The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (17 page)

May not future generations puzzle over why late-twentieth-century man, at astronomical cost, went shooting off into outer space?

However inscrutable their motives, in their aim to conquer time the ancient Egyptians succeeded. They still carry the plain message of man’s power as communal creator. In 1215, according to the Arab chronicler Abd al Latif, Caliph Malek al Azis Othman was offended by these monuments of idolatry. As a work of piety he assembled a large crew to destroy one
of the smaller pyramids, the pyramid of Menkaure at Giza. After eight months’ labor, his crew had made so little impression that he gave up. The mark of that hopeless effort is still visible in a small scar on the north slope of that pyramid. Since then, only the exploits of tomb robbers and the frolics of boisterous tourists tossing stones down from the summits have marred the pyramids’ simple grandeur.

N
OT
a single building of the Periclean Age of Greek architecture remains as intact as the Great Pyramid. Yet the ancient Greeks won their battle with time in their own way. Their structures survive only as fragments, in ruins or in copies, but the forms that they created, unlike the Egyptians’, surround us every day in our homes and public buildings, in our mantelpieces, in our windows and doorways. While the ancient Egyptians survive in their indestructible original works, the ancient Greeks survive through styles and motifs. Their survival resides in their persuasive power to command imitation and reincarnation.

Greek architecture has been called a kind of abstract sculpture. And perhaps no other form of art so separates the product from its original use. We admire the buildings on the Athenian Acropolis, even if we do not understand their function, and would not share the purpose for which they were built. If abstract art appeals by its form and not by its meaning, this surely must be the appeal of the ancient Greek architecture that survives.

It abstracts, too, by using stone to take the place of wood. The distinctive features of classic Greek architecture—the column and architrave (post and lintel)—are a translation of primitive wooden forms. The earliest columns in Greek temples appear to have been made of wood. The stone column, which was to become a hallmark of Greek architecture and of the whole classical tradition, in the beginning may have been fashioned after Egyptian or other Middle Eastern Mediterranean models. Only after the seventh century
B.C.
were Greek columns made of stone. Other surviving features of the Doric and Ionic orders betray their original wooden form. One of the more obvious is the shape of the triglyph, which alternates with the metopes
in the frieze, plainly derived from wooden beam ends. The reasons to substitute stone for wood were not all aesthetic, for the invention and widespread use of roofing tiles in the seventh century
B.C.
put a weight on the columns that wood could not support.

Greece is “a marble peninsula,” where coarser limestone too is plentiful. One variety of limestone found on the plains of Argos was easily split into irregular blocks for the distinctive “polygonal” masonry of terrace and fortification walls. Another variety found in the west and north of the Peloponnese had a rough surface and many cavities, providing a base for the finishing plaster. This less attractive marble was a common material for public buildings. But the Parthenon and other fifth-century monuments on the Acropolis were of Pentelic marble hewn from the quarries on Mount Pentelicus, ten miles northeast of Athens. Pentelic marble differs from other Greek marbles by its slight tincture of iron, which, exposed to the weather, gives the golden patina we admire on the Parthenon. The white marble used by ancient Greek sculptors and architects, the Parian marble from Paros, an island of the Cyclades in the Aegean, lacks the iron tincture, has larger transparent crystals, and remains white over the centuries. Special qualities of Pentelic marble help explain the elegance of the Parthenon and its companions of the Great Age, as it takes a sharp edge and a polished surface for close-fitting joints and subtle optical refinements.

The emergence of a homogeneous Greek architecture remains very much a mystery. There was a Greek architecture long before there was a Greek nation. The landscape of the Greek peninsula was fragmented by small mountain ranges, split by the Gulf of Corinth, and not united by any Nile. Communications were primitive and people were divided by dialects, for in the classic age of Greek architecture there was not yet a standard Greek language. Yet by the fifth century
B.C.
there had emerged a Doric style all over the peninsula. The rectangular stone temple was surrounded by columns, each topped by its echinus and abacus, and all enclosed by an architrave with a plain lintel, surmounted by a frieze of triglyphs and metopes, and roofed by a gently inclined pediment. An Ionic style from Ionia—Asia Minor and adjacent islands—became a kind of dialect variant in the language of architecture, with minor variations of proportion and detail.

Since temples were all houses for the same gods, built to suit the same tenants, perhaps it is not surprising that they should have had a common style. Men were always diffident about their ability to provide dwellings worthy of their gods. “But will God indeed dwell on earth?” King Solomon asked at the Temple of Jerusalem, “Behold the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded” (I Kings 8:27). Once a satisfying traditional form had been established, was
it not only good sense to follow it? The fact that the Doric and the Ionic temples were so true to type across the fragmented landscape may have helped Plato to develop his theory of ideas. Perhaps there really was a transcendent ideal of beauty in architecture. And of that ideal perhaps all the temples, whether in Olympia, in Paestum, or in Athens, were only copies.

The Greek temples, like the pyramids of Egypt, were creations of community. First, of the large unspoken community of communities across Greece that somehow enforced their single type and common style. This widespread aesthetic community enfolded many small face-to-face communities, each an independent city-state, or polis.

The Greek
polis
was as distinctive as the Greek temple. Commonly translated as “city-state,” it was really neither a city nor a state. And when we quote Aristotle to say that “Man is a political animal” we are misquoting. What he really said was that Man is by nature a polis-dwelling animal. The polis was a self-sufficient community just large enough and just small enough. Self-sufficiency, needed for independence, also provided opportunities for full human development. This meant that the city-state (or polis) could be neither wholly urban nor wholly rural, for it needed both countryside and city. In each polis there could be only one town. Otherwise citizens could not know firsthand one another’s needs. That town, the center of government, was usually walled, containing an agora or marketplace and a citadel or acropolis (originally the “polis”).

The polis, strictly speaking, consisted not of the territory but of the citizens. And it took its name not from the place where they lived but from its citizens. Thus Athens was named after the Athenians (devotees of the goddess Athena) and not vice versa. Mid-fifth-century Athens still kept relics of its tribal origins, for example in a law that restricted citizenship to the legitimate children of two parents of citizen stock. This whole “citizen” minority participated in the government, which, from
their
point of view, was a democracy. For they all were members of the governing Assembly and all had a chance to be in the Council, a kind of executive committee controlling finances. Members of the Council were chosen by lot and could be reelected only once.

During the Age of Pericles (c.460–429
B.C.
) there were several hundred such Greek poleis so varied that a general history of them is not possible. But their common virtues are recognizable and have been eloquently celebrated. Only participation in such a polis-community, as Aristotle noted, could make a man fully human. Virtues of the polis came, too, from the fact that it was not too large. Federalism as a way of joining communities into a single vast nation was alien to the ancient Greeks. They did experiment with
leagues and confederation’s for specific purposes, but their political philosophers did not even include federalism in their taxonomy of governments. A government so extensive that all citizens could not consult with one another seemed inconsistent with the good life, which was the purpose of the organized community. A state composed of too many people might be self-sufficient, but, Aristotle insisted, “it will not be a true polis, because it can hardly have a true constitution. Who can be the general of a mass so excessively large? Who can be herald, except Stentor?”

The largest polis in the Great Age of ancient Greece was Athens, whose population probably did not exceed 250,000. Corinth then had less than 100,000, and Thebes, Argos, Corcyra, and Acragas perhaps counted 50,000 each, many numbered 5,000, and hundreds of poleis had even less. With so many poleis sprinkled across the fragmented mountain-cut landscape, no one of them could have reached far out to the countryside. Athens, the most extensive, covered an area somewhat less than that of the state of Rhode Island (about one thousand square miles).

The classic temples of their Great Age were creations of these communities, and public in every sense of the word. In a special Greek sense, too, for the Greeks spent their days out of doors. Their temples, unlike churches, were not primarily places of worship but houses for gods. They were designed not to contain crowds of the faithful, but to be looked at by an admiring populace from the outside.

Each temple, the pride of a polis, had been “designed by a committee.” In mid-fifth century
B.C.
, when the greatest temples were being built, the decision to build one would be made by the polis’ Assembly and/or the Council who would set the budget, authorize the expenditure, and appoint a building commission. In a religious center like Delphi or Eleusis the temple overseers would make the decisions and the money would be dispensed by a finance board. The commissioners who supervised the work from design to completion were not experts or architects but simply citizens active in commerce, politics, or the professions.

They seem not to have drawn plans or elevations as a modern architect would. These Greeks of the classic age left us on their vases countless samples of their skill and imagination as draftsmen, but scholars have not found a single architectural drawing. Apparently they did not need them. In the beginning the Greek word
architekton
meant master carpenter, and by the sixth century, when stone had displaced wood for important temples, the dominant figure was the stonemason. The conventional design of a Greek temple was so firmly established that only variations of detail could be expected, and these could be settled on the spot, while the building was going up.

This uniformity distinguishes Greek architecture from the creations of
other great ages of building. The layman can notice conspicuous differences between the Gothic cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, Chartres, and Notre-Dame de Paris, though all were designed within a few decades of one another. Among Greek temples of the Great Age there are of course differences of scale. But only the eye of a specialist can find the differences of design between Greek Doric temples of the same epoch, even those so far apart as the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum in southern Italy and the restored Temple of Zeus at Olympia on the Greek Peloponnese.

The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, paragon of classical Greek architecture, hardly differs in plan or design from the familiar model. The only notable departure was the addition of a second chamber within, behind the main sanctuary, which still did not alter the impression from the outside.

What distinguished the Parthenon, then, was no novelty of conception, no additional “feature” or product of some clever architect’s imagination, but rather the refinements of the work. These were only “niceties” of Doric design, but centuries of admirers have noted their subtle charm. Some of these “subtleties” may not have been planned or intended. They may have been consequences or accidents of the fact that the Parthenon was built on foundations of a smaller temple and that some of the columns were being reused.

Perhaps the curvature of the column shafts was intended to correct an optical illusion. Columns with perfectly straight sides when seen against the light will seem thinner in the middle, which, of course, gives an impression of flimsy support. Greek stonemasons prevented this by making the columns bulge out slightly halfway up. This entasis, which in the sixth century was greater than that needed merely to correct the optical illusion, gave the columns an elastic appearance and so counteracted the tendency of the eye to reach indefinitely upward. Fifteen hundred years later, the upward reach would be an object of the Gothic builders. But the Greek column’s gentle curve induced the eye to travel up and down along the shaft. Stonemasons seem to have taken account of this problem by making the more conspicuous columns at the corners thicker than the rest.

Such “refinements” increase our delight in the familiar form but do not call attention to themselves. The aim was not to make the temple original or impress us with the boldness of the architect. Even the greatest Greek sculptors, potters, painters, and architects were not individualists. Greek art at its greatest was “canonical,” governed by rules and “orders” on which the artist only made refinements. And these refinements distinguished the masterpiece. But originality too was subdued into slight curves on standard forms. If, to us, “artist” conjures up visions of the Left Bank or bohemia, rebels against society’s conventional standards, among the classic Greeks
it was quite otherwise. Their rebel was not found among artists but among philosophers—he was not a Phidias but a Socrates.