The Acropolis and Persepolis

Two of the greatest monuments of the ancient world date from the fifth century B.C. and they embody respectively the ideals of the Persian and of the Athenian Empire. There had been nothing in all Asia as sumptuous as Persepolis; the Acropolis of Athens, a quarter its size, was given a magnificence absolutely unprecedented in Greece. A comparison between the two schemes must reflect the divergence between the Persian and the Greek outlook but also reveal some elements in common, if only because of an inevitable resemblance in ways of thinking among contemporaries when confronted with rather similar problems. But it must not be taken for granted that every parallel between them is fortuitous. There is reason to think that the sculptors employed at Persepolis were largely Greeks—conscripted subjects of Persia, no doubt; the sculptors of the Acropolis were by no means all Athenian but came also from other Greek states, and surely there must have been talk among them of the tremendous project from which many of their colleagues had returned to cities east of the Aegean. Persepolis was built steadily from about 500 to 460, by which time the reconstruction of the Acropolis had begun; its earliest Periclean building, the Parthenon, was commenced in 447. It is conceivable that some particular sculptor may have carved figures in the friezes of both Persepolis and the Parthenon; workmen who could attain the requisite standard must have been in demand. At any rate one Greek artist from the Persian service seems to have gone as far west as Delos, to judge by imitation there of the Persepolis type of column-base, in the Thesmophorium, a building datable about 480–460.