On the Parthenon metopes: concluding comment

One of the wounded metopes

Hebe and Hera (the "Annunciation" metope)

As I mentioned before the London metopes are for the most part intact and thriving. Tthose kept in the Acropolis Museum on the other hand are a sorry sight to behold -despite the expert efforts at restoration that ought to be admired. The main rerason for this goes a long way back to the early Christian period. At that time mobs of inflamed Christian zealots, egged on and protected by emperors (such as the murderous Theodosius I, the butcher of Thessalonica, but also the founder of the first church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople!), rampaged throughout the Hellenic world destroying the temples of the gods and wreaking particularly fierce violence upon free-standing sculpture on account of the nudity.

The Parthenon was also subjected to this brutality. Hords of destroyers equipped with sharp metal instruments mounted ladders to attack the metopes. They proceeded to hack away at the figures scraping off as much as they could and leaving just pitiful remnants on the marble slabs. Today you can witness this atrocity at close range as you stand underneath the metopes brought down from the building. It is just like being present at a murder scene. You can mentally reconstruct the lethal strokes of the barbarians as they smashed their victims: the marks of their aggression is plain on whatever has been salvaged.

Only one of those metopes on the north side was spared, and it has been also detached and brought into the museum. It depicts two female figures, one seated and one standing, facing each other. They are both headless nowadays. It represents Hera and her daughter Hebe in discourse about developments in the struggle between Greeks and Trojans and the possible outcome of that conflict. So what was it here that stayed the hand of the smashers? Well, the frenzied mobs of new converts to the "true faith", as they looked up to this metope, were seized by the delusion that they were looking at a representation of the Annunciation of the Virgin! How such a scene could have found a place on a buiding put up several centuries before they did not bother to ponder, for it is not in the nature of fired up ignoramuses to put to themselves rational questions like that. At any event we should be thankful for their self-willed blindness at least in this case. 

The Maidens of the Hill

Girl in Athens

Girl in London

Girl in Athens

Metope in BM

The last metope on the Parthenon (Acropolis Museum)

"Caryatids" is of course a misnomer. They were Korai, and more precisely Choephoroi, namely libation bearers to the tomb of Kekrops who was buried under the very porch that they had been carrying on their heads for so many centuries. Their outstretched hands bearing the phialae have long since been chopped off by jealous time, which has been particularly vicious with regard to the protruding parts of ancient statues such as limbs, noses, male genitals etc. It was this identity-obscuring mutilation that probably led to their association with the girls from Karyai in Laconia who visited the sanctuary once a year  to perform their ritual dance. I dare speculate that this must have been a rather sensational event, given the propensity of Lacaedemonian ladies to strut about scantily clad, as we are apprised in such a hilarious fashion in the Lysistrata.

Be that as it may, a major project is under way in the Acropolis Museum to clean up their torsos, ravaged as they were by twenty-odd centuries of exposure and especially by that suffocating smog that blighted the Attic sky in the eighties and the nineties. That shroud of pollution is now thankfully gone (one of the very few good tidings that one may relay from here), the maidens were replaced on the Erechtheion by replicas and were recently accorded the pride of place they deserve in the impressive new museum. The restoration project utilizing laser beams is  run by the Institute of Technology and Research in Crete, the only one of Greek insitutions of higher learning to rank among the top ones world-wide. The reason for this distinction (to digress a little, but not really as you will see) is that ITR was founded with a charter of its own which was modelled on those of Anglo-Saxon  institutions and therefore had nothing in common with the arrangements crippling the other local universities. This conjuction of classical culture and state of the art technology is a particularly happy one, if only as a sign of what might have been had modern Greece elected to embark upon the road of liberal republicanism conscious of its classical roots and inseminated with the modern scientific spirit. Alas, this destiny -as preached by the great Koraes- never came to fruition as reactionary nationalism eventually smothered all traces of free thinking and the values of individual autonomy in the country. Today we are living through the terminal consequences of that debacle.

At any event, already two of the five maiden remaining in Athens have been cleaned -three if you count the pitiful remains of one of them that was smashed by a Turkish shell during the siege of the Acropolis at the time of the Greek Revolution. And the results are astonishing. The grime of ages has been burned off and the honey-whiteness of the Pentelic stone has surged forth to display its breath-taking vivaciousness. You can sense the alert humanity pulsating through its hidden veins. The faces have sadly been half eaten away, but there is still enough of expression left on them to captivate an eager theoros across the chasm of the centuries.

These spruced up girls, each in her uniqueness, do indeed look so intimately in touch with their lonely sister in Rm. 15 of the British Museum. As I was staring at the latter during my visit this past February I could not help being affected by the sad abandonment oozing from her features, despite her being lovingly cared for. I was struck by the fact that her face is also half clawed off, which shows that even as she was being abducted Time had already been hard at work visiting its wrath. But even so, her almost erased eyes did seem to be beaming southwards messages of a mellow grief. Standing in front of her one cannot help conjuring in imagination the raptures of a family reunion. I have always thought that the only valid argument for the return of the Acropolis sculptures is the restoration of the aesthetic integrity of the Athenian monuments.No other consideration carries the slightest weight. And the sense of loss from that severance is today all the more poignant as one stands before that estranged girl in London, or before her companions in Athens as their shimmering whiteness is once again blooming in plain view.

Another significant event has also taken place. The last metope of the Parthenon remaining in place (the first from the western end on the south side) has been removed from the temple and brought into the Acropolis Museum. It depicts a centaur defeating a Lapith who in turn jabs the monster's thigh as he is being strangled. This piece of sculpture had never left its original place and the muck of twenty five centuries lay thick upon it. Now it has been chiseled away and the original marble has been exposed. Alas, it is seriously corroded, although even in this damaged state the explosive tension that Phidias instilled in the stone still leaps at you in waves. Once again, one cannot avoid the comparison with the condition of the metopes kept in the British Museum: those are immaculate, bar the inevitable fractures. The flesh of the creatures burns with the desire to be stroked. It is clear that their stay in London has benefited them greatly. Arguments, thus, based on the state of preservation of the sculptures would seem to favor those justifying Elgin's effrontery. I am saying this because a few year's ago, at the height of the nationalist frenzy for the return of the sculptures in connection with that foul show of the "Olympics", there was an outburst of indignation concerning some alleged faux pas of the BM restorers in scrubbing the frieze with some noxious substance or other. There may have been a grain of truth to this. But, whatever damage it may have caused, still the BM pieces are in visibly better condition compared to the ones in Athens -although if these are also laser-cleaned they may shine incomparably as well. But all this pales into insignificance compared to the botched repair work inflicted upon the Parthenon and the temple of Nike by Greek restorers back in the thirties (replacing for instance the lead joints with iron ones!). This veritable hatchet job resulted in the marble being fragmented from within. At the same time the loose pieces on the ground were haphardly stuck together thus deforming the architectural structure of the buildings. But this of course does not figure in the inane propaganda of nationalist demagogues, for whom anyway the issue of the sculptures is just a pretext for bashing the foreign "conspiracy" against the chosen race.

It is apposite to stress here that before the last two decades of the last century the issue of the Elgin loot did not figure at all in public discourse or in educational instruction. It was invented as a great "national issue" with the coming to power of the "socialist" party in 1981 as part of its "anti-imperialist" agenda. That was the same party whose educational policies ruthlessly suppressed classical learning, deformed the Greek language by cutting it down to the requirements of street agitation and in general gutted the school system by putting it under the control of party hacks. For the rest Melina shed crocodile tears before the horse heads of the Parthenon pediment in the British Museum. This crass hypocrisy, based upon utter ignorance of all things classical, has been the hallmark of official state policy.

All in all, even in this toxic environment some good things are happening for those with eyes to see. 

Missives into space

They say no information is lost in the turbulence of the universe, not even when things are gobbled up by a black hole. Hawking thought otherwise at some point, but this was a signal mistake of his early on. He has since recanted. We must be thankful. So nothing is wasted. Radio signals keep traveling on forever, sounds and voices also, hopefuly to be picked up by whatever receivers might be there on the other side when we are long gone. We are all stored as some kind of unique code in this colossal data bank. Existence is self-enclosed in its mathematical eternity. Quite a strange, nay incomprehensible, thought, but also quite comforting. It seems that immortality after all is on offer by pure objective science itself; one need not have recourse to delusion or runaway fantasy to secure it. God, or at least God as various perverted minds have posited him through the centuries, is indeed an "unecessary hypothesis" as Hawking also, correctly this time, asserted (except that this is not logically equivalent to the proposition that "there is no God"). This was a notion that occurred to alert minds very long ago. The finitude of absolute Being was the ingenious insight of Parmenides, the eternal conservation of material existence Epicurus' stupendous contribution to rationality (Epicurus' thought was after all a logically rigorous extension of Eleatic doctrine).

Why is all this relevant? Because when one lives in a society where communication has broken down, one needs some inner theoretical conviction upon which to ground the usefulness of writing and talking. I must confess that I have been going through such a crisis for the past few months, hence my inability to wield the pen -or to be more precise to hit the keyboard- after the thoughts I registered at the end of last year. There was a dismal closure there, a conclusion very much of the nature of a black hole that swallowed all of my expressive faculty -language itself kind of withered within me. I still stand by that conclusion: namely that what we have gone through in this place over the past three years is akin to the death of a star, the forces of entropy having finally suffused the modern Greek national project which for the past two hundred years has been desperately trying to discover or concoct some essence for itself. Well, it is now manisfest that it has failed. Of course, the debris is still burning away, but this weird flame is fast tumbling into terminal darkness.

The most egregious symbol of this is the current Greek parliament, which is the worst in history, a pathetic aggregation of corrupt old hands that actively caused the present implosion together with a bevy of new-fangled extremists of the left and right spouting ideological balderdash and enchanted by violence. The funny thing is that this putrescent set up is still able to express itself (it's not really expression, but a form of grunting and screeching) in the time-honored language of nationalism. The chief motif in this discourse is the hoary myth of malicious "foreigners" conspiring to wipe from the earth the "chosen race". It's the kind of declamation that surged mightily forth from the recent wreckage in Cyprus. The Cypriot situation is another sorry sight that one must dignify even with a passing comment. Still it is another eye-opening symptom of the cultural and ethical decomposition affecting today's Greek-speaking world (I wish we were dealing with Greekness and I wish we were dealing with sensible speech). The Cypriot ruin is entirely of the Cypriots' own making. They joined the EU under the solemn commitment that they would accept the UN plan for the unification of the island -a commitment they promptly and provocatively broke. For them the EU was nothing more than a stick to beat Turkey with. Their joining Europe was a pretense. The Ponzi-scheme of an economy that they erected, sucking in all the dirty money of the formerly communist Russian mafia, was also a deliberate enterprise. Then they affected surprise when the whole thing came tumbling down over their heads. And their first instinct was to fight tooth and nail to protect the Russian oligarchs by massacring their own small savers and nationalizing the working people's pension funds, a scheme that Merkel was right to castigate as the most shameless attempt to expropriate the little man's future ever attempted. Still, they excoriated as "usurers" the Europeans that advanced a 10 billion, 30-year loan at 2.5% and lauded the Russians as "brothers" from whom they had received 2.5 billion for five years at 4.5%, with nothing more forthcoming. In fact it was the Russian governement itself that had to remind them that they were EU members, and that their prime obligation was to strike a deal with the Europeans. And now AKEL, the pseudo-communist party that ruled Cyprus for five years to 2013 and presided over the economic and other disasters (such as the lethal explosion of the confiscated Iranian munitions meant for Syria which crippled the island's electricity grid), is loudly propagandizing for the country's exit from the Euro! How sick can you get.... But you see I broke my promise not to comment on this sordid, little affair.

The upshot is that in this whirl of nonsense and depravity there is no point in arguing, or talking even. The media and the universities are abuzz with anti-European, Stalinist and racist clap-trap. With the result that about 75% of the people believe that the proper way for Greece would be to follow the Cypriot example of rushing headlong into isolation and destitution to save its "national honor". Yet something inside will not let go. Thought is silent and that is as it ought to be. On the other hand, one ought not to be doing any favors to the baying cadavers of perdition. In the immense empty spaces of the cosmos a dissenting cadence ought still to be registered. But with no illusions, of course, as to its effect.