Parthenon In Athens Research Articles

Deciphering the Greek Temple: Verification with Software Tools of the Solar Design of the Parthenon in Athens and the Temple of Zeus in Olympia

In Greek temples, compositional order and Pythagorean geometry were used to achieve regularity, proportion and beauty, combining exact magnitudes between the parts and the whole. It is also known that all the temples were oriented with great precision. However, the diverse reasons for their construction makes their astronomical orientation more difficult to interpret. In this research, the Parthenon in Athens (447-436 BC) and the Temple of Zeus in Olympia (470-456 BC) were analysed with solar simulation software. Comparing the results obtained, it is verified that both temples were designed and oriented following a plan: to facilitate the symbolic use of sunlight for the veneration of the goddess Athena and the god Zeus on the dates of the celebration of certain religious rituals. Verification was performed using a process that allows its extrapolation to similar analyses of any other Greek temple.

2 The Ancient Sumerian Roots of the British - Pre- Imperial System of Measurement

When the French proposed their first metric system in 1723, they had no idea it had been invented by the ancient Mesopotamians 5000 years earlier. Just as the French proposed to use the length of a one-second pendulum to create standards of length, volume, and weight, the Sumerians created nearly identical meters, liters and kilograms. Our research shows that the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia used both the Moon and the Sun as their clock. It appears that the Egyptians improved on this timing accuracy by using the stars. Later the Minoans introduced the use of the planet Venus as a clock. These concepts spread throughout the ancient world from Britain in the West to Japan in the East. The Minoan standards are immortalized in the Magna Carta of 1215. The old English saying “a pint a pound the world around” had been true for over 3000 years. In the 19th Century, both Stuart and Penrose accurately measured the dimensions of the Parthenon, finding its width to be 0.9997 arc seconds on the polar circumference of the Earth. This accuracy puzzled scholars for 150 years. Our research shows the width of the Parthenon in Athens was designed to be 1/30 of the perimeter of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The same Pendulum Formula, when timed with Venus rather than the Sun, increased the pendulum length just the right amount. This precision was not dumbfounding – it was just dumb luck.

Athens or London? The Parthenon Marbles and economic efficiency

In the early part of the 19th century sculptures on the Parthenon in Athens were removed under the direction of the Earl of Elgin, then the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time included Greece. The sculptures were brought to Britain, finding their way to the custody of the British Museum in London in 1816, where they are viewed by millions of visitors annually. A debate long has simmered as to whether these Parthenon Marbles, which date from the 5th century BCE, should be returned to Athens or remain in the United Kingdom. Much of the debate concerns the legitimacy of Elgin's original transfer of the Marbles and, relatedly, their current rightful owner. This article employs a Law-and-Economics, efficiency-based lens to examine the “property dispute” surrounding the Marbles. The efficiency inquiry centers on what location for the Marbles will do the best job of satisfying human preferences, which depend to a large extent on access to the Marbles and the quality of that access. Coase-like reasoning is applied to the question of the “highest-valued” location of the Marbles, supplemented with behavioral economics concepts involving cultural identity and endowment effects. The article concludes by offering some contours for a potentially Pareto-improving agreement that would result in the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles in Greece.

Commodifying ancient cultural heritage: the market evolution of the Parthenon temple

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show and critically discuss the motivations, conflicting narratives, practices and effects around the marketisation of cultural heritage. The work focusses on the exemplar case study of the ancient temple of the Athenian Parthenon, as a proto-brand, to explore ancient, medieval and modern marketing forces and practices through which various stakeholders have promoted, gifted, commercially traded, exchanged, acquired and illegally removed national cultural artefacts and historical monuments.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a structured historical periodisation that covers three main eras – classical age, late antiquity and modern period – that triggered the marketisation of the ancient temple in diverse ways. First, historical research was conducted through the use of a range of secondary sources and archives. Second, observation techniques were used to study heritage marketisation practices at the New Acropolis Museum and the Parthenon in Athens and the British Museum in London. Third, visual material further facilitated the analysis.FindingsThis paper identifies multifarious institutional forces, political interests, technologies and sociocultural events that shape the commodification of history and marketisation of heritage offering a broader discussion on the evolution of early marketing practices and brands used to promote particular values, cultures and places, as well as the emergence and growth of illicit arts and antiquities markets.Originality/valueConsidering the lack of marketing research on the commercialisation of heritage, the work discloses novel insights around the use of cultural proto-brands and the formation of illegal markets and questionable arts trade practices. It, therefore, questions the ethical, socio-political, economic and aesthetic implications of the extensive marketisation of history and raises issues around the legitimate ownership, promotion and consumption of heritage.

Reading Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”: The Materiality and Mortality of the Fragmented Marble

Keats’s sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) records the poet’s aesthetic reaction to Greek marble statues installed in the British Museum, which were originally part of the Parthenon in Athens and transported to Britain by Lord Elgin. The marbles’s aesthetic effect on Keats, I would argue, is inextricably bound up with his instant recognition of their materiality, which becomes plainly evident to him in their fragmentary state. The syntactic fragmentation of Keats’s sonnet (especially its sestet) appears to imitate, ekphrastically, the fragmented forms of the sculptures. The aesthetic experience related in the sonnet arises from Keats’s intense awareness of the decay of the marbles: they have eroded away over time and were cut into pieces by man’s activity. In Keats’s view, the aesthetic power of ancient artifacts has a basis in their material limits. While most of the enthusiastic reviews of Elgin’s collection at the time disregarded its fragmented condition, Keats is made painfully aware of that condition―perhaps thanks to his lack of in-depth knowledge of classical Greek art―and thereby of his own mortality. In his sonnet on the Parthenon marbles, thoughts of materiality and mortality are closely interwoven. The state of physical deterioration to which even the great art of the past succumbs―that is to say, the obvious fact that even the marbles do not outlast time―forces him to contemplate his own death, and further, the fragility of poetic fame. The broken nature of the marbles held in the museum leads Keats to appreciate their aesthetic beauty in relation to the history in which they are steeped. The material decay that temporality has caused to the Elgin Marbles overwhelms the poet with a sense of mortality, fate that he himself and all artistic achievements, perhaps his own poetry, cannot be spared.

The Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum

In the early part of the 19th century sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens were removed from the Acropolis under the direction of the Earl of Elgin, then the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time included Greece. The sculptures were brought to Britain, finding their way to the British Museum in London in 1816, where they are viewed by millions of museum visitors annually. A debate long has simmered as to whether these Parthenon Marbles, which date from the 5th century BCE, should be returned to Athens or remain in the United Kingdom. Elements of the debate include questions about: the legitimacy of the initial relocation of the statuary; the quasi-legal impact of more than 200 years of British stewardship; the risk-mitigating role for dispersal of art; and, the influence on other art and museums of any precedent that might be established by return of the Parthenon Marbles.This paper surveys the arguments on both sides of the debate. A Law-and-Economics lens is employed to examine the “property dispute” surrounding the Marbles. Coase-like reasoning is applied to the question of the “highest-valued” location of the Marbles, supplemented with behavioral economics concepts involving cultural identity and endowment effects. The paper concludes by offering some contours for a potentially Pareto-improving agreement that would result in the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles in Greece.

Преображенская церковь в Кижах и Парфенон: консервативная реставрация

The method of conservative restoration is considered on the example of two architectural monuments of the world significance, namely, the Transfiguration Church in Kizhi and the Parthenon in Athens. The issue of ensuring mechanical safety in combination with the authenticity of the elements and structures of the monument is studied.

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

Reviewed by: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey H. A. Drake The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. By Catherine Nixey. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2018. Pp. xxxvi, 315. $28.00. ISBN 978-0-544-80088.5.) Scholarship, like the heavenly orbs, has its cycles. For the better part of two centuries, the narrative of Christianity's role in Rome's fall followed a path laid out by the philosophes in the eighteenth century—a story of a robust, enlightened, and sexually liberated civilization brought low by a swift descent into barbarism and superstition (readers will recognize the footprints of Edward Gibbon). Then, about fifty years ago, a new narrative exploded into view with Peter Brown's exuberant World of Late Antiquity (1971). Rejecting the model of "decline and fall" as artificial, scholars in this new field insisted on understanding the centuries between Rome's high point in the second century and the fragmentation of the Middle Ages as a time of "change" rather than "decline." The problem with the old view, these scholars argued, was that it focused almost exclusively on the fledgling states of western Europe, treating vital parts of this new culture as either foreign (the eastern Roman empire, now relabeled "Byzantium") or hostile (Muslims in Spain and North Africa). Then came the inevitable pushback, about twenty years ago, when more traditional scholars began to complain that their colleagues in Late Antiquity were ignoring clear signs of political disintegration and cultural decline, and most of all the baleful impact of Christianity. Seemingly, Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age is just another broadside in this ongoing battle: even its title harks back to a time when "the Dark Ages" that followed Rome were dismissed as "a thousand years without a bath." But Nixey has an entirely different agenda. Her target is not a bunch of greybeards but all those complacent readers in the West who reacted with shock and indignation when the Taliban blew up millennia-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan or, more recently, Islamic State did the same to the monumental temples of Palmyra. Nixey wants this audience to know that their forebears did all this and much more to the treasures of the ancient world. With vigorous prose and an eye for graphic detail, she writes of the destruction of ancient temples like the Serapeum in Alexandria and [End Page 708] the Parthenon in Athens, the murder of the philosopher Hypatia and relentless condemnation of her peers, and the burning of classical texts and statues. Nixey tempers this dismal story with disarming candor and wit, and her prose sparkles. But her point comes at a cost. Readers of this journal will frequently catch themselves saying, "Yes, but…," for Nixey's account is frequently one-sided, ignoring a broader context that, admittedly, would not excuse the destruction she narrates but would give readers a better perspective on the world in which it happened. Christian judges, for instance, did torture pagan philosophers, as she writes in chapter 16, but as Ramsay MacMullen noted long ago, elites had lost their exemption from torture much earlier, in a process that Christians had nothing to do with ("Judicial Savagery in the Roman Empire." Chiron, 16 [1986], 147–66). Similar observations could be made about the contrast Nixey draws between the playfully sexual banter of an Ovid and the stern moralizing of Christian homilists. As Nixey herself points out, "an increasingly moralizing tone" had emerged in the four centuries that separate Ovid from John Chrysostom, and "the rise in Christianity might even have been in part a symptom of such moralizing" (p. 191). This deliberately one-sided account is by design, justified by what Nixey sees as the whitewashing that Christianity has gotten in modern scholarship (p. 107). Specialists will lament the missed opportunities to draw wider conclusions about causality (by juxtaposing, say, the defiant language philosophers hurled at their torturers with the similar language of Christian martyrs). But that would be to call for a different book. If the one Nixey has written leads non-specialists to recognize that, just as Christian thugs do not define their faith...

History of Carotid Stroke

> [The] two branches which they call carotides or soporales, the sleepy arteries, because they being obstructed, or any way stopt we presently fall asleep. > > —Ambroise Pare (ca. AD 1510–1590)1 Current understanding of carotid artery disease begins in Ancient Greece. The term carotid is derived from the Ancient Greek karos (κάρος), meaning to stupefy. This first description is ascribed to Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BC) but defined in the later accounts of Rufus of Ephesus (fl. ca. AD 100), who stated that the term was used because superficial compression of the vessels was known to induce stupefaction. The importance of the carotid arteries was even evident in the timeless art of the era. The 31st metope (a rectangular architectural element) from the south side of the Parthenon in Athens (Figure 1) depicts a centaur gripping the neck and compressing the left carotid artery of a Lapith (member of a mythological Thessalian people) during the legendary Centauromachy battle. Galen (ca. AD 131–201) attributed the loss of consciousness to compression not of the carotid arteries but of “sensitive nerves” located proximal to the vessels.2 Today cardiologists recognize a similar syndrome of carotid sinus syncope, tested for through carotid baroreceptor hypersensitivity. Figure 1. The 31st metope from the south side of the Parthenon in Athens. On display in the British Museum, the southern aspect metopes depict the battle between the centaurs (left) and the Lapiths (right) at the wedding of Peirithus, the king of the Lapiths. The left carotid artery of the Lapith is here being intentionally compressed to induce unconsciousness. Photograph courtesy of Colin Howley. Used with permission. The most devastating consequence of carotid artery disease is stroke, which was referred to during classical antiquity as apoplexy. Hippocrates and Galen were both aware that the hemiplegia often accompanying apoplexy resulted from a lesion in …

Geophysical investigation in the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounio, Attica, Greece

G. Apostolopoulos, K. Leontarakis and C. Orfanos present an integrated geophysical investigation of the Temple that has been done with EM, GPR and ERT measurements. The cliff at Cape Sounion is the spot from where Aegeus, King of Athens, leapt to his death, thus giving his name to the Aegean Sea. The original Archaic Period Temple of Poseidon on the site, which was built of tufa, was destroyed in 480 BC by Persian troops during Shahanshah Xerxes I’s invasion of Greece. After the Athenians defeated Xerxes in the naval Battle of Salamis, the later Temple at Sounion, whose columns still stand today (Figure 1), was probably built in ca. 440 BC. This was during the ascendancy of Athenian statesman Pericles, who also rebuilt the Parthenon in Athens. The Ministry of Culture’s 2nd Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities has set up a project for geophysical investigation to detect whatever constructions or material may exist under the temple (possible relics of the previous temple). This project has been undertaken by the Applied Geophysics Laboratory of the School of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens.

Greek Temple Orientation: The Case of the Older Parthenon in Athens

The study of the orientation of ancient structures has recently experienced a renaissance in scientific interest after languishing for much of the twentieth century. Under the umbrella of the new multi-discipline of archaeoastronomy, the analyses of orientations have become more sophisticated, with a wider range of celestial phenomena now included, along with information derived from cult myths and rituals, so that celestial phenomena are identified through being relevant on a local, cultural and cultic level. Ironically, this revival of interest in temple orientations largely matches in its methodology that of Dinsmoor [1931], yet his work has lost favour because of his insistence on the priority of solar phenomena. In this paper, I revisit Dinsmoor’s analysis of one temple, the Older Parthenon in Athens, to assess his methodology and conclusions.

Hospital Building That Merges Science and Art: Alvar Aalto†

Architecture is one of the fine arts—despite its high technical content. It belongs with painting and sculpture. Historically—from ancient Greece through Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance—painting and sculpture were closely associated with buildings. Sculptures and mosaics decorated buildings themselves—as, for instance, the Parthenon in Athens or the Byzantine churches—or they complemented them, like the altars in medieval cathedrals. Later, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the illusionistic frescoes, such as those by the Bolognese artist Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), created virtual open spaces in the interiors of palaces and churches. Such associations of painting with architecture can also be seen much later, as in Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence) in Provence or in the nondenominational Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Lastly, contemporary public art is part of urban spaces. Architecture relates also to health, of course. In fact, some architects probably see healthcare as part of culture more clearly than many other professional groups (1). Initially, hospitals were buildings designed for the care of the needy rather than as specific places for the ill. The Shorter Oxford English …

Collective intelligence and its corollaries

A useful way to begin thinking about Chandra Mukerji’s Impossible Engineering is to ask her question from another time and place. How did the Parthenon in Athens get built in the fifth century BC? ...

Reflections on the Carotid Artery: 438 BC to 2009 AD

This essay has 2 objectives. First, it summarizes the publication of the reports that have been scattered through the literature since the largest of the definitive trials have appeared dealing with extracranial carotid stenosis. Second, it discusses the major differences that have been noted between the design and conduct of the large trials. The carotid arteries, the paired vessels delivering most of the blood to the brain, have been the subject of many observations from Grecian times to the present. The Greeks in 438 BC recognized the importance of these neck vessels. The Parthenon in Athens depicted in marble an attempt by a centaur to kill a soldier by bilateral manual compression of the neck arteries. The carotid arteries were pictured by Vesalius. They were most elaborately described with their branches and the effects of their occlusion by Thomas Willis of Oxford in 16641 (Figure 1). In 1612, Samuel Champlain, the founder of Canada, was engaged in a battle with hostile Iroquois and a stone-tipped arrow pierced his ear, grazed his face, and entered his neck stopping, as described by his definitive biographer, “just short of his carotid artery.”2 Figure 1. The home of Thomas Willis in Merton Street, Oxford built in the 17th century. Henry Barnett and Alastair Buchan, November 2008. Shakespeare’s literary and drinking companion, Christopher Marlowe, died (1593) in a London pub of hemorrhage after a stabbing through the eye into the intracranial site of the carotid artery. All this was recently translated from the Latin in the rediscovered write-up of his postmortem examination3 (Figure 2). In the Toronto medical school from which I graduated in 1944, we learned of the carotid artery in anatomy, but in my clinical undergraduate years, it never was mentioned in relation to stroke. Figure 2. Marlow’s knife went …

Translating the Elgin Marbles: Byron, Hemans, Keats

Every day, visitors come to the British Museum and contemplate a remarkable collection of sculptures created in Greece some twenty-four centuries ago. The events that translated these ancient artworks into an English context took place at the beginning of the 19 th century, when Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, had the sculptures detached from the Parthenon in Athens, shipped in several boatloads to England, and sold to the British government, which installed them in the British Museum as the Elgin Marbles. If the Marbles are implicated in a globalized debate over the treatment of cultural patrimony, in Romantic Europe they were surrounded by an even more animated controversy that manifested itself in politics, periodicals, and poetry. Taking into account the responses of John Keats and Felicia Hemans, I would like to re-examine the treatment of the Elgin affair by Lord Byron, focussing on its significance for the rhetorical form of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the social-cultural processes that were at work among Byron's 19th century audience. Byron asks his readers to compare the seizure of treasures from occupied Mediterranean countries to the ancient Roman practice of seizing trophies and celebrating their arrival in the imperial capital with public triumphs. Invoking this paradigm repeatedly in Childe. Harold's Pilgrimage and in his annotations to the poem, Byron characterizes Elgin's activities as a debased version of it. Modern trophies, epitomized by the Elgin Marbles, are obtained by negotiation and bribery, commodified as souvenirs or museum pieces, and publicized through modern media practices. While opposing the removal of antique ruins and seeking to offer an alternative aesthetic experience by way of his own poetry, Byron also intuits his own complicity in the structures of desire and commodification that characterize modern economic empires. Capitalizing on his position as British ambassador to Constantinople, Lord Elgin began removing large fragments of statuary, friezes, and bas-reliefs from the Acropolis and shipping them to London in 1801. The debate over Elgin's motives and justification--whether he had rescued the sculptures from certain destruction in Ottoman-occupied Greece, or whether he had himself destroyed the temple of Athena Parthenos by his crude removal of the marbles--was further complicated by the contemporaneous activities of Napoleon in plundering occupied Italy. Beginning in 1796, French agents transported paintings and classical sculptures from Rome, and elsewhere in the growing French empire, to Paris for display in the Louvre. In the case of France, the plunder of art-works was a much more deliberate imitation of ancient history, consistent with the self-representation of revolutionary France as a new Roman republic and Napoleon's self-construction as the new Augustus. The arrival of the largest shipment of artworks in Paris in July, 1798. was accordingly celebrated by a public triumphal procession in the style of ancient Rome. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, these artworks were restored to Italy. The widespread public debate over their restoration thus coincided exactly with the debate over the British Parliament's purchase of the Elgin Marbles, which was concluded in 1816. Britain, opposing France on the battlefields of Europe for almost twenty years while consolidating its own empire, more frequently located its cultural origins in Greece, and public discourse drew heavily on the trope of London as the New Athens. The significance of ancient Rome for the British Empire was mediated, moreover, by a more direct parallel between Britain and Venice, two island-republic-empires that derived their wealth from eastern trade and naval strength. Nevertheless, even if these elective affinities insulated Britain somewhat from manifesting the explicit imperial aspirations of Napoleonic France, the ambitions of Britain and France did clash directly over the acquisition of ancient ruins from the Eastern Mediterranean. …

Carotid surgery: the past is prologue. The John Homans lecture.

Carotid surgery: the past is prologue. The John Homans lecture.

The evolution of surgery for the treatment and prevention of stroke. The Willis Lecture.

Thomas Willis, the man for whom this lecture is named, was an Englishman and a leading neuroanatomist of the 17th century. Born in 1621, he attended Oxford University, graduating from Christ Church College in 1639. While still at Oxford, he became Sedleian Professor of Natural History in 1660. He did much experimental work with his associate Richard Lower. He performed injection experiments on cadavers and noted that if he injected the carotid artery on one side, the dye solution would come forth from the carotid on the opposite side. In 1664 Willis published his monumental work Cerebri Anatome , the most complete and accurate account of the nervous system that had hitherto appeared. In it he contributed the term “neurology” to medicine, a word derived from the Greek, meaning “sinew,” “tendon,” or “bowstring.” The word was translated and introduced into the English language in 1681 in Samuel Pordage's translation of Willis' work. Cerebri Anatome contains a classification of the cerebral nerves, the first description of the eleventh nerve, and a description of the hexagonal network of arteries at the base of the brain that we know as the circle of Willis. Although others had described the circle before Willis, he was the first to grasp its physiological and pathological significance. He records the clinical histories of two patients in whom he suggests that the anatomic configuration of the arteries at the base of the brain could prevent apoplexy. The book was illustrated by Christopher Wren, an associate of Willis at Oxford, later to become England's leading architect and designer of St Paul's Cathedral, numerous other English churches, and many historic secular buildings. Willis moved to London in 1666 and acquired the largest fashionable practice of his day. He continued his careful clinical observations and made a number of other important …

National History Day 1997 Supplement: Triumph & Tragedy in History

sively higher levels. Throughout the school year, students engage in extensive research of primary sources to prepare papers, projects, performances, and media pre sentations based on a historical theme. Themes are broad enough in scope to encourage investigation of topics ranging from local to world history. During the 1996-97 school year, National History Day invites students to research topics related to the theme Triumph & Tragedy in History. To understand the historical impor tance of their topics, students must ask questions of time and place, cause and effect, change over time, and impact and significance. They must ask not only when did events happen, but why did they happen. What factors contributed to their development? What was the impact or lasting influence in history? How did this topic change the course of events? What effect did it have on a community, society, nation, or the world? For National History Day 1997, stu dents are encouraged to select an indi vidual, idea, or event and demonstrate how and why their topic was a triumph and/or a tragedy in history. A student may choose to focus on the discovery of peni cillin as a historic and medical triumph. Or students may decide to study the tragic impact of the Great Russian Famine of the 1890s. In these cases, the subject could be presented as either triumph or tragedy. Students should keep in mind, how ever, that often the same topic can be viewed as both triumph and tragedy de pending on the experience of the partici pants, the perspective of historians, and the passage of time. One person's triumph was often another person's tragedy. For example, the American Civil War was a great triumph of the North over the South, of unionism over sectionalism, of freedom over slavery. But the war also took a terrible toll in human lives, caused wide spread destruction, and left a legacy of bitterness. In all wars and military en counters there are social disruptions and material costs?winners triumph and los ers experience tragedy. Securing the peace can be as difficult as winning the war. The year 1997 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan which resulted in the United States sending billions of dollars in food and equipment to Western Europe as its na tions struggled to overcome the economic devastation and tragedy of World War II. Was the Marshall Plan a triumph for the western European nations that partici pated? Was the Marshall Plan an eco nomic triumph for the United States? Was it a political triumph? Why or why not? How did the Marshall Plan differ from the reconstruction plans of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? While military topics may seem to be obvious choices because of the generally clear line between winners and losers, triumph and tragedy may be explored in a wide variety of historical contexts. Stu dents who are interested in ancient history might create a project that examines the architectural triumph in the building ofthe Parthenon in Athens and the tragedy of its use as a military arsenal and fortress in the centuries that followed. A performance might be developed that examines the life of Julius Caesar and his triumphant rise to power as well as his role in undermining the Roman Republic. Was his assassina tion considered a triumph or a tragedy by his contemporaries? By historians? Or students might produce a media presenta tion which interprets the destruction of

Olive production in Greece

The great triangular pediment over the west entrance to the Parthenon in Athens depicted the legendary contest between the goddess Athena and Poseidon, god of the sea, for control of Attica and Athens. Athena offered the olive tree and wisdom; Poseidon offered the horse and the power of the sea. The decision went to Athena, who became the patron of the city (12). Athena's sacred olive tree, according to the Greek historian, Herodotus, writing in the 5th Century B.C., was burned by the Persians but sprouted again from the roots. The present sacred olive tree (Fig. 1) of Athena was planted in more recent times and now grows at the top of Athens' rocky Acropolis near the Erechtheum, home of the famous Caryatids. The cultivated olive certainly must have had its beginning as selections from the wild olive, which seems to have originated in the eastern Mediterranean region (4, 5). The olive tree has been grown in Greece at least since the time of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, circa 3,000 B.C. Engravings of olive trees on vases, frescos, and rings unearthed at the palace at Knossos show that the people of that era ate olives and used olive oil as a fuel for their earthen lamps. A gold cup (Fig. 2) found among remnants of the Mycenaean civilization in