2. ‘How do we set straight our sacred city?’¹

1 The title picks up on the wide range of metaphors relating to ships and voyaging, some already dead or moribund, that were common in classical Athens, and brought together by, for example, Brock, Roger, Greek Political Imagery from Homer to Aristotle (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), http://doi.org/10.5040/9781472555694. At the time of the Greek Revolution, the commonest words used to describe the building of the new nation were variations on ‘rebirth’ and ‘regeneration’. In classical Athens, such concepts, which owe much to post-antique Christianity, seem scarcely to have existed.

2 Although classical Athens had many characteristics of direct democracy by those adult men who qualified for full citizenship, in practice in many respects it was an oligarchy, as pointed out in the Thucydidean speech put in the mouth of Athenagoras of Syracuse at Thuc 6. 39 1 and 2.

3 The claim to be avoiding rhetoric, or not to know about rhetoric, is a common figure of rhetoric, for example in the opening section of the Panathenaicus by Isocrates, and one that the Athenian audience would discount as a mere conventional courtesy. Even in the world of myth, the character of Hecuba in the play by Euripides of that name, in pleading at line 819 with the character of Agamemnon as she faces death or slavery for herself and her children, and the destruction of all that Troy meant, apologizes for not having learned the art of persuasion, ‘the only tyrant’, implying that if she, like other mortals, had been more willing to pay the fees, she would not be in her present situation. Hecuba’s invoking of a visual image in the same speech in order to make vivid her situation both to Agamemnon and to the audience and readership is referred to in discussing Figure 2.3 below. The Commissioners’ promise to confine their speech to what is ‘useful’ echoes the advice given by the character of Athena in the passage from Euripides’s Suppliants discussed with reference to Milton’s Areopagitica at the end of St Clair, William, Who Saved the Parthenon? A New History of the Acropolis Before, During and After the Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022) [hereafter WStP], https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0136, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22. The Commissioners also echo the sentiment of the speech by the character of Ion in Euripides’s play of that name, in which he laments the rights to speak in Assembly the he would lose if it turned out that, as a result of an audit of the evidence for what happened at the time of his birth, he was disqualified from speaking under the law of 451/0, to be discussed in Chapter 3.

4 The Commissioners make a point that seems to have become a cliché, included in the Platonic dialogue the Menexenus at Plat. Menex. 235d and 236a as an example of how to anticipate an objection. The Menexenus, a dialogue in the style of Plato, may have been written by him or another author as a rhetorical exercise, not as a work intended to deceive. The saying was attributed to Antiphon who was regarded as the best public speaker in classical Athens.

5 An example of the many metaphors drawn from the building industry, following, in this case, Aristotle in his treatise on rhetoric. Aristot. Rh. 1.1.5, An image of a measuring rod as used in the long eighteenth century, which matches what is known of actual ancient measuring rods and the metaphors they attracted, is at Figure 1.8.

6 A common rhetorical device, of which there are at least three examples in the plays of Euripides. Noted with references to the surviving plays and fragments by Karamanou, Ioanna, ‘Fragments of Euripidean Rhetoric’, in Markantonatos, Andreas and Volonaki, Eleni, eds, Poet and Orator: A Symbiotic Relationship in Democratic Athens (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 90–91, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110629729.

7 The Commissioners try to forestall the suspicion that they are just going to repeat well-rehearsed clichés, turning to the same comparison from the building industry as was used in the Phaedrus, the Platonic dialogue in which the role of editing as the enemy of spontaneity is discussed. Plat. Phaedrus 234e ἀκριβῶς ἕκαστα τῶν ὀνομάτων ἀποτετόρνευται. Noted by Kennerly, Michele, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 37, along with other examples of the classical period, taken mainly from Old Comedy and from Alcidamas, who mentions the use of manuscripts and wax tablets. By appealing to ‘seeing’ rather than ‘hearing’, the Commissioners signal not only that they accept the primacy of the visual in cognition as discussed in Chapter 1, but that they will be encouraging the audience to imagine the words as ‘opsis’ by the rhetorical device of ‘enargeia’, of which examples follow. In practice the Commissioners use, indeed some would say they have already overused, many of the rhetorical devices that writers on the arts of persuasion, such as Aristotle, discuss and recommend as useful in moderation, as is picked out in later footnotes.

8 The Commissioners show, as does Demosthenes explicitly, with similar words in his funeral speech, Dem 30 14, that they understand that speaking is a speech act intended to persuade and that its effectiveness is dependent upon the context, the shared and often familiar conventions, and the active participation of listeners in the making of meanings. Although at one level the remark is a rhetorical courtesy, the Commissioners show that they have a sophisticated understanding of the non-referential nature of language, and of the specific occasion, as we would expect from their plentiful experience of how speeches are received by live audiences. The binary between word and deed, common in all ancient Greek literary genres, is offered almost as a reassurance that conventions are being followed.

9 The Commissioners quote from Pindar, First Isthmian, 2, as the character of Socrates does in Plato’s Phaedrus, 227b, in what had perhaps become a cliché for stressing the importance of the matter at the beginning of a speech as rhetorical handbooks recommend. The practice of quoting long passages from ‘good and useful poets’ [ἀγαθοὺς καὶ χρηστοὺς ποιητάς] in the theatre or the law courts was explicitly defended by Aeschines, Aeschin. 1 141. Although, in the surviving corpus, the practice is most often found in three of the ten fourth-century canonical Attic Orators, and it is to them that we are indebted for preserving some long fragments, such as that from the Erechtheus of Euripides, the practice of citing shorter phrases, as a chreia, is found earlier. In the full version of the Pindar quotation, which some members of the audience may have remembered, the speaking character addresses his city, Thebes, as his mother, so the quotation is well chosen by the Commissioners as an exhortation to put their duty to Athens as a set of obligations above any private concerns. Throughout, by their choice of words, the Commissioners say that a continuity is being maintained, not that buildings are being repaired or rebuilt after a disaster, itself a performance of what they wish the audience to think. An invocation of Mother Earth and the mutual obligation of children and mothers, including the duties put on both women in the household (‘oikos’) and men to fight, is offered by the character of Eteocles at the opening of The Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus, in an example of how the Athenian tragic drama used the experience of other cities to set examples for Athens, sometimes as a contrast and at other times approvingly.

10 The Commissioners, abandoning the ships of state metaphors, which were overused to the extent that they had largely lost their primary meaning, turn to the earthquake metaphor used by the character of Creon in the Antigone of Sophocles. τὰ μὲν δὴ πόλεος ἀσφαλῶς θεοὶ/πολλῷ σάλῳ σείσαντες ὤρθωσαν πάλιν. Soph. Ant. 162 and 163. The context and the general ‘things of the city’ make clear that Creon was not referring to physical rebuilding.

11 Conventional, as in the Periclean Funeral Oration, Thuc. ii, 35. In contrast with modern political rhetoric in which practitioners like to draw attention to their own alleged personal qualifications, sometimes by claiming to have suffered as much as the unfortunates in the audience, [‘we share your pain’], which is frequently discounted as a mere courtesy, ancient practice prefers to imply that the speaker is merely acting as the medium for a message that is already agreed. One effect is to appear to treat the audience with respect as equals, but with the corollary that speakers may appear to be heartless, lacking in emotion, or cynical, as is a common modern reaction among readers of Thucydidean speeches.

12 The Commissioners follow a procedure described by Dio of Prusa, in his thirteenth oration in Athens, as ‘an ancient custom of the Athenians’. As is normal, they leave ‘the god’ unidentified, but is likely to be a reference to seeking the advice of the oracle at Delphi of which the reports, probably written on papyrus, were archived on the Acropolis, probably in due course held in the closed chamber of the Parthenon along with the other valuables of the city, as will be discussed using epigraphic evidence in Chapter 3. Since the Commissioners speak as a collective, they assume a conventional position as if it were uncontested, itself a form of building consensus. However at least some of the Commissioners, and many others in their audiences, knew that there were many men in Athens, both individuals and members of the philosophical schools, who did not believe that the gods existed at all, or took the view that, if they did exist, they paid no attention to human affairs, and yet others, such as Prodikos, who taught openly that gods were inventions of human minds, ‘nomismatic’ like the coinage, whose usefulness depended upon the trust put in them, not on any intrinsic value, and who did not have to exist to be useful, as discussed in Chapter 1. The cognate word, without the -ize, was put in the mouths of the Athenians in the Melian dialogue, as part of their claim that they were acting in accordance with pan-Hellenic practice: ‘οὐδὲν γὰρ ἔξω τῆς ἀνθρωπείας τῶν μὲν ἐς τὸ θεῖον νομίσεως, τῶν δ᾽ ἐς σφᾶς αὐτοὺς βουλήσεως δικαιοῦμεν ἢ πράσσομεν.’ Thuc. 5.105.1. On the Parthenon frieze, the gods are presented as taking an occasional interest in human affairs, as they do in the Homeric epics, as discussed in Chapter 4.

13 The Commissioners adopt the rhetorical device of acknowledging that there are opposing views, so that they can sweep away the objections by having their answer ready.

14 The Commissioners include the remark as part of the normal understanding, not as an aberration, as does Isocrates in the Panathenaicus Isoc. 12 186. Given the evident arbitrariness of life, with devastating lightning strikes, storms, and earthquakes, and innumerable unfair human contingencies, the Athenians found it impossible to devise theist explanations. However, they did adopt pragmatic solutions, some of which reveal an understanding of physics, as, for example, in the plugs in columns discussed in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 21, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.21.

15 The Commissioners adopt the point of view put into the mouth of Socrates by Xenophon in his account of his sentiments, in which he argued, as a believer himself, that it was as a demonstration of individual belief that justified these cultural practices, and that a small gift, if made in the right spirit by someone who could not afford a large one, was equally effective. Xen. Mem. 1.3.3. The sentiment is in line with the general aim of building community. It also encourages participants in festivals, whatever their ‘true’ motives, if such a concept is tenable, to exaggerate their performances in the knowledge that they are impressing the gods as well as their fellow celebrants. By the time of Dio of Prusa, a famous orator of the first century CE who participated in the discourse, and who accepted commissions from many cities, it was possible to pick out this effect publicly without being thought out of line. As he told the Rhodians, whom he scolded for their innovations: ‘perhaps the god requires no images-to-be-wondered-at’ (‘agalmata’), often translated as statues, losing the implied role of the viewer. The mainstream defence of the practice of sacrificing to the gods was repeated by Dio of Prusa, centuries later: ‘But in any event these acts are not ineffectual, because we thereby show our zeal and our disposition towards the gods’. D.Chr. 31.17. This component of the discourse adds further confirmation that the modern tendency to separate the buildings, the stories they offered, and the uses to which they were put in collective cultural activities may be anachronistic.

16 The Commissioners repeat the common response to those who doubt the existence or usefulness of gods, found, for example, in Euripides fragments 800, 915b and 948; and in the Ion 1615. Since the long term is not knowable, and sometimes we hear of sons having to suffer for the misdeeds of the fathers, invoking the long term is a neat way of rhetorically avoiding the question.

17 The Commissioners repeat ideas in Plato’s Phaedrus 229b, attributed to the character of Socrates, that mention non-Olympian chthonic gods, the practice at the oracle of Dodona of listening to the oak trees, and the story of Oreithyia, daughter of Erechtheus, being carried off by Boreas, the North Wind. Besides, they forestall any suspicion that they are only interested in the metropolitan city of Athens. As in the Phaedrus, the sentence also enables the Commissioners to claim that they are modest receivers of ideas that are already present in the storyscape.

18 In their phrase ‘rocky walls’ the Commissioners remind the audience that historic Attica had few landing places from the seaward, other than its defended harbours, a geographical feature that was still vital during the Greek Revolution and in the Second World War. By mentioning that they have been to the country as well as the town, the Commissioners claim not only to have covered the geographical area of Attica, but that they have consulted across an ideological spectrum—it being a tag that the city dwellers were soft and the country dwellers were illiberal. This tag, possibly containing a hint of a suggestion that the emancipation from brutishness still has some way to go even in Attica, was caught by the thought offered by a character in Henderson, Jeffrey, ed., Aristophanes, Fragments (London: Harvard UP, 2007), fragment 706.

19 The audience may have recognized that the Commissioners were repeating a phrase that Hesiod had used to signal a change of topic, especially if the reciter mimicked a Theban accent. ἀλλὰ τί ἦ μοι ταῦτα περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην. Hes. Th. 35. If we give credence to the document quoted by Lucian in the note of introduction, visits around Attica may have been part of the consultation process.

20 The Commissioners turn to, and reinforce the usage of, what appears to be a ‘chreia’, with its trope of ‘revelation’, used and, as a result, preserved by Clement of Alexandria in advancing a Christian agenda. It has been thought by some to have been derived from Hyperides and is noted among his works as fragment D1, but he may himself be quoting.

21 The Commissioners turn to a phrase used by Pindar in his Pythian Odes, iii, 75, which was used as a piece of entrenched wisdom (‘chreia’) for taking a long-term view by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Usher, Stephen, trans., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Critical Essays (London: Harvard UP, 1974, 1985), i, 9, in pointing out what he presented as a weakness in the work of Thucydides. The phrase is apposite in the context of the speech, encapsulating the micro-climate of Attica, the stories with which it was associated, the apparently perpetual durability of the main materials that will be used in the physical rebuilding such as marble, gold, and bronze, as well the main features of the discursive environment to which the proposals themselves and the resulting Parthenon were a contribution within an aspired-to indefinite continuity of past through present to future, as did indeed happen for many centuries.

22 The Commissioners, presenting themselves as suggrapheis, employ the rhetorical device of claiming to speak on behalf of the whole citizen body, even although the occasion is formally intended to discover the range of opinions, confident that their claim to know what the result will be will not be taken at face value.

23 The Commissioners refer to remarks quoted from the Iliad, Hom. Il. 10.224 and 2.372, as a chreia, by Aristotle, Aristot. Pol. 3.1287b, planting the thought that the Parthenon will celebrate the values of the Homeric era.

24 The merchant mariners, and their willingness to take risks, are praised by a character in the lost play by Sophocles, The Men of Scyros, fragment 555.

25 This point, though presented as generally agreed, itself a rhetorical device, was not universally accepted in classical Greece. Theognis of Megara, for example, with experience of the eugenics of animal breeding in mind, warned of the effects on the human race if ‘the best’ bred with the ‘low born’ for example in Testimonia, 6. On the other side, it is suggested by a character in a play by Euripides, fragment 232, that ‘arete’ is hereditary. The Commissioners deploy the example from folk wisdom used in Plut. Comp. Lys. Sull. 2.2 to slip out an acknowledgment that, even in its greatest crisis, the Athenians had not been united. Indeed, the sons of Peisistratus, whose father, although a tyrant, had accomplished much for Athens, had personally urged Xerxes to invade Greece and had accompanied the Persian army when it sacked Athens. The myths of an unchanging Athenianness required that exceptions, including the actions of traitors, should be rhetorically accommodated and re-integrated into the official story, or at least actively ignored, as shown by, for example, Steinbock, Bernd, Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.1897162. In their historical passages, the Commissioners were less concerned with presenting a true picture of the past than with giving their audience what Steinbock calls a ‘usable past’, ‘imagined and remembered history’, ‘cultural memory’, ‘believed history’, and ‘intentional history’. The same device of selection and omission was also used, as Steinbock shows, to enable the cities to shift their alliances and their wars with other cities—as, for example, the fact that Thebes, like the Peisistratids, had medized—and it is a common feature in the rhetorical self-construction of imagined communities. The taint of being associated with the tyrant Peisistratus and the quisling Peisistratids is yet another argument for discounting the possibility that the scene pictured on the Parthenon frieze is the actual Panathenaic festival, which was founded, or refounded, by Peisistratus. Although there are many examples of giving authority to current customs by claiming that they existed in the mythic age, there are other objections as will be discussed in Chapter 4.

26 The Commissioners risk antagonizing some of the audience by referring to the sentiment of the so-called Old Oligarch, Ps. Xen. Const. Ath. 4–6, who said that these men were more deserving than the hoplites of the army who were drawn from classes of Athenian regarded as socially superior. As is common in the literature of the classical period, the word for ‘useful’, which is repeated several times in the passage, is presented as the opposite of the word used for morally or civically ‘bad’ (kakos). As suggested in Chapter 1, the building of a fleet may have been made possible by the surplus of manpower that became available to be deployed for other purposes, as a result of the productivity gain in the economy brought about by the shift from the economic autarky of the oikos to the cultivation of exchangeable specialist crops.

27 Conventional, as in the Periclean Funeral Oration, Thuc. ii, 36, where it is also used as a co-opting device.

28 The Commissioners repeat a sentence in the exordium to the Periclean Funeral Oration as presented by Thucydides with its halting double negatives, reinforcing the speaker’s rhetorical presentation of himself as modestly feeling his way.

29 The Commissioners use a formulaic proclamation as discussed, with instances, in Collard, C., Cropp, M. J. and Gibert, J., eds, Euripides, Selected Fragmentary Plays Volume II (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 2004), 302.

30 The Commissioners, in giving a warning, recall the limitations noted by the character of Theseus in the Suppliants of Euripides, noted at the end of St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22 in the discussion of Milton’s Areopagitica.

31 These sanctions are mentioned in Ar. Eccl 143 and 292.

32 The Commissioners refer to the system of guarantees, some of which extended for many years, without which the Parthenon could not have been constructed, which is well documented for the fourth century and which we can be confident must also have been in operation in the fifth. Discussed by Burford, Alison, The Greek Temple Builders at Epidauros, A Social and Economic Study of Building in the Asklepian Sanctuary, During the Fourth and Early Third Centuries B.C. (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1969), 104–109. What the guarantees covered in the case of the Parthenon is not directly recorded, but if it followed the model applied later, they covered all financial liabilities, including wages, fees, and fines. Since the fines were levied for late or inadequate work, the guarantees effectively covered all aspects of the design and construction, the work in progress, with staged payments, and the acceptance and final payment. The system of guarantees, we can say, effectively spread the liability across the richer members of the polis beyond the public treasury. Seldom mentioned in modern discussions of the Parthenon, they enable us to say that ‘the Athenians’ built the Parthenon, but only in the sense that Queen Victoria ‘built’ Balmoral Castle. What effect the guarantees had on the money supply and on the growth of the economy cannot be measured, but it is certain to have been huge, and possibly strongly positive, not only in enabling more real resources to be mobilized from outside as well as from inside Attica, but in quickening the long trend towards specialization. Burford, who notes that Moses Finley helped her with the interpretation of the inscriptions, appears to have thought that the economy functioned without modern instruments of credit. The shift in the language from ‘we’, where responsibility is shared, to ‘you’, which blames and threatens potential opponents in advance, is a common rhetorical device.

33 The Commissioners, as Pericles does in his first war speech as reported in accordance with his conventions by Thucydides at Thuc 1. 140, are simultaneously claiming to be mere spokesmen for the citizen body and laying the ground for future excuses and recriminations. As their subsequent words show, however, the Commissioners, while at this point in their speech rhetorically bidding to be regarded as democrats who are above resorting to such devices, rely on the short memories of the listeners and themselves invoke Tyche when it suits their argument.

34 The Commissioners repeat a sentiment put into the mouth of Athena in Aesch. Eum. 694–695. As is common in political rhetoric, although they celebrate an alleged continuity, they will soon also declare for innovation. They implicitly warn against proposing significant changes. Such oblique hints, and the frequent emphasis on ‘usefulness’ and its cognates, helps to explain how, despite opposition as will be discussed in Chapter 5, the building programme was carried through over decades of changing electorates.

35 The Commissioners signal that they have reached the end of their exordium and are moving towards the main argument. They deploy the same piece of mythic history as was used at the beginning of the Periclean Funeral Oration, Thuc 2.36. As must have been widely known to the listeners, the Athenians were not unique in claiming to be autochthonous. The claim that Athens had never been invaded in mythic times was also put into the mouths of the Chorus in the Medea of Euripides, when the people of Corinth chant these truisms: ‘From ancient times the sons of Erechtheus have been favored; they are children of the blessed gods sprung from a holy land never pillaged by the enemy’. Eur. Med 825. Passages from the same speech are cited later in this chapter as examples of geodeterminism.

36 The Commissioners summarize thoughts set out in the Critias of Plato, one of the classical-age texts predicated on a theory of geodeterminism, of which autochthony was a component. Ἥφαιστος δὲ κοινὴν καὶ Ἀθηνᾶ φύσιν ἔχοντες, ἅμα μὲν ἀδελφὴν ἐκ ταὐτοῦ πατρός, ἅμα δὲ φιλοσοφίᾳ φιλοτεχνίᾳ τε ἐπὶ τὰ αὐτὰ ἐλθόντες, οὕτω μίαν ἄμφω λῆξιν τήνδε τὴν χώραν εἰλήχατον ὡς οἰκείαν καὶ πρόσφορον ἀρετῇ. Plat. Criti. 109b. The thought involved in linking two forms of knowledge, and the wisdom and skill involved in applying it, both words prefaced by ‘philo-‘, is that herding sheep and goats requires the same qualities as governing human beings, with the animals that cohabit with them in an oikos or polis, and that the potential future was designed into the geography from the earliest times. The Commissioners use the Greek word for nature (phusis and its cognates) not to refer to an unchanging characteristic, but in its ancient sense of well suited to its purpose. The same sentiment is found in the Homeric Hymn to Hephaistos HH 20 1. That text, including its reference to the brutishness narrative, fits so well with other examples of Athenian self-construction and discursive practice in the classical era that at least one scholar has raised the possibility that the hymn, with its archaized language, was composed in Athens in the fifth century and projected back to the mythic Homeric age so as to accord it greater authority. Shear, T. Leslie, Jnr., Trophies of Victory: Public Building in Periklean Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University in association with Princeton UP, 2016), 160.

37 τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν as used, for example in Hdt. 7.139.

38 The Commissioners refer to the mound raised over the Athenian dead at Marathon, instantiating the memory of the battle in the built landscape. They refer to the commissioning of a large picture of the battle that was seen in Athens for centuries into the future. The dates of the archonates is from Harding, Atthidographers, 102. For the rest of the speech, the editor has used the dates of the modern calendar.

39 The same sentiment is offered in Thuc 4.98, a Thucydidean speech put into the mouth of a herald from Athens in answering a complaint that the laws had been violated. As Rachel Kousser has pointed out, the differences in the customs regarding organized destruction and mutilation of images contributed to the rhetoric that mutilation was un-Hellenic and ‘barbarian’, the word now becoming almost synonymous with the modern ‘barbarous’. Kousser, Rachel, The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture, Interaction, Transformation and Destruction (Cambridge: CUP, 2017), 107. The best documented example of mutilation of images in classical Athens is the episode in a single night in 415 when the so-called herms, many presenting male figures with erect penises, that dotted the Athenian cityscape, were deliberately damaged, for reasons that are hard to understand except in general terms as acts of resistance to the official ideology of the city. The mutilation was immediately condemned as ‘asebeia’, in modern terms a criminal blasphemy against the official supernatural, and the perpetrators were punished at least as severely as if they had murdered living people, for example by death, exile, and confiscation of their property. After the putting down of the outbreak of resistence, the Athenian authorities restored the landscape, and therefore the storyscape and the festival-scape, to its pre-mutilation visual condition, with some herms repaired and others buried. Kousser, Afterlives, 138. Conspicuous mutilation became common in the Roman period and was evidently a formal policy of the ecclesiastical leaderships of the Christian successors, a fact that, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, helps to validate my suggestion for what event was displayed on the central slab of the Parthenon frieze.

40 Miles, Margaret, M., Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 24–25, from archaeological evidence from the Agora excavations, including layers of burned wood, and in the wells, mud bricks, pieces of wood, and broken crockery.

41 The Commissioners use the vivid image offered by the character of Hecuba at Eur. Hec 397.

42 As with the other examples of enargeia in the speech, it is impossible to know whether the rhetoric actually conjured up pictures, phantasms, or mental enactments in the minds of the listeners, or indeed whether internal picturing is consistent with modern neuroscience or is a useful way of understanding mental processes. In calling the statues ‘powerless’, the Commissioners echo the character of Hecuba’s lament in the Trojan Women by Euripides νεκύων ἀμενηνὸν ἄγαλμα Eur. Tro. 193, an example of the tradition of presenting the dedications of images made by human dedicators to gods, as images of gods.

43 The Commissioners recall the signs of disorder in the city noted by Teiresias in Sophocles’ Antigone, Soph. Ant. 1015–1020. The detail that orphans were employed in the work of shooing away birds from sacred sites comes from the Ion of Euripides. The role of birds as harbingers of the future was also noted by the character of Ion in the Ion who, at that stage of the play, is presented as innocently simple, at Eur. Ion 178. Some species of birds were credited with being able to foresee the future, and not just because they can see what is likely to arrive over the horizon from being able to fly high, as noted, for example in the work by Theophrastus on weather signs, an example of their species-specific culture.

44 The Commissioners remind us of the importance of funeral ceremonies in a society that had, for the most part, only a metaphorical notion of an afterlife as a continuation of memory. Destroying memory was part of the charge made by Lycurgus against Leocrates, Lyc. 1 147. Members of the audience are likely to have known the story of Antigone, and her defiance of authority to ensure burial rites for her brothers, perhaps in the version as retold by Sophocles.

45 From a fragmentary inscription dated 485/4, summarized by Camp, John M., The Archaeology of Athens (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 52. It was made from a metope, recycled from one of the temples destroyed by the Persians.

46 The Commissioners repeat the thought and some of the exact words used by Xenophon in his treatise on public finance known as Ways and Means, Xen. Ways 2.3.

47 Sentiments expressed in Isocrates, Panegyricus, Isoc. Pan. 63.

48 The Commissioners repeat a story of hybridity in Athens noted by Theophrastus, Characters 16.4. Sabazios was a Phrygian god, whose cult was also mentioned by Demosthenes.

49 In the Acharnians of Aristophanes, 38, a character plans to interrupt the speakers in the Assembly and the Scythians are called to restore order. The reciter acknowledges that the interrupter has made an obscene joke worthy of Aristophanes and he retaliates by making his own joke as it was to be used in Aristophanes, Peace, 20, showing he is also at home with obscenity. Rhetorically the reciter regains the initiative, with an implied sneer that the interrupter has spent his life in oriental countries where camels were most often seen. Since the audience for Old Comedy, which may have included women, was wider than the demos, it is likely that overlaps were common, and obscenity was regarded at this time, although not later, as part of the working of the democracy. As Benjamin Jowett noted long ago in discussing the platonic-style Menexenus, ‘Plato, both in the Symposium and elsewhere, is not slow to admit a sort of Aristophanic humour’, and we should therefore expect to find instances in other forms of speaking and writing, not as an exception but, as here, as a component of the discursive environment.

50 The Commissioners resume the seriousness by repeating the sentiment later voiced by Aeschines in Aeschin. 3 2. Whether there was such a law in Solon’s day or whether a custom was attributed back to a heroic founder as an invented tradition cannot be determined with certainty.

51 According to the character of ‘the Athenian’ in The Laws, by Plato, the audiences in the Assembly praised or blamed each speaker as loudly as if they were at the theatre. Plat. Laws 9.876B.

52 The Commissioners turn to a vivid comparison that is first used in a surviving written record in a letter written much later by Synesius of Cyrene available in English translation in FitzGerald, Augustine, ed., The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene (London: OUP, 1926), Letter 136, and which may have been a cliché much earlier. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the skins of slaughtered cattle are left, presumably to dry them out, for some time after the sacrificial killing, burning, and eating of the animals had ended. Since the same custom was practised in the classical period, as seems certain given that animal parts as well as their skins were preserved to be sold or were given to festival and temple staff as part of their remuneration, the skins would have added to the sense of the Acropolis as a perpetual slaughterhouse-cum-cookhouse, giving off stinks long after a festival procession had left. Black cows seem to have been specially prized, indeed specially bred, and their horns were wreathed before they were slaughtered.

53 The quotation, γιγνώσκω, καί μοι φρενὸς ἔνδοθεν ἄλγεα κεῖται,/ πρεσβυτάτην ἐσορῶν γαῖαν Ἰαονίας κλινομένην, preserved by Aristot. Const. Ath. 5, reminds us that a strong sense of Athenians themselves being Ionian predated the Persian wars and their aftermath, when many cities, principally in Asia, but also among the islands and in many locations elsewhere, including some in the Black Sea, were formally or informally joined with Athens in a real, imagined, or hybrid kinship as ‘Ionia’. In referring to Athens as Ionian, Solon was contributing to what was to become a standard commonplace in the classical period, but by his use of the archaic form Ἰαονίας, he was taking authority from Homer, Iliad, 13.673, where the old form with the alpha is also used to include the Athenians. As noted later, the involvement of the Athenians in the Trojan war was small, and the mention may possibly be a late addition. As was normal, the speakers slip from a narrative relation of a past event into the energeia of the present. They also claim a collective continuity with earlier generations of commissioners, emphasizing in their own words the continuity of the city. Herodotus, in listing the kinship origins of the cities that took part, not all on the same side, in the war against the Achaemenid forces (‘the Persians’), remarks—in a passage that was written and publicly recited at the time when the classical Parthenon was being designed and built—that the Athenians only called themselves Ionians, from the time of Ion, son of Xuthus. Hdt. 8.44. Solon was said to have settled a long-running dispute about the island, which is geographically as close to Dorian Megara is it is to Athens, by obtaining a declaration from the Delphic oracle that Salamis was ‘Ionian’. Plut. Sol. 10.4. My suggestion that the Parthenon frieze displays Xuthus in the act of naming the infant Ion is discussed in Chapter 4.

54 The Commissioners turn to a phrase used by the character of Electra in the Orestes of Euripides, τί τἄρρητ᾽ ἀναμετρήσασθαί με δεῖ; Eur. Orest. 14. The phrase used was a chreia more than half a millennium later by the Emperor Julian in his Letter to the Boule and Demos of Athens. 270d, which, as with other works by Julian, contains elements from the classical-era discourse. The quotation is introduced there ‘as if from some tragedy’ (τί με δεῖ νῦν ὥσπερ ἐκ τραγῳδίας τὰ ἄρρητα ἀναμετρεῖσθαι’). Julian had tried, without lasting success, to reverse the Christianization of the ancient empire and its institutions started by the military coup of Constantine that achieved success at the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, the mythology of which was invoked at the Siege of Athens in 1822. The custom of quoting useful phrases from ancient ‘pagan’ authors was continued by Christian writers, to the extent that they became one of the largest sources of fragments of lost works.

55 The Commissioners, in referring to the battle of Salamis, repeat the story about women living on the coast on the bay of Salamis given by Herodotus. Hdt. 8.96. As spokesmen for the official ideology, they uphold the authority of oracles, although in this case, as in others, the oracle was ambiguous and could have been taken as warning of a defeat.

56 The Commissioners turn to a phrase about the value of alliances that would be used in the law courts by Aeschines, but that is likely to have been conventional before his time, and here applied to the Delian league of mainly Ionian cities. Aeschin. 3.84.

57 The Commissioners refer to what Aelius Aristides in oration 23, 68 calls ‘an old saying’, attributing it to the archaic poet Alcaeus, reminding the audience of the Delphic oracle’s description of the fleet as a ‘wooden wall’. In a recent book, David Pritchard claims to have ‘settled’ the question raised by Augustus Boeckh and his ancient predecessors, such as Plutarch, by compiling estimates, mainly from records of the fourth century, of the amounts budgeted and spent on a number of headings—so much on festivals, so much on payments to officials and citizens—figures that can be compared with estimates of the annual cost of constructing and maintaining the buildings, including the Parthenon, arriving at the conclusion that the largest item was for war and war preparations. Pritchard, David, Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), commenting on passages such as: ‘To expend large sums on the fine arts, which appeared in the highest perfection at the sacred festivals, upon costly but lasting ornaments for the temples, upon choruses and musical entertainments, and upon a theatre, which was so perfect that it excelled equally in tragedy and comedy, were considered as acts of a liberal and noble mind. And while the Athenians were led by their religious obligations to these costly practices, the Spartans were satisfied to manifest their piety by offering small sacrifices to the gods. That the person who provides the sacrificial feast should receive a share of the offering, appears both natural and reasonable; but when the principal revenues of the State were wasted upon public banquets, and the sacrifices were maintained at the public expence not so much for the purposes of religion, as for the support of the poor, the policy of the Athenians was alike unjust and inexpedient, inasmuch as the continuance of it without oppressing the allies was impossible, and the State, being deprived of the means of self-defence in a most frivolous and unpardonable manner, was led on to certain destruction.’ Boeckh, Augustus, The public economy of Athens: in four books; To which is added, A dissertation on the silver-mines of Laurion, Translated from the German of Augustus Boeckh (London: Murray, 1828), i, 279. However, although Pritchard’s general conclusion is unexceptionable within its own terms, it would be a poor policymaker who considered, or proposed to others that they should consider, only the budgetary inputs to a policy without being persuaded of the benefits of the expected outputs and outcomes, and it would be a non-functioning democracy that gave approval in such circumstances. Neither of these conditions obtained in classical Athens. Hence the need for the present experiment.

58 The Commissioners repeat what was evidently in this case a common, not a specially invented, ‘chreia’, being found, for example, with variations, in Thucydides vii. 77 and Isocrates, Areopagiticus, 13. The members of the Assembly are again flattered by being called the rulers when they know that, in practice, the decision-making is weighted towards the rich ‘aristocrats’.

59 The Commissioners, who lose no opportunity to condemn the Thebans and stir up the Athenians against them, refer not only to military and naval preparations but to plans to evacuate the women and other non-combatants to the island of Salamis and elsewhere, as was done during the Greek Revolution. The so-called ‘Decree of Themistocles’, an inscription that commemorated the evacuation is discussed by Hammond, N.G.L., ‘The Narrative of Herodotus VII and the Decree of Themistocles at Troezen’ in Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 102 (1982), 75–93, https://doi.org/10.2307/631127.

60 Isocrates, Areopagiticus, 42. The Commissioners lay themselves open to a charge of contradiction since elsewhere in the speech they speak of the value of written laws.

61 The Commissioners summarize the conclusion that Isocrates set out, at greater length, in the same section of the Areopagiticus, and which was evidently standard fare in speeches on the need for ‘arete’ and ‘paideia’.

62 The Commissioners repeat the phrase that differentiates them from, and implicitly claims superiority to, the rest of the world.

63 The Commissioners point to other real efficiency improvements that had already resulted from the monetization of much of the economy, including a reduction in the amount of working capital needed and in the resulting higher real incomes accruing to an oikos, as was explicitly noted by Aristot. Econ. 1. 1344b. Although not mentioned specifically here, the remarks of the Commissioners form part of the generally accepted long-run narrative of development from brutishness discussed in Chapter 1.

64 The Commissioners use the ancient name for Pentelikon, where the Pentelic marble used in building the Parthenon and other monuments was quarried. So slow was the rate of change in the surface that, in the late nineteenth century, Sir James Frazer was able to describe how, from the Acropolis, the hill looked like a pyramid or a pediment, and how ‘through the clear air of Attica the unaided eye … can distinguish the white line of the ancient quarry.’ Frazer, J. G., trans., Pausanias’s Description of Greece (London: Macmillan, 1898), ii, 418.

65 The Commissioners’ prediction was proved true. An undated inscription perhaps as early as the fourth century, but more probably later, reports payments of duties of ten per cent and two per cent to ‘Lamachos in Athens’ for two consignments of Pentelic marble. Quoted and discussed by Burford, Temple Builders, 24. Another inscription records a heavy fine levied on Molossos of Athens for delays in delivering marble from the quarries to the port of Piraeus, among whose implied viewers intended by committing the record to stone, we may guess, were not only those who needed to check on historic precedents but members of the intercity marble trade. Burford, 189. Such details tend to confirm the suggestion by Thucydides that the main driver of change in the pre-classical times, was the freeing of the seas from pirates, as discussed in Chapter 1. The notion of ‘beauty’ as a general category applied to humans, usually boys and youths, and to inanimate objects that encourages feelings in the viewer, is occasionally found throughout the Hellenic centuries, and occasionally analyzed in works on rhetoric. As it happens, one of the earliest instances is on an inscription relating to the columns of a temple. Porter, James I., The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), especially 413–414, where a certain Kleomenes, who may be either the client or the contractor, is recorded in an inscription relating to the sixth-century temple to Apollo at Syracuse as calling the columns ‘beautiful’, evidently separating them from the temple itself.

66 The Commissioners generalize from Ode 10 by Bacchylides that celebrates multiple victories of an Athenian runner, unfortunately unnamed in the fragments of the Ode first printed in 1897 from a papyrus, but probably known to the audience. The Commissioners follow the rhetorical practice of encouraging crowds to identify with sporting champions as a form of community-building. The picturing of Homeric chariots on the Parthenon and their intended relationship with contemporary commemorative games is explored later when discussing the so-called peplos scene.

67 The Commissioners repeat a common play on the archaic Aeolic word κραναά, which links the eponymous king with the rocky landscape of Attica, repeating a trope found, for example, in Herodotus 8. 44 and Strabo 9.1. ‘Rocky Athens’ is used by Pindar, in Olympian 7.82; 9.88; 13. 38; and Nemean 8. 4; 8.11; 19. 5 and 49 as a conventional compliment to the city and its victors. The references in Aristophanes, Acharnians 75; Lysistrata, 482; and Birds, 123 refer to the Athenian Acropolis. Many of the references in the ancient authors are collected by Harding, Phillip, editor and translator, The Story of Athens: The Fragments of the Local Chronicles of Attika (London: Routledge, 2008), 30–32, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203448342. Since King Kranaos is said to have been present at the first trial on the Areopagus, he may have been among the figures presented in the packed composition on the west pediment of the Parthenon. And, as usual, as far as the names are concerned, we see a typical ancient attempt to use eponymns to impose a chronological historicity on mythic stories that are allowed to be fluid, depending upon the occasion in which they are deployed. Athena herself is presented as calling the people of Athens ‘the children of Kranaus’ in Aesch. Eum. 1011, a phrase that may imply in its highly formal context that only those Athenians whose families were accepted as ‘autochthonous’ are being addressed, an interpretation that might reasonably have been taken by some members of the audience who were thereby consigned, by official deeming (‘nomisma’), to a secondary status.

68 The claim is also explicitly made, in fuller and stronger terms, in the Funeral Oration of Demosthenes, Dem. 60 5. The fact of a divergence between what was actually done and how deeds were rhetorically presented is debated between the character of Socrates and Alcibiades in the Platonic dialogue known as Alcibiades 1, in terms that may imply that everyone who heard such sentiments treated them as mere conventional rhetoric for an occasion. Examples of Athenian aggression contrary to Hellenic norms are given by Thucydides, including that of Naxos, but not Melos. While there are many examples, such as in Greece during the military occupation of 1941–1944, when readers were happy to consume what is called ‘propaganda’ openly presented as such (and we can see the value to certain constituencies of, say, funeral orations, as statements that they can themselves use) it is enough to repeat that we cannot assume that funeral orations cannot be taken as the values of historic Athenians of the classical period, any more than we should assume that they physically resembled the figures presented on the Parthenon frieze.

69 The Commissioners repeat part of the emergence-from-brutishness narrative in the version of Thucydides Thuc. 1.2, as discussed in Chapter 1, that emphasizes the economic purpose of war in what, to him, were ancient times. The Greek word ‘arete’, used for what is here translated as the ‘best’ land, was the same as that used for the ‘best’ men, a reference to geodeterminism and autochthony, not likely to have been lost on the ancient audience.

70 The Commissioners follow the convention that Aeschylus in the Persians took from Homer of listing names, emphasizing the variety and asserting that they were worthy opponents. They have, in error, given the list of those who set out, instead of the other list of those who died, which is given later in the play. Like Aeschylus, they refer to the fact that the Persian fleet contained contingents of overseas Ionians and, by implying that they had no choice, enable the cities and island concerned to be reintegrated into the Ionian family, as is made explicit in the play.

71 Since it was common in the law courts for pleaders to bring in live witnesses, it is likely that the same practice occurred at important political meetings, although there is no direct evidence.

72 The Commissioners adopt the explicit advice of Menander Rhetor in his section on ‘how to praise cities’ in Race, William H., ed., Menander Rhetor and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ars Rhetorica (Harvard: Harvard UP Loeb editions, 2019), i, 6. Although writing much later, Menander Rhetor is drawing on his knowledge of classical-era as well as of later practice, and of the extent to which it was rhetorically effective. As will emerge in Chapter 3, it was a neglect of genealogy that led to a contradiction in the status of the eponymous Ion as pointed out by Euripides in his play, the Ion.

73 The analogy of exchanging ‘charis’ with ancestors, on the analogy of the mutual obligations between parents and children, is used in the opening of the Panathenaic speech by Aristides. It can be regarded as an ancient Athenian equivalent of an imagined community, as developed by, for example, Benedict Anderson, and discussed in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.02. The Greek word for one’s own young child (‘tokos’) is the same as that used for the interest payable on a debt denominated in monetary terms, the analogy being an increase in the productive capacity of the ‘oikos’, with ‘children of children’ used by Demosthenes to mean compound interest. The word is also used by Xenophon to mean the produce of the land, picking up another common piece of rhetoric: that those receiving income from utilizing the land, or employing others to do so, deserve more respect than those whose income derives from trade, manufacture, or from providing financial services such as loans either as capital or as working capital.

74 Hp. Aer. 12. Although the Hippocratic Corpus includes works compiled over several centuries, the Airs, Waters, Places, which is written by an author who is well-read and well-travelled, and which reflects attitudes current after the Persian wars, is thought to have been composed in the later half of the fifth century, as is the recent view of Craik, Elizabeth M., The ‘Hippocratic’ Corpus: Content and Context (London: Routledge, 2015), 11, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315736723. The text contains many other observations relating to the effects of the environment, including diet, different types of drinking water, exposure to the sun, physical exercise, and clothing, that may have influenced policy-making. A particular example, the custom of wrapping babies in tight swaddling bands, which is relevant to my suggestion of what is presented on the central scene of the Parthenon frieze, is noted in Chapter 4. The Commissioners adhere to a form of geodeterminism that pervades the literature of the classical period and was part of the discursive environment, and the advice of Hippocrates rests on assumptions about the four elements discussed in Chapter 1. However, although the apparent continuity of microclimates, including that of Athens and Attica, was used to support rhetorics of continuity in the characters of peoples, and of the stereotyping found, for example, in the Old Comedy, it seems always to have co-existed with rhetorics of the capacity to be changed for the better by paideia, as embodied in the myths of Anacharsis the Scythian, and never to have embraced the essentialism of modern European and American theories and rhetorics of ‘race’. There is, for example, no mention of essentialist racial characteristics in the Characters of Theophrastus. However, what the Commissioners present as well-attested, received, in modern terms ‘common-sense’ knowledge, may not have been universally accepted. Theophrastus, for example, professed himself puzzled by ‘the great variety to be found among men living under the same sky who have had the same upbringing’. Τί γὰρ δήποτε, τῆς Ἑλλάδος ὑπὸ τὸν αὐτὸν ἀέρα κειμένης καὶ πάντων τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὁμοίως παιδευομένων, συμβέβηκεν ἡμῖν οὐ τὴν αὐτὴν τάξιν τῶν τρόπων ἔχειν. Thphr. Char. 0. In opening his treatise with a question that presented itself to him as an empirical observation, Theophrastus undermines two of the pillars of official Athenian self-fashioning: geodeterminism, and the power of paideia to shape character and therefore conduct. He can, even from the evidence of this one passage, be regarded as among the ‘resisting viewers’ of the Parthenon, alongside the atheists, the ‘cynics’, the doubters and those who maintained an outward conformity mainly for the incidental benefits and the comforts of inclusion.

75 The vital importance of starting education at a very young age, for otherwise bad habits will continue throughout adult life, is emphasized by a character in a play by Euripides in fragment 1027. The steps by which the notion of charis (as offered, in, for example, the Periclean Funeral Oration) was extended from relationships among citizens within the polis of Athens to the wider community of the Ionians is discussed with references to ancient and modern authors, including Loraux, by Azoulay, Vincent, Xenophon and the Graces of Power, A Greek Guide to Political Manipulation (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2018). Translated by Angela Krieger from the French edition of 2004, 43–44.

76 The Commissioners pick up the exact advice on how to praise a city for its origins, Menander Rhetor, i, 15, 5, and the almost identical advice in [Dionysius of Halicarnassus], Ars Rhetorica, in his advice on funeral orations, 6, 2, that appears to have been written at much the same time but independently.

77 The audience was invited to enjoy being complicit in the cliché, especially as they are all aware that the overseas Ionians were a staple of comic stereotyping in the ‘old comedy’ of Eupolis and Aristophanes for being lazy, addicted to luxury, effeminate, cowardly, sexually deviant, and speaking in funny dialects. The mocking fragments of Eupolis are discussed by Storey, Ian C., Eupolis Poet of Old Comedy (Oxford: OUP, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199259922.001.0001; and those in the Aristophanic corpus are collected by Storey, Ian C., Aristophanes: Peace (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350020252.

78 The Commissioners may have been influenced by the passage on the early history of Athens in Herodotus 5. 55 to 96, where his attempt to combine stories from myth with reports of contemporary events is hard to follow, and would have been so even at the time when Herodotus recited and wrote. The accounts by Thucydides and his suggested explanations, although patchy and disputable, are clearly presented.

79 The Commissioners refer to the description of a temple in Delphi in Hdt. 5.62.1, of which fragments that confirm the description were found in excavations. Although the association the Commissioners make is not specifically recorded in any known source, it is in line with what is known to have happened both with the building programme and with the general discursive environment that makes frequent use of metaphors from the building industry.

80 The Commissioners again follow the Periclean Funeral Oration, running together the two thoughts, first that building memory and ideology in physical form is more durable than words and performance, and secondly, that even Homer cannot be trusted as a chronicler of the past. That the Athenians played a larger role in the war against Troy than that presented in the Homeric epics is implied in the Prologue, uttered by the character of Poseidon in Euripides’s tragedy, the Trojan Women, Eur. Tro. 31, but, in the context of that drama, mainly so that the Athenians become entitled to a larger share of the captured women, and questions relating to the treatment of enslaved women and refugees, a theme of several surviving plays, are discussed later in the speech in the passage beginning ‘We Athenians will always…’ They have adopted the geodeterminist trope of clear air leading to clear thinking, partly, we may guess, to avoid the blunt statement attributed to Pericles that Homer and poets do not tell the ‘truth’. At this stage the Commissioners are at risk of exposing their own contradiction that they want to build an Acropolis in order to achieve certain rhetorical effects on viewers and users while, as is usual in rhetoric, disowning rhetoric as such.

81 Euripides, Medea, 825. ἀεί διὰ λαμπροτάτον βαίνοντες ἁβρῶς αἰθέρος. The remark paves the way for the geodeterminism that follows.

82 This explanation of how geodeterminism worked in practice was offered by a character in the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, III, 7.3. He also mentions the possibility of malignancy and ophthalmia, a common illness in Greece even now from the sand particles that blow in from the Sahara, and an occupational hazard for marble workers, and especially the men who polished the surfaces of the Parthenon and other buildings with emery, as was understood at the time and will be discussed in Chapter 4.

83 The Commissioners remind the audience of the geodeterminism that, taken with kinship, is among the central arguments by which they justify their proposals to take a long view of the future. The claim that Attica was geographically equivalent to an island is almost a standard and enduring component of the discursive environment, being set out explicitly in, for example, Xenophon, Ways and Means, and in Aelius Aristides.

84 The speakers, in a typical binary of the kind that the ancient writers loved, pick up and labour a commonplace of the courts, as deployed by, for example, Lycurgus in his speech against Leocrates, Lyc.1. 13.

85 Almost a direct quotation from the Panathenaic speech of Isocrates in which, to our mind laboriously, but in Athenian terms respectfully, defends making a small change from what the audience might have expected, Isoc. 15.1.

86 Aristot. Econ. 1.1344b.

87 The many references in ancient authors to the regular lives of the storks, among which all the examples are noted, are collected in Arnott, W. Geoffrey, Birds in the Ancient World from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2007), 138–169, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203946626. They are not examples of popular ‘folklore’ but the science of the day as collected, notably, by Aristotle and his school. The adoption of the ideas by Aristophanes in the Birds parodies the laws of Solon that insisted on intergenerational responsibility.

88 The Commissioners refer to the stories about the intergenerational reciprocal duties of storks celebrated by the character of Socrates in Plato’s Alcibiades, and noted in Chapter 1, as examples of the emergence from brutishness narrative, and of the usefulness of cooperation with humans. We may also see a reference to the Parthenon frieze that, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, celebrates the role of women, and their role in the oikos in the imagined community of the polis, as discussed by Fehr, Burkhard, Becoming Good Democrats and Wives: Civil Education and Female Socialization on the Parthenon Frieze. Hephaistos Sonderband. Kritische Zeitschrift zu Theorie und Praxis der Archäologie und angrenzender Gebiete (Berlin, Münster, Vienna, Zürich, London: Lit Verlag, 2011).

89 The storks, cranes, and some other waterbirds are commended as practising the womanly reciprocal duties (‘charites’) in the household. Such birds are pictured as companions of young women on vase painting, often regarded by modern viewers simply as pets. The example pictured in Fehr, Good Democrats and Wives, Fig. 87, a red-figure hydria c. 470, now in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 80.95, shows such a bird as almost a participant or monitor in a scene of women placing wool in a basket and performing other household tasks. An image of what may be a crane is shown with female dancers in Osborne, Robin, The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2018), plate 6.13, from a red figure hydra in Copenhagen. An anecdote from a time before the catastrophic reduction in biodiversity of the last century illustrates how an ancient viewer, such as Aristotle, might have thought that his understanding was empirically observable. In 1828, Colonel Miller, sailing back from his philanthropic work in Greece, noted that: ‘At ten o’clock, a young crane fell upon our deck. How or in what manner it reached the ship, still remains a mystery to all of us, unless it had been borne upon the back of another; it could not have flown the distance, being as yet unfledged’. Miller, Col. Jonathan P., of Vermont, The condition of Greece, in 1827 and 1828; being an exposition of the poverty, distress, and misery, to which the inhabitants have been reduced by the destruction of their towns and villages and the ravages of their country, by a merciless Turkish foe … As contained in his journal, kept by order of the Executive Greek Committee of the city of New-York; commencing with his departure from that place in the ship Chancellor, March, 1827, and terminating with his return in May, 1828; during which time he visited Greece, and acted as principal agent in the distribution of the several cargoes of clothing and provisions sent from the United States to the old men, women, children, and non-combatants of Greece; Embellished with plates (New York: Harper, 1828), 29.

90 The Commissioners claim for Athens the intellectual achievements of the many philosophers now known as pre-Socratics, many of whom came from the cities of Ionia, of whose written works only fragments have survived, but whose ideas are referred to by later writers.

91 The Commissioners turn to what was probably an old saying about shaming and goat bells quoted by Demosthenes in referring to jurors in the law courts. Dem. 25.90. The passage goes on to describe the shaming power of the mutual gaze. To a modern eye, many of the images of festival goers found on vase paintings show them exaggerating their gestures of being transported into an emotional frenzy. The festival goers presented on the Parthenon frieze, being pictured as exemplars from the mythic world, show no vulgar histrionics.

92 The Commissioners pick up a point common since at least the eighth century when Hesiod wrote the phrase in Works and Days, passage beginning at line 448, that, because of the status of Hesiod, fixed it in the discursive environment for hundreds of years.

93 Arnott, Birds in the Ancient World, 52–54.

94 As modern wild-life studies have shown, the long V-shaped formations of migrating cranes, with the birds taking turns to be leader, conserves the energy of the whole flock by enabling it to maximize the benefits of the slipstream. In recent years, under the protection of laws agreed at regional level and wider, numerous species of birds, which once were plentiful and then were almost extinct in Athens, now winter in small numbers in the partial wilderness of the Acropolis slopes, as is noted on labels now displayed there that helpfully extend the visitor’s understanding of the classical Acropolis and of the prevalence of bird metaphors.

95 As Burkhard Fehr has plausibly suggested, given that the two-parent Periclean decree of 451/50 was being considered and carried into effect at the same time and by the members of the same civic institutions as were considering the proposals for the rebuilding of the Parthenon, there is nothing surprising in finding that viewers of the Parthenon were reminded of what Fehr calls ‘the importance of the Athenian extraction of Athenian [male] citizens on the maternal side, as prescribed by the citizenship law’. Fehr, Good Democrats and Wives, 143–144. The ‘customs’ referred to by the Commissioners include the practices by which legitimacy of birth is established, including the rejection of the unwanted by, for example, being abandoned and exposed to die. To be discussed in Chapter 3, drawing on the evidence of the Ion of Euripides and archaeological evidence.

96 That women had been disenfranchized was part of the earliest account of what was presented on the Parthenon, as discussed in Chapter 3.

97 In Athens, there is no word for ‘Athenianness’ although that linguistic formation was applied to women of other cities, a reminder that women, although allotted specific roles in the oikos, including the education of young children in civic, gendered, arete, were not citizens participating in the institutions of the polis.

98 The Commissioners offer the same thought, which is implicit in the brutishness narrative, as is set out extensively by the character of the man of Athens in Plato’s Laws, especially παντὸς γὰρ δὴ φυτοῦ ἡ πρώτη βλάστη καλῶς ὁρμηθεῖσα, πρὸς ἀρετὴν τῆς αὑτοῦ φύσεως κυριωτάτη τέλος ἐπιθεῖναι τὸ πρόσφορον, τῶν τε ἄλλων φυτῶν καὶ τῶν ζῴων ἡμέρων Plat. Laws 6.765e. The Commissioners do not explicitly warn against the corollary that the character of the Athenian made explicit and whose validity appeared to be validated by occurrences during the Peloponnesian War, that, if paideia was not regularly applied right through life, men, like other creatures, could revert, a point picked up in the rhetorical exercise in Chapter 5.

99 The Commissioners repeat the general ideology that women exist to serve men, and even that childbirth is a matter in which the male contribution is determinative, to be found in the classical-era authors. Such information as survives about the life of Euripides and the stories told about him, collected in the edition of Euripides edited and translated by David Kovacs, include the sneer that, unlike Aeschylus and Sophocles, he had not experienced war, and that, as a form of put-down, his mother was a seller of vegetables. The main allusion is however to the speech put into the mouth of the character of Medea in Euripides’s play of that name. Although first publicly performed in 431, striking thoughts in the play may have been known before then, as Euripides took his proposal through the stages of acceptance to be performed in the Festival and to obtain funding from private donors as part of their duty as ‘charis’. Alternatively, we may have an example of the composer or editor of a Thucydidean speech showing some knowledge of the future, as Thucydides himself does occasionally. The remark, in the Medea, line 251, ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾽ ἀσπίδα στῆναι θέλοιμ᾽ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ, was later to become a ‹chreia’ again attributed to Euripides, not to a character in a fictional work by Euripides, as in the work by Lucian known as The Cock where a slightly different version is quoted by the character of Mykillus: ‘ἀλλὰ κἂν σὺ μὴ εἴπῃς, ἱκανῶς ὁ Εὐριπίδης διέκρινε τὸ τοιοῦτον, εἰπὼν ὡς τρὶς ἂν ἐθέλοι παρ᾽ ἀσπίδα στῆναι ἢ ἅπαξ τεκεῖν. Luc. Gall. 19.

100 Reinach, Salomon, Peintures de vases antiques recueillies par Millin, 1808, et Millingen, 1813. Publiées et commentées par S. Reinach (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1891), unnumbered. From a painted vase in Naples. The stages appear to be, from right to left, as the vase might have been rotated when it was handled by its ancient owner, unmarried (‘parthenos’), marriage ceremony, and motherhood. As for birds, none have been noticed pictured within the stories presented on the Parthenon for which there is evidence, but an image of a bird looking much like that shown in the Figure, shown as tending its nest in a tree, was carved in low relief on the fifth-century Asclepieion on the south slope. Noted by Mantis, Alexandros, Archaeologist of the 1st Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, Disjecta Membra. The Plunder and Dispersion of the Antiquities of the Acropolis, translated by Miriam Caskey (Athens: Anthemion, 2000), figure 8a, in the Museo Civico in Padua. As the ages of woman [‘bildung’] narrative implied by the Figure exemplifies, although women and children are honoured in all classical-era media, including the literary, the time gap between the change of a young woman’s status brought about by the ceremony of marriage and the next change brought about by the ceremony of acceptance into the family of a healthy and legitimately conceived child is an interlude that is ignored. Of the tens of thousands of images painted on pottery to have survived, none has been found that shows a woman who is pregnant or in the immediate circumstances of giving birth. Lewis, Sian, The Athenian Woman: An Iconographic Handbook (London: Routledge, 2002), 13 and 15, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203351192. Lewis’s estimates, including on the preponderance of images relating to funerals and their rites, were given in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 4, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.04. It was a joke, derived from a comedy by ‘Plato Comicus’, that even the neighbours, who lived in flimsy houses, scarcely knew what was happening next door. Plat. Alc. 1 121d. It appears from the same passage that it was in these earliest days of life that the swaddling bands, to be discussed later in this chapter, were applied to the hapless infant. The large water bird in the image is another identity marker. Credited by Plato and Aristotle with having their own specific culture, such birds, storks, cranes, herons and others, are frequently found alongside images of young women. For example, Osborne, Transformation, plate 27, and 6.13, red-figure hydria from Athens, National Museum of Denmark 7359; Fehr, Good Democrats and Wives, fig. 87 at page 109, shows part of a red-figure hydria, unprovenanced. Another such bird is shown in the image of young women learning the arts of Athenian civilization practised at festivals reproduced on the cover of this book. Other examples are shown in Lewis, 21 and 26. A white-ground lekythos, a type of vessel used in the commemoration of the dead, whose manufacture is dated on stylistic grounds to c. 490, from a collection purchased in 1901, in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, reproduced in Kaltsas, Nikolaos and Shapiro, Alan, eds, Worshipping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens (New York: Onassis Foundation, and Athens: Hellenic Ministry of Culture and National Archaeological Museum, 2008), no 36, shows a mythic crowned figure, with the attributes of Artemis, apparently feeding a swan and who is wearing the Athenian marker of snake bracelets on both wrists. It is mentioned in Chapter 3, where the significance of that marker, and its possible relevance to understanding the central scene of the Parthenon frieze are discussed.

101 The Commissioners pick up a point about the desirability of showing uniformity so as to reduce the temptations to rivalry made by the character of the Athenian in Plato’s Laws. τίμιον εἶναι σῶμα οὐ τὸ καλὸν οὐδὲ ἰσχυρὸν οὐδὲ τάχος ἔχον οὐδὲ μέγα, οὐδέ γε τὸ ὑγιεινόν—καίτοι πολλοῖς ἂν τοῦτό γε δοκοῖ—καὶ μὴν οὐδὲ τὰ τούτων γ᾽ ἐναντία, τὰ δ᾽ ἐν τῷ μέσῳ ἁπάσης ταύτης τῆς ἕξεως ἐφαπτόμενα σωφρονέστατα ἅμα τε ἀσφαλέστατα εἶναι μακρῷ. Plat. Laws 5.728.

102 Following thoughts set out in the section of Plato’s Laws that deals with the differences between desirable (‘useful’) Athenians and those who have committed irregularities, the Commissioners pick out the penalties of being excluded from the two most significant rites of passage. μήτε γὰρ εἰς γάμους ἴτω μήτε εἰς τὰς τῶν παίδων ἐπιτελειώσεις. Plat. Laws 6.784. In the same passage where the two penalties are mentioned again, the character of the Athenian adds that any man who tries to break the convention can be struck and expelled. In the Laws, the author does seem to be offering his own ideas, and the work contains little that is intellectually dialogic except in form—so it is fair to say that Plato envisages a corps of oikos inspectors who would check on whether young couples were performing their civic duty to have frequent sexual encounters in accordance with a strict and detailed code. At least some of the passage is relevant to my proposed new answer to the old question of what is the event pictured as a contribution to paideia on the Parthenon frieze, to be discussed in Chapter 4.

103 The Commissioners, who at this point change to a coopting enargeia of the present tense, draw on a tradition stretching back to Homer that includes not only the Oedipus at Colonos by Sophocles but his Tereus, of which substantial fragments have survived. The numerous references from classical authors are collected by Suksi, Aara, ‘The Poet at Colonus: Nightingales in Sophocles’ in Mnemosyne, Vol. 54 (6) (2001), 646–658, https://doi.org/10.1163/15685250152952121, to which may be added Eur. Hec 337. The nightingales remind us too that in classical Athens the calendar date changed in the middle of the day, not during the night, but that many festivals occurred, at least in part, during the hours of morning and evening when the changing light of the unique natural environment was at its most colourful, most mutable, and most dramatic, and at night when the moon threw its own shadows.

104 Sophocles, unassigned fragment 767. In the Birds of Aristophanes, line 890, in a political parody of the way in which a new city [such as post-480 Athens] is invented, instituted with festivals, and named and governed by powerful men in their own interest, the character of Pisthetaerus, protesting at the suggestion that all the species of birds should be invited to the sacred feast that they are founding as part of city-building, remarks that a single kite could carry off everything. There are many other references in Arnott, Birds in the Ancient World, 76–78. The Commissioners, like Aristophanes, use the well-known rhetorical device of speaking in analogies as a way of avoiding criticizing their fellow citizens directly.

105 The Commissioners make a bold poetic claim based on the assumption that animals are also on a development path from individualism (‘brutishness’) to civilized cooperation, and repeat the thought in the version by Thucydides that western Greece was the least civilized region.

106 The implied comparison with pan-hellenic sacred sites where the local ecology was also influenced by the abundance of food for birds and other creatures, a consequence of the frequency of the festivals, is implied by the character of Ion in Euripides’s play of that name, in which, when he is at Delphi, he shouts at the flocking birds to go instead to Delos, Olympia, or Nemea, all sites where festivals were frequent. Eur. Ion 167; 175–176. As an orphan, the young Ion had subsisted on scraps left over from the festivals. That Delphi was ‘loved by birds’ was also noted by Aeschylus. Aesch. Eum. 23. As the occasional references to bird catchers round the Acropolis suggest, although some species of birds appear to have been formally protected, others were killed and eaten. If the Commissioners appear to be insensitive to the plight of orphans who are without kin or city, that may be a fair inference, although they go on to suggest a humane policy towards refugees.

107 The Commissioners refer to the Areopagus and the Pnyx and the other ‘famous hills’.

108 The Commissioners are pleasing and co-opting the audience by presuming that they would recognize the allusions to the Amazons who were defeated near the Areopagus Hill and to Oedipus at the Hill of Colonos. Sophocles, who came from a family of armour-makers whose workshop was at Colonos, was born there. By their allusions, the Commissioners sidle up to two points found in the civic rhetoric of the time, already discussed, namely that Athens had never been successfully invaded in mythic times, as in the Medea of Euripides, and that Athens was welcoming to foreigners and refugees, as in the Periclean Funeral Oration, a point returned to later in the speech when the Commissioners discuss the stories to be presented on the Parthenon.

109 The Commissioners imitate one of the conventions of the chorus in the tragic drama of saying the obvious in case some members of the audience may not have followed the allusions and the argument.

110 The misleading comparison that would-be political influencers make between their ideologically-driven rhetoric and a medical doctor using his specialist knowledge and experience to prescribe ways of curing sicknesses of the human body was used and developed by the character of Socrates in Plato’s Crito. In the Alcibiades, the character of Socrates, in partial contrast, points out that his aristocratic education in ‘writing and harping and wrestling’ was of little value in fitting him to be a political leader. A related point is made by the author of the rhetorical discourse offered in Chapter 5.

111 The Commissioners adopt the opinion of the character of Polemarchus, one of the three mainstream views of what constitutes justice that the character of Socrates sets as his agenda to be challenged in Plato’s Republic. The others are Cephalus, who defines justice as giving what is owed, and Thrasymachus who takes the view that justice is the interest of the stronger. That the view of Polemarchus was not that of a straw man invented for the purpose of the dialogue but was widely shared is shown by the fuller version offered by the fourth-century philosopher Alcidamas, noted in Muir, J. V., ed., Alcidamas, The Works and Fragment (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001), 81. The opinion is also attributed to the rich and overbearing Meno who is said to have learned it from Gorgias by the character of Socrates in Plato’s Meno, Plat. Meno 71d.

112 The opinion is also attributed to the character of Meno in Plato’s Meno Plat. Meno 71d. The suggestion that much of the Parthenon frieze displays the feminine sphere is discussed in Chapter 4.

113 I use the phrase ‘on account of our kinship with’ to convey the sense of κατὰ τὸ ξυγγενὲς as used by Thucydides in Book 1, Chapter 6, to include pan-Ionianism and the mutual obligations it entailed. This was a key feature of Athenian self-fashioning in the classical period, evidenced by many examples that emerge from the experiment, and is likely to have influenced the minds of those who commissioned the Parthenon, as will be suggested as an explanation for the central event pictured on the frieze in Chapter 4. Besides references in the main narrative, Thucydides has the speakers in six Thucydidean speeches invoke the bonds and obligations of their shared kinship or ‘genos’. Thuc. 1.95.1; 1.71.4; 5.104; 6.6.2; 3.86.3; 6.44.3. Noted by Alty, John, ‘Dorians and Ionians, in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 102 (1982), 4, fn20, https://doi.org/10.2307/631122. And although, on occasion, Thucydides may have appeared to disdain the truth value of old myths and eponyms, he also gave his personal view, as an experienced military general, that in Sicily, the Athenians, as Ionians, went willingly to fight the Syracusans who were Dorians, a neat example of the general point that what people can be persuaded is true can improve their performance even in war. Thuc. 7. 57.

114 Described by Miles, Margaret M., ‘Burnt temples in the landscape of the past’, in Ker, James and Pieper, Christoph, Valuing the Past in the Greco-Roman World: Proceedings from the Penn-Leiden Colloquia on Ancient Values VII (Leiden, Boston: Brill, c 2014), 111—145, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004274952_006. The Commissioners may be referring to the so-called Seated Athena that still survives, which asserted the Athenian claim that Endoios the sculptor had learned his craft from the mythic Daidalos, but even at the time of Pausanias, ‘ancient statues’ were to be seen.

115 In a recent book, Sarah A. Rous suggests that the Athenian authorities deliberately kept some material remains of the Acropolis that was sacked by the Persians, including the row of column drums from the pre-Parthenon shown in, for example Figure 24.17, Volume 1, as acts of what she calls ‘upcycling’, defined as ‘an act of self-conscious re-use that involves attention not only to the materiality of the object but also to the visibility of the prior life of the object and of the act of re-use itself’. Rous, Sarah A., Reset in Stone: Memory and Reuse in Ancient Athens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 6. The notion, which is a useful one and of which there are numerous modern examples, can help to explain the mutilation as well as the preservation of some objects, of which I offer an example from the Parthenon in Chapter 4. The use of the unused column drums in the hurried rebuilding of the walls, we can be confident, required a deliberate decision, but in this case, since meanings can later be attributed to ‘upcycled’ remains that were not present at the time of an emergency, the question of intention is, I suggest, more open. The earliest non-speculative relevant piece of evidence is in a remark of Isocrates, who in 380, towards the end of the classical era as conventionally dated, suggested that the [overseas] Ionians left their temples un-rebuilt as a memorial to the impiety of their enemies, adding the forward-looking consideration, that those who saw the ruins would distrust those who broke the Hellenic convention of ‘making war not only on our bodies but on our dedications’ ἀλλὰ καὶ φυλάττωνται καὶ δεδίωσιν, ὁρῶντες αὐτοὺς οὐ μόνον τοῖς σώμασιν ἡμῶν ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς ἀναθήμασι πολεμήσαντας. Isoc. 4 156. To modern ears, the second reason strikes an anticlimactic note, but it can be regarded as an example of the strangeness of the public discourse as it applied to war and the sacking of cities, to be discussed later in the chapter.

116 As usual in the classical era, by ‘natural’ the Commissioners mean fit for purpose.

117 The examples in this passage are mainly taken from Book 5 in the work of Theophrastus commonly known as ‘On the causes of plants’ but that, in the Greek, also implies origins, which discusses the cultivation of olive trees. The parallel with domestic dogs is in De Causis 3.6. As usual in the classical period, both Theophrastus and the Commissioners regard ‘nature’ as fulfilling a purpose.

118 An illustration of the regeneration that occurred after the Greek Revolution was given as Figure 14.3, Volume 1. At Melos, which had suffered severely during the war, it was reported in 1838 by one of the many travellers obliged to spend time there, that grafting the local olive trees with cuttings improved both the rate of growth and the yield. Garston, Edgar, Greece Revisited and Sketches in Lower Egypt in 1840, with Thirty-Six Hours of a Campaign in Greece in 1825 (London: Saunders and Ottley, 1842), i, 203. The claim by the Athenians of the classical era that they had discovered the benefits of grafting, and their celebration of the olive tree as the source of their prosperity on the west pediment of the Parthenon, is discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3.

119 A point made in the Funeral Oration as put by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles.

120 The Commissioners repeat the one of the claims made by the Chorus in the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles, with the suggested explanation by Aristotle, quoted in Chapter 1.

121 The Commissioners refer to the story presented on the west pediment of the Parthenon to be discussed in Chapter 3.

122 That the domestication of trees was much like the domestication of animals, as indeed it is, is implied by the story that Orpheus could do both just by his music, which was recounted by Clement of Alexandria at the beginning of his Protrepticus. θηρία γυμνῇ τῇ ᾠδῇ καὶ δὴ τὰ δένδρα, τὰς φηγούς, μετεφύτευε τῇ μουσικῇ. In this context I prefer the interpretation that he could change the nature of trees to the usual meaning of the word that he could transplant them.

123 The Commissioners, reluctant to name those who were dismissively called ‘Cynics’ who were noted for their robust challenging of mainstream ideologies, draw credibility from the works of Antisthenes, now lost apart from fragments and reports, in this case items 87A, 87B and 87C in Price, Susan, ed., Antisthenes of Athens: Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 312–313, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.5730060.

124 The Commissioners repeat the remarks of the character of Socrates in the Meno of Plato, Plat. Meno 89b, which gives another example of the utilitarian refrain of ‘usefulness’ noted in the quotation from The Children of Heracles by Euripides on the title page of the Areopagitica of Milton where the Greek word is used twice, as discussed in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22. Like the character of Socrates in the Meno, the Commissioners appreciate the distinction between ‘money’ and real resources, and the modern distinction between fixed, i.e. material, resources and human resources that are not all the same, and neatly set the foundation for the need for paideia. Σωκράτης καὶ γὰρ ἄν που καὶ τόδ᾽ ἦν: εἰ φύσει οἱ ἀγαθοὶ ἐγίγνοντο, ἦσάν που ἂν ἡμῖν οἳ ἐγίγνωσκον τῶν νέων τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς τὰς φύσεις, οὓς ἡμεῖς ἂν παραλαβόντες ἐκείνων ἀποφηνάντων ἐφυλάττομεν ἂν ἐν ἀκροπόλει, κατασημηνάμενοι πολὺ μᾶλλον ἢ τὸ χρυσίον, ἵνα μηδεὶς αὐτοὺς διέφθειρεν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπειδὴ ἀφίκοιντο εἰς τὴν ἡλικίαν, χρήσιμοι γίγνοιντο ταῖς πόλεσι. What ‘useful things’ consisted of was discussed in Chapter 1.

125 Xen. Ec. 3.

126 Unfortunately, the speech does not help to answer the much-debated question of whether there really was an ‘oath of Plataea’ under whose terms the Hellenic cities that had been desolated by the Persians agreed to postpone rebuilding for thirty years, or if it was a fourth-century rhetorical invention. Discussed by Kousser, Afterlives, 101.

127 The Commissioners acknowledge, without naming them, that Peisistratus and his sons undertook many building works that benefitted the city but that these works did not save it when the Persians invaded, with the Peisistratids among their local allies. They have come to the same conclusion as Boersma, who, in his 1970 study of the building works, concluded that: ‘the buildings constructed by Peisistratus were modest and functional; they were intended to benefit his own generation and not posterity’. Boersma, John S., Athenian Building Policy from 561/0 to 405/4 B.C. (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1970), 18. In translating the Greek word, eidolon, as ‘idol’, I do not imply that the Commissioners were being derogatory.

128 The Commissioners allude to the episode in the Athenian war against Aegina, when, as recounted by Herodotus, Hdt, 5.85, in an attempt to draw the Aeginetans into a sea battle, the Athenians tried to pull down the images with ropes, only for them to break. Herodotus adds that he does not believe the story that the images fell upon their knees and that they could still be seen in that position. The general point that large images were protected by their size was made in a memorable phrase by Cicero quoted in Chapter 5. Earlier the Athenians had sacked the city of Sardis, in the territory of the Great King, and the expeditions of 490 and 480/479 were, to an extent, likely to have been acts of revenge and precautions against a repetition—although all accounts are filtered through Greek authors.

129 The Commissioners use the Greek word for visual image (εἴδωλον) that does not carry the negative connotations later attached to ‘idol’ by others. They also allude to the role of the Parthenon as a secure storage facility, impervious even to fire, to be discussed in Chapter 3. In describing the duties of the official who had responsibility for the keys of the buildings in which the city’s valuables were held, the Aristotelian Ath Pol couples the physical assets and the written records as complementary, not as opposed. οὗτος τάς τε κλεῖς τὰς τῶν ἱερῶν, ἐν οἷς τὰ χρήματ᾽ ἐστὶν καὶ τὰ γράμματα τῇ πόλει, Aristot. Const. Ath. 44.1.

130 That the Thebans, whose role in the Persian wars was condemned by most other Greek cities as shameful, might decide, if they were given a chance, to remove the monuments in the built storyscape, and discontinue the associated ceremonial acts of commemoration, so changing the future narrative and threatening their very identity, was suggested by the ambassador of the Plataeans in the Plataicus attributed to Isocrates. Isoc. 14 58.

131 The Commissioners, taking a ride on the injunction inscribed at Delphi, ‘know thyself’, will allude almost immediately to the need to preserve archives written on perishable materials, but here they put first the measures to preserve an approved version of the memory in visual images, in performance, and in combinations of the two.

132 The Commissioners refer to the previous sources of authority noted by Isocrates in his Panegyricus, especially 28, which is explicitly presented, even to the use of the word, as a step in the development-from-brutishness historical narrative, mentioning the particular role of festivals that initiate their members into ‘mysteries’—that is, specialist knowledge—which they are given the responsibility of preserving.

133 The Commissioners, applying notions of the four elements, describe some of the manufacturing processes in much the same terms as they were later summarized by the elder Pliny in Plin. Nat. 30.33, and which, as noted in Chapter 1, pervaded the mainstream understanding in the classical era and earlier. Examples of materials used in the manufacture of images are also noted in the passage, but I omit them here, not only because some may have been introduced later, but to bring out the pervasiveness and longevity of the elements, and the purposiveness of ‘Nature’ in the discursive environment.

134 The Commissioners, in accordance with the usage of the time, make no sharp distinction between ‘poets’ whose medium was words presented in verse, and those ‘artists’ who worked in the visual arts; they draw attention to what can be regarded as anachronisms but can be regarded more plausibly as the invention of heritage, whereby the authority of current ideologies and practices is enhanced by giving them a longer pedigree than is warranted by evidence. All three of the tragedians of whom we have a few complete texts, use the device. Examples range from pushing back the founding of the Areopagus, the excluding of women from political affairs, the cultivation of the green olive, the custom of the funeral oration, and to the tight swaddling of infants. In modern terms, the presentations in ‘literature’ match those in ‘art’, for example in the stories displayed on the Parthenon. Since both media were employed to convince the same constituencies of consumers, such ‘anachronisms’ can be used to solve questions of what stories were presented on the Parthenon, including, in a few cases, the filling of gaps. I make use of the Oedipus at Colonus, the Trojan Women, and the Ion, all of which include references to stories presented on the Parthenon.

135 The Commissioners repeat a sentiment offered by Dio of Prusa in the Rhodian oration, D.Chr. 31.91, where Dio notes that Rhodes followed the practice among the Athenians. This may be an example of Athenian claims to an exclusionary exceptionalism, The gods and mythic heroes presented on the sculptural battle of gods and giants (gigantomachy) on the archaic-era Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi, a pan-hellenic site with a wide range of visitors, are named. The description of women visitors engaging with a gigantomachy at Delphi in the Ion of Euripides, as discussed in Chapter 3, is one of the few sources that enable us to understand how the ancient Athenians are likely to have engaged with the stories presented on the Parthenon.

Much of the Rhodian oration is devoted to attacking the then-recent practice of refurbishing statues of now largely forgotten men by adding new nominal labels, not as an intentional rewriting of the city’s history by altering the visible built heritage but as a way of saving on costs. The point is referred to by the author of the rhetorical discourse in Chapter 5.

136 D.Chr. 31.87 and 90. The local myths inscribed on the Parthenon, especially on the pediments and frieze, although complex, appear never to have been labelled. We need not take it that this custom implies that the viewer was already expert in all the stories, as some may have been, but that spoken guidance (especially in a participative collective festival context) was potentially more effective and inclusive as a means of disseminating the lessons of the stories as paideia. To judge from the innumerable vase paintings in which the names of the characters, including gods, are frequently included in the design, there was no objection to the naming of gods as such, although there are examples in other cultures. Many were evidently exported far from Athens, where their users could be expected to be less familiar. The same considerations may have applied to the frieze of the Treasury dedicated by the Siphnians at Delphi, a site visited by many from around Hellas and beyond, on which the names of the displayed characters were prominent.

137 The Commissioners aim to ‘straighten’ the story of Athens from the confusion of Herodotus, for example, and intervene in the debate about the relative effectiveness of the two main technologies in inscription, addressed in the Encomium to Evagoras by Isocrates Isoc. 9 73 and 74, using the word ‘dunamis’ to connote active agency, including agency of ideas, and couching the argument as a contrast, as is common in Greek literary writing, reinforced by particles, such as ‘men’ followed by ‘de’. Isocrates, a professional speaker, favoured words. The Commissioners favour picking up the alternative view in the debate about the relative advantages of the visual and the verbal set out in the Phaedrus of Plato, especially Plat. Phaedrus 227 d and e, where the character of Socrates argues that images cannot converse but continue tell the same story for ever, in contrast with words that get bandied about and become unstable. Although the character of Socrates uses the language of signs, as in modern semiotics, neither he nor Isocrates explicitly acknowledges that neither medium can be understood unless it has been mediated, as the Commissioners themselves were practising within the boundaries of the discursive environment—perhaps because it went without saying in a society in which making the mutes stones speak was a feature of cults and festivals.

138 A common metaphor in classical-era writings.

139 Dio of Prusa, known as Chrysostomos. D.Chr. 12.1. Although he was writing, or rather orating, perhaps with a standard speech before a panhellenic audience at Olympia half a millennium after the Parthenon and its cult statue were made, he makes use of parts of the long-lived discourse applied in Athens. Although, ornithologically, the other birds are mobbing the owl as a bird of prey that is a danger to them, the Commissioners present them in the same terms as in the Thucydidean funeral oration put into the mouth of Pericles, as examples of the wish of other cities to copy Athens, as the teacher of Hellas.

140 Why the little owl, which appears to have been plentiful in many localities besides Attica, came to be so closely associated with Athens has been much discussed, notably by Dunbar in her edition of the Birds of Aristophanes. To me the best explanation is the Greek name of the bird, ‘glaux’, being immediately connected by an ancient audience with the standard epithet, ‘glaucopis’, applied on dozens of occasions in both of the Homeric epics. The word itself was enough to identify Athena without the need to name her, for example at Hom. Il. 24.26. The name of the bird may be a back formation, akin to an eponym. As usual the Commissioners, following the conventions, present ‘nature’ as teleological and purposeful. Despite many suggestions for what colour is meant by ‘glaucopis’, of which ‘blue-grey’ has been much favoured, it may be that such attempts may be anachronistic. The study by Grand-Clément, Adeline, La fabrique des couleurs: histoire du paysage sensible des Grecs anciens: VIIIe-début du Ve s. av. n. è. (Paris: De Boccard, 2011), 399–403, suggests that, as discussed in Chapter 1, the classical-era experience of the little owls was that of their flashing eyes, as they darted here and there, as they were illuminated by the changing light, especially in moonlight.

141 Dio, in a passing remark at D.Chr. 12.6, preserves the only reference in the discourse to the level of detail exercised by the demos, in which he reports that Phidias, who had been commissioned to make the cult statue known as the Athena Promachos, as imagined by Schinkel in Figure 21.2, Volume 1, required specific approval of the people to make the small alteration of adding an image of the owl to the shield. The phrase, συνδοκοῦν τῷ δήμῳ, that is translated by Russell as ‘with the consent of the demos’ in Russell, D. A., ed., Dio Chrysostom, Speeches. Selections. Orations VII, XII, and XXXVI (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 159. It may preserve the wording of a formal record of the democracy. The record of the episode undermines the notion associated with western romanticism that Phidias was a free artist able to decide what to compose, rather than a contractor commissioned to carry out a plan decided by others on which he might expect to be consulted. It is in line with the general thrust of the discourse that is to link Athenian theism to the land, the light, and the viewerships, to provide a dynamic storyscape.

142 The Commissioners may be referring to painted ceramic vases that were exported from Athens to many locations in the Hellenic world and beyond, as well as being put to use in Athens itself, which show episodes from myth as well as from real life. Most use words to help the viewer, reader, and/or performer, to understand the scene depicted. Since the majority of those now surviving were acquired by individuals and museums in accordance within the destructive western ideology of ‘works of art’ that cares little for provenance or recovering the uses to which the objects were put, notably as part of funerary rites, their potentiality for recovering the customs and practices of ancient life is lost; the same ideology encourages the destruction of knowledge brought about by a huge, mostly illegal, trade to continue. The point made by the Commissioners applies more directly to the coinage issued by the state of Athens from the sixth century that picture the head of Athena on the obverse with a big-eyed owl, a sprig of olive, and the identifying legend ΑΘΕ. As shown by Kraay, C. M., The Coins of Ancient Athens (Newcastle: Minerva Numismatic Handbooks, 1968), they continued to be produced with minor variations for many centuries to the extent that the coins can be regarded as one of the most stable, most long-lived, and most frequently encountered presentations of the officially approved discursive environment. Coins do, of course, also have an economic role, but in classical Athens, as was well understood by, for example, Aristotle, their value was ‘deemed’. Those modern authors who continue to regard coins made from select metals as having an ‘intrinsic’ value against which real goods and services were, can, and ought to be, denominated, rather than the other way round, suffer from a form of money illusion perpetrated, and often internalized, by its beneficiaries. The effects on the Athenian economy of the money creation brought about by loans, guarantees, and oral contracts, is hard to assess because of lack of data, but, as with the olive oil revolution, is likely to have increased the real productivity, the growth rate, and the gross product, while bringing about inequalities in real incomes and wealth that were only partially alleviated by the redistributive customs of ‘charis’ and festivals. Hence, the simmering discontent and the huge effort devoted to community building, making use of the discursive environment of the time, as here provisionally recovered.

143 The Commissioners refer to the Theseids who claimed descent from Poseidon, but also to the Neleids, especially Melanthos the Neleid who came to Athens as a refugee and, after the failure of the Theseids, founded the new dynasty of Codros. Noted by Hopper, R. J., ‘Athena and the early Acropolis’ in Greece & Rome, Vol. 10, Supplement: Parthenos and Parthenon (1963), 12. We would expect to see the acceptance of a foreign dynasty, as obliquely referred to in the Periclean Funeral oration composed by Thucydides, featured on the west pediment of the Parthenon, mostly long since lost, where, under the valued symmetry, as discussed by Pollitt, J. J., The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974), the stories connected with Poseidon and the sea, on the viewer’s right, balanced those connected with Athena and the land, on the viewer’s left. Discussed further in Chapter 3. The story of the Neleids matched that of Xuthus, father of Ion, another foreigner who entered the Athenian mythic self-construction, both of whom, I suggest in Chapter 4, are likely to have been pictured on the Parthenon.

144 The Commissioners, as is normal, make no distinction between stories and histories. The translator has introduced a variant to avoid the modern convention of ‘[his]tories.’

145 The Commissioners repeat, almost word for word, the account given by Herodotus writing in the third person, as an outsider, at Hdt. 8.44.2. The name ‘Pelasgians’ that morphed with the word for stork ‘pelargos’ was used to connote the pre-Hellenic inhabitants, of whom a few traces remain in the names of geographical features such as the river Kephissus, personified and displayed as a reclining figure in the right corner of the west pediment, as a marker of location.

146 That the stories, when enacted, [‘the Muses’], were among the means by which the claimed continuity between the past and the future was deliberately kept alive in the minds of young men as part of their education when they reached civic maturity is made explicit in Euripides, fragment 1028. The Commissioners encourage the thought that the myths to be pictured are part of the intrinsic identity of the Athenians, not objectified, or even imitated, say, by adopting the names, although they do that too, repeating the sentiment that Sophocles, himself a native of Colonus, put in the mouth of the native of the place when he is met by Oedipus in the Oedipus at Colonus. τοιαῦτά σοι ταῦτ᾽ ἐστίν, ὦ ξέν᾽, οὐ λόγοις τιμώμεν᾽, ἀλλὰ τῇ ξυνουσίᾳ πλέον. Soph. OC 61. Much of the design of the Parthenon, with the choices of stories in stone that were displayed, as well as the festivals and collective performances that burgeoned during the classical period can be regarded as examples of what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘The invention of Tradition’, discussed in Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘Inventing Traditions’, in Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, Canto edition, 1992) where, on page 1, tradition is defined as ‘a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual and symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’.

147 The Commissioners repeat the caution in Plato’s Phaedrus, 275a, encouraging their audience to use their own critical skills as they look at look at the pictured stories, and providing legitimation both for the fluidity of the classical tragic drama and for the audience to take control of the meaning-making process, as discussed and exemplified in Chapter 3.

148 The Commissioners quote from line 433 of the same passage in the Suppliants of Euripides in which the character of Theseus, speaking as the spirit of essential Athenianness, commends, that is, the ‘usefulness’ of allowing citizens to speak, as discussed in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22 and misquoted in Milton’s Areopagitica. Although poets were regarded as skilled makers of words just as sculptors or painters were skilled makers of images, they were often described as being ‘inspired’. This is the reverse of the rhetoric of ‘creators’ in modern western romantic terms that compares ‘artists’ with gods. Other examples of literacy being commended, notably by Aristotle, are noted in Thomas, Rosalind, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 130. The Commissioners present a shift in the balance from orality to literacy as part of the narrative of Athens taking the lead in the continuing progress-from-brutishness narrative. And, as many in the audience would have known, some rival cities, including Sparta and Corinth, made little use of inscriptions on stone until centuries later.

149 An example of the records of the Areopagus written on perishable material being preserved in the Parthenon is noted in Chapter 3.

150 The names of the builders of the sixth-century temples at Samos and Ephesos had near-mythic status, not least because their written works on the techniques of building appear to have been amongst the earliest to have been composed and circulated in prose. Discussed by Coulton, J. J., Greek Architects at Work: Problems of Structure and Design (London: Elek, 1977), 24 and 163 fn 52. The translator has retained the Greek word ‘architectony’ to avoid the modern word ‘architecture’ which, like ‘artist’ comes freighted with anachronism. As Coulton noted, the ancient architectons, whose expertise included the whole field of civil engineering, both practical and theoretical, appear to have been guildsmen and were not normally paid much more than the skilled workers whom they supervised.

151 The Commissioners anticipate the joke attributed to Socrates, himself a trained stone carver, in Xen. Mem. 4.2. 8–10, noted by Coulton, Greek Architects at Work, 25 and 163 fn 63. They add their own humorous twist by turning the clichéd trope of deeds being better than words on its head, since for Euthydemos to have become an architecton would have involved a drastic loss of social status.

152 The Commissioners flatter the audience by denigrating the contribution of men with experience, picking up on a remark attributed to ‘the Stranger’, in conversation with the character of the young Socrates, in Plato’s Statesman, 261e, ‘καὶ γὰρ ἀρχιτέκτων γε πᾶς οὐκ αὐτὸς ἐργατικὸς ἀλλ᾽ ἐργατῶν ἄρχων’ and even the admission that an architecton directs the work of others has to be dragged out of him.

153 The Commissioners appear to refer to the economic organizations, known in later times as guilds, in which responsibility for the training, management, and contracts for employing different skills were formally divided among brotherhoods. We have an example of a document that sets out the main features of a guild, in the work in the Hippocratic corpus known as ‘the Oath’ (Hp. Jusj) that has seldom, if ever, been regarded as an example of a guild document or statement of customary practice such as may have existed across the wider economy, and not only among medical practitioners. It commits members to swear to treat the children of their teachers as though they were brothers; to share their money in case of distress; to train only other guild members; never to encroach on the work of other guilds, even in emergencies; and to keep the secrets of the brotherhood. These are almost exactly the same as are found for all guilds that were the main form of economic management in European countries from the mediaeval period until the change to free competition in the later eighteenth century. There are various indications of the existence of guilds in the making of images in the ancient texts, especially those historians written later by, for example, Pliny, that often give the master under whom a famous maker learned his skills as a kind of patronymic. And there are references to family members pursuing the same skilled occupation, including a brother of Phidias, noted in Chapter 5. Some boundaries, such as those between makers/workers in stone and those in bronze are made necessary by the differences in skills. As Adam Smith showed, taking the silversmiths as a case in point, the guild system resulted in less silver being available within an economy than if entry to the craft was not restricted, and, under the guise of looking after widows and children, slipped into conspiracies to raise prices. However, for large multi-year projects such as building the Parthenon, the continuity of a corporate guild offered big advantages to the clients; for example, some contracts appear to have included responsibility for upkeep, such as one to the family of Phidias to maintain the chryselephantine cult state at Olympia. It seems likely that guilds existed in the literary sphere, which would help to explain the persistence of conventions in the tragic drama and the astonishing extent to which the complex texts of some authors, though not mythic stories, remained stable for hundreds of years. We also hear of organizations such as the Homeridae (descendants of Homer) that appear to have curated the texts of the Homeric corpus and perhaps the extent to which they could be altered as well as performed. Following this interpretation, when Alexander of Macedon left the ‘house of Pindar’ untouched when he ordered the destruction of Thebes, he was not preserving a building with famous associations, like a modern national trust, but ensuring that the works of Pindar would continue to be regulated.

154 The Commissioners refer to the ‘Seated Athena’ that either survived the Persian sack or was replaced, that can still be seen in the Acropolis Museum. Some guilds or, in modern terms, ‘schools’ of sculptors, calling themselves ‘sons of Daidalos’ traced their origins back to a mythic founder of that name, in accordance with the custom of eponymizing. One continuous pedigree with all the intermediate names is summarized from scattered mentions in Pausanias and other post-classical authors by Jones, H. Stuart, Select Passages from Ancient Writers Illustrative of the History of Greek Sculpture, edited with a translation and notes by H. Stuart Jones, M.A. [and other academic qualifications] (London, New York: Macmillan, 1895), 1–16. From the long lists of names of numerous tragedies, now lost, Daidalos was always presented as a character from the heroic mythic era.

155 The main accounts of the life of Daidalos found in the ancient authors were usefully collected by Falkener, Edward, Daedalus; or The Causes and Principles of the Excellence of Greek Sculpture by Edward Falkener, Member of the Academy of Bologna, and of the Archaeological Institutes of Rome and Berlin (London: Longman 1860), xvi. The Seated Athena by Endoios, and its later history are discussed by Marx, Patricia A., ‘Acropolis 625 (Endoios Athena) and the Rediscovery of its Findspot’ in Hesperia, Vol. 70 (2) (Apr.–Jun., 2001), 221–254.

156 Discussed by Ashmole, Bernard, Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece (New York: NYU Press, 1972).

157 The Commissioners turn to the metaphor for the columns of temples used by the character of Iphigeneia, when, in Eur. IT 42–58, she describes her dream of the temple at her home city of Argos collapsing in an earthquake. The Commissioners may be referring to the plugs made from olive wood described in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 21, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.21 that proofed the Parthenon against collapsing in an earthquake, but also to the gift of Athena in making the men of Athens clever and inventive enough to devise a scientific remedy, a variation on the reputation for innovation that was part of Athenian self-fashioning, and to other components of which much of the play is devoted.

158 The Commissioners in effect promise that what will be, by far, the most frequently seen presentation in the city (at least during festivals), the west pediment of the Parthenon, will give equal space to the land and the sea gods and heroes: a much-valued symmetry. By showing the contribution in mythic terms, as on the tragic stage, Athens is able to offer a timelessness to the viewers, or at least those who know their local mythology or who can have the stories retold by guides and temple servants. Since their understanding of the time that had passed since the beginning of the world was measured in centuries or millennia at most, and they were aware of the durability of marble in the microclimate, a promise to build ‘for ever’ was not incredible, although the Commissioners were wise enough to include a reference to the unforeseeable in their peroration. The questions that arise in recovering what was displayed and commended on the west pediment are discussed in Chapter 3.

159 In a long-running dispute over the ownership of the island, which is geographically as close to Megara is it is to Athens, Solon was said to have settled the issue by obtaining a declaration from the Delphic oracle that Salamis was ‘Ionian’. Plut. Sol. 10.4.

160 A common trope. Examples are collected, including some from Thucydidean speeches by Figueira, Thomas and Soares, Carmen, eds., Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus (London: Routledge, 2020), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315209081. The Commissioners feel obliged to repeat it although the decision to build Ionian features on to a Doric building to an extent runs counter to the argument and is quickly passed over.

161 The Commissioners anticipate what was to become a standard claim made by Isocrates Isoc. 4 29, and picked up by successors, including the Romans as noted by Plat. Menex. 238a; Cicero, Flaccus 62: ‘adsunt Athenienses unde humanitas, doctrina, religio, frugeres, iura’. Without saying so explicitly, the Commissioners give the credit to Solon for the agricultural revolution that featured the combination of the change from an oikos economy to a polis economy, facilitated by the partial economic shift from a subsistence economy to an economy of olive plantations and of exchangeable olive oil that produced a surplus of real resources, as explained in the Thucydidean version of the brutishness narrative discussed in Chapter 1. Since Solon was, for the classical Athenians, a fully historical and not a mythic figure, there was no question of proposing him for a place among the stories presented on the Parthenon.

162 The olive tree is mythologized on the west pediment. The stories of the olive tree as symbol of resilience planted in the ground are noted St Clair, WStP, Chapter 21, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.21, as is the use of wood from the olive as an effective precaution against the columns of the Parthenon being thrown down in earthquakes.

163 The Commissioners use the argument deployed by Alcidamas, a fourth century author, in his treatise known as ‘On the Sophists’.

164 Although other colossal temples were being planned and built in Sicily and what is now southern Italy (‘Magna Graecia’), the Parthenon appeared bigger than it was, by, for example, having eight columns at each end instead of the more normal six. Discussed by Coulton, Greek Architects at Work, 74–96.

165 Plut. De Herod. 1. Although Plutarch is writing much later, he is offering a timeless general observation that may have been part of the discursive environment in the classical period. If so, it may have been used to justify the high specification to which the Parthenon was built, the lack of incipient gaps providing protection not only against the tools used by human invaders to destroy buildings but against natural erosion, seen as connected.

166 The Commissioners allude to the plans, which were carried into effect, of over-engineering the buildings as discussed in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 21, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.21, and the virtual impossibility, with the tools available at the time or foreseeable, of an enemy being able to knock down the buildings without an unaffordable cost in manpower, time, and risk.

167 Among other examples, in the Platonic dialogue, known as the Ion, the character of Socrates reminds the character of Ion of Ephesus that the Ephesians are Athenians, Plat. Ion 541. He also reminds Ion that the Athenians have often elected non-Athenians to be generals because they have demonstrated their military ability, and the two examples he gives are from cities regarded as overseas Ionian. Although the Athenians regarded themselves as Ionians, and descendants of the mythic eponymous Ion, they were also closely related to the Dorians since Ion was the grandson of Dorus. According to the complex genealogy that united the different branches of Hellenes through their eponyms, Hellen was the son of Deucalion, the first human after the Great Flood. His sons were Doros, eponymous founder of the Dorians, plus Xuthus and Aeolos, eponymous founder of the Aeolians. And the sons of Xuthus were Achaeos, eponymous founder of the Achaeans, and Ion, eponymous founder of the Ionians. It was this family tree that, in his play, the Ion, Euripides both assumes to be correct and shows is inconsistent with the Periclean citizenship law that confined voting rights to those men who could claim Athenian parentage on both sides, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.

168 The Commissioners refer to the story about an earthenware face made by Butades for his daughter who wanted a picture of a young man, which was exhibited at Corinth, as related by the Elder Pliny, xxxv.151, quoted by Güthenke, Constanze, Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920 (Cambridge: CUP, 2020), 25, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316219331, which influenced Winckelmann and Goethe to posit a feminine origin to ‘art’ as a bildung, or as the ancients called it, a paideia, to civility.

169 The Commissioners refer to the image of the seated Athena. By giving Endoios a local pedigree, the Commissioners claim the credit for all his work for Athens. By declaring him a pupil of Daidalos, a mythical figure, the authors of the dedicatory inscription anchor the image on the Acropolis to the world of myth. In the tragic drama there are reports of many plays that apparently include Daidalos as a character, so Endoios stands at the patrolled boundary, giving assurance to visitors to the Acropolis that the world of myth and of the tragic drama had once existed.

170 The Commissioners make a point attributed to Socrates in Plato, Hippias Major, 282a. A similar thought, that Daidalos only deserved to admired because his work was an early stage on a progression to Pheidias is in Aristides 2,118, Davison, Claire Cullen, with the collaboration of Birte Lundgreen, ed. by Geoffrey B. Waywell, Pheidias: The Sculptures and Ancient Sources (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2009), ii, 675. How far other archaic dedications may have survived the 480 destruction of the Acropolis, or been replaced with replicas, cannot be reconstructed with confidence, but elsewhere in the town and the countryside, they were probably still seen in cemeteries. As late as the time of Pausanias, works allegedly made by Daidalos could be seen elsewhere in Greece. The use of the word τέχνη to mean an organised trade is well attested and there is a later epigraphic reference to a συντεχνία λινουργῶν.

171 The Commissioners refer to the Parthenon and the Erechtheion, of which the Parthenon is primarily Doric but with elements, notably the frieze, that are Ionic, and the Erechtheion extravagantly Ionic. It is sometimes assumed that Vitruvius, in attributing the origin of the Ionic order to the eponymous hero Ion, took his account from a source that made use of the Ion, the play by Euripides. However, the version that he recounts is more consistent with the pre-Euripidean version that the Ion subverts and whose explicit conclusion is that it has to be replaced, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. The conferring of the eponym of Ion on to the Ionic order of architecture is therefore likely go back to a time before the fifth century, perhaps made explicit in one of the many lost works on which Vitruvius drew. The passage in Vitruvius is as follows: Postea autem quam Athenienses ex responsis Apollinis Delphici, communi consilio totius Hellados, XIII colonias uno tempore in Asia deduxerunt ducesque singulis coloniis constituerunt et summam imperii potestatem Ioni, Xuthi et Creusae filio, dederunt, quem etiam Apollo Delphis suum filium in responsis est professus, isque eas colonias in Asiam deduxit et Cariae fines occupavit ibique civitates amplissimas constituit Vitr 4.1.4.

172 The Commissioners refer to the commonplace that the Ionians were soft and effeminate, but turn it into a justification.

173 The remark of the Commissioners, with its use of ‘poets’, which in ancient usage included makers of visual art as well as fictions in words (including plays), is a reminder that neither the famous poets in verse, such as Pindar and Simonides, nor the statue makers, such as Pheidias, were ‘creators’ standing outside society, as rhetorics of romanticism are inclined to assume, but were fully integrated into the economy and reliant on pleasing those who commissioned them.

174 The Commissioners, as was normal, use the Greek word ‘graphe’ to include various types of images, not distinguishing ‘painting’ from ‘sculpture’ in cases where, since their focus was on the intended effects on the viewer, there was no need to mention the difference. Indeed, as far as the low relief of the Parthenon frieze are concerned, it would have been hard for the ancient viewer to tell the difference, even if he or she were interested, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, with the possible reference in Euripides’s play, the Ion.

175 The audience pick up a coded attack on the Spartans, with whom war is expected, remembering that it was because the Spartans refused to interrupt a festival that an inadequate force was sent too late to Thermopylae, and a coded reference to the annihilation of Leonidas and his companions.

176 This was a rhetorical exaggeration, unlikely to have convinced the whole audience. The circumstances of the coup and of the killing of the tyrant were as much personal as political, as described by Monoson, S. Sara, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21–50. And since this, and other coups, took place during a festival, a phenomenon that was well-known, noted in for example Aen. Tact. IV and others in Thucydides, including in the speeches, the Commissioners are, to an extent undermining their own proposals to have more festivals. The memory of the botched conspiracy also further weakens the already weak case that what was presented on the Parthenon frieze was the Panathenaic festival when the killing started, to be discussed in Chapter 3.

177 The Commissioners, in explaining in familiar terms the notion of moral progress as set out by Thucydides and the others, make use of the multiple meanings of the Greek word, tokos, that starting from a notion of a newly born baby is carried across to the produce of the land, and on through simple interest paid on a debt, that might not be denominated in monetary terms, to compound interest ‘children of children’ of which an example occurs in Aristoph. Thes. 830.

178 The proposal of the Commissioners appears to have been accepted, there being no images of citizens, except possibly one of Pericles for over a hundred years. Monoson, Plato’s Entanglements, 25. By forbidding the practice, as an unintended consequence, the Commissioners opened the way for accusations that the rule was being evaded as discussed in the rhetorical discourse in Chapter 5.

179 The erotic power of the Charites was acknowledged by the character of the Cyclops in the play by Euripides of that name, although he preferred boys. Eur. Cycl. 581.

180 An image of Hermes and the three Charites was seen outside the entrance to the Acropolis by Pausanias, and its existence noted by later writers who also say it was made by the father of Socrates, the philosopher. It is possible that the ‘Three Charites’ set up at the entrance to the Acropolis may have resembled the sketch. A two word fragment of the Erechtheus by Euripides ‘three yoked maidens’ ζεῦγος τριπάρθενον, to which some have suggested adding Χαρίτων, Sonnino edition fragment 21, would be in line with the custom, noted elsewhere in the Chapter, of making direct allusions to the classical era landscape, in plays set in mythic times, as a means of conferring on them the authority of having existed since time immemorial. Paus. 1.22.8. In mentioning elsewhere that the figures were draped, Pausanias admitted to being puzzled since, in his time, the Charites were presented as naked. In the classical period, although within the Acropolis, some males were presented as naked on, for example, the Parthenon frieze to signal that the events were set in the mythic heroic age, females were loosely draped, in what appear to be ankle-length ‘Ionian’ costumes. Discussed further in Chapter 3.

181 The Commissioners plan that the Acropolis authorities will continue to commission other images, and encourage others to seek permission to dedicate yet more, as happened, perhaps with some de-accessioning. Since, for what was approved and erected, we only have the account by Pausanias written long after and some archaeological traces, it is impossible at present to know the chronological order or the justifications offered at the time, especially as the credit for some statues appears to have been retrospectively attributed to famous sculptors including Phidias. Pausanias did not know what to make of ‘a bull set up by the Council of the Areopagus’, and in responding to his invitation to make guesses, I suggest that it reminded visitors that what were the most prized sacrificial animals, since most Athenians seldom ate beef, could be donated as ‘charis’ and that the sight encouraged the rich to do so, as well as breeding such animals to be purchased by the city or by the treasurers of festivals. Paus 1.14.2. Others were statue groups of two or more figures that offered moral stories in mythic terms. Discussed by Schanz, Holly Lee, Greek Sculptural Groups Archaic and Classical (New York: Garland, 1980). That of Apollo driving away an infestation of locusts reinforces the thought that the gods favour Athens. That of Apollo striking the satyr Marsyas, as punishment, materialised a story, already familiar in the classical period from the, now lost, work of the then highly-regarded fifth century lyric poet Melanippides of Melos. Marsyas was later said to have been flayed alive, in modern terms a disproportionate penalty for using the wrong type of flute, but in classical Athens a reminder that the songs were not to be altered, as discussed later. For a satyr, who is a leftover from the days before the emergence from brutishness to disobey the rules for festivals was not however a venial form of hybris. As will be discussed later in the speech when they declare that ‘Even a change in our songs can hurt the whole city’ they were reporting an opinion attributed to Socrates, the songs being more important than the static images, indeed the way their meaning was internalized and embodied. By the time of Hegesias of Magnesia, writing in the middle of the third century BCE, of whose works only fragments survive, the enterprise of turning the Acropolis into a mythic history in three dimensions, that the authorities could control and update as an apparently more durable statement of `Athenian self-fashioning as well as of paideia than any work consisting of words written on papyrus, even in multiple copies, was still under way. As he wrote, in a tantalising fragment: ‘I am unable to point them all out one by one [the temples and shrines of the Acropolis]; for Attica is the possession of the gods, who seized it as a sanctuary for themselves, and of the ancestral heroes.’ Around a century later, Polemon of Athens, by all accounts a more learned author than Pausanias, turned the comment of Hegesias into words, in a work devoted to the monuments and votive offerings on the Acropolis. Seldom has the precariousness of our modern understanding been more graphically exemplified. Had Polemon survived, even in a single copy as was the case with Pausanias, the whole tradition might have been more securely based on viewerly ways of seeing and on the intentions of the city’s authorities as presented in accordance with prevailing norms of rhetoric rather than on the chatty anecdotes of the uncritical Pausanias. He might have saved the site from being regarded as ‘art’ and made the current experiment in retrieving the discursive environment less necessary.

182 The Commissioners turn to a metaphor deployed by the character of Pericles in the Thucydidean Funeral Oration at Thuc. 2.41. As has been shown by S. Sara Monoson, the passage, that in the past has been regarded as a metaphor for selfless devotion and willingness of individuals to die for their country, and that could therefore be appropriately referred to in modern ceremonies of remembrance, has as its comparator the Athenian social practice of free-born men pursuing free-born boys in an elaborate sexual code, involving an exchange. It was a form of reciprocity or ‘charis.’ The metaphor depended too for its potential effectiveness on the extramission theory that the ‘gaze’ is itself an exchange. Since the practice was available almost exclusively to elites not to the generality of citizens, the allusion may therefore, both here and in the Periclean speech, have carried an implied promise that the men in the audience had an opportunity of joining the elites. As Monoson notes, Pericles had a reputation for speaking boldly, of which the ‘erastes/eromenenos’ metaphor may be an example of first usage rather than of first recorded usage. It is possible therefore that the sentence is an anachronistic addition by a later editor. The word ‘kalos’ and its cognates, usually translated, as here, as ‘beautiful’, seems not to have implied a general ‘aesthetic’ standard but to be related to implied purpose – beautiful for what? It was commonly used, perhaps coincidentally, to describe attractive young high-born men such as are pictured on the Parthenon frieze.

183 [Naples Museum] Raccolta delle più interessanti Dipinture e de’più belli Mosaici rinvenuti negli scavi di Ercolano, di Pompei, e di Stabia che ammiransi nel Museo Reale Borbonico (Naples: n.p., 1840). One hundred and twenty one outline copper engravings, untitled and unnumbered, although some copies have a manuscript index.

184 The Commissioners make a plea for the education (‘paideia’) in the city’s values, both for adults and for those adults and young persons who are not yet educated, to include an understanding of dialectic, among other routes to reliable knowledge, as recommended by the character of Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus, Plat. Theaet. 143a and in the Republic Pl.R.536d. It can be taken too as a defence of the dialogic nature of Athenian tragedy and, as I will suggest in Chapter 3, a recommendation to look at visual images according to the same criteria.

185 A point made by the character of Socrates in Plato’s Republic Plat. Rep. 5.458a referring to the opportunities of learning in conversations with friends as is the setting for the Republic as the characters walk to Piraeus to see a new festival, but it applies also to participating in a festival oneself.

186 This analogy was offered, and its implications developed, by the character of Socrates in the Theaetetus.

187 The Commissioners quote what is presented as a chreia or ‘saying’ in Soph. OC 139, but that may have been placed there by Sophocles in hopes that it would become a common saying. It is an example of what was then regarded as the primacy of sight over the other senses in the understanding of cognition, made more poignant in its first context by having been coined by the character of Oedipus who has destroyed his own eyesight. It also encourages listeners, who will soon themselves be processioners in festivals to embody their emotions that derive from all their senses together, just as Bacchylides uses a single verb, ‘melpein’ to refer to ritual song and dance as inseparable.

188 The Commissioners share the sentiment put into the mouth of Socrates in Plato’s Republic 424cd, where I have, in line with the thought in the previous sentence, widened the usual translation ‘music’ that may tend to suggest that Socrates is referring only to music in a modern sense. The bringing together of two hundred and fifty inscriptions, some fragmentary, that relate to rituals in ancient Greek cities in the online database [CGRN] A Collection of Greek Ritual Norms edited by Carbon, Jan-Mathieu; Peels, Saskia; and Pirenne-Delforge, Vinciane, in 2017 (available at http://cgrn.ulg.ac.be/), a resource that includes some from the classical period in Athens, shows that rituals were regulated to a high degree of detail. They lay down, for example, the times of day, the costumes to be worn, specifying the colour, the animals to be killed, the division of the meat into animal parts, and the remuneration of the officials (‘hieropoioi’) that may include particular cuts of meat, sometimes with items individually costed along with the source of funds. Some include measures for fines and other penalties if the regulations are departed from, and set out strict criteria, relating, for example, to quorums, procedures, and voting that would have made it almost impossible to make changes. A few claim to lay down decisions ‘for ever.’ The Parthenon frieze pictures a large number of men usually called ‘marshals’ whose role, in the light of the inscriptions, is likely to have gone beyond keeping the procession moving along. Indeed they can be taken as part of the visual rhetoric of the stories presented of pushing back presentations of a well-run celebration into mythic times, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. The rhetoric of the inscriptions, as set up in public spaces, is therefore not only to lay down rules but to give advice to viewers of the frieze and to reduce the need for its detail to be seeable.

189 Pindar fragment 76. ‘Ω ται λιπαραί και ιοστέφανοι και αοίδιμοι, Ελλάδος έρεισμα, κλειναί, Αθήναι, δαιμόνιον πτολίεθρον.’ The English word ‘glittering’ occurred to Perdicaris, the recently arrived Greek-American consul, in 1838, whose experience of the phenomenon was direct. Like some members of the audience of the speech, he may not have been aware that he was echoing Pindar who himself may have been turning a local oral tradition into the greater fixity of commemorative verse. Perdicaris, G.A., A.M., Late Consul of the United States at Athens, The Greece of the Greeks (Boston: Paine and Burgess, 1845), i, 27. The archaic word for city ‘ptoliethron’ conjures up the opening words of the Iliad. In Homer a ptoliethron is a city worth sacking, but being daimoned, Athens, according to the rhetoric, is protected by the gods. I am grateful to the late Martin West for his advice on this point. The first part of the phrase is quoted by the chorus in a slightly different version in Aristophanes, Knights, line 1329. ὦ ταὶ λιπαραὶ καὶ ἰοστέφανοι καὶ ἀριζήλωτοι Ἀθῆναι. The same word is used by the Chorus in praising Athens in Eur. IT 1130, perhaps as a quotation from Pindar that the audience would recognize as such. It is possible that the word could be taken to include the olive-oil covered athletic young men as well as the gleaming marble and statue of Athena Promachos. Some, such as the editors of Disraeli’s Letters, i, 175, have detected a pun on the eponymous hero, Ion, a suggestion that would conform with the discursive environment, including giving additional support to my suggestion for what was presented on the Parthenon frieze as discussed in Chapter 3, and there is a pun on the name in the Ion of Euripides, noted in that Chapter. However, if a joke is intended in the Knights, or was heard as such by the audience, the point is not developed. By mentioning the micro-climate of Thebes and Boeotia, the Commissioners remind the audience of the geodeterminism that Byron was to use in his attack on the character of Lord Elgin, as noted in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 19, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.19.

190 It has often been noticed that on the Parthenon frieze, young women are given almost as much picturing space as young men, both being presented as dutifully discharging their gendered roles. As Burkhard Fehr has suggested, given that the two-parent Periclean decree of 451/50 was being considered at the same time as proposals for the rebuilding of the Parthenon, there is nothing surprising in finding that viewers of the Parthenon were reminded ‘of the importance of the Athenian extraction of Athenian [male] citizens on the maternal side, as prescribed by the citizenship law.’ Fehr, Good Democrats and Wives, 143–144. In Chapter 3 I suggest that this observation, when put with the other evidence, enables us to identify the mythic scene that is presented.

191 The Commissioners, following the general narrative of economic and social progress from brutishness to its then current stage of Athenian democracy, suggest that the stories of the Athenian pasts to be presented, numerous though they are, should not be just an archive of local myths, but should be a selection made in accordance with the aims and claims of ‘paideia’ as frequently enunciated, most famously in the Funeral Oration of Pericles.

192 The Commissioners repeat the sentiment put into the mouth of Pericles in the Funeral Oration. τὴν πόλιν πᾶσαν τῆς Ἑλλάδος παίδευσιν εἶναι Thuc, 2.41. Often translated as the ‘School of Hellas‘, a phrase that seems to me to risk implying too static a role, and to underplay that it is the specifically Athenian version of ‘arete’ that is commended for others to adopt.

193 The Commissioners use almost the same words as are spoken by the Chorus in the Trojan Women by Euripides. Eur. Tro. 801–803. ἵν᾽ ἐλαίας/ πρῶτον ἔδειξε κλάδον γλαυκᾶς Ἀθάνα,/οὐράνιον στέφανον λιπαραῖσί τε κόσμον Ἀθήναις, Eur. The meaning of the various words, including ‘teaching’ is discussed by Kovacs, David, ed., Euripides: Troades. Edited with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 252, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199296156.book.1. Despite the joke in the Acharnians of Aristophanes, that uses the common Greek word normally translated as ‘shining’ to mean ‘oily’ like a sardine, he suggests that it may not refer to oiled human bodies. What seems certain from the passage that lists the gifts of Athena, is that it is a reference to the actual olive tree and mark of Poseidon’s trident pointed out on the Acropolis, and almost certainly to the story told on the west pediment of the Parthenon, where, as discussed in Chapter 3 the olive tree is given pride of place. The passage, with its reference to ‘shoots’ also confirms that it was a technology of grafting olive trees, and its application to the green variety, that precipitated the real-terms productivity gain that we may call the olive oil revolution, as suggested by Thucydides and as summarized in Chapter 1, not the harvesting of olives as appears to have been common long before and was not associated with Athena as innovator. What is know of the cultivation of olive trees round the Mediterranean basin, and the separation of the domestic from the wild variety, is discussed by Foxhall, Lin, Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy (Oxford: OUP, 2007).

194 The Commissioners run together the obvious point that children are born and brought up in the oikos during their early years with the metaphor that the oikos stage came before the polis stage in time, according to the brutishness narrative, but it was now less important than the polis.

195 In 476 BCE, for example, Kimon had established a temple in Athens to house the alleged bones of Theseus, specially brought from Delos, as part of a general agenda of building up a memorialising cult of Theseus as one of the founding heroes of Athens.

196 [British Museum] A Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1818), iii, opposite 26.

197 A thought offered by Aelius Aristides in his Panathenaic oration. Pan 81. Although composing hundreds of years after the classical period, Aristides may have been incorporating into the self-celebratory discourse an episode recorded by Xenophon who was alive at the time. When, in 405, the Athenians feared, with good reason, that they would be subjected to ritual extermination [‘andrapodizein’, a technical term to be discussed in the passage on the Thebans elsewhere in the speech] by the Spartans. Xen. Hell. 2.2.14–20, where the word or its cognates occurs three times, Xenophon has them declare that they would not so treat a city who had done such good work in the greatest danger ever to have befallen Hellas. The episode as recorded, whatever its historicity, may be contributing some of the answer to the question of why the Parthenon and other classical era monuments on the Acropolis were over-engineered. Not only could they be expected to be long lasting, and physically difficult to destroy, but they provided a rhetorical defence against those, notably Lysander, who in accordance with other pan-Hellenic conventions need suffer no private or public scruples at putting unarmed enemies to death, and frequently did so, but who decided, for other reasons, to try to achieve their aims by negotiation as Lysander did.

198 Among the formal political constituencies of the Athenian democracy were the Akamantidae, who are reminded of what Homer said of their having joined the expedition to Troy in the Funeral Oration of Demosthenes, Dem. 60 29, although the passage in the Iliad 3.144 does not fully support the claim. It is likely that Akamas is among the ‘Eponymous Heroes’ pictured on the Parthenon frieze, and was, as with the other Eponymous Heroes for their own constituents, pointed out as a focus of attention and storytelling at certain festivals, especially those that included boys. Demophon, in the tragedy by Euripides, The Children of Heracles, along with Akamas who is referred to but does not speak, emphasized that he is a democrat and is willing to take Athens to war against Argos/Mycenae, rather than return refugees who have sought sanctuary. In the Hecuba, by contrast, the two sons of Theseus are reported by the Chorus to have taken the illiberal side in the debate whether the enslaved Cassandra should be put to death as a sacrifice at the tomb of Achilles, perhaps implying that theirs was, or had been, a reasonable point of view, although the character of Agamemnon describes as ‘barbarian’, a word becoming synonymous with ‘brutish’, an attempt by Polymestor to seize the grieving Hecuba. Eur. Hec 122–124, and 1129. In the Medea, the character of Medea who has killed her children to spite their father Jason, in an act that he declares that no Hellenic woman could ever have done, nevertheless expects to be given sanctuary in Athens, and is not contradicted. Eur. Med 1339 and 1384. The Commissioners allude to the fact that Theseus, although promoted by predecessors, notably Pisistratus, as part of an Athenian continuity back to Homeric times, had many embarrassments on his CV, for example that he had raped Ariadne, Antiope, Anaxo of Troezen, and Helen when she still a child, that in classical Athens was below the marriageable age of fourteen, as reported by Plutarch in his Comparison of Theseus and Romulus. The presented contradictions, may not have been lost on audiences of the tragic drama where the character of Theseus is presented as the spirit of all that is best in Athens, as for example, in the Suppliants discussed at the end of St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22 in connection with the title page of Milton’s Areopagitica. In the debate recorded in the surviving tragedies and fragments, the case for welcoming refugees, or at least refugees from the leaderships of other cities, appears to be recommended, but only if the people, usually in the tragic drama, the same as the army agree, a form of democracy but also in some circumstances, an abnegation of a duty to provide leadership. The evidence was gathered by Ducrey, Pierre, Le Traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Grèce antique: des origines à la conquête romaine (Paris: Boccard, 1968). Although there is evidence for codes of law and practice relating to decisions to go to war and to its practices, especially between cities regarded as fully Hellenic, those persons whose cities were conquered, whether men, women, or children, appear to have been regarded as a form of booty, to be disposed of in whatever way the conqueror decided, including being put to death, enslaved, ransomed, or allowed to remain. Whether presentations in the tragic drama brought about any change in practice is impossible to judge from the evidence available. What is documented is that, by the time of the Panathenaic oration of Aelius Aristides many centuries later, the imagined city of Athens was presented as an example of welcome and generosity to refugees. Pan 48, with the example of Orestes quoted, perhaps from the drama, a thought also found in the Oration known as Athena, Behr, Charles A., ed., P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works (Leiden: Brill, 1986), ii, 223. It is possible that we have here an example of the brutishness narrative being employed to look forward to the future, as well as constructing a pleasing picture of a morally progressive past.

199 Whether Theseus, or his sons, were presented on the metopes of the Parthenon, and if so, in what form, cannot be judged given their mutilated state. In another example of the usefulness of genealogy and eponyms as recommended agents of change while claiming continuity, Menexenus, after whom the Platonic dialogue was named, is said in the Lysis and the Phaedo, to be the ‘son of Demophon.’ Although some have conjectured that Theseus is amongst the figures portrayed on the Parthenon pediments, and he may be there, the recumbent figure traditionally known as ‘the Theseus’, in the corner of the Parthenon east pediment is more likely to be a personification of one of the Attic rivers.

200 The Commissioners, alluding to the progress from brutishness narrative along whose trajectory Athens is the most advanced city, propose to exclude the portrayal of many myths that show the gods quarrelling or otherwise behaving in ways contrary to the city’s official self presentation, as seems to have happened, open up a gap between what was allowable in the drama, to understand which a higher level of critical sophistication was required than looking at fixed images. They were anticipating the objections set out by, for example, Isocrates in his Rhetorical Discourse known as the Busiris, such as ‘the calumnies of the poets, who declare that the offspring of the immortals have perpetrated as well as suffered things more atrocious than any perpetrated or suffered by the offspring of the most impious of mortals; aye, the poets have related about the gods themselves tales more outrageous than anyone would dare tell concerning their enemies. For not only have they imputed to them thefts and adulteries, and vassalage among men, but they have fabricated tales of the eating of children, the castrations of fathers, the fetterings of mothers, and many other crimes.’ Isoc. 11. 38. Paradoxically, as we learn from Athenagoras of Athens, a second-century-CE author who composed a plea to the emperor Marcus Aurelius to accord the status of a tolerated religion to the Christians as a breakaway from the tolerated Jewish religion, picked out some of the same myths, including those of Thyestes and Oedipus, as examples of what was being unfairly said about the Christians. Schoedel, William R., ed., Athenagoras, Legatio and De Resurrectione (Oxford: OUP, 1972).

201 The Commissioners refer to an idea that is uniquely found in the surviving written record of the classical period in Euripides’s play known as the Heracleidae, or The Children of Heracles. In two short passages Eur. Heraclid. 961–966 and 1009–1011, an attendant, tries to persuade the character of Alcmene that it is contrary to the laws of the Hellenes to put prisoners to death. The word used for attendant, ‘therapon’, gives the character much greater authority than a ‘slave’ who under the conventions of Athenian tragedy is allowed to say the unsayable but can be assumed not to be telling the truth. We have a glimpse here of a suggested next step in the progressivist advance from brutishness grand narrative.

202 The practice of killing the men and enslaving the women and girls is attested by Thucydides and Xenophon for the fifth, fourth, and later centuries. We may have some archaeological evidence from the cemetery at Phaleron by the sea where a mass grave of about eighty captives, still bound, has been. With only a few exceptions, the victims were aged between twenty and thirty-four years and had been deprived of water and beaten before being put to death. As discussed Chryssoulaki, Stella, ‘The Excavations at Phaleron Cemetery 2012–2017: An Introduction’, in Graml, Constanze, Doronzio, Annarita, and Capozzoli, Vincenzo, Rethinking Athens before the Persian Wars: Proceedings of the International Workshop at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich, 23rd-24th February 2017). Münchner Studien zur Alten Welt; Band 17 (München: Utzverlag, 2019), 103–113. If that age pattern was the norm, it helps to explain why, in many cities, including Melos, Lysander and others were able to restore the cities to their previous citizens, the boys who were spared being now grown up and joined by some older men who had found ways of surviving in exile. The many scenes of violence shown on the Parthenon are consistent with the view it is Homeric conventions that are offered, and the classical Athenians and Hellenes more generally had a strong sense of city and kinship, but little concept of what in modern terms is called ‘human rights.’

203 This plan was carried out, notably on the west pediment of the Parthenon where part-human part snake figures are shown in the so-called Kekrops group, but also on the iconography of statues of Athena and on their bases that were encountered at eye-level. The discourse of autochthony, when decoded, opened up two internal divisions, first the normalizing (‘nomismatizing’) of a general sentiment against foreigners and immigrants of the kind described by Euripides in the Erechtheus, and secondly a normalizing of a division by social class within citizen families, autochthony being a status that only birth could confer. The discourse of autochthony in its first sense was carried into law by the Periclean era law of 450 that restricted the right to participate in public debates to those men, who could show that they were ‘Athenian’ by both parents, an example of a form of racism practised in recent centuries until the present day, and which runs counter to the Athenian self construction as set out in, for example, the Periclean Funeral Oration. Unusually we have contemporary records of opposition, notably by Antisthenes, one of those who was prevented from political participation and by the character of Ion in Euripides’s play, the Ion, to be discussed in Chapter 3.

204 The Commissioners repeat, at the beginning of their sentence almost to the letter, the sentiments attributed to the character of Socrates at the start of the Platonic dialogue known as the Menexenus, a rare example of a description of the response of a real consumer, or certainly of the intended effects of the rhetorical aims of funeral orations. The use of the phrase ‘those that are named multi-coloured’ in the Menexenus (τοῖς ὀνόμασι ποικίλλοντες) also makes it an example of what Aristotle and others called ‘aesthetics’ a word not confined to visual ‘art’ in the modern usage but to the sensations felt by the consumer with all of his or her senses, including the assumption that William Gladstone was amongst the first to notice, that in Homer, the ever-changing light of Athens was itself better understood as a contributor to the sensation than as a mere externality to be elided, as discussed in Chapter 1. The usage of the Greek word ‘aesthetica’ and its cognates in the classical period, notably by Aristotle in his Art of Rhetoric and elsewhere, is discussed by Porter, Origins of Aesthetic Thought, 46–57. Although not written by Plato, the Menexenus, like the Eryxias mentioned in Chapter 1, is not a ‘spurious work’ intended to deceive, but an example of a rhetorical exercise, with elements of nudge-nudge playfulness and parody, into whose conventions the readership is invited to enter and become complicit. Its aims may include, as in the Old Comedy of Aristophanes (and others mostly lost except for fragments) a critique of the conventions of rhetoric itself. My experiment with the form is in Chapter 5.

205 The Commissioners adapt a requirement said to have formed part of the laws of Solon that regulated family, including sexual, relationships. Discussed with the associated ancient documents in Leão, Delfim F. and Rhodes, P. J., eds, The Laws of Solon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), fragment 52a, http://doi.org/10.5040/9780755626281. In the platonic discourse, The Menexenus, the character of Socrates notes that the ennobling effects of attending a funeral oration only lasted for three days at most.

206 Parker, Robert, ‘Law and Religion’ in Gagarin, Michael and Cohen, David, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law, (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 64, https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521818400.004, discussing Demosthenes against Meidias Dem.21.

207 The law under which Socrates was judicially put to death, an event that, by itself, should dispel the modern idea, discussed in the discussion of Milton’s Areopagitica in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22, that classical Athens protected or valued freedom of speech as such.

208 The Commissioners repeat a point made explicitly by, for example, Plut. De Iside 70. They also signal an assumption that the audience already shares that the main purpose of sacred sites and their buildings is to be a venue for festivals

209 Ibid. 65. The Commissioners, aware that speech acts do not necessarily represent what a speaker thinks, hasten to return to the easier ground of regulation. Contradicting an earlier part of their speech about mutual trust, they encourage slaves to make allegations against their masters and mistresses, even although they know that, with such incentives for men and women who had little reason to want to uphold the institutions of the city and its rhetorics, at least some allegations will be false.

210 In their attempt to maintain the elevated, poetic tone of this part of their discourse, the Commissioners refer to the old favourites, Homer and Pindar. Whether the references were still fresh or were clichés under construction cannot be judged, except to note that the allusions would have been instantly recognized by a high proportion of the citizenry and, as a result of their appearance in speeches such as the present one, become familiar to many who knew little of the historical occasions and contexts in which they first exercised their rhetorical power, but had encountered them in their own, to them modern, contexts, including reading them or listening to them being recited.

211 For a complaint that Athens already held more festivals than any other city and that they were an expensive nuisance that imposed unnecessary delays on day-to-day life, and costs on business, we have the remarks of the so-called ‘Old Oligarch.’ Ps. Xen. Const. Ath. 3. For a complaint that Athens already held more festivals than any other city and that they were an expensive nuisance that imposed unnecessary delays on day-to-day life, and costs on business, we have the remarks of the so-called ‘Old Oligarch.’ Ps. Xen. Const. Ath. 3.

212 This sentiment is also in Ps. Xen. Const. Ath. 3.

213 It should not be assumed that the Commissioners were being ironic, let alone sarcastic. The city was a large-scale purchaser of the farm products, grains, wines, and notably animals suitable for sacrifices, some of which had lead times of many months and required working capital over similarly long periods. And the expectation that citizens with large incomes would make voluntary contributions in accordance with ‘charis’ (including the unwritten laws of reciprocity and of honour), that is, make plans for their own forward-budgeting for the ‘oikos’, was an entirely reasonable one. We can take it too that the shift from ‘you’ to ‘we’ is not a result of lack of care but a rhetorical device aimed at consensus building and promoting notions of inevitability. The Commissioners have not taken the opportunity that Pericles is reputed to have done in his Thucydidean speech of the funeral oration, to criticize the free-loaders, in Greek ‘idiotes’, who selfishly take no part in public affairs while enjoying the benefits provided by the city. The fact that Thucydides felt able to include that criticism in what is otherwise a consensus- building rhetoric, may be an indication that some acknowledgement of the damage to civic cohesion done by the ‘idiotes’ could not be avoided if the whole speech was to achieve its broader purpose on the occasion. But for the historic Pericles to have introduced such a jarring and divisive political complaint on an occasion whose primary purpose was to pretend to unity is so unlikely that we may have here an example of how Thucydides was able to use a Thucydidean speech to address a wider audience, as already discussed.

214 Xen Mem 2.7.14. Discussed by Parsons, Mikeal C. and Martin, Michael Wade, Ancient Rhetoric and the New Testament: The Influence of Elementary Greek Composition (Waco: Baylor UP, 2018), 50, as an example of the use of animal fables in rhetoric. The Commissioners employ the device to remind the listeners in advance that money can be used to buy useful services and not just useful things, a point that they will return to later.

215 That this was done is proved by the inscription quoted by Iakovidis, Spyros E., The Mycenaean Acropolis of Athens (Athens: Archaeological Society of Athens, 2006, translated from the Greek edition of 1962), 266 from W. Dittenberger, SIG 3, 83. It is dated to c. 433/2 BCE. The use of the phrase ‘storkade’ in an official inscription shows that the memory that linked the site to the Pelasgians had been lost or was being cleansed.

216 By mentioning the chthonic gods whose cults continued to be practised in the caves of the Acropolis slopes and elsewhere, the Commissioners acknowledge, perhaps inadvertently, that the Olympian twelve had only assumed their primacy as a result of a human decision to deem them so by ‘nomisma’, although Athena is sometimes referred to as chthonic as part of the discourse of autochthony.

217 Discussed, with illustrations of actual examples found in archaeology, by Maggidis, Christofilis, ‘ΜΑΓΙΚΟΙ ΚΑΤAΔΕΣΜΟΙ or Binding Curse Tablets: A Journey on the Greek Dark Side’, in Holloway, R. Ross, ed., Miscellanea Mediterranea (Providence, R.I.: Center for Old World Archaeology and Art, Brown University, 2000), 83–100. The character of the wise nurse in the Hippolytus of Euripides suggests to the character of Phaedra that her sexual obsession with Hippolytus may be due to the secret actions of some enemy, so implying that no well-brought up woman could even think of such an explanation but also that it was prevalent and recognizable as prevalent by the audience. Eur. Hipp. 318. We have what is presented as a verbatim version of the penalties called down by a public curse on individuals, on cities and on whole ethnic groups, in the later classical period in the model speech by Aeschines against Ctesiphon, Aeschin. 3 110, of which the following is an extract: ‘That their land bear no fruit; that their wives bear children not like those who begat them, but monsters; that their flocks yield not their natural increase; that defeat await them in camp and court and market-place, and that they perish utterly, themselves, their houses, their whole family; “And never,” it says, “may they offer pure sacrifice unto Apollo, nor to Artemis, nor to Leto, nor to Athena Pronaea [‘the Athena who foresees and preempts’], and may the gods refuse to accept their offerings.” For how a formal, unpublicized time period between a physical birth and an acceptance of a disabled baby as a legitimate member of a family was available to allow for the disposal of unwanted babies and, incidentally, to ward off stories that a family had been cursed, is discussed in Chapter 4.

218 Examples from outside Athens noted by Osborne, Robin, and Rhodes, P. J., Greek Historical Inscriptions, 478–404 BC (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 102.

219 Plut. Per. 11.3. The reference is to internal political divisions that lead to civil disorder, conspiracies, and coups, with another resort to a comparison with the tools of the building industry.

220 The medical metaphor drawn from ancient misunderstandings is used in, for example, Plut. Lys. 17.6.

221 The Commissioners refer to the law of 450 that limited full citizenship and political participation to those men who could claim that both parents were free-born Athenians, the ‘two-parents rule’, which is discussed further, with its implications for understanding what is presented on the Parthenon frieze, in Chapter 3.

222 Although classical Athens was proud of being free, meaning independent, it was also internally highly regulated, as can be seen from the large number of offices noted in the Aristotelian Ath. Pol.

223 The Commissioners refer to the cosmological theories of Empedocles of Akragas, then at the height of his fame, of which a fragment containing the quotation they allude to has been preserved. Empedocles was carrying forward the ideas of earlier philosopher/scientists in developing the theory of extramission that was mainstream at the time of the speech and whose main features were to be further reinforced by the work of Plato and Aristotle.

224 The story is told in Plutarch’s Solon, Plut. Sol.5.2.

225 The Commissioners take a moment to explain the economic concept of capital and streams of benefits as different from financial capital and the interest that money can earn if lent out. It was a distinction that, we can be confident, the Athenians were well aware of and that they practised in their personal as well as civic lives, although they do not appear to have had an overarching word for capital in this, its most important sense for any policy maker whether in ancient Athens or at other times. In the ancient Greek language, although there are words for money, and for useable money, as the Commissioners will come to in their speech, common usage did not always distinguish between wealth and income derived from the possession of assets, or between the real economy and the ways in which the operation of the real economy was financed.

226 The Commissioners point out the interdependence of the Propylaia and of the Parthenon, whose actual construction seems to have proceeded simultaneously, both in deterring any attack by being seen to be astonishingly well-constructed from large marble blocks and in making it hard, even if an enemy were to take over the site, for him, or her, to seize the valuables stored there. It was well known, for example, from the failed coup by Kylon that political conspirators usually tried to seize the treasuries where coined money and bullion were stored along with other precious objects that could be melted down, converted into physical money, and used to buy real resources, part of the plot of Aristophanes’s comedy, the Lysistrata. The contents of the treasuries in the classical period were published and discussed by Harris, Diane, The Treasures of the Parthenon and Erechtheion (Oxford: OUP, 1995) and are briefly summarized in Chapter 4.

227 The Commissioners, in reminding the audience of the autochthonous myth and explaining the purpose of education in the stories of mythic and actual forebears, follows almost exactly the conventional rhetoric of the words of the Funeral Speech of Hyperides, delivered in 322.

228 The Commissioners deploy the various usages and cognates of the Greek word for ‘use’ and ‘useful’ to associate the resources of the city, including ‘chremata’ [useful things including ‘money’] to produce ‘chrestoi’ [useful men].

229 The Commissioners refer to a description put into the mouth of the Chorus, and therefore a commonplace, in the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles. ἐγχέων φόβημα δαΐων Soph. OC 699. As suggested in Chapter 1, the adoption of a tradeable crop almost as a monoculture may have been part of a real productivity improvement in the output of the land of Attica, compared with the poor quality of the land for producing agricultural crops for human consumption as in the oikos subsistence model. There are traces of an olive oil revolution in the fragments of the works of Solon that, whether genuinely by him or invented to preserve a memory, have him imposing limits on exports of oil, that is a measure to preserve jobs, and precautions, that were unsuccessful, to avert tyranny, it being easier for potential leaders of coups to seize cisterns full of oil than to tax or seize such little surpluses, a goat here or some barley there, that were available to be taxed or seized from the numerous semi-independent settlements of the oikos economy. Olive oil, a nutritious crop, appears to have been mainly valued as a way of cleansing and oiling the bodies of athletes, as is mentioned in the development account by Thucydides. Having the manpower available to the city well exercised would be an advantage in war, but scarcely enough to justify the word ‘terror.’ According to Plutarch’s Solon, for which he claimed the authority of poems now lost, Solon wrote a law forbidding slaves to practise gymnastics, or to take boys as lovers, so dignifying these practices by confining them to ‘the worthy.’ Plut Sol 1.3. A direct claim for the military value of olive oil is made by Aristotle in Problems 5.6, where he says that rubbing the body with oil mixed with water ‘stops fatigue.’ And Aristotle may have been right. Olive oil includes lipids that are ‘indispensable for human nutrition … almost completely absence from cereals’ even when olives are consumed in small quantities as a piece of fruit. Discussed by Bresson, Alain, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States. Expanded and Updated English Edition, Translated by Steven Rendall; Originally Published in French 2007–2008 (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2016), 128, https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691183411.001.0001. It is also possible that the audience for the Oedipus at Colonus and others appreciated that it was the releasing of manpower from inefficient farming that had enabled Athens to build its merchant fleet and navy. A discussion of the olive tree displayed on the most prominent place on the Parthenon, the west pediment, is in Chapter 3.

230 The Commissioners point to other real efficiency improvements that had already resulted from the monetization of much of the economy, including a reduction in the amount of working capital needed and in the resulting higher real incomes accruing to an oikos, as were explicitly noted by Aristot. Econ. 1. 1344b. Although not mentioned specifically here their remarks form part of the generally accepted long run narrative of development from brutishness discussed in Chapter 1.

231 See note 64.

232 The reference to our fathers is to the decision to build what is now called the pre-Parthenon with local Pentelic marble.

233 Although this is a rhetorical device, found, for example, in the Periclean Funeral Oration, it was highly relevant and convincing in the present context. One of the features of both pediments of the Parthenon is that they are so overcrowded with figures from the mythic history of Athens that it is hard to imagine that any ancient viewer would have been able to identify them all just from their markers, as will be discussed further in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. The Commissioners make a substantial point about the intended content and viewership, but as the character of Socrates remarks in the Gorgias, listeners do not, in any case, like speeches that are tempered to suit foreigners. Plat. Gorg. 513c.

234 The Commissioners echo a phrase used by the character of the god Hermes in the Prologue to the Ion of Euripides where Athens as a city is referred to as ‘not asemic’, to coin a word from modern semiotics, the study of signs and how they are used to signal more than may be suggested by a literal reading of words or images. ἔστιν γὰρ οὐκ ἄσημος Ἑλλήνων πόλις, τῆς χρυσολόγχου Παλλάδος κεκλημένη, Eur. Ion 8 and 9. In the play, as here, the comment may be reminding the audience that it is legitimate to draw a range of meanings from looking at the images, including as in the play, parallels with contemporary experience, but that remains a speculation. Some modern scholars in referring to the stories presented on the Parthenon use the word ‘polysemic’ although the problem of recovering what the signs meant in the strange circumstances of classical Athens remains. As it happens, the Ion preserves one of the view descriptions from the classical era of how real viewers, albeit fictional, engaged with the stories in stone as will be discussed in Chapter 3.

235 The Commissioners refer to the custom of filling the awkward spaces of temple architecture with mythical creatures that are half human, half animal, from the many examples found in the Acropolis excavations in the later nineteenth century as described in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 21, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.21. A conspicuous exception was the picturing of autochthony in the so-called Kekrops group on the west pediment of the Parthenon. An example of how the displayed monsters had been used to teach ‘arete’ in the past was put into the mouth of the character of Prometheus, who struggles to overthrow the old order, in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus: ‘Pity moved me, too, at the sight of the earth-born dweller of the Cilician caves curbed by violence, that destructive monster of a hundred heads, impetuous Typhon. He withstood all the gods, hissing out terror with horrid jaws, while from his eyes lightened a hideous glare, as though he would storm by force the sovereignty of Zeus. But the unsleeping bolt of Zeus came upon him, the swooping lightning brand with breath of flame, which struck him, frightened, from his loud-mouthed boasts; then, stricken to the very heart, he was burnt to ashes and his strength blasted from him by the lightning bolt.’ Aesch. PB, 355 to 365. That monsters were used to scare children is included by Aristides in his Panathenaic oration, 25, half a millennium later, an example of the long continuity.

236 The Commissioners defend the decision, on which they may have anticipated that their recommendation would be overruled by conservative forces in the Assembly, by enabling viewers to position the anomaly in the progress from brutishness narrative.

237 A point made in, for example, Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, Plut. Per. 1.3, where it is presented as a direct result of extramission, adding notions of being drawn to ‘the good.’ To a Greek listener, the word translated as ‘fresh’ is cognate with ‘flower.’ In the immediately following passage readers are warned not to equate the work with the moral quality of the maker, a confusion encouraged by the rhetorics of western romanticism, but dismissed as an error as discussed in Chapter 4.

238 The Commissioners repeat a thought offered by the character of Helen in Euripides’s play of that name, that if her attractiveness could have been wiped off as on a statue, the Greeks would have forgotten about her. Eur. Hel 260–264. I am grateful to David Kovacs for his advice on the meaning of the passage.

239 The Commissioners know that images are defaced as ways of performing opposition to the official ideology, sometimes, as in the case of the mutilation of the herms, apparently as a threat of terrorism. In practice the Commissioners knew that, as far as the stories presented on the Parthenon were concerned, it would have been impracticable, with minimal security, for anyone to get close enough to the sculptural images, whether to damage them or steal the metal. Mutilation at a distance only became practicable with the advent of firearms. Although there is not an exact correspondence, the officially authorized acts of mutilation of Christian times, discussed briefly in Chapter 3, appear to have been concentrated on the images that gave greatest offence to the new regime.

240 The Athenian audience did not need to be explicitly reminded that the sacking of cities and the taking of female slaves were among the attractions of war in their own time under their own conventions.

241 The phrase appears to be directly quoted, even to the use of the archaic ‘Iaones’, by Thucydides 1.6., who is the source for the wearing of the distinctively Ionian dress in the Ionian festival at Delos that brought together Ionian Athens with the overseas Ionian settlements in the islands on the coast of Asia. That the phrase is a late insertion in the Iliad, designed to boost the claims of Athens to have played a larger role in the Trojan war than the earlier versions reported, has been suggested by scholars, not least because it is implausible that ‘Ionians’, who are only mentioned in the Iliad at this one place, could have actually have fought wearing such an inconvenient dress. In this case, Thucydides, like other authors of the classical age, regarded the information about the past embedded in formal performances of memory as of at least equal truth value as those carried by technologies of inscription, whether written in words or pictured in visual images. What we can say is that the phrase ‘long chitoned Ionians’ (ἑλκεχίτωνες Ἰάονες), whenever it was accepted into the Iliad, became part of the discursive environment of the classical era and was presented in visual form as a counter-ecphrasis, as worn by the ‘Caryatids’ on the Ionic Erechtheion, and on the frieze of the Parthenon as discussed in Chapter 4.

242 The Commissioners apply to the metopes of the Parthenon the practice of making stories in stone displayed on sacred buildings become alive in the imagination of their viewers as is described by Euripides in the Ion, the main source for ways of looking at stories presented on sacred buildings, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. The Commissioners also remind us that the metopes, bearing scenes of pitiless violence, rape, within a tradition of monstering non-Hellenes, were much more visible than the stories presented on the frieze.

243 Hom, Il. 2.558. The geographical encyclopedist suggested the verses had been inserted into the Homeric text either by Peisistratus or by Solon to boost the Athenian claim that Salamis had always been part of Attica, populated by Ionians, that is, by kinsmen of the Athenians who also called themselves Ionians. Strab. 9.11.

244 The Commissioners compare the catalogue of ships in Book 2 of the Iliad in which the small size of the Athenian contingent is mentioned with the catalogue of the ships at Salamis, noted by Herodotus at 8.1.1, that recalls the list in Homer, to remind the audience of how far Athens has come both militarily and in comparison with other cities since those days. At Salamis the Athenians are reported as having provided a hundred and twenty-seven ships, by far the largest contribution, whereas the Opuntian Locrians, the smallest contingent, could only manage seven fifty-oared ‘penteconters’, a smaller type of vessel. By their rhetorical device the Commissioners turn the small and undistinguished role that Athens was reported as having played in the war against Troy in the Homeric epics, from a matter of shame into one of pride. Another example of the complaint that Homer had been unfair to the contribution of Athens to the conquest of Troy is in the speech put by Herodotus into the mouths of the Athenians in which they claim the right to be second to the Lacedaimonians at the forthcoming battle of Plataea ’in the hard days of Troy we were second to none.’ Hdt. 9.27.

245 Thanks to the careful work among the many small fragments by Alecos Mandis and Katherine A. Schwab, some of the conjectures made earlier, have been confirmed. Most of the metopes on the South side of the building appear to have been deliberately and comprehensively mutilated, probably as part of the Christianization of the building. Why others were left unmutilated remains unexplained, especially as they included some pieces that were at least as visible. In the absence of any plausible explanation related to visibility or ideology, we may be right to conjecture a change of policy, motivated by a thought that it was wasteful to devote resources to the expensive task of mounting scaffolds and chiselling out images, when there was no longer much of a threat of a successful counter-revolution against the Christianization. An alternative and cheaper strategy, that involved displaying the act of successful mutilation itself, appears to have been applied, either as an alternative, or more probably as an addition, to the central slab of the east frieze as will be discussed in Chapter 3. As I have been informally advised by Professor Yannis Lyzitzis of the University of the Aegean, to whom I record my thanks, a technology already exists that will enable the dates of breakage and mutilation to be estimated with greater precision, for example to the nearest century, and could, I suggest, be proposed as a project to the authorities responsible for the site.

246 In justifying the stories to be presented on the Parthenon, many of which, in the event, referred to eponyms of the various formal geographical and kinship constituencies, the Commissioners turn to a sentiment put into the mouths of the war dead in the Funeral Oration of Demosthenes. Dem. 60 1. On the first part, different constituencies were taught to identify themselves by eponyms, especially at festivals, such as at the pan-Attic Apatouria, one of the most inclusive and, at three days, the longest-lasting of the annual festivals, when the young, or occasionally adult, males who passed the various birth qualifications were inducted and registered, and it is plausible that the designers of the Parthenon, chose such stories to promote unity in difference as part of the general aim of producing ‘useful’ citizens. The Apaturia, on which there is much information recorded over many ancient centuries, including on its rules for performing and displaying induction, inclusion and exclusion, is described by Parker, Robert, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: OUP, 2005), especially 371, 458–461, and 488–449, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199216116.001.0001. On the second point, the Commissioners risk encouraging an unfavourable reaction from at least some of the audience. The land of Attica, all knew, was not a ‘common possession’ but was privately and unequally owned and that the dead, who could not reply, were being rhetorically deployed to help justify a political unity that they may or may not have agreed with when they were alive. The apparently similar claim put into the mouth of Pericles in his Funeral Oration as reported by Thucydides, namely that the whole earth was their sepulchre, was less objectionable.

247 The Commissioners make a factual claim whose validity there is no reason to doubt. In a rhetorical exercise composed by Lucian, centuries later but within the continuing discursive tradition, known as Anacharsis, or Athletics, the character of Solon, often invoked as the originator of the best civic institutions, tries to persuade the character of the doubting Anacharsis that these occasions were amongst the greatest benefits the gods can bestow on a city, noting them in a list that includes, personal freedom, security, wealth and reputation. ἀλλ᾽ ὃς ἐν αὑτῷ συλλαβὼν ἔχει τὴν ἀνθρώπου εὐδαιμονίαν, οἷον ἐλευθερίαν λέγω αὐτοῦ τε ἑκάστου ἰδίᾳ καὶ κοινῇ τῆς πατρίδος καὶ πλοῦτον καὶ δόξαν καὶ ἑορτῶν πατρίων ἀπόλαυσιν καὶ οἰκείων σωτηρίαν, καὶ συνόλως τὰ κάλλιστα ὧν ἄν τις εὔξαιτο γενέσθαι οἱ παρὰ τῶν θεῶν. Luc. Anach. 15. The word for enjoyment, ἀπόλαυσις, as it was used by authors in the classical period retained the sense of actual consumption of fruits brought about by good government, although there is no need to suspect the Commissioners of appealing here to the bellies of the audience, the redistribution of real incomes being a well understood effect, as well as civic policy, of most communal feasts involving meat.

248 The reciter, who had been primed to expect opposition to the proposal to disallow references to the half-snake myth of autochthony, that was among the cornerstones of the power of certain families within Athens, concedes the point as a way of escaping having to make bigger concessions by including the so-called Kekrops group on the west pediment, where it struck the ancient viewer, Antisthenes, as it does most moderns, as so implausible as to be ridiculous and to attract ridicule.

249 An allusion to the extraordinary latitude allowed to classical era dramatists, especially Euripides, to tell old stories in new ways. In the Phoenix by Euripides for which there are testimonies and fragments, the character of Anagyrus revenges himself on a neighbour who had cut down his trees, by maddening one of his foreign girl friends to claim falsely that she had been abused by the neighbour’s son, with the result that the father blinded his son and hanged himself and the girlfriend threw herself into a well.

250 The reciter presages an argument that later was made explicitly, and is still heard today, that enabling citizens to exercise critical judgement is not an optional extra to a civic education, but the best means of enabling a democracy to make informed decisions. Here, as elsewhere, we are reminded that those who commissioned the Parthenon were concerned to promote oligarchic values, and to an extent to persuade the populace to accept such values, especially a liking for aggressive war and imperial expansion, as if no alternatives were available. The extraordinary freedom of the classical era drama was ended not long after.

251 The Commissioners encourage viewers, to whom by their choice of words they reveal some condescension as leaders to followers, to imagine the images as able to move like the actors in a play, as will be discussed, with examples of that way of seeing from Euripides, in Chapter 3. The mention of ‘safely’ anticipates the objection that, under the theory of cognition by extramission, the viewers may internalize the actions of the dialogic actors rather than the moral and political lessons of the dialogue itself. Because it became a ‘chreia’, that is, a useful piece of wisdom, by good fortune, we have a surviving fragment of a dialogue that gives support to the idea that this thought is present in the discursive environment. In the fragment, the character of Antisthenes, a historic figure and friend of Plato, who was noted for the boldness of his ideas, points out to the character of Socrates that, although there is much violence in the tragic drams, ‘no poet of tragedy has been so bold and shameless as to bring into his drama a chorus being slaughtered.’ Antisthenes of Athens, Price edition, Chreia 16, 65, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.5730060. It has been noticed that the chorus in Greek tragedies is sometimes part of the drama as participating characters and sometimes stands outside as observers. For example, Mastronarde, Donald J., The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 89, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511676437, where the distinction is made between the ‘intra-dramatic’ and the ‘extra-dramatic.’ And there is at least one case in a surviving tragedy in which a chorus scuttles from the one to the other. In Aeschylus, Libation Bearers, 872–874, ‘let us distance ourselves from the deed, so that we may seem to be without responsibility for these evils’ as translated by Mastronarde, 100. Although in this case the chorus of slaves appears to be presented as simply avoiding responsibility, they might also be avoiding the pollution of being complicit in causing a death. The chreia of Antisthenes enables us to claim with greater certainty that this convention was a general one that is likely to have been enforced in advance of approval to perform, if that was ever needed, by the city’s institutions, including the institutions that supplied the financing. A limitation, that may have been driven by other occasions, therefore gives the gnomic statements of the chorus a particular authority as statements made within the limits of the permissible, and therefore makes them especially useful in reconstructing the discursive environment. In the stories presented on the Parthenon, there is no equivalent of the external chorus, although there are many examples of the main characters presented as observing the action.

252 The Commissioners quote from the invocation to the local climatic conditions that in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus are brought together as gifts of the land-as-mother metaphor already deployed and perhaps familiar and conventional, as necessary for the survival of the city. PB 88–91. All these features are pictured on the Parthenon, where the symbolic figures set in the corners of the pediments are normally understood as positioning the main events pictured in time and place, but without directly linking the land with the production of food. The vital importance of water both in defence and in food-production, by, for example, irrigating the olive groves and other crops, was never absent, and the references to the sea may have reminded the local audience of classical Athens both of fishing and of overseas trade. In one of he many twists in the Ion by Euripides that are soon reversed, the character of Ion, in what may be an allusion to the reclining figure in the pediment of the Parthenon, angrily invokes the eponymized Cephisos river as father of his true mother, in contrast to Kreousa, his stepmother, who has at this point in the play plotted to kill him. Eur. Ion 1261. Since the whole passage is hard to comprehend and Cephisos, a male character, is not mentioned elsewhere in the play, some scholars have seen it as an interpolation, as noted by Martin, Gunther, ed., Euripides, Ion, Edition and Commentary (Leiden: de Gruyter, 2018), 463, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110523591. However, apart from breaching the general principle of preferring the more difficult reading, the contrast between a human genealogy and one emergent from the local geography and climate, an elaboration of autochthony, may not be too strained.

253 It is striking that the Commissioners do not begin with the gods, but as in funeral orations grant them only a subordinate walk-on role, when they are mentioned at all. Alongside the political and legal institutions, that were legitimated by having their date of foundation pushed back to the mythic time of the founding of the Areopagus, were the kinship associations, ‘phratries’, mentioned as existing at that time in Aesch. Eum. 656, and the ‘phylai’, conventionally translated as ‘tribes.’ Besides the numerous three-dimensional images of mythic characters that were displayed in the crowded pediments of the Parthenon, the frieze displays images in two dimensions of what appear to be the ‘Eponymous Heroes.’ In Chapter 3, I discuss how such images may have been engaged with by viewers in the classical era.

254 The Commissioners, picking up the familiar rhetoric of seeing and remembering, evidently refer to the two pediments of the Parthenon crammed with figures from the mythic history, that invite the non-mythic human generations both immediately and in the future to join them in a parade of ‘arete’ maintained. They seem also to refer to the images of the largely passive gods displayed on the east frieze of the Parthenon and who confer, by their presence as unseen spectators, their approval of the mythic events that are presented on the frieze as being enacted.

255 The socio-medical claim that, if babies were tightly wrapped in swaddling bands, they would grow up to be tall, lean, and straight, was a commonplace of the discursive environment during many ancient centuries. It is presented as normal by Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE work, Hp. Aer. 20, where the barbarous, ungainly, and ugly Scythians are alluded to as examples of what happens when swaddling is not practised. The advice given by the character of the ‘Athenian stranger’ in Plato’s dialogue, the Laws, Plat. Laws 7.789E, was that a child should be kept swaddled till it is two years of age, and then physically carried everywhere by a strong nurse for another year as a precaution against distorting its legs by putting too much pressure on them. The ‘stranger’ who though not named, is thought, as in earlier dialogues, to represent, and speak for, the historic Socrates, who for most of his life had a closer physical resemblance to the flabby Scythians than to the young men presented on the Parthenon frieze, acknowledges that his proposal would be difficult to enforce and might incur ridicule. The stranger makes clear that he is arguing by analogy with moulding soft wax, and that he thought that babies were at their most brutish when young, for which he took the vocal and other protests made by babies at being controlled in this way as evidence. Swaddling bands feature in the Alexandra, one of the few post classical plays to survive, Hornblower, Simon, ed., Lykophron: Alexandra: Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, and Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2015), line 1202; and frequently in the New Comedy of Menander, from where the themes of late recognition and reconciliation, and the defeat of Tyche, were adopted into comedy in Latin. As late as the first century CE, Luke of Antioch, (St Luke), the man with medical knowledge who may have written or compiled the Acts of the Apostles, uniquely among the authors of the four canonical Christian accounts (‘gospels’) of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, mentions that the infant at his birth was wrapped in swaddling bands, perhaps partly to signal a royal ancestry, but Luke goes on to imply that it was because Jesus was swaddled in infancy and because in boyhood he held conversations with medical doctors, that he grew up to have the qualities prized by Athenian paideia, tall, wise, and understanding the mutual obligations between humans and gods. Luke 2, and especially 52, where I have given the ancient meaning of ‘charis.’ Καὶ Ἰησοῦς προέκοπτεν σοφίᾳ καὶ ἡλικίᾳ καὶ χάριτι παρὰ θεῷ καὶ ἀνθρώποις. The numerous examples in the visual record are noted, with illustrations, in Chapter 4. I mention here, in anticipation of a question that may arise in the minds of readers, that I had come to that provisional thought before I decided to offer the Thucydidean speech that I have prepared as impartially as I could, without being swayed in the choice of topics by my knowledge of what is to come. In Chapter 4 I set out the evidence for swaddling more fully than for other components of the discursive and rhetorical environment. Although, in the event, the Thucydidean speech adds much weight to the suggestion, Chapter 2 has been drafted so as to preserve the potential value of the approach even for readers who may be unconvinced by the suggestion in Chapter 4.

256 The Commissioners allude to the opinion of Hippocrates, drawing on the standard theory of the four elements, that the main cause was that the Scythians did not use swaddling clothes. Hp. Aer. 20. They call them ‘wild’ to distinguish those who were nomadic, from the Scythians the audience were more familiar with, who were employed to keep order.

257 The Commissioners, pursuing the theme of improving the physique and the moral qualities by swaddling refer to the description by Hippocrates of swaddling the head of infants to make it more elongated: ‘[I]mmediately after the child is born, and while its head is still tender, they fashion it with their hands, and constrain it to assume a lengthened shape by applying bonds and other suitable contrivances. The Ionic Greek: ἀναπλάσσουσι τῇσι χερσὶ καὶ ἀναγκάζουσιν ἐς τὸ μῆκος αὔξεσθαι δεσμά τεπροσφέροντες καὶ τεχνήματα ἐπιτήδεια shows that by ‘bonds’, Hippocrates meant forcible constraint such as was used on prisoners. They refer to the portrait of Pericles by Cresilas, of which many copies survive from ancient times, that show him with his helmet pushed back – to show he never ceases to be a warrior- and that emphasises his long head. Although Hippocrates says the custom is no longer practised, because, as he says, quoting examples of hereditary characteristics, the son of a father who has had his head artificially elongated would himself have a long head. A funerary monument that shows the practice, illustrated at Figure 4.17 shows that the custom was still practised in classical or post-classical times, and may have been referred to in the mythic world portrayed on the Parthenon.

258 The Commissioners allude to the notion, set out explicitly by Aristotle in a passage of his treatise on the movement of animals, iv, 706a. As elsewhere, ‘nature’ is set within the teleological emergence from brutishness narrative, with no implication that the presentations were copied from natural models as was to become a commonplace of western romanticism and of the custom of assuming that the ancient Athenians resembled the presentations. In hoplite warfare, as every ancient Athenian viewer knew, the notion that a citizen soldier might be permitted to choose to carry his shield on his right shoulder was militarily ludicrous, and any soldier who was inclined to prefer his left to his right hand, was a throwback who could not be tolerated.

259 The Commissioners repeat a point made by Aristotle in his treatise on the Movement of Animals, 12, 712a, where the problem was identified as overtiring the horses by their riders’ misunderstandings of how horses actually move, whether walking or prancing, that caused them to refuse to obey their riders. There is, as with many points in the speech, a large learned literature on the numerous horses displayed on the Parthenon frieze. Most treat the horsemen as ‘cavalry’ although of course the real cavalry in classical Athens never appeared naked and I will call the figures presented simply as horsemen, the potential importance of to understanding what is displayed will be discussed in Chapter 3.

260 The Commissioners repeat the claim made by the Chorus in the Oedipus at Colonus Soph. OC 714. On the Parthenon frieze most of the bridles were rendered in paint, their presence can be easily restored from the actions of the riders and the heads of the horses pulled back. It was part of the discourse, perhaps related to the emergence from brutishness narrative, to assert that the Athenians were the first to apply useful new technologies. In the same passage the Chorus claim that the oar was an Athenian invention, and more plausibly the domestication of the olive tree as discussed in Chapter 1. The horses, like the dogs, and other domesticated animals, have advanced towards their ‘natural’ purpose by becoming members of the oikos.

261 The Commissioners refer to the ten four-horse chariots on the south and a similar number on the north frieze of the Parthenon that picture helmeted, semi-naked, but unarmed young men leaping off the war chariots as described as the way of fighting in the Iliad. The scenes interrupt the narrative of both friezes but are consistent with the convention designed into the composition that expects the events pictured to be encountered and perceived through the columns as episodes. As discussed further, with other examples, in Chapter 4. Those who, in modern times, have taken the view that, as an exception, the Parthenon frieze presented scenes from the contemporary festival of the Panathenaia (the ‘Stuart conjecture’) are able to interpret the episodes as references to the games that formed part of that festival. However, for those who are unconvinced by the Stuart conjecture, there is a ready explanation in the words of Joan Breton Connelly, in the more plausible ‘Connelly conjecture’, that what was shown were ‘not Athenians taking part in the historical games but their legendary forebears who actually made war in this way.’ Connelly, Joan Breton, The Parthenon Enigma, A New Understanding of the World’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 195. Only the wealthiest men, usually hereditary land-owners, were able to afford to keep horses, a status they proclaimed in the names that they gave themselves and their sons, Hippias, Hipparchos, Xanthippos and many more, including Hippothoon, one of the Eponymous Heroes pictured on the frieze, whose father was the god Poseidon. Noted with plentiful other examples, and confirmed by grave goods made over many centuries, by Camp, John McK. II, Horses and Horsemanship in the Athenian Agora (Athens: American School of Classical Studies, 1998). That even the most famous pan-hellenic games, and not just those associated with the Panathenaic festival were deemed to have existed in mythic times, another instance of jumping back across the ages about which the Greeks knew little, is exemplified by the ruse invented by the character of Orestes in the Electra of Sophocles, that has him make a slave swear that Orestes was killed falling from a chariot at the Pythian Games. Soph. El. 49. In the Clouds of Aristophanes, the play opens with the character of Strepsiades, pursued by creditors, telling the audience how he was persuaded into marrying a ruinously extravagant wife whose snobbish social pretensions include insisting that their son be given a name that includes ‘horse.’ The values that the Commissioners wish to present, such details suggest, are those of the privileged and that they were not universally accepted. Taken together with other indications of the discursive environment, notably the absence of weapons, we can be confident however, that the occasion that the horsemen are presented as attending a non-military celebration and that they are not soldiers but representatives of a privileged elite.

262 The Commissioners refer to members of the travelling guild of Homeridae, who seem to have started in Chios, the alleged birthplace of Homer, and who, as rhapsodes, in the classical periods and earlier travelled over Greece, including Athens, reciting selected passages in a particular style, in competitions. In Plato’s Ion, Nestor’s description of Homeric games is mentioned as an example. Plat. Ion 530a. As it happens, but this may be a coincidence, the dialogue is devoted to a discussion of the truth value of rhapsodies, a word rooted in weaving, and of the legitimacy of the strong emotions they brought about when sung well, and a comparison is made with static pictures, of which the Parthenon frieze was, in ancient terms, an example. No point about genealogy is explicitly made about the name of the character who is in conversation with the character of Socrates, Ion of Chios and its association with the mythic eponymous Ion may have been heard.

263 The Commissioners summarize a general theory set out by Aristotle in the Movement of Animals, 6, 700b, which, in accordance with what was then normal, makes no distinction between human and non-human animals, and justifies the use of erotic images as a means of persuading. It helps to explain the variety of male figures in various states of nudity presented on the Parthenon frieze, the diaphanous garments that reveal the female body underneath that were to become even more common later, and the particular case of the pubescent female as the ideal social body as presented on the central slab on the east frieze.

264 The Commissioners, use the authority of Pindar, quoting from a verse that was noted verbatim by Plutarch in his Maxims of Philosophers, Plut. Maxims 776c, turning it in a new direction. A discussion of how classical era viewers are noted as looking at the stories displayed on sacred buildings including the Parthenon is in Chapter 3.

265 The Commissioners use the phrase ἀνδράσιν ἀλλοφύλοις employed in the Thucydidean speech put into the mouth of Nikias who cautions against becoming involved with the city of Selinus in Sicily in Thuc 6.9.1. That the word excluded other Hellenes and not just barbarians is shown by the similar phrase put into the mouth of Athena as the spirit of Athens in the Eumenides by Aeschylus, line 851, ὑμεῖς δ᾽ ἐς ἀλλόφυλον ἐλθοῦσαι χθόνα γῆς τῆσδ᾽ ἐρασθήσεσθε, that shows both that the word was applicable to the people of Argos and, as with the rest of the play, was part of the self-fashioning of the classical city. From what we can tell from the fragmentary evidence, the stories presented on the Parthenon were in the event either pan-Hellenic, Ionian or locally Athenian.

266 The Commissioners quote the observation made by the character of Hephaistos, in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus τὸ συγγενές τοι δεινὸν ἥ θ᾽ ὁμιλία. PB 39. In its context the phrase, with the ambiguous word ‘deinon’ whose meaning ranges from unusual and puzzling to admirable and terrifying, refers to the reluctance of the character of Hephaistos, that he overcomes, to bind his kinsman Prometheus. A similar sentiment, this time emphasizing that he is not acting out of kinship, is put into the mouth of the character of Ocean later in the play. PB 291.

267 The Commissioners anticipate statements about the history of the settlement of Sicily set out by Thucydides at the beginning of Book 6, 1 to 5, that as has often been pointed out is a resumption of the mythic history (the ‘archaeology’) in Book 1, that we can be confident formed part of the discursive environment long before the occasion of the reported debates on whether to invade and colonize Sicily. Like Thucydides, the Commissioners appear, for example, to endorse the element of that past that presents overseas colonization as part of a desirable stage in progress from brutishness, as one of the means by which in the Periclean Funeral speech, Athens is presented as ‘the school of Hellas’ overseas conquest being the military arm of what would later be called by modern European and American colonizers a ‘civilizing mission.’ The reported Thucydidean speeches bring out vividly the extent to which appeals to kinship were central to the question. And even when Thucydides, as narrator, offers his opinion that there was a ‘real reason’, he does not dismiss the kinship stories as untruthful, noting, for example, that some of the peoples were survivors from the fall of Troy, an aetiology claimed by several cities, such as the recently rediscovered Tenea, and later by Rome as celebrated by Virgil in the Aeneid. He also uses eponyms, such as Dorus as the father of the Dorians, presented as enemies of the Ionians, without noting that such names were a useful shorthand. The whole passage is, in my view, relevant to the mythic stories presented on the Parthenon, including my suggestion for the puzzle of the frieze as will be discussed in Chapter 3. The passage in Thucydides is commented on, mainly with respect to her discussion of money and resources, by Kallet, Lisa, Money and the Corrosion of Power in Thucydides (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 24–31, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520927421.

268 In referring to the ancient theories of what occurs in the act of seeing, ‘extramission’, as discussed in, for example, Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s On Sense and the Sensible, and elsewhere back to the time of the Ionian Empedokles, the Commissioners quote faithfully from Sophocles’s tragedy, Sophocles, ‘Oenomaus’, in his Fragments, edited and translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Library 483 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 242–248, fragment 274. They also imply, at the risk of falling into self-contradiction, that the visual does not need to be accompanied by the verbal (‘ecphrasis’) in order to be appreciated. An image of an actual kanon was given as Figure 1.8.

269 The Commissioners turn to the same maxim that Aristotle uses in the Art of Rhetoric, 2. 1394b5, to exemplify how to use [disputable] maxims as ways of pleasing and persuading an audience by telling them what they already believe to be true and generalizing it into a piece of accepted wisdom. This maxim, or gnomic utterance, is taken from Euripides, Trojan Women, 1051. The adding of one rhetorical trope to another, piling Pelion on Ossa as they might have said, shows their inexperience and risked alienating the audience, many of whom, being trained in rhetoric themselves, understood what was happening.

270 The Commissioners turn to the metaphor for extramission used in Plato’s Phaedrus, 245b–c, that, when combined with the erotic, as is also invoked in the same passage in the Phaedrus, helps to explain the aims of the producers of the Parthenon, not just by offering a rhetoric that they share with the consumers, but as an essential and unchanging characteristic of physiological perception and cognition. It is based on the same misunderstanding as was set out by Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo as discussed in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22, although here widened to include warning against as well as inviting to imitate.

271 The Commissioners allude to the ways of seeing and of translating static visual images into explanatory and hortatory words, with the aid of the rhetorical devices known as ‘enargeia’ and ‘ekphrasis’, that had been practised since the age of Homer before the advent of writing, as discussed in Chapter 1 and of which actual examples are given and discussed in Chapter 3. They slip in a reference to the durability of Pentelic marble in the microclimate of Athens. The Commissioners only apply the modern distinction between ‘sculpture’ and ‘painting’ on occasions when it is needed, as it seldom was in the case of the images that formed part of the Parthenon and other temple sculpture, as distinct from free-standing works, preferring, as was more normal, to judge and categorize images by their expected effects.

272 Examples of actual ancient viewing of temple sculptures are given in Chapter 3.

273 This custom is explicitly mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, HH 3 196, and shown on innumerable vase paintings. The ancients seem to have appreciated more than modern commentators until very recently that the skin is a sensitive organ of communicating pleasure, especially in places where hair grows, such as the wrist but not the palm of the hand. Discussed by Howes, David, ‘The Skinscape: Reflections on the Dermatological Turn’ in Body and Society, Vol 24 (1–2) (2018), 225–239, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1357034X18766285. Some ideas that start from the presumption that the skin is a boundary are discussed by Grundmann, Steffi, Haut und Haar: politische und soziale Bedeutungen des Körpers im klassischen Griechenland. Philippika, 133 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019) at present only known to me from the review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review dated 21 October 2020, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2020/2020.10.21/.

274 The Commissioners draw authority by referring to the ancient, almost mythic, poet even for a phrase that, by itself, appears to add little, but that to ancient listeners may have conjured up a memorable episode of climax. It is only known from having been used by Plat. Laws 2.669d. ὅσους φησὶν Ὀρφεὺς λαχεῖν ὥραν τῆς τέρψιος. The metaphor of a magnet and chain to describe the sense of a mutually-shared and self-reinforcing sense of shared excitement that occurs in crowds, attributed to Euripides, is used by the character of Socrates in Plat. Ion 535e, attributing it to Euripides as recorded in fragment 567 from the lost Oeneus.

275 The Commissioners use a phrase ὄψει καὶ μνήμῃ employed by Aristides in Oration 13, according to Dindorf’s numbering, that describes how looking at built heritage, was thought to work, or was at least rhetorically commended as an explanation of how it might be deemed to work. Since ‘seeing’ carries all the justificatory force of extramission, that gave it primacy among the senses, it is likely that the phrase caught an aspect of the discursive environment that was long-lasting and not much contested. And that by looking, Aristides had in mind, not only individual viewing but the immersion of the collective experience of the movement, singing, dancing, smells etc. of festival processions and their associated rituals of communal eating and drinking. Elsewhere in his orations, for example in Dindorf number 20, Aristides employs the words for ‘nature’ and ‘rationale’ in their Greek senses, περὶ τῆς φύσεως τῆς αὑτοῦ τὰ μὲν ὄψει, τὰ δὲ καὶ λόγῳ.

276 The Commissioners refer to the theories of Democritus and others, summarised by later ancient authors, such as Plut. Quaest. Nat. 735a-b, that present the image-carrying particles, τὰ εἴδωλα, implied by extramission, as material objects, sometimes with their own mental agency. I record my thanks to Caterina Pellò whose paper ‘Life and Lifeforms in early Greek Atomism’ delivered online at the Institute of Classical Studies, London, on 18 January 2021, included a survey. And we have an example of how the psychology was thought to work in the Athena of Aelius Aristides Ael. Ar. Orat. 2 9. Although recorded centuries later and in the form of a meditation, the piece is firmly within the discursive environment which Aristides, who was not himself an Athenian, endorsed and prolonged in his Panathenaic oration. His reported dream takes the form of an imagined walk on the Acropolis of Athens, in which the statues, pictures, and the stories that they tell are all examples of the Acropolis as paideia. Athens, its history, its achievements, and its inventions, and Athena, its deity, are merged so as to be indistinguishable.

277 The speakers assume that the listeners share their understanding of extramission. In the key phrase of Aristides, whose Panathenaic oration reads in places like a tour of the Athenian Acropolis, they link sight with memory,

278 The Commissioners repeat the thought in the Thucydidean funeral oration by Pericles and in other authors as discussed by Azoulay, Xenophon and the Graces of Power.

279 The Commissioners take a moment to explain the economic concept of capital and streams of benefits as different from financial capital and the interest that money can earn if lent out. It was a distinction that, we can be confident, the Athenians were well aware of and that they practised in their personal as well as civic lives, although they do not appear to have had an overarching word for capital in this sense or, except by analogy, as here, the notion that the benefits from investment can take many forms.

280 The Commissioners summarize the dialogue between Socrates and others given in the imitation of a Platonic dialogue known as the Eryxias. Although not by Plato, the piece, that appears ‘not to have been composed before the beginning of the third century B.C., belongs in tone to the previous age … [and] is imagined to take place sometime between 431 and 421.’ Laistner, M.L.W., M.A., Reader in Ancient History in the University of London; formerly Craven Student in the University of Cambridge, Greek Economics (London: Dent, 1923), ix. They include a touch of light humour, as is recommended in the rhetorical handbooks as part of the strategy of bringing the audience on to their side, known in Latin as ‘captatio benevolentiae’.

281 Eryxias, 51.

282 The Commissioners quote from Ode 10 prepared by Bacchylides of Ceos for the winner of an Athenian footrace.

283 The Commissioners rhetorically conceal the contradiction between the notion of ‘charis’ as an obligation and as a gift given freely, and the quid pro quo that rich donors can expect. In the event only a few private donors were given the full marble treatment.

284 The Commissioners pick up a phrase, used, for example, in Pindar Nemean 5.53–54, reminding us again that, if we are to re-imagine the experience in a festival context, it is not only the paint and the metal that we have to include. The quotation, although referring to a festival at Nemea, also suggests that presentations of the Charites in some form as a reminder of the purpose of festivals were not unique to the Acropolis of Athens.

285 This example of enargeia by the Commissioners bears a close resemblance to the opening scene of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes. The saying aloud of the names of a selected list of typical localities in Attica is itself a contribution to unifying scattered real communities. Here, as in the Lysistrata, the mention of Salamis evoked not only the sea battle but the fact that, until the time of Solon, Salamis had been part of Dorian Megara, and its conquest by Athens marked the beginning of Athenian imperial expansion. Whether the people of Salamis had actually changed their kinship identity, assuming that they were the descendants of former Megarians and not settlers sent in to replace them, is not known.

286 An explicit mention of those who are excluded by not being permitted to wear the chaplets in Xen Mem 2.7.22.

287 The Commissioners employ enargeia. According to Theophrastus, On Odours, 12, the smell of the flowers used in garlands could be felt at a great distance, and they were presumably chosen, like the music, so as to draw in outsiders. He discussed the same phenomenon in De Causis 6.17.1, with possible explanations, mentioning the difference between the wild and the domesticated varieties at 6.20.1. The famous lines by Pindar, on ‘Athens the Violet Crowned’, mentioned earlier as having become a kind of Athenian anthem, reminded audiences of the garlands as well as the violet of the sky. It is likely that the garlands shown on the Parthenon frieze were painted violet and saffron crocuses, another plant with the same property.

288 The Commissioners repeat the sentiment that unites the anonymous giving and social reciprocity of Charis with the arts associated with the nine muses, as sung by the Chorus in Euripides, Heracles, 675, in what was evidently a commonplace of the time and although a gentler phrase was used, μὴ ζῴην μετ᾽ ἀμουσίας, it was part of the self-affirming and excluding of others narrative of progress from brutishness. As an example of the longevity of the passage as catching the discourse of privilege and exclusion, and the need to distinguish themselves performatively from the vulgar and the boorish, it is quoted by Dio of Prusa in his discourse to the people of Alexandria. D.Chr. 32.100. Aristotle’s view that ‘charis’ is a claim made by a civic elite that they are endowed with qualities that make them popular, including generosity, is noted by Azoulay, Xenophon and the Graces of Power, 28.

289 The primacy of sight in display and performance is assumed and implied by the Laconic saying attributed to king Agesilaos: ‘When someone desired to know why Spartans do battle amidst the sound of fifes, he said, ‘So that, as all keep step to the music, the cowardly and the brave may be plainly seen.’ Plut. Apoph. 236.

290 Aeschines, Against Timarchos. Aeschin. 1 21. In his model speech ‘on the Choreutes’ the Orator Antiphon lists among the penalties for homicide, ‘to be banished from his city, its temples, its games and its sacrifices, the greatest and most ancient of human laws.’ Antiph. 6 4. For other lesser deviations from the norm to be excluded from the ceremonies in which the city performed its official self, was to be deprived of identity. An example of the official rhetoric being at odds with the real situation. Festivals, especially those that took place at night appear to have been the occasions for much transgressive behaviour, to the extent of that aspect becoming a standard plot of comedy and satire.

291 The Commissioners remind the audience of the role of the Acropolis as the site of many inscriptions, carefully placed in some cases so as to be near the buildings, that set out decisions by the city where they can be checked. As noted in Chapter 1, these inscriptions, that mostly record decisions already taken, although important for the record-keeping, the public information, and the audit and accountability aspects of democracy, tell little about the prior processes of proposing, deliberation, and decision taking. By using the neutral ‘seeing’ the Commissioners avoid embarrassing those who could not read but might have inscriptions read to them by others. They repeat the common belief that women were more guilty of spreading and believing rumours than men.

292 The hearers, in a passage that makes use of the licence given to authors of Thucydidean speeches to include references to the future, will be reminded on the opening scene-setting passage of Plato’s Republic, a work that itself sets out ideas for promoting civic unity.

293 The Commissioners, in pointing to the incidental benefits of festivals in meeting the aim of unifying, and educating the various constituencies of the city, turn to the thought offered by Epicrates, the late fifth century comic dramatist, who reports that it was during the festival that he saw debates about what are now called the hard sciences and how they might be classified and defined, presented in comic terms, an aspect of the philosophical schools of Athens more often associated with Aristotle. Like Thucydides, the author/editor of the speech may have anticipated the future. Plato’s Academy was not formally established until 387, although teaching of the kind mentioned is likely to have gone on long before that date. The fragment is embodied in Athenaeus 2.58. I am grateful to Dimitri El Murr for drawing attention to this passage and for other useful exchanges at a seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London on 25 November 2019.

294 The Commissioners anticipate what may already have been in the discursive environment as a rhetorical cliché, the description of a peripatetic walk round the city in Plato’s Phaedrus 227d. The mention of Megara, a Dorian not an Ionian city on the land border of Attica, from whom Solon had, by using force and diplomacy, obtained possession of the island of Salamis, may imply that the walkers are so deeply engaged in their conversation that they forget where they are, or possibly that the Megarians are being told that they need to listen to the conversations as part of the mission of Athens to be, as in the Periclean Funeral Oration, the ‘school of Hellas.’

295 Mentioning the ties of ‘genos’, a word that is liable to carry anachronistic associations if translated as ‘race’, is a reminder that many of the festivals were not confined to Athenians.

296 That different music was played for different gods is an implication of Aristotle, Politics, 1342 b3.

297 The Commissioners take care here and elsewhere to avoid implying that sacrificing to the gods was a form of bargaining, although it is evident from references in the ancient authors that many people understood the rites in those terms. It was a common joke that the gods were only given the parts of the dead animals that humans did not want.

298 The Commissioners resort to enargeia to make vivid for their audience the dramatic lighting of the fat-wrapped thigh bones of the slaughtered animals, which, as recent experiments have confirmed, sends a burst of flame about six minutes after the lighting, that lasts for about ten minutes before burning out. Discussed by Morton, Jacob, ‘The experience of Greek sacrifice: investigating fat-wrapped thigh bones’, in Miles, Margaret M., ed., Autopsy in Athens: Recent Archaeological Research on Athens and Attica (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015), 66–7. The Commissioners are careful not to claim that sacrifices encourage the gods to confer favours. But, they also allude to the civic trope that, if sacrifices were to be discontinued, the gods would desert the holy places. In the Antigone by Sophocles, the character of the wise Teiresias declares that the gods are no longer accepting the prayers that accompany the burning of the thigh bones, because Antigone’s brother remains unburied. Soph. Ant. 1019–1022. The passage may imply that scavenging birds and animals congregated near sacred sites because of the leftovers from animal sacrifices, as part of the habitat and that an unburied body would quickly become carrion.

299 According to Theophrastus, On Odours, 12, the smell of the flowers used in garlands could be felt at a great distance, and they were presumably chosen, like the music, so as to draw in outsiders.

300 The phrase ‘dusty-footed’ was used by Plutarch to describe the country people of Epidauros, quoted from Moralia II, 291 d., by Burford, Temple Builders, 16.

301 The Commissioners pick out how the rites in the Acropolis could be seen from a distance, in much the same terms as the Christian rites were described by Lord Bute over two thousand years later, as noted in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 22, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.22.

302 Comparing the sudden realization of the truth of something not previously known with the kindling of a lamp is a rhetorical trope, found, for example, in Plato’s Epistles, Plat. L. 7.341c, although Plato usually also presents it as the culmination of a sustained period of study, as do the Commissioners. It is also found in Plat. Sym. 210e.

303 Examples from the ancient authors for this common metaphor for memory are noted by Agócs, Peter, ‘Speaking in the wax tablets of memory’, in Castagnoli, Luca and Ceccarelli, Paola, eds, Greek Memories, Theories and Practices (Cambridge: CUP, 2019), 68–90, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108559157.

304 The Commissioners turn to another image from the building industry, as it had been used by Pindar as quoted by Ath. 1.44.

305 A possible reference to the horsemen shown on the Parthenon frieze who show minimal individuality.

306 The Commissioners allude to Homeric Hymn 11. Although the hymns were almost certainly composed much later than the epics, from the seventh to the fifth centuries, they were accepted as having been composed by Homer by almost all ancient testimonies, including that of Thucydides at Thuc. 3 104. Although the texts from the classical period that have survived, especially the tragedies, suggest that a change in the treatment of refugees was being debated as part of the progress from brutishness narrative, we find little attempt to alter the conventions of war as such that brought about the miseries so vividly voiced by the female victims, both women and girls. On the contrary most authors uphold the view that if a city is captured by force, rather than by agreement under negotiated terms, everything belonged to the conqueror. For example, Xenophon puts into the mouth of the wise Cyrus addressing his troops an unequivocal claim that it is a universal law among Greeks and barbarians if a city is captured by force, everything, whether the bodies of the people or the useful things they possessed, belonged unconditionally to the conqueror. καὶ μηδείς γε ὑμῶν ἔχων ταῦτα νομισάτω ἀλλότρια ἔχειν: νόμος γὰρ ἐν πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἀίδιός ἐστιν, ὅταν πολεμούντων πόλις ἁλῷ, τῶν ἑλόντων εἶναι καὶ τὰ σώματα τῶν ἐν τῇ πόλει καὶ τὰ χρήματα. Xen. Cyrop. 7.5.73. The notion that the conquered have no ‘rights’, to use a modern term, is put in the mouth of the character of Socrates in Plato’s Republic in describing his ideal city, Plat. Rep. 1.327a, and is repeated in Aristotle’s Politics as an example of the conventional law of slavery. Aristot. Pol. 1.1252a. When read against these indications of the norm, the decision of the Melians to resist and the subsequent action of the Athenians, which Thucydides reports but does not condemn or say is contrary to custom as he does for the enslaving of Naxos, appears less as an inevitable outcome than as the result of a conscious choice on the part of the Melians that, given their geographical as well as the political circumstances, was more than likely to be successful. During the classical period, the majority of assaults did nor succeed. According to the evidence gathered by Ducrey, Pierre, Le Traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Grèce antique: des origines à la conquête romaine (Paris: Boccard, new edition, revised and extended, 1999), xxii, sixteen sieges were successful, twenty-eight where the attack was abandoned, and fourteen when the situation was resolved by agreement. To Isocrates, the alleged cruelties committed by Athens on the people of Melos and other cities were slanders got up to sully the reputation of Athens by other cities, such as the Spartans under Lysander, who in modern terms had done worse, a defence that the historical record for other sackings tends to support. Isoc. 12 1, Ducrey, 125–127. Isocrates also claimed that it was an example of good government that Athens gave a public demonstration to cities already under Athenian control of the likely consequences if they were contemplating revolt, another situation in which the convention applied. Isoc. 4 1.

307 The Commissioners could not have known that what they hoped for was to occur (not quite as they had foreseen) during the Peloponnesian War: as Thucydides, at Thuc. 8.25.3, recounts, there was a battle in which the Argives, assuming that the Milesians would not stand their ground, made a sudden attack and were defeated, with the loss of three hundred men, who were then joined by the Athenians. It was one of the few historical examples in which the Parthenon project as advocated by the Commissioners led almost immediately to favourable results. Another was the decision by Lysander and the Spartans not to destroy Athens in 404 as already discussed.

308 The Commissioners repeat the sentiments, later committed to words, in the opening sentences of the treatise on war by the fourth century Greek writer known as Aeneas Tacticus. They know that war is normal, and that although the stories in stone of the Parthenon and other buildings all show the Hellenes as winning, the real viewerships would jib at such a rhetoric, and they offer a variation of, and practical application of the overriding thought that an essential Athenianness can survive the ups and downs of real events.

309 The Commissioners turn to the sentiment in the speech by Lycurgus against Leocrates Lyc. 1 110, that if those of the present day do not live up to the arete of the ancestors, they damage Athens by destroying its social capital, and they can only prevent that from happening, in this case, by putting Leocrates to death.

310 Almost exactly the same words are used by Isocrates in Panegyricus, 84. The phenomenon of soldiers experiencing a sense of having missed out on the opportunities for fame and reputation open to those who survived a ‘glorious’ previous war is attested, notably for the philhellenes and for many other historical cases, notably in post-World-War-Two Britain, where the previous war has been mythographized in word, image, and performance. Isocrates’s invoking of ‘some god’ exemplifies the common rhetorical practice of presenting events as occurring almost of their own accord, rather than as the result of human agency, and whose rhetorical tendency is to exculpate all concerned.

311 The claim to have defeated forty-six nations at Marathon is included in the speech put into the mouths of the Athenians by Herodotus when, before the land battle of Plataea, they claimed the right to be regarded as second only to the Lacedaimonians. Hdt. 9.27.

312 The dates of the archonates from Harding, Atthidographers, 102. For the convenience of readers, the editor has used the dates of the modern calendar.

313 The quotation, γιγνώσκω, καί μοι φρενὸς ἔνδοθεν ἄλγεα κεῖται,/ πρεσβυτάτην ἐσορῶν γαῖαν Ἰαονίας κλινομένην, preserved by Aristot. Const. Ath. 5, reminds us that a strong sense of Athenians being Ionian predated the Persian wars and their aftermath. The references to Ion in Attic cults and festivals are collected by Kearns, Emily, ‘The Heroes of Attica’ in Bulletin Supplement (University of London. Institute of Classical Studies), No. 57 (1989), 109–110, 174–175.

314 The Commissioners refer to the development from brutishness account of the origins of their distinctive civilization in a polis. And as modern archaeology has confirmed, the caves on the Acropolis slopes near the water were settled in neo-lithic times. As discussed by Parsons, Arthur W., ‘Klepsydra and the Paved Court of the Pythion’ in Hesperia, Vol. 12 (3), The American Excavations in the Athenian Agora: Twenty-Fourth Report (July–September 1943), 191–267. How the Athenians of the classical period may have interpreted the remains of ancient settlement that turned up in their modern building works is not recorded in any ancient author, but it would have given empirical support to the brutishness narrative. The Athenians of the classical period also knew that many of the commemorative ceremonies associated with the caves, one of the main ways of preserving memory and identity across time in an age before the technologies of inscription, were built round gods and heroes that pre-dated the Olympian canon.

315 The Commissioners repeat the account by Thucydides in his account of the long past in Book 2.

316 The water carriers are shown on the Parthenon frieze.

317 The custom that, in Athens, water from the Enneacrounos spring was used to wash babies as part of the naming ceremonies, was described by Thucydides in Book 2, 13. ‘Birthday’ was not the day of physiological birth but of social birth that only occurred with the naming ceremony. The relevance of this observation to our interpretation of what story was told on the Parthenon frieze, where I offer a new conjecture, is discussed in Chapter 3.

318 As described in St Clair, WStP, Chapter 21, https://doi.org/10.1164/obp.0136.21.

319 The Commissioners here anticipate the bemused reactions of the Ottoman soldier to the western souvenir collectors, as described in Chapter 21 of my companion volume Who Saved the Parthenon?.

320 A possible reference to the co-called Peace of Kallias of c. 449 at which the Achaemenid Empire accepted, at least for the time being, that it had lost control of the cities of Ionia.

321 In mentioning the threats from other Hellenic cities, the Commissioners remind the audience that the Thebans had taken the side of the invading Persians. By the time they come to their praise of Pindar later in the speech, they anticipate that the audience will have forgotten the earlier passage.

322 The Commissioners repeat, almost word for word sentiments set out in Xen. Mem. 1.1.7 and 8.

323 The Commissioners mention a fear of arson, as when in Euripides’s play, the Ion, the character of old man suggests that the Delphic oracle has been so unreliable that it should be burned down Eur. Ion 974. This and other plays report many complaints against the gods. The Commissioners may have foreseen the danger, that occurred at Ephesos in the following century when Herostratus (Eratostratus) set fire to the temple at Ephesus, was put to the torture where he confessed to his motivation, and a decree was passed making it a criminal offence to mention his name. Since the story is well known and his name mentioned by the ancient historians the decree was evidently ineffective. The episode is referred to by Byron, in his satire The Curse of Minerva, lines 200ff.

‘May hate pursue his sacrilegious lust!

Link’d with the fool that fired the Ephesian dome,

Shall vengeance follow far beyond the tomb,

And Eratostratus and Elgin shine

In many a branding page and burning line;

Alike reserved for aye to stand accursed,

Perchance the second blacker than the first.’

324 The Commissioners repeat the convention used, for example, in the Periclean Funeral Oration, ‘Numberless are the chances to which, as they know, the life of man is subject.’ Thuc. 2.44.1. Indeed it needs to be included in funeral orations and some alleviation offered. As, for example, ‘But if, as a mortal being, [the soldier] meets his doom, what he has suffered is an incident caused by chance, but in spirit he remains unconquered by his opponents.’ Demosthenes, Funeral Oration, Dem.60.19.

325 The Commissioners signal that they are reaching their peroration, that will link the past, the present, and the future to a notion of unchanging Athenianness as it will be instantiated in stone on the Acropolis. Whereas many writers after the end of antiquity until recently routinely invoked various forms of destinarianism, implying an ordered and sometimes a guided world, the authors of the classical period, especially Euripides when he presents the mainstream view in words attributed to the Chorus, draw attention to the arbitrariness and unpredictability. To present the gods themselves, as subject to Chance, as here, and in for example, the lost Andromeda, fragments 152, 153, and 154, Euripides, Selected Fragmentary Plays, Collard et al edition, ii, 155, is more rare.

326 The Commissioners refer to the story told at greater length in Plat. Tim. 21b.

327 The inscriptions are transcribed in Davison, Pheidias, ii, 1089 and 1094. The practice appears to have been discontinued perhaps because the Commissioners for the statue did not want to risk the charge that the character of Odysseus warns of in the Cyclops of Euripides, of having equated Tyche with the divine or implying that the divine was less powerful than the godly. My translation of ἢ τὴν τύχην μὲν δαίμον᾽ ἡγεῖσθαι χρεών, τὰ δαιμόνων δὲ τῆς τύχης ἐλάσσονα Eur. Cycl. 606–607, that attempts to preserve something of the ambiguity of ‘deeming’ and of the generalizing word ‘daimon.’An alternative explanation is that the Commissioners for the financial audit were setting up their excuses in advance if it turned out that valuables had been stolen or embezzled, or if the charge was brought as a political weapon, as is recorded as having happened as noted below. The received view that the accounts relate to the statue known as the Athena Promachos has recently been challenged by Foley, Elizabeth, and Stroud, Ronald S., ‘A Reappraisal of the Athena Promachos Accounts from the Acropolis (IG I³ 435)’ in Hesperia, Vol. 88 (1) (2019), 87–153, https://doi.org/10.2972/hesperia.88.1.0087. It has been suggested that Tyche is amongst the figures presented on the pediments of the Parthenon, especially the female figure that has slots for wings. If ancient viewers could reasonably have thought that was the intention, we may have another indication that they were encouraged to regard the compositions as theatrical performances waiting to happen, in accordance with an ancient genre of seeing, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.

328 The Commissioners do not need to tell the audience that they are quoting from Homer, and are claiming an equality with, indeed a superiority to, the heroes of the mythic world of the Homeric epics.

329 Again the Commissioners do not need to say explicitly that they are quoting Homer.

330 As the audience know ‘the Argives’ was one of the phrases used by Homer to describe the whole Greek force. The humiliation of Argos in the classical period is described in Her. 6.83.

331 The Commissioners signal that they are reaching their peroration, that will link the past, the present, and future to a notion of a paideia whose aim of promoting an unchanging Athenianness will be instantiated on the Acropolis in the stories displayed and the rituals that take place in their vicinity.

332 The Commissioners trail an idea made explicit in the summary of early history at the beginning of Thucydides’ work, at Thuc. 1.10.3, that suggests Homer as a poet had exaggerated, and probably distorted, what had really happened. The passage shows that what came to be called the Homeric question about the historicity of the Homeric poems, that began again in eighteenth century Europe, had also been considered in classical Athens.

333 The Commissioners use a trope employed, many have thought, to great effect in the Thucydidean funeral speech of Pericles, but that is likely to have been in use before, not coined for the first time for that occasion. Indeed it may have struck the audience as a cliché to be discounted as exaggerated rhetoric, as the Commissioners struggle to balance praise of Homer, as they must always do, with tentative attempts to criticize him or at least to gloss the works. Their own speech has itself been infused with Homeric echoes. And the listeners to the speech in contemporary classical times and later knew that classical Athens placed great weight on learning Homer, with competitions in reciting, and examples recorded of men allegedly knowing the poems by heart.

334 The Commissioners use a general term not city-specific, so as to be able to include Pindar, not an Athenian, although he was rewarded with a large sum of money and an honorary position as ‘proxenos’, an office that, in modern terms includes a notion of honorary citizenship. As the disgruntled Isocrates was to write not long afterwards: ‘It would be even more absurd if, whereas Pindar, the poet, was so highly honored by our forefathers because of a single line of his in which he praises Athens as “the bulwark of Hellas” that he was made “proxenos” and given a present of ten thousand drachmas, I, on the other hand, who have glorified Athens and our ancestors with much ampler and nobler encomiums, should not even be privileged to end my days in peace.’ Isoc. 15 166. The Commissioners have also, without naming him praised Simonides of Ceos, who, although from an offshore island of Attica, prepared celebratory epigraphs and epitaphs for other cities, including the Lacedaimonians. We have another reminder here that ‘poets’ of words, like the ‘poets’ of visual images, functioned within the political economy of the time and not outside it as rhetorics of romanticism imply.

335 The Commissioners refer to the passage in the Iliad which caused puzzlement in ancient times, in which the Achaeans are encouraged by Nestor to build walls which will protect their ships and bones of their dead, and the memory of their exploits in preparation for a return but which are then disappeared by Homer, leaving only the account by Homer as a memory of their fame. Discussed by Bassi, Karen, Traces of the Past, Classics Between History and Archaeology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 40–63, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8785930.

336 The Commissioners, reverting to the Homeric notion of hero may be referring to the story in the passage in Eur. Her. 945 where the messenger reports the cry by Heracles: ‘I must take crow-bars and pick-axes, for I will shatter again with iron levers those city-walls which the Cyclopes squared with red plumb-line and mason’s tools.” Without quite saying so, they are moving the discourse away from monument cleansing as display to the need to protect the Parthenon from monument cleansing in the future, a policy implicit in the extent to which it is over-engineered and not easily dismantled, even for recycling the marble blocks, without incurring huge and disproportionate expense compared with the alternatives.

337 The Commissioners use the language of the Periclean Funeral Oration. The translator has left the awkward phrase ‘signs’ used there rather than more common rendering ‘monuments’ both to retain the continuity between past, present and future and to include the implied thought that other forms of self-celebration are included, such as historical works such as his own.

338 The Commissioners conjure up a mental image of what appears to have become a cliché applicable to many cities. It was used by Aelius Aristides, noted for his Panathenaic oration in praise of Athens but used in the words employed by the Commissioners of Rome. Oliver, James Henry, The Ruling Power: A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century after Christ through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1953), 99.

339 The Commissioners allude to a characteristic of rhetorics of heritage that the past from which the narrative of essential continuity is compiled has, by selective puffing up of some episodes and selective downplaying others, to include both triumphs and disasters in a unifying narrative.

340 The Commissioners employ the phrase in which Thucydides described the purposes of his history that also emphasises its own ‘usefulness.’ Thuc. 1.22. ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν αὐτὰ ἀρκούντως ἕξει. κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα.

341 The Commissioners repeat the convention used, for example, in the Periclean Funeral Oration, ‘Numberless are the chances to which, as they know, the life of man is subject.’ Thuc. 2.44.1. Indeed the element of contingency needs to be included in funeral orations and some alleviation offered for the general unfairness of life. As, for example, ‘But if, as a mortal being, [the soldier] meets his doom, what he has suffered is an incident caused by chance, but in spirit he remains unconquered by his opponents.’ Demosthenes, Funeral Oration, Dem.60.19.

342 The destructive eruption of Etna in Sicily in 479/478 is referred to by Pindar, Pythian, i. 21; and by Aeschylus in the Prometheus Bound, line 365.

343 The Commissioners anticipate a point made explicit by Isocrates in his speech ‘Against the Sophists.’ As the Commissioners and their audience knew there are several passages in the Homeric epics where the gods are presented as debating what to do.

344 There appears to be little sense of providentialism in classical Athens as distinct from a general sense of being at the mercy of fate [‘moira’] or fortune [‘tyche’], as something, usually unwelcome, that happens inexplicably and unavoidably. The instances in the surviving works of Euripides are collected by Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides, 188–189, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511676437. As the Commissioners and their audience knew there are several passages in the Homeric epics where the gods are presented as debating what to do. The possible existence of a king Minos of Cnossos who ruled the sea was dismissively mentioned also by Herodotus at Her. 3.122.2, incidentally providing more evidence that some memory, however hazy, had been maintained for over a thousand years, in stories passed orally as myths and/or renewed with the help of commemoration ceremonies. Stories of an invasion of Attica by the Cretans led by Minos were still being told in Athens another half millennium later at the time of Pausanias, and were memorialized in the tomb of Nisus, ‘the red-haired’, that stood near the site of Aristotle’s Lykeion. Paus.1, 4, traditions that are easier to explain as by then established by all the technologies of inscription. The calendar date of the volcanic eruption on Thera/Santorini, and the subsequent tsunami that may have been decisive in bringing Minoan civilization to an end, has recently been dated, from the evidence of tree-ring patterns, by Charlotte Pearson and other members of a team, to 1506 BCE, as reported in the Archaeology News Network of 31 March 2020. The legends surrounding Deucalion as a variant of Middle Eastern myths of a Great Flood, of which the best known is that of Noah, were summarized from earlier accounts in Greek as well as from others, by Lucian, who was himself from Syria, in the text known in its Latinized version, as De Dea Syria, (on the Syrian Goddess), 12 and 13. The Commissioners refer to the story that, as usual, is presented as factual and that projects back notions of Athenian superiority and leadership into the deep past, put into the mouth of the character of Critias in Plat. Criti. 108e. By mentioning Deucalion, his son Hellen and his grandson Ion, the Commissioners reaffirm many of their earlier points including the autochthony story.

345 A similar point is in the Periclean speech at Thuc 1, 64. The Commissioners, without being explicit, point out that the post-479 Acropolis did not preserve much from the past; that their recent military and naval victories were at risk of being forgotten; and what was proposed by way of linking the past to the built heritage was, with exceptions, more artificial than organic. They then offer a version of the observation of Thucydides at 1.10.2 at which he explicitly links his difficulties as an evidence-led historian in finding reliable information about the past with what a future Thucydides might find, namely, that if Sparta were to become desolate, as Mycenae had become in his day, and all that remained were the holy places and the foundations of the public buildings, as time passed, posterity would greatly underestimate its power. If, by contrast, Athens ‘were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to have been twice as great as it is.’ Although the Commissioners present the planned and engineered longevity of the Parthenon as a reason for building it, and they were to be proved right in their prediction that it would endure, Thucydides uses the comparison as a warning to historians and others not to be misled by appearances, as he had declared at the very beginning of his work that one of the ways in which he intended that his work would be useful. Like the Commissioners, others have taken the idea not as a warning but as a measure of success. The risks of Athenocentrism in accounts of ancient Greece are now well understood, but even with the addition of archaeological evidence they remain hard to offset.

346 The Commissioners repeat what appears to have been a commonplace used in summing up, as, for example, at the start of Plato’s Critias, Plat. Criti. 106a. If so, it is an example of the usefulness of ‘the gods’ as a coping stone holding together a public discourse, and that does not imply, nor even expect, the statement to be taken literally.

347 The Commissioners slip in the important qualification that not all those who were present and listening would be legally allowed to speak, not only women, metics, and slaves but the constituency of free Athenian men, who did not qualify as ‘autochthonous’ under the two-parent rule, among whom was included Antisthenes, who resented being a second-class citizen under the nativist rules, and the fictional Ion in the play by Euripides of that name, to be discussed in Chapter 4.

348 The Commissioners quote a remark of a character in one of the plays of Sophocles. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, ed., Sophocles, Fragments (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1996), number 955, page 412. Since Sophocles won, by far, the most prizes in the dramatic competitions, the Commissioners enlist his name on the side of their proposals. As a rhetorical practice, to quote what a character in a literary work is presented as saying as the opinion of the author, even when, as here as is common, it is deployed as a complement to the author, is of course, an appropriation that, by changing the boundaries of the context may change the meaning taken by listeners. In the case of an ancient dramatist, the practice is especially unfair since the opinions expressed by the character are frequently followed by a contrary opinion offered by another character. This rhetorical device, later called a ‘chreia’ by Theon of Alexandria, a writer of a rhetorical manual, although occasionally found in the classical period, with one example attributed to Plato, was to become more common, with other examples given in Chapter 4. Ancient authors, especially, Euripides, appear to have made a point of including what were later called in Latin ‘sententiae;’ in Renaissance English ‘select sentences’, but whether authors, subject to various limitations imposed by the city’s institutions, saw it as part of their trade to provide pithy sentences and vivid metaphors, in modern terms ‘sound-bites’, cannot be ascertained from the record, but seems likely.

349 In Chapters 3 and 4.