Princeton (2016) p/b 496pp £54.95 (ISBN 9780691170572)
This is a very welcome book, and for several reasons. Greek Architecture has been out of fashion as a subject for scholarly study, and anyone wanting a full architectural description even of the buildings on the Athenian acropolis has had to go back to Dinsmoor’s classic Architecture of Ancient Greece (3rd. edn. 1950) and disentangle the details from the now out-dated text. Shear provides us with both full and up-to-date descriptions of the architecture, not simply of the Parthenon, Temple of Athena Nike, and Propylaia but also of the Hephaisteion, Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous, Temple of Athena at Pallene (transferred to become the Temple of Ares in the Agora), Temple on the Ilissos, Telesterion at Eleusis, and Odeion of Pericles. Although the plans and drawings are not always as helpful as they might be (it is frustrating to have a discussion that turns on Pier W of the Propylaia illustrated by a plan which does not label Pier W), the quality of the drawings and of the black and white photographs is superb. It is particularly good to have appropriate attention paid to the architectural mouldings, so often ignored in other recent accounts. Any discussion of the architecture of these buildings must now start from here.
When we turn from architecture to sculpture, the treatment is less definitive. Some particular problems catch Shear’s attention, others do not. The photographic coverage of the sculptures is often poor—we have no close-up views of the friezes of the Athena Nike temple at all, and only two views of its balustrade sculpture—and when it comes to the Parthenon we are given no pictures of any metopes and only Carrey’s drawings of the pediments, though we have five pictures of the north frieze and six of the east frieze along with no fewer than nine of the frieze of the Hephaisteion. This is unfortunate, not simply because a reader seeking to understand the discussion needs to find illustrations elsewhere, but because it suggests that the visual details have no relevance to the interpretation of the sculptures.
One further notable and welcome feature of Shear’s discussion is his serious engagement with the epigraphic evidence (he prints the Greek text of the most relevant inscriptions in an Epigraphical Appendix). This is particularly invoked over issues of dating. One of the most intriguing of these comes in the final chapter, where Shear argues that the decision to build the Erechtheum was taken in 425, following the plague and the 426 earthquake, whose damage to the Parthenon he details, in order to appease the wrath of the gods by providing a separate temple for the old statue of Athena Polias. Since Shear shows very nicely that housing an old cult statue alongside a new cult statue was a regular Greek practice, it is unclear why the Athenians should think Athena unhappy about the arrangement. Here, as with the motivation of the building programme described in this book, the explanatory framework Shear offers (cf. the title Trophies of Victory) is rather reductionist. Fortunately, the book offers detail rich enough to support a more subtle account.
Robin Osborne