This abridged and revised edition of the author's monumental The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge, 1998) focuses specifically on the development of the Acropolis in the fifth century BC and the building program initiated by Pericles. Incorporating the latest discoveries and research on individual monuments of the Acropolis, this edition is illustrated with 145 halftones as well as a CD-ROM including 180 color images of the monuments of the Acropolis. Previous Edition Hb (1998): 0-521-41786-4 Previous Edition Pb (2000): 0-521-42834-3
The challenge of Periclean Athens to the students of civilizations is unmistakable: the city and its empire reached a level of culture and well-being scarcely paralleled in the history of man elsewhere. And like the characters in a Greek tragedy, the city and its leaders and citizens were busy in their time of glory making provision for their own tragic decline. "I have tried to suggest in general terms," says the author, "the meaning of Periclean Athens, addressing my interpretation to laymen. . . With the increasing mass of specialized research on ancient Athens, it is imperative to catch a general notion of the significance of the whole. . . The result is a picture of a complex society, as any great civilization is bound to be, with its magnificent achievements and its faults." This first volume in The Centers of Civilization Series does indeed give a clear picture of Athenian civilization, its literature, philosophy, and political and judicial writing; its painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and drama; and even the arts of war. Above all, the book suggests to modern readers the supreme importance of decision in all of man's affairs, and the frightful consequences of wrong decision, once it is made.
Mid-fifth-century Athens saw the development of the Athenian empire, the radicalization of Athenian democracy through the empowerment of poorer citizens, the adornment of the city through a massive and expensive building program, the classical age of Athenian tragedy, the assembly of intellectuals offering novel approaches to philosophical and scientific issues, and the end of the Spartan-Athenian alliance against Persia and the beginning of open hostilities between the two greatest powers of ancient Greece. The Athenian statesman Pericles both fostered and supported many of these developments. Although it is no longer fashionable to view Periclean Athens as a social or cultural paradigm, study of the history, society, art, and literature of mid-fifth-century Athens remains central to any understanding of Greek history. This collection of essays reveal the political, religious, economic, social, artistic, literary, intellectual, and military infrastructure that made the Age of Pericles possible.
Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
This book is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Athens, its topography, monuments, inhabitants, cultural institutions, religious rituals, and politics. Drawing from the newest scholarship on the city, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.
