The other prostitutes howled with laughter at this. Even Perikles cracked a smile. I suppose the whole town had embraced the metaphor.
“Enough of this. Get back to your work,” I said, pointing the whores toward the guests.
“This is the last time we will invite this sort of horde into our home,” Perikles said. “Everyone wishes to mingle with us to further his own purposes, even the whores on the payroll. In the future, we shall have to limit ourselves to those whose loyalty is certain.”
“Is there a reason for exercising caution at this time?” Pheidias asked. “This is our moment of triumph.”
“No better time to be cautious. Triumph gives rise to more enemies than failure, I assure you,” Perikles said. “Are you aware of the ridiculous assertions we were made to suffer today? Elpinike, the former mistress of Polygnotos, has started the rumor that Aspasia sat for you for the face of Athena. And that you painted yourself and me into the goddess’s shield as two warriors.”
“Why, that is true, at least in the case of Aspasia,” said Pheidias. “I did not think anyone would notice. The likeness is not apparent.”
“Explain yourself,” Perikles demanded, not of me, but of Pheidias.
“I needed a face that was young and beautiful, but that also carried the quality of wisdom. I coaxed Aspasia, and she agreed. As for the other accusation, I have no explanation. It is simply not true.”
Perikles turned to me. “You did not confide this in me?”
“We did not intend for anyone to notice the likeness,” I stammered. “The sittings were done in secret. We wanted to protect you from the information. There is enough talk about me.”
“Yes, that is true,” he said. I could tell that he felt I had betrayed him. “Neither of you will speak about this to anyone. If asked, you will continue to say that the charges are absurd. Elpinike’s long, vicious tongue is carrying the rumor to the four winds. Say nothing about it. Nothing. Now if you’ll excuse me, Aspasia, I will leave you to bid goodbye to our guests. I am going to bed.”
He turned around, leaving Pheidias and me to stare at his back as he made his way across the courtyard, speaking to no one. The party had grown wilder. Two discus throwers who had placed high in the day’s competition were tossing one of the Anchovies between them, the girl laughing crazily as she flew through the air. Perikles mounted the stairs, oblivious to this, or to the acrobats performing tricks or the people trying to get his attention, leaving me to wonder if I had just sealed an unhappy fate for both my bastard child and myself.
I do not recall the passage of time from that moment until the one when I realized that Alkibiades had entered the courtyard. By the time I saw him it was too late. Before I could make a move to hide from him—for in my present condition, I did not want to speak to so disagreeable a man—I saw a look of shock register on his face. Then I saw it transform into anger. I followed his gaze. The discus throwers had stopped playing ball with the Anchovies, and both girls were now straddling the standing athletes, who were cupping their buttocks. It took me a moment to realize that the athletes were bouncing the girls up and down on their erect penises, much to the delight of the other guests. Some of the ladies were watching with utter glee, as if they hoped that they might have the next turn with the men.
Alkibiades did not speak to anyone. I doubt that any of the others even saw him or registered his unspoken outrage. Everyone was so enthralled with the performance that they were oblivious to him. Without comment, he turned away, leaving in as much of a hurry as he had arrived. He stormed off into the night, but I knew that his thoughts were not sanguine, and that they would lead to trouble.
The Ottoman-occupied city of Athens, April 1802
MARY LEANED CLOSE TO the frieze as Elgin had instructed, looking down the length of it. Though she was in her third and most sick-making month of pregnancy, she had climbed the laddered scaffolding so that she could see the acclaimed piece of sculpture in situ before it was taken down. They had brought big saws with them on the voyage to Athens; Mr. Lusieri had required them to remove the gigantic slabs of marble from where they had rested since the hands of Pheidias’ workers had hauled them up and put them in place. The Greek sculptor had fortified each piece of his relief with a thick backing, which made it far too heavy to be transported; Elgin’s workers were hacking the sections away from their backing so that they could be more easily taken down and shipped to England.
“Is it not the most astonishing piece of sculpture you have ever seen?” Elgin asked. “Can you not envision the procession?”
“Oh yes, it’s so lifelike! It’s like watching a parade.” Or a ballet, she decided upon further reflection, what with the wavelike crests of the heads of the animals and the cavalrymen who rode them. She had to look away quickly, though. The lumber beneath her feet shook as the workers on the other side of the building did battle with a metope that apparently did not wish to be dislodged. Mary felt the motion all the way inside her belly, and she did not intend to be sick here at the location of her husband’s grand project.
“Come round,” Elgin said. “Let us check on their progress.”
The workers numbered in the dozens and included a group of masons. Amid a web of ropes and pulleys, the team was working tools into the masonry to loosen the marble slab, which was fixed between the triglyphs that decorated the perimeter of the temple’s exterior. While the masons chiseled away, other workers worked thick ropes around the metope as the temple loosened its grip on the ornamental sculpture.
The metope was a particularly gorgeous one, Mary thought, of a centaur abducting a woman. The woman, however, to Mary’s eye, looked willing.
“Have you ever seen such beautiful delineations of the body?” Mary asked.
“The woman?” Elgin asked.
“No, the beast! I declare, Pheidias made the creatures irresistible. In some of these metopes, it appears to me that the centaurs are seducing the girls, rather than abducting them.”
“Seduction makes abduction so much easier,” Elgin said, smiling. Mary wondered if he was musing on some past conquest or talking about his courtship of her. He had seduced her and then abducted her to foreign lands.
“And now, thanks to us, the world will have an opportunity to view these magnificent things,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “The French made off with a few of the metopes, but they shan’t get any more. Now that they are once again on the loose, we must hurry our mission before they try to intercede.”
Elgin had not been so happy in months. The drier climate seemed to agree with his health, and seeing the progress of his artistic team boosted his spirits. He had easily taken over supervision of the removal of the marbles, rising before dawn each day to preside over the work. Nothing escaped his notice.
Mary felt the planks beneath her tremble again. She looked down to see Dr. Scott climbing the scaffold and arriving at her side. “Lady Elgin, should you be at this altitude on such a precarious construction in your condition?”
“I wanted to see the frieze before it was taken down,” she said. “Besides, who knows how long these ladders will remain in place.”
The artists had had to remove the scaffolding on the Parthenon walls once before when the Disdar had accused them of building it to spy on women who lived in the adjacent temples, now converted into harems. He informed them that the offense was punishable by death, which made them desist at once. But with the new firman, the artists were able to rebuild the scaffolding required to remove the metopes, the frieze sections, and the pediment statues that Elgin wanted. The Disdar seemed to be in Elgin’s pocket—literally. Even with the firman, he required daily bribes to refrain from interfering with the work.
“Dr. Scott, please keep Lady Elgin company,” Elgin said. “I must see to the work being done on the ground. You cannot trust a soul with these treasures. Would you believe that when I ordered the houses around the Parthenon to be razed so that the grounds might be excavated, the old fool who built them g
leefully told me that he had ground up the fallen pediment statues and used the materials to build his hut!”
“Do see to your duties, then, Lord Elgin, before more treasures are lost forever,” Dr. Scott said. “Lady Elgin and I shall tour the frieze together.”
Elgin disappeared into the hubbub below, but Mary was grateful to be above the chaos and dust. The view from her vantage point was spectacular, on one side looking out over the plains that surrounded Athens, and on the other, upon majestic Mount Lycabettus, where she had attended Easter Sunday services at a Byzantine chapel just a few days ago. But she could not ignore the rude huts and run-down cottages and mounds of modern rubbish that interrupted the loveliness of the ruins and the landscape.
The Turkish occupiers were living atop the Acropolis and had pitched tents everywhere. The higher officials and soldiers of rank had admittedly built houses using rubble that had fallen from the temples, those glorious monuments conceived by Pericles and designed by Pheidias that she had been studying. Sometimes, imagining their original condition, Mary could barely look at the ancient buildings, which now were mere carcasses, ravaged by time, by war, and by negligence. In between the huts and tents and the ruined temples, the Turkish occupiers had planted gardens of fruits and vegetables, which seemed to thrive despite the lack of rows or any semblance of order, adding to the general disarray of the place. Every Turkish soldier had a servant, who was cooking his master’s dinner in a pot over an open fire. Billowing smoke choked the air. Merchants—did they follow every army on earth?—hawked food and supplies and other goods, adding a hectic noise to the general feeling of pandemonium. Amid the tumult, men squatted in whatever shade they could find, mumbling prayers. Here and there, a few scraggly cypress trees clung to the ground, like stalky symbols of more serene times.
The Parthenon, however, was somehow still venerable for having survived all of its wounds. The portico had been walled up to store military supplies inside, and the walls of the cella had long ago been pummeled for their lead. Yet it retained a chaste grandeur, and the Turks had come to appreciate the temple, or at least recognize its inherent holiness. They might have torn the whole thing down; instead, they had built a small mosque inside, which was still intact and in use despite the work that Elgin’s artisans were doing on the exterior. Mary had been informed that her viewing of the frieze had to take place between prayer times, for no woman could be in the vicinity of the building when men were praying at the makeshift mosque.
“These are the pavements once trodden upon by gods and heroes,” Dr. Scott said dramatically, looking downward. “Doesn’t seem right, does it?”
Mary shook her head. “How does a civilization once so mighty have such a fall?”
“It did not happen all at once,” Dr. Scott said. “The degradation of the monuments began when the Romans conquered Greece. Tiberius Nero raided the Acropolis and took most of the standing statuary for his personal gardens.”
“Oh, I know the decay has taken centuries. I suppose that I’ve been reading so much about the days of Pericles that I started to imagine that it all happened quite recently. I would not have been surprised to find the Assembly in session, with him at the podium,” she said.
“But this old girl still stands,” Dr. Scott said, waving his arms around as if to encompass Athena’s temple. “And in her many incarnations, she’s served many gods. The Visigoths may have sacked the Acropolis in the third century, but all of her lovely bones survived. Then the Christians converted her into a church. Perhaps all who have gazed upon her columns and pediments have been spellbound enough by her beauty to preserve it.”
“Imagine seeing it in its original splendor,” Mary said. She tried to picture it without the small dome the Turks had built in the center of the roofless ruin. “Quite honestly, Doctor, I would prefer it to have remained a good Christian church. I’ll wager that those early Christians didn’t sell off its rubble to passing visitors,” she said, feeling proud that she could defend the actions of her religious forebears.
“Far from it. They saw it for the holy shrine it was. Though the Greeks, like the rest of the civilized world, converted to the ways of Christianity, they never lost pride in their grand past. When Emperor Theodosius the Great declared Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, he ordered the destruction of all pagan temples. But the Athenians ignored his edict, merely changing the identity of the presiding lady from Athena to Mary. Quite a refined way to make a transition, when you think about it.”
“Whatever happened to the colossal statue of the goddess carved by the hand of Pheidias?” Mary asked.
“That, with the wondrous Athena Promachos raved over by Pausanias, was removed. Some say both were destroyed in earthquakes. But others say they were taken to Constantinople to serve as symbols of the new empire, where they were lost in one of that city’s great fires.”
“Now, that I can believe,” Mary said, laughing. “Whatever goes to that city eventually burns.”
One of the primary reasons the Elgins had decided to come to Athens was that their embassy had been badly damaged when fire broke out in the city. “I watched as one hundred buckets of water were unceremoniously dumped over our beautiful furniture and carpets,” Mary said. “When the Turks go to put out a fire, nothing is spared!”
Elgin had taken it as an omen that they were to leave the city while repairs to the embassy were being done. Of course, Mary knew that he had been searching for a reason to leave his duties in Turkey and visit his master project in Athens.
“We cannot blame the Turks entirely for the Parthenon’s disintegration. When they took it over, they didn’t destroy a thing, but merely whitewashed its walls and mosaics. They added the minaret, but did not harm the building any more than it had already been harmed. Its grandeur must have spoken to even the most barbaric among them,” he said wistfully.
“I thought you respected the Turks,” Mary said. She caught a whiff of meat roasting and put a handkerchief over her nose.
“Within limits,” he replied.
“After all, it wasn’t the Turks who truly destroyed the temple, but the Venetians,” Mary said. “In 1687, a foolish Venetian general fired upon the building, shattering the structure. The grand building exploded, killing all its inhabitants.”
“Lady Elgin, you’ve studied your history. I am impressed,” Dr. Scott said.
“A duty to my husband,” she answered. “And to the monuments themselves, Dr. Scott. Can you bear seeing them in this state of disgrace? Especially when we consider what they once represented?”
“That is why your good husband is going to such lengths to rescue them,” he said. “What is left will be safe in England.”
During their conversation, the scaffolding had been shaking, and Mary had been trying to ignore it. The metope that the men had been trying to remove all morning had been giving them difficulty, as if it did not want to be dislodged from its home. Though it made her nervous, she was determined to see what was left of the frieze here in its strange location high above the ground where only birds and the gods could have seen it. She had read the geographer Pausanias’ descriptions of the Parthenon, written in the second century of the Christian era, but he did not mention the frieze. Now she understood why: from his vantage point on the ground, he may not have seen it.
Key pieces of the relief had been removed already and were wrapped and waiting at the docks. Those, she would have to see out of context and in England. But the rest, she wished to see as the tableau Pheidias had conceived and executed. Already, the gaps were making it difficult to reconstruct the grand procession. The artists had described some of the missing slabs to her, and some she had admired in their drawings. She had particularly wanted to see the portion representing the gods with their backs to the processionals, but it had already come down.
Mary realized that there was not one representation of Athena left on her temple. The image of the great goddess that had once been everywhere on the Acropolis, looking out
over her population with her protective and wise gaze, was now nowhere to be found. The statues of the goddess that had been in the two pediments on the Parthenon, one representing her at the moment of her birth, the other in her contest with Poseidon, had long ago been destroyed. No one knew exactly how it had happened, but none of the excavations performed by Elgin’s staff around the Parthenon had yielded images of the goddess.
Perhaps the Turks had used the very statues of Athena, fallen from the pediments, to build their houses. Mary was sickened to think of Pheidias’ beautiful statues pummeled to nothing and lodged with ordinary concrete and mortar, holding up the walls of these unsightly buildings.
Even on the metopes where Athena appeared, the face of the goddess was damaged. Mary realized that nowhere in the city called Athens had she been able to look upon the face of Athena. Someday, in a faraway and unimaginable future, would the face of Jesus be wiped from the earth? She shuddered at her own morbid—and perhaps sacrilegious—thought.
Suddenly the lumber beneath her feet shook violently, throwing her into Dr. Scott’s arms. She heard the screams of men and the sound of ropes flying around pulleys. In an instant, something crashed to the ground with a thundering noise.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Scott asked, looking her in the face.
“Yes, quite,” she said, escaping his grasp and racing around the scaffolding as fast as she dared to see what had happened. She prayed that the beautiful metope had not met a disgraceful fate.
Pheidias’ lovely sculpture rested safely on the ground in a single piece. But the workmen’s endeavors had loosened a part of the adjoining masonry, a finely made cornice, shattering it into white marble fragments now littering the ground. The Disdar had taken the pipe out of his mouth, which was wide open in either astonishment or disgust. “Telos!” he yelled. It was one of the ten Greek words that Mary knew, and it meant “the end.”