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.