Pheidias, Sculptor to the Gods

Pheidias, the son of Charmides, was an Athenian born around 495 BC, according to the best evidence available (Richter, 227). When he was approximately 10 years old, armies of the great Persian empire, which had already subjugated Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor (western Turkey, today), invaded the Greek homeland. A defiant force of natives, lead by Athenians, met the conquering Persians at Marathon, 26 miles outside Athens. There the defenders repulsed their would-be overlords, securing freedom for southern Greeks, spawning great feelings of nationalism-- embraced with remarkable zeal by the Athenians, and securing the enmity of Persian emperors for many years to come.

Just a decade later, when Pheidias was about 20, the Persians invaded again, rampaging over much of Greece but reserving the harshest treatment for Athens, the city that had dared to oppose the last Persian advance. The marauding armies sacked Athens, destroying homes, public buildings, and crops in the surrounding territory of Attica. Yet, in a series of great battles at Themopylae, Salamis, and Plataeae (Walston, 58), soldiers and sailors from all over Greece, probably including Pheidias himself, finally turned back the Persians, who swore they would return yet again to rape and pillage.

When the Persians turned tail, the Greeks were understandably relieved, although their cities lay in ruins and their crops, previously abandoned, held little prospects for a harvest large enough to feed the starving masses. At this point, feelings of unity and camaraderie enveloped people from all the city-states, for they had put aside their differences and triumphed over a barbarian enemy of superior size, strength, and experience. Greeks, according to cultural scholars, now operated with great surety of purpose and tremendous width of vision. In their elation of victory, they rallied around a god-- the pan-Hellenic Zeus who guarded them-- and they trudged forth, determined to create a peaceful and secure society.

A scale model of Athens' acropolis, Pericles's monument to the city's valor View it in the Perseus Collection

The happiness would not last long. Each polis shortly returned to its own concerns, and Athens, perhaps more than any other, needed time to rebuild itself. As one historian noted, "Filled with this high spirit and with all the vast experience of a great history, the Athenians were forced, as it were, to re-colonize their own country; to begin life again, as backwoodsmen instinct with long culture and old traditions of home, as an ancient community moved with the new tasks, vigor, and energy of emigrant settlers" (Walston, 59). Tyrants, political leaders who wielded nearly absolute control but did not carry the negative baggage of modern dictators, began reconstruction and fortification of Athens in earnest in the late 470s BC. The second of these, Kimon, attracted artisans from all over the Greek world, planning to make his a monumental city worthy of its newly acquired fame and grandeur. But Kimon's projects served only to lay the groundwork for the next tyrant, Pericles, and his august architect, Pheidias.

"We can thus imagine how a boy, gifted by nature with strong impulses, a receptive heart, a rapid intelligence, and a creative imagination should, from the earliest age, be imbued with the spirit of greatness: how the youth was affected by the stirring events of the overthrow of the Persian supremacy, and how his desire for work and for the effectuation of his inner feelings in the outer production would be nurtured by the activity and energy which surrounded him at the close of the war" (Walston, 60). And since Greek artists had already achieved great triumphs in the field of sculpture, Pheidias did not have to create a new medium for the expression of his talents, he had only to learn from his predecessors.

Although his liberalizing age encouraged creativity in terms of departure from traditional schools of sculpture, Pheidias learned from several old Athenian masters who produced their great works before the tumult of the Persian invasions. He also studied at the side of Ageladas, a teacher from Argos who, in addition to Pheidias, instructed a handful of other exceptional classical sculptors. From Ageladas, Pheidias discovered old-fashioned techniques and representational methods common in areas south of Athens. In learning the methods of two distinct schools, the former driven to vitality and rhythm while the latter preferred well-defined composition and symmetry, Pheidias avoided provincial idiosyncrasies and acquired the knowledge necessary to integrate archaic methods with innovations of his own (Walston, 65).

This phenomenally talented and remarkably learned mind would, however, go to waste if it did not find a patron. For Greek artists of all kinds relied on the generosity (sometimes the consequence of state compulsion) of wealthy citizens. In Pericles, a rhetorician whose political star rose with volcanic speed and surety, Pheidias found his man.

A look up the stairs of the Propylaia, the majestic entrance to the acropolis View it in the Perseus Collection

Pericles did not passively take the reigns of power. As the afterglow of Marathon and Salamis faded, Pericles sought to capitalize on Athenian hegemony. In the face of the Persian threat, city-states throughout the Greek world organized a defensive league, backed mainly by the renowned Athenian navy and headquartered on the mid-Aegean island of Delos. Over time, as the requirements of defense became greater and the cost of a far-flung navy ballooned, the Athenians gradually took control over their partners, extracting tribute for the Delian treasury and asserting strong-armed "recommendations" concerning foreign policy. By the time Pericles took power, the Delian League had become the Athenian empire-- with power a nationalist like Pericles could exploit.

The tyrant planned to transform Athens into a marble city in the course of his leadership, a feat which the Roman emperor Augustus would emulate 450 years later. And so, when the Treasury of the Delian League moved to Athens, Pericles set forth his plans for the gold it held. Indeed, he "though it justifiable to draw on the contributions of other Greek cities in the League to rebuild and beautify an Athens ruined by the Persian occupation. The gold reserves were turned into works of art, although Pericles declared at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War [against Sparta and her allies] that, in case of extreme necessity, the gold offerings and the furnishings of the temples could be used as gold bullion" (Leipen, 17-18).

Thus Pericles found the money to redouble Kimon's building campaign. In fact, the "reconstruction" ordained shortly after triumph over the Persians became the full-scale decoration of the city. Pericles' "subtle taste and delicate tact, combined with his universal culture and practical energy, made him the fittest person to help and encourage a genius like Pheidias, as they enabled him to detect this genius, insure his services, and join in friendship with the man" (Walston, 61). And that friendship lead to an unprecedented working relationship, as Pericles consulted Pheidias on all public works and charged him with supervision of the great monuments' construction. Most importantly, "something conceived by an imagination saturated with well-balanced thought, whose conceptions, however lofty, were never fantastical, had to be realized; and there was no question of weakness or powerlessness for the victors of Marathon and Salamis (Walston, 60).

The pair's greatest collective achievement-- still recognizable today-- stands on the Athenian acropolis, the high plateau rising at the heart of the city. On it, Pericles placed several cult statues, and a number of diverse temples (incorporating many different design techniques and styles), including the temple to Athena the Protectress, the city's patron goddess. That temple, which would later become known as the Parthenon, included the single greatest work of statuary in Greece at the time, the Athena Parthenos, which Pheidias himself designed and constructed.

The classical biographer Plutarch, in his Life of Pericles, remarked, "As the buildings rose stately in size and unsurpassed in form and grace, the workmen vied with each other that the quality of their work might be enhanced by its artistic beauty. Most wonderful of all was the rapidity of construction. Each one of [the structures], men thought, would require many successive generations to complete it, but all of them were fully completed in the heyday of a single administration" (Richter, 215). With construction of the Parthenon having been underway for nine years and with six still to go before completion, Pheidias unveiled his chryselephantine statue of Athena the Protectress in 438 BC to the acclaim of his benefactor and the city.

Fame and fortune did not last long, however. Pheidias's jealous competitors leapt at every chance to decry him, and Pericles's political opponents, unable to attack the great statesman directly, chose to attack his artisan friends. So, not long after the dedication, people who should have been sharpening chisels chose to grind their axes in court-- the place where Athenians fought many of their political battles. For Athens' democracy provided that one citizen could sue another for almost any reason, and the punishment for civil infractions did not generally require restitution: the guilty could easily find themselves ostracized (i.e. exiled for ten years), as many of the city's most well-known and, periodically, well-liked figures did.

Modern ruins of the Erectheion, another temple near Athena's Parthenon View it in the Perseus Collection

Alas, Pheidias's adversaries leveled their charges and brought him to trial. Plutarch relates that the malcontents persuaded one of Pheidias's assistants to sit in the market-place and ask for immunity from prosecution if he accused his employer of wrongdoing. The city accepted and brought a formal prosecution before the assembly. They charged that Pheidias had (a) embezzled state funds while constructing his statue and (b) committed a sacrilege by giving a likeness of himself and one of Pericles to two figures on the Athena's shield. Pheidias trounced the latter allegation by removing all the gold from the statue (Pericles has recommended that the sculptor make this possible in the event that the city needed funds) and weighing it. On the second charge, there could be no real defense.

Even Aristophanes, the comic playwright and conservative social commentator whom Plato credits with popularly tarnishing Socrates' good name, tossed in his two drachmas' worth in Peace, his anti-Periclean satire. In the comedy, Aristophanes blames Pericles for starting the Great Peloponnesian War in order to cover up the "misdemeanors" of his good friend and chief architect... Pheidias. Of course, Aristophanes took his caricatures to extremes, as with Socrates in The Clouds, so one must not rely on them when looking for historical fact. But the point remains: Pheidias became very famous, and political foes and grumblers used him as cudgel with which they could attack Pericles.

In any case, Pheidias lost the trial and found himself and his family homeless. Leaving his Athena with a clever design trick to frustrated his enemies, he sought refuge in a place where the political fires did not burn as hot. He traveled to Elis, a region in the northwestern Pellopponesus, where elders decided that Olympia, the religious sanctuary and home of the quadrennial pan-Hellenic Games which the Eleans guarded, had a suitably mammoth temple to Zeus, the guardian of all Greece, but required a similarly colossal statue.

In Elis, the climate offered not only relief but also freedom. Unlike today, when Athens is revered as the home of all Greeks, fifth-century-BC Greeks feared and often detested Athens and its mighty navy. After all, Pericles had plundered the Delian League's treasury to build a monumental shrine to his own city's protectress, an act which, on the whole, won him great favor at home while it vexed the allies who involuntarily paid for its construction. At Olympia, however, the entire town stood as a sanctuary for all Greeks, where warring city-states would lay down their arms and compete in the Olympic Games. A temple here would glorify all Greeks, and a statue in honor of Zeus would unite them.

In his workshop, just steps away from the already decades-old temple of Zeus, Pheidias left the cares of politics-- not his chosen field, anyway-- aside and concentrated on enjoying work on his statue of Olympian Zeus. The sculpture, when completed, reached a height 30% higher than the Athena Parthenos. The seated god was so large and imposing, in fact, that critics remarked that he looked as if he would tear off the temple's roof to extricate himself from its earthly confines. Simply put, Pheidias's 45-foot high chryselephantine and ebony sculpture towered over visitors in such a way the those who looked up into his eyes felt the intense stare of a national protector lording over them. The statue, a work unparalleled in chryselephantine materials, secured for Pheidias a place alongside the hanging landscaper of Babylon and the sentinel of Alexandria as a creator of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

This artistic triumph, unfortunately, came late in his life. And though the exact date of Pheidias's demise remains uncertain (some fix it at a time when others assert he had not yet finished the Zeus), the best evidence available certifies that Pheidias worked on the Zeus only after being exiled from Athens (Richter, 227, and Spivey, 158) and that he died not long after its completion, a happy and revered man retired in the countryside of Elis (Walston, 83). The hands which produced so much "sublimity and precision" ceased their poetic motion in the early 420s BC, just after Pericles launched the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Then and there, as the Sculptor to the Gods journeyed to Hades, the Golden Age of Athens (and Greece) began its tragic retreat.

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