Irrational Greece

Greeks have a reputation for Apollonian rationality and calm, but that’s at best only part of the story. In the NYTBR, Caroline Alexander describes the Dionysian underside of classical Greece:

“On Mount Lykaion (‘wolf mountain” in Arcadia, annual traditions honoring Zeus re-enacted a seminal rite of human sacrifice. In Plato’s Republic, the casual observation is made that in Athens anyone who wished to injure an enemy could commission a magician to cast a harmful spell; ‘for with their incantations and magic formulas they say they can persuade the gods to serve their will.’ Similarly, archaeologists have discovered grotesque little voodoo-like figures bristling with spikes, and curse tablets that were inscribed with malevolent prayers during this Golden Age of humanism and reason. Spirits and dark ancestral memories haunted the landscape of enlightened Athens.”

Alexander is reviewing Joan Breton Connelly’s The Parthenon Enigma who argues that “Athenians were a far more foreign people than most feel comfortable acknowledging today. . . . Theirs was a spirit-saturated, anxious world dominated by an egocentric sense of themselves and an overwhelming urgency to keep things right with the gods.” 

Against this background, Connelly attempts to solve the multiple puzzles of the frieze sculpture and other ornaments on the Parthenon. Alexander lists some of the unanswered questions: “A wheeled cart, tricked up to evoke a ship under sail, was a highly visible feature of the procession — why does it not appear on the frieze? Why are male water-bearers depicted, although it is known that only women carried water in the procession? Why are there chariots, an anachronism in fifth-century warfare? Above all, why would a scene of contemporary civic life appear on this temple to Athena, when every convention of Greek religious art was to draw on images from mythology?”

Connelly discovers a solution in Euripides depiction of King Erechtheus, who saves Athens by the sacrifice of his daughter. According to Connelly, “The serene figures depicted on the frieze were participants not in a civic festival but in a sacrifice — a human sacrifice — of the king’s youngest, maiden daughter, the crop-haired child.”

Alexander observes that this is not the only possible explanation, but finds Connelly’s case convincing, “broad and deep.”