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Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles. Cambridge: University Press, 2004. Pp. xxvi + 304 + CD-ROM of images. ISBN 0-521-82040-5. $75.00.
Hurwit's The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge 1999) has quickly become a standard text for courses in Athenian topography and Greek archaeology. His most recent book, The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles, is an "abridged, revised, updated, and reorganized" (xxiii) version, focused on the High Classical period, which incorporates recent scholarship since the completion of the earlier book (in 1997). The new book is highly readable, filled with useful information, and likely to become a very popular text for students, teachers, and scholars. I would not say it replaces the earlier book, nor does it try. I highly recommend both to anyone interested in Athenian architecture, religion, political history, and public art. Hurwit's style of concise, lucid comments on the multiple problems surrounding the Acropolis monuments is remarkable.
The book is arranged generally in chronological order. The first chapter, "The Rock and the Goddess," condenses chapters one and two of the 1999 book and introduces several topics to which Hurwit returns later. Chapter two, "Landscape of Memory: The Past on the Classical Acropolis," is a trendy chapter heading but nonetheless Hurwit demonstrates that in many of the Classical monuments-the Erechtheion, the Nike bastion, the north aisle of the Parthenon, and the great Bronze Athena-the designers of the Acropolis directed a dialogue with the past and created a communal memory for Athens. For example, Hurwit ingeniously suggests that the Parthenon's north metopes, showing the destruction of Troy and the Trojan Palladion, forged a link with the archaic naiskos, which presumably held a small, old statue...