Parthenon

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The Parthenon is the great Doric temple of Athena Parthenos — Athena the Maiden — that stands on the summit of the Acropolis in Athens. It was built between 447 and 432 BCE, in the decades of Athenian power that followed the Persian wars, when the city had grown wealthy as head of a maritime league and turned that wealth toward rebuilding the sanctuary the Persians had burned. The architects Iktinos and Kallikrates raised the building; the sculptor Pheidias oversaw its ornament and made the colossal image it was built to house.

That image is gone. It stood roughly twelve metres high, fashioned of gold and ivory over a wooden core, and showed the goddess armed and crowned — a statue so costly that its gold plates were designed to be removed and weighed. Around the outside ran the metopes, carved panels of mythic combats; within, above the inner colonnade, a continuous frieze depicted a procession of horsemen, elders, and offering-bearers, usually read as the great Panathenaic festival in which the city brought a new robe to its goddess. The reading is probable rather than certain; the frieze carries no inscription, and what exactly it shows has been argued for two centuries.

What the temple meant to those who built it is harder to fix than its dimensions. It was a treasury as much as a shrine — the reserves of the league were kept here — and scholarship has long debated whether the Parthenon ever held a regular cult in the ordinary sense, since the older Athena had her altar elsewhere on the rock. It was, at minimum, the civic monument of a city that identified itself with its patron goddess and meant the building to say so.

Its long afterlife is unusually legible. The Parthenon stood largely intact for roughly a thousand years as a temple, was converted to a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin in late antiquity, and became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Athens. The single catastrophe came in 1687, when a Venetian shell struck powder the Ottomans had stored inside and blew out the centre of the building. In the early nineteenth century Lord Elgin removed a large part of the surviving sculpture to London, where it remains, the subject of a restitution dispute still unresolved.

The Parthenon has since become something its makers could not have intended: a standing emblem of the classical itself, copied on banks and parliaments and cited as the measure of proportion in stone. Beneath that later weight is the plainer fact of what it was — a house raised by one city for one goddess, and left, in ruin, more looked at than any temple ever was in use.

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