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Like the Apadana reliefs, the Parthenon frieze echoes its ritual setting and represents
a ceremonial procession, in this case the Great Panathenaic procession, which began at
the Dipylon Gate and wound its way through the agora to the Acropolis, before culmi-
nating with the dedication of the peplos woven for Athena.^1 The frieze of the Parthenon
evokes the immanent commencement of the Panathenaia with its depiction of horsemen,
elders, charioteers, musicians, water carriers, maidens and marshals, and sacrificial bulls
processing around the edges of the building. Mirroring the ritual experience of its citizens
in this way, the frieze celebrates Athenians as much as it honors Athena. The program of
the frieze, therefore, is fundamentally votive in nature in its depiction of the ritual honor-
ing of Athena by her citizens. Like the Persian Apadana, the celebratory and ceremonial
mood is motivated by gift-giving. Specifically, the frieze emphasizes the preparations for
offering Athena the new peplos woven for her by her city. In other words, it celebrates the
contractual reciprocity of Athena and Athens and parallels the terrestrial contractual rela-
tionship set up in Persepolis between the ruler and the tributary nations of the empire.
The visual programs of both monuments are motivated thematically by processions of
gifts, tributary and votive, and they share a similar formal logic—so much so that the
Parthenon frieze has been read as a visual emulation of the Apadana reliefs.^2
The Apadana of Persepolis was completed under Xerxes (reigned 486–465 bce),
whose rule was marked by failed campaigns in mainland Greece that ultimately
prompted the creation of a sense of pan-Hellenic unity cast in oppositional terms to
the Persian “barbarians”—that is, to a Mediterranean divided politically and ideo-
logically between Greeks and Persians. The Parthenon’s visual program was the prod-
uct of this new ideological division. It emphatically celebrates the Athenians and by
implication derides the Persians. The viewer’s vantage point of the frieze, which pro-
vides a ritual mirror of the Athenian contract with the gods, is framed by the metope
program which serves to punctuate the rhythmic preparations of the Panathenaic
procession with staccato scenes of the epic eternal adversaries: here the Greeks con-
front centaurs, amazons, giants, and Trojans. These serve as mythic shorthand for the
epic battle of rationality and irrationality that allegorizes the Greek conception of
West versus East, Order versus Disorder, Us versus Them. The metopes form the
outer frame for viewing the contemporary ritual drama of the Panathenaia—they act,
in other words, as a thematic contextualization for the frieze. Thus the Parthenon’s
inner ionic frieze, which pictures the Athenian celebration of Athena in a similar vein
as the Apadana reliefs, is framed by the mythic metope sculptures alluding to an oppo-
sition between the Greeks and the Persians. The Parthenon not only borrows from
the formal logic of the Apadana but it recasts it for contemporary ideological pur-
poses, specifically for “barbarizing” the Persians.
This brief comparison of the visual programs of the Parthenon and Persepolis high-
lights their histories as entangled in cross-Mediterranean politics and cultural practices
while at the same time reveals their centrality to the construction of Greek and Persian
identity respectively. As Mediterranean monuments they evoke intertwined histories
and aspirations—rivalries and emulations. Describing them as “Mediterranean,”
however, is not merely a gesture towards their location in the maritime networks of
the sea but rather an acknowledgment of the relationship between the local level
of interpretation and the broader flow of materials, technologies, styles, and ideologies.
Such a distinction, however, begs for a clarification of what constitutes a Mediterranean
monument.