Parthenon. East frieze. Block 2 (II)
Inventory number
Ακρ. 877
Artist
Pheidias' workshop
Category
Architectural sculpture
Period
Classical Period
Date
442-438 BC
Dimensions
Fragments of the block's left lower corner: 0.295 x 0.175 x 0.22 m
Fragments of the block's right side: 0.835 x 1.169 m
Material
Marble from Penteli
Location
Parthenon Gallery
On poorly preserved Block II five maidens, the last of the women that participate in the Panathenaia procession depicted on the preceding Block III (Ακρ. 1066), move slowly to the right. A small fragment on the lower left corner of the block, preserving the feet of two women, is a plaster cast of the original that is located at the British museum in London. On the block the women are clad in chiton. Over it they wear himation or peplos. Each one holds an omphalos phiale for performing the libations enacted before the animals’ sacrifice on the Great Altar outside the Temple of Athena Polias.
The frieze on the east side of the Parthenon shows the arrival on the Acropolis of the procession formed by the people of Athens during the festival of the Panathenaia in honour of the protectress of the city, Athena. The procession’s destination was the Temple of Athena Polias. Its purpose was the transportation of the Panathenaic peplos destined to adorn the age-old xoanon of the goddess and the offer of a grand sacrifice of animals at the Great Altar outside of the temple.
The converging groups of women from both sides of the east frieze hold ritual vessels and are received by supervisors. The central scene, right above the temple's entrance, depicts the giving of the Panathenaic peplos and takes place in the presence of the Olympian gods who are rendered at a larger scale than the mortals. The gods are flanked with ten male figures, possibly the Eponymous Heroes of Attica, the mythical progenitors of the Athenian tribes.
The east frieze is relatively well preserved as the explosion of the Parthenon by the Venetians under the command of the general Francesco Morosini, in 1687, did not cause many damages on this side of the temple. The drawings attributed to the painter Jacques Carrey, who visited the Acropolis in 1674, just thirteen years before the bombardment by Morosini, help our understanding of a few missing parts of this side of the frieze.
The total length of the east frieze is 21.18 m. It is formed of eight blocks, but sometimes scholarly work refers to nine blocks as one of the slabs was initially treated as being made by two separate segments (Blocks VII and VIII). Today the so-called Block VII is in the Louvre Museum in Paris whereas the rest of them are divided between the Acropolis Museum and the British Museum in London, where they ended up after they were removed by Thomas Bruce, the lord of Elgin, in 1801-1804 when Greece was still under Ottoman occupation. In order to facilitate their transportation, Elgin's workmen, cut off with saws or crowbars only the external faces of the blocks that bore the relief decoration. The Acropolis Museum exhibition includes plaster casts of the blocks’ faces on which some of the original fragments that fell off the monument, and thus escaped the looting, have been adjusted.
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