Acropolis Apocalypse

[mayhap]

Dude. I obviously did an extremely cursory job googling my Parthenon professor. I mean, I knew she was the Joan Connelly who did this excavations in Cyprus, but I was totally unaware that she was "that evil man John Connelly [sic]" who prompted a German opposition party leader in 1995 to posture about withdrawing from the European Union because it was tolerating him.

Academia can be nasty. That was what the tweedy old man who sat down next to me started telling me before class, when I confessed that Prof. Connelly had only spoken generally and not in detail about the reaction she had gotten to her theory.

Said theory, which she exposited this evening, concerns the Parthenon frieze that ran, when it was all in one place, along top the inner row of columns. This is always given as representing the Panathenaic procession, which is a bit odd, being contemporary rather than mythic, but there you have it.

Except, of course, Connelly has another idea, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. LiveJournal post. Whatever. Which you're probably going to skip. :D

Anyway, her idea germinated from a fragment of a lost Euripides play recovered from a papier maché (papyrus maché?) Ptolemaic sarcophagi. The fragment was from the Erechtheus, which naturally tells the founding myth of the Bronze Age king to whom the Erechtheion belongs. I think this sort of thing should attract some more interest, seeing what a dearth of extant Greek drama we have, but no, apparently the thing to do is publish your findings in an obscure German publication which is published only in Latin, into which you must translate said findings. Uh, way to attract an audience there, guys.

So, it's hard to explain without slides, but she made a very, very persuasive argument that the frieze depicts the conflict between Erechtheus, honorary offspring of Athena, and Eumoplus, the son of Poseidon and Thracian king. This would be the Athena versus Poseidon thing we had going on here before, part two. Erechtheus consults the oracle at Delphi, and they trot out their standard "you have to sacrifice your daughter" number. Unlike Clytemnestra, Erechtheus's wife, Praxithea, is all about this. "If that's what it takes, it's all about the common good, baby," she says. Okay, she says it a little more eloquently than that. That's why her speech was quoted in an oration that the scholar who published the fragment recognized.

Anyway, they sacrifice the youngest daughter per the requirement. The other two daughters kill themselves as well, in a gesture of solidarity. Although the battle is successful (from a Greek chauvinist perspective anyway), Erechtheus is swallowed into the earth in a little freak earthquake incident, leaving Praxithea all alone, a little more than she bargained for. Athena pays her a visit and establishes some customs: bury them on the Acropolis, honor the girls with maiden choruses, offer libations of honey mixed with riverwater, and you're going to be my very first priestess (her name means something like "doing for the gods").

Oh, and did I mention that the youngest daughter is apparently referred to simply by the epithet "Parthenos"? Athena Parthenos. Just like Zeus Agamemnon and Apollo Hyacinthus and all those other pairs of gods and heros who enjoy combined cult worship. Besides, it takes care of that niggling fact that Parthenon is genitive plural.


I really bought the theory, if you couldn't tell. It may or may not be true, but it's useful. Pragmatism. It's something we've been talking about in Robots a lot. :D

Comments

[satyadasa.livejournal.com]

That's very cool how the play explains the etymology like that. When was that fragment found? How long did it take before the obscure article somehow made itself noticed?

And what did she do to that MP?