If you fancy a detective story, Mary Beard’s is a voice apart with a conversational style of writing, belying her academic pedigree at its heart. This book is serious history written as a detective story.
What the author presents is a witty and accessible discussion about the building’s downfall from a glorious classical temple to a controversial tourist attraction. Whether you have seen the Parthenon or not, it appears to inspire much awe, making it a magnet for our imagination.
The book presumes only a very basic familiarity with the ancient world and the history of Athens. Mary Beard writes for a wide audience with a text that’s lucid and admirably unencumbered by jargon or esoteric terminology which often leads the uninitiated reader to despair.
Chapter One, entitled “Why the Parthenon might make you cry”, sets out to present the Parthenon as an object of extreme emotional experience, a source of marvel, emulation and debate. Had it not been dismembered and ended up in so many museums, it would never have been half as famous.
In Chapter Two, Beard travels back in time to present ancient sources for the building while discussing its original function and sociohistorical context. She formulates numerous questions, not so much in order to answer them but to reflect on the limitations of the Parthenon as a bridge between the present and the distant past.
Chapter Three brings to the forefront, its various iterations between the end of antiquity, and the modern era. Since the ’70s restoration works much has revealed much about its ‘bones’, in regards to it becoming a church and its subsequent function as a cathedral under the Franks, Catalan and the Florentines, and finally as a mosque under the Ottomans. Mary Beard highlights the role of the Parthenon at the center of lost perceptual universes which were once sought as the “magic” for its classical origins.
Chapter Four covers the building’s history from the disastrous explosion of 1687 to the present day. Travellers visiting the edifice helped themselves to architectural sculptures, initiating their dispersal around Europe. The process culminated in Lord Elgin’s infamous intervention, the legality of which lies at the core of persisting debate regarding repatriation of the Parthenon’s marbles. She discusses how during the 19th century Classicism period when everything in Greece was fabricated to fit the European narrative of an ideal past.
In Chapter Five, the author reflects on our idealisation of the Parthenon as a symbol of Democracy and the unfavourable realities and contradictions of the society that generated it.
The subject of Chapter Six, “Meanwhile, back in London….” accounts for the current situation over the ownership of the Parthenon and its ultimate fate. Beard points out the longest running cultural controversy, is not simply between the Greek government and a highly prestigious British cultural institution, but also the contradictions surrounding the contemporary life of the Parthenon.
The last section, titled “Making a visit?” makes recommendations for travellers to Athens and London to include the important historic Weiler Buildings South-East of the Dionysus Theatre and adjacent to the new Acropolis museum, which houses the only set of plaster casts of the expatriated marbles. The book is a book in expanding literature on the Parthenon. Mary Beard has achieved a needed synthesis of a building and its sculptures.
Interestingly, like all ruins it was exploited, which is why Beard refuses to condemn Lord Elgin’s removal of the marble friezes, now resting in the British Museum, considering when he visited the site it was a ‘ruined affair’ colonised by a mosque, encroached by a garrison shanty-town, and despoiled for more than a century by locals and visitors alike.
The decision to remove the sculptures would not have been a difficult choice according to Mary Beard, a safer place by removal, than left as it were. Luckily, a couple of decades later, Lord Elgin was almost vindicated, when plans were drawn up to build a new royal palace on the Acropolis, which fortunately came to no fruition. The Greek government began a campaign of ‘restoration’ that systematically removed every vestige of “Barbarian” influence on the Parthenon.
This was almost as much of a crime as bringing the whole thing to the ground. Yes, says Beard, much was lost but there were successes in the discoveries they made.
Beard ‘s historical knowledge is only surpassed by her ability to tell a story.
