The Frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike
About 425 to 420 BC
A row of marble blocks less than half a metre high, crowded with fighting men, comes from the little Ionic temple of Athena Nike that stands on the bastion beside the entrance to the Acropolis. On the east side the gods were shown seated in assembly. On the other three sides, Greeks fight, and this is the surprise: on the south side they fight Persians in trousers and soft caps, almost certainly the battle of Marathon, while on the north and west they fight other Greeks. It is one of the very few times a Greek temple showed a real historical battle rather than myth, a bold statement by an Athens at war with Sparta.
The relief is deep and violent. Bodies twist and fall, cloaks whirl, horses rear and shields clash, all in a band so small that the sculptors had to pack the action tightly. Look at how the ground line is used: fallen warriors lie along the bottom edge while the survivors leap over them. The carving of the Persian dress, with its sleeves, trousers and tiaras, is careful enough to have been done by people who had seen such clothing. Weapons, now missing, were added in bronze and would have gleamed against the painted background.
The temple was built around 425 BC to a design by Kallikrates and was dismantled in the seventeenth century by the Turks to build a gun battery, which, ironically, preserved much of its sculpture as filling. Four blocks of the frieze were taken to London by Lord Elgin and are in the British Museum; the rest are here, removed from the reconstructed temple in the twentieth century to protect them from pollution. Walk along the whole row, and then, when you leave, look up at the temple on its bastion where casts now stand in their place.
Did You Know? This is one of the only Greek temple friezes to show a real battle, the Athenians fighting the Persians at Marathon.
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