Interpretation
As no description of the frieze survives from antiquity, the question of the meaning of the sculpture has been a persistent and unresolved one. The first published attempt at interpretation belongs to Cyriac of Ancona in the 15th century AD who referred to it as the “victories of Athens in the time of Pericles”. What is now the orthodox view of the piece, however, namely that it depicts the Greater Panathenaic procession from Eleusis to Athens, was mooted by Stuart and Revett in the second volume of their Antiquities of Athens, 1787. Subsequent interpretations have largely built on this theory even if they disallow that a temple sculpture could represent a contemporary event rather than a mythological or historical one. It has only been in recent years that an alternative thesis in which the frieze depicts the founding myth of the city of Athens instead of the festival pompe has emerged.
The contention that the scene is a document of Athena’s festival is fraught with problems. Later sources indicate that a number of classes of individual who performed a role in the procession are not present in the frieze, these include: the hoplites, the allies in the Delian league, the skiaphoroi or umbrella bearers, the female hydraiphoroi (only male hydrai bearers are portrayed) thetes, slaves, metics, the panathenaic ship and some would suggest the kanephoros, though there is evidence that she is accounted for. That what we now see was meant to be a generic image of the religious festival is problematic since no other temple sculpture depicts a contemporary event involving mortals. Locating the scene in mythical or historical time has been the principal difficulty of the line of inquiry. John Boardman has suggested that the cavalry portray the heroization of the marathonomachoi, the hoplites who fell at Marathon in 490, and that therefore these riders were the Athenians who took part in the last pre-war Greater Panathenaia. In support, he points out, the number of horsemen, chariot passengers (but not charioteers), grooms and marshals comes to the same as the number Herodotos gives for the Athenian dead: 192. Equally suggestive of a reference to the Persian War is the similarity several scholars have noted of the frieze to the Apadana sculpture in Persepolis. This has variously been posited to be democratic Athens counter posing itself to oriental tyranny or aristocratic Athens emulating the Imperial East. Further to this zeitgeist argument there is J.J. Politt’s contention that the frieze embodies a Periclean manifesto, which favours the cultural institutions of agones (or contests, as witnessed by the apobatai), sacrifices and military training as well as a number of other democratic virtues. More recent scholarship pursuing this vein has made the frieze a site of ideological tension between the elite and the demos with perhaps only the aristocracy present and merely veiled reference to the ten tribes.
The pediments, metopes and shield of the Parthenos all illustrate the mythological past and as the gods are observing on the east frieze it is natural to reach for a mythological explanation. Chrysoula Kardara, has ventured that the relief shows us the first Panathenaic procession instituted under the mythical King Kekrops. This explanation would account for the absence of the allies and the ship as these post-date the original practice of the sacrificial rite. In evidence she offers E35 as the future King Erichthonios presenting the first peplos to his predecessor Kekrops, iconographically similar to the boy’s depiction on a fragmentary kylix of the 450s. A recent interpretation by Joan Breton Connelly identifies the central scene on the east frieze (hence above the door to the cella and focal point of the procession) not as the handing over of Athena’s peplos by the arrhephoroi but the donning of sacrificial garb by the daughter of King Erechtheus in preparation for the sacrifice of her life. An interpretation suggested by the text of the fragmentary papyrus remains of Euripides’s Erichtheus wherein her life is demanded in order to save the city from Eumolpos and the Eleusinians. Thus, the gods turn their backs to her to prevent the pollution from the sight of her death. A contentious subject in the field, Connelly's solution to the problem of meaning poses as many problems as it answers.
Read more about this topic: Parthenon Frieze