The Spartans would have nothing to do with the plan, so the Pan-Hellenic congress
never took place. But Pericles went ahead with the restoration of the temples on the
Acropolis that the invading Persians had destroyed, and the Parthenon was begun in
447, to be finally completed fifteen years later. We may say that the motive was
political in the sense that the grand vision of Pericles was designed to express and
enhance the growing confidence and self-awareness of the Athenian polis.
Plutarch vividly describes the energy that went into the new construction:
So the buildings arose, as imposing in their sheer size as they were inimitable in
the grace of their outlines, since the artists strove to excel themselves in the beauty
of their workmanship. And yet the most wonderful thing about them was the speed
with which they were completed. Each of them, men supposed, would take many
generations to build, but in fact the entire project was carried through in the high
summer of one man’s administration.
(Life of Pericles, 13)Three years after the completion of the Parthenon, in his funeral oration over the
Athenian dead, Thucydides has Pericles give voice to the Athenian cultural ideal: ‘Our
love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of things of the mind
does not make us soft’ (2, 40). The Greek phrase, which is literally rendered as ‘with
economy’ and often put into its converse form ‘without extravagance’, is not to be
understood as referring to cost, for no expense was spared in the project, for which
funds were diverted from the treasury (made up of contributions from the allies).
Beauty with economy and without extravagance is an aesthetic ideal perfectly
embodied in the classical art of the Periclean age.
The design of the temple, the main form of Greek architecture, is well estab-
lished as early as the seventh century. The roots of classical architecture go back
to the ancient Egyptian, Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. The Egyptians used
columns to decorate their temples and tombs, and the Minoans used the method
of construction known as ‘trabeation’, that is the placing of horizontal beams or
lintels across the top of load-bearing upright posts or columns to form the ‘entabla-
ture’. In the development of Greek architecture, there are two main stylistic orders
(the Greek word for column is stylos), the Doric that had evolved as the predominant
form on mainland Greece, and the Ionic which developed in Ionia and the Aegean
islands in the late sixth century. The Doric is the more severe and grand (fig. 55a);
the Ionic, with its taller and thinner columns and its greater decoration, is the
more graceful (see fig. 55b). The later Corinthian order, which was the predominant
form of temple architecture in imperial Rome, is a variation of the Ionic with a
distinctive capital (see fig. 55c). The Parthenon is regarded as the perfection of
the Doric order.
ART 239