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LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2017-18
St. John’s College – Annapolis, Maryland
FALL 2017 SEMESTER
Date
Event
August 25, 2017
“Plutarch’s Swarm”
Speaker: Joseph Macfarland. Dean
St. John’s College, Annapolis
September 1
All-College Art Discussion
September 8
(Homecoming Weekend)
Concert
Jason Vieaux, Classical Guitar
September 15
“Abraham Lincoln and the Daughters of Dred Scott: A Reflection on the
Declaration of Independence”
Speaker: Diana Schaub, Professor of Political Science
Loyola University
September 22
“Recognizing Odysseus”
Speaker: Margaret Kirby, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
September 29
“Music and the Problem of Human Desire”
Speaker: Gregory Freeman, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
October 6
Long Weekend
No lecture
October 13
Concert
The Parker Quartet
October 20
All-College Seminar
60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu
�October 27
“God and Philosophy in Descartes’ Meditations”
Speaker: Henry Higuera, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
November 3
(Parents’ Weekend)
“The Student, by Anton Chekhov: A Story About Us Told and Glanced
At by Louis Petrich”
Speaker: Louis Petrich, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
November 10
“’Be a sinner and sin boldly’ – Martin Luther and Christian Freedom”
Speaker: Tom May, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
November 17
“At the Crossroads of the Cave: Plato and Heidegger on History and
Nihilism.”
Speaker: Gregory Fried, Professor & Chair
Department of Philosophy
Suffolk University Boston
November 24
Thanksgiving Holiday
No lecture
December 1
“The Significance of Quantum Mechanics”
Speaker: Bernhardt Trout, Professor of Chemical Engineering
MIT
December 8
John by Annie Baker
King William Players
December 15 – January 7
Winter Vacation
No lectures
60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu
�SPRING 2018 SEMESTER
Date
Event
January 12, 2018
“Duns Scotus’s Modal Argument for the Existence of God—An
Introduction”
Speaker: Jim Carey, Tutor
St. John’s College, Santa Fe
January 19
“Hume on Animals”
Speaker: Aaron Garrett
Department of Philosophy
Boston University
January 26
“On Aquinas”
Speaker: André Barbera, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
February 2
Long Weekend
No lecture
February 9
Concert
Nordic Voices
February 16
“Franklin, Autobiography, and the St. John’s Program”
Speaker: Matthew Davis, Dean
St. John’s College, Santa Fe
February 23
All College Seminar
March 2 – 18
Spring Break
No lectures
March 23
“Visual Epistemology—A humanist perspective”
Speaker: Johanna Drucker
Department of Information Studies
UCLA
60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu
�March 30
(Good Friday)
Steiner Lecture
“What was the Purpose of Archimedes’ Floating Bodies”?
Speaker: Reviel Netz
Stanford University
April 6
“The Wonder in the Word ‘Open’”
Speaker: Dan Harrell, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
April 13
Kristensen Lecture
“Utopia, Ideology and Grand Strategy in the 21st Century”
Speaker: Arthur Herman, Author
April 20
“Are individuals beings?”
Speaker: Hannah Hintze, NEH Chair, Tutor
St. John’s College, Annapolis
April 27
The President by Ferenc Molnar
King William Players
May 3
Reality Show
60 College Avenue | Annapolis, Maryland 21401 | 410-263-2371 | sjc.edu
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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4 pages
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2017-18
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2017-2018 Academic Year.
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Office of the Dean
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-2018
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Vieaux, Jason
Schaub, Diana
Kirby, Margaret
Freeman, Gregory A.
The Parker Quartet
Higuera, Henry, 1952-
Petrich, Louis
May, Thomas
Fried, Gregory, 1961-
Trout, Bernhardt L.
Carey, Jim
Garrett, Aaron
Barbera, André
Nordic Voices (Musical group)
Davis, Matthew
Drucker, Johanna, 1952-
Netz, Reviel
Harrell, Daniel M., 1961-
Herman, Arthur, 1956-
Hintze, Hannah
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
August 25, 2017. Macfarland, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3106" title="Plutarch's swarm">Plutarch's swarm</a> (audio)
September 22, 2017. Kirby, Margaret. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3187" title="Recognizing Odysseus">Recognizing Odysseus</a> (audio)
September 22, 2017. Kirby, Margaret. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3186" title="Recognizing Odysseus">Recognizing Odysseus</a> (typescript)
October 27, 2017. Higuera, Henry. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3447" title="God and philosophy in Descartes' Meditations">God and philosophy in Descartes' <em>Meditations </em></a>(audio)
November 3, 2017. Petrich, Louis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3450" title="The Student, by Anton Chekhov">The Student, by Anton Chekhov</a> (audio)
November 10, 2017. May, Tom. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3454" title="Be a sinner and sin boldly">Be a sinner and sin boldly</a> (audio)
November 10, 2017. May, Tom. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3457" title="Be a sinner and sin boldly">Be a sinner and sin boldly</a> (typescript)
November 17, 2017. Fried, Gregory. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3456" title="At the crossroads of the cave">At the crossroads of the cave</a> (audio)
December 1, 2017. Trout, Bernhardt. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3461" title="The significance of quantum mechanics">The significance of quantum mechanics</a> (audio)
March 23, 2018. Drucker, Johanna. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3803" title="Visual epistemology">Visual epistemology</a> (audio)
March 30, 2018. Netz, Reviel. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3805" title="What was the purpose of Archimedes' Floating Bodies?">What was the purpose of Archimedes' <em>Floating Bodies</em>?</a> (audio)
April 6, 2018. Harrell, Daniel. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3819" title="The wonder in the word "open"">The wonder in the word "open"</a> (audio)
April 13, 2018. Herman, Arthur. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3828" title="Utopia, ideology and grand strategy in the 21st century">Utopia, ideology and grand strategy in the 21st century</a> (audio)
April 20, 2018. Hintze, Hannah. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3832" title="Are individuals beings?">Are individuals beings?</a> (audio)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
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PDF Text
Text
The St. John's Review
Volume 50, number 3 (2008)
Editor
C. Nathan Dugan
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Bramt
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Thomas Browning
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©2008 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. Jolm's Public Relations Office and the St. fohn's College Pri11t Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Is There Great Jazz? ...................................................... 5
Andre Barbera
Preformationism In Biology: From Homunculi To
Genetic Programs ........................................................ 33
jorge H. Aigla, M.D
The Persians and the Parthenon: Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon............................................. 53
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
-.:f Is There Great Jazz?
fj:-- Andre Barbera
Ten years ago I began a lecture with an excerpt from "Split
Kick." [Musical example 1] 1 That lecture was ostensibly
devoted to one evening's recorded performance by Art
Blakey's quintet in 1954. My barely hidden agenda was to
ask, 'is there great jazz?', to answer 'yes', and to consider the
implications for St. John's College. Now I ask the question
explicitly, although my confidence in an affirmative answer
has waned. Addressing the practical problems associated with
an affirmative answer is not the main thrust of my remarks.
Rather, I want to consider whether jazz really is worthy of
our attention.
What is 'great' and what is 'jazz'? I shall not attempt to
define greatness. As we consider jazz and its possible merit,
however, we may uncover some of the aspects of greatness
that we attribute to the works already on St. John's program,
or at least think about some of our prejudices on behalf of
those works.
Let us get straight about what kind of music jazz issomething we all know already. Jazz is primarily instrumental
music, emphasizing brass and reed instruments, based on
dance, popular song forms, and the blues, and is of distinctly
African-American character in its origin, development, and
soul. Jazz entails swing, the blue tonality, and improvisation.
Jazz musicians employ idiosyncratic timbres or tone colors. In
jazz, instruments are treated like voices and voices like instruments. Ultimately, one might find in jazz expressions of
Andre Barbera is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
This lecture was delivered at AnnapOlis on September 8, 2006. }.,.{usical
examples arc listed in Appendix 1 and can be heard online by visiting the
St. John's Review webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml)
and clicking the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by
Andre Barbera".
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
individuality, autonomy, freedom. Many examples of jazz
lack some of these characteristics and perhaps a few lack
them all, but this rough definition should suffice. Of these
various characteristics, some are more important than others,
for example the African-American natnre of the musical
idiom. Jazz is race music, by which I do not mean that one
need be overtly cognizant of race to appreciate it, nor that
jazz musicians need to be African Americans. Nonetheless,
the nature of jazz, its soul, is African-American. Other
important characteristics of jazz include swing, the blues, and
expression of the individual. I shall speak about swing now,
and comment on the others later.
Swing is good, out of place in much music, but
undeniably a good musical characteristic. Swing is difficult to
define. It requires that the music neither speed up nor slow
down, thus betraying its origin in dance. Fifty years ago, in a
famous albeit imperfect treatment of the phenomenon, Andre
Hodeir noted: "In jazz, the feeling of relaxation does not
follow a feeling of tension but is present at the same
moment." And, "Swing is possible ... only when the beat,
though it seems perfectly regular, gives the impression of
moving inexorably ahead .... " 2
A well-known example of swing can occur in consecutive
eighth notes that are played such that the note on the beat
lasts longer than the note off the beat. [Musical example 2;
Appendix 2, Swing Eighths] How much longer one note lasts
than another varies and presents a notational challenge that is
usually and wisely ignored. One does not learn about swing
from written examples, and besides, this depiction is very
narrow, pertaining only to consecutive notes of equal
notational value. We shall consider a more subtle and
complex example of swing later.
Now that we have skirted the question of greatness and
provided a loose description of jazz, we might reasonably
wonder: why even ask if there is any great jazz? Empirically,
one can discern the influence of African-American music all
�BARBERA
7
over the globe, from the blues revival in 1960s England to the
second-hand influence of the Beatles throughout the Western
world, India, and the Far East, from the popular music of subSaharan Africa to the internet-transported pop music of
today. There are a handful of exceptions: the Nazis banned
this kind of music, and it is prohibited in some strict Muslim
societies. But by and large, blues, jazz, and African-American
music in general can be heard all over the world, in its
original forms as well as in myriad adaptations and dilutions.
Of the various sub-types of African-American music, jazz
is clearly the most sophisticated, the highest, by which I mean
the most developed and complex. Thus I maintain with little
or no reservation that jazz is the great music of the \Xlestern
world over the past one hundred years; but here I am using
'great' to mean hegemonic. Pervasive influence is insufficient
for us to canonize the music as great in our terms, as worthy
of our study, but it is sufficient reason for us to consider it.
Our aim here is to begin to evaluate the musical merit of jazz.
What are the qualities of jazz that might make it great in
the sense of The Republic or Euclid's Elements of Geometry
or The Brothers Karamazov? Here the long list of what is
ordinary about jazz intrudes, the reasons why jazz for all of
its charms is not great, but in fact rather common. I shall
address five aspects: setting, structi1re, boredom, recording,
and individuality.
Setting
We can go right back to our opening example to start
working on our list. The object of scrutiny is a performance,
a live recording. (Let us just agree to use the common if
somewhat nonsensical terminology of "live recording" to
distinguish recordings made in front of an audience from
recordings made in a studio.) The piece, "Split Kick" by
Horace Silver, is not written down in the traditional sense.
The performance is an isolated event occurring on a Sunday
night in February 1954, in a nightclub. People drink in nightclubs and talk and eat while the musicians are playing. Jazz
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has made it into the concert hall, but most often its setting is
one of entertainment and amusement. The use of 'noble' in
such a context seems overdressed and proud.
Blakey's quintet had been playing at Birdland for the
entire week, two sets a night. But these musicians were not a
working group, having been pulled together for the specific
purpose of that week's performances leading up to a live
recording. 3
Let us not ignore the spoken introduction. William
Clayton "Pee Wee" Marquette was the short-statured m.c.
who worked also as doorman at Birdland. He lived upstairs,
took his meals there, and "touch[ed] the guys in the band for
money. "4 Pee Wee reasoned that his promotion of the
musicians entitled him to a commission. Pee Wee also carried
with him an adjustable butane cigarette lighter set at the
maximum: apparently the sight of a two-foot flame shooting
up in the dark, basement nightclub provided a thrill to
patrons. 5 Does great music need a pitchman with a flamethrower?
At nightclubs, jazz musicians usually give two performances per night, and sometimes three on weekends. The
Village Vanguard, an old-style, cash-only jazz club in New
York, books groups Tuesday through Sunday, with performances at 9 and 11 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and
Sunday; 9, 11, and 1 on Friday and Saturday. That's not art;
that's work!
Therefore, the setting for jazz is common.
Structure
"Split Kick" is a contrafact that relies on the standard, 32measure structure and harmony of a popular song, that is, on
a small, narrow, and fragile framework. 6 A structure like this
is central to almost all improvisation-this is in part why free
jazz blew itself up and did so fairly quickly. What did Mozart
do with this structure? There are his variations on themes,
usually for keyboard, which doubtless are close to transcriptions of improvisations. They show Mozart not at his best-
�BARBERA
9
one might even say 'worst' except that worst and Mozart's
music don't really go together. The variations are boring and
lack intensity, just one elaboration after another. The
structure of theme and variations imposes in most cases
limitations of harmony, meter, and phrase. There are a few
instances of jazz that break out of this mold, generally
ambitious and pretentious endeavors. If jazz were to be great,
it seems to me it must work within and simultaneously
transcend by some means the limitation of theme-andvariation structure.
Boredom
Structural limitations lead to the indisputable fact that vast
stretches of jazz performances are boring/ One might make
the same remark about other works of art, literature,
philosophy, and so forth. I shall not mention those works on
the program that I find most tedious, with the exception of
Tristan tmd Isolde. The conclusion of that opera is glorious by
any measure and stands perfectly well as good music, severed
from what comes before it. But part of its true glory rests in
relief, or release, the sense that the bad trip of the past four
hours is about to end.
We do not read all ancient geometers, do not study all
Viennese classical composers, do not read all enlightenment
philosophers. There is a fair amount of material attributed to
Euclid that we never look at, and for that matter we read only
about half of The Elements of Geometry. We have time to do
only so much, and besides, much of what we skip is boring.
With jazz, in a misguided sense of fairness-everyone gets
a turn-we have drum solos and bass solos, most of the
former and virtually all of the latter being boring to listen to.
This is not to question in the least the nearly indispensable
roles played by drums and bass in making good jazz. But all
sorts of solos by melodic or chording instruments are also
boring. My friend Stevie Curtin, a guitarist, says that there is
a lot of killing time in jazz. Such a notion is related to the
labor of the entertainer, and is of a lower order artistically
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than the boredom that is composed into works with an
intention of ultimate release or exhilaration.
Recording Industry
Since the 1920s, jazz has been disseminated not only to its
audience but also to its future practitioners largely by means
of recordings. To cite just one sequence: Lester Young listened
to the recordings of Frankie Trumbauer, Charlie Parker to
those of Lester Young, Lou Donaldson. and just about
everyone else to those of Charlie Parker. The recording
industry is a business, and most decisions regarding what gets
recorded and who hears it are made with an eye toward
turning a profit. All art and literature might be constrained to
some degree by the practicalities of life, but the short-term
demands of the free market hardly allow for the unfettered
and ennobling expression of the human spirit.
Worse still, the idiom of jazz, which depends upon
spontaneous invention, is disseminated in recordings that are
hardly products of spontaneity. Records are made by
acoustical engineers and then marketed. No doubt the live
recording is an attempt to mitigate this apparently contradictory relationship. Michael MacDonald, an audio
technician, producer of jazz records, and graduate of St.
John's College, mentioned to me that his goal as producer of
a "Live at ... " recording "was to place the listener in the
second row of tables, in from the stage." 8 To some extent, I
believe such recordings are effective. Think of our opening
example: it is as if we really are at Birdland; we can visualize
Pee Wee Marquette on the stage; we can see the musicians
taking their places; we imagine that the music is produced
spontaneously before us.
Alas, in this case there is some deception. From the Blue
Note documents sent to me by Michael Cuscuna, I conclude
that "Split Kick" was recorded in the middle of the third set
of five sets of recordings made that evening. Marquette says,
"We're bringing back to tl1e bandstand at this time, ladies and
�BARBERA
II
gentlemen, the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group .... "
Were they really coming back to the bandstand, or were they
just sitting there, waiting for the audio technicians to record
an introduction ?9
The Individual
In a list of the hallmarks of jazz, Gunther Schuller has placed
primary emphasis on the development by the performer of a
unique tone or tone color. 10 Schuller argues that the more
resistant the instrument, trumpet versus alto saxophone for
example, the more important it is to develop such a tone.
This idea characterizes jazz no differently than one might
describe pop singing-it all comes down to some captivating
tone color. In thinking especially about Miles Davis, a master
of various tones, I thought that Schuller might be right.
[Musical Example 3]
How to characterize Davis's tone? Variety: brassy notes,
bent notes, dirty notes, decaying notes, breathy notes. One
trumpet sound, in fact, seems to be pitchless, or composed of
many pitches, all breath. Writers have used various terms to
describe the color of Davis's tone. To me it seems first and
foremost to be fragile but inherently contradictory, both
harsh and delicate at the same time. An intended accolade
given to some popular and jazz musicians and singers is that
they could have played classical music, or they could have
sung opera. I am thinking of Sarah Vaughan in this regard. It
is safe to say, with that tone Miles never could have played
classical music.
In review, jazz is common, not great, because:
1. It is performed primarily in nightclubs;
2. It relies on the structure of theme and
variations;
3. In many instances it is boring, exuding a
workman-like or laborious quality;
4. It is controlled by the recording industry;
5. It is obsessed with tone color.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
From these remarks, one might think that I was called in to
help put down an insurrection of jazz rebels seeking to
contaminate the St. John's program with their music. To
generalize, the issue that I am placing before you is one of
entertainment versus ennoblement, that is to say, refreshing
versus new and improved. Thus far, I have been making the
case for jazz as entertainment, and as I attempt to show some
ennobling qualities of jazz, you will see that we never leave
entertainment and its limitations far behind.
*
*
*
There are many great jazz musicians about whom I have to
say only that they deserve lectures of their own. In addition,
strong, fruitful influences, like Latin music, important issues
regarding the composition of the jazz audience, and widely
celebrated and influential recordings do not figure in my
remarks. Thus my remarks are not broadly representative of
jazz, although I hope that they touch on its character. Most of
early jazz and all recent developments are also absent, which
betrays my prejudices and age.
Rather than great jazz musicians, let us ask if there is
simply a great jazz recording, or more narrowly, a great jazz
solo. We turn first of all to the great man of jazz, Louis
Armstrong, who almost single-handedly transformed his
work into one that revolves around the exceptional
individual.
Here is an excerpt from "Hotter Than That" recorded by
Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1927. The excerpt includes a
polyphonic, eight-measure introduction, then three choruses
of 32 measures each, followed by a call-and-response passage
between voice and guitar. I direct your attention especially to
the first and third choruses where we hear Armstrong first as
cornetist and then as vocalist. Despite the relatively primitive
recording conditions, it is abundantly clear to me why this
jazz was called 'hot'. I also call your attention, although it is
hardly necessary, to the latter half of the third chorus where
�BARBERA
13
Armstrong sings in 3/4 meter against the prevailing 4/4 meter.
[Musical example 4]
What I find truly remarkable about this vocal passage is
how Armstrong extricates himself from the 3/4-meter
pattern. He does not do so abruptly, but rather before
returning to 4/4 he follows the ten measures of 3/4 with a
measure of 12/8, whose off beats do not jibe with either the
4/4 or the 3/4 pattern. Jazz writers comment on the interchange between Armstrong and guitarist Lonnie Johnson that
follows this passage, although I sense a letdown at this point
after the brilliance of Armstrong's cornet playing and his
stunning scat singing.
"Hotter Than That" is a very important piece in the
history of jazz, but I feel the need to make some excuses for
it-primitive recording, no drums, a time-killing piano vamp.
Let us consider a somewhat more modern piece. A quick
search on the internet produced the following testimonials: 11
1. Terell Stafford, who has been hailed as "one of
the great players of our time, a fabulous trumpet
player" by piano legend McCoy Tyner, cites as one
of his most profound musical influences Clifford
Brown's rendition of "Cherokee."
2. On bandleader Bob January's website My
Favorite Things, under "My favorite recordings,"
there is a short list that contains Clifford Brown's
"Cherokee."
3. Trumpeter Woody Shaw, in an interview for
Down Beat [Aug. 1978], said: "I'll never forget
[Brown's "Cherokee"]. It just haunted me. Such a
beautiful dark tone. Clifford more or less shaped
my conception of what I wanted to sound like."
4. On a site that seemed to be connected to
Springfield Public School District 186, Springfield,
Illinois, in a section entitled "Entertainment:
Rediscovering classic jazz," Justin Shields cites
"one of the greatest jazz recordings in history, the
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
classic 'Cherokee' [by Clifford Brown]."
5. And on a blog entitled Corn Chips and Pie:
Chunky nuggets, Millicent posted the following
[May 3, 2006]. "Let me tell you something: if I
played the trumpet (well, I did once, in the sixth
grade), I would transcribe every single note of
Clifford Brown's solo ... of 'Cherokee,' and I would
work on it every day of my life. Finally, at age 97,
I would master it, and every single resident of my
nursing home on Mars would shit himself in
wonder and awe. Then I would die."
Perhaps we should take a listen. We hear the introduction,
the tune or head, and then two choruses of improvisation by
Clifford Brown. A word about the introduction: it is a
pejorative cliche about the music of native Americans, but it
functions well in setting up the rapid, soaring, pentatonic
melody. [Musical example 5]
Clifford Brown's solo is truly exhilarating, especially the
last quarter of his first chorus with its breathless overflowing
of notes. The remaining solos on this performance by other
musicians are good, but certainly not in a league with
Brown's. So one experiences a let-down of sorts in the latter
half of the piece. Indeed, the same thing happens in Brown's
solo itself: the second chorus, as fine as it is, cannot match the
first. The bar has been set too high, too soon, having the
effect of a denouement that lasts too long.
Now I would like to turn to a jazz solo that I think is
great, on Frank Wess's "Segue In C,'' performed by Count
Basie and his orchestra at Birdland in 1961. The arrangement
of the piece is masterful, but I want to home in on the first
solo after Basie's introduction, Budd Johnson playing tenor
saxophone. Johnson was a highly regarded and widely
traveled musician, but it is safe to say that his is not a
household name, not even in some jazz circles. We shall hear
the last introductory chorus by Basie, followed by Johnson's
solo.
�BARBERA
15
Johnson's solo lacks the dazzling virtuosity that is heard
on "Cherokee." Rather it comprises six beautifully designed,
integrated blues choruses. Here we have a successful attempt
to overcome the inherent limitation of the theme-andvariation structure. Johnson has fashioned each chorus as a
melodic and emotional succession to the previous one, and
with a musical sense for the shape of the entire set of six. The
first is restrained, sweet-toned, and bubbles over with swing,
in part owing to the entrancing rhythm section. Indeed, much
of the music produced by Basie's orchestra can be taken as
exemplars of swing. The second chorus expands the register,
emphasizing tone 5, and ends with repeated tone 6 as a
springboard to a further expansion of the register to tone 8
in the third chorus. In the third and fourth choruses, the wind
instruments from the orchestra accompany the soloist with
riffs. The fourth chorus is marked at the beginning by a
quotation of "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown
Hair," which I note solely to orient the listener. The fifth
chorus is the emotional high point of the solo, containing
loud, long, high blue thirds leading into the first and fifth
measures. The sixth chorus, the denouement, is as subtle and
effective as the first. It begins with repeated C's, tone 1, and
ends with an almost self-effacing descent down to low tone 3.
[Musical example 6]
I have also attempted to notate the first three-plus
measures of the sixth chorus to emphasize an aspect of swing.
[Appendix 2, Triplets] Excluding subtleties of intonation, and
even assuming that the rhythmic designation of the individual
notes is approximately correct, where does one place the last
note, B-flat, of the example? In other words, is it the third
part of a triply divided half measure that falls late (indicated
by the arrow pointing right), or is it an anticipation of the
downbeat of the next measure (indicated by the arrow
pointing left)? Probably neither. [Musical example 7]
What we hear is the soloist fall behind the beat. Triplets
can produce the effect of speeding up or slowing down
depending upon the durational value to which the ear hears
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
them as an alternative. In this case, the triplets in and of
themselves produce a drag on the beat, and Budd Johnson is
playing the triplets progressively slower. The passage is made
even more effective by the early appearance of the B-flat. This
is the note that transforms the tonic harmony of C major into
a secondary dominant chord pointing to the subdominant
harmony of measure 5 in the chorus. The secondary
dominant has occurred throughout the piece in measure four,
but in this case the phrase is truncated, at least theoretically,
by the omission of a second occurrence of the note C.
Therefore, the transformational B-flat arrives just a little bit
early even though the triplets are gradually slowing down.
The ear and the heart make sense of this.
Why don't we stop here and canonize "Segue In C"? I
have already mentioned that the piece is well orchestrated
and unfolds beautifully. There are a couple of written-out
ensemble passages to come as well as a trombone solo. The
latter is the problem. The trombone solo is not bad, and the
audience at Birdland that night seemed to like it, but in fact it
is no match for Johnson's solo, and at times seems downright
crude. It effectively diminishes the work.
With the examples by Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown,
and Budd Johnson, we have encountered the problems or
dangers of seeking greatness: (1) in a recording; (2) in an
improvisation; (3) in a whole that consists of a series of
contributions by different individuals. I shall return to this
example by Budd Johnson at the end, but let us move on.
What is the work? In most cases we have books, writings
assembled and organized at some time and place into what
are now books with titles like the Elements of Geometry or
the Critique of Pure Reason. In some cases our works are the
realized performances of musical scores, for example Bach's
St. Matthew Passion. In other cases, somewhat more
problematic for us at St. John's, but not really for our
conception of the work, the object resides in a museum,
Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Picasso's Guernica, for example.
�17
BARBERA
With jazz, the nature of improvisation turns the work into
an action. Certainly there are instances of improvisations
becoming fixed compositions.' 2 Nevertheless, the very
essence of jazz seems to entail spontaneous music making,
real-time poiesis. Charlie Parker's legendary status in the
world of jazz rests in part on his unmatched ability to
produce unique improvisations repeatedly, even on multiple,
consecutive takes of the same tune in the recording studio.
Ted Gioia addresses this problem in The Imperfect Art:
Reflections 011 jazz and Modem Culture. He proposes to
develop an "aesthetics of imperfection." Gioia writes, " ... the
virtues we search for in other art forms-premeditated
design, balance between form and content, an overall
symmetry-are largely absent in jazz." And later, "our
interest in jazz, it would seem, is less a matter of our interest
in the perfection of the music, and more a result of our
interest in the expressiveness of the musician ... [whose
performances) are judged ... not by comparison with some
Platonic ideal of perfection but by comparison with what
other musicians can do under similar conditions. Our interest
lies primarily in the artist and only secondarily in the art." 13
On first reading, such a suggestion seems to imply a kind
of hagiography of individuals, in short, a study of great men
and their deeds. The achievements of Alexander the Great are
indeed great, and conceivably we might sit around and
discuss how he did it. In that discussion, the contributions of
some participants would be more valuable than others, but
likely so because of experience or at least outside reading. I
presume that an appreciation of jazz does not entail an
interest in this man or that, in Louis Armstrong or Charlie
Parker, but rather in the artist. We might be amazed at the
man who can play the fastest, or the highest, or the loudest
on a given instrument, but certainly this amazement differs
from our enchantment with Clifford Brown's solo on
"Cherokee."
As listeners to jazz, we marvel not at the highest or
loudest or strangest note, but at that consecution of notes
- -----------
---~
--------------
--
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
aptly fitted to the tune, at a specific time and place, on a
specific instrument or instruments. If in so doing we are
studying great men, we are doing so only while they are
actually performing the deeds that make them great.
This brings us to a reconsideration of individuality, which
previously I had listed among those characteristics that make
jazz common. There the subject was tone color, that quality
of sound that might be uniquely identified with a performer.
A unique sound is of some interest owing to the originality
and skill needed to produce it, but it is hardly a principle of
great music. It is, at best, an ingredient.
There may be in jazz, however, a sense of the individual
far more significant than unique tone color. Part of Louis
Armstrong's great achievement during the 1920s was to make
jazz a soloist's music in place of the quasi-egalitarian ethos of
collective improvisation. His effect on jazz was analogous to
what Babe Ruth did for baseball, making it a slugger's game.
Since Armstrong, nearly all jazz has been concerto music,
music that requires an ensemble, but only to throw into relief
and to support the music of the individual.
The jazz soloist, the individual, goes about his work in
connection with the blues. The connection is in fact threefold. First, there is the structure, usually tripartite, built on
strong harmonic pillars. Second, there is the blue tonality
with its characteristic tone 3, its subtonic, and its embellishment of tone 5. Third, there is the sentiment, the lament
that conveys the soul of jazz. It is this third meaning of the
blues that is of paramount importance in defining the role of
the jazz soloist.
Lament underpins much jazz, but not in such a way that
hearing jazz (or blues) is a sad experience for the listener.
Quite the opposite. The listener, through the music, has his
cares-not necessarily woes-articulated in a way that
surpasses his own ability to express them. Blues guitarist
Brownie McGhee went so far as to reverse the relationship
ordinarily expressed by "having the blues." He said, "The
�BARBERA
19
blues was in the cradle with me rockin'. I never had the blues.
The blues had me. My cradle would rock without anybody
rockin' it. " 14 For the listener, something like catharsis takes
place, but not in the sense that the listener pities or fears a
representation of truly pitiable beings or frightful conditions.
The listener's condition or lament, rather, is transformed in
the musical expression and, if not lifted from her shoulders,
is at least lifted up before the community and to God. The
jazz soloist is a priest.
As is the case with most works of art, the expression is
individual, particular. The sentiment is not ''Abandonment
and infidelity are evil" but rather "My baby done left me."
Blues musician Bill Broonzy said, "It's a natural thing that no
two human beings had blues the same way." 15 Expressions by
and of the individual are hardly unique to music or to the
United States, but in this country there has existed over the
past two centuries a remarkably and perhaps uniquely fertile
ground for the sprouting up and growth of a musical idiom
that so expresses the soul. The setting is, of course, a special
case of the melting pot, a fertile ground that includes the
contradiction of enslavement of Africans sanctioned by a
government that in spirit may be the best attempt so far to
secure individual liberty in the context of society and its
responsibilities. The contradiction is enslavement coupled
with insult and irony.
One need not know about the enslavement of Africans in
the United States in order to appreciate jazz, but the existence
of jazz is, in my opinion, unthinkable without the
enslavement. This notion might cause mathematical minds
with a taste for justice to worry about or question the
goodness of the world: the price for a great artistic development being cruelty and dehumanizing social structure.
Such a thought-if there were not any cruelty, there would
not be any jazz-puts emphasis in the wrong place. The
world is a wonder, aspects of which may be considered in
terms of equations. (For those of you familiar with The
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Brothers Karamazov, one might think of the difference
between Ivan and Zosima.)
A brief review: after considering an argument for jazz as
common, jazz as entertainment, we have been considering the
possibility of something greater. We have heard excerpts from
legendary solos by Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown, and
a solo by Budd Johnson that overcomes the limitation of
theme and variations and in so doing achieves integrity. From
these examples we were required to consider what is the jazz
work, and this in tnrn led us to think about the jazz soloist as
an individual who, in the context of the blues, makes a
connection with the individual listener.
I have proposed an image of the priest for the jazz soloist,
but I want to emphasize the limited, thoroughly Western
notion that I have in mind. I do not see the soloist as a kind
of African tribal leader, or even as a Levite. In other words,
although the soloist serves as an intermediary, taking upon his
shoulders the burden of articulation, and thus in a way
performs a sacrifice, he does not do it primarily for the good
of the community. That good may be a by-product of his
action. Rather, he does it for you, or for me. He acts for the
individual. His entire musical being is that of the individual,
the autonomous one, cast in relief against the communal
background.
Before concluding with remarks on how the connection is
made, I would like to consider one more musical example, a
candidate for a great work, albeit a miniature. In fact, we
shall hear three versions. The piece is not much more than a
riff, composed by Charlie Parker and set in the 12-measure
blues sequence. Entitled "Now's The Time," it has a
moderate tempo in between the slow lament and the fast
instrumental blues. I call it a dance blues. 16
Parker recorded "Now's the Time" more than once, and
although his solos are almost always interesting, I know of
nothing special about those recordings to recommend them
as great. Here is the beginning of one from 1953-Parker's
solo on this recording is very good-so that we can hear the
�BARBERA
21
basic plan. In lieu of trying to write out the head or theme
based on a single performance by Parker, I have provided the
version published in The Real Book, with a copyright of
1945,17 [Musical example 8; Appendix 2, "Now's The Time"]
Now let us listen to the beginning of a recording by tenor
saxophonist Sonny Rollins from February, 1964. We shall
hear the head, just one blues chorus in this case rather that
two in Parker's, and then four choruses of improvisation.
[Musical example 9]
In my opinion, there are many factors that contribute to
the greatness of this performance: the busy drums; the highly
propulsive bass-clear evidence that you do not need to allot
a solo to the bassist as long as you let him really blow during
the performance; the tone of the sax-narrow or with
minimal vibrato at times, but chock full of pitch variation;
omitted notes, for example measure six of the head; thematic
choruses, the first built around ghost tones in approach to the
tonic, the second and third emphasizing tone 6 in both the
upper and lower registers, the fourth emphasizing tone 2. A
comprehensive analysis would tie together these tones of
emphasis, which function like the recitation tones of improvised psalmody." But here my analytical goal is much smaller
and narrower.
I call your attention to one very brief passage in measure
8 of the second chorus, although I shall gloss over the details.
I have transposed Rollins's solo to F for purposes of
comparison. 19 [Musical example 10; Appendix 2, Rollins,
2:5-8]
Rollins has centered initially on D, tone 6, for this middle
phrase of the blues, measures 5-8, but then there is a startling
flourish, the beginning of which is presented in the last
measure of the example. Assuming that D-flat and C-sharp
are the same notes, you can see that the sixteenth-note run is
a whole-tone scale. The whole-tone passage ruptures the
music; it breaks the groove. But this rupture makes musical
sense. Three or four of the tones comprising the scale are part
of the tonality, a blues in F. The B-natural and the C-sharp
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
however are definitely outside, and these are the notes that
startle us, that give us the tension that accompanies relaxation. I believe that the inspiration for this rupture, and what
makes it work so well, can be found in the accompaniment to
the head.
We hear Ron Carter, the bassist, play a chromatic ascent
in the head in measures 5-8, in a rhythm only approximated
in the written musical example. [Appendix 2, Rollins, head 58] The B-flat and arguably the B-natural and C are also part
of the theme, but what about the C-sharp? The latter note
does not appear in the two recorded versions by Parker that
I am familiar with nor in the written version. [Musical
example 11]
From whom did the chromatic ascent come? Horace
Silver, perhaps? During A Night at Bird/and in 1954, Blakey's
group played "Now's The Time," and the chromatic ascent is
clearly presented by the pianist, Silver. Note that while the Bflat, B-natural, C-natural and their harmonization are played
by the entire ensemble, only Silver plays the C-sharp.
[Musical example 12; Appendix 2, Blakey and Silver, head 58]
Rollins must have heard this recording, and perhaps the
chromatic ascent had been making the rounds for some time
in the performance of "Now's The Time." Ten years separate
the two recordings. 20 When the chromatic ascent is carried to
an extreme of four notes, then we arrive at C-sharp, which
along with B-natural provides the missing tones for a
complete whole-tone scale. It is precisely in this connection
that Rollins is able to push or break the tonality, albeit for a
moment, and to do so with inherent musical logic.
I am not suggesting that Rollins came to his performance
in a fashion as pedantic as my presentation, although in jazz
circles he is famous for his introspection. A close look,
however, at an admittedly very short passage provides an
insight into and possible understanding of the musical
thinking of a jazz genius. Rollins apparently liked the result,
�BARBERA
23
because he plays a very similar passage in measure 7 of the
third chorus. [Musical example 13]
Let us now move from small to large, from consideration
of chromatic passing tones to the general question posed by
the title of the lecture. Have we found a great work of jazz?
Undoubtedly, provided that we stay within the realm of jazz.
The rest of the performance is also very good, with solos by
Herbie Hancock and again by Rollins, with further references
to the whole-tone phrase. But is the work really great? I see
two related reasons for saying "No." First, it is a recording,
and second, the recording took place in a recording studio.
There is no way around the first problem, one that is shared
by virtually all music that we study and to some degree by just
about every work on the St. John's program insofar as the
books are translations made from texts established by editors.
I feel that the problem is more serious with jazz, with that
musical idiom in which, as I have claimed, we are entertained
and perhaps ennobled by the individual in the very act of
individuation.
Attempting to solve the second problem, the studio
recording, is a temptation that I find irresistible. The solution
is a temptation because we know that in most cases the "live
recording" is also somewhat of a fabrication, a piecing
together by recording engineers of recorded excerpts. This is
the case with A Night at Bird/and. The reason why the
temptation is irresistible is because the engineers often do a
good job.
By a good job, I mean that the recording approximates
the real thing, and I make this claim from experience. I know,
I have experienced the real thing, an ennobling performance
by a jaz.z musician. At one point I considered apologizing for
what amounts to a dressed-up version of "jazz in my life."
Further reflection on the subject inclines me to think that the
personal aspect of the subject is in fact central. Jazz is about
individuals, it is music by the individual and for the
individual. It is not only concerto music, but concerto music
best heard in its actual, spontaneous development, and best
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
heard up close, that is, as chamber music, in a setting where
the listener relates intimately and personally to the
performer. Our chambers are nightclubs.
The Blakey performance at Birdland is about as good a
recorded live performance as any that I know of. It is a
recording and thus artificial, or doubly artificial, but it
captures a sense of spontaneity and improvisation. The music
and the musicians are of high caliber. And they were cookin'
that night. Nevertheless, there may be no individual piece,
not even an individual solo that we could call great, not on a
par with the performances that we heard by Louis Armstrong,
Clifford Brown, Budd Johnson, and Sonny Rollins.
Where does this leave us? Even if we were to decide that
there are great performances of jazz that could be revisited
repeatedly, those performances would be relatively brief: five,
ten, fifteen minutes. There are a few examples in jazz of
extended compositions and performances, but by and large,
the great performances of jazz are miniatures. Such being the
case hardly excludes jazz from our consideration. We might
approach a performance like Sonny Rollins's "Now's The
Time" in a way similar to our approach to a motet by Josquin
des Prez or a sonnet by Shakespeare. Were we to try for
something larger, longer, my inclination would be toward the
Live at ... genre rather than the extended work-A Love
Supreme-or the thematic collection of recordings, for
example Out of Time. The problem with my preference, A
Night at Bird/and, is that we know it is an artifice, a collection
of miniatures pieced together to give the impression of a
whole. Its advantage, on the other hand, is the success of the
ruse, the conveyance of a sense of spontaneity spread out
over an evening's work, and this is crucial. For a great work
of jazz must convey the sense of the artist at work, that work
being a priestly lament that strives for, that longs for, that
articulates ... and here words fail me. I cannot say what jazz
articulates. Jazz, I believe, really is about something, albeit
ineffable. Furthermore, jazz has meaning, not just musical
meaning, but meaning as jazz. It exudes the spirit of America,
�BARBERA
25
especially North America. Freedom of the individual is
perhaps the characteristic most commonly associated with
jazz, and although this seems to be generally true, the peculiar
qualities of lament, sacrifice, and beauty are missing in this
characterization.
Let us narrow our scope by returning to the example of
Budd Johnson's solo in "Segue in C." The structure of theme
and variations is a limitation that hinders musical development, but at the same time it provides the channel through
which improvisation, individuation can take place. 21 Unlike
with literature and the non-temporal arts, with jazz the clock
is ticking. Unlike with the music of Mozart, with jazz the
clock is ticking now. Jazz is urgent, and so we feel it when
Budd Johnson falls behind the beat. We feel it not because we
fear that Johnson is going to lose the beat, but rather because
we can feel his control, his autonomy. [Musical example 14;
Appendix 2, Triplets] The blues and song form provide the
foundations of phrase and harmony that allow for such free
elaboration, that allow for elaborations about the
autonomous individual.
Time flows. Music forms time. Improvised music forms
time in time, perhaps self-referentially. Jazz, if it is great,
forms time in time in history: this individual, this place and
time, your lament, but made beautiful, transcendent.
I do not know if there is great recorded jazz. The portion
of this account that has sought such a work, that has
attempted to determine its characteristics, and that has
argued diffidently in behalf of a few cases, is shamelessly
based on personal testimony. In the final analysis, no amount
of explanation on my part will make jazz or any individual
performance great for you, just as I am powerless to persuade
you, ultimately, that the Mozart-da Ponte operas are great.
Knowledgeable and sensitive human beings point to these
works and tell us they are great. Personally I am certain in one
case, Mozart, and favorably inclined but uncertain in the
other.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
Appendix 1: Recorded Music Examples
Musical examples can be heard online by visiting the St. John's Review
webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml) and clicking
the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by Andre
Barbera".
1. Split Kick
2. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, val. 1
Clifford Brown (tp), Lou Donaldson (as),
Horace Silver (p), Curly Russell (h), Art
Blakey (d), February 21, 1954, Birdland, New
York City
0:00- 0:58 (Marquette's introduction) and
0:00- 1:05 (Blakey, "Split Kick")
Sonny Rollins Quartet, The Essential Sonny
Rollins: The RCA Years
Sonny Rollins (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron
Carter (b), Roy McCurdy (d), February 14,
1964, New York City
0:00-0:09
3. I Thought About You
Miles [)avis Quintet, The Complete Concert:
1964
Miles Davis (tp), George Coleman (ts),
Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (h), Tony
Williams (p), February 12, 1964,
Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York
City
0:00-1:13
4. Hotter Than That
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, The Hot
Fiues and Hot Sevens, vol. 3
Louis Armstrong (cor, voc), Kid Ory (tb),
Johnny Dodds (d), Lil Armstong (p), Johnny
St. Cyr (bj), Lonnie Johnson (gt), December
13, 1927, Chicago
0:00-2:16
5. Cherokee
Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, Clifford
Brown's Fittest Hour
Clifford Brown (tp), Harold Land (ts), Richie
Powell (p), George Morrow (h), Max Roach
(d), February 25, 1955, New York City
0:00-2:48
�BARBERA
6. Segue In C (Alternate)
7. Segue in C (Alternate)
27
Count Basie Orchestra, Basie at Bird/and
Thad Jones, Sonny Cohn, Lennie Johnson,
Snooky Young (tp), Quentin Jackson, Henry
Coker, Benny Powell (tb), Marshall Royal (cl,
as), Frank \Vess (as, ts, fl, arr), Frank Foster,
Budd Johnson (ts), Count Basie (p), Freddie
Green (gt), Eddie Jones (b), Sonny Payne (d),
June 27, 1961, Bird land, New York City
1:04-3:28
Count Basie Orchestra
3:02-3:12
8. Now's The Time
Charlie Parker Quartet, The Essential Charlie
Parker
Charlie Parker (as), AI Haig (p), Percy Heath
(b), Max Roach (d), July 28, 1953, Fulton
Recording Studio, New York City
0:00-0:37
9. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00 -1:40
10. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-0:52
11. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00-0:15
12. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, vol. 2
0:00- 1:39
13. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-1:10
14. Segue inC (Alternate) Count Basic Orchestra
3:02-3:12
Play List
To locate the music examples on www.rhapsody.com, search by album
title, then by song title.
Album Title
Song Title
Basie At Birdland
Segue In C (Alternate Take)
Clifford Brown's Finest Hour
Cherokee
The Complete Concert: 1964
I Thought About You
The Essential Charlie Parker
Now's The Time
The Essential Sonny Rollins: The RCA Years Now's The Time
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Vol. 3
Hotter Than That
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Announcement
Marquette
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Split Kick
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 2
Now's The Time
Appendix 2
Swing Eighths
Triplets
Now's The Time
by Pee Wee
�BARBERA
29
Rollins, 2:5-8
Rollins, head 5-8
Blakey and Silver, head 5-8
Notes
1
Here is Pee \Y/ee Marquette's introduction:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down
here at Birdland this evening, a recording for Blue Note Records. \Vhcn
you applaud for the different passages, your hands goes right over the
records there, so when they play 'em over and over, throughout the
country, you may be some place, and uh say: 'Well, that's my hands on
one of those records that I dug down at Birdland.'
We're bringing back to the bandstand at this time, ladies and gentlemen,
the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group, featuring the new trumpet
sensation, Clifford Brown; Horace Silver on piano; Lou Donaldson on
alto, Curly Russell is on bass.
And let's get together and bring Art Blakey to the bandstand with a great
big round of applause.
How 'bout a big hand, there, for Art Blakey.
Thank y' all."
�30
2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956; rev. ed., New York: Grove Press,
1979), 195 and 198.
3
I presume that the recording was made over the course of the last night
of the engagement because this specific collection of five musicians was
not a working group. Horace Silver recalls the recording lasting for two
nights over the weekend rather than one (HS 12/20/96). [This format
indicates the date of conversations between the author and Lou
Donaldson (LD) and Horace Silver (HS).] Other sources indicate one
night's recording. In 1975, Michael Cuscuna discovered four takes previously ignored or unknown. These were issued on a separate record as
Volume 3 (BNJ 61002). In addition there are according to Cuscuna four
"rejected takes, some not even complete on tape-never to come out."
(Personal correspondence, 1996) The current two-volume set of CDs
contains all preserved material except for the rejected takes (Blue Note
CDP 7 46519 2, DIDX 1130 and CDP 7 46520 2, DIDX 1131).
4
(HS 12/20/96). Lou Donaldson remembers Marquette serving the
function of 'policeman', who had his hands full keeping the often-rowdy
audience in check (LD 12/18/96).
5
Bill Crow, From Bird/and to Broadway (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 88.
6
The harmonic sequence underlying the piece is 'borrowed' from
another song, "There Will Never Be Another You" by Harry \Varren and
Mack Gordon. It is quite common among jazz musicians to compose a
piece by adding a new theme or melody to the harmonies of a popular
song, and this procedure in itself would not seem to disqualify a work
from greatness.
7
Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections 011 Jazz and Modem Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108-109. Gioia quotes Andy
Warhol: "I like to be bored." The author adds: "That much-if not
most-jazz is boring seems scarcely undeniable; given its extreme
dependence on improvisation, jazz is more likely than other arts to
ramble, to repeat, to bore."
8
Personal correspondence, June 26, 2005.
9
The same holds for "\Vee-Dot" on A Night at Bird/and. Marquette says,
"How 'bout a big hand, for Art Blakey, Art Blakey and his wonderful allstar[s]." But the recording documents show that this version of "\VeeDot" was recorded in the middle of a set.
10
"What Makes Jazz Jazz?" Musings: The Musical \Vorlds of Gunther
Schuller: A Collection of His Writings (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 27. This is a talk given by Schuller at Carnegie Hall on
Dec. 3, 1983. " ... jazz is, unlike many other musical traditions both
�BARBERA
31
European and ethnic/non·Western, a music based on the free unfettered
expression of the individual. This last is perhaps the most radical and
most important aspect of jazz, and that which differentiates it so dramatically from most other forms of music-making on the face of the
globe ... so typically American and democratic .. .I would like particularly
to dwell on one dear way in which jazz distinguishes itself from almost
all other musical expressions ... and that is the way jazz musicians play
their instruments, with particular regard to the aspect of sonority, timbre,
and tone color.,
1l The internet addresses for (1)- (3) and (5) are given here; (4) is no
longer available.
www.terellstafford.com/main.html
www.bobjanuary.com/favorite.httn
www. woodyshaw.com/downbeat 1_cberg. pdf#search =%22Woody%20Sha
w%20DownBeat%22
http://cornchipsandpie.blogspot.com/2006/05/chunky-nuggets.html
12 Portions of the Rite of Spring apparently came from Stravinsky playing
around on the piano. Conversely, jazz musicians repeat solos, a famous
example being Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul," the thinking being
that if you have come up with a good solo, why mess with it. Lou
Donaldson admitted to engaging in an activity nearly the opposite to
learning one's solos (LD 7/8/96). In response to my question regarding
whether he practiced his instrument any longer, he said "No." Rather, he
has worked out a way of practicing on stage, at gigs. He plays songs in a
variety of keys and tempos, which amounts to practice.
13
Gioia, The Imperfect Art, 55 and 101.
14
Interview by Studs Terkel of Big Bill Broonzy (vocal), Sonny Terry
(harmonica), and Brownie McGhee (guitar), "Keys to the Highway," May
7, 1957, Chicago, WFMT.
15
Ibid.
16
Indeed another composer, Andy Gibson, combined the riff with a
simple melody to make "The Hucklebuck/' a popular dance and
recording of the late 1940s.
17
The Real Book, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation,
no date), 293. The written example includes only the melody and not the
indicated harmonization.
18 Tone 6 substitutes for tone 5, a slight extension of normal movement.
Tone 2 does not substitute for tone 1 but rather points to it. Tone 2
specifies the end while at the same time leaving open the possibility of
additional choruses, a possibility that is realized by the piano choruses
and two subsequent choruses on saxophone.
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
19 The head appears on the upper staff and Rollins's solo on the lower
staff.
20 Rollins had been working on "Now's the Time." Three weeks earlier,
Jan. 24, 1964, he recorded the piece with the same musicians. That
recording lasts sixteen minutes, four times longer than the one under
consideration. In some ways, it sounds like practice for the real thing. My
version of the Jan. 24 recording seems to be pitched in the key of B! And
even if it is in B-flat, the range for Rollins is a fifth above the range for
the Feb. 14 recording. Note also that Hancock only camps in the Jan. 24
recording, and does very little of that, in the course of the sixteen
minutes, perhaps another indication that this is an experiment in the key
of B major.
21
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1966), 213. Necessity and "freedom of the
will" become one in artists.
�33
Preformationism In Biology:
From Homunculi To Genetic
Programs
1-
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D.
I. Introduction
Organic beings come to be. The way in which they do so has
been subject to much speculation and debate. In this paper I
shall review some of the ideas put forth regarding generation,
and argue that ways of thinking and seeing in the study of
development have had weighty influence on other areas of
biology.
II. Development
I should begin with what is perhaps the most notorious image
in all of biology: that of a human sperm containing a
miniature organism (Figure 1). I use the word "image"
advisedly, as this is not a drawing of what is seen, nor a
schematic diagram of an object, simplified in order to aid
understanding. Nicolas Hartsoeker produced it in his 1694
Essay de Dioptrique. 1
We would do well to study it attentively: it has detail,
definition, there is no blurriness, and it depicts a familiar
form. It wishes to suggest that a preformed microscopic
human individual is already present, complete, in the male
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D., has been a Tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe since
1985. This essay is a modified version of a Friday Night Lecture originally
delivered in Santa Fe on December 6, 2002. The lecture was dedicated to
two friends and retiring coileagues: Hans Von Briesen, Director of
Laboratories, and to the late Ralph Swentzell, Tutor. I again dedicate this
essay to them. The author acknowledges his indebtedness to Professor
Richard Lewontin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard
University for his close reading of the essay followed by his helpful and
insightful comments and suggestions.
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sex cell. This type of what would come
to be known as "preformationism" is
really a 111<Jrphological pre-existence of
a miniaturized adult homunculus. It
rests folded, patiently, apparently
peacefully, and it is already developed.
Once presumably created, this future
being is simply "awaiting the hour of
its birth." 2 All that needs to happen is
growth of its parts by accretion. This
living being will be engendered, but
was not, strictly speaking, reproduced.
The image's beauty and suggestiveness (and cuteness) are nonetheless
plagued by its unreality: Hartsoeker
never saw it, could never have seen it
(given the state of microscopical
science at his time with absence of
corrected objectives for aberration and
astigmatism, without oil immersion for
increased resolution, and lacking
staining techniques for enhanced
contrast and visibility), and lastly, no
one shall ever be able to see it. It
simply does not exist. Hartsoeker
himself explicitly says only that
perhaps one would see this, if there FIGURE 1
were better instruments. 3
In order to expect to see this, or to be able to claim to
have "seen" this cased figurine, several observations and
mental conceptions have to come together. We shall take a
brief detour in our attempt to understand their confluence.
There are two, and only two, options for understanding
development: either the future being and its parts exist in
smaller form from the very beginning, or the adult parts come
�AIGLA
35
to be as products of development from structures that do not
originally resemble them in the least.
For the former "preformationist" possibility, a miniature
form of the future organism is already present, and development is merely unfolding (what was termed in early days
"evolution"), with growth of pre-existing morphological
entities.
Marcelo Malpighi (who had discovered with the aid of
the microscope the capillaries in the lung just four years after
William Harvey's death-1661) was the earliest proponent of
this view, and gave us several drawings in 1673,4 where the
baby chick is all there, from the start. One may be tempted to
disregard this view as nonsensical, but consider: how is one
to explain an apparent gelatinous blob of unformed matter in
the egg, giving rise to and becoming a chick (or a
salamander)? The puzzle of development was solved (in a
way) with the preformationist hypothesis, and it was
explained in purely mechanical terms: unfolding and
enlargement of pre-existing components. The alternative, so
it seemed to Malpighi and his followers, would have to
postulate a mysterious directiveness to the process of development, a vital and, to them, non-material force.
Two thousand years earlier Aristotle clearly understood
the two possibilities, and perspicuously argued against preformationism: "How will the foetus become greater by addition
of something else if that which is added remain unchanged?
But if that which is added can change, then why not say that
the semen from the very first is of such a kind that blood and
flesh can be made out of it, instead of saying that it itself is
blood and flesh?" 5 And wondering how parts of the embryo
get made, he asserts:
Either all the parts, as heart, lung, liver, eye, and
all the rest, come into being together, or in
succession, as is said in the verse ascribed to
Orpheus, for there he says that an animal comes
into being in the same way as the knitting of a net.
That the former (parts coming into being simulta-
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
neously) is not the fact is plain even to the senses,
for some parts are clearly visible already existing
in the embryo, while others are not. 6
This argument of his is one of temporal succession in what
one observes. He concludes: "If the whole animal or plant is
formed from seed or semen, it is impossible that any part of
it should exist ready made in the semen or seed .... " 7 In
addition, his logical division of bodies into matter with form
inseparable from it, makes possible the whole doctrine of
epigenesis: the possibility of pattern emergent as a process,
like plaiting a net or painting a picture. Aristotle does not
address the further impossible consequence of the preformationists: not only is the organism pre-existent, but in this
already formed being, all of its descendants have to be present
-the so-called theory of encasement or fitting.
Trying to make clear the way in which matter and form
jointly come to be in the embryo, Aristotle wrote that "the
female contributes the material for the semen to work upon"'
and that the semen communicates to the material body of that
embryo the power of movement and form.' In this formulation Aristotle is simply being consistent with his notion that
"the mover or agent will always be the vehicle of the form," 10
and also with his conception that "that which produces the
form is always something that possesses it." 11 So the male
provides "the form," what seems to be at once formal,
efficient, and final cause, and the female contributes the
material cause.
Malpighi and Hartsoeker seem to be have clung to these
latter statements of Aristotle, but appear to have disregarded
the same author's foregoing arguments against preformationism. For Aristotle the semen provides the form for the
embryo, not the formed embryo.
Another factor that must have helped Hartsoeker believe
one should eventually be able to see what he delineated is the
observation by Anton van Leeuwenhoek of spermatozoa in
semen in 1680 {which he likened to "animalcules") through
�37
AIGLA
his microscope (Figure 2), which apparently was able to
magnify specimens 270 timesY It should not be forgotten
that a cell theory (of which I shall speak presently) did not yet
exist for Hartsoeker-it would take 150 years for spermatozoa to be identified as cells by Kolliker in 1841.
In any preparation of human semen, seen with the very
best available optics, the folded foetus cannot be seen; it can
only be imagined. In critical microscopy work, it is difficult
for the eye to see what the mind does not know, and the eyes
may well be blinded by what the mind knows. Further, the
eyes, at times, may see what the mind desires. Hartsoeker's
homunculus is a beautiful example of what I would call
wishful proleptic observation being fitted to preconceived
theoretical commitments. Malebrauche has described this
mode of operation: "The mind should not stop at what the
eye sees, for the vision of the mind is far more penetrating
than the vision of the eye." 13 I beg to differ, and would
venture to say, by contrast, that seeiug with the eye of reasou
may not be the best way of looking. Seeing is a complicated
8
FIGURE 2
1
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
matter. Observation is colored by expectation and theory
(preconception). It may not be possible to encounter scientific
"facts" as data, objectively discovered. The wish to see
something may often well determine what is "discovered."
One could hardly blame Hartsoeker for providing us with his
famous image, notwithstanding the fact that he was not
adhering to the dictum our students are repeatedly urged to
follow: "Make sure you do not merely find what you are
looking for!"
Preformationism does not have to deal with the formidable problem of development as such, and Hartsoeker sided
with the "spermist" sub-school in wishing to find the
miniature organism in the male seed (the other school being
the "ovist").
Another microscopist, Wolff, in 17 64, described
"globules" in animal tissues, and when he aimed his good
instrument (by the day's standards) at the developing chick
egg, he saw no minuscule baby chick; and in cross section, he
discerned layers of spherical structures that eventually gave
rise (or differentiated) to an embryonic organism. He
opposed the preformationists, and his "epigenesis!" school
taught that development started from an entirely homogeneous and unformed mass, acted on by an extraneous forcea "vis essentialis" (a force related to being alive). The camps
had been set, and preformationism with its purely mechanistic tendencies, seemed to have been forever discredited, in
favor of an epigenetic process of differentiation, that in its
inception embraced a form of vitalism, and left us with the
gargantuan problem of true development.
III. Cell Theory
That the development of the cell theory itself was influenced
by other theories in biology is not widely recognized. Of
course atomistic speculations from the physical sciences
played a role; but there is more.
�AlGLA
39
c
In 1665 Robert Hooke had observed pores and box-like
structures in cork, which he christened "cells," but he said
nothing of their possible biological meaning.
Schleiden, studying plant tissues, attempted to explain
what he saw in strictly physico-chemical terms. A good
biologist, he knew of Wolff's publications and eliminated
preformationism altogether from anatomy and embryology.
He applied what must have seemed to him "epigenetic"
considerations to cell formation and development, and in
1838 summarized his work 14 (see Figure 3 15 ). He could illafford to think that cells came from cells (which sounded too
much like preformationism), so cells had themselves to
develop. He made the cell nucleus (discovered by Robert
Brown five years earlier) the center of cell formation, calling
it the "cytoblast." The nucleus itself (or the nucleolus, as his
writings are unclear on this point) separated out of the
formative fluid (the "cytoblastema") by a sort of precipitation
in a "mother liquor," and only then, about it condensed the
rest of the cell (the cytoplasm) and its membrane. He emphasized that plants consist exclusively and entirely of cells and
their products, and an early version of the cell theory was
born.
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notice that for Schleiden cells are mostly structural
elements and without physiological import, nor is there a
continuity of cells or of life in a precise sense. Also, we must
remark, this epigenetic cellular thinking fits well with spontaneous generation.
Schwann, a colleague of Schleiden, accepted this theory
of cell formation, and he deserves credit for extending it to
animals in 1839. 16 He also added some thoughts about
function and metabolism to this intermediate cell theory.
Schwann described the formation of blood corpuscles in
excruciating detail, ascribing also to the precipitated or
crystallized nucleus the power of cell formation de novo.
Let us pause and regard the engraving of Figure 3. After
much consideration I have come to the conclusion that cells
just do not look like this, and I say so after carefully studying
many different plant tissues, and having studied for over
three decades animal tissues nuder the microscope. The only
thing that resembles to any degree this illustration are figures
of the special form of cell death called apoptosis. Apoptosis is
programmed cell death, was characterized by the pathologist
Kerr in 1972, 17 and is now one of the most widely studied
genetic molecular phenomena. Cells that die due to a genetically programmed mechanism in apoptosis show nuclear
shrinkage, condensation, fragmentation, and in contrast to
other forms of cell death (necrosis), exhibit no inflammatory
response. Could Schleiden and Schwann have seen apoptosis
and interpreted it with the eye of their cellular epigenetic
framework? That is, did they take dying cells for cells
forming? It is impossible to tell, as this type of cell death
apparently plays a minor role, if at all, in plant tissues. Or
could perhaps their preparations have had bad fixation and
poor staining, and they be describing artifacts? This is
unlikely. What is possible for me to tell in reference to
Schwann's writings on blood cell formation, is that he was
imposing a chronological order on what he saw statically,
thinking the nucleus of red cells came before their membrane
and cytoplasm, whereas the order of development is precisely
�AIGLA
41
the opposite: the nucleus of red cells becoming smaller and
eventually being extruded, Schwann inferred, with the aid of
the imagination, a dynamic sequence of events in fixed
tissues, and he erred. He wished what he saw to depict and
imply what he wanted.
It is intriguing that the conceptual frame of epigenesis,
and the disproval of preformationism by Wolff in embryology, carried over into cell theory, retarding it and giving it
an originally erroneous mechanism for cell genesis.
This mistake was brilliantly dispelled by the pathologist
Virchow. In 1860, twelve years after Schleiden and Schwann,
he defined the cell as "the ultimate morphological and
functional element in which there is any manifestation of
life. " 18 For Virchow all cells (including abnormal ones like
those found in cancer growths) do come from pre-existing
cells, and he rightly saw Schleiden and Schwann's theory of
free cell formation as nothing but an avatar of de novo
spontaneous generation; and this, before Pasteur's work of
1860 and 1864, disproving once and for all the discontinuity
of life. At last the cell theory developed into its mature form,
and a unity underlying the diversity of living organisms was
established. The word "Biology" (coined by Lamarck and
Treviranus) now, finally, became meaningful.
The capping of the cell theory comes with Walter
Flemming, 19 who in 1879 described cell division or mitosis:
not only did cells come from cells, as Virchow showed, but
now all nuclei come from pre-existing nuclei.
rv: Modern Embryology
Once the sperm and the egg were also recognized to be cells,
investigators turned their eyes to the process of fertilization.
Hertwig20 in 1876 and 1885 determined that this event is due
to the joining of the male and female nuclei. Heredity must
then be due to the transmission of a material substance, and
the male contributes to the new organism some matter as well
as the female (contrary to Aristotle's teachings), and it is the
nucleus that is embodying this matter.
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Van Beneden21 in 1883 saw that the colored stubby bodies
discovered by Flemming in cell division (and now named
chromosomes) played a role in fertilization. Studying the
round worm Ascaris megalocepha/us bivalens, which has four
chromosomes in each adult cell, he observed that two
chromosomes came from the father's sperm and two from the
mother's egg, before the new zygote formed and divided.
Although he does not say so explicitly, the hereditary
substance now seemed to be confined to these nuclear bodies.
The chromosomes then, are equally contributed by the
parents, and are constant in number for the species.
With the recognition that all cells arise from cell division
in adults as well as during embryonic development starting
with the zygote, the next question tackled was: How do cells
become different and give rise to a complex organism?
Let us turn to the experimental embryological work of
Roux, Driesch, and Spemann and Mangold. Roux 22 destroyed
one of the two blastomeres at the two-cell stage in the frog,
and got a half-embryo. Notice his experiment constitutes a
defect study. He concluded that the potency of a cell equals
its fate, and that each cell is self-differentiating, the whole
organism being simply the sum of independently developed
parts. In a sense, he advocated a preformation of limited,
fated, and pre-assigned potentialities, and established embryology as an experimental science of proximate causations and
mechanisms.
Roux's experimental results ran into difficulties with the
work of Driesch. 23 When this investigator separated (not
destroyed) one of the blastomeres of the sea urchin at the
same two-cell stage, he got a half-sized full embryo. Notice
his experiments are isolation studies. These results induced
Driesch to embrace an extreme vitalism, postulating a
nonmechanical entelechy (Factor E). 24 For what machine, if
cut in half, could still function normally? The potency of an
early cell is not preformed, and turns out to be much greater
than its fate. The resulting half-sized embryo strongly
suggests that cells at very early stages of development are
�AIGLA
43
pluripotent. Eventually Driesch's thinking, without a mysterious non-material "entelechy," became known as holistic
organicism: the organism is more than a mere summation of
individual parts added together.
The climax of this part of the story comes with Spemann
and Mangold25 who in 1924 showed that a portion of tissue
from a newt embryo could induce the formation and
production of other tissues, even of an incomplete new newt,
in a recipient. Developmental possibilities, then, are not
totally preformed, and many events in morphogenesis must
be the result of cell-to-cell interactions.
It must be emphasized that in Roux's experiments the
killed cell remained attached to the viable one, and the developing embryo did not "sense" this cell was dead. If the killed
cell had been separated, as in the work of Dreisch, the
embryo would then have compensated (regulated) its development into a (smaller) whole embryo. Driesch's work
reveals that a developing organism is a whole, and that its
plan for differentiation at any time and stage of its embryology lies in the totality of its being. This does not mean that
any and every alteration in a part of an organism will
interfere with the normal development of the rest of the
complete organism-this would be a claim of an extreme
form of wholism. The developmental process is a regulative
one, where the embryo has the ability to grow normally even
when some portions are removed or rearranged. The embryo
is a "harmonious equipotential system"26 because all the
potentially independent parts function together to form an
organism. Driesch's concept of "regulation" implies that cells
must interact with each other in complex ways, and the work
of Spemann and Mangold demonstrates that one tissue can
direct the development of another neighboring tissue. The
small grafted region in their experiments was called "The
Organizer" since it controls the organization of the complete
embryonic body. The organizer is a piece of tissue; tissues are
made up of cells; cells contain nuclei with chromosomes
within.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
V. Chromosomes
Mendel's work was published in 1865, and only
unearthed in 1900, after much embryological and cytological
work had been performed. Shortly after the re-discovery, in
1902 Boveri 27 united the sciences of embryology and
cytology. In his experiments he demonstrated that normal
development depends not on the number of chromosomes
per se, but in the normal combination of a complete set of
these structures. He managed to fertilize a sea urchin egg with
two sperms, so three sets of chromosomes became apportioned to four cells after the second zygotic division. The
chromosomes were distributed asymmetrically, by chance, to
the daughter cells. When these cells were gently separated
and allowed to develop, only those with at least one whole set
of chromosomes gave rise to a normal individual.
Furthermore, the abnormal embryos were abnormal in
different ways. His conclusion was seminal: chromosomes are
functional individuals, that is, each chromosome must possess
(and give rise to) different qualities.
The same year brought the work of the American Walter
Sutton, 28 who painstakingly documented the continuity and,
�AIGLA
45
more importantly, the distinct individuality and physiological
singularity of chromosomes in the Giant grasshopper. Figure
4 shows his most elegant camera Iucida drawings (not
diagrams or photographs) of chromosome groups. They are
unprecedented and unequaled, even when compared to
modern ones, in resolution and accuracy. Chromosomes are
then continuous in a given species from one generation to
another, from one cell to its descendants, and are also
morphological individuals one from another. They are the
preformed material substrate for heredity and development
in living organisms.
In truth, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, meaning
that chromosomes are the bearers of hereditary factors or
traits, had been established by Boveri and Sutton. But some
biologists wanted stronger, unequivocal evidence or proof.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, a senior colleague of Sutton at
Columbia University, was originally trained as an embryologist, and of course, detested any suggestion of preformationism. He was "an experimentalist at heart" (his own
words) and very much disliked inferences in biology. 29 From
the start he opposed the chromosomal theory of heredity,
since to ascribe to chromosomes the ability to confer
character traits must have carried the vice of preformationism
for him. We must add that the controversy over what had
exclusive responsibility for hereditary development, either
the nucleus itself or the cytoplasm instead, was not yet totally
settled. Furthermore, Morgan's opposition stood despite the
fact that sex determination seemed by then to be caused,
quite clearly, by chromosomes.
When he turned to genetics, studying the fruit fly
Drosophila, Morgan was unconvinced that a strict association
between specific characters and specific chromosomes
existed. He read in the work of Boveri and of Sutton only a
parallel behavior, during cell division and fertilization, of
chromosomes and Mendelian traits. His apprehensions may
strike us as peculiar but are not altogether awkward: it is
indeed strange to suggest that the shape or color of an organ
�46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in a living being was preformed in some as yet mysterious
way, in these stubby colored structures known as chromosomes. Although we do not have now, as with Hartsoeker,
any preexistence of a complete homunculus, our eye meets
preformed materials that are passed on and could determine
form and function.
Morgan's paper of 1910 30 is extraordinary in many ways.
In no other does one see the struggle an author is undergoing
in arriving at an inevitable conclusion that contradicts his
previous beliefs. He prevents himself throughout from even
using the word "chromosome"; he establishes that the traits
for sex and white eye color are "combined," but avoids
calling them physically linked. He refutes his own distrust
and establishes the chromosomal theory of inheritance by
demonstrating that one specific character corresponds to the
behavior of one specific "factor" (later shown to be a
chromosome, visible under the microscope).
Fortunately in this case, and unlike in the history of cell
theory, the suspicion against preformationism did not retard
progress in genetics. Morgan himself was soon converted,
becoming one of the staunch advocates for ascribing to
chromosomes their genetic role through his further work and
that of his students, particularly Sturtevant and Bridges (who
provided direct proof of the chromosomal theory of inheritance in a most difficult paper).
VI. The Genetic Program
Chromosomes were found to be constituted largely of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA was shown to be the
material responsible for conferring visible (phenotypic)
traits. 31 The molecular structure of DNA was determined in
1953,32 and soon after the language of the genetic code. DNA
is the preformed element in natural living beings, and it
controls development-to a degree. In other words, development could be said to be preformational as regards genes
and their hereditary influences, but rigorously epigenetic in
actual constructional activities from undifferentiated begin-
�AIGLA
47
nings. And this leads us to the concept of the so-called
"genetic program," and to new problems and questions.
There are really two problems that both genetics and
embryology must address in order to get an adult organism
from a fertilized egg: cells becoming different (differentiation) and cells producing shapes (morphogenesis). Both
processes appear to be directed, and with the rise of information theory and the knowledge of the molecular biology of
instructions and mechanisms for protein coding by the DNA
base triplets, the notion of a genetic program is quite
reasonable. What exactly do biologists mean by a genetic
program? Where is it coded? And if it is coded in DNA, how
so?
First, the program is one of combinations of three
molecules (bases) determining an amino acid, and about three
hundred of these amino acids specifying an average protein.
If the genetic program has a language, the alphabet is made
up of single bases. It must be noted that a protein is not even
completely specified by its amino acid sequence, originally
coded by the DNA. The intracellular environment plays a
role in the final folded stable state of proteins, and every
protein has alternate stable states. The future shape of a string
of amino acids is "open," and the actual final configuration
only "closes" through environmental conditions."
Secondly, the genetic program must be an open one.
Evidence for this was provided one hundred years ago by
Harrison, 34 who observed independent differentiation in
nerve fiber outgrowth from single cells. Frog protoplasmic
fibers extended from nerve cell bodies into any region where
frog lymph was present in a Petri dish (in vitro)-a result not
consistent with a rigidly preordained genetic program. That
the program is modifiable and plastic is obvious from the
experimental results of Spemann and Mangold, and from
recent work with stem cells. Also, the phenomena of regeneration of limbs in some animals, of memory and of learning,
imply that the program is not rigid, yet has some specificity. 35
It is worth emphasizing that both-cell differentiation and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
morphogenesis-are the result not only of a genetic program,
but also of what some have appropriately designated as a
"somatic program," consisting of the whole embryo at any
particular time and stage. 36 Neighboring cells and their
respective positions cause and induce changes in cell shape,
adhesion, motility, migration and function, and in the shape
of organs and of the organism as a whole. The program is not
a "recipe" for the final product; environmental information
and random developmental noise enter into a notcompletely-determined process."
Lastly, it is essential that the program turned out to be not
a descriptive program, as was thought previously (specifying
what the cell or the whole organism will look like), but
instead a program of instructions describing how to make an
organism. 38 Consider a structure in origami. A set of data
completely specifying its final configuration would be
extremely difficult to collect, and would not at all explain
how to achieve the end form. It is much easier to formulate
instructions on how to fold a piece of paper; simple instructions about folding have complex spatial consequences. In the
same way during development, gene action sets in motion
sequences of events that can bring about profound changes in
the embryo. If the program were the full description of the
organism, modern molecular biologists could rail again, this
time with an ultramicroscopic intonation, against preformationism. This generative program of instructions is carried
out on an epigenetic basis, and the road from DNA to
proteins to phenotype is extremely complicated and
tortuous." It is also the case that the environment can
influence, to a great degree, the variable expression of the
genetic program. 40 The embryo not so much develops as
emerges from the fertilized egg; it reveals itself, and one may
be tempted to say that it is almost evoked.
For some modern molecular biologists like Changeaux (a
famous collaborator with Jacob and Monod), any talk of a
developmental program is pointless, 41 and he wishes to
dispense with the term altogether, placing exclusive emphasis
�AIGLA
49
on epigenetic processes. He arrives at this (to me) extreme
view from his work on the development of neural connections in the nervous system (a sophisticated extension of
Harrison's work), where much plasticity occurs. This
malleability is only to be expected, so why is Changeaux so
much against the concept of a program? I am afraid that a
specter is haunting him: the specter of preformationism.
Rightly understood, a genetic program need not totally
determine and predict exactly what the precise shape of a
given nerve cell or of a nervous system with its billions of
synaptic connections, or of a whole vertebrate, will be. No
animal or plant is fully shaped and entirely determined by its
DNA. In this sense, living beings are not absolutely
predictable and may never be "computable. "42 Speaking of a
genetic program does make sense, especially if one considers
that this program is an historically evolved one, 43 and does
not provide an unalterable architectural blueprint, but only a
set of instructions for·the construction of a living being, and
at the same time, the means to carry it out.
Prominent developmental and molecular biologists have
recently wondered whether we "understand" development at
all. 44 The implications for a philosophy of biology are deep;
what seems to be at stake is our understanding of the concept
of "understanding" itself. It has become nearly impossible to
discern or even expect any broad general principles in embryology,45 and there may be not mnch more to explain than
what is observed. 46 We have an alphabet (nucleotide bases)
and words for development (triplets coding for amino acids
that make up proteins). What appears to be wanting, and has
so far remained elusive, is a "grammar of development." 47 My
guess is that this will not be forthcoming merely from the
completed human genome project that ascribes to portions of
DNA in different chromosomes the coding for the various
proteins that help constitute a living organism.
The foregoing discussion should result in a change in
conceptualization in the posing of the problem of differentiation and development. The old "classical" question was:
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"How does an apparently homogenous, small ball of yolkladen cytoplasm with a nucleus, turn into a large, complicated, highly organized adult with fully functioning organs?"
Now we had better ask: "How does the encoded structure,
compressed into the specialized maternal organ-the eggbecome transformed into the realized structure of an adult
organism?"48
VII. Epilogue
I have attempted to investigate the role of an idea, preformationism, in several areas of biology: developmental
anatomy, cell theory, the chromosomal theory of inheritance,
and the concept of a genetic program. Beholding an egg
should remind us that it embodies, for Aristotle, a world of
explanation. It should be apparent that for us, one of the
greatest mysteries lies hidden within, and what is more,
comes out of it.
Notes
1
Nicolas Hartsoekcr, Essay de Dioptrique (Paris, 1694), 230.
2
F. Jacob, The Logic of Life (Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press,
1993), 20.
3
Hartsoeker, Essay de Dioptrique, 229.
4
L. \'V'olpert et alia, Principles of Development (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 3.
5
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Bk. I, Ch. 8, 723a15-20, A.
Platt, trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6
Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. 1, 734a16-22.
7
Ibid., 734a33-35.
8
Ibid., 729a29-32.
9
Ibid., 729b5-8.
10
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. Ill, Ch. 2, 202a9. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gayc,
trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed.
Princeton University Press, 1984).
11
Ibid., Bk. VIJJ, Ch. 5, 257b10.
J. Barnes
(Princeton, NJ:
�51
AIGLA
12 E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 138.
13
Nicholas Malcbranche, De fa recherche de Ia
1700), 48.
verite, Vol. I, (Paris,
14
M.J. Schleidcn, Contributions to Phytogenesis, H. Smith, trans.
(London: for the Sydenham Society, 1847 [orig. 1838]).
15
R. Virchow, Cellular Pathology (London: John Churchill, 1860), 10
(Figure 4).
16 T. Schwarm, Microscopical Researches into the Structure and Growth of
Animals and Plants, H. Smith, trans. (London: for the Sydenham Society,
1847 [orig. 1839]).
17
]. F. R. Kerr ct alia, "Apoptosis: A Basic Biological Phenomenon with
long-ranging Implications in Tissue Kinetics," British Journal of Cancer,
26 (1972): 239.
18
Virchow, Cellular Pathology, 3.
19
In B.P. Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Iuheritance (New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1968), 43-47.
20
In Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Inheritance, 4-8; 26-33.
21
Ibid., 54-59.
22
In B.H. \Villier and J.M. Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 2-28.
23
In \Villier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 38-50.
24
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. I
(London: Adam and C. Black, 1907).
25
In \Vrllier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 144-184.
26
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism.
27
In \'\i'iliier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 74-90.
28
W. Sutton, "On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in
Brachystola Magna," Biological Bulletin IV, no. 1 (1902): 24-39.
29
S.F. Gilbert, "In Friendly Disagreement: Wilson, Morgan and the
Embryological Origins of the Gene Theory," American Zoologist 27
(1987): 797-806; S.F. Gilbert, "The Embryological Origins of the Gene
Theory," Journal of the History of Biology II, no. 2 (1978): 307-351.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
52
30
T.H. Morgan, "Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophilia, '' Science
XXXII, no. 812 (1910): 120-122.
31
O.T. Avery, CJv1 Macleod, and M. McCarty, journal of Experimental
Medicine 79 (1944): 137-158.
31
J.D. \Vatson and F.H.C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,"
Nature 171 (1953): 737-738.
33
D. Whitford, "Protein folding in vivo and in vitro," in Proteins:
Structure and Function (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
34
R.G. Harrison, "Observations on the Living Developing Nerve Fiber,"
Anatomical Record 1 (1907): 116-118.
35
E. Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology," Science 134 (1961): 15011506.
36
E. :Niayr, This is Biology (Cambridge, lvlA: Harvard University Press,
1997), 21, 171.
37
R. Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment
(Cambridge, .MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
38
\X'olpert, Principles of Development, 21.
39
Science 295 (1 March 2002): 1661-1682, see complete issue.
40
Lewontin, The Triple Helix.
41
J.P. Changeaux, Neuronal Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 195.
41 L. \Vol pert, "Development: Is the egg computable or could we generate
an angel or a dinosaur?" in M.P. Murphy and L.A.J. O'Neill, What is
Life? The Next Fifty Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 57-66.
43
.Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology"; Mayr, This is Biology.
44
L.Wolpert, "Do We Understand Development?" Science 266 (1994):
571-572.
45
Ibid.
46
R. Lewin, "Why is Development so Illogical?" Science 224 (1984):
1327-1329.
47
Ibid.
48
E. Mayr, "Comments on Theories and Hypotheses in Biology," Boston
Studies in Philosophy of Science 5 (1968): 450-456.
�53
The Persians and the Parthenon:
Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon
1
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
"Who are you and what is your family? .. .How old were you
when the Medes came?"
Xenophanes
1. The Building and the Polis
There are no words on the Parthenon (Figure 1). So in one
sense it is true that, unlike Aeschylus's Persians, the building
offered Athens a "visual, non verbal" education. 37 But, like
every other feature of this logos-loving city, this silent marvel
in marble invites all who see it to articulate in words the
story-or multiple stories-it too tells about Athens and
Persia.
The first is the story of the building itself, the story of its
building. Like Aeschylus's play, it has its origin in the Persian
wars. But its site far predates these events, reminding us of
ancient times when Athens was a fortified community
centered around a palace monarchy. From its earliest days,
Athens, like Persia, shaped and rearranged the natural
features of the environment to serve the demands of its
communal life. In the early Bronze Age (1300-1200 B.C.), the
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John1s College.
This essay is in two parts. Part One of this essay appeared in the previous
issue of The St. Jolm's Review, volume 50, number 2. Notes are continuous.
The photos included in the text are courtesy of Ann M. Nicgorski,
Willamette University, 1998. Dr. Nicgorski's excellent collection of images of
all the parts of the Parthenon discussed in this essay is available and easy to
use at www.willamette.edu/cla/Ytrvicws/parthenon/. For websites and books
with a fuller selection of photos, see the Bibliography before the Endnotes.
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE l (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
Acropolis, "high city," was artificially terraced and shored up
by a wall of cut rocks. So old and huge was this rampart that
it was called the "Cyclopean" wall; it was said to be the work
of a barely-civilized pre-human people, or of the legendary
Giants under the direction of Athena, who had defeated them
in an early war between the Gods and the Giants. 38
Eventually, the Acropolis above it became the site of a
fortified citadel from which the Athenian royal family ruled
the surrounding population.
Legend also told how Poseidon and Athena long ago vied
for primacy in this land. The sea was Poseidon's claim to
power; he caused a pool of salt water to appear on the rock.
Athena brought forth an olive tree as evidence of her power.
The judges ruled that the olive was the more valuable gift and
the goddess became the patroness of the city whose name she
shared. The incident was memorialized in the pool and the
olive that remained in the Erechtheion, one of the earliest
temples on the Acropolis. There is a story that, in 480 B.C.,
on the day after the Persians burned the Acropolis, the men
whom Xerxes sent to sacrifice in the shrine fonnd that "the
�FLAUMENHAFT
55
olive had put forth from its stump a shoot of about a cubit's
length" (Hdt., 8.55). By the early sixth century, the hill was
no longer dominated by a royal palace, but had become a
major sanctuary, accessible to all by a wide ceremonial ramp
that led visitors to a temple with an altar to a small olivewood
statue of Athena Polias, that is, "of the city." This carved
figure, xoanon, wrapped in her pep/as (robe), remained a
focus of civic religious life for centuries.
The statue had such close relations with Athens that, like
the supposedly autochthonous human population, it was
associated with no other earthly place. Its origins were
unknown; it was said to have fallen on this spot from the
sky, 39 the home of Athena's father, Zeus, on whose unlimited
empire Xerxes wished to model his own. Unlike the shadowy
legend of the statue's beginnings, the story of the birth of the
goddess herself was well known. So, indeed, are those of the
other Greek gods. Anthropomorphic in looks and character,
these gods are immortal, but not eternal; each came into
being, and each is associated with partial aspects of nature or
human experience. The story of a god's genesis often points
to the characteristic nature of that god. The full divinity of
each is most fully expressed when all are considered together.
But, unlike Persian multiplication, pantheon does not mean
mere aggregate or multiplied strength. Rather, it means a
defined plurality in which the elements are related, but differ
from, and are even in tension with, each other, and so
compose a viable and complete whole. Once again, as we saw
in Part One of this essay, the metaphor of well-woven fabric
comes to mind.
It was predicted that Athena's mother, Metis, whose
name means "cunning," "craft," or "counsel," would give
birth to a child excelling in these same qualities, one who
might rule the world. So Zeus, the child's father, swallowed
the pregnant Metis. When the time came, Hephaestus, also
crafty and cunning, split Zeus's head with an axe and
delivered the baby. And so Athena appeared in the world:
full-grown, fully armed, with an extraordinary intelligence,
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the very personification of immediacy, wily craft, and
resourcefulness. Not born from a mother, never to be one
herself, the maiden, parthenos, became the patron goddess of
a city of extraordinary masculine activity, one that excelled
not only in physical strength, as evidenced in war, but also in
the political arts of public speech and commerce and the
technological arts of agriculture, horse chariots, and ships.
But this child of her father was patron to women as well. Her
craft was manifest in the spinning and weaving of wool, as
well as of words. The image of her owl appeared on loom
weights that remained indoors, at home, with the women, as
well as on the currency exchanged in the open-air Agora
below the Acropolis, where men congregated to conduct the
commercial affairs of the city. Pallas Athena stood behind the
pep/as-weaving women and the spear-carrying warriors
whose lives together made a complete human city. The civic
fabric of Athens was woven from her arts, equally at work in
men and women ..
The annual Persian feast to celebrate the Great King's
birthday was called "tuktu," that is, "perfection" (teleion,
Hdt., 9.11 0). Athens' greatest festival celebrated not the birth
of a divinized despot who claimed that he was different from
all other men, but that of a civic deity who really was. The
meaning of her pep/as, in contrast to Xerxes' in Aeschylus's
play, reveals much about the two regimes. 40 There were two
related summer festivals devoted to Athena, one involving
part of the city and one all of it, both focused on the
olivewood image and what she wore. In May, the women
celebrated the Plynteria, the "washing rites." Gently
undressing and veiling the olivewood Polias, they carried her
pep/as to a spring, or perhaps as far as the sea, to launder it.
In the meantime, in the Kallynteria, the "adorning rites," the
crude and featureless image was prepared to receive the clean
garment. She was bathed and oiled and decorated with
jewelry. Robed again, she was replaced near her altar in the
old temple to await the most important festival of the year,
which took place in the following month, and bore her name.
�FLAUMENHAFT
57
From as early as the seventh century B.C., the June
Panathenaia, the festival of "all Athenians," culminated in a
citywide procession in which Athena's people presented her
with her annual birthday gift, a new peplos. By the next
century the festival included musical and rhapsodic performances, athletic and equestrian contests, and the awarding of
tripods, figurines, and large vessels of olive oil to those who
excelled in honor of the goddess who brought the olive.
The weaving of the peplos for the olivewood statue was
begun, appropriately, nine months before the goddess's
birthday celebration during a festival of crafts, when the
loom's warp-the upright cords-was set up by nine women
"workers," ergastinai, from designated aristocratic Athenian
families and several seven to nine year old girls dedicated to
the service of Athena. These children lived on the Acropolis
for the nine months and helped weave the pep/os. This bright
purple and yellow, woolen "story-doth" was decorated with
a tapestry-like depiction of Athena's exploits in the victory of
the Gods over the Giants. As we shall see, the Parthenon, like
other Athenian works, repeatedly associates this mythical
victory with Athens' historical victory over Persia. In the early
celebrations of the Panathenaia, the peplos was a rectangle of
about five by six feet and would have fit the human-sized
wooden image. Later, it may have been as big as a ship's sail
and, like real sails, would have been made by sewing several
loom weavings together. 41 The larger peplos was probably
made by professional male weavers for the Greater
Panathenaia every fourth year 42 and may have been exhibited
in the old temple of Athena Polias after the festival. Before
that, however, the pep/os was transported, perhaps on a
wheeled ship-cart, from the northwest city gate near the
Kerameikos district along a processional route to the Agora,
to the base of the Acropolis, and then carried up to the top
for presentation to the goddess. The ship "float" may have
been made from a Persian trireme captured at Salamis. Like
the wooden benches in the theater, and the roof and internal
decorations of the Odeion, which were made of Persian masts
�58
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and spars,43 it would have been an explicit reminder of the
Persian defeat. Again, the analogy of the Spanish Armada
makes vivid the attempt to keep an averted disaster literally
before one's eyes. In the hall of Gray's Inn in London, a
carved wooden screen thought to have come from a flagship
in the Spanish Armada has served a similar function for
centuries. It was rescued by firemen when the building was
badly damaged during the London Blitz and survives today to
remind the small island nation of its unlikely survival of both
Spanish and Nazi attempts to invade and conquer it. 44
How can we understand the festival fabrication rituals on
which this ancient city and its citizens spent so much time and
effort and money? Both the weaving and the civic procession
are prime examples of the ways in which the democratic polis
produced and maintained itself as a civic community.
Representatives from all parts of the population-old and
young, men and women, citizens and resident aliens, slaves,
and workers in many different crafts-participated in the
preparations that were overseen by a large number of administrative officials. The weaving at the center of the
Panathenaia was thus the occasion for weaving together not
only the pep/os, but also the different elements of the
Athenian city. The prescribed rituals and legal instructions
concerning the workers, places, times, materials, patterns,
colors, and the delivery of the woolen cloth occupied the
attention of much of the population. One can observe the farreaching effects of such "material" rituals in the building of
the ark and tabernacle by the wandering Israelites; it kept
them busy and made them obedient, law-abiding, and
devoted to what they had worked so hard on. The same
effects are aimed at in the annual festival that removes and
replaces the K'aaba cover in Mecca, and in Christian processions of a beautifully dressed image of a patron saint, like the
annual fiesta for La Conquistadora in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In their outlook and technology, Athenians looked to the
new, the future, and change. At the same time these rituals
held them to the old, the past, and the recurring. Festival
�FLAUMENHAFT
59
preparations and participation compelled these self-sufficient
and resourceful citizens to recognize their dependence on
what was beyond their control. Free and self-governing, the
Athenians on such occasions devoted their powers and
resources to obedience to laws and the service of old traditions and gods. If, in celebrating Athena, they were simultaneously celebrating their own achievements and character,
the rituals in honor of the goddess seem designed to remind
them also of their limitations. By the middle of the fifth
century, the birth of Athena Parthenos, her victories over
Poseidon and the Giants, her procession, and her peplos
would all be pictured on the most outstanding building on the
Acropolis. For that fabrication and its effects on the city we
must return to the events memorialized in Aeschylus's
tragedy.
At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. a small Athenian
army and their allies defeated a massive Persian force that had
traveled vast distances by land and sea, transforming even the
shape of the lands they traversed, to conquer resisting cities
in Greece. 6,400 subjects of the great king died at Marathon.
The Athenians lost 192 citizen hoplites. In the aftermath of
this unlikely victory, Athens began to build a new temple on
the south side of the Acropolis in honor of her patron
goddess. This required extending the south platform of the
Acropolis, which dropped too steeply to accommodate the
planned temple. Although much work had been done, the
Marathon Hekatompedon ("hundred-footer" temple) was
still unfinished when the Persians returned under Xerxes in
480. This time they reached Athens itself and burned the
entire city, including the unfinished temple. Before the
Persians arrived, almost the entire population of Athens had
been evacuated to Troezen and to the nearby islands of
Aegina and Salamis, to which they probably brought the
olivewood image of their goddess. 45 As Aeschylus reminds his
Athenian audience, the religious and political life of the polis
lay not in its streets and buildings, but in the characteristic
activities and attitudes of its citizens. The boule (council)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
continued to meet at Salamis, even as those it governed saw
smoke rising from the burning buildings and their contents,
including the peploi of former years, 46 on the Acropolis. A
year after Xerxes' defeat at Salamis, the force that had
remained in Greece with the Persian general Mardonins was
decisively smashed by the Athenians and their allies at the
battle of Plataea.
Here the story of the Parthenon almost ended, for after
the victory the Greek allies took an oath:
I will not set life before freedom ... having
conquered the barbarians in the war .. .I will not
rebuild any of the temples that have been burnt
and destroyed by the barbarian, but I will let them
be left as a memorial to those who come after of
the sacrilege of the barbarian. 47
This way of remembering through preserving ruins is seen in
the preserved parts of the cathedral the Nazis destroyed at
Coventry and was urged in recent deliberations about what,
if anything, should replace New York skyscrapers destroyed
by twenty-first century barbarians. The rubble in Athens was
left to lie or was used haphazardly in the hasty fortification
and reconstruction of the city. But in the repaired north wall
of the Acropolis some of the column drums from the
unfinished temple to Athena were deliberately placed so that
they could be seen from the restored Agora, the marketplace,
below. These pillars remain on view today.
Thucydides tells the story of the recovery of the victorious, but destroyed, city of Athens (1.89-108). Domestic and
civic buildings were rebuilt, and the port at Piraeus was laid
out and fortified. Despite Lacedaemonian objections, long
walls were built to the sea, and the Athenian naval force was
expanded. Most of the Aegean and coastal cities became allies
of Athens in the Delian League to keep the seas open and to
discourage future Persian invasions. Before long, the allies
preferred, and were encouraged, to give money to Athens and
let it build the ships necessary to protect them all. These cities
�FLAUMENHAFT
61
soon found themselves members of an alliance that was
rapidly coming to be dominated by its strongest city. In 454
B.C. the League's treasury was moved from Delos to Athens.
When peace was concluded with Persia in 449 B.C., the
Athenians summoned all the Greeks to a general assembly to
discuss future safety and to reconsider the Plataean oath not
to rebuild sacred places. One consideration was to be that the
Greek allies had failed to sacrifice to the gods who had saved
them from the Persians. Pressured by the Lacedamonians,
who declined to attend, and resenting the growing power of
Athens, no other League members showed up, and Athens
decided unilaterally to continue policing the seas and
collecting tribute.
At this point Pericles proposed rebuilding and enlarging
Athena's temple on the Acropolis. His oligarchic enemies in
the assembly objected to spending the money of the Delian
League for an Athenian project, charging that they would be
"gilding and bedizening our city .. .like a wanton woman
[who] adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues
and temples worth their millions" (Plut. Pericles, Xll}. 48
Pericles countered that the allies were "owed no account of
their moneys" as long as Athens effectively "carried on the
war for them and kept off the Barbarians" (Plut. Pericles,
XII). Plutarch describes the enthusiasm with which the
populace then embraced this vast public works project. It
would call many arts into play and involve long
periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes,
no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and
soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a
beneficial share of the public wealth ... So then the
works arose, no less towering in their grandeur
than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since
the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves
in the beauty of their handicraft. And yet the most
wonderful thing about them was the speed with
which they arose. (Plut. Pericles, XII-XIII)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Here Plutarch emphasizes the competitive spirit and the
speed that, like the swift victory at Salamis, characterized all
things Athenian. When the oligarchs continued to complain
about the great expense of the Parthenon, Pericles offered to
fund the undertaking himself, as years before, he had funded
the production of the Persians, and as, more recently, other
wealthy individuals had underwritten other buildings and
beautification projects in the ciry. In this way, he said, Athens
would be saved the cost and "I will make the inscription of
dedication in my own name" (Pint. Pericles, XIV). At this
dramatic gesture, the wary assembly quickly voted in favor of
public funding and sparing no cost. For the next few decades,
a great deal of the assembly's time was spent deliberating on
the features and expenses of the new temple. Even as it took
shape, it was supervised and discussed by the democratic
population for which it was being built. These discussions are
recorded in civic records and in the narrative accounts of the
extraordinary writers Athens also produced. Thus the aristocratic Pericles maneuvered his oligarchic enemies into
supporting polis-sponsored projects that would increase the
power of his radically democratic supporters. The Parthenon
was the centerpiece of the building program. The man whom
Plutarch calls "that political athlete" (Pint., Pericles, III) was
among the most interesting competitors ever to exhibit
himself upon the Athenian stage. The Panathenaic trophies
and the names of the athletes who won them are lost in the
anonymity of time, like those of the Persians who died at
Salamis. The name of the young aristocrat who made his
"brilliant debut"49 as the choregos of Aeschylus's Persians, was
not inscribed on the temple, but it was known forever after as
Pericles' Parthenon. 5•
Before looking at the Parthenon, let us glance briefly at
some Persian buildings where, as in Athens and Sparta,
physical constructions reflect the political structure and
principles of the regime. As Aeschylus describes it, the everexpanding Persian Empire is centered on the royal palace and
nearby tomb of the divinized monarch, the only godlike
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63
figure who appears on stage. Although the play is set in Susa,
it is clear that the king's palaces, like everything else in
Persia-except the monarch himself-are multiple; in
addition to Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis are mentioned
repeatedly as the king's headquarters. But, unlike the civic
and political activities of Athens, which took place in one
bounded, permanent location, the Persian court was also
always on the move. 51 Super-civilized in some respects, it
retained nomadic aspects more characteristic of lessdeveloped peoples. The King sat upon a movable throne. The
portable royal tent, as elaborate as the palaces, was an object
of wonder to the Athenians, who may have copied its shape
in the roof of the new Odeion. 52 Herodotus says that
Ekbatana, the palace fortress built by Deioces, the first king
of the Medes, was built for himself and his bodyguards on a
hill and was reinforced artificially with seven strong walls; the
rest of the people lived outside the stronghold. Deioces
arranged that all business "should be contracted through
messengers and that the king should be seen by none" (Hdt.,
1.99). The structure of the hierarchical Persian regime
insured that each level-subjects, local officials, and regional
satraps-had dealings only with the ones immediately above
and below it. At Persepolis, the huge compound was not far
above the plain below and may have been surrounded by a
mud wall. This too was a closed site, open only at the king's
pleasure. An ancient commentator remarks that, "at Susa or
Ekbatana, the king was invisible to all," but everything was
arranged so that he "might see everything and hear everything. " 53 His viceroys, "the Great King's eyes/' 54 as
Aeschylus's Persians refers to them, were ever vigilant.
Even in the public audience hall, the Apadana, at
Persepolis, vision seems to have been obstructed by the many
columns and the distant ruler in the large, dark chamber
would not have been easily observed by his subjects. 55
Directions came from an unseen center from which attention
was also turned by the king's desire for unlimited expansion.
A long inscription describes "the palace which I [Darius] built
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
at Susa" 56 of timber, gold, stone, ebony, and brick transported
from the far reaches of the empire. Unlike the Athenian
political records with their public accounts of the expenses
and inventories of Periclean buildings, there is no Persian
record of the architects, organization, or political context of
Persian building. In Persia, as in Egypt, the King's massive
construction projects, like his military campaigns, were facilitated by the unlimited, enslaved manpower at his command.
The eastern monarchy did not discuss its "public" buildings
any more than it discussed its foreign and military policy. It is
not surprising that Persia produced no narrative history or
drama and that among the extant ruins of its great buildings
there is no evidence of either assembly places or theaters.
Herodotus's observations about the buildings and
monuments of "barbarian" nations other than Persia are also
instructive about what was different about Athens' greatest
monument. Not surprisingly, the nomadic and under-civilized
Scythians had no temples or cities; residing in movable tents,
their only significant permanent places were their fathers'
gravesites (Hdt., 4.127). These itinerant non-builders were
also not producers of cloth. They made no linen or woolen
fabrics, both of which require a stationary economy, but
dressed themselves mostly in animal skins. Early Persians,
before the eras of the great buildings, also wore leather.
Croesus and the Lydian conquest softened tl1em into the
lovers of luxurious fabrics, robes, and slippers with which,
along with enormous palaces, the Greeks associated them. In
Lydia, the greatest building was a royal tomb constructed by
craftsmen and by prostitutes who worked on it to earn their
dowries (Hdt., 1.93). The walled city of Babylon had two
walled compounds within it, one for the royal palace, the
other for a stack of multiple towers, ziggurats. The latter
contained a huge temple for Zeus with a great gold statue of
the god and altars for sacrifice to him. Herodotus says Xerxes
took the statue and killed the priest who had forbidden him
to do so (Hdt., 1.181-2).
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65
The most impressive buildings of the Egyptians were not
temples for gods, but massive memorials to the godlike kings
who built them. Thus, Moeris built a propylaia (gateway) to
the temple of Hephaestus as a memorial to himself (Hdt.,
2.101), and Cheops built pyramids, intending to preserve his
memory as a divinized ruler. Cheops used slave labor,
ordering all Egyptians to work only "for himself" (Hdt.,
2.124). Amasis, the last of the Egyptian kings described by
Herodotus, considered himself a "great lover of the Greeks"
(Hdt., 2.178). But Herodotus emphasizes how different
Egypt was: the sheer size of his propylaia and temple to
Athena at Sa'is, the "supernatural" (hyperphueas) size of its
stones, how long it took for two thousand men to transport
its building materials from great distances, and the many
colossal statues and hybrid man-headed sphinxes around the
temple. Herodotus was "amazed" at the huge shrine, made
from a single stone, outside the temple. It was said that one
of the workmen had been killed while trying, unsuccessfully,
to lever it into place (2.175). The story strikes an odd note,
given the thousands of anonymous slaves who lost their lives
to Egyptian projects. In Memphis, the statue of Hephaestus
measured seventy-five feet; it was so large that it had to lie flat
on its back in front of its admirably large temple (Hdt.,
2.176). Again and again, Herodotus associates the size and
character of the buildings of non-Greek peoples with their
political and religious character.
Now behold the Acropolis again, this time with the
completed Parthenon and surrounding buildings in place
upon it. From the top, all of Athens, including its boundaries,
would have been visible. The ancient city itself was walled,
and contiguous lands were contained between mountains and
the sea. Herodotus observes that the longest wall of the Great
King's private domain in Ekbatana was "about the length of
the wall that surrounds the city of Athens" (Hdt., 1.98,
emphasis added). Unlike the eastern empire that recognized
no natural boundary, Athens was open on the inside and
bounded-though accessible to outsiders-on the outside,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
both physically and politically. Political life was not contained
in a closed palace, garden paradise, or tomb, where all
communication with the royal family was mediated by
officials or bodyguards. The sacred precinct upon the
Acropolis was articulated from its surroundings by its
elevation and by the grand gateway, the Propylaia, through
which it was entered. But, like the Agora, which was no more
than a ten or fifteen minute walk from any place in the city, 57
the Acropolis was accessible to all Athenians, to resident
aliens, metics who "dwelled among" (met-oikeo) them, and
to foreigners (xenoi) who visited from elsewhere. In festival
processions and athletic competitions, in battle, assembly, and
the theater, Athenians were on view to each other and direct
speech was the preferred medium of exchange. Unlike the
staircase to the Apadana, the stairs to the Propylaia invited
those who climbed them to enter and to look.
The new temple could be seen from everywhere in
Athens: from the lower hill on the Pnyx where the assembly
met, from the theater on the south slope of the Acropolis, and
even from the sea. Most other buildings in Athens were made
of dark wood and baked brown mudbricks. Rebuilt quickly
after the Persians went away, they were not made to be
looked at or to be visible from afar. Even the public buildings
in the Agora, including marble stoas, temples, and fountains,
would have had, at least from their location, a lower status
than the temple on the Acropolis. Various architectural
"refinements" that will not concern us here make the
Parthenon appear to be "springy" or to float skywards,
increasing its high status in the physical city. Because it is
located on the highest spot on the hill and near the edge of
the southern side where less traffic was possible, most views
of it from elsewhere on the Acropolis would not have
included other large structures. 58 Unlike the Agora, which
was planted with shade trees, the rocky hill above it did not
support trees or other vegetation-except Athena's olive.
There were, however, numerous smaller buildings,
monuments, and billboards, so that the ancient visitor's view
�FLAUMENHAFT
67
would have been far more cluttered than what we see today.
As we have seen, some of this "clutter" functioned as a
"public archive in bronze and stone," 59 providing information, to those who could read, about the building projects
themselves.
The temple to Athena was not used for child sacrifices,
prostitution, or royal burials. Visitors to the Parthenon came
to deliver the birthday peplos to the goddess-and to look.
What they saw was themselves, both in the flesh and represented in local marble. The temple was not used for
worship of the goddess. Rather, like Aeschylus's play, it was a
"monument" or "reminder" of the city's collective defeat of
a different way of life, a house for a goddess who exemplified
what they regarded as a superior life for human beings. As we
shall see, the pictures of the Parthenon clearly distinguish
men and gods, humans and beasts, as well as male and female
human beings. Deified kings, as well as sphinxes, Centaurs,
and Amazons, are all rejected as hybrid; each in its own way
undermines human nature. Unlike the unlimited, enslaved,
yoked manpower that worked and died on Persian palaces
and Pharaohs' pyramids, the Parthenon work force, although
it certainly included slaves, consisted of citizens, resident
aliens, and foreigners as well, all paid for their labor. In
addition to the myths depicted on the temple, there are myths
about it. An old story tells how a mule that was resting from
its task of dragging heavy marble up to the building site came
back, of his own free will, to encourage his yokefellows in
their work. 60 Athenian civic propaganda, spread easily among
a small population whose politics consisted of constant talk,
insisted that even beasts of burden were enthusiastic participants in this project. Self-yoking in a noble cause is the theme
of the story that Athenian Solon tells Croesus about the
blessed brothers, Cleobis and Biton, who put themselves
"under the yoke" of a carriage to pull their mother to
worship at the temple of Hera (Hdt., 1.31). Another story
contrasts with that of the Egyptian laborer crushed in the
temple of Athena at Sa'is, where the goddess is present only in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the huge, inert statue (Hdt., 2.175). In Athens, in contrast,
Plutarch reports that, when the most zealous workman at the
construction site of the Propylaia entrance to the Acropolis
fell off the building, mortally injuring himself, Pericles was so
dispirited that the Goddess appeared to him in a dream and
told him how to heal the man (Piut. Pericles, XIII). The
popular myths repeatedly assert that Athena watched over
and took an active interest in the building of her city.
The dimensions of the new Parthenon were larger than
those of its predecessor so that it could accommodate the
statue that Phidias planned for it. But, like the city that
withstood the mixed and disproportionate Persian force, the
Parthenon is a monument to unity and proportion. In what
follows I shall not discuss the architecture itself, but concentrate on selected parts of the temple, in which "narrative"
depictions shape the viewers' collective memory of their
victory over the Persians. On the stage Aeschylus depicts
Persians who, although different from Athenians, are recognizable human beings like themselves. On the Parthenon, the
actors on the "stages" of the pediments and metopes on the
outer temple resemble the humans who view them, but are
super or sub-human in size or form. The inner walls of the
temple are the "stage" on which Athenians view themselves
engaged in the paradigmatic Athenian festival, the celebration
of Athena's birthday. As in Aeschylus's tragedy, the civic
clothing and dynamic "weaving" of Athenian democratic
politics is meant to look superior to the luxurious fabrics and
strong yoke of the Persian Empire. The most important ritual
fabric in Athens was woven to clothe the wooden image of
the goddess who watched over this city. Just as Aeschylus's
play represents the power and failure of Persia in the Queen's
robes and Xerxes' peplos, so the Parthenon's pediments,
metopes, and frieze, and the celebrated statue of the goddess
herself, make Athena's pep/as a politically significant artifact.
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69
2. Pediments: Before and Above the Polis
Although the Parthenon stands at the center of polis life, the
citizens who come to see it are made to look again, to re-view
their city in the light of what is outside it, both spatially and
temporally. Thus, the pediments, the triangular gables facing
outward east and west on the short sides of the temple, depict
the outermost context of the city, the cosmos in which the
bounded polis takes shape and flourishes. Unlike the
divinized Darius and Xerxes, who aspired to a realm as
extensive as Zeus's sky, the Parthenon assumes a realm that
transcends the limited human world. In two dramatic scenes
depicting well-known stories, the pediments exhibit divine
beings who have their primary location outside the city, above
the mortals whose affairs they are both spectators of and
participants in. These representations of the gods depict the
continual adjustment and balancing of different and complementary human qualities. They show how Athens became
Athena's city through the careful interweaving of all the other
gods-including those who seem antithetical to her waysinto a heterogeneous but viable whole. Although it depicts
opposition and strife among the gods, the "polytheism" of
the Parthenon is informed by a principle of a coherent,
unified cosmos. The "dramas" staged on the pediments do
not conclude in the mere defeat of one of the contesting
sides; the gods don't die. The victor wins by assimilating the
vanquished and adjusting the order of the world. We know
about the pediments from a few remarks of the traveler
Pausanias who saw them in the second century A.D., from
Jacques Carrey, who made drawings of them in 1674 before
they were largely destroyed in a gunpowder explosion in
1687, and from the damaged yet remarkable figures in
Athens, Paris, and the British Museum in London. Classicists
and archaeologists have put together a variety of plausible
scenarios for the two pediments. The non-expert can follow
their lead and think through, in a general way, what the intent
and effect of these scenes might have been.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The pediments are populated with three-dimensional
sculptured figures. These are positioned at different angles,
some facing forward, others seen in profile. Some appear to
be moving towards the front triangular plane of the scene,
and some actually do penetrate it. The originals had attachments, some of which mnst also have projected outside the
plane. The triangular frame and the rounded character of the
sculptures remind one of theatrical tableaux; viewed more
closely, the sculptures might even have appeared to be
"rounder" than would distant actors who might appear flat in
a very large theater. The pediment figures are unusual in that
their backs, unseen after the sculptures were mounted, are
finished; like actors on a stage, they appear as "real"
personages, not just building ornaments. The "backdrop"
wall was originally painted bright red or blue, and the
colorful patterns painted on the sculpted clothing of the
figures would have stood out against it as costumed actors did
onstage. Tragic actors, like those in the Persians, are intelligible to the spectators, the "audience," primarily through
their heard speech. How do the silent pediment actors
"speak" to Athenians about the Persian wars of recent
memory and about the community that survived them?
The west pediment faces the spectator as he approaches
the Parthenon from the great (unfinished) entrance gate, the
Propylaia. His first view of the highest part of the "back" of
the temple (as it appears in descriptions and drawings) would
be a tableau of the contest between Athena and Poseidon,
who take center stage. The scene is set on the Acropolis.
Pausanias says their strife was for the "land," suggesting a
very early, almost proto-Athenian time. They are symmetrically flanked by horse-drawn chariots and gods. In the
narrowed corners are reclining river gods (and perhaps the
autochthonous king Kekrops), snakes, a sea monster, and
other figures associated with early legends of king Erechtheus
and his family: "The figures in the angles represent the royal
population of Athens before it was Athens. " 61 The contest
between Poseidon and Athena pits the natural abundance of
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71
surging fluidity against the artful prosperity of rooted solidity.
Fruit and oil, wooden boats and oars, will characterize
Athena's city, where speech and artful skill, techne, will shape
the sheer power and fertility of Poseidon. Thus, the victory of
Athena in this pre-political agon results not in the elimination
of the immortal god of the sea, bnt in his assimilation. On the
north side of the Acropolis both the olive tree and the salt
spring remained as reminders of the outcome. Travelers by
sea leaving or arriving at Athena's city would always see the
great temple of Poseidon on the cliff at Sounion. Equilibrium
rather than mere defeat is suggested by the position of the
contenders, both of whom remain upright in a "great
'Pheidian V'," 62 and by the way Poseidon's leg overlaps
Athena's, placing him in the foremost position. The pediment
suggests that balance in Athena's city involves harnessing
Poseidon for the city's benefit. But harnessing does not mean
simply yoking. Every visitor to the Parthenon remembered
that the Persians were defeated at sea, and that Athens'
greatness, in contrast to that of landlocked Persia, was the
result of her close and comfortable relation with Poseidon.
Unlike Xerxes and the Persians, Themistocles and the
Athenians knew that one doesn't "beat" or shackle the sea,
but collaborates with it by sailing and swimming. In the 4 70s,
after the maritime victory at Salamis, Athens may have
developed a Poseidon cult around the salt spring and the sign
of the trident,63 which, like the olive tree depicted in the
center of the pediment, remained visible on the Acropolis.
The west pediment memorializes the victory over Persia by
asserting that Athens succeeds under the supervision of gods
who transcend the city in time and place, but that, in Athens,
there is a time and place for all the gods.
The "front" east pediment also pictures a cosmic event,
"in the manner of classical drama ... played out in the course
of a single day." 64 The scene is Olympus. In the center, the
viewer would have seen a tableau that included Zeus, perhaps
seated on his throne, Athena, newly emerged from his head,
and Hephaestus holding the axe that liberated-and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
delivered-her. With a mother named Metis, "craft" or
"wisdom," and gestation in the head of Zens, she comes into
the world as a manifestation of rational, self-reliant thought.
Just as the symmetry of Athena and Poseidon on the west
pediment conveys their simultaneous existence in Athens,
here the symmetry of Athena and Hephaestus around Zens
indicates that these two must be thought of together. "In
Athens, the birth of Athena makes a new god of Hephaestus,
for they share between them the patronage of all things made
by the hands. " 65 He is her midwife, but also the "working
partner to the newborn goddess of work. "66 Like the central
figures on the west pediment, the central group here is
flanked by an array of divinities, some individuals, and some
in groups carved from common blocks of marble. Tied
together, they suggest again that Athenian mortals look up to
a pantheon of complementary divinities. The east pediment's
location, Olympus, is a loftier mountain than the Acropolis of
the west pediment. It is far removed from the city around the
Acropolis, but the "explosion of power"" from the head of
Zeus affects not only the gods who have homes on Olympus.
"The event taking place between" Helios, the sun, in the
south angle and Selene, the moon, in the north "is ... an event
of cosmic significance. It is dawn. There is a new order on
Olympus. The coming of Athena has changed the world." 68
As we have seen, Athens commemorated Athena's birth
with a new dress, whose weaving and presentation provided
the city with an elaborate protocol for holding itself together.
The fast-moving, quick-thinking city of rationality and
progress here tied itself to tradition and repetition, to time.
The east pediment, like the festival and the Parthenon itself,
made the Athenians look backward as well as forward and
recognize their mortal limits. Thus, although the gods who
live forever have an endless future, time as it is depicted on
the east pediment is cyclical, not linear. Just as Athena's
victory on the west pediment does not simply banish
Poseidon, here on the east "Light does not banish darkness
from the world, for neither can exist without the other." 69
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73
Dawn, like Athena's birthday, always comes round again. But
although the gods do not die, even they tire and retire when
the sun goes down. Nothing captures this quite so well as the
immortal but weary horse of Selene's chariot, about to sink
under the night horizon in the northern angle of the
pediment. The horse breaks the plane and thus the distancing
frame of the pediment, and seems to reach into our world.
Viewers have always loved him, for although his days are not
numbered like ours, he expresses weariness as we too know
it.
Like the Persians, the Parthenon suggests "weaving" as an
image for the holding together of a human community. One
of the most astonishing things about the pediments is the
sculptured clothing, a trademark of Pheidias's style
throughout the Parthenon. Unlike the stiff Persian costumes
and royal gear that obscure nature with conventional wealth
in Aeschylus's dramatic depiction, the fabrics pictured here
reveal the bodies they cover. Iris's clinging, blowing dress,
Hestia's light, crinkly crepe under heavier woolen folds, and
Amphytrite's belted peplos amaze the viewer with the art of
the sculptor, who imitates soft fabrics in stone, but also with
the art that weaves real soft fabrics of cloth, the art of Athena
herself. Through the draperies, and probably through the
"embroidered" patterns that were painted upon them, the
groups of sculptures could unify "motifs involving a complex
dramatic action and including many interlocking
figures ... Pheidias invented a plastic means by which a scene
composed of many parts could be transformed into a single
powerful image." 70 Their flowing garments and the variety of
angled positions make the three goddesses on the east
pediment (perhaps Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite) seem to
"weave" in and out among each other (Figure 2). We shall see
something similar in the low relief frieze inside the
Parthenon. Like the Athenian pantheon and Pheidias's sculptured tableaux of these gods, the weaver's art combines many
elements into a coherent whole. The politics of the city that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 2 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
fabricated the Parthenon sculptures and Athena's woven
peplos did something similar: it fabricated its way of life by
weaving together free speech in the political deliberation of
free individuals. Entirely different are the lined up, repetitious figures on the Persepolis Apadana staircase. Unlike the
lovely, varied, and flexible materials of the Parthenon, their
stiff, identical robes do not convey the famed beauty of
Persian weaving. In contrast to the dramatic tableaux vivants
of the Olympians on the pediments and the Athenians and
gods on the frieze (to be discussed below), even in Persia's
most accomplished works of art, the Persians remain
arbitrarily and stiffly yoked together, just as they are said to
be in Aeschylus's play.
3. Metopes: Outside the Polis
The outer sides of the temple display what's outside: earthly
alternatives that threaten to invade and destroy Athena's
polis. Wrapping around the outermost upper wall of the
Parthenon, below the pediments, is a horizontal band of
ninety-two squares, thirty-two on the long sides and fourteen
on the short. These metopes, seen "between the holes" or
"between the eyes," are separated from each other by slabs of
three vertical bars called "triglyphs," which frame each scene.
Originally painted in bright, contrasting colors, the figures on
the metopes were far more distinct than they appear today.
Each square presents a framed static scene, a snapshot, to the
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75
spectator who can view one whole side at the same time, or
each picture in the band, as he circles the temple. The
metopes are carved in high relief and most do not appear in
the round as the theatrical pediment statues do. Here, too,
the effect is sometimes compared to the changing scenes in a
drama, but now the scenes remain in place while the
spectator moves. Another difference is that in the theater the
scenes follow one another in time, suggesting causal relations
between them, while the metopes are freestanding or paired
images that do not depict a sequential narrative in time. The
central scene of Aeschylus's play is central in time; the center
of a band of metopes is central in space, although, as we shall
see, on the south side, it may represent a different time, but
one related in theme, to those around it. Like the play, the
metopes can be seen as four sets or "acts," each depicting a
particular conflict between Greeks (or their champions) and a
particular enemy: on the east, gods and Giants; on the north,
Greeks and Trojans, on the west, Greeks and Amazons, and
on the south, Lapiths and Centaurs. These subjects appear
repeatedly in the Parthenon and in other fifth-century
buildings. The threats depicted are all analogues to the
Persian invasion depicted by Aeschylus. The play uses words
to depict the unseen Greek alternative to the Persians seen on
stage. But the metopes depict the Greeks as well as their
would-be destroyers. Each set can also be "read," like
Herodotus's inquiries, as the struggle between the civilized
Greek city and a particular deficient alternative to the life it
regards as human.
All four sets depict battles with mythological enemies. On
three sides, mortal victors defeat mortal enemies. But on the
east wall, the final destination of visitors to the Parthenon, the
viewer would have faced the early cosmic conflict in which
the Giants, sons of Gaia, the Earth, arose to challenge the
hegemony of the heavenly Olympian gods. As we have seen,
the great "Cyclopean" foundations of the Acropolis were
reminders of Athena's victory and harnessing of Giant power
in the service of her city. In some versions of the legend the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Giants are defeated and imprisoned in the locations of
volcanoes. The primitive Giants are the first depiction on the
metopes of an attempt of massive force to overcome divine or
human civilization. Their eruptions are associated more with
the powers of nature than with intentional evil. They cannot
be simply destroyed, but are containable and even usable.
Little remains of the eastern metopes, but their theme
appeared repeatedly on the Parthenon, most notably on the
great statue's shield and on the peplos itself." Thus, every
element of the east side of the Parthenon refers the ultimate
prosperity of Athenian civilization to the divine. Beneath the
birth of Athena on the east pediment and behind the Giant
metopes, the viewer would see the culminating panels of the
interior frieze, picturing the Olympian gods towards whom
the procession of Athenians moves. And through the east
doorway, beneath the pediment, frieze, and metopes, in the
innermost part of the temple, he would view the statue of the
Goddess herself. Nowhere on the Parthenon does any
historical human being become an immortal, as did the
mythical Heracles, who probably was depicted helping
Athena overcome the Giants. And unlike the giant representations of Darius and Xerxes in Persia, there are no enlarged
portraits of identifiable individual human beings.
Themistocles, not named but clearly referred to in
Aeschylus's play, is not identifiable on the Parthenon, and
Pericles, as we have seen, is present only in the spirit of the
project. 71 Nowhere is it suggested that human rule might
extend indefinitely, like that of Zeus or the Great King's
dreams. In the stories depicted on the Parthenon and in the
contained inward focus of the building itself, Athens differentiates itself from its recent Persian enemy. As we shall see,
the story of the Parthenon itself and of the politics of its
construction under Pericles suggests an Athens that will need
to expand its own aims, even as it remembers its defeat of
unlimited expansion. As the articulated and delimited city
moved towards its own version of empire, its relationship
with the goddess and gods of the eastern "front" of the
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77
Parthenon would shift radically from that celebrated in its
memorial monument in the decades immediately following
the Persian War.
For the conflict between mortal human beings, the
designers of the Parthenon's north metopes (the ones facing
the Athenian Agora) selected the war with the Trojans, a
people who are the same as their Greek enemies in their
nature, physis, but whose conventions, nomoi, like those of
the Persians, represent a different way of life. Although the
Trojan War was a Greek invasion, it was viewed as a response
to a previous "invasion" on the part of the Trojans since
Paris's violation was thought to undermine all civilized
custom. Thus, some of the surviving slabs show Menelaus,
Helen, and Paris. The historical and mythological Trojans
were an eastern patriarchal monarchy that, in some respects,
resembled Persia. Homer depicts the "Trojans" as a mixed,
polyglot, loosely combined force from many different places.
In contrast, the Greeks, although from many cities, are ethnically coherent; they speak the same language, function as a
political community, and coordinate their military efforts. 73
Like Aeschylus's Persians and Herodotus's Inquiries, the
Parthenon's north metopes depict an alternative human
culture in order to think about the customs most appropriate
to human nature.
The anthropology of the remaining metopes, the
Amazons of the west and Centaurs of the south sides, depicts
mythical beings that resemble, but are not quite, human
beings. Unlike the Trojans and Persians, they represent a
difference in kind-in nature-rather than in custom. The
first are entirely human, but entirely female, rejecting life
with males of their own kind. The second are entirely male,
but are hybrids of human and beast. Athenian civic
mythology had long depicted Amazons and Centaurs as
enemy invaders and threats to Athens and to Theseus, its
founding king. The metopes, like the tragic dramas, assume
familiarity with these stories, but they do not dramatize
incidents involving particular heroes. Little remains of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Amazon metopes, but a brief consideration of what they
represent will help to understand the unified thought of the
Parthenon and to set the stage for the better preserved
Centaurs.
The Amazons are liberated women. In contrast to the
typical Athenian confinement of women and their children
within the home, these untamed, unmarried horsewomen
hunt, fight, and even mate in the open air, rejecting the
confinements of the polis, of buildings generally, of conventional female clothing, and even of their own bodies. Their
name seems to refer to their custom of removing the right
breast; the breast-less (a-mastos) woman could more easily
pull a bow or throw a javelin, typically Persian weapons, as
opposed to Athenian hoplite spears. The voluntary mastectomies are reminiscent of Persian castrations described by
Herodotus; the exclusion of males and the isolation of the
Amazons also require denaturing and mutilation. Some depictions of Amazons show two breasts, exposed in a way
unthinkable for ordinary Athenian women. In others, they
appear in pants, short belted jackets, and pointed caps, and
have pale skin as opposed to the outdoors tans of Athenian
men.74 Athenian artists often pictured Amazons in Persian
dress and hats in order to mock the latter as effeminate.
Athenian mythology credited the defeat of the Amazon
invasion of Athens to Theseus, and located his victory on the
hill of the quintessentially masculine war god Ares, the rocky
platform just below the Acropolis. In the Oresteia Aeschylus
depicts the establishment of the Athenian court on the
Areopagus and makes clear that its supersession of the female
Furies is a critical step in the development of civic justice in
the Athenian polis. The defeat of the Amazons by the male
founder of Athens invites two questions.
The first concerns the truth of the common claim that
Athens simply assumed male superiority and that women
were regarded as inferior human beings. There is no doubt
that Athens was a male hoplite culture; men fought its wars,
spoke in its assembly, met in its markets, socialized in its
�FLAUMENHAFT
79
gymnasia and symposia, wrote for and performed in its
theater, and designed and built its temples. Women, in
contrast, spent their time at home, indoors, among other
women and female and young male children. They had no
property rights, did not take part in public deliberation, and
were certainly less articulate and less visible than their fathers
and brothers, husbands and sons. The myths about au
Amazonian alternative to such a life are not surprising. But it
is misleading to claim that Athens aims to exclude women as
it does the half-humans and barbarians on the outside of the
temple. There is a difference between differentiation and
exclusion. Athens and its myths distinguish appropriate
realms for male and female human beings, but they do not
attempt to eradicate the female. Amazons are excluded
because they attempt to exclude the male from human life.
Their defeat by Theseus resulted not in the elimination of
women, but in their integration into a human life that
includes both sexes. In the carefully revised civic legends that
replaced the hyper-masculine, godlike Heracles with Theseus,
the unequivocally human founder marries the Amazon queen.
She and her comrades live on in what, from the perspective
of egalitarian modernity, looks like a subordinate position.
But Athenian drama and religion make clear that women are
necessary, not just as producers of children, the only role for
which the Amazons reluctantly acknowledged their need for
men, but for civilized life as the Athenians saw it.
Once again, women's work offers an appropriate
metaphor. The communal fabric is woven from warp and
weft: each requires the other; they have different jobs to do.
One is upright, stiff, a visible support; the other is horizontal,
more pliant, weaves in and out, sometimes behind the scenes,
sometimes visible. Modern technology has gone a long way
to liberate the sexes from their strictly differentiated natures;
how far is yet to be seen. But in fifth-century Athens, where
Persians had to be repelled by hand-to-hand combat, and
where birth control, frozen foods, and mass-produced textiles
were not available, division of labor follows from natural
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
differences bet\veen the sexes. Differentiation may require
hierarchy. But we shonld also note that refusing to medize
included rejecting polygamy, as well as effeminate dress and
luxury. This snggests that polis life inclnded a developed
sense of the individnal worth of women as well as of men,
however constricted the lives of the former now appear. As
we have seen, the Panathenaic festival included, and even
featured, women. Only they could perform certain civic
fnnctions, including the most intimate ministering to the
patron goddess. The peplos had to be made, not by slaves, but
by female "citizens with known ancestry" who performed
this rite, "not for themselves, bnt for the city. It is the ritnal
that distinguishes the women of Athens from the women of
other states ... it is a ritual in which women and men both play
important roles." 75 However dominant the males of Pericles'
city were, its women were present and visible. The Amazons,
we must conclude, are on the outside, partly because they are
women who relocate themselves from inside to outside, but
also because they are women who attempt to remove
themselves from the full hnman condition, that is, from a
civic life that interweaves, however hierarchically, men and
women.
A second question about these warrior women is that of
their relation to Athens' patron, the warrior goddess, Pallas
Athena. Is she to be considered the paradigmatic Amazon? A
complicated answer is suggested by the different, but
overlapping, aspects of her presence on the Acropolis. In the
early days, worship of Athena Polias seems to have taken
place in the old Erechtheion temple where the olivewood
statue resided, and where Athenians brought multitudes of
little statuettes as offerings to her, seeking, perhaps,
protection, like that sought by later generations when the
Parthenon was sanctified as "Our Lady of Athens." During
her great annual festival, the women bathed her, applied
cosmetics, and dressed her in traditional female garb and
jewelry. She was human-sized or smaller and was associated
with female fertility, agriculture, and domestic prosperity in
�FLAUMENHAFT
81
peacetime. She may have been seated and she carried no
shield or weapons. There is nothing of the Amazon about her.
Another Athena, called the Promachos, "foremost
fighter," was a large bronze statue made by Pheidias perhaps
as a thank-offering for the Greek victory at Marathon. This
one stood outdoors on the western side of the Acropolis. Her
armed figure, the Centauromachy pictured on her shield, and
the Persian spoils displayed around her base, 76 suggest the
more masculine task of defending Athens. Although she is
more a symbol of public military strength than an object of
worship and private protector like the Polias, here she seems
relaxed, a secure victor over Persian invaders rather than an
aggressor in her own right. Her shining spear and helmet
were visible to ships sailing towards the city as they passed
Cape Sunium. 77 This Athena is no more suggestive of the
Amazons than the Polias is. In action, Athena as battle god
differed from her brother, the bowman Apollo. Walter Otto
long ago suggested "immediacy" as the feminine element of
her fighting spirit. 78 Unlike the "far-shooting" god, and unlike
Amazons and Persians, both of whom fought with bows and
arrows, Athena shows up near at hand among those she
champions, both women and men, as she does at Homer's
Troy and Aeschylus's Salamis.
The temple Pericles built in the decades after Salamis
housed the third Athena on the Acropolis, Pheidias's most
famous statue of Athena, the Parthenos, "maiden"; unlike the
Amazons, she is comfortable with a roof over her head. We
shall consider the colossal image when we arrive at the
innermost chamber of the Parthenon. For now, let us merely
raise the question: is she the divine image of the ordinarily
reclusive, fierce but shy, race of women warriors of Athenian
legend? Or is she something new, an Athenian god on the
march, ready to leave her home and city, the Promachos of
the post-Parthenon empire that Pericles sees as the natural
successor of the Persian one that failed in Athens?
The south metopes, which depict women merely as the
occasion for masculine conflict, have survived in good
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
enough condition to convey some idea of what they once had
to say. The thirty-two tableaux depict a well-known legend,
the battle between the Lapiths and their half-brothers, the
Centaurs, who, like Theseus's friend, the Lapith king
Pirithous, were fathered by Ixion. 79 Demanding a share in the
kingdom, they made war on the more civilized branch of the
family until an uneasy truce was established. In a foolish
gesture of reconciliation, Pirithous invited the estranged
relatives to his wedding, but the unruly Centaurs got drunk,
wrecked the party, and attempted to carry off Pirithous's
bride and the other Lapith women. Although the panels do
not present a continuous linear narrative of this event or its
outcome in the defeat of the Centaurs, they are arranged in
pairs, triplets, and groups by their composition and subjects.
All but one contain only two opposed figures, and that one,
east 21 (moving to the right, facing the south side of the
temple), concludes a central set of nine panels in which the
Centauromachy is not the subject. We reserve this mysterious
center for the end of our discussion.
As we have seen in Aeschylus's play and on the
Parthenon, Athenians associated their Persian enemies with
the fully human Amazons. Like Persian Xerxes, Trojan Paris,
and Amazon women, the male Centaurs disrupt marriage and
hospitality as the foundations of the human city. 80 But, for
several reasons, they seem even more alien. However
lopsided the Amazon attempt to avoid the limitations of
ordinary mature female lives, they are recognizably human in
form, belong to a coherent community, and make arrangements for its continuity. The Centaur seems more a member
of a herd than of a community. His hybrid body combines a
mature human nature with a mature beastly one. The result,
as pictured in the metopes, undermines rather than enhances
human wholeness. The Amazon isolates herself from the male
half of humanity; the Centaur combines male halves of two
different kinds. Aeschylus's play and the Persian Queen's
dream raise the question of whether different nations of
human beings can be viably yoked together to form a
�FLAUMENHAFT
83
coherent human regime. The Parthenon Centaurs depict a
"yoking" of two different kinds that is incapable of coherent
human life. Egyptian and Assyrian art often represent hybrids
of different animals and of animals and humans in the service
of humans. Persian monsters of this kind are found in eaglefaced lions and human-headed bulls in Pasargadae and
Persepolis. But on the Parthenon such a combination is the
enemy and would-be destroyer of civilized human life.
In contrast to the bodies of the Lapiths, who are beautiful
even in their painful twisting, the bodies of the Centaurs lack
unity and proportion. Combining the upright and horizontal
forms of its progenitors, the Centaur lacks the full powers of
either orientation. Like snapshots or scenes in a dramatic
pageant, the metopes freeze moments of violent action,
exhibiting the peculiarity of Centaur posture: they cannot
stand or kneel like men; they can rear like horses. Although
all Centaurs are man above and horse below, there are early
depictions (not on the Parthenon) with human forelegs. From
the front, these might look more human, but from the side,
they appear even less unified, since their nether parts are also
dual. Both combinations viewed from the side or rear present
not one whole, natural being, but a beast with two backs.
The most human parts of the Parthenon Centaurs are the
faces. Although some are grotesque and mask-like, while
others are said to be "sensitive" or "grandfatherly," several
features emphasize their un-emerged humanity, or their
reversion to bestiality. Their heads are set low on their
shoulders and are less visibly articulated from their bodies by
necks than those of the humans (south 26, 29, 31). Unlike the
dean-shaven faces of the young Lapiths, the Centaurs are
bearded; they look older and shaggy and the beards further
obscure the articulation of their heads. 81 In south 31 the
bearded head of the Centaur is hard to grasp, but the Centaur
has the Lapith by the throat (Figure 3). Rationality seems
pulled down or sunken into their violent, marauding Centaur
bodies. A recent interpreter claims that the more "human"
faces among the mask-like, ferocious ones are evidence that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the sculptors did not
view these problematic
beings as uniformly alien
and hostile, or offer an
"easy apology for human
superiority," and asks
"whether they [centaurs]
should be construed as
other at all." 82 It seems
more correct to say that
the occasionally human
expressions underline
the grotesqueness of FIGURE 3 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
their bestial behavior,
just as Xerxes' pain at his disastrous failure intensifies the
audience's understanding of what is wrong with his grotesque
project. Persian violations are the result of human nature
aspiring to the super-human; Centaur violations are the result
of human nature sunk into the subhuman. In both cases,
hybris characterizes the hybrid.
The sunken heads are emphasized even more by the
prominent rear ends of the Centaurs. Their upright human
torsos are short and the heavy bulk of their horizontal horse
bodies pulls them groundward. Even when rearing or
bucking, they are not taller than their human opponents.
Many originally had carved hairy tails that protruded out of
the frames of the deeply carved reliefs. Some interpreters
associate the tails with the supposed phallic character of the
Centaurs, deriving their name from the Greek word for
"goad" or "prick" (kentros), and relating it to obscene phallic
jokes that play on their name and sexually aggressive
character. 83 But interestingly, many of the Centaurs do not
have prominent or even visible genitals, as do most of the
Lapiths, who are often pictured in full frontal nudity. \Vhen
the Centaur organs of generation are visible, they are in
equine location. The early Centaurs with human front legs
raise the odd possibility of two different sets of genitals. One
�FLAUMENHAFT
85
would expect that these organs would be of great interest,
given the virile potency of the horse component, as well as
the hybrid nature of the combination. The relative lack of
attention to the genitalia of the Parthenon Centaurs reminds
the viewer that there are no accounts, as there are for
Amazons, of communities of Centaurs. After the first mating
of Ixion, references to females or to reproduction are rare.
The human torsos of the Parthenon Centaurs have navels
indicating their generation. But whatever their own
genealogy is, it seems that Centaurs, like mules and other
hybrids, are themselves sterile dead ends. Amazons do not
marry, but they generate and raise children; Centaurs do
neither: they rape.
Finally, the Parthenon Centaurs seem remarkably
unsexual in their attack on the Lapith women. The
impression the metopes give is more of disrupted communal
festivity, marauding violence, and theft than of lust; more
unfamiliarity with the celebratory social use of wine by a
civilized community, than a coordinated attempt to provide
themselves with women. This is not the rape of Sabines taken
for marriage to perpetuate a community. The two slabs that
do depict Centaurs with women (south 25, 29) show only the
attempted abduction and call attention to the awkwardness of
any actual coupling. Viewed as a whole, these metopes
suggest that the sculptors are more interested in depicting the
opposition of male bodies than the violation of female ones.
Like the pediment sculptures, the metopes are extraordinary in their representation of drapery, the fabric that
indicates the presence of differentiated but coordinated activities of men and women in a well-fabricated human
community. The nude bodies of the Lapiths are repeatedly
displayed against the fabric of woven capes made by the
mothers and wives they are fighting to protect. Kenneth
Clark's distinction between nudity and nakedness 84 reminds
us that the visible bodies of the Lapiths are not merely
exposed as those of animals would be. Rather, they suggest
the freedom and equality of citizen soldiers on view to each
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
other. Like the Athenian youths who performed a nude
armed dance at the Pauathenaia, they exhibit their readiness
to protect their threatened community. 85 In contrast to the
"nude" Lapiths, the half-animal bodies of the Centaurs, with
their lifelike muscles, hairs, and veins, would look strikingly
"naked." They are unfettered by the yokes, reins, and bridles
with which, elsewhere on the temple, human masters have
"clothed" their animals. On the frieze, these signs of human
domination were made more visible through the use of paint
or real reins or bridles attached to the stone with bronze
rivets. Two of the best-executed and best-preserved metopes
demonstrate some of the themes sketched above. Both focus
our attention on woven cloth as a sign of civilized humanity.
The composition of south 27, the sixth slab from the eastern
corner, positions the Lapith and Centanr combatants so that
their bodies pull away from rather than turn upon each other
as Poseidon and Athena do in the West Pediment (Figure 4).
The Centaur appears to be trying to remove a spear from his
back, and the Lapith is about to strike him again. All the
features described above-the upright posture of the man,
supported by his two sturdy legs, the exposed human genitals,
the unusually low horizontality of the beast, the sunken
Centaur head-are present here as in other panels. But the
remarkable pulling
apart of the two
bodies allows the
sculptor to concentrate attention on
the full folds of the
long cape worn by
the youth; the eye
falls especially on
the curved vertical
folds between the
figures. The cloth,
as well as the fact
that the nude man
FIGURE 4 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
�FLAUMENHAFT
87
is carved in much
higher relief than the
Centaur behind him,
separates and makes
him stand forth from
his surroundings as the
naked beasts never do.
In his almost threedimensional
roundness, this man
resembles pediment
gods or human stage
actors. The open cape
FIGURE 5 (Courte-sy of A. Nicgorski)
reveals his articulated
human body and its dominating and generative powers, but
attests also to human shame and the recognition that, for the
human, cover and exposure are appropriate in different
circumstances. Finally, the sculptor's craft has represented in
its own medium the product of the weaver's craft: soft,
folded, perishable cloth is captured in hard, rigid, permanent
marble. In their drunken rampage, the Centaurs have
scattered weapons and jugs about the wedding feast turned
war. Techne, in the form of weapons, wine, and weavings, is
the trademark of the human; mere force characterizes the
non-human.
South 28 (Figure 5) functions as a partner to 27. Stunned
or dead, a Lapith youth lies flat on the ground, legs useless,
arms pinned under him, genitals flaccid, head tipped back.
Under him is his crumpled cloak, likely to be his burial
shroud when the battle is over. A bucking Centaur, naked
chest erect and arm stretched out like the Lapith's in 27,
towers above the youth. His carved tail, miraculously intact
over the centuries, stands out in triumph, and he grasps a
bowl from the wedding feast, perhaps the domestic "weapon"
with which he felled the Lapith. Unlike some depictions of
Centaurs, the ones on the Parthenon are not shaggy. 86 For the
most part, they are naked and unprotected. Therefore, the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
most striking feature of this panel is the extraordinary wild
panther skin that hangs upside down from the Centaur's
outstretched arm. Part shield, part cloak, it is the complete
antithesis of the fabricated cloth that signals the human, even
more so since parts of it hang in folds reminiscent of the cloth
in other metopes. Here a wild hybrid carries the barely transformed skin of a wild beast, another violently killed victim
who never self-consciously faced his killer as human
combatants do. The open-fanged jaws and outstretched claws
of the dead panther hang directly over the face of the dead
Lapith, emphasizing the confrontation of the wild and the
civilized. Finally, the combination of man and beast in the
triumphant Centaur appears even more monstrous by the
additional limbs and tail provided by the draped panther skin.
Moving one more slab to the right, the spectator would
have faced, in south 29, another frozen moment. An elderly
Centaur with short, flabby torso and bald, bearded head low
on his chest abducts a struggling young Lapith woman. Her
vulnerability and violation are indicated by her torn peplos
and exposed naked shoulder and breast. Greek art often
displays the kalokagathos-the "noble and good" mannude, as he would have displayed himself in the gymnasium.
Respectable women, the wives, mothers, and daughters
whose lives were more secluded than those of the men,
usually appear clothed, only partly visible to observers. The
Lapith girl's crinkly dress reveals her spread legs, although, as
we have suggested, the Centaur seems more intent on robbery
than on sexual assault. All his strength is concentrated in his
left arm and the hand that restrains her powerless hand and
holds up her body as he attempts to gallop away. On this
Centaur's back, balancing the crinkly dress pressed against his
chest, is one of those capes that appear on some of the other
metope Centaurs. The garment does not fall naturally on the
Centaur's back; rather, this beast with two backs is cloaked
only on its human shoulders. Unlike the capes that "frame"
the vertical bodies of the nude humans, this one grotesquely
emphasizes the monster's hybrid nature; the naked horseflesh
�FLAUMENHAFT
89
of its nether part interrupts its downward flow. The
"piecrust" edging on the cape will be seen as the characteristic decoration of the cloaks of the young Athenian
horsemen of the frieze. Once recognized as a mark of the
civilized city and its citizens, it appears even more anomalous
on the horse-men that threaten civilized life.
The greatest mystery about the south metopes concerns
the apparent intrusion of seemingly unrelated material in
south 13 through 21. Unfortunately, these scenes are known
only through the Carrey drawings, which reveal that the
center panels of the Centauromachy contain no Centaurs.
Jeffrey Hurwit reviews suggestions that these panels are
dramatically (or cinematographically) coherent as a "mythological 'flashback"' in the manner of "similar debriefings in
the choral odes of tragedies," and that they may have
presented the background story of Ixion and his descendents,
or of "early Athenian kings and heroes."87 He suggests that
the central panels are not intrusive at all, but relevant to the
central purpose of the Parthenon: the celebration of Athena
and her city is itself a paradigmatic civic activity. Thus, these
carvings may depict Athena and her cult statues. South 19-21
may "have represented the spinning of cloth, the removal of
a robe or pep/as in a roll from a loom" and the "disrobing of
a stiff, old-fashioned cult-statue (the Athena Polias) in anticipation of the presentation of a new dress: the central events
of the Plynteria and Panathenaia come to mind. " 88 As we shall
see, these events are represented also at the final destination
of the Athenian procession on the east end of the frieze. If, as
I have suggested, the Parthenon repeatedly uses woven fabric
and the women who weave it as images of the interwoven
elements of a coherent enduring community, female woolworkers and dressers at the center of the male
Centauromachy make sense. From both ends and at the
center of the south side of the Parthenon, the violent
Centaurs undermine the foundations of human society:
hospitality, marriage, weaving, and civic religion.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4. Frieze: Within the Polis
At the outermost and highest position of the temple's short
east and west ends, the pediments and their sculptures in-theround point to what is beyond and above the city. The
external band of "framed" metopes carved in high relief
below them on all four sides of the temple depict the
struggles of the civilized polis to maintain itself against terrestrial threats in the shape of fully and partially human aliens.
Within the columns on the inner structure a three-foot-high
ribbon of pictures carved in low relief also wraps around the
temple. The frieze is continuous, broken visually only at the
four corners of the building. But since it is viewed from
outside and below, through the columns, it is also seen as a
series of separate scenes like the metopes and like the articulated episodes of Aeschylus's play. Like the Persians, which
differs from most tragedies by depicting a contemporary
historical rather than a distant mythical event, the frieze
differs from other Greek friezes in depicting a contemporary
subject; it is a "documentary"" in real place and time: "For
the first time in Greek history, it shows mortal human
beings." 90 On the inside of the temple we view the city from
the inside, at home, at peace: a terrestrial, civilized
community attached to and defined by a particular locale.
In the play Athens views Persians and examines itself
indirectly by looking at them. On the Parthenon frieze Athens
looks directly at itself. The Parthenon frieze shows victorious
Athenians rather than defeated Persians. The Persians are now
remembered, not by preserving ruins and abstaining from
civic rituals, but by restoring these rituals at-and even onthe temple. The setting is, once again, the Acropolis. The
festival procession that had to be abandoned "when the
Persians came" now makes its way through all the important
public places in the city, serving once more, but with special
meaning, "as a symbolic reappropriation of the city's space by
the community." 91 Mourning memory has given way to
festive memory. The frieze replaces the flight of the people
and Athena from the city to Salamis with the procession of
�FLAUMENHAFT
91
the reestablished populace to the new home of the goddess at
the center of the city.
Like Pericles' funeral oration, the city on the frieze does
not emphasize individuality; unlike those of the Centaurs and
even the horses, the Athenian faces on the frieze are indistinguishable from each other. 92 Also, unlike the metopes with
their opposed pairs, the frieze contains all the elements of a
coherent population organized into groups. In characteristic
clothing, young and old, male and female, magistrates and
citizens, warriors and weavers, and even resident aliens who
call this city home, make their way to the east front of the
temple. The frieze resembles a story·cloth, wrapped around
an enclosed form. Like the city and the building itself, it
emphasizes the boundedness of the city. The observer circumnavigates the sides, looking inward towards the center. 93 As
we have seen, the final pomp€, "procession," of Aeschylus's
tragedy depicts the disintegration of the Persian regime and
the shamed ruler's retreat in his tattered pep/as into the
private confines of his palace, out of the view of those he has
ruined. In contrast, the Panathenaia pomp€ on the frieze
depicts an integrated regime in the act of delivering a new
pep/as to the goddess and openly displaying the "ruler"-the
demos, "people," itself-to the public view.
In the Persians, the dramatic action moves forward; the
scenes change, while the spectator remains stationary. On the
Parthenon, the procession is frozen into stationary stone. But
as the spectators move forward towards the front of the
temple, the frieze procession itself seems to advance. 94 The
spectators in the theater are simultaneously in their own time
and that of the play. Likewise the viewers at the temple are in
both the time of their own procession and the time of the
procession on the frieze. Like the play and the east pediment,
the frieze respects the unity of time, and its action too has a
beginning (at the southwest corner), middle (on the north
and south sides), and end (on the east where the two sides
meet). Unlike the framed metopes, which depict separate
episodes, the Ionic frieze is a "seamless whole" that can
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
present a narrative in "a continuous spatial and temporal
flow." 95 "Everything here is ongoing; everything is process.""
Various participants turn in different directions, adjust their
clothing, and wait, like actors, for their cues. Marshals
motion them forward, cavalry and chariot horses wait
patiently or rear restlessly, trained acrobats jump on and off
chariots, and a sacrificial ox digs in its heels.
A selective discussion will once more highlight the way
the frieze "remembers" the Persians and defines Athens in the
same "vocabulary"-this time pictorial-of yokes, woven
fabric, and speech. Again, comparisons with Persian visual art
prove instructive. The designers of the Parthenon and many
other Athenians were familiar with the great buildings of the
eastern empire, and it is likely that some of those who carved
its marbles had earlier worked on Persian buildings. Was the
Parthenon frieze "an ideological reply to the creation of their
old enemy," 97 or, after Athens had avoided the Persian yoke,
was "Persian imperial propaganda ... appropriated and
adapted by nco-imperialist Athens for the purposes of
promoting her own self-image"? 98 On the peripheral
pediments, metopes, and frieze of the great democratic
temple, the differences from Persian buildings are more
striking than the suggested "appropriations." But, as we shall
see, in the innermost chamber of the temple, the viewer is
sharply aware that Athens, too, "required an empire, but an
empire different from any that had ever existed." 99
Let us look again at the relief on the Apadana (throne
room) staircase at Persepolis. It depicts foreigners in
procession, bearing gifts to the Persian king. Their clothing is
repetitive, stiff, and stylized; no animated human body is
revealed or enhanced by the heavy robes of the Persians or
the simple tunics of their subjects. The foreign groups are
distinguished from each other in dress, gifts, and the animals
that accompany them but, like Xerxes' army of soldiers, they
are all alike in the most important respect, their enslavement.
They march stiffly, in single file, all in the same position, at
the same distance from each other. 100 The individuals are
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isolated even as they form a unit. The loss or addition of a
few figures would have little effect for, like Xerxes' armies,
they are not woven together into a coherent whole. Their
sameness suggests that the army of craftsmen who made them
were also "under the yoke." The figures are clearly carved,
with beards, hands, and feet making pleasing decorative
patterns like those in interior tiling or wallpaper. But they
lack animation and will of their own, neither gesturing to nor
speaking with one another. Individual figures or groups are
regularly tepeated so there is no narrative in time, no illusion
of motion. The effect is mesmerizing and intimidating, and
reduces the viewer to "gaze in something like awe-from
prostration level." 101 Another Persepolis relief shows Persian
subjects carrying the king on his throne. They too are all the
same; he is unique, above, and much larger than they. They
serve as the patterned architectural support on which his
weight presses.1 02
The difference in size is also seen in a rock relief at
Bisutun on which captured rebel kings approach Darius.l 03
The location of this impressive carving is itself interesting. It
sits high on a cliff overlooking a mountain, inaccessible, like
the Persepolis Apadana, to the sight of Persians as if it were
meant for the realm to which the King aspired-the whole
world. Unlike the Parthenon in the middle of Athens, this
monument in the middle of nowhere-or everywhere-bears
an inscription, the same words that begin all public utterances
of the King: "Proclaims Darius the king ... " The picture of the
diminished and yoked human beings before him conveys the
same political principle as the words: absolute despotism. On
the Persepolis staircase the camels, mules, and horses are
reined and bitted. On the Bisutun monument the hands of the
captured kings are tied behind their backs. Forced to face
their conquering master, they cannot look at or speak with
each other. The metaphor of Aeschylus's choruses and the
Queen's dream is depicted on the cliff at Bisitun: the captive
kings are literally yoked together by the cord around their
necks.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In contrast to the Persian unity of repetition, the long and
varied Parthenon frieze conveys the dynamic unity of the city
it celebrates. Among the Greek cities, the Athenians alone
celebrated their unification in a public festival. 104 Civic
mythology told how, long before the building of the
Parthenon, Theseus united a number of independent communities to "live together," szmoikeo, in a single city. No longer
held together by a single monarch, the democratic citizens on
the frieze walk in pairs or groups that articulate them into
sub-classes of the city. Unlike the mass pictures on Persian
palaces and rock reliefs, the Athenian participants are neither
unconnected individuals nor yoked teams, but autonomous
and willing parts of an organized whole. The frieze conveys
their freedom-the same freedom Pericles describes in the
funeral oration-in several ways. The people are local
citizens, not foreign subject peoples of other nations. They
are self-organized. Marshals resembling their fellow citizens
in size and dress are stationed at various points to keep an eye
on the parts of the procession and to direct them to move at
the right times. There is no all-seeing agent of an unseen
monarch supervising the action. Other city magistrates at the
east end take part in the central ceremony of the festival, the
folding of the goddess's festal robe.
The figures on the frieze differ in size, but not as in the
Persian murals. In order to fit the frieze horses into the
confines of the three-foot band, the sculptors made them the
size of ponies, and the bulls being led to the sacrifice are no
taller than their human masters. There is no colossal Great
King or Pharaoh towering above his subjects. In the selfgoverning democratic city, only the gods are larger than the
citizens; seated, they are the same height as the standing
humans who deliver offerings to the only beings they
recognize as above them. The rest of the frieze figures are
distinguished into ranks of horses, lines of chariots, pedestrians, bearers of various implements and, on the east side,
the only mortal women depicted on the temple. Unlike the
figures in Persian frieze processions, the Athenian participants
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take different positions, and look in different directions.
Unlike yoked non-Persian processors, here even nonAthenian metics, who carry trays and parasols, willingly
weave their way in the procession to the front of the temple.
Only animals are reined or yoked together. The beautiful
horses on the frieze are separated from their human handlers
who coordinate animal strength with human needs in finely
wrought chariots. Unlike the diminished Persian subjects,
these zeugei pompikoi,' 05 "yoked processionals," seem to have
their nature enhanced by their participation in the civic
festival. They might remind us of the story of that mule who
returned of his own will, unyoked, to further the work on the
temple. Elsewhere on the frieze, graceful young riders recall
that Athena was also the "horse-taming goddess." Hers is the
power that enables men to train and work with horses, rather
than merely to subjugate them by force. The bulls and sheep,
as objects of sacrifice, are more mere instruments of their
human masters. But, like that of the weary pediment horse
described above, the depiction of the resisting "heifer lowing
at the skies" 106 reveals an extraordinary sensitivity to the
psychic dimension even of mastered animals. Persian bulls
and horses seem stiff and unanimated in comparison.
The frieze unfurls in a horizontal band, but there are no
prostrate subjects, dying La piths or half-horizontal Centaurs.
The posture of free citizens is upright. As if to underline the
free character of the event, the frieze includes among the
chariots, acrobatic contestants, apobatai, about whom little is
known, but who seem to have shown their agility by jumping
on and off moving chariots in competitions. It is sometimes
suggested that they represent the freedom and flexibility of
the Athenian hoplite warriors who, to the perplexity of historians, are not represented on the frieze. Most importantly like
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aeschylus, who all point to free
speech as the key distinction between Persians and Athenians,
the Parthenon frieze depicts Athens' citizens communicating
with each other. Marshals beckon, horsemen and pairs of
girls chat, magistrates converse in groups, and the chief
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
archon instructs the child who helps him fold the pep/as. In
their freedom to speak-to describe, deliberate, and
disagree-the human members of this city resemble their
gods, who, on the frieze, are also depicted in conversation.
The procession begins at the southwest corner of the
temple. The first figure on the west side-the one farthest
from the front-is a nude young man who is arranging his
large cloth mantle as the procession is about to begin. Most
of the figures are clothed. The Parthenon frieze, like the
metopes and like the peplos ceremony of the Panathenaic
festival itself, repeatedly draws our attention to the ways in
which human beings cover their bodies.l 07 Along three sides,
the moving spectator sees at intervals marchers who are
adjusting their clothing, belts, or footwear as they progress
forward. The clothing of the figures on all sides of the temple
articulates them into groups, identifiable by cloaks, tunics,
hats, and footwear. The fabrics also indicate motion, speed,
and the direction of the procession and contribute to our
sense of real live activity on the frieze. The frieze also depicts
many objects-chariots, bridles, pots, trays, and stoolsfabricated by this technologically sophisticated people.
Interestingly, it shows no buildings, agreeing perhaps with
those who evacuated to Salamis, that the Athenian polis could
survive even if its buildings were destroyed, as long as its
political and ritual activities were maintained.
The long north and south sides of the frieze exhibit the
male warriors of Athens, unarmed, at peace. Modern viewers
have puzzled over the depiction of archaic chariot warriors
rather than fifth century hoplites. Some explain it as
supporting Pericles' expansion of the Athenian cavalry.
Others claim that the 192 figures (if you count right) on the
frieze were meant to represent the 192 hoplite soldiers who
fell at Marathon as they participated in the last Panathenaia
before the battle. 108 The depiction of young men guiding
spirited yet orderly horses suggests the character of the city
Pericles describes in the Funeral Oration. It is a stark contrast
to the dream that the Persian Queen describes in Aeschylus's
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play. As we saw in Part One, the submissive and the spirited
women pull against each other when Xerxes yokes them to
pull his chariot. The chariot horses on the frieze have more
in common with the horses that pull the chariots of the gods
in the corners of the west pediment. These horses and
humans who, unlike centaur horse-men, are fully distinguished from each other, are nevertheless a masterpiece of
intertwining elements. Here the technical art of perspectival
carving in extremely shallow bas-relief produces a stone
picture that looks almost like a flat woven mat. Once again,
the interweaving of the figures suggests the way in which this
city is bound together. A computer video in the British
Museum turns the chariot horses to show how they would
look if they faced the viewer. As the figures turn, the frieze
resembles a weaving that, stretched in different directions,
reveals but does not unravel the separate strands of which it
is fabricated. The horses and humans in the frieze procession
"hold together" as individuals do in the Athenian polis, but
not in Persia.
As the procession weaves its way forward, slowing as it
approaches its destination, the culminating scene takes center
stage and is "framed" by the
two central columns of the
eastern front. The frame is
structural and therefore
more prominent than the
changing "frames" the
viewer makes for himself as
he progresses towards the
pep/as scene (Figure 6); this
makes this scene "static
and eternalized." 1' ' Many
viewers feel that the
procession also becomes
"hushed" or "silenf' at this
point, as all senses focus on
the most important human
FIGURE 6 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fabrication on the frieze. It is literally a woven fabric. Below
the pediment depicting the birth of Athena are pictured the
city's chief ceremonial magistrate, the archon basileus ("king
archon"), his young assistant, and the goddess's birthday
pep/as. That they are folding, and not just holding, the pep/as
points to the integrity and continuity of the city, for they are
preparing to put it away, according to the custom of the past,
for the dressing of the image in the future.uo The confidence
about continuity and the future is also suggested by the
participation of children in the ritual. It is a stark contrast to
the dead-end feel of the Persians, where Aeschylus's young
and childless king withdraws in pathetic pompe in his tattered
pep/as. The ritually woven story-doth, which may have been
painted on the marble in bright yellow and purple, depicted
the victory of gods over Giants, the subject of the east
metopes. Its making and its part in Athena's festival symbolize
the way in which Athens itself is "woven" together. Evelyn
Harrison observes that, like the one on Keats's Grecian Urn,
"this is a picture of a folk." 111 By "brede/ of marble men and
maidens," Keats means both "breed" and "braid." Like the
urn pictures, the chiseled Parthenon "folk" resembles a
"braided" tapestry. Horizontal lines are still visible "to serve
as a sort of warp for the design." 112 Like the gods who
overcame the Giants, these citizens were able to overcome the
Persians because they were politically "well-woven." This is
what Athenians meant when they said they were "worthy of
the pep/os." 113
The web of state, or fabric of society, is the product of the
interweaving of warp and weft: male and female, public and
private, and, as the Eleatic Stranger explains in the
Statesman, of courage and moderation. In his description of
the ruling art, the true statesman, like the master weaver,
supervises and interweaves all the subordinate activities of the
city. After preparing a multiplicity of single strands of wool,
he combines them in a tightly woven, but freely flexible,
unity. Unlike autocratic tyrannies like Persia, where difference
is regarded as rebellion, and ropes, bridges, and fetters bind
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unrelated parts into a rigid, unnatural "whole," the Greek
city thrives on the "tension" between its different elements.l 14
It holds together from within, like a well-woven fabric or, as
we have seen, like the pantheon of the gods. The designers of
the Parthenon suggest that a "smooth web," which is smooth
not despite, but because of its tension, can be achieved in a
law-abiding democracy as well as in the virtuous monarchy
described by the Stranger. Here, too, statesmanship has interwoven raw materials, tools, vessels, servants, laborers,
merchants, ship owners, clerks, heralds, soothsayers, and
priests into a working whole. Plutarch's description of
Athens, coordinated and collaboratively at work on Pericles'
building projects comes to mind. But the statesmanship is that
of citizen magistrates, not monarch.
The eastern side of the frieze depicts women, not as
objects in the hands of Centaurs, but as active members of a
flourishing society, the producers of the city's swaddling
cloths, everyday garments, and ceremonial fabrics for the
living, as well as shrouds for the dead. Again, we should
emphasize that the weaving pictured here is not private but
civic work. The loom for weaving, like the plough for
planting and the press for making olive oil, is a domestic
peacetime contrivance of the armed goddess who, at other
times, champions the warriors who defend her city. Near the
end of the procession, Athena appears without her helmet
and weapons with the aegis in her lap. Here we see the
worker goddess, Athena Ergane, the patroness of
shipbuilders, woodworkers, and weavers like the ergastinai
who wove the peplos, seated, appropriately, with the metalworking smith, Hephaestus, who split Zeus's skull with his
ax, enabling Athena to be "born."
Like the gods on the pediments, the gods seated together
at the head of the frieze procession are multiple strands that
together make up a unified whole. They too are a "folk." Like
the rest of the frieze figures, they present a silent story to be
articulated by the viewer. Each divinity is identifiable by
distinctive looks or by conventional tags, some in the form of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
objects that were once attached to or painted on the marble
reliefs: Apollo's headband (drill holes remain), Poseidon's
trident (now missing from his left hand), Hermes' hat, Ares'
club, Athena's aegis, Hera's veil, and Zeus's throne (the
others are on simpler, backless, stools). Each god has a special
position with respect to the others, either by genealogy and
history or by what each personifies. But not even a god is
autonomous or self-sufficient. None can even be himself until
woven into the pantheon in the context of the others. In
some places, the perspective of the low relief carving makes
their limbs look entwined or interwoven. They lean against
each other (Hermes-Dionysus, Poseidon-Apollo, ErosAphrodite), and refiect each other in their arm gestures
(Dionysus, Hera, Apollo) and veils (Hera-Aphrodite). Jenifer
Neils suggests that those in the right hand group, which
includes Poseidon, are associated with ports, the sea, and
naval battle. They are balanced by those of the left hand
group, which includes Demeter; these are associated with the
countryside, agriculture, and land battle. All together, she
claims, the gods remind the viewer of the completeness of the
recent Athenian victory over the Persians. 115
Their overlapping draped garments also unify them in an
integrated group. Like the garments everywhere on the
Parthenon, where there is little nudity,'" these are
remarkable. Except for the child Eros, the gods, like the frieze
Athenians, are all clothed in rippling, crinkly, folding, fiexible
material that conforms to the lifelike bodies beneath it.
Athena's peplos is carefully pinned at the shoulder and tucked
under her legs; Artemis wears a head cloth and modestly
adjusts her gown to cover her shoulder, and her skirted robe
falls about her differently positioned legs in a different way
from Athena's. The Athenian people, "worthy of the pep/os,"
worship gods whose clothing is tailored for anthropomorphic
bodies.
How are the frieze Olympians related to the frieze
Athenians? Some claim that the gods turn away and show
little interest in the procession in honor of the goddess. 117 But
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101
Neils revives a view that they are sitting in a semicircle and
thus are attending to the central pep/as scene "before"
them. us Viewers of the frieze who think of the "row" of gods
this way visually deepen the low-relief carving and bring out
its "texture." Like the flattened ranks of horses, the gods and
humans appear as they might in a woven tapestry. So the gods
are both interested and not interested in the mortals who
honor them. As at Troy, they can turn away to pursue their
amours, quarrels, and conversations. But, as Homer shows,
the most serious and interesting activities of the gods who live
on Olympus are the ones that are interwoven with those of
mortals on earth. Athena is as interesting as a strand in
Homer's stories of Achilles and Odysseus and in Aeschylus's
accounts of the founding of the Athenian court and defeat of
the Persians as she is in her own story. The Parthenon gives us
the gods both on their own and woven into our mortal
stories.
The frieze offers the Athenians a picture of themselves
that is also worthy of the gods' attention. The human festival
is, after all, the reason they have gathered together in Athens.
The only other place where they assemble in this fashion is at
home on Olympus. Now they have accepted seats of honor
and look relaxed, keeping their distance from the mortals yet
prepared to stay and grace the holiday with their presence.
There is time to be passed before the animals are sacrificed
and the meat is distributed in the Keramikos at some distance
from the temple. The Gods, who dine on nectar and
ambrosia, do not appear eager for the festival feast. Mortal
fighting, yoking, and weaving require mortal eating. But the
gods who live forever have leisure just to look and to talk.
Some of them view the approaching procession. Aphrodite
points out something to young Eros, who perhaps has seen
fewer of these events than the others have. And others, Zeus
and Hera, Athena and Hephaestus, and Poseidon and Apollo,
turn to each other and converse, just like the rwo groups of
five magistrates fianking them. If the pep/as has already been
displayed and is now being folded away, the culminating
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
scene of the frieze illustrates the purpose of the temple as a
memorial of the Persian attempt to destroy Athens. The
Persians have come and gone. In Athens, the gods who live
forever participate in the Athenian Panathenaia; Athena's
pep/as-and the people "worthy of the peplos"-endure.
5. Statue: Parthenos, Polis, Empire
As they arrived at the front side of the Parthenon the
spectators would first see the eastern pediment depicting the
birth of Athena. Beneath it the eastern metopes showed the
goddess's battle with the Giants. From between the central
columns her birthday pep/as on the frieze would be visible.
But the extraordinary visual displays we have discussed so far
were all only wrappings, the decorative coverings of the
house of the goddess herself. Ancient visitors to the temple do
not even mention the frieze, but all marvel at the statue. Deep
within, in her own private chamber, Athena Parthenos stood
alone, visible and awesome in
looks and size, to the "folk"
that came to her birthday
party. Unlike the Great King in
his Persepolis throne room,
this divinity was made to be
seen. But Pheidias's masterpiece can no longer be seen.
Pausanias's descriptions, some
ancient souvenir statuettes, a
small Roman copy, the
Varvakeion Athena (Figure 7)
and other statues of the type,
are all that's left to shape our
understanding of the famous
statue and what it could have
meant when the Parthenon
was the highpoint of the
Athenian polis. The full-size,
concrete reproduction in the
FIGURE 7 (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
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103
unlikely setting of Nashville, Tennessee has attracted much
popular and scholarly attention, but it is hard to believe that
the Parthenos could have looked like that.
The size of the little korai statues presented with
petitionary prayers of individual Athenians to the familiar
wooden image of Athena Polias 119 suggests the personal
attachment and affection that those who brought them felt
for their domestic goddess. The bronze Athena Promachos is
larger than the human warriors she would lead in warding off
a threat to their city; outdoors and approachable, she stands
"foremost" but at ease among them. We have seen how the
Parthenon, unlike the colossal buildings of other places, is
large, but somehow commensurate with human size aud the
capacity to take it in. This is true, despite the fact that
Pheidias deliberately made it larger than the earlier
"Parthenon" on its site so that it could contain the statue he
intended to put in it. Similarly, the large size of Athena on the
east frieze is subtly suggested by her seated position, but does
not overwhelm either the mortals depicted near her or the
mortal viewers of the frieze. But the standing 120 Parthenos
statue, although of human shape, was colossal, almost forty
feet tall, far beyond human scale. She was the power behind
the most powerful city in the world. Full-breasted and
clothed in an Athenian pep/as, she would not have resembled
the human-sized Amazons at the edges of the city. She held iu
her extended right hand a much smaller statue of Nike, the
goddess of victory, that was almost six feet tall. Athena
Parthenos stood ready and armed, with the Gorgon aegis not
resting on her lap as in the frieze, but as visible armor over
her pep/as. Her helmet, crowned with sphinx and griffins,
had its earfiaps up to indicate peacetime, but it was on her
head, and she held her spear. Her shield was engraved with
the familiar subjects of fighting Amazons and Giants, and her
sandals depicted, once again, the Centauromachy. Here, as
elsewhere in the building, Athena's defense of Athens in
contemporary times is associated with her defeat of these
earlier threats. But now the victor over the Giants is herself a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
giant. The folds of her giant pep/as recall the stiff, fiuted
columns of her giant temple more than they resemble the soft
and folding fabrics we have been observing elsewhere in the
Parthenon.
Like the Zeus at Olympia, the Parthenos was marveled at
for its size and for the materials it was made of: the bright
white ivory of her face and arms, the gemstones of her eyes,
and the gold of her clothing and equipment. Unlike the
olivewood Polias that fell from the sky, perhaps as a gift from
Zeus, the Parthenos was admired as the fabrication of an
extraordinary Athenian artist. Just as the later, world-famous
statue at Olympia was Pheidias's Zeus, this masterpiece was
Pheidias's Athena, the product of human imagination and
technical prowess at their peak. In contrast to the smaller,
worn, wooden slab, this Athena was huge, hard, and very
heavy. The plates of gold that formed her dress weighed
almost a ton.
The atmosphere inside the temple was mysterious and
unsettling, illuminated by window light reflected from a pool
at the statue's base. The shimmering water and light must
have suggested a sort of animation in the immense and
immovable stone figure. The beauty of the Parthenos was
reportedly breathtaking. She must have been deinos, simultaneously "terrifying" and "terrific," "awful" and "a\vesotne."
Unlike the (probably) seated wooden doll that received
female ministrations and petitions, and unlike the seated and
sociable Athena of the east frieze, Pheidias's goddess was
upright and alone. Unlike the statuesque Persian Queen, who
is humanized by what she says, the Parthenos was silent. She
did not communicate with the mortals who came to see her.
Gifts were not presented to her or animals sacrificed at her
altar, and no priestess interpreted messages from her. Since
the huge, flat, ivory face was fastened to the surface and
removable-like the theater mask of Xerxes' mother-it must
have been less realistic and human than some of the more
expressive marble faces elsewhere on the temple. The size of
the immense, white hands, one holding a man-sized statue
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and the other balancing an enormous spear and shield, must
have appeared proportionally larger than the neck and face,
because they were closer to the viewer. Could one still see in
this colossus the goddess of handiwork, Athena Ergane, the
"worker," with hands on a woodcarving, pot, or loom? Or
would her hands suggest those of great Achilles, whose great
man-slaying hands ruthlessly killed Priam's son?
As we have seen, the Persians and Egyptians made such
statues, sometimes so large that they had to lie prone on the
ground. They were usually the images of Kings and Pharaohs,
who represented themselves as all-powerful, even divine, in
their homelands and as entitled to the universal empires they
aspired to outside. Does the colossal Athena still celebrate, as
the outer parts of the temple do, the bounded, self-governing
city and its victory over the despotic juggernaut that sought
to yoke it and deprive it of speech? Or is she, deep within the
temple, the embryo of the imperial Athens destined to emerge
in the fifty years following the Persian Wars? Paradoxically, in
preserving what it viewed as its fully free way of life, Athena's
city, democratic within, was becoming despotic without. The
rule (arche) that began in self-defense against an everexpanding despot soon became the ever-expanding means for
maintaining the extraordinary expense of its extraordinary
achievements. But necessity-for defense or for maintenance-was just the prologue to full-scale empire (arche) in
the Athenian mode.
The necessary means soon became an end in itself as
empire became the full expression of Athenian glory.
Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and its
erstwhile ally Sparta alludes frequently to Athens' erstwhile
imperial enemy Persia. The Persians had always exhibited the
King's valuable possessions as a means of displaying his
power. After the Persian wars, Athens, contrary to its earlier
customs, began to exhibit the valuable trophies left by the
fleeing Persian army. In 454 B.C., the year the Delian treasury
was moved to Athens, each of her colonies and "allies"
marched in the Panathenaic procession with an offering of a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cow and a full suit of armor. Some of these "allies" must
uneasily have remembered the Great King's demands for
earth and water several decades before. The Parthenon frieze
does not picture tribute-bearing allies, armed Athenians, or
alien slaves. But as Athens grew rich and powerful she began
to display herself, not only as the producer of dramas, games,
festivals, and art, but as a city worthy of power, as well as the
pep/as. The empire itself soon became part of the display.
Pericles' three speeches in Thucydides make clear that the
internal glory of Athens required external support, often at
the expense of those who did not participate in the
democratic life that Pericles describes. In contrast to the
Persian yoke, weaving has been the appropriate metaphor for
Athenian democratic politics. But Athens' appropriation of
the resources of the unraveling Delian League was destined to
conclude with the unraveling of Athens itself. Pericles does
not use the word "yoke" in his tough arguments for Athenian
rule over the former allies; nor do the Athenians who later
present Melos with their ultimatum. But the Melians know
they must choose between subjugation and death. Just as
Athens had become the only independent city in the Delian
League, its nominal democracy had become the rule of one
citizen (Thuc., 2.65). And Athena, comfortably interwoven
with her fellow gods on the Parthenon frieze, had reappeared
like Darius, in the depths of her temple, huge and
shimmering, overpowering and alone.
As an expensive war with Sparta became increasingly
likely, Pericles assured the Athenians that they had at their
disposal tribute from the allies, public and private dedications, sacred vessels, Persian spoils, and temple treasures.
Several decades before, Aeschylus had vividly contrasted the
private gold of the Great King with the communally owned
silver of the city that defeated him. Xerxes' stage-mother
asserts that he is accountable to no one. Now Pericles
reminded the Athenians that the pep/as of Pheidias's statue
was not a soft woolen fabric like that of Athena Polias, but
one of solid gold. But it, too, could be removed. For, when
�FLAUMENHAFT
107
Pheidias began his masterpiece, Pericles had advised him to
make the pep los detachable (Plut. Pericles., XXXI). 121 Pericles
now reminded the assembly that the goddess was there not
only to be looked at, but also to finance their "safety," and
that no ally need be consulted. As long as they replaced the
loan, they could make use of "the gold plates with which the
goddess herself was overlaid" (Thuc., 2.13). By this time, the
storeroom of the Parthenon was the depository of the Delian
League treasury that had been moved to Athens. Within the
lifetime of the men who had survived Salamis, the building
that began as a memorial of free Athens' defeat of imperial
Persia metamorphosed into a monument to imperial Athens.
In truth, the building was less a "temple" in which to worship
a goddess than the city's icon of its own power and a secure
storehouse for its usable resources; it had become "the central
bank of Athens." 122
Reversing Themistocles' pre-Salamis strategy of evacuating the population from Athens and depending on a
"wooden wall" of ships, Pericles' first speech advised outdwelling Athenians to "bring in their property from the
fields" and "come into the city" (Thnc., 1.143; 2.113) behind
the walls Themistocles had hurriedly built in anticipation of
war with Sparta. Donald Kagan points out that Pericles recognized this strategy as an attempt to overcome "problems
presented by natnre" by turning mainland Athens into a more
defensible "island" (Time., 1.143).123 One is reminded, not
only of Salamis, but also of the "unnatural" projects of
Persian and other barbarian overreachers to "yoke" the
Hellespont, turn peninsulas into islands, and reroute rivers by
digging channels. Thucydides says it was hard for a rural
Athenian to leave behind his town (polis) and the ancient
form of government (po/iteia) of his father (Time., 2.14).
When these suburban Athenians had come into the city-here
he says astu (Thuc., 2.17), the physical surroundings-they
had nowhere to go, so they camped in deserted places, and in
sanctuaries and shrines. The Acropolis and Parthenon were
off-limits. But many crowded into land at the foot of the
�108
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Acropolis-land that an oracle had warned against inhabiting-and in areas between the Long Walls, and in the
Piraeus (Thuc., 2.17).
Just before Pericles' second speech, the funeral oration,
Thucydides says that the Athenian army that invaded Megaris
with Pericles as its general was "the largest army of Athenians
that had ever been assembled in one body" (Thuc., 2.31). His
enumeration of the different parts of this force reminds one
of Aeschylus's descriptions of the Great King's army in the
earlier war. His Persian Queen would have been satisfied with
this numerical account of Athenian strength. The funeral
oration is the more subtle account of the source of Athenian
strength, the one the Queen could not appreciate. The free
city that defeated the Persians is to be celebrated and loved
for the character of its life: its political institutions, laws,
physical beauty, wisdom, and the character of its citizens.
Athens is open to all the world; no one is prevented "from
learning or seeing" (mathematos e theamatos, Time., 2.39);
the city is an exhibit, a school, from which all Hellas can learn
(Thuc., 2.41). But as Pericles continues, it becomes clear that
Athens is not a large enough stage on which to exhibit its own
excellence, and that he is thinking of a wider audience than
even Hellas. The delimited city that once remembered the
Persians is now offered the prospect of being honored and
remembered forever by the whole civilized world. Its citizens
can win glory by fixing their gaze, not only on the city but on
the "power [dzmamin] of the city" (Thuc., 2.43). Athens'
power must be displayed in the great theater of war and only
colonies or defeated enemies will serve as "everlasting
memorials" (mnemeia ... aidia, Thuc., 2.41) of her greatness.
Immediately after Pericles' celebration of Athens in the
funeral oration (2.34-46), Thucydides describes the plague,
making it clear that it was exacerbated by the crowding of the
country people into the city (again called astu): now even
temples were filled with corpses and "No fear of gods or law
of men restrained" (Thuc., 1.53). It is unlikely that Athena's
temple on the Acropolis remained unviolated. Plutarch says
�FLAUMENHAFT
109
that Pericles' enemies blamed him for the plague, attributing
it not only to the crowding, but also to the idleness of the
multitudes of men who were "pent up like cattle with no
employ or service" (Plut., Pericles. XXXIV). We might
remember his earlier enthusiastic description of the opportunities for employment and prosperity that Pericles' building
projects had provided.
Pericles' third and last speech is a sober acknowledgement
of the Athenians' sufferings and an exhortation not to allow
these private ills to jeopardize the "common safety" (Thnc.,
2.61). But "freedom" no longer means defying the Great
King's demands for "earth and water" and halting the
expansion of the Persian Empire. Athens and Sparta, as
different as they were, could willingly "yoke" themselves
together to avoid subjugation by Persia. Here Pericles speaks
again of the relationship between Athens' expanding
"empire," her drive to supersede her own limits, and the
necessary subjugation of her erstwhile ally:
... of two divisions of the world which lie open to
man's use, the land and the sea, you hold the
absolute mastery over the whole of one ... to
whatever fuller extent you may choose; and there
is no one, either the Great King or any
nation ... who will block your path as you sail the
seas ... Nor must you think that you are fighting for
the simple issue of slavery or freedom; on the
contrary, loss of empire is also involved and
danger from the hatred incurred in your sway.
From this empire, however, it is too late for you
even to withdraw ... for by this time the empire you
hold is a tyranny, which may seem unjust to have
taken, but which certainly it is dangerous to let go.
(Time., 2.62-63)
Pericles reminds his discontented fellow citizens that their
fathers acquired, preserved, and bequeathed the empire to
them, giving Athens a "great name" (Thuc., 2.64),
�110
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presumably one far greater than the "Athens" that Darius
wanted to be reminded of, and than the Persian names which
had frightened all Greeks until Athens defeated Xerxes.
Pericles' last words are again about how, even as all things
decay, the memory (mneme) of the glorious Athenian enterprise will endure; the "splendour of the moment and the
after-glory are left in everlasting remembrance" (aeimnestos,
Time., 2.64).
The ivory skin and golden pep/as of Pheidias's Athena
seem to have remained on the statue through the end of the
Peloponnesian War. But she must have provided a kind of
political and psychological support for the empire that was
incubating as Pericles beautified and glorified the city.
Thucydides recounts how internally democratic Athens
became as brutal and denatured to its external subordinatesand eventually to itself-as the internally despotic tyranny of
Persia had been in its expansion. But the silent Parthenon tells
a much more tragic story than the one Aeschylus dramatized
for his fellow citizens. For Athens at her peak exemplified a
human way of life more noble and more natural than overextended Persian despotism, despite the latter's impressive
multiplication of territory, people, buildings, and gold. The
story of Athens is tragic, rather than merely sad or repellent,
for the same reason the story of Oedipus is tragic: the terrible
collapse comes about not, as in Persia, because of grotesque
suppressions and distortions of the human soul, but precisely
as a result of the full exercise of human capacities: selfgovernment, mastery of the sea, poetry, mathematics,
philosophy, art, and architecture, and the free human speech
that makes it all possible. It is difficult simply to say that we'd
prefer for Oedipus or Athens to have been more "moderate."
Pericles urged restraint, even as he cultivated an Athenian
love for Athens that was bound to end up as an eros for Sicily
(Time., 6.24). His ward, Alcibiades, the man most in love
with the Sicilian expedition, was disastrously recalled to
Athens in a ship called the "Salaminia." In the first half of the
century, Phrynichus and Aeschylus made it possible in the
�FLAUMENHAFT
111
theater for the surviving Athenians to weep for Miletus and
even for the Mede. As Athens completed the building
intended to remember its own razing and restoration, the city
hurtled forward to the events described in Thucydides'
terrible account. The colossal Athena within that building was
the terrible image of power that Pericles said would insure the
survival of Athens' name. The shining, bright monument to
Marathon and Salamis could not deter the dark, bloody
massacres at Mytilene, Melos, and Mycalessus. In some
terrible way, it contributed to them.
6. Pandora
We come at last to our last Athenian pep/os. The pedestal of
the statue of Athena depicted another carved gathering of the
gods at another birthday celebration of yet another
parthenos, the maiden Pandora. Hesiod gives two accounts of
the world's first human woman; in both, she and the gods are
the source of all of mankind's troubles. 124 After Prometheus
defied Zeus by giving fire to human beings, Zeus ordered
Hephaestus and Athena to produce a counter-gift, a
"beautiful evil" (kalon kako11), in response to Prometheus's
empowering gift. Hephaestus mixed earth and water and
fashioned a lovely maiden, Pandora, "all-gifts." Athena taught
her to do needlework and to weave the "skillfully embroidered" (po/udaidaloll) web. She dressed and veiled her, and
the other goddesses adorned her with finery. A surviving cup
shows Athena in her own shawl and aegis, pinning the peplos
on the new-made girl. 125 Everyone knows the end of the
story: Pandora opened the jar of "all gifts," releasing them
upon previously free and unburdened man, forcing him to
"bow his neck to the yoke of hard necessity." 126 Along with
the blessings of fire, agriculture, and weaving, man now
possessed the curses of disease, war, and slavery. The source
of human ills, of course, is human nature itself, and Athens
understood itself as the paradigmatically human city. The
tragic account of Athens' glory that we read in Thucydides'
long discursive book can also be "read" in the emerging
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
empire's most impressive building. Like Pandora, the
"beautiful evil" made by Hephaestus, and like the terrible
events depicted in the tragedy that Aeschylus and Pericles
made beautiful for the theater, the monument that Pheidias
and Pericles made beautiful on the Acropolis is a kalon kakon:
the story of the Parthenon and the stories that it tells show
Athens in full flower, and also show the seeds of her selfdestruction.
This story began with an account of Aeschylus's Persians,
a humane view of the tragedy of an empire that attempted to
subjugate free Greek cities under the yoke and mantle of
worldwide tyranny. As different as they were, the defensive
alliance that voluntarily yoked Athens and Sparta together
succeeded in preserving them-and their differences.
Decades later, having torn each other and themselves apart in
the war that Thucydides attributes to Athens' own pursuit of
empire, Alcibiades, who had spent the war bouncing from
Athens to Sparta, to Thrace, to Persia, suggested that the two
former allies might achieve true glory if they once again
yoked themselves together to oppose Persia. This time the
alliance would not be defensive, but aggressive, with the aim
of establishing a Pan-Hellenic empire. The project could
never work since, as we observed above, the yoking of nnlike
partners, even under Darius or Xerxes, is bound to be
temporary. Athens and Sparta were too different to ally for
joint conquest, in contrast to defense, and Alcibiades was
nurtured in Pericles' Athens, not in the palace at Persepolis.
His last wild scheme collapsed completely as the Spartans
entered Athens, unopposed, seventy-six years after the battle
of Salamis. There is no play describing that event.
�FLAUMENHAFT
113
Bibliography
All the images discussed are available online at many websites. Any
reliable search engine will locate a large selection. They can also be found
in the following, easily available, books:
Athens:
Bruno, Vincent J. The Parthenon. New York: \'7.\V. Norton, 1974.
Connolly, Peter and Hazel Dodge. The Ancient City: Life in Classical
Athens and Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hurwit, Jeffrey .M. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Jenkins, Ian. The Parthenon Frieze. Oakville: British Museum Press, 1994.
Neils, Jenifer. The Parthenon Frieze. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
~~-~-·
YVorshipping Athena: Panatheuaia and Parthenon. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Neils, Jenifer, ed. Goddess and Polis. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992.
\Voodford, Susan. The Parthenon. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Persia:
Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
WiesehOfer, Josef. Ancient Persia. London: LB. Tauris & Co., 2001.
Notes
37
Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New
York, 1991), p. 161-62.
38
Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge, 1999), p.
74.
39
40
Pausanias, I.xxvi, declines to comment on the truth of this story.
Peploi were given to Athena in the rituals of other Greek cities; Athens
seems to have been the only place where the "garment was actually
placed upon the statue." E. J. W. Barber "The Peplos of Athena," in
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
114
Jenifer Neils, ed., Goddess and Polis (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1992),
p. 106. Perhaps the earliest description of such a presentation is described
in Book Six of the Iliad, when the desperate women of Troy under siege
make such an offering in hope of her aid. \Vhen she prepares to go to the
aid of the Greeks, she takes off her "soft peplos, that she herself had
made and her hands had fashioned" (VIII.385-86) and dons the tunic of
Zeus and her armor.
41
Barber, in Neils (1992), p.llO.
42
The festival and evidence for its changes over time are described in
detail by Hurwit (1999) and H.\V. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians
(Ithaca, New York, 1977), pp. 29-50. See also Jenifer Neils, "The
Panathenaia: An Introduction," in Neils (1992), pp. 13-27. H. A. Shapiro,
"Democracy and Imperialism: the Panathenaia in the Age of Perikles," in
Jenifer Neils, ed., \Vorshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1996), 215-25.
43
Kagan, p. 168.
44 Jan
Collie, Hidden London (London, 2002).
· 45
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgeway, "Images of Athena on the Akropolis,, in
Neils (1992), 122-42, p. 122; Peter Connolly and Hazel Dodge, The
Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens and Rome (New York, 2000), p. 12.
46
Hurwit, p.136.
47
Russell Meigs, "The Political Implications of the Parthenon,, in The
Parthenon, ed. Vincent J. Bruno (New York, 1975), p. 103, citing the
orator Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 81.
48 Plutarch's
Lives, Pericles, XII, Vol. III, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 37. Subsequent references will be given in
the text.
49
Kagan, p. 37
50 Meigs,
51
p. 111.
Allen, pp. 93-4.
52 Pausanias,
I.xx.
53
Joseph Wieseh6fer, Ancient Persia (New York, 2001), p. 34.
54
Persians, 979, and Hall, n. 979, p. 172.
55
Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of Persian
Kings (New York, 1969), p. 57.
56
Wieseh6fcr, p. 26.
�FLAUMENHAFT
115
57
Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age, trans.
Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, 1998), p. 381.
58
The setting of the full-scale reproduction of the temple in a flat, treefilled park in Nashville, Tennessee makes the building itself feel very
different. The ancient view \vas probably more restricted than it is now;
the view from the west side was best. Ian Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze
(London, 1994), p. 18.
59
Hurwit, p. 54.
60 Susan Woodford, The Parthenon (Cambridge, 1981), p. 20. Montaigne
says that "The Athenians ordained that the mules which had served in
building the temple called Hccatompedon [the earlier Parthenon] should
be set free, and that they should be allowed to graze anywhere without
hindrance." "Of Cruelty," in The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, trans.
Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1975), p. 103.
61
Hurwit, p. 176.
62
Hurwit, p. 176.
63
Hurwit, p. 32.
Vincent J. Bruno, "The Parthenon and the Theory of Classical Form,"
in The Parthenon (New York, 1974), p. 91.
64
65
Evelyn B. Harrison (1974), "The Sculptures of the Parthenon," in
Bruno, 225-311, p. 248.
66
Harrison (1974), p. 249.
67
Harrison (1974), p. 233.
68
Hurwit, p. 179.
69
Harrison, p. 278.
70
Bruno, p. 94.
71
This may suggest that the primary aim of the building was to celebrate
this victory, rather than Athena's birthday. See Hurwit, p. 30.
72
An enemy of Pheidias claimed that the sculptor had made likenesses of
himself and Pericles in the Amazon metopes. Pheidias died while in prison
on these charges. Plutarch affirms the resemblance to Pericles (Pint.,
Pericles, XXXI).
73
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft, "Priam the Patriarch, His City, and His Sons,"
Interpretation, 32.1 (Winter, 2004): 3·31.
74 Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: W!omen and the Pre~History of the
Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1991), p. 54, citing Bernard
Ash mole, Architect and Sculptor itt Classical Greece (London, 1972),
�116
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pp.165ff. Sec also Larissa Bonfante, "Nudity as a Costume in Classical
Art," American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 93, No.4, (October,
1989), p. 555.
75
Mary R. Lefkowitz, "Women in the Panathcnaic and Other Festivals,"
in Neils, ed., \Vorsbipping Athena, 1996, 78-91, p. 81.
76
Hurwit, p. 24.
77
Pausanias, I.xxviii.
78
\'\falter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
Religion (Boston, 1954), p. 53.
79 The
myths about their ancestry are confused: they are the products of
the mating of Ixion and a marc, or of Ixion's offspring and a mare, or of
Zeus in the shape of a horse and Ixion's wife.
80
duBois, pp. 27-8.
81
In the frieze behind the mctopes, only older men, officials, and some of
the gods are bearded, but all have articulated necks.
82
Robin Osborne, "Framing the Centaur: "Reading 5th Century
Architectural Sculpture," in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Simon
Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 71, 75-76.
Osborne ends by suggesting that "treating others as beasts" may "itself
constitute a lapse in propriety," p. 83.
83
duBois, p. 31.
84
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York, 1956).
85
Bonfante, p. 554.
86
duBois, p. 30.
87
Hurwit, p. 173 and Note 62.
88
Hurwit, pp. 173-74.
89
Neils (2001), p. 196.
9
°Kagan, p. 160.
91
Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the
Ancient Greek City (Cambridge, 1992), p. 106.
92
Peter von Blanckenhagen, Unpublished lecture, St. John's College,
Annapolis, date unknown.
93
The British lvluseum's Duveen Gallery reverses the direction of the
viewing, enclosing the viewer rather than the pictures.
94 The
CD that accompanies jenifer Neils's The Parthenon Frieze
(Cambridge, 2001) attempts to approximate the experience of walking
�FLAUMENHAFT
117
alongside the frieze by moving the frieze before the stationary viewer.
The corners of the temple are indicated by four red lines.
95Ncils (2001), pp. 33,37-8.
96
Evelyn B. Harrison, ''The Web of History: A Conservative Reading of
the Parthenon Frieze," in Neils (1996), 198-214, p. 211.
97 Woodford, p. 33.
98 Jenkins,
99
p. 26. Jenkins rejects the latter view.
Kagan, p. 111.
100 Woodford,
101
p. 36.
Green, p. 5.
102 \Vieseh6fer,
Plate V.
103 WiesehOfcr,
Plate I.
104
Robert Parker, Athenian Religiou: A History (Oxford, 1996), p. 14.
105
Neils (1992), p. 93.
10 6 John
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 1820.
10 7 This
theme has been fully explored by Jennifer Neils in \'(!orshipping
Athena (1996), Goddess and Polis (1992), and The Parthenon Frieze
(2001). On Greek weaving, the pep/as, and cloth fabrication in general,
see also Barber, in Neils (1992) and Barber (1994).
lOS
Harrison (1996) is critical of John Boardman's speculation, 199-200.
109 Neils (2001 ), p. 70.
110
Harrison (1996), p. 203; Neils (2001), p. 68.
111
Harrison (1996), p. 210.
11 2 Neils
(2001), p. 80.
113
Harrison (1996), p. 200.
ll 4
Plato, Statesman, 303b-311c.
11 5
Neils (2001), pp. 188 ff.
11 6
Neils (2001), p. 186.
117 Phillip
Fehl has argued that the rocks in the frieze locate the gods, also
emotionally distanced from the humans, on distant Olympus. "Gods and
Men in the Parthenon Frieze" (1961), quoted in Bruno (1996), 311-21.
118
Neils (2002), pp. 61-6.
119
Hurwit, p. 18.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
118
120 Pausanias,
I.xxiv.
121
His foresight later saved the sculptor from an accusation that he had
stolen some of the gold. \Vcighing proved he had not.
122
Hurwit, p. 164.
1D
Kagan, p. 113.
124
Hesiod, Theogony, 571-616 and Works and Days, 60-105.
125
Jenkins, p. 41.
126 Jenkins,
p. 40.
�
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ANNAPOLIS/ MARYLAND 21404
November 1991
fOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM' S SCHOOL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1991-92
August 30, 1991
Ms. Eva T. H. Brann, Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
What is a Book?
September 6
Mr. Michael Dink, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
The Wrath of Achilles
September 13
Ms. Judith Seeger, Tutor
and Professor Anthony Seeger
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Anatomy of Shame:
A Shameless Excursion
from Athens to the Amazon
September 20
Professor Lucius outlaw
Department of Philosophy
Haverford College
Haverford, PA
'Race' and Social Justice :
On W.E.B. DuBois' 'The
Conservation of Races'
September 27
Professor Ellen Davis
New York, New York
Story-Telling With
Pictures: A Greek
Invention
October 11
Concert
October 16
(Wednesday)
Mr. Howard Fisher, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Body Electric
October 25
Professor Gregory Nagy
Department of Classics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
Myth as Exemplum
in Homer
November 1
Professor Amy Kass
Chicago, IL
The Education of
Telemachos
November 8
Ms. Dorothy Guyot, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Are Police Officers to
American Cities as the
Auxiliaries are to the
Platonic Republic
November 15
Ms. Linda Wiener, Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
Shark Dissection as
Poetry and Philosophy:
The Practice of Science
TELEPHONE 301-263-2371
�The Ecology of Human
Reproduction
November 22
Professor Peter Ellison
Department of Biology
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
December 6
King William Players
January 10, 1992
Is Thinking Spontaneous?
Professor Stanley Rosen
Department of Philosophy
Pennsylvania state University
University Park, PA
January 17
Mr. Leo Pickens
Director, Athletics
St. John's College
Annapolis
'Box Where Sweets Compacted
Lie': An Explication of
Donne's "Nocturnal Upon
st. Lucies Day"
January 24
Mr. Andre Barbera, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
An Account of Musical
Taste
February 5
(Wednesday)
Ms. Lila Luce, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Logic After Aristotle
February 7
Mr. Peter Seeger
Concert
February 14
Professor Edward C. Smith
School of Education
The American University
Washington, D.C.
Frederick Douglass's
Influence on the War
Strategy of Abraham
Lincoln
February 21
Mr. Harvey Flaumenhaft, Tutor Reluctance, Risk, and
st. John's College
Reputation:
George
washington Decides to
Annapolis
Preside
March 20
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research
Chicago, IL
March 27
Professor Don E. Fehrenbacher Lincoln and the American
Department of History
Literary Figures of
stanford University
His Time
Stanford, CA
April 3
Mr. Joe Sachs, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
War and Peace
The Battle of the Gods
and the Giants
�April 10
Professor Tu Weiming
East Asian Languages
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
An Interpretive Reading
of the Great Learning
April 15
(Wednesday)
Mr. Erik Sageng, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
A Baconian Mathematics:
MacLaurin's Motivation
for His Adherence to
'Ancient Standards of
Evidence and Certainty'
April 24
King William Players
May 1
Professor Ray Coppinger
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA
The Domestication
of Evolution
May 8
Mr. John E. Pfeiffer
New Hope, PA
Paleolithic Painting:
The Origins of Art
and Religion
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1991-92
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1991-1992
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1991-1992 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1991-1992
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dink, Michael
Seeger, Judith Leland, 1944-
Outlaw, Lucius T., 1944-
Davis, Ellen
Fisher, Howard
Nagy, Gregory
Kass, Amy
Guyot, Dorothy
Wiener, Linda F., 1957-
Ellison, Peter
Rosen, Stanley
Pickens, Leo
Barbera, André
Luce, Lila
Seeger, Peter
Smith, Edward C.
Flaumenhaft, Harvey, 1938-
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Fehrenbacher, Don E. (Don Edward), 1920-1997
Sachs, Joe
Weiming, Tu
Sageng, Erik Lars
Coppinger, Raymond
Pfeiffer, John E., 1915-
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
August 30, 1991. Brann, Eva, T. H. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1242" title="What is a book?">What is a book?</a> (typescript)
March 6, 1992. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3719" title="Battle of the gods and giants">Battle of the gods and giants</a> (audio)
March 6, 1992. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3720" title="Battle of the gods and giants">Battle of the gods and giants</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/72a23ef3a99cdd9e7e9e4bf1304a40c5.pdf
2d82bec276959ebb10f2fa195e71433a
PDF Text
Text
· ·~·~ ST JoHN's C o LLEGE
•
.ll· .
.nn .
~~
P.O. BOX 2800
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404-2800
FOUNDED
1696
AS
K ING
W ILLIAM'S
S c HOOL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1994-95
September 2
Eva T. H. Brann, Dean
St . John's College
Annapolis
"The Past-Present"
September 9
Professor Stephen Scully
Boston University
Boston, MA
"ROMA-AMOR: Love and
Empire in the Aeneid"
September 16
Dr. James N. Jarvis
Children's Hospital
of Michigan
Detroit, MI
"Cells and Genes Are
Parts of Animals:
Aristotle in the 20th
Century"
September 23
Professor Edward Smith
The American University
School of Education
Washington, DC
"Lincoln's Reelection
Reconsidered: The
Cruicible of 1864"
September 30
Mr . Clarence J. Kramer
Corinth, VT
"Nostalgia ... and Beyond"
october 7
Mr. Curtis Wilson
Tutor Emeritus
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Dynamical Chaos: Some
Implications of a Recent
Discovery"
October 21
Concert
October 28
Mr. Andre Barbera, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Musical Property
of African Americans"
November 4
Professor John Sallis
Department of Philisoophy
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
"Reading Plato's
Timaeus: The Place of
,.....
XWfo.
November 11
All - College Seminar
November 18
Dr. R. Lloyd Mitchell
Department of Philosophy
Washington & Jefferson College
Washington, Pennsylvania
"Discovering the
Philosopher: Republic
473c-480a"
December 2
Ms. Ann Martin
Annapolis, Maryland
"Atonement"
TELEPHONE 410-263-2371
�.II
•
·~~ ST
~~
JoH N's CoLLEGE
P.O. BOX 2800
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21 404-2800
F OUNDED
1696
AS
K ING
W ILLIAM"S
SCHOOL
Lecture/Concerts - 2nd Semester 1994 - 95
January 13
Mr . Joshua Kates, Tutor
St . John's College
Santa Fe
"Sappho I: An
Ontological Approach"
Januar y 20
Ms. Judith Seeger, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Parmenides"
Januar y 27
Concert
February 10
Mr . Steve Crockett
Atomic Energy Commission
Washington, DC
"On Becoming Free"
February 17
Douglas Allanbrook, Tutor
St . John ' s College
Annapolis
"The Taking of Time"
February 24
Professor Sarah Broadie
Department of Philosophy
Princeton University
Princeton , New Jersey
"Theory and Practice
in Ari s totle's Ideal
Life"
March 24
Mr. Peter Kalkavage, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Hegel's Logic of
Desire"
March 31
Mr. Mortimer J . Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research
Chicago, IL
" How the Program at
St . John's College
Originated"
April 7
Concert
April 14
All - College Seminar
April 21
Adam Schulman, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
"Defeat Into Victory:
The Strategy of Odysseus
in Sophocles's Ajax and
Philoctetes
April 28
Professor Paul Heyne
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
"The Guild of
Economists : Wou l d
Adam Smith Want to Join?
May 5
King William Players
May 12
Dr. Wade Davis (cancelled)
Washington, DC
TELEPHONE 410-263-2371
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1994-95
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1994-1995
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1994-1995 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1994-1995
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Relation
A related resource
September 2, 1994. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/265" href="The%20past-present">The past-present</a> (audio)
October 7, 1994. Wilson, Curtis. <a title="Dynamical chaos" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3654">Dynamical chaos</a> (typescript)
March 24, 1995. Kalkavage, Peter. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3814" title="Hegel's logic of desire">Hegel's logic of desire</a> (audio)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Brann, Eva T. H.
Scully, Stephen, 1947-
Jarvis, James N.
Smith, Edward
Kramer, Clarence J.
Wilson, Curtis
Barbera, André
Sallis, John, 1938-
Mitchell, R. Lloyd
Martin, Ann
Kates, Joshua
Seeger, Judith Leland, 1944-
Crockett, Steve
Allanbrook, Douglas
Broadie, Sarah
Kalkavage, Peter
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Schulman, Adam
Heyne, Paul T.
Davis, Wade
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/93aca8d61814859b2ba82d027814eac0.pdf
e2598c541cfc5be4a59b02d1670a5f51
PDF Text
Text
-~~
St. John's College
. . ·~
,...
T H RE E HUNDRED YE A R S
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL
II
•
~
PO. Box 2800, An napol is, MD 21404
410-263-2371, Fax 410-263-4828
LECTURE / CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1996-97
August 30, 1996
Ms. Eva T. H. Brann, Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Why Read Books?"
September 6
Ms. Patricia Locke, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"A Sainte-Chapelle
of the Mind"
September 13
Professor Frederick Crews
Department of English
University of California
Berkeley, California
"Freud: Harmful or
Fatal If Swallowed"
September 20
Mr . John Verdi, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"How We Do Things
With Words: An
Introduction to
Wittgenstein"
September 27
Mr. Christopher B. Nelson
President
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Foundation, Generation
and Immortality: Images
of Fatherhood in the
Aeneid"
October 4
Professor Peter Suber
Department of Philosophy
Earlham College
Richmond, Indiana
"Infinite Reflections"
October 18
Professor Judith Grabiner
Pitzer College
Claremont, California
"Methodological
Imperialism and
cartesian Geometry"
October 25
Mr . Jody Gatwood and
Mr. Brian Ganz
Concert
November 1
Mr. Stewart Umphrey, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Eternity"
November 8
All-College Seminar
November 15
Professor John T . Bonner
Professor Emeritus
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
"Social Amoebae:
The Advantages of
Togetherness"
November 22
Ms. Janice Macaulay
Tutor, Graduate Institute
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The End of Tradition?
Pluralism and Problems
of Contemporary Musical
styles"
December 6
King William Players
�St. John's College
.
•
P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404
410-263-2371, Fax 410-263-4828
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIA M'S SCHOOL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - SECOND SEMESTER 1996- 97
January 10, 1997
Ms. Marilyn Higuera, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Prelude to Vocation:
Eliot's Middlemarch"
January 17
Ms. Olivia Delgado de Torres
Tutor, St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Jocasta: A Wimple
of Widows' Weeds"
January 24
Professor Giuseppe F. Mazzotta
Italian Languages and Literature
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
"The Language of
Treachery in Lower
Hell "
February 7
Professor Vicki Hearne
Westbrook, Connecticut
"The Phenomenology
of Toto"
February 14
Mr. Eliot Fisk
Concert
February 21
Mr . Andre Barbera, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
"Birdland:
21, 1954"
March 21
All-College Seminar
March 28
Professor Michael Davis
Sarah Lawrence College
"Euripides Among the
Athenians"
April 4
Mr . David Stephenson, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
"Ptolemy 's Tr uth"
April 11
Professor Ronna Burger
Department of Philosophy
Tulane University
New Orleans, Louisiana
"Health of Soul and
Psychic Medicine :
On the Argument of
Aristotle ' s Ethics"
April 18
Profe ssor Stephen H. Ke llert
Department of Philosophy
Hamline University
Saint Paul, Minnesota
"Chaos Theory a nd
Scientific
Understanding"
April 25
Pa l e strina Choir
Concert
May 2
King William Playe rs
May 9
Mr. John Lynch
Ringling Brother Barnum
& Bailey Cir cus
February
To b e announced
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1996-97
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1996-1997
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1996-1997 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1996-1997
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Relation
A related resource
August 30, 1996. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Why read books?" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/267">Why read books?</a> (audio)
August 30, 1996. Brann, Eva T. H. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1247" title="Why read books?">Why read books?</a> (typescript)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Brann, Eva T. H.
Locke, Patricia
Crews, Frederick
Verdi, John
Nelson, Christopher B.
Suber, Peter
Grabiner, Judith V.
Gatwood, Jody
Ganz, Brian
Umphrey, Stewart, 1942-
Bonner, John T.
Macaulay, Janice Michel
Higuera, Marilyn
de Torres, Olivia Delgado
Mazzotta, Giuseppe F.
Hearne, Vicki
Fisk, Eliot
Barbera, André
Davis, Micahel
Stephenson, David
Burger, Ronna
Kellert, Stephen H.
Lynch, John
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/905a24c0f76c81129a3bf1e766e514ca.pdf
ee2c7bb3f779e5da7fa2a3bc6021390f
PDF Text
Text
S!JOHN'S
College
ANN A POLlS • SANTA FE
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE FIRST SEMESTER- 2006-2007
(August 24, 2006 - conected copy)
August 25, 2006
Mr. Michael Dink
Dean
St. John's College
" In the Eyes of Others, Part II:
Rousseau and Smith"
September 1
All College Seminar
Montaigne's essay
"On Friendship"
September 8
Mr. Andre Barbera
Tutor
St. John's College
"Is There Great Jazz?"
September 15
Mr. L. Harvey Poe
Annapolis, MD
"On the Roots of the Political
Philosophy of the Constitution"
September 22
Mr. J. Walter Sterling IV
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"The Visibility of Dying
in Homer's Iliacf'
September 29
Mr. Samuel Kutler
Tutor Emeritus
St. John's College
"The Republic of Letters and
the Republic of Numbers"
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P. 0 . Box z8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYJ, AND
21404
410-626-25II
FAX 4I0-295-6937
www.sjca. edu
October 6
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 13
Mr. Jonathan Tuck
Tutor
St. John's College
"Baudelaire's Swan Song"
October 20
Professor Paul Bagley
Loyola College
Baltimore, MD
"On Why Spinoza's Teaching
in the Tractatus Is Necessarily
Theologico-Political"
October 27
Professor James A. Arieti
Hampden-Sydney College
Virginia
"Achilles, the Moral Pioneer"
November 3
Mr. Andreas Haefliger:
Concert
Piano Sonatas of Beethoven
November 10
Professor David Branning
Trinity College
"Quantum Mechanics"
November 17
Mr. Frank Pagano
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Masks of the Naked Animal:
Herodotus on Shame and
Ci vi I ization"
�December I
Mr. John Tomarchio
Tutor
St. John's College
"Aquinas and the Object
Proper of Metaphysics"
December 8
King William Players
Midsummer Night's Dream
�S!JOHN'S
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE SECOND SEMESTER- 2006-2007
College
Januaty 12, 2007
Professor Kirk Sanders
University of lllinois
at Urbana-Champaign
"Epicurean Emotions"
January 19
The Aulos Ensemble
Handel 's "Acis and Galatea"
January 26
Mr. Joseph Smith
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"The Diffidence of Reason- A
Reading of the Conclusion of
Book 1 of Hume's Treatise"
February 9
Ms. Ange Mlinko
Croton-On-Hudson, NY
Modern Poetry
February 16
(Steiner Lecture)
Professor Camille Paglia
University of the Arts
in Philadelphia
"Form and Figure in Greek Art:
Ideal Beauty, Individualism, and
Political Space in Greek
Architecture and Sculpture"
Februaty 23
Professor James Nonis
Howard University
"The Negro Spiritual: A
Choral Art Form"
March 23
Concett
Talich String Quartet
March 30
Prof Christina von Nolcken
University of Chicago
"Another "Lollere in the
wynd"? Chaucer, his Miller,
and Nicholas' Door"
April6
All College Seminar
April 13
Mr. George Russell
Tutor
St. John' s College
"Freedom and Equality in
Lincoln's Understanding of
the American Polity''
April20
Mr. Jason Tipton
Tutor
St. John's College
"Man's Emergence from the
State ofNature: An Account
Founded on Darwin's
Discussion of Sexual Selection"
April28
King William Players
17te Good Doctor
MayS
Reality
No Lecture
ANNAPOL I S • SANTA PE
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P. 0. Box 2.8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
2.I404
4I0-62.6-2.5rr
FAX 4I0-295-6937
www.sjca. edu
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule First Semester - 2006-2007 (August 24, 2006 - corrected copy) & Second Semester - 2006-2007
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2006-2007
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2006-2007 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 2006-2008
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Relation
A related resource
October 13, 2006. Tuck, Jonathan. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3800" title="Baudelaire's swan song">Baudelaire's swan song</a> (audio)
October 13, 2006. Tuck, Jonathan. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3797">Baudelaire's swan song</a> (typescript)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Dink, Michael
Barbera, André
Poe, L. Harvey (Luke Harvey)
Sterling IV, J. Walter
Kutler, Samuel
Tuck, Jonathan
Bagley, Paul
Arieti, James A.
Haefliger, Andreas
Branning, David
Pagano, Frank N.
Tomarchio, John
Sanders, Kirk R., 1966-
The Aulos Ensemble
Smith, Joseph
Mlinko, Ange
Paglia, Camille, 1947-
Norris, James
von Nolcken, Christina
Russell, George
Tipton, Jason A.
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
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