After watching a four-part series made in 2016 called Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit, I looked for an audiobook by her. She was on the screen every minute, along with views of the Roman Empire beginning with Rome and going to the far reaches of empire from the north of Britain to North Africa. It was an engaging series and I am now a fan of Mary Beard, a classics scholar formerly at Cambridge University.
The Parthenon is no less engaging. Early in Chapter 1 she describes “other parthenons” built in honor of the original. I recall vividly seeing the one in Edinburgh, a city called by some The Athens of the North, built at the urging of Lord Elgin in honor of the Battle of Waterloo on Calton Hill. By “the one” I mean the dozen columns that were built before the money ran out. Calton Hill left me with many questions, given the number of unrelated monuments on it.
In the US Beard notes that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many banks, government buildings, and museums were built that remind one of the Parthenon. The one she focuses on is the replica in Nashville, Tennessee, built within 3 millimeters of the original. It was originally built for the 1897 centennial celebration, but the people of The Athens of the South were so taken with it, they reconstructed a permanent one in the 1920s. She describes a bit of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville which gave it an international reputation.
Built in the 5th century BC, the one in the actual Athens was a temple honoring Athena with a huge statue of her by Phidias. Greek temples were not gathering places for worship, but housed statues of those to be honored. At the end of the 5th century CE it became a Christian church, the Cathedral of the Virgin; the fact that it was a Christian church for almost as long as it was a temple is willfully forgotten. And then the Turkish rulers converted it to a mosque in the early 1460s, another fact to which we turn a blind eye. They used the Erechtheion as a harem with the caryatids (the six statues of maidens that are columns for the building) “now doing duty as advertisements for the delights that lay inside.”
During their war with the Venetians, the Turks stored ammunition in the Parthenon, the Venetians fired on it, and the resulting destruction encouraged Lord Elgin to scoop up the marbles that had been blown off and remove many still on the building. He took them back to Britain, setting off the huge controversy that Beard thinks thrust the Parthenon in the public eye more than it would have been otherwise.
One last thing I want to remember: Beard mentions Pausanias multiple times as he was a traveler who wrote about Greece, born around 110 CE and was perhaps the earliest writer whose description of the Parthenon has not been lost. His name was familiar to me from my reading about Ancient Greece in the 1990s.
Mary Beard, The Parthenon, Harvard University, 2010 (revised edition), 240 pages (I listened to the audiobook).