A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [72]
‘Centaur World’ for the Athenians would have meant not just the Persian Empire, but other competing Greek city-states, and above all Sparta, with whom Athens was frequently at war. The struggle against the Centaurs that we see on the metopes becomes an emblem of the perpetual battle that, for the Athenians, every civilized state has to fight. Rational man has to keep struggling against brute irrationality. Dehumanizing your enemy like this takes you down a dangerous path, but it’s a magnificent rallying call if you’re waging war. If chaos is to be kept at bay, so the message goes, reason will have to fight un-reason again and again.
I chose this particular sculpture because it gives us the bitter insight that, in the short term, reason does not always prevail. The defence of the rationally ordered state will cost some of its citizens their lives. And yet – and this is why this sculpture is such a supreme achievement – the dying human body is shown with such pathos, the fierce struggle depicted with such balance, that the victory goes not to the strutting half-beast, but to the Athenian artist who can turn conflict into beauty. In the long run, this sculpture seems to say, intellect and reason alone can create things that endure. The victory is not just political: it is artistic and intellectual.
This is the Athenian perspective; but how was the Parthenon perceived by people who came from one of the other Greek cities? You might expect that because the Parthenon is called a temple, it would have been a place of prayer and sacrifice; in fact, it became a treasury – a war-chest to finance the defence of Greece against the Persians. In time, though, this fighting fund became protection money, demanded by Athens from the other Greek cities when Athens placed itself at the head of them. It forced them into becoming satellites of the growing Athenian maritime empire. And a great chunk of that money was siphoned off by the Athenians to fund the Acropolis building programme. Mary Beard gives us the non-Athenian view of the Parthenon:
The Parthenon must have been the kind of building that you spat at and kicked if you could. You knew, if you were one of Athens’ subjects, that this was a statement of your own subordination. There was a clear and vociferous faction in Athens when the Parthenon was built, which said the money shouldn’t be spent that way. That this was, in the words of one, dressing Athens up like a ‘harlot’. That’s very odd for us to empathize with now, because the Parthenon sculptures seem so austerely beautiful. It’s hard to think of them in terms of prostitution. It’s very discomforting to think of our touchstone of good Classical taste as having appeared vulgar. But it clearly did, to some.
One of the many extraordinary things about the Parthenon is that it’s meant so many different things to different people at different times. Conceived as the Temple of the Virgin Athena, it was for centuries the Christian Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, and it later became a mosque. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was a neglected ruin in a diminished Athens ruled by the Turks. But in the 1820s and 1830s, the Greeks won independence, and they were given a German king by their European allies. The new state needed to define what kind of society it wanted to be. Olga Palagia takes up the story:
Greece was resurrected