ATHENS' CROWN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 88, 15 April 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

ATHENS' CROWN.

THE GRAND PARTHENON.

A NEW ZEALAND LINK.

(By H. L. PILCHER.)

Comparisons between Greece and New Zealand must often have been made by those familiar with the Greek landscape either at first hand or through Greek literature. "The sea cast round her like a mantle, the sea-cloud like a crown," sang Swinburne of England, and the lines apply to our own island home. But they apply to Greece as well, that country of many islands and bays, where the sea "was an integral part of the lives of men. Marathon looked on the sea, and Salamis, and Thermopylae. The pulse and beauty of the sea run through all Greek literature from Homer downwards. There have been no people in history 'to whom the sea meant more than to the Greeks. We New Zealanders, too, are a people of the sea, blue or "wine-dark," and sundered by time and space though wc are from the Greece of Pericles and Plato, we have inherited Greek culture. When someone wished to indicate that Dun'edin was a centre of learning, did they not call it the Athens of the South? Every classical pillar or colonnade, that we build links us to Greece. And it is significant that the study of Greek in our university colleges is growing. Athens Recalled. There is one spot in, New Zealand, however, that, more than any other, now recalls Athens. Standing one day on the steps of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, looking out over the blue waters of the Hauraki Gulf, with the stately white Doric columns rising above me, I thought of other stately Doric columns, mellowed by the passing centuries, looking out over another gull, the Gulf of Aegina. Here, where I looked out, the Maori canoe had of old cleft the waters; there, the proud sails of Theseus and Ulysses had glistened. Here, the shimmering gulf, with misty Coromandel looming against the sky, lay steeped in a maze of history and legend, as beautiful perhaps as anything the ages have vouchsafed to us; there, Piraeus, Salamis and the mountains of Epidaurus had cradled a mythology that has enriched civilisation.

There was food for thought, and though there was much dissimilarity there 1 was a ' subtle, liaison - that made one pause and consider how interwoven are the thready of which is fashioned our life. Had

there been no Athens, no incomparable Parthenon, then perhaps there had been no Doric columns where I stood; had Ictinus, that master of all architects, not conceivcd the marvellous proportions of his immortal temple to the virgin goddess Athene, where tens of thousands of tons of massive masonry are poised as gracefully as an alighting bird, then Auckland had had no imposing portico to its memorial. Athens has indeed set its stamp on the world, even on far-off Auckland, where a superb building, superbly sited (in the words of Mr. S. F. Markham, who is visiting us on behalf of the Museums Association of London), not only built in Greek style, but carries on it a quotation from an immortal Greek writer —the funeral oration of Pericles as reported by Thucydides. One's first impression of the Acropolis is of a sea of stone. Ruined marble temples built on a hill of solid rock, and endless pieces of broken statuary and masonry, lying in disarray. It is-apt to be disappointing to the newcomer, as there is little at first sight to link with the "Glory that was Greece," and little enough to Impress, unless it be the massive columns and pediments. No imagery, no tracery, no decoration, nothing but plain colonnades, almost grim in their silent severity, tight-lipped guarding the untold secrets of twenty chequered centuries. Well may the eager visitor feel almost a rebuff, well may the tourist, expecting heaven knows what frills and flourishes, look upon it with a trace of disappointment. Its beauty was not created with a few blows of a mason's chisel, its appeal lies deeper than a little superficial carving. Centuries of History. The incredible beauty of the Propylea and the temple of the Parthenon is not revealed in one cursory glance; one must pause, one must meditate awhile. Stand for a time, as it were, in reverence, in the scarred western portico of the Parthenon, among the masonry that has stood thus for 2000 years. Slowly a realisation of its greatness will dawn upon you. ' Note the white splashes on the mighty yellowed columns where Morosini's cannon spattered the marble, the niches cut in the pillars where the Turks placed beams across to form the roofs of bivouacs, the marks of a camp fire lit by careless soldiery; go through the main doorway into the bare interior and broken north and south colonnades cruelly shattered by the explosion of a powder magazine in the seventeenth century. Every stone is charged with history. The temple of the Parthenon was successively a Greek temple to Athene, an early Christian church, the crude painted ikons of which can still be seen on the walls, a mosque, powder magazine and barracks. Torn and mutilated though it be, its true greatness is not

impaired. In spite of the ravages of man, and- of the centuries, the immortal spirit breathed into the stones by Ictinus and Kallikrates rises superb.

To appreciate the grandeur of that ruined pile, it is necessary first to learn some of its history. Every corner of the place is saturated with it, and one must first drink deep of that history, and then give free rein to fancy. Those chiselled marks extending along the eastern, and part of the northern facades, are where Alexander the Great hung captured shields after his glorious Persian campaign. Those ruts worn in the steep unpaved centre way through the Propylea gateway were worn by the chariots of the ancients as they went in the triumphal procession, depicted in the bas-reliefs in the British Museum. From these stony ramparts the aged King Aegeus cast himself, On seeing his forgetful son's black sail returning from Crete. There, below, is the theatre of Herod Atticus, built in rough brown agglomerate by the matter-of-fact Romans. In that cave prison on the hill of Philopappos, across the valley, the homely Socratcs drank the fatal hemlock. Everything is steeped in history. Wonderful Symmetry. Turning to the architecture of the Parthenon, you will be amazed at the wonderful proportions, the gracc and symmetry. There is not a straight line in the building, and yet all is so subtly treated that the gentle curves are unnoticeable. The long steps surrounding the temple are convex, the pillars are tapered in a graceful curve, the cornices, friezes, architraves and pediments follow the same ingenious lines. If a hat is placed on the steps at one end, it cannot be seen if looked at from the other end along the step, and yet the steps look perfectly straight.' This artifice is used to avoid the square, solid effect of straight lines, and is said to indicate the curve of the earth's surface. Without it, the temple would be as squat and undignified as a barracks, but with it' its magical lines are a perpetual delight. The silhouette of Salamis through the columns of the western portico is one of the most perfect pictures that can be seen. The columns so cunningly proportioned, tapering to the simple Doric-capital, form the outlines of a Creek vase of amazing beauty. There is food for profound thought in this building that all haye copied, a,nd none has equalled. Here is the world's nearest approach to architectural perfection; here is true greatness triumphant over the tyrannies and mutilations of man. I pondered this as I looked above me at the stately columns of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, an unconscious tribute to the master craft of the ancients, and thought how fitting -a monument to those it commemorates.