myth that has "centrality ... within the consciousness of the
Athenians" is not found elsewhere in Athenian art. C. does,
very usefully, point out many difficulties with the traditional
modern interpretation of the frieze, as others have done before her,
and this should spark healthy debate.
From:
Tomas Marik
Subject:
Re: AEGEANET Connelly's Parthenon (long)
Date:
Wed, 7 Feb 1996
When I first heard about re-interpretation of the Parthenon frieze a
"a mythological scene" I didn't take serious, but now that
it has been published it perhaps really needs discussion. Although I
am not more than an undergraduate student of Classical Archaeology I
have a strong inclination to contribute to such a discussion - can't
say whether it will be helpfull for anybody. Unfortunately the last
number of AJA didn't arrive yet at our institute, so I'm dependent
on Silverman's summary. For the "old" interpretation I
found references to Adolph Michaelis, Der Parthenon, Leipzig 1871,
p. 203 ff. (did the author take it into account/refer to it?) where
a summary of contemporary theories is given as well as arguments
against them. From this moment on the freeze is (more or less)
generaly refered to as Panathenaiac procession - the only not
mythological one on the whole Parthenon in literature. But why must
there be something "mythological"? If I'm not wrong then
the Panathenaia was the most important "festival" at
Athens, why shouldn't it be "holy" enough? On "bearded
man on the Parthenon frieze without knife" Michaelis, p. 208-9
offers a fine theory. "The charriots and the lack of hoplites.."
...I don't feel they evoke the distant past, simply what was going
on during the Panathenaia. Why should the Pandora on the base not be
"Hesiod's" one? If at least Pausanias and Plinius thought
it was. One of the strongest arguments in favour of the old theory
can be found in the decorative composition of the Parthenon itself.
Not only separate parts MUST (in 5th c. Athens) form a unit (e.g.
the freeze in itself must refer as a whole to one topic, west and
east pediment must be related,...) but all parts of the figural
decoration form one system. That means that western part of the
freeze must be, from its contents, related to western pediment and
western metopes etc. On all this see for example Charbonneaux, La
sculpture grecque classique, and at lot of others How does the new
interpretation fit into such a system?
Date:
Fri, 9 Feb 1996
From:
Nick Nicastro
Subject:
AEGEANET Connelly's Frieze and Temporal Disjunction
Regarding
Joan Connelly's reinterpretation of the Parthenon frieze, David
Silverman recently asked: >The strengths of C's interpretation
are evident. What are its >weaknesses? First, conceiving of the
procession as separated in time from the >scene on the "peplos"
slabs is perhaps a weak link ("the central scene may be >read
as a sort of flashback," p. 67). In the fragment of the play on
papyrus, >Athena instructs Praxithea to establish a ritual in
honor of the girls. But >are there parallels from architectural
sculpture of the Classical period for >this sort of temporal
disjunction? Does it not seem more likely that whatever >is
depicted on the frieze, it all takes place at one time? I'm not sure
about the 5th century, but such "temporal disjunctions"
may have been fairly common in the pre-Classical arts. There's an
article in "The Ages of Homer" omnibus by Mark
Stansbury-O'Donnell ("Reading Pictorial Narrative", p.
315) that takes Homer's "Shield of Achilles" as a starting
point for speculations on "narrativity" in Geometric
ceramic-painting. According to Stansbury-O'Donnell, Greek viewers
were able to interpret multi-level narratives (w/ past, present, and
future actions) in single visual compositions, usually on the basis
of arrangement and motion. This kind of interpretation may have been
part of "visual literacy" in antiquity, just as our
reading of cinematic montage is part of visual literacy in the 20th
century. There's certainly many examples of such disjunctions down
to Roman times-- so maybe it wasn't so unusual in the 5th century,
either. There's lots to wonder about in Stansbury-O'Donnell's
piece-- sometimes it seems like a tissue of circular arguments. But
it is worth recognizing that the rules of ancient visual
representation and reception may not have fit our modern notions of
"likeliness".
Date:
9 Feb 1996
From:
"Hurwit, Jeff"
Subject:
AEGEANET Connelly and Temporal Disjunction
In
response to N. Nicastro's comments on visual literacy and temporal
disjunction vis-a-vis Joan Connelly's theory: While I cannot accept
Connelly's interpretation of the Parthenon frieze for such reasons
as those offered by K. Clinton, O. Palagia, E. Harrison, I. Jenkins,
and others, and while I find her interpretation of the Pandora scene
on the base of the Athena Parthenos especially bizarre (she is
tempted to see it as the apotheosis of Erechtheus' sacrificed
daughter, while our ancient sources were sure it was a *genesis*), I
would like to point out that some scholars (e.g. E. Simon) have read
a background myth into the (more or less) lost central metopes of
the south side of the Parthenon. If, for example, it is the Ixion
tale that was told in metopes 13-20/21--that is, the story of the
progenitor of both the centaurs and Lapiths shown in the metopes on
either side--then we might have the same sort of "flashback"
that Connelly sees at the center of the east frieze. Surely an
Athenian audience used to tragic choral, or Pindaric, odes might not
have been disturbed by such a device. |
| Culled
from
the
UMich archives of Aegeanet |
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