About the Author

JOAN BRETON CONNELLYis a classical archaeologist and the author of two previous books, "Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece" and "Votive Sculpture of Hellenistic Cyprus." She received her A.B. in classics from Princeton University and Ph.D. in classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College, where she now serves on the board of trustees. In 1996, Professor Connelly was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She received the Archaeological Institute of America s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and held NYU s Lillian Vernon Chair for Teaching Excellence in 2002 2004. She has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, Magdalen College, New College, and Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Connelly has excavated throughout Greece, Kuwait, and Cyprus where she has directed the Yeronisos Island Excavations since 1990. She is currently a professor of classics and art history at New York University."

Reviews

A highly detailed, often technical history . . . these pages spring to life with Breton Connelly s excitement . . . The sources are treated with considerable even-handedness, with the result that the interpretation is quite compelling . . . [The frieze s] procession is not political, or even contemporaneous with Pericles's Athens, she suggests, but religious and mythological.
Daisy Dunn, "Literary Review "(UK)
A valuable argument about the purpose of the temple as a visual memento of the invisible past . . . Connelly s theory is attractive and plausible, and is backed by a considerable breadth and depth of scholarship archaeological, visual, and textual.
A. E. Stallings, "The Weekly Standard"
Learned, ambitious, generously illustrated and pugnacious . . . up to date with the excellent theoretical work of recent decades . . . [Connelly] aims to address both specialist and general audiences simultaneously . . . The stakes are therefore higher than in most disagreements in classical archaeology . . . What we know of the operation of the institutions of the democracy . . . works strongly in favour of Connelly s argument . . . Even those who have doubts must surely now recognize that Joan Breton Connelly s ideas deserve to be taken into the mainstream . . . Personally I am convinced that, in her main claim, Connelly is right. She has not solved the enigma but dissolved it . . . It is time to change the textbooks and the museum labels.
William St. Clair, "Times Literary Supplement"
Exciting and revelatory the subject of this matchless narrative is a matter of extraordinary significance for understanding the ancient people we so admire "The Parthenon Enigma" serves as a bracing reminder that first-rate scholarship not only takes no visible fact for granted, but also digs deep into the unknown unknowns Her book is that rare thing: the exposition of a truly great idea, and a reminder of what a thrilling subject the past, that foreign country, can be.
Caroline Alexander, "The New York Times Book Review
" A careful, learned account and a good read There is plenty of learned and intricate argument here.
Mary Beard, "The New York Review of Books"
The thrilling notion that a great monument has been decoded, that centuries of misunderstanding have been put to flight, will captivate many readers one of the most original theses of modern classical scholarship.
James Romm, "The Wall Street Journal"
""
A detailed portrait of the Parthenon as seen through what Connelly calls ancient eyes.
Eric Wills, "The Washington Post"
Engaging and intensely interesting . . . [makes] a thoughtful, stimulating, and unquestionably valuable contribution to our understanding.
J. J. Pollitt, "The New Criterion"
Usually recognized as a symbol of Western democracy, the Parthenon emerges in Connelly s bold new analysis as a shrine memorializing myths radically alien to modern politics An explosive reinterpretation of a classical icon.
"Booklist," starred review
"This detailed, smart, and tantalizing study offers much to savor while immersing readers in a 'spirit-saturated, anxious world' at the mercy of mercurial gods."
"Publisher's Weekly"
Joan Connelly's groundbreaking work will forever change our conception of the most important building in the history of western civilization. By cracking the hidden code of the Parthenon, she reveals the classical world in a radical new light that will reorient how we all view its legacy for the 21st century.
Tom Reiss, author of "The Black Count," winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Joan Connelly's learned and elegant study makes a powerful case for a new understanding ofthe Parthenon, its original meaning as a religious object and for the fullest possible restoration of its many parts still scattered far and wide.
Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Classics and History, Yale University, and author of "The Peloponnesian War"
I so admire the historical approach of this luminous book: courageously and intelligently starting from scratch, Joan Connelly reconstructs the meaning of the Parthenon from the perspective of Perikles and his contemporaries in Classical Athens. The unfamiliar picture that emerges gives us all a sharper vision of what this timeless monument can still mean to our own troubled world.
Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University
Readers born before 1960 may be reluctant to break with some long established truths about the meaning of the Parthenon frieze but Joan Connelly s book is one for the 21stcentury, full of new finds and fresh insights.
Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
We are a species of storytellers whose tales have shaped our reality since ancient times. Joan Connelly s brilliant study of the Parthenon shows how a myth can reveal as many secrets as a rock or a ruin, and how rethinking what we know about antiquity can help us better understand ourselves today.
George Lucas, creator of the "Star Wars" saga"