The Parthenon

The story

The temple on the hill

The Acropolis of Athens is a rocky hill that towers over the city. For centuries it was the sacred place of Athens, with temples and sanctuaries dedicated to the protecting gods. In 480 BC, during the second Persian invasion, Xerxes' Persians sacked Athens and devastated the sanctuaries on the hill. When the threat passed and Athens became rich and powerful, Pericles decided to rebuild it on a grand scale. The centrepiece of the project was a new temple for Athena, the goddess of the city: the Parthenon. The name comes from “Parthenos”, which in Greek means “virgin”, one of Athena's titles.

Work began in 447 BC. The temple was finished, in its main parts, in 438 BC, while the sculpted decoration was completed in 432 BC. In less than fifteen years the Athenians built a building that is still considered one of the most perfect ever made. The architects were Ictinus and Callicrates. The sculptor Phidias, a friend of Pericles, had a directing role: he looked after the decorations and the statue of the goddess.

What it is like

The Parthenon is a Doric temple, that is, built in the simplest and sturdiest style of Greek architecture, with columns without a base and a plain capital. It has eight columns on the short sides and seventeen on the long sides. It measures about 69.5 by 30.9 metres, and the outer columns are more than ten metres high and almost two wide at the base. It was a very large building, entirely of marble.

The Greek builders had an almost obsessive idea of perfection. That is why the temple has some “optical corrections”: small tricks that fool the eye. The floor, for example, is not perfectly flat, but rises slightly in the middle, because a perfectly horizontal line seen from far away would seem to sag downwards. The columns are slightly wider in the middle (this swelling is called “entasis”), they lean a little inwards and the decorated slabs are narrower towards the corners. The result is a building that, to those who look at it, seems perfectly straight and harmonious.

The sculptures

The decorations were a true encyclopedia of myths. On the outer side ran 92 metopes, marble slabs with scenes carved almost in the round. On the east side they told of the fight between the gods and the giants, on the west that between the Greeks and the Amazons, on the south that against the centaurs and on the north the Trojan War. Inside the colonnade, along the walls of the cella (the main room of the temple), ran a frieze 160 metres long, of which about 130 survive. It showed a procession, that of the festivals in honour of Athena, the Panathenaea. The two pediments, the triangles above the façades, showed the birth of Athena (to the east) and the contest between Athena and Poseidon for possession of Athens (to the west).

In the darkness of the cella stood the statue of the goddess, about twelve metres high, made of gold and ivory over a wooden core. It was called Athena Parthenos, and was the work of Phidias. Today it no longer exists.

We imagine the Parthenon as white, but originally it was coloured. The sculptures and some parts of the building were painted in bright colours and had metal attachments. The colours have disappeared with time.

A long history

For centuries the Parthenon remained a temple. In Byzantine times it was turned into a church dedicated to the Mother of God. After the Ottoman conquest (1458), it became a mosque, with a minaret. The worst damage came in 1687, during a siege by the Venetians led by Francesco Morosini. The Ottomans were using the Parthenon as a gunpowder store. On the night between 26 and 27 September a bomb hit it and caused an explosion that broke the building and destroyed the roof. The Parthenon was left in ruins.

At the beginning of the 19th century the English diplomat Lord Elgin obtained permission to take sculptures from the Acropolis, and his men carried off about half of those that remained. Today many are in the British Museum in London: 15 metopes, 17 figures from the pediments and about 75 metres of frieze. The Greek Ministry of Culture says that 56 blocks of the frieze are in London and 40 in Athens. Since 1983 Greece has officially asked for their return, and the discussion is still open: some think they belong in London and others in Athens.