Dionysus was one of many sculptures in the east pediment of the Parthenon. Together they formed a narrative which, according to the second century geographer and travel writer Pausanias, depicted the tumultuous birth of Athene (Perry 257). In the original design, the climax of the drama must have been at the centre of the pediment from which nothing now remains. Dionysus was reclining at the south end, facing away from the centre and as yet oblivious to the main event of the narrative. He will likely remain so, because the centre of the pediment was destroyed when christians converted it to an apse, and whatever was left was hauled away by the Earl of Elgin in 1803.

Whether or not the sculpture represents Dionysus and not some other mythological character is still debated. The current museum label accompanying the sculpture entitles it 'Theseus'(?), merely because that is whom the Earl of Elgin supposed it represented. The figure is entirely nude, so the only thing that can help to identify it is the mantle he is resting on, under which the paws and part of the hide of a great cat are visible (Perry 265). It may have been holding something in its raised right hand, but its right arm was broken off and lost before any record was made. It has been suggested that the sculpture is of Herakles because that hero is in a similar posture on a coin of Croton (Perry 265), but if the hide was the lion's skin of Herakles it would have had the beast's head attached (Waldstein 142). Because of the presence of Helios (the Rising sun) in the south corner and Selene (the Setting moon) in the north corner, it is believed that the locality of the narrative is the rock of Olympus (Perry 264). If this is so, it is unlikely that Herakles or Theseus could be there, because neither are Olympian gods, nor were they full grown men when Athene was born (Waldstein 144).

Dionysus was known not only as the god of wine, fertility, and pleasure but also as a bloodthirsty hunter often associated with the lion, the panther and the lynx. "The panther, as is well known, appears in descriptions of a later period as the favourite animal of Dionysus and is found with him in countless works of art" (Otto 111). And in Homeric Hymn 7, Dionysus frightens the pirates who had captured him by having a lion appear (Otto 111). So the cat hide, the possibility of a thyrsus in his raised hand, and the sculpture's place in the divine narrative would be explained if the figure is accepted as representing Dionysus. He is relaxed which is how the god of pleasure and wine was usually and appropriately portrayed; he is slow to notice the event behind him. It is therefore likely that the sculpture represents Dionysus, but nobody can be sure.

What remains of Dionysus is now at the British Museum, London. Although it has been badly damaged, much of its shape and refined surface is still intact. It is immediately recognizable as a reclining male nude, and if looked at a moment longer, no ordinary male. The form is that of an extraordinarily beautiful and muscular young man, with finely formed veins and a full vigorous musculature visible by its surface (Perry 264).

It is interesting to note that while male figures were most often depicted in the nude, female figures were clothed. This is certainly true for the pediments of the Parthenon, and can be attributed to what Greek society considered proper. This is illustrated in Book V of Plato's Republic when the hypothesis of women's equality to men is discussed:

...and the most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women naked in the palaestra, exercising with the men,...

Yes, indeed, he said: according to present notions the proposal would be thought ridiculous.

Yet having begun we must go forward to the rough places of the law; at the same time begging of these gentlemen for once in their life to be serious. Not long ago, as we shall remind them, the Hellenes were of the opinion, which is still generally received among the barbarians, that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and improper; and when first the Cretans and then the Lacedaemonians introduced the custom, the wits of that day might equally have ridiculed the innovation.

No doubt.

But when experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far better than to cover them up, and the ludicrous effect to the outward eye vanished before the better principle which reason asserted, then the man was perceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of his ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously inclines to weigh the beautiful by any other standard but that of the good.

The extraordinary physique, both male and female, was the custom for Greek sculpture. According to coeval writing, the accepted ambition of art was not merely to recreate a perfect likeness or mirror image of nature, but to surpass the flaws of nature and create a lifelike ideal. In Book III of Plato's Republic, Socrates asks the sculptor Pharrhasius, "Since it is not easy to find everything without a flaw in a single human being, do you not then collect from a number what is beautiful in each, so that the whole body may appear beautiful?" and Pharrhasius concedes.

It is difficult for us to feel what beauty meant to the Greeks. They believed that the love of beauty should influence everything from great achievements to mundane chores. Plato wrote a great deal on the concept of beauty, all the time equating it with virtue in so far as beauty is the semblance of virtue. In Book III of Plato's Republic, Socrates professes that:

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul, with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters into both.

In the case of depicting Dionysus, the sculptor may have felt especially impelled to transcend his own skill because the divine subject was more than an ideal male youth; he was a perfect god. This illustrative passage is from Plato's The Drinking Party (211-12):

...once you have seen it [beauty], you will never be seduced again by the charm of gold, of dress, of comely boys, or lads just ripening into manhood;...if it were given to man to gaze on beauty's very self - unsullied, unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint that haunts the frailer loveliness of flesh and blood-...it is only when he discerns beauty itself through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with the true, and not the seeming, virtue - for it is virtue's self that quickens him, not virtue's semblance.

However, it is true that when representing mortals, ancient Greek sculptors also strove for nothing short of a perfect form. "The creation of beauty was the sculptor's chief interest and his types are selected with this end in view" (Richter 43). Polykleitos of Argos, a sculptor who worked at the same time as the construction of the Parthenon, wrote a book called The Cannon and in it he argued that beauty was a matter of "symmetria", an elaborate system of proportion which he goes on to describe. What is left of Dionysus is well proportioned, "in which each part and limb of the body stands in harmonious proportion to the other parts and to the whole of the figure, and all give the picture of harmonious physical life" (Waldstein 142).

Its scale, however, is larger than life, but this not surprising considering that it was made to be viewed from a distance and probably to represent a god. Because the narrative was a single scene, the scale of Dionysus was equal to that of all the other sculptures in the Pediment. This unity of scale created a problem in terms of the architectural space available because the figures placed north and south of the centre had progressively less headroom due to the sloping roof (Carpenter 81). The need for a unified scale within the triangular pediment's narrative made it necessary that Dionysus, at the south end, be reclining. The figure faced away from the centre because it could neither have been sculpted with its head craned 180°, nor on its back with its legs in the air, without appearing awkward or undignified respectively. Thus, it was sculpted as it was in order for its grand scale to fit the narrative, its shape to fit the architecture, and its graceful pose to be fitting of a god.

Under the harsh sunlight which is characteristic of Greece, the highlights and shadows of temple exteriors and exposed sculpture is intense. Rhys Carpenter considered this when addressing the question of why relief and sculpture were used on the Greek temples instead of painting, "...any painted composition spread flat upon an exposed surface would have possessed insufficient spatial actuality, in contrast with the vividly real structure of the building." He goes on to assert that for the pediments, "statues in their full and firmly solid actuality must seem as real as the temple on which they were stationed" (78). Carpenter also comments on the choice of material used in the sculpture, "...for the sculptural adornment of a marble temple there was no other choice than marble, since it was seemingly unthinkable to the Greek mind that bronze should be employed" (81).

None of this, however, explains why the sculpture was finished with the quality of the surface no less masterful on the back than the front, despite the fact that they were only meant to be viewed from the front, and their backs meant to face only the pediment wall. The sculptor could not have known that his work would eventually be examined individually, at the British Museum. The reason could be the Greek faith in ideal beauty and perfection; simply knowing that their sculptures had unfinished backsides would bother them. Or because the Parthenon was dedicated to a god, Athene, the Greeks could well have surmised that she and the other gods might mingle among the sculpture in the pediments, and be outraged if the backsides were left nubbly. Yet another possibility is the sculptor's love of his art, demanding of himself nothing short of a finished form. The real answer probably rests somewhere between these three possibilities.

The Parthenon was commissioned by Pericles as the major part of his adornment of Athens. It was paid for by money collected from neighbouring costal towns and islands for collective defense. This diversion of the defense budget received much criticism but could not be stopped because the democratic framework of Athens had failed and Pericles had become a dictator. Pericles awarded the overall artistic direction to Pheidias, who had already earned a great reputation. The Parthenon was built in the fifteen years between 447 and 432 B.C., a short time for such a vast project. The pedimental sculptures were probably the last work to be completed and emplaced; sometime after 438 B.C. when the temple was dedicated. It is not known who did the actual carving; "It is nowhere stated that he [Pheidias] made the decorative sculptures, and indeed the amount of these is so great that no man could have carved them all" (Chase Post 102). Many Attic masters were probably involved, since the frieze and the two pediments were completed in less than ten years (Janson 109). Exactly who sculpted Dionysus is therefore unknown, but the loss of this information is relatively unimportant to our appreciation of the sculpture. It remains one of the finest examples sculpture from the Attic school, and an awesome thing of beauty to see.

Works Cited

Carpenter, Rhys. Greek Sculpture, The University of Chicago Press; 1960.

Chase, George Henry.; Post, Chandler Rathfon. A History of Sculpture; Harper & Brothers, New York; 1925.

Janson, H. W. History of Art, Harry N. Abrams, New York; 1973.

Otto, Walter F. Dionysus, Myth and Cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London; 1965.

Perry, Walter Copland. Greek and Roman Sculpture, Longmans, Green, and Co., London; 1882.

Plato. The Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 3rd Ed.; 1892. Reprinted by Clarendon Press, Oxford; 1924.

Plato. The Drinking Party (or Symposium), trans. Michael

Joyce, Everyman's Library, London and New York; 1935.

Richter, Gisela. The General Characteristics of Greek Sculpture,

Waldstein, Charles. Essays on the Art of Pheidias, McGrath Publishing Company, Washington DC, 1973.