Review: The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West's Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It, by Joan Breton Connelly

Abstract

Joan Breton Connelly The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West's Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, 485 pp., 8 color and 132 b/w illus. $35, ISBN 9780307593382 The title of this book suggests that its purpose is to present a comprehensive view of the Parthenon in context, and to this end it constructs throughout summaries of the history and interpretation of the Acropolis, especially of the Parthenon. Six of the volume's ten chapters are general treatments of a variety of issues surrounding the Acropolis and the Parthenon. The prologue introduces the Parthenon and the purpose of the book. Chapters 1–3 present the geography and historical development of the Acropolis and a biography of Perikles. The heart of the book and its major contribution, the final articulation of Joan Breton Connelly's 1996 reinterpretation of the east frieze of the Parthenon, is established in detail in chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7.1 The prologue and chapters 1–7 are my focus in this review. The final two pieces, chapter 8 and the epilogue, are tangential, presenting the legacy of the Parthenon, including Elgin's removal of the Parthenon sculptures from Greece and brief comments on the possibility of their repatriation, on the design of the new Acropolis Museum, and on the modern-day issue of cultural property. The prologue offers a brief presentation of various historical understandings of the Parthenon and introduces the essential questions to be addressed in the book. Perhaps most important, it emphasizes the centrality of the “relationship of dead heroes and heroines to the rites of remembrance at the Panathenaic Festival” (xxiii). Chapter 1, “The Sacred Rock,” introduces the most basic context of the Parthenon, the physical characteristics and natural environment of the Acropolis, and describes how the local mythological tradition that shaped later Athenian consciousness grew out of the surrounding landscape and expressed itself in myths and monuments. The chapter explores how the geography of Attica and the myths and memories that resided in it were …