The Parthenon's placement in the city dramatized its collective civic value. Visible from many places in the city, from new or expanding districts as well as from older quarters, the icon of unity glinted in the sun. M. I. Finley has aptly called its quality of self-display, of being looked at, “out-of-doorness.” He says, “In this respect nothing could be more misleading than our usual impression: we see ruins, we look through them, we walk about inside the Parthenon. . . . What Greeks saw was physically quite different. . . .” The building exterior mattered in itself; like naked skin it was a continuous, self-sufficing, arresting surface. In an architectural object, a surface differs from a facade; a facade like the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris conveys the sense that the interior mass of the building has generated the exterior facade, while the Parthenon’s skin of columns and roof does not look like a form pushed out from within. In this, the temple gave a clue to Athenian urban form more generally; urban volume came from the play of surfaces.
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The Elgin Marbles were unusual because they brought together the vast crowd of human beings in the Panathenaic procession with such images of the gods. The sculptor Pheidias represented the human bodies in distinctive ways, first of all by carving them more boldly in the round than had other sculptors; this carving increased the reality of their presence near the gods. Indeed, the human beings depicted on the Parthenon friezes look more at home among the gods than they do, say, in friezes at Delphi. The Delphi sculptor emphasized the differences between gods and men, while Pheidias in Athens sculpted, in Philipp Fehls's phrase, “a subtle connection between the realms of gods and men that somehow has the appearance of an inherent necessity.”
The human figures on the Parthenon friezes are all young, perfect bodies. their perfections nakedly exposed, and their expression: equally serene whether they are tending an ox or mastering horses. They are generalizations about what human beings should look like, and contrasted. for instance, to a Zeus carved at Olympia a few years before; the god's body there was more an individual, his muscles showing signs of age and his face signs of fear. In the Parthenon friezes, the critic John Boardman has remarked, the image of the human body is “idealized rather than individualized . . . otherworldly; [never was] the divine so human, the human so divine?“ Ideal, young, naked bodies represented a human power which tested the divide between gods and men, a test the Greeks also knew could lead to tragic consequences; for love of their bodies, the Athenians risked the tragic flaw of hubris, of fatal pride.
The source of pride in the body came from beliefs about body heat, which governed the process of making a human being. Those fetuses well heated in the womb early in pregnancy were thought to become males; fetuses lacking initial heat became females. The lack of sufficient heating in the womb produced a creature who was “more soft, more liquid, more clammy-cold, altogether more formless than were men.” Diogenes of Apollonia was the first Greek to explore this inequality of heat, and Aristotle took up and expanded Diogenes’ analysis, notably in his work On the Generation of Animals. Aristotle made a connection, for instance, between menstrual blood and sperm, believing that menstrual blood was cold blood whereas sperm was cooked blood; sperm was superior because it generated new life, whereas menstrual blood remained inert. Aristotle characterizes “the male as possessing the principle of movement and of generation, the female that of matter.
The Greeks believed that “female” and “male” represented the two poles of a bodily continuum, whereas the Victorians, for example treated menstruation and menopause as such mysterious female forces that men and women seemed almost different species. Laqueur describes this Greek view as one in which “at least two genders correspond to but one sex, where the boundaries between male and female are of degree and not of kind . . . a one-sex body." Barely heated male fetuses became effeminate men; female fetuses heated beyond the norm produced butch women. Indeed, from this physiology of reproduction the Greeks derived principles for understanding the anatomies of men and women: the same organs were reversed in male and female genitalia. “Turn outward the woman's” vagina, Galen of Pergamum asked a medical student to imagine, and “turn inward . . . and fold double the man’s penis, and you will find the same structure in both in every respect.” Galen’s views would serve as scientific truth for nearly two thousand years, passing from Western antiquity, via Arab doctors, into Christian medicine of the Middle Ages, surviving the Renaissance, and ending only in the seventeenth century.
For most of Western history, medicine thus spoke about “the body”-one body, whose physiology moved from very cold to very hot, from very female to very male. Heat in the body seemed to govern people's power to see, to listen, to act and react, even to speak. In Perikles' time, this discourse began to cohere as a language of bodily stimulation. Two generations before him, for instance, people commonly believed that “one sees because light issues from the eye." By the time of Perikles it was thought that the eye instead receives warming rays from an object. In his 'On Sense and Sensible Objects, Aristotle later argued that even the experience of transparency and empty space was such a physical experience; since light, which is a substance, impresses itself on the eye, images generate heat in the viewer. Yet these warming rays are felt unequally by different human beings: the warmer the receiving body, the more intensely it responds to stimuli- as a roaring fire consumes a log more avidly than does a barely flickering fire. The cold body is sluggish in its responses, it heats more slowly.
Words seemed to make the same physical impress on the body’s senses as did images, and the ability to respond to these verbal stimuli also depended on the degree of heat the receiving body contained. For Plato, phrases like “hot words” and “the heat of argument” were literal descriptions rather than metaphors; dialectic and debate warmed the bodies of the participants, while bodies which thought in solitude grew cold. To be sure, by the Periklean age the Greeks had developed the habit of silent reading, a habit dramatized by the playwright Euripides in Hippolytos; reading required different mental habits than speaking. Yet the Greeks did not have the modern, abstract experience of a “text”: the Greek reader would have thought he heard the voices of real people speaking even on the page, and to revise a written text was like interrupting someone talking. Only when the body was alone, neither speaking not reading, did its powers grow cold and sluggish.
This ancient understanding of body heat led to beliefs about shame and honor amongst human beings. The medical register passing from female, cold, passive, and weak, to male, hot, strong, and engaged formed a scale of ascending human worth; it treated males as superior to females made of the same materials. The modern historian Giulia Sissa observes that “When the feminine was included in the same sphere as the masculine . . . the result was not liberal acknowledgment of equality but dismissal of the female as ‘obviously’ inferior to the male.”
