Poets, writers and artists, from Keats to Le Corbusier, have woven the Parthenon and the democratic ideal it stands for into the fabric of cultures around the world. Like the work of Shakespeare, the structure seems to belong to a shared Western heritage. Pericles, who ordered the building of the Parthenon, told citizens, “You must… feed your eyes upon [Athens]… till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this.” Pericles’ celebration of Athenian values echoes down the centuries. During World War I, images of the Parthenon were printed on the sides of London buses to remind a weary populace of the “civilized” ideals their sons were dying for.
Yet the temple was controversial from the start, funded by tribute money the Greek Empire forced its subject states to pay in order to assert Athens’s dominance. Contemporary critics considered it an extravagant waste, “dressing Athens up like a whore.” Its now signature white marble was painted. Inside it was crammed to the ceiling with the city’s glitzy treasures. Transformed in about A.D. 600 into a Christian church, it became a mosque, harem and ammunition store after the Turks conquered Greece in the 1460s. Each incarnation added new structures–cathedral doors inlaid with silver, a bell tower, a minaret.
The latest threat to the Parthenon has its own echoes in Athens’s ancient past. Critics say that a rush to restore the building before the 2004 Athens Olympics may jeopardize the authenticity of the monument, though architects continue to insist that preservation remains their overriding concern.
Beard argues that we treasure the Parthenon precisely because it is half ruined, and the current controversy echoes those that surrounded the restoration of other masterpieces, like Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, when critics complained that the re-creation of the artists’ original gaudy colors had gone too far. Beard reveals our knowledge of its history to be tantalizing and fragmentary. We have filled in the gaps with our own ideals, like a modern idea of democracy that bears little resemblance to that of fifth-century Athens, or a notion of pure, classical beauty far removed from its gaudier reality. “That sense of loss, absence and desire… now gives the monument its cultural power and urgency,” she writes. Even the nature of its restoration seems consistent with the history that Beard lays out. As workmen labor round the clock to gussy it up for the Olympics, the Parthenon continues to reflect our era’s priorities–and guard the secrets of its own.
