48
“E
xciting and revelatory…Her book is that
rare thing: the exposition of a truly great
idea, and a reminder of what a thrilling subject
the past, that foreign country, can be.”
NewYork
Times Sunday Book Review
The Pharos Arts Foundation, in collaboration
with the Moufflon Bookshop, presented a talk by
Professor Joan Breton Connelly, and the launch
of her book
The Parthenon Enigma
, on 27 June
2014 at The Shoe Factory, Nicosia. The event was
held under the auspices of the Embassy of Greece
in Cyprus on the occasion of the Hellenic Presi-
dency of the Council of the European Union.
From the Pharos Arts Foundation
Built in the fifth century BC, the Parthenon has
been venerated for more than two millennia as
the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and pro-
portion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also
come to represent our political ideals, the lav-
ish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the
model for our most hallowed civic architecture.
But how much do the values of those who built
the Parthenon truly correspond with our own?
And apart from the significance with which we
have invested it, what exactly did this marvel
of human hands mean to those who made it?
In this revolutionary book, Professor of Classics
and Art History at New York University, Joan
Breton Connelly, challenges our most basic as-
sumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient
Athenians. Beginning with the natural environ-
ment and its rich mythic associations, she re-cre-
ates the development of the Acropolis – the Sa-
cred Rock at the heart of the city-state – from its
prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a
constellation of temples among which the Parthe-
non stood supreme. In particular, she probes the
Parthenon’s legendary frieze, the 525-foot-long
relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper
reaches before it was partially destroyed by Vene-
tian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and
most of what remained was shipped to Britain (in
the nineteenth century) among the Elgin Marbles.
The plot
The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession – a dazzling
pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and
maidens – has for more than two hundred years
been thought to represent a scene of annual civic
celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But
thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the dis-
covery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenis-
tic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s
intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered
a long-buried meaning, namely a story of human
sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In
a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual,
this story was at the core of what it meant to be
Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars
our popular notions ofAthens as a city of staid phi-
losophers, rationalists and rhetoricians, a world in
which our modern secular conception of democ-
racy would have been simply incomprehensible.
The Parthenon Enigma
Book by Joan Breton Connelly
