The Persian invasion of Attica had a profound effect on the way that the

Athenians felt about themselves and their past. The Battles of Marathon and Salamis,

490 BC and 480 BC respectively, were incredibly empowering for the Athenian morale

and would shape the course of Athenian history at least until their defeat at the end of the

Peloponnesian War. Much of this confidence and pride found its way into their art and

architecture, culminating in the completion of the Parthenon in 438 BC. However, the

Greek mentality precluded a realistic representation of the Battles and their impact, and

instead "the Greek leadership at this time, especially in Athens, turned to religious and

moral paradigms of heroic myth, not only to celebrate their victory and newfound power

in the Aegean, but to explain and justify it as well."1

Mircea Eliade, the well-known Romania mythologist, elucidated this universal

tendency to create archetypal narratives out of historical events in his penetrating study,

The Myth of the Eternal Return. "All the important acts of life," he states, "were revealed

ab origine by gods or heroes. Men only repeat these exemplary and paradigmatic

gestures ad infinitum."2 This pattern of sacred paragon and profane duplicate, is seen in

contemporary Greek literature as well. The poets Pindar and Bakchylides honored the

virtues of heroes to heroicize contemporaries and platonic Forms raised the eternal state

of Being over the temporal state of Becoming.3

Therefor, it can come as no surprise that the Greeks dealt with both the trauma

of the Persian invasion and the pride of the Greek victory in the same fashion as they

dealt with all momentous events, by retroactively altering existing mythic models to

parallel historic circumstances. Artistically speaking, this was not a simple feat,

especially considering the Greeks had sworn an oath to never rebuild the monuments and

shrines which were destroyed by the Persian occupation of Athens and the Acropolis.4

They had taken this oath so as never to forget the slight against them and their city,

brought on by what they believed to be Persian hybris. However, first with Cimon's

Theseion in 475 BC5 and finally with the Parthenon, built on the site of the Older

Parthenon that was destroyed by the Persians, the Athenians circumvented their oath to

remember the destruction, by creating a monument to their victory.

The Parthenon was started in 447 BC and was dedicated in 438 BC. Popular

scholarship places the design of the sculptural theme to Phidias, who also sculpted the

Athena Parthenos housed inside. Certainly, "some of the decorative detail on the

statue has the same subject-matter as some of the metopes, and this identical choice can

hardly be coincidental."6 The shield of Phidias' gold and ivory monument, with its

Amazonomachy (the Battle of the Greeks and Amazons) on the exterior and its

Gigantomachy (the Battle of the Gods and Giants) on the interior, corresponds to the

western and eastern metopes respectively. The sandals of the statue carried the

Centauromachy (the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs) as does the southern metopes.

As B.F. Cook states, all the subjects "appear to have a common theme: the conflict

between order and chaos, between civilization and barbarism."7

To the Greek mind, anyone who did not speak their language was a barbarian and

was therefor represented with demeaning iconography.8 Like Oedipus blinding

himself, the inevitable cause of the iconography of physical deformity or barbarian

costume, was hybris. As David Castriota puts it, "in its broadest sense, hybris connoted

insolent and willful acts of outrage, a form of behavior arising from a lack of restraint or

a lack of respect for lawful limits of various kinds."9 The Persians had, in the Greek

mind, demonstrated their hybris by not being content with ruling Asia and instead

attempting to invade Greece. There is even one account in the work of the Greek

historian Herodotus, which tells of the Persian envoy to Macedonian that was

slaughtered because of "insolent brutality, drunkenness, and sexual immoderation."10

The similarities between this story and the Centauromachy, in which the Centaur

Eurytion and his companions insulted and abused the women of the Lapiths, are hard to

ignore. Then, of course, there is the obvious physical oddity of the Centaurs, augmented

by the "violence and sexuality associated with the equine portion"11 of their bodies.

This barbaric nature of the Centaurs' character is readily apparent in the southern

metopes of the Parthenon. In one metope, an elderly Centaur carries away a young

Lapith girl and in another, a Centaur bludgeons a Lapith warrior with a large

water-pot. Both of these images were obviously meant to highlight the beast-like

mentality of the Centaurs, and by extension, of the Persian invaders.

One does not have to look far to find similar sentiments in the western metopes.

The Amazonomachy was an ingenious allusion to the Persian invaders as the Greeks

"tended to examine or explain phenomena in terms of binary opposites."12 As Castriota

explains, "a Greek male of the fifth century would probably have understood the

experience of the Persian Wars in terms of an antithesis between his own male-centered

culture and a compound animal/female/barbarian enemy."13 The Amazonomachy took

this binary nature that much further as the Amazons were at once female and "anti-

feminine, self-mutilating, man-hating, and technically underdeveloped."14 This, in and of

itself, does not directly link the Amazons' defeat to that of the Persians'. However,

Herodotus mentions, and no doubt contemporary Athenians would have been familiar

With, the story of the maritime Medizer Karian Artemisia. Dressed and armed like a

man, Artemisia was a Greek women who fought, like many other Greeks known as

Medians, on the side of the Persians. The Amazonomachy, therefor, may not simply be

an allusion to Persian invaders, but a representation of the Greeks who, through greed or

hybris, allied themselves against the mainland, similar to the Amazons shunning of their

traditional female role.

What remains clear, is that the Amazonomachy was a remote, almost completely

unknown myth until after the Persian War and what was extant before the War depicted

Herakles battling the Amazons on foreign soil. The post-War Amazonomachy, as seen in

the western metopes, had two unique, yet essential, features: Theseus and an invasion of

Attica. There can be little doubt that the binary shift from foreign soil to Attic invasion

references the Persian occupation and destruction of the Acropolis. However, Theseus'

newfound role is slightly more obscure. As has been mentioned earlier, the Athenian

leader Cimon dedicated the reliquary and tomb called the Theseion in 475 BC and he was

said to have identified himself with the figure of Theseus. After winning a victory over

the Persians and Thracians at Eion in 476 BC, Cimon brought back to Athens what was

thought to be the remains of Theseus, the Athenian hero who had supposedly defeated the

Minotaur (another half-human abnormality like the Centaurs) and had unified Athens.

Shortly after his return, Cimon erected the Theseion in the Athenian Agora, which had

depictions of Centauromachies and Amazonomachies. That a memorial was erected to a

once little known mythic hero at the same time as he began to usurp the central role in a

myth once dedicated to Herakles, a figure often associated with the tyranny of

Peisistratos, can hardly be a coincidence. In fact, many modern scholars have come to

the opinion that around this time Theseius had begun to represent the new era of

democracy in Athens. If this is the case, his newfound role in the Amazonomachy, and

the Centauromachy for that matter, can have a profound effect on the interpretation of

these two mythical narratives. The defeat of the Persians, then, in the Athenian

mentality, derives not only from Persian hybris, but from Athenian democracy, over and

above the Persian monarchy.

The connection, as Castriota elucidates in his book Myth, Ethos, and Actuality,

should be impossible to miss. Obviously, however, the symbolic representation of the

Athenian democratic superiority was not a uniquely original thematic construct. In fact,

using extant vase painting to reassemble the destroyed wall murals of the Theseion, John

Barron speculates that the Amazonomachy and Centauromachy may contain "reflections

of the Tyrannicide poses."15 This back to back pose is also seen in the Berlin

Gigantomachy Cup, a contemporary vase, which forces one to question the, as

yet unexplored, meaning of the Gigantomachy in the eastern metopes of the Parthenon.

It is unusual that this subject has not yet been elucidated, especially due to its central

position over the temple entrance. The few studies that have arisen concerning the

meaning of the eastern metopes focus only on their consistency with the other three sides,

placing them as a hierarchical simile for the battle between Greeks and Persians, based on

the current interpretations of the other metopes. As one scholar states, "comparison to

the exploits and objectives of the gods themselves seemed to establish the mythic Greeks

or Athenians and their worthy descendants unambiguously as mortal surrogates for the

gods."16 While no doubt this is a valid assumption, it would be wrong to judge them

simply based on that criteria. Certainly, as a paradigmatic metaphor, the meaning of the

other metopes would instead arise from the symbolic iconography of the Gigantomochy

over the main entrance.

Interestingly enough, the history of that iconography is not a stable one and "even

from the start, it seems to have had a broader meaning and one that could change with the

times."17 Initially, during the Archaic reign of Peisistratos and his sons, Hippias and

Hipparchos, the Gigantomachy was woven into the peplos, the traditional robe carried in

the Pananthenaic Procession and used to cover the wooden statue of Athena on the

Acropolis. However, it also appeared in the pedimental sculptures of the Old Temple of

Athena. As Jeffrey Hurwit explains:

Most scholars believe that Hippias, and his brother Hipparchos, not long after

their father's death, built a peripteral Doric temple - the Archaios Naos or the Old

Temple of Athena - on the foundations still to be seen on the north side of the

Acropolis, partly beneath the classical Erechtheion. But not even that much is

certain and the Archaios Naos (to judge from the style of its surviving sculptures)

may not have been built or finished until after the tyranny fell (say, around 505).18

There are a few different key clues that point to this conclusion (and by extension,

slightly alter the existing interpretation of the Parthenon's thematic program).

The most notable evidence is, as Hurwit suggests, a stylistic one. The statue of

Athena which remains from the Gigantomachy of the Archaios Naos is strikingly

similar to the sculptures from the eastern pediment of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Created by the sculptor Antenor, who later returned to Athens to cast bronze memorials

to the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton (and very likely the Eastern Pediment

of the Old Temple of Athena), the eastern façade at Delphi was a bribe to involve Sparta

in the Athenian Revolution.19 The man behind the commission was Kleisthenes, who led

the deposition of Hippias in 510 BC. This the only building, however, erected to

monumentalize the new democracy. The Athenian Treasury in Delphi, which contained

elements of themes seen in the Theseion and on the Parthenon, was also constructed

around the time of the Archaios Naos. "Some scholars place it just before 500 and make

it a kind of architectural and sculptural proclamation to Greece that the tyranny had been

overthrown and Kleisthenitic isonomia established."20

Half a century later, the Gigantomachy once again changed its colors, while at the

same time retaining its past references to Athenian independence. After he was deposed

in 510 BC, "Hippias fled to Sigeion: the fates of Athens, the mother city of Ionia, and

Persia, the empire that had swallowed Ionia up, thus became more ominously

intertwined."21 In Persian controlled Ionia, Hippias became a tool for the ambitious

satrap, Artaphemes. This situation, however, was neither unique to Hippias nor Athens.

The Island of Naxos, for example, was attacked by the Persian controlled city of Miletus,

where the tyrant Molpagoras fled after Naxos, "inspired by events in Athens, had

introduced equality."22 As Persia and Greece came closer and closer to war, the fight

against the barbarians and the struggle against tyranny became increasingly inter-related

for Athens and its democratic allies. So, the successes at Marathon and Salamis were

actually dual victories for the Athenians and the Parthenon, with its central

Gigantomachy, was erected to publicly monumentalize this double triumph.

"Later Greeks, according to Aristotle, compared the … tyranny of Peisistratos to

the mythical reign of Kronos."23 The Giants, then, born of the blood of the Titans as

were the Olympians, were not an external threat to the authority of Mt. Olympus.

However, as Persia increasingly took advantage of its Grecian allies, the representation of

the Gigantomachy changed drastically. "The Giants are first shown as hoplite warriors,

but by the Classical Period have become wild men, wearing animal skins and using rocks

and torches as weapons."24 The threat of a tyrannical usurpation of Athens had become

synonymous with the threat of Persian invasion. So, the Parthenon, constructed around

the themes of order over chaos, civilization over barbarity, and democracy over tyranny,

can be seen to have a "unifying ethical matrix," a holistic presentation against threats to

Athenian moral superiority, both external and internal. The cornerstone of Athens' right

to freedom and democracy, in the Greek mind, rested in its origins in divine will. With

the Gigantomachy, the Athenians had found "the ultimate mythic paradigm for the

defense of law and sophrosyne and the punishment of hybris, in which the gods

themselves suppresses the presumptuous and irreverent affront to their authority."25

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1985.

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London.1991.

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University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 1992.

Cook, B.F. The Elgin Marbles. British Museum Publications Limited, London. 1984.

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Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return Or, Cosmos and History. Trans. Willard

Trask. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1954.

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Merck, Mandy. "The City's Achievements: The Patriotic Amazonomachy and Ancient

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