High City

Is the literal meaning of “acropolis,” and the multi-cultural population of a city visits it every day, In 480 BC, sixteen year old Pericles, his friend Sophocles, and their precocious tag-along pal Phidias stared up at the ruins still smoking on the hill where the Persians had burned and looted the Ancient Temple, along with just about everything else. “They’ll be preserved, no one will be allowed to cart them away, so we never forget,” said Sophocles. “Not this time” Pericles replied. “We’re going to build the biggest temple in the world.” “Need a sculptor?”’ asked Phidias. This graphic novel is pretty much accurate. Things to remember: the Parthenon was the treasury for Athens: in fact Phidias’ colossus of Athena inside concealed large reservoirs of gold and other precious materials. The religious building was the Erechtheion, named after the ancestral King Erechtheus, who founded Athens. The friezes that were on the Parthenon show the procession which will end in the sacrifice of Erechtheus’ youngest daughter Chthonia to make come true Apollo’s oracle that Athens will defeat its enemy Eleusis if he does so. (Sophocles’ frenemy Euripides wrote a play about it that was dramaturged by Socrates. Most of the play is lost.) Many of those friezes were looted in 1800 by Englishman Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and his abetting wife and are on permanent exhibit in the British Museum. The new stunning Acropolis museum exists precisely to refute the classist British assertion that the Greeks don’t know how to take care of their own heritage. And if you tour the museum you will never hear Lord Elgin’s name without the words “stole” or “thief”.Read more