Ferrari - The Ilioupersis in Athens

Department of the Classics, Harvard University

The Ilioupersis in AthensAuthor(s): Gloria FerrariSource: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 100 (2000), pp. 119-150Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185212Accessed: 17/09/2009 10:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dchu.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Department of the Classics, Harvard University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Harvard Studies in Classical Philology.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185212?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dchu

THE ILIOUPERSIS IN ATHENS*

GLORIA FERRARI

F the role of the Athenians at Troy was marginal at best, to judge by the epic tradition,' two monuments attest to the fact that, in the fifth

century B.C.E., the Athenians found it a source of pride. Around the year 420 one Chairedemus, son of Euangelus, dedicated on the Acropolis a colossal bronze statue of the Wooden Horse,2 which Pausanias described (1.23.8), identifying the men emerging from its belly. These are not the "best of the Argives" mentioned in the Odyssey (4.271-289) but local heroes: Menestheus, Teucer (the half-brother of Salaminian Aias), and the sons of Theseus, Acamas and Demophon. Earlier in the century, the verses inscribed on three herms, commemorating Kimon's victorious siege of the Persian fortress of Eion in 476/5, explicitly claimed the heroes who fought at Troy as the antecedents of contempo- rary heroes. The epigram began by comparing the men, who had fought against "the sons of the Mede," to king Menestheus who had lead his army to war "at the side of the Atridae upon the sacred plain of Troy."3 As in Simonides' elegy for the dead at Plataea,4 the Eion epigram thus cast the war against the Persians in the model of the expedition against

*The Author thanks Brunilde S. Ridgway for sharing her profound knowledge of the Parthenon sculptures, and Mary Ebbott, for rewarding discussions of the Persians.

1 Homer only mentions the Athenian contingent in the Catalogue of Ships (Iliad 2.546-556); the surviving fragments of Lesches' Little Iliad and Arctinus' Ilioupersis record that Demophon and Acamas found their grandmother Aethra, on the night that

Troy fell, and brought her back home; A. Bemabe, Poetae Epici Graeci: Testimonia et Fragmenta I (Leipzig 1987) IP arg. 21-22; MI fr. 20.

2 The statue itself has perished, but its inscribed base remains in situ in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia, IG I3 895; Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Athenian Acropolis (Cambridge 1999) 195, fig. 168.

3 D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge 1981) 255-259 no. xl. 4 M. L. West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci II2 (Oxford 1992) 118-120 no. 11; Deborah

Boedeker, "The New Simonides and Heroization at Plataea," in Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees eds., Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (London 1998) 231-249.

Gloria Ferrari

Troy. It is easy to understand these monuments in an entirely positive sense, as celebrations of the city's glorious past and of the power of its patron goddess. Athena herself had actively pursued the destruction of the city and had even taken a hand in the construction of the horse that brought down its walls.5 The actual sack of Troy carried rather darker connotations. Nevertheless, this too became a dominant theme in Athe- nian art and tragedy in the decades following the Persian wars. Schefold and Jung noted that the representations of the subject on Athenian vases are on the increase from the 490s B.C.E.6 What is more, the Ilioupersis was chosen for large-scale public projects, namely, the wall paintings of the Stoa Poikile, dated to about 460-450 B.C.E.7 and the metope series on the north side of the Parthenon, which was completed in 432.

The significance of the Parthenon Ilioupersis has long been understood by reference to the subjects chosen for the other three sides. Each represents an episode of Athenian myth-history. The battle of the gods against the giants is the occasion of Athena's aristeia over the giant Asterius, which is the foundation legend of the Panathenaea.8 The Amazonomachy of the west metopes probably celebrates the defense of the Acropolis by Athens' national hero.9 The heroic friendship of The- seus and Pirithous is at center stage in the Centauromachy, which is the main theme of the south metopes.10 Each of these themes also functions

5 Odyssey 8.493; on the making of the Wooden Horse, see Michael J. Anderson, The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art (Oxford 1997) 18-26. Athena may be represented sculpting a model for Epeios on a classical red-figure oinochoe, Berlin, Staatliche Musen F 2415, ARV2 776, 1; LIMC s.v. "Athene" no. 48.

6 Karl Schefold and Franz Jung, Die Sagen von den Argonauten, von Theben und Troia in der klassischen und hellenistischen Kunst (Munich 1989) 283-285.

7 Pausanias 1.15.1-4; John. M. Camp, The Athenian Agora (London 1986) 66-71. 8 Gloria Ferrari Pinney, "Pallas and Panathenaea," in J. Christiansen and T. Melander

eds., Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Ancient Greek and Related Pottery (Copen- hagen 1988) 465-477. On the east metopes see Ernst Berger, Der Parthenon in Basel. Dokumentation zu den Metopen (Basel 1986) 55-76; K. A. Schwab, "Parthenon East

Metope XI: Herakles and the Gigantomachy," AJA 100 (1996) 81-90. 9 The battered state of the west metopes (Berger [above, n. 8] 99-107) makes it

impossible to determine if this is the battle for the Acropolis of Athens or another Ama-

zonomachy. On the possible relevance of the theme to that of the west pediment, see David Castriota, Myth, Ethos, and Actuality: Official Art in Fifth-century B.C. Athens (Madison, WI 1992) 143-151.

10 Berger (above, n. 8) 77-98; A. Mantis, "Neue Fragmente von Parthenon Metopen," Jdl 102 (1987) 163-181; "Parthenon Central South Metopes," in Diana Buitron-Oliver ed., The Interpretation of Architectural Sculpture in Greece and Rome (Washington 1997

120

The Ilioupersis in Athens

by analogy with the next to develop a sustained allegory of the ulti- mately victorious struggle of the forces of justice over transgressive violence and freakish twists of nature. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect that the Ilioupersis of the north metopes likewise contained ele- ments that were particularly relevant to the history of Athens and that it provided a fourth example of hubris-driven assault against the gods and human society. With few exceptions,"l scholars have identified the offenders in the Trojans, for their perverse refusal to surrender Helen and so remedy Paris' offense against Zeus Xenios. The subject of the north metopes, therefore, would be the punishment of Priam and his city, in accordance with the will of Zeus.12 This traditional view feeds into a more radical formulation of the opposition of Greeks to Trojans. The sack of Troy is read as a transparent metaphor for the struggle of Hellenes against Persians, Greeks against barbarians, East versus West.13 In this light, the Ilioupersis becomes the key to understanding the entire metopal program as an allegory of the Persian wars.

The current reading rests on the sound premise that myths provide exempla, which reveal constant, overarching patterns that structure human experience.'4 By the fifth century, however, the sack of Troy

[Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers 39. Studies in the His- tory of Art 49.]) 67-81.

l Namely, Schefold and Jung (above, n. 6) 280-283, quoted below. Brunilde S. Ridg- way, Fifth Century Styles in Greek sculpture (Princeton 1981) 18-19, questioned the

interpretation of the Ilioupersis on the north metopes as an allegory of the victory over the Persians, pointing to the fact that in literary and visual imagery the Trojans are not characterized as barbarians. She restated her skepticism in Prayers in Stone: Greek Architec- tural Sculpture ca. 600-100 B.C.E. (Berkeley 1999) 164. Anderson (above, n. 5) 246-247 passes over the Parthenon Ilioupersis, putting forward the idea that its message may be a

warning about the rewards of greed and excess. See also below. 12 Berger (above, n. 8) 14-15 offers a tabulation of scholarly hypotheses concerning

the subject of metopes 30-32, which hold the key to the meaning of the representation. Although he retains the traditional view that the metopes represent the punishment of the

Trojans, Berger also notes both the limited role of the Athenians in the Trojan war and the murky connotations that make the sack of Troy a less than ideal metaphor for the Hel- lenic struggle against Persia.

13 T. Holscher, Griechische Historienbilder des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Wiirzburg 1973) 72-73; E. Thomas, Mythos und Geschichte (Koln 1976) 66-67; Hurwit (above, n. 2) 232; Deborah Boedeker, "Presenting the Past in fifth-century Athens," in Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub, Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-century Athens (Cambridge, Mass. 1998) 185-202 and passim.

14 For an introduction to the vast literature on the subject from the specific perspective of the use of myth in fifth century Athens, see Castriota (above, n. 9) 3-16.

121

Gloria Ferrari

was established as a mythic paradigm indeed, but the paradigm of sacrilege and excess. This point has been made often and well, so that a brief analysis of the iconography of the Ilioupersis on Athenian vases may suffice here. The major features of its imagery are well established by the middle of the sixth century B.C.E. and extend without radical changes into the classical period.15 The two events most often represented are the rape of Cassandra and the murder of Priam. The standard iconography of the rape places Cassandra in Athena's temple clinging to the statue of the goddess; Aias, son of Oileus, armed and threatening, pulls her away (fig. 1).16 As in Arctinus' Ilioupersis, Priam dies on the altar of Zeus Herkeios, where he had sought refuge.17 To mark further the holiness of the place and the gravity of the offense, Onesimos inscribes Dios hieron and Herkeio, respectively, upon the altar in his two paintings of the subject (fig. 2).18 In a significant departure from the literary versions of the story, the vases show Neoptolemus throwing the corpse of Priam's grandson, Astyanax, at the old king.19 Three vase paintings-the two cups by Onesimos and one by the Brygos Painter- include Polyxena in the picture, uniting in a single frame the three most egregious victims of the hero's rage.20 Polyxena will die later, when Neoptolemus sacrifices her to the vengeful ghost of Achilles, on Odysseus' advice (Euripides Hecuba 107-139). The implications of the

juxtaposition were caught by Anderson, who writes: "the allusion to that abhorrent human sacrifice adds an even darker dimension to the sacrilegious murder of Priam, as it suggests that Priam's death at the

15 Sources grouping two or more episodes of the sack are analyzed by Maria Pipili in LIMC s.v. "Ilioupersis."

16 LIMC s.v. "Cassandra"; J. B. Connelly, "Narrative and Image in Attic Vase Painting: Ajax and Cassandra at the Trojan Palladion," in P. J. Holliday ed., Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (Cambridge 1993) 88-129.

17 IP arg. 13-14; Apollodorus Epitome 5.21. On the iconography of Priam see Mar-

garet C. Miller, "Priam, King of Troy," in J. B. Carter and S. P. Morris eds., The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Towsend Vermeule (Austin, TX 1995) 449-465.

18 Remains of the tondo of a cup composed of fragments once in Berlin, Staatliche Museen 2280-2281 and in the Vatican, ARV2 19,1 and 2; kylix in Rome, Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia (once in Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum 83.AE.362, 84.AE.80, 85.AE.385), D. Williams, "Onesimos and the Getty Iliupersis," Greek Vases in the J. Paul

Getty Museum 5. Occasional Papers on Antiquities 7 (1991) 50-56. 19 In the Iliou Persis, Odysseus kills Astyanax (IP arg. 20-21); the Mikra Ilias fr.

21.1-5 has Neoptolemus hurl the child from the walls of Troy. 20 For the cups by Onesimos, see above, n. 18. The Brygos Painter pairs the murder of

Priam with Polyxena as she is led away by Acamas on Louvre G 152, ARV2 369,1.

122


altar be understood not only as violation of a suppliant, but also as a corrupt form of sacrifice.21

Both the rape of Cassandra and the murder of Priam normally appear in depictions of multiple episodes of the sack. Particularly rich treatments of the subject include less violent events: the recovery of Helen, the escape of Aeneas, and the rescue of Aethra. On the Vivenzio hydria of 480-470 B.C.E. (fig. 1), the central scene of murder and may- hem is framed by the departure of Aeneas, at the extreme left of the picture field, and the rescue of Aethra, at the other end. The fragmentary large cup by Onesimos in Rome, dated to about 490, presents the most detailed composition (fig. 3).22 The central medallion contains the death of Priam. The inner wall of the cup shows on one side the attack on Cassandra, flanked by fighting groups; at the far left Aethra reaches out to Demophon and Acamas, while on the far right is Odysseus with Theano and Antenor. On the opposite side, of which little remains, is Menelaos in pursuit of Helen, caught at the moment at which he is won over by her beauty once more, and lets his sword drop. A contrast of impious violence and humane behavior is suggested also by the contra- position of the departure of Aeneas with Anchises to a scene combining the rape of Cassandra with the murder of Priam, respectively depicted on the reverse and the obverse of a calyx-krater of the 460s B.C.E.23

In analogous fashion, a volute-krater by the Niobid Painter juxtaposes the rape of Cassandra and the rescue of Aethra on one side to the death of Priam on the other.24 The spotlight remains on sacrilege. By privileg- ing the deaths of Priam and Cassandra, the imagery places emphasis on the defilement of the shrines and the violation of suppliants.

Polygnotus' paintings of the Ilioupersis depicted the aftermath of the sack. Pausanias 1.15.2 confines his description of the tableaux in the Stoa Poikile to the group of kings gathered to consider the crime of Aias, son of Oileus, but he describes in great detail the Ilioupersis in the

21 Anderson (above, n. 5) 238 and 59-61 (on the sources for the death of Polyxena); the point is made again by Peter Blome, "Das Schreckliche im Bild," in Fritz Graf ed., Ansichten griechischer Rituale (Stuttgart 1998) 72-78, 93-95. On the sacrificial connotations of the sacrifice of Polyxena, see also J.-L. Durand and F. Lissarrague, "Mourir a l'autel," Archivfiir Religionsgeschichte 1 (1999) 91-102; I owe the last two references to Albert Henrichs.

22 Above, n. 18. 23 Kalyx-krater Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 59.176, ARV2 590,11. 24 Bologna, Museo Archeologico 268, ARV2 598,1.

123

Gloria Ferrari

Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi.25 Aias stands by an altar; Cassandra is near, holding on to the statue of Athena, which Aias uprooted from its base when he dragged her from the temple. The ground is strewn with corpses, Priam's among them. For this variant of his death, Pausa- nias 10.27.2 cites Lesches' Little Iliad, according to which Priam "was

dragged away from the altar and fell an easy prey to Neoptolemus at the gate of his own palace." Helen sits among her handmaids; Eury- bates seeks her consent to the release of Aethra, who has Demophon at her side. The killing has stopped, except for Neoptolemus, and the Achaeans prepare to decamp. The scene, in fact, begins with the ship of Menelaus being readied for departure. The painting probably bore no resemblance to the vase-paintings that are used to reconstruct it. The

principal features of the myth are nevertheless in evidence: the violation of Cassandra and, in addition, the failure of the Achaean kings to

punish the offender; Neoptolemus' insatiable bloodlust. As Pausanias did, the ancient viewer would have supplied from his store of epic knowledge the story of how Priam was dragged away from the altar of Zeus and had been left to the mercy of Neoptolemus. Together with the

literary representations (to be considered shortly), the visual images establish that, in the years preceding and following the planning and

carving of the Parthenon metopes, the sack of Troy was deployed as a model of savagery. With Castriota, one may well ask: "how and why would the planners of these works have utilized what had always been a canonic image of Greek atrocity and failed character as the centerpiece of a larger program designed to praise the Athenians and their allies as

punishers of hubris, rather than the perpetrators of it?"26 Castriota's study of the use of the Ilioupersis theme in post-war

Athens forcefully exposed the contradiction implicit in the traditional

interpretation of the north metopes of the Parthenon. The answer he

gave to his own question, however, reaffirmed that interpretation in

stronger terms. If it was juxtaposed to the struggle of the gods against the Giants, of the Athenians against the Amazons, and of Lapiths with Theseus against the centaurs on the Parthenon and in the Stoa Poikile, then "the Ilioupersis must somehow have functioned in these monuments as the accompanying themes did-in positive, heroic terms."27 A

25 Pausanias 10.25-27. D. Stansbury-O'Donnell, "Polygnotus' Iliupersis: A New

reconstruction," AJA 93 (1989) 203-215. 26 Castriota (above, n. 9) 100. 27 Ibid. 100.

124


common denominator is identified in the triumph of good over evil, of Greeks over non-Greeks, and of Hellenic sophrosune over barbarian hubris. In an atmosphere charged with national pride, the patriotic ring of "this classic mythic paradigm of panhellenic triumph against the power and arrogance of Asia" would override the damning connotations that the myth traditionally held.28 Post-war representations of the Ilioupersis then would offer a radical reinterpretation of the mythical tradition, one that cast the Trojans into the role of quintessential barbarians, and made of the fall of Troy the mythical paradigm of victory against Persia.29 In practice, the transformation of the Achaean sack of Troy from a paradigm of hubris into a model of sophrosune would have been accomplished by Polygnotus and Phidias, each in his own way. Polygno- tus is imagined to have painted the Trojans in oriental dress,30 and to have turned Aias, son of Oileus, and Neoptolemus into "negative foils to illustrate the overwhelming excellence of the Greeks." By choosing to represent its aftermath, he was able to eliminate virtually all the violent aspects of the sack and leave the viewer with the impression of "a noble, restrained, and just conqueror."31 By omitting the crucial scenes of rape and murder and choosing episodes that reflected well upon the Greeks, Phidias likewise is imagined to have made over the Achaeans into exem- plars of Greek arete and agents of the justice of Zeus.32

Some may reflect that in the Ilioupersis power and arrogance qualify the Atridae better than Priam. And, as Castriota admits, the revisionist versions of the myth he envisions find no echo in Athenian tragedy and vase-painting.33 The real difficulty with the argument, however, is struc-

28 Ibid. 86. 29 Ibid. 17-28, 96-133, 165-183. This thesis is complementary to that of Edith Hall,

Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford 1989) 1-19, 102, and passim, according to which a shift of attitudes took place, in the wake of the Persian invasion, which transformed the Per- sians and their ancestors, the Trojans, from foreign peoples into models of alterity with

respect to Hellenic identity. 30 Castriota (above, n. 9) 106-109. 31 Ibid. 115-117, the quotes from pp. 115 and 118. 32 Ibid. 165-174. 33 As others have done, Castriota ibid. 96-100, 175-179 argues that later, near the end

of the fifth century and in the fourth, the image of the Trojans undergoes the ethnic meta- morphosis that turns them into barbarians. Proof of this is found in the oriental costume that Priam wears on the often-cited krater from Valle Pega (Ferrara Museo Nazionale 1637, LIMC s.v. "Aias II" no. 910), one other Attic vase (Agora P 18849, Miller [above, n. 17] 459, fig. 28.16), and on several Apulian vases of the fourth century, which are inspired by tragedy. What may be provisionally called the "orientalization" of myth in Athenian drama is too large a topic to be tackled here. It may be enough to say with

125

Gloria Ferrari

tural in nature. In order to convey a sense of righteous victory, the theme would have to be imbued with a radically different meaning than it normally had, not simply recast in more optimistic terms. This opera- tion would throw the mythical framework to which it belongs into utter disarray, for, as Nagy has argued, "the outer narrative that frames mythological exempla is itself a mythological exemplum, on a large scale."34 In the case at hand, a sanitized, laudatory rendition of the sack of Troy would remove the causes of the anger of the gods and make nonsense of the whole epic sequel of the tragic nostoi of the Achaeans. Moreover, sudden, radical change fundamentally impairs the capacity a myth has to function as exemplum:

Exceptional as it is, the model as model is traditional. The model is a precedent, and that precedent would lose its rhetoric, its very power, if it were to be changed for the sake of change. It is one thing for us to recognize changes in the development of myth over time. It is quite another to assume that changes are arbitrarily made by those who use myth as exemplum within their own society. As precedent, mythological exempla demand a mentality of the unchanging, of adherence to the model, even if myth is changeable over time.35

The question then may be recast in rhetorical terms: would a subject that came trailing so heavy a baggage of pejorative connotations be chosen, unless that baggage was crucial to its charge? The thesis of this paper is that the Ilioupersis was deployed on the Parthenon precisely because it was the paradigm of wrongful conquest. The images invited comparison with the Persian invasion of Greece, not, however, in the sense that the Trojans prefigure the Persians. Rather, the recent sack of Athens is seen through the image of the epic sack of Troy. The comparison is reinforced and acquires special poignancy by the position of this

Miller 459 that "by the end of the fifth century a 'tragic costume' which featured some components of Oriental dress was widely used in the Attic theater for foreign mythical kings as well as for Greek." This is what in Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed. rev. by John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford 1968) 198-202, is called "typical tragic dress" (199).

34 Gregory Nagy, "Myth as Exemplum in Homer," in Homeric Questions (Austin 1996) 113-146, the quote from p. 137.

35 Ibid. 146.

126


subject on the north side of the temple, overlooking the site of the old

temple of Athena that had been burned by the Persians. To say that a "Greek" fifth-century viewer would have made his own

the cause of the thirteenth-century "Greek" sackers of Troy is to reduce to a slogan a rather more complex set of notions about the Mycenaean past, particularly about the war at Troy, which changed that world for- ever. The word "Greek" glosses over one important fact: the partici- pants in the expedition against Troy were a nation of Achaioi,36 which perished long before the emergence of the polis and the forging of a new nation, whose inhabitants called themselves Hellenes. As the first joint venture of the cities, which would later constitute Hellas, the expedition against Troy established a collective identity, to which each polis acknowledged ancestral ties. But Hellenic identity depended upon marking the differences in ideology, social practices, and ethnic composition that separated the world of the Achaeans from that of the polis, as well as differences that set the polis apart from all barbarian nations. The sense in which the Hellenes are in a sense, although not truly, Achaeans is played upon in the story of the prophecy given to king Cleomenes of Sparta, who intended to seize the Acropolis of Athens (Herodotus 5.72). When he attempted to enter the cella of the temple of Athena Polias, the priestess rose from her seat, saying: "Stranger from Sparta, go back and do not enter the shrine. Dorians are not allowed in here." To which the king replied: "Woman, I am not Dorian, but Achaean." His claim was false, however, as the fact that he and his men were driven out demonstrated.

If the Achaeans are not altogether Hellenes, neither are the Trojans barbarians, in the fifth-century sense of the word. The ancestors of the moder barbarians and the ancestors of the Hellenes were imagined to inhabit a world in which the divide separating Achaioi from Dardanoi and other Eastern nations was differently and unevenly marked. Thucy- dides 1.3.2-3 makes this point briefly in his archaiologia, where he notes that Homer, although composing long after the Trojan war, refers to the Hellenes-to-be not by the name Hellenes but as Danaoi, Argeioi, and Achaioi: "Nor did he use the term barbaroi, for the reason, it seems to me, that the Hellenes on their part had not yet been separated off so as to acquire one common name by way of contrast." Accordingly, in

36 For the understanding that Achaioi refers to a people and not simply to an "epic collective," I depend upon G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore 1979) 83-84. See also Hilary Mackie, Talking Trojan (Lanham 1996) 18-21.

127

Gloria Ferrari

literary and visual representations, Trojans and Achaeans share the same code of ethics, worship the same gods, speak to one another without interpreters, and are indistinguishable from one another in appearance.37 A degree of savagery is an integral part of the heroic character,38 but in the Trojan epic it is exhibited primarily by the Achaeans, in the forms of human sacrifice and the slaughter of children, Troilos first, then Astyanax. Two versions of the murder of Priam are particularly relevant here, in which Neoptolemus has decapitated the boy and holds the head out to his grandfather.39 In the same manner Achilles may be represented as he hurls the head of Troilus at the Tro- jan contingent, which comes too late to the boy's rescue.40 As much as the murder of Troilus, that of Astyanax was an act of Scythian savagery.41 The words Andromache speaks in Euripides Troades 764-765, when the child is taken away from her, are an apt commen- tary here: "Oh Hellenes who have learned the cruelties of barbarians / why kill this helpless child?"

The narrative frame of the Ilioupersis obliges us to see in the events of that night not the triumph of good over evil but a tragic example of the use of violence as the means to justice. The actions by which a wrong is vindicated are themselves crimes, which in turn demand to be avenged. Aeschylus (Agamemnon 764-771) cast the vicious spiral of

37 Robert Zahn, Die Darstellung der Barbaren in griechischer Literatur und Kunst der vorhellenistischen Zeit (Heidelberg 1896) 9-42; Hall (above, n. 29) 19-47. Mackie (above, n. 36) identifies in the Iliad modes of speech that are specifically Trojan and different from the Achaean, amounting to a form of ethnic characterization. She rejects, however, the notion that notations of "ethnic difference" amount to a representation of the

Trojans as barbarians, in a position of "alterity" with respect to the Achaeans (p. 9). 38 Nagy (above, n. 36) 62-63, 135-137, 151-160. 39 Black-figure amphora in Bonn, Kunstmuseum 45, ABV 299, 16; white-ground

lekythos in Athens, National Museum 11050, LIMC s.v. "Astyanax" no. 14. 40 Tyrrhenian amphoras Munich, Museum antiker Kleinkunst 1426, ABV 95, 5; Flo-

rence, Museo Archeologico 70993, ABV 95, 6; band cup, Basle, private collection, LIMC s.v. "Achilleus" no. 359a; black-figure hydria, British Museum B 326, ABV 362, 28. On the "contamination" of the iconography of the death of Troilus and the death of Astyanax, see A. Pomari, "Le massacre des innocents," in C. Bron and E. Kassaplogou eds., L'image en jeu (Yens-sur-Morges 1992) 103-125, particularly pp. 113-115; Anderson (above, n. 5) 192-199.

41 On the particularly brutal connotations of the decapitation of the enemy, see Charles Segal, The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad (Leiden 1971) 20-21. For an analysis of the characterization of Achilles' behavior as Scythian in vase-paintings, see

my "Myth and Genre on Athenian Vases," ClAnt (forthcoming).

128

The llioupersis in Athens

killings that had characterized the heroic age in the metaphor of the

generative capacity of hubris, one giving birth to another, which unleashes a new gale of ate, "unconquerable, invincible, unholy" violence. Hubris on the part of Paris, who violated the law of Zeus Xenios by taking Helen away, and of the Trojans, who refused to surrender her to Menelaus, called for war. Zeus granted the destruction of the city. But the bloodless hubris of the Trojans pales in comparison with that of the Achaeans. The sack of Troy is the point at which the gods withdraw their support and destroy them. With Hera, Athena had been the major instigator of the annihilation of Troy and unwavering in her pro- Achaean stance. She becomes now the Achaeans' deadliest enemy. Alcaeus made of Aias an example of the fact that an unpunished crimi- nal is a threat to society, and painted a vivid picture of the crime.42 Aias bursts into the shrine of Athena, a 0ecov / [0vadot]oa 0eoo3XatoIt ncdv- 'Tov / [aivo](x'ra gaKdapov i(P'uicK, "of all the blessed gods, the most [dreadful] to temple plundering mortals" (17-19). He seizes the

princess as she clings to the statue, with reckless disregard for the wrath of the goddess who is nIo4goL 86'r?[pp]av (23), "the dispenser of war." The fragmentary poem breaks off with the image of Athena dashing across the wine-colored sea, stirring sudden storms in her path. The sequence of events, to which Alcaeus' poem alludes, is fully explained in the prologue of Euripides' Troades, 1-97. The play was performed in 415 B.C.E., less than a generation after the sculptures of the Parthenon were completed. In the bleak dawn following the onslaught, Poseidon contemplates what remains of the great city he and Apollo once helped build: deserted groves, the seats of the gods awash in blood, the corpse of Priam lying on the steps of the altar of Zeus Herkeios. Athena inter- rupts his musings to request his help to deal the Achaeans a grim voyage home, noston pikron (66). This is what they deserve for the outrages to herself and her temple, the violation of Cassandra, and their failure to punish Aias, son of Oileus:43

When they take ship from Ilium and set sail for home Zeus will shower down his rainstorms and the weariless beat Of hail, to make black the bright air with roaring winds. He has promised my hand the gift of the blazing thunderbolt

42 D. Page, Supplementum Lyricis Graecis (Oxford 1974) 81 S 262. 43 Troades 77-86 and 95-97; translation by Richmond Lattimore in D. Grene and

Richmond Lattimore, Euripides II (Chicago 1956).

129

Gloria Ferrari

To dash and overwhelm with fire the Achaean ships. Yours is your own domain, the Aegean crossing. Make The sea thunder to the tripled wave and spinning surf, Cram thick the hollow Euboean fold with floating dead; So after this Greeks may learn to know to use with fear my Sacred places, and respect all gods beside.

Poseidon agrees to her request and offers the following reflection:

That mortal who sacks fallen cities is a fool, Who gives the temples and the tombs, the hallowed places Of the dead to desolation. His own turn must come.

This passage contains a number of points that have a bearing upon the visual representations of the Ilioupersis in general, and the north

metopes of the Parthenon in particular. There is emphasis on Athena's sudden about-face, and on the provocations that brought it about. Athena reveals that Zeus himself will rage against the Achaeans and, in addition, has granted her the use of his thunderbolt, implying that she has consulted her father before seeking Poseidon's help. This requires us to envision an episode in which Zeus sanctions the punishment of the Achaeans. In fact, Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica 14. 422-472 gives a detailed account of that Dios boule, including Athena's appeal to her father, his verdict, and the dispatch of Iris to Aeolus.

With the plot of the Ilioupersis firmly in mind, let us turn to what remains of the north metopes of the Parthenon (fig. 4).44 On this side, as on the east and west, the sculptures were effaced deliberately, leaving only a few figures and traces of others, but enough remains to be sure of the subject and of the structure of the representation, in a broad sense. With few exceptions (metope D, "Iris" in 31, and "Hera" in 32) all figures face or advance towards the right, establishing a strong east- west direction for the viewer and a starting point at the east end. The frieze is divided into two unequal sections. The sack of the city is framed by the figures of Helios rising on metope 1 and Selene setting on metope 29.45 The first scene (metope 2) contains the prow of a ship,

44 Berger (above, n. 8) 11-53. On the fragments, see C. Praschniker, Parthenonstudien (Vienna 1928) 68-86; Mantis, "Neue Fragmente" (above, n. 10) 181-184.

45 That the figure in 29 is Selene is made certain by the remains of the moon-sickle at the upper right; the position of the legs of her horse clearly indicate that she is setting, not

simply shining upon the sack. The identification of the charioteer in no. 1 is disputed (see

130


from which two nude men disembark, carrying objects. In metope 3 Praschniker saw an archer and a warrior.46 Of the next twenty metopes only fragments survive, for the most part small and unreadable, whose place in the sequence is uncertain. One (metope A) probably held the representation of a bull led to sacrifice.47 Metope D shows a man, nude except for a mantle, leading away a female figure in peplos, perhaps Polyxena.48 The scene of the recovery of Helen by Menelaus stretches over metopes 24 and 25. Helen runs to a shrine, toward an ancient statue, while Aphrodite-a small Eros perched on her shoulder-stands between her and her vengeful former husband. Number 26 is lost. Dorig suggested that it was part of a two-metope sequence of the rescue of Aethra and Clymene, whom he identified with the woman following a hero in chlamis on metope 27.49 Aeneas's escape with Ascanius is recognizable in metope 28. The hero is in "Greek" dress, nude except for a chlamis fastened around his shoulder, and carries a round shield. Situated beyond and outside the depiction of the events at Troy, the last three metopes form a self-contained whole, in which Praschniker identified the schema of the council of the gods, with Zeus and Iris at its center (31).50 Although the identity of the goddesses in metope 32 is far from secure, it is possible that the seated one is Hera and that the one standing Athena.

If the loss of all the central metopes allows some freedom in recon- structing the content of the frieze, what remains and the mythic tradition impose some constraints. One may choose to interpret the astral figure on metope 1 and Selene on 29 in an allegorical sense. This opens the possibility that episodes of the Trojan epic that are distant in time or space may here be represented sequentially.51 Or one may choose, as I have done,52 to take rising Helios and setting Selene to establish the time of the action. The sack, which had begun in the middle of the

the summary of interpretations by Berger [above, n. 8] 14, 19); again, the position of the horses' legs shows that, if this is an astral figure, it is rising.

46 Praschniker (above, n. 44) 13-17, 119-122. 47 Berger (above, n. 8) 26-28. 48 Jos6 Dorig, "Les m6topes nord du Parthenon," in Ernst Berger ed., Parthenon-

Kongress Basel (Mainz 1984) 204. 49 J. Dorig, "To programma tes glyptes diakosmeseos tou Parthenona," AE 1982,

196-197. 50 Praschniker (above, n. 44) 132-138. 51 See Berger (above, n. 8) 14-15 for a summary of interpretations. 52 Following Praschniker (above, n. 44) 93-98.

131

Gloria Ferrari

night under a radiant moon,53 is nearing the end. We confront the denouement of the pillage and the killing at daybreak. The vessel in metope 2 may then be the ship of Menelaus made ready for departure, as in Polygnotus' painting in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi. In metope A, the scene of sacrifice (if Berger's identification is correct) calls to mind the statement of Nestor at Odyssey 3.143-146 that Agamemnon intended to offer hecatombs to Athena, to appease her anger.54 There is no way to establish how Phidias dealt with the outrages of Priam, Astyanax, and Cassandra, but they must be included, because the narrative framework of the myth requires it. As in other representations that illustrate multiple episodes of the sack, the metopes will have included the scene of the sons of Theseus, Demophon, and Acamas rescuing their grandmother Aethra. The scene provided that element of particular relevance to the myth-history of Athens that is present also in the other metope-cycles on the Parthenon. As to the council of the gods, its placement after the scene of the destruction of Troy, indicates that it takes place in direct connection with the sack, either contemporaneously or soon afterwards. If this is a Dios boule, the logic of the narrative suggests that it is the one in which Zeus sealed the fate of the Achaeans and promised his thunderbolt to an enraged Athena-the occasion to which Athena refers in Euripides' Troades 80-81, and which Quintus of Smyrna describes in the Posthomerica 14.422-472.55 In this fashion, the promise of bitter nostoi for the Argives follows on the heels of the persis that is their cause.56 It is worth noting that, as in the case of the Gigantomachy, Amazonomachy, and Centauromachy, the north metopes represent not the victory of the just, but the conflict as it unfolds. The assembled gods plan to avenge the assault that has just taken place, but the execution of their verdict lies in the future.

The arguments presented above enrich and support the statement of Karl Schefold that, like tragedy, the Parthenon Ilioupersis is about the inescapable cycle of crimes and punishments that defines the human

53 Mikra Ilias, fr. 9: vi 0 V ?rv rlV eodraTTI, Xacslpin 6f' nixe,EXe oGeXivq. 54 Berger (above, n. 8) 26-28, 34-35. 55 See above. Praschniker (above, n. 44) 138-139 considered this possibility and dis-

missed it, on the grounds that Athena, on metope 32, has her back to Zeus. Schefold and

Jung (above, n. 6) 282 suggested that the assembled gods discuss the punishment of the Greeks.

56 On the interlocking of persis and nostos in the epic, see below, pp. 144-145.

132


Figure 1. Attic red-figure hydria. Naples, Museo Nazionale 2422. After Adolf Furtwangler and Karl Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei

(Munich 1904) pl. 34.

133

Gloria Ferrari

Figure 2. Attic red-figure kylix. Rome, Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia. Interior detail.

134


Figure 3. As above. Interior.

135

Gloria Ferrari

Metope 1 Metope 2

Metope D

Metope 28

Metope 24

Metope 29

Figure 4. Parthenon, north metopes. After Camillo Praschniker, Parthenonstudien (Vienna 1928).

136

The Ilioupersis in Athens 137

Metope 3 Metope A

Metope 25 Metope 27

Metope 30 Metope 32 Metope 31

Gloria Ferrari

condition in the heroic age.57 I would add that, in this tale, righteous- ness is never at any point the exclusive prerogative of one side or the other. There is an important distinction to be made between participation in the expedition against Troy and participation in the sacrilegious violence against the helpless and the gods. When Nestor reveals to Telemachus the events that followed the sack of the city, he explains that "Zeus in his mind devised a sorry homecoming for the Argives, since not all were responsible (voigoveq) nor righteous (8iKcato)" (Odyssey 3.132-134). He implies that some of the men who took part in the capture of the city did so according to the rules of the heroic code of war, responsibly and righteously. These words aptly describe what the Athenians did on that terrible night. In visual representations of the Ilioupersis, the sons of Theseus are very much in evidence but have no part in the fighting and violence. Their role is limited to the rescue of their grandmother. The picture of the Ilioupersis by the Kleophrades Painter is instructive on this point (fig. 1). The central scene of sacrilege is framed on either side by paragons of filial piety: the departure of the Trojan Aeneas from the burning city, carrying Anchises on his shoulder, and the Athenian Damophon and Acamas turning a helping hand to old Aethra. Aethra's condition is the result of an earlier act of hubris, which exactly parallels that of Paris and indirectly establishes a comparison between the capture of Troy and an ancient sack of Athens. To rescue their sister Helen, whom Theseus had abducted from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, the Dioscuri invaded Attica and took away with them to Sparta Theseus' mother, to be Helen's handmaid.58 Aethra later followed Helen to Troy. By their participation in the recovery of Helen from yet another abduction, Demophon and Acamas atone for their father's transgression, which had caused his mother's enslavement, and secure her release.59 At the same time as they narrate the causes of the ultimate destruction of the Argives, the images highlight the contrast

57 Schefold and Jung (above, n. 6) 282: "Die Frevel der Griechen gehoren zur Tragodie der menschlichen Existenz, zu Grosse und Verhangnis des Menschen, das Siihne verlangt. Die Skulpturen des Parthenon sind nicht als Propaganda fur Athens Selbstbewusstsein zu verstehen; so billig ist die griechische Kunst nie zu deuten: Nein, es geht um das mythi- sche Begreifen des Daseins wie in der Trag6die."

58 Apollodorus 3.10.7, scholium at Iliad 3.242, and Herodotus 9.73 give Aphidnae as the site of the sack; Apollodorus' Epitome 1.2 identifies the city as Athens, as did a poem by Alcman (Pausanias 1.41.4) and an inscribed hexameter on the chest of Cypselus (Pau- sanias 5.19.3).

59 Anderson (above, n. 5) 97-101.

138

The llioupersis in Athens

between the bad behavior of Aias, Neoptolemus, and the Atridae and the piety of the Athenians. The contrast of the two is key to understanding how, in Athens, the capture of Troy could be cause for both pride and condemnation. In this scenario, the ancestors of the Athenians find themselves invariably on the side of their goddess. Athena herself claims a large part of the spoils of war, a parcel of the Scamander val- ley, of which she makes "a choice gift to the sons of Theseus" (Aeschy- lus Eumenides 402). The point of representing the Ilioupersis, however, was not to praise the Athenians but to blame the Achaeans.

The efficacy of the Parthenon Ilioupersis as the mythic exemplum of the devastating consequences of hubris lies in its capacity to establish a different analogy with the Persian invasion of Greece. Here I wish to reopen a possibility, which John Boardman entertained briefly, then dis- missed: that the destruction of Troy prefigures that of Athens.60 The case for a metaphoric link between the two relies on three kinds of cir- cumstantial evidence. The first is an argument from probability. Long before the Persians invaded Greece, Troy stood as the paradigm of wrongful conquest in visual images and in the lost poems that dealt with the subject. That model contained many features that made it the perfect vehicle for a metaphor of the Persian invasion: an overwhelming force crossing the sea; the slaughter of suppliants; the plunder and burning of the shrines of Athena; death at sea for the invaders by the will of the gods. A more specific, non-accidental correlation is indi- cated by the prominence accorded the destruction of temples in both accounts: in the epic model, the desecration of the temples brings ruin upon the attackers; in Greece, and on the Acropolis of Athens, the very temples they had burned kept alive the memory of the Persians' sacrilege. Finally, the analogy between the outrages committed by the Achaeans and those committed by Xerxes is explicitly drawn by Aeschylus in the Persae and in the Agamemnon.

Herodotus reports an ominous episode, early in Xerxes' campaign, which announces the wrath of Athena against the men who will plunder her shrines. When it entered the land of Ilium and set camp for the night at the foot of Mount Ida, the Persian army was struck by a hurri- cane with thunder, which caused the loss of a host of men.61 Upon

60 John Boardman, "The Kleophrades Painter at Troy," AntK 19 (1976) 14-15; The Parthenon and its Sculptures (Austin, TX 1985) 249.

61 Herodotus 7.42: ril v & aFqv I 3v &ptaVpiorplv Xtepa tji F?; ?T v 'IXUaItd yiv. Kai RpcirTa 'Ev oi0 irb j 'i,16 vuKcXa ava(eLvavn ppovTai Tr Ka(i xpnpoArpe ireoanT'lxouo Kca xtvC arixou rxiau' oaZui v oV lXov &tO(P0etpav.

139

Gloria Ferrari

reaching the Scamander, the king climbed the citadel of Priam, driven by a desire to see the site. There he sacrificed a thousand bulls to Athena Ilias and his Magi poured libations to the heroes of Troy. Nes- selrath has shown that these ceremonies are in conformity with the Per- sian view of the Trojan war, which Herodotus reports in book 1.1-5.3: the destruction of Troy on a frivolous pretext was unjust and it laid the foundation of the Persian enmity towards Greece.62 By paying formal tribute to the goddess of Ilium and the victims of the Achaean invasion, Xerxes represents his own invasion of Greece as a retaliatory expedition and claims for himself the role of the avenger. "After they performed these acts-Herodotus adds-their army was seized by panic fear in the night."63 If the direct link drawn here between the sacrifices and libations and the dread that struck the Persian army has any significance, it is to indicate that the king's offerings did not please Athena Ilias, and that his attempt to identify his cause with that of the Trojans failed. The actual capture of Athens contains several points of correspondence with the capture of Troy. Xerxes and his troops found the city empty of its population, except for the treasurers of the sanctuary and a few men too poor to leave, who had barricaded themselves on the Acropolis (8.51). When the citadel was taken, some of its last defenders threw themselves off its wall; others sought refuge in the temple of Athena Polias. The Persians turned directly to the doors of the temple, opened them, and killed the suppliants. After the slaughter, they plun- dered the sanctuary and set the whole Acropolis on fire.64 As Agamem- non had wished to do in the wake of the sack of Troy,65 Xerxes tried to placate Athena with offerings. He dispatched the Athenian exiles in

62 Heinz-Ginther Nesselrath, "Herodot und der griechische Mythos," Poetica (1996) 283-284. I owe the reference to this article to Nino Luraghi.

63 Herodotus 7.43: raixTa 6? coitroaavoiot vulcKTb; (p63o; ? T;O ocpazXTO6 6ov veixeoe. This sequence of events has an uncanny similarity to another story in Herodotus

involving Athena and the Persians. As they approached the temple of Athena Pronaia at

Delphi, the barbarians were greeted with thunderbolts from heaven and two great boul- ders broke off Mount Parnassus, killing a host of men; then "from the temple of Athena there was heard a shout and a cry of triumph" (8.37). Next, the Persian army was seized

by panic fear and turned to flight (8.38). The episode is reported also by Diodorus Sicu- lus, 14.3-4.

64 Herodotus 8.53: Tc&v 68 fepoCov1 aovaopeprloK6Te; tpcrov Lev ExpdaovTO 7p6O Tix 7c6XaS, TaTca; 68 avoitavT?E ToU; itcKera; kp6veov . EiCi 8 ot rnvx vT?; KaTEoTp- (OVxo, T6 IpOV GUova(avT?; EvVenprloav IoaxV Tiv &CKpO7ro?lv.

65 See above, n. 54.

140


his following to the Acropolis, to perform sacrifices, either because he had experienced a vision, or out of concern over having burned the temple (8.54).

The matter of the temples burned by the Persians was addressed in the oath, which the allied Hellenic forces allegedly took on the eve of the battle of Plataea. A recitation of ancestral glories, with a pro- nounced anti-Peloponnesian flavor, is the context in which we encounter the Oath of Plataea for the first time in Lycurgus' prosecution of Leocrates for treason. It contains the following clause: "I will not rebuild at all (or from the ground up) any of the sanctuaries burned and destroyed by the barbarians, but I will leave them standing as a reminder of the barbarians' impiety for generations to come."66 Whether the oath is authentic or a fabrication, as Theopompus of Chios claimed,67 the provision concerning the destroyed temples was hon- ored, after a fashion. Archaeological and literary sources indicate a pat- tern of selective compliance. We learn from Plutarch, who makes no mention of the oath, that in the years immediately following the Persian invasion at least two temples were rebuilt.68 Many others, however, were not built anew, but continued to function down to the time of Pau- sanias, still displaying the scars of the destruction. Pausanias mentions the temples at Haliartus, the oracular shrine at Abae in Phocis, the temple of Hera on the road to Phalerum, and the temple of Demeter at Phalerum.69 Among the Ionian sanctuaries that had been sacked, he sin-

66 Against Leocrates 81; the text is closely comparable to Diodorus 11.29.3. The clause about the destroyed temples is absent from the version of the Oath of Plataea that follows the text of the ephebic oath on the stele from Acharnae. Marcus N. Tod, Greek Historical Inscriptions II (Oxford 1950) 303-307 no. 204.

67 FGH 115 F 153. The debate over the authenticity of the Oath of Plataea continues in modem time, with scholars firmly positioned on one side or the other, but those who believe in its historicity seem now to have the upper hand, after Siewert's monograph on the subject. Peter Siewert, Der Eid von Plataiai (Munich 1972) 102-108, however, argues that the promise to make memorials of the burnt shrines was not part of the original oath, because that clause is omitted in the Acharnae inscription and some temples were rebuilt immediately after the battle of Plataea.

68 These are the temple of Athena Areia at Plataea, Aristides 20.3, and the Telesterion of the Lycomedae at Phyla, Themistocles 1.3.

69 Pausanias 10.35.2-3. It is commonly assumed that these temples lay abandoned and in ruins for centuries but nothing in Pausanias description suggests that this was the case. In the course of the Sacred War, in 347, the Phocians sought refuge in the temple of Apollo at Abae, presumably as suppliants. This indicates not only that the structure was in good enough repair to give them shelter but also that it retained its cult functions. Even after it was set on fire a second time by the Thebans, the temple remained standing,

141

Gloria Ferrari

gles out the temples of Hera on Samos and that of Athena in Phocaea, "a wonder to behold, even though they were damaged by fire" (7.5.4).

On the Athenian Acropolis itself, the ancient temple of Athena Polias was never rebuilt. In the late nineteenth century, D6rpfeld and Kavvadias uncovered its foundations on the terrace north of the Parthenon, revealing that no building had encroached on upon them in

antiquity.70 Although this fact has been acknowledged for some time,71 we have yet to reckon fully with the importance of Dorpfeld's discov-

ery in our understanding of the Periclean planning of the Acropolis reconstruction. It is possible indeed that, as D6rpfeld argued, the temple was repaired and continued to function in its damaged state to the end of antiquity.72 At the very least, the fact that it remained undisturbed indicates that the site of the outrage was established as the tangible memorial of the Persian impiety. Once the import of that decision is

acknowledged, the temple can be seen to be the centerpiece of an extensive choreography of ruins, of which other parts have been recog- nized for some time. Column drums and part of the architrave of the archaic predecessor of the Parthenon were built into the south wall of the Acropolis.73 Pieces of the entablature of the archaic temple of Athena Polias were built high up into the north wall of the Acropolis, not randomly but in correspondence with the location of the temple.74 In the same position and further to the east, column drums from the

although "the most frail of the buildings burned by the flames" (Pausanias 10.35.3). Pau- sanias mentions the temple of Demeter at Phalerum a second time in book 1.1.4, with no reference to its destruction; the temple of Hera on the road to Phaleron, which he describes as having neither doors nor roof (1.1.15), still housed the statue of the goddess by Alcamenes.

70 W. Dorpfeld, "Der alte Athena-Tempel auf der Akropolis zu Athen," AthMitt 10 (1885) 275; "Der alte Athenatempel auf der Akropolis," AthMitt 11 (1886) 337-51; Antike Denkmiler I, 1886, pls. I-II. P. Kavvadias and G. Kawerau, Die Ausgrabung der

Akropolis vom Jahre 1885 bis zum Jahre 1890 (Athens 1906) col. 32. 71 W. N. Bates, "Notes on the Old Temple of Athena on the Acropolis," HSCP 12

(1901) 319-326. 72Wilh. Dorpfeld, "Der alte Athenatempel auf der Akropolis," AthMitt 12 (1887)

25-61, 190-211. The survival of the archaic temple is the subject of a separate essay, "The Ancient Temple on the Acropolis at Athens," forthcoming in AJA (2001).

73 M. Korres, "Die Athena-Tempel auf der Akropolis," in W. Hoepfner ed., Kult und Kultbauten auf der Akropolis. Internationales Symposium, Berlin July 7-9 (Berlin 1997) 219.

74 F. C. Penrose, The Principles of Athenian Architecture (London 1851) pl. 40, figs. 1-2; Kavvadias and Kawerau (above, n. 70) col. 72; Hurwit (above, n. 2) 142, 159.

142


unfinished predecessor of the Parthenon, also burned by the Persians, remain an impressive sight to this day.75 The display of ruins on the north wall would be visible for a long way from the processional route at the Panathenaea, coming into progressively sharper focus before the procession turned westward, to the entrance ramp of the Propylaea.76 Upon entering the Acropolis the visitor confronted the colossal bronze Promachos, built with the spoils of Marathon (Pausanias 1.28.2), which stood in front of the terrace of the ancient temple. The temple itself of Athena Polias contained the most legendary (and possibly inauthentic) Persian spoils: the cuirass of Masistius, Mardonius' sword (Pausanias 1.27.1-2). And on its terrace stood ancient statues of Athena, "intact but blackened and too fragile to survive a blow," which had felt the Per- sian fire, still there for Pausanias to see over 600 years after the event (Pausanias 1.27.6).

It is against this background that the theme of the destroyed shrines in the Persae of Aeschylus and in the Agamemnon acquires proper resonance. This is also the most conspicuous among a series of links between the two plays, staged at a distance of fourteen years. While each has been noted before, less attention has been paid to the way in which these correspondences echo back to the Ilioupersis theme to sug- gest a comparison between the sack of Troy and that of Athens.77 The two plays, it has been noted, have a comparable structure, in which an anxious chorus of elders and the queen await news from the field and learn of the outcome of the expedition from the messenger, before the return of the king.78 As in the Agamemnon, the chorus of the Persae recalls the gathering of a great armada for the expedition (Persae 16-58; Agamemnon 40-48). In both, although in substantially different

75 A. Tschira, "Die unfertigen Saulentrommeln auf der Akropolis von Athen," Jdl 55 (1940) 242-261.

76 As Robin F. Rhodes, Architecture and Meaning on the Athenian Acropolis (Cam- bridge 1995) 32-33, writes: "The rebuilt north wall of the Athenian Acropolis ... represents a specific monument consciously constructed from the ruins of the Persian sack to commemorate that specific event, to warn of the Persian threat, to kindle the anger of the Athenians against them, and, probably, to symbolize the Athenians' selfless sacrifice of their city to the general defense of the Greek mainland." See also T. Leslie Shear Jr., Studies in the Early Projects of the Periklean Building Program (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, Princeton 1966) 36-37; Hurwit (above, n. 2) 142.

77 Anderson (above, n. 5) chapter 7 gives a perceptive analysis of Aeschylus' use of the Ilioupersis theme in the Agamemnon.

78 Ibid. 107 n. 1.

143

Gloria Ferrari

ways, the king's decision to cross a hostile Aegean is represented as an act of mad daring, thrasos.79 In the Persae, the words "about the nostos of the king and of the army rich in gold" (&ag(pi 8e vdcatp T f 1actoxsip / Kai toRuXpUiaoo oxpatna 8-9) both announce the content of the play and set up an epic frame of reference.80 Xerxes' nostos, in fact, is the subject of the Persae, as much as that of Agamemnon is the subject of the play that bears his name.81 The chorus and the queen await the king's return. Fears for his safety and dark foreboding are momentarily dispelled when the messenger reveals that he is alive (299), to give place to despair over the loss of Persian lives. The ghost of Darius is informed that his son has safely crossed the bridge over the Hellespont into Asia (735-736). The king finally appears, at the end of the play (908-917), a broken man in tatters, whose arrival signals the start of the kommos: "in salutation for your nostos I shall release this wretched- sounding cry, the sorrowful voice of a Mariandynian mourner, a wail full of tears" (935-940).

The significance of the word nostos, so near its opening, becomes apparent if one reflects upon the marked use of Homeric diction in the play,82 and upon the connotations that the word carries in the Homeric poems. Nostos signifies both the safe return from an expedition in distant lands and the song about the homecoming. Like the song of Phemius (Odyssey 1.326-27), the Nostoi of the epic cycle recounted "the baneful homecoming of the Achaeans from Troy, which Pallas Athena had ordained."83 Anderson has shown how in the epic any

79Agamemnon 222: ppoToi; Opcaotvet yap aioXp6ogrlti; / tatikva rcapaKcona nTpooinjpwov; Persae 744-748: ncLS; ' ogb6; Td' o a6 caret6ox; TJvuDvo ve Opaoaet / 'oxti'EXXAioovTov pov 8o'ov g; sogacotv pv/ `oL(te (oi?v peovG / a, Boaoopov p6ov Oeo).

80 The scholia at Persae 8-9 note that the phrase is Homeric. Aeschylus uses the word nostos only here and at Agamemnon 812 and 989; A. Sideras, Aeschylus Homericus (Gottingen 1971 [Hypomnemata 31]) 34.

81 S. Ireland, "Dramatic Structure in the Persae and Prometheus of Aeschylus," G&R 20 (1973) 165-168, argues that the absent Xerxes dominates the plot of the Persae. Edith Hall, Aeschylus, Persians (Warminster 1996) 18, points out that the play "is essentially a 'homecoming' drama, like tragedies derived from the cyclic Nostoi"; see also her com- ments on 1. 8 at p. 107.

82 Homericisms in the Persae are collected by Sideras, (above, n. 80) 198-200, 212-215. Ann N. Michelini, Tradition and Dramatic Form in the Persians of Aeschylus (Leiden 1982) 77-78, 105, suggested that epic forms in the play would have been per- ceived as "obsolete and strange" (77) and may be employed with dramatic irony to char- acterize barbarians.

83 Nagy (above, n. 36) 97 ?6 n. 2 notes that the word nostos at Odyssey 1.326 "obeys

144


thought of the return is intimately tied to that of the sack.84 Zeus'

promise to him-Agamemnon recalls at Iliad 2.112-113-was that he would return home after destroying Troy. But the longed-for return home, which was part of the conquerors' reward, turns into their punishment. In a perversion of the traditional bond, in the Trojan saga nostos follows persis as retribution follows crime.85 Nestor will explain to Telemachus in the Odyssey:

But after we had sacked the sheer citadel of Priam, and were going away in our ships, and the god scattered the Achaeans, then Zeus in his mind devised a sorry homecoming (Xuypov

v6oTov) for the Argives, since not all were considerate nor righteous; therefore many of them found a bad way home, because of the ruinous anger of the Gray-eyed One, whose father is mighty.86

The wealth of allusions implicit in the word nostos would not be wasted on the audience for whom Aeschylus staged the Persae in 472 B.C.E., in the midst of a city still in ruins. These were Athenian men, well versed in the epic, most of whom, like Aeschylus, had faced the Persians on land and sea. The sack of Athens was Xerxes' Ilioupersis.

The allusion to the Achaeans' disastrous nostoi at the beginning of the Persae is picked up again in the messenger's speech, with the description of the wreck of the Persian ships in the battle at Salamis. The image of death at sea must have been part of the tradition of the Ilioupersis. Traces of it remain in Alcaeus' vision of Athena raising waves over the sea as she storms out of Troy. In Euripides' Troades 82-84, Athena asks Poseidon to make the Aegean pass "thunder to the tripled wave and spinning surf, cram thick the hollow Euboean fold

the convention of beginning with a word that serves as a title ... followed by an epithet and then a relative clause that sets forth the relationship of the title word to the main subject...."

84 Anderson (above, n. 5) 75-81. 85 Ibid. 77: "Just as Paris' crime is punished with the ultimate destruction of Troy, so

too the wrongs committed by the Achaians in sacking Troy are punished as they return to Greece. Retribution binds together persis and nostos in a simple cause-and-effect relationship."

86 Odyssey 3.130-135; translation by R. Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer (New York 1965).

145

Gloria Ferrari

with floating dead." In the Agamemnon, the messenger describes the effects of that storm in terms of an attack (653-660):

ev VxKTI 8'oGK1c4avTa ' cbpcop& KcaKc-.

(petiCov K ai 8e KepoTU o ?Evoat [i5a

vavS yap tpo; aXXiX71at EpijKial ivoax

XE4?tKOVt al)(P - O)V czXO,, l ?a' 6tIpoKi:7Co, %?eiu(-6VI Tixpo crVV (rc T' O[lppoKWti(p),

MxovT' 6apavrot ntOItpvo; KCaKOI) PTp6OCp. ?tei 8' &vfiXOe XCaLcgpov ilXfo (pdo;,

6poLgev &v0oov n7iXayoS Aiyaiov veKpoig dv6pCSv 'Aaxtiv vacvxtKoig T' Ep?Etiotg.

In the night evil storm-waves arose. Winds from Thrace pounded the ships One against the other. Rammed by the violence Of the whirlwind with wintry squall and crashing rain, The ships were gone from sight into the evil shepherd's vortex. But when the bright sun's light came up again, We saw the Aegean sea blossoming with the corpses Of Achaean men and wreckage of ships.

Similarly, in the earlier play, the Persian ships hemmed in by the Hel- lenic fleet gore one another with their rams, and corpses and wreckage fill the shores of Salamis (Persae 412-420):

Tx& cp&a eV vVv Ip?'a lepatKco oxapaxo'i dvxTEXev * dg; 8E nfioq ; v (TrEV veiCv

/IOpotoT', &apoyi 6' oits; &XXa Xot; 7apiiv aXTol 6' n' cc' aixv ,C poXaSi; XaXKooTo6olt; ncalovx', 0Opauov ndvxa Kcco)nrpr\l To6ov

'EXXrlVtKaOC l vi? ve o; OK appcagaovox KIcKXCo) nrpt4 eOtIvov * I'rTIOVTo 8& o7Kcd(pil VEc6v, OdXaXaoa 6' OK)'c' O jv i8?i6v, vavayiox v nqOriQouoa Kai (p6voV ppoT&iv CaKTCai 6 VEKpCV X0tpd8e1; 'C' EnkrXq0 v.

At first the flood of the Persian army Held out. But when most of the ships were rounded up In a small space, with no means to bring aid to one another, They struck each other with bronze-beaked

146


Rams, shattered all oared armament, And the ships of the Hellenes, not without forethought all around in a circle, struck. Ships' hulls Were turned upside down, one could no longer see the surface of

the sea, Which was filled with the slaughter of men and wrecked ships. Headlands and reefs filled up with corpses.

There are further, indirect ties. Embedded in the dense imagery of the

tempest in the Agamemnon is the figure of ate as windstorm. Aeschylus makes use of this metaphor throughout the play.87 In the passage at hand ate is the whirlwind, tuphos, which strikes the ships with driving rain and thunder and creates the eddy that swallows them. The root- cause of the disaster is evoked in the image of the shepherd. With an

appeal to the Homeric formula regularly applied to Agamemnon, who is "shepherd of peoples," notCi\v Xa&cv, the whirlwind becomes

metaphorically what Agamemnon had been in actuality: a "bad shepherd," who leads men to destruction.88 A third metaphor for ate is at work in the image of the sea in bloom with corpses.89 The meaning of the image becomes clear in the words spoken by Darius in the Persae, likening the "heaps of corpses" of the Persians fallen at Plataea to the

blossoming of ate, which is the consequence of Xerxes' hubris (818-822):

9ive; vcKp&v 6e Kcai TppToorOpq yovB acpova or?Iatlvowotv ogLgaLv 3ppotcov (b; oV% I6n7Cp(p OVTiOV6V iova XPh (ppovEiv. iopit; y&p ?tav0oo ' KapTCooe oItXDv aTTi;, 60sv IayKXauvov Eaga 06po;.

Heaps of corpses, even in three generations' time,

87 I analyze the imagery of ate in detail in "Figures in the Text: Metaphors and Riddles in the Agamemnon," CP 92 (1997) 12-19.

88 Achilles indeed refers to Agamemnon as inotgivo; KicaK in a fragment of tragedy, whose attribution to Aeschylus' Myrmidones is disputed. See Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Aeschy- lus II (Cambridge, Mass. 1957) 591-592 fr. 286.8.

89 Branded "exceptionally incongruous" in John Dewar Denniston and Denys Page, Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford 1960) 130. Citing Wilamowitz, Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus, Agamemnon II (Oxford 1950) 324, connected Agamemnon 659 to Persae 420, as did H. D. Broadhead, The Persae of Aeschylus (Cambridge 1960) 126.

Gloria Ferrari

By their silence will signify to the eyes of men That one who is mortal must not presume above his station. For hubris, flowering, brought forth the bloom Of ate, and from it reaps a harvest of lamentation.

The focal image here is established by the word cftaga, referring to mowing or reaping. Hubris blossoms into ate as stalks of grain flower into ears of corn, but its crop is death. Similarly, in the Agamemnon the corpses strewn over the sea are the flowering of hubris, producing blooms of ate.90

The most striking of the correspondences between the two tragedies, however, is the key role that the destruction and plunder of the shrines plays in both. In the Agamemnon 338-344, Clytemnestra contemplates the situation of the Achaeans now in possession of Troy, sleeping in

Trojan houses and explicitly links their safe return to the observance of the property of the gods:91

ei 6' CTe4epoiol T o;)S oX1taoooXoiV 0Oeo'i; Txot; r i oo; &X6or; Oev 0' i6pE tata, o0 x&v XO6vTe; au0i;S avd aXoiev av v

Epo(; &8 lij tI; 5p6oTepov iCgn,Jir oTpaTrt niopoetv &a ji XPpri, KIpcpeav VIKOtLr?VolU 6?T yap ipob oIKiou; voozCLgo ot(ozrpiax;, KaadgL at 8lta XoLu Od epov KcXoov naXtv.

And if they reverence the gods who are guardians of the city And the dwellings of the gods of the conquered land Then the conquerors will not in turn be conquered. Before, let no desire seize the host To plunder what they must not, overcome by greed. They need the deliverance of safe return to their homes, To double back onto the second stretch of the course.

90This image occurs again at Septem 601: arqS; 6poupa Oavaxov EcKaptirerwa (excised by most editors; see G.. . Hutchinson, Aeschylus, Septem contra Thebas [Oxford 1985] 138). The metaphor is not a creation of Aeschylus, since arlq av9v0ea appear also in Solon 4.36, M. L. West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci II (Oxford 1972). On the

generative power of ate, see also above, pp. 128-129. 91 Castriota (above, n. 9) 99 writes that "Aischylos might easily have portrayed Atossa

or Darius speaking these words of warning to Xerxes in the Persians."

148


The herald, who announces Agamemnon's arrival, confirms her worst fears (hopes, that is) (524-528):

& EX ) VtV U LOndlaXOUE, 1KaC y'ap O'UV 7pE7LEt,

Tpotav icataa cvaava toi- &icrip6pot At'; gaic XXn, nj Kacictpyaaat ir`6ov PoJtoi 6' hatto2t icai Oe6v i6pi~tata, Iccair~ppxx 6 CI t6 S ~wac6 XXIvtat XOov6S But hail him welcome for it befits him, The man who has laid waste Troy with the mattock Of Zeus the avenger, by which the plain has been turned under. Vanished are the altars and the dwellings of the gods, and the seed is utterly destroyed the whole earth over.

This echoes the words spoken by the ghost of Darius in the Persae 807-812:

oanptv CaIC0v UWt0Ir eitcagv&c t ca8e?v, iSpeFo; aicotva icaOcov (ppovijpRrw0v, ot yTfv ioX6vte; 'EXX6c8' oi OF, i-v ppFtil I,soiivto GUMX oi 8& int.up&vt 'i u ao o~hv 0l6u TFCL adl at VF-co;

IOCLO,i 6' *atoiot atj.t6vov 0' i6p,$axta inp6ppt4a qp 6 rjv av tpawrat 60 ,pcOv.

There the highest of calamities is in store for them to experience, The price of hubris and godless designs, They who, come to the land of Hellas, did not refrain From despoiling the icons of the gods nor burning temples. Vanished are the altars, and the dwellings of the daimonesY92

Uprooted from their bases, were turned over in defilement.

With slight change, Aeschylus quotes line 811 of the Persae, perhaps a famous line by then,93 at Agamemnon 527, where the image of uproot-

92 P. Perdrized, "Le t6moignage d'Eschyle sur le sac d'Ath6nes par les Perses," REG 34 (1921) 57-79, argued convincingly that the expression refers to the desecration of burials.

93 W. Kierdorf, Erlebnis und Darstellungen der Perserkriege (G6ltingen 1966 [Hypom- nemata 16]) 14-15. Following Fraenkel (above, n. 89) 266-267, some consider Agamem- non 527 an interpolation, which crept into the text by way of a note in the margins. There remains to be explained why an ancient reader would gloss the description of the sack of

Gloria Ferrari

ing and turning over altars and tombs lends itself to a more elaborate metaphor of destruction as a clearing of the ground. The allusion to the parallel fates of Athens and Troy here is more explicit than ever.

With its sympathy for the conqueror in his disgrace and for the loss of the nation's youthful flower in a wrong war,94 the play looks at the Persians through the lens of the heroic world. Hellenes and Persians are worthy opponents, bound by the same code of war ethics, in a struggle that is driven and monitored by the gods. Although it affirms the innate courage, cunning intelligence, love of freedom, and piety of the Hel- lenes, the play resists interpretations that would reduce it to a jingoistic statement of Hellenic superiority over a corrupt East. The Ilioupersis on the north metopes of the Parthenon had an equally complex and polyva- lent charge. The metaphor that cast Athens' ordeal in the mold of the epic granted her enemy superhuman power and arrogance, and so gave her struggle a heroic dimension. As it drew comparisons, the analogy also highlighted differences. Except for Aeneas, all the men of Troy would perish with its fall, down to the seed of Hector. But the men of Athens survived the attack, and the city with them.95 In this light, it appears more than coincidence that the images of the sack of Troy on the north metopes looked upon the ancient temple of Athena Polias, immediately to the north, which was the visible trace of the Persian impiety. The anger of Athena, of which Xerxes was warned when he visited Troy, constitutes a metonymic link between the two. By its position, the Parthenon Ilioupersis drew upon, and gave epic resonance to, the artful display of ruins, which were deployed throughout the citadel and which, as we slowly have come to recognize, were as much a part of its classical plan as the new Periclean buildings.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Troy with a line from the sack of Athens. In addition to Kierdorf, Denniston and Page (above, n. 89) 120-121 and Anderson (above, n. 5) 119-120 have argued that the line should be retained.

94 Persae 918-927. See M. Ebbott, "The List of the War Dead in Aeschylus' Per- sians," in this volume.

95 Aeschylus makes the point at Persae 348-349. When the messenger attributes the disaster at Salamis to the gods' hostility, saying that the gods protect Athena's city, a puz- zled Atossa wonders: "is Athens yet unravaged?" The messenger replies: "so long as men remain, her walls stand firm" (?T' &p' 'A0rlv&v ?aT' &xo6p9ToS; T6XotS; / &vSpi&v yap OVTCov epKco; EoTv &aocpa?;).

150

Documents

Ferrari - The Ilioupersis in Athens