Parthenon Frieze _ East III, 18-19

myminifactory

Six men stand between the girls and the gods. They may be compared with figures 43-46 on the other side of the gods. These ten may be the eponymous heroes of the ten tribes of Athens. Alternatively, they are civic dignitaries of some kind. The east frieze is made up of eight or nine blocks that are considerably longer than the blocks of the other sides. The middle block V is 4.50 m in length, whereas the corner blocks are narrow because they are actually the narrow ends of block I of the north frieze and block XLVII of the south frieze. The surviving blocks and fragments are scattered among various museums: in the Acropolis are blocks II and VI, in the British Museum blocks I, III-V, VIII and in the Louvre block VII. A number of fragments are also in the British Museum, while others are in the Archaeological Museum of Palermo. In contrast to the west frieze, the east frieze has a certain symmetry of composition because it is the focal point of the processions on the other sides. The theme represented is the procession toward the Acropolis that took place during the Great Panathenaia, the commemoration of the birthday of the goddess Athena. The Parthenon's frieze forms a continuous band with scenes in low relief that encircles the upper part of the cella within the outer colonnade. Numbering taken from I. Jenkins' The Parthenon Frieze, 1994. Frieze slabs are marked in Roman numerals, and people are marked in Arabic numerals.