The Periclean Building Program
The Peloponnesian War put a stop to the most spectacular demonstration of the
confidence and pride that Pericles and his fellow citizens felt in their city-state
during the height of the Golden Age in the 440s and 430s B.C.
In the early 440s
B.C. the assembly accepted Pericles' recommendation to initiate a public building
program1
of temples and other structures in public religious sanctuaries on a scale seldom before
seen in a Greek city-state. The new buildings seemed spectacular not only because they
were expensive but also because their large scale, decoration, and surrounding open
spaces contrasted so vividly with the private architecture of Athens in the fifth
century B.C.
Athenian Private Dwellings
Athenians lived in a variety of different kinds of private dwellings in the
city proper2, in its densely populated suburb around the main harbor of
Piraeus3, in villages of varying sizes scattered throughout the countryside of Attica,
and, occasionally, in isolated farmsteads. The majority of city and suburban dwellers
lived in
apartment buildings4, which could
be several stories high. Most apartment dwellers probably crowded themselves and their
families into no more space than a room or two, which they rented from the building's
owner, because they could not afford a very high rent. Wealthier people in the city
owned individual homes, but they frequently had a house and land in the countryside,
too. Dwellers in the countryside owned or rented houses that varied in size from tiny
bungalows to larger structures perhaps on the scale of a small modern house that might
be accompanied by other farm buildings such as sheds. Indeed, Athenian private houses
in both in the city and the country were generally modest in size.
City Houses
Archaeology has not been able to reveal much detail about the
homes of
residents of Athens5 because the modern city covers the remains of
almost all the residential districts of the ancient city and thus inhibits
excavation. Nevertheless, we know that homes in ancient Athens were wedged
haphazardly against one another along
narrow, winding streets.6 Even the residences of rich people followed the same basic design of
bedrooms, storerooms, and dining rooms grouped around open-air courtyards. Some
houses had more than one story. The women and men of the household usually had
rooms set apart for their separate use7, especially if there were
infants or small children8 in the family. These youngsters would be looked after in the women's
quarters, but all members of the household would see each other frequently despite
the notional division of the interior space of the home by gender and age. The
architectural tradition of grouping the house's rooms around a courtyard facilitated
contact among all the members of the household, who included the slaves of the
family. Wall paintings or works of art were as yet uncommon as decoration in private
homes.
Sparse furnishings9 and simple furniture were the rule. Water for household needs had to be
fetched from
public fountains.10 This onerous and constant work was performed by women and the household's
slaves. Sanitary facilities usually consisted of a pit dug just outside the front
door. The pits were emptied by
collectors paid to dump manure11 outside the city at a distance set by law.
Liturgies and Benefactions
The rich citizens of Athens were expected to benefit the public as a whole by
spending their own money to increase the amenities of life for all. In the case of the
civic duties called
liturgies12 (“work for
the people; public service”), the wealthy were legally obligated to provide
financial benefits to the city-state. Especially costly liturgies included duties such
as
paying the costs13 of putting on
drama in the annual public festivals14 of Athens or financing and serving as an officer on a
warship15 in the city-state's fleet. In other cases the wealthy provided benefactions
that were not obligatory but nevertheless also displayed their civic mindedness and
generosity toward their fellow citizens. Such benefactions included providing animals
for public sacrifices and the feasting on their roasted meat that followed and
constructing public buildings and other architectural improvements in the
city16. Although the
costs of liturgies and benefactions, which could be heavy, obviously were a drain on
the resources of a family as a whole, they were normally peformed in the name of the
male head of the household. Spending generously to provide benefits for the common
good was regarded as a primary component of male aristocratic virtue. Generous
benefactors of the public earned increased social eminence as their reward and perhaps
greater favor with their fellow male citizens when they ran for elective office, such
as that of general. Liturgies and benefactions performed by the rich in the interest
of the city compensated to a certain extent for the lack of any regular income or
property taxes.
Benefactions by Cimon and his family
Cimon,17 an aristocratic and wealthy man, gained great fame for his costly
benefactions to his fellow citizens. He was renowned, for example, for
opening
his orchards to let others pick whatever they wanted,18 but his most famous benefactions were architectural. He
paid to have
landscaping with shade trees and running tracks installed in open areas of Athens,
and he also footed the enormous bill for the construction of footings for
defensive walls19 to link the urban center of Athens and the
harbor at Piraeus20 some seven kilometers away. Cimon's brother-in-law also participated in the
family tradition of benefiting Athens by paying for highly-visible public building
projects. He had built as a gift to the city the renowned
Painted Stoa.
21 Stoas were narrow, colonnaded
buildings open along one side, whose purpose was to provide shelter from sun or rain
for these conversations. The Painted Stoa stood on the edge of the
central
open area, 22 the agora, at the center of the city. The
agora served both as a market area where
merchants could set up small stalls and as a gathering place for Athenian men to
discuss politics and every other issue affecting their lives in the city-state. It
was the commercial and social heart of Athens. The crowds of men who came to the
agora daily for conversation would cluster inside
the
Painted Stoa23, whose walls were decorated with paintings of great moments in Greek history
commissioned from the most famous painters of the time, Polygnotus and Mikon. That
one of the stoa's paintings portrayed the battle of Marathon in which Cimon's
father, Miltiades, had won glory was only appropriate, since the building had been
paid for by the husband of Cimon's sister, probably with financial assistance from
Cimon himself.
Public Funding of Buildings
Although rich Athenians sometimes personally financed the construction of buildings
for the use of the public in classical Athens in keeping with the tradition that the
wealthy should benefit their city-state, the most conspicuous and ultimately most
famous architectural monuments of the fifth century were paid for by public revenues.
Athens received revenues from many indirect taxes such as harbor fees and sales taxes.
The extent to which Athens may have benefited from the
tribute paid by the
allies in the Delian League24 remains controversial
because the ancient sources offer no detailed picture of the ways in which the tribute
was expended. Some scholars think that Athens used part of the
League funds,
which were stored on the acropolis after the League's treasury was moved to Athens
from the island of Delos in 454,25 to help finance the
massive public building program initiated by
Pericles26 in 447. Others argue, however, that the ancient evidence does not support this
view.
The Scale of Athenian Public Buildings
The scale of Athenian public buildings varied according to the amount and kind of
space required to fulfill their function. The complex of buildings on the agora's
southwestern edge,27 for instance, consisted of modest-sized structures such as that in which the
city-state's council of 500 held its frequent meetings and the public archives were
kept. The larger meetings of the
assembly28, for which
6,000 attendees seems to have represented a quorum, did not take place in a building
at all but rather convened in the open air on a
hillside above the agora.29 There the architectural
modifications were minimal: a speaker's platform hewn from the rock of the hillside,
a retaining wall built up at the rear of the meeting area, and, eventually, a
portico along the sides of the open area.
Pericles' Acropolis
In 447 Pericles instigated a building project in Athens30 whose scale, cost, and magnificence provoked comment and controversy in its
own time and has contributed enormously in later ages to the reputation of the Golden
Age of Greece. The focus of the project's construction was the
Athenian
acropolis.31 The acropolis (“upper city” or
“city-height”) was the massive, mesa-like promontory that rose
abruptly from the plain on which the city was built and towered over its center, the
agora below. Here the original settlers of Athens
had made their homes, and only slowly had the city expanded onto the plain at the foot
of the looming citadel. A single access road, the “Sacred Way”,
wound up the slope from the agora to the acropolis
and passed through a gate near the top at its western end. The two most conspicuous
monuments constructed on the acropolis under Pericles' program were a huge marble
temple of Athena (called the Parthenon) and a mammoth gate building (called the
propylaia32) straddling the western entrance to the acropolis. The purpose of the
Parthenon was to house a costly new image of the
goddess33, over thirty feet high and made of gold and ivory.
Elaborate carved
sculptures decorated the outside of the Parthenon34, which was surrounded by a
colonnade of fluted columns.35 The propylaia, too, had columns, and
one of its rooms apparently housed
paintings36, rather like a modern museum.
The Controversial Cost of the Periclean Program
The Parthenon and the propylaia alone easily cost more than the equivalent of a
billion dollars in contemporary terms, a phenomenal sum for an ancient Greek
city-state. The
finances for the program 37perhaps came in part from the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League,
although scholars debate to what extent allied funds were used. Funds certainly came
from the financial reserves of the goddess, whose sanctuaries, like those of the other
gods throughout Greece, received both private donations and public support. Pericles'
program was so expensive, however, that
his political enemies among the
aristocrats railed at him for squandering public funds and ruining the city-state's
budget.38 In response to the criticism, Pericles brought the issue before the assembly
of male citizens: “Do you think I have spent too much?” he
reportedly asked. “Entirely too much,” they shouted back.
“Fine,” he retorted, “I will pay for the buildings
myself and put my name on them instead of the people's.” Shamed by the
implication that they lacked pride in their city-state, the men in the assembly
immediately changed their minds. In an uproar they authorized Pericles to spare no
expense in spending public funds to finish the project.
The Parthenon
The new temple built for Athena on the acropolis became known as the Parthenon,
meaning “the house of the virgin goddess,” from the
Greek
word for a virginal female39, parthenos. As the patron godddess of Athens,
Athena had long possessed another sanctuary on the acropolis.40 Its focus was an olive tree regarded as the sacred symbol of the goddess, who
was believed to provide for the economic health of the Athenians. Athena's temple in
this earlier sanctuary had largely been destroyed by the Persians in the invasion of
480 B.C. For thirty years, the Athenians purposely left the Acropolis in ruins as a
memorial to the sacrifice of their homeland in that war. When Pericles urged the
rebuilding of the Acropolis' temples, the assembly turned not to reconstruction of the
olive-tree sanctuary, but rather to construction of the Parthenon. The Parthenon
honored Athena not in her capacity as the provider of economic prosperity but as a
warrior serving as the divine champion of Athenian military power. Inside the
Parthenon,
the gold and ivory statue,41 over thirty feet high, portrayed the goddess in battle armor
and holding in her outstretched hand a six-foot statue of the figure of Victory
(Nike in Greek).
The Parthenon's design
Like all Greek temples, the Parthenon itself was meant as a house for its deity,
not as a gathering place for worshippers. In its general design, the Parthenon was
representative of the
standard architecture of Greek
temples:42 a rectangular box
on a raised platform, a plan that the Greeks probably derived from the stone temples
of Egypt. The box, which had only one relatively small door at the front, was fenced
in
columns all around.43 Normally only priests and priestesses could enter the boxlike interior of
the temple; public religious ceremonies took place around the
open-air
altar,44 which was located outside the east end
of the temple. The soaring columns of the Parthenon were carved in the simple style
called Doric, in contrast to the more elaborately decorative Ionic or Corinthian
styles that have often been imitated in modern buildings. The facade of the United
States Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., for example, is built in the
Corinthian-style.
The Parthenon's special architecture
The Parthenon was special in its great size and elaborate decoration. Constructed
from 20,000 tons of Attic marble, it stretched nearly 230 feet in length and a
hundred feet wide, with
eight columns45 across the ends instead of the six normally employed in Doric style, and
seventeen instead of thirteen along the sides. These dimensions gave it a massive
look conveying an impression of power. Since perfectly rectilinear architecture
appears curved to the human eye, the Parthenon's architects ingeniously designed
subtle curves and inclines in its architecture to produce an optical illusion of
completely straight lines: the columns were given a slight bulge in their middles;
the corner columns on the corners of the temple's raised platform were installed at
a slight incline and closer together; the platform itself was made slightly convex.
These technical refinements made the Parthenon appear ordered and regular in a way a
building built entirely on straight lines would not. By overcoming the distortions
of nature, the Parthenon's sophisticated architecture made a confident statement
about human ability to construct order out of the entropic disorder of the natural
world.
Sculpture on the Parthenon
The sculptural decoration of the
Parthenon 46 also proclaimed Athenian confidence about their city-state's relationship
with the gods, whom the citizens regarded as their helpers and supporters. The
Parthenon had sculptured panels along its exterior above the columns and
tableaux of sculptures in the triangular spaces
(pediments)47 underneath the roof line at
both ends of the building. These decorations were part of the
Doric 48 architectural style, but the Parthenon also presented a unique sculptural
feature. Carved in relief around the top of the walls inside the porch formed by the
columns along the edges of the building's platform was a continuous band of figures.
This sort of continuous frieze was usually put only on Ionic-style buildings. Adding
an
Ionic49 frieze to a Doric temple was a striking change meant to attract notice to
its subject. The Parthenon's frieze depicted the Athenian religious ritual in which
a procession of citizens paraded to the Acropolis to present to Athena in her
olive-tree sanctuary a
new robe woven by specially selected Athenian
girls50 (the Panathenaic festival). Depicting the procession in motion, like a
filmstrip in stone, the frieze showed
men riding spirited horses51, women walking along carrying sacred implements, and the
gods
gathering together at the head of the parade52 to observe their human worshippers. As usual in the sculptural decoration on
Greek temples, the Parthenon frieze sparkled with brightly colored paint enlivening
the figures and the background. Shiny metal attachments also brightened the picture,
serving, for example, as the horsemen's reins.
The Significance of the Parthenon Frieze
No other city-state had ever before gone beyond the traditional function of temples
in paying honor and glorifying its special deities by adorning, as the Athenians did
on the Parthenon, a temple with representations of its citizens. Previously, the
closest temples had come to a reference of such local significance had been to place
sculptures in their pediments that depicted mythological scenes53 with particular meaning for the people of the locale in which temple had been
built. The Parthenon, indeed, had such scenes in its pediments. The
sculptures
of the east pediment54 portrayed the birth of Athena, the patron deity of the
Athenians, while the
west pediment55 portrayed Athena and Poseidon, god of
the sea, engaged in a contest to see who would become the patron deity of the
Athenians by bestowing on them the greater blessing. The Parthenon frieze, however,
achieved a new level of local reference. It made a unique statement about the
relationship between Athens and the gods by showing its citizens in the company of the
gods, even if the assembled deities carved in the frieze at the temple's eastern end
were understood to be separated from and perhaps invisible to the humans in the
procession depicted in the frieze. A temple adorned with pictures of citizens,
albeit idealized citizens of perfect physique and beauty56, amounted to a claim of special intimacy between the city-state and the gods,
a statement of confidence that these honored deities favored the Athenians. Presumably
this claim reflected the Athenian interpretation of their success in helping to turn
back the Persians, in achieving leadership of a powerful naval alliance, and in
controlling, from their
silver mines57 and the allies' dues, an amount of revenue which made Athens richer than all
its neighbors in mainland Greece. The Parthenon, like the rest of the Periclean
building program, paid honor to the gods with whom the city-state was identified and
expressed the Athenian view that the gods looked favorably on their empire. Their
success, the Athenians would have said, proved that the gods were on their side.
