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.

The temple rose on the ruins of an earlier one. When the army of Xerxes took the Acropolis in 480 BCE it burned the half-finished marble temple that stood there, and for a generation the Athenians left the wreckage as it lay — a charred witness, by some accounts kept deliberately unrepaired as a memorial of what the invader had done. The Parthenon that replaced it belongs to a different era of the city’s confidence. After the Greek victory the alliance against Persia hardened into an empire run from Athens; around 454 BCE its common treasury was moved from the island of Delos to the Acropolis, and the surplus tribute of the allied cities became, in effect, the building fund of the city that led them. The Parthenon was the first and largest of the works that remade the rock under the program associated with Pericles — followed by the monumental gateway of the Propylaia, the small temple of Athena Nike, and, last, the Erechtheion, which gathered the Acropolis’s older and stranger cults beside it.

Architecture

It is built of Pentelic marble quarried from Mount Pentelikon north of the city, a stone that weathers to a warm honey color in the light. Eight columns stand across each end and seventeen down each flank — a colonnade of forty-six exterior columns wrapping a temple roughly seventy meters long. The plan is Doric in its outer order, but the building everywhere strains against the rules of that order: the cella was unusually wide, an Ionic frieze ran where a Doric temple would carry none, and an interior chamber behind the main room held four slender Ionic columns. The Parthenon is a Doric temple that quietly admits the lighter Ionic manner into itself, and the tension between the two is part of its character.

Almost nothing in it is straight. The platform on which the columns stand, the stylobate, swells upward toward its center in a shallow dome; the columns lean very slightly inward and bulge at the middle in the curve called entasis; the corner columns are thickened and set closer to their neighbors. These are the famous refinements — adjustments so small they are measured in centimeters, worked into a building of thousands of tons of marble. Long read as optical corrections meant to defeat the eye’s tendency to see true lines as sagging or splayed, they may equally have been pursued for the living quality they give a form that would otherwise be inert: the Parthenon does not sit on its hill so much as press up from it. The precision required to cut curved courses that still close perfectly is among the reasons the building has been studied as intently by engineers as by historians of art.

The cult image

The image the temple was built to hold is gone. Pheidias built it of gold plates and carved ivory on a timber frame — the chryselephantine craft at its most ambitious — a figure some forty feet tall, the goddess standing armed and crowned, a winged Victory the size of a person held out on her right hand, a shield and a coiled serpent at her side. Ivory gave the flesh, gold everything else. The gold was not merely ornament. Pheidias, on Pericles’ insistence, fashioned the plates so that they could be lifted off and weighed; the historian Thucydides reports that Pericles once reckoned the statue’s removable gold at forty talents and counted it among the reserves the city could draw on in extremity. The cult image was at once a goddess and a strongbox, and the two meanings were not felt to be in conflict. Dedicated around 438 BCE, the statue is lost utterly; it is known through small Roman copies — the rough marble Varvakeion statuette chief among them — and through the descriptions of later travelers, above all Pausanias, who saw it standing in the second century CE.

The sculptural program

The carved decoration of the Parthenon is the most elaborate to survive from any Greek temple, and it works on three registers. High on the outside ran ninety-two metopes, square panels carved nearly in the round, each side of the building given to a single mythic war: gods against giants on the east, Greeks against Amazons on the west, Lapiths against centaurs on the south, the fall of Troy on the north. The recurring subject is the victory of order over the monstrous and the lawless — a theme an Athenian could read, without anyone needing to say so, against the recent defeat of Persia. The two pediments, the great triangular gables at either end, carried sculpture in the full round: the birth of Athena springing fully armed from the head of Zeus on the east, and on the west the contest between Athena and Poseidon for possession of Attica, which the goddess won with the gift of the olive.

The third register is the most discussed object in Greek art. Around the top of the cella wall, where no Doric temple carries one, ran a continuous Ionic frieze some hundred and sixty meters long, low-relief and once brightly painted: riders reining in their horses, elders and musicians, men leading sacrificial cattle, women bearing vessels, and at the center, over the eastern door, a seated assembly of gods flanking a quiet scene in which a folded cloth is handed between a man and a child. The frieze is almost universally read as the Panathenaia, the festival in which the city carried a new woven robe, the peplos, up to its goddess every fourth year — and the central cloth as that very robe. But the reading is probable, not certain. The frieze carries no inscription; nothing on it names a single figure or fixes a single event; and what exactly it shows has been argued for two centuries. That a temple should depict, in its most sacred band, not a myth but the citizens of Athens themselves in procession would be without parallel, and the strangeness of that idea has kept the question open.

Treasury and cult

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 on the Acropolis, the back chamber of the Parthenon held dedications and plate inventoried year by year in inscriptions still partly preserved, and the cult image itself was gold that could be stripped and spent. Scholarship has long debated whether the Parthenon ever held a regular cult in the ordinary sense: the ancient and central worship of Athena on the rock belonged to a different, olive-wood image of the goddess as Athena Polias, whose altar and ramshackle home stood where the Erechtheion would rise, and whose festival the Panathenaia served. The Parthenon may have been less a working temple than a votive offering on a colossal scale — a building dedicated to the goddess rather than a stage for the daily acts of her cult. It was, at minimum, the civic monument of a city that identified itself with its patron goddess and meant the building to say so, in marble, to the allies whose money had paid for it.

That identification of stone with order had a long intellectual afterlife of its own. The conviction that proportion is not decoration but the visible form of a rational cosmos belongs to the same Athenian century, and runs from the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine of harmonics — that whole-number ratios govern sound, soul, and the world alike — into the Platonism and Neoplatonism that made measured beauty a ladder toward the divine. The Parthenon is not a philosophical text, and no ancient source ties its dimensions to a Platonic scheme. But it stands in the same city, in the same generation, as the thought that beauty is number made visible, and it has been read in that light ever since.

The long afterlife

The Parthenon’s later history is unusually legible, because the building stayed standing and in use far longer than most. It served as the temple of Athena for roughly a thousand years. With the Christianization of the empire it was converted, around the close of the sixth century CE, into a church — and the maiden goddess gave way to another maiden, for the church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Panagia, the all-holy; under the Byzantine empire it was one of the most important Christian shrines in Greece. After the Ottoman conquest of Athens in the fifteenth century it became a mosque, a minaret rising at one corner, and the building had now housed three religions in turn without losing its roof.

The single catastrophe came on the night of 26–27 September 1687. A Venetian army under Francesco Morosini was besieging the Ottoman garrison on the Acropolis, and the defenders had stored gunpowder inside the Parthenon, trusting its massive walls. A mortar bomb found the magazine. The explosion blew out the long colonnades and the center of the building, scattered the marble, and ended in an instant the structure that war, conversion, and a thousand years of weather had left nearly whole. What had been a temple, a church, and a mosque was now a ruin.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman court, had a large part of the surviving sculpture removed and shipped to London — roughly half of what remained, including a long stretch of the frieze, many of the metopes, and figures from both pediments. Acquired by the British Museum in 1816, they are displayed there still. Greece has formally sought their return for decades; the modern Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009 at the foot of the rock, was built in part to house them should they come back, with the missing pieces shown as plaster casts beside the originals so that the gaps are made plain. The dispute over where the sculptures belong — whether removal was rescue or plunder, whether a divided monument can rightly be reunited only in one place — is among the most public arguments in the world over cultural property, and it is not resolved.

Scholarship and the texts

The building survives in fragments dispersed across Athens, London, Paris, and elsewhere, and its modern study is in large part the work of reassembling those fragments — physically, on the Acropolis itself, and in scholarship. The continuing anastylosis directed for decades by the architect Manolis Korres and the Acropolis Restoration Service has corrected earlier twentieth-century repairs, cataloged the surviving blocks, and recovered an extraordinarily detailed understanding of how the temple was quarried, lifted, and cut; an overview of that campaign is set out in the lecture by Fani Mallouchou-Tufano, The Restoration of the Athenian Acropolis.

The interpretation of the frieze is the field’s longest-running argument. The orthodox Panathenaic reading received its fullest modern statement in Jenifer Neils’s study of the frieze, and the radical alternative — that the central scene shows not a procession but the legendary king Erechtheus and the sacrifice of his daughters to save the city — was pressed by Joan Breton Connelly, whose case and its critics are weighed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Mary Beard’s account sets the building’s history beside its modern uses and the restitution dispute, and the survey of these and other works in the Journal of Hellenic Studies gives a sense of how crowded the literature has become. The ancient witnesses are fewer and indispensable: Plutarch’s life of Pericles, which describes the building program and Pheidias’s part in it, and Pausanias’s second-century guide, which records the cult image and the pediments as a traveler still saw them — both preserved in the wider body of classical texts that also carried the Platonic thought of the same city forward.

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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