Waldstein, Charles: Essays on the art of Pheidias (Cambridge, 1885)

VII.] THE CENTRAL SLAB OF THE PARTHENON FRIEZE. 257

is primarily an expression of Attic unity. How then would an artist commemorate
the event and represent the scene?

In an essay on the Parthenon frieze by Th. Davidson recently published and with
much, I must say most, of which I cannot agree, the author rightly criticises the
common interpretation of the Parthenon frieze in maintaining that there are no
instances in Greek art of the representation of a general indefinite custom such as a
periodically recurring event. Though there is one instance of the representation of
the various athletic games without any reference to definite contests or victories on the
throne of the Olympian Zeus by Pheidias, still the author is right in maintaining that
it was contrary to the Greek mind to represent generalisations without clothing them
in the sensuous form of some definite type or event. But he is strangely misled by
the word " event" into assuming that the Greeks then chose some contemporary
historical event. Of this there are no instances in sculpture in the time of Pheidias.
We do hear of paintings in the Stoa Poikile at Athens (by Mikon, Polygnotos or
Panainos), a secular building in which among mythological scenes, such as Theseus
leading the Greeks against the Amazons, are represented the battles of Oinoe and
Marathon. But in the battle of Marathon (to this Pausanias devotes a few words of
description while he merely mentions Oinoe) Theseus, Athene and Herakles take
part and so the action receives a mythological character. Other instances of approach
to the representation of an historical, still less contemporary, event even in painting I
know none in the time of Pheidias.

But contemporary events were commemorated and represented in art by a fixed
method congenial to the Greek mind. The lasting type of the attribute or event was
made the artistic bearer of the thoughts and feelings of the time. This the Greeks
possessed in the myths of gods and heroes. And thus, for instance, the warlike-
glory of the Greeks was in all times represented and their individual victories com-
memorated by the mythical types of Greek prowess over barbarian forces, such as the
Gigantomachia, the Amazonomachia, the battle between Centaurs and Lapiths. In
Athens those myths were chosen by preference to commemorate the victory over the
Persians in which the Athenian hero Theseus distinguished himself, and so the
Gigantomachia is one of the subjects of the metopes of the Parthenon.

When the sculptor desired to represent on the frieze the Panathenaic procession
and all that it meant to the Athenian, he sought for the mythical type of this festival,
the Panathenaion. This type is the real founding of the festival and the establishment
of the political unity of the Attic people in the Synoikia of Theseus, the national hero
and the active shield of the Greeks at Marathon.

I therefore see in the Parthenon frieze the representation of the Synoikia of
Theseus. It is needless to say that in these mythical representations the Greeks
did not strive after imaginary archaism, but represented the customs and people
of their own lime, the Lapiths as Attic warriors, and the Thesean festival as the
festival they saw before them, the youths and warriors that made Athens great.
Thus this scene, commemorating the great festival of the day, recalled the foundation
of Attic national greatness by the patron hero, and glorified the protecting goddess
of the Athenian state.

In all the works of the Parthenon Pheidias has glorified the Attic people and
Athene, and it is a normal development to which we have alluded in the second essay
that he should have risen in his last period from Athene and Panathenaism at
Athens to Zeus and Panhellenism at Olympia.

W.

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