Parthenon: Ancient Techniques for Building a Masterpiece I SLICE HISTORY

Athens is to undergo spectacular development in the 5th century BC. Athens is a whole agglomeration of 140 villages or small towns around Athens, in Attica. They are all important and all contribute to the Athenian forest. In an area of 2,650 square meters, it will now have 400,000 inhabitants. Its people will be saying they've never seen such a thriving city. So to whom do we owe this golden age? To Pericles, one of Themistocles' successors as ruler of Athens, who has big plans for the city. When the wars were over, the Greeks feared a return of the Persians. So a lot of Greeks joined the Athenians to form a defensive league, which will be called the League of Delos. Delos is an island. It's a neutral territory where the 200 cities that finance the Maritime Defense League all keep their money. It's already a foretaste of the future Athenian Empire. After a while, Pericles convinces his allies that it would be better, for safety's sake, to move the war treasure at Delos to Athens. The money will be used to start a major construction program. From 445 BC, they decide to rebuild the Acropolis. And they will start by building the most famous temple in the world, the Parthenon. Pericles is so proud of his homeland and so devoted to his city that he wants a perfect building to the glory of Athens. The Parthenon will be considered by the Greeks to be the most beautiful monument ever built on earth. It celebrates the arts with splendor. When the Athenians could build the buildings on the Acropolis, the big marble temples, they controlled most of the resources of the Eastern Mediterranean, so that they could hire the best architects, the best sculptors, the best painters. This temple, dedicated to Athena, will be a monumental work of 69 meters 51 by 30 meters 88. For the overall conception, artistic conception of the Parthenon was under the control of Phidias, who was Pericles' advisor and choice. The structure of the temple is surrounded by 46 columns. There are 8 on the front and 17 on each side. These 46 outer columns are each 10 meters high. A raised stone platform supports the walls of a rectangular room that has been divided in two. The statue of Athena, standing on a pedestal and with its impressively huge dimensions, will dominate the larger room. The man who was the creative genius behind the program was a man called Phidias, who was both a sculptor and designed the plans of the buildings that were built. He was also the sculptor who made the golden ivory cult statue that stood in the Acropolis. The other, smaller room housed both the war treasure from Delos and the offerings made to the divinity. Nothing is as it appears. And the lines of the Parthenon appear to be perfect. In reality, to achieve this perfection, the architect had no choice but to correct the perspectives slightly. To give you an idea, we've deliberately exaggerated them. If the monument had been built on flat ground, this is how it would have looked from the ground, its columns slightly splayed at the top. The Greeks used two vanishing points to compensate for the slope of the ground, thus slightly bending the columns inwards. What's more, the corner columns are thicker to make them stand out. Otherwise, they would have appeared thinner than the others. It's obvious that the Greeks of the 5th century BC were absolute masters of the laws of optics and perspective. These corrections are the greatest strength of the architecture of the Parthenon. It's not the straight line that makes the Parthenon a masterpiece. It's the deviation from the straight. So the reality is one that belongs to the eye, and not to the constructed world. To build this remarkable edifice, all in marble, they have to overcome several difficulties. The nearest marble quarries are 16 kilometers away, on Mount Penteli. Every single block is pre-cut on site, and roughly shaped with just some notches for lifting it. Each weighs between 2 and 5 tons. The block is loaded onto a cart pulled by oxen. We know that an ox can cover 1.5 kilometers per hour, so we can deduce that it took between 5 and 7 hours to bring each block down to the Acropolis. On the western slopes of the Acropolis, a second team takes delivery of the blocks. A ramp has been created to carry these heavy blocks of stone, which will now have to be hoisted to the top of the hill. A third team is tasked with unloading and setting up the block. But how did the ancients manipulate so precisely these blocks that weighed tons? We've known for millennia how to transport heavy loads, and the technique doesn't vary much. We pull the load over a flat surface, and we raise the blocks with levers. Back in the 6th century BC, though, those Greek inventors caused a technical revolution by inventing the pulley and hoist. By coming up with several systems that use two or three pulleys in unison, they succeed in increasing human strength dramatically. The ancient Greeks devised some extraordinary lifting machines. Let's take a look at some of them. To lift heavy loads, they used a multiplied winch consisting of two large masts joined together at the top. To raise or lower the load, there were two ropes linked to a hoist system that reduced the strain. This machine could lift two ton blocks to a height of six meters. To save time, you also had to be able to move along the structure you were building. So how did they manage that? This mobile lifting device was mounted on rollers so it could be moved sideways. In this way, the entire structure was assembled on a mobile platform. The feet of the two big masts were hinged onto each side of the platform. And there were lifting machines that could work on several scaffolds at once. Let's take a look at these strange beasts. The four-masted elevator consisted of a scaffold of four vertical beams, and its upper platform supported a capstan winch. Weights of up to two tons could be hoisted up inside it. It was the Greeks' unique knowledge of mathematics and engineering that gave birth to the Parthenon. There are a thousand workers there on the site. Each column consists of ten to twelve blocks held in place by a metal stud. Once the column is mounted, a team of stonemasons completes the finishing. Nowadays, restoration techniques are careful to reproduce these ancient techniques faithfully. And once an element is in place, we too sculpt it. Forty-six columns, each ten meters high, had to be erected to build this temple destined to become the most beautiful emblem of classical architecture. The Parthenon has the particularity of being a Doric-style temple into which elements of the Ionic style were integrated. The Doric style is very plain, and the columns have no base. They're very imposing, and the design of their capitals is simple. The Ionic style, however, features a molded column base and a lushly coiled capital at the top. It's a more refined style that is more delicate and more slender. Parthenon combines both the Doric order and the Ionic, and that's a geographical distinction more than anything. The Doric order was invented in the Peloponnese and in the Western Greek world. The Ionic style is in the islands of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor, and Athens is physically at the juncture of those two areas of influence. So it's an architect's game, but at the same time, it's a political game. In a way, you could say that Athens is Greece. Above the capitals of the columns is a feature called the architrave. Then the carved frieze, painted in colors. Both inside and out, the temples were always painted in bright colors, blue, white, red, and gold. The Greek temples were multicolored. Greek life was multicolored. So this animation of the raw material was part of the Greek spirit in ancient times. Ancient Greece and ancient Athens should always be seen as multicolored. The colors faded over the years, and over the centuries became white with their great age. Finally, above the frieze came the temple's triangular-shaped pediment. In the Acropolis Museum, we can admire the reconstructions of those pediments. The eastern one has as its theme the birth of the armed Athena out of the head of Zeus, the king of the gods, while the western pediment narrates the duel between Athena and Poseidon, both eager to be protector of the city. The very noblest of materials were sent to Athens. The white marble of Mount Pentele, of course, but also other colorful ones intended for the floor inlays, brought from all over Greece and entrusted to the care of renowned craftsmen. The decision to build these temples meant that a huge number of people were put to work, and Plutarch describes literally dozens of professions for bringing the marble, for the animals who would bring the marble and carry it up to the top, for painters, for sculptors, for carpenters. Just dozens of trades were necessary and hundreds of people in order to build these great buildings. Imagine the sheer effort involved for the ancients. 22,000 blocks, a total of 100,000 tons of marble, were used to build the Parthenon. It took just nine years to build the Parthenon architecturally. They continued working on the building for another six years in order to do the sculpture that decorated it. Inside the Parthenon, the Athenians could admire the colossal statue of Athena, 12 meters high, made of gold and ivory. The statue of Athena was created using a process well known to the ancient Greeks. On a wooden frame, a model was made the size of the statue. They added ivory to it to portray the skin. Then it was clothed with gold plate, the weight of which is just incredible. One ton of gold. And on the statue's head, a headdress made of beaten gold. The statue of Athena we call the Chryselephantine statue, because it was made of gold, chrysos in Greek, and ivory, elephas, was not a cult statue. People didn't prostrate themselves in front of it. But it was in a way an offering made by the Athenians to Athena. The mirror of water in front of the statue is intriguing. Does it represent an aesthetic desire to dramatize the deity or to maintain a distance from her? In fact, it was there to humidify the air. The ivory elements of the statue had to be preserved, or they might have dried out, or even worse, split. The eyes were made of precious stones. This huge statue, covered in gold plate, was an offering. A gift of great magnificence from the Athenians to their mother goddess, to thank her for her blessings. But all the wealth on display was also a kind of credit fund for the city, which they could draw on if necessary, especially in time of war. Its price is estimated to be double that of the Parthenon in which it stood. At a time when Athens had to be remodeled as the center of the world, Pericles decided to move all the silver and gold from Delos to Athens, and to start in the Parthenon. The Parthenon served as a strong box for the annual tribute paid by the 200 cities of the League of Delos to ensure their defense. The Athenians used this treasure for all their internal dealings. We know that democracy ended up being an expensive business, since the magistrates were all paid, the members of the boulet were paid, court juries were paid. That money also came from the tribute paid by allies. It's not a temple. In fact, it's a bank. The Parthenon took 15 years to build, and people at the time found that amazing. To manage to construct something so huge, so beautiful in such a short time, remains an incredible architectural feat, of which Pericles would say, future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.