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To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage. To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village. A rebel son who hated his father,
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survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of
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titanic proportions From Empire. The Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand. And I'm William Duranpo. In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong. We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution. A time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic. Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.
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The Parthenon, that famous temple that stands right over Athens, one of the most celebrated buildings in the world, imitated and copied everywhere from Edinburgh to Nashville, Tennessee.
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Nashville, Tennessee is brilliant because it's an almost exact life size replica. But it's also been a huge draw for modern celebrities. I remember Cliff Richard crooning in front of it in the movie Summer Holiday. Do you remember that?
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B
No, I don't. And I find it charming that you think of him as a modern celebrity now.
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It's in films, it's in video games, it's in memes and emojis. Everywhere.
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B
It's absolutely everywhere. And it still of course dominates and towers over the city of Athens. It's kind of a national symbol for Greece and it's also a symbol, I suppose, of the persistence of the idea in the classical world. Some people, maybe not me, but some people would say it was a sort of symbol of civilization itself, showed a
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picture of it, I think many people could name it. It's a bit harder to know what exactly this thing called the Parthenon is, who built it, what it was used for, why it's so important, what actually the word Parthenon means.
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B
There are lots of other things that we could talk about in relation to Parthenon, not least the ongoing centuries old argument about whether it's okay for the British Museum to own vast chunks of its sculptures and whether they should be restituted to Greece. But actually we'll talk about that another time. But we're not going to talk about that today. We want to start today from actually just thinking about the building itself, Really.
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We're back in the 5th century BC for most of this and I like the idea of starting there because the Parthenon has become so controversial that it sometimes hard to see through the controversy to the building that lies behind it. And the building has in part, a relatively simple history. It is the flagship temple. Standing still in the religious center of the ancient city of Athens on the Acropolis hill means, you know, the high city that you can still look up to from almost anywhere. You are in the, in the city of Athens. Now the whole place, the whole site has a very long history. But what we're looking at is the moment in the middle of the 5th century BC when an enormous amount of money gets plowed in by the Athenians to, as it were, redo, to reconstruct and to rebuild their ceremonial buildings, which this Parthen building is the most important. Now they're rebuilding because backstory about 50 years earlier there'd been a terrible invasion, they'd been invaded by the Persians and the ceremonial center had been destroyed. So this is a kind of post war reconstruction moment and it's that temple becomes the absolute central symbol of it. I think at this point we have to stop for a moment and say, what's a temple?
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B
Yeah, exactly. Because when we think of temples, our minds, for many of us, if we were brought up in a sort of Judeo Christian tradition or adjacent, we think of churches or synagogues as places that we would go to and visit and have a service or get married in or have a funeral in. And partly because a lot of our kind of ecclesiastical or religious architecture draws on actually these wonderful classical temples. And very often the path on quite closely in certain cases I think it's easy to get confused between. But actually ancient Greek temples were super different, weren't they? You didn't go there for a kind of service dedicated to the goddess or whatever, did you?
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A
It's completely different. And essentially what an ancient temple is, and this is true for Greece and Rome, is it is a house, but it's not a house for us. It's a house where a statue of the God or goddess lives. Now there might be all kinds of rituals that happen around about the temple, but you don't do that inside. Inside is where the God or goddess was given a guest house really in the city. And what's really striking is that, and this is where we're coming to the name Parthenon. Each of these Gods and goddesses are not like we tend to imagine, you know, Athena, the goddess Athena, she's the same everywhere. The God Apollo's the same everywhere. Each of them in each temple have their own specific identity. And so it's a house for that specific God. And so far as the Parthenon is concerned, the God in question, the patron deity of Athens, is Athena. Parthenos. And that means virgin. What we call the Parthenon is the temple of the virgin goddess, the Parthenot goddess, Athena.
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B
Right. And there may be other. And indeed are other temples in Athens that are dedicated to Athena, but are dedicated to other aspects of her. And indeed lots of temples to other gods. But this is Athena's tem that contains her image. But there is this sacrifice business. Right. I mean, people sacrificing to the gods is a big thing. But that happened outside the temple.
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Mary. Yep. You would sacrifice, basically kill animals to offer to the goddess or the gods. But it's outside what happens. The ritual is open air. You don't go into the temple in order to have a service conducted by a priest. You go into the temple if you go to see the statue of the God or goddess. And that's the bottom line.
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B
Yeah. Okay. So thinking about the Parthenon itself, like who actually built it is a really interesting. Like, physically, who built it, who designed it, who master planned it, and who put their hands to the stone. And actually, oddly enough for. Because given that so very long ago, we know quite a lot about that. Right. We know that there was an extraordinary figure called Pheidias who was a sculptor, but was also, as it were, the master planner of this entire complex of extraordinary buildings on the Acropolis. And we also know the names of the actual architects.
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A
Yeah, we know a huge amount of some of the characters who lie behind this. There's Pericles, who is working within the democratic constitution of athens in the 5th century, but has quite a lot of individual power and is often treated as the mastermind behind all this rebuilding. Because it's not just the Parthenon. There's other buildings on the Acropolis and elsewhere. We know the name of the big sculptor designer called Pheidias. We know the names of the architects of the Parthenon, Ictinus and Callicrates. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, because aside from the big names in this, there are thousands upon thousands of ordinary Athenians who are involved in some way, from the quarrying of the stone to the trundling of it, to the putting up the scaffolding to the carving in creating within 15 years this vast building from, you know, starting at ground level and having it finished off. It's a huge capital project. This is the HS2 of the Athenian 5th century. And they do it with considerable more speed, transparency and commitment, I think.
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B
Yeah, than any modern, any modern capital project such as Britain's own Deer high speed rail link, which has been trundling on for years. I mean, one of the wonders of this whole thing is how relatively well documented it is for us now. I mean, certainly compared to other building projects in the ancient world we know,
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actually, I think a really surprising amount of the sort of minute detail of how they did it, because that's because the Athenians in the democracy of the 5th century were absolutely committed to transparency. So what they did is they would publish the records of the employment of the money spending on these projects in minute detail. And by publish, I mean, they would inscribe them on stone all ready for anybody who wanted to read this boring stuff to read.
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B
I love it. I mean, can you imagine public accounts and these days being inscribed on stone for everybody to come and look at? It's absolutely amazing. But lucky for us, because it survived.
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A
You know, some of them survived. I mean, we, you know, we get little fragments, but they're the kind of fragments which just give you a little insight to how the building worked. And you can, you can see them do things like commission a whole load of wood purchases and you think, right, okay, so they're building scaffolding now because they must be putting the scaffolding up on the building. You can see them getting rid of things when they finished, you know, when they were surplus to requirements. So they used quite a lot of gold in this building and when they finished, they sell off the excess gold. And you could see them kind of policing the employment practices. What do you do about the guy who might be a bit slower at his work than the man next door? So we've got these glimpses and in some ways very detailed glimpses of how this building got put up. And it did rather quick. I mean, it's 15 years or something. You know, you kind of think of modern big capital projects in the United Kingdom, elsewhere too, and you think, 15
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B
years, it's a blink of an eye. Or compared to a medieval cathedral, or it might take 100 years also the blink of an eye. There's a much later description by Plutarch, a Roman writer writing in Greek. I mean, admittedly from hundreds of years later, but he, he was writing a biography of the statesman Pericles. But he writes about all the different trades and all the different people who were involved in the construction, which, even though it's much later, it does have the sort of ring of plausibility about it, and it's very vivid. He talks about sailors were involved and soldiers, rope makers and carpenters, molders, bronze smiths, stone cutters, dyers, workers in gold and ivory painters, textile workers, embosses, you know, people who make furnishings, wagon makers, trainers of animals and drivers, leather workers, road builders. Like this is a whole city undertaking where no one is in touch because
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you've got a quarry as a marble. Yeah. And then you've got to bring the marble from the quarries outside, 10 miles away or something, to the city. So you need roads and you need to. And you need pack animals and you need. You know, there is a great system here and there are overseers who are clearly kind of big mastermind planners. And I don't think those are necessarily the pheidiasis or the ictinuses or Kallikrates of this world. These are the sort of upper echelons of the middle management are doing a lot of this.
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B
The modern equivalent would be blokes in hard hats with clipboards, engineers, really making sure that this thing happened in the order that it needed to happen and on time. And they did a very good job. 15 years is the blink of an eye for something as extraordinary as the. As the Path.
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A
And what they're putting up here is something which will be kind of easily recognizable to, you know, anybody from any part of Greece who visited it. I mean, we've talked about a temple being not really like a church, much more like the home for a statue of the God or goddess. But they tend to follow the same pattern across the Greek world and later in the Roman world. And what you've got in the path is in some ways quite typical of that. So they knew what they were building. They weren't kind of inventing all this from scratch. And you've got a central room, or in this case, two rooms standing on a platform. And that's where the. The statue of the God is going to be. Round this, you have a colonnade formed of columns, and at either end, at the very top, you have these things technically known as pediments, but really what they are, just triangles. Triangles. So you've got two triangles, one at each end, columns all the way around, and a couple of rooms in the middle, and it's all raised up a bit on steps. Now they're doing this at an absolutely vast scale. But they. They kind of. The. The template's already there. And I think what's really surprising, what would have been surprising about the Parthenon when it was being built, was not just its size. It's a very big temple. It doesn't end up actually being the biggest temple in the Greek and Roman worlds at all. What was really surprising, this is where people would have, you know, jaw dropped, is that every possible place you could put sculpture, they put it right. So you've got sculpture in the gable ends, you've got sculpture going round the inside of the colonnade or around the central room, you've got sculpture just underneath the roof, 92 panels of individual bits of sculpture. And that is what would have been surprising. And that in some ways is what attracts the attention of Greek writers, because. And you've mentioned Plutarch talking about, you know, the immense busyness of actually getting it done. The puffin becomes a tourist attraction as well as a kind of central bit of Athenian ceremonial space. And we get descriptions of it in that kind of literature, in the tourist literature. And I'm thinking here, particularly of a guidebook to Greece written in the 2nd century CE by a guy called Pausanias. And along with Plutarch and along with the inscriptions about who's doing the building and how it's being organized, he is. Is our kind of fantastic source to what it once looked like, because he is describing it probably for the benefit of people who are coming to see it for the first time. You know, just like a modern guidebook saying, go up the necropolis and you can look at the Parthenon. This is what you'll see and explaining it all.
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B
Can I ask you a question? We look at the Parthenon and see it now, and it's a sort of shining white in color. Right. There's been a lot of recent scholarship around how these temples and particularly the sculptures within them were painted. Many colours. I always find it quite hard to take because, you know, the ingrained sense of classical sculpture being this sort of shimmering white is quite hard to get your mind around the idea that they may have been painted in a kind of hyper realist flesh tones and multicolored robes. So what's your opinion on that?
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A
There is no doubt that the Parthenon was painted. What there's doubt about is quite how gaudy it was.
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B
That's where I always trip up. I don't want it to be too
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A
gaudy, actually, you know, partly because it was up for a very long Time and the traces of whatever it was coated with, you know, they're very, very hard to recover. The jury is still out of whether it was an appalling kind of Disney of bright colours or whether it was nice highlighting which just brought the sculpture out. But one thing is for sure, it was certainly coloured. The other thing, which I think is kind of goes against our own assumptions about how it have looked, is that we now tend to see it, whether we go there ourselves or see it in pictures. It's kind of isolated. There are one or two buildings surviving from the ancient world on the Acropolis, but they're all rather kind of. They're pristine and round about them is just marble rock. Now, one of the things that Pausanias, in his description of what it would be like visiting the Parthenon, tells us is that the whole Acropolis and all around the Parthenon would be absolutely full of stuff, right? There would be dedicatory statues, there'd be little shrines, and it was part of a real kind of hexic situation. It's a very. You know, it's very busy up there on the Acropolis. Visually busy. It's not that pure. Pure white. No, it wasn't. Pure white marble temple in a kind of sea of pure marble rock.
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B
Yeah. Not this sort of classical harmony, but a much more of a kind of. Well, yeah, maybe not exactly chaotic, but moving towards.
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A
Yeah.
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B
A busy, colourful scene rather than a kind of beautiful wedding cake.
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A
That's right. At the moment, it looks too much like a beautiful wedding cake, you know, with the white icing. And that is what you have to get rid of.
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B
So what happens if we zoom in? Can we zoom in on the sculptural aspects a little bit? And, you know, what were the sculptures of? Where did you see them? You know, why did they depict what they depicted?
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A
Well, I think you have to start outside. We'll go inside in a bit.
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B
Outside.
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A
What you have to remember is that in 1687, there was a very big explosion in the Parthenon. It was then being used by the Ottoman Turks as a munitions depot and it got hit by a Venetian cannonball in a war between the Venetians and the Turks. And it did huge amounts of damage to some of the sculpture. Not all, but up to that point, much more had survived than what then was left. I think you've also got to reckon that the Christians, the early Christians with their chisels, got rid of quite a lot of sculpture too. They didn't like pictures of the pagan gods and so they were defaced. So we haven't got anything like what there originally was, but we've still got quite a lot. And if you put it together with the description by Pausanias, you can really get quite a long way to see what they were aiming at in this, you know, in this really, truly over the top amount of temple sculpture. And some of the most damaged bits are actually the gable ends. But Pausanias is quite detailed about the gable ends, or at least he tells us what the sculptures in them represented. And they were parts of the story of Athena and her relationship to Athens. Here we've got the temple of the patron goddess and here are two bits of her myth now over one gable end. And some outer figures of this survive over one gable end. It was said, he said that they showed Athena the goddess being born, as she was said to have been directly from her father Zeus head.
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B
No need for a mother.
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A
It was telling women that they weren't actually necessary. It was telling women that. Now we have very little idea how Pheidias and his fantastic group of sculptors would have pulled off the idea of a picture, a sculpture in marble of Athena being born from the head, tiny
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B
Athena with all her armor on from the hed of.
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A
But that is what is at one end. And at the other end we have a battle going on between Athena and Poseidon, who's the God of the sea. And it refers to a story. Again, not much of this survives, but it clearly referred to the story that Poseidon and Athena battled it out for who was going to be the patron God of Athens. And Athena wins because she brings them the olive. Yeah, Poseidon brings in the sea, but Athena wins with the olive. So that's what you've got at the two ends. Now what then is left? You've got. You have 92 panels around the top, just under the roof, which show conflict. They're actually the mostly, not all. They mostly show conflict between civilization as represented by Greece or by Athens, and barbarity as represented by all the kind of nasty things in the world.
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B
So just to be clear, this is running around the top of the temple from the outside?
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A
Yes.
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B
This is what, if you're a nerdy geeky person like me, you call the metapes.
- [25:00]
A
Yes. If you're a nerdy geeky person like you, Charlotte, this is the Metops or Metapes. And they, you know, they are pretty kind of full on because they, again, don't all survive. They were particularly the victim of Christian chisels, actually, but they show the conflict between Upstanding Greek warriors. And the mythical, part man, part horse, centaurs, you know, who. Creatures who.
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B
They kind of represent a kind of unruly kind of human bestiality.
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A
Yes, it's Greeks beating centaurs. Then you have, of course, you've got Greeks beating Amazons, who are female warriors
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B
from the very back of beyond.
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A
And the one thing you know, if you are reading a Greek story, is that the Amazons, female warriors from the back of beyond, represent transgression, and the Greeks always beat them. So you've got Greeks beating Amazons is another great chunk of them. And you also have kind of in a similar vein, though this time involving gods, but you have gods beating giants who tried, in a famous conflict, tried to kind of usurp the position of the gods. So it's quite hard to, I think, to get across how brutal this was. This is an absolutely in your face narratives about Greeks winning things. Right, that's right now. But there's one more bit, and it is the bit that we now kind of admire the most about the Parthenon sculptures, because it's from. It's the frieze.
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B
So we've walked inside the temple.
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A
No, you're not inside. You're inside the colonnade.
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B
Inside the colonnade.
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A
You're not in the middle rooms. You're inside the colonnade. And at the very top of the wall that you. That you come to when you get inside the colonnade, running all the way around, and it's something like 160 meters, you have this sculptured frieze which shows some kind of procession. It's now hugely admired because of the way it manages to kind of show you kind of four horses all in a row, carved out of about two inches of marble. You know, there's chariots, there's some people carrying offerings. It's going all the way around the building and it leads up to the main front door. We go into the temple and right at the top there. And there is one scene which is actually, it looks like a deeply underwhelming culminatory scene of a child. It's not quite clear whether it's a boy or a girl, a child handing over a bundle of textiles to an older person. Right.
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B
This is the sculptural scenes that we can see partly in the British Museum and partly in the Acrocurus Museum in Athens. So this is, as it were, what the fuss is about. So we're not discussing today.
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A
You know, the pediments and metaphys are also Part of this, part of the problem. But these are the ones we can
- [28:38]
B
now see super close up in museums, in short. But actually if you'd been there, you'd have been craning your head at a very peculiar angle to see them.
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A
Well, there's a kind of surprise here because, you know, we've mentioned before Pausanias describing the sculpture, describing the ancient touristic experience. What is really interesting is that Pausanias doesn't mention the Metopes, but he doesn't mention the frieze. Now this, two issues here. One is there's quite a strong suspicion that Pausanias never noticed the frieze because it's right up high in the inside of the colonnade. Perhaps he didn't see it, but what it means is that this rather puzzling bit of sculpture we don't have an ancient identification for. He doesn't say, oh, there's a freezer and it shows. This is completely silent. So the frieze and what it represents has become the big mystery of the Parthenon actually. Now the standard view, and I think it's one that I'd go along with, but it's not the only view is that what it shows. And it's a bit complicated, but it shows the procession that leads up every year to a new dress, basically a new dress, textile, new robe being handed over by one of the weavers, children or whatever to the priest of the next door temple to the Parthenon. This is where it gets complicated. It looks as if what we're seeing here is, is this regular ritual event all happening outside, not in the temples at all, which made and handed over a frock basically in which another statue of Athena was then dressed. Now this statue of Athena actually was just a plank of wood, so she sure needed a dress. She was kept in a nearby temple. That is what most people say. And you can see, I think by the way that I'm describing it that you can see that there are certain holes in this, in, in this. But that is, that's.
- [31:07]
B
Yeah, it's kind, it's, it's kind of obscure, isn't it? And it's, it's argued over and, and the senses that you have as we see them close up today in, in the two museums, this sort of remarkably vivid, beautiful sort of storytelling. But the story itself is fairly obscure. I mean these beautiful, beautiful. I just love the horses. I mean the beautiful sculptures of horses. And there were gods and goddesses mysteriously involved and ordinary people and bulls and leading it to this procession. With the folded textile. But one thing I think that's really nice that it points to is that this textile was really important. And we know, or we possibly know that one of these things was woven by young girls or women every year or maybe every four years. There's quite a lot of textile debate about the role of textiles in this temple and actually the Parthenon itself. But whatever it is, it is definitely a textile and it's definitely the focal point of this absolutely enormous procession. And we don't have any of these textiles because they just don't survive in the way that ceramics survive and that stone sculptures survive. But we also. It was possibly very elaborately woven with scenes from the myth of Athena. You know, one has the impression that it was probably a very precious and important object, but slightly mysterious to us because we don't have. We don't have textile work that's sitting in museums making us think, gosh, how wonderful ancient Greek textiles were. We don't have that. So my suspicion is that actually that textile could have been really quite an extraordinary thing.
- [32:53]
A
It's absolutely a wake up call trying to. I think for now, it unseats our assumption that Greek art comes in stone on pottery.
- [33:06]
B
Yeah.
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A
You know, Greek art came in a whole wide range of forms and some of the most important objects were textiles woven by women. Yeah, women and girls.
- [33:17]
B
So this is a sort of incontrovertible part of the whole religious arrangement that we definitely know was made by women, this particular little textile. And that's the focal point of this enormous procession. So, you know, there are women involved here as well as all these blokes.
- [33:35]
A
That's right.
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B
And nameless women.
- [33:37]
A
Yes. But, you know, you watch people. I mean, this particular scene is in the British Museum and you watch people seeing that this being told, this is the central focus. This is the central bit over the front door, guys. Right. And they look puzzled. It's because. What on earth is going on?
- [33:58]
B
Well, it looks like a folded tea towel.
- [34:00]
A
It looks like a blanket. It looks like a blanket in urn. It is very hard to make sense of one of the things that is peculiar about the Parthenon and why people have wanted to find other explanations from the one that we've been sort of gesturing towards is that the decoration on Greek temples is apart from this, overwhelmingly, it depicts gods and mythological figures. Every Greek temple, its sculpture is gods, a myth. And just like the metopes around the Parthenon or the gable sculptures. So people are worried about this appearing to show a real life procession with real life Athenians in it. And so they wanted to try, and I think they've been super unsuccessful. They wanted to try to find a myth that you could make this fitness. Myths of human sacrifice have been appealed to not very convincingly, but if it is a representation of the Athenians in procession, handing over this textile, it's also a sign of the extraordinariness of the Parthenon in that it's representing real human beings. Yeah. And people would then say, right, that's the Athenians for you, isn't it? You know, slightly above themselves.
- [35:39]
B
Yeah. They've put themselves into a mythical position. They've believed the myth, they believe the main myth.
- [35:46]
A
So. And it is, you know, and I said, it's the path and the mystery. It is the path and the mystery. And, you know, as you, you start to tell the story of it, it
- [35:55]
B
kind of unravels a bit in your hands, doesn't it? We don't know quite enough.
- [35:59]
A
This is a textile, but it's not actually for this temple, it's for the next door, you know, you think I. I can. I feel the lack of conviction coming
- [36:07]
B
over in what I'm saying. Yeah, well. But I'll tell you what, why don't we walk inside the temple now? Because as we walk, we, We've walked up the steps of the temple, we've walked around it, we've. We've walked around the outside, we've walked around the entire colonnade, we've craned our
- [36:23]
A
heads and if we are Pausanias, we've failed to notice the fridge, failed to
- [36:27]
B
notice the freeze, because we're lazy tourists. But now we're going to get. Now we're going to walk right inside the temple and actually we're going to be greeted by an inescapably magnificent, shimmering, overwhelming, blingy, blingy sight. Right.
- [36:42]
A
It is a what, 15 meter, 12 to 15 meter statue of the goddess Athena. Athena Parthenos, the virgin goddess, and she is made out of gold and ivory.
- [37:00]
B
So my favourite obscure classical world, Chris Elephantine. She's a chrys.
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A
Elephantine statue made out of gold and elephant and ivory. Right.
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B
And the whole point is she doesn't exist anymore. Right. You went in ant, you'd have gone in there and had this extraordinary vision of this vast, shimmering, wealthy, shiny white and gold thing.
- [37:26]
A
Yes.
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B
And she doesn't exist.
- [37:27]
A
Yeah, she probably. We know that there was a big fire in the Parthenon in the third century ce, and if you want to guess, the chrysalophantine golden ivory statue was destroyed then, it certainly could hardly have survived it. Now, I think we ought to be a bit clear about the golden ivory. It wasn't solid gold and solid ivory. There was a frame, a wooden frame. And then she was kind of constructed in sheets of gold and sheets of ivory roundabout. And we know it was hollow because there are stories of mice nesting inside it.
- [38:02]
B
So sweet.
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A
So the mice find a very convenient place to make a nest.
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B
It's a very luxury sort of, you know, Trump Tower type nest for a mouse.
- [38:09]
A
But, you know, she's extraordinary. She's big, she's got great helmet on, she's carrying a shield, she's a woman, but she's dressed in military kit. And what she's trying to do is to evoke that particular view of this virgin goddess who actually lives here. Now, not all statues are the same. Some are just wooden planks, but this one is vast, shimmery and immensely precious. Now, I tend to go with the bling version of this. I do. But I think there's a bigger intellectual point to it. Because if you read ancient debates, and I have plenty of ancient debates on this, about what a God looked like, how would you recognize a God if you saw it? Big question. Well, some of their answers were they'd be very big, they'd also be very shiny. That's one. A surefire guarantee that you're dealing with a God is if you meet this very big person who shines. Right. And so I think you've got here something which goes beyond bling. It's about trying to evoke what it would be like to look at our God. And it's nice that we can tell from the archaeology that there is a pool of water just in front of the statue. And part of the point of that, I mean, it might have been nice for humidifying the ivory. It might have helped keep it from flaking. But it also, it would have reflected whatever light you could get. And it would make the sculpture of Athena shimmer.
- [40:08]
B
And you'd get her twice over. Cause you'd get her in the reflection. The whole thing is a kind of amazing vision. And we know about her partly because actually, Pausanias, our guidebook writer, was obviously, you know, completely bedazzled and overwhelmed by the sight of this sculpture, which is why he maybe forgot to mention all the boring stone sculptures around the outside. Because he really does describe that this sculpture in quite a lot of detail, down to the details on her helmet and so on and so forth. This was obviously what would grab Your attention.
- [40:41]
A
Yeah. And Pausanias is a really good, really detailed account. I mean, I just thought 80% of his description of the Parthenon, for your average tourist is about this sculpture. It's not about the rest. But we've also got some glimpses of her from the sort of ancient tourist trade. Yeah.
- [41:03]
B
Little sort of miniature ones.
- [41:06]
A
Yeah.
- [41:06]
B
Ones to take home.
- [41:07]
A
Yeah. You could buy one for your mantelpiece back at home. Other cities occasionally kind of used a version of her on small scale, so you've got that sense of being able to compare a load of different versions, but all clearly reflecting something very close to what Poussinias talks about. And that's why, if you were to go to Nashville, Tennessee, they have not just got the outside and the frame of the Parthenon there, they've also got a modern replica based on all these, of the statue of Athena herself. And it has quite recently been gilded, so you can get the real impression by going to Nashville.
- [41:55]
B
Shiny shininess. But there's another room. There's another room. Right. So there are two rooms. The other room is full of stuff. Right. Full of the riches of the Athenian
- [42:09]
A
temples quite often just have one room in the middle and that's where the statue of the God goes. And that's. That's it. The Parthian's got a back room as well as a front room. The statue is in the front room. In the back room is what the treasury of the Athenians. And it is. It includes all kinds of things that were offered to Athena that the Athenians had got from places and they stuffed them away in this fantastic Aladdin's cave just behind, in the room behind them, the statue of Athena. And they are just extraordinary. I mean, there are thrones that they've looted from somewhere. They've got daggers, they've got lyres, there's a gold drinking horn. Now, we know this from descriptions and inventories, inscribed inventories. We don't see them any longer, they're also all gone. But there was supposed to have been a gold drinking horn that Alexander the Great's wife gave them. And Alexander, how on earth it all fitted in, Heaven only knows. Alexander is supposed to have donated to the temple, which is also the city, really, 300 suits of Persian armor, piles.
- [43:37]
B
It's a real dragon's hoard. And it's quite hard to imagine how. Yeah, exactly. How it would be in heaps, I don't know, or displayed in museum conditions. I mean, who knows?
- [43:45]
A
It's with all the transparency again, of making lists of it and saying what there is. And it makes you realize, I mean, that there must have been security issues here. And you know, our idea that we would just walk into the Parthenon and admire the sculpture and go away again. I suspect there was some quite burly security guards and it was heavily locked after dark. Because this is where an enormous amount of the wealth which belonged sort of to Athena, but sort of to the city of Athens.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah.
- [44:24]
A
Was. Was housed.
- [44:25]
B
Yeah. And in this. So we sort of. We've been through the outside and the inside there, but. And we. And we've talked about this sort of guidebook descriptions of the temple. But what, what did people think? Because they, what did people make of it in the ancient world? Because it. This huge, huge amount of resource and money had been thrown at this extraordinary thing. And quite often spending money on enormous capital projects is controversial. I just wonder whether the breaks were always entirely positive about it or what.
- [44:56]
A
No, they weren't. And what blue top tells us is that some people in Athens, when it was being put up, were pretty opposed to this awful waste of money. But also there was more to it because if we say, well, who really bankrolled this? Well, Athens in the middle of the fifth century has got a growing empire. It's a pretty exploitative empire. And where's Athens finding the money to build something like the Parthenon and all the other buildings? Well, actually it is from the prophets, the tribute, as it is euphemistically known from the Athenian empire or the Allies, as they're euphemistically known. And the part of the. The awkward squad in Athens. So this was. This is what's quoted, the Parthian was like dressing up Athens like a whore and it was using the prefects of the empire to turn Athens into a prostitute. So there is this kind of other
- [46:05]
B
strand, a sort of discomfort with the excess.
- [46:09]
A
And you get hints of that in little reported anecdotes which say, for example, that there was a little trial, little case about corruption aimed at Pheidias, because had he actually made off with a bit of the gold that was supposed to be on the sculpture, the sculpture of Athena. And both Phidias and Pericles get into trouble because on the great shield that Athena is holding in the big statue in the middle, Phygias is supposed to have put his face amongst all the other faces and Pericles face. Now you might say there's a little bit of self promotion, but it was also sacrilege. And there's one story that he ended up in the nick for a short time. Having done that, that by and large though, I think it gets a good press. I mean there's some funny incidents on the way. And there's a guy in the 4th century is supposed to have kind of used the Templars pop up brothel. Really shock horror again, how he did this, heaven knows. And where exactly don't know. But most people in the ancient world, most of the big guys, they want to leave their own mark on the part. They want. They want to claim their bit of the Parthenon glory. So there's a sculpture inside of the Roman emperor Hadrian, right. Hadrian wanting to have a bit of the Parthenon mystique. Alexander the Great as well as giving endless number of suits of Persian armor, hammers, shields, all around the facade just to put his bit there. And there is an inscription that has been discovered very, very faintly an inscription right across the front entrance which commemorates the Roman emperor Nero.
- [48:08]
B
Right, that's so interesting. And it shows that this building as we know, has a super long life taking us right up to today. And as it were, it has the life of the century in which it was built, but then a long, long history of use and reuse and claiming and reclaiming and decline and revival, which we will look at in a future
- [48:32]
A
episode we going to. Because, you know, it's somewhere in the third century, it probably did get very badly damaged by a fire. But the good news is that that was not the end. It wasn't destroyed, it was damaged and it was not the end of the Parthenon, which eventually gets turned into a church and then into a mosque. And the history still goes on.
- [48:57]
B
Yeah, so the history still goes on till today when Greece has become one of the most visited countries in the world for tourists. Lots of people go to Greece. Obviously not everybody goes to Greece, not everyone can get to Greece, but it is a hugely visited country. The Acropolis, the Parthenon itself is by far the most visited site in Greece and thousands of people, maybe 15, 17,000 people go there every single day. It can get very hot in Athens. I feel exhausted even thinking about visiting the Acropolis and the Parthenon or I have done in the last five or 10 years. What tips would you give somebody who wanted to do it, Mary? Is it a kind of go early in the day situation? Does it go in the middle of the winter situation? I mean, what's the best way to visit?
- [49:53]
A
Ideally not in summer, but then most people who are going on their holidays to Greece are going in the summer. So that's not very helpful. I think it is a bit of a climb to get. You know, we've talked about the Acropolis. It's a hill, right? You have to climb up the hill to get there. I think that we always tend to have the view that somehow it's more honorable to go early in the morning, you know, get up early before the sun is up. I think most visitors tend to think, let's get up early and go quickly.
- [50:25]
B
That's the problem, isn't it? There's already a queue super early, so everybody's having that thought.
- [50:29]
A
Thoughts? I think possibly go late. I have much enjoyed my visits there. I have to confess that now I prefer to go to the Acropolis Museum, which is a fantastic, fantastic museum. And you can sit there and you can look out of the windows designed to give you the perfect view of the Parthenon. So I think I wouldn't feel too guilty not making the climb.
- [51:01]
B
Also, the Acropolis Museum has a very nice cafe. You can be among the sculptures, those that aren't in the British Museum or elsewhere, and look at the wonderful architecture of the Parthenon from afar.
- [51:12]
A
The other alternative is to go to Nashville, Tennessee.
- [51:17]
B
Well, Mary, I think we should finish there for today. But I mean, you've literally written the book on the Parthenon, which is a book. It's true, it is a book, but I would say it's a brilliant book. And my relative silence during this episode has been because most of what I know about the Parthenon is from your actual book. I actually really love this book. So it would be remiss for me not to mention that if, if you want to know more about the Parthenon, please read Mary Beard's book on the Parthenon, which is a superb book. But as ever, we want to know your thoughts, thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to us@instant classicspodgmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classicspod.
- [52:03]
A
Bye bye.