The Parthenon by Mary Beard

Author:Mary Beard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780674010857
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2003-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

‘LARGER THAN I REMEMBERED, & BETTER HELD TOGETHER’

When Virginia Woolf encountered the Parthenon again in 1932, more than 25 years after her first visit, she reflected in her diary on what had changed. ‘Yes, but what can I say about the Parthenon – that my own ghost met me, the girl of 23, with all her life to come: that; and then, this is more compact & splendid & robust than I remembered. The yellow pillars – how shall I say? gathered, grouped, radiating there on the rock … The Temple like a ship, so vibrant … It is larger than I remembered, & better held together.’ Woolf was righter than she knew. Although her diary entry suggests that she put the changes down to the tricks of memory or the effects of maturity, in the years between her two visits the Parthenon had been substantially rebuilt. It really was ‘more splendid & robust … larger & better held together’ than it had been in 1906.

For side by side with the policy of clearance and excavation went a sporadic programme of reconstruction of the fifth-century monuments. The most extreme example was the little temple of Victory (Athena Nike), built between 427 and 423 BC, on a parapet high up on the right of the entrance to the Acropolis. This had been completely dismantled by the Turks in 1686 to build defences against the invading forces of the Holy League. It was put together again from scratch immediately after the War of Independence, as the very first major restoration project of the new state. It was taken apart and reassembled again in the 1930s, and is now undergoing its third total reconstruction. In what sense it is the same building as that erected 2,500 years ago is very hard to say.

The restoration campaigns on the Parthenon were less radical, but they significantly changed the overall appearance of the building, creating a much less ruined ruin. In 1834, when young King Otto sat on his throne in the temple to listen to Klenze’s speech, the building was in its most dilapidated state ever – the clusters of columns at its two ends separated by a vast gaping hole. Through the nineteenth century there were occasional efforts to put some missing sections back in place. In the 1840s, for example, four lost columns in the north colonnade, and one in the south, were partially rebuilt from pieces lying around the site; and 158 blocks were put back on to the walls of the interior rooms, infilling where necessary with modern red brick. But the major interventions came early in the twentieth century, prompted by an earthquake which damaged the building in 1894, as well as by a series of political crises that made an ostentatious investment in the greatest legacy of classical Greece seem a useful piece of public relations. The first round of repairs was finished in 1902; it was relatively modest and was carried out under the aegis of an international committee of advisers who recommended no full-scale reconstruction.

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