Inventory number
Ακρ. 18138
Artist
Agorakritos' workshop (?)
Category
Architectural sculpture
Period
Classical Period
Date
426-421 BC
Dimensions
Height: 0.045 m
Length: 1.735 m
Width: 0.43 m
Material
Marble from Penteli
Location
First Floor, West
Block c comes from the east frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike and features ten incomplete human figures. On the viewer’s left the man from whom only the legs are preserved is Hephaistos. Next to him is Zeus seating on his throne and resting his feet on a stool. Before him an indiscernible object has been interpreted either as an offering bench or trophy. Behind Zeus stands Hera followed by Herakles and Hebe (or Hermes and Hygeia or Hekate) and Demeter with her daughter Persephone who embraces her mother by the shoulders. The last figures of the scene are two women that dance around another woman that sits on a stool. They may be the Horae (Hours) with their mother Themis or Thetis with two Nereids or the Muses.
The east frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike depicts the gathering of the gods around Zeus who sits on his throne roughly in the middle of this side. Some researchers suggest that the gods watch Athena's birth from Zeus’ head whereas others insist that they take part in the “psychostasia”, the weighing of Achilles' and Memnon's souls, two heroes of the Trojan war, so that the gods can decide whom of the two they will let live.
The frieze consists of fourteen blocks overall that depict different scenes on each of its sides. Today nine of these blocks are in the Acropolis Museum, one has been lost and four of them are in the British Museum in London after they were forcibly removed by Thomas Bruce, lord of Elgin, in the beginning of the 19th cent.
In 1687 the temple and the parapet of Athena Nike were dismantled by the Ottomans and the material was used for the reinforcement of a gun emplacement and the fortification of the west side of the Acropolis against the attacks by the Venetians under the command of the general Francesco Morosini. Between 1835 and 1836 the gun emplacement was demolished and the Temple of Athena Nike was restored for the first time under the supervision of Ludwig Ross, the administrator of antiquities at the time. A second reconstruction was carried out in 1940, while a third was completed in 2010.
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