Latest Scheme For The Parthenon
Pictured is the central scene of the east frieze of the Parthenon. ‘The traditional reading of the frieze,’ writes Mary Beard, interprets it as ‘the presentation of a newly woven robe (peplos) to Athena,’ the high point of a festival celebrating the goddess. Joan Breton Connelly, in “The Parthenon Enigma,” instead argues that the frieze depicts a scene from early Athenian myth, in which King Erechtheus, as Beard writes, ‘has been told by an oracle that in order to save Athens from invasion he must sacrifice one of his daughters,’ and is not receiving the peplos but rather handing the material over to his youngest daughter, who will wear it as her shroud.
