{"id":798,"date":"2019-11-12T22:19:46","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T03:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/?page_id=798"},"modified":"2026-07-31T00:26:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T00:26:33","slug":"parthenon-marbles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/illustrated-lectures\/parthenon-marbles\/","title":{"rendered":"Parthenon Marbles"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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East Pediment Theme: The Birth of Athena It is only thanks to Pausanias’ description that we know the details of the East Pediment’s central subject, since much of the sculpture was removed when the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church. What remains shows the sun god leading his horse-drawn chariot out of Oceanos, the band of water encircling the earth, into the sky above the gods witnessing the birth of Athena: the dawning of a new day. A reclining god, the only pedimental figure to retain his head, looks on from an animal skin (Dionysus and Heracles have both been proposed); the horse on the pediment’s right side, belonging to Selene (the Moon) or Nyx (Night), shows an exhausted expression and drooping head, having run its course, in contrast to the energetic steeds of the rising sun on the left. West Pediment Theme: The Contest Between Athena and Poseidon Uniquely among Greek temples, both pediments of the Parthenon feature the same divine figure, Athena, patron goddess of Athens, and no human figures at all (compare the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, whose east pediment features Zeus but whose west pediment shows Apollo watching the Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths). The West Pediment depicts the contest between Athena and Poseidon for patronage of the city, with the other gods looking on; only the torsos of most figures survive. Athena’s olive tree, her winning offering, stood between the two contestants, each attended by a four-horse chariot, little of which survives (the Venetian commander Morosini destroyed Athena’s chariot horses in a failed attempt to remove the sculptures in the 1680s, though much can be reconstructed from Jacques Carrey’s detailed 1674 drawings). Athena was attended by Hermes, Poseidon by Iris; other figures are thought to represent legendary Athenian kings, including Cecrops, the snake-footed first king of Athens, whose torso is now in the Acropolis Museum. Filling a temple’s triangular pediment space is a real artistic challenge – balance matters more than busyness. While the east pediment’s corners are filled with the horse-heralds of the rising and setting sun, the west pediment fills its diminishing corners with reclining water gods, likely personifications of local rivers, echoing similar figures at Olympia. Remarkably, sculptors fully finished areas of these statues that were never meant to be seen (the figures were designed to be viewed only from the front and from a great distance below), leaving behind their chisel marks as evidence of their pride in the work. The Parthenon Frieze The traditional interpretation of the Parthenon frieze is that it re-enacts in stone the Panathenaic Procession, which concluded with the draping of a new peplos over the cult statue of Athena in the Erechtheum. The procession, beginning eleven miles away in Eleusis and following the Sacred Way up to the Acropolis, unfolds across all four sides of the building: preparations on the west, a double procession along the north and south, converging on the east side (the temple’s entrance), where the Olympian gods themselves are depicted, with a group of five mortals at the center appearing to deliver the peplos. Another compelling interpretation holds that the frieze is more than a glorification of the goddess – it may also memorialize the men who died at Marathon. Just as each of the ten Athenian tribes is honored at the memorial on site at Marathon, the frieze depicts ten groups of horses and men; 192 Athenian soldiers died at Marathon and were buried in the soros there, and 192 is also the number of soldiers carved into the frieze’s procession toward union with the Olympian gods. Metopes Each of the Parthenon’s 92 metopes was carved in high relief. Each side of the building depicts a different mythical conflict, each thought to allegorize the Greeks’ recent defeat of the Persians: the Gigantomachy (Battle of the Giants) on the east, the Amazonomachy (Battle of the Amazons) on the west, the Centauromachy (Battle of the Centaurs) on the south, and the Trojan War on the north. The south metopes best survived both the catastrophic 1687 explosion that damaged the Parthenon and earlier Christian efforts to remove traces of paganism from the building. The British Museum Exhibit These sculptures are presently housed in the British Museum in London, having been purchased in 1816 from the Earl of Elgin (hence their common name, the “Elgin Marbles”). Elgin, serving as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Court, systematically removed sculpture, architectural fragments, and inscriptions from the Acropolis while Athens was under Ottoman rule – a removal whose ownership remains disputed between Greece and Britain to this day. Note: interpretation of ancient art is never straightforward. B.F. Cook’s The Elgin Marbles (British Museum, 1984) served as a primary source for much of this page, though scholar Joan B. Connelly has more recently put forth the intriguing (and debated) argument that the frieze depicts a traditional ceremony of child sacrifice, a practice not uncommon in antiquity for ensuring a city’s continued prosperity, and possibly connected to the origins of Athena’s cult in Athens.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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East Pediment Theme: The Birth of Athena It is only thanks to Pausanias’ description that we know the details of the East Pediment’s central subject, since much of the sculpture was removed when the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church. What remains shows the sun god leading his horse-drawn chariot out of Oceanos, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":790,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/page_fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-798","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2163,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/798\/revisions\/2163"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/drjclassics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}