An Ionic frieze on a Doric temple
A frieze is a continuous band of sculpture. Doric temples usually had metopes and triglyphs above the columns, and the Parthenon has them too, on the outside. What makes it unique for a Doric temple is a second, Ionic-style frieze, set further in: it wrapped around the upper walls of the cella, the temple’s main block, and over the two inner porches. It was built of 115 blocks, 1.06 metres high, which were structural parts of the wall, and its reliefs show 378 human and divine figures and more than 220 animals, mostly horses.
Pheidias designed it, and some of his most gifted pupils carved it. Because it sat behind the outer colonnade and high up, a visitor saw it only in glimpses between the columns, never all at once.
Where does the procession start?
At the south-west corner of the temple. There the procession splits into two. One group moves along the west end and then the whole north side; the other runs along the south side. Both head east, to the temple’s main front.
The west side shows the start. Horsemen are getting ready in the Kerameikos, the potters’ quarter of Athens where the procession began: some talk, some tie their sandals, some bridle or calm their horses, a few are already galloping. The west frieze is almost intact, because the explosion of 1687 did not reach this end of the temple; fourteen of its sixteen blocks are now in the Acropolis Museum, removed from the building in 1993, and the other two are in London.
Along the long sides
The north side shows the procession on the move along the Panathenaic Way. At its head, young men lead cows and rams to the sacrifice; behind them come youths carrying water jars and offerings, then musicians with pipes and lyres, elders holding olive branches, eleven chariots taking part in a race, and finally sixty horsemen in ten groups. In the chariot race, armed men with shields leap off the speeding chariots, a contest called the apobates.
The long sides suffered most. The explosion of 1687 damaged mostly the middle of the north and south flanks, and our knowledge of parts of the north frieze depends on drawings attributed to the painter Jacques Carrey, made in 1674, thirteen years earlier. Three north blocks had already been taken out when the temple became a church, to open windows.
Arrival on the east side
Over the main entrance, the two streams meet. Groups of women approach from both corners, and the Olympian gods sit waiting, carved larger than the mortals around them. On block V, Zeus sits on a throne, his sceptre once completed in bronze; Hera beside him lifts her veil in the gesture of a bride; Iris arranges her hair. Further along, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis and Aphrodite sit on simple stools.
At the centre is a quiet scene that has nothing of a parade about it. Two girls carry stools on their heads towards a woman, perhaps Athena’s priestess, while a mature man, possibly the Archon Basileus, the magistrate in charge of the city’s religion, holds up a folded cloth with a child. The cloth is the new peplos, the robe woven for the ancient wooden statue of Athena Polias. Next to the scene, Athena’s own figure sits with her back to it, her aegis in her lap, with Hephaistos turned towards her.
Why a procession of citizens?
Greek temple sculpture usually told myths, and the Parthenon does that on the metopes and pediments. The frieze is different: it shows the people of Athens themselves, riders, musicians, elders, young men and women, honouring their goddess under the eyes of the gods. Some scholars give parts of it a mythical reading, seeing the founder-king Theseus in one of the riders, but the festival is the generally accepted subject. Read with the rest of the building as one programme, the frieze is where the city places itself on the temple of its own goddess.
Where to see it
Blocks and fragments of the frieze are in the Parthenon Gallery of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Much of the rest, including block V of the east side with the peplos, is in the British Museum in London, removed by Lord Elgin‘s agents in 1801-1804. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: “The frieze”; West frieze block VIII (Akr. 20022); North frieze blocks VI (Akr. 864) and XVII (Akr. 1065); East frieze blocks IV, V (Akr. 855) and VI.
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”.
- M. Voutyras and A. Goulaki-Voutyra, Ancient Greek Art and Its Legacy, Centre for the Greek Language (2012).
