The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [54]
And the splendification of Athens was not measured just in masonry. The modern-day pollution of central Athens is nothing compared to that in the Golden Age. On the south-east slopes of the Acropolis itself a foundry has recently been excavated. Massive clay channels here drained off the molten wax and other by-products of foundry-cast art. Temperatures of up to 950 degrees centigrade had to be stoked in the furnaces on these slopes – the Agora, the Parthenon itself, must have been regularly shrouded in clouds of charcoal-smuts. This was where those bronze sculptures, heroically naked, most funded by individual dynasties, were knocked out to satisfy both the city’s renewed democratic sense of itself and aristocratic competitive instinct – visible proof that your family was capable of more great works than the next.
We should pause for a moment to imagine just how many created versions of the human form there were in Athena’s city. Athens was a territory where the breathing population was watched by beautifully worked stone and metal men – idealised versions of humankind, an embodiment of the democratic Athenian’s ambition. Sculptures – bronze, marble, wood – all dressed in real clothes as if they suffered hot and cold like any other human, lined the sanctuaries, the roads, the colonnades, the law-courts. Only a tiny fraction of the bronze statuary cast in Athens in the fifth century remains, so it can be easy to underestimate just what a packed, ever-expanding site-specific art gallery this city was, the public spaces populated by crowds of silent humans. Silent, but not muted. With a showman’s urge to make their new attraction (in this case, the show city of democracy) as gaudy as any Persian king’s court or Babylonian tyrant’s processional way, the Athenians stage-set demos-kratia. Statues, monuments, temples, democratic courts were all painted and stained in Technicolor. The stark application and gloopy pigments used would shock most of us today, but these were designed to be seen under the bright Attic sun, and their gaudy glory to be remembered.
In 2007 archaeologists turned up in the earth of the Agora seashells pretty with cinnabar-red, lapis-blue and calchite-green mineral pigment. Winkled out of the ground, these craftsmen’s paint pots were half-empty – their job, for some reason, interrupted. The majority of Athens’ public buildings were painted or stained: recent analysis has shown that the Parthenon was gaudy with greens, blues, reds and gold. The Agora was where the backdrop of Athenian democracy was liveried. It was also where the fruits of the Athenian empire – exotic and home-grown – were enjoyed.
Scientists from the west coast of Asia Minor, rhetoricians from Sicily, philosophers from Thessaly and Macedonia made their way to Athena’s city, all chatting, arguing, thinking: imagine the hubbub – the Athenians had a name for it, the thorubos – the buzz of opinion and dissent in the streets, the council chambers, the Assembly, and at those famous debauched-yet-refined symposia that Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon et al. have immortalised, where wit and wine flowed, where poetry was sung and schemes of self-advancement were hatched.
Pericles also filled his city with billowing music. He commissioned the Odeion concert-hall