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landingtree) wrote2018-11-28 05:46 pm
landingtree) wrote2018-11-28 05:46 pm
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A vexed temple
The metro was closed for a strike today, as we discovered when the twenty-five of us tried to walk down the steps into it. Luckily nowhere we were going was very far - though I've been slowly getting more of a sense of how things fit together, only today did I realise just how close we were to the metro stops we've been using. Athens looks from the Acropolis like a deep drift of seashells up against the hills, and I knew to begin with that despite its being built very much on the flat its population is higher than New Zealand's, so I've been imagining the distances as larger - it also doesn't hurt that the slum our hotel's on the edge of looks worlds away from even Panepistimiou, to which I'd walked before. ('All-knowing', I was told today; it's the university street. What's that in Maori, I wonder? We should study there, instead of on Kelburn Parade, while we're at it with changing venerable names, oh great Vice-chancellor).
Past the music of the strike in the square. To Hadrian's library, and the Roman agora, with its eight-faced Tower of the Winds. Sunny day. (Native Greeks have been observed in fur jackets, but eighty percent of the wardrobes of our group remain unused, waiting for parts northerlier). Lunch next to the monument awarded a tragedian, I've forgotten its name - lunch of dried apricots, feta cheese, sausage, grapes, and croissants, all bearing a suspicious similarity to foodstuffs available in the breakfast buffet of the hotel. I plead Nanny Ogg. And then to the day's most interestingly complicated monument.
The temple of Zeus Olympieos was designed at the behest of the tyrant Pesistratos, or perhaps his son Hippias, before the year 500 BC. Tyranny works better when the city you tyrannise can see itself thriving, and whacking great temples can be a component of that. But they also take a while. Athens was not then the power it became, and this was to be the largest temple in Greece. Only the foundations were laid before the Pesistratids fell. Then for several hundred years they remained right where they were, as a monument to the end of tyranny.
In 174 BC, Antiochus IV Epiphanes had pissed off the Romans considerably, and also started the Macabean Revolt, which did not go well for him. He was fairly short of friends. Something to do about this was give the Athenians a whacking great temple - euergatism, the word of the week on this field trip - using a Roman architect, because that would play in Rome. By that point, the end of tyranny wasn't aging very well, so there were some foundations going begging.
A fair number of expensive pillars had been raised by the time Antiochus IV Epiphanes' money dried up in his veins. They were nice enough pillars that when Sulla passed through at the head of an army sent to demonstrate that siding with Rome's enemies was never, in any way, going to be a good idea, he took some of them back to Rome with him for the rebuild of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. And the foundations remained where they were. Rather later Augustus added a pillar to them, and then stopped.
It's Hadrian's Olympieion which stands today. He was the great philhellene Emperor, and he had definite opinions on how Hellenes should go about Hellening. With imperial resources to pour into making a Hadrianic Athens, the temple was finished within two years. Eight columns by ten in double rows in a vast precinct, the temple housed a chryselephantine statue of Zeus which, if no larger than the adjacent statue of Hadrian, was at least no smaller. And that very temple, commenced as a statement of benign tyranny's advantages and finished under a very different incarnation of those advantages, stood on through the years, enduring changes of rule, adapting to different social norms as changes swept the Hellenic world... until it was torn down by the Heruleans in 267 AD.
(Today I saw one of the best photos ever, although nobody reading this will quite know why. It shows Classics lecturer James Kierstead standing on the Acropolis with laser beams shooting out of his eyes into the ground, and it is captioned, 'The 2016 field trip, when the Heruleans invaded and we had to help James learn to use his powers. On top of site visits and assessments we thought the workload was a bit unfair.' You'd need to meet James, really, but if I had a dollar for every time in the last week I've heard the words 'until it was torn down by the Heruleans in 267 AD', I would have enough money to buy a cheap tourist bronze of Zeus Olympieios).
The temple was not in fact torn all the way down. Sixteen pillars still stand, and do the best job of being huge of any of the temples we've seen so far. Most of the rest of the temple became essentially a marble quarry, but a seventeenth pillar stood until the nineteenth century, when it came down in a thunderstorm.
And we walked in the city gardens on our way to the museum of post-Classical Greece, where there were some beautiful and intricate Byzantine icons - I'm getting better at spotting the Annunciation from a distance. Since the icons delayed me I left the museum after the people I'd been going to have dinner with, and walked to one of the places in Ada Palmer's gelato atlas, which led me well in New York and leads me well here. (Ann, I'll send you a link to it when I'm next on a device high tech enough to do links. If you feel like gelato when you visit New York it's a trusty guide to what's excellent). Then I wandered to the Plaka, slightly disconsolate because I expected to fail to locate any dinner people, and ran into them almost immediately coming out of a jewellery shop. We spent a while having a very cheerful Greek woman who did her Honours on T.S. Eliot and a Wellingtonian who now runs the next shop over trying to sell us things, I fatally compromised an attempt to haggle by admitting to the possession of a borrowable two dollar coin, and there was merriment and ridiculous portions of gyros or salad for dinner. Nice to be getting to know these people, having conversations of friendship and interest instead of 'fate has placed us at the same breakfast table and now we must say words.' And despite a choice of route we won't be making again, we weren't mugged on the way home.
Now it is ten o'clock, and tomorrow is Eleusis. Bed.
Past the music of the strike in the square. To Hadrian's library, and the Roman agora, with its eight-faced Tower of the Winds. Sunny day. (Native Greeks have been observed in fur jackets, but eighty percent of the wardrobes of our group remain unused, waiting for parts northerlier). Lunch next to the monument awarded a tragedian, I've forgotten its name - lunch of dried apricots, feta cheese, sausage, grapes, and croissants, all bearing a suspicious similarity to foodstuffs available in the breakfast buffet of the hotel. I plead Nanny Ogg. And then to the day's most interestingly complicated monument.
The temple of Zeus Olympieos was designed at the behest of the tyrant Pesistratos, or perhaps his son Hippias, before the year 500 BC. Tyranny works better when the city you tyrannise can see itself thriving, and whacking great temples can be a component of that. But they also take a while. Athens was not then the power it became, and this was to be the largest temple in Greece. Only the foundations were laid before the Pesistratids fell. Then for several hundred years they remained right where they were, as a monument to the end of tyranny.
In 174 BC, Antiochus IV Epiphanes had pissed off the Romans considerably, and also started the Macabean Revolt, which did not go well for him. He was fairly short of friends. Something to do about this was give the Athenians a whacking great temple - euergatism, the word of the week on this field trip - using a Roman architect, because that would play in Rome. By that point, the end of tyranny wasn't aging very well, so there were some foundations going begging.
A fair number of expensive pillars had been raised by the time Antiochus IV Epiphanes' money dried up in his veins. They were nice enough pillars that when Sulla passed through at the head of an army sent to demonstrate that siding with Rome's enemies was never, in any way, going to be a good idea, he took some of them back to Rome with him for the rebuild of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. And the foundations remained where they were. Rather later Augustus added a pillar to them, and then stopped.
It's Hadrian's Olympieion which stands today. He was the great philhellene Emperor, and he had definite opinions on how Hellenes should go about Hellening. With imperial resources to pour into making a Hadrianic Athens, the temple was finished within two years. Eight columns by ten in double rows in a vast precinct, the temple housed a chryselephantine statue of Zeus which, if no larger than the adjacent statue of Hadrian, was at least no smaller. And that very temple, commenced as a statement of benign tyranny's advantages and finished under a very different incarnation of those advantages, stood on through the years, enduring changes of rule, adapting to different social norms as changes swept the Hellenic world... until it was torn down by the Heruleans in 267 AD.
(Today I saw one of the best photos ever, although nobody reading this will quite know why. It shows Classics lecturer James Kierstead standing on the Acropolis with laser beams shooting out of his eyes into the ground, and it is captioned, 'The 2016 field trip, when the Heruleans invaded and we had to help James learn to use his powers. On top of site visits and assessments we thought the workload was a bit unfair.' You'd need to meet James, really, but if I had a dollar for every time in the last week I've heard the words 'until it was torn down by the Heruleans in 267 AD', I would have enough money to buy a cheap tourist bronze of Zeus Olympieios).
The temple was not in fact torn all the way down. Sixteen pillars still stand, and do the best job of being huge of any of the temples we've seen so far. Most of the rest of the temple became essentially a marble quarry, but a seventeenth pillar stood until the nineteenth century, when it came down in a thunderstorm.
And we walked in the city gardens on our way to the museum of post-Classical Greece, where there were some beautiful and intricate Byzantine icons - I'm getting better at spotting the Annunciation from a distance. Since the icons delayed me I left the museum after the people I'd been going to have dinner with, and walked to one of the places in Ada Palmer's gelato atlas, which led me well in New York and leads me well here. (Ann, I'll send you a link to it when I'm next on a device high tech enough to do links. If you feel like gelato when you visit New York it's a trusty guide to what's excellent). Then I wandered to the Plaka, slightly disconsolate because I expected to fail to locate any dinner people, and ran into them almost immediately coming out of a jewellery shop. We spent a while having a very cheerful Greek woman who did her Honours on T.S. Eliot and a Wellingtonian who now runs the next shop over trying to sell us things, I fatally compromised an attempt to haggle by admitting to the possession of a borrowable two dollar coin, and there was merriment and ridiculous portions of gyros or salad for dinner. Nice to be getting to know these people, having conversations of friendship and interest instead of 'fate has placed us at the same breakfast table and now we must say words.' And despite a choice of route we won't be making again, we weren't mugged on the way home.
Now it is ten o'clock, and tomorrow is Eleusis. Bed.
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