Download PDF | Anthony Kaldellis - The Christian Parthenon_ Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens-Cambridge University Press (2009).
273 Pages
The Christian Parthenon Byzantine
Athens was not a city without a history, as is commonly believed, but an important center about which much can now be said. Providing a wealth of new evidence, Professor Kaldellis argues that the Parthenon became a major site of Christian pilgrimage after its conversion into a church. Paradoxically, it was more important as a church than it had been as a temple: the Byzantine period was its true age of glory. He examines the idiosyncratic fusion of pagan and Christian culture that took place in Athens, where an attempt was made to replicate the classical past in Christian terms, affecting rhetoric, monuments, and miracles. He also reevaluates the reception of ancient ruins in Byzantine Greece and presents for the first time a form of pilgrimage that was directed not toward icons, Holy Lands, or holy men but toward a monument embodying a permanent cultural tension and religious dialectic.
ANTHONY KALDELLTS
is Professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on topics in late antiquity and Byzantium, focusing on the literary and philosophical aspects of historiographical texts. His studies on the reception of classical culture in Byzantium recently culminated in the book Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (2007). He has also translated many Byzantine authors into English (among them Hesychios, Genesios, and Psellos) and one of his side-interests is the Byzantine history of the island of Lesbos.
Preface
This book unveils for the first time a nearly 1,000-year-long chapter in the history of the Parthenon and the city of Athens, namely the Byzantine phase of their existence. Studies of the post-classical Parthenon have so far focused on the travelers of early modern Europe,' and strongly imply or state that nothing of any deep cultural or philosophical significance happened during the Byzantine era, indeed that it could not have happened because the Byzantines did not have the same relation to the classical past as do the Europeans.
The result has been an appropriation of the Parthenon as a defining monument of the modern. West and a denial of it to others, especially Byzantium. But this study argues, on the basis of extensive evidence assembled and, in some cases, uncovered here for the first time, that after antiquity Athens and the classical legacy that it still represented in the minds of many Byzantines did not vanish from the stage of history as has been asserted. The Parthenon, converted into a church, became an important site of pilgrimage whose fame spread throughout the Christian world. Yet contrary to the modes of Byzantine piety, what attracted pilgrims and adoration were not any sacred relics or icons that were kept there but rather the Parthenon itself, the building, whose classical past was known and, indeed, quite visible. Christian devotion was here engaged in a direct and continuous dialogue with antiquity, in the very seat of its classical greatness.
The building was even believed to have mystical properties: a divine light emanated within or from its ancient marble walls. It some cases, it is difficult to know whether honor was being directed at the church or the Mother of God to whom it had been reconsecrated. Certainly, the Parthenon had never received this kind of attention in antiquity itself. It was now honored by emperors, visited by saints, inscribed with the names of many pilgrims, and praised by orators in glowing terms. TheTheotokos Atheniotissa was famous in Rome, Constantinople, and the East.This book traces for the first time the Orthodox history of this classicalmonument and attempts to explain why and how it became so important ina pre-modern, pre-European Christian world.
It is exciting and amazingthat such discoveries can still be made. Obviously, there are many interpretive frameworks into which thisnew history can be situated. One can, for instance, use the new textualevidence to supplement what has been the main (in fact, the only) directionof research on the Byzantine Parthenon so far, namely the archaeological.I have resisted this approach, first because I am no archaeologist and,second, because the textual evidence tells us different kinds of things thandoes archaeology and I want to uncover its own tensions and dynamics.
Onecan also study this material from the standpoint of medieval Mariolatry,the adoration of the Mother of God, which took a highly unusual form inByzantine Athens that has not yet been studied or even recognized. Therewere moments when middle Byzantine Athens eclipsed even Constantinopleas the special city of the Theotokos. But this dimension of the story I alsoleave to experts in other fields than mine. The framework that I use for myanalysis here is largely that of the reception of the classical tradition, namelyhow Byzantine Christians adapted the mixed legacy that they inherited fromthe ancient world. The emphasis is not on "continuity" but on the creativeaspects and historical dimension of the cultural tension between Hellenismand Christianity.
It calls for close readings of the texts that mention and sointerpret the Parthenon for medieval audiences, for philological art-history.Secondary themes brought into the discussion are the questions of medievalpilgrimage and civic identity. I had never planned to write this book, but while reading throughthe original sources for a broader project, Hellenism in Byzantium: TheTransformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the ClassicalTradition, I kept coming across references to Athens and the Parthenon.At first, I thought a brief article could bring attention to these texts and askthe basic questions of interpretation, but the evidence continued to pile up.And this was the Parthenon, after all, always on the horizon as I wasgrowing up.
It is not an insignificant topic in itself, and so I decided thatits forgotten history deserved a longer study. Some disclaimers are in order. This book focuses on the Parthenon andits veneration by Christians and does not offer a full history of ByzantineAthens, though digressions at key moments discuss the historical context and give a sense of the life and topography of the city. Chronologically, the book covers the years from. AD 400 to 1200. Partly for reasons of space I have not fully explored here Athens in late antiquity (second to sixth centuries), except to the degree that it provides a background for the conversion of the Parthenon into a church. The society, intellectual life, and religious and economic transformations of Athens in late antiquity are large and exciting topics that have not yet been fully addressed.
The evidence (textual, archaeological, and prosopographical) is very rich, and so cannot be adequately covered here. Briefly, in that period the city boasted many prominent professors of philosophy and rhetoric, especially the anti-Christian Neoplatonists and some even more famous students, such as the future emperor Julian and the future Church Father Gregorios of Nazianzos. The city was sacked three times, by the Scandinavian Heruls (AD 267), by Alaric's Goths (AD 396), and by the Slavs (ca. 580).
It remained a bastion of paganism and anti-Christian thought until quite late, indeed almost up to the very end. But it is the aim of the present study to argue that the closing of the schools by Justinian (ca. AD 529) and the catastrophes of the seventh century did not spell the "end" for Athens' classical civilization, as is not merely usually but rather always assumed. Finally, a note on conventions. I have generally avoided the term"Virgin," which is not what the Theotokos and Theometor ("Mother of God") is normally called in Orthodox tradition. The term "Parthenos," which does mean Virgin, I have usually left untranslated because when used by Byzantine writers it was complicit in the negotiation between the classical past and Christian present of the temple on the Akropolis.
Byzantine names are not Latinized or Anglicized but spelled correctly, except where they would not be easily recognized. A note on the jacket image A `classic' photograph of the Parthenon would not be appropriate for a book such as this, and has been used too often on book covers anyway. The early modern sketches and paintings by western travelers depict a post-Byzantine phase of the city's history and would be misleading. I have opted for a work of Theophilos Hatzimichael (1870-1934), a folk painter from my native island of Lesbos who adorned the walls of many homes and shops with scenes from Greek history and daily life.
His interest in the classical past, along with his figures in the Byzantine iconic tradition, make his painting of "Perikles on the Pnyx justifying theAkropolis expenses" (1928) the closest we have to a view of how theByzantines themselves might have imagined ancient Athens, as some ofthem tried to do (see pp. 156-157 below). For permission to use this imageI thank the Municipality of Mytilene, Lesbos, and its mayor NasosGiakalis.
Acknowledgments This book owes a great debt to the work of many philologists and archaeologists, who continue to bring texts and artifacts to light, often without knowing what future projects they are enabling, and often too without thanks. Assembling the scattered pieces of this puzzle confirmed for me the importance of publishing recovered knowledge, no matter how small each piece may seem by itself. I have also incurred specific debts. Audiences at the Department of Greek and Latin of the Ohio State University; the Modern Greek Program and Department of Classics of the University of Michigan; the Department of History of the University of California, San Diego; the Workshop on Late Antiquity and Byzantium at the University of Chicago; and the Byzantine Studies Conference (2006) asked penetrating questions and provided additional data. I am grateful for those invitations. Amy Papalexandrou, Bill Caraher, and Tasos Tanoulas read earlier versions of the book and made valuable comments, sharing their time and expertise. So did the two readers appointed by the Press, one of them Liz James, whose comments corrected particular flaws and improved the organization and presentation. The tough love of Polymnia Athanassiadi saved me from a weak introduction, for which, in retrospect, I am especially grateful. The book has also benefited from discussions with Giorgos Anagnostou, Stephanos Efthymiades, Nasia Giakovaki, Tim Gregory, Vassilios Lampropoulos, Artemis Leontis, Carolina L6pez Ruiz, Titos Papamastorakis, and Lina Saradi, who generously shared their own publications and thoughts. I thank Anne-Marie Helvetius for Ghislain; Rob Nelson for light in Byzantine churches; and Nicolette Trahoulia for helping me rule out the Alexander romance. Wendy Watkins efficiently provided material from the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies, and the College of Humanities made possible a research trip to Greece at a key moment. This project required that I look beyond my usual textual preoccupations.
Among its greatest pleasures were the discussions and experiences I have had with the architects and conservators working on the Parthenon and Propylaia, who were unfailingly supportive (despite my Byzantine heresies) and who freely gave information, books, and the opportunityto examine the monuments on a day I will not forget. Some of the photographs capture what I saw. The Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA) isa model agency, the most courteous, scholarly, and professional I havedealt with., whose attention to detail is exactly what is needed to ensurethe future of the temples. I thank especially Fani Mallouchou-Tufano, TasosTanoulas, and Manolis Korres, to whom we owe what we know about themonuments' ancient, Byzantine, and modern history.
They deserve someof the credit for this book's contributions as well (though none of theblame for its errors). Most of the photographs in the book were taken by me. Manolis Korresgraciously allowed me to reproduce his drawings of the ancient andByzantine Parthenon. Thanks are due to Angelos Matthaiou, GeorgiosPapadopoulos, and the Greek Epigraphical Society for permission touse Fig. 12, which they also graciously supplied to me; to Albert Faillerfor permission to reproduce Figs. 19 and 20 from the Revue des EtudesByzantines (1976); to Dr. Alam Payind, Director of the Middle EastStudies Center of the Ohio State University, for his spectacular photographof Soumela (Fig. 23); to the Committee for the Conservation of theAcropolis Monuments (ESMA) for making Fig. 27 available to me fromthe archives of the Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), and to FaniMallouchou-Tufano for obtaining that permission on my behalf; to theAmerican School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations, forpermission to reproduce Fig. 21; and to the Photographic Archive of theBenaki Museum, Athens, for permission to reproduce Fig. 31. JuliaD'Agostino of the College of Humanities' Digital Media Services Studioscanned many of the images; her expertise instantly solved my technicaldifficulties.
I especially thank Michael Sharp of Cambridge University Press forhis early interest and support for this project as well as for his support ofByzantine Studies in general; thanks also to the entire team at the Press(Liz Noden, Rosina Di Marzo, and all whose names I don't know) for seeingthe book through to completion with such efficiency and good cheer. This book is dedicated with love to Kim Vogel, heptakis.
Introduction Byzantine Athens: a city with no history? The last history to be written of Byzantine and medieval Athens was Ferdinand Gregorovius' 1889 Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter.t Gregorovius' analysis was not deep, nor was his familiarity with Byzantium. He devoted more space to the shorter period of western colonial rule (AD 1205-1456) than to the far longer Byzantine period. Lacking many of the sources that we have today, Gregorovius filled pages with background political narrative that intersected with Athenian history only at specific moments. Many textual and archaeological sources of information about Byzantine Athens have since come to light, as the reader of this book will realize. Yet there has concurrently been a regression in the prospects for a new history to replace that of Gregorovius.
Few of those sources have been utilized in a spate of recent surveys of Athens and the Parthenon, which offer detailed coverage of antiquity and then jump to the first western travelers and the modern nation-state while devoting only a few pages to Byzantium. In part this is because these sources are written in difficult Greek and have not been studied by professional Byzantinists, who have too much material to wade through in proportion to their numbers and whose focus has traditionally been on Constantinople. Still, had this material been collected, it would have been impossible for a scholar of ancient art to assert that "almost nothing is known of the history of the Parthenon during the `Dark Ages,' which were nowhere darker than at Athens."Z To the contrary, far more is known about the Parthenon in Byzantium than in antiquity, though "known" is an optimistic term here; rather, far more can be known. To alleviate this part of the problem, I have included in this book translations of most of the main sources for the Christian Parthenon.
But the regression is only partly due to the difficulty and dispersionof the sources. More serious is the deep-seated assumption that Athensceased to have any importance after Justinian's closing of the schools(usually dated to 529), that both as a physical city and a set of idealsAthens lost its relevance in a Christian world ruled by Constantinople.Not only did it have no history, it could not have had one; its time hadpassed. According to the historical sources, no traveler (or almost none) visited Athens,which, at this time, was not a great city but a city without importance. Even whentravelers arrived in cities that were rich in antiquities, they tended not to be veryinterested in them.3
The "historical sources," as we will see, say more or less exactly the opposite.Or consider the following, more lofty declaration: After the eclipse of antiquity, sealed by the closing of the philosophical schoolsby Justinian, Athens lay forgotten for centuries, enshrouded by a mantle of silence.For the medieval pilgrim it offered no sacred relics and held no promises of spiritualrenewal or salvation ... Athens' political and cultural ascendancy in the easternMediterranean disappeared with the demise of classical civilization and passed on toother urban centers as new societies appeared in the area.4 Conventional though they are, these statements are false - not misleadingor exaggerated but contrary to reality. As this book aims to prove, Athenswas not forgotten, for it became one of the most important religious centersof the Byzantine world, attracting hundreds if not thousands of pilgrimsincluding many from outside the empire. As a shrine of the Theotokos,there were moments when it eclipsed the prestige even of Constantinople.Moreover, it offered one of the most appealing promises of salvation thatany medieval pilgrim could hope for and, in addition, this promise waspredicated on the classical past to which the Parthenon was always indissolubly linked. There is strong evidence for a fairly widespread interest inclassical antiquities, which seem to have been central to the civic identities ofthe towns of Byzantine Greece and which also seem to have generatedsomething of a tourist industry.
It was in Byzantium, not in antiquity, thatwe first find what we might for the sake of emphasis call worship of rather than only in the Parthenon (and even the latter has been denied by some to the classical. Parthenon, which seems not to have captured the aesthetic, religious, or philosophical attention of antiquity). And it was the Byzantine Athenians who first praised the temple's "divine light," not anyone in antiquity and certainly not the western travelers who usually receive the credit for this trope. They too were echoing a long Byzantine tradition, albeit unknowingly. Byzantine Athens has not been denied a history because of the "sources" but because, as can easily be seen in the above quotations, it happens to lie in the path of a particular view of history, a view that deals in large abstractions. Here Athens and the classics all lie on one side of a great divide with Christianity and all that is medieval or Byzantine on the other. The two sides may not overlap for they represent incommensurate worldviews. This is a picture familiar from many textbooks and specialist studies. The centers of classical civilization were eclipsed by new religious and political configurations.
Where Delphi, Athens, and Rome had once been the centers of the world, now the center was placed at Jerusalem or Constantinople. Classical antiquity is believed to have been buried for over a thousand years before it was rediscovered (or reinvented) by the Europeans, its true and natural heirs.5 Athens was too closely linked to its classical past to play a leading role and so, with the passing of its era, no one has tried to imagine a contrary picture of its history, one in which the city "reinvents" itself to succeed in a changed world. The narrative of abstractions precludes creative engagement between pagan and Christian Athens. A hybrid such as the Byzantine Parthenon could have no history at this level because the thing was a contradiction in terms. The building's classical aspect was only a curiosity; at any rate, its conversion into a church - a philosophical incongruity - could take place only against a backdrop of Athenian decline and insignificance, which has accordingly been imagined and written into the history books before anyone bothered to look in the Byzantine sources. Even the building's survival occasioned surprise.
Pouqueville, a French traveler to Greece in the early nineteenth century, deplored the damage done to the monument by the Venetians and Elgin, but also asked: "Howcan one explain the Parthenon's preservation under the reign of Constantine and Theodosios - tyrants unworthy of the name `great' [i.e., by extension, under all the Byzantine emperors] - who have destroyed more artistic masterpieces than the barbarians and the Turks?"6 Here Byzantium represents the antithesis, indeed the physical cancellation of classical antiquity, justas much as did the "barbarians," e.g., the Persians, in sum all "Oriental,"despotic, un-Hellenic peoples like the Byzantines who were demonized by theEnlightenment. But why, then, did the monuments of Athens survive?Pouqueville knew nothing from the sources about this, so his quandary wascaused purely by his own preconceptions.
We have to remember through allof this that the Byzantines had done far less damage to the monunent thanhad Elgin and the Venetians! The discontinuity thesis has taken serious scholarly form since then;it is, after all, a position many of whose aspects have ample support inthe sources. In the twentieth century, Cyril Mango has stressed the breakbetween antiquity and Byzantium in terms of both literature and artisticheritage. I have addressed the question of literature elsewhere (that is,whether Byzantine classicizing texts are "distorting mirrors" that merelymimic ancient models without reflecting any of their underlying merits,values, or ideas).' Regarding the antiquities of Greece in the Byzantineperiod, Mango articulated what has become the standard position for thepast forty years. Most Byzantines, he argued, believed that ancient statueswere inhabited by demons or possessed magical properties, and thosewho wrote about them were not interested in them as art but were onlyslavishly following ancient rhetorical. conventions.
In sum, "the Byzantinesin general did not evince the slightest interest in what we understand byclassical Greece."8 This position has since echoed in the literature. "It isstriking how little interest was shown by the inhabitants of the Byzantineempire ... in the relics of classical antiquity that were still to be found inthe region where they lived," resulting in an "alienation of the Greeks fromtheir own early cultural phases." After the rise of Christianity, "it was to bea thousand years before Christians turned their attention back to Italyand Greece as classical lands."9 The position that Mango attacked in his argument for discontinuity -that "Byzantium was a beacon of classical civilization shining in thebarbarous gloom of the Middle Ages" - has been far too marginal in thescholarship to merit such attention. It is a straw man, crudely put so as to be easily refutable, and enables Mango to move to the opposite extreme.
In a paper stressing discontinuity in the very title, he even draws attention to the fact that some Byzantines wore caftans and turbans and used prayer rugs. "I was not trying to prove that the Byzantines dressed and behaved like Arabs," he adds,10 but the image sticks and raises the question of whether Byzantine Studies is an extension of the Classics or a species of Orientalism. It echoes Pouqueville's (less scholarly) equation of the Byzantines with barbarians and Turks. The notions that the Byzantines were not interested in ancient Greece and that they did not look upon Greece in their own time as a classical land are, as we will see, false, certainly when it came to Athens.
To the contrary, it was difficult for them to speak of Athens at all without engaging directly with the problem of its classical past and the relation of that past to Christianity; they were overaware of the classical past, not blind or indifferent to it. But this should not be taken as an argument for continuity. Byzantium was not the same as classical antiquity; it is rather that many sites of its culture, even its Christian aspect, were constituted in dialogic relation to it. My goal is not to replace one monolithic, closed view of Byzantiumwith another, but to move away from the need to have one view in the first place and to stimulate a critical discussion about why a particular view has prevailed - a view prejudicial to Byzantium in the Enlightenment context of modern historiography - when the evidence taken all together presents a mixed picture.
So, for example, whereas it is easy to find Byzantine sources that reflect the belief that demons inhabited statues and pagan ruins, I have not found that belief attested for Athens in particular. The filling of Constantinople with ancient statuary, to cite another example, had to do with aesthetics and imperial ideology, as has belatedly been recognized.11 Therefore, to explain the success of the Christian Parthenon requires us to rethink Byzantine views of the classical past and scrutinize our field's stake in the narratives of the Enlightenment (e.g., pagans vs. Christians, antiquity vs. the Middle Ages, reason vs. superstition, or freedom vs. theocracy and "oriental despotism").
If it is necessary to speak about history at this level of abstraction, we must recognize that all cultures are sites of conflict and disagreement and are riven by contradiction at the deepest level of their ideological foundations. Modern writers were not the first to speak of "the end of Athens," and the polarities of Athens vs. Jerusalem or vs. Constantinople are not of modern make. With the modern narrative of Athenian decline in the background, let us extend this section by looking at some of its ancient and Byzantineantecedents. The problem is in their interpretation and correct use, notmerely in tracking them down and citing them as primary evidence, for theyare not really evidence as such. It was Tertullianus (ca. 200) who first posedthe famous rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?," towhich he implied the answer "absolutely nothing."
The context of this claimwas an argument that philosophy, man's effort to attain the truth byunaided reason, was ultimately responsible for many Christian heresies.St. Paul had warned against it, for he had been at Athens and had, in his discussions there, become acquainted withthat human wisdom which pretends to know the truth. But in fact it only corruptsthe truth, and is itself divided into its own manifold heresies by the variety of itsmutually repugnant sects. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Whatconcord is there between the Academy and the Church? ... Away with all attemptsto produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition. 12Tertullianus eventually joined a sect that was condemned as heretical, butthat irony pales before the impossible position that Christian intellectualswere taking with such lofty pronouncements. He himself was steeped indialectic and disputation (Jerome later fancied him a lawyer), and neverentirely shook off the formative influence of Stoic philosophy, even in histheology. In fact, it was only his familiarity with "Athens" that enabledhim to make the case for Christianity that he did, and the same was true forall later Christian theologians.
It proved impossible to expound Christiandoctrine based solely on Scripture. The practical question, then, was notwhether to use Greek philosophy but how, though on the level of rhetoricand propaganda almost all Christian theorists maintained that their faithhad entirely supplanted the wisdom of the ancients, which was foolishnessin the eyes of God. Still, an influential minority of Christian sophists (suchas Gregorios of Nazianzos) was more honest than Tertullianus aboutwhat they owed to Athens, both the city and the ideal for which it stood.Athens had something to do with Jerusalem after all, but it was difficult tosay exactly what, a tension that ran through Christian "humanism" andwould, as we will see, run through the history of the Christian Parthenonas well.13
It was not easy for Athens to adapt to the Christian world. Named after its patron goddess, the city's reputation was ineluctably linked to the cults, myths, rituals, and art that many Christians had set out to abolish. The author of Acts notes, in connection with St. Paul's brief visit there, that the city was full of idols (17.16). Paul began his addess before the Athenians by saying that he considered them to be "most religious" (17.22), but deisidaimonia can also mean superstition or religious in a negative way (especially if daimones were false deities). This is not necessarily what Paul meant but it is how his words would have been taken by later Christian readers.
This reputation was compounded by the city's failure to convert in late antiquity. The pagan cults persisted and the city's intellectual life included and was even dominated by outspoken pagan Platonists until the sixth century. It required imperial intervention by that most Christian monarch, Justinian, to shut down the schools in AD 529 or 531.14 This pagan conservatismconfirmed the suspicion held by many that the Athenian ideal itself was infected with the pagan aspects of Greek culture. Justinian's intervention has often been used as a symbolic date for the end of antiquity, especially in connection with the grand narrative. Many Christians gloated over the end of Athens and the Athenian ideal. The liturgical poet of Justinian's Constantinople, Romanos Melodos, proclaimed the triumph of the "Galilaians" over the Athenians, alluding sarcastically to the polemical term used by the last pagan emperor, Julian (AD 361-363), who loved Athens, in his attack on Christianity. In another poem, Romanos sneered at the nonsense of the pagan philosophers. 15 The downfall of Athens, in other words, was literally celebrated from the pulpit of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
It was around this time (fifth to early seventh centuries) that the most famous hymn in Orthodoxy was composed. It is called the Akathistos because the congregation stands during it. In the Salutations of the Theotokos, it too gloats over the defeat of Athens: Hail, vessel of God's wisdom, Hail, repository of his providence, Hail, you who reveal the philosophers as unwise,Hail, you who refute the vain weavers of words, Hail, for the bickerers are now feebleminded, Hail, for the poets of myths have wasted away, Hail, you who sliced through the Athenians' twisting.16 In short, some of the most authoritative voices of the new faith in thenew capital of the empire made a point of proclaiming the refutation ofmere human wisdom by Christ and his Mother and broadcast the defeatof "Athens." Even after the end of paganism, popular readings continued tocirculate in which Athens was depicted as indelibly stained by its past. In theLife of Markos the Athenian, a later fictional romance set in late antiquity,the saint equates "Hellenism" with "the persecution of the Christians," andthanks God for "leading me to this holy place [i.e., "Ethiopia"], lest I die inmy own country [i.e., Athens] and be buried in earth that had been pollutedby so many sins."17 Pagan Athens was rhetorically and physically eliminated.
The Parthenonand other temples were converted into churches, and a villa near the agorathat may have belonged to the last head of the Academy was taken over inthe mid sixth century for use by the city's bishop.18 The shift to other centerswas nicely reflected in the romance of Athenans, the daughter of a professorat Athens and a pagan. Around AD 420, she was selected as the bride of theemperor Theodosios II. Baptized as Eudokia, she settled in the court atConstantinople, but scandal later caused her to leave for Jerusalem and takeup pious causes. The career of this empress who "quite literally preferredJerusalem to Athens" was retold in many later Byzantine chronicles andtales.19
The rejection of Athens could take the form of polemical epigrams aswell, which were written as late as the tenth century by loannes Geometres."The city of Erechtheus sprang from the earth" - alluding to the ancientAthenians' autochthony - "but New Rome came from the heavens." Anotherepigram is about the "wise men of Athens": You keep talking about theancient wise men, it sneers, but all you really have left is Mt. Hymettos andits honey, the tombs of the dead and the ghosts of the wise. By contrast, ourcity - Constantinople - has both faith and the words of true wisdom.
These texts can be (and have been) used to support the narrative of the end of Athens. After antiquity Athens could not compete directly with Rome or Jerusalem, for "the world of the future was Christian, while the greatness of Athens was unalterably pagan ."21 Its schools were shut down by Justinian, its art transported to Constantinople to adorn the Christian court and capital, and its ideals rejected by the authoritative spokesmen of the newreligion. The city itself would have no real history, certainly no glory to match its classical past, at least not before the establishment of the modern Greek state in the nineteenth century.
That's the way history should have happened, according to one view - only it did not, as a multitide of Byzantine sources reveals. What then of Tertullianus, Romanos Melodos, the Akathistos hymn, and Geometres? What must be stressed about them at this point is that they are not really "sources" at all, certainly not for what was happening at Athens. They were rhetorically expressing their commitment to a particular set of ideological priorities. They were not making historical or factual statements in the first place, but constructing a narrative of "Athens" and "Jerusalem" (or "NewJerusalem") in which they had a personal stake.
Tertullianus' position was too compromised for us to take it at face value. As for Romanos, the Akathistos, and Geometres, their gloating was premature. Athens would prove capable of usurping the position of Constantinople as the Theotokos' favored city, and in the language of the Akathistos itself no less! And an emperor of Geometres' own time would also pay homage to the Atheniotissa, undermining the poet's polarity of heaven and earth. We should not, then, as previous generations have done, rush to accept the view of Romanos, Geometres, and the like as exemplary of the Byzantine view and history of Athens. The evidence presented in this book will reveal that these ideological pronouncements, which have been taken as canonical Byzantine views and even turned into history by many scholars, do not reflect the development of Athens as a Christian center in Byzantium. Not only was the city's history different from that implied by the rhetoric of these texts but the mainstreamByzantine view of Athens turns out to have been far more positive and nuanced.
This book will fill in that history for both the Parthenon and Byzantine Athens more generally - a history that is widely supposed not to exist - and it will also reveal the creative engagement at Athens between the classical and the Christian elements that both flowed into the making of Byzantine civilization. The fundamental dynamics of the culture were different in this respect than what has long been believed. In the process,we will also uncover considerable evidence for the nuanced ideological,archaeological, and even psychological modalities that underlay the reception of ancient ruins and monuments in Byzantium, specifically in Greece.These were not in their essence modern. They were only rewritten later toaccord with modern narratives. The shape of many familiar "histories" mayhave to be redrawn.
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